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Volume 103, Issue 10 Monday, November 4, 2013

LABOUR WEEK

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Interview with Mohamed Sesay on transitional justice Performance + interview with spoken word artist Moe Clark Art + activism panel with Stefan Christoff + Thien Vo Anti-gentrification panel on Montreal + HoMa

News 03 NEWS

Discussing labour issues on an unsympathetic campus

Labour week comes to McGill Frosh report released by AUS PGSS hustings

Second installment of Labour Week kicks off on November 4

Panel on women in politics

08 COMMENTARY

The global trend of land-grabbing Letters What labour activism can learn from the media

11

FEATURES

This photograph does not represent the movement

THE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

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SCI+TECH

The realities of coding bootcamps Montreal as a intelligent city

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HEALTH&ED

The commercialization of diet pills A not-so-radical way of viewing cellphones and cancer

18

SPORTS

Young hockey players forgo education to go pro Listomania in sports journalism

20 CULTURE

Beat Nation showcases Aboriginal street art The sax makes a comeback The Arab World Festival’s hits and misses

23 EDITORIAL

PGSS Referendum endorsements

24 COMPENDIUM!

Tour of McGall military research Roland Barthes on spicing up your sex life

3

The McGill Daily

Monday, November 4, 2013

Jill Bachelder and Igor Sadikov | News Writers

T

his Monday marks the beginning of the second annual installment of McGill’s Labour Week, a week-long event aimed at exploring the labour movement at McGill and in Quebec. McGill’s Inter Union Council (IUC), a group of labour unions at McGill, has worked to create a variety of workshops, panels, and talks, in hopes of promoting awareness about the function and purpose of the many different McGill unions.

Labour Week was started last spring after some members of the IUC began to see that general knowledge of unions at McGill, even among students who are union members, was low.

“We’ve noticed a lot of our members don’t really talk about or don’t really understand what the purpose is of having a union,” said AGSEM: McGill’s Teaching Union Vice-President for Invigilators and TAs Sunci Avlijas, one of the organizers of Labour Week. “[We] wanted to have some kind of event where the members of the McGill community [could] have a discussion about labour.”

According to Avlijas, last year’s Labour Week received a positive response, though it had a low turn-out because it wasn’t publicized extensively. There has been much more publicity for this year’s event.

A number of changes in the organization of the week have the IUC hoping that this year’s Labour Week will be even ‘bigger and better’ than last year. Workshop proposals came from members of the McGill community, creating more content diversity and leaving the IUC with more time for planning the event itself.

One of the sessions included this year is a panel on current issues in labour, led by Caroline Jacquet and Thomas Lafontaine, representatives of UQAM’s student employees’ association, Syndicat des étudiante-s employé-e-s de l’UQAM (SÉTUE), and Jamie Burnett, AGSEM’s Invigilator Grievance Officer. Burnett will be speaking about the different agreements that exist between unions and employers in the United States and Canada, such as the Rand Formula, and the existence of right-to-work policy in the southern U.S., as well as problems that can arise from the various forms of agreements.

Jacquet and Lafontaine will focus on how the legal right to strike has been compromised in many parts of Quebec and Canada. They will speak about the barriers that exist within strike-related legislation that can make union worker strikes difficult to organize. As well, they will compare the situation of the labour movement to that of the student-led strikes of 2012, where strike mobilization was considerably easier, despite a lack of clear policy

The 2011 MUNACA strike

Victor Tangermann | The McGill Daily

protecting strikers.

McGill’s treatment of labour issues has left much to be desired in the past, according to Burnett. “The MUNACA [McGill University Non-Academic Certified Association] strike in 2011 was a very clear example of the erosion of the legal right to strike,” he said.

At the time, the University filed injunctions that prevented strikers from holding symbolic picket lines, and was also accused of using casual workers to replace striking MUNACA members. However, McGill was cleared of the charges of using scab workers by the Commission des relations du travail.

“On the one hand, MUNACA is prevented from holding a minimal symbolic picket, which at no point ever prevented anyone from getting onto campus; on the other hand, the Quebec government is not keeping its side of the bargain, effectively giving McGill carte blanche to use its most vulnerable casual workers to undermine others,” Burnett claimed.

McGill’s unions continue to be dissatisfied with the University’s treatment of current labour issues. Sean Cory, President of the Association of McGill University Research Employees (AMURE), listed two potential changes affecting unionized workers: the modification in pay frequency, and the 2.2 per cent raise in employee contributions to the pension plan.

These changes represent a combined loss of $120 to $200 in monthly income for workers, according to an email from Cory sent to AMURE members. “It is an unbelievable cut in pay. We have employees who do not know where this money is going to come from,” he told The Daily.

Cory finds that the proposed changes unfairly target unionized workers. “The pay frequency change is only going to affect unionized employees – they decided not to do it to the non-unionized employees,” he said. “A lot of people are wondering why only the unions are affected by this.”

The unions have already taken action.

“MUNACA has filed a complaint to the labour board about being targeted because we’re unionized. We’re going to have a hearing next month about this. So it’s not looking good for being unionized labour at McGill,” Cory added.

According to Burnett, the recent budget cuts do not justify McGill’s attacks on workers. “Almost all of the attacks on workers and unions right now at McGill are said

by McGill to be necessary because of the budget cuts. One question is whether or not those budget cuts themselves are necessary: for example, McGill did not accept additional support from the Quebec government which would have mediated the effects of provincial funding cuts, instead electing to take the cuts right away with the hopes of passing the cost onto its employees, especially its unionized employees.”

Burnett is convinced that strong unions are vital to protecting workers’ rights at McGill.

“What is clear is that unions at McGill need to be strong and united to stand up to those attacks. Labour Week has been a great platform for McGill’s unions to work together and to discuss important issues – something we would very much like to see continue.”

Labour Week runs from November 4 to 8. For more information about events, visit interunionvoicemcgill.com.

The McGill Daily

4

News

Monday, November 4, 2013

Sexism, drinking culture still prevalent at Frosh AUS Equity Commissioners release critical report Dana Wray | The McGill Daily

I

n the recently released Arts Undergraduate Society (AUS) Frosh Report, AUS Equity Commissioner Josh Falek details an incident where a froshie yelled at a passerby, “Fuck you! I don’t know if you’re from the UQAM [or Concordia] or what but you’re not [from] McGill! How does it feel to be second best!”

In the report, Falek wrote, “The idea that this student actually had no idea where he was but was still assured he was better than everyone else was a perfect reflection of broader McGill entitlement.”

These kind of on-the-ground failings were detailed in the Frosh Report within a context of change. This year saw Frosh coordinators attempt to introduce equitable concepts into the design of Frosh, which has long been lamented as inequitable. Such changes include less of a focus on drinking, less sexually explicit, classist, and/or sexist chants, and more inclusive programming.

However, the Frosh Report details that the attempted implementation of these equitable concepts often didn’t extend into practice.

In one case at Gerts – although the game was not supposed to be played under the

new equitable rules at Frosh – groups played “Strip Waterfall,” where participants had to take off their clothes while drinking.

“It’s a really weird introduction to McGill campus – ‘this is where you’re going to be for the next four years, get used to taking off your clothes in academic buildings,’” Falek said.

“The whole rape culture that is associated with [drinking games] is what really needs to go,” AUS Equity Commissioner Hannah Sinclair added. “It’s the compulsory [sexual] aspect of it. There’s a huge pressure.”

A redesigned pub crawl – renamed the “Montreal crawl” – was touted earlier by Frosh coordinators to The Daily. According to Falek, however, visits to city parks and other activities aimed to make the crawl less alcohol-heavy didn’t work. “From what I saw, the pub crawl was a pub crawl. I did not see anything different from that.”

“I think there’s something to be said that we’re still sending kids to the hospital every year,” said Falek, noting what he called an “unsafe drinking culture” at Frosh.

According to AUS VP Events Paul Laugh-

Engineering: $173,000 in awards and scholarships to encourage future engineers The aging population and the retirement rate are two phenomena that continue to affect the engineering profession.

That is why it is necessary to encourage future engineers.

The next generation of engineers has a wonderful future ahead of it. Those who choose engineering and ultimately become engineers should not doubt this for a minute: The profession is more attractive than ever.

One of the attractive aspects of the profession is its growing diversity. Just think of the wide range of industries. Beyond civil engineering and construction, which are discussed quite a bit in the news, there are around twenty other major industries in which engineers work: aerospace, IT, environment, manufacturing, biomedicine, etc. In fact, engineering goes into almost all of our everyday objects.

The demographic profile of the profession’s membership is also increasingly diversified: women account for 13% and international engineering graduates more than 20% of it.

The profession also offers excellent job prospects. The unemployment rate is lower than the Québec average. A wide range of employers hire engineers: governments at all levels, private firms, etc.

Mr. Daniel Lebel, Eng., FEC, PMP President

Other incentives In order to guide its actions, the Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec has developed several policies. One of the policies that is particularly important to me is the Policy on Rewarding Professional Excellence, and particularly the component of this policy that is dedicated to encouraging engineering students.

More specifically, the OIQ accomplishes its goal of encouraging future engineers by presenting distinctions to them every year at an official event.

These recognitions provide an opportunity to discover new talents and introduce them to their future colleagues.

They reward engineering students who demonstrate excellence in their academic results and a commitment that reflects the profession’s chosen four major values: competence, ethics, responsibility and social commitment.

lin, the AUS executive was unaware of these problems during Frosh, and were only informed afterward by Dean of Students André Costopoulos and Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning) Ollivier Dyens. “One of the biggest things we want to work on is we want to develop a better, across-the-board communication system throughout Frosh,” Laughlin told The Daily.

There were consequences for both leaders and froshies who broke the rules – at least in theory. Bracelets could be cut, disallowing the individual from attending any more Frosh events. However, cutting a bracelet took two coordinators to validate the claim and to administer the punishment – something that was hard to come by in the confusion of Frosh, according to both Laughlin and Falek.

The needed revision of the selection process for leaders was emphasized by both the AUS executive and Equity Commissioners.

“The biggest problem is there [are] still Frosh leaders and coordinators not really taking into consideration that equity is needed, [or] wanting it to be there,” Falek said.

“You can’t expect equity to be maintained in Frosh by people who may not necessarily be trained in equitable purposes,” added Falek, referring to the need for Equity Commissioners to supervise the hiring process.

According to the AUS Equity Commissioners, one of the main problems with the attempted integration of equity was the expectation that Frosh would transform itself overnight. “You can’t just say things are going to be equitable now. It’s not an instantaneous thing, it’s a process, it needs to continue,” Sinclair said.

“The equity policy is there in theory but not really in practice,” she continued.

“And so the consequences are also there in theory but they’re not necessarily being put into practice.”

The Frosh Report echoed a similar sentiment, stating, “Equity is not something that can be achieved in a single year. Oppression does not cease to exist because of some minor modifications. The entire system must be adjusted to include and promote those who could not access it previously.”

Student Award of Merit The Student Award of Merit is given to three recipients. Application files are evaluated on the basis of three criteria: the students’ community service, the quality of their academic record and the strength of their essay on the professional responsibility of engineers in the field of engineering they are studying.

The value of these awards is anything but negligible: $7,500, $5,000 and $3,000, plus a plaque attesting to their merit, are presented to the three recipients.

The Fellowship for Excellence The Fellowship for Excellence in Graduate Studies is given to a member of the Graduate Student Section or to an engineer who is studying full time.

The amount of this Fellowship, which is awarded with a plaque, is $7,500.

OIQ Foundation scholarships The OIQ Foundation also awards $150,000 in scholarships.

These scholarships are intended for university students (40 $3,000 scholarships for students in a bachelor’s of engineering program) and CEGEP students (15 $2,000 scholarships for students who want to continue studying engineering at university).

First, you need to join our Student Section!

The OIQ’s Student Section is an active and influential group that is present in all schools and faculties of engineering in Québec.

Membership is one of the eligibility criteria for the Student Award of Merit and the Fellowship for Excellence. If you are thinking about applying for one of these awards, you now have another reason to join the Student Section! Admission is free and your membership lets you enjoy special contact with your future professional order.

To find out the other eligibility criteria, I invite you to visit the “Awards and Fellowship” section of our site, as well as the Foundation’s site.

Hurry! There are only a few days left to apply before November 29.

Daniel Lebel, Eng., FIC, PMP

The McGill Daily

News

5

Monday, November 4, 2013

Immigration detainees continue resistance United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights called to take action Hannah Besseau | The McGill Daily

D

etainees continue protesting for better prison conditions at Ontario’s Central East Correctional Centre (CECC) in Lindsay, Ontario after over six weeks of strike action. The strike began September 17, when prisoners refused to return to their cells. Since then, they have taken up a hunger strike, among other tactics.

“At least three or four [detainees] are still on hunger strike,” Syed Hussan, a member of No One Is Illegal Toronto, told The Daily. “[These detainees] are locked in segregation.

They’re denied showers, et cetera, simply for speaking out.”

The detainees’ demands include better access to medical care, social services, food, legal aid, and more consistent phone calls, all

of which have been limited since the detainees were moved from a federal prison in the Greater Toronto Area to the CECC. One detainee, Michael Mvogo, is taking matters further. According to a press release from No One is Illegal Toronto, Mvogo has reached out to the Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions at the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to petition for his release.

Mvogo’s case challenges his detainment as a violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

“Mr. Mvogo has been detained basically because Canada has no bar,” said Hussan, referring to Canada’s indefinite limit as to the length of migrant detentions.

Mvogo has been held in detention for seven years, and according to No One is Illegal Toronto, has been denied a hearing by the Federal Court of Canada. Originally from Cameroon, Mvogo cannot be deported without travel documents, which cannot be obtained. However, he is far from the only one.

Hundreds of migrants are currently facing similar arbitrary detention.

“The province is saying they’re just holding [the detainees] for the federal government, but they’re also being paid by the federal government to hold them,” said Hussan, referring to prisoners at the CECC. Mvogo wants Canada to establish a ‘presumptive’ period for detainees. “Mvogo hopes [for the United Nations] to instruct Canada to

release him. If that happens, it would apply to all long-term detainees,” Syed said.

“I’ve spent nearly a decade in jail and this suffering does not look like its going to end,” Mvogo told endimmigration.com. “The Federal Court won’t hear my case. I’ve been forced to go on hunger strike, and to approach the United Nations because the Canadian immigration system is just broken. Canada should either remove immigrants like me within 90 days, or release me. Jailing people endlessly should not be an option.”

“We hope that the Canadian government stops breaking international law [and] legal practice,” said Hussan. “We believe people should not be detained on immigration grounds at all.”

Debates held on upcoming post-grad referenda Discussion of student media, writing centre, post-doc student services Tom Portsmouth | The McGill Daily

S

tarting October 22, McGill’s Post-Graduate Students’ Society (PGSS) held a series of hustings, or debates, to create an opportunity for dialogue between postgrads and proponents of “Yes” votes on three referendum questions. The third and final installment took place on the evening of October 30 in Thomson House, where all three representatives were present to give their cases and answer questions from the floor.

McGill Writing Centre The first referendum question on which post-graduates will vote will be whether or not they support paying a $1.50 fee per term in support of the McGill Writing Centre.

The Writing Centre’s representative, Julien Ouellet, said that the Centre’s survival is on the line, adding that McGill ended up not providing this service to students that every university “from Harvard to U [University of ] Sherbrooke” has.

The sum would be enough to ensure its survival – a “no-brainer,” he concluded – and would also ensure the continuation of one-onone tutorial services for grad students. Without the fee, those services would be terminated. In October’s meeting, Council voted against a motion amending the PGSS budget for a one-time transfer of $3,000 to the Centre for tutor wages.

McGill Tribune Post-graduates will also resolve whether or not to pay $0.75 per student per semester to the McGill Tribune. The money will go toward “bolstering our publication by enhancing the services that we already have,” according to the Tribune’s representative and former editor-inchief Elisa Muyl.

The extra funds would go toward financing a smartphone and tablet application and

Khoa Doan | The McGill Daily a graduate student focus within the paper’s pages, as well as training initiatives such as writers’ workshops.

Post-doctoral fee for student services The third question facing post-graduates in the referendum concerns McGill’s body of close to 600 post-doctoral fellows (or post-docs).

With the fee question, post-docs will be voting whether or not to pay a mandatory fee to be included under the purview of student services.

For full-time post-docs, this entails a monthly fee of $22.74 – or $136.46 per semester – that would enable them to access all services that fall under McGill’s Student Services umbrella.

At the moment, post-docs can access these services on an individual basis if they opt to pay the current Student Services Fee ($156.89 per semester). This makes it more expensive, and also means that service staff are not trained to cater to the post-doctoral student body’s specific needs.

In the event of a “Yes” vote, post-docs would be able to take full advantage of services such as Career Planning Service, Health Services, and Financial and International Services.

“All these are things that other graduate students would take for granted but that we can’t access at the moment,” said Emma Vincent, president of the Association of Post-

doctoral Fellows (APF), pointing out that the Quebec government designates post-docs as students, but since they have PhDs and teach classes, they are in “limbo” between the statuses of student and professor.

She also added that in the event of a “Yes” vote, PGSS and the APF would work together with the administration to transfer some or all of the cost of this monthly fee to postdocs’ supervisors.

The referendum for these three questions will be held online at ovs.pgss.mcgill.ca between November 4 at 8:00 a.m. and November 8 at 5:00 p.m.

The McGill Daily

6

News

Monday, November 4, 2013

Women underrepresented in federal politics Panel discusses issues of gender representation Rochelle Guillou and Emma Noradounkian | News Writers

O

n October 28, the Women In House program, in collaboration with McGill’s Political Science Students’ Association (PSSA), held a panel called “Yes SHE Can” to discuss gendered political participation and promote a more equitable representation of women in politics.

The panel featured Elisabeth Gidengil, a Political Science professor at McGill; Janine Krieber, a member of the Projet Montréal Board of Directors; Martine Desjardins, former Chair of the Quebec Federation of University Students (FEUQ); and Patrik Öhberg, a post-doctoral student working with the Canada Research Chair in Electoral Studies at Université de Montréal’s Department of Political Science.

Carly Walter, one of the organizers of the panel and PSSA Vice-President External Affairs, told The Daily that the panel was an important recognition of the inequality of political representation in Canada. “I have a lot of male friends, and they think it’s ridiculous when I talk about inequality. They don’t think it really exists anymore, or that it’s a problem, but it is.

[24.7 per cent] of our federal parliament is female, which is drastic – it’s way too low.”

The panelists addressed what they believe are the reasons behind this low share of seats, and proposed possible solutions to promote women’s interest in politics.

Krieber located the problem within Canadian society. “The problem is that […] this Canadian society is not organized to accept women in politics,” she suggested, drawing on her own experience in political arenas.

Gidengil agreed, pointing to the expectation

on women to take care of children and other family members. “The way Parliament operates is just not family-friendly, sitting late into the night and so on.”

On the other hand, Öhberg alleged that women’s reluctance to enter politics is due to their “natural hesitation and over-thinking” when being asked to participate in political matters – a point that Desjardins agreed with.

Finola Hackett, one of the panel organizers and a coordinator of the Women in House program, claimed instead that the reason behind this alleged reluctance lay in the unwelcoming environment in politics.

“Is it harder to convince a woman to run if she lacks the economic security, family support, or social networks to make it easier to adjust to the demanding lifestyle of politics, and if she knows she’ll face discrimination from colleagues or the media? Of course it is,” Hackett said.

NDP Member of Parliament Laurin Liu echoed this point in an interview with The Daily on the topic. “Women’s hesitation stems from other difficulties that they have in accessing roles of power that are traditionally held by men,” Liu said. “There is still a lot of work to do on that front.” Öhberg believed that the key to promoting women’s interests would be to have more women in Parliament, a view that Shaina Agbayani, one of the panel organizers, a coordinator of the Women in House program, disagreed with.

“I don’t think that having more women in politics will change the game in itself,” Agbayani told The Daily, adding, “I think [the Women in House Program and I] recognize that

Khoa Doan | The McGill Daily there are many ‘fronts’ in this battle against the barriers for women’s equitable participation in society, and that the government is only one of them.”

The discussion also turned to women who presently hold political positions, and more particularly, to their representation in the media, which the panelists believed to be gender-biased.

“Just read a news article about a woman [in politics] and it will talk about what she is wearing. It doesn’t talk about what the guy is wearing,” Gidengil said.

Gidengil also addressed the double standard of behaviour. If women behave in an assertive manner, she said they will be portrayed as too aggressive. However, if wom-

en try to focus on consensus within politics, “[they] will get marginalized.”

Both Hackett and Agbayani acknowledged that the focus on the gender binary also left many people out of the discussion, whether they identified with a fluid concept of gender or felt that there were intersectional barriers preventing their entrance into politics.

“Though the Women in House program is specifically focused on the concern of female representation, it’s important to acknowledge that gender issues don’t exist in a vacuum, and are tied to broader injustices surrounding who gets to have a say in political discussions,” Hackett said, adding that the focus of the particular panel did not lend itself to a broader perspective, but that it would be noted for the future.

AUS Council supports creation of Indigenous Studies Program Referendum questions also discussed

T

he Arts Undergraduate Society (AUS) held its bi-weekly Council meeting last Wednesday and adopted all six of the proposed questions to be asked in the upcoming referendum period, as well as a motion regarding AUS’s support for the creation of an Indigenous Studies Program.

Indigenous Studies Program In Council on October 2, Arts Senator Claire Stewart-Kanigan presented a notice to motion regarding support for an Indigenous Studies Program at McGill.

The motion to support the program was then presented at the meeting last week, and passed unanimously. The motion mandates the AUS to adopt a stance of support for the proposed Indigenous Studies minor, the eventual development of an Indigenous Studies major, and the prioritization of the creation of a Chair in Indigenous Studies.

According to Stewart-Kanigan, the proposal for an Indigenous Studies program has

Cem Ertekin | The McGill Daily been finalized and submitted to the Arts Curriculum Committee.

Stewart-Kanigan said that there has been a push by students in the past to have such a program, but as students graduate and move on every year, it becomes easy for such projects to get lost.

“The students were met with active faculty cooperation in this [proposal]. [...] Now that there’s an actual proposal, there is an actual vote [where] we can say that we support a certain side,” said Stewart-Kanigan in an interview with The Daily.

“When it does come up for consideration at the curriculum committee, and at the Faculty of Arts committee, and each subsequent level that the proposal has to go through, there will be strong student support that can be called upon that will perhaps influence the considerations,” she continued.

Referendum Questions Two of the proposed referendum questions

deal with increasing the number of representatives on Council – including the addition of an Equity Committee Representative and a Financial Management Committee Representative.

In an interview with The Daily, StewartKanigan said that she strongly supported the addition of an Equity Committee Representative to Council.

“Having someone who is highly sensitized to oppressive behaviours [...] can add a useful dimension to not only the discourse itself, but the way the discourse happens in AUS Council,” Stewart-Kanigan explained.

“Given that the Equity Committee has been firmly established, the VP Internal [Enbal Singer] thought it would be a good idea to have a representative from the Equity Committee on AUS Council to institutionalize equity, to make sure that equity is involved with the AUS and they have a mechanism to report to the Council,” said AUS President Justin Fletcher in an interview with The Daily.

Other questions included amendments to the AUS Constitution and by-laws, such as a redistribution of responsibilities among executive members.

One of the constitutional changes being brought forward at referendum focuses on the fact that the AUS has hired a full-time executive assistant, whose salary is paid by student fees, to make a distinction between administrative tasks and governance. This change was imposed during the Winter 2013 referendum and now the AUS is seeking to update the constitution to reflect these changes.

“Now that we have more time to focus on governance, it was a good time for us to clean up the constitution [...] So we found this to be a good opportunity not just to look at that position but all of our positions, and how [...] the descriptions [could] be written better, have clearer mandates, and actually reflect a lot of the work we do,” Fletcher explained.

The polling period for the referendum will take place from November 21 to 26.

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The McGill Daily

Monday, November 4, 2013

Who’s hungry?

Grabbing land to feed… the rich Aaron Vansintjan A Bite of Food Justice The first of a two-part series.

“

This area is known as a bread basket,” says Ella Haley, a resident, activist, and professor at Athabasca University. She's referring to Brant County, which lies southwest of Toronto, just a 30-minute drive from Hamilton. “It has very fertile farming communities.”

That is, until recently.

In 2005, Ontario delineated one of the world’s largest greenbelts around Toronto, forbidding development in the hopes of preserving farmland and conserving nature.

Brant County, and other nearby counties like Simcoe, Niagara, and Wellington, happen to be just outside of it. Since then, many farmers in these counties have sold their land and become millionaires.

Now, the greenbelt is dotted with what Haley calls ‘agri-slums’: whole acres of farmland where heritage barns are derelict and land is left unworked. A development corporation by the name of Walton, Inc. plans to pave roads, raise up condos, and transform the county for good.

When word of the land sales reached community members, many were outraged about the lack of consultation. A petition was signed by a coalition of Mohawk activists, faith groups, and environmentalists. Walton's plans went on, largely unhindered. Presentations to council didn't do much either.

One particularly meticulous resident, David Langer, started digging up the fine print.

Over the phone, Haley guides me through one of the documents Langer had posted online. It’s from the Ontario Land Registry, listing the shareholders of a Walton-affiliated purchase.

“Usually, when you sell a farm you sell to an individual, or you sell to a couple. But in this case, this farm is broken up into 663 shares,” Haley says. This is no usual development project; people from all over the world – Singapore, India, China – are buying in to these shares, even though they won’t be planning on living there.

But what's the issue? Investors – Haley calls them land bankers – buy up property, develop the land, sell it at an inflated price to foreign investors, new residents move in, Brant County gets richer. That doesn't seem so bad.

The problem, Haley thinks, is that this kind of speculation and development ends up being worse for local communities. “What you’ll see is that land bankers and speculators are coming to Brant County because land is cheaper, because they’re outside the green belt. When they buy it, they keep it as farms until they want it. This leads to ‘acre slums.’”

From fertile to fallow land. The development of massive tracts of land for the purpose of suburban housing has another side effect, says Haley. Given the current economy, it’s easy to import fresh foods from abroad. But with recent oil price spikes and global food

Sylvan Hamburger | Illustrator crises, that kind of cheap food may not always be available. “Food security means ‘do we have enough food?’ But food sovereignty is: ‘can we grow what we want, where we want? Can we grow it locally?’” When farm-land, especially one of Canada's breadbaskets, is taken over for housing, this can have serious ramifications for an already precarious food system.

Brant County, it turns out, isn’t alone.

People all over the world are experiencing similar enormous land acquisitions. In some

cases, the land they live on is sold from under their feet overnight by international investors. “The plunder of Brant County’s foodland,” says Haley, can be linked to a global trend: land grabbing. *** It’s hard to talk about land grabs without talking about GRAIN, a small non-profit organization working to support small farms

worldwide. GRAIN’s mission is to support people’s control of their own food production – food sovereignty – and to maintain biodiversity throughout the world. By supporting and connecting small farmers, social movements, researchers, and grassroots movements, they strive to develop a network all over the world to fight against large agri-businesses.

(Continued on page 9)

Commentary

The McGill Daily

Monday, November 4, 2013

9

Letters Submit your own: letters@mcgilldaily.com

McGill’s hiring inequities

Respond to racism

Dear Daily, The scenario described in Hera Chan and Nicolas Quiazua’s article (“McGill School of Social Work accused of perpetuating systemic racism,” News, October 28, page 3) about Ed Lee’s important complaint regarding racist hiring practices at McGill did not surprise me.

One detail that stands out as especially familiar is the search committee’s use of internally adopted criteria that are not included in public job postings.

This has been the case in every hiring committee I have been a part of at McGill (and at other universities), and in some cases internal and vague criteria have been used to eliminate candidates of colour, as well as queer candidates, from consideration. I have not witnessed a case when challenges to such eliminations within a committee were successful (at McGill or any other university). In one case, a candidate of colour was not shortlisted because several committee members asserted she was not “stellar enough” for McGill, whatever that means.

The fact is that the vast majority of people

applying for academic jobs at McGill are highly and often comparably qualified, which means hiring decisions tend to come down to matters of taste, personality, pedigree, and other subjective and vague criteria that never appear in job announcements and have nothing to do with merit, qualifications, et cetera. McGill is not unique in this regard, but McGill certainly provides mushroom soil for racist and hierarchical decision-making in search committees, and some departments and programs seem to be more egregious than others. In some fields where there are many more candidates than there are jobs, scores of exceptionally qualified academics never make shortlists.

Ed Lee’s complaint exposes the need for faculty and administrators to have some serious and honest discussions about how hiring decisions are really made, what really underwrites the vague language of “excellence,” and how the very structure of the University and its hiring practices maintain inequalities.

(Continued from page 8)

years. They install palm monoculture. Within five years you have no traditional small production sector, because it’s been replaced by large-scale production. All these women who had their income derived from this, suddenly don’t have anything any more. When women lose their financial independence they receive all kinds of abuse, entering prostitution systems, derived of poverty, violence, gendered violence.”

When lands are seen as common, women tend to support their families through subsistence farming. Take away that common land, privatize it, and the wages received from working on these plantations will not be nearly enough. Whole communities are af-

In 2008, GRAIN started to notice reports of governments and companies travelling across the world to acquire huge swaths of land. As they say in one 2013 article, “The sheer number of such reports signalled something new; we had not seen this intensity of investor interest in farmland before, and in our view it was a reaction to the food crisis and the financial crisis of that same year.”

GRAIN quickly published a report, Seized!

The 2008 land grab for food and financial security, and in so doing, initiated a global wave of activism, protest, and research to fight the phenomenon.

Land grabbing, explains Claire Lagier, who works for GRAIN and is completing a masters in Environmental Science at UQAM, is a complex process. Each case is different. Like in Brant County, sometimes it's large corporations and foreign shareholders that buy up land. Sometimes it’s whole governments like China or South Korea that invest in land to secure food access in the future. “There’s a lot of very fertile land that’s being bought,” says Lagier, “especially in Africa, in countries where land rights are very poorly defined.”

But again, what’s the issue? Why should we be worried?

Lagier explains that land grabbing often ends up harming local communities more than it might be intended to help them. “[For example] there's a lot of countries where women are traditionally, culturally, in charge of producing palm oil, processing it, and selling it on markets. Then these companies come and negotiate with the chiefdom to either buy the land or lease the land for 100

—Adrienne Hurley Associate Professor, East Asian Studies

When farm-land, especially one of Canada's breadbaskets, is taken over for housing, this can have serious ramifications for an already precarious food system. fected, and sometimes they put up resistance.

“You have some cases of grabbings where [there is] a private security or local police force that comes, and if they meet any resis-

Dear Daily, The news of institutional racism at McGill’s School of Social Work speaks to a wider culture of racism at McGill that is no ‘news.’

If you consider the demography of almost all the other departments in the Faculty of Arts, the inequitable representation of folks of colour is patent. These inequities seep down into day-to-day overt acts of racism and micro-aggressions that occur all the time.

The day after the Human Rights complaint was starting to make its waves, I witnessed racial profiling in the SSMU lounge.

“This is discrimination. I’m a black guy. I go through this every day of my life,” said this student, before he was forced to respond to the security officer’s request for his student ID to verify that he was a student who could use the space.

The SSMU couches have been my second home for my four years at McGill, and I have never seen anyone carded. The guard’s rationale was that it is his duty to card people he hasn’t seen in the lounge before. The many white students who I’ve never seen before,

who haphazardly use the space, will never be carded, because they fit the prototypical image of McGill student – a prototype that is a function of McGill’s deeply-rooted racist history. In that interrogatory moment, that guard crystallized that SSMU and campus at large are not “safe(r) spaces.” The over-visibility of blackness in that space was further re-inscribed and will likely continue as black students are profiled across campus.

In these situations, we have a duty to intervene. We cannot control the fact that discrimination happens, but we can control how we respond to it. There will always be limitations in our interventions, but nonetheless, we must hold ourselves and one another accountable to responding when these incidents occur. I encourage us to spread the news of the School of Social Work around, to talk to our peers about it, and to critically discuss it together while asking ourselves how we can be lighter placeholders in systemic racism.

tance to the grab that they’re doing, they will intimidate people, and they will kill peasant leaders and social movement leaders to intimidate resistance and to get people to stop organizing,” explains Lagier.

It’s not just foreign nations and investors that are buying up land. Canadians are doing it too, even though they might not know it. “Pension funds and investment funds are some of the biggest players of the financial industry, and in the past five to ten years they’ve been investing about $15 billion in land, which is expected to double by 2015. It's something that's growing really fast right now.”

“La Caisse de dépot et placement, which is the biggest pension fund in Quebec, just announced last year that they will be investing some money that they’re managing for unions into a company created in Brazil to acquire land. That means it’s a first instance of a Canadian pension fund investing [in land grabs]. We also learned very recently that the Canada Pension Plan has also just made its first investment in farmland. It’s a very new trend of Canadian pension funds to do this.”

These funds are being used to buy up largely forested or ‘unused’ land, in the hopes that they will produce some profit in the future. And it’s only increasing, says Lagier.

“This is a gold rush that is happening with farmland all over the world, but especially in Africa and some parts of South America and Southeast Asia.” GRAIN says that 60 countries have been targeted, and Oxfam estimates that 33 million hectares (about eight times the size of the Netherlands) have been leased or sold since 2001, and about 60 per cent of the projects are in Africa. It’s clear that land grabbing is a global trend that is on

the rise, with little to stop it.

This all sounds very familiar. Foreign investors buying up huge swaths of land?

People claiming that locals aren’t ‘efficient’ or ‘productive’ enough and are mismanaging the land? Taking advantage of local legal structures for the sake of profit? Violently taking people’s land and then forcing them to work on it? It bears a really strong resemblance to the history books, particularly the chapters on early colonialism.

—Shaina Agbayani SSMU Equity Commissioner 2012-2013

It’s not just foreign nations and investors that are buying up land. Canadians are doing it too.

What’s confusing about land grabbing is whether it’s a recent phenomenon, unique to the past decade, or actually a continuation of older processes, like the large-scale privatization of land that happened when Europeans colonized other continents. The next part of this series will delve into that question by considering how the two are linked, why they’re different, and how colonialism continues to this day. I will also show what people all over the world, but especially in Canada, are doing to fight it.

A Bite of Food Justice is a column discussing inequity in the food system while critiquing contemporary ideals of sustainability. Aaron Vansintjan can be reached at foodjustice@mcgilldaily.com.

The McGill Daily

10

Commentary

Monday, November 4, 2013

Working against precarity Media strategies for labour Errol Salamon | Commentary Writer

I

n recent discussions within the labour movement in Canada and Quebec, people often overlook the role of media workers in fighting against neoliberal austerity politics and precarious, flexible work. Yet labour activists could learn from, and collaborate with, news and broadcast media workers to resist capitalist assaults.

What insights can the labour movement gain from the organizing strategies of media workers? Precarity has arguably been one of the defining features of broadcasting and newspaper work. Against these labour conditions, media workers have a long history of mobilizing.

Since the birth of the labour movement in Canada in the 19th century, media workers have been at the forefront of labour struggles and social change. Newspaper printers were at the centre of one of the most significant events in the history of the Canadian labour movement: the 1872 strike at Toronto newspaper the Globe.

On March 25, 1872, after the paper’s management neglected the Toronto Typographical Union’s demands to work less than 12-hour days, the printers went on strike. These workers were among the pioneers of the international Nine-Hour Movement for a shorter workday. On April 15, 1872, a demonstration was held in Toronto in solidarity with the striking printers. A parade of around 2,000 workers quickly grew to 10,000 people, representing about 10 per cent of the city’s population at the time.

As capitalism accelerated, the labour press gave workers a crucial autonomous platform.

Following the strike, the federal government passed the Trade Unions Act (1872), legalizing labour unions in Canada.

Beyond legislative reform, after 1872, many of the labour movement’s more radical demands stemmed from the news workers strike, including the demand for a shorter workweek. The Toronto Trades Assembly, a major labour organization at the time, also published the weekly publication Ontario Workman, Canada’s first labour newspaper. As capitalism accelerated, the labour press gave workers a crucial autonomous platform to not only raise awareness of labour injustice and oppression, but also to fight against it.

This practice of autonomous or alterna-

tive labour-based media is still important today. In April 2007, locked out workers at Journal de Québec created their own newspaper, Média Matin Québec, urging people to boycott the Journal. Sun Media Corp., the owner of the paper, locked out 140 unionized staff, deciding to end negotiations with workers regarding salaries, the length of the workweek, job outsourcing, and media convergence.

[In mainstream media,] strike coverage is typically centered on the effects of the dispute, often erasing the broader context in which it emerges.

With the support of their union, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), news workers published and distributed around 40,000 copies per day of their free alternative paper, from Monday to Friday. The paper ran for more than 14 months, the duration of the lockout. It was meant to serve as a pressure tactic to force the employer to return to the collective bargaining table.

Another strategy is to use alternative or community media to support non-media workers. Campus-community radio and television stations can use media to build links and solidarity with the labour movement. An example of solidaritybuilding media is the monthly “Labour Radio” show on CKUT 90.3 FM. Community media programs like “Labour Radio” are important to counter mainstream, profitdriven media and provide spaces for alternative voices.

Compare mainstream media and “Labour Radio” coverage: the former tends to focus on events rather than issues. One of the key events through which corporate media frame labour is the strike. Strike coverage is typically centred on the effects of the dispute, often erasing the broader context in which it emerges. To address these work stoppages, mainstream media typically use biased, anti-worker language, based on assumptions of mobilization against the labour movement.

Unlike profit-driven media, “Labour Radio” regularly includes in-depth coverage of concrete labour issues. Without this discussion, many people aren’t usually able to fully grasp labour events. “Labour Radio” is also inherently pro-worker and supports the la-

Alice Shen | The McGill Daily bour movement: often, stories are about the projects of rank-and-file workers.

For example, a December 2011 “Labour Radio” show included a piece about McGill University Non-Academic Certified Association’s A Christmas Carol hardship fundraiser for workers following the fall 2011 strike, and the importance of union strike funds. Also aired was an in-depth interview with Michel Daigle, the president of the union representing workers at a pork processing plant in St. Simon, Quebec, who were locked out since 2007, and a documentary about the labour of basket-making in India. Workers and unions are not only reflected on Labour Radio but also help to directly oppose anti-labour biases found elsewhere in the media.

In addition to autonomous or alternative media, a key strategy of precarious media workers is to organize collectively in unions.

L’association des journalistes indépendants du Québec (AJIQ) is a union that represents freelance journalists in Quebec. AJIQ is affiliated with La Fédération nationale des communications (FNC). FNC is a federation of unions that represents around 7,000 communication workers in Quebec.

AJIQ fights to improve the socio-economic and labour conditions of freelance and contract journalists, some of the most precarious media workers who don’t typically form unions. It has also supported individual grievances related to worker pay (for example, underpayment, no payment, or late payment). In addition, AJIQ has fought for the recognition of author rights of independent journalists.

If the labour movement is looking to move beyond precarity, it can learn a lot from, and build solidarity with, media workers.

Errol Salamon is a PhD student in Communication Studies, and can be reached at errol.salamon@mail.mcgill.ca.

Errol will be hosting a panel on media strategies for labour on Thursday, November 7. Panelists include Mariève Paradis, a freelance journalist and President of AJIQ; Lisa Djevahirdjian, a Conseillère syndicale for SCFP (CUPE); and David Tacium, a CEGEP teacher with experience on the executive of his union amd host of “Labour Radio” for six years. For more information on Labour Week at McGill, and to view the full schedule, please visit interunionvoicemcgill.org.

Features

The McGill Daily

Monday, November 4, 2013

NOT A MEDIA EVENT Photographing the feeling we call community Written by Hera Chan Above Photo by Hera Chan When the media event happened, I was trying to forge my way across the street. It was my first year of university, and the Maple Spring was coming into full swing.

The immediate reaction I had was to photograph the demonstrations – or should I say #manifencours – that were passing by. Living across from Loto-Québec at the time allowed a trigger-happy young photojournalist like myself to capture much of the police violence enacted upon protesters – mostly made up of youth (presumably students).

The student strikes, known affectionately as the Maple Spring, created a spectacle that many media-makers took advantage of and exploited.

This was the time for student photographers, journalists, and editors to demonstrate just how well they could report, tweet, and break news on a topic that hit so close to home. For many of them, the strike became a great opportunity to showcase their work, to ‘make it’ into mainstream media outlets and to network with fellow reporters.

In fact, many student reporters and leaders made careers out of the strike, which they continue to harvest. As a contributor to student media, and the photo editor of The Daily at the time – my term began in May 2012 but I was photographing before that – I, as well as many others, occupied the liminal space between would-be militant and (Continued on pg 12)

11

12

The McGill Daily

Monday, November 4, 2013

Features

There are two photographs taken on March 22, 2012 from the 200,000-strong demonstration from the Maple Spring – marking the largest anti-tuition demonstration in Quebec history. My experience of the demonstration is depicted above.

Thien’s chosen photograph from that day is below.

budding reporter.

The Daily released a cover on March 12, 2012 – before my editorship – that said in boldface font: “Vote to Strike.” The white text was set on a bright red square. In the coming year – during my editorship – the 20 members of the editorial board continued to write editorials in support of the student movement and covered nightly demonstrations that we felt were inaccurately portrayed by mainstream media. In a sense, I felt that by photographing, I was contributing to the movement.

Being published in The Daily was a way to amplify my point of view, my experience, and my vision of the events. To document police brutality became, in my view, a means of incriminating them, to expose the force that swept away protesters with tear gas and pepper spray: human bodies acting as push factors wearing army-grade gear.

But I was not only photographing the police. I have photographs of demonstrators enacting violence on capital and property, breaking bank windows, and spray-painting the city red – acts many mainstream

Photographing is an inherently nostalgic exercise. Once the moment is captured, it is over. The photographer’s power in creating collective memory is immense, but it will always be a collective memory at a distance.

WA NT

a Paradox, I am wondering how l could possibly exist in this infinite, morally dubious world.

Music sears my soul, corrodes Sodium in my dragon eyes, illuminates my spirit; paints it a symphony of undefined colours. should I go blind, my life would be uneasy, uncomfortable, unjust. I have always had attachments to whatever happened to drift (even for moments) across my life. should I go Deaf --- I can too vividly imagine the pure terror. silence ringing in my ears (excruciating), discordant. wrapping my mind with insanity’s reverent tendrils Choking. and if my mere (great) imagination is this wild, I am so very afraid of how clear and deep reality would cut.

I am good at nearly everything, and Music does not escape that. though I long for distinguished talent an explosion to propel me out of this lucky mediocre life my upper middle class world. no one can deny my intelligence (though they can reject modesty) yet at this point it is far too easy. I was born lazy. I have potential dormant in my veins, pools of lovely blood just waiting to explode. my vocabulary is limited and inadequate for whatever I wish to express on paper. the notes in my head just can’t seem to sing or vibrate on a piano the way they do in confinement.

I like bum spontaneous actions rolling on dirty floors hands, guitars, height velvet voice long walks on the beach and the occasional lie , in order for dramatic effect. sometimes I wonder if people can walk through me and my transparency. sometimes I dream of shattering a million voices, a billion minds (of their expectations) with me. give me unconditional love and in return being the kindred soul I am will lovingly, place in your open palms something valuable: honesty.

Empathy defines me, and yet on what grounds can I say I feel the same as you? no one will truly understand the depth and detail of feeling shuddering your body except you. give me Ignorance and I will try my very hardest to learn. show me Ignorance and I will try my very hardest to be its tamer.

I will be great.

You’ll never forget me (please).

2

Ki-eun Peck

Kei. I take love by its tendrils wrap it by its edges; soft, careful, intent, smoothing creases.

I dip my fingers in the tears and make nations out of lonely islands.

YOU WERE NOT TEN PIECES OF MY HEART I’m a Sahara desert, a dried lake, a saltless ocean a dime without ten pennies.

You were not ten pieces of my heart instead, appearing in chips (fragments) (pieces) jutting into my clavicle, shards of glass I stain red.

THE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Sitting in the park you translate longing into your own language with no future tense and a hundred words for warmth.

On their green front lawn our polite neighbours discuss the most humane way to kill a lobster. They say the freezer seems gentler but too slow.

Uncovered

Your new dictionary cannot help anyone tell stories.

Instead of previous structures you find silence, push back cuticles to discover the pale hidden shell.

Along the street your diligent neighbours wrap trees like squat ghosts.

Remember our promise to carry extra words, pockets sweetly bulging with unnecessary adverbs.

Fall and yet you are busy uncovering the earth under the raked gravel pale arms under summer tan.

The mottled bark of each branch exposed by autumn’s sudden nakedness.

Together, we decide this summer will taste kind, our insults packed away in cardboard boxes with holey woolen sweaters.

In defense you love the goosebumps sprouting thinly on the swell of your bare thighs.

With your hand you shield absence like a candle from winter’s stiff persistent gust.

Searching your new lexicon, in the brash sun we practice opening our mouths without biting.

Ritual

Christy Frost

Summer Translations

You were a doctor’s daughter used to dispensing drugs from the Rubbermaid tub by your parents’ bed.

Did you miss prescription?

The sacred scrawl of approval from the hand that discovered your body on the flat blue cot, while the shiver of rice paper crinkled with your thigh.

And the blunt fingers that hurt with knowing all your glands --What of them?

The puppeteer

Sylvan Hamburger

Y

IDENTIT

3

Erinn Acland

Annie Preston

1963

Heritage

4

we sat on the back porch and you talked to me about wintertime in kansas all dry knuckles and chapped lips, winds that chased the dreams that dried up in the dustbowl of the yesterdays and your words ran down my throat like a leaky faucet or like slow rain, the kind that kansas never sees and all I could think of is that my grandmother never throws anything away because she was raised during the great depression and because she saved the newspaper from when kennedy was shot and because she would have fixed the leak in the faucet, and then I would never have heard any of this at all, anyway.

My grandfather, his father, his father’s father they had some kind of magic, they spoke with doves, and somehow I have lost it because even these pidgins don’t love me, even these sidewalks are tired of carrying me around.

And I think it’s because my grandfather’s trade shamed the family in the New World, in the New World where magic turned into sidewalk dust and dreams dissolved like copper in water and like the salt on my grandmother’s eyes leaked when her son died in that unspeakable way, the same way her husband was hidden from autumn light because he was too many of the wrong things and the things that would not make advances or make things move faster, go forwards, progress progress progress but rather A trade. To talk to doves, to pull scarves from thin air and rabbits from hats.

To see memories in our veins, and oh, I would fall in love with the pidgins if I was able to; I would take them somewhere freer if I knew how.

Speak a language I should have learned, give all these things value in my heart.

THE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Camille Zolopa

When I Was Growing Up

When I was growing up, We lived in a solid house.

It offered all the benefits of solid matter.

I could place my hand on the wall and feel its cold permanence.

I could draw with a felt pen and know that I would watch that red ink fade gradually in the sun as the years and years and years passed.

Even though I thought I’d ruined it, Much more effort is required to profane such impermeable impassivity.

The heaviness of matter.

Usually the walls were very thick, But sometimes I could feel the walls contract and expand with a slow rumble like the stirrings of the greedy dragon under the mountain.

Very occasionally, I would stumble across new doors that led to tumultuous tombs of light and movement and decay.

I would proffer bruised flowers there in hopes of favor and return, But I could only ever find such rooms once.

Now, I don’t live in the solid house any more.

And neither does he. But she still does.

She lives in the solid house, slowly, slowly contracting and expanding.

Someday the dragon will explode out of his pit, but is it better to live her way the same day, the same day, the comfort of the seemingly-forevers?

He lives in a dreamscape, so high in the mountains he can almost drink from the heavy clouds.

He will never reach them, but is it better to live his way thinking the best will be within reach tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow?

As I am growing up, I live in a paper house.

Walking a thin line like the edge of Occam’s razor.

Light passes through the walls, Leaving its grainy translucence on my skin.

When I try to place my hand on the wall It shivers and flutters, taunt as a rabbit’s heartstring jittering like the lofty canvas of a boat that doesn’t know whether it will sail or stay.

Plugged In

Sylvan Hamburger

Y

IDENTIT

5

Colours On a Page Mel Hatter was seated on a stained object resembling a chair. He was inside a stained building which no one except the architect thought resembled a library. Four hours had passed and Mel’s back had begun to ache. He had been drinking in the bard’s words and lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunk and flicked his tongue like a forked night on the air. Like a snake he got up, uncoiling himself from hibernation to extend down the hall. Glancing from side to side in his progress at so many pretty faces, his forked tongue worked lasciviously. And when he had almost poked out his head—forgot my jacket!

‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’ Time to turn back and descend the stair...

Mel came outside very frustrated with his evening. It was so warm now that he hadn’t needed the jacket. Pale and loitering, he collected his thoughts then stumbled forwards.

There was the dissipating feeling of stickiness he always got inside a library. It was as if everyone’s collective sweat became airborne in libraries. After it had bred a clammy swarm, the mists dove to settle on every surface and sprout from fertile pores. He hoped that the wind outside would air his body and his mental stupor. The hopeless dejection of a night at the library was combined with that heightened purpose after putting down a good book, a blooming sense of self. With this he overcame the feeling he had wasted time. Boiled from the froth of habitual confusion the fog of libraries and philosophers was condensed by the heat of his inquiry and the night’s unseasonal warmth—and into a question which seemed clearer than all the rest.

“What were you inside that library? What were you?”

Mel smiled because the answer was elevated: a sculpture... which the last four clockturns had spun round. Not spun in confusion over missing jackets or turned unfinished as on a potter’s wheel. He was to that rotation of the earth and daily museum-traffic the timelessness and immobility of great art on a pedestal. The library had been the Louvre.

He had been... The Nike of Samothrace.

Mel’s smile broadened as he pursued the idea. Oh Nike was so like himself, not running away from his lazy mind but coming to it lovingly she lay his aching head on her stone breasts. Now she came alive and Pygmalion got his wish: they merged together, then he stood tall in the Louvre. Meanwhile the dim tourists, those annoying shits, had preferred to talk, to perspire, to look at their phones. But he sensed their tacit reverence for the diligence he embodied and that they appreciated his patient endurance of their company even though he had no head for the task. Had he any ears his focus on victory was such that his mind would have blocked out all noises. He would attain the laurels come Marathon and hopefully die in exhaustion. The cold feeble hands of that very thespian it had been his task of deciphering would lead a general huzzah for Mel’s sake. The huzzah, an outburst such as it was, was retracted: he had come to bury Mel not praise him.

And yet the poet smiled for he couldn’t hear their banalities, the tourists’ words were all Greek to his ears, and now only the poet’s words held meaning for Mel’s senses... which

Ben Cohen-Murison were however fading...

The sky was mostly turning black as Mel looked up. But here and there were small colourful ribbons appearing. For the first time in many cycles the night had taken off her mourning attire and put on something new, wearing an array of blues and purples in addition to her usual black. The colours tapered away indiscriminately like a folded garment tucked into the pockets of a dress. It was all rather elegant but he was jealous of the change in her. She had probably read some silly novel to parody his labours. This was some emulation of a powerful lady in Woolf or Flaubert. Maybe she had taken these ladies on their colourful pages to her black chest in rapture and they had penetrated her savage heart. These reds and purples of the sky had come gushing forth.

The text had been something inspiring and she—Mel wistfully acknowledged—she at least had learned something those four hours. Mel turned his eyes downwards. He was so sad that he locked his eyes on the pavement that he was passing over. With hatred he saw the tri-colore of roving peoples: Grays, browns, yellows. He nudged such trash as he could find into less conspicuous areas which only the depraved, the wandering and the unloved would choose to look at and make use of in their sullied, slatternly hovels, such garish colourful people as they were. Then under his breath he muttered to the source of his sadness: “Have you forgotten him so soon?”

A short pause and then Night whistled: “Whom?”

“Only someone who thinks you’re a goddess. I guess he’s not important. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

A pause...longer this time and he seemed to be waking. The seconds passed and he regretted having offended her, so breaking the silence he continued more plainly: “I don’t mean myself: it’s not me who loves you. But I mean that you don’t care about him whoever he is. And it’s because you’ve dressed in something nice and bright tonight.”

“No,” she responded quickly this time, “The other half of me, that better and brighter half is never jealous. I am worshipped by pagans but He is no idolater. He does not make me a goddess any more than I am by carving me in stone idols. He does not trap my image in the Pantheon to burn me with His passing eye during the day; never leaves me there at night among the burnt offerings and the watchful eyes of our family and the horse-whips of his burning lust. I am free to roam at night as I should, for our loyal paths will always cross at sunset. As I say to you now about my dress have I said to Him about my body: do not expect me in mourning. He is content and so am I.” “Well good for you” Mel said with yearning lips, his tears flowing, with no selfassurance of having spoken wittily or dumbly and in confusion as to whether he still slept in the library, his face kissing its pages or the woman he loved.

Andy Wei

6

THE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

PiĂąata

Eleanor Milman A Study Of Cohesiveness

Clara LagacĂŠ

i.

National Identity: a sense of a nation as a cohesive whole, as represented by distinctive traditions, culture, and language (OED). two languages: English & French. two nations: I have never felt like a cohesive whole when I sit for a long time, a red line appears in the middle of my stomach the softness of my belly divides me in half My father always says: you are bicultural, BE PROUD. I am.

But only sometimes. ii. my body mapped out by another the curves of my hips, the lines of my lips drawn sensuously with fingertips, brushing lightly, bruising hard, under covers, intertwined tight iii.

Je ne me souviens plus. iv. grind and rub smash and scour polish and melt light the glass on fire and you will have a round globe smooth, united hold it up for everyone to admire (be careful not to drop it.)

Y

IDENTIT

7

All is Well, All is Well, All is Well Still rubbing the beer his new neighbours had paid for out of his eyes, Ian left his room and walked into the slate grey ’93 Chevy parked in his living room. “...the...fuck...?” It sat, impassively low slung, on the splinters of the table he had found last night while moving in. The walls and ceiling matched his memory, as did the box of granola he’d knocked over.

After taking too many aspirins, he turned around to make sure the truck was still there. Its rear bumper advertised a radio station he hadn’t heard of, and a ski resort. Ian rubbed his temples and called a friend.

He was leaning around the truck scrambling eggs when Brian arrived, tool set in tow.

“Well’m if ’n yer trynta pop this truck out yonder door, cain’t see how ya do it less’n you take the thing apart.” Tools brought out Brian’s accent.

“Right, that’s what I figured. If you can help, I’ll join in after these eggs.”

“Well allllllllrighty.” With that, Brian slid under the truck. “I guess...I’m eating them on the pan,” Ian mumbled.

Brian heard nothing, but rolled out to say, “well, hey, it’s lookin like it’s the top stuff what comes off first. Y’see I reckoned as much, but I jus like playin’ withis here rollin’ pan.”

“For sure, yeah, you don’t have to start without me.”

The truck came apart, down the stairs, and into a box left over from moving day. Three hours later, below Ian’s truckless apartment, Brian said, “if we put this truck back together, we can do whatever we want with it. It’s ours, we could sell it or drive it around or anything. It’s a gift from the universe.” His tools were upstairs.

“Right, ok, are we just gonna put it back together here?” There was no shade, and a grocery store in the plaza nearby.

Running back down the apartment’s stairs with his tool kit, Brian called out, “T’ain’t no reason I reckon we cain’t haver together here quick as she came apart.”

Eight hours later, well into saturday night, with a crowd of tipsy onlookers in fishscale dresses, Brian rolled out from under the truck, dressed in grease.

“Now, ladies, gentlemen, friends and wellwishers,” addressing them from the ground and making no eye contact, “What it is you done seen here is no less’n the resurrection o’ Christ himself.” With an expansive gesture, he presented the truck to them.

“You’re kidding,” Ian said.

“No siree, I am not, I am compelled in the presence of our Lord, I speak only the truth, God’s honest.” He threw his tools into the bed and told Ian, “Come now, let’s us spread the news, the word is returned, is resurrected.”

The crowd cheered as the two drove away. Until the truck’s disappearance the following morning, Ian drove while Brian, in ecstasy, yelled precisely the right things at anyone they passed.

Alex Williams

Mahmood Zargar

Tamim Sujat

8

THE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

The McGill Daily

Features

13

Monday, November 4, 2013

outlets later used and continue to use to demonize demonstrators.

Seeing that defenders of the use of police force were also deciding what was considered ‘criminal,’ I started to question whether my role as a photojournalist was contributing to incrimination of these protesters. *** A lot of my closest friends, I met in the street. They are people I never would have rubbed shoulders with in the university education setting. The nights came alive with a new type of community, a collective that swelled to the thousands. One such friend of mine is Thien Vo, a selfdescribed documentary or snapshot photographer, though he still hesitates to describe his work as such.

Thien’s photographs have a way of showing intimacy, something that I have not yet been able to accomplish to my satisfaction in my own work. “I was able to do what I wanted because no one expected me to do it,” Thien said, recalling the beginning of his photo blog. It was his archive, a visual record of red square-wearing folks that did not come from the major newspapers. “If people wanted to remember the event, I didn’t want them to only have the news,” he said.

In my understanding of photojournalism at the time, I was expected to be able to capture the big moment – spectacular beyond belief – where the protesters and the

police clashed. It is all very violent. There may be bloodshed and large black, armed horses. The angle of the shot is lined up so the ground doesn’t quite line up to the frame horizontally. In the heat of the moment with all the adrenaline, even you, the photographer, are falling.

The big moment makes the photograph in a newspaper. We were sent there for this media moment, and had to judge when exactly was the time to run toward rubber bullet shots fired and tear gas canisters ejected. The photographs I was taking were for student press. But outside that, why was I taking these photos? Who could I claim my photography represented, other than my own individual experience?

For Thien, his photographs were “a way of proving [he] was there, a way of proving [his] participation.” As an independent photographer, the experiences you seek in a photograph become yours instead of being dictated by a media mandate. Thien sought to show the existent power dynamic between the demonstrators and the powers that be at the time. “I [was] a demonstrator before being a photographer during that time,” he said.

Alternatively, when looking at the photographs published in mainstream media, I was always disappointed. It was hard to find a protester expressing emotional outcry. You only see them donning Guy Fawkes masks and balaclavas. (Please note that no one ever smiles at a community-organized march,

ever.) The photographs were taken from the outside, the sidewalk, where the photojournalist was protected from the people and the police. Some shots I saw were even taken from behind police blockades.

At the time, student media was exploring the possibility of community-building through established media sources. But I was still photographing according to a media mandate, based on representations of demonstrations by famed Leica-carrying photojournalists from the past. That first wave of photojournalists had invaded the popular imagination before colour film was a thing, from iconic photographs of a demonstrator in front of an army tank in Tiananmen Square, to Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother.” The power of these photographs to provide a new framework for thinking attracted me. The power of my eye to create those frameworks for monumental movements inspired me. *** I never questioned my right to interpretation; the right to put my framework on other people’s experiences. Sometimes the photographic ability to capture may be exactly that – a capture of your experience of your subject; your appropriation of their experience. Thien told me, “You have to be honest with yourself, where you stand, your politics, and that will show through your photography.”

The negotiation of my role as a photojournalist continues, albeit with advice from friends I met in the streets. The perpetuation of physical violence in photography is a delicate balance between an attempt to keep the powers that be in check and creating another violent image for readers to consume or editors to use out of context.

Photographing is an inherently nostalgic exercise. Once the moment is captured, it is over. The photographer’s power in creating collective memory is immense, but it will always be a collective memory at a distance.

For me, to have the privilege to visually represent the experiences of others in the public sphere comes with a weighted responsibility. Creating a connection with the subjects I photograph, and working through different methods of consent in photographing are things that I am still working on.

After the photograph is distributed, the power reverts back to the people who see it.

The way of seeing and interpretation in the future will contextualize what Thien, I, and so many other photographers have captured as the Maple Spring. The archival memory machine marches on through other demonstrations and media events. My hope in photographic media lies in changing where subjectivity lays in my images. This is my experience, not someone else’s. This photograph does not represent the movement.

This violence may not indict that police officer. And no, do not just consume it. Let me pass you the salt first.

Sci+Tech

The McGill Daily

Monday, November 4, 2013

A rockstar programmer in nine weeks?

14

if(skill>0): go to bootcamp Jeremy Schembri | Sci+Tech Writer

Alice Shen | The McGill Daily

C

oding skills seem to be the new vogue in the employment world. Budding entrepeneurs believe the only thing between them and the next Facebook is their lack of HTML mastery, while employers are searching for tech-savvy hires who can keep up with this month’s must-have digital feature. Bootcamps advertise a zeroto-hero program, getting intrepid wannabe programmers up to a decent coding skill level in 9 to 12 weeks; but is this even possible? The Daily talked with a few Canadian bootcamps and their alumni, who had very different experiences.

A typical bootcamp lasts about two to three months and costs anywhere from $7,000 to $12,000. Students immerse themselves in an intensive training program where they are taught programming skills through tutorials and hands-on projects.

Bootcamp programs are demanding – students typically commit to 40 hours a week of class and another 20 to 40 hours per week for side projects. All this work promises a much -desired reward: employment. Bitmaker Labs, a bootcamp in Toronto, boasts that over 85 per cent of its graduates find a job or begin their own startup within a month of graduating.

Tory Jarmain, a co-founder of Bitmaker Labs, told The Daily that because “there are more web development positions open than developers,” bootcamps are becoming a popular way to teach people to code. Though other options such as free online coding schools and university programs are available, Jarmain believes that, “A huge advantage exists in skill training with other people and that learning to code does not need a

four-year commitment.” With the lack of specializations in web development in higher education and the increasing demand for people with coding abilities, the demand for talent is far outstripping supply.

“[Some] fell behind and were not at the caliber they thought they would be at the end.”

Ashley Beattie Bootcamps are also a way for companies to recruit skilled people other than computer science graduates – such as people looking to make a career change or demographics underrepresented in technology.

At HackerYou, a Toronto bootcamp, 70 per cent of the classes are comprised of women.

The founder, Heather Payne, who is also a founder of the not-for-profit Ladies Learning Code, told The Daily that bootcamps “accelerate the career of anyone who already wanted to be a web developer.”

Bootcamps advertise the ability to teach people of all skill levels to code, though they are largely tailored toward those who want to start their own venture or become professional web developers. However, both the interviewed alumni expressed similar opinions that the initial differences in coding ability, combined with hard work, quickly stratifies the students into high-achievers and those who get left behind.

Unlike conventional education systems, which have formal regulation and evaluation systems, bootcamps operate free from wide-reaching structure or oversight. In Ontario, vocational programs that cost more than $1,000, and are more than 40 hours in length, may be subject to investigation or registration with the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities (MTCU). Earlier this year, the MTCU investigated Bitmaker Labs on the grounds that it was operating as an unregistered school, causing Bitmaker to put its program on hold. Bitmaker Labs eventually received a legal exemption, but without regulation it is hard to evaluate the promotional claims made by bootcamps.

Ashley Beattie, a graduate from Bitmaker Labs in winter 2013, had an overwhelmingly positive experience, and has since started a company called Kiwi Wearable Technologies. He went into the program with previous coding knowledge and was able to ‘get it’ after six weeks of the course. “After you write 10,000 lines of code you are well on your way to being a successful programmer,” Beattie told the Daily. But he emphasized that this was not the case for everyone: “[Some] fell behind and were not at the caliber they thought they would be at the end.” Beattie knew that he wanted to be an entrepreneur going into this program and was able to use his experience at Bitmaker to eventually start Kiwi Wearable Technologies.

The Daily spoke with another recent alumni from a Canadian bootcamp (which she chose not to name) who did not have such a positive experience. According to

Jennifer*, “[It was] unfair because the bootcamp increased the class size to almost double what was promised, it unexpectedly shut down for a few days halfway through, and it lacked a well thought-out structured curriculum.” She went on to say that, “The program had internal conflicts and the teachers, students, [and] organizers did not share the same teaching philosophy.” She referred to the stressful learning environment, frustration in the difficulty of understanding concepts, and the lack of guidance as reasons the bootcamp did not live up to her expectations.

“The program worked well for some but not for me,” Jennifer admitted to The Daily.

“The program worked well for some but not for me.”

Jennifer Bootcamps can generally provide a relatively quick and effective method for people to learn to code with high employment rates – making it an attractive option for those who are hoping to learn highly marketable skills. Still, this stressful and condensed environment does not work for all. To really thrive in this environment, some previous knowledge of programming is generally required. The lack of transparency and the variable quality of courses implies high stakes for students who are investing large sums of money. *name has been changed

The McGill Daily

Sci+Tech

15

Monday, November 4, 2013

Montreal one of the “Smart21” What is an ‘intelligent’ community?

Diana Kwon | The McGill Daily

W

e live in an age when you can call a taxi with a click of a button or chat with someone on the other side of the world in a matter of seconds. In our increasingly connected world, broadband communications and information technology are changing communities around the world.

The Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) is a non-profit organization that researches, encourages discussion, and brings awareness to the development of modern cities. According to the ICF, an intelligent community is one that has been able to understand and take steps toward addressing the problems brought up by a broadband economy, such as increasing migration from rural areas to large cities.

Louis Zacharilla, along with co-founders John Jung and Robert Bell, began this initiative in order to find ways to marry access to information and communications technology (ICT) with economic development and restoration of cities.

The ICF has named 21 of the world’s ‘top intelligent communities’ since 1999 in an attempt to bring greater visibility to their initiative and encourage discourse among communities. This year, Montreal was named as one of the “Smart21,” along with other cities such as Hsinchu City, Taiwan, and Nairobi County, Kenya.

“I always had my hometown in mind – how could it have been different, what happened, and how is it happening again?”

Louis Zacharilla The naming of the ‘Smart21’ is largely a venture promoting the idea of intelligent cities. “What we meant to do was to give visibility to the idea [...] even though to a large extent, this kind of stuff is always somewhat arbitrary,” Zacharilla admitted. When cities submit their applications for nomination, academic analysts assess these cities based on five criteria developed by ICF: broadband infrastructure, innovation, knowledge workforce, digital inclusion, and marketing and advocacy.

Another challenge described by Zacharilla was the difficulty in conducting quantitative analysis on the largely qualitative data provided by cities – and in comparing cities like Montreal that are populated with over a million people with cities such as Wanganui, New Zealand that have less than 20,000 people. Though the selection process may be less than perfect, the value in this process comes from the conversations and subsequent changes that are

Kristian Picon | Illustrator born out of this initiative.

The trend of increasing migration of individuals toward cities brings up concerns.

“More people now live in cities than ever before in human history, which means a lot of places are being largely depopulated [...] and the economies are suffering – making this a real global problem,” Zacharilla told The Daily. Zacharilla grew up in a small railroad town in upstate New York that he saw deteriorate as the railroad became less of an important infrastructure. Businesses eroded, and the ‘best and brightest’ migrated to the cities. When describing the motivation behind getting involved with ICF, Zacharilla explained, “I always had my hometown in mind – how could it have been different, what happened, and how is it happening again?”

TechnoMontréal, the information and communication technology cluster of Montreal, was responsible for the city’s submission to the ICF. TechnoMontréal has been working on the Montréal Digital Metropolis project since 2010. This project has focused on three major axes – collaborative ecosystems, smart data, and digital infrastructures – with the hope of creating awareness, mobilizing the public sector, and developing projects.

Collaborative ecosystems include the development of ‘living labs,’ which allow for innovation to occur with the user at the

forefront of the development process. One example is the Living Lab SAT (Société des Arts Technologiques) at the Ste. Justine University Hospital Centre. Here, digital arts are being used for the development of treatment for patients. Developing digital infrastructures involve initiatives such as bringing accessible Wi-Fi to all citizens. In Montreal, this is being done through collaboration with organizations such as Île sans fil by creating areas of free internet access throughout the city.

“What we meant to do was to give visibility to the idea [...] even though to a large extent, this kind of stuff is always somewhat arbitrary.”

Louis Zacharilla By facilitating the use and access to open data sets, changes can be made from various systems that range from health to

transportation. A major consideration for Montreal is developing smart transportation. “Transport is one of the things that really need to be worked on,” Lidia Divry, CEO of TechnoMontréal, told The Daily.

Divry emphasized the importance of being labelled one of the Smart21, “I think it will be very important for Montreal in terms of accelerating progress. With the municipal elections happening, there are a number of candidates who have [brought up] smart cities, [and] since two years ago, we’ve been talking to the government about moving toward smart cities.” Despite the research that is being done, and changes that are happening at grassroots levels, the support of the government is needed for widespread implementation of the various smart initiatives.

Though Montreal was labelled one of the top intelligent communities, there are considerations that must be made in order to maintain this status. Montreal has a ways to go in order to develop a ‘smart’ transportation system, and still have room to grow in terms of making the internet accessible for all. Montreal does not stand on its own however, and its acknowledgement as an intelligent community should be used, as Zacharilla stated, to allow for broader knowledge transformation across communities to allow improvements to other participating communities.

Health&Ed

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The McGill Daily

Monday, November 4, 2013

Diet pills pay Dr. Oz a visit

Commercializing and commodifying the industry Andrea Saliba | Health&Ed Writer

Midori Nishioka | Illustrator

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ur society is driven by the need to lose weight, the need to look ‘perfect,’ and the need to reinforce ourselves and our self-esteem by thinning down.

Conversely, people say they don’t have time to work out, they don’t want to cut certain foods out of their diet, or they are too impatient to wait a few months or a year in order to see the full effects of their weight-loss regimens. Ours is a society of cutting corners, so how do people expect that to be applied to their weight-loss?

Then comes the creation of diet pills.

Some researchers spend the entirety of their professional careers trying to find the best diet pill that can compel people to consume it, and pharmaceutical companies wait quietly and patiently for the next big thing to be created so they can snatch it and commodify it as fast as they can. Diet pills, then, become part of the marketplace, a product to be bought and sold, to be advertised, to be commercialized, and to be broadcast to millions.

Raspberry ketone Raspberry ketone (a naturally occurring compound found in red raspberries that gives them their smell) was introduced on the Dr. Oz Show in February 2013. Unknown to many, he called it “The No. 1 miracle [pill] in a bottle.”

Dr. Oz, accompanied by self-proclaimed “fitness and weight-loss expert” Lisa Lynn,

said that the pill makes your body “think it’s skinny” by producing a hormone called adiponectin. Furthermore, Lynn added that this pill “slices up the fat in your cells” which makes burning fat easier, and that the pill is said to be “very healthy” and has no “side effects.” For it to work, Lynn says that you have to take at least 100 mg of raspberry ketone, the equivalent of one capsule per day. (To get the same amount of raspberry ketone naturally you’d have to eat 90 pounds of raspberries a day.) The results start showing after one to five days, and, the longer you stay on this pill, the more weight you lose.

This pill sold out in many health food stores just after this episode aired on television, according to an abcnews.com article published on April 5, 2013 entitled “Raspberry Ketone Frenzy.”

Lynn said she discovered this pill by doing “research, research, and research.” Lynn forgot to inform the viewers that raspberry ketone was never tested on humans in clinical trials. Instead, it was tested on mice in two different experiments in 2006 and 2010.

Dr. Arya Sharma, Professor of Medicine and Chair in Obesity Research and Management at the University of Alberta, said in an interview with the Globe and Mail in June 2012 that raspberry ketone acts on the body by activating stress hormones, which can lead to problems such as an increase in heart rate. Dr. Sharma continued, adding, “The

science is just not there. The studies aren’t there. I would not be spending my money on any of this stuff.”

Garcinia cambogia On October 29, 2012, the show aired another episode featuring another diet pill called Garcinia cambogia or, in other words, “the newest, fastest fat-buster.” Garcinia cambogia is a tropical fruit native to Indonesia. Dr. Oz said that you can lose fat without dieting or exercising with the help of this diet pill – he called it the “revolutionary fat buster.”

This pill is said to be different from other diet pills in the market because of its “dual action”: it decreases body fat while suppressing appetite. Furthermore, it is said to aid in suppressing the stress hormone cortisol, and therefore can help decrease belly fat.

Dr. Oz said on the show that “[he] does not sell this stuff, [he] does not make any money on this, and [he] does not commission any brand on this.” The raspberry ketone phenomenon repeated itself after this episode.

Many health food stores that held the product suddenly found themselves lacking stock.

But does this pill actually work? Contrary to raspberry ketone, this pill was actually already tested on human subjects, but the results were not that positive. The first experiment done in 1998 – which was published in the Journal of the American Medi-

cal Association – and another one done in 2010 – published in the Journal of Obesity – came to the same conclusion: Garcinia cambogia failed to produce any significant weight-loss compared to a regular diet plan. But the last experiment showed that the Garcinia extract generated only shortterm results, and that “its clinical relevance seems questionable.”

The harsh truth If a diet pill is said to be ‘good,’ as shown on “The Dr. Oz Show” or just by good publicity, people will take it no matter the consequences. Our society is a fat-phobic one, and a lot of people will do anything it takes to lose weight and attain the supposedly ‘perfect’ body. Pharmaceutical companies make millions using that affective aspect. This marketplace is getting out of control, and Dr. Sharma asserts that “better regulations and tighter rules should be put in place to restrict the types of weight-loss claims companies are allowed to make.”

While that is one of the solutions, what is more important is changing how society views people who aren’t considered ‘skinny’ or ‘perfect.’ This could reverse the current trend, and people would not resort to drastic measures in order to become what society expects them to be, and shows like “Dr. Oz” wouldn’t feel compelled to thrust dieting into the mainstream.

The McGill Daily

Health&Ed

17

Monday, November 4, 2013

Speculation and pseudoscience Redpath Museum hosts event on mobile phones and health Joanna Wang | Health&Ed Writer

A

popular notion that cellphones may be potentially cancer-causing agents is a source of worry for many who hear these hypotheses. News outlets such as the Globe and Mail, the New York Times, and the CBC have been caught in the whirlwind of these claims, publishing articles with titles like “The disturbing truth about cellphones,” “Cellphone Radiation May Alter Your Brain. Let’s Talk,” and “Cellphone use may be linked to cancer...”

These types of articles feed off of speculative research and pseudoscience concerning mobile devices and health, and consequently propagate a baseless fear among the general population.

Lorne Trottier, co-founder of Matrox Group, and Kenneth R. Foster, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, held a talk at McGill entitled “Mobile phones and health: how should we respond to public concerns?” in order to dispel any myths surrounding the risks these devices may carry.

No, cellphones are not harmful, and every current study that attempts to conclude that can easily be proven wrong.

Whether it be at work, home or even a quick glimpse while driving, we are often compelled to check our cellphones. The radio waves (a form of electromagnetic radiation used for long-distance communication) emitted by cellphones may be a source of anxiety for many, to the extent of pointing to cancer as a potential result of the already long list of the supposedly harmful effects of cellphones on humans.

Lorne Trottier (Left), with Kenneth Foster (Right) Foster claims that not enough documented evidence exists to prove that the radio waves from cellphones can be held responsible for cancer. Even though the belief that cellphones cause cancer leads to more anxiety, the reality is that radio waves “have no effect on biological tissues,” according to Foster. But the fear related to the belief in cellphones causing cancer has led to product scams claiming to protect a person from the ‘dangers’ of electronics.

Trottier described a lecture that promoted a misconstrued view of health related to mobile phone use. Magda Havas, a professor of Environmental and Resource Stud-

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ies at Trent University, conducted a study published in the European Journal of Oncology in 2010 revealing that human heart rate doubled when people were in the presence of cordless phone chargers. This research was later shown to be false by Trottier and Harvey Kofsky, a professional engineer.

According to the National Cancer Institute, in a study entitled “Cell Phones and Cancer Risk” published in June 2013, some case-control studies in Sweden found statistically “significant trends of increasing brain cancer risk for the total amount of cell phone use and the years of use among people who began using cell phones before age

Robert Smith | The McGill Daily 20.” On the other hand, another large, casecontrol study in Sweden found no increased risk of brain cancer for that same age group.

In Foster’s view, “What scares people is the fact that we use the word radio waves.”

This fits into his early hypothesis that all the worry is psychological in nature. Trottier then concluded with the answer to the question on everyone’s minds: No, cellphones are not harmful, and every current study that attempts to conclude that can easily be proven wrong. Instead, it is up to the mainstream media to stop recycling speculations and myths, and advertising them as realities we should all be afraid of.

Come to half-section meetings on Tuesdays at 5:30 p.m.

Email scitech@mcgilldaily.com, healthandeducation@mcgilldaily.com or sports@mcgilldaily.com for more information

Sports

18

The McGill Daily

Monday, November 4, 2013

Hockey’s need for different goals

The ongoing education problem for young hockey prospects Lewis Krashinsky | Sports Writer

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n the land of the chip and chasers, time plays tricks on you. One moment you’re in the spotlight of 20,000 inebriated fans and the next you’re a fading fragment of hockey’s enduring history. Careers come and go like warm weather in Quebec and after it all ends, legends turn back into normal people. The game demands a lot of its players. It demands them to sacrifice their bodies, give their maximum effort, and forfeit all other focuses. But is it fair of the sport to also demand their futures?

Much ado has been made in the last decade, and rightly so, about player safety. The goal of both the league and the players’ union has been to make the game safer, in order to preserve players’ futures. But what hasn’t been talked about enough is education, specifically the fact that education is often forgone in order to take a shot at the pros. This leaves former players with few meaningful options following their careers and potential financial hardships.

This situation results from the majority of pro-caliber prospects playing in major junior leagues (such as the Ontario Hockey League or Western Hockey League) instead of at colleges or universities en route to the National Hockey League (NHL). Although there is an educational program in place in all the major junior leagues, recent reports have shown that only about 20 per cent of players get a collegelevel degree from this program, as compared to 88 per cent for college hockey athletes.

This is not an issue pertinent to the stars, who make millions over lengthy careers, but rather to the multitude of players who either don’t last long in the league or who don’t make it at all. Of all the players at the highest amateur level, junior or college, only 4.7 per cent of them will make it to the pros. But for the lucky ones that do make it, chances are they won’t be playing there for long. The average NHL career lasts only 239 games, and more than 50 per cent of player’s careers are finished before they turn 30. One player who stands as the model counterexample to this problem is McGill graduate and former Montreal Canadien Mathieu Darche.

Darche played four years for the McGill Redmen, amassing 130 points in 90 total games. His senior season he scored 27 goals and had 35 assists in only 26 games. He graduated in 2000 with a degree in international business. In an interview with The Daily, Darche discussed his time at McGill and the issue of education in hockey.

“For sure I enjoyed [my time with the Redmen],” Darche said. “I spent four years with the same group of guys, we all started in first year together. It wasn’t a competition; people weren’t pushing for a contract or fighting for their careers.” Darche is thankful for his time at McGill, saying, “Most of my closest friends are guys who went to McGill and it’s where I met my wife. I worked hard, but definitely had fun.”

Following the completion of his degree, Darche was signed by the Columbus Blue Jackets as an undrafted free agent. He spent

Haidan Dong | The McGill Daily twelve years between the American Hockey League (AHL, the professional league directly below the NHL) and the NHL, including three years with the Montreal Canadiens from 2009 to 2012. Darche retired from pro hockey last February.

“I have no regrets about my career.

Through it all, it was great,” Darche explained. “Coming from the CIS (Canadian Interuniversity Sport league), which is not a common route, I had to work my way up. I always dreamed [of ] play[ing] pro, but never thought it would actually happen. I idolized the Canadiens growing up, so it was great to be able to play for them. The highlight of my career was playing for the Canadiens in those final three years.”

Darche was correct in his assertion that coming from the CIS is not a common route.

This past year in the NHL, less than 30 per cent of all players had come from college hockey programs. The majority came straight from the junior leagues with nothing more than a high school diploma.

When asked if he would advise kids today to take the university/college route instead of playing major junior, Darche said: “Without a doubt. Of those who do [make it], what percentage will actually make enough for the rest of their lives?”

“After high school [major] junior hockey was never an option for me. I never considered not getting a university degree,” said Darche.

“The way I saw it was that you go through school because you probably will end up using your degree more than your hockey skills.

I was one of the few who made it to the pros, played 12 years and I’ll still end up using my education more than I will my hockey skills.”

Having spent more than 500 career games in the AHL and only half that amount in the NHL, Darche even attributes part of his eventual success in hockey to his education.

“I spent a long time in the minors, too long in my opinion,” he joked. “I felt more secure [having earned a degree]. It was the way I was able to grind it in the minors all those years,” Darche added. “I knew I had options after. I could pursue my dream and ha[ve] something to fall back on. It gave me the opportunity to push longer, and hang on, and eventually make it.”

Hockey is isolated, to an extent, in its lack of college-educated players. The National Football League almost exclusively drafts players out of college. The National Basketball Association (NBA) primarily draws its talent from college as well. Only 19.3 per cent of current NBA players did not come from a college team, with many of these players coming from nonAmerican leagues. In baseball, players are either drafted from college or straight from high school; they have the choice to pursue higher education in their road to the pros. Aspiring pro-hockey players often don’t have that same choice, as it is far more likely to make it out of junior leagues than from the college level.

“It would be much better if the NHL could be more like basketball and football, where education is the route to the pros,” Darche argued. “But I don’t know how we get there. It’s going to take a long time to change.”

This past summer, just months after his retirement, Darche began putting his McGill degree in international business to use.

He was hired by Delmar International Inc., a large firm involved in freight shipping and customs brokerage, as director of business development and public relations.

“Business was always something I looked at [for after my career], how and when I didn’t know.” Darche said. “You prepare for your post-career [life] but live in denial almost. You decide you should plan, but don’t end up really doing it, ‘cause you never want it to be over. But I’m really enjoying where I am now.”

Few others can match Darche’s achievements. He had a long and successful pro-hockey career despite coming from CIS hockey and now has a promising business career because of his university degree. But why does this story have to be a rarity? If education were intertwined with the path to the pros, it could be different. The likelihood of making it to the NHL wouldn’t be changed and career length would still be short. But there could be fewer players who leave the game with limited options, fewer players whose lives are only centred on that brief moment of fame and more players like Mathieu Darche.

The McGill Daily

Sports

19

Monday, November 4, 2013

Listomania

Sports media’s obsession with lists Evan Dent | The McGill Daily

P

lenty of people have bemoaned the ‘listification’ of the online media world.

There’s BuzzFeed, with 28 GIFs that YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO SEE, and Thought Catalog with 20 reasons why your 20s are (insert something banal here), and so on and so forth. It’s all shameless clickbait (I’m not going to pretend I haven’t clicked on the 17 puppy GIFs that will change your life), but I find myself unsurprised by the trend. As a sports fan, lists have been the status quo in the media for as long as I can remember.

Every week, the major sports media outlets release their “power rankings” of each team in the league, usually for each major sport. Let me go down the line here: ESPN, Sports Illustrated, the Sporting News, TSN, CBS Sports, SB Nation, and Bleacher Report (a shudder passes through me as I have to include them among the major media sources, but clicks are clicks) all publish a weekly ranking in nearly every sport. (Deadspin has a somewhat satirical weekly ranking of all 125 teams in college football, but otherwise abstains, along with Sports on Earth and Grantland – all sites that claim to have ‘intelligent’ sports writing.) In a somewhat meta move, Yahoo!

Sports has many of its contributors write an analysis of every other site’s power rankings of a certain team. For some sites, the ranking is based on a collaborative ranking by a number of writers; for others, it’s based on one person’s opinions, or ‘advanced’ statistical analysis. Either way, it’s always a numerical ranking of every team, followed by a short, pithy sentence about the team. ‘Listification’

Alice Shen | The McGill Daily has gone far beyond beyond simple power rankings, too: ESPN has even begun #NBArank, which is basically a power ranking of the 500 best basketball players in the National Basketball Association (NBA), while Grantland just finished their run of 10-to-25 minute youtube videos that previewed – and ranked – all the teams in the NBA. This is in addition to simple list articles, such as the five best defensemen in hockey or, as was recently posted on ESPN.com, 100 (mostly rhetorical) questions leading up to the Sochi Olympics.

This is not an internet-based phenomenon at its roots, to be sure. College football has been in the rankings business with a media poll since 1934, a coach’s poll since 1973, and a computer based ranking since 1998. Weekly power rankings in newspapers haven’t been uncommon in the last 20 to 30 years. But their explosion into prominence – a front page story every time – is surely linked to the internet, on which every outlet is competing for your precious clicks.

Besides being obscenely easy to write – this team is better than this team, for x reason, where that reason is usually a better record – these lists are so ubiquitous because they get an ungodly amount of web traffic. Your average fan wants to see exactly where their favourite team is on the ranking, and then react to that. It also easily drums up controversy, wherein the site manufactures suspense as to which team will get the coveted number one spot. (And the reward for that spot is, um, validation?)

Power rankings, through their very names,

also validate the elitist position of writer above everyone else. The creator of the power ranking gets to be judge, jury, and executioner on all the teams in a certain league, and these rankings often are titled with the name of the media organization – so the writer (or writers) decides what, symbolically, the whole organization thinks of a certain team.

Insidiously, power rankings can even be used to create stories. ESPN has an individual writer for every National Football League (NFL) team. Each week, once the NFL power rankings are released, every writer writes a “power rankings reaction” that responds to the ranking of a team, and asks whether it was right or wrong. That’s right – an article responding to an almost always totally arbitrary ranking and whether that arbitrary ranking got it right (in the writer’s eyes). Clicks abound, though. I can’t say I’m innocent – I’ve clicked on and fervently read power rankings before, looking for ‘my’ team and what the writer thinks of them. So why the obsession, for both writer and fan? I’ve already said that lists are easy to write and reinforce the exalted position for the sportswriter, but for the fan, it’s a little more complicated.

For one, many fans feel the need for validation – that their team should be at whatever number in the power rankings, and get the ‘respect’ from the national media. Success alone is not enough – it must be recognized by everyone else to mean something.

It’s also a really, really simple way to digest the events of a season – rank every team, and you can easily see who’s doing well and

who isn’t, without any nuance at all. Power rankings create an easy narrative to follow for a season; as some teams ‘rise,’ confounding our pre-season expectations, others fall from grace, and others still stay steadily mediocre. Since most people can’t watch every game of every team, it allows the fan to believe that they know what’s going on across the league.

It seems that many fans look toward sports to get the final, definitive result that cannot be found elsewhere in society; every game is a closed narrative with a tidy end, with easy-tocast heroes and villains. The ending of most sports – where one team gets a win, and sometimes this win is the championship – is the simplest way of showing that one team is better.

The end gives them comfort. Or so people desire. The reality is more of a mess, with multiple players all having influence on any single play, these plays adding up to an end result that often doesn’t reflect the true talent of each team.

That is, the better team on paper doesn’t always win; there’s luck, there’s anomalies. I find sports compelling for that reason – that the end is often uncertain, that you can lose even if you play better, or win based on pure luck.

I suspect that a lot of people would agree with me – the sentiment that “on any given Sunday,” anything can happen – but the overwhelming popularity of power rankings indicates otherwise: plenty of people just want a tidy narrative to follow. It’s a way of following sports that completely strips away nuance; a comfort instead of something interesting.

Culture

The McGill Daily

Monday, November 4, 2013

Taking Aboriginal culture to the streets

20

“Beat Nation” showcases multidisciplinary Aboriginal art

T

Lindsey Kendrick-Koch | The McGill Daily

he Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art’s latest exhibition, “Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop, and Aboriginal Culture,” delves into the evolving face of Aboriginal culture, using the lens of hip hop street culture. In its introductory blurb, the exhibit claims to “give voice to the struggle” of Aboriginal youth in the modern era via new and intriguing avenues of political expression. Using such things as the beat, the stage, and the street, the collection, which originated at the Vancouver Art Gallery, claims to effectively “reinvent older traditions into new forms of expression,” through diverse media, such as painting, sculpture, and film.

In Nicholas Galanin’s “Tsu Heidi Shugaxtutaan, part 1 & 2,” a short video of the traditional Tlingit raven dance is juxtaposed with a robot dance performed to the same music,

highlighting the interaction and the possibility for exchange between street dance and traditional “Tlingit cultural expression.” For the remainder of the artworks, however, a more accurate way to describe the theme is as an exploration of the broader impact of modern urban culture on traditional Aboriginal art. Examples of the hybrid urban-Aboriginal representation include KC Adams’ “Ipad is Cree Floral,” an actual iPad decorated with Aboriginal beadwork. Highlights also included an installation piece featuring low-rider bicycles adorned with Aboriginal motifs and a fashion display including an Aboriginal patterned corset, skirt, and knee-high spiked and heeled boots. Also exemplary of the exhibit’s theme is “Jilaqami’g No’shoe” by Jordan Bennet, a pair of modified skateboards with

Alice Shen | The McGill Daily

Eli Sidman (MDes 2013), WonderVision, installation shot, 2013 SAIC Design Show. Photo: Sara Condo

Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects Six graduate-level degrees Apply by January 15 Graduate Admissions 312.629.6650 gradmiss@saic.edu

carved-out patterns representing the artist’s reflection on contemporary Aboriginal youth activities and “question[ing] what it meant to be Indian [sic] in contemporary society.”

However, while the exhibit claims to present an overarching theme of the interaction between hip hop, art, and traditional Aboriginal society, in reality the interactions sometimes lack cohesion, and appear forced, such as in the colossal eagle motif on a back wall of the gallery, by Corey Bulpitt and Aime Milot. While the creation is spray-painted and does boast a minute amount of typical graffiti in the bottom corner, the street quality seems unnaturally imposed upon the eagle and is somewhat strained and out of place in a gallery, as opposed to the typical setting for Bulpitt’s work: gritty urban spaces (for example, under the Granville Street bridge in Vancouver). Taken out of their original context, the works displayed lose their power as a reflection of a broader cultural phenomenon. Within a museum exhibit, the works’ original intent and authenticity is diminished.

Roland Souliere’s monolithic caution tape, utilizing Aboriginal colours and patterns, that wraps around the walls of the gallery in an attempt to translate the symbolic meaning of street culture, was also out of context. This feels so obvious that it tarnishes the intended symbolism. Overall, it is challenging to appreciate the meaning of these works in the whitewashed museum setting.

The exhibit also features a significant amount of film media, including Kevin Lee Burton’s “Nikamowin (song)” and “Heritage Mythologies” by Jackson 2bears, which drew influence from electro and DJ/VJ sound. Jackson 2bears’ work highlights an emerging trend in Aboriginal mixed-media art – a remix of rap/electronic music combined with a video of flashing images of Aboriginal life, in this instance on the reserve. Unfortunately, the images of the reserves seem disconnected from the music, drawing few emotional parallels with the beat, unlike in other pieces. A more successful example of mixed media is “Dubyadubs” by Madeskimo, an Inuit DJ. He merges customary

Aboriginal throat singing with sounds of nature and dub and electronic beats, set to footage of the Canadian Arctic landscape and wildlife.

He also fuses, into the black and white film, a “fantastic filter” of colourful prisms. By distorting this black and white footage with modern sounds and colour, Madeskimo intelligently draws parallels with the morphing nature of Aboriginal identity in contemporary culture.

Parts of the exhibit also explore notions of persisting personal identity within the metamorphosis of cultural identity. The series of acrylic-painted elk-hide drums by Sonny Assu is representative of the artist’s melting pot heritage (the explanatory blurb refers vaguely to Assu’s “diverse background”), with the flat, wallmounted drums representing vinyl records.

The records are purported to be recordings of his grandfather singing traditional Aboriginal songs, an element that adds an additional facet to Assu’s piece. The records also make a political statement, their number corresponding to the number of years for which the famed potlatch ceremony was outlawed in British Columbia. This simple piece, incorporating both personal and community messages, evokes a stronger response from the viewer than other works in the exhibit that did not as effectively communicate the artist’s identity.

The exhibition conveys a symbolic message about cultural hybridization and traditional motifs through a plethora of nontraditional media. Nonetheless, the narrative of the evolving Aboriginal identity upon interaction with mainstream culture cannot be fully appreciated in the confined surroundings of a large museum. The exhibit aims to show how Aboriginal culture is morphing, adopting and adapting street culture. However, this creation of art happens outside museum walls, and this museum exhibit, an overly formal setting, is little more than an acknowledgement that this is indeed happening.

“Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop, and Aboriginal Culture” will run till January 5, 2014 at the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art (185 Ste. Catherine W.).

The McGill Daily

Culture

21

Monday, November 4, 2013

Sax and the city

Saxsyndrum brings the saxophone back to pop music Rory Williamson | Culture Writer

Photo courtesy of Nick Schofield

I

t’s hard to think of a musical instrument more constrained by negative associations in recent memory than the saxophone – as far as its use in pop music, that is. Beyond the realms of jazz, funk, and classical musical, the sax inevitably reeks of over-the-top 1980s cheese. After pop sax’s early-to-mid 1980s heyday, during which sax solos launched hit after hit into stratospheric bombast, it vanished as smoothly as it came, swiftly becoming so embarrassing that it even resisted the rehabilitating power of irony.

After reaching a peak (or nadir, depending on how you look at it) in Wham!’s 1985 “Careless Whisper,” the sax in pop seemed permanently locked into conjuring up the heady mixture of cringe-inducing awfulness and unabashed enjoyment that only hits from this particular decade of perfectly coiffed hair can provide. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it has since proved an unpopular choice in all forms of pop music.

Others tell a different story, though: after an unusual double occurrence of Top 40 hits featuring sax solos, Rolling Stone went as far as to label 2011 the year of “The Return of the Sax.” Its “return” still couldn’t shake its maligned 1980s associations: both Lady Gaga and Katy Perry drafted in sax greats from the past to provide novelty, retro set pieces that didn’t skimp on the cheese. On the indie rock side of the musical spectrum, Destroyer’s wonderful record Kaputt also found plenty of room for the sax. Even here, though, it served as a remnant of a bygone era, forming part of a sound that deliberately exploited unfashionable sounds from previous decades for their decadence and sleaze.

It’s refreshing, then, to hear the energetic interaction of the saxophone with forward-

looking electronic samples and beats in the music of Montreal duo Saxsyndrum. Featuring Nick Schofield on drums and synths and David Switchenko on sax, the band just launched their debut record Future Circus at a Halloween show at Casa del Popolo. Describing their sound as “of the electro-nerd variety.

Jazzy at times, lots of bass, and ripping arpeggios,” Schofield goes on to cite influences such as LCD Soundsystem and Colin Stetson, alongside “retro embracement” of Bootsy Collins and Weather Report.

Drawing in part from the ‘retro’ novelty of pop sax, as well as its use in jazz, the duo’s fusion of musical styles aligns itself with forward-looking musicians who combine the organic and the electronic.

Drawing in part from the ‘retro’ novelty of pop sax, as well as its use in jazz, the duo’s fusion of musical styles aligns itself with

forward-looking musicians who combine the organic and the electronic. “Both members have jazz and funk roots but love the abrakazam of dance music,” says Schofield. “We’re actively trying to attain an organic certificate when playing live by drawing more from Four Tet, Pantha du Prince, and James Holden — all of whom healthily exist in the dance realm while retaining creative control in live contexts, on bold and subtle levels.” This allows for an interaction between improvised jamming and sampled beats, meaning that when playing live, the band members “partake in solos and sometimes stray from pop structures but also align [themselves] with dancebeats and big bass.”

Questions about their attitude to the use of belting sax solos in pop past and present produce jokes that suggest the band remains pretty indifferent to the more overthe-top uses of the instrument. “Regarding our brass perception, Saxsyndrum’s view is akin to safe-sax rather than ‘going raw’”; apparently, “a studded or flavoured protective layer” can help contain the “redundant risks” attendant on the sax’s “great virility.”

As for its appearance in the music of Gaga and Katy Perry, Schofield jokes that, “Our niche is really just the scraps they left for us to chew on, the electro-nerd scraps,” while admitting, “We’re unintentionally heavy on the fromage, and fromage can stink of retro.”

This is not quite the sax of “Careless Whisper” or Duran Duran’s “Rio,” then, but one that manages to maintains a glimmer of that same joyous “fromage.”

One distinctly modern trait of Saxsyndrum’s debut is the rotating line-up of collaborators: each track features a different Montreal-based musician, with various vocalists

drafted in to finish the songs off as they neared completion. It’s a record very bound up with the fertile local music scene. Schofield’s enthusiasm for the city’s cultural life is clear: “Montreal is definitely stimulating and is bursting with communities representing just about any area of interest. We admire organizations like CKUT for giving so many communities a chance for their voice to be heard. We’re genuinely excited by how much of our Montreal community is represented in Future Circus.”

“We’re unintentionally heavy on the fromage, and fromage can stink of retro.”

Nick Schofield Partly it’s this spirit of variety, of stylistic malleability, that allows the band to move away from a concern with the sax’s less-thanillustrious history during these past few decades. With “the tentatively-titled Patty-Cakes (Pat Cruvellier and Pat Latreille)” joining the band in acoustic settings, Nick acknowledges Saxsyndrum’s openness to dynamic change, claiming: “Evolution is inevitable and we thought our music should be expressible in any environment, like in a park or at a party.”

Whatever the context in which it’s played, perhaps the chief novelty of their music is that its use of the sax quickly becomes much more engaging than mere novelty.

The McGill Daily

22

Culture

Monday, November 4, 2013

Building bridges through the arts

The Arab World Festival gives a complicated taste of Arab culture Celine Caira | The McGill Daily

T

he Arab World Festival of Montreal is a multidisciplinary event that strives to facilitate the meeting of Arab and Western cultures by providing a space that fosters their exchange. The festival contains a wide variety of programming including film screenings, concerts, dance shows, debates, poetry slams, and conferences. This year, the event spanned from October 25 to November 9. The festival also supports and produces artistic initiatives based on the cultural diversity found in Montreal.

According to organizer Emily-Jane Aouad, the festival is able to encourage an artistic exchange because the audience is mostly made up of Canadians who already possess a passion for learning about other cultures.

In addition, the festival meshes Western and Eastern cultures in on-stage dialogues.

For example, this year the festival brought together the Algerian dance group El Ferda with Montreal’s choreographer Kim Girouard to produce a performance of ancient Arab dances with a contemporary spin. A poetry slam at l’Escalier also illustrated this intercultural dialogue as Quebecois Arabs of Syrian, Moroccan, and Tunisian background recited prose recounting their experiences growing up as immigrants in Quebec.

The festival is one of a kind. According to Aouad, it is “the only event in Quebec fully dedicated to arts from the Arab World” offering exclusive and unique artistic programming. The high proportion of Arabs who speak French, for example immigrants from Algeria or Morocco, facilitates the sharing of cultural ideas within Quebec. According to Aouad, “Most of the international artists and intellectuals who come to the festival are Francophones. So the ‘Salon de la Culture’ section of the festival (where conferences debates and round tables happen) is held mostly in French.”

However, although the festival has always

Alice Shen | The McGill Daily been well-received, Aouad pointed out that it is sometimes negatively influenced by the social and political context within Quebec.

Aouad told The Daily that in 2007 when the “accommodements raisonnables” (reasonable accommodations) were being debated, the festival experienced a significant decrease in the Quebecois audience turnout.

“There have also been a few incidents where team members or volunteers have been insulted while handing out flyers for the festival,” Aouad said with regret. According to the festival’s website, “With every new edition, this event defies a social reality characterized by an increasing polarity” between Arab and Western cultures. Despite the sometimes unfavourable political and cultural atmosphere, the festival has grown significantly because of its commitment to showcasing original and innovative Arab-Quebec content and its courage to dare to do so.

This year the Arab World Festival entered its 14th year against the backdrop of political and religious aggravation caused by the the Parti Québécois’ recently proposed Charter of Values. “Well, we do not like to mix political and religious matters with the festival, which is purely dedicated to arts and culture. The festival has been a non-political and non-religious organization since its creation.” Aouad said. However, given that the Charter would affect a large percentage of Arabs within Quebec, the festival could not avoid addressing the issue. Aouad told The Daily, “We have programmed a debate discussing the Charter as well as other conferences and debates discussing social issues of our actual society.”

Despite the high quality of artistic content showcased at the festival, an event of this sort proves to be problematic. As the title of the festival suggests, “Arab” identity is treated as largely uniform, without much distinction between the many groups that fall under

the umbrella of that label. In reality, Arabs have many different ethnicities, practice diverse religions, and inhabit geographically distant countries across the Middle East and North Africa. Presenting a wide assortment of ethnicities, religions, and countries under the same umbrella seems to belittle the vast cultural variety and ethnic plurality found in the Arab world. This runs the risk of greatly misleading the average Canadian viewer and enforcing the idea that Arab culture is homogeneous. Ask someone from Lebanon how they are different from someone from Egypt, and I’m sure they will have a lot to say.

The festival also claims to be “a non-political and non-religious organization since its creation,” however, this glosses over the many ethnic, religious, and political cleavages that have existed in the Middle East for centuries. “I don’t think you can discuss the Middle East without discussing politics,” says Omar, a Palestinian McGill student in attendance at the festival who was raised in Dubai. While the festival showcases performers and speakers from a myriad of Arab countries, it offered little discussion of the tension and discrimination that occurs between those groups. The salience of these differences could be seen in the film Would You Have Sex With An Arab, where documentary filmmaker Yolande Zauberman asked this question to Israelis at bars in Tel Aviv. To Arabs, she asked, “Would you have sex with an Israeli Jew?” There was a wide variety of answers given, shaped by their individual religious views and country of origin. The film demonstrated that, to Arabs, even something like attitudes on sex and intimacy are politically and religiously charged. “While striving for a festival that is non-political and non-religious is honourable, it would be deceptive and falsely utopian.” says Omar. “The festival can claim it is non-religious and non-political in the

sense that everyone is welcome regardless of background, but not in the sense that art and culture of real value can be contributed without a political component. Maybe for a country like Belgium this could be true, but for a post-war country like Iraq, or a postrevolution country like Egypt, it would be unlikely. Can you imagine current Egyptian art that doesn’t discuss the revolution?”

According to Omar, the festival provides a platform for Arab immigrants who plan to stay in Quebec to find common ground with one another over culture, values, and food.

However, he does not see the festival having a successful unifying effect unless the uglier, more difficult political issues are addressed.

“What good does it do for Pan-Arabism if an Egyptian and a Sudanese can enjoy a plate of hummus in Montreal, if their political tensions haven’t been addressed for when they return to their respective countries?” he says. “Living as an Arab in a foreign country, you’re more likely to see commonalities than differences: you’re kind of forced to collaborate. Quebec could act like a marriage counsellor for Arabs, providing a safer, more accepting stage to delve into deeper issues.

Instead of suppressing such problems, the festival should address them head on. Only then could we work for a more realistic PanArab goal.”

Whether the Arab World Festival, with its dedication to showcasing artistic talent inspired by the meeting of Arab and Western cultures, succeeds at uniting the many ethnicities, religions, and nationalities that are Arab remains unclear.

The Arab World Festival will run till November 9. Events are held in a variety of locations in the Downtown and Plateau Mont-Royal areas. Go to festivalarabe.com for more information.

Editorial

volume 103 number 10

editorial board

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PGSS referendum endorsements

phone 514.398.6784 fax 514.398.8318 mcgilldaily.com coordinating editor

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coordinating@mcgilldaily.com coordinating news editor

Hannah Besseau news editors

Molly Korab Jordan Venton-Rublee Dana Wray commentary & compendium! editor

E.k. Chan

culture editors

Nathalie O’Neill Hillary Pasternak

E.k. Chan | The McGill Daily

features editor

Juan Velásquez-Buriticá science+technology editor

Diana Kwon

health&education editor

Ralph Haddad sports editor

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rec@delitfrancais.com cover design Hera Chan

contributors Erinn Acland, Shaina Agbayani, Jill Bachelder, Celine Caira, Ben Cohen-Murison, Khoa Doan, Haidan Dong, Cem Ertekin, Christy Frost, Rochelle Guillou, Sylvan Hamburger, Adrienne Hurley, Lindsey Kendrick-Koch, Lewis Krashinsky, Clara Lagace, Eleanor Milman, Midori Nishioka, Emma Noradounkian, Ki-eun Peck, Kristian Picon, Tom Portsmouth, Annie Preston, Igor Sadikov, Errol Salamon, Andrea Saliba, Jeremy Schembri, Tamim Sujat, Victor Tangermann, Aaron Vansintjan, Joanna Wang, Andy Wei, Alex Williams, Rory Williamson, Mahmood Zargar, Camille Zolopa

The voting period for the Fall 2013 PGSS referendum begins today, November 4, but the election period has been marked with a disappointing lack of transparency. At the time of press, the information made publicly available by PGSS has been extremely limited. The exact questions have not yet been made available for students to view on PGSS’ elections page, and although three hustings were held, PGSS has only actively promoted one of the questions through its listserv. This lack of information is an impediment to the informed decision-making of students who wish to evaluate their positions on the questions before the voting period begins, and is a show of disorganization on the part of PGSS.

of Directors. The fee would also make all graduate students members of the Tribune Publications Society. A similar proposal was presented to graduate students last year, but did not pass, due to the impression that the Tribune did not provide adequate coverage of graduate student affairs. Since then, the Tribune has made a significant effort to increase its graduate student coverage.

Student media is essential for both informing students of on-campus events and keeping student politicians and the administration accountable. The Daily urges students to vote “yes” to the non-opt-outable fee of $0.75 per semester, thereby making student media accessible to the entire student population.

Question re: McGill Writing Centre – YES, with reservations The McGill Writing Centre provides an essential service for students, especially those who require assistance with academic writing. Without the $1.50 per semester fee, one-on-one tutoring for graduate students will not be offered. A very similar motion was included in the Winter 2013 PGSS Referendum, but did not pass.

The Daily advises its readers to vote “yes” to this fee levy, but with reservations. While The Daily acknowledges the importance of the Writing Centre, it should be funded as a basic, essential service by the University itself, rather than yet another fee that is offloaded to students. Effective writing skills should be part and parcel of the university education we pay tuition to obtain. Nonetheless, The Daily supports a “yes” vote to maintain student access to these necessary services.

Question re: Post-Doctoral Student Services Fee – YES As it stands, post-doctoral fellows – those who have completed a PhD but who continue academic research at the university – may individually opt to pay the student services fee, but are not required to. Post-doctoral fellows are not clearly classified by the University as students; additionally, they receive stipends rather than salaries for their research, but are taxed by the federal government as employees rather than students. To require all post-doctoral fellows to pay this fee, rather than relying on individual initiative, would unify postdocs as a base of students rather than precariously defined ‘employees,’ thus solidifying their image as an essential part of the student community.

Making the fee non-opt-outable would provide student services, such as Health Services, Career Planning Service, and Financial and International Services, with the necessary funds to improve and specialize the services available to post-doctoral fellows, and consequently, all post-doctoral fellows would stand to benefit. As such, The Daily advises its readers to vote “yes” on this proposal.

Question re: McGill Tribune – YES The McGill Tribune does not currently collect a fee from graduate students, though it does from undergraduate students. The fee would make the Tribune accountable to graduate students, with a mandated graduate student representative on the Board

—The McGill Daily Editorial Board

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Compendium!

24

The McGill Daily

Monday, November 4, 2013

Lies, half-truths, and contact in the sack

Students invited to “revel in glory” of McGall weaponry Open house includes tour of hangar, bomb range E.k. EK | The McGall Weekly

M

cGall’s open house last week saw a veritable flood of half-interested wealthy American parents and their children on our esteemed campus, raising eyebrows in feigned interest at the many entirely thrilling sights. A recent addition to the open house, the “Walking Tour of Things Designed to Kill People,” was a surprise hit among attendees.

One of the main organizers of the tour, Kevlar Saul, spoke with The Weekly about the unexpected interest. “I guess a lot of prospective students want to know about McGall’s long-standing involvement in technologies designed and manufactured for the specific purpose of ending human lives,” Saul said cheerfully. “The drones were a real hit.”

The tour’s announcement was itself the subject of much curiosity, as McGall had previously done “everything in its power” to keep military research away from the eyes of the public, according to Saul. When reached for comment on the overnight renouncement of such secrecy, McGall’s Extremely Welcoming Centre simply explained that “it was time” for McGall to be fully transparent in its militaristic dealings, and because “it’s not like people would refuse to attend the university based on its contributions to warfare anyway.”

The tour reportedly included a visit to

the heretofore secret McGall hangar, embedded deep in the heart of Mount Royal and accessed through a tunnel that connects to the basement of the Jones Administration building. Tour attendees were invited to “gaze with wonder” upon the rows of unmanned aerial vehicles. When they proceeded to the armoury, the attendees were then granted permission to “reach out and feel the unyielding strength resting inside [the thermobaric explosives].”

The McGall Military Research Division also staffed an ‘information kiosk’ in Service Point during the open house, alongside other student services and offices. The Division candidly answered questions about the militaristic applications of many engineering research projects, and also revealed the involvement of other faculties in the research, much to the “pleasant surprise” of many attendees, according to a debriefing released by the Division.

“I got a much clearer sense of the practical applications of research here,” one prospective student said of the tour and kiosk.

“I’m thinking of going into biochemistry, so it’s good to know that I could be contributing to the painful deaths of people in strange and exotic lands halfway around the world, someday. [...] Chemical warfare is a whole other job niche I hadn’t considered until today.”

E.k. EK | The McGall Weekly Given the success at the open house, Saul is optimistic that he will be able to continue giving the tours in the future. “There’s something about that spark of delight in people’s

Gettin’ spicy in the sack The Reanimated Corpse of Roland Barthes provides more advice Dear Reanimated Corpse of Roland Barthes, Lately my love life has been somewhat boring. Do you have any suggestions for spicing things up in the sack?

—Vanilla in Verdun Roleplay / Role-play In assuming the role of an other, the amorous subject is able to pretend to lose their will-to-possess, to not suffer at the hands of the amorous other.

1. I initially read the question and thought you were like me, isolated, alone, looking to ‘spice up’ («pimenter») your love life. Since I am on this node, let me ‘riff ’ a little bit on speed dating, which has been suggested to me many times, so that I might ‘get out there’ and ‘find someone in this world.’ Speed-dating is a repetition of the pleasure encountered between the time of meeting and the time we find ourselves suffering for the amorous other. This is the time of imagination, of forecasting, one in which we see the amorous other innocently. Speed-dating allows one to experience this pleasure in

short bursts over and over, and gives us a choice among the many ‘fish in the sea,’ among the large pool of amorous others who will eventually consume us. Our Jaws (a film I quite enjoyed as I wrote A Lover’s Discourse, seeing the amorous relationship between the shark and Richard Dreyfuss. Yes, indeed, we will need a bigger boat).

2. Ah, but you, “Vanilla,” are already consumed, and now find that the touch of the other no longer excites you as it once did; it is now a routine, the other being thoroughly possessed. But I find that in the very asking of this question, Vanilla, that you are worried that the other you love is no longer being excited by you, and that this is your failure, you cannot help but worry that they feel bored of you, plotting to be rid of you and all of your vanilla-ness.

You ask, how can I please the amorous other more?

3. It is through this lens we can see that you are still caught by the will-to-possess, and fear that your contact in the sack is crucial

to this possession. I would have to agree with Freud, here, in that your psychological need here is holding back your ‘performance.’ (How silly it is to speak of the act as performance, as if we were finely tuned machines of contact.)

4. So I suggest the common idea of ‘roleplay,’ wherein you take on the role of someone else, someone who is not so tied up in the idea of constantly pleasing their lover for fear of not losing them. It is only you, though, who should assume another role – for this would confuse your desire.

5. Once you become an ‘other,’ one who does not suffer by the hand of the other, at this time, then, you can become more adventurous, free from fear of losing your possession. As is said in Werther: “I have so much trouble with myself, and my own heart is in such constant agitation, that I am well content to let others pursue their own course, if they only allow me the same privilege.” You can become the other, merely pursuing your own course, outside of the agitation of your own heart.

eyes when their fingertips graze against the smooth surface of a drone. It’s a real pleasure to inform the public, and I think the transparency is a good move on McGall’s part.”

The Weekly’s Literary Supplement Supplement First they came for the activists, and I did not speak out— Because I was too privileged.

Then they came for the Arts TAs, and I did not speak out— Because I never went to any of my conferences.

Then they came for the bikers on campus, and I did not speak out— Because I lived too close for a bike in the Ghetto.

Then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak for me.

—Le Tigre Moutarde

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