vol102iss38

Volume 102, Issue 38

March 14, 2013 mcgilldaily.com

THE

POLICE ISSUE

McGill THE

DAILY

Puppies, ponies, and pigs since 1911

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

Pg. 8

The McGill Daily and Radio CKUT 90.3 fm present:

An Alternative Summit on Higher Education Friday, March 15 5-6 p.m.

Tune in to 90.3 fm to hear our panelists: Benjamin Gingras, Nadia Hausfather, Justin Marleau, and Tim McSorley

LEADERSHIP TRAINING PROGRAM

Leadership Skills Development Workshops Take the opportunity to sign up for the Leadership Training

Program’s FREE Skills Development Workshops!

These workshops were created to give students the chance to develop and build leadership and life skills. These skills often prove to enhance academic success. $WWHQG D PLQLPXP RI ÀYH ZRUNVKRSV WKURXJKRXW DFDGHPLF \HDU DQG UHFHLYH D FHUWLÀFDWH RI FRPSOHWLRQ $OO ZRUNVKRSV DUH RQ 0F*LOO·V downtown campus.

Ahmadiyya Muslim Students’ Association presents

World Peace Conference

Is World War III Inevitable?

ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING

Friday, March 22nd, 2013

Wednesday, March 27th Leacock, Room 232 5:30pm

Come and check out the FINAL workshops of the year ...

Use Your Your Leadership LeadershipSkills SkillstotoSpice SpiceUpUpYour Your CVCV Wednesday, March 20, 17:35-19:35 ,PSURYH \RXU &9 ZLWK SUDFWLFDO WLSV RQ KRZ WR UHÁHFW \RXU OHDGHUVKLS skills and experiences!

Negotiation Skills Negotiation Skills Thursday, March 21, 17:35-19:35 This experiential workshop will explore and expand your own negotiation skills by being involved in an actual negotiation simulation.

We can all be better negotiators and attain more win-win outcomes!

Professionalism: Being Professionalism: BeingYour YourBest Best Thursday, March 28, 17:35-19:35 Being professional or unprofessional has many repercussions in interpersonal interactions and attaining career success - learn how to better navigate this fundamental terrain!

Registration available online see all the workshops offered this semester & register via: ZZZ PFJLOO FD ÀUVW\HDU OHDGHUWUDLQLQJ ZRUNVKRSV For more info, drop by the Leadership Training Program in the First<HDU 2IÀFH in the Brown Building, Suite 2100, or call 514-398-6913

Main event from 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM Leacock 232 McGill University

Talk + Q&A Session – Free & Open to All Various Speakers - Free Refreshments

For more information and free registration:

islamevents.ca loveforall.ca

Members of the DPS are cordially invited.

facebook.com/groups/AMSAMcGill/ faraz.rajput@mail.mcgill.ca (514) 649-6191

News meetings Thursdays at 6 p.m.

The Daily office - SSMU B-24

news@mcgilldaily.com

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

For more information, please contact chair@ dailypublications.org

NEWS

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

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03 NEWS SSMU sends lease open letter to admin Concordia profs vote to strike AMURE agrees to collective agreement Athletics fee to increase SACOMSS faces fee referendum Women’s Day march

08 COMMENTARY Safe communities are free from police The mental effects of undercover policing

Photo Farid Rener | The McGill Daily

Anti-Zionist discourse silenced on campus Professor’s door defaced with Zionist slogans

Tips for keeping safe during protests

THE POLICE ISSUE

12

FEATURES

Trans* people denied access to shelters

14 HEALTH&ED Sex work and the police McGill’s 13-year-old MOOC

16

CULTURE

Getting your beard through customs History preserved in wax

18 COMPENDIUM The set-in-stone man is going out of business

19

EDITORIAL

McGill’s ties to Israeli universities

Farid Rener The McGill Daily

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panel entitled “Zionism in Academia” discussed on Tuesday that academia in North America is complicit in privileging Zionist discourses, rendering the study, analysis, and discussion of Palestine invisible.

Facilitated by Michelle Hartman, professor of Arabic Literature at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill, the panel – held as part of Israeli Apartheid Week – drew a crowd of fifty people.

The panel was composed of Mohsen al Attar, a visiting professor and human rights lawyer, and Douglas Smith, a PhD student who was a member of Tadamon!, a Montreal-based collective working in solidarity with struggles for self-determination, equality, and justice in the Middle East.

“I’m not interested in the question of if Zionism holds a privileged place within the environment of North American universities, because I think that it does.

I don’t think that it is a question whether or not Palestine is colonized, because I think that it is,” Hartman said in her introduction to the panel.

“In many university spaces, to say this is not accepted,” she added.

Instead, Hartman continued, the panel would focus on the way in which this privilege manifests itself.

Hartman told the audience that it had been hard to find people to talk at the event, as many people that she had approached didn’t want to talk about these

issues in public.

Hartman herself was on the receiving end of political smearing at McGill in February, when her office door was defaced with Zionist slogans.

In 2009, Hartman, along with 81 other Montreal CEGEP and university professors, signed an open letter published in Le Devoir in the wake of the Israeli bombing of the Islamic University of Gaza.

The letter, which was in support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, called for academics around the world to support a boycott of Israeli academic institutions, and an ending of all economic relations between Canada and Israel.

“We call on the Harper government to re-evaluate its policies and to unequivocally condemn the Israeli siege and assault on Gaza, which constitute serious violations of international and humanitarian law,” the letter read. “We further demand that the Israeli government immediately cease its violence,” it said.

Hartman previously had a copy of this letter posted on her door. Sometime between the evening of February 4 and the early morning of February 5, slogans stating that Hartman was a “lover of terrorists,” and that “Israel has been a state for 1,200 years,” were scrawled across her door.

“I don’t feel personally threatened. I see this rather as a way to silence the issue. My understanding of that defacing is in the context, not necessarily particularly here, but in a broader context of silencing of people on university campuses who talk about the issue of Palestine and

Palestinians,” Hartman told The Daily shortly after the incident.

The incident was downplayed by her department, and her colleagues came to a consensus not to say anything publicly about it. Hartman, however, felt that it would have been better to issue a public statement about it.

Hartman said during the panel that many of her colleagues, but particularly students, often do not feel that they are able to speak about the question of Palestine in many places within the university, especially in classrooms.

A member of Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights McGill (SPHR), a group that advocates for the rights of the Palestinian people, and organizer of the conference, told The Daily that at McGill, “Zionist discourse has so ingrained itself in the university, you aren’t free to use the ‘anti’ [Zionism] discourse.”

Another SPHR member told The Daily that they actively try to hide their political ideas in their classes in fear of the consequences of voicing them. “People are afraid of talking about it more than any other issue,” they said.

Adrienne Hurley, a professor in East Asian studies who also signed the open letter, asserted to The Daily that McGill had taken a particularly aggressive stance against BDS. “You have a university that has taken a side, and this is a really clear side. You have these slogans written that echo the political sentiment of the administration, and that specificity is important, ” she said.

Hurley speculated that had a

similar political action been carried out in another department, the response would have been much different.

Al Attar, however, said during the panel discussion that the issue of Zionism, which as an idea contains many contradictions, is often oversimplified, and that academics self-censor as a direct consequence of irrational fears that stem from such oversimplification.

“Zionism is not overrepresented in academia, but oversimplification gives rise to the illusion of an overrepresentation of Zionism, and this gives rise to allegations of anti-semitism,” he said.

Smith outlined various cases across Canada and the U.S. where anti-Zionist voices had been silenced.

For instance, in February, around the same time that Hartman’s door was vandalized, New York City officials threatened to cut funding to Brooklyn College because the school’s political science department sponsored an event featuring Omar Barghouti and Judith Butler, both of whom are advocates of BDS. Glenn Greenwald wrote in the Guardian that this type of action was a threat to academic freedom.

Some professors believe that what is allowed to be said on campus has changed as McGill moves toward funding more programs through donors. Abby Lippman, a professor in Epidemiology, told The Daily by phone that “the way you have to go for funding has changed a lot over the years. That has changed the sort of research people can do.”

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NEWS

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

SSMU execs release open letter to admin Lease negotiations threaten “core mission” of SSMU Lola Duffort The McGill Daily

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n Monday, with a little over a month before the end of SSMU Council’s term, SSMU executives released an open letter to the administration regarding Shatner building lease negotiations, now ongoing for nearly three years.

If a new lease is not signed and approved by Council by April 31 – which this year’s executives admit is a possibility – lease negotiations will be passed on to a new executive for a third consecutive time, marking the fourth year of such negotiations.

They conceded in their letter “that running such a building has

a cost [and] that the University is facing tough financial decisions,” but insisted that the University acknowledge the “massive value” of student life, and its responsibility to help SSMU achieve its core mission.

Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning) Morton Mendelson told The Daily in an email that he doesn’t “disagree with anything in [the executives’] letter,” but that “unfortunately, the University Centre is an extremely expensive building to run, and McGill can no longer afford to support it as much as it has in the past.”

“McGill, like other Quebec universities, is unexpectedly facing extreme budget compression along with uncertainty about funding for the years ahead,” he continued.

But according to SSMU VP Clubs

& Services Allison Cooper, since the provincial budget cuts, the proposals for the lease put forth by the University have not really changed.

Instead, she says, the University’s “discourse” has changed.

“It’s meant more excuses,” Cooper said.

SSMU President Josh Redel sees a certain irony in the arguments McGill has been making to the government following cuts to university budgets, especially when contrasted with its plans for SSMU. “Yes, we’re in a financial reality on planet Earth in Canada; in Quebec that requires cuts across everything,” he told The Daily. “[But] the University’s response has been, ‘Do you realize that these cuts threaten…the core

mission of this University?’”

Noting this tone, Redel said some demands made by the University would “very much threaten the core mission of SSMU.” SSMU executives are also frustrated with how drawn-out the process has been. The uncertainty that comes with operating a building without a master lease has become increasingly problematic, they argue. It entails nine-month subleases with second-floor tenants, postponed renovations, and a hesitancy to invest in long-term projects, such as a student-run cafe.

The content of lease negotiations are confidential – an added source of frustration, according to the executives’ letter – but the main points of contention have been a rent increase, the length

of the lease, and the implementation of a cost-sharing system for the building’s utilities.

Despite the terms of the lease being far from complete, Redel believes that the Society will “very likely” have to hike the non-opt-outable fee it levies from students, and SSMU has already begun to tighten its belt.

In November, SSMU released a budget with a $211,320 projected deficit, which SSMU VP Finance and Operations Jean-Paul Briggs attributed in large part to estimates of future shared utility costs with the University.

To reduce the deficit, SSMU abolished a series of “non-essential” expenditures, cut the position for one full-time building manager, and dipped into the Student Life Fund.

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

Research employees approve new contract Contract has pay increases, reforms for casual employees Michael Lee-Murphy The McGill Daily

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early two and a half years after being organized into a union, the Association of McGill University Research Employees (AMURE) voted yesterday to ratify their first collective bargaining agreement.

Once signed, all members of the association will see a 3.2 per cent salary increase across the first two years, and a minimum 1.7 per cent increase in the following year.

In addition to the across-theboard increases, the contract establishes minimum salary levels for all employees. Casual employees will immediately see a minimum hourly salary of $11.18.

Full and part-time research associates, on the other hand, who typically have PhDs, will see a minimum hourly salary of $22.75.

Assistants, usually working with Master’s degrees, will make a minimum hourly salary of $19.75.

Current salary rates for research employees are determined on an ad-hoc basis by research directors, and vary across departments.

In June 2015, a tiered salary rate will be implemented according to merit.

Full and part-time employees will also see increases in vacation time, up from two to three weeks a year. Employees of seven or more years will be entitled to five weeks vacation.

Currently, full-time research employees are eligible for tuition discounts for family members. Under

the new contract, regular employees working at least 25 hours a week will be eligible for the same benefits.

While the new AMURE contract won’t be officially signed for a few weeks, the tentative agreement was overwhelmingly ratified by the membership. The union is split into two bargaining units, one for research assistants and one for research associates, which voted 96 and 95 per cent respectively in favour of the contract.

When signed, the new contracts will represent over 1,200 workers, according to AMURE’s president, Matthew Annis.

The contract is the culmination of over a year’s worth of negotiations, as bargainers first sat down with the University in January 2012.

Annis said that he is most proud of the protections achieved for casual employees, such as vacation premiums and written contracts.

The union was unable, however, to achieve reforms for what Annis called “false casuals,” or casuals that have been working at McGill for years and work enough hours to qualify as parttime employees, but are still classified as casuals and thus earn less money.

The negotiations were overseen by provincial arbitration last fall, after almost a year at the bargaining table. Previously, research employees had only been able to voice their concerns through the McGill Association of University Teachers (MAUT), Annis said.

“This is the first time we’ve had a unified voice,” he said.

There are still two groups of workers – invigilators and course lecturers – who have unionized but have yet to see a contract.

Photo Robert Smith | The McGill Daily

Concordia’s full-time teachers’ union issues unlimited strike mandate University’s latest offer “brazen disrespect,” say union leaders Molly Korab The McGill Daily

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fter 15 months of tense contract negotiations with Concordia’s administration, Concordia’s full-time teachers’ union, the Concordia University Faculty Association (CUFA), voted with a resounding 74 per cent in favour of an unlimited strike mandate this weekend. Three-quarters of the union’s members came out to vote.

The strike mandate is not itself a strike, but it allows the union to declare one at any time with 48 hours’ notice.

After CUFA announced in late February it would vote on a strike mandate, the university offered a renewed three-year contract, termed the “global offer.”

The offer itself, as well as the fact

that the university posted it online instead of meeting with the union, represent “brazen disrespect” and an attempt to undermine the negotiating process, according to a statement posted to the union’s website on Tuesday.

CUFA President Lucie Lequin said the online posting was a move designed to preemptively influence CUFA membership prior to further meetings later this month.

“It’s a desire to go around the negotiation team and influence [CUFA] membership,” she told The Daily.

The statement also critiques the offer on the grounds that it misrepresents the value of the proposed salary increases, offers steps too small given the grid compression, attempts to divide the membership by offering inequitable steps, and refuses to review parts of the salary model which have not been

updated in ten years.

The vote followed 45 meetings between CUFA and the administration, which began prior to the expiration of previous contracts in May 2012. Concordia requested a government-appointed conciliator last December when it became clear that demands on both sides stood too far apart on certain issues.

The conciliator serves as an impartial third-party observer experienced in negotiations processes, with the authority to make recommendations, but not decisions.

The university declined to comment on the strike mandate or the outrage provoked by its posting of the global offer online, reiterating instead the upcoming mediation dates.

“Concordia deposited a global offer of settlement for the renewal of the collective agreement with

CUFA,” Christine Mota, Concordia’s media spokesperson, told The Daily. “Our next meeting is March 18. There are two more scheduled after that.”

Lequin, however, described the later date as part of a longstanding tendency toward unavailability on the part of the university.

“For the last two weeks, the university has not been available for conciliation,” she said.

In the statement responding to the global offer on its website, CUFA executives also write that, “Despite being condemned for doing this in the past, the Employer has once again stooped to posting its global offer on the web…thereby undermining the conciliation process.

That this comes when the Employer is unavailable to come to the bargaining table until March 18 makes this move all the more deplorable.”

Despite a 13 per cent pay gap

between Concordia’s faculty and professors at other Canadian universities, Lequin stressed that contention between the two parties revolve in large part around non-monetary issues, such as workload, hiring procedures, working conditions, and sabbaticals, and thus have little to do with Concordia’s expected $13 million in budget cuts.

“In the collective agreement, there are only two articles that are directly monetary,” she said. “We started to negotiate those in November.”

Professors are currently working under the conditions of the expired contract until a new deal is negotiated.

As for the mandate, Lequin pointed to the university’s role in avoiding a strike.

“We don’t know [if we’ll end up striking],” she said. “It takes two to tango.”

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NEWS

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

McGill Athletics forecasts $413,116 deficit PGSS says one third of athletics fee subsidizes varsity programs Dana Wray The McGill Daily

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cGill Athletics and Recreation is asking for an ancillary fee increase for the first time in three years, after posting a $413,116 deficit for the 2013-2014 academic year.

In response, the Post-Graduate Students’ Society (PGSS) released a memo on January 23 criticizing the use of the fee for varsity programs.

According to PGSS, the 20132014 budget for McGill Athletics and Recreation saw an increase of $708,116 – 10.9 per cent – to their overall budget.

In an email to The Daily, Drew Love, the executive director of Athletics and Recreation, said that this budget increase encompassed several components, including university salary policy, facility improvements, and increased maintenance.

According to Love, approximately 35 per cent of the total budget – $3.8 million – is paid out in salaries and benefits to staff. An additional $3 million of the budget covers “facility operating expenses.”

Love also noted that the University had more than doubled the overhead charges for the athletics unit from 1.5 per cent to 3.5 per cent.

To cover such costs, McGill’s athletics unit relies not only on student ancillary fees but also on other sources of revenue such as facility rentals and sponsorship.

However, PGSS pointed out in the memo that McGill’s yearly sponsorship revenue of $115,250 was low compared to that of other major universities. In comparison, they reported that the University of British Columbia received over $500,000 in sponsorship revenues.

PGSS was especially concerned with the heavy burden placed on students to make up for the deficit, and suggested that McGill Athletics and Recreation “reduce the subsidy for varsity athletics and diversify their revenue sources, and instead subsidize services more widely used by students.”

Love said that the athletics unit was aware of the need for additional sources of revenue, and was looking into alternate sources. “To supplement this external revenue we proposed in next year’s budget that we add a fundraiser position [with a $50,000 salary] to work with alumni and other groups to raise additional funds for our programs.”

It is in this financial context that McGill Athletics and Recreation is asking undergraduate students in the SSMU Winter 2013 Referendum period to approve a $7.25 per term fee increase, or about 6 per cent of the current $120.50 fee for full-time undergraduates. This is the first request for a fee increase since a $1.50 hike in 2009.

PGSS, however, has a different referendum fee increase question from SSMU. Academic Affairs Officer Adam Bouchard told The Daily that PGSS has been working closely with the McGill Athletics and Recreation Advisory Board and hopes to review the question in April.

In the memo, PGSS criticized the request for an increase, stating, “McGill students pay higher athletics fees, on average, than students at any other major university in Canada. Typically students pay roughly $60-$70 per term.”

Love disagreed with this. “I’m looking at [PGSS’s] calculations, and [I’m] not in support of all of their math,” he said at a SSMU Legislative Council meeting on January 24.

Love specified in an email to The Daily that comparing athletics fees across universities depended on a variety of costs including maintenance and upkeep of facilities, staff, programming, and others.

According to Love, the University of Toronto athletics fee encompasses similar costs to McGill, and is $150.01 per term for most full-time students.

PGSS also asked in their memo whether the increase would be justified, stating, “the fees that are collected would disproportionately benefit a very small fraction of the McGill student population.”

After an independent analysis of the athletics budget, PGSS determined that the costs of programs such as the fitness centre, intramural sports, and recreational activities, are not subsidized by the ancillary fees.

Instead, these programs run on an operational surplus from user fees which are additional to the mandatory per-semester contribution.

PGSS noted that around 34.1 per cent of the ancillary fee subsidizes the direct costs of varsity athletics, including salaries of coaches, administration, and teams themselves.

According to the memo, there are a total of 578 varsity athletes.

The memo also noted that the vast majority of funding is directed toward 238 varsity athletes on Level 1 teams such as football and men’s hockey.

In SSMU Legislative Council on January 24, Councillor Zachary Rosentzveig raised concern over this subsidization, especially because “[ancillary] fees are non-opt-outable.”

Love defended the subsidization of varsity programs, pointing out their “remarkable impact…on the university, the greater community, and our alumni.”

Photo Robert Smith | The McGill Daily

McGill’s Sexual Assault Centre faces fee referendum SSMU considers alternatives to student referenda Laurent Bastien Corbeil The McGill Daily

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he Sexual Assault Centre of the McGill Students’ Society (SACOMSS), funded by McGill students since 1994, is set to be subject to the ballot box next week as part of SSMU’s Winter 2013 Referendum period.

Because of its status as a student service with a levied fee, SACOMSS must run a referendum to renew its non-opt-outable $0.75 fee every three years.

SACOMSS is a volunteer-run organization and, according to a spokesperson, is the only sexual assault cen-

tre in Montreal that offers its services to people of all genders and sexualities under an anti-oppressive mandate.

“Having a sexual assault centre operating under that framework is really important […] especially on a university campus,” Lily Hoffman, an external coordinator with SACOMSS and co-chairperson of its ‘Yes’ committee, told The Daily.

“A sexual assault centre that’s available for support to people who experience sexual assault, or who have people in their communities who do, is really valuable to creating a safe community where people can feel they can talk about their experiences,” she said.

While SACOMSS would continue

to exist even if it lost its referendum, the loss of student funding would jeopardize its ability to offer services.

According to its Facebook page, the $0.75 fee goes toward supporting its phone line, drop-in services, support groups, education campaigns, and advocacy and accompaniment services.

According to Associate Provost (Policies, Procedures & Equity) Lydia White, the University also provides services to survivors of sexual assault along with SACOMSS. “The University offers a variety of services to students in crisis, including those who have been the victims of sexual assault,” White wrote in an email to The Daily.

“These services include: the McGill Health Services, McGill Mental Health Services, McGill Counseling Services, McGill Security Services and McGill Chaplaincy Services.”

As for whether it was appropriate for a sexual assault centre to be subject to referenda, White noted, “It would be inappropriate for the University [to] comment on the SSMU referendum question, or the appropriateness of the fee renewal or increase.”

When asked about the inclusion of McGill Security Services as a resource for survivors of sexual assault, SSMU VP Club & Services Allison Cooper spoke to key differences between the two organizations.

“That speaks to the expertise

that students have in running these services, because SACOMSS is so powerfully different than Security Services or those other services,” she told The Daily. “It speaks to a misunderstanding of [the issue].”

For Cooper, the notion of holding referenda for student services – especially for SACOMSS – is absurd.

SSMU is currently looking into placing SACOMSS under the SSMU base fee so that it could avoid facing the ballot box every three years, she said.

The SSMU base fee accounts for the operating budget of the student union. It pays for administrative fees, governance, operations, campus events, and the upkeep of the Shatner building.

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

Hundreds march to commemorate International Women’s Day Demonstrators tackle “ongoing plague of violence against women” Hannah Besseau The McGill Daily

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round 500 people gathered on March 8 for the 13th annual International Women’s Day demonstration in Montreal.

The Committee of Women of Diverse Origins – a Montrealbased grassroots organization – organized this year’s march to celebrate women’s achievements and draw attention to ongoing gender inequality.

The march kicked off at Place Émilie-Gamelin, with a long series of speakers, including representatives from the Immigrant Workers Centre (CTI-IWC), South-Asian Women’s Community Centre (SAWCC), Tamil Women’s

Association, No One is Illegal, and PINAY: Filipino Women’s Organization in Quebec.

This year’s demonstration aimed to address the “ongoing plague of violence against women and its related aspects, as well as to celebrate the courage and tenacity of women who stand up to confront and challenge it in Montreal,” according to the Women of Diverse Origins website.

Typically, a series of workshops are offered as part of the events for Women’s Day. This year, however, the committee opted for a dance in support of the One Billion Rising movement, a campaign aimed at ending violence against women and challenging rape culture within mainstream society.

The dance was performed by

members of PINAY, who advocate for female migrant workers in Montreal.

“Sometimes a workshop is too heavy,” said a member of PINAY on the Committee of Women of Diverse Origins. “In the past they’ve been a bit much for people to really absorb the information.”

Though the dance itself was well-received, the One Billion Rising movement was a contentious selection to include in the Women’s Day celebration.

Emma Pallotto, a community activist and member of an action group who challenged the One Billion Rising V-Day demonstration this past February, noted some of One Billion Rising’s shortcomings.

“I found what was wrong with [One Billion Rising] was its simplistic look at ending violence

against women,” Pallatto told The Daily. “Of course, that’s what we want to do, but we need to address what we mean when we ask what is women, what is violence.”

She also pointed out limited understandings of violence within the movement.

“It only seems to count violence as physical violence, but what we don’t hear about is other forms of violence. There is no mention of the state and how it is violent against women and women of colour. There is nothing on lesbians and the counterviolence in their daily lives.”

Despite its efforts, International Women’s Day has long been criticized for essentializing gender and excluding non-conforming and queer identities.

“We have this idea that there

is only one woman. Man violent, and woman passive, and that’s just way too essentialist,” Pallotto continued. “We need to think about how violence seeps into the lives of trans* women and trans* men.”

PINAY, however, chose to take a different look at the One Billion Rising initiative.

“Our version of the One Billion Rising was a Filipino version. It was more militant. We were following the music, and the lyrics in Filipino were saying, ‘women, it’s the right time now to rise up and fight,’” said a representative from PINAY. “We wanted to address a more imperialist theme in the lyrics, [rather] than a gendered one. This was important for us to bring up for Women’s Day.”

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

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A Tale of Two Cops On the police state, the justice system, and building safe communities

Ryan Thom Memoirs of a Gaysian

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t was, in fact, a police officer who showed me the greatest kindness on the day I first tried to kill myself – I am amused and perplexed to think of it now.

Several years later, an aversion to and enmity for cops is instinctive to me. To a sometimes-activist and transgender, racialized person, the police are a natural enemy, the iron arm of a nation-state that seems determined to crush the resistance of marginalized bodies that refuse to submit to its oppressive policies, heteronormative standards, and colonial legacy.

Yet it was a blonde, butch, lesbian police officer who told me that everything was going to be all right as she gently handcuffed me, that she understood why I was doing what I was doing. It was this cop – not the psychiatrists at the hospital with their questions and blank stares, not the social workers with their pitying smiles, not the teachers who told me I couldn’t come back to school because I was a legal liability – who said, “Of course you feel like killing yourself. We live in a crazy place. Sometimes, I feel just like you. I became a cop so I could keep kids like you safe.”

The dominant story around police in middle-and upper-class society is that they are the guardians of the public – they exist to protect us from harm, from ‘the bad guys.’ One need only look to the massive genre of police television and fiction to find this narrative: our boys in blue, shining badges against the darkness of violence and anarchy. Yet if we examine the real-life underpinnings of the policing vocation, a darker narrative emerges, one that is well known to anyone who has lived or worked in marginalized communities. Police exist to exert the control of wealth, whiteness, and other forms of social dominance over public (and often private) space. They enforce the rules that govern which bodies may occupy which spaces, and the ways in which bodies interact with each other within space. Simply put in practical terms, police remove

homeless people from the metro not because they are doing anything wrong, but because they are unsightly. They patrol gay cruising grounds and red light districts at night (yes, still), because homosexual acts and sex work are considered indecent, regardless of consent between two adults.

They beat and drive activists from the streets because protests are a disruption of the steady flow of capitalist production that makes the rich richer.

We often hear that incidents of police brutality are accidents of fate – the wrong person at the wrong end of a bullet at the wrong time, or that there are two kinds of cops, the majority good and the minority bad apples.

But the police institution itself is founded upon brutal policies that uphold a brutal social hierarchy; it is no wonder that women, people of colour, trans* people, the mentally ill and the homeless are so often on the receiving end of police ‘accidents’: there is my blonde, butch, lesbian cop, and then there is the drunken officer who shot a gun into a car carrying three transwomen. There are the New York City police, whose number of stop-and-searches performed on young black Americans in 2011 exceeded the number of young black Americans living in New York. One is hard-pressed to name a social justice movement

Illustration Grace Jackson | The McGill Daily

that has not been opposed by deployment of the police. How can the police not be brutal, violent, racist, oppressive? That is their job.

If police are society’s guardians against the dark, then we are the dark: we the marginalized, the subversive, racialized, gender-outlawed, deviant, non-status, migrant, poor. Yet we, too, turn the violence of the state’s arm against each other, aspire to ascend into that protected, coveted light – last summer, Montreal’s queer council of commerce called for an increased police presence in the Village to keep homeless youth from driv-

ing away business. Somewhere, somehow, a blonde, butch, lesbian woman with a compassionate heart became a police officer so she could protect queer teens – and arrested me for attempting suicide.

How can this be? And who do we turn to for protection against public violence, intimate abuse, the danger that comes with the territory of living in the margins?

It is one half of an answer to these questions to protest police brutality. The other is to invent and embrace alternatives, to imagine an option other than handcuffs to protect queer teens who want to die. To give

up both the seductive desire to be absorbed into the protected echelon of upper-class white, heteronormative dominance and the fantasy that without state repression, violence between us would not exist. To take responsibility for protecting our own communities from both within and without. To create a darkness that is safe to live in.

Ryan Kai Cheng Thom is a writer who is looking for alternatives to the justice system. Contact them at memoirsofagaysian@mcgilldaily.com.

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

Under the covers Intimate surveillance and the state Lucy Cameron The McGill Daily

I

t’s early evening, and I am lying in bed listening to the Valentine’s Day episode of This American Life. Act Two of our program, Ira Glass tells me, follows the story of 18-year-old Justin Laboy from Park Vista Community High School in Florida. Justin is an honour-roll kid, a straightlaced transplant from the Bronx: studious, courteous, reverent of authority, unfailingly gives his seat to elderly ladies on the bus.

That kind of kid. This is the story of his relationship with Naomi Rodriguez, the attractive if somewhat delinquent new girl from Queens. Over the course of senior year, the two gradually get to know each other and start dating.

Justin is a Good Kid, our radio interviewer tells us; he doesn’t use drugs, and when Naomi asks him one day out of the blue where she can buy some, he doesn’t even know where to go. (Me, listening: mentally flag this point of suspicion – American teenagers, you have at least a rough idea about what the kids behind the portables are up to.) Justin says he’ll see what he can do. A couple of days later he comes through, and Naomi offers to pay him back for it – here, their stories diverge.

Justin says he declined at first and then caved to pressure and accepted the money. 25 bucks, not a even a ticket to prom, not a big deal. Except in this particular case that 25 bucks meant a felony charge for a freshly-minted eighteen-year-old.

As it turns out, Naomi (suffice to say, not her real name) was a part of a larger plan: that of the state police department, which had orchestrated a sting operation across Florida high schools to crack down on drugs. The girl who never did homework and slept in class was a 25-yearold undercover narcotics officer.

Ain’t it the way.

The ethics and efficacy of undercover policing have long been under scrutiny. From “informants” who spy and exact information in the hopes of avoiding sentencing, to “paid agents,” insiders to routinely receive cash for information, to your average undercover cop, the already corrupt system becomes a further tangled web of motivation, extortion, and duplicity. On their website, the Canadian Justice Department quotes legal literature on the subject, saying that “there is little information about how effective undercover investigations are, what they cost (economically, psychologically, con-

stitutionally), or why they fail.

Similarly, the extent to which police departments use the strategy is unknown.” The New York Police Department (NYPD) reports having 120 undercover officers in its Organized Crime Control Bureau. In 2008 alone, the Service de police de la ville de Montréal (SPVM) reported conducting 764 undercover operations. You think, gee, that’s kind of a lot – then you realize that these numbers are essentially meaningless. Justice works in mysterious way, evidently.

The show switches to the next segment, but I am stuck thinking about this Floridian kid and the felony charges he’s going to carry for the rest of his life. For radio purposes, the anecdote is presented in a humorous, light-hearted manner, but beneath the “I got punk’d!” jocular sound bytes of its protagonist lies a much darker narrative about surveillance, intimacy, and state control.

Listening to this story, my mind moves in ten directions at once.

Why are the Florida police out to get some unassuming high school kids? How long will these ridiculous charges follow and stigmatize this kid? Infinitely? Entrapment... what? Ultimately what I can’t get past is how clearly this incident illustrates the sadistic and immoral mechanism of undercover policing. Policing in general has got to be one of the biggest snafus of modern society, but that’s another article. Undercover policing presents its own particularly disturbing brand of injustice that warrants consideration.

As a widespread control tactic that is only becoming increasingly prevalent as it finds more creative avenues, undercover policing undermines the bonds between people. It is a psychological weapon that corrodes human relationships from within, and undercuts public trust, open dialogue, and the foundations of community. We become closed off, fearful, suspicious, fiercely individualistic, and, what’s worse, justified in adopting this garrison mentality because the threat of undetected surveillance all around us is real. And somehow, it is accepted.

This kind of gross infiltration, although it may not directly affect many of us living day-today, has varied and damaging consequences in the collective psyche, especially within activist communities. June 2010 saw what was invariably one of the most outrageous incidences of this kind of state-sanctioned violence in recent memory – at least in Canada.

In January 2009, when the

Illustration Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily

Guelph Anarchist Black Cross (ABC) was beginning to organize around the G20 summit that would be held in Toronto the following summer, they were joined by two new members, Brenda Dougherty and Khalid Mohammed. Where Khalid was somewhat gruff and aggressive in his demeanour, Brenda was a soft-spoken, mild young woman with glasses and a nervous laugh.

She said she had just gotten out of a long-term relationship with an abusive partner; any behavioural abnormalities were chalked up to emotional stress. Group members recall that Brenda would bake for meetings; she was always taking notes, always asking everyone how they were doing. She went out of her way to lend emotional support to her allies. And while there were some rumblings of suspicion about Khalid between group members, Brenda was never reproached. Six months later, she had been smoothly integrated into the ABC and the personal lives and confidence of its members. She moved into an anarchist space and directed her energies toward organizing direct action around the G20.

At 4 a.m. on June 26, 2010, just before the summit was to begin, police invaded the homes of the several prominent activists. Brenda Dougherty was Brenda Carey: an undercover officer posing in one of the most elaborate sting operations in Canadian history.

In hindsight, considering the $653-million budget the Canadian government allocated for security, the mass arrests, pepper spray, broken windows, batons – a montage entirely too familiar by now – it is evident that the government was prepared to take any steps necessary to quash dissent. The familiar montage: today, this seems to be how Canada works. Undercover policing, intimate infiltration, betrayal: this is how the state protects itself. In the case of Justin Laboy and his sad baggy of weed, we are left scratching our heads. “Kill them with kindness”: an invisible display of excessive force.

Media coverage of the 18-month-long infiltration of southern Ontario anarchist chapters has since provided all the compelling details of the reallife Canadian espionage episode. Missing from the picture is

the damage not captured in the images of police brutality that plastered headlines – the interpersonal trauma that results from betrayal. It is not an experience one expects to understand without having lived it personally. To share your life with someone, to let a new person into a space where you share your struggles, politics, personal hardships – a space predicated upon open communication and respect for difference – this intrusion is a disturbing perversion of faith.

The institutionalization and normalization of such tactics tears at the fabric of human relations. Granted, there is no way to speak of humanity as a quilt without sounding lobotomized, but consider: what are we doing to each other? When the woman who bakes you muffins is putting you in prison, when you want to impress your high school crush and end up in juvenile detention, we make prisons of our minds.

Lucy Cameron is a U3 English and Philosophy student, possibly an SPVM officer, who knows. She can be reached at lucy.cameron@ mail.mcgill.ca.

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commentary

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

Illustration Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily

No justice, no peace, no burnout Ten tips for dealing with the cops when protesting Mona Luxion Through the Looking Glass

10. Tell your comrades it’s okay to

be scared, to need time off, to make decisions based on the knowledge that you can’t go from facing riot cops to studying and expect your brain to keep up.

9. Promise your friends you’ll ask them for support when you’re losing track of time and basic needs because your brain and body is fucked up with ongoing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

8. Promise them you’ll return the favour. Promise yourself to be hon-

est with them when they need more support than you can give alone.

Promise yourself to be honest with them when they need more care than they realize.

7. Cry. Crying flushes the pepper

spray out of your eyes, blurs the images of riot cops that play incessantly when you close your eyes, bleeds the adrenaline from your body, and the physical pain, and the anxiety you feel about your friends, your lovers, your future.

6. Accept that All Cops Are B(insert

non-patriarchal slur here), but that they’re worse to some people than to others. Look out for your comrades whom the cops love to target: women, people of colour, people with conditions or records, people

who defy gender norms, people with disabilities. Known organizers.

Consider the impacts of having ragefuelled cops around for sex workers, homeless folks, folks who use intravenous drugs, and look for opportunities for solidarity.

5. Invite your friends to cuddle.

Carry phone chargers so people who’ve been too out of it to go home don’t lose touch with their friends.

Plan jail support.

4. Add Maalox (used with water as an anti-tear gas remedy), a lawyer’s number, a bandana and goggles, disinfectant, and Band-Aids to your bookbag. Take it everywhere you go.

3. Continue to dream. If we’re work-

ing for a revolution here, we don’t

want the new world to look like the old. Let yourself imagine not just what that world looks like but how we get there.

2. Don’t talk to the cops. Do talk to

Cheer when court battles allow people to stay in the country or stay out of jail.

0. Be strategic. Make chaos for

your friends and family and classmates and everyone who loves you but doesn’t get it. Give yourself time for this. Find someone you can talk to and reteach yourself how to have conversations that aren’t about strategy or slogans or where they took the people they arrested. Remind yourself that this, too, is resistance.

capitalism. Protect yourself from the cops that defend the crumbling world order and reclaim the streets for a life not ordered by their demands. Remember that the battle between protesters and cops is but a small part of where the struggle between humanity and capitalism plays out, and never mistake the battle for the war.

1. Celebrate a diversity of tactics.

Cheer when the windows of mega corporations are destroyed. Also cheer when someone does the dishes that fed hundreds of people with wholesome, collectively-made food.

In Through the Looking Glass, Mona Luxion reflects on activism, current events, and looking beyond identity politics. Email Mona at lookingglass@mcgilldaily.com.

THE POLICE ISSUE

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The Police Issue

The Police Issue We are launching this special issue – in print and online with interactive content – the day before the annual anti-police brutality march in Montreal, which takes place March 15 at 5 p.m.

The goal of the march, and this special issue, is to engage the McGill and greater communities in thinking critically about police forces as institutions and in looking at alternative methods of preventing and responding to crime.

As a branch of the state, a police force works for the dominant interest in a society – today, that is protecting sites of capital and upholding the status quo. By their very mandate, the police must suppress those who challenge the current system and its supporters. This has been shown during demonstrations in support of the student movement, where police officers stand in front of banks to protect them from property damage. Officers have no problem using physical violence toward people and routinely target certain groups of the population based on race, class, ethnicity, political affiliation, or geographical location.

Last year’s constant police presence at demonstrations supporting the Maple Spring revealed to many what these targeted populations experience regularly: Montreal police officers unevenly enforce municipal bylaws and use violence to suppress those who choose to protest.

And let’s not forget that the act of entering the streets to demonstrate is a privilege in itself, and one that is denied to populations who rightly fear being targeted by the police.

The work of the Coalition Opposed to Police Brutality attempts to aid those who have suffered from police brutality or been unjustly arrested.

In this issue, we explore everything from the methods in which police protect the most privileged among us at the expense of the marginalized, to alternatives to the militarized, repressive nature of police forces. We hope our content provides a basis for conversation about the police that rarely takes place, one that allows us to think critically about the nature of the police.

In this issue...

03

Anatomy of an SPVM cop

08

Alternatives to our current police state

04

Counteracting riot weapons

09

The SPVM’s arsenal

05

Animal training in the SPVM

10

Transparency and knowing your rights

06

Arrests made during the Maple Spring

11

Police portrayal in the media

07

Money spent on the student movement by police

12

Justice for the Victims of Police Killings Coalition Cover photo by Robert Smith

March 14, 2013 | The McGill Daily

3

The Montreal Police The police force in Montreal is the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM). The SPVM has the second largest municipal police force in Canada, with 7,197 employees, including 4,600 officers. The city centre experienced a heightened police presence in response to protests against tuition hikes in the spring and summer of 2012. Police frequently use ‘less lethal’ weapons such as tear gas, pepper spray, concussion grenades, and rubber bullets to disperse groups.

Uniform On March 5, SPVM officers traded in their steel blue shirts for a blue-black counterpart that is said to match the uniforms of most other municipal police forces across Canada. SPVM chief Marc Parent denied that this change would influence perception of police and make them seem less approachable. A promotional video was made by the SPVM to introduce the new shirts, which now more closely match the colour of the pants and vest that make up the rest of the police uniform. CTV News reported that this transition would cost the SVPM $20,000.

Dog The SPVM employs nine dogs for the purpose of protecting police officers, patrol, and conducting sniff searches. The dogs are purchased from other police forces or breeders in Quebec when they are puppies, between eight to ten weeks old, for $1,000. It costs approximately $3,000 per year for the dog’s food and upkeep. It would take around thirty police officers to conduct an outdoor search at the same level as one police dog. The dogs are made to be desensitized to chemical gases, pepper spray, and gunfire, which are employed by the SPVM on a regular basis.

Weapons The SPVM’s ‘less lethal’ weapons are partially provided by Safariland, a U.S.-based manufacturer for military and law enforcement agencies formely owned by BAE Systems, one of the world’s largest defense firms.

It markets its protective gears, such as riot helmets and shields, under the Hatch and Monadnock brands. Other less lethal ammunitions and chemical sprays are marketed under the Defense Technology brand. In Quebec, their products are sold through F.N. Sports based in Longueil.

—Compiled by Hera Chan, Nicolas Quiazua, Anita Sivabalan, Anqi Zhang

Blockading A typical formation and tactic for riot police is blockading. Police will form a line of ten to twelve cops across (or more, if they need to fully block the route) to stop or slow down the protesters. Behind this line are three more lines of riot cops, usually starting with a line of three, then six and another twelve policemen in line. The front line may start “passively” allowing some protestors to filter past and leave the demonstration, in effect sepa-

rating the crowd as it walks through. With the “passive” line, police may also allow a particularly threatening group to walk through the first line, and then surround them and make arrests. Police may also tighten up the line and use shields and batons to intimidate protesters. If this “hard” line is challenged by the protesters, tools may be used to physically harm protesters. The line tries to stay connected at all times. Behind this line of twelve are usually two cops with gas canisters (usu-

ally pepper spray) as well as the squad leader.

If the line is broken, the gas may be used; the squad leader is close enough to the action to effectively command the front line. The third line of cops, behind the gas teams, are usually an arrest team. This team makes arrests for those who may have gotten through the front line. In the back is another row of twelve police, who protect the backs of the police in front of them while setting a back line to begin kettles.

Kettling Mass arrests have become very popular in riot control tactics, as was seen during last year’s student protests. In a kettle scenario, the police surround as many protesters as they can, allowing them to peacefully leave the demonstration, or, more often, make arrests. A 2005 report by the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights singled out the Montreal police for using the tactic.

—Compiled by Evan Dent

4

The Police Issue

Counteracting riot weapons Text: Esther Lee | Graphics: Tom Acker Note: Some treatments suggested in this article should be performed by trained volunteers or professionals.

Untrained individuals should only perform these treatments when absolutely necessary.

plications, and even death.

Pepper Spray Pepper spray, also known as Oleoresin Capsicum gas or spray, is another form of lachrymatory irritant, used for riot control and self-defence by the police. It is most commonly used in canister spray forms, and can contain dyes for police to mark and identify protesters. Unlike tear gas, pepper spray will stick like oil to exposed areas of the body and face, and can cause irritations for up to several hours. The severity of these effects will also depend on how heavily the individual is dosed, and in what proximity – individual response also varies according to one’s respiratory reactions to chemicals.

The most common effects are: immediate irritation to the eyes and skin and difficulty in regular breathing, which includes coughing. For those with asthma, or other respiratory difficulties, this restriction of breathing passages may be more severe with heavier risks and com-

Do it Yourself (DIY) Treatment The effects of pepper spray can be treated with a solution of half liquid antacid, such as Maalox, and half water – it is important to carry a squeezable water bottle with a spout tip for easier and more effective treatment. Squeezing the stream on one’s eyeball in the direction from nose to ear will flush out pepper spray residue. This can be used to rinse out mouth and eyes, as well as to wipe off pepper spray oil from the skin.

This neutralizes the acidic residue of pepper sprays. Further, pepper spray oil should be cleaned off immediately with absorbent wipes or pads to prevent further skin irritation. If this is not available, moderately soak tissues or towels with water and blot off the oil from the skin. Pepper spray on the skin can be alleviated by applying mineral oil followed by alcohol: first soak absorbent wipes with the mineral oil and alcohol separately, then wet irritated skin with mineral oil wipe, and immediately blot the same area with an alcohol-soaked wipe.

Be cautious not to leave mineral oil on pepper-spray exposed skin to prevent further burns or irritations. Individuals should refrain from touching affected body parts in order to prevent rubbing the spray deeper into the skin.

Police Batons Batons are usually used by the police for self-defence or to restrain individuals. They are hand-held by the officers and can cause blunt trauma upon contact – they are the most directly applied use of physical force.

Possible injuries caused by batons include bruising, cuts, dislocated or broken bones, and/or nausea, vomiting, loss of consciousness, and decreased awareness related to trauma to the head.

DIY Treatment There is a possibility of rib injuries if the

Tear Gas Tear gas, a popular term for ortho-chlorobenzylidene-malononitrile (CS gas) or chloroacetophenone (CN), is largely used by the police for crowd or riot control, usually as a hand-held spray or with some form of a grenade launcher for gas canisters. Tear gas is an irritant, and when used with direct contact in close quarters, it can cause severe inflammation in the nose, mouth and eyes.

It is important to note that the severity of possible effects can vary depending on: “the strength of the chemicals, how heavily you were dosed, the amount of ventilation to disperse the chemicals, your response to dis-

caused from falls. Stun guns administer electric shocks upon direct contact, and will cause similar side-effects as tasers.

Tasers/Stun Guns Considered a non-lethal weapon, tasers are used to restrain individuals (by the police) without active use of direct hand contact. Tasers act as a neuromuscular-incapacitation device by restricting an individual’s control of the body with electric shocks.

When used, the taser will attach two barbed prongs onto the individual (clothing or flesh), and deliver five-second shocks of 50,000 volts of electricity – this will cause the individual to lose control of their central nervous system, and therefore, all muscular functions. The police officer can apply multiple shocks as long as the taser is connected to the targeted individual.

Tasers can cause temporary or prolonged psychological shock, skin burns, muscle spasms, bruising, and/or injuries

DIY Treatment Minor injuries, such as bruising, can be treated with ice packs. Cuts should be attended to immediately. Burns caused by taser barbs can be relieved with water; it is important not to break the blisters. Burns can be gently blotted with sterile cloths, and bandaged after applying ointments. If the burn appears to be severe, additional medical help should be sought out.

Muscle spasms can be relieved with ice packs; however, continuous monitoring of the affected area is important to prevent further muscular damages. The affected individual should be given water and food, such as bananas, to restore the electrolyte level. It is also common to feel psychological shocks. According to a medic workshop hosted by QPIRG McGill, it is important to “re-humanize the situation” by providing comfort and medical support through first seeking consent from the affected individual.

individual experiences difficulty in breathing.

In most severe cases, individuals can cough out blood, usually caused by damages to the lungs. Medical help should be immediately sought out – the affected individual may require CPR to maintain respiration until help arrives. If the individual experiences brain or spinal injury due to severe blunt trauma to the head, it is important not to move them until professionally trained medical help can be sought out to stabilize the spine.

Make sure to remain calm and stay with the injured person until after the medics arrive to help evaluate the injuries in detail.

Furthermore, if a targeted person experiences pain with limited motion range in the limbs, there is a possibility for dislocated or broken bones. These injuries should be handled by a trained professional – incorrectly treating a dislocated shoulder can lead to long term problems in the joint.

comfort, barriers you are using, your respiratory reaction to pollutants, and the treatments used,” according to the QPIRG McGill medic workshop. However, some immediate effects will include tearing of the eyes, blurring of the vision, minimal to severe difficulty in breathing including continuous coughing and sneezing, and burning sensation to the exposed skin.

DIY Treatment Side effects caused by tear gas usually become less severe once direct contact is avoided; therefore, it is important to be out of the ‘fog’, or cloud of tear gas, and search for places of fresh air. Avoid being in enclosed spaces where ventilation is low, which causes the chemicals to stay concentrated. Use water to cool off irritations in the eyes, mouth and nose, and rinse off any exposed skin. It is also important to change out of any contaminated clothes to avoid further irritation.

and nausea, moderate to severe headaches, and/or complete loss of consciousness.

Plastic/Rubber Bullets Rubber bullets are used by the police for riot control and to disperse hostile protest crowds.

They are considered as ‘less-than-lethal weaponry’ but can still cause serious damages if shot in direct contact at close range. Though rubber bullets are considered safe deterrents, bruising, cuts, and in its most severe case, penetrating injuries can occur. They may also shatter eyeglasses or other glass objects.

In a situation where the police open fire into the crowd, individuals should face away from the direction of the projectiles while protecting sensitive areas such as the eyes and throat. Individuals also may experience head injuries in extreme situations, which can cause decreasing levels of consciousness or physical/situational awareness, vomiting

DIY Treatment Minor injuries caused by rubber bullets can include moderate to severe bruising of the affected area – this can be treated with consistent icing of the bruise in cycles of twenty minutes. If the injury remains painful when pressure is applied and continues to swell with limited range of motion, there is a possibility of fractured or broken bones. If professional medical attention cannot be easily reached, fractured bones can be stabilized from joint to joint with cardboard or wood – internal bleeding can be detected with signs of severe bruising and swelling. Any ‘in the field’ treatments of this sort must be medically followed up. For deeper cuts or bleeding, apply pressure to the wound with clean cloth or tissues until the bleeding stops. Clean the injury with water. If the rubber bullet is lodged inside the skin, it is important not to move the object, as doing so can cause more bleeding. The rubber bullet should be immobilized with clean bandages, and immediate medical care should follow.

March 14, 2013 | The McGill Daily

5

Animal training in the SPVM Canines and cavalry supporting the status quo Instead of batons and boots, some members of the Montreal police force have tails and hoofs. They don’t speak French or English, and are incapable of understanding the basic norms of human interaction. Why? Because they are animals.

The Service de Police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) currently uses both dogs

and horses to help police officers with their tasks. This use of animals is widespread across the island. The cavalry unit was deployed during some demonstrations throughout the student strike last year, and the canine units are frequently used for substance detection.

How are these animals trained before they are taken to the streets?

Photo Alex Pritz | The McGill Daily

Cavalry unit

Canine unit The canine unit was first created in the mid-1960s, but later shut down in 1972, with the SPVM citing “administrative reasons” to explain the project’s sudden abandonment.

23 years later, in 1995, the canine unit was reintroduced. Currently, there are nine dogs on the payroll; two are specialized in explosives detection, and the other seven are trained to detect narcotics. Being a police dog isn’t easy – all must acquire a base set of skills over the course of their training, in addition to their respective specialties.

All the dogs the SPVM uses are of the German Shepherd or Belgian Malinois breed, and are selected based on their health, agility, sociability, courage, and instincts. With the exception of some older outliers, most dogs begin their training in the SPVM foster program when they are around eight to ten weeks old. The dogs are given to an SPVM member, who familiarizes them with the environment they would encounter in the field. When they are eight months old, the dogs are

tested for their instincts, familiarization, socialization, and courage. If they pass the test, they are returned to their foster program for around seven additional months.

After this maturation period, the dogs are assigned to a specialized handler. Each dog receives 18 weeks of general training after the test taken at eight months of age, as well as five additional weeks of specialized training, such as narcotics or explosives detection. During general training, the dog is taught to search, track, detect, and apprehend targets. The dogs are also taught to handle the harsher aspects of the job, through desensitization to the sound of gunfire and the effects of chemical gases (meaning the dogs are not affected by pepper spray or other gases used by the SPVM). After completing the training, the dogs officially become part of the force, and live full-time with their handlers. Dogs typically begin their operational career when they are two to three years old, and work for five to seven more years, after which they are retired.

—Evan Dent

The SPVM stables are situated on Mount Royal on Chemin Remembrance, about five minutes east of Beaver Lake. The only cavalry unit in Quebec, it consists of eight horses, nine officers, and one sergeant.

Officer DuFont told The Daily that two horses will be retiring this year, necessitating the recruitment of two new animals.

As DuFont explained, the cavalry unit uses the national Canadian breed. They use the Canadian breed because of their “calm temperament, and because they are well adapted to the climate.” These animals are a thicker breed, or, as DuFont put it, “hardy.”

In order to give the impression of uniformity, all of the police horses are approximately the same size, and are black in colour.

With each officer assigned to one horse, close relationships are inevitably forged between rider and steed. These relationships are useful; as DuFont explains, this closeness “creates a more comfortable and trustworthy bond.” Officers are intimate with their own horse’s personality and quirks: “Let’s say one horse is less comfortable with flags; while on duty, they know to keep that horse farther away.”

The SPVM relies on horses to go places that squad cars cannot, such as the mountain and Montreal’s many parks. For this kind of patrol, the horses and officers go in groups of two to three and typically walk to their destination. However, if the cavalry unit is needed for larger events, like parades or demonstrations, the offi-

cers and horses will be brought in a trailer to the location where they are needed.

The horses are bought from private owners, and the unit usually prefers mature animals – their life experience aids in the training process. There are two steps involved in training: first is a riding test to determine if the horse can obey basic commands and isn’t too temperamental. The second step is desensitization, which aims to familiarize the horses to things they might encounter on patrol or at events. They accustomize the horses to any and all visual and auditory stimuli – balloons, flags, brightly colored tarps, horns, whistles, et cetera. They also have the horses walk over different types of terrain, such as plastic, tarps, and litter, in order to minimize their reaction to difficult ground conditions.

The process of becoming a mounted officer is long and thorough as well. All officers start as patrol. In order to join the cavalry unit, they must have a physical, medical, and riding evaluation, as well as an interview process. The decisions of who will become a cavalry officer is usually dependent on seniority once the group has been narrowed down.

The cavalry unit is usually placed as backup to police officers on foot – their position is carefully considered, with all potential risks to the animals considered well in advance. The sergeant of the unit is ultimately responsible for the unit’s behaviour during events.

—Jessie Marchessault

6

The Police Issue

Arrests during the Maple Spring

Date: May 1, 2012 Number of protesters: 3,500 Number of arrests: 107 Details: May Day demonstration organized by the Convergence des luttes anticapitalistes de MontrĂŠal (CLAC).

Since February 2012, Quebec has seen an estimated 4,170 arrests as a result of the protests, including 1,742 in Montreal.

Compiled by Dana Wray and Hera Chan | Maps by Amina Batyreva View the full interactive map online at mcgilldaily.com/PoliceIssue

Date: April 28, 2012 Number of protestors: thousands Number of arrests: 2 Details: Quebec Premier Jean Charest called for spreading the five-year, $1,625 tuition hike, over seven years.

Date: April 26, 2012 Number of protesters: 5,000 Number of arrests: 60 Details: Education Minister Line Beauchamp barred members of CLASSE from participating in talks.

Date: February 17, 2012 Number of protesters: 37 Number of arrests: 37 Details: Protesters broke into and vandalized the CĂ&#x2030;GEP du Vieux-Montreal.

Date: May 1 Number of p Number of a Details: Bys ple leaving in violence.

Date: November 10, 2011 Number of protesters: 30,000 Number of arrests: 4 Details: 100 riot cops on McGill campus, students, staff and faculty beaten and pepper-sprayed.

Date: May 17, 2012 Number of protesters: 5,000 Number of arrests: 122

GATINEAU

Date: April 17, 2012 Number of arrests: 1 Details: Criticized government, police conduct, and judiciary at a press conference. One arrested is professor. Students defied a court injunction and blocked access to a campus building.

March 14, 2013 | The McGill Daily

QUEBEC CITY

Date: May 23, 2012 Number of arrests: 176 Details: Protesters charged under Bill 78.

Date: May 20-21, 2012 Number of protesters: 5,000 Number of arrests: 300 Details: Two journalists arrested near St. Laurent and Ontario.

19, 2012 protesters: 3,000-20,000 arrests: 69 standers, including peoclubs, were caught up

Money spent on student movement related policing Compiled by Dana Wray

SPVM Between February 1 and June 27

Date: February 23, 2012 Number of protesters: 15,000 Number of arrests: 1 Details: Student Francis Grenier is badly hurt in the eye. Students allege it is from a police stun grenade, although this is never confirmed.

Overtime: hours not available

$7.3 million

Sûreté du Québec (SQ) (Not including the city of Montreal)

During the student protests

Date: April 19, 2012 Number of protesters: 200 Number of arrests: 2 Details: Arrests made randomly through downtown Montreal.

Overtime: 28,000 hours

$1.5 million

Specially trained intervention units VICTORIAVILLE

During the first 11 weeks of the student protests

Deployed 150 times Date: May 4, 2012 Number of protesters: 2,500 Number of arrests: 106 Details: Protester Maxence Valade lost an eye, sustained head trauma.

$2.5-3 million on deployment

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The Police Issue

Restorative justice and smashing the state Alternatives to our current police force

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Asking the question ‘what are alternatives to policing?’ is to ask the question ‘what are alternatives to capitalism?’” said Luis Fernandez, Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northern Arizona University, in a phone interview with The Daily.

By definition, policing is the regulation and control of a community – “the role of the police is to maintain the capitalist social order,” Fernandez said. “A lot of [the] time the role of police is to maintain the social order so that those particular people who have power can do

their business with the least amount of disruption...possible.”

Part of maintaining the current social order means that the police force does not treat everyone as though they are on a level playing field. “Capitalism develops very specific kinds of social arrangements, that for the most part require a very strong stratification of people. You need police to maintain that particular kind of order…[the actions of the police are] not equally distributed – it’s not equal opportunity policing,” Fernandez said. This leads

to higher rates of police brutality and incarceration in less privileged populations.

Activities such as watching, recording, and noting police activities – promoted by activist networks such as Copwatch – can occasionally work to counteract the aggressive actions of the police by changing the power dynamic in favour of the people who may otherwise be harmed by the police. “[Copwatch] has a certain kind of Foucauldian power where the police officers, if they think they are going to be watched, they are

much less likely to abuse people,” Fernandez said.

Imagining a world without police, however, is daunting – without police, who would respond to emergencies? Who would we call when we see a crime being committed? Despite this, Fernandez does not see a society without police as not so far off.

“Most of our communities already exist without policing.

Most of our human interactions are already outside of the purview of police officers,” he said. “Most of the social relationships between

people do not require police intervention,” he added.

While a complete abolition of the police system would require a change in social order, some alternatives to the current police system set out to empower people to keep their communities safe, while encouraging everyone to live lives that are free of violence and oppression. A society with little or no policing requires strong community organizations to mediate and react to conflict when it does occur.

—Farid Rener

PREVENTATIVE MEASURES One key shortcoming of the police force is that it reacts to crime more often than it actively prevents crime. Communities that feel underserved by the police have thus had to come up with alternative methods in order to keep safe without police help; however, many of these methods seem to exacerbate the dichotomy between criminal and victim.

Anti-crime design is one such method.

Groups like Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) Ontario advocate for the creation of public spaces that actively prevent crime. For instance, CPTED suggests high visibility in public spaces – basically, more windows – to decrease hidden spaces where crime may occur. With more observers, wouldbe criminals may be less likely to commit crimes. A crime prevention design technique called “natural access control” also suggests

building fences to clearly delineate public and private spaces, or designing spaces so people know precisely where they are allowed and not allowed to go. Instead of constant police patrols or merely reactionary police work, this design-oriented approach physically prevents crime through space.

Community-based sexual assault centres have also emerged in the past decades as a valuable alternative to police. Locally, centres like Sexual Assault Centre of the McGill Students’ Society or the Montreal Sexual Assault Centre give non-police aid to survivors of sexual assault. This includes helping survivors immediately after incidents as well as providing them with crucial long term support and advocacy.

Community centres are also more likely to keep the survivor’s identity a secret, as they work in total anonymity. These solutions give

survivors more support than traditional police work, which does not typically provide support for the survivor past legal action.

An organization like Walksafe McGill is a small-scale version of what many neighbourhoods and communities have implemented.

The Réseau québécois de Villes et Villages en santé (the healthy communities network) is one program that asks community members to define what they want their community to be and allows them to come up with ways to prevent crime from occurring in the area. Other programs around Quebec include neighbourhood watch programs that encourage communities to police themselves and prevent crime through vigilance and community education.

—Evan Dent

RESTORATIVE JUSTICE

Illustrations Alice Shen | The McGill Daily

Restorative justice, as an example of an alternative to police, has a long history in Canada, particularly within Indigenous communities. It traditionally lessens the state’s role in dealing with crime, and focuses on methods like mediation, dialogue, and reconciliation, instead of punishment.

Founded on the principle that traditional apparatuses of the criminal justice system typically do not take into account the needs of victims, restorative justice works to include victims in the process. It functions with the voluntary participation of victims, offenders, and community members. Victims typically address how the crime has impacted their lives, and offenders are encouraged to take responsibility.

“The collective body of citizens has the ability, in a deliberative, consensus model, to determine with the offender, whether the offender goes to jail or not,” Fernandez explained. “This becomes an alternative to law enforcement and policing because you have the power with the people, collectively,” he added.

There are several essential tenets unique to restorative justice: recognition that crime is a violation of one person by another, rather than an act against the state, and that it is

harmful to both personal relationships and to communities. The process takes the holistic context of an offence into consideration, including moral, social, economic, political, and religious considerations.

Restorative justice has been recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada and is mentioned within the Criminal Code in paragraph 718.2(e). It is often used to try to lessen the large number of Indigenous peoples within the criminal justice and prison systems – Indigenous peoples make up approximately 2 per cent of Canada’s adult population, but made up between 17 and 18.5 per cent of federal prison admissions in 2006.

Peacemaking circles, a form of restorative justice seen in some Indigenous communities, focus on non-hierarchical dialogue between community, victim, and offender.

These circles focus on looking at larger, structural issues of crime and prevention within the community, as opposed to focusing on crime on an individual basis.

Dissatisfied with Canada’s current punitive criminal justice and penal system and concerned that it unfairly targets Indigenous peoples, the Kahnawake Mohawk community, located on the south shore of the St. Lawrence river, began to

use Sken:nen A’onsonton, which means “to become peaceful again,” the traditional restorative justice system reintroduced by the Mohawk in Kahnawake in 2000. These practices provide alternative measures to the federal criminal justice system, and focus largely on preventative measures and interventions.

Other restorative justice models include Victim Offender Mediation programs (VOMPs), which originated in Ontario, and focus on problem-solving between victim and offender with the help of a trained mediator. Unfortunately, despite its success, the program was terminated in 2004 due to a lack of funding.

Historically, restorative justice has been used for addressing minor crimes; however, some, such as Howard Zehr, a professor of restorative justice at the Eastern Mennonite University, argue that it can be effective in cases of more serious crimes, such as sexual assault or murder. The evidence for this varies, and results often depend on multiple variables, such as mediator training or the voluntary participation of all parties involved.

—Molly Korab

March 14, 2013 | The McGill Daily

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The SPVM’s arsenal Compiled by Laurent Bastien Corbeil, Nicolas Quiazua | Illustrations by Amina Batyreva

Flash bombs Batons Used by: escouade urbaine (squadrons), bicycling squads and cadets.

Batons are used to subdue protesters through physical force and instill fear and a marching rhythm.

Side grips increase the power of the hit – expandable batons allow for mobility and biking. Batons have broken ribs and have been used directly on individuals’ heads causing, for example, a triple fracture on protester Gabriel Duchesneau’s head on May 1.

Handcuffs Restraining devices allow for mass arrests in kettling. The handcuffs used during protest are more flexible and compact than the normal metal handcuffs, but can still cause heavy bruises on wrists.

Rubber bullet guns and ammunition

Flash bombs are projectiles that detonate with a flash bang effect. They are fired over the heads of subjects for crowd control in order to make a large crowd disperse by instilling a sentiment of fear and confusion. They are usually followed by a charge in the seconds following the explosion.

These bombs have been fired directly at protesters, and may be involved in the lost of Francis Grenier’s eye on March 7, 2012, and the injury of the shinbone of an unnamed protester on March 5, 2013.

Pepper spray Used to stun and momentarily dehabilitate an individual or crowd resisting verbally or physically to arrest.

Implicated in the death of four people between 1996 and 2000 in Montreal.

The SPVM started using pepper spray in January 1996.

Four levels of concentration are used for different levels of resistance. In the incident involving Stephanie Trudeau (agent 728), the police officer was armed with a yellow band aerosol, which had a 0.4 per cent concentration. The highest level of concentration is 1.3 per cent.

The four delivery systems vary for individual or crowd use. High volume delivery is used for riot and crowd control situations where a large number of people are close to police lines and police are outnumbered. Ranges up to 25 feet, and is often used without any aim.

Sponge bullets deliver a strong, stunning blow to a body without penetrating it. They are designed to be directly fired at specific subjects but have issues of accuracy at long range, making them dangerous and potentially lethal at short range. Minimum engagement range is 10 to 15 metres, and maximum effective range is 50 metres. Velocity at 50 metres is 200 feet per second.

Last year in Oregon, the police confronted a violent man wielding a hammer. The man was hit six times by sponge rounds, one of which broke his thumb.

Foam bullets are also available for green marking. They are used to retrace individuals suspected to be instigators at protests, otherwise similar to sponge bullets.

Vehicles The SPVM had 560 cars at its disposal in 2011. More than half of those, however, are deemed to be worn out. On average, police vehicles are around 56 months old.

The most common police vehicule is the Ford Crown Victoria. Crown Victoria models are currently being phased out in favour of the newer Dodge Charger vehicle.

Two black Dodge Chargers were recently acquired by the SPVM. The cars are designed to stealthily catch traffic offenders. The costs of the vehicules are estimated at $34,000 each. The SPVM has said that it would be spending $10 million over three years to upgrade its fleet.

Vehicle enhancements In addition to the amenities found in regular cars, police vehicles often come with additional features. The SPVM has spent $14 million to equip its vehicles with the M-IRIS system, an onboard computer that allows officer to quickly access police databases from their car.

Police cars are outfitted with a “police pack” upgrade that offers more performance and handling than normal vehicles. Upgrades include heavy duty brakes, shocks, and transmissions. First aid kits, fire extinguishers, flares, and barrier tapes are often common in police vehicles.

Rubber ball blast grenade with CS gas Delivers three different tools in one for psychological and physical effects: light, loud explosions, and a harmful gas.

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The Police Issue

So much for transparency The fine line between public relations and propaganda in the Montreal police Carla Green The McGill Daily

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lthough the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) has an entire department dedicated to public and media relations, the Montreal police has been accused of suppressing the public’s access to information.

On February 27, La Presse released a video depicting Agent Daniel Lacoursière, a member of the SPVM’s media relations team, violently blocking one of the newspaper’s cameramen from filming a protest.

“I’m not going to talk precisely about the particular case [of Agent Lacoursière],” said SPVM Sergeant Laurent Gingras in a phone interview with The Daily, “but I can tell you that if members of the public are not satisfied with the service they’ve had or want to complain about brutality, they can complain to the police ethics commission; every officer has to answer to the

ethics commission.”

Some argue, however, that the problem with the SPVM’s public relations is not what it blocks from the public eye, but the way that it spins the information that it lets through.

Alexandre Popovic, member of the Coalition against Repression and Abuse by Police (CRAP), told The Daily in French: “When someone dies as a result of the action of the SPVM, the public relations team will spread the ‘police version’ of the story, which is, obviously, always the version that will exonerate the police officer from any guilt.”

The SPVM’s most potent public relations tool is its Twitter account, which boasts almost 53,000 followers and over 10,000 tweets. The SPVM told The Daily that there are “several people who tweet” on the account, but it is primarily run by Melissa Carroll, a civilian police officer.

In a blog interview published in 2011, a year after she assumed the post, Carroll described working for

the SPVM as her “dream job.”

“I think that my continued presence and interactions with people have helped to establish a trusting relationship and to show that we’re the source of information to know everything about the SPVM,” she told the blogger.

Neither Carroll nor the SPVM responded to The Daily’s repeated requests for an interview.

While the SPVM is not the only police force that tweets, it is arguably the most active and, often, the most controversial. Carroll and the others who tweet under the @SPVM handle actively interact with Montrealers, sometimes leading to real-time debates.

When an activist media association tweeted that the SPVM was conducting searches in buses and the metro during the two-day demonstration against this year’s Summit on Higher Education, @ SPVM tweeted back within ten minutes, denying the accusation and causing other Twitter users to chime in, claiming that eyewitness accounts supported the

original charge.

In a strange twist, since the SPVM is such a reliable presence at any protest action in the city, its hyperactive Twitter feed has become a useful resource for tracking protests in real-time and for late-coming activists looking to get in on the action.

CRAP’s Popovic admitted to having used the police force’s Twitter for the purpose of finding a protest when he was running late.

“The information they tweet is pretty precise, I’ll grant them that,” he said. “It’s a bit of a paradox [to be using the SPVM’s Twitter in that way], but yeah, I have to give them that.”

Tweeting allows the SPVM to interact with the public more directly than ever before, and could also push the police force more accountable for its actions.

In the 2011 blog interview, Carroll said that in the beginning some Montreal police officers were “hesitant about going ahead with [the SPVM’s Twitter, because] they didn’t understand what the

benefit for a public service could be,” although she reported that they were “very happy” with it once it was started.

“We think we are being transparent [with Twitter],” said Lacoursière. “We use it to inform the public generally, like about what route a protest will take and if it is declared illegal,” he said.

If the SPVM’s Twitter were used only in this way, Popovic thinks that it would be a good initiative. But he argues that even though Twitter seems to make the police force more accountable, it’s nonetheless used to manipulate public opinion in favour of the police.

“I’m for more transparency,” he said. “If the SPVM were only tweeting neutral information, like where a protest is, I couldn’t be against it. The thing is that the SPVM also uses Twitter to justify its interventions as they’re happening, like claiming they’re intervening in a protest because protesters are throwing projectiles, or in other similar situations.”

Knowing your rights Compiled by Queen Arsem-O’Malley and Mercedes Sharpe

Collective Opposed to Police Brutality

What to do when arrested

What to do if in a mass arrest

In response to a public assembly held regarding the mass arrests after the 1995 demonstration against Human Life International, in which street youth and punk communities voiced a strong demand for a permanent basis against police brutality, the Collective Opposed to Police Brutality (COBP) organized to protect against threats to freedom of speech and address the impunity rampant in the actions of the SPVM. 18 years later, examples such as Victoriaville and the offences perpetrated by officer 728 prove that violence continues to permeate police work and is rarely punished. “Impunity makes police believe they are above the law,” François Du Canal, a member of the COBP, said in an interview with The Daily. “The media reminds us that there are the ‘bad apples’ in these events, but officer 728 was not an exception.” Since 1997, the COBP has organized the annual demonstration commemorating the International Day Against Police Brutality in the streets of Montreal. Students taking to the streets on March 15 must remember, whether their cause is to oppose SPVM interventions in marginalized communities or “ostie de carrés rouges,” that the COBP will be available to help guide ethics committees and courts to protect the rights of protesters in the event of wrongful arrests or acts of violence.

If you are detained, questioned, or arrested by an officer, be aware that: • You do not have to provide your identity to the police unless you are: under arrest, driving a motor vehicle (you must show a driver’s license), in a bar or movie theatre (to prove that you are over 18), or found at night in a public place (like a park).

• If a police officer asks you to accompany them or identify yourself in a situation other than those listed above, ask if you are under arrest. If not, you don’t need to provide identification.

• Police must identify themselves upon request, or provide a badge with their name and ID number.

• Contact the COBP. The COBP supports victims of police brutality by helping them file complaints in the Police Ethics System and contest wrongful accusations. Remember to remain patient – the collective might take several days to respond following mass arrests.

• You have thirty days to contest your ticket.

Check the not guilty (non-coupable) case behind the ticket, and leave the plea ( plaidoyer) section blank. The plea is optional information that will not help your case.

• Demand to see the evidence held against you. To do this, you must write to the Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions (DCPP), taking note to include your case number (written on your ticket or statement of infraction).

• Be efficient about collecting evidence. If you ask within a week of the arrest, you can request surveillance footage from surrounding businesses (e.g. the Grande Bibliothèque).

• Engage in collective defense. Protesting is a collective effort, and therefore collective opposition to mass arrests imposes a large weight on the judicial system. The main lesson from the trial of March 15, 2009, in which 221 people were arrested and ticketed for infraction of the P-6 anti-protest bylaw, is that contenders have to present a clear defence and testify to it, otherwise they are found guilty.

• Engage in self-representation. The COBP lawyers are willing to give a crash course in defending oneself in court without formal representation, free of charge.

For more information, refer to the Collective Opposed to Police Brutality website, cobp.resist.ca.

If you are detained by the police, • Ask why. Police must explain what charge you are being arrested for. If you are not under arrest, police can only detain you if they have “reasonable grounds” to believe you are implicated in a crime.

• You do not have to provide any information other than your name, birth date, and address. Anything you say to police can be used against you.

For any search by police: • There must be “reasonable grounds” to believe you are in possession of a firearm or drugs or • They are detaining you for questioning (due to reasonable belief that you are implicated in a crime).

•In order for police to search your home, they must have a search warrant signed by a judge.

March 14, 2013 | The McGill Daily

Cops on the small screen Primetime shouldn’t root for the fuzz

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ONLINE CONTENT For this special police issue

Police shootings in Montreal

Queen Arsem-O’Malley, Laurent Bastien Corbeil, Isobel Cully, Anqi Zhang

Illustration Alice Shen | The McGill Daily Hillary Pasternak The McGill Daily

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he public loves a good antihero. But the thing about anti-heroes is that, in the end, they’re still heroes. They break a few rules, bust a few heads, but it’s all done to save the day. They buck the system in service of the system, and we’re okay with that. We, the aforementioned public, are served by the system, are we not? In return for these moral gymnastics, antiheroic characters earn our respect and esteem. But let’s say that a fictional character that we idolize has a real-world counterpart. Would they deserve our praise as well?

One of the easiest places to find a good anti-hero these days is in the police procedurals that populate North American primetime. Police procedurals have been guaranteed hits since the early days of television, but today there are more than ever. Crime dramas have become cozy comfort food, syndicated and frequently marathoned in cable TV’s outlands. These officers on the small screen are reliable, even when they tend toward the unorthodox. They are the Praetorian Guard of the establishment, morally upright, armed only for our safety. Corruption within the rank and file, as well as the institution, can be an interesting plot point.

But with the right officers on hand to

blow a whistle, it’s never a problem for long. We can trust the police on television. And because television, much like the internet, never lies to us, we can trust that it is the real thing.

It’s routinely revealed to the public that police officers and the higher-ups who direct their activities are often somewhat less than well-intentioned out here in reality. Montreal, a city unafraid to send a riot squad to a university campus, is a fantastic place to be reminded of that fact.

This isn’t to say that all police officers are inherently evil and should not be trusted. That’s patently ridiculous. Cops are people. People are good and bad. But most of the images of law enforcement that enter our homes every night are not good and bad. Even the darkest, the grittiest of precinct-set morality plays often center on a knight whose armor retains a hint of shine beneath the grime and tarnish. Recent years have given us cable series such as The Shield and The Wire, which depict their badge-wielding protagonists as fundamentally biased creatures, who don’t always have public interest at heart in their work. But beloved as these series are within certain circles, they’re the type of knotty, intellectual drama that can only rarely catch fire in the public imagination.

Even when they do, they have to deal with the same problem as any network potboiler. The police procedural can try to examine the deeper

moral implications of its characters’ actions. But to stay on air, it has to deliver on a visceral level. It has to entertain: car chases, aviator sunglasses, shootouts, flashy interrogation techniques. Who cares if they’re technically not allowed to hold that person for questioning? Keep them there! We want to hear more creatively-worded threats! To get itself syndicated, a show needs to have an element of cool. And really, who can argue with cool?

The noble cop is a North American archetype with a stunning level of staying power; for example, the longrunning, frighteningly durable CSI and Law & Order franchises, which have dominated the small screen for the past couple of decades. Not to mention the dozens of smaller dramas and procedurals that have come and gone in the surrounding slots.

Even left-fielders like the reality show COPS (which existed before many of us did and will likely die long after we’re gone) place themselves firmly in the camp of the law enforcement officers it follows. They’re the ones keeping us ‘normal’ folks safe from the ‘wackos.’ And also the people who smoke weed.

Most meat-and-potatoes crime dramas, like a lot of popular entertainment, are bedtime stories. Narratives and bedtime stories have their place, but when these narratives are all we hear day in and day out, they teach us to live in a world that doesn’t exist.

Racial profiling in Ottawa Helen Hsu

The full interactive map of arrests during the Maple Spring Dana Wray, Hera Chan, and Tom Acker

mcgilldaily.com/PoliceIssue

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The Police Issue

Illustration Alice Shen | The McGill Daily

Putting an end to police impunity Sixty people killed by police since 1987 Dana Wray The McGill Daily

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nas Bennis, Claudio Castagnetta, Ben Matson, Quilem Registre, Gladys Tolley, and Fredy Villanueva share one thing in common: they were killed by police officers.

The families and friends of these six individuals had also all met significant legal and administrative roadblocks when they tried to seek answers for investigations they felt were biased or incomplete.

At the Forum Against Police Violence and Impunity in 2010, the families and friends of the six victims formed the Justice for the Victims of Police Killings Coalition to remember their loved ones, support the families and seek “dignity, justice, and truth”.

For the past three years, the Coalition has held an annual march on October 22. According to their website, “the symbolic date of October 22 was sub-

sequently chosen for a familyfriendly event to commemorate the victims of police killings to coincide with the National Day of Protest in the United States organized by the October 22nd Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation, which has been mobilizing every year since 1996.”

The Coalition also calls for an end to racial and social profiling by police. The widely publicized death of Fredy Villanueva in Montreal Nord in 2008 sparked riots over perceived racial profiling after the unarmed 18-year-old was shot three times while playing dice in a park.

At the Coalition’s vigil on October 22, 2011, Robyn Maynard, a social justice organizer in Montreal involved with the march, explained the problem of profiling. “[Police brutality] happens to people who are socially profiled, people with mental health issues, people who are very poor, whose lives are not given as much value

in our society. Those are the people who the police can kind of have impunity to kill because there are no repercussions,” Maynard said.

Julie Matson, one of the most outspoken activists in the Coalition, has experienced this firsthand. Despite evidence of severe beating by officers from the Vancouver Police Department, her father Ben Matson’s death in 2002 was declared accidental.

According to the coroner, he choked on his own vomit because of the position he was left in by the police.

“Throughout the process of dealing with my dad’s death, from the initial investigation, through to the public inquest, I couldn’t ignore the blatant use of profiling, be it class, race or otherwise, and the continual upholding of systemic impunity and privilege that the police have,” Julie Matson wrote in a blog post on October 1, 2012.

Bridget Tolley is another outspoken member of the Coalition.

She alleges that her mother, Gladys Tolley, was the victim of racial profiling as an Aboriginal woman. One October night in 2001, after visiting her daughter, Tolley walked across a two-lane highway to return home, and was fatally struck by a Sûreté du Québec (SQ) officer.

A string of instances of improper conduct immediately followed Gladys Tolley’s death.

Bridget Tolley was shocked that the primary causes of death were listed in the police report as “negligence of a pedestrian” and “alcohol,” essentially absolving the police of responsibility and placing the blame on her mother’s shoulders.

Tolley has fought for her mother’s memory ever since. The first Sisters in Spirit vigil in 2006, held in honour of the more than 600 Indigenous women missing or murdered across Canada, was inspired by Gladys Tolley’s death.

In 2010, the Government of Quebec denied requests for an independent investigation into

her death, leaving the family broken-hearted.

Internal inquiries rarely end with a guilty verdict. According to the Coalition, over sixty people have been killed by the police in Montreal since 1987, and 300 people have been seriously injured by the police in Montreal since 1989. Out of these cases, the Coalition asserts that only two officers were ever charged – and both were acquitted.

Across Canada, regulations regarding police abuse and illegitimate violence differ depending on the province. Additionally, there are no comprehensive statistics on police-related deaths in Canada.

The Coalition holds its annual marches and vigils not only to heal the families and to push for change, but also to raise public awareness about the issue. “If you look at us, we are all really normal people,” Julie Matson told the crowd at the second annual Coalition march and vigil. “This is the thing about this kind of violence, it affects everybody.”

Financial Statements April 30, 2012

features

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

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Left out in the cold How Montreal shelters neglect trans* identities HANNAH BESSEAU

Illustration BY Amina Batyreva

features

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

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t’s January 21 and I am standing outside the Old Brewery Mission. People are eagerly shuffling inside, hauling their stuffed bags in their arms and fumbling with their belongings. The temperature is expected to drop to -38 tonight and it seems like the shelter patrons’ irritated expressions are frozen to their faces.

There are approximately 20,000 homeless people living in Montreal, and shelters across the city hit their maximum capacity the week of January 21. The Old Brewery Mission is one of the shelters in Montreal that offers temporary overnight services. The shelter prides itself in its efforts for non-discriminatory admission to its services, which include a bed, a shower, a meal, and leisure activities. I called the reception of the Old Brewery Mission and inquired about the admission process for those who come in for a night of refuge from Montreal’s intolerable winter.

The Old Brewery Mission told me that the process is simple: first, there is a short interview to ensure the shelter is a right fit for the person’s needs and expectations, meaning they offer beds for homeless clients, but not onsite mental health services. After the interview, bags are checked for drugs, alcohol, needles, and weapons, and finally legal documentation is requested, which can be any sort of identification.

In times of overcapacity, the admission process becomes more selective. Administrators need to make executive decisions on who merits accessing their services. After speaking with the Old Brewery Mission, the specific qualifications for vulnerability were still unclear. Yet some of society’s most vulnerable are left out in the cold based on their trans* identity.

The documentation requested by shelter services states one of two genders, female or male. If a person’s physical appearance does not match the sex listed on their documentation, shelter administrators are more inclined to turn the person away. I sat down with Gabrielle Bouchard, a Peer Support and Advocacy coordinator at Centre 2110, an advocacy group that offers safer sex and trans* health services to Concordia University and the greater Montreal community. For Bouchard, the admission process at shelters hinges on fixed notions of gender identity. “If you don’t look the part, then the questions are asked that are fundamentally discriminatory. Unless you have an F on your documentation, then you don’t have access to these services. That F is very difficult to get. First, if I want to have a sex reassignment surgery that will modify my body forever in a very significant way, I need a variety of authorization from different medical professionals to prove that I’m really trans*. All of this costs money. If you’re already homeless, then chances for you to get to that operation are very difficult.”

*** According to Action Santé Travesti(e)s et Transsexuel(les) du Québec (ASTT(e)Q), women’s shelters require trans* people to have undergone sex reassignment surgery in order to obtain a matching gender ID. This requirement aligns with Quebec law, which requires a psychological assessment and sexual reassignment surgery to change official documents.

In Montreal, to undergo sex reassignment surgery, one must first be referred by the Human Sexuality Unit at the Montreal General Hospital. People are then subject to a list of criteria.

Gender Reassignment Surgery Montreal (GRS), which boasts being “one of the best organizations in the world for transsexuality surgical services,” is covered under standard Quebec healthcare if the person can meet the criteria. Their criteria for a male to female operation has to meet the standards of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, Inc. Furthermore, one of the patient’s recommendations has to be made by a scientist who has followed the patient for at least six months, so as to ensure they are living according to their gender identity. According to GRS website, the other more specific requirements are as follows: 1. That is hormonal sex reassignment recommended by a clinic behavioural scientist 2. Full-time living in the social role of the chosen gender [for] at least 12 months 3. Two letters are required for surgery: Two separate letters of recommendation from mental health profession-

als who work alone without colleagues experienced with gender identity disorder are required for surgery and – if the first letter is from a person with a master’s degree, the second letter should be from a psychiatrist or a clinical psychologist. Those who can be expected to adequately evaluate co-morbid psychiatric conditions.

The time and commitment to the operation is immense on multiple fronts. If one is able to obtain all of these referrals confirming their medicalized trans* identity, the Quebec government will cover the expense of the operation. Without this coverage, according to GRS Montreal, the operation would cost approximately $70,000, which is not included in regular healthcare costs.

For people with healthcare and the financial means of obtaining the proper documents, sex reassignment surgery is certainly a trying process, but possible. I spoke with the coordinator of ASTT(e)Q, Nora Butler Burke, who told me about the unfortunate problems facing lower-income trans* women. “In one case, a woman actually met all the criteria that most trans* women can meet, in terms of having surgery, but because she didn’t have the money to pay for her legal documents, she didn’t have a female sex on her legal ID and she was told she wouldn’t be welcomed.”

A survey conducted by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force shows that the unemployment rate for trans* people is double the rate of the population as a whole. In addition to this, 15 per cent of those surveyed live on less than $10,000 a year.

This number jumps to 34 per cent if the person is black and transgendered. Keeping this, and the four to six month wait time, in mind, the application for sex reassignment operation appears to be an exhausting process both personally and financially for those already in a vulnerable position.

Burke explained why this process is problematic, even after obtaining the operation. “There is a lack of access to proper mental health support and support for people transitioning. A lot around the process of sex reassignment is not ensured unless people are wealthier or privileged…It’s important to understand how this lack of access to healthcare has a direct effect on how people live their lives and the likelihood they will enter into different relationships. They might end up living with someone who is abused, more likely to be profiled by police. This process is directly related to class and economic status.”

In addition to this, in order to access certain services, the female or male dichotomy on one’s ID delegitimizes any gender that does not conform to male or female.

*** Burke also questions why sex reassignment surgery is the determining factor of shelter admission rather than greater education on trans* integration. “Discrimination still takes place within the shelters even if accepted. Trans* women accepted still have a hard time because of different discriminatory attitudes.

Shelters don’t often do work on educating and raising awareness on different people within the space and different issues such as abelism, racism, et cetera. We see shelters replicating those same barriers and exclusions that are directly out of state regulations, replicating a certain component of violence.”

Such is the case of one anonymous trans* man, Alex** who was recently interviewed on CKUT 90.3 FM’s show Transzister Radio as part of the Homelessness Marathon.

CKUT annually participates in the Homelessness Marathon, a nationally broadcast 14-hour radio event that opens a space for homeless people to share their thoughts, stories, and experience with the greater Montreal community.

The podcast has clear sound, but Alex’s voice is scratchy and shaky. “Myself, I was homeless three times. One was due to a fire, and two to do with assaults. Those [assault] times, it was not good because I was invited to stay at a women’s shelter. I was there for the month of April. I was told I could stay…but I didn’t stay there because I was having nightmares about the place [where] I was sleeping. The nightmares were that the other people holding me down trying to kill me on the bed. I don’t think anyone was actually planning on doing that to me but that’s what the nightmares were and that’s why I chose to sleep on a little bench on the corner of Ste. Catherine instead.”

Throughout February, ASTT(e)Q has offered trans* sensitivity and advocacy training to shelter workers, as a means of solving this problem. They also offer to escort people to shelters in emergency situations.

Alex continues, “ASTT(e)Q helped me find a place, they were really nice. …I called a temporary place for a month, but it was really expensive. It was $600 per month, with laundry and meals [included], but I was paying so much. ASST(e)Q was kind and helped with the deposit.”

“It made me feel better that someone was with me. The lady let me do most of the talking to explain that I was transsexual. It was nice having someone with me just in case something bad could have happened.”

*** Cases like Alex’s occur all too often, as those who do not fit into rigid gender roles are more likely to experience violence, in and out of the shelter. Burke elaborates on how “shelters have inherited a certain brand of feminism that is not able to understand trans* women as women, and that’s something important to talk about. Fighting essentialist idea of what is woman. Legislation is used to legitimize this logic.”

This process Burke describes is an mixture of transphobia and genderism. According to the Human Rights Office of Queen’s University, transphobia is the “fear, loathing, and discriminatory treatment of people whose gender identity or presentation does not match in a socially accepted way” and genderism in the sense of “the belief that there are, and should be, only two genders and that one’s gender is inevitably tied to biological sex.” Trans* people bear the brunt of such discrimination.

This discrimination works its way into the shelter, and Bouchard holds shelter workers somewhat complicit in genderist notions. “There is the idea in shelters that they have to protect other women there. That trans* people would make the other women feel uncomfortable. This is very close to the conservative argument where segregated bathrooms do not include trans* people and where they are neglected in the Charter of Rights and the Criminal Code. There is an intrinsic fear that trans* people will sexually assault others.

They are characterized as predators and this is just ignorant.”

She emphasizes that this misconception is perpetuated by discriminatory policies. She calls for a shift in refocusing the discussion on awareness as a means of reducing this prejudice. “My personal opinion is that the idea that a trans* woman would be dangerous, or might make others uncomfortable, is something women’s shelters will just have to deal with. They’ll have to deal with it the same way they had to deal with sexuality, and the same way they had to deal with racism.

There is no real ground for basing discrimination on these categories. If we work on educating the people who work at these shelters, and the people who attend, on trans* sensitivity, people will become more comfortable. I don’t expect this to happen easily or anytime soon, but it’s starting to happen.”

Burke offers a similar suggestion. “With the case of trans* men, they often lack visibility and awareness. The ideas of potential safety issues come about because of a lack of education among shelter workers. Accepting trans* women to shelters isn’t enough. They are often reprimanded for ‘bad behaviour’ when often they face incidents that provoke them. It’s important that policy be put in place that really clarifies what access should look like.”

Fortunately, Federal Bill C-279 is currently going through the federal legislature to protect individuals of trans* experience under the Canadian Human Rights Act. It also aims to include gender identity and gender expression in Canada’s Criminal Code. Bill C-279 is a step in the right direction for trans* people, but the ways in which it will affect shelter life are difficult to speculate.

The case of trans* people being denied access to shelters in Montreal speaks to the intersecting discrimination trans* people face when simply in search for a warm meal.

Demanding documentation that only allows the letter F or M excludes vulnerable members of society from their basic rights. A bed is better than a bench, awareness is better than ignorance, and with further understanding of trans* issues, we’ll sleep more soundly through the winter nights. **Names have been changed.

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

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Sex workers and the SPVM Emery Saur All That Naked Business

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very year, beginning in the spring and early summer, the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) plants fake police officers disguised as sex workers on corners normally occupied by outdoor workers, in an attempt to target and prosecute clients seeking sexual services.

Sex work – the exchange of sex or “sexually-charged” acts for money or other valuables – is legal in Canada.

However, it is incredibly difficult for sex workers and their clients to engage in this exchange, given the stringency of legal particulars.

Under the Criminal Code of Canada, sections 210-213, it is illegal to keep a brothel or “common bawdyhouse,” to transport or direct a person to one of these “bawdyhouses,” to “procur[e] a person” to engage in prostitution, to live off of the avails of prostitution, and for sex workers and clients to communicate in public places, including motor vehicles. Section 213, the communication law, is the section most commonly upheld by the SPVM. “Client-based approaches are dangerous for sex workers,” says Émilie Laliberté, a former sex worker and the general director at Stella, a community organization that works to provide support and information to sex workers, sensitize and educate the public about sex work, fight discrimination, and promote decriminalization of sex work.

“Whenever there’s a raise in the persecution of [Stella’s] clients on the streets [by the SPVM], we have way more descriptions on the bad tricks list.” The “bad tricks” list is a section of a monthly bulletin released by Stella that provides workers with descriptions of violent assailants recently seeking services, and the act, and location, so that the workers may better protect themselves.

However, instead of pulling from this list, the police target whoever approaches the officers disguised as sex workers, and frequently arrest non-violent clients. According to Laliberté, the SPVM might arrest anywhere from 50 to 75 clients in one week. Fewer clients on the streets leads to longer hours spent soliciting, more tension and stigma from area residents, and less choice and control over clients. Reports of violence against sex workers increase.

“They’re going to accept clients that they would have not accepted before, and they’re going to accept less for services than they would have done before. Sometimes they will have the instinct that maybe someone doesn’t look good or they get a bad feeling, but they’re not going to

Illustration Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily

listen to it because they’ve been waiting on the corner for three hours, and so they’re going to jump in the car.”

Sex workers in Montreal greatly mistrust the SPVM because it sees them as criminals rather than members of a community. As a result, they are unable to ask for the services they need, and are forced to choose between obeying the law and maintaining their own personal safety.

“One of the major issues regarding sex workers and [lack of] police protection...is that all the violence faced by sex workers goes unresolved. We have about 15 to 20 bad trick descriptions of events of assault, sometimes rape, sometimes attempts of murder,” Laliberté told The Daily.

“These sex workers that come to us with a number, address, description – they won’t necessarily press charges against the assaulters because they don’t believe in the system and they’re afraid they’re going to be the one ending up in jail.”

In Montreal, Stella annually records between fifty and sixty cases of violence, including rape, brutal beatings, and attempted murder against sex workers. These statistics, and the information that accompanies them – sometimes as specific as home addresses of the assailants – are available to the SPVM, often only nominally investigated. Only four or five cases reach the courts every year.

Intense scrutiny by the police is dangerous for the workers, because it gives them less time to analyze a potential customer for threats,

decreasing their control of the situation and making it more likely they’ll be attacked.

171 female sex workers were murdered between 1991 and 2004, according to a 2006 Statistics Canada report. Because many such killings go unreported, a House of Commons sub-committee declared that these numbers were “almost certainly lower than the real figures.”

The Daily attempted to interview three sex workers in the HochelagaMaisonneuve district about their experiences with police repression, but they refused to comment because they thought a lengthy conversation might be confused for communication or solicitation, and end up in their arrest. One woman sitting in a doorframe said, “even if I don’t get arrested, I’ll get humiliated.”

If a sex worker is found to be in violation of section 213, they commonly receive a quadrilateral restraining order, which restricts them from entering certain neighbourhoods – not only for solicitation, but for other things like picking up their child from school or buying groceries. Most of these people live in the areas in which they work and then suddenly, after they receive this “quadrilatère,” they can no longer be seen there by police, who, in areas with a fair number of sex workers, are everywhere.

“They don’t need to be charged with anything anymore,” said Laliberté, “they just need to break their condition and they are thrown in jail. And so they lose their apart-

ment, the guardianship of their children. We do intervene in the provincial prison, and we see that sex workers are over-represented in prison.”

“The current law makes them criminal[s], and it does send a message to the assaulters and violent men that they can target sex workers and they won’t be charged. There is a huge need for the situation to change.”

It is of fundamental importance to distinguish violence institutionalized by the state through repressive policies like those seen in sections 210-213, and the violence enacted on sex workers by individual officers.

The SPVM are, in most situations, just doing their job. But this job is still an extension of institutionalized systems of repression, and violence does still happen. Like the woman in Hochelaga said, intimidation and humiliation are commonplace, and the ambivalence and confusion within courts and the legal system makes it incredibly difficult for police to balance their prerogative to protect these workers with their attempts to crack down on outdoor sex work.

In 2008, three sex workers named Terri-Jean Bedford, Amy Lebovitch, and Valerie Scott organized to challenge sections 210-213. The Superior Court came to a decision in 2010 and the judge decided to decriminalize these sections. But the government appealed the decision less than two hours following the judgement, and so the women took it to the Court of Appeals, which, in March of 2012, agreed that it was unconstitutional

to criminalize 210 “bawdyhouses” and 211 “living off of the avails”, but maintained that public communication was illegal.

“On June 12, the Supreme Court will hear [this] case. We have the intention of intervening in that case.

We’ll be looking to the Supreme Court to make a decision that could make it much safer for all sex workers to work in Canada and receive as much protection from the police as any other citizen,” says Laliberté.

The Daily called multiple SPVM quartier-based bureaus, but they all declined to comment.

Laliberté said, “So we asked the SPVM what are their priorities? Is it to prosecute the assaulters, the rapists?

The guys that should be in jail but are circulating freely? The guys whose phone numbers we have in our badtrick list? Or is it that you arrest the people who are exchanging sexual favours for money?”

Stella said “they’re looking [onward] to the [June 12] Bedford case.”

For more information, visit chezstella.org. Those who believe in the full decriminalization of sex work are encouraged to write to their deputies to advocate police protection for all.

All That Naked Business is column on sex. You can reach Emery at allthatnakedbusiness@mcgilldaily.com

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

McGill’s online movement, circa 2000 Sitting down with COOL cofounder and teaching enthusiast, Professor David Harpp Omar Saadeh The McGill Daily

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rofessor David Harpp, the newly appointed Tomlinson Chair of Science Education and Macdonald Professor of Chemistry at McGill University, has published over 230 research articles, twenty of which are on teaching. He also sits on the McGill Senate and advises the University on academic integrity.

Harpp has received over a dozen teaching and research awards including the prestigious 3M National Teaching Fellowship and McGill’s inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award for Leadership in Learning. In 2000, he led an initiative through the Office for Science & Society (OSS) to promote online courses dubbed COOL (COurses OnLine) McGill.

Anyone, regardless of whether they are McGill students, has access to the McGill lectures on this program from their home.

The Daily sat down with Professor Harpp to talk about McGill’s participation in the massive open online courses (MOOCs) movement, more recently known as edX, and about the foundation and workings of COOL McGill.

The McGill Daily: How did COOL McGill start?

David Harpp: It started, not with the University’s money, but through the Office of Science and Society. It was a project that I had wanted to do.

We had two programmers…that were really keen and capable. So we sat down and digitized about 16,000 35 mm slides; we used a great many visuals.

During the first couple lectures in 2000, we tested COOL without informing the class. On the third day a woman approached me, wideeyed and slightly panicking. She said that she missed the first two classes and asked “what do I do?” I thought that this would be the perfect time to tell her about COOL. Expecting her to be amazed, I was a bit disappointed when all I got was a “thanks” and she quickly walked back up the aisle. It’s all very much like in a Harry Potter movie; we are just expecting people to walk through walls. This was only a lecture.

In the first couple of years there were only maybe ten courses being recorded. We had some money, so we funded the programmers until 2006, and in a more modest fashion since then. Before that, we [Harpp, Joe Schwarcz and Ariel Fenster] – the inventors – owned it. But that seemed wrong, and plus I didn’t want to have anything to do with the finances. So we later navigated with the Provost

Photo Omar Saadeh | The McGill Daily

[Anthony Masi] to give these two programmers the whole thing.

They started a company [IDEALS, with Nic Siggel as chief programmer] and gave McGill a license to use the software.

MD: Where did the idea come from?

DH: [It started] in Organic Chemistry during the mid seventies. I was able to supply all 500 students with 12 feet of 36mm film each – that’s a mile of film! We sat down, cut it up and sold it for a cost ($2.50 including the viewer) to the students. This set my head in a direction for the rest of my life.

MD: Does a professor need to be in a lecture hall to create a COOL stream?

DH: COOL lets you do it from anywhere, your home or at the office. Professors can remotely review midterms and upload extra learning modules. 350 courses per year use the software, but via a student ID. It runs on a laptop – in fact, we could do it right now – and it’s available to anyone.

Unfortunately it isn’t used nearly as much as it should be.

MD: If COOL works so well, why hasn’t it been marketed better?

DH: The new owners of COOL have talked with University of Montreal, Concordia, Sherbrooke, and others, but they

don’t seem to be interested. I don’t know why. We would be saving everybody a lot of money and it works well. At least from my point of view – [but] some people just don’t get it.

Egos are a part of it. Some professors don’t want their lectures recorded for a number of reasons: they don’t like the sound of their voice, the way it will look, and they didn’t want publicly talk about their research – they don’t feel comfortable. They are concerned about class attendance – which does decrease depending on the time the lecture is given. In today’s modern student life, illness, religious holidays, athletic events, and sometimes work schedules [are some of the reasons students regularly skip].

We’re the victims of our own success – all instructors prefer a filled room, so we will have to try a bit harder if the class is reduced.

If Jerry Seinfeld went to Leacock 132, and there were 14 people scattered throughout the room, he’d probably die out there.

However, if the grades were going down, I’d say this isn’t good – but the grades aren’t going down.

Actually all of our classes show that the grades are gently sliding upwards. The students are doing the work.

MD: How is the quality of MOOC courses evaluated?

DH: Well, they would be the same courses that have already passed muster here. They are not going to be some watered down half-credit lectures on some topic. They are going to be bona fide courses.

Upon completion, students are only offered a certificate. There are, though, some courses on Coursera [an online education company that works with universities to hold courses online], where a couple universities are actually offering course credit! … [But] I don’t think that most schools are going to offer credit at all, they are only offering information if people want it – they could have done it for years on COOL, and they can still do that.

MD: Where is the money for the program coming from?

DH: True, this is coming at the worst imaginable time in terms of our budget, but it’s not coming out of our budget. McGill is depending on donors who want McGill to be in this high-level league.

MD: Do you think that free online courses will level the playing field among universities?

DH: What if the best organic chemistry course, anywhere, was put on by somebody from, say, the

University of Illinois, why shouldn’t we [assign it at our university]? And someone can make that case, but I think [a professor’s] ego is going to get in the way.

On the other hand, they could also take the attitude that this super professor [from another university] gives a very good class, and I [the McGill professor] could fill in the blanks. Students could be better off and I might be able to guide them in a way that I would have never had the time to otherwise.

In fact, at the Harvard Business School, they don’t teach accounting anymore – at all! Everyone finds that odd. They don’t teach accounting at all at the Harvard Business School! That’s a shocker. They have their students take it online!

MD: Is this the evolution of education?

DH: Yes, and a lot of people think so. Many people also feel that the residential university experience is important for all the “other” contacts and learning experiences, outside of the classroom.

But frankly, I remember a lot more of the fraternity and dorm stuff than I do about my classes back in my time. I think there is room for both – traditional campus lectures and online MOOC classes. I just wish they had a better acronym.

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

WHAT’S THE HAPS Illustration Hera Chan | The McGill Daily

Islamophobia & Co. The othering of an entire culture Ralph Haddad The McGill Daily

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have not shaved my beard since May of last year. I trim it, yes, but I have taken an oath not to completely shave it off my face. I am a huge fan of beards – it’s often the topic of jokes in my close of group of friends – but no one actually knows why. I used to put up a fight with my teachers every time they told me to shave it off for school (which I understand – it was a policy at my strict private Catholic school) but ever since moving here, it’s been a matter of cultural symbolism than simple pride.

As a Middle Eastern man, I am blessed (or cursed) with bushy eyebrows, a thick beard, and basically the whole hairy package (which I will not be addressing in this article). The fact that I am a bearded person with a Lebanese passport, apparently, has a whole different meaning to North American customs officials. It’s always the same conversation with my parents before I travel anywhere in the industrialized West: “shave your beard off, they might detain you!” It’s a simple joke with deep cultural resonance. There is no justifiable reason why I should have to shave in order to pass as more “white-looking” to please customs officials every time I travel to Canada or the United States. This is racial profiling. That I am being singled out because I am ‘Muslim-looking,’ (Muslim, of course, a prerequisite for being a terrorist according to the West) is completely unethical, and speaks volumes about the terror-driven, Islamophobic society the West has become. My initial reaction to a recent bus bombing in

Bulgaria, which killed seven people, was “please don’t let the bomber be an Arab.” We can’t get a break.

A 2010 CBS poll showed that 51 per cent of Americans agree with racial profiling as a way of assessing whether someone is or isn’t a national security threat (as opposed to 59 per cent of Canadians who disagree with racial profiling as a tactic, and 79 per cent of Canadians who agree that racial profiling goes against the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, according to a recent poll conducted by the Canadian Department of Justice). Racial profiling has graced the pages of The Daily more than once, and why not? As long as this issue stands as a major social problem, someone has to write about it.

The reality is that, while I am not Muslim, if I even look ‘Muslim’ to customs officials or border officers, there is always the possibility and the fear that I will be detained, I will be searched, I will be interrogated – a possibility that will exist for as long as I hold a Middle Eastern passport. And while I understand that this problem does not only plague one ethnic or racial group, Middle Eastern travelers are often most visibly plagued. Recently, on a train to New York, I was taken aside (along with all other non-American, non-Canadian passport holders) to fill out an entry document to the United States. While I was waiting, I was listening in on a conversation between a U.S. customs agent and a Korean man – not much older than me, which was happening nearby.

He had been selected for a “randomized search.” The officer consoled him with sentences like “this happens all the time” or “it’s standard

procedure, don’t worry” while going through his personal belongings and delicates with gloved hands.

I don’t know about you, but I have never seen anyone other than a person who is a visible minority person be taken aside for questioning.

When my mother first told me to shave before going to New York City for Reading Week, I bristled, telling her I wasn’t going to just because I would put off the customs officers, but I eventually relented. “Is my beard short enough?” I asked. She nodded, and that was that. I was now set for travel. For me, it’s not just that simple fact of having to consider this every time I travel. There are cultural implications surrounding this simple act of cutting something off my face.

It doesn’t only symbolize hormones or puberty or “masculinity.” I also see it as a signifier of Arab identity.

To shave my beard is to let go of part of my identity, my culture, where I’m from. It is my way of continuity with my past, continuity I genuinely do not want to lose.

And it’s not just the facial features, looking “too Arab,” or “too Muslim.”

It’s also a dress code. According to the United States’ Transportation Security Administration (TSA), “the new standard procedures subject all persons wearing head coverings to the possibility of additional security screening, which may include a pat-down search of the head covering.” They also say that although you are permitted to wear “loose fitting or religious garments” while going through security, it could lead to an extra screening, which is apparently done to ensure the safety of the travelling public. Doesn’t the ‘travelling public’ include people in headscarves

and “loose fitting religious” clothing?

How do airport and customs officials get away with these searches, and brush them off as being “random” and for ‘the good of the community?’

Is it okay to justify strip searches, intense cavity searches (to which my best friend was subjected at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York), three-hour interrogations (my father suffered one of these, at one of the several Vermont U.S. border security stations) on the ludicrous basis that the traveller has a Middle Eastern passport or that they look Middle Eastern or ‘Muslim’?

Has America, operating through institutions like the TSA, completely disregarded that terrorism and violence might not just come from foreign lands? What happens when the threat of violence comes from within? A recent shooting at a Sikh temple (it’s worth noting, for those who don’t know, that Sikhism is a religion entirely separate from Islam) in Wisconsin that left seven dead – and was labelled by Attorney General Eric Holder as “an act of terrorism, an act of hatred, a hate crime,” – left question marks about whether the American government is doing enough to combat domestic terrorism in a post-9/11 era. The shooter was an Army veteran, who killed himself shortly after the incident.

The shooter was not wearing “loose fitting religious garments,” and the shooter was indeed not a foreigner.

According to an article published on edition.cnn.com, “Sikhs in America have been targeted by revenge-seekers who apparently have mistaken them for Muslims, perhaps due to the traditional turbans they wear and their dark skin.” I sense a pattern.

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Voices to Power: Queer Youth Storytelling with CKUT Radio and Ryan Thom QPIRG Concordia 1500 Maisonneuve West, suite 204 Thursday, March 14 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Free Tonight’s “No Place Like [Queer] Home” will explore queer interaction with various spaces, including the city, the school, the workplace, and the home. This is the first installment of Voices to Power, a three-part workshop series hosted by CKUT and Ryan Thom that seeks to give queer-identified youth the tools to express themselves through storytelling art.

Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris MainLine Theatre 3997 St. Laurent March 14 to March 24 2 p.m. or 8 p.m. $20 for students This bilingual version of In Your Face entertainment’s off-Broadway production premieres tonight at the MainLine Theatre.

Jacques Brel is Alive and Well, a 25-song musical revue of Brel’s repertoire, first premiered in 1986 in New York’s Greenwich Village, where it had a successful four-year run. Whether you’re a Brel aficionado or a curious newbie, this promises to be a musically rich evening.

The Void Magazine: Space Launch La Brique 6545 Durocher March 15 8:30 p.m. $5 Montreal magazine The Void is launching its newest issue. The evening will start off with selected readings from the magazine’s fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Bands Baked Goods and Wastoids will perform, followed by a DJ Choozy and DJ Nick Persons set. Cover includes a copy of the magazine.

Le Horse Palace Excentris Cinema 3536 St. Laurent March 15 to March 21 1:30 p.m. and 7:15 p.m. $9.25 for students Taking its title from Montreal’s only remaining stable, where the calèches of Griffintown keep their horses, Le Horse Palace explores the changing character of the neighbourhood. Nadine Gomez’s bilingual film aims to sensitize audiences to ideas of material and immaterial heritage as they pertain to the changing urban landscape.

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

Culture with a low melting point Coming soon: A Montreal wax museum Matthew Herzfeld The McGill Daily

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hen I was eleven, I took a picture of a photograph of a moose, so I could tell my friends in New York I had seen one of these mythical creatures on a family trip to Eastern Quebec.

Nowadays, I get my little white lie fix by claiming serendipitous celebrity sightings wherever I go.

Was that Christopher Walken I saw getting a shoe-shine in Newark Airport? Was that Larry David kvetching about a pastrami sandwich in front of me at Schwartz’s Montreal Delicatessen? Everyone has guilty pleasures.

Now Montrealers will have a new outlet for their celebrity fixations. This April 19, the company which operates Musée Grévin in the 9th arrondissement in Paris will open a wax museum in the

empty Eaton Centre building at Maisonneuve and University.

While wax museums offer cheap thrills, the cost of admission can get expensive. At New York’s famous Madame Tussauds, full price admission for a family of four (children 4 to 12) is $130.

Paris’ Grévin costs at least $100 as well. In this age of instant archive access on YouTube, and with everyone’s 15 minutes of fame virtually guaranteed, are wax museums still relevant?

First, a brief history of these peculiar spaces: The Queen of all wax museums (and maybe gimmickry in general) was Madame Marie Tussaud (17611850), whose name is attached to museums from London to New York, Niagara Falls, Las Vegas, and beyond. Born in Strasbourg, Tussaud first learned the trade of wax sculpture from Dr. Philippe Curtius, in whose Parisian and Swiss homes she was a house-

keeper. Besides playing with wax, Curtius was also a physician.

Though he had artistic ambitions, Curtius used wax for more practical purposes – as a medium to depict the anatomy to students.

Wax figuring probably developed from this intersection of medicine and art. Death masks, originally fashioned from gold and other valuable materials for Egyptian pharaohs, would eventually be made from wax in the latemiddle ages. In fact, Tussaud’s oldest figure still on display is a 1765 wax portrait of Louis XV’s last mistress, Madame du Barry. In 1776 Madame Tussaud was featured in an exhibition at the Palais Royal in Paris, and she quickly developed inroads with royalty in France and England, as her sculptures were more life-like than paintings.

Though wax figures are meant to preserve memory of a faded past, we tend to lump wax museums with cabinets of curiosities. I

WIN ONE of 25 DOUBLE PASSES to the PREMIERE on MARCH 21 at 7PM at the CINEPLEX FORUM presented by

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Illustration Erica Jewell | The McGill Daily

cannot recall anyone ever asking if wax sculptures are art. Though these figures served a purpose of recording the past in a way words or paintings could not (Tussaud also made death masks of guillotine victims, for instance), today this is mostly unnecessary.

Which begs the question: why do tourists still shell out stupid amounts of money to mingle with fake replicas of the public figures they already consume inordinate amounts of online and on TV? For some insight, consider the Hollywood Wax Museum. It was founded by one Spoony Singh in 1964, because even in SoCal’s playground for the rich and famous, celebrities were “obligingly sparse.”

Though ticket prices are over $15 a person nowadays, the museum still brings in over 300,000 people a year in a city not starved for attraction or distraction. Part of the appeal of Singh’s museum is its figures’ lessthan-real appearance – it’s described by the New York Times as “beyond the realm of campy” and “old-time Hollywood decadence that is soulful and deeply satisfying.”

Unlike Hollywood Wax or even original London Tussaud models, the new Tussaud sculptures (and likely the Grévin figures as well) show little evidence of the human artistic touch. Is the artistry perhaps in the arrangement of figures?

The original Grévin in Paris features 450 figures arranged with artifacts to uniquely illustrate France’s past in a way that a stodgy museum exhibition could never bring to life. Similarly, the Montreal museum will include famous figures from Canadian history, including hockey player Guy LaFleur and of course (lest my

Heart not Go On), Céline Dion.

Before I was old enough to avoid family vacations, my parents used to drag me and my sister to all the historic landmarks along the Eastern seaboard of the U.S. Though places like Gettysburg, Colonial Virgina, or Boston offered no shortage of sites with real, visual evidence of the past, inevitably we ended up at a restoration and reenactment village in Massachusetts, Colonial Williamsburg, or the President’s Wax Museum. Though even then these places seemed like cheap approximations or plays on the past, they offered something that all the art museums (and we went to many) were lacking: interactivity.

At Madame Tussauds you could pose with and visually disgrace these alarmingly life-like statues of figures you loathed or loved. It was like a living museum in that the ‘art’ and the spectator were stomping around in the same awkward tango. Though I will not go to another wax museum, I think other art institutions, many of which are struggling financially, could learn from this interactive model. We can already see all the pieces online, so how can you move beyond viewing to participation?

Whether it derserves to be ranked among Los Angeles’ more distinguished institutions or not, the Hollywood Wax Museum’s reputation in the public consciousness never stood much of a chance. As owner Singh said, “On Hollywood Boulevard, dignity kind of gets lost in the shuffle.” If Montreal wants its own wax museum to cultivate a similar aura, Ste. Catherine’s, that infamous stretch where office worker and sex worker, designer store and dive bar mingle, could not be more appropriate location.

compendium!

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

lies, half-truths, and extended dream sequences

i8

Illustration Amino Acid | The Twice-a-Weekly

Stonewalled The death of arrangements has unforeseen effects Euan EK The Twice-a-Weekly

“

Hello, is this the set in stone man?”

“Oh God, finally.”

“No, I’m Peter.”

“Oh. Wait. I meant oh God, thanks for for calling, Peter.”

“Ah. You’re welcome. Is something the matter?”

“Nobody speaks to me anymore.”

“Okay. But I was just calling in to get a job done, if you need to speak to someone…”

“You can help me.”

“I’m not really trained for this sort of thing…”

“No. I meant that your business will help me.”

“My custom?”

“Yes.” “Oh. Is business going badly?”

“You could say that.”

“Well, explain.”

“Nobody wants anything set in stone anymore.”

“No one?”

“No. To tell you the truth, you’re the first call I’ve had in weeks. I think I’m going to have to just let it go.”

“Weeks? Surely not? People still make plans. They must need

some set in stone.”

“Not like they used to. You know, in the old days it was simple. People would make some plans, throw a few ideas about a final time around, find out what works for everyone, and then give me a call to get it all finalized, carved into a nice piece of granite or something. I’m quite skilled with a chisel.”

“I’m sure you are; that’s why I called you.”

“I’m the best. It’s a talent, an art if anything, but it’s also hard work.

It took a lot of training to get here you know. Years and years of chipping away at the career ladder.

There’s quite a hierarchy in this profession. You have to hammer on more than a few doors but it pays off in the end. At least it did.”

“What’s changed?”

“It’s technology. All these newfangled phone-eyes and plastic tablets. I remember when a tablet was just a good old-fashioned piece of sturdy clay, something good to set down your thoughts in. Moses was a great customer of mine; he ordered ten of them.

There was a time I could keep myself in business just by selling ten commandment knock-offs to cheeky bishops and priests look-

ing to make a quick buck.”

“And then what?”

“Carbon dating.”

“And so the new tablets are putting you out of business?”

“Yeah. People today are all about their on-the-fly plans. They like to ‘change it up’ as they say.

‘We don’t need plans ‘cause we can just make a call if we’re gonna be late’, they say. But it’s a mess.

It’s a real mess.”

“In what way?”

“They think making plans on the fly is not really making a plan.

But it is. It’s just penciling it in over and over again. Look, Peter, I don’t want to sound jealous, cause I’m not, I’m not a jealous guy, you know – commandment ten, ‘thou shalt not covet’, one of my best pieces of work – but the penciling-in guy? He’s absolutely loving it right now. Fair play to him, the last few decades, with the Biro, you know, they weren’t so kind on him. But these days?

I mean, fuck. It’s all penciling in.

I’m surprised events ever happen. And the waste! He’s almost drowning in paper. I went to see him last week, you know, to see if he had any tips on some confirmations that might be coming up, and all I could see of him was

his head. His head above a sea of paper. I don’t know how he gets those plans down correctly. Can he even see his hands? But, you know, fair play to him. But fuck it’s a mess.”

“Right. Well that’s awful, Simon. I hope it picks up for you.

In fact, I might have a little something for you.”

“Oh good, good. ‘Cause I’ve had years of training. Did I mention that?”

“You did, but…”

“Oh good, good. I’ve been in the business for epochs. And I haven’t been lazy during my downtime either. I’m always working on that CV. Gotta show what I’m doing between gigs, as they say. I’ve been making some really nice progress fine-tuning Garamond in sandstone – real flaky stuff, real tricky to work all the little serif flicks into it, but it does look absolutely fabulous at the end. Shall I put you down for something like that? Or I suppose you want Helvetica? Very rock ’n’ roll these days I know…”

“I just want to make sure I don’t miss my anniversary next week. I’m just looking for something simple, something permanent in a nice piece of rock…”

“And don’t I have the rock! I have got literally tons of rock sitting in my workship right now.

Granite, basalt, claystone. A lovely bit of dolomite just begging for a wedding or an anniversary to be carved into. Oh, and don’t get me started on Paleocene era bauxite – it puts the stuff from the Cisuralian era to shame it really does. And just last epoch I put some Cenomanian age Glauconite in the catalogue to see if it would do well. It didn’t really take off until your own subatlantic age but it’s been a real seller since then. Looks fabulous on a mantelpiece, makes for a real conversation starter…”

“Look, I think this is all a bit much…”

“Please. Peter. How about something from the Pliocene epoch? You gotta help me. I’ve got hundreds, maybe thousands, of chisels on backorder. And rock isn’t cheap. Cash flow is essential in my line of work; I just need a little leg up.”

“Simon. I’m really sorry, but…”

“What?”

“My wife just called me. She wants a divorce.”

“You moderns…zero staying power. Zero. And fuck Henry VIII, too.”

19

EDITORIAL

volume 102 number 38

Geopolitical cowardice: McGill’s ties to Israeli universities

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

Laurent Bastien Corbeil Lola Duffort Farid Rener

Illustration Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily

commentary editors

Jacqueline Brandon Steve Eldon Kerr 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

copy editor

Nicole Leonard web editor

Tom Acker

McGill is complicit in Israeli Apartheid. This is something that should not be forgotten as we arrive at the end of this year’s Israeli Apartheid Week. Apartheid is defined as a crime against humanity “committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group” by the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

McGill students must acknowledge our university’s active involvement with Israeli universities that conduct arms and weapons research for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). We, as students of this institution, should speak out against these ties.

The land of Palestine, which has been inhabited

by Arabs for more than 1,000 years, is currently occupied by the state of Israel. Illegal settlements, restrictive checkpoints, and the denial of basic necessities – such as medical treatment and the supply of clean water – all perpetuate a state of apartheid in occupied Palestinian territories.

McGill claims that its academic ties are politically neutral and solely research-oriented. This argument is an easy way out and willfully dismisses Israeli universities’ military research, and their

contribution to apartheid. McGill has a memorandum of understanding with Tel Aviv University, which described itself as being on “the front line of the critical work to maintain Israel’s military and technological edge” in its 2008 winter review.

McGill also partners with the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, which, according to an article published in the Nation in March, conducts “research and development into military technology that Israel relies on to sustain its occupation of Palestinian land.”

Affiliation is a political statement. Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) is a disaffiliation campaign launched by 171 Palestinian non-governmental organizations in 2005, based on the successful divestment campaigns which helped to end the apartheid regime in South Africa. McGill’s partnerships are not politically neutral, and it must break ties with Israeli universities to end its support for Israeli Apartheid.

To sign a petition to the Board of Governors regarding divestment from McGill’s connections to Israel’s illegal settlements, go to http://bit.ly/Z3U343.

— The McGill Daily Editorial Board

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cover design Amina Batyreva contributors Hannah Besseau, Lucy Cameron, Carla Green, Ahmad Hassan, Matthew Herzfeld, Grace Jackson, Erica Jewell, Molly Korab, Esther Lee, Michael Lee-Murphy, Mona Luxion, Jessie Marchessault, Davide Mastracci, Shane Murphy, Omar Saadeh, Emery Saur, Mercedes Sharpe, Anita Sivabalan, Alice Shen, Ryan Thom, Nicolas Quiazua, Dana Wray

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ETHAN COX (RABBLE.CA) DOUG SWEET (McGILL RELATIONS OFFICE) + OTHER PANELISTS

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