Vol102Iss33

Volume 102, Issue 33

February 14, 2013 mcgilldaily.com

McGill THE

DAILY

Holier than thou since 1911

Published by The Daily Publications Society, a student society of McGill University.

Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women page 15

NEWS

The McGill Daily Thursday, February 14, 2013 mcgilldaily.com

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McGill reels as budget cuts begin Jobs and salaries most likely to be affected Lola Duffort The McGill Daily

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he administration has made it increasingly clear in public presentations – as well as behind closed doors – that jobs and salaries will likely bear the brunt of the provincial government’s budget cuts, though there have been no concrete announcements about where the axe will fall.

In a series of ever-changing directives from the government, the administration received the news last Friday that the University would lose its $32-million conditional grant should it fail to cut at least $9.6 million from its current budget by April.

The government had already told the University that it would be receiving $38 million less in operating grants between this fiscal year and the next, but this latest announcement means the University cannot simply absorb the loss of revenue into its accumulated deficit. Instead, it must show that it has cut spending by the equivalent of 50 per cent of this loss in revenue – roughly $19 million – before April 2014.

The government is waiving certain accounting rules in an attempt to help universities deal with the budget cuts recently imposed, but McGill is emphatic that these measures will not help.

Higher Education Deputy Minister Chrystine Tremblay told university administrators last

Friday that universities would now be allowed to shift money from their previously restricted capital budgets to their operating budgets, according to the Journal de Québec.

The reverse has been standard practice across the province – and at McGill – for over a decade. In the 2011-2012 fiscal year alone, universities shifted $275 million from their operating budgets to their capital budgets.

Operating budgets are traditionally earmarked for teaching and day-to-day operations, whereas capital budgets pay for building and infrastructure costs.

VP (Administration and Finance) Michael Di Grappa told The Daily that McGill is not considering shifting money allocated for capital projects back into its operating budget.

“We have so many demands, and such a shortage of capital funds that that really wouldn’t do anything to transfer money.

It would just put a deficit on the other side... I don’t think that’s something that’s [suitable] for McGill,” Di Grappa said.

McGill estimated $647 million in urgent maintenance work in its most recent budget.

The province has also temporarily lifted restrictions on conditional grant deficits, and Di Grappa admitted that “there was no question” McGill would in fact run a deficit this year.

Administration officials told union presidents at a meeting Wednesday morning that “headcount scenarios,” in which staff

numbers could be cut, would be released in the upcoming days.

Administrators floated the idea of closing the school, the library, or certain community services such as the dental clinic for a week in a symbolic gesture against the government’s actions, according to people at the meeting who spoke to The Daily.

“There are all kinds of unpleasant scenarios in trying to meet a cut of this size…. Everything has to be on the table, because the University’s long-term survival depends on [it],” Provost Anthony Masi told members of the University community at a Town Hall this Tuesday. “This is unprecedented, it’s an assault on higher education in the province.”

Masi also noted that cuts to Quebec’s three main research councils would hit McGill – a research-intensive university – especially hard. This would remove one possibility for “indirect cost recovery,” since McGill would be unable to obtain additional research grants.

Although Masi did not give his Town Hall presentation “to announce a package of bad measures” he did reiterate several times that 75 per cent of the University’s $590-million operating budget is spent on salaries and benefits.

Masi did not consider in his presentation the list of suggested measures the provincial government had recommended to universities just this Friday, and only made mention of the operating grant.

Back to the basics of racism

Online access to the arts

09 FEATURES

Colonialism in a cinematic nutshell

ANNUAL GENEREAL MEETING The AGM of the Daily Publications Society (DPS), publisher of The McGill Daily and Le Délit, will take place on

Wednesday, March 27th Leacock, Room 232 5:30pm Members of the DPS are cordially invited.

The presence of candidates to the Board of Directors is mandatory.

For more information, please contact

chair@dailypublications.org

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NEWS

AUS looks to reform advanced credits McGill panel denounces Canadian justice system PGSS backs administration line

Christianity at McGill: one girl’s story

11 HEALTH&ED

Sustainability Fund in peril

Imagining free education

07 COMMENTARY

12

Canada’s next top model minority

Interview with Grace Potter

CULTURE

15

EDITORIAL

Remembering Canada’s missing and murdered Indigenous women

16 COMPENDIUM! Obituaries

news

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The McGill Daily | Thursday, February 14, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Art history and communications studies graduate students join ASSÉ ASSÉ mobilizes its members against the summit Lola Duffort The McGill Daily

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he Art History and Communication Studies Graduate Students Association (AHCS GSA) voted at their General Assembly this Tuesday to join the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante’s (ASSÉ) 70,000 members.

The AHCS GSA, which represents 86 graduate students, will be the first student association at McGill to affiliate themselves with ASSÉ, the most progressive of the three major provincial student federations.

All graduate students and post-doctoral fellows at McGill are affiliated with the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ) through the Post-Graduate Students’ Society (PGSS). The AHCS GSA, whose parent student association is PGSS, will also keep their previous affiliation with FEUQ. “FEUQ is really good at lobbying, but ASSÉ is much better at educating and mobilizing its members,” said PGSS

Communications Studies Councillor Gretchen King, who brought the affiliation motion to the GA. ASSÉ has threatened to boycott the upcoming summit on higher education, where their main proposal – free education – has effectively been taken off the table. It has also planned a demonstration for the last day of the summit in downtown Montreal, and encouraged its members to vote on a one- or twoday strike during the summit.

As of February 10, ASSÉ reported that five student associations, representing a total of 10,000 students, had already voted for a one-day strike during the summit, which will be held on February 25 and 26.

ASSÉ has warned that its members would again protest and go on strike, should the outcome of the summit be a tuition hike or the indexation of tuition to inflation.

Following suit, the AHCS GSA voted to boycott the summit, and will hold an emergency GA next Tuesday to vote on a two-day strike during the summit in order to “actualize” their boycott, King said

Photo Hera Chan | The McGill Daily

during the meeting.

At the upcoming GA, the AHCS GSA will also consider the possibility of an unlimited general strike should the outcome

of the summit be either a tuition hike or indexation.

Affiliation to ASSÉ will cost the AHCS GSA $3 per member per year, and the student society will have to

make amendments to its constitution to make evident that the GA is its highest governing body, something which King says is “already true in practice.”

Engineering undergraduates support tar sand exploitation EUS reacts to Divest McGill campaign Farid Rener The McGill Daily

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he Engineering Undergraduate Society (EUS) council passed a motion “supporting the social, environmentally responsible, and ethical development of the Canadian Oil Sands, with a continued focus on engineering innovation to improve extractive technologies,” during their meeting on Wednesday.

The motion, signed by five Mining Engineering Co-op students, was moved partly in reaction to another motion passed at SSMU Council on January 24, committing SSMU to lobby the University to divest its holdings in companies connected to fossil fuel production.

The passing of the SSMU motion was “yet another example of how outof-touch the SSMU is with constituents, including those of the Faculty of Engineering,” the motion read.

The motion also called for the EUS representatives to SSMU, Anna Cybulsky and Farzan Subhani, to work alongside SSMU’s political campaigns coordinator – Christopher Bangs, a spokesperson of Divest McGill, a group that is calling on the university to divest its holdings from companies involved in fossil fuels extraction – to “compel him to reach out to all engineering students to solicit their input and opinions.”

Discussion of the motion followed a presentation given by Bangs, who explained to EUS the impetus for the creation of Divest McGill, and fielded questions from councillors about what divestment would mean, both for the University and engineering students.

“No one has any desire to hurt employment opportunities for engineers,” Bangs told Council. “It’s not the tar sands or nothing, it’s not ‘if we don’t invest in the tar sands, where are the jobs,’ instead, we

need a responsible transition from the tar sands to more responsible forms of energy,” he said.

Many councillors expressed concern about the effects that divestment would have on their constituents. Electrical, Computer, and Software Engineering Student Society President Dirk Dubois asked Bangs whether Divest McGill was also asking McGill to move away from research in fossil fuels.

“We have no control over, and no desire to hurt anyone’s research opportunities. This is solely focusing on the endowment fund, maybe the pension fund, it is not focused on research,” Bangs replied.

The motion noted that at least 26 of the 60 Mining Engineering Co-op students had been “provided invaluable co-op experience” at tar sands mining companies. Jonathan Aubertin, Co-op Mining Engineering Undergraduate Society president,

who has worked in the tar sands in the past, and one of the motion’s signatories, brought a jar full of oil-covered sand to the meeting.

One councillor wanted to add a clause to the motion stating that EUS explicitly would not support Divest McGill’s campaign. However, this motion was voted down by a majority. Dubois also petitioned for the motion to be tabled until next week so councillors would be able to solicit their constituents.

This was, he felt, an “inflammatory motion,” with the potential to “piss off a lot of people.”

Councillors were concerned that were they not to pass the motion, they would be “burning bridges,” since the motion passed

by SSMU would show McGill engineering students in a poor light in the eyes of many energy companies. Were McGill to divest from these companies, the worry was that they would no longer want to provide research funds to McGill.

“I’d like Council to know that if McGill divests from oil sands companies, no oil sands company would come here for research or for any kind of grants. I don’t see why a company would come here if you take that explicit position that you are not supporting their industry at all,” Subhani told Council.

While the motion passed – meaning that EUS would not be supporting Divest McGill, but would instead be actively supporting the continued extraction of oil from the tar sands – Bangs was still relatively pleased with the outcome.

“The people who voted tonight, feel in some ways like they want to see fossil fuel production done in a more ethical way, which is certainly something we are in favour of,” Bangs told The Daily.

Other items on the agenda included policy changes to Blues Pub, McGill Engineering Competition policies, and a budget review.

Daily Elections are coming up!

All twenty positions on our non-hierarchical editorial board will be available for the 2013-2014 school year.

In order to vote or run in the elections, you must be a Daily staff member. Staff members must have contributed six articles, illustrations, or photos, or two features, come in for three production nights, or some combination thereof.

If there’s a section you’re interested in running for, or if you’re unsure of your staff status, please contact the relevant section editor(s) by email (available on page 15 of this issue).

Candidate Statement

March 11 Noon

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Elections

March 12 March 14 6:00 p.m.

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news

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The McGill Daily | Thursday, February 14, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Arts undergraduates seek new credit system Council supports Industrial Relations Program, more funding for classroom renovations Cem Eterkin and Juan Camilo Velásquez The McGill Daily

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he Arts Undergraduate Society (AUS) said on Wednesday that it would lobby for change in the advanced standing credits structure, support the existence of the Industrial Relations program, and ask McGill for more funding for classrooms.

Monday’s Winter General Assembly (GA) was unable to meet the required quorum of 150 members, and thus all motions discussed were non-binding. Motions were subsequently considered for final approval at Council Wednesday night.

Advanced Standing Credit Reform Campaign One of the motions passed mandates AUS to lobby the Faculty of Arts to allow students to “enter the University as U0 students, with the option of being able to use advanced standing credits to avoid prerequisites.”

Currently, students who complete Advanced Placement (AP) exams, the International Baccalaureate (IB) program, or A-Levels receive university credit for their secondary school work.

Those who attain 24 or more credits enter the University as U1 students, and are expected to finish their program in three years.

“AUS is taking a stance on an important academic issue; this doesn’t hurt anyone, it just allows added flexibility for students… this is something that the administration is aware of. If they realize that students support it, this could be a big step moving forward,” said VP Internal Justin Fletcher, who

moved the motion.

When asked about advanced credits at AUS Council, Provost Anthony Masi said that the administration was “trying to find new ways of addressing ” the issue.

Healthy Teaching and Learning Spaces AUS was also mandated to support the Faculty of Arts in its efforts to secure more funding from the University to improve the quality of classrooms and buildings. The motion regarding Healthy Teaching and Learning Spaces, which passed at Council, is specifically aimed at room 101 of 3475 Peel.

“Over the last two years we’ve got an application for room 101 on Peel 3475, which falls under the Department of English. Last year, the committee approved $15,000 in funding for the room; this year, they are applying again for $17,000,” said Saad Qazi, AUS VP Finance, referring to Faculty of Arts requests made to the Arts Undergraduate Improvement Fund (AUIF) to fund renovations.

The application for the $17,000 was denied, however, on the grounds that the University – and not students – should fund these renovations.

The motion was amended at the GA to ask that the Faculty of Arts make a list of rooms that fail to meet health code requirements publicly available.

Support for the Industrial Relations Program Another motion asked AUS to assist the McGill Industrial Relations Association (MIRA) in its campaign to support the continued existence of the Faculty Program in Industrial Relations.

The motion suggests that the

Photo Georgia Gleason | The McGill Daily

University is “currently reviewing the Industrial Relations program as part of its regular process of program review, with the possibility of retirement of the program.”

“Right now there are few Arts professors with research interests in Industrial Relations and the program needs funding from the Faculty of Arts,” said Fletcher.

According to AUS VP Academic Tom Zheng, however, Faculty of Arts Dean Manfredi mentioned that the program would not be cancelled next year, but that it would enter a “transitional period.”

MIRA Representative Rebecca Tacoma noted that the Industrial Relations student association has not been informed of any official decisions not to cancel the program.

Fletcher told Council that it was “important to still demonstrate support for this program.”

The motion passed unanimously.

Reform to the VP Finance Position Qazi and AUS President Devon LaBuik moved a motion that seeks to reform the VP Finance position by giving AUS Council the power to determine whether or not candidates are eligible for the position.

“When you come into the VP Finance position, it requires a lot more specific skills than going into some other VP positions,” LaBuik told The Daily. “And considering that almost all the other positions rely on the VP Finance to get the money to them, I think we need to make sure that the VP Finance is reliable.”

In an interview with The Daily in September, Qazi said that AUS had significant debt when he took office. This was mainly a result of money being seized by the Quebec government when AUS failed to file taxes several years in a row.

It had also failed to submit audits to the University since 2008 because of a lack of financial reporting from departmental associations within AUS. This prompted the University to withhold student fees from the association.

The motion was tabled.

However, Qazi specified that his intent was to gauge the overall response of the GA. He is planning on improving the motion with the addition of a list of qualifications and the planning of a training program.

Former prisoner speaks out on systemic corruption David Milgaard describes justice system’s lack of protection for innocents Molly Korab News Writer

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anada’s justice system has long been failing those wrongfully convicted, according to David Milgaard and Peter Edwards at a conference hosted by Innocence McGill on Tuesday.

Imprisoned for 23 years on false charges of rape and murder and exonerated by DNA evidence in 1997, Milgaard described his ordeal and spoke on the pressing need for justice reform in Canada.

Describing Milgaard’s case,

Edwards, a longtime journalist specializing in organized crime and justice issues, noted the unusual nature of Milgaard’s exoneration in an oft-inefficient and corrupt criminal justice system.

“As great and inspiring as David’s story is, it’s not a triumph of the system. It’s a triumph despite the system,” he said. “We can’t pretend that the system did anything right in this case whatsoever.”

“The Canadian Justice department is failing, and it is failing miserably,” Milgaard said.

Drawing from his own experience, he described systemic bias

against those who maintain their innocence, and who are often denied parole for refusing to admit guilt.

He spoke on the need for an independent review board to investigate potential miscarriages of justice in Canada and to help protect and exonerate the wrongfully convicted.

He also suggested that the Canadian government implement other, non-punitive justice models, like restorative justice.

Restorative justice emphasizes active dialogue between victims and offenders and encourages offenders to take responsibility for their actions.

Julia O’Byrne, of Innocence

McGill – an organization dedicated to investigating wrongful conviction claims in Quebec – pointed out systemic problems like prosecutorial power and the widespread use of plea bargains, which can incentivize false confessions from innocent people afraid of harsher sentences imposed by a jury.

“Nobody can ever see what kind of negotiations the Crown is offering, what the plea negotiations are like, yet they wield so much power…. They’re not held accountable,” she told The Daily.

Edwards also spoke about the plight of First Nations peoples with-

in the criminal justice system, who often give false confessions, believing the system will work against them.

Rilla Banks, also of Innocence McGill, noted a disparity between statist understandings of justice and those of First Nations peoples.

“Within Aboriginal communities, many of them have different modes of dealing with people that commit crimes in their community. It’s much less adversarial than the [federal] system,” she told The Daily. “I think that if you’re not informed about the system, and you don’t feel that you’re part of it, you wouldn’t want to cooperate with it.”

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NEWS

The McGill Daily | Thursday, February 14, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Quebec universities underfunded, says graduate student motion Motion alleged to be “administration-sponsored” Michael Lee-Murphy The McGill Daily

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n a tense council meeting on Wednesday night, McGill’s PostGraduate Students’ Society (PGSS), a member of the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ), voted to adopt a motion saying that there is evidence of massive underfunding in Quebec universities.

Their stance is in line with the argument put forth by the Conférence des Recteurs et des Principaux des Universités du Québec (CREPUQ) – the association representing university administrations across the province – who have long argued that universities in Quebec are underfunded, and who will lobby for increased funding from the Parti Québécois (PQ) government.

On the other hand, FEUQ, one of the province’s biggest student federations, believes that the greater problem is that university administrations are mismanaging the money they already receive. FEUQ argues that this money amounts to an unregulated blank cheque for administrators.

The motion comes at a crucial time, as the PQ-sponsored summit on higher education is less than two weeks away.

The motion to adopt the policy position of underfunding was put forward by the PGSS executive commit-

tee after a vote of four to one. PGSS External Affairs Officer Errol Salamon was the lone dissenting voice among the executive, and spoke alongside FEUQ leadership present at Council to oppose the motion.

The motion’s supporters argued that while CREPUQ is one of the strongest proponents of tuition hikes – against the demands of students who were on strike last spring – it would be self-defeating for PGSS not to lobby for greater university funding.

Salamon argued that the motion essentially represented a deal cut with the administration, and claimed that university administrations across the province have been lobbying student associations to adopt their position.

Jonathan Mooney, SecretaryGeneral of PGSS, objected to the characterization of the motion as being sponsored by the administration.

Salamon’s allegations stem from a meeting between Mooney and Olivier Marcil, McGill VP (External Affairs), in September. They discussed the issue of underfunding, at which time Marcil gave Mooney documents and research laying out McGill’s case.

Mooney and Marcil also met at noon on the day of the council meeting, though Mooney said they did not talk about the upcoming motion.

The motion, Mooney said, was the logical outcome of a report prepared by PGSS staff researcher Conor

Farrell, and therefore had nothing to do with the administration. During a heated period of debate, Mooney told councillors that opposition to the motion was “absurd.”

Mooney said that Marcil had not asked him to create any specific policies during their meeting in September. However, following the meeting, Farrell undertook what Mooney described as a study of all the existing research on Quebec university funding, from across the political and ideological spectrum.

Farrell’s report concluded that there

was indeed evidence of underfunding in Quebec universities.

This assertion differed markedly with the argument offered

by Justin Marleau, a researcher for AGSEM-McGill’s Teaching Union.

According to Marleau’s analysis of McGill budgets for a period of five years between 2007 and 2012, McGill’s overall operational revenues have increased 30 per cent since 2007, and 43 per cent of the increase has gone into administrative and non-salary expenses.

Leah Freeman, a McGill Social

Photo Hera Chan | The McGill Daily

Work graduate student who is also FEUQ’s vice president of graduate student affairs, spoke against the motion, referencing a recent report from a Quebec professors’ federation saying that Quebec’s universities are funnelling money into construction projects that the government intends to be used for teaching.

“The reality is that no needs analysis has been done for Quebec universities. There has been no analysis of how many teachers we’re missing,” said Cameron Monagle, FEUQ’s coordinator of internal affairs.

Future of the Sustainability Projects Fund in jeopardy University budget cuts could affect the fund Esther Lee and Dana Wray The McGill Daily

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s McGill struggles with provincial budget cuts by the Parti Québécois (PQ) government, the future of several programs and departments remains uncertain. Complications in funding are affecting the continuation of programs such as the Sustainability Projects Fund (SPF).

The SPF was created in 2009 as a three-year pilot project with the vision of fostering a culture of sustainability at McGill.

SPF Administrator Lilith Wyatt told The Daily that the SPF was a unique initiative because of its foundation on collaboration between staff and students.

Half of the SPF’s annual $840,000 budget comes from student member fees of the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU), the PostGraduate Students’ Society (PGSS), and the Macdonald Campus

Students’ Society (MCSS). In the past three years, this money was matched by the administration.

The initial description of the administrative matching was vague, and according to SPF’s website, included: “contributions from internal or external donations; centrally managed capital and operating budgets of the University; and grants from external agencies and non-governmental organizations.”

Wyatt explained that this allows for significant flexibility. In some cases, this administrative matching includes instances where individual departments approach the SPF to help them with funding, developing, and managing specific projects.

“About 16 percent of the administrative matching so far has actually come from departments,” Wyatt said, adding that this by-project basis was part of the original vision of the fund, but was difficult to predict.

Wyatt told The Daily that the SPF has allocated approximately $2.3 million over three years on

94 projects, 90 per cent of which are collaborations between professors and students.

The fund has an impressive track record of success. According to Wyatt, 177 student jobs have been created, three companies have been founded, and around 150 students have been able to get course credits for participating in SPF projects. The most visible projects include McGill Feeding McGill, Campus Crops, Edible Campus, and the Aboriginal Sustainability Project.

Despite this legacy, the cuts the University now faces make it difficult to ascertain how, and if, the SPF will survive when its three years of funding run out in the fall of 2013. Due to the long timeline of many of the projects, there is an almost one-year lag between the allocation of the funds to projects and their use.

The senior administration at McGill and the SPF are in talks to try to find specific alternative solutions to a funding crisis forcing cuts across the board. Wyatt was

very positive about the possibility of alternative sources of funding, and clarified that “it’s not as though all of that money needs to be found and put into a pot.”

“It’s just a matter of trying to find, more specifically, where [the money] can come from. The cuts are so profound at this time that every unit is going to feel it, and every priority is going to feel it,” Wyatt said.

SSMU President Josh Redel was also cautiously optimistic about the fund’s renewal. “It looks like we have potential solutions, but it’s just the uncertainty of what next year will look like,” Redel told The Daily.

For reasons of confidentiality, Redel was unable to elaborate on what these potential solutions could be. At present, Redel said, SSMU is working along with the SPF and with McGill’s administration to “[make] sure the fund reflects current financial reality.”

Last week, SSMU’s Legislative Council delayed a motion to approve a question concerning

the renewal of the fund’s student support. Redel explained that this delay was due to the wording of the motion, which assumed administrative matching. “The fund wouldn’t be true to its original form if it doesn’t have the match. It’s not that it would disappear, but we might have to look at how it’s composed, who’s able to apply for it, what kind of projects it undertakes, if it isn’t a parity fund.”

Both Wyatt and Redel stated that they would prefer not to proceed with the question until commitment had been secured from the administration.

This kind of financial uncertainty is not unique to the SPF as student groups, programs, and the university administration are scrambling for solutions to cuts Wyatt called “catastrophic.”

“Everything’s kind of just all over the place,” Redel said. “The financial situation is changing day to day, especially over the past two weeks...Everyone is kind of bogged down.”

commentary

The McGill Daily Thursday, February 14, 2013 mcgilldaily.com

7

Of race and privilege Back to basics Alexander McKenzie Commentary Writer

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hilst discussing a grad school application with a friend, I mentioned that I was highlighting my racialized background. The friend rolled their eyes, retorting, “I wish I was more minorities, I wish I had more cards in my deck.” I choked and changed the subject.

My friend’s statement reflects many of the conversations about race that have circulated campus this year. I have noted a belief that discussions of race victimize white people, and that persons of colour benefit from social advantages due to their racialization, such as affirmative action programs. This narrative portrays these advantages as sufficient enough that politicized persons of colour should refrain from ‘sensationalism’ and simmer down. This shallow conception of oppression must be juxtaposed to significant societal shifts regarding race. We have fostered an environment in which ‘racism/racist’ have become dirty words. This has made it polite to skirt, or even ignore, issues of race. ‘Being a racist’ is now stigmatized, but so are attempts to discuss occurrences of individual or institutional racism. This silence directly bolsters the privileges that are central to racism.

It should not be contentious to note our society’s systemic racism.

The lived experiences and experimentally tested evidence for endemic racism is voluminous, be it in our health services, law enforcement, educational systems, immigration systems, et cetera. Nor is it revolutionary to highlight that being born not white provides individuals with a plethora of barriers and limitations.

Not all persons of colour are equally or equivalently affected by these factors. No individual is simply their race; we all are situated within an intersectional web comprised of our sexuality, genders, economic statuses, and many other dynamics. Oppression is influenced by all these factors, allowing individuals to navigate society with varying success. For instance, wealthy individuals, such as myself, enjoy economic privilege regardless of race. Likewise, in situations when this social privilege is unidentifiable – walking along a street, for example – people tend to be treated according to visible identifiers, such as race (hence my tense relationship with police officers).

McGill perpetuates this racism at a macro and micro level. The macro level was discussed in a recent Daily editorial (“This institution is still too white,” February 7, page 18). At a micro level, McGill is unfriendly or hostile to persons of colour. The articles “You

are racist” (Commentary, October 18, page 7) and “All racism happens because of whiteness” (Commentary, November 8, page 7) both explored how racism hangs like a miasma on the McGill campus. I believe the reactionary, rather than constructive, responses to these articles is telling.

Now, for the millionth time: you have privilege. If you are a white person, ingrained into your skin from birth is an inalienable privilege that means you are, were, and will be treated fundamentally differently from people of colour. This privilege makes it easier for you to use and accrue social, political, and economic capital giving you access to broad mechanisms of power in society. Meanwhile, your obliviousness to this has real consequences for persons of colour. This is why you are, have been, and will continue to be a perpetuator of inter-personal and structural racism, unless you attempt to challenge systems of privilege. This is why you are racist.

The unwillingness to appreciate this truth is racist. A belief in ‘colour blindness’ is racist. The concept of being ‘post race’ is implicitly a product of privilege. Whiteness confers upon yourself a tabula rasa, a state of ‘racelessness’. In the mirror you see a ‘sporty person, with a great laugh’. I get to see ‘Black male’. When described to a friend, you’re an individual. I am my race. If I succeed I am a testament to my race. If I fail, I am a disgrace. If I get shot dead by a trigger happy asshole, who thinks a soda can is a threat, it’s because of this fact.

We are not all the same. Race was socially constructed, but the scaffolding’s gone, leaving a sturdy and wellfounded colonial effigy that does exist. To pretend it doesn’t, to dismiss our daily experiences and oppressions with platitudes, is to ignore the impact it has on persons of colour.

This is the stage in the argument that someone yells about antiwhite racism. Wouldn’t it be awful if individuals could be assigned characteristics because of a physical trait. However, the highlighting of privilege does not assume shared personalities. Instead it asserts the benign notion that our societal images of employable individuals, intelligent individuals, marriable (date-able, sexually attractive) individuals, and law-abiding individuals, are predicated in whiteness.

You benefit from this daily: realize this, accept this – and then let’s have a real discussion about race.

Meanwhile, whiteness protects you from a particularly persistent, racially targeted, form of psychological abuse (known as micro aggressions). To experience this: 1) Have your professor check with you every time race is raised (just to make sure the ‘black community’ is content).

2) Be referenced every time a

Illustration Catherine Polcz

discussion of Africa arises.

3) Be told that your academic success is due to your Asianness (i.e. strangeness, invalidating your effort, instead claiming your success is a function of you racially ‘cheating’ school).

4) Suffer through a list of jokes regarding your race: selling cocaine, running quickly, rap music.

5) Be pestered regarding the lyrics of rap music, or where to find cultural food.

6) Have your nationality stolen from you through questions like “where are you really (or ‘originally’) from.”

7) Have your race stolen from you: “You know Arcade Fire? Dude you’re sooo white-washed.” (I guess the ‘black community’ is going to take back my membership card and rap bible now.)

8) Listen to your professors glorify the intelligence of intellectuals who describe your (male) ancestors as sub-human, and when raising this issue be dismissed as irrelevant/ irreverent (the same authors that also treated all our self-identified female relatives as non-existent).

9) Have people note, with sur-

prise, how ‘articulate’ you are (Compared to what you were expecting?! Verbose, fine, but ‘articulate’?).

This list is a selection of my experiences from a random day this year.

However, no person should have to ‘prove’ their oppressions. It is basic decency to respect others’ emotions and experiences. These acts represent an attempt to compare persons of colour against a set of racial stereotypes; they are a list of arbitrary, oppressive measures against which our daily actions are measured.

These aggressions are constant, and over-shadow my educational, social, and daily experiences. Yet, if you challenge this, you get told to ‘lighten up’ (hah), get called an alarmist, or get your personal information sent to white supremacists.

I am not calling for ‘white guilt.’

Guilt re-situates the oppressor in the centre of the response to this oppressiveness. Your guilt is not necessary, or useful. Instead I ask for you to become an ally. Allyship means discussing, situating yourself within, and challenging privilege.

Having privilege does not make you a bad person. You were born with it; it is not your fault. However,

are you going to use it to perpetuate systems of oppression? Or are you willing to validate experiences, not give dismissive and patronizing responses to the experience of minoritized communities, and engage in respectful discourse over race and its effects? It means not making wistfully patronizing statements about your desire for minoritization. Likewise, it means realizing that whiteness is a form of racialization, just as constructed and mediated (but not nearly as oppressed) as any other racialization, that needs discussing and deconstructing. You’re racist. It’s not (fundamentally) your fault, until you decide to do nothing about it.

Now do something.

Alexander McKenzie is a U3 student studying Essentialisation and the Male Gaze (Poli Sci/IR). He was raised of, in, and around whiteness, and this article comes from a place of intense frustration, but also love.

He will happily respond to all comments, other than those predicated on: tone, semantics, or minutia. He can be reached at alexander.mckenzie@mail.mcgill.ca.

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The McGill Daily | Thursday, February 14, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Next top model minority On migration, assimilation, and resisting colonization through solidarity Ryan Thom Memoirs of a Gaysian

“While [the Chinese worker] gives us labour he is paid for it, and is valuable, the same as a threshing machine or any other agricultural implement.” – Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, 1885

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here was a time when my father, from whom I inherited a love of storytelling and grandiose expression, liked to say that the stars aligned for the birth of me and my sisters. He stepped out of the tiny apartment he shared with my mother in Vancouver on a starless night and wished for children whose lives would finally fulfill the promise of Gum San/Golden Mountain, the land of opportunity. Children who worked so hard and spoke English so politely that no guei lo would deny them citizenship, or a degree, or a job. He happened to look up, my father said, and there they were: the three blue stars of Orion’s belt, smiling back at him. Shortly after, Baba said, my sisters and I were born – one, two, three children, with minds as bright as stars.

The model minority is a wellknown trope in contemporary Western culture. Just the other week, a bespectacled, buck-toothed, book-carrying Asian university student appeared on How I Met Your Mother. This is how the white majority believes it can define us: primarily East Asian, but also occasionally South Asian or Latino. We are hardworking, subservient and socially awkward, asexual, apolitical, moneyscrimping, piano-playing, scholastically gifted (but only in the maths and sciences), obsessed with the pursuit of success. A social conservative’s ideal citizen, if not for the fact of our t(a)inted skins, our strange smells, and backward religions.

We are the model minority myth, the migrant’s dream, the almost Canadian/American/European, but not quite – never quite.

Yet there is another side, an inside, to the model minority

myth, a side as bitter as the winters through which our foreparents laboured for a tiny fraction of the pay that white workers received. It is an inside comprised of outsiders, we who know what is being lost in the endless scramble for survival and acceptance in a country that once demanded racist Head Taxes and internments; a country that set forth legislation to deny entry to our kind, relenting only so it could exploit our vulnerability, our labour, our desperate hope. The capitalist Western nation-state devalues our bodies and denigrates our cultures, all the while keeping us docile by holding out the promise of full citizenship, participation, equality only a generation or seven away.

Our existence is used as a weapon against the non-model minorities, the First Nations and black communities and everyone else who fails to play the game they were set up to

URGENT!!!

Don’t like your rights being trampled on?

Neither does anyone!

lose. If you can do it, why can’t they?

The white ruling class demands: you worked hard, why can’t they?

My sisters and I learned to embody the model minority myth.

We had no choice; failure meant a return to the poverty and humiliation, meant lifetimes spent under the guei lo’s boot. Assimilate. Do well in school. Assimilate. Never cause trouble. Assimilate. Don’t rock the boat. Four generations of ghosts and living relatives are counting on you.

Assimilate. Never talk back to the teacher, you’ll be punished. Never show anger to the boss, you’ll be fired. Assimilate. Survive.

Standing on the bones of a family legacy, my sisters and I reached for the sky. We mastered English so completely that our white teachers accused us of plagiarism even as Chinese faded from our tongues. Even as rats scuttled through our house and our parents struggled to make ends

Illustration Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily

meet, we made the top of our classes every time. Our parents worked to an inch of their lives so we could study, because everything we did was an investment in future happiness.

It was the trans girl in me that finally forced me to understand that the dream will never come true. You can’t be an Asian boy who wears dresses and has sex with men and still be a model minority. I broke beneath the weight of pursuing capitalist perfection, shattered decades of my father’s dreams in the night I came out. Still, sometimes I find myself getting caught up in the game. I scramble to get good grades, get into grad school, win scholarships, all while putting myself through undergrad. I smile and scrape and allow my identity to be used as a token by institutions, all to prove what a good transgender Asian citizen I am, so that I can defy statistics and succeed by the

standards of this country ruled by whiteness, heterosexism, capitalism.

Each time, I wonder, how long until I break again? How will I be punished when, inevitably, I scream? Who will the next top model minority be – the university-educated Chinese who work so hard, the South Asians who make such good employees, the white gay couples who get married and join the military? And what could we do if we stopped playing this game, refused to chase this myth that enslaves us? What could we bring about with our memory of ghosts, our rage and resilience and will to survive, our unbroken strength, our hearts bright as stars?

Ryan Kai Cheng Thom made it to the final round of Canada’s Next Top Model Minority, but lost in the end, like all the other contestants.

Commiserate at memoirsofagaysian@mcgilldaily.com.

In addition to the two (how generous!) consultation meetings scheduled by the admin, The Daily invites all students, staff, and faculty to send their thoughts on the new protest protocol to letters@mcgilldaily.com for an upcoming spread on the protocol.

DUE TODAY!

features

The McGill Daily Thursday, February 14, 2013

The good, the bad, and God text

HANNAH EDMONDSON

illustrations AMINA BATYREVA

mcgilldaily.com

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The McGill Daily | Thursday, February 14, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

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Yeah, but you’re just inherently good, and I’m just, well, not.” We’re sitting on a hotel bed with a slightly crooked gilded portrait of an angelic Jesus looking down upon us as we discuss why I am a Christian and she, one of my travel companions, is not.

I smile at this notion that I am inherently good. Me, the girl who in the ninth grade downed a bottle of tequila and was rushed to the hospital, where I proceeded to flirt with the male nurses and insist that my mom was a lesbian. Me, who in the fifth grade became so angry with my brother that I took my long nails and scratched bloody lines down his back, and then was proud that I had made my big brother cry. Looking at my past and my present, I can confidently say that I am not predisposed to being a good person. This ‘goodness’ my friend refers to does not come from a biological (psychological? behavioural?) inclination within me, but from a God who is all that is good, pure, and perfect. It is not that I am good, but rather that I acknowledge just how bad I am.

I have been a practicing Christian for all of my adult life. I am often asked why I believe; there is no straightforward answer I can give. It is not just a mental knowledge, or a spiritual awareness. I think C.S. Lewis put it best when he said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” *** My parents became Christians in their late teens and early twenties and were, for a time, distanced from their families for their seemingly strange beliefs. I, however, have always known who God was and that Jesus died on a cross for the sins of the world. I also grew up in a culture where this was common knowledge. When my family and I moved from England to Texas, we also moved into a very Christian environment, where almost everyone went to church at least on Christmas and Easter. My childhood was full of vacation Bible schools, seven-foot papier-maché rocks representing Jesus’ tomb, Veggie Tales, and Bible verse raps. During that time, I came to understand how just and loving this God was that my pastors kept talking about, and believed in his existence. I was baptized when I was twelve and from there began to study the Bible to understand what being a Christian really meant.

My view of Christianity, however, drastically changed when I entered the ninth grade.

High school is a big transition for anyone.

Entering high school, I became more selfconscious and hyper-aware of the actions of those around me. I began to see Christianity – and the Bible – as a set of rules preventing me from having fun. I wanted freedom, and

so I searched for it. I thought I found freedom in the flickering light of a cigarette, or the green-tinted eyes of a grade 11 guy, or the white lie I told my parents when they asked where I was going that night. If freedom was in these things, I thought, then why did I feel in myself more of a void than I had before?

These feelings I had been grappling with all came to a head when I went to the hospital for drinking nine times the legal limit of alcohol. I had been hanging out with a group of my friends and with an older guy, whom I had a crush on. Perhaps to impress him, or perhaps because I had no idea how alcohol worked, I ended up drinking far more than I should have. I remember waking up in my bed in mismatched pajamas and having to peel the electrode pads off of my chest. I had no idea what had happened until my parents filled me in, and it dawned on me what rebelling against my faith had led to. I hadn’t found freedom; I had merely replaced God with a different master: man. Or, well, high school boys.

A few months after the electropads my dad was offered a job in Canada, and we left the Lone Star State for Oakville, Ontario. Ontario was far different from the snug Christian environment I had just come from. Outside my church congregation, none of my friends were Christians, so all of my beliefs and the actions that reflected those beliefs were fairly alien to them. I remember my friend asking me one day, in all seriousness, if I was a lesbian. She could not understand why I didn’t date guys, and so she immediately presumed that I wasn’t attracted to them. These types of instances helped me evaluate the reasons behind my actions. While those experiences ultimately strengthened my faith, I felt isolated from those around me. I also discovered a need to constantly work at ‘being good.’ I followed the commandments: honoured my parents, tried not to lie, attempted to love those around me, but I failed time and time again. I placed an immense amount of pressure on myself to be perfect, forgetting that I was not and could never be. *** The transition from Ontario to Quebec, the suburbs to the city, home to residence was difficult. While Oakville was not full of Christians, Montreal, I found, had even less.

Even though Quebec is a province of cathedrals, only 2 per cent of Montrealers profess to having a personal relationship with Jesus (Catholics are excluded from this study, considering they do not personally connect with Jesus, nor share the gospel with other denominations). Despite the province’s strong Catholic history, many families do not fit the nuclear mould. Quebec has the highest percentage of common-law partnerships and the second highest percentage of same-

sex relationships in Canada. Living in this city, full of its own political self-expression and ideals, had a profound effect on me.

While wrestling with what I believed, I lacked the guidance of fellow believers. Even though I did not have many Christian friends in Oakville, I had supportive Christian parents. Amidst my friends’ hurtful words and my own insecurities, my parents had always encouraged me to be true to myself and to love those around me even when I felt like I couldn’t anymore. It was around this time that I met a few people from a Fish Frosh event that attended Providence church.

Through them, I started attending a bible study after feeling more of a desire for spiritual connection. At Providence, I entered a small – the group consisted of around forty people – yet mighty community of other like-minded believers who showed me more love than I thought was possible outside of a biological family.

There, I met friends like Francesca Mitchell and Stephanie Adjemian. Like me, Francesca was hesitant about her beliefs.

“If I’m honest, coming to university as a Christian was a bit of a challenge at first,” Francesca told me. “I was anxious to make a good impression on my flatmates, so I ended up partying pretty hard, and I had to work hard to ensure that God didn’t become an afterthought. Truth be told, I wasn’t always successful.” Like it was for me, the so-called freedom Francesca sought only led to dissatisfaction. Referring to the process of finding community in the church, Francesca said: “For someone like me, who doesn’t come from a Christian family background, [it] has really been amazing.”

Before leaving for university, I remember earnestly praying that God would provide me with Christian friends who would encourage me in my faith. At the beginning of university, however, I did not have that physical support system. Uncertain of who I was or who I wanted to be, I signed up for both Arts Frosh and Fish Frosh, the 115-person Christian frosh at McGill, in an attempt to try it all. My Frosh week involved more pub-crawls, power hours, and hitchhiking rides from strangers claiming to be the owners of 747 (in hindsight, not my brightest idea), than Fish Frosh activities. Stephanie was also attempting to figure out her own belief system during Frosh as well. “In university, I was away from the church I grew up in, and I was no longer living with my parents. I felt a responsibility to figure out the particulars of how I believe what I believe and underwent a pretty radical transformation in the way I think, theologically speaking,” she says.

In those first couple of years, I finally realized just how ‘bad’ I was. I often hear people say, “Well, I’m no Hitler, so I don’t see how

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I could possibly go to hell,” as an excuse for their actions. We often socially compare ourselves to feel better and ignore the vileness within. I had been particularly guilty of that: believing that because I had not killed someone, or robbed someone, I was a good person. On examination of my heart and my mind, I found that I was not as nice as I would have liked to believe. I was proud, unloving, and selfish, and, even worse, at least to me, I could do nothing to change it. I recognized at that moment a need for a saviour. I rediscovered what it meant to have a Heavenly Father.

I could finally put my trust and hope in someone who loved me unconditionally and perfectly. The rules that had once felt like prison bars became gifts of guidance given by one who cared for me better than anyone else.

When I recognized the bad in me, I could see so much clearer the good that is God. *** The belief that Christians are naturally good people, or that all Christians judge others, is a false yet permeating belief in society. I see this misconception in the Quinn Fabrays, Ned Flanders, and Hilary Fayes of modern media. This ‘holier than thou’ attitude, however, goes against everything that Jesus said and did while on earth.

Jesus did not come to earth on thundering clouds and take up residence in an ivory tower. He was brought into this world by a teenage girl, who was engaged to a carpenter, in a barn. He was laid in an animal trough and swaddled in ragged cloth. His birth was indicative of the life that he was to lead, one of humility and servitude. He ate with the prostitutes and tax collectors and mingled with the blind, lame, and lepers. He was despised by those he tried to love. His most humble act came, however, when he was publically nailed to a cross at the request of those he was dying for.

Naked and starved, he cried out: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” In that moment, Jesus atoned for all my badness: my pride, ambition, selfishness, conceit, hate, and reconciled man to God. Blameless as he was, Jesus became the ultimate sacrifice for all of our sins.

I am a Christian. I’m also a sister, a Victorian novel enthusiast, and a clean roommate. I’m also a control freak, bad at keeping in touch, and guard my feelings for fear of getting hurt. I’m just like you.

I look at my friend as we sit in a hotel in Rome and say, “I’m not good, but God, He’s great.”

“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came

by Christ Jesus.” –Romans 3:23-24

Health&ed

The McGill Daily Thursday, February 14, 2013 mcgilldaily.com

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Free education A vision of McGill’s future as an online classroom Omar Saadeh Health+Ed Writer

8:30 a.m., February 14, 2043 My twenty-something-year-old daughter, Amina, grabs her iEverything at the breakfast table while impatiently waiting for our kitchen management system to fry two over-easy eggs, toast a couple slices of wholewheat bread, and brew a strong Arabica coffee (one milk, three sugars).

Amina is a third year Arts student at McGill, lives at home in Brossard, actively participates in rallies organized by the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ) against increasing tuition hikes, and has high aspirations to change the world.

It’s a school day and her first class starts in five minutes – leaving her with ample time to make her morning commute of fifty feet.

8:35 a.m., Amina’s iEverything projects her professor in 3D as my daughter sits back comfortably on the sofa, eager to start her favourite class, ISLA 385 Politics and Poetics in Arabic Literature (a McGill Arts class that was apparently threatened to be cut thirty years ago). The class has been prerecorded, yet is still interactive and free to access by anyone with an internet connection. In addition to the McGill students, registered pupils from around the world are also signing in. To Amina’s surprise, there’s a pop quiz today.

After the lecture, tuition-paying students are separated into online groups supervised by professors or teaching assistants (TAs). In these smaller groups, students have the chance to pose questions, discuss problems, and share ideas. Midterms and final exams are administered to registered, fee-paying, students during these meetings; meanwhile, GPS coordinates are recorded to avoid group work on exams. Course feedback can be given by anyone registered to the course – student or instructor. The University collects and processes all the feedback in order to keep the course up-to-date, accommodating changing ideas and events while also making any necessary corrections.

The beauty here is that Amina can go back and review anything from the lecture that she had trouble understanding. She can ask a supervisor for help during discussion periods, discuss issues in depth on the class’s online TA-monitored forum, or send an email to a professor.

At the end of a semester, university credit is given to those who pay for the online course, while the nonpaying students receive only a certificate of completion. Furthermore,

students that pay tuition are eligible to attend workshops, tutorials, and conferences and are evaluated by sitting for exams.

Before making the big step forward and deciding to pay for Amina’s degree at McGill, we had a serious talk about the pros of having a degree versus the money saved upon completing a certificate.

A lot of things have changed around McGill since 2012.

It is unfortunate that McGill’s campus has been reduced to the iconic Arts building, Leacock, and the Redpath Museum. However, it is understandable, since McGill doesn’t require as many classrooms or libraries, due to an increasing demand towards online services. The once bustling hallways of the engineering and science departments are now occupied by overly qualified scientists that once held teaching positions. Under the banner of the McGill Research Corporation, these technical gurus are pushed to their limits to produce scientific results as efficiently as humanly possible.

The popular MOOCs (massive open online courses) movement of the early 21st century consequently separated the idea of learning from research, formerly under the same umbrella definition of education.

Elite universities began by posting several lectures online with an open invitation to anyone with an internet connection. Following the popular trend, many other institutions did the same. This deviation from conventional attitudes forced universities to revisit, and in many cases, revise their statement of purpose, stressing their focus on quality of teaching and their students’ needs more than ever before.

Initially, the MOOCs movement had been dominated by big name schools – championing their brand name around the world. Their efforts granted millions of people free universal access to quality education, while erasing the limitation of physical location or financial constraints. The price of information – and arguably education – drastically fell.

While this had a positive effect on the level of global education, it forced lower-tier and mediocre universities to compete with elite institutions over the same crop of students. The enticement of attending a Harvard philosophy course was too much for local and state universities to contend with.

Large campus schools were faced with tough decisions and found it harder and harder to defend their vastly built campuses and expensive infrastructure in lieu of these lower cost alternatives. In fact, MOOCs became so popular that only a few elite universities survived as learning

Illustration Oles Chepesiuk | The McGill Daily

institutions, forcing others to specialize in specific hands-on professions that require in-class instruction. *** MOOCs have recently been the subject of much debate on many university campuses, including our own.

The name MOOCs originates from the University of Manitoba, where the first university-level course was offered free of charge to 2,300 online students. This small Canadian success story has blossomed into a global movement, gaining momentum as more and more universities jump on the MOOCs bandwagon.

This may come as no surprise.

Statistics Canada puts the in-province tuition increase for Quebec at 110 per cent and Ontario at 210 per cent since 1990. While these numbers are high, they are profoundly dwarfed by the American tuition surge of 360 per cent since 1986. This resulted in a high interest in MOOCs

by U.S. universities.

In late December 2011, academic faculty at the Massetchusets Institute of Technology (MIT) decided to experiment with a MOOC-style pilot program by offering an engineering circuits and electronics course online, for free. A couple months later, the course opened to a colossal audience of 155,000 registered

students. If each lecture hall held 200 students and five classes were offered each semester during the fall and winter terms, that would be equivalent to the total class participation realized over 77 and a half years!

At Princeton, longtime professor of Sociology Mitchell Duneier offered an online course after thirty years of routine classroom- style lectures. 40,000 students enrolled.

Stanford, too, experienced similar success with its Artificial Intelligence course, recording over 160,000 registrations, according to the New York Times. *** Today, McGill is continuously ranked amongst the top twenty universities around the world – as ranked in a Times Higher Education poll in Macleans – year after year.

However, according to Principal Heather Munroe-Blum, we have been recently hit by an estimated $19-million budget cut from the Quebec government that may have tarnishing repercussions on the McGill’s reputation. As the University’s figures out how to deal with a smaller financial endowment, students face mounting tuition fees.

Will the MOOCs movement spark a drastic change in our education system? Will prospective students

consider MOOCs as an alternative to a traditional education? How will universities bring in revenue from free online courses? How does all this affect McGill?

The Daily asked Professor James Clark, the former associate dean of academics of McGill’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, about the MOOCs movement at McGill.

Clark asserted that online course offerings are a natural extension of McGill’s educational outreach and that “online lectures have a number of advantages over classroom lectures, such as flexibility in scheduling, and allowing students to review the lecture many times if needed. Students will have to be self-disciplined to make sure they keep up with all of the lectures.”

Clark also expressed positivity when asked about the financial returns of such a program, believing that such an offering could bring in additional revenue.

McGill would be able to expand its reach into new markets, while also reducing on-campus costs by more efficient use of classrooms.

As this debate continues to mature on McGill’s campus, the right question may not be whether we can afford to give free classes online, but rather, can we afford not to.

culture

The McGill Daily Thursday, February 14, 2013 mcgilldaily.com

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Unhooked, stripped down, and hella sexy Grace Potter and the Nocturnals Cleo Valentine Culture Writer

and the best of all endings.

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his past Thursday night, Montreal played host to Grace Potter – arguably one of the current queens of rock and roll – and her band, the Nocturnals, who are promoting their recently released album, The Lion The Beast The Beat. An increasingly rare breed, this group leaves absolutely everything on stage in performances that are entirely unhooked from the very beginning to the very end.

In the afterglow of the show, I couldn’t help but wonder whether there would be many more evenings like this. I think it’s safe to say that there will always be live music, but it’s difficult to dispute the fact that guitar-based bands are on the decline, and that rock and roll, as a compelling force within contemporary music, seems to be quickly disappearing.

According to Billboard Magazine, the number of rock songs on the singles charts fell from 10 per cent in 2008, to 4 per cent in 2010, and then to an astounding and dangerously anemic 2 per cent in 2012. The demise of the genre couldn’t have been more evident with the announcement of this year’s Grammy nominations for Best Rock Performance, which strangely included the oh-sofolksy Mumford & Sons. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t that the band doesn’t make great music; I’m just not sure that the music they make could be fairly described as rock.

So what if it’s true? What if rock and roll is dying and we are quickly approaching the end of an era? Does it matter, and should any of us care? I was reminded this past week, as I was out on the floor watching Grace Potter and the Nocturnals rock out like the best of them, that it really does matter, and that we should. There is something deeply soulful, wonderfully primal, and disarmingly honest about rock music that no kind of sampler, auto-tuner, or other synthetic interface can ever touch.

It has a stripped-down, human element to it like few others, and of course, as Grace Potter made clear last night, what else would make you move like that? *** Hours before she took the stage at the Corona Theatre, Grace Potter sat down to answer a few questions for The Daily about the tour, rock and roll,

McGill Daily (MD): It’s been said that new tours are like new lovers with all of the thrill and excitement that goes with that.

From your perspective, what’s different about the Roar Tour, not only in terms of the way it looks and the way it sounds, but also in the way it feels?

Grace Potter (GP): Well, this tour is special for a few reasons. For one thing, we’ve got a badass light rig with mirror balls and a fog machine! More importantly, for every show on this tour, we invite our fans to make song requests through Twitter, which doesn’t seem very rock and roll, but has been a great way to hear what the fans want.

It’s always cool to hear the songs you request and it’s great for the band...keeps us on our toes.

MD: You probably know the statistics better than I do, but last year there were only two rock songs on Billboard’s top 100 singles chart. Where have all the rock and rollers gone and why do you think this genre is so anemic at the moment?

GP: I was just having a conversation with someone about this. I really don’t know much about the industry...I think rock and roll had its heyday, there were some amazing breakthroughs, and then it kinda became a circus. The excesses were obviously fun to watch and read about, but at a certain point in the mid-nineties, I think people just didn’t buy the bullshit anymore. That’s not to say that all rock is dead and gone, but the general perception might be a bit tainted.

There are plenty of rock bands that have shaken off that larger-thanlife scene and just gotten back to making good music, but it’ll take a second to earn our way back up the rungs … or maybe we just don’t care about top 40 anymore.

MD: Have you had the chance to watch Sound City [documentary about the eponymous LA record label] yet? What do you think has been lost in the evolution from analog to digital recording, if anything? Is there perfection to be found in little imperfections or is that just a means of rationalization?

GP: I have not had a chance to watch...but I’ve had lots of conversations about digital versus analog. I think there should always be little imperfections in music, but I’m not completely opposed to digital recording.

There’s a time and a place for it. At the end of the day though, great musicians playing great old

Photo Cleo Valentine

gear straight to tape just sounds better. It’s not supernatural.

MD: Neil Young once said that rock and roll is not about survival. Ultimately, rock careers, like all careers, come to an end.

Although it’s a long way off for you, what’s your position on the underlying sentiment in Neil Young’s “Hey Hey, My My”

namely, is it better to burn out as Young would have us believe, or is it better to fade away, which was ironically and of course tragically, John Lennon’s preference?

GP: I love that song. Neil is certainly still going strong. Hmm. Is it better to burn out than to fade away? I’ve never been a fan of fade-outs on albums…it’s like the

party’s still going but you’ve been ushered out the door against your will. I love cross-fades though – cause you get to stay at the party and just move from room to room … so I’m gonna throw that metaphor into my career arc. If I had to choose how things would end, they wouldn’t. I’d just wander into a new party.

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The McGill Daily | Thursday, February 14, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Art in the digital age

Artexte inaugurates an open-access database Charles Larose-Jodoin Culture Writer

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ince the early 1980s, Artexte has been an archive organization of the printed word in Canadian contemporary art. After a recent move to the Art Actuel building at 2 Ste. Catherine East, Artexte launched e-Artexte, an open-access database, research platform, and online repository for contemporary art publications since 1965.

The physical Artexte collection is impressive in its breadth. It includes critical essays, exhibition catalogues, magazine/journal articles, conference papers, and artist-initiated publications – along with 22,000 monographic, visual, audio or digital documents, roughly 9,000 Canadian and international contemporary art exhibition catalogues, 7,300 artists’ files, and 3,000 files on Canadian and international cultural organizations.

The digital e-Artexte collection will exist as a complement to the paper-based collection. It will make the contents of the collection searchable through Google and Google Scholar, as well as through federated search engines (such as WorldCat) that assemble content for scholars in diverse fields of study. E-Artexte will thus facilitate the tasks of writers, researchers, and publishers interested in contemporary art on a global scale by making it easy to access and search a vast amount of content using the internet.

E-Artexte is based on open-access principles. The open-access move-

ment believes that scholarly literature and research results should be freely accessible for unrestricted use, in the interest of advancing global scholarship and knowledge. Most universities offer their faculty and students the opportunity to self-archive dissertations, journal articles, and other writing within institutional repositories. These repositories are freely accessible via university websites.

E-Artexte takes this standard model a step further by creating a repository that can be freely accessed by anyone.

Those opposed to open-access include publishers and university presses who fear they would be losing money by making ‘their’ publications available for free. They see publishers as part of the scholarly information chain and view a pay-for-access model as necessary to ensure that publishers are adequately compensated for their work. This is important in order for journals to continue to maintain a scholarly reputation, arrange for peer review, and edit and index articles. According to publishing houses, these tasks require economic resources that are not supplied under an open access model.

One needs to be a member to deposit works to e-Artexte, which requires publishers to pay a fee based on their revenue. Individual artists can become members for free. Not all artists are welcome: to be eligible one must be considered part of the contemporary Canadian art scene and not just a “Sunday painter,” according to John Latour, information specialist at Artexte.

Illustration Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily

Having an online database for art brings to the fore the issue of the internet as a medium for art, as not all artworks can be captured fully in digital format. For instance, Annie Descôteaux’s collage book, entitled AD NAUSEAM, is made from coloured cardboard shaped into the figures of perverse fables where creatures, foodstuffs, and organs trade roles. Originally a physical book, Descôteaux subsequently set up AD NAUSEAM as a website and as a digital file on e-Artexte. According to Descôteaux, all three different versions of the work express the same idea, even though the electronic version yields a different artistic experience than seeing the

physical book would, because the digital version of the work does not reveal that the book is made using scissors, cardboard, and glue. This example is relevant because it illustrates the process of digital reformatting works must undergo in order to be made available on the internet. Naturally, this often erases the traces of the artist’s personality.

From their work, and imposes constraints on how it is viewed.

So, the digital repository of art is a great way to grant wider access to easily digitized art criticism, art works, and texts. However, digitization has some restrictions and doesn’t perfectly represent all forms of art. It could be the case that open-

access repositories will give greater visibility to digital artworks at the expense of works which do not conform to the frame of technology, but perhaps this change is not necessarily bad.

Although this has the potential to give greater visibility to digital art at the expense of those works that don’t transfer well into cyberspace, the prospect of open-access digitization of Canadian contemporary art will be welcomed by all those who have an interest in the subject.

Check out the new database at www.e-artexte.ca, or visit the physical collection at 2 Ste. Catherine East, room 301.

Colonialism in a narrative nutshell The revolutionary African cinema of Ousmane Sembène Lilya Hassall Forays into Film and Feminism

I

n my last column, I responded to this year’s biggest and least politically correct blockbuster, Django Unchained, by recommending a few independent films that explore race more thoroughly and thoughtfully.

Two of these films, Bush Mama and Killer of Sheep, were products of the LA Rebellion, a radical independent film movement that was heavily influenced by the post-colonial African cinema of the 1960s.

This week I’ll continue my exploration of radical films about race with one of these radical early African films, Black Girl. Made in 1966, the film is not only one of the earliest movies, African or otherwise, with a black female protagonist, but also the first feature by director Ousmane Sembène, often

cited as the father of African film.

Even before Sembène earned such high praise, he lived a remarkable life of political resistance. Born in rural Senegal in 1923, Sembène fought in World War II, stowed away to France, joined the French Communist Party, and helped lead a strike to impede the shipment of weapons for the French war in Vietnam, all before he ever picked up a camera. Sembène wrote two socialist novels before he switched mediums, hoping that through film, his social critique could reach a larger audience. Luckily for him, his second novel earned him an invitation to Moscow, where he would have an opportunity to study filmmaking before finally returning to Senegal in 1960.

Previous to the 1960s, the only films made about Africa were Western, and shot black Africans through the lens of either paternalisim or blatantly malign racism.

When anti-colonial films were made, such as René Vauthier’s Afrique 50,

or Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’ Les Statues Meurent Aussi, they were banned in France and its colonies. It was only with the liberation of many African nations around 1960 that Africans began their own cinematic tradition. As Sembène explained it, “For us, African filmmakers, it was then necessary to become political, to become involved in a struggle against all the ills of man’s cupidity, envy, individualism, the nouveauriche mentality, and all the things we have inherited from the colonial and neo-colonial systems.”

Black Girl, which Sembène adapted from one of his short stories, tells the story of Diouana, a Senegalese domestic worker whose white French employers go on vacation to France and take her with them. Taking place entirely in Diouana’s boss’ claustrophobic Antibes apartment, flashbacks show Diouana’s journey from the slums of Dakar to the maid market, a square where black women wait for white women to hire them, an image strongly resembling a slave

auction. In Dakar, where Diouana’s employers were foreigners, they treated her with kindness and generosity, employing her only to mind the children. In their native France, however, to Diouana’s surprise, the couple reduces her to a maid. There, the couple and their French friends exploit, humiliate, and objectify the illiterate Diouana until her final act of resistance and self-expression.

Giving Diouana a voice-over that accounts for most of the dialogue, the film resists racist portrayals of Africans as purely physical, non-cerebral beings by constantly foregrounding her interiority. Further, it acts as a devastating indictment of colonial racism and classist oppression not only on an interpersonal level but also on an international level. As Diouana’s total dependence on her employers in France results in her exploitation, Sembène communicates more broadly that Senegal, though liberated, is still dependent on, and therefore at the mercy of France.

Sembène’s use of the medium of film to reach a larger audience paid off. Black Girl won the Prix Jean Vigo, a prestigious French award which, until 1966, had only ever been awarded to white directors. The film quickly became the first African film to garner international acclaim, immediately drawing attention to African cinema and its fiery critique of colonialism and global capitalism.

Today, you can even find it on Netflix.

Like Bush Mama and Killer of Sheep, the American films it would help spawn, Black Girl is a film about exploitation and oppression from the perspective of the exploited and oppressed, a necessary alternative to mainstream treatments of race, gender, and colonialism from Django Unchained to Lincoln to Zero Dark 30.

Lilya Hassall is a U3 Cultural Studies student. Forays Into Film and Feminism is a bi-weekly column about alternative films. Contact her at foraysintofilm@mcgilldaily.com.

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The McGill Daily | Thursday, February 14, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Inkwell - Emery Saur

Art Essay - Siobhan Lazenby

pussy is mine my vagina is anxious and depressed, and relies on suppositories. It has a manifesto and seeks peer review and validation.

It watches labiaplasties in the middle of the night, on youtube stares at the pieces of skin just sitting on the gauze, no blood, looking like roast beef hands and feet are the sweetest flesh, but my vagina bets labia is the most bitter, from all the kegels it’s done and because in the beginning i worked so hard to be acquiescent, and now im afraid to stop. my vagina smiled, one day long ago in dance class, with a fan kick my teacher said/you only do it right, when your vagina smiles and when we put vaseline on our teeth our vaginas smiled too, in quietus when do our martha-stewart-style queefs rain confetti down upon us, and when do we become phenomenal? slime mold has 13 genders, but the slime that leaks from my vagina has only one, and there is suffering for i have known the sighs already, heard them all, for all the hairs poke from my perforated flesh, like ears, and i have been roofied and i have battened down for rape.

For i have seen the fears already, and others grief is so much worse; it’s older and empirical, and mine is only mongering. i wandered in from another kind of fantasy and i was grown to be of use so i walk fast at night. the vessel was made to be filled, and wear all kinds of hats and im trying to be magnanimous so when you stop to ask me for directions and then try and pull me into your car i feel guilty

culture

because im a slut and love to fuck and i’m not picky there is drudgery in my vagina, and there are state laws, mandatory delays, and biased counseling its reactions are wrong, and it exists on the cusp of a complete and utter nervous breakdown. and the rotting seed of a long-dead zeitgeist still rains from the sky there is a dissonance between what i say and others feel/and my womanhood is quiet in its folds, and it will kill itself i’ll follow you/ i’ll follow you/ into my vagina, and when you’re done i guess i’ll follow you out and then get lost as i am/ i am quiet/ in my roundness, and see half-glorification in starvation and demi-preservation so that i can rely on my potential, never to discover that perhaps it isn’t even there at all my mind mewls for less smite, and my vagina for someone to touch it, and it hums shlick, shellac, bang bang/ we’re in the sexy business i shine, right?/ cause i grind so suave and impossible and they all taste the same this morbid self obsession, female confession i profess, and regress because that which impressed upon me/is empty and eggs get personhood, but mine is so wrapped up i grow old, i grow old, i shall wear my inner labia rolled to keep in all the darkness i am woman now, so why compare?

I am woman. stop there. this pussy is mine/i think i think this pussy is mine

V-Day is a global activist movement to end violence against women and girls, inspired by The Vagina Monologues. Come see McGill’s own Vagina Monologues this week, February 14 to 16, 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. in Leacock 132.

Tickets are $10, and proceeds go to benefit two anti-violence organizations in Montreal, Head and Hands and WomenAware.

A look Inside Lara Roxx HIV and the porn industry Sophia Ma Culture Writer

It’s not every day you get to meet a former porn star. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting as the emcee welcomed Lara Roxx onto the stage of the Concordia auditorium, but it wasn’t the thin, elegant young woman with short dark hair who faced the audience and said, “This is the closest I’ve ever been to being in a university.”

The screening of Mia Donovan’s documentary Inside Lara Roxx was organized by Concordia University and Cinema Politica.

Shot over the course of more than six years, the film follows Roxx’s life after she contracted HIV in Los Angeles while shooting a porn scene without protection. Both Roxx and Donovan were present at the screening. Rather than being hesitant about sharing her

most intimate experiences with hundreds of strangers, Roxx was incredibly open. “A lot of times people are shy to ask the questions they really mean to ask,” she said before the screening started.

“Don’t be…It’s fine.”

The documentary begins in April 2004, when it was revealed that Roxx was had contracted HIV during one of her shoots, and became something of a media sensation. The 21-year-old, who had worked as a stripper, escort, and porn actor in Montreal, had moved to the porn mecca of Los Angeles to make some quick cash before moving on. She contracted HIV while shooting her very first scene in L.A. The media frenzy faded away quickly, but Mia Donovan, a filmmaker and recent Concordia graduate, was determined not to let Roxx’s story be forgotten. However, as much as Inside Lara Roxx is about Roxx’s story, it is also an

exposé on the many failings of the porn industry, such as the lack of regard for safe sex practices. There is pressure on actors to perform unprotected sex, which is more popular and thus more profitable – however, as Roxx learned, it is also very dangerous. Nevertheless, there is no easy solution: she believes that imposing condom use upon the porn industry would not put an end to unprotected sex scenes in films – instead, it would drive production of these movies underground and thus make it more dangerous.

The brutality of the porn industry was evident everywhere in the documentary. While many new actresses were originally unwilling to perform unprotected sex, their agents, who became powerful father figures for many girls, were experts at forcing them far outside their comfort zones. Former porn star Dick Nasty says at one point, “You got to be realistic. It’s what

the public wants to see.” Even Bill Margold, the founder of Protecting Adult Welfare (PAW), a charity organization trying to create safer working conditions for porn actors, vehemently denied that the porn industry was in any way to blame for Roxx’s tragedy. “You walked on a razor blade and you got cut,” he tells her in one scene.

But Roxx is not telling her story to assign blame, or to condemn the porn industry. She merely hopes that her story will be able help others avoid her mistakes. When asked about the personal costs of exposing herself to such a wide audience, Roxx said it would all be worthwhile if she could just help one person.

Despite its heavy subject matter, the film ends on a hopeful note. Roxx sits silhouetted on a beach, telling the camera about the night she thought about committing suicide. She traces patterns in the sand and says that she didn’t take her life that night because

she realized, “Maybe my life sucked, but life didn’t suck.” And she had to live on in order to see more of it.

Inside Lara Roxx premiered at the Hot Docs Festival in 2011. Since then, the transformation in the young woman standing onstage has been incredible. As she took questions from the audience, she was poised, eloquent, and funny. One of her main messages in the film was that “HIV is not a death sentence anymore.” She says her health is now great, that she is currently working on a professional diploma in graphic design, in a serious relationship, and on good terms with her family. Both she and Donovan would like to see the film go in a more educational direction.

Roxx is optimistic about her future, but she is also now coming to terms with her past. In the documentary, she was asked if she was proud of what she had done. “Well,” she answered, “I’m not ashamed.”

15

EDITORIAL

volume 102 number 33

Remembering Canada’s missing and murdered Indigenous women

editorial board 3480 McTavish St., Rm. B-24 Montreal, QC H3A 1X9 phone 514.398.6784 fax 514.398.8318 mcgilldaily.com coordinating editor

Queen Arsem-O’Malley

coordinating@mcgilldaily.com

coordinating news editor

Juan Camilo Velásquez news editors

Valentine’s Day marks the annual Memorial March for Missing and Murdered Women in cities across Canada, which honour the disproportionate number of Indigenous women who have been and still are victims of systemic violence in this country.

More than twenty years ago, in 1991, Vancouver saw the first memorial march, kicking off a movement that has grown in strength and size ever since. The devastating legacy of colonialism and deadly effects of sexism, rac-

ism, and marginalization are a daily reality for Indigenous women, whom groups like Sisters in Spirit and the Native Women’s Association of Canada struggle to bring to the forefront of Canadian media consciousness.

Here, we break down recent activism – and the lack of government initiative – surrounding missing and murdered Indigenous women.

—The McGill Daily Editorial Board

Laurent Bastien Corbeil Lola Duffort Farid Rener

February 1991: First memorial march

commentary editors

Jacqueline Brandon Steve Eldon Kerr

for missing and murdered women held in Vancouver in response to the murder of a Coast Salish woman in the city.

culture editors

Kaj Huddart Hillary Pasternak features editor

Christina Colizza science+technology editor

Anqi Zhang

health&education editor

Ralph Haddad sports editor

Evan Dent

multimedia editor

Kate McGillivray photo editor

Hera Chan illustrations editor

Amina Batyreva design&production editors

Edna Chan Rebecca Katzman

2004: UN report “Stolen Sisters” counts that 510 Indigenous women have disappeared or been murdered in Canada since 1980.

copy editor

Nicole Leonard web editor

Tom Acker le délit

Nicolas Quiazua

rec@delitfrancais.com

cover design Amina Batyreva and Hera Chan contributors Camille Chabrol, Oles Chepesiuk, Hannah Edmondson, Cem Ertekin, Georgia Gleason, Lilya Hassall, Ahmad Hassan, Molly Korab, Charles Larose-Jodoin, Siobhan Lazenby, Alex McKenzie, Michael Lee-Murphy, Catherine Polcz, Omar Saadeh, Emery Saur, Ryan Thom, Cleo Valentine, Dana Wray

2010: Funding to Sisters in Spirit cut from federal budget and reallocated to government-run programs.

2012: Native Women’s Association of Canada estimates that over 600 Aboriginal women have gone missing or been murdered since 1982.

October 2005: Bridget Tolley founds the annual Sisters in Spirit vigil and march. Tolley’s mother, Gladys, was killed by a police cruiser in 2001.

January 2008: Walk4Justice, a nonprofit group that raises awareness about justice for missing and murdered women through cross-country walks, is founded.

February 2010: First Montreal march for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women is held.

January 2013: Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains launches canadasmissing.ca, a website for gathering information on active missing persons cases.

February 2013: Operation Thunderbird (#OpThunderbird) – a project aiming to map out sites of assault, injury, and murders of Indigenous women – launches.

14 February 2013: Memorial marches are held in at least 16 Canadian cities. statistics/government grassroots movements/awareness

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Shedov sales representative Letty Matteo ad layout & design Geneviève Robert Mathieu Ménard dps board of directors

Queen Arsem-O’Malley, Erin Hudson, Rebecca Katzman, Michael Lee-Murphy, Anthony Lecossois, Matthew Milne, Sheehan Moore (chair@dailypublications.org), Joan Moses, Farid Muttalib, Shannon Palus, Nicolas Quiazua, Boris Shedov

All contents © 2012 Daily Publications Society. All rights reserved. The content of this newspaper is the responsibility of The McGill Daily and does not necessarily represent the views of McGill University. Products or companies advertised in this newspaper are not necessarily endorsed by Daily staff.

Printed by Imprimerie Transcontinental Transmag. Anjou, Quebec.

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compendium!

The McGill Daily Thursday, February 14, 2013 mcgilldaily.com

lies, half-truths, and the caretaking of strange animals

i6

Obituaries Remembering the dead; leaving a legacy Difference Difference (often also known as différance) had a long/short and singular/complex life. Born as death’s opposite, difference lived as difference died: strangled by his own web/rhizome of signifiers and signified, unable to reconcile mind/body and subjectivity/being. Difference will not be missed by society at large, having become notably silent in recent years. Many critics contend that difference has in fact been dead for years and that there is no escape from Empire’s erasure.

—Rottan Fandangle Patience Patience died just before breakfast yesterday. Observers believe it was because the line at the Redpath Tim Hortons was “just

absurdly long, too long for Patience himself.” Patience leaves behind an estate valued at over $5 billion that he accrued slowly with careful planning and prudent risk-taking in the stockmarket over decades.

—DiAnne Graves

tended to bring with them. SelfMotivation will not be missed by many people, who never knew her well as the internalization of the values of wage-slavery was completed in the mid 1980s.

—Shingles Williamson

Self-Motivation Self-Motivation, the best friend of luminaries such as the Muse, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Procrastination, has passed away. Always a social being, SelfMotivation had begun to feel ignored by other people, who had largely turned toward external sources of motivation, such as money and fear. Self-Motivation consistently expressed her fear of external motivators, and the accompanying rise in instrumental reasoning and logic that they

The Papacy The Papacy was one of the longest running tenured positions in history. Born around 47 AD inside of Saint Peter, The Papacy survived countless deaths, wars, crises of faith, and numerous occasions of being proven completely to live on well into the 21st century.

Although many expected it to survive its latest crisis – a very bitter and public breakup with Joseph Ratzinger’s earthly body – the Vatican, the administrative body of the Catholic Church, announced

on Monday that The Papacy will be retired, to be replaced by a team of adjunct Popes and part-time Cardinal students.

—Jill Saint-John The Commons The Commons passed away last night when the final piece of her was sold to Goldcorp to push the numbers up by 5 per cent next year. The Commons was, at one time, very large, and a flourishing member of the universe, because it was the entire area of this planet. Over time, however, people kept looking the other way and not paying attention at crucial moments and The Commons was slowly eroded as primitive accumulation picked up. Thankfully, the end came quickly for The Commons, as her

remaining life was quickly swallowed up over the last 100 years of rapid industrialisation.

—Karen Marx The Teenage Producer Born in the city of Ableton, MacbookLand, The Teenage Producer made a name for himself moving sequences of ones and twos from one area of a hard drive to another. With no discernible musical talent, The Teenage Producer has amazed most musicians by touring the world and being regarded as an object of sexual attraction, despite spending all his time alone in his parent’s bassment.

The Teenage Producer’s death might allow for the development of new musical genres.

—William Fitzgerald

winter colours

by Hieronymus Chanski and E.k. EK