vol102iss42

Volume 102, Issue 42

April 4, 2013 mcgilldaily.com

McGill THE

DAILY

Euan EK since 1911

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

Did You Know?

The bookstore is among the largest employers of students on campus.

We support fair trade and maintain 100% sweat shop free products.

When you shop at the bookstore, your money contributes to McGill’s Office of Student Life and Learning.

You can now shop online for McGill apparel,gifts, diploma frames and more!

www.bookstore.mcgill.ca

Thank you!

Annual General Meeting

to all our readers and advertisers for all their support throughout the year.

on Friday, April 5th, at 3pm in the LICM office (Room 107 University Centre, 3480 McTavish).

All members are invited to attend (all fee-paying McGill undergraduate and graduate students are members of the LICM).

~ The Daily advertising crew.

For more information, email pub.licm@mail.mcgill.ca.

We hope to see you there!

AVOIDING CULTURAL CLICHÉS ENGLISH, FRENCH OR SPANISH TRANSLATION FOR WHAT YOU’VE GOT IN MIND.

Have a nice summer!

REGISTER TODAY.

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH CREATIVE WRITING PRIZES AND AWARDS The MONA ADILMAN PRIZE IN POETRY, estimated value $500--or estimated value $250 for two students, is open to undergraduate or graduate students registered in the Faculty of Arts for the best poem or group of poems relating to ecological or environmental concerns.

The CLARK LEWIS MEMORIAL PRIZE, estimated value $400, is open to major or honours students in the Department of English. The prize is awarded annually or from time to time for original plays staged in the course of the academic year.

The CHESTER MACNAGHTEN PRIZES IN CREATIVE WRITING (two prizes, one of estimated value $600 and another of estimated value $300) are open to undergraduate students of the University for the best piece of creative writing in English, i.e. a story, a play, a poem, an essay, etc. Printed compositions are ineligible if they have been published before April 16, 2012.

SCHOOL OF CONTINUING STUDIES WWW.MCGILL.CA/SCS-TRANSLATION 514.398.5700

The McGill Daily will be back on September 3rd.

Le Délit will be back on September 10th.

The PETERSON MEMORIAL PRIZE, estimated value $2,000, is open to undergraduate or graduate students registered in a degree program in the Department of English with distinction in English Literature (CGPA 3.30 or above) who has also shown creative literary ability.

The LIONEL SHAPIRO AWARDS FOR CREATIVE WRITING, three prizes of estimated value $1,300 each, to be distributed if possible among the genres of poetry, fiction, screen writing and playwrighting. Each prize is to be awarded on the recommendation of the Department of English to students in the final year of the B.A. course who have demonstrated outstanding talent. (A note from your academic adviser verifying you will have completed your program requirements and the minimum credits required by the Faculty of Arts MUST accompany your submission.)

These competitions are restricted to students who have not previously won the First Prize.

Forms to be completed are available in the Department of English General Office, Arts 155. Submissions must be IN TRIPLICATE. DEADLINE: Tuesday, April 16, 201

@mcgilldaily

While we’re not in print over the summer, we’ll still be updating our online content at mcgilldaily.com.

in this issue 04

NEWS

17

PGSS exec alleges sexual harassment

COMMENTARY Moving beyond rape culture A letter to children of colour

Leacock restructuring consultations

Letters from our readers

Non-unionized workers and budget cuts

Institutional memory and student politics

A different look at McGill’s finances

Sexism at a physics comedy show

CCLA releases letter on repressive tactics McGill’s ties to the Tea Party

Don’t assume I want gay marriage

Heather Munroe-Blum: interview and retrospective A look into Morton Mendelson’s term at McGill

feminism: more than tackling rape culture

Interns! Remember about the law

36

17

CULTURE This summer’s festivals

22

SSMU and PGSS reviews

FEATURES

Blood on the silver screen

Poli Sci ‘68 strike remembered

Searching for Bigfoot and the truth

Animal research at McGill

The year in photos

Pulpy thrills Investigating Quebec corruption

The year in quotes

28

TED talks – cocktail party education

HEALTH&ED

Dr. Drama will now see you

McGill’s research highlights

Artistic labyrinth

31

Banjo bash

SCI+TECH Automation of labour and its impact on the average worker On media literacy and racism in social media Assessing the tech scene for women in Montreal

The challenges of urban renewal

46

EDITORIAL Against police repression of dissent

47

COMPENDIUM! Radical students recant views

22

34 an oral history of the 1968 poli sci strike

SPORTS

Economist draws line

The weird world of NFL scouting

SSMU babies unleash yourselves

NEWS

The McGill Daily Thursday, April 4, 2013 mcgilldaily.com

4

PGSS rocked by accusations of sexual harassment External Affairs Officer claims executives cultivated culture of intimidation Laurent Bastien Corbeil The McGill Daily

I

n an atmosphere of distrust and animosity, Post-Graduate Students’ Society (PGSS) executives squared off yesterday at a meeting in the Thomson House Annex on allegations of bullying and sexual harassment brought forward

by External Affairs Officer Errol Salamon and Equity Commissioner Gretchen King.

In a letter to the PGSS Board of Directors obtained by The Daily, Salamon and King alleged that some members of the PGSS executive routinely engaged in “sexual harassment, psychological intimidation, and discriminatory behaviour.”

The meeting was the culmination of a year-long conflict between members of an executive team where mistrust and divisions run so deep that officers regularly record each other’s public and private conversations without prior knowledge.

“It seems as if that these days, everybody is recording things. […] I feel like I need to practice what I’m going to say,” a member of the executive told The Daily.

The hostility pushed several members – including Salamon – to seek external help.

“People are extremely upset. […]

We see each other every day and it has been getting worse and worse every day,” the same executive added.

For nearly an hour, several executive officers argued with Salamon over the validity of his claims.

According to Salamon, an officer on the executive team exposed themselves and masturbated in front of him and another executive officer after a meeting in June.

“I was appalled, I was shocked. I couldn’t believe anyone would do that, especially in front of someone [they] didn’t actually know very well,” Salamon told The Daily.

The executive officer in question said they only removed their pants.

“We were drinking, we were

socializing. It was not PGSS business […] there was some consumption of marijuana by some people, and during that time, I did remove my pants, that’s true, but I never exposed myself, I never took out my genitalia,” they said.

The executive further alleged the claims were fabricated in response to disagreement that erupted between the two over a motion to censor Salamon at Council.

“I was willing to entertain alternative solutions to a censor motion, […] during this meeting [Salamon] stated ‘I will retaliate’ if a censor motion was brought forward, stating that [he] would accuse me of sexual harassment…” the executive said.

For Salamon, the June incident marked the beginning of a series of inappropriate sexual conduct from the same executive member, including making sexual advances at Salamon prior to the team’s departure to the executive retreat in Mont Tremblant and sexualized comments that were uttered toward another

Message from the Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec Happy National Engineering Month!

March is National Engineering Month. This event allows young people across Canada to discover the engineering profession by highlighting its excellence.

In Québec, this year’s National Engineering Month is particularly important due to the events of the last few M. Daniel Lebel, Eng., PMP months surrounding the process of awarding and manaPresident ging public contracts in the construction industry.

For that reason, the Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec (OIQ) took the opportunity provided by this year’s National Engineering Month to remind the public of its commitment to get to the heart of things and restore trust in the profession, which has 63,000 members who work in a wide range of different fields.

The OIQ made this commitment in an advertisement aired throughout the month of March on television and the Web. The advertisement, which can be viewed on the OIQ’s Web site or YouTube, emphasizes the values that the OIQ is committed to defend: competence, rigour, transparency and accountability.

From the disciplinary process and our ethics and professional conduct action plan to our active contribution to the work of the Charbonneau Commission, all of our activities in recent months show just how seriously the OIQ takes its commitment to the public in the advertisement.

Engineering promotion and recognition While making this commitment, the OIQ also launched several initiatives in March aimed at promoting and gaining recognition for the profession.

Indeed, it is important to make young people – girls and boys – and the general public more aware of the many facets of the engineering profession in order to spark their interest in an engineering career.

We want to show that engineers make an essential contribution to Québec’s socioeconomic development and to instill a desire in young people who are interested in innovation and technologies.

A quiz contest One of the activities planned for this year’s National Engineering Month was a fun and educational quiz contest for secondary school and CEGEP students.

PGSS member who sat on one of Salamon’s committees.

“We’re talking about ten months of discomfort. […] I feel so uncomfortable. I’ve been bullied throughout this term,” Salamon said.

Other members of the executive team also made additional sexualized comments toward Salamon, he said. In one instance, an executive officer asked Salamon why he had not considered sleeping with the executive officer who had allegedly exposed themselves.

In another instance, Salamon alleged that another member of the executive team threatened to reveal Salamon’s relationship with a member of Divest McGill before an endorsement vote on the divestment campaign. According to Salamon, the threat was made in an attempt to sabotage the campaign. The allegation was denied by the executive officer in question at yesterday’s meeting.

Salamon is currently on a leave of absence, citing hostility with his co-workers.

“We’re talking about ten months of discomfort. […] I feel so uncomfortable. I’ve been bullied throughout this term.”

Errol Salamon External Affars Officer

The “Tricks and Genius” quiz contest is presented in the form of a comic strip at www.placeforyou.ca. Site visitors who take the quiz have to find the science trick that will help Dr. Bolt retrieve an item that was stolen from him.

Participants have a chance to win $3,000 in prizes.

2,034 times welcome!

National Engineering Month was also the perfect moment to welcome the 2,034 new engineers who have earned their engineer’s permit in the last 12 months.

Many hundreds of them attended the Soirées signature ingénieur(e) that we held in March at the Montreal Science Centre and at Espace 400e Bell in Quebec City to mark their entry into the profession.

As I personally told them at these events, new members have every reason to be proud of their new professional title. Their pride is based on years of studies to earn their bachelor’s degree and, more importantly, years of efforts and work to obtain their engineer’s permit.

The OIQ also celebrated this important step in the careers of its members by publishing the names of all the new engineers in Les Affaires and several Québec dailies.

PLAN celebrates 50 years Finally, this year’s National Engineering Month coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of PLAN, the OIQ’s magazine.

To highlight this anniversary, the graphic design of the publication has been given a makeover and now features a cleaner look.

PLAN has had a front row seat to the developments in Québec engineering over the last 50 years and the March issue takes a look back at them. This issue and other previous issues are accessible in the “Media and documentation” section of the OIQ’s Web site.

As you can see, while fulfilling its mission of protecting the public, the OIQ takes concrete actions to promote and gain recognition for the profession, which is essential to all spheres of society.

Happy National Engineering Month!

Daniel Lebel, Eng., PMP President

news

5

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Leacock restructuring consultation continues Discussion focuses on student involvement, advising Anqi Zhang The McGill Daily

P

lans to restructure Leacock and reorganize its administrative units were put before roughly 30 Arts students on Tuesday night at an Arts Town Hall meeting as part of the Arts faculty’s People, Processes & Partnerships initiative.

In the basement of the building under consideration, students directed questions to Dean of Arts Christopher Manfredi, Associate Dean (Academic Administration and Oversight) Gillian LaneMercier, and Associate Dean (Student Affairs) Lucyna Lach.

The major points of discussion were the process of student consultation and the effectiveness of the advising systems in the Arts faculty. Students voiced concerns similar to those raised at previous town halls and council meetings regarding departmental integrity and community.

On the topic of changing advising structures in the Arts faculty, Lach explained that the proposed central advising hub for the third floor of Leacock would include an Arts OASIS advisor, thereby allowing “cross-pollination” between faculty and departmental advisors.

Upon criticism of this kind of advising restructuring, as well as more general criticism of the

advising system, Manfredi called upon students to explain “how it’s been ineffective.” Students responded with concerns about already existing problems such as new students no longer having assigned advisors.

A second major focus of the night was the process of student consultation, and the effectiveness of efforts designed to attract student involvement. Noting that between 40 and 50 students out of 3,000 invited attended a consultation co-hosted by AUS and OASIS, the question of how to reach a larger proportion of the student body was raised.

“We sent out information and expect[ed] it to be cascaded,” said Manfredi. Several student association representatives proposed ideas for better communication.

Morgane Suel, president of the Anthropology Students’ Association, suggested to Manfredi that they should communicate with the student associations rather than the student body, and allow the representatives to reach out on a broader scale.

History Students’ Association VP Internal Affairs Laure Spake suggested that delegates be sent to consultations from student associations so that they can better communicate with their constituents.

Other ideas for facilitating student involvement included sending emails over departmental rather than faculty listservs, or creating a

Photo Robert Smith | The McGill Daily

board of ideas in a common space.

In an interview with The Daily, Manfredi reflected on the ideas raised with regard to student consultation. “We’re always trying to communicate with students and get their feedback…and I think we got some great ideas. […] We have an incentive to communicate effectively; we want to communicate effectively.”

While focusing on the restructuring of Leacock, the Town Hall also

cast light on the plans to relocate departments in 688 Sherbrooke and the Ferrier building.

Manfredi described the plans – scheduled for this coming summer – that would see 688 Sherbrooke become the location of the East Asian Studies department, instead of the current location of the French Language department, as “not particularly problematic.” Plans for 688 Sherbrooke, according to Manfredi, are not part of the People, Processes

& Partnerships initiative.

To train administrative workers to work for multiple departments in 688 Sherbrooke, a cross-training program will be implemented.

This same program is proposed for training administrative workers in the Leacock building should the restructuring be approved.

Manfredi said that the administrative officers that will be affected are “quite happy about the possibility of having other people to talk to.”

Non-unionized workers bear brunt of budget cuts Widespread opposition to administration’s drastic measures Lola Duffort The McGill Daily

F

or non-unionized workers at McGill, the decision to freeze wages and hiring was made unilaterally by the administration, despite employee group representatives arguing that cuts on this scale would necessarily damage working conditions and compromise the quality of the University’s core mission.

When the McGill University Non-Academic Staff Association (MUNASA) executive, which represents roughly 500 non-unionized workers on campus, met with human resources last Tuesday, they were told point blank that wages and hiring would be frozen, and that workers would be offered early retirement packages.

“It was presented to us as what

the University was going to do,” MUNASA President Ron Critchley told The Daily. “We looked at [these measures], and we said, ‘In no way can we support this, this is going to really hurt our membership.’”

The decision to freeze professors’ salaries was made by the McGill Association of University Teachers (MAUT) executive along with a joint MAUT-administration compensation committee, and was never brought to the association’s council or membership.

MUNASA released a bulletin to its members Tuesday saying that the association “strongly [opposes] the approach put forward by the University,” which it believes will “have a profound effect upon all McGill staff and on services to students.”

“It is our conviction that not enough options have been explored to provide for an equitable solution that would have much

less impact on staff morale and the operations of the University,” the bulletin continues.

In dealing with provincial cuts, McGill is taking some of the most drastic measures of Quebec universities, reiterating in several messages to the university community that it will have to slash its expenses to match government cuts in full. In her latest message to the McGill community, Principal Heather Munroe-Blum also added September’s cancelled tuition hike to the administration’s calculus, pushing what the University needs to cut to $43 million, rather than $38 million – the actual amount withheld from McGill for this year and the next, following December’s cuts.

Université Laval, which was dealt a similar blow – $36 million in cuts for this year and the next – is taking a different approach. They will trim

$3 million this year, $6 million next year, and deduct the remaining $27 million from the $1.7 billion reinvestment the province has promised in two year’s time.

A recent Montreal Gazette article quoted Laval’s vice-executive rector Éric Bauce saying that cutting $36 million would have been “impossible and unreasonable.”

Administrators say that McGill is unwilling to postpone cuts until they can be nullified by the reinvestment because it is conditional on Quebec’s economic situation.

Concordia is waiting until the end of April to make any decisions, and the Université de Québec à Montréal (UQAM) will be dipping into its capital funds to offset the cuts – something McGill has previously said it cannot do with such high deferredmaintenance costs.

MUNASA also takes issue with

the manner in which information about the cuts and the University’s financial situation has been relayed to the community. They are “really troubled,” according to Critchley, by the $1.1 million jump in non-salary savings reported by the University in their latest message to the community.

“The lack of detail in the numbers driving these decisions troubles us greatly,” MUNASA’s statement reads.

In response to MUNASA’s bulletin, Vice-Principal (Administration and Finance) Michael Di Grappa reiterated in an email to The Daily that these measures were intended to mitigate the need for layoffs in a second round of cuts.

“This is a very difficult situation for everyone, and we understand that these measures will cause distress for some members in our community,” he said.

6

Year in review

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

The Daily’s year in review

E

very year, The Daily’s final issue seeks to wrap up the previous seven months of reporting, thinking, and writing, with a look back.

The theme of last year – which was reflected in our final issue – was the spirit of activism that permeated McGill campus and Montreal.

This year saw MROs, summits, arguments, and demonstrations around governmental budget cuts to education, the dismissal of 100 Arts classes, the arrival of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and tuition

increases. Buzzwords like ‘consultation’, ‘indexation’, and ‘debt’ have been thrown around and it’s difficult to sort through all of the numbers and percentages.

In this issue, we hope to summarize and contextualize the major decisions made by our governing bodies, from the McGill administration to the Parti Québécois, and the ramifications – financial and otherwise – of these changes.

—Queen Arsem-O’Malley and Christina Colizza

SSMU lease negotiations

I

n March, SSMU executives wrote an open letter to the administration decrying the current state of lease negotiations, an ongoing source of tension between SSMU and the McGill administration.

The negotiations, underway for three years and in danger of entering a fourth, have centered around a failure to reach solutions on certain issues, primarily involving increases to SSMU’s rent and the implementation of a cost-sharing system for the Shatner building’s utilities.

A tenant of the Shatner building for the last 48 years, SSMU paid a symbolic annual rent of $1, similar to student unions at other Canadian universities, until 1999 SSMU’s rent for the 2011-2012 school year was approximately $127,000.

In 2010, when SSMU’s lease expired, negotiations became contentious with the University’s requirement that SSMU pay a portion of utility costs – a cost historically covered by the University.

SSMU President Josh Redel told The Daily in March that he believes it is “very likely” that SSMU will have to increase its non-optoutable fee in anticipation of shared utility costs with the University.

The uncertainty of the lease negotiations and likely increases in associated expenses have contributed to SSMU’s projected budget deficit of $211,320 for the fiscal year.

According to VP Finance and Operations JP Briggs, SSMU has been forced to reduce expenses by abolishing “non-essential” expenditures and has cut the position for one full-time building manager.

The tensions have grown more pronounced with this year’s announced budget cuts to the University. McGill must cut $19 million from its budget by the end of the 2014 fiscal year. If they fail to do so, the government will withhold $32 million in grant money. The University reports that it expects a $200.8-million deficit by the 2015 fiscal year.

At the recent Winter 2013 General Assembly, Redel projected that lease negotiations would be over by mid-April.

However, as the negotiations are confidential, there has been no word on whether this projected deadline is possible. If SSMU does not wrap up negotiations by April 30, the process will continue into its fourth year under the new executive.

Budget cuts at McGill

T

he Quebec government’s plan to slash provincial university budgets by $250 million before April 2014 will see McGill aim to cuts its expenditures by almost $38 million over the next two years. Salaries and make up more than 75 per cent of the University’s core operating budget. In the first phase of cuts, to diminish job losses, McGill will reduce salary costs through a combination of wage reductions, salary and hiring freezes, and a voluntary retirement program for staff over the age of sixty. Once the University has assessed the savings realized, a second phase of cost-cutting measures, including layoffs, will likely be required.

Senior administrators will take a 3 per cent salary cut on May 1, and McGill has also asked each employee group to take a one-year salary freeze. To date, the McGill Association of University Teachers (MAUT) has agreed to the freeze, but campus unions say they will resist the administration’s proposal.

“The admin are saying that everyone

needs to be contributing equally to sacrifices.

But we did not benefit during the good years – our pay rates have barely kept pace with inflation,” Justin Marleau, Vice-President of AGSEM – McGill’s Teaching Union’s Teaching Assistant (TA) unit, told The Daily in March.

The AGSEM executive will recommend its members reject McGill’s proposal, which would cancel a 1.2 per cent wage increase.

McGill’s union for non-academic staff, MUNACA, has also refused to reopen their contract and forgo a 3 per cent wage increase.

Quebec Premier Pauline Marois has extended the timetables for administering the cuts over five- and seven-year periods, and promised a $1.7-billion reinvestment in 2014-2015, but McGill is predicting the worst. Provost Anthony Masi has said that the University’s accumulated deficit could almost double to around $200.8 million by the 2015 fiscal year.

—Steve Eldon Kerr

—Molly Korab and Dana Wray

Year in review

7

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Indexation and tuition

A

t the Quebec Education Summit in February, the Parti Québécois (PQ) government announced a proposal to increase tuition by 3 per cent annually.

Many media outlets referred to this increase as “indexation.”

Indexation refers to increasing something (here, a fee) according to annual inflation rates. The Canadian inflation rate is published

by Statistics Canada, which also reports average household incomes. The PQ claims that the increase in tuition is based on the increase of average Quebec household incomes.

Proponents for the indexation of tuition argue that by increasing tuition fees according to inflation, the burden of paying for university remains the same. Opponents to the idea argue that historically, the idea behind a tuition freeze was to decrease the burden of tuition fees, theoretically making university education more accessible.

Some critics of the PQ’s plan argue that the use of the term “indexation” is incorrect, since the proposal is a continuous 3 per cent increase. Inflation is not a constant rate of increase – so a steady 3 per cent increase does not reflect inflation – so indexation is not an accurate term for the PQ proposal.

SSMU motions also included the term “indexation” in the Winter 2013 referendum period. Questions to increase the Athletics fee and the question to increase the Student Services Ancillary Fee contained a second part, which provided for the fee to increase according to inflation, as indexed by the Bank of Canada CPI (Consumer Price Index), until 2017. This is a correct usage of the term, and does not pre-emptively declare the rate or amount of the increase.

—Queen Arsem-O’Malley

McGill and ATI requests

O

n December 7, 2012, McGill University brought forth legal action against 14 individuals, who the University asserted were submitting “systematic” and “repetitious” Access to Information (ATI) requests – either to clog up the system or gain access to sensitive material and besmirch McGill.

The motion filed by McGill claimed that the requests are “retaliation measure[s] against McGill in the aftermath of the 2011- 2012 student protests.” Responding to these requests, according to the motion, would be “serious impediments to [McGill’s] activities.” Many of the requests concern university finances, research conducted in certain McGill labs, and documents between McGill and national defence or security agencies.

The motion asked that McGill be given the ability to refuse future requests deemed to be similar to those filed by the 14 individuals listed, The Daily, Concordia student newspaper the Link, the website McGilliLeaked (which compiles documents that have been granted under ATI requests), and “any McGill student.” *

The University says that it would only deny claims it found harmful, though the ruling would give them the right to disregard any ATI request they judged to be under this category.

The action is indicative of the administration’s increasingly adversarial stance towards the release of information. The university is attempting to hold veto power on ATI requests, allowing them to control the flow of information to its own students. McGill’s focus is on shaping the public discussion about the university, making sure that the information they release is good for the brand, and preventing potentially embarrassing or damaging information from being released to the public. McGill has placed a premium on the public standing of the university, understanding that potential students and investors are increasingly paying attention to what the university is doing. *As of press time, the University had dropped mention of both The Daily and “any McGill student.”

Student fees and responsibility

T

his year, McGill’s winter referenda questions were focused largely on the introduction and increase of fees levied for student services. SACOMSS, McGill student’s sexual assault centre, requested a renewal of their 75-cent fee. Other questions asked students to give money to maintain the McGill Writing Centre and to create an SSMU Equity Fund. The two largest fee increases on the referenda ballot were the Athletics Ancillary Fee and the SSMU Ancillary Fee. These same two fee increase questions also included a proposal for indexation of the fees to inflation for the next four years, until the 2016-17 school year.

All referendum questions, including indexation questions, passed. There is no question that the McGill community requires the services tied to these fees, and the referendum results attest to this need. A robust athletic

program, a well equipped writing centre, and a resource for survivors of sexual assault are all services that McGill would be much worse off without. But should we be paying for them in student fees?

Increasing student fees at all, let alone indexation (which amounts to an automatic fee increase over several years without consulting the student body in question), is part of an ongoing trend of McGill shifting financial responsibilities onto students. As much as these services are necessary, the McGill administration appears to be making specific choices not to protect them. Instead, the University asks students to shoulder the financial burden for a wide range of services, ignoring our most basic needs as a school community.

—E.k. Chan and Anqi Zhang

—Evan Dent

8

NEWS

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

AGSEM official calls McGill’s financial records inconsistent Troublesome reporting practices and infrastructural problems main culprits Operating deficits before inter-fund transfers and other below-the-line adjustments

2010

700,000

-11,913,000

2009 2008

Data from Justin Marleau’s presentation “Understanding McGill University’s Finances and Their Impacts on the Future of Labour on Campus”

2011 2012

-16,253,000 -12,434,000

4,700,000

26,438,000

tive and support staff; 39.1 percent in benefits, largely due to changes in benefits calculations, and 535 per cent in student aid, though he noted this growth only represents $22.7 million.

Within the administrative and support staff growth, Marleau also highlighted that the increase can be largely attributed to a 33 per cent increase in management positions from 2006 to 2011.

Speaking to this, Marleau suggested a reorganization of McGill’s managers, stating that the “increase in centralized administrative managers is troubling, as it is not clear why the growth is so large.”

Marleau later spoke to how choices could be made differently to avoid the current cuts McGill has to undertake.

“Maybe we should target those expenses that have raised too high a rate, rather than expenses that have not. That’s why I wanted to look at those specific items and then see where’s the money going, because you can’t, if you spend the money in a targeted manner and then force across the board cuts, you’re not doing it correctly,” Marleau told The Daily.

As such, Marleau has called for the re-evaluation of capital assets and needs. “The infrastructure is the problem, not the cost of employees, so from my perspective the operating fund normally would be fine if the infrastructure wasn’t problematic.”

In the presentation, he pointed to the $822 million in deferred maintenance costs for capital assets that are themselves only worth $1.2 million.

When asked by The Daily if these costs could be reduced, Di Grappa stated: “The $822 million is the current value of work required to bring the buildings back to an acceptable state of operations. The $1.2 million represents the cost of acquisitions of all our current capital assets. The two don’t relate.”

Marleau later pointed to potential discrepancies in the numbers and uncertain questions for the future.

“The evaluation of the capital infrastructure was done at the height of the corruption scandal here in Montreal for public works,” he said, “but to be quite honest, it may not actually be that high.”

“Should we try to have different buildings? Should we try to buy buildings off-campus, could that be cheaper, maybe it’s not worth it to repair certain buildings? Those are the type of questions that need to be asked.”

2012

J

ustin Marleau, the VicePresident of AGSEM – McGill’s teaching union, provided a critical appraisal of the University’s finances at March 22 presentation for Labour Week at McGill.

This analysis comes as University administrators across the province prepare to implement provincial budget cuts. At McGill, the cuts have taken a toll on staff, as the University asks different campus groups to accept wage and hiring freezes for the upcoming year and warns of layoffs­­.

In an interview with The Daily, Marleau explained that the McGill University Non-Academic Certified Association (MUNACA) strike last semester, and the student movement of the past year, prompted him to look into the University’s finances. “[I was] trying to figure out why McGill was always running deficits every single year. Because it is highly unusual that an organization would continuously run deficits every single year, unless there is something systematically wrong.”

One of Marleau’s problems with the University’s financial reporting practices is the significant gap between its projected and actual expenses and revenues. For example, operating revenues were projected to be $602.7 million in 2011 fiscal year (FY) and $652.7 million in the FY 2012 budget. The actual operating revenues, however, were $630.9 million in FY 2011 and $709.8 million in FY 2012.

Vice-Principal (Administration and Finance) Michael Di Grappa told The Daily in an email that the inconsistency came in 2011 from changes to the measurement of the fiscal year, following a government mandate to change the end of the year from May 31 to April 30.

“FY 2011 was an 11 month reporting period. The difference is therefore based on real tuition not being prorated over the 11 month period while the budget had prorated tuition and fees for 11 months.”

Di Grappa attributed the discrepancy in 2012 “to sales of goods and services due to the operations of an additional residence (Carrefour Sherbrooke) and government grant adjustment, mostly related to enrolment.”

According to Marleau, some of the differences between budget projections and actual financial

statements occur “because the assumptions behind the budgets turn out to be wrong.” To illustrate this, Marleau showed the enrolment projections included in the FY 2008 budget. At the time, the University calculated enrolment increases of no more than 2 per cent a year and decreases in almost every year of Doctoral enrolment. The actual enrolment of all full-time students, however, shows a different landscape, with increases of over 3 per cent for most years, including a 7.2 per cent increase for a year in which a decrease was projected.

According to Marleau, “there is no real explanation to be given, they just make assumptions, and for the enrolment data it is very surprising because you control it.”

Di Grappa told The Daily: “We have no control over how many students will accept the offers in any one year. Our past experience is that we have had more acceptances than anticipated,” he continued.

After this, Marleau focused his talk on the operating deficits the University has been running since 2007, and the decisions that cause these deficits.

McGill’s finances are divided into four funds: the operating fund, dealing with day-to-day expenses; the restricted fund; the Plant Fund, encompassing the capital assets of the University; and the endowment fund, essentially the University’s investment portfolio.

Marleau stated that operating deficits, as defined by McGill, occur only after inter-fund transfers. “One should look at [the period] before the transfers to see if the operations are running the deficits or if it truly is caused by other activities.”

According to Marleau’s calculations, for example, in FY 2008, the University had an operating surplus of $7,198,000 before interfund transfer, and a $16,253,000 deficit after the transfer. This is the biggest discrepancy in the period between 2008 and 2012, but all years show a drop in the operating fund.

In the presentation, Marleau stated that the money transferred is going to capital purchases and to cover shortfalls created when payouts from the University’s endowment were reduced from 5 per cent to 4.25 per cent in 2010.

However, Marleau also pointed to the growth in expenses within the Operating Fund since FY 2007.

18 per cent was in academic salaries, which did not grow after 2010; 9.2 per cent in student salaries, 30.2 per cent in administra-

7,198,000 2008 2009 -119,000 2,993,000 2010 6,684,000 2011

Juan Camilo Velásquez The McGill Daily

Graphic Will Werblow

news

9

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Canadian Civil Liberties Association calls on UN to protect right to protest Recent police crackdowns in Quebec spark international concern Hannah Besseau The McGill Daily

T

he Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) joined eight international civil society NGOs in late March in writing a letter calling for the UN to amend a draft resolution protecting the right to protest. The letter directly cited police repression in Quebec as a primary example of recent violations of that right.

The letter addresses a need for more precise language involving peaceful protests, wherein current broad definitions can result in violations of democratic rights. It also calls for reduced state violence during peaceful protests, and identifies a need to regulate government protocols for the use of less-lethal weapons technology.

“We believe that protests need to not just be tolerated, but be

facilitated in a democratic society,” Cara Zwibel, director of the Fundamental Freedoms Program at the CCLA, told The Daily. “It is through these protests that people deal with grievances in a democratic society.”

The CCLA is a national organization with a self-described mission to promote “respect for, and observance of, fundamental human rights and civil liberties.” Previously, the CCLA, along with fifty other organizations, called for a public inquiry into police actions during the Quebec student protests.

The letter addressed to the UN comes in light of ongoing observations of repressive state measures at peaceful demonstrations in Quebec, and seeks to shine a critical light on this issue.

In the past month alone, Montreal has seen at least three protests shut down by preemptive police intervention. Such interven-

tion tactics typically employ frequent use of non-lethal weapons, such as CS gas bombs.

“In our experience, many countries deploy this technology at a much earlier stage […] using it to disperse peaceful protests or in lieu of other available de-escalation techniques,” the letter states. The letter recommends that established protocols be put in place to regulate the use of such weapons.

However, this is not the case in Quebec, where these weapons are used arbitrarily at protests. These measures have been attributed to the municipal by-law P-6, which requires protestors to provide the routes and dates of demonstrations to police for approval in advance.

In addition to the use of nonlethal weapons, the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) has used tactics such as kettling and mass arrests to contain protests.

“We are concerned that the

police have chosen this by-law. In both [the] Quebec and Canadian charters there are protections from unreasonable detention when the police detain people. I can’t say if they’ve been adhered to,” said Zwibel.

“It’s an attempt to discourage protest activity, for sure,” she said.

“The protests [in Montreal] have gotten much smaller. It could be a function of people deciding if it’s worth the trouble.”

Such tactics, Zwibel said, may discourage protest on a larger level.

“There will always be people who are very committed to the cause and willing to face the consequences,” she noted, “but even people who are committed to the cause may decide that the constant interaction with the police and the ticketing is detracting from the ability to protest.”

Additionally, the letter raised concerns about bystanders facing

the brunt of these police tactics.

“The blanket classification of an entire assembly as non-peaceful has the effect of arbitrarily abrogating the peaceful assembly rights of a large number of individuals,” the letter states.

The letter also raises broader civil liberties concerns regarding increased state restrictions on protesting.

“Although protest management can be an important state role, excessive state regulation of peaceful assembly also has the potential to significantly chill peaceful protest,” the letter states.

The letter specified the need to “include a recognition that the state’s responsibility to protect, respect, and fulfill the right to peaceful assembly [...] extends to the obligations to minimize legislative or regulatory practices that may chill the exercise of these rights, including measures such as prior approval permitting schemes.”

TaCEQ is Seeking Candidates for Secretary-General Positions!

TaCEQ, the Quebec-wide student association that SSMU is a member of, is now accepting nominations of candidates for the positions of Secretary General, Vice-Secretary General (Administration and Finance) and Vice-Secretary General (Communications and Internal Relations).

All three positions are part time, for a one-year term. Work includes representation of members to other bodies such as the provincial government, coordination of and communication with member associations, calling meetings and institutional support.

A working knowledge of French is required, as is the ability to do some travelling around Quebec. For more information, contact VP External Robin Reid-Fraser at external@ssmu.mcgill.ca or 514-398-6798.

10

NEWS

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Tea Party billionaire funding McGill fellowship Prof, students vouch for program’s academic freedom Eric Andrew-Gee The McGill Daily

F

or the past three years, McGill has been the only Canadian university to receive an academic grant from the Charles G. Koch Foundation, an arm of the formidable political advocacy operation of Charles and David Koch, two American billionaires who have bankrolled the Tea Party movement and various climatechange deniers in recent years.

The $10,000 grant funds a political theory fellowship in which students meet to discuss seminal liberal texts under the guidance of libertarian theorist and McGill professor Jacob Levy. Undergraduates receive $500 for their participation in the Fellowship over the course of the year; graduate students get $750.

Over 200 American universities receive funding from the Foundation. The grant application page of their website reads, “the Foundation focuses its grantmaking on a select number of programs it believes are best positioned to support principles of liberty and long-term prosperity.”

Levy and several students interviewed by The Daily are adamant that the Fellowship – officially called the Research Group on Constitutional Studies Student Fellowship – meets the highest standards of academic freedom.

Byron Taylor-Conboy, a Master’s candidate who describes himself as a “progressive, left-leaning social democrat” said, “one of the reasons why I thought [the funding] was acceptable in this situation is that there was no sort of constraints on what we could talk about.”

Jake Bleiberg, U3 Political Science, echoed this. “In being exposed to those texts, you’re certainly getting a liberal perspective on the world. But I don’t feel as if there’s a political push behind it,” he said. “I think we’re looking at the books in the same critical way you would in a class.”

While all of the students contacted by The Daily thought the McGill Fellowship in question was free from overt interference on the part of the Foundation and were happy to be a part of it, some felt that Koch grants were symptomatic of larger problems in academia.

“I think the Koch brothers have been an example of using big money to privilege certain views, which I would say is anti-democratic,” said Isaac Stethem, who graduated last semester and has been a Fellow for two years.

Asked if he would be comfortable seeing a Koch grant at every Canadian university, Taylor-Conboy said, “Of course not.”

“I think it’s problematic, a massive private investment in universities, and we see it increasing now,” he went on. “I think it opens the door to a curtailing of intellectual

thought and academic freedom.”

“Everything is dirty money.

Anything we do now is dirty money – dirty money circulates in the system. So to say, ‘Oh, you know, this Koch Foundation money is dirty money,’ – maybe that’s correct, but the problem isn’t just the Koch Foundation, it’s the system.”

The Koch brothers have been explicit about the ideological control they try to wield over the organizations they fund. In 2007, David Koch told the libertarian journalist Brian Doherty, “If we’re going to give a lot of money, we’ll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our intent. And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don’t agree with, we withdraw funding.

We do exert that kind of control.”

Presented with the quote, Levy countered that the McGill Fellowship was too small to merit such interference. “There’s one important part of that quote that you read, which is ‘a lot of money.’ […] $10,000 grants to universities aren’t like that,” he said.

In recent years, the Kochs have been in the spotlight for aggressively funding right-wing political causes.

Greenpeace called Koch Industries, the brothers’ multinational corporation involved in various industrial and manufacturing activities, a “kingpin of climate science denial,” for spending more than ExxonMobil to fight against climate change legislation between 2005 and 2008.

In 2004, David Koch co-founded the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which recently has been involved in financing Tea Party groups and organizing antiObama rallies across the U.S. Doherty has said that Charles Koch’s goal in entering political activism in the 1970s was to tear government “out at the root.”

“Do I worry about what other causes donors give to? Not as a rule,” Levy said. “I’m concerned about how they interact with their educational and university grants.”

• • • The Foundation has no say over which students are admitted to the Fellowship, Levy says. Levy picks the Fellows himself, based largely on “the number and range of highlevel courses in political theory, political philosophy, jurisprudence, and related fields, and the grades in those courses.”

Levy, who is listed as a guest lecturer on the website of the Kochfunded, libertarian Institute for Humane Studies, declined to show The Daily examples of his grant applications to the Koch Foundation, citing McGill’s donor privacy rules.

In an interview, he said the application consists largely of telling the Foundation what books he plans to assign. In the past three years, Fellows have read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Montesquieu’s

Charles Koch, the world’s sixth richest person, funds libertarian groups across the U.S. Spirit of the Laws, and The Federalist Papers by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay. This year, students are concentrating on Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. Each book is a touchstone of liberalism.

Levy receives no money from the grant. He has been on sabbatical for four of the six semesters that the Fellowship has been in place at McGill. “This is teaching I’ve been doing in my spare time,” he said.

At the end of each year, Levy writes a report to the Foundation: “I say we met this many times, we successfully covered this many books, and for the students who are graduating, I say, here are the things that students are going on to do.”

The Foundation does not appear to be concerned with the Fellows’ ideological orientation, even if they are dramatically at odds with that of the libertarian Kochs. Mylène Freeman, one of the McGill stu-

dents elected to Parliament as an NDP candidate in 2011, was a Fellow in the group’s first year at McGill.

“I was happy and proud to include her accomplishment prominently in the year-end report I send to the Foundation of the impressive things our students go on to do,” Levy wrote in an email.

• • • Last year, an employee of the Foundation visited McGill and sat in on one of the Fellowship’s discussions.

“Professor Levy mentioned beforehand, ‘just act the way you would normally act,’” Bleiberg said.

Still, when the employee – Stephen Sweet, Program Coordinator for Marketing and Recruiting at the Foundation – stood before the group and mentioned grants and internships that the Koch Foundation offered, some of the more left-wing Fellows bristled.

Photo Forbes

“At least one or two members asked questions that had to do with the ideology behind the group, or the principles tied up with it,” remembered Stethem.

“There were a good number of people last year who identified as part of the radical left,” Bleiberg said.

“Someone tried to ask whether or not [the Koch Foundation was] open to employing people who really disagreed with them. I think he got a sort of non-answer to that.” “[The Koch Foundation employee] was very directly challenged and from a radically different position. I don’t think the people who felt they had something to say to him tried to say it gently.”

Bleiberg said he saw this as evidence of the Fellowship’s academic freedom. After all, despite the testy exchange, McGill’s grant was renewed at the end of the year.

Levy says he intends to apply for the grant again this year.

news

11

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Principal sits down with campus media for the last time

A

s the five male journalists and photographers from The Daily, Le Délit, and the Bull and Bear sat down for the end of year interview with Principal Heather Munroe-Blum, she asked, in French: “Where are all the women?”

Questions focused mainly on budget cuts and the recent protest protocol, as well as the reputation of McGill on the whole as an international institution. Munroe-Blum took the interview as an opportunity to reiterate the fact that the administration is trying its best to preserve academic quality throughout the cuts. She said that the administration has been lobbying the government against the cuts, and that its top priority is to get fair funding. She said that the government cuts are keeping universities “hostage,” and that this was the wrong way of going about cutting government spending – which she felt was important in light of the government’s deficit.

Speaking about the changes at McGill during her tenure, MunroeBlum said that she thinks the biggest transformative factor has been globalization, motivating universities across the world to do research that “makes a difference socially and economically.”

She felt that democracy is currently in “full bloom” on campus, and she was happy that McGill is such an outspoken community.

Student protests, she said, have not necessarily been bad for McGill’s reputation, and when asked about the new protest protocol, MunroeBlum said that she was proud that McGill had seen “more demonstra-

tion in the last 24 months, of all kinds.” She felt that the new protocol managed to support the safety and sense of well-being of students and professors.

The McGill Daily (MD): McGill is the only university thus far that has decided to cut so drastically and immediately. Other universities are either dipping into their capital budgets, waiting on new directives, or counting on the promised $1.7 billion reinvestment. Why? Heather Munroe-Blum (HMB): [McGill] dominantly delivers programs by our tenured professors, the majority of Quebecois universities run on a very different model, which is very much a chargé-de-cours and part-time student model. There’s no question that it costs more to run a research-intensive, graduate student-intensive university, with a range of professional faculties, and that is our mission […] Our credit rating is a credit rating that Quebec depends on. Quebec borrows money on our credit rating.

Le Délit (LD) (in French): How can McGill say that it’s part of Quebec, and, at the same time, call tuition fees sacred?

HMB: I don’t believe that professors should say things they don’t believe, and I look at the different data, and I see that in my first years here a frozen, low tuition fee, did not get accessibility, and it did not build quality. We don’t want American tuition fees here, but I think that it’s very important to be honest about what builds educational strength and what creates

Photo Robert Smith | The McGill Daily

degree completion.

MD: The police have been especially heavy-handed with demonstrators this year. Do you think they could have had different tactics?

HMB: I don’t think I need to tell the police or the government how to run their circumstances. I was very surprised last spring that a range of universities in Quebec did not stand up for the right of students to attend their classes. And I did express this in the context of the university system.

MD: When we came in, you asked us “where are the women?”

Do you consider yourself a feminist, and if so, what does this mean for you, and how does that translate into university policy?

HMB: I never thought of myself as a feminist or not, but I did hear my mother every day saying, education is the source of all things good. She believed very powerfully in that, and [she] lectured my brothers every day on how to treat women. That was the culture I grew

up in. […] I saw in the days after [my appointment as Principal], how powerful it was, not just to women and girls, but to visible minorities, to older men who were immigrants, that McGill, this traditional university that everyone had seen as far off and untouchable, was suddenly open. And it was really a dramatic example, for me, of the power of symbols.

—Compiled by Carla Green and Farid Rener

A look into Munroe-Blum’s McGill Retrospective on the Principal’s ten-year term Molly Korab The McGill Daily

I

n 2003, when outgoing Principal Heather Munroe-Blum began her first of two five-year terms at McGill, her first meeting with student organizations touched on issues that still ring true today.

“I think the contribution of students to the total costs of student education is extraordinarily modest,” she told SSMU Council at that meeting. Such a comment would not be out of place nowadays.

Ten years later, as she prepares to pass the baton to Suzanne Fortier, Munroe-Blum’s term has seen recurring themes surrounding issues like university funding and labour negotiations, constituting an overarching shift in the University’s top priorities that will have repercussions for a long time to come.

Munroe-Blum began her term

with the explicit goal of unfreezing tuition rates to allow for increases, while at the same time lobbying for additional funding from the Quebec government. She quickly went to work to achieve these goals.

In her second year of office, Munroe-Blum oversaw the privatization of international tuition, which allowed for significant increases in rates up to 8 per cent a year, and petitioned the Quebec government to lift its former freeze on rates for in-province students. Despite widespread student mobilization against tuition increases since 2012, MunroeBlum has continued to push for their implementation, and most recently has started a campaign against $38 million in budget cuts imposed by the Quebec government.

Privatization of tuition fees continued in 2009, with the Desautels Faculty of Management MBA program. The administration turned down provincial budgetary subsidies

in favour of charging its own tuition rates, which were raised to $29,500 at the time. This engendered a 1,663 per cent hike for in-province students – a move that sparked outrage amongst the Quebec community.

Munroe-Blum has also overseen significant changes in University and administration structure. In 2004, she personally drove a significant restructuring of McGill’s Board of Governors (BoG). In the name of efficiency, the BoG’s body was cut in half, from 45 to 25 members. Student voting seats went from four to two, with the nonvoting seat reserved for the SSMU President eliminated. Today, there is one undergraduate seat which is appointed by SSMU. This voting seat is usually held by – but not reserved for – the SSMU President.

Seemingly innocuous changes, such as the implementation of the Principal’s Task Force in winter 2006, led to frustration within the

student body – questions directed at the administration involving contentious issues such as the eviction of SACOMSS (Sexual Assault Centre of McGill Students’ Society) from its former setting often met the deflective statement, “The task force is looking into it.”

The privatization of university resources has been another source of controversy: from the renaming of the Faculty of Music in 2005 due to a $20 million donation from businessman Seymour Schulich to debate over the University’s involvement in investing in 645 publiclytraded corporations, including 14 directly involved in tar sands, Munroe-Blum has been accused of pushing priorities oriented toward a more business-friendly model.

This falls in line with other conflicts, including tensions with labour unions such as the McGill University Non-Academic Certified Association (MUNACA) and

Association of McGill University Support Employees (AMUSE).

MUNACA went on strike during the Fall 2011 semester, eventually ratifying a collective agreement with the administration at the end of that year.

Ultimately, Munroe-Blum’s term has been characterized by several overarching narratives, often perceived as oriented toward the administration rather than the student body. Certainly, not all reforms have been for the worse – such as the creation of the Arts & Science degree in 2004, among other new programs – and a mere half-page cannot begin to cover the lengthy reforms undertaken during her term. But as students face steeper fees for fewer services and hostility from the administration on a variety of issues, it remains essential to question, critique, and challenge the initiatives taken by the administration over the past ten years.

12

NEWS

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Mendelson’s contentious tenure comes to a close Michael Lee-Murphy The McGill Daily

T

he end of the school year also marks the end of the tenure of Morton Mendelson as McGill’s Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning). Of all the administrators working at McGill, Morton Mendelson’s name has been in the pages of this newspaper and in other campus media more than any other, except possibly Principal Heather Munroe-Blum.

After seven years in the position, The Daily sat down with Mendelson for an hour-long interview to put together an overarching picture of his time here, and the ways in which the position has changed McGill.

The position itself was created as a result of MunroeBlum’s Spring 2005 “Task Force on Student Life and Learning.”

The task force’s mandate was to “broadly examine and enhance the student experience at McGill.”

Mendelson joined the task force in the fall of 2005, replacing Martha Crago, also an administrator.

Mendelson was appointed to the newly-created position in July 2006. The task force’s final report, submitted to the principal in December of that year, said that the brand-new Deputy Provost would “champion the development of a greater sense of belonging for McGill students.”

Did he? Do students have a greater sense of belonging here?

We may never know, four-year undergraduate degrees being what they are. There are, to be sure, different schools of thought on that question, but it is undeniable that Mendelson has left his mark on university life at McGill. His office was occupied last year for nearly a week, with students demanding his resignation, among other things.

That occupation, he said, had an “awful impact on this office.”

“People in my office are still rattled,” he said, bemoaning what he called the necessity of increased security in the James building.

Indeed, the James building is now a remarkably different place than it was a few years ago. The interview that constitutes much of this story was months in the making, Mendelson only agreeing to it after seeing a list of topics. The door to his office on the sixth floor is now locked, a development Mendelson says he hates.

In addition to demanding his resignation, the occupiers of Mendelson’s office were protesting

Photo Hera Chan | The McGill Daily

his refusal to recognize the element of a CKUT and QPIRG referendum question that sought to make both their student fees non-opt-outable.

Speaking of the occupation, Mendelson said: “there was a lack of empathy for the effect that this would have. The irony is the event did not change or did not achieve the goal” that the occupiers sought.

Mendelson is finishing his term and the fees for CKUT and QPIRG remain opt-outable. The administration did agree to recognize the vote as a referendum on existence – though not on the issue of online opt-outs – an agreement Mendelson said was reached before the occupation.

Over the years, campus groups such as CKUT, QPIRG, and – in the interest of full disclosure – this newspaper have decried the mandated existence referenda as an attack on independent student life at the university. Mendelson, however, views the existence referenda as crucial to maintaining the “accountability” of the student groups.

“If the students say [a particular student group] shouldn’t be operating, then they shouldn’t be operating,” he said. The principle, for Mendelson, is that the University administration is charged with “putting our hand into student pockets and taking

money and handing it over to a third party.” He disagreed with the suggestion that the same logic could be applied to other functionings of the University that involved third parties, such as construction companies, functionings that don’t require the student body to vote. Mendelson pointed out that as of yet, there has not been an existence referendum question that has failed.

Another of the high profile developments involving Mendelson’s office during his tenure is the authoring of a protocol governing future protest on campus. Flowing out of the occupation, the administration established a new set of rules by which protests could take place on campus, along with guidelines for security services to police them. The initial version of the protocol drew fierce opposition from campus activists and unions, and even drew a condemnation from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

The administration eventually split the protocol into two parts: a set of operating procedures and a statement of values, with only the second part to be voted on by Senate, which approved the statement last month.

Mendelson said he was pleased with how the process surrounding the protocol ultimately went. “I

think the university engaged in a very serious conversation about a very serious issue,” he said.

Referencing a particularly heated 2009 confrontation between Canadian Minister of Citizenship, Immigration, and Multiculturalism Jason Kenney and protesters from the group No One Is Illegal, Mendelson said that over the course of his tenure he has “been surprised…about the degree to which some students are very intolerant of what is being expressed, but extremely tolerant about how opinions are expressed.”

Expression of student opinion is certainly a topic Mendelson is familiar with. He has been one of the primary targets of student anger over the years, consistently bearing the brunt of criticism for various administrative decisions.

From the repeated attempts to close the Architecture Café, to student referenda, to the protest protocol, it has most often been Mendelson that is seen by student activist circles as the villain.

“That was the part of this job that was the most surprising,” Mendelson said, adding that he felt as though he was the lightning rod for all administrative decisions that were disliked by students.

Of all his accomplishments dur-

ing his tenure, Mendelson said he was most proud of connections he established between various previously independently operating units on campus, and the team he built to do it. The more streamlined approach, Mendelson said, is consistent with the task force’s recommendations on the fostering of a “student-centric” university.

The most visible manifestation of the streamlining of bureaucracy is, of course, Service Point.

According to Mendelson, the Service Point combines services for students that were previously dispersed across seven offices in four buildings into a single location.

Does Mendelson have any regrets?

“We were not as successful in getting that across to students, I think, as we should have been.

Maybe part of that was issues of communication and consultation,” he said. He stressed though that he feels communication from students to the University has improved from a decade ago, pointing to the forthcoming implementation of a student co-chair on the Senate committee on student services.

It hasn’t yet been announced who will fill Mendelson’s shoes, but they will be walking into one of the most watched positions in the McGill administration.

news

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

13

SSMU year in review

T

Josh Redel As President, Josh Redel took the lead of SSMU following a highly politicized year with the intentions of keeping his executive, and the student body, undivided. This was shown in the successful integration of different faculties with the SEAMLESS conference and better integration during Orientation Week. However, this improved integration came at the expense of SSMU’s political role, which was minor throughout the year, sometimes even failing to support student groups and causes.

This semester, in lease negotiations, as well as in Board of Governors and Senate, Redel adopted a stronger line – yet perhaps not strong enough.

His role as a liaison could have benefited from better communication with the student body, so as to better elucidate the state of the budget and lease negotiations.

As with most past presidents, he tackled the recurring issue of poor attendance at SSMU GAs. Redel focused on technical solutions like clickers, which, although well-intended, were not enough to engage students and increase attendance.

Within his portfolio, Redel implemented some sustainability initiatives like the green GA. Redel also developed accountability measures in the Human Resources department, which have been useful given the lack of commitment by

some members of the executive.

Allison Cooper VP Clubs & Services Allison Cooper was by far the most politically active member of the executive team.

Cooper was a strong advocate for student groups and an ardent supporter of student rights. She consistently brought forward motions at GAs, and her knowledge of issues outside of her portfolio made for an invaluable contribution to Council sessions.

Although she started the year slowly, Cooper launched a new informational website, Clubpedia, and has been working on an online club management portal, Club Hub. She also spearheaded the space campaigns, one of the most notable efforts undertaken by SSMU this semester.

JP Briggs Throughout the year, VP Finance and Operations JP Briggs communicated poorly with students and student media, making it difficult to keep him accountable. Briggs contributed little to Council meetings, and his term was marked by a general disinterest in student issues.

According to the executive attendance report, Briggs consistently came in late to the SSMU office at 11 a.m., missed meetings, and was often late to other events. This lack of commitment was particularly troublesome, as the society faces financial uncertainty from the lease negotiations, and a projected deficit of $211,320.

Even though a two-year plan for a student-run cafe was created by last year’s SSMU executive, with the goal of opening in Fall 2013, no concrete steps have been taken, and the project’s time frame has expanded considerably.

Michael Szpejda As VP Internal, Michael Szpedja

Illustration Alice Shen | The McGill Daily

his year’s SSMU executive was characterized by a lack of ambition and an unwillingness to tackle divisive issues. Apart from their basic roles, executives failed to undertake any significant projects or truly engage with political issues.

SSMU is, in many ways, no different than it was a year ago. Many of the problems our union faces, such as lease negotiations, persist to this day.

did the bulk of his work over the summer overseeing the restructuring of Orientation Week. Following this effort, however, Szpejda seemed to have lost momentum and his work mostly went unnoticed. Like Briggs, Szpedja did not adequately communicate with student media, and rarely spoke up at Council meetings. He also failed to engage students through the weekly listserv, which was demonstrated by SSMU’s feeble advertising efforts to events such as the poorly attended GAs. Szpejda could have undertaken initiatives to communicate more with other portfolios, and to implement the SSMU Equity Policy so as to prevent the mixed reviews on Frosh and incidents like blackface at 4Floors.

Robin Reid-Fraser The portfolio of VP External is traditionally the most politically charged of the executive, but Robin ReidFraser’s political action failed to live up to expectations. The first Introduction to Quebec Week in January was

undermined by miscommunication.

Many events were cancelled, and the ones that weren’t were plagued with low attendance.

Reid-Fraser also failed to create an open line of communication between TaCEQ and the student body, making it difficult for SSMU and TaCEQ to establish a productive relationship. This was Reid-Fraser’s biggest failure, and she was often criticized for it by councillors.

However, Reid-Fraser cannot be blamed entirely for TaCEQ’s disappointment. The group itself has been characterized by disorganization and inefficiency.

The creation of two Community Ambassador positions for the Milton-Parc community was also one of Reid-Fraser’s initiatives.

Although the initiative is too new to see many tangible results, the position is a step in the right direction.

Haley Dinel Throughout her term as VP University Affairs, Dinel has not been a

particularly strong voice in negotiating with McGill, whom Dinel characterized as sometimes being “a brick wall.”

Although some initiatives are more invisible to the general student body, Dinel has lacked any real impact on student-administration relations.

Dinel, along with Redel, is responsible for handling a third year of lease negotiations with McGill for the Shatner building. Despite numerous progress updates, the negotiations seem set to roll over for a fourth consecutive year with the new executive.

One of her biggest accomplishments this year was the creation of a minor in the North American Indigenous Studies program.

Dinel, as the executive in charge of the Equity Policy, saw an important failure with the incident at 4Floors, where a student wore blackface. This semester, Dinel has been working with the VP Internal and VP Clubs & Services to shift the focus of the Equity Policy for next year from dealing with complaints to implementing preventative measures.

PGSS year in review

T

his year’s Post-Graduate Students’ Society (PGSS) executive was made up of Secretary-General Jonathan Mooney, External Affairs Officer Errol Salamon, Academic Affairs Officer Adam Bouchard, Financial Affairs Officer Pooja Tyagi (replaced by Erik Larson as of March 22), Internal Affairs Officer Michael Krause, and Member Services Officer Elizabeth Cawley.

Salamon started the year off strong in August, organizing an Englishlanguage electoral debate alongside SSMU, the Concordia Student Union, the Concordia Graduate Students’ Association, and the Dawson Student Union. One of the only Englishlanguage debates of its kind, it was an opportunity for the anglophone student unions to collaborate further throughout the year.

PGSS, in collaboration with SSMU,

organized an alternative education summit in December in preparation for the provincial education summit in February. “We addressed several key issues, including tuition, university financing, international and out-of-province students, and university-industry partnerships,” wrote Salamon in an email to The Daily.

However, Salamon told The Daily that some students didn’t feel comfortable attending, due to administrative interference in the event. “According to the PGSS Secretary-General, the administration even asked PGSS to remove particular McGill student presenters from the event because of their political views,” he wrote.

Salamon has also been a proponent of francophone culture at McGill, especially after an executive meeting in October that almost led to the cutting of French translation

services at PGSS. “At many PGSS meetings, I’ve supported a bilingual McGill, highlighting historical struggles of francophone Quebeckers in Quebec and the continued need to fight for university education and services that are accessible to francophone students,” he said. Cawley also told The Daily that a group has recently been formed to create a formal PGSS language policy, and will be meeting in the coming weeks.

Salamon was the only person on the PGSS executive who voted against taking the same stance on tuition as Conférence des recteurs et des principaux des universités du Québec (CREPUQ). CREPUQ has long argued that universities in Quebec are underfunded. During a meeting, Salamon alleged that Mooney had tabled the motion after meetings with Vice-President

(External Affairs) Olivier Marcil.

Notable successes for this year’s PGSS executive include the beginning of a project to create a daycare, and the creation of a better online content management system for their website.

Mooney also counted the successful campaign for accreditation in March, with a 29 per cent voter turnout, as one of the biggest successes this year.

“We worked with [the Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies office] and McGill [Network and Communication Services] to increase student e-mail space from 200 MB to 300 MB, and negotiated a reduction in the fees postgrads have to pay to use the gym, the sports medicine clinic, and fitness and [recreation] courses,” Mooney told The Daily by email.

February was marked by more turmoil for PGSS. That month, the Art History and Communications Studies

Graduate Student Association (AHCSGSA) voted to join the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (ASSÉ), considered Quebec’s most radical student union. PGSS is a parent organization to AHCS-GSA. Typically, all graduate and postdoctoral fellows are associated with another union, the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ).

Later in the month, the Chief Returning Officer Brock Rutter resigned from his post, storming out of a debate between PGSS candidates and shouting, “You people are ridiculous. You aren’t fit for this university, you aren’t fit for society.”

Mooney, Bouchard, and Cawley are running unopposed for reelection in their positions for next year.

Larson and Krause both face opponents, and Navid Khosrav will be running for External Affairs.

14

news

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

The year in photos text by Hannah Besseau, Lola Duffort, and Molly Korab

Quebec Summit on Higher Education

February 26, 2013 – The Parti Québécois (PQ) government-hosted Summit on Higher Education in February was largely seen as a meaningless publicity stunt. The Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (ASSÉ), a student association representing around 70,000 students, chose to boycott the Summit, as the topic of free education was not going to be discussed, and instead organized a demonstration in protest of the two-day summit. The demonstration on the final day of the Summit drew a crowd of 10,000, as well as a heavy police presence. The day ended with the PQ increasing tuition annually by 3 per cent and violent police repression of protesters.

Idle No More

December 24, 2012 – Idle No More grabbed initial national attention with Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence’s sixweek-long hunger strike in protest of the federal government’s plan to pass omnibus Bill C-45, which amended the Indian Act, and other environmental laws, making it easier for the government to appropriate Indigenous lands. The movement – symbolized by a red felt feather – aims to address ongoing practices of colonialism toward Indigenous peoples in Canada.

They protested institutionalized oppression with a series of demonstrations, flash round-dance mobs, highway blockages, and a surge of teach-ins educating the Canadian population on Indigenous issues. Idle No More may not gather the same number of people to march in the streets anymore, but it seems like the movement is far from finished.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Nicolas Quiazua Shane Murphy Hera Chan Dave Tsang Jessie Marchessault Lindsay Cameron

2

1

3

4

5

6

News

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

15

Parti Québécois victory rally

September 4, 2012 – Pauline Marois of the Parti Québécois (PQ) won a plurality of seats last September, succeeding Jean Charest, strident supporter of implementing a tuition hike. At her victory rally, located in the Métropolis venue, a lone gunman attempted to assassinate her, but instead killed one Métropolis employee and injured another. Prior to her election as the first female Premier of Quebec, Marois was a supporter of the student movement, advocating for a tuition freeze. She quickly backpedaled on those promises the year after, instituting an annual tuition increase of 3 per cent. The PQ government also imposed mandatory budget cuts to many universities, including a $38 million cut to McGill.

The McTavish Flood

January 28, 2013 – McGill saw its second flood in two years this January. Originating from a burst water main at Des Pins

and Doctor Penfield, the flood swept through campus, hitting Sherbrooke and extending to University. Service Point, the Welcome Centre, and the James Administration building were evacuated. Classes in the Wong, Wilson, and Birks buildings were canceled or relocated. Approximately 80 classes were canceled. Many buildings suffered water damage, the hardest hit being the James building Annex.

Protest the Protocol

January 24, 2013 – Following the six-day occupation of the Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning)’s office in February of 2012, the administration released a provisional protocol outlining new rules to govern campus protests.

Subsequent attempts to create a permanent, updated version of the protocol – which now included a definition of a “peaceful” protest – were met with widespread opposition, including a written condemnation from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. Ultimately, the administration split the protocol into two documents – a statement of values, as well as operating procedures. The operating procedures, in which some of the most controversial parts of the protocol were preserved – were adopted without Senate or Board of Governor approval.

Divest McGill

February 1, 2013 – Divest McGill called on the University to divest its holdings in fossil fuels companies and the Plan Nord.

The group is part of a growing movement across North American campuses. McGill currently holds investments in 35 of the world’s largest carbon reserves of publicly traded corporations. Divest McGill strives to share the message with the community that these investments are unsustainable, and are calling on the University to divest from these holdings. They submitted two petitions to McGill University’s Committee to Advise on Matters of Social Responsibility (CAMSR) in February and as of yet are awaiting a response.

16

news

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

This year in quotes “The attempt to define peaceful is, in my mind, ideologically dangerous.”

—SSMU President Josh Redel on the provisional protocol

“I am wondering if someone can help me to understand governance processes at this university.”

—Senator Catherine Lu on MOOCs and Senate

“It is clear from the various articles published in The McGill Daily, The Concordian, and La Presse, that the requests are specifically formulated not only for the purpose of gathering material for publication on the McGilliLeaks [sic] website but essentially as a retaliation measure against McGill in the aftermath of the 2011-2012 student protests.”

“One of the things I always say is that ‘as an anarchist, it’s my responsibility to be in administration.’”

—Dean of Students Andre Costopoulos

—McGill’s Motion on Access to Information Requests “McGill has its own definition of an investigation…You would assume that you would talk to the person who filed the complaint and published a peer-reviewed paper that laid out the issues.”

—Brown University professor David Egilman on McGill’s investigation into allegations of research misconduct made against professor emeritus J. Corbett Macdonald

“I never thought of myself as a feminist or not, but I did hear my mother every day saying, education is the source of all things good.”

—Principal Heather Munroe-Blum when asked if she was a feminist

“There is no direct correlation between the size of a class and the educational experience that it offers; it’s a combination of things…You can sometimes have a very poor educational experience in a very small-enrolment class.”

—Dean of Arts Christopher Manfredi on classes being cut

“We want to protect the quality of that mission, but the quality of life surrounding it will have to be affected. I don’t mean to be cute on that.”

—Provost Anthony C. Masi on provincial budget cuts

“I’m just curious how SSMU intends to represent all of the students at McGill University…If we’re leaning one way, that means we’re not representing all of our constituents.”

—SSMU VP Internal Michael Szpejda on whether to endorse a “yes” vote on the CKUT referendum

“[We] worked with [the Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies office] and McGill [Network and Communication Services] to increase student e-mail space from 200 MB to 300 MB.” —PGSS Secretary-General Jonathan Mooney on his most important achievements in the last year

“A judge isn’t necessarily trained as a policeman or a prosecutor…I don’t see why the Provost would have to have training, I’m more on the judge’s side.”

—Provost Anthony C. Masi on not receiving further sexual harassment training apart from the Assessor’s orientation

commentary

The McGill Daily Thursday, April 4, 2013 mcgilldaily.com

i7

Illustration Alice Shen | The McGill Daily

What’s wrong with rape culture Moving campus feminism beyond sexual politics Mona Luxion Through the Looking Glass

A

nyone who reads The Daily regularly is familiar with the basic tenets of anti-‘rape culture feminism: we live in a society in which rape is normalized through cultural scripts about romance and gender roles, ‘humour’ that treats rape as a punch line, a lack of education about consent, as well as the way everyone from gossip rags to the court system engages in victimblaming, prioritizing rapists’ lives over survivors’.

A significant part of campus feminism is dedicated to countering this cultural trend. Reading the responses to the “I need feminism because...” campaign last year, I was struck by how many of them echoed concerns about rape and sexual assault. A similar trend can be seen in large parts of the feminist blogosphere, dominated by young middle-class white cis heterosexual women whose activism translates into book titles like Yes Means Yes and The Purity Myth, and actions like Slutwalk and the Hollaback

website, on which women can post pictures of street harassers.

These concerns are legitimate. A majority of women (and, though the statistics are less clear, likely a majority of trans* people of all genders) experience sexual assault. These numbers skyrocket within already marginalized populations: Native women and women with disabilities, among others. I strongly believe in the necessity of both preventing future rapes and making the world safer for survivors to live in. The role of institutions like McGill’s studentrun Sexual Assult Centre of McGill Students’ Society (SACOMSS), for example, is vitally important.

But a focus on ending rape and sexual assault as the be-all-end-all of feminism ignores the fact that what causes rape is not ‘rape culture’ but patriarchy. (Or, more specifically, kyriarchy: the intersecting mess of oppressions under which we live that includes racism, trans misogyny, ableism, colonialism, and so on.) The thing is that no matter how many times you repeat that rape is about power, by focusing on ‘rape culture’ you keep the focus off of power structures and on individual acts of assault.

Focusing feminism on rape

centres the actions of one person against another person, rather than addressing systems that give certain classes of people power over others. Though talk of a ‘rape culture’ would suggest we are looking at systemic patterns, the way it is discussed focuses on changing an environment that encourages certain choices, rather than abolishing institutions that make such actions inevitable.

Women have been systematically dispossessed by institutions made up of powerful men, and pressed into dependent relationships with men due to economic need. Under a capitalist system that depends on a workforce that is desperate for cheap wage labour, social and legal frameworks were set up that made women responsible for providing male workers with comfort and pleasure at the end of the day – support and nourishment so the men can get back to work the next day. Relying on a strict gendered division of labour, these institutions also erased queer and/or trans* people’s very existence.

Although many of these institutions are currently undergoing transformations as other divisions of labour become more important, we are still very much living in their

wake. Rape must be understood as an inherent part of a hierarchical system that teaches us not to see others as equally human, treats human relationships as essentially transactional, and has for centuries operated on the understanding that certain bodies exist purely to satisfy the greed and desires of others.

Unfortunately, banning all the rape jokes in the world won’t change that.

Second, focusing on rape culture as the most visible example of women’s oppression ignores the many other ways that gendered oppression operates. A campus feminist movement that is profoundly upset at sexualized advertising but not at the administration’s attacks on salaries and pensions for MUNACA – a labour unit made up predominantly of women – is a campus feminist movement that is seriously missing something.

Feminists who can rattle off ten ways men can stop rape, but have never paid attention to the way our immigration and deportation regime hurts women and queer and trans* people of all genders might want to take another look at where the problems lie.

Finally, focusing on rape as the worst possible form of oppression perpetuates problematic ideas

about women’s sole virtue being their sexual purity. That is not at all to say that it is wrong to feel violated by rape or sexual assault, but that the obsession with rape as the most victimizing of experiences is problematic. Although for some people rape may be the worst thing that has ever happened to them, for others it is not, and perhaps we should start thinking of supporting all survivors of violence, whether rape or psychological abuse or systemic racism. This is particularly true given how commonly non-men are murdered by intimate partners, clients, or random misogynists.

While I share many of my fellow campus feminists’ desire to see the world free from oppression – including sexual violence – I suggest we take a look at the bigger picture to make sure our analyses and strategies for action respond to what’s really going on. Abandoning the simplistic framework of ‘rape culture’ is a necessary step in building an inclusive, truly transformative, feminist movement.

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

18

commentary

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

8AM classe$ are painful.

With an average student return of $1000, at least taxes are painless.*

$29.95 student pricing

& free SPC Card*

hrblock.ca | 800-HRBLOCK (472-5625) © 2013 H&R Block Canada, Inc. *Average is based on all student returns prepared at H&R Block in Canada for 2010 tax returns. The average refund amount calculated for students was over $1,100, cannot be guaranteed and ǀĂƌŝĞƐ ďĂƐĞĚ ŽŶ ĞĂĐŚ ŝŶĚŝǀŝĚƵĂů ƚĂdž ƐŝƚƵĂƟŽŶ͘ ΨϮϵ͘ϵϱ ǀĂůŝĚ ĨŽƌ ƐƚƵĚĞŶƚ ƚĂdž ƉƌĞƉĂƌĂƟŽŶ ŽŶůLJ͘ dŽ ƋƵĂůŝĨLJ͕ ƐƚƵĚĞŶƚ ŵƵƐƚ ƉƌĞƐĞŶƚ ĞŝƚŚĞƌ ;ŝͿ Ă dϮϮϬϮĂ ĚŽĐƵŵĞŶƟŶŐ ϰ Žƌ ŵŽƌĞ ŵŽŶƚŚƐ ŽĨ ĨƵůůͲƟŵĞ ĂƩĞŶĚĂŶĐĞ Ăƚ Ă ĐŽůůĞŐĞ Žƌ ƵŶŝǀĞƌƐŝƚLJ ĚƵƌŝŶŐ ƚŚĞ ĂƉƉůŝĐĂďůĞ ƚĂdž LJĞĂƌ Žƌ ;ŝŝͿ Ă ǀĂůŝĚ ŚŝŐŚ ƐĐŚŽŽů / ĐĂƌĚ͘ ^ƚƵĚĞŶƚƐ ƉĂLJ Ψϳϵ͘ϵϵ ĨŽƌ ŽŵƉůĞdžͬWƌĞŵŝĞƌ ƌĞƚƵƌŶ͘ džƉŝƌĞƐ ϭϮͬϯϭͬϮϬϭϯ͘ sĂůŝĚ ŽŶůLJ Ăƚ ƉĂƌƟĐŝƉĂƟŶŐ ůŽĐĂƟŽŶƐ͘ ĚĚŝƟŽŶĂů ĨĞĞƐ ĂƉƉůLJ͘ ^W ĐĂƌĚƐ ĂǀĂŝůĂďůĞ Ăƚ ƉĂƌƟĐŝƉĂƟŶŐ ůŽĐĂƟŽŶƐ ŝŶ ĂŶĂĚĂ ŽŶůLJ͘ KīĞƌƐ ŵĂLJ ǀĂƌLJ͕ ƌĞƐƚƌŝĐƟŽŶƐ ŵĂLJ ĂƉƉůLJ͘ &Žƌ ĨƵůů ƚĞƌŵƐ ƐĞĞ ǁǁǁ͘ƐƉĐĐĂƌĚ͘ĐĂ͘

Unfit to Print proudy presents

“THE 2012-2013 YEAR IN REVIEW BEST OF EPISODE” Looking back on a busy year, The McGill Daily’s one and only radio show and podcast brings you a retrospective.

Tune in to hear highlights from stories on: an obscure sensory phenomena called ASMR the puzzle of modern masculinity a phone sex operator explains why phone sex is like hentai and much, much more.

For children of colour who have attempted suicide Whom I talk about when I talk about writing

Ryan Thom Memoirs of a Gaysian

“This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. […] The dark, dark liver – love it, love it, and the beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart.”

Toni Morrison, Beloved Dear child of colour: It has taken a long time for me to learn how to love you.

You were born into a long line of hunger and secrets; to this day, you are still hungry, with your mouth full of silence and your stomach full of ghosts. I used to think it was impossible to love someone so hungry. You wanted so much, child of colour – a whole world that did not belong to you, a homeland stolen from you at birth. You wanted more food, more money, a house without rats and the strange smells of your parents’ foreign cooking. You wanted more than your share. You stared at the tiny, dustcaked television and dreamed of bluer eyes, whiter skin, blonder hair. You stared at the mirror and wanted a different life.

Child of colour, you were taught to swallow your wanting.

Someone slapped you early on and told you to move on, get over it, life isn’t fair, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Someone told you that it wasn’t your place to ask questions, demand answers, ask for more, fight back. You learned that truth and desire were punished. Head down.

Work harder. You learned to hide desire, your shameful hunger. What can’t be cured must be endured. You endured your ugliness. You endured your shame.

You endured wanting – always wanting – the wrong bodies, the wrong genders. You took what pleasure you could in silence, always afraid of being caught. You took what love you could get in silence, no matter where it came from or what you had to do for it.

Queer child of colour in a Western land, you will always be a foreign body in a hostile organism. The school, the workplace, the dance floor, the university, the street, are designed to purge your presence from their veins.

Illustration Carlyn Hopkins | The McGill Daily

This white country will feast on your body if you let it, will swallow you whole and demand that you give thanks to its throat.

Your protests are called insanity and your silence, complicity. Your compliance is mistaken for consent. Sometimes, even you forget the difference.

Child of colour, you are full of hatred and jealousy and rage.

Your belly is swollen with all of the retorts you have swallowed over the years to thoughtless insults delivered daily by both cruel and well-meaning white people. Your teeth are clenched around words you will never say to your parents. Your nails dig blood from palms of clenched fists that call, impotent, for justice, for militancy. You have wanted a revolution since before you knew the word. You want a revolution, but have no idea how to get there. You have no name for the future that you want. You have no memory of the freedom that you dream of.

I am learning to love your wanting and your hatred and your secrets, child of colour. I love your queerness and your darkness and your memories of shame. I love the stories you haven’t told. I love the defiance that is your survival.

I love your capacity for compassion, for sacrifice, which, like all of you, have endured. I love your

skin, your carnal wanting. I used to think you were ugly, child of colour, but am starting to understand that beauty is so much more than what you cannot have.

I want to wrap my desire and rage in words and wrap them around your hunger and fill that empty space. I want to love you through the mirror. I want to choose you – you – on the dance floor, want to find you in the hostile hallways of schools we defied all odds to get into, want to stand with you on the streets where we protested, begged, ran away, hid, bruised our knuckles, bled, sold sex. We are everywhere, child of colour. I see you.

Child of colour, I used to wonder if it was possible to love someone so hungry. I love you because you are hungry, and because I am. Our bodies come together to bleed colour into this white world, our wantings collide to make this place wider. There is a universe of stories in our intertwined mouths, a river of the homeland’s ghosts seeping from our flesh. Child of colour, I am singing your song.

Ryan Kai Cheng Thom is a child of many colours. They are grateful to The Daily for giving them this space, and to their readers. Contact them at memoirsofagaysian@ mcgilldaily.com.

commentary

19

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Letters Leacock’s provides a necessary and valuable source of ...?

Solidarity with survivors Dear Daily,

Dear Daily, Congratulations on your referendum win and I look forward to future issues. Regarding Davide Mastracci’s letter concerning the same, Mastracci should realize that Christopher Wang’s opinion and contribution are not worth any less because they appear in the pages of Leacock’s rather than The Daily. Likewise, mischaracterizing an episode at the Bull and Bear to unsubtly accuse its Executive Editor of racism and sexism does nothing to refute the observations he makes in that piece. I was surprised and dismayed that Mastracci felt the need to dismiss Leacock’s as vapid and incapable of meaningful analysis, the Bull and Bear as a haven of racism and misogyny, and the McGill Tribune as a lapdog for the McGill administration in order to celebrate The Daily’s referendum victory. Mastracci and his ilk regularly flood the commentary pages of The Daily with shallow but provocative pieces and interpret controversy as a sign of success in challenging “norms many do not realize they carry,” rather than a failure to start a constructive and necessary conversation on those topics. The patronizing, holier-than-thou tone found in those commentaries and mirrored in Mastracci’s letter make them more successful at drowning out the type of substantive investigative journalism, arts, and culture features that Mastracci might agree makes the paper valuable than actually moving campus discourse forward. There is no need to denigrate, disrespect, and dismiss other campus publications to appreciate The Daily’s unique contribution, and Mastracci would do well to learn this.

The Sexual Assault Centre of the McGill Students’ Society (SACOMSS) would like to express its solidarity with Landen Gambill. Gambill is a student at the University of North Carolina (UNC) facing an Honor Code violation, filed against her in response to her complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, alleging that UNC “has routinely violated the rights of sexual assault survivors and failed to assist them in recovery after the reported abuse.”

Earlier this year, Gambill made the very brave decision to file a formal complaint with her university against her rapist. For her decision to be met with possible expulsion and challenges brought to her by the university is atrocious. A survivor’s decision to talk about their experiences of sexual assault is that, a decision, and it is never necessary to do so. Once one chooses to share their experiences, however, it is crucial that they be met with support and belief, two sentiments absent from UNC’s reaction to Gambill.

Part of a university’s responsibility is to ensure the safety of members of the university community; this includes supporting survivors of sexual assault. Instead, it seems that UNC has chosen tactics of alienation and intimidation.

As a student-run sexual assault centre committed to offering support to survivors and their allies, we feel it is important to express our concern over the handling of Gambill’s experiences by her university and community. We wish to extend our support and solidarity with Gambill through this ordeal, and acknowledge her courage throughout this process.

Gambill deserves to be respected and believed, as well as to see this process end equitably.

—Casey Adams U3 History and Political Science

—Sexual Assault Centre of McGill Students’ Society

Some facts and some received truths Dear Daily, The story that appeared on Monday, March 25 (News, Page 3) in The Daily concerning Dr. Alexander Nataros contains misleading information and requires clarification.

In contrast to what is suggested in the article, the Family Medicine Program is not in danger of losing its accreditation.

In fact, the accreditation review completed last week was highly favourable, with specific positive comments about McGill’s efforts to provide an appropriate workplace environment for residents.

The Faculty of Medicine cannot comment on the details of Dr. Nataros’ case, due to privacy rules.

However, it is important to note that there are protocols in place to address these matters, to ensure due process and to protect all parties involved. These protocols, including the involvement of the Collège des médecins du Québec, were followed.

—Dr. Sarkis Meterissian Associate Dean Post-Graduate Medical Education Faculty of Medicine

Illustration Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily

Maybe it’s just a ploy for a game of extreme musical chairs...

Dear Daily, The Faculty of Arts at McGill is, like so many academic units in Canada, the UK, and the U.S., under financial and administrative duress – a situation worsened by the recent cuts in McGill’s budget by the provincial government. In order to address such exigencies, Dean Manfredi of the Faculty of Arts has organized an initiative entitled People, Processes and Partnerships, with a planning committee consisting of 75 members, 55 of whom are administrators, and ten students, leaving only ten positions for faculty members – a sign already that something is amiss with this planning.

The current planning group has proposed two scenarios to address the pressures involving limits of space and personnel faced by the Faculty of Arts.

Both scenarios are unacceptable according to professors across the Arts faculty present at an overpacked Town Hall meeting set by the Dean on Monday, March 18.

The two scenarios involve a first stage of extensive renovations to one Arts building (Leacock), with costs budgeted at approximately $2.5 million, and, far more worrisome for the long-term health of intellectual, pedagogical, and collegial life at McGill, the dispersal of certain departments (most notably History) and what the Dean calls the “clustering” of administrative staff – effectively their consolidation into group offices physically and psychologically separate from departments, separating them from the very programs they must help administer. The key difference between the two plans is whether chairs and the departmental administrative officers (AOs) will stay together in the department (with all other support staff moved away) or whether the chair will remain with the department and the AO go with other support staff.

Both of these latter scenarios would be catastrophic for the intellectual and pedagogical life of the students and faculty, as well as for the working environment of the support staff.

Before coming to McGill in 2010, I taught for six and a half years at the University of Manchester in the UK where I witnessed the short- and long-term financial, institutional, and emotional and psychic costs of just such an administrative reorganization (the key element being the consolidation of support staff and their removal from proximity with departments). I can attest to the absolute devastation wrought by this type of initiative on everything that is positive about working and learning in a university environment. Here are some of the costs of clustering and removing administrative staff from their knowledge base in departments: 1. Support staff become deskilled and disconnected in relation to what departments actually do academically, resulting in a loss of overall efficiency.

2. Support staff become isolated, alienated, and unhappy, leading to extremely high levels of turnover, and thus a loss of overall efficiency as well as a rapid lowering of morale.

3. With administrative staff moved out of departmental offices, students have no public interface, with disastrous effects on their feeling of connectedness to programs and departments.

4. In this situation, faculty members suffer because we end up being the only ones physically located in departments to answer questions and provide a public face for the department. Again, this creates a massive loss in efficiency (academic staff are by no means efficient sources for basic departmental or university information) and a parallel loss of the capability

of professors to pursue research, as well as a lowering of morale amongst professors and students.

5. Faculty members bear more and more of the brunt of the high turnover amongst support staff and the unhappiness among students.

6. Without departmental offices run by administrative staff, the department as a whole has no “centre,” and hence loses its intellectual identity and public face.

We appreciate efforts by the Dean and his committee to find solutions for the current retrenchments. However, if the stated goal is to achieve higher efficiency in departments and the running of our programs, then clustering and isolating administrative staff away from students, faculty, and departments as centres of learning is not the answer. To the contrary, such a restructuring destroys the unseen efficiencies of working in coherent communities aiming at achieving group goals, not to mention rapidly eroding morale and creating an unpleasant and alienating workplace for both academic and support staff, and hence a negative environment for students. By consolidating administrative staff and taking away their physical proximity within departments you remove the glue that brings us together as intellectuals and teachers, as well as eroding their job satisfaction by removing the direct signs of their contribution to departmental goals.

You remove the public interface for both faculty and students. Instead of teaching and research, faculty are left desperately trying to make up the loss of specialized and locally available administration staff; students suffer, support staff members suffer, research declines, and McGill becomes an inhospitable place to work and study.

—Professor Amelia Jones Grierson Chair in Visual Culture

20

commentary

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Remember what?

The importance of institutional memory in student politics Queen Arsem-O'Malley The McGill Daily

T

he movements that we remember are the movements that leave records. The student occupation of the Leacock building in 1968 spawned the film Occupation; the work done by Demilitarize McGill from 2006 to 2010 has been immortalized online.

Our administration banks on, and profits from, the fact that Student X does not remember most of the struggles of previous generations – the ones whose records aren’t so easily found. Student X is concerned with which classes to choose, because they don’t remember the series of cuts that led them to this narrow selection. Student X is concerned with saving money on their meal plan, because they don’t know the history of accessible and affordable student-run food on campus.

This is how the administration breaks promises, takes away autonomy, narrows choices, and revokes freedoms: because we never knew we had them in the first place. And if Student X learns this history, starts to organize, and tries to fight back, the administration can wait until they graduate and try again.

Years ago, McGill students had the right to use the McGill name.

They had groups that didn’t face regular existence referenda. Studentrun areas offered safer spaces for stu-

dents to study, eat, and most importantly, talk to each other on campus.

SSMU didn’t pay over $100,000 in rent to its own university. Senior administration positions were few, and Russian Studies majors enjoyed their own department.

Last year, an open letter to the administration regarding their treatment of the #6party occupation – a protest against the decision to void the results of the CKUT and QPIRG existence referenda – was signed by 157 alumni. A huge number of these signatories are former SSMU executives and councillors, faculty association executives, members of campus media, and leaders of student groups; in other words, the students on this campus who are closest to and deal with the administration the most. (14 of these signatories are former Daily editors, and more are former columnists and contributors, a fact that I am proud to note.)

“We believed that through dialogue and compromise we could work toward common goals. We acted in good faith and expected the same in return,” the letter read. Despite this optimism, these alumni wrote, “after years of fruitless attempts to engage meaningfully with the McGill administration, we realized that we were wrong.” Nothing has changed.

For student groups, services, and clubs, turnover is rapid – you’re lucky if you grab ‘em straight out of Frosh and squeeze in three or four years of membership. Leadership

changes annually, and living memory maybe stretches back for the last five or six years.

This reality is a nuisance for members and executives: when a problem arises, when a question of history is raised, the answer is buried in paperwork, yearbooks, or former members’ brains. Students’ collective lack of knowledge about our predecessors, and a faulty memory of our past, leaves us in danger of losing much more than just a history.

There are written archives – The Daily has 100 years of archives from a student perspective, most of which reside in our office. There are oral archives – faculty and staff on this campus have seen generations of students fight the same battles again and again. We need to utilize these resources, prioritize the development of a knowledge of the context that we are living in, and recognize the longevity of the legacy that we are continuing.

Grassroots organizers often talk about building support block by block, person by person. If we want to build a stronger campus and stronger student movements, we need to build memory – and understanding – year by year, movement by movement.

Queen Arsem-O’Malley is the Coordinating editor of The Daily. The opinions here are her own. To talk to her, reminisce with her, or offer her a job, you can reach her at qarsemomalley@gmail.com.

Illustration Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily

Surely you’re joking Physics class clown performs comedy set featuring misogyny, pedophilia Shannon Palus The McGill Daily

T

he emcees introduce Mike as the class clown — you know, that kid that’s always cracking jokes. Pulling up explicit images on his laptop while he’s sitting at the front of the class. That guy.

I am at the annual McGill Society of Physics Students (MSPS) talent show. We are at a bar, a handful of blocks away from campus. The night kicked off with a performance of the Red Shift Blues, which features department head Charles Gale and Dean of Science Martin Grant. But the adults are gone now.

As the class clown begins discussing an erection (his? I can’t remember), I pull my Android out of my purse and fiddle with the record function. The thing that now exists in my iTunes is 24 minutes long. Its contents mostly concern male masturbation, but it also – okay, this is your trigger warning – includes a hypothetical scene in which the speaker goes to a restaurant to shove meatballs up the asses of his

co-diners, in order to render their assholes bloody.

And a description of what Mike thinks of when he sees a cute girl: “Oooh booty. Oh, that looks good.

Oh those [synonym for breasts]. I want to put my face in them and – ” he makes a bububbbbb sound. “Look at her mouth.” Beat. “I want to put my penis in your mouth.’”

“Now you see exactly where I’m going,” he says. This is gross-out humour. This is Seth MacFarlane at the Oscars, less refined.

And then – a joke about a baby, the baby’s parents, and oral sex.

(The flimsy set-up: Freudian psychology is fucked up, because you know, kids love their parents.)

I am sitting at the front of the room. Mike’s followed his joke with the words, “it would feel good.” The two people sitting on either side of me are not laughing.

But, it seems, we are surrounded by laughter.

“I was just being me,” Mike tells me later.

In October, I wrote an article in The Daily titled “Fine men, sexist pigs”, (Commentary, October

11, page 7) outlining the chilly climate that I have experienced in the Physics department. Though condensed and exaggerated on the MSPS’s talent show stage, Mike is a prime example of the kind of behaviour that contributes to it, the kind of behaviour that objectifies women and trivializes sexual consent. This behaviour is not limited to McGill – following my article, I received many emails and nods of support from women (mostly women, anyway) outside McGill. Nor is it limited to the science and tech community – take Ayla Lefkowitz’s article on a rugby banquet last year (“Dresses, Drinks, Mysogyny,” Commentary, February 2, 2012) in which, among other things, the attendees sing a song that goes: “I wish that all the ladies / were like the statue of Venus / because then they wouldn’t have any arms… to shove away my penis!”

But the fact that rape jokes and objectification of women are in any way an acceptable part of the fabric of this community is not okay. I like this department. I’ve had a great time here. In retrospect, even the heavy workload was okay.

Chandra Curry, MSPS VP Academic, tells me over breakfast at Cora’s a couple days later that if people had been booing, she would have pulled Mike off stage (she didn’t hear the act, she was busy running the show). Mike had the support of the audience. The MSPS talent show committee had asked participants to submit proposals for their acts (no one was turned down); in attempt to draw a line, she had asked Mike specifically if he would say anything that would offend her. “My trust – mine, as well as [that of] the entire committee – went too far,” she said.

She gives me Mike’s name and number – I had known him as just, ‘one of the loud kids who is usually playing foosball’ – and tells him to expect a call.

“Jokes by definition should not be taken seriously,” he tells me. “If you are offended, I am sorry, but you should grow up.”

To say that jokes are not serious is a ludicrous statement. I love comedy and I will defend my half-hour of weekly Parks and Recreation time like my life depends on it. Comedy is a great part of our culture, not just

because it allows us to relieve mental burdens, lose our breath, and bond: it allows us to explore parts of our life that can feel out of reach in the realm of seriousness – from silly embarrassing moments, to, yes, even rape (see Lindy West’s “How to make a rape joke”). In Mike’s case, comedy seems to serve as a haphazard expression of his sexuality (masturbation), as well a as power play.

Much like sex, which runs the gamut from serious to funny, stressrelieving, to therapeutic – even in its most frivolous and fleeting expressions, never wholly meaningless – comedy can be wielded as an expression and reaffirmation of one’s power over others.

For Mike, all that nuance and respect for comedy just doesn’t exist.

“Is there any joke you wouldn’t make?” I ask him.

“One that’s not funny. If people don’t laugh, then I feel bad.”

He is planning on doing stand up again. He had fun. People liked it.

Shannon Palus is about to graduate with a B.Sc. in Physics. Reach her at shannon.palus@gmail.com.

commentary

21

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

The law on unpaid internships Frighten employers into paying you Josh Mentanko Commentary Writer

T

rolling through McGill’s Career Planning Service (CaPS) job database last week, I came across the perfect summer job. It involved research and writing on an interesting topic, and it promised the opportunity to work from home.

I get my best work done in bed, so naturally I was thrilled. Even better, the position resembled a job that I held last summer, until I noticed one substantial difference: it was unpaid.

We have all thought about working for free, even if we can’t afford to. Internships, long associated with glamour occupations in the arts or media, are now prerequisite for almost any entry-level position. Those who lack the cash to work for free in expensive cities scramble for a dwindling number of paid positions.

I am one of those scramblers, which is why I reacted so strongly to seeing my perfect summer job as an unpaid internship. It hit me in the gut. Just one year ago, I was paid to do a job very similar to it.

My living expenses haven’t gone away, so why has my paycheque?

The ubiquity of the unpaid internship is hard to overstate. From Kanye West interning at Fendi, to last summer’s ‘farmer interns’, it is difficult to find a field where some young sucker doesn’t toil away for no remuneration.

Cultural references to internships abound. On a 2012 episode of the Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert referred to “cotton internships,” alluding to another era where people did real work

for no pay. The comparison is exaggerated, and most critics would say that it leaves out the fact that today’s interns have a choice. Choice, however, is a slippery word in the context of precarious employment. If most interns had a choice, they would probably choose to get paid.

The law regulating internships varies from province to province.

Ontario has some of the clearest legislation on this topic. According to Ontario’s Employment Standards Act, for a position to be called an internship, the employer should “derive little, if any, benefit from the activity” and the employee should receive training “similar to that which is given in a vocational school.”

Last year, an Ontario court awarded settlements of around $10,000 to two former interns of a software engineering company. In Girex Bancorp Inc. v. Hsieh, the court held that “aside from a reference letter of dubious value,” the employer reaped all the benefits of the “voluntary trainee” labour.

Sound familiar?

The Canadian Association of Career Educators & Employers’ statement on unpaid internships, which McGill has endorsed, echoes some of Ontario’s criteria for acceptable unpaid internships. Despite this, a quick search on CaPS’ job database reveals postings for unpaid internships of dubious legality. Reference letters, networking opportunities, and yes, even “experiential learning,” are not acceptable substitutes for a living wage by any legal or moral standard.

A common counter-argument to the idea that people should be paid is that employers, particularly non-profits, cannot afford

Illustration Alice Shen | The McGill Daily

to pay their (young, temporary) employees. There is nothing unprecedented about the financial squeeze on non-profits and, while it is unfortunate, it is no excuse for making the opportunity to work at a non-profit the prerogative of the rich alone. The homogenous life experiences of people working in the non-profit sector are a real problem that the reliance on unpaid interns only exacerbates.

A good first step to navigating the rampant illegality of unpaid internships is simple: refuse to work for free. If the thought of demanding a paycheque makes you feel so weak, scared, and alone that you would rather work for free, then work away. Once you are finished volunteering your summer for an investment bank, do what the two young interns in Girex Bancorp Inc. v. Hsieh

did: complain to your local labour board. If there is anything encouraging about the legal situation of unpaid interns in Canada it is that there is nothing like the threat of a future lawsuit to make employers follow the law– and this time, the law is on your side.

Josh Mentanko is a first-year law student. Josh can be reached at josh.mentanko@mail.mcgill.ca.

The Human Rights Campaign logo Same-sex marriage is not a panacea Alex Cooper* Commentary Writer

I

am not a political radical. I am not seeking to tear down the establishment. And I am not, by any means, an activist. But I am a member of the LGBT community, though I do not choose to use any one of those labels – not because I feel any particular hatred for them, but simply because none of those words really describe me. I am quite the apathetic non-heterosexual, if you will. One thing has bothered me recently – the glut of profile pic-

tures sporting a red equals sign on a pink background (and all of the other colour combinations).

By no means do I not support same-sex marriage – there is simply no justifiable, secular argument that exists in opposition.

What I do not support, though, is the use of same-sex marriage as a rallying point, as a universal goal that all gay people are somehow striving for, or as something that can be obtained by changing your profile picture. No one is going to suddenly realize, “My god, I’m a homophobe! I suppose I really ought to change my entire set of social values,” because you

engaged in a piece of Facebook slacktivism (although, as I’ve said, I make no claims to be a great activist myself ). I appreciate your support, but you could do something better for me.

You could help me feel comfortable holding my boyfriend’s hand anywhere in town by not doing a double take when you pass us. You could not awkwardly look away when I kiss him. You could not equate homosexuality with certain political philosophies. This is the important stuff.

Marriage equality is not a battle to be won by the LGBT community, because most of the battle

is going to be fought after the fact.

Just because I can marry whomever I want doesn’t imply that I’m going to be treated equally in all other regards in my life – there is still going to be a struggle for total equality that will take multiple generations to resolve. I already feel socially accepted here in Montreal, and acknowledge that LGBT acceptance is greater here than elsewhere – in the U.S., for example. Change will not come from the courts: it is the societal change that has already taken place that has caused them to even consider the question.

So this is what I ask: support

this broad societal change. This goes for the LGBT community, as well, who often marginalize themselves through inaccessible ideology. Don’t assume you’re fighting a battle on my behalf, when really the accessibility of marriage is quite low on my list of priorities. Just continue to treat me like you would any other guy. Isn’t that what equality’s supposed to be about? *Alex Cooper is a pseudonym. Alex is a U1 Arts & Science student who is so much more than their sexuality. To respond, email commentary@mcgilldaily.com.

features

The McGill Daily Thursday, April 4, 2013 mcgilldaily.com

22

Compiled by Eric Andrew-Gee and Christina Colizza

I

An oral history of the 1968 Political Science student strike

Daily front page, Oct 4. Political Science was far from the only student association pushing democratization.

Arnold August, 1968 chairman of the PSA: “The late 1960s was ingrained in the minds of millions of young people in the world. We got a lot of inspiration from the United States, as well as Mexico, with the [Olympic] Games, where you had two Afro-Americans who won the Olympics and when they were given their medals they had their hands up [in the Black Panther salute]. These were the things that inspired us. Paris. The United States, where you had these massive demonstrations in front of the Democratic Convention, where hundreds of people were arrested. We were definitely conscious that we were part of the movement. It was in our blood at that time.”

September 27, 1968 The Daily reports that students are dissatisfied and are demanding that the Political Science department be democratized. They are seeking a “critical and socially relevant approach to political science.”

n November 1968, the McGill Political Science Association (PSA) went on strike. There were no political science classes for two weeks. Eventually, students occupied the fourth floor of the Leacock building; Leninist students had more control of events than tenured professors. The strike ended in an enduring student victory.

If it sounds like something out of another world, it’s only partly so. In 1968, there was a student strike contagion going around. French students almost removed the government of Charles de Gaulle in May and June.

Campuses across the U.S. roiled with protests against the Vietnam War. It did not seem strange for undergraduates to wield power.

In Quebec, the fever was as high

as anywhere. 15 of 23 Quebec CEGEPs were on strike at some point that year – Rendez-Vous ‘68, it was called.

McGill students responded late and partially to what was happening in Quebec. This pattern, like so much else involved in the 1968 PSA strike – the rhetoric of radical and moderate, the tactics, the narrative arc – will seem familiar to anyone who lived through last year’s student protests.

The resemblance is often uncanny.

We compiled a history of the 45-yearold strike from newspaper archives, interviews with faculty and students, and footage from a 1970 National Film Board documentary called Occupation.

The result will – we hope – provide perspective on the events of last year, and on where we stand as students today.

The Daily logo, stylish as ever. The paper also faced the same charges of left-wing bias as it does today.

Plus ça change.

October 11, 1968 Political Science students meet with faculty for the first time and faculty agree to consider a motion to at least “partially democratize the Political Science department.” Professor John Shingler suggests that student representation on committees would only add to the present bureaucracy.

October 18, 1968 Thus far, according to August, discussions with the department have not progressed. In a 164-6 vote, the PSA rejects the proposals on student participation made by the faculty. Later that week, three students make the rounds of Political Science classes, criticizing the PSA as a Marxist minority. The Daily reports that “in virtually every class, [the three students] were coldly received and their interpretation challenged.”

Sam Noumoff, McGill Political Science professor (retired 2005): “We had something called the Tripartite Commission on the nature of the university [between 1967 and 1970] – divided between administrators, faculty, and students.

The Commission met for months and months and months. And what emerged from that was a recognition that students had a right to participate in university life at an important level – at a policy-making, a decisionmaking level.”

Harold Waller, McGill Political Science professor: “The Daily then, and probably now, was very biased in one direction. With the exception of 1970, when Charlie Krauthammer [now a neoconservative columnist for the Washington Post and Fox News contributor] was the editor, then it was a very sensible newspaper. So The Daily had an axe to grind, and they were totally in favour of the students’ position and totally against our position. And therefore I don’t think the reporting was objective.”

October 1, 1968 The PSA issues a three-page manifesto in The Daily.

The manifesto calls for “change in political orientation of the University to one that is explicitly critical of the status quo.” Student Council member Harry Edel says PSA should “adopt the strategy and tactics of labour unions in negotiating.”

August: “I remember one article in La Presse and one article in the Gazette – [the mainstream media] barely looked at it. They pretty much ignored it. The fact that the main media virtually ignored, while The McGill Daily supported it – I think that’s fine, that’s perfectly normal.”

Michael Breecher, Political Science professor then and now

November 1, 1968 PSA and faculty meet in an open meeting in the Leacock building. August says, “by reorganizing the department, along functional lines, the faculty has maintained a façade of democracy while making most decisions in secret.”

Waller: “The PSA was organized and led by what I later understood to be Marxist radicals. One of them was Arnold August, who might have been the head of it. Arnold later became very active in the Communist Party of Canada, Marxist-Leninist, ran for parliament on that ticket.” [August ran for federal parliament as a member of the Marxist-Leninist party in 1979 and 1980; and then for the Quebec National Assembly on the same ticket in 1994.]

Noumoff: “[August] had this huge beard at the time.

And people with huge beards were looked on at the time as somehow demonic. But it was also part of the uniform of the period.”

features

23

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

The PSA votes overwhelmingly to strike in what seems to be the Shatner Ballroom.

J.R. Mallory, Chairman of the Political Science department

August: “In 1968, I was trying to find my way around politically. And then I read some passages by Marx, and then by Lenin, and then it clicked…At that time, 1968, I was not affiliated with any political party. There was a Students for Democratic Society at McGill – [Marxist political science lecturer] Stanley Gray was one of the leaders of it – I was part of that movement. We were basically leftwing people, for sure. We were against U.S. aggression all over the world – we supported Vietnam, we supported Cuba against the United States, we didn’t like the capitalist system. It wasn’t as sharp as one would have expected, but we were in favour of a new type of society that would be more appropriate for the vast majority of people.”

November 4, 1968 The Daily deems division between faculty and students “irreconcilable.” Chairman of the Political Science department J. R. Mallory says “hiring is a professional matter,” and that no students should be involved in the process.

November 7, 1968 The stalemate continues. Professors Waller, Breecher, Jackson, and Mallory form a commission on student grievances. August feels that the four were unlikely to be sympathetic to students.

Waller: “The essential demand was that students have parity in all aspects of department decision-making.

Which meant everything from curriculum to tenure decisions to hiring and so forth. And here I was, a young assistant professor, who had no power, and now the students want to take away half of the power. So I wasn’t sympathetic to that at all.

“I just finished grad school myself – I didn’t think I should be making decisions at the grad school where I was. I thought that would have been quite…presumptuous on my part. And I thought it was presumptuous on the part of the students. I thought the job of shaping the curriculum and deciding on standards and deciding who to hire, or who to continue or give tenure to or promote, were basically professional decisions and should be made by professionals.”

Secretaries fled the fourth floor of Leacock – students took to answering phones with “Political Science, occupied. May I help you?”

November 11, 1968 The Daily reports that 20 per cent of the Political Science faculty would support student parity in many aspects of departmental government. The other 80 per cent could not be expected to support anything more than the one-third representation on the curriculum committee and one-fourth on the “Section” committee, which had already been granted. PSA says faculty are offering too little, too slowly.

Noumoff: “I was in support of them throughout the entire process. And the reason is, I simply believe it.

Students are not just pampered, transitory members of the community. They have a stake in what goes on, in what is taught, in how it’s taught, in what the balance is in the department. Students are part of the community, and they should be respected as such, because, indeed, they have things to say which can be valuable.”

November 21, 1968 Faculty holds separate meeting to discuss their response to student demands. Students send all-dressed pizza to closed faculty meeting – faculty accepts alldressed pizza. Still, faculty insists “no compromise,” stating that student demands represent “beyond what has been conceded in comparable universities. They represent a radical innovation.”

Student prank or Daily in-joke? It’s not clear.

Waller: “I didn’t think giving them half the power over decision-making was appropriate, and certainly not to that group of students, who had an agenda which I didn’t agree with on substance. Their agenda was to promote a left-wing view of political science…and I certainly did not subscribe to Marxism. I felt there was a place in the department for teaching about Marxism. For example, Stan Gray was doing that.

But…I thought that the question of what you have on your reading list and what you should teach was a matter of your professional judgment, and it’s an invasion of academic freedom when someone, whether it’s students or departments or deans, tell you what and how to teach.”

November 24, 1968 In the face of the faculty’s refusal to compromise, PSA votes 319–179 to take direct action. 150 Political Science students occupy fourth floor of Leacock building after meeting.

One secretary fled, apparently intimidated by the students: “Students are occupying the building. I can’t take any more calls,” she said. Female PSA members began answering the phone: “Political Sciences, occupied. May I help you?”

A suspected “right-wing militant” tried to enter the fourth floor of Leacock later in the day; occupiers threatened to throw him down the stairs unless he left. “He left,” The Daily wrote. Three Montreal police officers also came to Leacock to manage an abortive bomb scare. A schedule of the day’s ad hoc seminars published in The Daily includes “Guerilla Warfare” at 10 a.m., followed by “The Correct Handling of Authoritarian Professors” at 11 a.m.

24

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Harold Waller, who still teaches at McGill, tried to hold a class during the strike. Picketers broke it up after a bitter shouting match.

John Shingler, once anti-strike, dramatically anounced his support for students at a PSA meeting on the fourth floor of Leacock.

August: “We made sure everything was clean, in terms of the washroom, in terms of the food, and everything like that; we took care of our own cleanliness.

We couldn’t leave the place because we didn’t want to give it up to the administration. So like any occupation, there are the normal difficulties of sleeping there. We had to have a basic, certain number of people who would hold the fort during the night. So we had to organize shifts for sleeping over. Organize food and coffee for people there. We would leave at 8 or 9 at night, so the shift that was sleeping over there would be from 8 to 9 to about 7 or 8 in the morning.

So it was a long shift – it was rough…people sleeping on the floor. I don’t think futons existed at the time – I think we based ourselves on old-fashioned sleeping bags…. Me personally, I wouldn’t say I slept more than three or four hours a night.

I would say the prevailing mood was excitement.

Because even though many of us, including myself, I wasn’t sure if [the strike] would actually work. When the strike vote was majority in favour, it was festive, because we sort of felt liberated…It was a very liberating feeling: here we are, going against the tide, bucking the status quo on a very important issue.”

Students slept in sleeping bags on the floor of Leacock.

November 28, 1968 Professor John Shingler declares unequivocal support for the strike. “There comes a time,” he said, “when those who have substantial positions of authority in institutions yield only under pressure of political demands.”

Noumoff: “At the time there was a lot of bile and a lot of anger on the part of the students.”

Waller: “A number of my students came to me and they said, “look, we don’t support this action, and the PSA does not have the right to impose a shutdown of classes on us.

If they want to stay home, that’s their business – we want to have a class, we want you to teach us.” There were about ten students in the class out of fifty or sixty or whatever.

So I was walking toward the classroom, and they were lined up behind me, following me. And we came to the door of the classroom. And there was a guy there from the PSA who was supposedly keeping people out. And I just kept walking. And he stepped back and I walked into the room and my students came after me. And we sat down in a circle, because it was not conducive to giving a lecture, and we started talking about American politics. And he ran back to strike headquarters. You know, “Waller’s teaching his class, we gotta do something.” So the whole crew comes charging down, they came barging into the classroom, with the [NFB] cameraman in tow, grinding away. They said “don’t you know that you’re not allowed to teach your class.” And I said “you can’t tell me not to teach my class. My students want to learn, I want to teach, that’s our business.” And then [PSA members] turned on the students, they put on the pressure, you know, “the collectivity has decided no classes, you can’t break the discipline of the collectivity.” Eventually they persuaded the students to leave. But they were putting very heavy pressure on them, which I would consider coercion.

They harangued them, they browbeat them – I don’t think they used physical force, but there was an implicit threat of physical violence I would say. Eventually the students decided they weren’t going to turf it out.”

November 25, 1968 Faculty agree to cancel all classes. PSA gains support from other student groups and associations. Some antistrike students try to attend class.

features

Not a particularly important player in negotiations – but how cool does this guy look?

August: “You had two positions there. One was the students who wanted to go back to school. They said, “I want my education, I want to go to school, I want to take my class.” While the other side, including a person who voted against the strike, we all said the decision was made in a general assembly of the PSA – the PSA voted several times in favour of the strike, and that mandate has to be respected…Now, the individual students, the I-want-myeducation types, in the spring 2012, as in the PSA strike 45 years ago…they were saying je, me, moi: me, myself, and I. It’s a very profound thing: whether you see society from the point of view of your own individual interests, or you see yourself as part of a society, as part of a movement that wants to improve the society. And that’s what hit me when I watched that movie 45 years later.”

November 27, 1968 Strike continues.

August: “[I said]: ‘No one’s gonna flunk: we’ll do our own papers, we’ll correct our own papers, our own exams.’ I was reacting to the faculty saying just before that, “If this thing goes on, you’re going to lose your session, and you’re going to lose everything.” When I said no one’s gonna flunk, if I remember correctly, there was a pretty strong round of applause. I think that was the main psychological, political obstacle that we overcame right at that moment, when we said, “No way, they’re not going to intimidate us into giving in.” That was the turning point.”

August: “[Shingler] contacted us. He said, “Look, I agree with you, I’d like to explain my position at the PSA,” and we said sure. And that’s exactly what he did.”

Noumoff: “John Shingler had been president of the white South African union of students in South Africa.

So he had been a student activist himself previously. He may have been tormented by it for a while, but I think he saw the historic writing was on the wall, and that it made sense to accommodate it.”

December 2, 1968 After three days without any negotiation, the occupation is one week old. The first round of student-faculty negotiations begin; they are filmed on CCTV for students to watch in the Adams auditorium. PSA demands onethird representation on departmental committees.

Harry Cowen, a student negotiator, calls the department “politically monolithic.”

“The arguments of the faculty are bankrupt and intellectually bankrupt,” said August. “Professor Nayar, your field is very important – political development – it encompasses a lot of people in the third world, and we know very well there are a lot of positions in the third world who are not of the orientation you have and the orientation you have in your reading list.”

Breecher denounced the students’ interrogation of professors’ political beliefs. “Those of us who have had the pleasure of living through the McCarthy era recall vividly the kind of television display in which individuals in universities were harangued but precisely for the opposite reason.”

features

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Students watching PSA-faculty debate in what looks like the Adams auditorium

August: “I asked the professors there, when we had that closed-circuit exchange, how come there’s no literature by Lenin in any of the books, when it could be interesting for students to hear what Lenin had to say about capitalism and imperialism. I was proud of myself when I saw that.”

December 3, 1968 Round two of CCTV negotiations; faculty refuses to concede regarding hiring and firing. Breecher: “Is a first year medical student the equal of a doctor?” Cowen quotes T.S. Eliot and John Lennon.

Professor Nayar speaks against the idea of racially specific teachers for certain topics: “[Mr. Cowen] says if we’re going to talk about black power, we should get a black person to come talk to us. If somehow blood is necessary for the communication of ideas, if that is so, none of the people in our department, except perhaps for myself or Professor Mallory who teaches Canada, and I who teach Asian politics, would be qualified to teach here. Mr. Noumoff wouldn’t teach his East Asian group – you should get a Chinese to come and teach it that. Or if it goes further, with Mao’s philosophy, somebody from Hunan.”

Allan Stanovici (PSA exec): “We’re all pretty well white, middle-class people, all within a certain mould, we’re all individuals within this mould – it’s very free and egalitarian. But it’s all within a certain context: certain people will come from outside this mold and we see very quickly how quick the reaction forms, how quick the shell closes.”

25

Left : Baldev Nayar, professor of Indian politics. Right : Arnold August, the Leninist PSA chairman. Nayar would become August’s Master’s supervisor.

August: “[There] was jubilation, because it was rough, and everyone was wondering, how long can we keep it up? We played their bluff; we stuck to our position that we want to be on the committee. It’s quite possible that if we did not win it, the strike might have disintegrated. It’s quite possible.”

December 5, 1968 PSA votes to end strike after ten days – but not before it had made clear that its drive for parity is far from over.

Strike officially ends at 2 p.m.

At the time, August said, “Victory for PSA. A turning point in the student movement at McGill.”

“Victory in that we weren’t totally defeated,” said Harry Edel.

August: “It wasn’t a celebratory party with beer or anything like that. It was handshakes, and hugging each other – “we won” and “classes are starting again.” It was relief that we won. If we wouldn’t have won, and been forced to go back to classes without that, it would have been very depressing. People were really tired – we hadn’t slept much, we had been occupying that place for a while. So we hugged, we were happy and all that, then people went home to try and recuperate physically.”

Noumoff: “It was a final vote within the Political Science faculty, with one vote against it, when it finally was resolved. And it was resolved primarily because one of the members of the department, who at that point was Associate Dean of the faculty, a man by the name of Saul Frankl – who was a labour negotiator – he came up with an argument that seemed to echo with many of the more conservative colleagues who didn’t want any change at all.

Saul said, “Look, you know how bureaucracies work, and you know how systems work. We all know this as political scientists. Well, I can assure you, when we let the students in, they’ll get tired, they’ll get bureaucratized, they’ll be sucked in to the system, and they really won’t be too much of a threat.” And that seemed to work with what I would call the recalcitrant members of the department...

While I didn’t welcome what Saul Frankl said, I believed he was right, as a lot of the history since then would demonstrate.”

Before they conceded, Harry Cowen delivered a speech to members of the PSA: “Once upon a time we would have been prepared to sit, like Estragon and Vladimir, on the cold moors of Leacock, waiting for Godot, listening in hope to the messenger who tells us that Godot will be coming not today, but tomorrow. But we are no Vladimir, we are no Estragon. We know that Godot never comes of his own accord, if at all.”

August: “I would say that the professor who most antagonized the students was Breecher – Professor Breecher, Michael Breecher. He was quite arrogant and he was obviously trying to divide us. Harry Edel said he’s trying to divide us and we have to be careful.”

PSA executives Harry Cowen and Allan Herscovici, relieved at the strike’s end.

December 4, 1968 Students accept one third representation on curriculum and section committees, less than the parity they sought but a big improvement over the lack of representation they had before.

Students vowed to keep fighting for parity as they accepted a compromise. In fact, student representation in Political Science remains largely unchanged from the settlement of 1968.

26

features

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Of mice and men The moral dilemma of animal research Text: Carla Green | Illustrations: Amina Batyreva

“

You never get used to killing an animal,” Hélène Ste-Croix told me. She said it sadly, almost defensively, as though she was worried I would think that she was used to killing. But it wouldn’t be surprising if I did: countless times during her career, Ste-Croix has killed animals that she spent time with and cared for, all in the name of science.

From 1995 to 2005, Ste-Croix worked as a technician at McGill’s Animal Resources Centre, and, like most of the people I spoke to who are involved in non-human animal testing, she’s a little touchy about it. “You learn not to bring it up that much,” she admitted.

McGill is no stranger to criticism over its use of animals in research. Ste-Croix was working here in 1996 when a group of activists demonstrated in front of McIntyre Medical building and allegedly tried to set the centre’s research animals free.

They didn’t manage to get into the building, but did break one of its windows, and, according to Ste-Croix, thoroughly rattled the staff working there at the time. “[Supervisors] told us to be careful and not advertise that we worked [at the centre],” she said. “When you work with animals, you always have to be aware of these things.”

The attempted break-in was part of the larger movement against animal testing in the nineties, much of which centered on McGill. As one of Canada’s biggest research centres, McGill is also one of the country’s most frequent users of animals as research subjects. In 2011, its labs and affiliated research facilities used a staggering 69,894 test animals, including 25,661 that were subjected to procedures McGill classifies as “invasiveness D,” or “moderate to severe stress or discomfort.”

Rebecca Aldworth, who is now the executive director of the Canadian Humane Society, was a Concordia student in the nineties and a member of the Concordia Animal Rights Association. She took part in the 1996 protest, and told the McGill Reporter at the time that she was upset when the win-

dow was broken, because the point of the protest was “to let people know we’re enraged...not damage things.”

“We want to expose [McGill] for the cruel and sadistic practices it allows and supports,” she said. ***** Fast forward almost twenty years. Robert Balk chairs one of McGill’s committees that assesses the ethics of animal research proposals. He remembers the 1996 demonstration well. “I guess I was more annoyed than anything else,” he recalled. “I certainly don’t think there’s any reason to be protesting animal research; each experiment has been reviewed very carefully, and the results have been beneficial to animals as well as humans.”

Nonetheless, using animals in research has long been contested, and historically, its divisiveness has sometimes led to more demonizing than constructive dialogue. This divide shone through when I spoke with Suzanne Smith, a former lab technician in an animal research lab, and the director of the Animal Compliance Office at McGill. When I was leaving her office after our interview, she stopped me at the door and asked, sounding disheartened, whether I was going to write “another negative article about animal research at McGill.”

“We try so hard to make sure the animals have good conditions, and then people go and write about us like we’re evil,” she said.

Jim Gourdon is a trained research animal veterinarian, and the director of Comparative Medicine at McGill. He, too, has had the experience of being stereotyped for his work with animals in research. “If you look at movies and at pop culture, the myth of the evil scientist is quite strong. It’s easier to convince people that there’s been an abuse of animals, even

if it’s false, than that we work really hard to take good care of the animals. Good news doesn’t make the headlines,” he said.

Along with Smith, Gourdon serves on one of McGill’s Animal Care Committees (ACC), which review all research proposals involving animal subjects, and have the power to veto or request modification of any aspect of the proposal relating to animals. The ACC were created in 1968 by the Canadian Council on Animal Care (CCAC) in an attempt to implement more oversight of the use of animals as test subjects. They’re made up of at least one researcher who uses animals, an administrator not involved in animal research, a veterinarian, a community representative, a student from any faculty, and a lab technician, and can include other members “as needed.”

Yet the structure of the ACC, and the people who serve on them, still trouble people like Liz White, a director of the nonprofit Animal Alliance of Canada. “Animal Care Committees are mostly staffed by people who are in research, and you usually don’t have a balance of opinion between people who support research and people who are opposed to it. If there were, there could be quite a vigorous debate about the kind of research that the committee is reviewing,” she said.

Even Smith admits that “every member of the committee must accept that, if there’s a strong scientific merit to the project, then it’s acceptable to sacrifice some animals to it.” For her, if someone is completely against animal research, “there’s no point in being a member on the committee.”

As evidenced by White and Smith, there seems to be a strong ideological difference between researchers and animal rights workers regarding the merits of research, despite a common concern for animal welfare. White further protested that even if members of the committee disagree with its final decision, confidentiality agreements disallow the public from hearing anything about it. “This is

features

a closed, encapsulated system, so that nobody knows what the debates or problems are.” ***** The CCAC oversees the use of animals in public, private, and university laboratories, including animals used for cosmetic testing. Cosmetic testing, which includes everything from skincare to shampoo to bleach, is considered to be separate from scientific research. It’s illegal in Europe, and does not happen at McGill. To give you a better idea about cosmetic testing, it involves tests like the median lethal dose (or LD50) test, which involves force-feeding a group of animals a certain product until half of them die from it, almost always after intense and prolonged suffering with no anesthesia.

Cosmetic testing, even among those who work with animals in research, is widely unpopular. “I find it totally irrelevant,” said Ste-Croix. “I think there’s no point in doing it at all.”

But when it comes to using animals for scientific research, the ethics become much more foggy. Is it okay to use animals for research when many of them are treated better than most farm animals? When the research might greatly benefit humans?

The CCAC is supposed to deal with precisely this problem, and ensure that animal research is carried out according to what they have dubbed “the three Rs” of humane animal experimentation: replace animals when possible, reduce the use of animals when not, and refine the process to “minimize pain and distress.”

Ste-Croix argues that the CCAC does a good job of making sure animals are treated well. “Everyone’s taking care of the animals and making sure that researchers use alternatives if they can. I just hope that people understand that we’re not a bunch of Nazis trying to torture animals.”

“Every researcher I talk to tells me they love animals – and I’m sure they do,” said White. “But when you have 1,300 mice for research, are you telling me that that researcher loves and cares for each mouse? I don’t believe all researchers are bad and I don’t think they all want to do bad things to their animals. But there is a systemic intellectual laziness about getting away from the use of animals in research.”

White and other animal rights activists also argue that the CCAC doesn’t do nearly enough to hold researchers accountable and reduce the use of animals in research.

“There is virtually no platform for transparency and accountability. There is no platform for discussion about the

27

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

ethics and morals of the use of animals in research, and there is no mechanism by which we begin to reduce the numbers of animals that we use in Canada,” she said. “The CCAC says they’re working hard to make change, but that’s just nonsense. We’ve been at them for ten years to try to get them to make a change, and they simply refuse.”

If there’s a lack of alternatives to animals as test subjects, Gourdon faults the government and other bodies that provide research funding. “Researchers will do research if you give them money,” he said bluntly. “Looking into alternatives for animal research isn’t an area that’s currently supported by granting agencies; there are some private agencies that will fund that kind of research, but it’s really marginal.” ***** Moral and ethical discussions of animal rights issues, from research to factory farming, often circle back to the concept of speciesism. Speciesism questions the very notion of there being a clear-cut line that we can draw between beings we call humans, and beings we call animals. As the argument goes, according to animal rights philosophers, the distinction is arbitrary since certain ‘animals’, like chimpanzees, have the same capacity for language and rationality as a human infant. Why don’t we test on infants? If we agree that this line is arbitrary, our treatment of what we deem ‘animals’ seems horrifying.

People who talk about speciesism use it to draw a parallel between our treatment of animals and the racism and sexism of human society. The analogy is that treating an animal as inferior just for being in the category ‘animal’ is the same as treating a woman as inferior just for being in the category ‘female’. It’s especially salient in the case of animal research, in which animals are used as surrogates for humans. While animals’ biological similarity to human subjects justifies the research, our perceived distinction between the two allows us to think it’s okay.

“The majority of people put the line between animals and humans, and I’ve accepted it,” said Smith. “If having all the benefits of research for my children means that some animals were involved in research, as long as they don’t suffer, I’m okay with [the fact that the distinction is arbitrary].”

And this arbitrary distinction tends to be the focus of arguments against animal research. Animal rights activists often use the example of pain research, which tends to be conducted on primates and necessarily involves the animals being in pain. The primates used for pain research make

good poster children for the cause, especially because pain studies rarely result in grand discoveries. To many activists, the end doesn’t justify the means.

“There’s research that I’ve reviewed that’s been ongoing for ten to 15 years, and not a published paper out of it,” said White, speaking generally about animal research. “What’s the point in treating all these animals as though they were disposable widgets for, apparently, the betterment of mankind?”

But let’s think about the example of mice instead of primates (and this is where the researchers find people hypocritical). Most people wouldn’t contest the usage of mice for cancer research. But if the question is of monkeys enduring pain, everyone is up in arms.

While we as a society don’t like to think about hunting endangered species, many people have no problem wearing leather or eating pigs. Animal research, on the other hand, might evoke images of a mad scientist performing vivisection on a chimp – something that would make most people squirm, ethically.

And this leaves us in a morally sticky situation. While one would hope the CCAC could work to be more transparent and develop alternatives to animal research, we can’t stop doing it outright. At least not right now. ***** Millions of animals every year are raised for the sole purpose of testing and scientific research, and many of them suffer greatly in the process. Right here at McGill, a portion of the animals used in research come from species, like macaque monkeys, that have been shown to be quite similar to humans, and, as far as we know, all animals used in research are capable of suffering. They are also all, necessarily, subject to conditions that would be considered unacceptable for human participants in research.

We don’t like to think of ourselves as complicit within a system that exploits animals. But most of the scientific benefits that we enjoy wouldn’t be possible without the suffering and death of millions of animals every year. How can we advocate for changes in animal research without acknowledging our own dependency on animal exploitation? We’re able to avoid this uncomfortable question because people like Ste-Croix end up doing the dirty work behind the scenes. “You shield yourself a little bit,” she said to me toward the end of our phone call, “because otherwise you’d end up crying everyday.”

health&Ed

The McGill Daily Thursday, April 4, 2013 mcgilldaily.com

28

This year in research at McGill Asbestos October 2012

HPV study January 2013

One of the most heated health issues at McGill this year revolved around the controversial asbestos study conducted by retired McGill professor John Corbett McDonald. On October 18, 2012, McGill cleared McDonald of any misconduct – the study was allegedly funded by the asbestos industry, and found no harmful effects from the asbestos studied.

But the study is still questioned by some. The controversy around this study affected the way that McGill viewed its education and research process. We, as students, should always be critical of what we learn and not assume that professors are infallible. This issue has sparked debates over reliability, accountability, and the way

In January 2013, McGill launched a study called Carrageenan-gel Against Transmission of Cervical human papillomavirus (HPV) infection (CATCH) to evaluate a new method of HPV prevention. A seaweed extract, carrageenan, has been identified as an inhibitor of HPV infections by the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.

The CATCH study involves the application of a Carrageenan in gelform as a personal lubricant before sexual intercourse, in order to prevent the spread of the virus. The plan is to recruit 465 women, who are sexually active and universityaged, to apply the gel before sex.

Half of these women will be given the Carrageenan gel, and the other half will be given a placebo. This study will show both the effectiveness of the Carrageenan gel in pre-

that studies should be conducted at McGill. McDonald deemed certain types of asbestos “innocuous.” Some types of asbestos have been linked to cancer. Asbestos industries have cited McDonald’s flawed study to promote asbestos usage. However, McGill investigators found “no evidence of scientific misconduct,” on McDonald’s part, according to the CBC. —Zoë Knowles

venting HPV and in treating existing infections. While a vaccine preventing HPV was released in the market a few years ago, it does not prevent all strains of HPV, which in turn can cause cancers in the throat, tongue, penis, vagina, vulva, anus, and cervix. If successful, the study will revolutionize the treatment of HPV, which is the most common sexually transmitted infection (STI), making this a very important study. However, the problem with the study is that is seems to be geared only towards cisgendered women, presumably those who are heterosexual. However, HPV can be contracted by any sexually active individual, including men, and the testing of this drug should be open to individuals of all genders and sexual orientations.

McGill researchers treat autism in mice November 2012

Promising multiple sclerosis treatment March 2013

On November 21, McGill researchers released a paper in Nature describing their success in inducing and reversing autism symptoms in mice, marking one of the first real steps toward treating autism. Researchers knocked out a specific gene in mice that was involved in regulating the production of certain groups of proteins.

Without this gene, they found an increase in production of these proteins, and the exhibition of autistic symptoms in mice. Using drugs that blocked protein production, researchers were able to successfully prevent protein overproduction, and reversed autism symptoms in these lab mice.

However, like many other animal

Successful clinical trials using bone marrow transplantation (BMT) were carried out in a small group of patient with Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Though a highly risky from of treatment, BMT has been found to be effective in preventing relapse in patients with MS. This study was based on immunological research at the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) and the Université de Montréal. The principle investigator of the study was Amit Bar-Or, a neurologist and researcher at the MNI and director of the Experimental Therapeutics

models of disease, it is not certain that this mechanism causes autism in humans. Additionally, autism may not always be caused by genetic mutation, and for such cases, further studies are required to gain useful insights and treatments. Still, this study shows that autism may be reversible, which could give hope to the millions of people worldwide affected by this disorder.

—Zoë Knowles

program – which, according to Bar-Or, is “a program that grew from [their] interest in trying to study the biology of a human condition by studying people with the human condition.” In particular, with a disease like MS where no real animal model exists, researchers are finding it more effective to study the biology of what is actually changing in the human with the illness, by assessing early phase clinical trials such as this BMT study in humans.

—Diana Kwon

—Sarah Fortin

health&ed

29

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

University’s attempt at energy reduction March 2013

Understanding the cultural impacts of HIV/AIDS in the Middle East March 2013 HIV/AIDS is a global crisis – over 34 million people are estimated to have contracted with HIV in 2011. This is a particularly large issue in the Middle East, due to the fact that HIV-related topics are a cultural taboo in this region, which leads to very few efforts in research, and a lessened chance of affected individuals reaching out for help.

Saoussan Askar, a graduate student in Sociology at McGill, is studying how HIV and AIDS is conceptualized and discussed

in the Middle East by conducting a discourse analysis of media outlets in these areas. Thus far, Askar has found little or no mention of safe sex or treatment of HIV, and an exclusion of the questions of why and how transmission occurs. The results have pointed to the need to address certain cultural taboos related to HIV in the Middle East in order to be able to provide better prevention and treatment measures.

—Diana Kwon

McGill has completed an array of projects aimed at decreasing its energy consumption and improving sustainability. McGill partnered with the Energy Management Group to make the University’s energy “more visible and easier to track.” The company has installed 400 real-time energy metres in seventy buildings on campus. The results from these metres can be accessed by anybody online at mcgill.pulseenergy.com. Projected energy savings from recent projects that involve “heat recovery from a data centre, a ventilation upgrade in a chemistry building, or upgrades to one of the library buildings, range from $100,000 to $300,000 for each project,” accoding to the group.

McGill has succeeded in lowering its greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent since 2002. While it may seem productive for McGill to

partner with an outside organization to help with energy needs, it would be worth looking at its own resources – staff, graduate, and post-graduate students – for help on these issues. One of the means through which McGill is doing so is by undertaking an applied student research project dubbed the “McGill Energy Project.” This project has allowed undergraduate students to build an energy systems map for McGill. It has also given them the opportunity to develop methods to forecast the university’s energy demand and optimize steam and chilled water origination. Involving undergrads is a good step on the university’s behalf, but careful consideration of background and experience should be taken before assigning these students to bigger projects.

—Ralph Haddad

Illustrations Hera Chan | The McGill Daily

Nanoparticles for brain disorders March 2013

The neurochemistry of music March 2013

Today, the number of Canadians affected by brain tumours and disorders, such as Alzheimer’s, are on the rise.

One of the main issues in terms of treatment for these diseases is that less than half of the administered dose of medicine contained in current drugs actually reaches the brain. Sebastien Boridy, a Pharmacology graduate student at McGill, is currently looking into developing the technology to administer nanoparticles into the brain. Nanoparticles provide a uniquely effective way of delivering drugs to the brain because of their specificity and improved penetration into target areas in the organ. These drugs

Daniel J. Levitin, a professor of Psychology at McGill, aided by his post-graduate research fellow, Dr. Mona Lisa Chanda, has discovered multiple benefits of playing and listening to music.

The effects of the latter on the reduction of pre-surgery anxiety were found to be greater than the usual prescribed pre-operation medication. Music was found to strengthen the immune system by increasing the number of important mucosal antibodies and natural killer cells. The research also showed that music plays a role in mood management and in human social bonding. On the topic of further research, the authors will examine probable

hold huge potential for the future treatment of brain disorders.

—Diana Kwon

differences between playing and listening to music, and found a correlation between oxytocin – the ‘love drug’ – group affiliation, and music, as well as the possible similarities in chemical pathways between musical pleasure and other forms of pleasure, such as sex and food.

—Julie Prud’homme

30

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

year in review

MOOCs

I

n late February, the McGill administration announced that the University would be joining edX, a consortium that offers what are known as Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The announcement, a month after McGill’s Senate was first informed about the possibility of MOOCs, caught many in the McGill community by surprise.

McGill won’t see MOOCs offered until 2014, and the question of whether or not participants will receive McGill credit for the online classes, as well as possible fees for the courses, is still up in the air. University administrations across North America have been joining various MOOC consortiums, and the technology has been a source of controversy in higher education circles.

Proponents say that MOOCs will make higher education accessible to potential scholars around the world, while detractors have argued that the technology threatens the livelihoods of staff and the very idea of the university. In March, Harvard

– which is a founding member of the edX consortium McGill joined – began offering its first online humanities course, the Ancient Greek Hero. Harvard said it would be asking alumni to volunteer as teaching assistants for the course.

At a following Senate meeting, Senators interrogated Provost Anthony Masi about how the decision was made, with Masi pointing them to a reference to MOOCs in the Achieving Strategic Academic Priorities white paper the administration authored back in October.

Senator Jonathan Mooney referred to the process by which MOOCs were decided upon as “not respectful of Senate,” and an “abuse of the process.” Masi told Senators that the decision to offer MOOCs was an administrative, not an educational, matter. He also told Senators that they would have a chance to decide on which courses would be offered in the years to come.

—Michael Lee-Murphy

Cuts to art classes

I

n January, Arts students found themselves faced with reduced course diversity for the upcoming academic year, after the Faculty announced plans to eliminate 100 courses. According to Dean of Arts Christopher Manfredi, the cuts – which represent 8 per cent of classes in the Faculty – have been discussed since September 2012.

The faculty emphasized that the courses to be eliminated would mainly be low-enrolment classes taught by full-time professors. This, Manfredi said, would allow those professors to teach larger lectures at the expense of the course lecturers that currently teach them. The resources saved in the elimination of these courses will be reallocated to the Teaching Assistants (TAs) budget, which would increase by 16 per cent.

The objective is to “increase the proportion of Arts courses and students taught by permanent, full-time faculty members,” Manfredi said in January.

Students were far from pleased with the decision, using a January 24 Town Hall held by the Faculty in conjunction with the Arts Undergraduate Society (AUS) to express their dissatisfaction.

Among the concerns were the lack of student input in the decision-making process and negative educational effects stemming from a lack of small courses. “[...] There’s no absolute correlation [between class size and learning outcomes], but the avenues with which you engage pedagogically with students are vastly increased when you have smaller class sizes,” said U3 Political Science student Lily Schwarzbaum during the Town Hall.

Manfredi explained that the changes were implemented following student consultation that called for more full-time professors, asserting that this would improve the quality of classes.

However, students and professors are stridently against the cuts, as they mostly target small classes. In addition, the move cannot be chalked up to budgetary concerns – the plan as constituted would not save any money. The move seems, then, to indicate McGill’s priority to get their professors to teach as many students as possible, regardless of the quality of the class.

—Evan Dent and Juan Camilo Velásquez

McGill’s search for a principal

A

McGill principal costs a lot of money – not only in terms of salary, but also in the long and drawn-out process required to find one. Last year, with the approaching end of Principal Heather Munroe-Blum’s term at McGill, the University began a costly search for a new principal. Suzanne Fortier, who will begin her term in September, was the Board of Governors’ (BoG) final choice – though that choice came after a lengthy process (with quite a few zeros on the end).

In March 2012, a 14-person advisory committee was formed, consisting of BoG members, alumni and Senate appointees, administration members, support staff, McGill Association of University Teachers (MAUT) appointees, an undergraduate representative, and a post-grad representative. That committee worked with Odgers Berndtson, a company that brands itself as “global leaders in executive search.”

From September 2012 to January 2013, Odgers Berndtson ran up a total of $178,690 toward McGill’s bill. While around $71,000 of that price tag went toward advertising – including ad placements in the Economist, the Globe and Mail, the Times Higher Education, and other publications

–­ the remaining bulk of the money went toward “consultative services.”

“Consultative services” can range from communications and liaisons with candidates to $12,000 “Executive Briefs,” according to invoices acquired through Access to Information (ATI) requests. Notably, the nearly $180,000 may not be the true cost – the number came from invoices published on McGilliLeaked that dated back to September 2012, several months after the search began. Furthermore, the true cost is not reflected as the search was still ongoing when these ATIs were provided.

According to SSMU VP University Affairs Haley Dinel, prior to hiring Odgers Berndtson, the advisory committee held approximately thirty consultations, and convened around twenty times throughout the 2012-13 school year. BoG had the final vote, choosing Fortier, a candidate perceived as politically friendly, considering her experience working with the federal government in research grants and her Quebec origins.

Now that the search is over, the only question left is: will she be worth the price tag?

—Molly Korab

sci+Tech

The McGill Daily Thursday, April 4, 2013 mcgilldaily.com

3i

Machines in the labour market Automation, welfare, and the demise of the human worker Kaj Huddart The McGill Daily

S

ince the industrialization of manufacturing, humans have worked in increasingly specialized roles, producing more and more value per worker.

Through the wars, the recessions, the bull runs, and the energy crises of our capitalist economies, jobs have been lost, created, and lost again. The rise of labour activism and collective bargaining raised living standards, and motivated factory bosses to consider workers’ welfare as well as sheer profits. In the mid-20th century, a strong manufacturing base provided Western workers with high employment, cheap consumer goods, and even a decent wage in a union-protected job.

In 2013, a couple of developments in the long history of manufacturing have changed this picture irrevocably. The real wage of the average American worker has stagnated for more than thirty years, while elites have clocked incredible economic gains. Much of North America’s manufacturing has long since moved to Asia – witness the demise of the local textile industry, once the lifeblood of Montreal neighbourhoods and small towns in Quebec’s southwest, now remembered only through abandoned red-brick factories scattered around Mile End. The union job and the middle class are in decline, a constant theme in the liberal press since the Great Recession five years ago. The Occupy movement came and went, failing to enact meaningful political change, but succeeding in imprinting the idea of the 99 per cent on the North American psyche.

Last year, a flurry of articles cautiously heralded a ‘return’ of manufacturing jobs from China to the United States. Most news outlets were prescient enough to note that the flow of jobs from China to the United States, if it can even be characterized as such, was a slow trickle at best. Then, in February, American television show 60 Minutes published a segment on “the jobless recovery.” According to an emerging body of economic research, jobs are returning to the United States, not to be worked by humans, but by robots.

60 Minutes interviewed two MIT professors, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, authors of a recent book, Race Against the Machine, in which they argue that ongoing automation in the American economy threatens wider income inequality and higher

Illustration Alice Shen | The McGill Daily

unemployment. Human organizations must catch up to technological change, or face obsolescence in the labour market, as increasingly complex and efficient networks of robots and computers protect corporations’ bottom line. McAfee and Brynjolfsson believe that by encouraging entrepreneurship and embarking on an audacious update of the educational system, we can help keep humans relevant in our processes of production.

Unfortunately, the effects of automation grow at the same pace as developments in its technology: that is, exponentially. Will entrepreneurship training and an overhaul of education really enable humans to keep pace with the progress of technology twenty, thirty, or forty years in the future? Race Against the Machine suffers from the same assumption proposed by Marxism, capitalism, and even good old Christianity: that it is necessary and good for humans to work.

Consider a world, decades in the future, where automation has replaced nearly all of the simple, mechanical jobs that are still tenuously held in America. Electricity is

generated from a variety of renewable resources, from hydroelectric dams to advanced nuclear fission and solar panels. People move about using driverless mass transit and automatic cars. Factories and warehouses produce goods without human involvement, aside from perhaps a few engineers who monitor the production. Hydroponic farms, with automatic irrigation systems, grow food under optimal conditions until robotic harvesters collect the ripe produce. Dairy cattle are raised in much the same way they are today: in “factory farms,” by the thousand, their udders connected to suction devices.

Whether this vision strikes you as a paradise or a dystopia, the technology already exists, and is being implemented increasingly in the world today.

Driverless transit systems are already in use in Vancouver, Tokyo, Singapore, and other modern cities. Google is testing a driverless, self-directing car.

Existing sources of renewable energy, though slow to catch on, must eventually be implemented, as oil wells run lower and carbon

emissions become a more pressing problem. Hydroponic agriculture is predisposed to automated processes; even outdoor farms are gaining higher yields through the use of GPS-coordinating robotic harvesters.

All of this bodes ill for the average worker. True, the “knowledge economy” won’t soon be replaced by robotic researchers, writers, or hi-tech entrepreneurs. But for the rest – skilled factory workers, drivers, agricultural labourers, clerks, and so on – the future looks bleak, if current political and economic conditions continue.

The only way to plan for such a massive shift in the economy is to reconsider our notions of employment, welfare, and the moral value of work. In a future where machines produce most of the value – in food, energy, transportation, and consumer goods – but where our current economic structures persist, not everyone will find a remunerative job. Full employment, a concept promoted in conventional economics as the sign of a healthy economy, will no longer be possible. The only morally acceptable alternative, then, is a

wide-scale form of welfare. Already in America, there is need for a much better system of redistribution, as evidenced by the fact that most of the U.S.’s economic growth over the past thirty years has lined the pockets of the rich and well-educated.

Unless we are content with a fundamentally inequitable social order, one that will inevitably be worsened by the progress of automation, a guaranteed minimum income is a future necessity.

Of course, the idea that a large portion of the population would be kept in house and home by the state is anathema to the traditional conception of capitalism. But as our economy continues to experience the radical changes wrought by super-efficient technological systems, we must reexamine what we consider to be an acceptable social order. Fundamentally, our notion of the “right to work,” at least insofar as it applies to creating value in a capitalist economy, should be replaced by more fundamental values: the right to be healthy, the right to spend time with one’s family, the right to experience art, and the right to leisure.

sci+Tech

32

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

What’s in a meme?

The racial violence of social media Caitlin Mouri The McGill Daily

T

wo men stand on a street wearing nothing but bras and women’s panties. One slaps the other with a fish then pours a glass of milk over his head.

“Thank you sir, may I have another,” the slapped man says.

This video is one of the many “trophies” posted on 419eater.com, a website that sees its purpose as exposing and shaming perpetuators of the “Nigerian 419 scam,” in which an individual receives an email informing them of a large amount of unclaimed money that can only be accessed with the payment of an advance fee. Members of the site, who call themselves “scambaiters,” obtain their trophies by pretending to fall for a scammer’s story. Through an extensive game of cat-and-mouse, they convince the scammer to provide proof that he or she is a real person by sending a very specific, usually humiliating, photo or video.

Nearly all of the images collected in 419eater.com’s “Trophy Room” depict black men, and some women, holding self-ridiculing signs or performing demeaning acts. One image shows a young black woman holding a sign that reads, “I will do everything that I am asked.”

This striking image inspired the title of Lisa Nakamura’s talk for the Art History and Communication Studies (AHCS) Speaker Series, delivered on March 14: “‘I Will Do Everything That I am Asked’: Spambaiting, Dogshaming, and the Racial Violence of Social Media.”

Nakamura, a professor in the

American Cultures department and the Screen Arts and Cultures department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, views the images on “scambaiting” sites, like 419eater.com, as digital-age expressions of racial violence.

In contrast, users view these sites as enclaves of vigilante justice.

419eater.com even goes out of its way to state that scambaiters do not target particular races or nationalities, but simply respond to whatever scam emails they receive. They estimate on their website that over 50 per cent of these scams originate from Western and Southern Africa.

The “Nigerian 419 scam,” a version of the centuries-old “Spanish prisoner” scam, was popularized in Nigeria in the 1990s. The fraudsters, motivated by political and economic unrest and a sense of entitlement to Western wealth siphoned out of colonial Africa, brought this scheme to the digital age. Today, the scam has gained worldwide notoriety, with perpetrators all over the world using outlandish tales of ousted politicians or deposed princes to con around $3 million a year out of their victims.

Despite the global nature of the scam, the images posted on scambaiting websites retain a racial dimension. Nakamura, who studies racial constructs online, noted that some images mirror primitive tableaus of “exotic” cultures, which were once used to illustrate ads and product labels. Other images explicitly degrade the scammer through acts of primitivism. They reduce cybercriminals to “professional savages,” performing for Western audi-

Illustration Akanksa Chaubal | The McGill Daily

ences as colonized people once did at exhibits and World Fairs in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Nakamura placed the images in the context of a larger culture of “digital pillory,” a form of public shaming that makes use of the internet’s inclination towards visual humour, as well as its reach and permanence. She pointed out a variety of trends – some harmless, some not – that have made viral rounds, including dogshaming, slut shaming, body shaming, and even child shaming.

In a world where individuals

communicate online by exchanging funny images, memes like this become rhetorical tools, which reinforce social attitudes. Yet, users who see scambaiting images on meme-sharing sites, like Reddit, often fail to see the images as racist. By placing these images in an intentionally humourous context, Nakamura noted, viewers are primed to see the images as funny.

Even as the internet becomes a central means for interaction, it is still often viewed as virtual in the purest sense; that is, what appears on the internet is not necessarily real.

However, in a society with increasing dependence on this digital method of communication, anything represented online has very real ramifications offline.

While the internet can be used to educate and inform, Nakamura concluded, “maybe some memes should die.” She ended the discussion on a positive note, however, remarking that memes can also be used to challenge attitudes. In one forum, for example, a user responded to a scambaiting meme with another meme: an animated gif of a child shouting, “That’s racist!”

The policy behind the homepage OpenMedia @ McGill promotes media literacy on campus Anqi Zhang The McGill Daily

F

or many, the internet is a free-for-all, a place where dialogue is unfiltered, information abounds, and entertainment is just a sub-Reddit away.

There has been much discussion of how information is transferred online, the implications of the virtual world on our real experiences, and the kind of discussions that are facilitated when individuals speak from behind screens.

However, there has been decidedly less coverage of the policies that govern our internet, cell phone, and technology use, though they are commonplace. For the majority of the public, most of this policy conversation goes unnoticed (except in cases such as the high-

profile SOPA/PIPA debate of spring 2012, regarding a proposed U.S. bill that was ostensibly created to crack down on online copyright infringement). Even within a highly connected population of university students, Stella Habib and Alexandra Esenler, club directors of OpenMedia @ McGill, realized that few think about “what’s dictating what you can or cannot do.”

Existing to promote “students’ interest in media, technology, and information policy,” the McGill chapter of OpenMedia was established three years ago, but had been largely inactive during its first two years of existence. Technically a branch of OpenMedia.ca, a non-profit that focuses on a broader range of media issues, OpenMedia @ McGill is largely independent, though they do have a representative to the parent organization. This year, it was approved for

full club status under SSMU, and has offered events and blogging opportunities (in both French and English) to its members.

In an interview with The Daily, Esenler and Habib emphasized the importance of having a club that specifically deals with issues related to technology use and internet policy. Esenler spoke about the goal of OpenMedia as one that “hopes to engage McGill students” in such a way that students feel “empowered” in the choices they make with regards to technology and improve their understanding of how internet policies influence the online experience.

The group seeks not to inspire, alarm, or deter individuals from online activities; instead, it seeks to promote discussion and debate about important issues. Habib stressed that “anyone can be interested in [media

policy]; whether you’re coming from a business background, social background, technology background, you can have a different stance on it. That’s what we’re trying to promote as a club.”

While promoting media literacy is the official mandate and major focus of the club, Esenler also stressed that she hopes to develop the role of the club in helping students interested in internet policy find internships. Both she and Habib are Communications minors, and they spoke about the lack of networking opportunities at McGill for students in the program.

Habib told The Daily that “people are like, I’m in Communications Studies, but what does that mean for the future?”

Though both Habib and Esenler are graduating and will be stepping down from their roles as club

directors, Esenler hopes that next year’s executive will continue to work toward providing opportunities for students interested in media policy issues. They also hope that OpenMedia can partner with other campus media such as TVM and CKUT, groups that they feel are “directly affected” by the policies OpenMedia is interested in, to raise awareness at McGill.

The world today is increasingly technological – and increasingly online. “It is important to think of the politics behind [technology] and…know your rights as a consumer online,” Esenler stressed. At a university where media literacy is not a major focus in program curricula, the importance of a club that allows students to explore and understand issues relating to media – particularly online media – is paramount.

sci+Tech

33

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Women in the (tech) world Examining the tech landscape for women in Montreal Diana Kwon The McGill Daily

M

ontreal is one of the growing tech hubs in North America, and the number of women joining the tech and startup industry is growing.

However, though the number of women entering this traditionally male-dominated tech sphere is burgeoning, there still remain barriers to establishing complete gender balance in these communities.

Those working in the Montreal tech scene generally feel it to be a woman-friendly environment.

Alexandra Ruaux, who currently owns her own web design and 3-D printing consulting company, Molecularcode Webdesign, told The Daily in an interview: “I’ve never felt being a woman has been a disadvantage...My actual experience has been very positive, and I’ve found balance to be very equal.”

However, she noted that there appear to be specific niches within the tech industry in which women work. “I know a lot of women doing all sorts of jobs, [but] there is a definite imbalance in the types of jobs.” Mathieu Leduc-Hamel, president of Montreal Python (a group designed to promote the use of the Python programming language and strengthen the developer community) and Mandy Poon, digital marketing consultant at w.illi.am (a company involved in cross-functional consulting and digital development), also commented on this imbalance in distribution. They noted that things like web development that involve so-called “hard-coding” are still very much male dominated. “[Once you] open the definition to public management and marketing, you will get more women, but there is some type of barrier that women don’t seem to be comfortable crossing in the field...We still have the image of the computer-related field as a male-centric industry.”

Additionally, almost all founders of startup companies in Montreal are male. Startups are companies in their initial stages of operation, designed to develop a new product or service. Though she owns her own business, Ruaux doesn’t consider it a startup company. According to her, “almost all startups [in Montreal] where there is more than one person was [started by] a male. I can’t think of a single startup that is owned by a female…though I know a lot of women who work for themselves.”

Besides these differences, women’s interest in entering tech can be strongly influenced during school.

The world of technology is one that is rapidly evolving and devel-

oping, and with that comes a creation of a wide variety of different types of jobs. However, though the tech landscape is changing rapidly, schools do not present all the jobs that are in the realm of possibility.

Poon told The Daily that she did not realize a career in public relations could involve tech. She said, “I feel that the problem might be that a lot of jobs in tech have changed in the past, say, four years, and it has changed so quickly that schools and the literature have not caught up…I graduated from a PR management program at McGill two years ago, but even then, I didn’t do a single course on digital technology.”

Neither Poon nor Ruaux started in tech – Poon studied political science and public relations, while Ruaux began her career as a biochemist. When asked how she got a job in digital marketing, Poon recalled that, “It was truly by accident, and I feel for a lot of people it happens by accident.”

Ruaux also admits that she “partially fell into it.” Though she originally came to Montreal to hold a postdoctoral position in biochemistry, she eventually decided to leave the field. While looking for job prospects, she began to design websites for some organizations.

When she realized she could make money doing this, she decided to create her own company.

This situation begs the question as to why there is a lack of women in these specific fields, even as involvement in the industry as a whole increases. An important consideration is the fact that men and women face different challenges. For instance, pregnancy and giving birth distinctively affect females. As a result, there are issues with stereotypes, expectation, and inequities in pay scale and time off in the workplace. Web development is something that still remains largely male-dominated, while areas involving social media (such as digital marketing and community management) find a large increase in female involvement.

“It might be things that women are less interested in,” says Poon, “...I feel as though women are less attracted to the role of development, one of those jobs where you are solitary and do a lot of work alone. A lot of women I’ve spoken to really enjoy the interactive aspect of a job, [and] you have things that are rising [for women] like social media.” Though varying interests may lead to the difference in distribution, cultural stereotypes affect the willingness of women to explore the predominantly male fields.

In Montreal, current efforts are underway to promote the inclusion of women in the tech scene – for women to explore and develop

Illustration Alice Shen | The McGill Daily

technology-related skills. Montreal Girl Geeks provides a platform for women to be trained and to meet other like-minded women, by hosting events and providing resources.

Additionally, other Montreal tech groups like Montreal Python hold women-only programming workshops. Hamel reflects that in previous years, the audiences at their programming workshops were composed largely of men; however, hosting women-only events allows for a safe space in which women can feel as though they belong.

They have found these efforts bring more women to their mixedgender events as well. “It made a big difference just to let them know it’s open to anyone…It’s a matter of making them feel like they belong,” said Hamel. In addition, women-specific events allow women to connect and support each other. “I think that the events made specifically for women are very effective, in the sense that you

are able to network with a bunch of people who have had the same challenges as you…and you want to be ensured that you will be in an environment where you know people will be supportive as to what you are doing,” says Poon.

Though the media often speaks of the lack of women in tech, it is not simply a numbers game.

According to Hamel, at the most recent Pycon (a conference that brings together Python users) the attendees were 20 per cent women – a big increase from previous years. However, despite the growth in numbers, there are still major problems that arise with regards to women in tech. Even in very recent news, we see incidents such as the uproar caused by a woman tweeting about two men making sexist comments at the Pycon conference, and an article released by Complex magazine depicting the “40 hottest women in tech,” that offended and infuriated a huge

number of women. The reality is, women still need to work harder to be taken seriously in the maledominated tech world.

However, the future does look bright. There are a large number of women in tech, especially in Montreal, and the numbers are growing – with the efforts of organizations to promote women-only events making a large contribution. The problem is not that there aren’t enough women interested in pursing tech careers, but that there is a need to learn how to cater to different needs and better integrate men and women in working environments. This involves keying in on people’s talents while providing opportunities to show them all the options. As digital technology develops there will be an increasing need for different types of roles, meaning that ultimately, diversity will play a crucial role in the development of tech.

SPORTS

The McGill Daily Thursday, April 4, 2013 mcgilldaily.com

34

Falling stock The troubling world of football scouting Evan Dent The McGill Daily

A

fter the Manti Te’o fake dead girlfriend scandal (I never get tired of typing out the phrase “fake dead girlfriend”) in January 2013 – perhaps the greatest recent instance of the mainstream media tripping over itself to chase a heartwarming story – many sports fans and some writers speculated that Te’o is gay, and his fake dead girlfriend was merely a cover.

This rumour, entirely speculative and created on the internet, was apparently convincing enough to lead a number of National Football League (NFL) teams at the 2013 NFL scouting combine to ask Te’o in private interviews if he is gay.

The NFL found itself in an awkward spot. Having just received a warning from the New York state attorney general that asking this question could be considered a discriminatory practice, the organization gently reminded the team’s managers that their prying questions were, in fact, constitutionally illegal. Te’o’s sexual orientation is none of their business.

As players are increasingly put under a microscope that disregards privacy and even decency, a disheartening pattern emerges. In an effort to make sure that their investments – the money a team will spend on a contract – are not wasted, scouting has become an increasingly problematic practice.

I’ll stop for a moment to explain the NFL scouting process, beginning with the combine. What began as a small get-together of scouts and players doing physical drills has, in the past decade, ballooned into a television spectacle.

Most of the draft-eligible players go to Indianapolis, where they do drills. Coaches, general managers, and scouts watch vociferously, stopwatches around their necks, clipboards in their hands. Every physical metric is meticulously recorded and put into a file on the player. In a drill such as the fortyyard dash – which has become the most famous drill, overhyped to the point of ridiculousness – the difference between 4.7 seconds and 4.4 seconds can mean millions of dollars.

Between these drills, the players are interviewed by the media, and then have private interviews with most of the teams. Players also take an intelligence test called the Wonderlic – but more on that later. This is all done to give teams a good sense of the personality of the athletes in

whom they might be investing millions of dollars. But, as the Te’o story illustrates, some teams have taken these interviews a little bit too far. Famously, in 2010, Miami Dolphins general manager Jeff Ireland angered prospect Dez Bryant by asking whether Bryant’s mother was a prostitute (after learning that his father was a “pimp”), and publicly apologized for the question after the draft.

What does an NFL team want from their prospective employees?

If possible, these 20- and 21-yearolds should have entirely mistakefree history – both on, and sometimes more crucially, off the field.

Among college-age men, a clean record is hard to find, as many have experimented with alcohol and drugs. These relatively benign slip-ups earn the players heavy questioning in the draft process, as teams try to avoid recruiting someone with ‘character issues.’

The suspicion and questioning is not netted out to each player equally. As pointed out in a recent Deadspin.com piece about white collegiate basketball star Marshall Henderson – who has a history of ‘off the court’ legal troubles, and after his last game walked off the court while flipping off the crowd – white players and players of colour have very different experiences after they make mistakes. The white player falls into a redemptive narrative; players of colour are more often cast out and made to suffer more. In short, a player of colour with ‘character issues’ is far more likely to fall in the draft – often costing millions of dollars – than a white player.

Too much personality is also seen as a bad thing. Two years ago, Cam Newton, a black quarterback, was castigated by certain sectors of the sports media for stating his desire to become an “entertainer and icon.” The reaction was as if he had publicly declared he would like to ignore football entirely and focus on personal fame. A year later, Robert Griffin III, another black quarterback, seemed to have learned from Newton’s blunder – he wooed the press with funny interview answers and cool socks, while carefully avoiding saying outright that he wanted to be famous.

Still, big personalities like Griffin III lose out when compared to someone like Andrew Luck, a white quarterback who was taken in the draft just ahead of Griffin III. Luck was a consummate professional, all business. He presented himself as a personality-less football nerd – someone who would spend hours in the film room as

Illustration Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily

opposed to, I don’t know, celebrity-ing – and was considered the safer pick over Griffin III. What about the Wonderlic test, given to every player at the combine to supposedly test theur knowledge? The test asks players to answer SAT-like math and reasoning questions in a short amount of time. The inherent racial bias of standardized tests has been wellcovered, but the Wonderlic raises an even more basic question: why on earth is it still administered?

How exactly is knowing when the two trains will meet at all related to being really, really good at football?

Reading a playbook and knowing what comes next in a pattern of numbers are, at best, spuriously related. And yet, every year, there’s a report of some highly touted prospect – almost always players of colour – scoring, out of a fifty-point scale, somewhere in the single digits. In draft season, this hurts the players’ draft stock. That’s right: a test tangentially related to the sport can have huge effects.

A draft in any sport should, at its base, be merit-based. A collegiate athlete’s production on the field, however, is often put in the backseat to ‘character issues,’ physical

‘measurables,’ and how well the player interviews. What do teams want? They want a football robot, devoted solely to the team, who won’t give the team bad PR. They want players to never make a mistake, and to always represent the team’s ‘brand’ positively. They want a guy comfortable giving blasé, clichéd quotes to the media day after day, not someone overly emotional.

A commitment to the team is valued above all – willingness to risk life and limb, and to not be too much of a celebrity. A safe prospect – that is, the best prospect to an NFL team – is not too human.

year in review

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

35

Demilitarize McGill

D

emilitarize McGill is a student-run organization that rallies against military-related research at McGill, and calls for more transparent and ethical research practices. Although the original Demilitarize group went dormant in 2010, students regrouped to resume their efforts last fall.

Demilitarize McGill reports that the administration denies the existence of any military research, and that because McGill has no policy regarding their ties to the military, there exists a lack of transparency and regulation. This lack of accountability is a fundamental problem that Demilitarize McGill wishes to address. In an effort to clarify the breakdown of funding for McGill labs, the group has filed a number of Access to Information requests. All have been refused.

Still, Demilitarize McGill believes labs consider war as an opportunity to field test their research.

Demilitarize McGill belives that the Shockwave Physics Group’s research on thermobaric explo-

sives spiked in the years leading up to the Iraq war.

The group also points to the Computational Fluids Dynamics Laboratory, which gets funding from aerospace manufacturers, and has developed anti-icing technology that is used on commercial, as well as defence, aircraft.

Ties to military organizations extend beyond technological development. The Political Science department has an ongoing collaboration with Université de Montréal, running an institute that is funded by the Canadian Department of National Defence.

The widespread lack of accountability regarding links McGill may have to the military is an ongoing problem that Demilitarize McGill seeks to confront. Through actions such as walking tours and teach-ins, Demilitarize McGill is working to spread awareness on this issue.

—Diana Kwon and Nathalie O’Neill

Plan Nord

T

he Plan Nord, announced in May 2011 by Liberal Premier Jean Charest, and rebranded “Le Nord pour tous” by the newly-elected Parti Québécois (PQ) in September, is a 25-year economic booster that will create 20,000 jobs per year in an expansion of mining, logging, and damming operations.

In terms of public investment and return, the Plan Nord is second only to Alberta’s tar sands; the government expects that it will bring in $14 billion over the course of the project. Environmental and Indigenous groups, though, have branded it an expedited marketing and political tool for global mining companies interested in extracting iron ore, gold, uranium, diamonds, and other natural resources from the territory of Quebec that lies north of the 49th parallel.

The project is expected to be carried out on 1.2 million square kilometres, a total of 72 per cent of northern Quebec, though the government has said that 50 per cent of this land will be protected.

Denise Jourdain from the North Shore Innu community of Uashat mak Mani-Utenam told The Daily in October that, according to her calculations, Hydro-Québec was paying each member of the community $1.25 a day for the next fifty years to “allow

SNC-Lavalin and MUHC

I

f any group has received unwanted attention this year, it’s the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC), an organization of McGill-affiliated hospitals, and one of the two largest healthcare institutions in Montreal. The centre is comprised of the Montreal Children’s Hospital, the Royal Victoria Hospital, the Montreal General Hospital, Montreal Neurological Hospital, the Montreal Chest Institute, and the Lachine Hospital. The construction of MUHC’s newest project, a $1.3-billion superhospital in NDG, in the west-end of the city, has been the subject of intense scrutiny, which only intensified after the 2011 revelation that C.E.O Arthur T. Porter had seriously mismanaged funds. He resigned shortly after.

The MUHC has a projected $115-million deficit. The Globe and Mail reported that the MUHC had paid close to “900,000 questionable and unauthorized” overtime hours since 2009.

Concerned about the deficit, the Quebec government named an overseer to the MUHC in December of 2012. The deficit was only the tip of the iceberg: this past November, two former executives of SNC-Lavalin, the construction company who was awarded the contract to build the

hospital under Porters’ tenure, were charged with fraud and the use of falsified documents.

The executives allegedly authorized $22.5 million in “irregular” payments related to getting the contract for a $1.3-billion hospital. Beyond the fraud charge, the Globe and Mail reported that SNC-Lavalin paid the $22.5 million to Sierra Asset Management – a bank run by Hermann-Josef Hermanns, a business associate of Porters’.

Last week, MUHC was criticized in an open letter in the Montreal Gazette from six physicians, who claimed the Centre had become “dysfunctional” and that the recent scandals affecting the construction had “significantly damaged the reputation that two centuries of work had so carefully achieved.” The physicians’ scathing letter further discusses how the superhospital will have less resources than proposed, and that the implications of these changes have yet to be addressed. Blame, according to the six, does not fall on Arthur Porter alone. Instead, they point to “a management structure completely unsuited to the supervision of gigantic projects” to explain the projects’ disastrous trajectory.

— Christina Colizza

them to destroy our rivers and pollute the air.”

In February, the PQ organized a two-day long Strategic Forum and trade show on natural resources, which provided networking opportunities for businesses and individuals interested in taking advantage of the large investments set aside for the plan. Both days of the forum were met with demonstrators who said the plan is extremely environmentally damaging. Some Indigenous groups said the plan appropriates Native land without properly compensating their communities.

“They’re clear cutting, they’re digging open mine pits where people are still living off the forest, and are threatening the life as we know it of future generations,” Yvan Bombardier, a member of First Nations community organization La Famille, told The Daily in February.

Real McKenzie, Chief of the Innu Nation of Matimekush-Lac John, insists that development plans must address social problems that disproportionately affect the Innu compared to the Quebecois population, particularly in the context of rapid mining development, saying “without the consent of the nations of Québec, the Plan Nord is a Plan Mort.”

—Farid Rener and Emily Saul

culture

The McGill Daily Thursday, April 4, 2013 mcgilldaily.com

Island in the sun Text: kaiva brammanis, celine caira, nathalie o’neill, hillary pasternak, bipasha sultana Image: amina batyreva

Osheaga

A

s this music festival nears its seventh birthday, it seems that the name ‘Osheaga’ has permanently entered Montreal’s music vocabulary and is now walking the fine line to becoming a summertime cliché. With the promise of offering a “world-class European-style” event, the Osheaga music and arts festival stands as the largest festival of its kind in Canada. It will be taking place amongst the stunning greenery of Montreal’s Parc Jean-Drapeau on Île Sainte-Hélène.

This year’s headlining artists span a spectrum of musical genres. From indie rock to hip hop, the 2013 lineup brings together numerous favourites from around the globe, making it surely impossible to see it all. Headliners include The Cure, Phoenix, Mumford and Sons, Beach House, New Order, Vampire Weekend, and Kendrick Lamar, with many more such as Florence and the Machine and The Weeknd likely to be announced in the coming weeks.

Fresh and local bands not to be missed include electronic music group A Tribe Called Red, who blend instrumental hip hop, reggae, and dubstep-influenced dance music with elements of traditional First Nations music, particularly vocal drumming and chanting. From the international music scene, Osheaga has plucked artists such as American rapper and lyricist Azealia Banks, England’s folk punk singer-songwriter Frank Turner, and Ireland’s indietronica group Nightbox. The festival also caters to those sporting a twin fetish, featuring the indie rock sister act Tegan and Sara as well as the electrohouse EC Twins.

With three-day festival passes starting at $235, and a range of corporate sponsors that reads like a brand-recognition eye exam (H&M, Bacardi, Coca Cola), this crown jewel of Canada’s mainstream-for-the-cool-kids music scene better deliver. Osheaga will run from August 2 to 4.

Piknic Electronik

E

njoy jamming to electronic beats? If so, keep your eyes (and ears of course) open for this year’s tenth edition of Piknic Electronik at Parc Jean-Drapeau. An electronic music fest that runs every summer from May to September, Piknic invites you to check out a host of DJs, both international and local, who play an eclectic array of beats every Sunday evening. Think of it as the warm-weather alternative to Igloofest, where you get to bask in the long-awaited heat of summer and admire a snow-free Montreal. And seeing as it’s a family-oriented event where all ages are welcome, kids, parents, and grandparents are all invited to jam along (granted, just how much fun they would be having is questionable).

Whether you’re done with school for the year, done for life, or have the misfortune of taking summer classes, why not kick start the impending warm season with a visit to Piknic?

Piknic Electronik will run from May 19 to September 22.

Tickets are $12.

MUTEK

O

n its website, MUTEK describes itself as an “international festival of digital creativity and electronic music.” The MUTEK festival will showcase “sound, music, and audiovisual art.” MUTEK aims to be at the forefront of innovation, supporting emerging voices and presenting festival-goers with unique audio and visual experiences. For its 14th edition, MUTEK will feature both local and international artists, from electronic stars to budding newcomers. The ‘mu’ in MUTEK derives from the word ‘mutation’, reflecting this festival’s effort to embrace and stimulate creativity. From house to IDM to instrumental hip hop, MUTEK spans a wide range of electronic styles.

Artists performing at MUTEK range from the straightdance-based DJs of yesteryear to more pop, funk, and minimal artists. Matthew Herbert, a British electronic musician, will be performing at MUTEK for the first time since 2005.

Herbert, as he’s commonly known, was a legendary figure on the 1990s house music circuit, and his set will likely reflect that. Jamie Lidell, whose output spans electronic dance and more traditional, vocal-based pop music, promises to be more conventionally accessible for those festivalgoers who aren’t as used to club settings. Andy Stott from the UK and Moritz von Oswald from Germany will round out the bill with their moody, minimal techno. With shows performed in larger venues such as Metropolis and SAT, MUTEK promises to facilitate the mood with immersive visuals and enthusiastic crowds.

Passes for the entire five days of the festival are $200, with weekend passes running at $120. This year’s individual ticket prices have not been announced, but will probably range from completely free to $40. Individual tickets will go on sale April 9. MUTEK will run from May 29 to June 2.

36

culture

Fringe Festival

P

opulism and the arts had a baby, and they called it the Fringe Festival. Created in 1947 by artists who, feeling they were being excluded from the Edinburgh International Festival, decided they were going to have their own party and none of you jerks are invited so there, this intercontinental phenomenon is now in its 21st year in Montreal. Artists from the worlds of music, comedy, dance, and theatre are selected by lottery (albeit a lottery slightly tweaked to favour Quebec artists), and given censorship-free run of venues in the Plateau Mont-Royal, Mile End, and downtown areas. This year Fringe will feature such colourfully-named acts as Fuck You! You fucking Perv! (a performance piece by artist Leslie Baker, involving confrontational tap dancing and off-colour humour), How to be a terrorist (a solo show by Jimmy Grzelak, which is about the Boy Scouts of America), and FASTER Presents: The Elephant in the Room (a “modern day musical fairytale”).

Prices will vary for individual events, but a three-day pass is available for $30. The Fringe Festival will run from June 4 to 24.

37

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Festival International Nuits d’Afrique

S

ince 1987, the Festival International Nuits d’Afrique has brought together the best of old and new musical traditions from across Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. This year, the festival will be taking place in venues dotted across Montreal. With a strong commitment to showcasing top artistic talent, the festival has brought together many of the world’s greatest and most passionate performers, enabling it to remain at the forefront of artistic creativity.

This year, the festival is offering a record number of 91 shows and workshops produced and given by more than 500 artists from 32 countries. Nuits d’Afrique is an affordable way to experience the music, culture, and personality of dozens of countries around the globe without the airports and jet lag.

The festival lets you pick and choose which events to attend, with packages of three shows on sale for $70 and five shows for $100. For those travelers on a tighter budget, the festival will also be offering a selection of free concerts between July 19 and 21.

Festival Transamériques

T

he Festival TransAmériques (FTA) describes itself as “multilingual, hybrid, [and] festive.” Combining dance, performance art, and theatre, often in a single performance, FTA evidences the collaborative potential of the contemporary art world. The FTA’s mission for community outreach means meetings with the festival’s featured artists, workshops, and free parties are also included in its programming.

FTA’s programming is not only entertaining, but often includes relevant social and political critique. Take “Dachshund UN,” a performance installation by Australian artist Bennett Miller, featuring volunteer dachshunds sitting at a model United Nations. Quirky, yes. But, according to Miller, also a representation of the interaction, unpredictability, and racial diversity of the actual UN. Or Johannesburg-based choreographer Robyn Orlin’s piece “Beauty remained for just a moment then returned gently to her starting position...” which offers a critique of South African society. Besides its inclusion of international artists, the FTA also showcases local talent such as Montreal performance artist Dana Michel, who will be presenting “Yellow Towel,” an exploration of stereotypes of black culture.

FTA events are mostly spread out across the Plateau MontRoyal and downtown area in venues including Monument National, Centre Phi, and the outdoor Place des Festivals.

Some of the shows can be pricey, with tickets up to $60, though festival-goers can purchase packages at discounted rates. FTA runs from May 22 to June 8.

38

culture

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

The Act of Killing Mise-en-abyme cinema and the Indonesian Massacre Lilya Hassall Forays into Film

T

hus far in my column, I’ve mostly written about dusty old films that were released, quickly shelved, and remembered only by a select few. Usually, I live my adventures through the forgotten stacks of film history, but sometimes I get sick of endless Google goose chases for obscure films that nobody else gives a shit about.

This week, being one of those times, I decided to do my column the old-fashioned way. That’s right, folks, close those gaping mouths: I actually went to a movie theatre.

Luckily for me, last Thursday was the most recent installment of Docville, a monthly series of documentary screenings hosted by the Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM). The film screened, The Act Of Killing, was a remarkably unique documentary filmed entirely in Indonesia.

Largely made under rookie director Joshua Oppenheimer, but executive-produced by cinema heavyweights Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, the documentary focuses on Indonesia’s traumatic past and present collective memory.

The film follows Anwar Congo and a few other men who were involved in the government-sponsored massacre of communists that occurred between 1965 and 1966.

Previously, Indonesia’s President Sukarno had maintained power by forming a tenuous alliance with the Indonesian Communist Party against the right-wing military. In September of 1965, however, the assassination of a number of generals was cast as an attempted communist coup, and the military soon began a campaign to exterminate all communists in Indonesia. By 1967, somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 alleged communists had been murdered, and the ICP was all but gone.

Congo explains that in 1965 he and his friends were promoted from “cinema gangsters” who made their money scalping movie tickets to paramilitary executioners. Over the next year, Congo brags, he personally ended more than a thousand lives.

The film, which tells the unique story of a few in order to ask far-reaching questions about life, death, and human nature, has strong thematic similarities to Herzog’s other non-fiction work.

Like Herzog’s Into the Abyss, for example, a film about men on

death row, The Act of Killing looks at life through the eyes of those who kill.

Oppenheimer’s film, however, is far more bizarre than Herzog’s typical creations. For one, rather than holding Congo and his fellow thugs accountable, the present Indonesian government celebrates the men as heroes.

Indeed, the corrupt totalitarian regime enshrines the extermination of communists as a glorious moment in Indonesian history.

The state repression remains so intense, in fact, that most of the Indonesian members of the film crew appear as “anonymous” in the film’s credits to ensure their identities are protected.

Even stranger than the Indonesian celebration of mass murder is the film’s structure, which, as one critic put it, seems like a “throwaway gag from a postmodern novel.” Rather than simply interviewing the former paramilitaries about their past, Oppenheimer asks them to engage in their own filmmaking process and re-enact their killing for him.

The men decide to recreate their murders in the style of the classic American films they once sold tickets for, and the generic tropes for Westerns, film noirs, gangster flicks, and even musicals, become the structuring elements for the restaging of a genocide.

Many of the men’s conversations about their past occur on set during their re-enactments.

Preparing to shoot, so to speak, the men stand around in cowboy hats, 1940s-style double-breasted suits, and bikinis, boasting about how many people they killed, and the ages of the young girls they raped (14 being the most desirable age, according to one).

Congo also describes how he and his friends would go see Elvis movies and dance straight from the cinema to the paramilitary office down the street where they suspected communists were being interrogated.

“I’d give the guy a cigarette,” Congo describes, “I’d still be dancing, laughing . . . It was like we were killing happily.”

Make no mistake: this is no Ken Burns history lesson. Rather than delivering a fact-based account of the horrors that took place, the film explores uncomfortable questions about the relationship between film, history, and personal experience.

Most importantly, perhaps, the film asks how to locate personal morality and guilt in a world that has gone mad. Congo, despite the government’s celebration of his actions, is plagued by nightmares

Illustration Catherine Polcz | The McGill Daily

and second thoughts that worsen with the re-enactments. His friends, on the other hand, ostensibly feel no guilt: it’s just a “nerve imbalance,” they tell him. “You are haunted because your mind is weak.”

One of Congo’s guilt-free pals, Adi Zulkadry, justifies his actions by noting, with disturbing accuracy, that “‘war crimes’ are defined by the winners . . . I’m a winner, so I can make my own definition.” Zulkadry points the finger of blame back toward America when he notes that “when George Bush was in power, Guantanamo was alright. The Americans killed the Indians,” he continues, “has anybody been arrested for that?”

The doc also explores the bizarre role of American film in real-life violence, and the per-

formative nature of killing. Most unnerving, perhaps, is Congo’s boast that he borrowed execution methods directly from violent American flicks. The thugs’ choice to re-enact the murders in the style of classic American genres is thus disturbingly fitting.

American culpability in the genocide extends far beyond its cinema, as the CIA has admitted that, in 1965, they supplied the Indonesian military with names of communists to murder and allegedly provided them with the funding and training to do so.

The film emerges as a disturbing and disorienting mise-enabyme of historical reality, collective memory, personal experience, and cinema. Refusing the audience any simple access to

truth, The Act of Killing interrogates the documentary genre’s claim to reality, and is the most important piece of non-fiction cinema I’ve seen in years.

Don’t take my word for it though – Morris and Herzog became the film’s executive producers only after they saw, and were blown away by, Oppenheimer’s finished product.

Herzog, upon viewing the film, said, “I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade,” calling it “unprecedented in the history of cinema.”

Lilya Hassall is a U3 Cultural Studies student. Forays Into Film is a biweekly column about alternative films. Email her at foraysintofilm@ mcgilldaily.com.

CULTURE

39

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Illustration Akanksa Chaubal | The McGill Daily

Maybe the guy in the tinfoil helmet has a point Bigfoot, zombies, and the search for truth Elena Dugan Archiving the Arcane

A

bout a year and a half ago I attended UnCon, a convention in London held by the ‘offbeat’ (read: occult) magazine, the Fortean Times. There were people wearing tinfoil hats, and multiple presentations on searches for famous cryptids (creatures whose existence is rumoured but not confirmed – they almost found them, they swear). A couple months ago, a professor of mine (an ordained minister/spitfire) asked me why there were so many zombie shows on television, and why the next big movie was Warm Bodies, the zombie movie filmed partially on the McGill campus.

Believing in ghosts, zombies, and your friendly neighbourhood monster is backward, isn’t it? Stories of Bigfoot, the Yeti, the Chupacabra, hauntings, spirit possessions, and séances – all are shams, the tools of charlatans and con-artists, traps set for unsuspecting marks or the mentally weak. We know enough about the world that these supernatural phenomena are improbable to the point of completely impos-

sible, and it’s conspiracy theory to entertain seriously the idea that they might exist. Just like the markings on medieval maps “Here be Dragons,” we have explored and claimed enough of our planet to be able to debunk factual aberrations of this scale. We may find a new snail in the Amazon, but a nine-foot bipedal mammal wandering around in Oregon? No dice.

I think that it’s generally a bad idea to assume that cultural phenomena catch on because people are stupid, or are easy marks. The people at this conference were not all frizzy-haired basement dwellers throwing their money at spirit mediums. There were some academics, notably one man presenting his currently-quite-popular book The Psychopath Test, in which he concludes that many corporate CEOs have psychological profiles exhibiting psychopathic tendencies. Also notable was a medievalist presenting illuminated drawings of Blemmyae – monsters with no heads and their faces on their bodies. Presenters considered their work to be a concerted rejection of a body of scientific and cultural beliefs, and an effort to explore their limits. As one Yeti hunter put it in his presentation, “the rule is that you search for the

unknown. It doesn’t say, ‘only if you find something.’”

The first part of this rule is second nature to any scientist who has ever dissolved into rapturous visions of discovering a cure for cancer, or a new element. The second part often gets ignored.

Isn’t our acquisition of knowledge, our search for the absolute truth of the universe, moving toward a definite goal? Aren’t we all Stephen Hawking, trying in our own small way to find the simplest most elegant Theory of Everything? You have to find something to justify the search. There must be some determinate ground upon which to stand, or at least to hope to stand upon.

Erwin Schrödinger’s famous cat in the box thought experiment illustrates the principle of uncertainty, that there are some things we can never know, and that there is a necessary limitation on our physical knowledge. Since we cannot observe it, and cannot collapse the wave of probability to one particular state of being, we must consider the cat in the box to be both alive and dead (though as author Neil Gaiman points out, if no one opens the box to feed it, it will be two kinds of dead).

Uncertainty and indeterminacy

seem built into our physical and intellectual universes, but still with limits. No ghosts! No dragons! Absolutely no Yetis!

I am not saying that the Chupacabra is roaming St. Urbain, waiting for us to sacrifice some goats (the panic in Mexico in the 1990s was probably caused by a roaming herd of coyotes with mange). What I am saying is that this obsession with liminality, the indeterminate, uncertain, and cloudy areas of possibility is not constricted to the academic enterprise. A man in the audience with a truly prolific white beard at the UnCon responded to a presentation on canaries and voices of the dead, “We are practiced Forteans, and we are able to live with uncertainty.” U3 Philosophy majors at McGill are not the only ones who have realized the character of the universe.

So why are there shows about zombies? Are they fodder for the degenerates of the world to craft their voodoo beliefs, and ironic pleasures for the enlightened? Or is there something about a zombie, a creature not-alive-nor-dead, something that subverts our expectations of the very nature of ‘creature’ and of ‘entity’. I recently read a Jacques Derrida comic book (I refuse to read his

notoriously confusing actual writings, as I presently wish to retain my will to live) that uses zombies to express the horror of indeterminacy. They poison systems of order, and must be removed, but you cannot kill the undead, you cannot eliminate the elusive.

Zombie movies generally rely on magic, or some sort of superior power, which will come in and reverse the living-dead phenomenon, making the zombie either a dead corpse or a living being.

Without this superpower, zombies are still an active and present threat.

Warm Bodies will show zombies roaming the McGill campus, but don’t we already have our own nonfictional zombies roaming our intellectual landscapes? Indeterminacy is threatening, and so we attempt to put limits even on the limitless.

We are comfortable with a supple, subtle, and probabilistic physical and philosophical universe driven by embracing indeterminacy as the condition for the possibility of possibility itself, but we draw the line at biology. Or do we?

Archiving the Arcane is a column about religion and myth in the modern world. Elena can be reached at arcane@mcgilldaily.com.

40

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

culture

Gratuitous everything Sherwin Tjia’s button-pushing short stories Farid Rener The McGill Daily

S

herwin Tjia enjoys pushing people to a point just outside of their comfort zones.

The creator of the Strip Spelling Bee, Slowdance Nights, and the Cardboard Fort Night, Tjia, a former Daily contributor who also writes, paints, and works at McGill, seems to take pleasure in putting people in awkwardly sexy situations, and watching what happens. Tjia – a connoisseur of three things (French fries, pantyhose, video games) and a collector of one (small black dresses) – launched his book, Serial Villain, which was released last fall, on March 21 at the MainLine Theatre.

The cover of Serial Villain advertises “A Dozen Thrilling Illustrated Tales!” below an image of a busty, blue-eyed, red-lipped, gun-toting blonde. This is almost exactly what you will find inside – the stories are all parodies of the thriller genre, and as Tjia put it, are written in a “glib, ramshackle, free-flowing, very straightforward” style. His sentences are short. There is an abundance of exclamation marks. There is gratuitous sex. People get shot! It’s certainly gripping stuff.

In reality, there are only eleven thrilling, illustrated tales, because the twelfth, a story about two boys who are obsessed with carrying out the “Ultimate School Shooting,” was a little too distasteful for Tjia’s publishers at Conundrum Press. Tjia can be a funny guy, if you think things like going back in time and having sex

with Hitler’s mom are funny. In one of the stories he had tried to find a noncliché way of saying “he knew the place like the back of his hand,” and came up with: “He walked unerringly through the dark room. He knew the place like the tip of his dick.” But in the end this was edited out. “My publisher had a different idea,” Tjia said.

“He thought this was really terrible.

In all truth, he was right. I read the story again, and it kind of stuck out.

Like a penis.”

Many of the stories in this collection of “short stories for mature readers” are about control. From a character who goes back in time to kill Hitler, to a hypnotist who has programmed his wife to have the “Best and Most Intense” orgasm of her life whenever he says “dinosaur stew,” I can’t help but see these tales as a reflection of Tjia’s own control fantasies. Of his events, he says: “I have a lot of fun, because people are doing crazy shit I ask them to.

Look at Strip Spelling Bee: I’m getting drunk, I’m being paid, people are taking their clothes off for me, and I’m the only one who can take pictures. This works for me.”

This is reminiscent of one grim scene in “The Best and Most Intense,” the second story of the collection, in which a hypnotist fantasizes about hypnotizing 15 people into having a group orgy, or maybe committing suicide. While this may make Tjia seem slightly perverted, pushing people to their limits in his events also gives him the opportunity to empower participants to explore another side of themselves. “I want people to feel like they have control. There are rules in

Photo courtesy of Sherwin Tjia

place. It’s like a board game where you become this person you aren’t normally. What I want to do is give people a very precise gap to jump through… but you can jump through it however you want,” he said.

Because the characters in Serial Villain use each other to further the plot, there is a lack of intimacy between them. “You can accuse this book of being Hollywood schlop,

where there is a plot, and the people are just pawns inside that plot.

You are so busy cramming the story in that there is just no room for too much quiet time or intimacy,” Tjia told me.

Unlike Tjia’s other work, where he seems to be sensitive to the dangers of portraying gender stereotypes, he doesn’t use the parodying nature of Serial Villain to subvert the

usual roles that women play in pulpy thriller novels. When I mentioned the word ‘gender’, he looked at me sheepishly, and said, “I don’t feel like I’m always going to be an angel in my writing. I do have strong women characters. I know in my next book there will be strong women characters. …People make things, and they don’t always make good things. You can’t always be an angel.”

Corruption is the new norm for politics But is Quebec more corrupt than other provinces?

Charlotte O'Neill Culture Writer

Y

ou don’t have to look too closely to notice the cloud of corruption hanging over Montreal. Every day, the Montreal Gazette, La Presse, Le Journal de Montréal, and Le Devoir add revelations to the increasingly complex web of corruption in Montreal’s city hall. The Charbonneau Inquiry, a provincial-level investigative process that welcomes the media, has so far led to the downfall of the mayors of both Montreal and Laval.

Trust in the government is low even by local standards, as fraudulent links between government and organized crime are revealed to an increasingly cynical population.

With government corruption in mind, The Daily caught up to Professor Marcel Danis, a member of Concordia’s Political Science

Department since 1968, who currently teaches the courses Governance and Organized Crime and Public Policy and Corruption. From 1984 to 1993, he was an elected member of the federal parliament, serving in a variety of roles, including Minister of Labour for the Conservative Party. In an interview, Danis shared his thoughts on the existence of a culture of corruption.

In media in the Rest of Canada (ROC in local parlance), Quebec tends to be portrayed as Canada’s outlier, the crooked brother surrounded by a family of legitimate and lawful provinces. However, Danis was quick to debunk this stereotype.

“It may seem like that,” he explained, “but I think the reason is simply to do with the number and quality of investigative reporters within Quebec.” Le Journal de Montréal’s investigative unit is headed by Andrew McIntosh, who also works as an investigative reporter for the Montreal Gazette.

According to Danis, these two publi-

cations’ organizations are the leading investigative units in the province.

Apparently, the anti-corruption investigation resources employed by these newspapers exceed those of any other publications in Canada.

When corruption claims hit the media, Danis explains, the government acknowledges them, investing in fixing the issues. In response to the high amount of coverage corruption has received in Quebec, the government created an arms-length anticorruption investigative commission, and a new permanent chapter of the provincial police dedicated to rooting out graft. In Danis’ view, once a process such as the Charbonneau Inquiry is created, corruption is bound to be detected. He claims that Canada’s other provinces do not possess such an active investigative media, allowing corruption to go undetected.

When asked what, in his view, was at the root of corruption, Danis definitively answered that “the cause

is always money.” Greed is something that tempts individuals from all positions in society, from lawbreaking corporations to corrupt public servants.

However, according to Danis, problems of corruption are more prevalent in municipal governments, arguably because politicians and public servants at the municipal level have more opportunity to engage in corruption.

According to press coverage over the last couple of years, Mafia-linked construction firms are a local phenomenon, existing in symbiosis with politicians at city hall who hand out contracts in return for lucrative kickbacks.

“The Mafia is definitely involved,” confirms Danis, “particularly in Montreal, where it has been able to corner the market and block others from getting [municipal construction or repair] contracts completely.”

Danis believes that the solution to our culture of corruption lies in the hands of a new leader. “We need someone who is going to come into

the city and clean it up,” he explains.

“Montreal corruption has existed for a long time, but it doesn’t mean it has to take a long time to solve,” Danis believes. It simply boils down to ruthless non-acceptance.

Whether there is any truth to the idea that the rest of Canada is as corrupt as Quebec, it is indisputable that in Quebec, and particularly in Montreal, corruption is extremely visible. The perception of government corruption is an increasingly central characteristic of Montreal culture.

There is a common saying that “the fish rots from the head,” implying that society is held back by the greed and incompetence of its leaders. If the lawlessness among bureaucrats and elected officials that exists in Montreal is ever to change, it must begin with an indisputably honest and fair government setting the right tone. Perhaps, then, we should be looking beyond the usual suspects at the ballot box to demand real change.

year in review

41

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

the spvm and protesters

T

his year has seen an intensification of police repression in Montreal. Municipal by-law P-6, which was enacted at the height of the Quebec student movement against tuition hikes in May 2012, requires that routes for all demonstrations are submitted to the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) at least eight hours in advance. The by-law also makes it illegal for protesters to cover their faces with masks, scarves, or other pieces of clothing. Last year, even after the by-law was adopted, demonstrations that were declared illegal were allowed to continue without police intervention if no criminal acts were committed.

Police now use P-6 to declare protests illegal minutes after they begin, and to justify detainment, arrest, and ticketing of demonstrators – including members of the press. A ticket for a first offence costs $637, a potent deterrent to participation for those who cannot afford them. The police crackdown has contributed to dwindling numbers at recent protests, like the roughly 200-person March 22 demo that last year numbered over a hundred thousand more. This use

of preventative force has recently intensified; the Montreal Gazette reported that in a two-week span in March, the SPVM arrested more than 650 people at only three protests – one third of the total arrests made throughout more than 700 tuition-related demonstrations from February to September of last year.

This heavy legal hand is accompanied by a large police presence at protests – sometimes outnumbering protesters – as well as threatening rhetoric. “The Charter [of Rights and Freedoms] protects the right to freedom of expression, but there is no right to protest,” SPVM spokesperson Jean-Bruno Latour told La Presse in French.

P-6 has been denounced by students, human rights scholars, and the Quebec Bar Association – which represents the province’s prosecutors and lawyers – alike. Opposition continues with demonstrations, vigils, and denunciations in the press. It remains to be seen what the cost of the controversial by-law will be to freedom of expression – and to the Parti Québécois government.

—Nicole Leonard and Dana Wray

idle no more

T

he roots of the Idle No More movement spread deep into Canadian history. Our government is, and always has been, a colonialist power, under which the Indigenous populations of Canada have long suffered. This past October, omnibus bill C-45 was introduced to Parliament, inciting four Aboriginal women to begin a campaign calling attention to the abuses of the rights of Indigenous peoples in Canada. In the months that followed, teach-ins, flash mobs, marches, as well as highway and rail blockades were staged across the country, as well as globally (South Africa, Australia, and several countries Europe all staged protests of their own). As a result, the movement garnered a lot of media attention as well as an explosion of reactions and support on diverse social media networks. Chief Theresa Spence became a poster woman for the movement after beginning a liquidsonly fast in protest, with the goal of obtaining a

meeting between Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Governor General David Johnston, and Aboriginal leaders, to discuss C-45 and Indigenous issues more generally.

Though Idle No More encompasses a wide range of issues, C-45 remains a focal point. The omnibus bill contains sweeping series of legislation changes that would strip away environmental protection laws and allow the government easier access to protected Indigenous lands. It does this by altering laws such as the Indian Act, Navigation Protection Act, and Environmental Assessment Act. Packaged as the Jobs and Growth Act, C-45 uses the rhetoric of job creation and economic vitality to disguise a greedy and exploitative agenda that undermines Indigenous land rights and increases the access of businesses to Canada’s resources.

—Kate McGillivray

montreal infrastructure

M

ontreal is crumbling, and has been for a while. Falling bridges and potholes may have been prominent news in the city for the past few years, but this year, McGill felt the effects of poor infrastructure directly as a deluge swept through campus for several hours on January 28, in the iconic event now known as “the McTavish flood.” The surge, originating from a burst water main at the intersection of Pins and Dr. Penfield, caused damage to the downtown campus currently valued at several million dollars – a figure that, according to Principal Heather Munroe-Blum, could rise.

While this is not the first water main breakage affecting McGill in recent memory – a burst in the McTavish Reservoir in September 2011 caused a similar flooding of lower campus – it has caused the most extensive damage, and is a prime example of the pervasive frailty of Montreal’s infrastructure.

Much of Montreal’s current structural problems can be attributed to rushed and unreliable construction in the 1960s and 1970s, in preparation for the Montreal Expo and Summer Olympics, as McGill professor of Civil Engineering Saeed Mirza told the Montreal

Gazette in February. Though attempts to rebuild bridges such as the Champlain and Mercier have been made, as well as an attempt to repair the Turcot, they have been met with numerous barriers – both financial and otherwise.

Claude Dauphin, first vice-president of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) and the mayor of Lachine, estimated in a recent interview with the Gazette that to bring Canadian infrastructure up to acceptable levels will require $123 billion. However, the Parti Québécois unveiled one of the smallest infrastructure budgets in years on March 27, with plans to allocate only $5.6 billion over the next two years on the province’s roads.

Additionally, there are no guarantees as to where Harper’s government will spend the $53 billion earmarked for infrastructure over the tenyear period set to begin in 2014. The program outlined in the federal budget targets Montreal directly with millions for the Champlain Bridge reconstruction project and repairs to the Mercier Bridge, but has been characterized as “a small first step.”

—Emily Saul and Anqi Zhang

42

culture

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

(TED) Talk to Me Intellectual porn for the middle class

Illustration Julia Boshyk | McGill Daily Anqi Zhang The McGill Daily

T

he TED Talks app on my smartphone goes unopened for months at a time; it has blended into the background image surprisingly well, given that its logo is red and white, and my phone’s background is blue. And yet I don’t consider it a candidate for removal; it has survived several app purges, and I can’t quite explain why. You see, I have a somewhat distraught relationship with TED – I like having it available, but have come to hate using it.

I was first introduced to TED somewhere around the tenth grade. At that time, it seemed the peak of intellectualism, far more relevant than the basic functions we were taught in math, or the names and shapes of clouds taught in science. It was learning, we thought, without tedium or coercion by way of grading. In other words, it was the ideal learning experience, and that’s why we liked it. But if we had been just slightly more honest with ourselves – something quite difficult for tenth graders to do – we would have admitted that we liked

it because it made us feel smart, like we were beyond the grind of high school.

This phenomenon – the drive to partake in something because it makes you feel smarter, or like a better person (even if doesn’t actually improve you in any way), is what TED relies upon to keep afloat its brand, its talks, and yes, to sell its $3,750 to $7,500 event tickets.

TED describes itself as devoted to all “Ideas Worth Spreading,” having broadened its scope beyond the original Technology, Entertainment, and Design fields from which it takes its acronymic name. Its cultural cachet, though, extends far beyond ideas. Watching TED Talks is a means of accruing cultural capital – twenty minutes and you come away with one more topic you can pretend to know something about. This type of cocktail party education is exactly what draws viewers into the fold, promising to deliver bitesized pieces of knowledge that can pave the way to the top of Maslow’s hierarchy. But if the talks are steps toward self-actualization, the elite annual events form the peak of the hierarchy itself. As quoted on the TED website, event attendees have called it the “ultimate brain-spa.”

Holding the same kind of cultural – and social – value as a spa experience reflects the elitist nature of the events themselves.

There are certainly valuable things on TED – off the top of my head, I can recall Jill Bolte Taylor‘s story of how she consciously witnessed her own stroke, Isabel Allende‘s exploration of feminism and creativity, and Luis von Ahn’s discussion of the power of largescale online collaboration. But for every Allende, there is a Cameron Russell, telling us that though she makes money as a model, “Looks Aren’t Everything.” For every Bolte Taylor, there is a preachy platitude about being beautiful, about making the most of our time, about being the best we can be (see Elizabeth Gilbert’s talk on how we all have a little genius in us). For every truly unique story, there is a twenty-minute lecture that pats you on the back for learning an elementary-school-level moral lesson rather than imparting you with useful adult knowledge.

And yet we are all drawn in by TED’s promise of earthshatteringly bright speeches – myself included. Though my scrolls through the list of TED talks in search of enlightenment

are becoming increasingly infrequent, I do find myself drawn at times by a prominent neuroscientist exploring the search for consciousness, or the visualization of global poverty statistics to debunk stereotypes. But more than this, I am drawn by the big names, the names of leading intellectuals I can drop while talking to friends.

And against my best judgment, I also feel the urge to appropriate the knowledge available on the TED platform to elevate my own perceived intellectualism.

The extraordinary stories TED uses as its selling point exist not because of TED, but because they belong to extraordinary people.

Their stories would still exist without the events in Whistler, San Diego, or New York, and they may well still be easily unearthed.

Though TED does provide a platform, we cannot attribute any of its amazing content to the organization; it’s simply a launchpad like any other. And while its online platform – launched in 2006 – is accessible to all with a web connection, the elite events – pinnacles of all that is TED – are not nearly as open.

After a TEDx McGill event in 2011, I wrote about the selection

process for speakers, in which the event organizer told me that speaker selection was based on personal connections with organizers rather than name recognition. While TEDx, created to give communities “TED-like experiences at the local level,” is just dissociated enough from TED to be labelled ‘independent’ (though there was a situation recently where TED exerted its power to shut down talks it deemed illegitimate at a TEDx West Hollywood event), its tone varies little from that of its parent organization. Like TED, it selects the stories they want to bring to the forefront based on some hardto-define notion of what is interesting and valuable.

TED’s mandate is fundamentally inspiring, professing to believe in the “power of ideas to change attitudes, lives, and ultimately, the world,” but its curatorial position and exorbitant fees create an elitist atmosphere that is more focused on developing individualistic cultural cachet than enacting real change. As a result, TED’s mission is diluted to the point where it might be more accurate to see it as celebrating the “power of ideas – for those who can afford them.”

CULTURE

43

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

Disorientation in neon and concrete Laurent Grasso’s Uraniborg Bipasha Sultana The McGill Daily

I

magine waking up and finding yourself in the middle of a dark, shadowy maze of narrow corridors, lined with open rectangular windows that section off mysterious rooms that are luring you to enter. That’s one way of describing the experience of walking through Laurent Grasso’s latest exhibition, Uraniborg, in the Musée d’art contemporain.

The entire exhibition is unique in that it is architecturally structured to resemble a labyrinth of multi-media artworks, ranging from 17th century European paintings to 20th century photographs and more recent video installations. As I was directed to the second floor of the museum, where I was told Grasso’s exhibition would be displayed, I hopelessly searched the entire floor for a couple of rooms with Grasso’s works on neat display.

As one of the security guards led me past a few of these conventional display rooms (albeit, featuring other artists’ works), he halted at the sinister, poorly-lit entrance of my destination, and with a smirk, informed me that finding the exhibition and navigating through it wasn’t easy.

Reflecting back, I find it telling that the security guard behaved almost like a gate-keeper, a common trope in old legends, because Grasso’s exhibition captures the very essence of delving into a myth, where our sense of spatial and temporal orientation dissolves into irrelevance.

This is emphasized by the ostensibly

deliberate omission of information cards that are usually placed next to museum artworks to inform the viewer of the title, date, and medium of the work they are observing.

Take the video installations as an example. On Air featured footage, mainly in extremely wide shots, of a near-deserted location in an unspecified desert occupied by vast dunes of rubble and dirt. The tiny bodies of vehicles and people that move amidst the space are mere specks – it is the dunes that command our attention.

The Silent Movie is a video installation that explores a large military surveillance dome in the middle of the sea. As it directs us through the cracks and crevices of the dome and glides through the smooth metal walls that shield it, the camera curiously lingers on a wide shot of the moving sea, or on a colony of spiders populating a corner of the dome, to remind us, as the rest of Grasso’s exhibition does, of the sublime and daunting presence of nature. One installation quite literally spells it out, where large, neon-lighted letters that read “Visibility is a Trap” are lined against a wall.

A theme explicitly (and successfully, in my humble opinion) explored in Grasso’s work is that there is always more than meets the naked eye, and humankind has been guilty of claiming authority over what it sees. This is addressed in the windows of displayed artworks, where each piece – be it footage, painting or sculpture – is stationed behind a concrete wall, one that segregates and dictates an appropriate distance

Photo Georgia Gleason

between observer and artwork. With neat square windows cut out to allow us to observe them, Grasso appears to be invoking the notion of how controlled visibility has infiltrated various institutions, including the realm of art. In other words, if these artworks are truly oeuvres in possession of admirable qualities, the concrete wall and cut-out windows prevent us from appreciating these qualities. Instead, we are forced to view them from a controlled distance.

The most memorable piece was, to me, the most banal-looking. It consisted of neon-lit shapes of stars on the wall, forming what I was later told was the constellation of Orion, modelled on a preserved sketch of the constellation by Galileo. Beside it stood a small TV screening the televised footage of Pope John Paul II issuing a public apology on behalf of the Catholic Church for having condemned Galileo to heresy, 400 years after the fact. As I stood utterly

perplexed in what was the smallest room in this labyrinth of an exhibition, one of the security guards crept up behind me and quoted a critic (unbeknownst to me) who claimed that it took the Church a lot longer to recognize its misstep than it does for the light of a star to travel to our eyes.

Laurent Grasso’s Uraniborg runs until April 28 at the The Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal at 185 Ste. Catherine.

Theatrical therapy You Arrive offers a multi-dimensional learning experience Daphne Rustow The McGill Daily

D

rama Therapy, the use of theatre to promote awareness and healing of mental health issues, encourages growth for both performer and audience. You Arrive, an auto-ethnographic piece

by Bonnie Harnden, communicates thorny ideas in a contemporary and honest manner. Combining educational and artistic elements, You Arrive is a powerful embodiment of the new Drama Therapy movement.

“In some shows,” explains Harnden, “there is a real feeling of a therapeutic process happening in the audience.” You Arrive deals with many difficult subjects, including family trauma, child development, and interpersonal relationships. The play itself is centered on the concept of ‘arrival.’ Arriving, for Harnden, involves achieving a personal balance between thoughts and emo-

tions to reach a place of stable peace.

This state, described by Harnden as “staying connected,” can be disrupted by childhood trauma.

You Arrive represents Harnden’s accumulated personal knowledge and experience in the field of psychology. Harnden is a professor in the Creative Arts Therapies department of Concordia University, which studies the ways in which theatrical and psychotherapeutic methods are combined in order to generate personal, emotional, and developmental change within individuals. Harnden has also spent over a decade at the Montreal Children’s Hospital’s Department of Psychiatry, researching and practicing clinical work with troubled adolescents.

You Arrive explores the creation and destruction of the self in children and adolescents. Harnden emphasizes the notion that a child needs to see a reflection of themselves in their caregiver. This self-reflection gives the child the sense that they are being

seen, listened to, and understood by those around them. This in turn allows the child to develop a degree of emotional regulation, a process by which both a flooding or absence of emotion is avoided. The parent, for their part, needs to facilitate healthy childhood development by containing their children’s feelings as well as regulating their own emotions, tempering feelings of anger and anxiety so as to avoid negatively influencing the child. Harnden seems to empathize with the difficulty of child rearing, stating during the performance that “[parenting] is never perfect – [it just has to be] good enough.”

But what happens when it isn’t good enough? Some forms of unhealthy familial relationships can create childhood trauma. When a caregiver is repeatedly unable to regulate their emotions, their child will be constantly over-flooded and subjected to high levels of stress, internalizing their caregiver’s feelings, eventually making them unable

to separate their emotions from those of their caregiver. This leads to adolescents, and even adults, experiencing emotional flights without any real cause.

You Arrive uses several mediums of communication simultaneously. “I wanted [the performance] to have that multimedia feel,” says Harnden. “[The viewers] take the content in differently.” You Arrive delivers its message through references to famous theoretical claims within psychology, Harnden’s own narration of said claims, and the cast’s performance itself. Four young Drama Therapy students present the themes of You Arrive, portraying relationships between family members as well as characters’ internal struggles.

Harnden’s sensitive narration and the cast’s skilled portrayal of childhood trauma interact positively and reinforce one another’s power.

The combined effect communicates the difficulty certain children experience in recovering from traumatic

experiences. But You Arrive also offers the hopeful possibility of, one day, reaching a sense of arrival, even if it’s after years of psychotherapy.

To arrive is to achieve a sense of wholeness, security, and continuity, in both one’s thoughts and feelings.

You Arrive has both an educational and artistic quality – it seeks to explain psychological themes through Harnden’s descriptive narration, framed by the cast’s portrayal of concrete events. Yet You Arrive also communicates its themes through a plurality of voices and frequent use of visual metaphors. Perhaps the most remarkable quality of Harnden’s theatrical work is the way the message itself is infused in, and reinforced by, the structure of the piece. As Harden explains, the use of different mediums leads the audience to gravitate between intellectual and emotional experiences, allowing for a sense of multi-dimensional understanding, or in other words, arrival.

44

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

culture

Country kitsch The Wheel Club experience Matt Herzfeld The McGill Daily

S

omewhere, they call this music timeless, though you might call it old-fashioned.

Follow the creaky wooden steps out from the wailing cold and into the Wheel Club, and find yourself anywhere but just off of Sherbrooke.

Founded in 1966 by musician Bob Fuller, The Wheel Club is a bar and dart club with a bluegrass pedigree. I went down Monday for Hillbilly night, which is free to the public. Filled with a mix of wayfaring visitors and salty but hospitable regulars, the club is more family reunion than raucous rodeo. With no cover (regulars pay $25 a year for membership), Monday nights are a pleasant free-for-all, where guests find their place among the checkered tablecloths and plaid-shirted silver-haired country folk toting steel-strings at the open mic.

I found my place in a corner, halfway to the back along the wood-paneled walls, that lead to a long rickety oak bar. Beside me at the folding table was a man, his body slung like an empty sack of potatoes, whose balding profile found solace in the swoon of a har-

monica. As a couple of cowboys caroused and played some country tunes out on the low stage, a lone woman in green danced with herself. She would continue dancing alone frantically into the night.

The stage is sprinkled with seventies country kitsch, lanterns, paper Easter bunnies, and Christmas lights, and the guitar players beat out weary tunes, stiff as boards. Wagon wheels lean against the stage and pictures of old timers hang upon the wall like old wallpaper. The songs are old, too; the club regulates that all tunes played must be written before 1965.

A squeaky wheel might get the grease, but quiet or not, no one is alone here.

After the band chugged through a Jimmy Rogers waltz, a man leans over me to look into the other room. Two old men in Western dress from head to toe play pool beside an open guitar case. The announcer asks the audience how an old friend is recuperating, and tells another guest, “Oh that’s a nice country shirt you got!” A guest fiddle player steps up to the stage, laughing and making mistakes. A wrinkly man in a Canadiens jersey from the seventies hobbles over with an overflowing paper plate,

Photo Andrew Toh

grunts, and says, “How bout a nice black licorice?” I oblige. Like a family reunion, this is one big, laid back, social jam session.

Can you crash someone else’s family reunion? My four years in Canada, marked by a series of

strikes and never-ending red-taperibbon-cutting ceremonies, are a part of me now, irreversible. You learn to like a country like you learn to love a family, learn to love yourself. The little faults are ugly or they’re beauty marks. Call them

what you will, they happened and the past is here to stay.

As I work my way back out onto the street, an old man in spurs and a cowboy hat leans against the door, breathing into a cigarette.

The strong and silent type.

Unmaking Montreal To move forward, the city needs to correct its mistakes Kaj Huddart The McGill Daily

T

he first time my mom let me ride a bike more than a few blocks away from my NDG home, I raced down the dangerous hill on St. Jacques to St. Henri, a new world dominated by ancient brick tenements, abandoned factories, colourful row houses, and busy freight railway tracks. The post-industrial landscape held a strange sort of enchantment, a palpable nostalgia available even to an observer with no connection to the area’s past. Having moved from suburban East Vancouver a couple years before, I was still used to lawns, stucco cottage-type houses, wide streets, and a general feeling of prosperity. I remember my first real bike trip through the city as the first time I understood the value in Montreal’s aesthetic.

For a city in North America, Montreal is remarkably aware of its own architectural value.

Perhaps that’s because it’s older than Vancouver and Toronto, more densely built, at once

grander and more decrepit. Now, the city’s physical charms are a primary tourist draw, benefiting Montreal and its citizens with millions of dollars of revenue.

The abundance of whimsical vernacular architecture reinforces the cliche of Montreal as a ‘Latin’ city, with an appealingly laid-back, hedonistic culture.

Other aspects of the city don’t inspire as much pride. Our downtown, pockmarked with parking lots, boasts a few big-city skyscrapers among older row-houses, but suffers from an overarching trend of architectural mediocrity.

Some cities were lucky enough to undergo minimal development during the most destructive phase of “urban regeneration” in the sixties and seventies. We were not so lucky. Jane Jacobs, who fought the powers-that-be in New York and Toronto to stymie the construction of superhighways across the city core, never lived in Montreal. From the fast-crumbling Turcot interchange, to the vast, useless space of the Olympic complex, Montreal bears the bruises of mid-century monumental folly. Bringing these

areas back to the appealing, human scale that locals and tourists value in the Plateau, for example, will require billions of dollars and a lot of smart, citizen-oriented development thinking.

Unfortunately, Montreal suffers from a municipal government that is inefficient, corrupt, beholden to certain interests, and mired in the urban design theories of the past.

Take, for example, the haphazard development of the Quartier des Spectacles. Designed to nurture the city’s cultural industries – in part a reaction to the loss of manufacturing and other traditional economic providers – the Quartier centralizes a couple of the city’s larger festivals, like the Jazz fest and Just for Laughs. But has it really become the city’s destination for culture? With Osheaga and Piknic Electronik on St. Helen’s Island, and the contemporary music scene up in the Plateau and Mile End, why was the area around Place des Arts selected for millions of dollars of investment?

The venture is characterized by a continuation of the same sort of thinking that wrecked the city’s

physical environment in the sixties.

The desire to define a district by a particular function, to be determined by government, smacks of Le Corbusier’s dreadfully stale city models. Although the city has created some appealing public spaces, the destruction of buildings, including much of the lower Main, has left the area with more empty lots than it had before.

Rather than embarking on ambitious new ‘great projects’ to support arts and culture, the municipal authorities – when not attempting to clean house – should focus on removing obstacles to neighbourhood development, and facilitating hubs of artists and entrepreneurs through subsidized spaces and studios, rather than shiny architecture.

Until ten years ago, there was an elevated interchange at the intersection of Pins and Parc.

An absurd ten lanes of car traffic converged on Parc. Access to the mountain was restricted, and the downtown district and the western Plateau were spacially divided by a wall of concrete and fast-moving vehicles. Totally hostile to pedes-

trians, the interchange posed a huge obstacle to the neighbourhood’s development into the walkable, appealing area it is today.

Many other examples of bad urban planning persist across the island. Between the Old Port and downtown lies a massive trench containing the Ville-Marie expressway. A tear in the urban fabric, the trench is surrounded by a layer of empty space and abandoned buildings, which eventually give way to the more contiguous areas of Old Montreal and Chinatown. The Turcot expressway casts a neighbourhood-sized shadow in which almost nothing lives or grows. Rosemont and Hochelaga are cut off from the Plateau because of a lack of safe pedestrian crossings of the rail line that defines the north and east borders of the neighbourhood.

The reconnection of our core urban districts will have a positive effect on the city’s economy, liveliness, and aesthetic value. Unlike the creation of new single-vocation districts, the effects of this sort of targeted redevelopment – or ‘undevelopment’ – are multifaceted and highly positive for the surrounding area.

contributors

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

45

thank you to all our contributors this year!

Shaina Agbayani, Sid Ahmed, Yasha Ahmed, Claudia Alexander, Eric Andrew-Gee, Anne Arky, Karel Asha, Tobias Atkin, Sofia Bachouchi, Sam Baker, Chris Bangs, Darin Barney, Jessica Barudin, Mark Bay, Jason Behrmann, Elena Bennett, Dominique Bernier-Cormier, Hannah Besseau, Akiva Blander, Eitan Blander, Sophie Blaze, Jake Bleiberg, Ben Blutrich, Jon Booth, Julia Boshyk, Daniel Braden, Kaiva Brammanis, Janna Bryson, Cameron Butler, Vincent Calabrese, Celine Caira, Lindsay Cameron, Lucy Cameron, Nicholas Cameron, Camille Chabrol, Alex Chan, Alexander Chang, Akanksa Chaubal, Andrew Emond, Annie Chen, Oles Chepesiuk, Natalie Church, Conor Coady, Sean Coleman, Christiana Collison, J. Oliver Conroy, Allison Cooper, Madeleine Cummings, Joelle Dahm, Shrinkala Dawadi, Emily Dehority, Julia Devorak, Julien Dinerstein, Rosie Dobson, Ilana Donohue, Eliot D’Silva, Elena Dugan, Brody Duncan, Flora Dunster, Hannah Edmondson, Benjamin Elgie, Euan EK, Ceren Eroglu, Cem Ertekin, Ethan Feldman, Morgan Fergenbaum, Marcello Ferrara, First Year Council, Anna Foran, Carol Ellen Fraser, Eliyahu Freedman, Jessica Fu, Catherine Gao, Gardner’s Floor 7, Natalie Geffen, Alexis Gianella, Dominique Glassman, Georgia Gleason, Sebastian Grant, Carla Green, Erica Gregor, Ben Grill, Vivian Gu, Sarina Gupta, Jimmy Gutman, Waseem Haja, Tiffany Harrington, Esther Harvey-Peake, Lilya Hassall, Ahmad Hassan, Josiah Henderson, Evan Henry, Matthew Herzfeld, Elliot Holzman, Max Honigmann, Carlyn Hopkins, David Huehn, Adrienne Carey Hurley, Grace Jackson, Sarah Jameel, Declan Rankin Jardin, Rafiya Javed, Erica Jewell, Isabella Johnson, Cas Kaplan, Maija Kappler, Kiara Kaminski, Fedor Karmanov, Alex Kasstan, Lindsey Kendrick-Koch, Sean Kershaw, Tanya Kirnishni, Jamie Klinger, Jay Knight, Justin Jek-Kahn Koh, Andrew Komar, Molly Korab, Lewis Krashinsky, Henry Kronk, Diana Kwon, Gaby Lai, Thomas Lamarre, Charles Larose-Jodoin, Alison Laywine, Siobhan Lazenby, Esther Lee, Jennifer Laura Lee, Michael Lee-Murphy, Ayla Lefkowitz, Timothy Lem-Smith, Corey Lesk, Brendan Lewis, Zach Lewsen, Ariel Lieberman, Cynthia Liu, Lucy Liu, Austin Lloyd, Jessica Lukawiecki, Mona Luxion, Jaime MacLean, S. Azam Mahmood, Niyati Malhotra, Isabella Mancini, Julie Mannell, Jessie Marchessault, Guillermo Martínez de Velasco, Megan Masterson, Maria Mastorakos, Davide Mastracci, Matt May, Alex McKenzie, Paul Meldrum, Amelia Mensch, Josh Mentanko, Seamus Mercury, Gregory Mikkleson, Tamkinat Mirza, Julia Misler, Cameron Monagle, Harmon Moon, Jonathan Mooney, Sheehan Moore, Joan Moses, Caitlin Mouri, Shane Murphy, Sivakami Mylvaganam, Moe Nasr, Wyatt Negrini, Midori Nishioka, Derek Nystrom, Emily Olson, Leyla Omeragic, Charlotte O’Neill, Nathalie O’Neill, David Ou, Emma Overton, Shannon Palus, Jassi Pannu, Kevin Paul, Sean Phipps, Luciana Pitcher, Anton Plavski, Hugh Podmore, Catherine Polcz, Slawomir Poplawski, Zoe Power, Mike Prebil, Queer McGill Trans* Working Group, Nicolas Quiazua, Celine Seta Rahme, Margie Ramos, Maggie Rebalski, Sean Reginio, Robin Reid-Fraser, Krissy Reimels, Arezu Riahi, Maya Richman, William Clare Roberts, Nicholas Roy, Omar Saadeh, Francois Sabourin, Swathi Sadagopan, Esmond Sage, Errol Salamon, Hussain Sangji, Matthieu Santerre, Nastasha Sartore, Emily Saul, Emery Saur, Joanna Schacter, Jeremy Schembri, Lily Schwarzbaum, Eliana Schwartz, Heaven Sent, Jitika Shah, Mercedes Sharpe, Emory Shaw, Alice Shen, Benjamin Sher, Kate Sheridan, Sula Sidnell-Greene, Max Silverman, Alexei Simakov, Lily Simon, Hannah Sinclair, Anita Sivabalan, Lucille Smith, Robert Smith, Kristal Spreadborough, Noemi Stern, Bracha Stettin, Micha Stettin, Andreanne Stewart, Hillary Storm, Nicole Stradiotto, Stephen Strople, Bipasha Sultana, Allen Tahm, Victor Tangermann, Nirali Tanna, Noah Q. Tavlin, Stephanne Taylor, Ryan Thom, Wong Kar Tsai, Zoey Tung, Adrian Turcato, Derek Tyrrell, Cleo Valentine, Aaron Vansintjan, Evan Vassallo, Jordan Venton-Rublee, Isabelle Viarouge, Justine Vidal, Elie Waitzer, Simone Sinclair Walker, Kira Walz, Shona Watt, Christopher Webster, William Werblow, Victoria Winslow, Daniel Woodhouse, Daniel Wolfe, Dana Wray, Annie Xie, Ethan Yang, Linda Yu, Mercedes Sharpe Zayas, Doris Zhu

we couldn’t have done it without you!

46

EDITORIAL

volume 102 number 42

editorial board

«Police partout, justice nulle part»

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 commentary editors

Jacqueline Brandon Steve Eldon Kerr Illustration Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily

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 le délit

Nicolas Quiazua

rec@delitfrancais.com

cover design Hera Chan contributors Casey Adams, Eric Andrew-Gee, Hannah Besseau, Julia Boshyk, Akanksa Chaubal, Celine Caira, Alex Cooper, Elena Dugan, Sarah Fortin, Georgia Gleason, Carla Green, Lilya Hassall, Matt Herzfeld, Carlyn Hopkins, Amelia Jones, Molly Korab, Zoe Knowles, Diana Kwon, Esther Lee, Michael Lee-Murphy, Mona Luxion, Bernard Mak, Davide Mastracci, Josh Mentanko, Sarkis Meterissian, Caitlin Mouri, Charlotte O’Neill, Nathalie O’Neill, Shannon Palus, Catherine Polcz, Julie Prud’homme, Daphne Rustow, SACOMSS, Alice Shen, Robert Smith, Bipasha Sultana, Ryan Thom, Andrew Toh, Will Werblow, Dana Wray

At the annual March Against Police Brutality on March 15, 240 out of an estimated 300 attendees were arrested and fined. This year’s March 22 demonstration, marking the one-year anniversary of the 200,000-strong march against tuition hikes, saw more than 200 out of approximately 350 protesters kettled and issued fines of $637.

Arrests were made pre-emptively: before protesters could even gather, riot police made targeted arrests, formed kettles, and put a clear end to any possible demonstrating.

The escalation of police repression in this city cannot be tolerated by our community at McGill and at large.

The government’s response to dissent has been harsh.

On May 17, 2012, the day before Bill 78 was passed, demonstrators marched peacefully for over seven hours in protest of the new law. Bill 78 was quickly drafted by the Parti libéral du Québec in an attempt to control the rising number of people marching in protest of the government. Four days later, the police arrested 518 protesters. Parts of Bill 78 were repealed by the Parti Québécois when they won the provincial election in September 2012, but police are still using the tactic of mass arrest and exorbitant fines under municipal by-law P-6, a similar piece of legislation. The laws created and then undone by the state are autocratic and high-handed.

Police repression of social movements creates an environment of fear. Officers do not protect communities, but instead demonize them and break the bonds people form when marching in solidarity with one another. Rather than creating working mechanisms for society, the state uses laws as tools of oppression. Being at risk of arrest is not a consequence many members of our community can readily face. For people already systematically targeted and

structurally discriminated against by the state, facing riot police in the street can come with heavy baggage. This could mean anything from being deported, to being forced to pay considerable fines. Police repression, then, not only creates an environment of fear, but it further prevents those marginalized by the system from taking action.

This attitude is not an isolated event – police forces around the world use similar tactics to control populations and suppress protest. In June 2012, Russian officials raised the maximum fine for unsanctioned protests to the equivalent of around $9,000; the maximum fine for organizing illegal protests was raised to around $32,000. This, too, raised the ire of activists who challenged the constitutionality of the law. But more important is the government’s timing: the change came after a series of protests challenging Russian President Vladimir Putin. Throughout 2011 and 2012, New York City police used tactics of mass arrests against people involved in the Occupy movement.

The list of examples of similar tactics goes on forever.

Governments are attempting to limit the effectiveness of protest by forcefully defining it on their terms.

The worst result of police repression is the creation of a population that does not challenge power. Our methods are valid but our rights are being egregiously violated.

Contesting state repression can be a creative process: only with the forceful stamping out of activism have vibrant social movements been labelled as negative. The state is trying to end a conversation that has begun in the streets; it is trying to stamp out dissent with violence and persecution.

—The McGill Daily Editorial Board

Errata In the article entitled “Demilitarize McGill organizes walking tour”(News, March 18, page 6) the line “The IASL, which was founded in 1951, conducts research for the U.S. Air Force” should have said: “The IASL, which was founded in 1951, has conducted research on topics suggested to students by the U.S. Air Force.”

As well, the sentence “Graduates from the IASL often go on to work with major governmental military organizations, such as the U.S. and French Air Forces, as well as major weapons manufacturers such as Boeing” was incorrect. While it is impossible to say whether graduates of the IASL have ever worked for Boeing, the company funds a $500,000 fellowship at McGill – the first given by Boeing to a law faculty.

The Daily regrets the errors.

3480 McTavish St., Rm. B-26 Montreal, QC H3A 1X9 phone 514.398.6790 fax 514.398.8318 advertising & general manager Boris

Shedov Letty Matteo Geneviève Robert Mathieu Ménard

sales representative ad layout & design

dps board of directors Queen Arsem-O’Malley, Erin Hudson, Rebecca Katzman, Michael Lee-Murphy, Matthew Milne, Sheehan Moore (chair@dailypublications.org), Shannon Palus, Nicolas Quiazua, Boris Shedov

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

Printed by Imprimerie Transcontinental Transmag. Anjou, Quebec.

ISSN 1192-4608.

CONTACT US NEWS COMMENTARY CULTURE FEATURES SCI+TECH HEALTH & ED SPORTS MULTIMEDIA PHOTO ILLUSTRATIONS DESIGN&PRODUCTION COPY WEB

news@mcgilldaily.com commentary@mcgilldaily.com culture@mcgilldaily.com features@mcgilldaily.com scitech@mcgilldaily.com healthandeducation@mcgilldaily.com sports@mcgilldaily.com radio@mcgilldaily.com photos@mcgilldaily.com illustrations@mcgilldaily.com design@mcgilldaily.com copy@mcgilldaily.com web@mcgilldaily.com For meeting times, check the “Contribute” tab at mcgilldaily.com

compendium!

The McGill Daily Thursday, April 4, 2013 mcgilldaily.com

lies, half-truths, and the revolution will be editorialized

47

Campus radicals learn rationality Give up Heaven Sent The Twice-a-Weekly

O

ver the Easter weekend, the McGall community was shocked to hear that the radical students on campus – often called “the vocal minority” – had given up on all of their ideals and protests, citing the fact that they were “rationally, just plain wrong” in a statement released by William Blake, a U2 Criticism and Critiquing major.

The statement, he claims, speaks for all radicals on campus. “One person can speak for a whole group, of course,” is how Blake chose to explain it.

“It’s been a long road for us.

But thanks to commenters on Facebook, Reddit, and the McGall Twice-A-Weekly’s website, I’ve learned how wrong I was about everything,” continued Blake.

Blake, who had participated in many demonstrations against the Quebec government’s tuition hikes – and also their proposed indexation and budget cuts – admitted that he had been “wrong” to demonstrate.

“It became quite clear to me: because I could pay for higher tuition, I’m not allowed to protest against it. I have a MacBook and sometimes buy Starbucks coffee; after realizing this, I stripped off my red square in disgust. Also, Quebec’s tuition is the lowest in the country, and when things are low, they should be higher. That’s like downtown Duh-ville.”

“My original idea to instead tax corporations a percentage point or two more, I found, was also ridiculous. The businesses would leave, and, as is known, without businesses, how could the province survive? Yes, businesses, not education, is what’s important. I now feel strongly that education should be structured like a business, because business just works. Pay more, get better things. Economics: it always works. Unassailable, really.”

Blake expressed regret that “my and other campus radicals’ actions last year, in getting a tuition freeze enacted, caused the government to cut the education budget this year.

The protests led to that, for which I am deeply sorry.”

Blake also addressed other recent controversies that he had taken a radical stance on, such as Divest McGall. “I thought that divesting from fossil fuels would make a more ethical university. But, once again, rationality came out ahead. Divesting would barely dent fossil fuels’ money supply, and what would it mean for engineers? Their post-graduate employment possibilities would be threatened.

We can’t just willy-nilly go into a decision like that. It should take time. And we need to make sure engineers have jobs, before finding cleaner energy sources. Same thing with Demilitarize McGall.

That research isn’t all bad, after all. The ends justify the needs.”

Blake had recently participated in the March Against

Police Brutality. “What a horrible mistake,” he conceded, before announcing his intention to pay the $637 fine he had received after being caught in a kettle. “Listen.

It’s like this. The police are among the best people we have in this great nation (I mean Canada here, though I think Barack Obama and the U.S. are doing great, too). They protect the people. I now have an implicit trust in them. Brutality is an outlier. And the protesters need to start submitting their route, really.”

Blake further pledged support for moderation in all facets of life.

“Thank goodness I had my revelation before voting in the SSMU elections. I now know that a moderate approach – one that works with the administration, never too pushy, was the best for this school. Plus, everyone who I voted for declared that they would keep politics out of their platforms.

Personal politics have nothing to do with making decisions for the students’ society, of course.”

Recent controversies over Frosh themes and 4Floors costumes were also addressed: “I used to be offended by things like blackface, sombreros, and Frosh themes that encouraged the hypersexualization of women. But I needed thicker skin. I mean, once you get rid of one thing, where does it ever stop? This slope is very slippery. Gotta just grin and bear it.”

At the end of his statement, Blake concluded with a statement regarding McGall’s administration, about whom he had previously

Illustration Amino Acid | The Twice-a-Weekly

penned numerous angry articles for The Twice-A-Weekly. “I used to think those guys were so, so bad. But then it came to me: the administration just wants to help us. They’re here, primarily, for students. I can’t wait to take more Arts classes with full-time professors, even if they’re bigger in size.

Because I know the administration listened to people like me.”

Blake, when asked by The

Twice-A-Weekly what he plans to do with his newfound rationality, gave a low-key answer. “Well, I plan to teach radicals the same lessons I’ve learned using internet commenting. But, when I’m not doing that, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll go to some sports games, watch some movies – I heard Argo was really good – and definitely hit the wine and cheeses up. Oh, and BDA. Dolla dolla beers y’all!”

Economist successfully draws line Management student later points at line Euan EK The Twice-a-Weekly

N

obel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman yesterday successfully drew a line onto an Excel spreadsheet, before copying that same line onto a Powerpoint slide.

People are now worried.

A small subset of the people is worried because they believe the line symbolizes the sadness and anger of a powerful metaphysical force, which they also believe to be behind the appearance of similar lines throughout history. These people have warned that if any more similar lines appear in the near future, they will cease the movement of sequences of binary numbers between large grey

boxes. The larger grouping of people is worried that if the binary numbers cease moving, there will be no more small green pieces of paper for them.

All of the people agree that the line is Important.

Speaking to The Twice-aWeekly moments after drawing the Important Line, Krugman advised people to look very closely at “all of the line,” before attempting “the difficult task” of interpreting its meaning.

“As you can see,” said Krugman while pointing to the start of the line, “the line first moves from the bottom of the screen to the top in a sort of diagonal way. In Economics, we say that the line ‘ascends.’”

“But then, and this is the really important bit,” said Krugman, “the line starts to go down – it starts to ‘descend’.”

According to Krugman, it is this ‘descending’ that signals the line’s importance.

“At this point,” said Krugman, pointing to the highest part of the line, “we want the line to continue to ‘ascend.’ But, as I have already taught you, this line then ‘descends.’ The line does not keep ‘ascending.’ This is important.”

Many people, including all of the Important White Men, agree with and understand Krugman.

Charles McMaths, President of the Society of Important White Men (SoIWM), contacted The Twice-a-Weekly to stress the importance of the Important Line.

“We do not know the full magnitude of the force that lies behind this line,” said McMaths. “But we must appease it.”

According to McMaths, the SoIWM has exclusive access to ancient lore, passed down through generations of SoIWM members, that explains how to appease the power and make the line ‘ascend’ once more.

“It all comes down to stopping the movement of the numbers,” said McMaths. “Actually, this lore is several generations old, so it technically only mentions the movement of small circular pieces of metal, and also shells, and pieces of wheat.

But we extended the principle to all of the numbers. If ever any member of the SoIWM comes across a bad Important Line, we change the numbers, whatever they may be – that is what the lore requires.”

Critics of the line argue that the Important Men have forgotten why

they are drawing lines.

“It used to be that we were expected to learn not only how to draw the lines, but why we were drawing certain lines, and not others,” said an old Marxist Economist who refused to be named because names are just the means through which the Bourgeoisie interpellates members of the proletariat as its subjects. “But now its all drawing, no asking,” he said.

Elsewhere, U2 Management student Jean-Paul LeBriggs pointed to the line during a seminar and was congratulated. LeBriggs told The Twice-a-Weekly he had been practicing by pointing to the menu in Gert’s all year.

“I expect a fulfilling life of pointing at graphs ahead of me,” LeBriggs said.

48

The McGill Daily | Thursday, April 4, 2013 | mcgilldaily.com

COMPENDIUM!