Vol103iss14

Volume 103, Issue 14 Thursday, January 9, 2014

Pointless since 1911 mcgilldaily.com

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

Supervised injection sites in Montreal NEWS (Page 4), EDITORIAL (Page 19)

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Contents 03

January 9, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

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NEWS

HEALTH&ED

Supreme Court opens the door for sex work

How the mainstream perptuates rape culture

Montreal plans four safe injection sites

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How did SSMU fare last semester?

SPORTS

Continuing problems for gay rights in sports

AUS REFERENDUM PERIOD Do you want to amend the AUS Constitution, levy a fee on AUS members, or change any AUS fees?

Deadline to submit petition with 100 signatures or have a referendum question approved by AUS Council: Wednesday, January 15 Campaign Period: Monday, February 3 - Tuesday, February 11 Polling Period: Thursday, February 6 - Tuesday, February 11 Check your email for a referendum kit!

Questions? Email president.aus@mail.mcgill.ca or elections.aus@mail.mcgill.ca

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COMMENTARY

Dear Well-Intentioned Liberal White People Undermining the Canadian Fisheries Act

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17

Interview with graphic designer Isaiah King Killing the music snob

19

FEATURES

CULTURE

EDITORIAL

The violence that lies behind catcalls

The stigma of drug use must be dispelled

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20 COMPENDIUM!

SCI+TECH

Cyberbullying and online privacy

Book-burning program to keep warm

Canadian environmental protection

TV show to air as series of GIFs

WINTER SESSION January – April

REGISTER NOW! McGill Students and Staff Welcome!!

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News

January 9, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

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Supreme Court strikes down laws against sex work Implications of ruling yet to be determined

Alice Shen | The McGill Daily Janna Bryson News Writer On December 20, the Supreme Court of Canada made a landmark ruling in the Bedford v. Canada case by striking down three core provisions of Canada’s sex work laws.

The unanimous decision leaves the federal government one year to provide new, legally viable legislation.

The case, brought forward by current and former sex workers Terri-Jean Bedford, Amy Lebovitch, and Valerie Scott, challenged three antisex work laws: the “bawdy house law,” which prevents the owning, managing, or occupying of a “brothel”; “living on the avails,” which prevents any third party from profiting off of another person’s sex work; and the “communicating law,” which prohibits any communication for the purpose of sexual services for money in public.

Chez Stella is a Montrealbased organization that advocates for the decriminalization of sex work. Their website outlines that the laws in question make it illegal for sex workers to work from their own homes, hire bodyguards or drivers, or speak in public with clients about specifics such as con-

dom use and which sex acts they consent to.

The organization has advocated for the laws to be invalidated, arguing, “Any law that contributes to the number of deaths, confinements, thefts, physical assaults, and sexual assaults experienced by one group of people – in the name of decreasing street noise, unwanted advances, and moral discomfort experienced by another group of people – is not acceptable and must be struck down.”

Concordia University’s Simone de Beauvoir Institute gained intervener status in the Bedford case in June 2013. According to Viviane Namaste, of the Institute, the decision is a step in the right direction.

“The recent ruling is quite a symbolic victory in saying that sex workers that are engaged in the exchange of sex for money – which is entirely legal in the Canadian context – have the right to do so safely,” Namaste told The Daily.

According to Namaste, despite the ruling, there are still sub-articles of the Criminal Code that criminalize activities related to sex work. Namaste explained to The Daily that new legislation should take into account those

it affects, stating, “The next step needs to ensure that sex workers are involved in every step along the way to all solutions.”

“For us at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, we really considered the Supreme Court decision a feminist victory [...] because it has struck down laws which were proven to increase violence against women,” maintained Namaste.

However, the notion that this ruling will promote the safety and protection of sex workers is contested. Claudette Dumont-Smith, Executive Director of the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC), condemned the ruling in a press release on December 20.

“The NWAC is very disappointed with [the Supreme Court decision] as it fails to protect Aboriginal women and girls who are among the most vulnerable population in Canada,” she stated.

“The state has pushed Aboriginal women from one institution to another – residential schools, foster homes, group homes, and prisons, to name a few. NWAC refuses to accept brothels as the new official institution for Aboriginal women and girls and we refuse to accept that prostitution is the solution to

addressing women’s poverty.”

The NWAC has expressed concern that decriminalizing sex work will attract human traffickers and pimps, which would increase the sexual exploitation of, and violence against, Indigenous girls and women.

Instead, they support the Nordic model of sex work regulation, which only criminalizes pimping and the purchase of sex. The NWAC plans to be involved in the federal government’s discussion of new sex work legislation.

The policy impact of the Bedford decision is up in the air. The three provisions were struck down because they were deemed inconsistent with other legislation concerning sex work and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Speaking to The Daily, Professor Daniel Weinstock of McGill’s Faculty of Law explained that the government has a variety of regulatory options.

“One response could be for [the government] to say ‘Fine, it will be illegal to sell sexual services for money in Canada,’” said Weinstock.

“They could also allow the provisions to lapse in full […] ideologically, I think that [the current] gov-

ernment would be inclined to do something more restrictive.”

The fact that the Supreme Court’s decision was unanimous is significant, and could impact future rulings in other areas of the law. Weinstock suggested that there are similarities between Bedford v. Canada and the controversy surrounding assisted suicide and euthanasia.

“What the court is saying very strongly with its interpretation [of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms] is that Canadians have a right to policies that are demonstrably shown to protect their interests, rather than policies that are based on moral convictions,” said Weinstock.

Parliament resumes on January 27. Weinstock expects the federal government’s future decisions to be impacted by the outcome of Bedford, arguing, “This government is predisposed to govern with an ideological hand, and I think the Supreme Court is saying that won’t pass.

We have to see that with respect to these crucial issues – the most fundamental life, liberty, and security interests of Canadians – that we have policies that are governed by the best available evidence.”

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News

January 9, 2014 The McGill Daily | www.mcgilldaily.com

Supervised injection sites come to Montreal

Four sites will help reduce infection, overdose among drug users Jill Bachelder News Writer

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t was announced in December 2013 that Montreal will soon be home to four supervised injection sites. The sites will include three permanent locations in already existing clinics across the city, as well as one mobile clinic to serve the Montreal area.

The news comes after a decadelong struggle between the Canadian federal government and the Quebec-based organizations that have been advocating for supervised injection sites (SIS) in Montreal ever since the first site, Insite Vancouver, was established in 2003.

SISs are places where injectiondrug users can go to obtain clean needles and dispose of used ones.

Additionally, social workers and on-site emergency medical attention are available to users if needed.

These sites are part of an approach known as harm reduction, which involves programs that provide safe spaces and medical services for drug users in a non-judgemental and non-coercive manner.

Since its inception, Insite has operated under an exemption to the Controlled Drug and Substances Act, allowing it to legally provide help to drug users.

Inspired by Insite, Montrealbased organizations, such as Asso-

ciation pour la Défense des Droits et l’Inclusion des personnes qui Consomment des drogues du Québec (ADDICQ) and CACTUS Montreal, began campaigning for SISs in 2003.

However, they were unable to obtain the same exemption that Insite was given, and thus had little hope of creating the sites. In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that Insite was a necessary service, according to Sylvain Côté of ADDICQ, a community-based organization that provides support for injection drug users.

“It was a decision that said that Insite should be not only implemented but continued as an essential service for drug addicts that saves lives and that could prevent overdoses and HIV,” said Carole Morissette, public health doctor for Montreal Public Health. “For us, in Montreal, that judgement was a real boost in this situation and then gave us an opening.”

This decision fueled a huge campaign for SISs in Montreal.

“We campaign,” said Côté, “we did some protest[s], we wrote letters... we demand to be included on the committee that was working on SISs, such as the public health committee of Montreal.”

Côté noted that such sites are important as they create services for drug users that allow them to perform injections in a safe space, dispose of their used needles properly, and obtain medical services if needed. Both

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they and the surrounding community benefit, with lower instances of both common diseases in users and drug usage in public.

“What we see is that [...] people who would use the safer injection sites are people who have no place to go to inject themselves safely,” said Amélie Panneton, community organizer with CACTUS Montreal. “[This] means that usually they consume the drugs in the street, in the public domain, which is dangerous for them because we know there are lots and lots of overdoses in public spaces.”

One important aspect of SISs is that they provide on-site access to medical care and give users access to a social worker if they decide that they

want to stop using, or need support.

“We have lots of evaluations and research projects that can demonstrate the efficacy of safer injection sites to prevent death to prevent overdoses, and to prevent HIV [...] and that help drug users to be related to the rest of the health network and have access to other services they need,” said Morissette.

“The main obstacle is from the Conservative government,” said Côté, “but public health departments from major cities […] are really supporting the idea.” The federal government’s policy on drug prevention does not favour supervised injection sites, Côté noted.

They have instead chosen to focus

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more on increasing funding for law enforcement and preventative education, while decreasing spending on harm reduction. “They simply consider drugs as evil – people who use drugs as criminals,” Côté added.

Some opposed to SISs argue that sites like these promote illicit behaviour and can lead to increases in crime and drug use in the area, a major reason behind the Conservative tabling of Bill C-65 (also known as the “Respect for Communities Act”) this summer that sought to make it harder to have such sites.

Panneton noted that the sites are awaiting the go-ahead for funding from the Ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux (MSSS), a process whose length CACTUS cannot fully predict. Additionally, the sites would have to receive an exception from the federal Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, such as Insite did in Vancouver.

For organizations like CACTUS, the creation of these sites is a step towards reducing the harm caused by illicit drug use in Montreal. “We’ve been giving out material,” said Panneton. “We’ve been doing intervention with these people, trying the best we can. But we see that we would really need a safe injection site to help even more, that’s why we find it really really important to have multiple sites in Montreal.”

News

January 9, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

SSMU executive midterm reviews Written by Molly Korab, Jordan Venton-Rublee, and Dana Wray Illustrations by Alice Shen The Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) has seen its share of challenges this past semester, but these have resulted in little tangible action on political issues. Attempts to campaign against issues such as the Charter of Values and cultural appropriation failed to gain significant clout. SSMU did finally open up the long-awaited student-run café, but it fell short of expectations. General assemblies have been poorly attended and poorly organized. Although the Legislative Council and the executive are internally cohesive, they have remained distant from the student body.

Katie Larson – President

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atie Larson’s first semester as President has left much to be desired. The SSMU executive has presented a united front, but has accomplished little in the way of political stances. Larson herself has not been particularly vocal in Senate or the Board of Governors, and fails to connect with the student body about relevant issues.

Communication with campus media is also a weakness for Larson, and should be improved upon to better provide information to the student body.

Unlike her predecessor, Larson hasn’t made improvements toward

the dismal attendance of the General Assemblies (GAs), and has been criticized by both campus media and Legislative Council for the lack of advertising. However, Larson recognized the GA as a weak spot in an email to The Daily, and said that open discussions on changes to the GA format will be scheduled for this semester.

Lease negotiations continue to stretch on into their fourth year, and although Larson told The Daily that the negotiations were progressing well, due to their confidential nature, it is difficult to know if they will wrap up by the end of this school year.

Larson pointed to the amendment of the out-of-date SSMU constitution, to ensure it was still legal in Quebec, as a success for her and the executive. However, this success did not come without some confusion over the by-laws surrounding the constitution’s approval.

As for next semester, Larson told The Daily she was looking forward to a discussion about SSMU’s sustainability mandate.

However, part of this discussion was spurred by the abrupt departure of the Sustainability Coordinator – an issue about which SSMU has not been transparent.

Brian Farnan – VP Internal

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ne of the main duties of VP Internal is Orientation Week, including Frosh. For yet another year, SSMU and other groups introduced small initiatives that aimed to make Frosh more inclusive of underage and non-drinking students, as well as more sustainable and with more equitable events.

However, one of the biggest

failures on Brian Farnan’s part was the $21,000 lost on Frosh. According to Farnan, simple budgeting mistakes – such as failing to calculate PayPal commission, miscalculating taxes on sponsorship, and overspending on new initiatives – accounted for most of the loss. To avoid a similar situation in the future, the responsibility for Frosh’s $200,000 budget will be put into

the hands of SSMU’s accounting department instead of students.

Farnan’s communication with The Daily has been poor at best, and he often fails to respond to emails and phone calls. As an elected and paid official, Farnan needs to seriously improve his communication with campus media if he wants to be transparent about his duties.

Samuel Harris – VP External

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he VP External portfolio is usually the most politically charged of SSMU’s executive positions. As this year’s VP External, Samuel Harris was tasked with working with the Montreal and Quebec community through various campaigns and associations. One ad hoc campaign, in opposition to the Charter of Values, was slow to get off the ground, though Harris told The Daily that it was limited by the lack of quorum at the Fall GA. Harris continued the street team project started last year as a part of a community relations

initiative during Frosh. Although Harris called Frosh a “mixed bag,” he stated that he believed that there were less noise complaints this year than last.

However, Harris hasn’t followed through on some of his campaign promises, such as opposition to the indexation of tuition and the integration of students into the Milton-Parc community. Although Harris did work on the issues in the beginning of the semester, any further work since that time has not been visible.

Instead, Harris has focused on

the Table de concertation étudiante du Québec (TaCEQ), one of the main student lobbies in Quebec, of which SSMU is a founding member. Harris told The Daily that the promotion of TaCEQ became a case of damage control after the failure to host a TaCEQ congress. However, TaCEQ has faced criticism in the past from campus media, SSMU Legislative Council, and SSMU executives.

In the upcoming semester, Harris told The Daily he would be hosting a forum between Montreal student unions, something that failed to happen last semester.

(Continued on page 6)

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News

January 9, 2014 The McGill Daily | www.mcgilldaily.com

Joey Shea – VP University Affairs

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he VP University Affairs portfolio is primarily in charge of negotiating student affairs at the University level, among other responsibilities – sitting on Senate and University committees, Equity at SSMU, library improvement, and research. Shea has been noticeably vocal at Senate, and has also been transparent and open with campus media.

Shea’s biggest accomplishments of the term include the creation of an ad hoc mental health committee at SSMU with the goal of creating a substantive mental

health policy by the end of the year – which Shea expects to see at Council by late January or early February. As well, Shea drew attention at Senate to a surplus in the Student Services budget. Plans to spend the surplus on administrative affairs instead of student services were soon corrected.

Additionally, Shea saw an unexpected turn of events – the sexual assault allegations levelled against three Redmen players in November – as an opportunity to start an important campus conversation about rape culture and

sexual assault.

Shea considered one of her bigger failures to be Legislative Council’s failure to pass a motion banning the song “Blurred Lines,” as well as SSMU’s much-criticized Costume Campaign, which ended up misusing cultural appropriation in an attempt to denounce it.

Next semester, Shea will be focusing on passing a mental health policy, as well as following up on the sexual assault allegations, and potentially terminating lease negotiations in conjunction with SSMU’s president.

Stefan Fong – VP Clubs & Services

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hile not as politically active as his predecessor, Stefan Fong has steadily dealt with the myriad challenges of the Clubs & Services portfolio. Fong told The Daily that he focused on the logistical and administrative aspect of the job, rather than the sometimes problematic dynamics between clubs.

Fong has revamped many logistical aspects of the portfolio, including club audits, the room booking sys-

tem, activities night, and the fourth floor of the SSMU building.

The changes to the room booking system allow rooms to be booked earlier. Fong told The Daily that the new system has received mixed reviews, but that it eased the pressure on both groups and the administrative side of SSMU. The allocation of offices on the fourth floor of SSMU to clubs faced some problems. According to Fong,

Tyler Hofmeister – VP Finance and Operations

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yler Hofmeister’s first semester has largely been marked by lease negotiations, SSMU’s budget, and the financial questions surrounding the opening of the new student-run cafe (SRC). Hofmeister’s communication with campus media has been reliable but tenuous, as the VP Finance and Operations requests that all communication be done over email.

Hofmeister faced a deficit of $90,000 in the 2013-14 SSMU budget due to the uncertainty of lease negotiations and utilities expenses, but managed to rearrange it to proj-

ect a $50,000 surplus. This was largely achieved through cutting costs in the General Administration category, as well as executives’ personal budgets, Building, Club, and IT budgets. Hofmeister also outlined a long-term project that he has been working on in which SSMU is doubling the rate of interest on its account holdings, projected to save SSMU thousands of dollars per year. Hofmeister is also working on institutionalizing this approach in order to continue the process.

However, many long-term expenses were shifted, putting for-

ward the possibility that SSMU will face a deficit in the future.

Hofmeister wrote to The Daily in an email that his biggest accomplishment was the opening of the SRC in the cafeteria space formerly occupied by Lola Rosa.

The SRC, while certainly a step in the right direction, reneges on former promises by SSMU to create a student space with the new opening, instead opting for a lunch counter. The true success of the SRC in the future will hinge on an ability to create and expand into a space for students.

problems with a mice infestation and fire hazards complicated the allocation, causing delays and frustration with clubs.

Fong’s most ambitious project for the next semester is the creation of ClubHub, a management portal.

Due to the length of SSMU executive positions, it is almost sure that it will not be finished this year, but the initiative is a crucial foundation for the future VP Clubs & Services.

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Commentary

January 9, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

8

So you want to talk about racism Dear Well-Intentioned Liberal White People Kai Cheng Thom From Gaysia With Love

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o: Liberal White People Everywhere, the World Re: Talking about Racism and the Politics of Guilt and Love “‘Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed,’ she said, ‘and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.’” Toni Morrison, Beloved Dear Well-Intentioned Liberal White People (WILWP), So you want to talk about racism. Well, you should know: it’s going to hurt. To talk the truth about race and racism is a kind of surgery which cannot be anesthetized, sterilized, made painless and easy to consume. You need to feel something. Many things, actually: anger, sadness, fear, guilt, resentment, envy, despair – because that is what real relationships with real human beings are like, and I want you to experience me as a real human being. I don’t want to be a tool, a doll, a fetish, a caricature, a charity case, a monster, or a capital-E Expert in Interracial Politics anymore. You cannot really love any of those things. And I want you to love me; it’s what you taught me to want. I dare you to listen. I dare you to love me.

As a writer, performer, student, and community member engaged in critical dialogue on race and racism, there are certain questions that I am often asked by white people in my life: Why am I responsible for something that my ancestors did (i.e. colonization, slavery, forced migration, cultural genocide)? How long is long enough to feel guilty?

If white people are always getting it wrong, why can’t you just tell me how to not be racist? If I don’t want to be an oppressor, what is my place in the struggle for racial liberation?

WILWP, here’s the thing: if you can’t figure it out on your own, I got nothin’. Over the years I have certainly learned a lot of academic theory, a lot of critical history, a lot of postmodern terminological jargon, and if pressed, I could formulate answers to these questions. I could talk about the ways in which the history of European colonization of Asia, the Americas, and Africa continue to shape the socioeconomic realities of the present. I could pull out Peggy McIntosh’s list of white privileges. I could refer you to preeminent critical race theorists, and

I could cite statistics.

But frankly, I am plumb tired of doing that. You can look it up on the internet for yourself. To enter that discussion is to jump down an endless rabbit hole of contention to which there is no bottom, in which your racial privilege and angst are the perpetual centre of gravity.

There is no relationship of love in the darkness of that debate, no way to make you understand, no reason for me to stay.

So let’s make a deal, WILWP. You don’t ask me to explain history’s connection to the present, and I won’t ask you to reimburse generations of poverty created by slavery and indentured servitude, head taxes, internment, and discriminatory education and employment practices. You don’t ask me when you can stop feeling guilty, and I don’t ask you when I’m going to get back those conversations I didn’t have with my grandparents because my family decided that I would have a better chance at life in Canada speaking English instead of an obscure Chinese village dialect.

You don’t ask me what your place is in the “struggle for racial equality,” and I don’t tell you that you directly benefit from oppression that has resulted in my personal trauma.

To borrow a phrase from the Daria theme song, “Excuse me, you’re standing on my neck.”

What I propose we talk about – what I think we must talk about – is not the theoretical position that white people should take in order to ‘liberate’ people of colour, but rather the positions that you already occupy. Well-intentioned white people, you are inextricably enmeshed in nearly every aspect of my life. You are my teachers, bosses, co-workers, roommates, friends, and sexual partners. And in every one of those roles, the fact of your race gives you some measure of power over me: the power to place yourself in the centre and me in the margin. Your well-intentioned questions, your desire to not feel guilty, your Hollywood White Saviour movies like The Help and The Last Samurai and Dances With Wolves, and your trips to dig wells in Africa and teach English in Korea do nothing to close the gap between us.

This is perhaps hurtful to read, WILWP, especially if you are someone who knows me well. If you are used to my generally gentle demeanor, my politically correct sense of humour, my middle-class living room manners, you may

Alice Shen | The McGill Daily want to cry. Feel free. I will not tell you that your tears are worthless, though they are dangerous to people like me: white women’s tears have brought many a conversation to a halt, have gotten many people of colour imprisoned and fired for being ‘too aggressive.’

But I believe that tears can be healing as well. As a child, I learned not to cry, have in fact lost the ability to cry in confrontations, because they meant I only got hurt worse. Even people of colour’s tears are worth less than white ones. So let’s all cry if we need to.

Talking about racism should cause you pain. Fear, and anger, and yes, guilt too. It means we are speaking

the same language.

And what are we really talking about when we talk about race?

Well, I don’t know about you, WILWP, and I don’t speak for other people of colour, but I am talking about how to love. Not in the superficial, “let’s just treat everyone the same and bake a cake of rainbows and smiles and eat it and be happy” sense, but about the kind of love that hurts. The kind that is complicated, the kind that struggles to breathe, that leaves bloody handprints on the side of the face. I am talking about the fact that if we are to be quite honest, we already know that there are no final answers to your questions, have always known.

That you may not have chosen the legacy of your whiteness, but it is yours, and it is your responsibility to figure out how to heal the damage it has done. If you want to talk about race with me, you have to accept this. If you want to talk about race with me, you have to listen to the things that hurt, that scar and bleed – and love me anyway.

In truth, Kai Cheng From Gaysia With Love is an epistolary exploration of intersectionality by Kai Cheng Thom. They can be reached at fromgaysia@mcgilldaily.com.

Commentary

January 9, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

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Our environment is more than just an economic resource A newly weakened Canadian Fisheries Act Natasha Carruthers Commentary Writer

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he Canadian Fisheries Act of 1868 is one of Canada’s oldest pieces of environmental legislation, protecting fish habitats by making water pollution illegal, albeit in the interest of the economic sustainability of Canada’s then-booming fishing industry.

The recently enacted changes to the Canadian Fisheries Act under Bill C-38 (the Jobs, Growth and Long-term Prosperity Act) are not only environmentally detrimental to fish populations but also mask other interests regarding the Northern Gateway pipeline, according to some environmentalist groups. Without implementing any other effective legislation protecting freshwater species, this alteration is short-sighted and should be reconsidered if the freshwater ecosystems are to survive.

A number of industrial and environmental groups were consulted when developing the proposal for the bill. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) sought feedback on the existing fisheries legislation from 23 business and industrial groups. All criticized the existing Act on economic grounds, and supported Bill C-38. Yet the environmental groups consulted defended the leg-

islation as among Canada’s most effective environmental protection laws and recommended reinforcing it. The industry’s input was clearly weighted more heavily, as the law was changed according to their recommendations.

The Act now only prohibits “serious harm to fish that are part of a commercial, recreational or aboriginal fisheries, or to fish that support such a fishery.” This significantly narrows the protected areas to those directly affected by industry, a small percentage of Canada’s waters. Since the Species at Risk Act emphasizes species already at risk, this leaves a gap for species that will become at-risk in the aftermath of the bill. This bill illustrates the instability of a weak sustainability approach as articulated by Aldo Leopold, an ecologist. He asserts that “a system of conservation based solely on economic self-interest is hopelessly lopsided […] It assumes, falsely [...] that the economic parts of the biotic clock will function without the uneconomic parts.”

Green Party leader Elizabeth May is in fierce opposition to the bill that has now become law in Canada, saying that it has “taken a sledgehammer to environmental law and policy” in the interest of pipeline development. Providing a safe legal environment for pipe-

Eleanor Milman | Illustrator lines was allegedly a top priority when tweaking the bill’s environmental legislation and industrial project review process.

This bill, effective as of November 2013, is a clear example that the Conservative government’s definition of sustainability

is a weak one, which holds industry and economics above all else.

Beyond the environmental impacts, May expresses that the way these hidden motivations have been discreetly presented is an “affront to democracy.” In reality these amendments aim to acquit

industry of their environmental responsibilities, leaving the majority of Canada’s freshwater ecosystems unprotected.

To get in contact with Natasha Carruthers, email commentary@ mcgilldaily.com.

The Daily is looking for a Reader’s Advocate The RA will write a twice-monthly column weighing student concerns against the RA’s assessment of the paper’s performance. Any Daily staff member (with six Daily “points”) can apply.

The ideal candidate will be passionate about The Daily and reader response, having an understanding of and/or willingness to learn about The Daily and its Statement of Principles (SoP). Possible tasks include reader surveys and interviews, thematic columns, critiques of how The Daily lives up to its principles, and judging the relevance of the SoP and The Daily to the student body.

Submit applications or questions to commentary@mcgilldaily.com

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LIVING ON A RUNWAY An exploration of catcalls and the violence that lies behind them WRITTEN BY CARLA GREEN ILLUSTRATION BY CLAIRE LESLIE

Trigger warning: this article contains references to verbal sexual harassment.

I

t would happen within steps of my front door. First, the eye lock. Then, as I pass by on the street, a hiss in my ear that grows until it hangs still in the air, lingering menacingly: hermosssssa. I am in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and it is every morning of the five months I lived there.

If you ask anyone who identifies as a woman who has lived in Buenos Aires, this happens to her at least once a week, and more often, multiple times a day. People usually divide piropos – the Spanish word for a catcall – into two categories: nice piropos, and aggressive ones. It is commonly agreed that the difference between the two lies in the eye (or ear) of the piropo-ed, and that usually depends on the catcaller’s tone of voice.

Beyond this basic dichotomy, the culture of catcalling becomes a roaring jungle of subjectivity and contradiction. During the dozens of conversations I’ve had about catcalling over the past six months, I’ve heard one woman speak ferociously against the machismo of catcalling, only to sheepishly admit later on that she had catcalled a man once, or maybe twice, but only as a joke. I’ve had men tell me that they catcall frequently, but only when they’re drunk, and it is always a joke.

I spoke to a bisexual man from Colombia who told me that he likes getting catcalled by men, but only in gay neighborhoods, and only if they use “sweet words,” a rarity in Buenos Aires, according to him.

I want to be clear: Argentina is not the only place in the world where I have been catcalled, and it is most certainly not the only place in the world where it happens. But it is the place

where I became interested in understanding why it happens. Growing up in New York, I was catcalled, but sparsely. I could probably count on two hands the number of piropos I received in 18 years of living there.

In Buenos Aires, on the other hand, walking the streets can be, at times, like walking under an avalanche of piropos (the quantity varying based on weather, time of day or night, neighbourhood, clothing choice, and/ or the judged propriety of such clothing choice for all the above conditions or, frustratingly, none of the above, just pure subjectivity). I lived there just long enough to get fed up with the avalanche of piropos, but not long enough to get used to it.

Even more than getting fed up with the epidemic of catcalling in Buenos Aires, I found myself becoming rabidly curious about why men catcall. I know what goes through my head when somebody catcalls me: confusion, delayed comprehension, fear, anger, and/or exhausted indifference. But I had no idea what was going on in the minds of the men who catcalled me and other women all day, every day in Buenos Aires. So I decided to go for a walk with a friend and a recorder to interview the first person who catcalled us.

A man’s perspective A friend and I found our subject walking through a plaza across the street from the Universidad de Buenos Aires’ medical school. Ricardo (the subject) is a med student. He was sitting, drinking beers with some friends after class when he called out something unintelligible to us. We looked doubtfully at each other, turning slowly to look at him. All doubt was blown away as we were hit by a flurry of suggestive air kisses.

“Mi amor!” he shouted. I took out my recorder, heart pounding in my chest.

But the conversation turned out to be deeply unsatisfying, because his answers were mostly what I had imagined they would be. Why had he catcalled us? “Because we’re cute,” he said, because he liked the way we were walking, and we have beautiful eyes.

What goes through his head while he catcalls?

“Nothing,” he replied dismissively, “I don’t know, I don’t think.”

What was he expecting or hoping for when he’d catcalled us? A smile maybe, or that we would come for a chat.

I had been hoping for entirely something else, maybe a glimmer of misogyny, a hint that he purposefully and knowingly degraded women by catcalling them. Zilch. I had been refusing to accept that catcalling is a systemic, societal phenomenon, and could only be explained in those terms, with the frustrating everyone’s-to-blame-so-nobody-is logic that seems to always accompany societal problems.

Even more frustratingly, I had to admit that women were partly to blame, and that some women actively encourage catcalling.

When I asked Ricardo, incredulously, if piro-

To men who [say] ‘well how am I supposed meet a woman on the street?’, I’d say º^LSS ÄYZ[ VM HSS know that most women don’t want to meet you.’

Miguel

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pos ever actually worked for him, he smiled gently at me as if I were a bit stupid. “Of course,” he said. He had even been on dates with women he reeled in by piropo. “Women are just like men,” he told me, adding, “women are looking for something, too.”

He may be right, in a way. Women are sexual creatures too, and we, too, can be on the prowl. But women become, overwhelmingly, the passive subjects of piropos, whether we choose to answer or not. Does that mean that we, women, are just naturally sexually passive, waiting to be admired before we move in for the kill?

Holly Kearl, founder of stopstreetharassment.com, says no. And the fact that some women respond to piropos in a positive way, she claims, has more to do with plain old sexism than anything else. “We’re taught that the highest praise we can get is male attention, whether it’s positive or negative, but especially if it’s positive,” she said. “So I think it’s common – especially for young women – to feel complimented on some level [by street harassment].”

A woman’s perspective Many of the women I spoke to, catcalled regularly or not, felt conflicted, stuck in the gap between liking and resenting being catcalled. “I think I’ll miss it when I go home,” my roommate, Iris, told me. She’s Dutch, 26 years old, and had been living and traveling in Latin America for over a year. “[When I go home,] it’s like, why isn’t anyone telling me anything anymore. What happened to me? It’s really contradictory because it’s nice and not nice at the same time. It’s really weird.”

One of my Argentine roommates, Kim, chimed in, “You would definitely miss it. You get comforted by it. It may sound stupid, but it’s like, if you put makeup on and then somebody [tells you] something, [you think] ‘I look pretty today.’ It’s like, I don’t like to hear it, but if I don’t receive it, I’ll get mad.”

But there are also women who don’t feel conflicted about piropos. Mariam, an exchange student in Buenos Aires who grew up in Abu Dhabi, hates being catcalled. In Abu Dhabi, she said, the streets are even more inundated with piropos than in Buenos Aires. She was about eight years old when it first happened to her there. And she realized a long time ago that men catcalling her has nothing to do with the way she looks. She told the story of how one time, as a teenager there, she made a conscious effort to dress in a way that wouldn’t attract male attention, and got catcalled anyway.

“I was having a really bad day, and I walked out of my house in an outfit that I specifically hoped would hide me, so I wouldn’t be seen. So I kind of dressed like a guy would, with sweatpants and big tennis shoes, a huge sweatshirt, and I put my hair in a beanie. No makeup, no nothing.”

“And ironically enough,” she continued, “just as I walked out of my house, I got catcalled by [someone] driving by in their car and slowing down. That was very surprising because I walked out with the preconceived thought that I did not want to be solicited in any way possible, not even in a friendly social way.”

Mariam’s story validates a perspective that I’ve come to take on after months of daily piropos: nothing I do matters. My appearance has nothing to do with the

piropos I receive. But the idea that piropos are inspired by women’s beauty – rather than by men’s desire – is as tenacious as it is false. And no matter how baggy your sweatpants or neutral your appearance, it’s almost impossible to stop automatically checking your appearance after every piropo, searching for a cause.

Was that a catcall?

Miguel, a good-looking guy in his twenties from Buenos Aires, says that it’s the beauty of the women he passes on the street that inspires his piropos. “It could be 30 [times], if 30 women pass by [who inspire me],” he said. “I think that women enjoy it, because I know how to do it well.”

“I’m looking for a smile, and the women know that. Usually, I get a smile, because my piropos aren’t an offensive thing,” he added with a wry smile. He refused to give an example, explaining that he thinks up piropos on the spot. But as I was getting the mic set up before the interview, he asked me what a woman so colourfully dressed and with such beautiful hair could possibly want to talk to him about. This was, of course, before he knew that I’d be interviewing him about piropos. There are many people – men and women alike – who would say that what Miguel does is a perfect example of piropos done right. But what it’s really a perfect example of is why they’re a problem.

Miguel gives the name piropo to the things he says to women in the street (and the women themselves would probably also call them piropos) because that’s the format men know for talking to women in the street. And catcalling has become so dominant as the de facto form of street communication that if someone just says hello in passing, women will ask themselves: was that a catcall?

“People will ask me ‘what’s the difference between a compliment and harassment?’” said Kearl. “I think the difference is consent.

It’s respect. And yeah, it’s really hard to give consent in a public space, because you don’t know each other. To men who [say] ‘well how am I supposed meet a woman on the street?’, I’d say ‘well, first of all, know that most women don’t want to meet you.’”

Emma, an exchange student from Dallas studying in Buenos Aires, had never been catcalled before going to study there.

Since everyone drives everywhere in Dallas, she told me, there isn’t much opportunity for it. And the first time she was catcalled, she said, “I felt objectified and bad.

It was definitely a negative feeling.”

“I was walking by some construction workers, and they just did the standard hey and the kissy noises. But I just walked by and ignored it. It wasn’t like they were really saying anything. They were just making random noises at me, like I was a cat, a fucking animal. And I don’t understand how that’s supposed to be a compliment or how it’s supposed to feel good in any way, in that form.”

That’s not to say that all piropos are equally bad, or that there aren’t even some that can make you feel good. If someone calls out to me that my smile is a ray of sunshine that brightened up their day, I clearly take it differently than someone whispering in my ear that they’d like to fuck me blind. But if I’ve been told my smile is a ray

of sunshine, I’ve also been commanded to smile – in passing, on the street – because I am beautiful. Nice or aggressive, a piropo is a piropo is a piropo.

A beauty sick society Piropos both reveal and perpetuate our attitude toward women and their bodies as public objects to be soliloquized about and/or abused at will. When someone catcalls me, it unconsciously, and against my will, refocuses my attention to what society tells women and girls is our most valuable attribute, that is our looks, our bodies. In addition to the piropos themselves, it is their inherent nature of objectifying women that has very real and devastating consequences for women.

Renee Engeln, a psychology researcher at Northwestern University, calls these consequences “beauty sickness.” “It’s a ‘sickness,’” she says, that has become epidemic among young women, although it does affect older women and even men to a lesser extent. She defines beauty sickness as an excessive preoccupation with one’s appearance, to the point where the amount of time, energy, and resources spent on trying to maintain and improve one’s attractiveness as judged by the public leaves

“We’re taught that the highest praise we can get is male attention, whether it’s positive or negative, but especially if it’s positive. [...] So I think it’s common – especially for young women – to feel complimented on some level [by street harassment].”

Holly Kearl little room for other pursuits.

She explained the paradigm at TEDxUConn, going on to talk about the way that from early childhood, little girls are taught that they are, above all else, beautiful (or, if not, that they should aspire to be). She invites us to think about how the go-to compliment for a young girl is not that she is intelligent or courageous or creative, but rather that she is beautiful. These compliments could be considered a pint-sized version of piropos, eyedropper doses of objectification, administered – with the best intentions and without a hint of malice – from birth.

Compliments that come at a cost If this still seems hard to accept, talk to any woman about the way she feels when she gets catcalled walking alone at night.

Iris, my roommate who said that she will miss catcalling when she goes home to Holland, also admitted that if someone cat-

calls her when she’s walking alone at night, she feels uncomfortable. “[When I feel uncomfortable,] I’ll just smile or say thank you or goodnight. I’m just like, ‘okay, I’ll be nice and then quickly walk away,’” she said. “Maybe because I think if I’m arrogant or un-nice [sic] it’ll get worse.”

If women feel uncomfortable or intimidated or scared, if they feel obligated to smile or graciously accept a piropo, it’s because they are well aware of the violence that lurks behind them that could emerge at any moment. Catcalls are a daily re-assertion of the position of power that men hold over women, the power to tell us that we are beautiful and to punish us if we don’t take it well when they say so.

Catcalls are a mechanism that ‘put women in their (our) place’ by reminding us what that place is, sexual objects subject to the whim of men.

And piropos also have a concrete effect on many of the tiny decisions we make every day, from what route to take to work, to what time to come home, to what to wear out of the house. Mariam, who told the story of getting catcalled when she was dressed as a boy, said that when she was living in Buenos Aires, she would always consider the possibility of piropos when getting dressed to leave her apartment.

“If I’m wearing something with a little cleavage, I always [take] care to bring a scarf with me, in case I’m going to have to be walking at some point alone or taking a bus at night. Not because I’m afraid to get cold, necessarily, but [because of piropos].”

Piropos para todos?

Almost all the men I interviewed for this piece – lifelong catcallers or catcalling virgins, Argentine or not – shared one point of view: if the world changed tomorrow and women catcalled the way men do, they (the men) would probably be pretty happy about it. And several people, women and men alike, proposed it as a ‘solution’ to catcalling. Why doesn’t everyone just catcall everyone?

It turns out that YouTube offers a wealth of material for people who dream of such a world. The videos are usually funny, but most are designed to shoot down the beloved proposal of piropos para todos (piropos for all) with the message being, you wouldn’t really like it if this happened to you.

The videos also get at a deeper truth, which is that the equal-opportunity catcalling world that they portray does not exist.

There are men who get catcalled, of course, some of them even by the small minority of catcalling women. But they make up an exceptional slice of the overwhelming rule that piropos are designed to objectify women. The videos are funny because they are so untrue to life. We don’t live in a world where women objectify men in that way, and in any case, we’re probably better off for it.

So rather than trying to convert women into catcallers, we should make an effort to convert everyone to something else entirely. Humans are incredibly creative animals, and we can find a different, better way to talk to each other. I challenge everyone, catcallers and catcall-ees alike, to stop feeding the monster of street harassment and find another way to communicate. This one is broken.

Sci+Tech

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Bullying 2.0 Omnibus Bill C-13 tackles cyberbullying by eroding digital privacy

Kristian Picon | The McGill Daily Jeremy Schembri Sci+Tech Writer

W

ould you rather be bullied online or watched by the police? Bill C-13, the Protecting Canadians from Online Crime Act, was developed in response to the recent tragic suicides of Canadian teens as a result of online bullying and harassment.

Amanda Todd and Rehtaeh Parsons serve as reminders of the destructive power of cyberbullying.

This bill is an omnibus piece of legislation that plans to criminalize forms of cyberbullying while slipping through provisions that would expand police surveillance.

Despite calls to split the bill into cyberbullying and lawful access parts, the debate is moving forward on the two separate issues: how to reduce the worst forms of cyberbullying, and our rights in the digital age.

Bill C-13 makes it a crime to knowingly share intimate images of a person without explicit consent for distribution from the subject.

According to Member of Parliament Charmaine Borg, New Democratic Party (NDP) Critic for Digital Issues, “[This clause is] widely supported from all sides of the house regardless of the party colour […]

but the main problem with this bill is that there are only three pages on cyberbullying and the rest is essentially about lawful access.”

The problems opponents have with Bill C-13 are that it lowers the threshold to obtain access to personal information, and eliminates the checks-and-balances that keep Internet Service Providers (ISPs) – such as Bell and Rogers – from voluntarily providing private information to the authorities.

The bill proposes to lower the threshold to obtain warrants from “reasonable grounds to believe” to “reasonable grounds to suspect” for specific production orders such as tracking data or transmission data. The burden for “proof to suspect” means that a law enforcement agency simply needs to suspect a person has committed, or will commit, a crime. The argument for lowering the burden is that transmission data is not invasive and a lower burden to receive a warrant is justified. “This type of information in relation to which a person has a lower expectation of privacy is often collected at the beginning of an investigation before police develop reasonable grounds to believe an offense has or will be committed,” explains Justice Canada spokesperson, Carole Saindon.

Yet, the metadata being targeted is not well defined in the bill, and depending on a judge’s interpretation, may include anything from routing information on a call to your internet history.

Despite politicians’ defense that what they are collecting is “just metadata,” there is a great amount about one’s private life that can be learned through this information. German politician Malte Spitz demonstrated the power of metadata to track one’s daily life by releasing six months worth of data to the public, showing that detailed information – like where he slept, who he called, what cities he travelled to – could be easily accessed.

Currently, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) governs the collection, use, and disclosure of personal information by private sector organizations. In general, personal information can only be disclosed with the consent of the individual; however, under certain circumstances, such as under the organization’s own initiative or in emergency situations, ISPs can share personal information (such as an address linked to an IP) with law enforcement agencies without the individual’s consent.

Current law states that even though the ISP can voluntarily disclose personal information to the police, they are still liable for damages if the person was innocent, however, Bill C-13 gives ISPs legal immunity to reveal their users’ personal information. “By taking out this whole liability aspect, you are really just encouraging this whole backdoor of personal information going into the hands of police offers without there being probable cause,” says Borg.

Despite these increased powers of surveillance, it is unlikely that cyberbullying will be prevented. According to Shaheen Shariff, an associate professor at McGill whose research focuses on bullying and cyberbullying, “Bringing in laws may not really solve the problems as there is a spectrum of these types of behaviours that go from mild to extreme.” Shariff believes that implementing a set of laws that criminalize bullying will be difficult to accomplish because of the diverse nature of the issue in question.

The pervasiveness, ease of distribution, and number of social networks on the internet allow bullies to harass people no matter where they are. Putting numbers on cyberbullying or bullying is difficult as

people define and experience it differently. Shariff notes that teachers rarely think there is a problem with cyberbullying at their school even though many students have admitted to having experienced it. Shariff says that teachers and administrators are not aware of a problem because students who are bullied often avoid reporting to authorities due to the belief that the situation will get worse if they do, a lack of confidence that adults will be able to respond to the problem, or a fear that their digital privileges may get taken away.

Cyberbullying laws may allow police to deal with the worst forms of cyberbullying, though at the risk of limiting the protection of citizens’ information.

Bill C-13’s additional clauses are unlikely to solve cyberbullying, provide a way to lower the burden of obtaining a warrant and reduce the checks-and-balances needed to keep ISPs from sharing our personal data. Laws cannot be updated quickly enough to deal with the new challenges that technology creates. As more people spend more time online and as telecommunication information becomes richer, online privacy should be tightened and not loosened.

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The real change in climate change Canadian environmental protection up to the people, not politics

Kristian Picon | The McGill Daily Jane Zhang The McGill Daily

C

anada is home to some of the world’s most calendarworthy natural landscapes, one fifth of the world’s freshwater resources, and rugged ‘outdoors-y’ environmentalists. Yet the federal government is all but protective of the nation’s massive natural resource endowment, not to mention the social security and well-being of Canadians.

Canada currently ranks last in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries in terms of environmental protection, and is the only country to have pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty governing the reduction of carbon emissions. On a national level, the Conservative government has cut major programs like the Federal Environmental Assessment, the Contaminated Sites Action Plan, and the Action Plan on Clean Water, jeopardizing our clean water and air resources while expediting megaprojects in oil and mineral extraction.

Francois Choquette, an New Democratic Party (NDP) Member

of Parliament and Deputy Critic for the environment, told The Daily that the Conservative government dismantled and cut funding to important environmental programs, leaving weak regulations on the transport and carbon sectors that will contribute to a three degree Celsius warming over the next century.

The current scientific consensus is that anything above a two degree Celsius rise (compared to 1990 levels) in global temperature will be irreversibly damaging, causing more intense and frequent extreme weather events, significant water shortages, and failing crop yields in developing and developed regions.

Choquette told The Daily that despite these harsh realities, “We are still waiting on [the government’s] regulations on the polluting industries of oil and gas.”

The NDP proposes a more rigorous plan that involves investing in renewable energies, working alongside First Nations and Inuit peoples, and regulating carbon emissions to stay within the twodegree limit. The NDP also aims to restore the losses many environmental organizations have

experienced under the Harper government, such as the Federal Environmental Assessment Act, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and endangered species habitat management programs.

But even if the NDP were to go into power next term and keep all their promises, would it be enough?

Cameron Fenton, founder of the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition (CYCC), believes that true change comes from the people, not politicians. Fenton told The Daily that “[communities must] push back against the political and financial power of fossil fuel corporations. Until we’ve taken away their power, no political solution will be enough.” Fenton went beyond the environmental dimension to say that “climate change is a symptom of deeper inequalities in our economic and political systems.” Climate change is not only about the carbon dioxide; it’s about our broken economic system.

This is especially relevant to the younger generation, hardest hit with sky-high student debt and youth unemployment rates. Fenton started the national CYCC movement in 2009 to challenge federal

politics and build a “unified youth voice on climate change.” Fenton believes that this movement “isn’t a fight against pollution [but] a fight against polluters.”

Fenton sees hope in the fossil fuel divestment movement and encourages students to jump on board. According to Fenton, “[It has] taken off faster than any campaign on climate change […] [and] directly challenges the power of the fossil fuel industry” in an unprecedented way. The divestment movement points out the nation’s carbon bubble – the idea that though a lot of value is put into the fossil fuel industry, once the world starts to seriously target climate change the fuel will lose its value. Fenton said this movement is also “[pointing to] the fact that Canada’s heavy investments in fossil fuel extraction are putting everyone’s economic stability at risk, from pension funds to University endowments.”

The national climate action movement has spurred on many local organizations, including Climate Justice Montreal (CJM). CJM’s Kristian Gareau, like Fenton, is disappointed but unsurprised by the

federal government’s dismantling of environmental legislation given the current corporate culture.

“Our current economic model is jeopardizing the very planetary conditions that sustain life,” Gareau told The Daily, and the consequences are unequal in spread.

“Our governments are willing to bail out the economic elite, while the rest of us are stuck with the bill,” he noted.

Gareau, like many climate justice activists, said that, “We need system change, not climate change.” Climate justice opens up a conversation about the socalled winners and losers of climate change, and allows the community at large to explore alternatives to the current economic paradigm.

In a political climate where the federal government favours corporate tax cuts and pipeline expansions over human health and environmental sustainability, it is up to the people to shake up the conversation and shift the power.

To join the climate justice movement visit www.climatejusticemontreal.ca or www.ourclimate.ca.

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Breaking news: Sexual assault The mainstream media’s endorsement of rape culture Joelle Dahm The McGill Daily Trigger warning: this article contains discussions of rape and sexual assault.

Rape culture is still a prevalent side effect of our patriarchal society, affecting every single one of us. So why doesn’t it cease to exist, even as awareness of it continuously rises? One facet of the problem lies with the media. Mainstream media – often sensationalist – chooses to expose news that will attract the immediate attention of its consumers. This kind of exploitive yellow journalism tends to focus on big cases like the Steubenville incident. Many things were wrong with the coverage of this particular case, including the trend of illustrating situations with very low to no conviction time given to the rapists.

Other examples are the Daisy Coleman case in Maryville, which is recently being re-investigated, the Florida State case against Jameis Winston, and even the accusation of rape against three McGill football players that came up this past November in the media.

The McGill case illustrates the dilemma that comes with the depiction of sexual assault in the media. The case went by mostly unnoticed, with the accused perpetrators staying on the football team until a Montreal Gazette article entitled “McGill football players face sex assault charges increasing public awareness” was published two years after the assault itself. The McGill community responded with harsh criticism of the University, that claimed not to have been aware of the case before May of the past year, even though the Gazette claims to have contacted them in September 2011. The article led to a broad understanding in the community that the University’s inactiveness in dealing with the issue created space for rape culture. The community responded by collectively suggesting and achieving improvements in the way McGill treats rape culture, as seen in Ollivier Dyens email to the McGill community shortly after the article was published. Next to acknowledging that McGill’s “over-all response did not meet [the] community’s expectations,” Dyens stated that the University is going to make some progress, like the hiring of a full-time coordinator, a forum on consent in terms of sexuality in January, and an annual forum on safe-space. This

Alice Shen | The McGill Daily shows that media can be useful and is necessary as a proclamation against injustice.

The problem is that media is commercialized as journalists are also dependent on a living. The Gazette article did achieve a certain amount of social justice, but at the same time it put attention on yet another case in which neither the McGill administration, nor the coaches of the Redmen football team treated rape as a serious crime. The alleged sexual offenders were able to just go on with their lives for almost two years, while the survivor dropped out of university and left the province Media uses rape culture for its own profit. Sex sells and assault is a punchline.

The sensationalist coverage of cases like these is disproportionate to the almost non-existent coverage on the cases of rapists that, if convicted at all, were sentenced to more than the average two years in jail – even though the maximum penalty could be 14 years. The Globe and Mail states that police are seeking lesser charges in cases of sexual assault because they are easier to prove than higher level assault charges and more likely to result in a conviction. Unfortunately, the charges are then lower than they should be in many cases.

More important for the media, however, is the impression that

non-controversial cases are of less interest, as they do not pose the same attraction to audiences. As a repercussion, rape can generally be conceived as a less severe crime and increase the incentive of possible perpetrators to act on their intent. Stricter law enforcement, and the awareness of such, could lead potential perpetrators to not take action confronted with the apparent consequences. This would however not be an explanation for the non-ceasing existence of rape.

One reason for sexual assault is power, and the power of one’s own dominance over another human being. All oppression is a direct result of a hierarchical construct of human worth. This past November, Nikki Mosello and five other students in the class “Contemporary Issues in Education” organized a workshop, open to the public, as part of their class. During the workshop, which consisted of education and discussion on rape culture, Mosello stated, “We live in a culture of hypermasculinity, where the man has to be dominating and powerful.” The cultural notion of hypermasculinity, paired with misogyny, prevails in media, advertisements, and entertainment that we are confronted with every day.

“We are surrounded by sexual imagery, but we don’t talk about it.”

Lisa Trimble, lecturer within the McGill Education faculty, who was teaching the class last semester, stated, “I think it is very problematic that we are surrounded by [sexual imagery], but we don’t talk about it. If we could [have an] open, candid discussion about sex, maybe we wouldn’t perpetuate rape culture, maybe we wouldn’t perceive it as a game, and sex wouldn’t be seen as a commodity.” In our society, healthy sexuality and sexpositivity are viewed as taboo, with even basic sexual education in schools being controversial. The missing open discourse can lead to people associating shame, violence, and power with sex, instead of love, intimacy, and joy, because that’s what we are brought up to do, and what popular culture and media try to teach us.

People often don’t believe in the culpabilty of a perpetrator, especially when the latter is a well respected member of society. Candace Steinhart, co-organizer of the workshop, said, “The myth is that sexual perpetrators are crazy perverts. In reality, they are often people we know in a community who have done something wrong.

By vilifying rapists, we separate them from mainstream society, taking away any of their human qualities.” This contributes to the maintenance of rape culture by giving the potential offender

the impression that – based on the privilege or their social status – they can get away with it.

Media repeatedly reinforces this assumption. CNN’s Poppy Harlow for example made the heavily disputed statement on the Steubenville case that it was “incredibly difficult, even for an outsider like me, to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believed their lives fell apart.”

Media uses rape culture for its own profit. Sex sells and assault is a punchline. Sexist TV shows and advertisements are not the only problem though. Media reinforces the notion that rape culture is not serious by their specific choice of stories that show cases in which the perpetrators got away easy. “Even though rape is the perpetrators’ fault, as bystanders we have the responsibility to reduce rape culture,” asserted Madeleine Hicks, one of the co-organizers, during the workshop. Media could help in preventing rape culture by getting rid of the obvious sexism it displays and by putting more focus on cases that were treated with the necessary rigour. But as of now, mainstream media is not only a bystander, but also a precursor, of rape culture.

Sports

January 9, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

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On the precipice A cloud of troubles before the emergence of an openly gay male athlete Evan Dent The McGill Daily

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ack in May 2013, free agent National Basketball Association (NBA) player Jason Collins announced on a front page story in Sports Illustrated that he was gay. It was the first time any active professional male athlete in the socalled ‘big four’ sports (football, baseball, hockey, and basketball) had publicly come out. Collins hasn’t yet been signed; he hasn’t played a minute of NBA basketball since the announcement.

The market for 35-year-old players (ancient in professional sports terms) with declining skills is not quite robust these days, which somewhat explains Collins’ absence from an NBA team. Unfortunately, this is not all that has come up: there are fears that the media attention would be a distraction to the team (and there’s nothing more terrifying to teams these days than a media distraction, because athletes apparently can’t handle answering questions about the real world for 20 minutes a day, or something) and that Collins’ presence might disrupt the chemistry of the locker room.We have yet to see an openly gay male athlete play for any period of time. For some reason, the media has mostly ignored a number of openly gay female athletes, but this is also related to the fact that women’s sports are consistently underreported. Stories on trans* people attempting to ‘cross over’ into their identified gender side of a sport are usually reported on as anomalies; sometimes a tired debate ensues over whether it’s ‘right’ that someone do this. But the main sticking point for the media is an openly gay male athlete, and we’ve reached a tipping point of people waiting for it to happen, especially since it appears that Collins may never get another shot at the NBA. Speculation about athletes’ sexuality has become common parlance with the advent of 24hour sports networks, the internet, and Twitter. Just recently, Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers was the target of rumours claiming that he was gay, leading to an incredibly awkward interview where he had to say that he “really, really like[d] women.”

In November 2013, Mike Freeman released a story for Bleacher Report that claimed that two gay,

Alice Shen | The McGill Daily free agent football players were ready to come out this season before the teams interested in them balked, one for money reasons (which some doubt is true) and another fearing the reaction the signing might garner from the media – and possibly negative reaction from fans or players. “Quite simply, teams remain terrified of signing an openly gay player,” Freeman wrote.

We have yet to see an openly gay male athlete play for any period of time.

Further compounding these issues was a recent article published

in Deadspin by former Minnesota Vikings (and currently unemployed) punter Chris Kluwe, who claimed that he was cut from the team in 2012 in part because he had publicly spoken out in favour of same-sex marriage. Kluwe alleges that his coach, Leslie Frazier, told him to stop speaking publicly on the issue, while his position coach, Mike Priefer, reportedly made multiple homophobic remarks towards Kluwe. All this, along with Kluwe’s increasing age and somewhat declining statistics, are what Kluwe alleged led to his dismissal from the team.

This left You Can Play and its founder, Patrick Burke, in a rough spot. You Can Play is an organization that seeks to partner with collegiate athletic programs and professional leagues to create a welcoming environment for gay athletes. Burke initially tweeted (then deleted) that Kluwe had been cut for his performance more than anything else; his reasoning for this was that he did not want athletes to think that speaking out for gay rights would get them fired. Clari-

fying later, Burke told Buzzfeed that “[…]we do not want to see people take this incident and make it seem like you get cut for being gay-friendly in the NFL,” and that Kluwe’s case was “totally unacceptable, horrific, and (we hope) atypical[…].”

Let’s throw yet another log on this fire and discuss the upcoming Sochi Olympics, where further anti ‘gay propaganda’ laws were recently passed. Many people have balked at a boycott of the games, but do want to make some sort of statement at the Olympics in favour of gay rights. Olympic rules specifically prohibit public political demonstrations by athletes, because, for some reason, a giant international competition featuring nearly every country in the world must remain totally apolitical. You Can Play has distributed small pins with their motto written in Cyrillic, but that’s been about the extent of advocacy so far. There seems to be a tangible desire to speak out against the Russian laws, but action so far has been slow, whether from fear of prosecution or athletes’ reticence to publicly speak out.

So, yes, there seems to be anxiety over when gay rights are going to go big in sports (and, again, going big means coming out as an openly gay athlete, or showing support for gay rights). The issues surrounding the first openly active gay male athlete, athlete advocacy, and the media’s desire for one of the biggest sports stories ever – basically, the gay rights version of Jackie Robinson (professional baseball’s first black player) - have now intersected into something fascinating. There is a subtle sense of waiting for the next big story, of breathless anticipation. Projects such as You Can Play have attempted to create an accepting environment among professional organizations, but we haven’t yet seen push come to shove; it remains to be seen what will actually happen when that first openly gay male athlete faces their first unfriendly crowd, their first disparaging comment, and ever more intrusions into their personal lives by a hungry media. At this point, it’s not an if, but a when, and we’re standing at an uneasy precipice.

Culture

January 9, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

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Getting graphic Graphic designer Isaiah King on art and activism

Isaiah King

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ntario-born Isaiah King, a graphic designer working in New York City, studied graphic design at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt) in Boston. When he graduated in 2008, King headed to New York to try and make it big. Now, he has a self-titled company, a multi-disciplinary studio dedicated to the creation of graphic design, branding, illustration, and more. King’s work has been exhibited in array of cities in Canada and the U.S.. In the following interview, King opened up to The Daily about his job as an artist and his take on the place of the artist in contemporary society. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

McGill Daily (MD): Tell us about your job as a graphic designer. What type of art do you make?

Isaiah King (IK): I run my own

Alice Shen | The McGill Daily studio, so my day-to-day involves a lot of different moving parts. I develop design and communication solutions, I design, I art direct other creatives I’ve brought on for projects (designers, animators, writers, web developers, illustrators, et cetera), I meet with clients, I make coffee, I do bookkeeping, I illustrate, I animate, I make more coffee.

A design job will play out roughly like this: I’ll meet with a client to discuss the job. We talk about the problems that need to be solved, ideas that need to be communicated, desires, wants, hates, hopes, and dreams. If I need to bring in some other great talented creative colleagues I give them a call. Once all the boring paperwork and money discussions are over the job commences. Brainstorming, angst, procrastination,

labour pains, more angst all give way to the birth of a handful of viable design solutions. These are presented to the client. Then we’re in production. From here we roll out our brilliant concept across the entire project. We design and layout, we animate, we develop, we work back-and-forth with the client through a process of refinement that takes us to completion.

Besides my client work I’m constantly working on my own projects.

Woodcut printmaking is one of my favourite mediums right now, but I also draw and try to experiment with new animation techniques. These projects evolve very differently from my business jobs, most notably because they do not need to address a specific communication challenge. My personal projects only need to satisfy my critique and my expression.

MD: When at work, where do you draw most of your inspiration from?

IK: My inspiration comes from a broad range of things, some passive, others proactive [...] Some of my inspiration comes from outside influences that I consciously seek out. Some of my inspiration comes from seemingly accidental discoveries. A mistake or a new mark or style I stumble into that can lead to some inspiring exploration. [My inspirations include] Alexander Rodchenko, James Victore, Chaz Maviyane-Davies (for graphic activism), Edvard Munch, Banksy, The Vienna Secession (Klimt, Moser, et cetera), and 1960s to 1970s American and Cuban amateur (and some professional) political poster art.

My move into the graphic design realm is owed in part to meeting Chaz Maviyane-Davies. Although I had already discovered and loved activist poster art from Cuba and the U.S.. I had not fully realized design’s role in contemporary public discourse. Chaz has defined his career as a graphic dissident from his roots in Zimbabwe to his professorship at MassArt. James Victore best articulates for me what graphic design can be at its best. He says, “I have always tried to make work that has an opinion. My opinion.” He challenges the common paradigm of a designer as a mere service provider, ready and willing to “pretty up” any message handed down by a client. The philosophy of bringing myself, my art, my opinions, and my voice into my design work is very important to me.

I am always striving to marry my personal art and expression with design and public dialogue. Banksy is an artist I see doing this perfectly.

His art is by nature public, its expression is personal, and it communicates clearly while creating dialogue (which, in my opinion, also makes it graphic design).

MD: Do you believe that it is important to have an education in art to be successful within the art world?

IK: This is a very tough question and I’m not sure I have a specific answer for it. I will say this – one definitely doesn’t need a formal art education to be a talented, skilled, and relevant artist.

Personally, going back to art school changed my life. It set me on the path that I’m on today. Going to art school was so much more than the sum of its parts. It was more than the curriculum, it was the fellow students, it was the non-studio classes (literature, history, politics, writing, et cetera), it was a handful of exceptional professors, it was the sheer act of taking a huge step forward to enrich myself that made my

art education worthwhile.

Art education was important for my ‘success’ (if you can call it that), but I still couldn’t make a universal statement on its importance in success within the art world. We’d need to have a broader discussion on which ‘art world’ we’re talking about and what different kinds of successes look like.

MD: In light of the current economic crisis and political challenges that the United States has been facing, what role do you see the artist playing in contemporary Western society? Do you agree with the growing belief that art is an expressive tool with a powerful political potential?

IK: I agree that art has always been a powerful tool with the potential to work with, fight against, challenge, cast a light upon issues that are political, social, personal, and community related.

How art relates and makes itself relevant to these issues will constantly change. The role of the artist will constantly change. I’ve always rejected the simplistic view that “art holds a mirror up to society.”

Though that is one role it can play I think it would be more accurate to say art is society, art is culture.

Therefore I think that the artist’s role in contemporary society is, and will be, an interwoven role rather than just a responsive role.

The role of art has gone far beyond just the individual artist.

The tools that come from creative training are proving indispensable in our current economy and social environment. Rather than pointing to the relevance of one or more art forms — painting, dance, et cetera — I think we are now understanding the value of creative thinking in all fields. I’d like to reference Sir Ken Robinson here, because he’s much smarter and more articulate than I am. He talks about our current education model being based on the same model developed in response to the industrial revolution. The digital revolution (among other changes) is moving us into uncharted territories at breakneck speed. Our traditional model of education cannot prepare us for jobs in the future that don’t even exist yet. So it’s not that everyone should be a woodcut printmaker and a dancer in the future, it’s that the thinking and training to be those things allows one to tackle problem solving and innovation with a larger arsenal. I believe this is how art is most powerfully (and surreptitiously) relevant in our day-today lives.

- Compiled by Louis Denizet

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Culture

January 9, 2014 The McGill Daily | www.mcgilldaily.com

2014: The year we kill the music snob Why we should get over ourselves and just get down

Jasmine Wang | Illustrator Hillary Pasternak The McGill Daily

L

adies and gentlemen, there is something rotten in the current state of popular music.

I’m not talking about Top 40.

The Top 40 is the Top 40, and it always will be. 2013 didn’t bring us much of anything new in the realm of the hyper-popular. There were club-oriented hip hop tracks, shiny power ballads, upbeat selfempowerment pop anthems, and more anonymous electro-bangers than you could shake a Moog at.

We had a few pleasant surprises – the rise of a certain curly-haired Kiwi teenager, a last minute video pipe-bomb of a R&B masterpiece, a fox-ear-adorned novelty hit.

We North Americans like to tell ourselves that the new year is a time for new things, so why limit that philosophy to a gym membership? Why not extend this inevitably temporary enthusiasm to the realm of pop culture? Let’s get rid of something that’s been hanging around for years, that we all know needs to be put out at the curb: the

music snob.

A music snob is not a hipster, if that’s what you’re thinking, though the two categories often intersect. Hipsterism is an aesthetic, a lifestyle for some. Snobbery is a mindset. The internet is littered with references to the term “music snob,” but few attempts to definitively describe it (although if you’re looking for a concise, zeitgeist-y laugh, go see what UrbanDictionary.com has to say on the subject). Suffice to say, a music snob is defined by their taste, taste which is obviously, self-evidently better than yours.

If you listen to Led Zeppelin, they like Blue Cheer. If you’re into 2Pac, they want to know how you haven’t heard of Kool Keith.

Music snobbery has been raised to an art form in the past decade or so, creating a monastic class of scholar, lurking in both dingy record stores and the deeper reaches of the internet, hoarding information about obscure EPs and side projects, arguing about who started which movement, who’s been unfairly ignored by history.

First, there’s the state of indie rock, which has been one of the traditional domains of the music snob since its inception in the 1980s. Or rather, the term “indie rock,” which now denotes a vague sensibility rather than the status of an artist’s representation, much the way “alternative” was bandied about in the 1990s.

The ‘indie’ hit of the moment is “Sweater Weather” by the Neighbourhood, which sounds suspiciously like the product of a less treacly, alternate-timeline Maroon 5. “Gangster Nancy Sinatra” Lana del Rey is corporate to the bone, but so convincingly dressed up in underground tropes that no one seems to care. Or maybe they never cared in the first place. The question is moot, we’ve reached ironic singularity, a point where it’s possible to derive as much enjoyment from something considered objectively ‘bad’ as something objectively ‘good.’

Williamsburg is nearing the latter stages of the gentrification process. Pitchfork gets tens of millions of page views per month,

and it’s getting hard to tell where ironic appreciation of pop music turns into sincere enjoyment.

Even those perennial hipsters over at VICE have gotten in on the act, recently declaring mildly-rebellious pop princess Miley Cyrus to be “punk as fuck.” The underground culture has lost its ‘under.’ Garish hipster Dadaism, once the province of fringe acts, has made it into the music videos our younger sisters are watching.

What I’m saying is that taste is irrelevant at the moment. Loudly irrelevant. Those long, Talmudic arguments over credibility and ‘selling out’ have been rendered moot. We need to take off the sunglasses. Attitude-wise, we need less Velvet Underground, more Meatloaf, more Celine Dion, hell, more Billy Joel. I myself used to belong to this class of people who defined themselves in opposition to the masses of ‘sheeple’ who listened to pop radio on purpose.

How dare they enjoy music specifically created to be enjoyed?

How dare they give over their ears to the tyranny of Katy Perry?

Looking back, it all smacks of an uncomfortable elitism. What right do I have to look down on someone for not devoting themselves to the ‘correct’ musicians, as determined by a bunch of largely white affluent urbanites with nothing better to do than barricade themselves in an ivory tower of basement shows and unfindable blogs?

I propose we strip away the outer trappings of the music snob to leave the creature hidden at its core exposed to the open air: the music geek. One who is not defined by attitude, but enthusiasm. A music snob might profess to an ironic appreciation for Miley Cyrus, her punk-rock majesty, but a geek can be an unabashed worshipper. Silly? Sure, but also sincere and enthusiastic. Really, what’s a snob but a geek with a few aggressive defense mechanisms?

Using specialized knowledge as a method of declaring superiority before someone could use it to the opposite effect. Abandoning these protective measures in favour of vulnerability may not be easy, but possibly worth the risk in the end.

Editorial

volume 103 number 14

editorial board 3480 McTavish St., Rm. B-24 Montreal, QC H3A 1X9

January 9, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

Addiction is not a crime

phone 514.398.6784 fax 514.398.8318 mcgilldaily.com coordinating editor

Anqi Zhang

coordinating@mcgilldaily.com coordinating news editor

Hannah Besseau news editors

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

E.k. Chan Emmet Livingstone

culture editors

Nathalie O’Neill Hillary Pasternak features editor

Carla Green

science+technology editor

Diana Kwon

health&education editor

Ralph Haddad sports editor

Evan Dent

multimedia editor

Hera Chan

photo editor

Robert Smith illustrations editor

Alice Shen copy editor

Davide Mastracci design & production editor

Rachel Nam web editor

Chris Mills le délit

Camille Gris Roy

rec@delitfrancais.com cover design Chris Mills and Robert Smith contributors Jill Bachelder, Janna Bryson, Natasha Carruthers, Joelle Dahm, Louis Denizet, Claire Leslie, Eleanor Milman, Kristian Picon, Jeremy Schembri, Kai Cheng Thom, Juan Camilo Velásquez Buriticá, Jasmine Wang, Jane Zhang

Hera Chan | The McGill Daily

I

n December, a project for four supervised injection sites in Montreal was put into action by the city’s public health department, which submitted a proposal to the provincial government requesting funding for the planned sites. The news comes after years of effort on the part of advocates across the city, who have been working to ensure the safety of drug users, despite the harmful and dangerous social stigma that surrounds drug use and addiction.

Supervised injection sites are centres where drug users can access clean needles and safely inject pre-obtained drugs under the supervision of a nurse or medical professional. Such sites are crucial in preventing the spread of infections and diseases, such as HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C, among drug users, as well as preventing other injection-related problems such as overdose and vein damage. They also provide a safe, judgement-free space for drug users, and serve as a place for drug users to seek detox treatment or other forms of support if they so choose. Supervised injection sites have not been found to contribute to any sort of increase in crime or drug-related debris, nullifying the arguments of many critics. Furthermore, in terms of public health spending, the planned safe injection sites are expected to pay for themselves after four years.

Supervised injection sites are an important component of a harm reduction drug strategy, an approach that has been neglected at the federal level, particularly with the Conservative government’s misguided anti-drug campaign. This can be seen in measures such as the failed “Respect for Communities Act,” which sought to

make it more difficult to open safe injection sites. With such a toxic climate at the federal level, the burden of crucial work falls to individual cities, oftentimes to community and advocacy organizations. One example of this is Vancouver’s Insite, the first supervised injection site on the continent. Insite’s impact has been pronounced: it has seen a decline of 35 per cent in overdose deaths at the clinic, compared to a 9 per cent drop city-wide, and there has been a 30 per cent increase in people seeking detox treatment since its opening – all despite the lack of federal support for its activities.

Here in Montreal, there will be multiple supervised injection sites, unlike the single Insite clinic in Vancouver. The project includes planned funding for three sites, as well as one mobile site. The sites hold the potential to make a tremendous impact; however, these projects will require ongoing support to ensure their success. Vancouver and Montreal, as of now, are the sole cities in Canada with plans for supervised injection sites, with none planned or present in the U.S. – a dispiriting sign for such an important resource that works against stigmatizing drug users.

The stigma surrounding drug users and addiction does not end with such initiatives, but they certainly help by normalizing the safe supervision of drug use.

Open discussion is the most important step toward implementing adequate harm reduction strategies to face the reality of addiction and work toward healing.

Addiction should not be treated as a criminal problem but as a public health issue.

—The McGill Daily Editorial Board

Errata In the article “ASSÉ set to publish journal in English” (News, November 25, page 12), The Daily stated that during the 2012 Quebec student strike, only departmental associations went on strike at McGill. In fact, the PGSS voted to go on strike for three days. The Daily regrets the error.

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dps board of directors Queen Arsem-O’Malley, Amina Batyreva, Jacqueline Brandon, Théo Bourgery, Hera Chan, Benjamin Elgie, Camille Gris Roy, Boris Shedov, Samantha Shier, Juan Camilo Velásquez Buriticá, Anqi Zhang All contents © 2013 Daily Publications Society. All rights reserved. The content of this newspaper is the responsibility of The McGill Daily and does not necessarily represent the views of McGill University. Products or companies advertised in this newspaper are not necessarily endorsed by Daily staff.

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Compendium!

January 9, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

20

Lies, half-truths, and sick burns

Tips on destruction of archives distributed Conservative government recommends burning books for warmth E.k. EK The McGall Weekly

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akeshift “book-burning centres” have popped up nationwide and in parts of the northern U.S. in an effort to stay warm through the cold snap currently chilling many parts of North America. First starting as a desperate measure during ice storms that knocked out power in many parts of Eastern Canada, the creation and maintenance of these small centres were encouraged in an advertising campaign launched in the last week of December by the Canadian government.

Through gold-leafed pamphlets delivered door-to-door, as well as a series of bus ads in most Canadian cities, the Conservative government has taken a proactive stance on both keeping its citizens warm and destroying priceless and irreplaceable texts in the new year.

The government announced in 2012 that it would begin shutting down many national archive sites across the country, in what it called a “totally legitimate” costcutting measure as positions and programs were slashed.

A significant number of these archives were relied upon by environmental researchers and activists attempting to piece together records and reports of climate change. Skepticism dogged the closures, as limiting access to information regarding climate change

was publicly referred to as being “goddamn sketchy.”

The closures have now been rolled into a national strategy on “fighting the symptoms of climate change,” according to the Minister of Environment, Ollie Spille, in a press conference on January 2.

The ads offered helpful advice on different uses for old and discarded archive collections and any other materials that “indicate socalled ‘alarming’ global climatic trends.” Tips included using loose pages as kindling for bonfires, hardcovers as longer-burning fuel, and shredding pages to use as stuffing for makeshift quilts or pillows.

Since the archive closures leave thousands of books destined for landfills or scattering to private collections, the book burning initiative makes better use of these unique and rare tomes for the good of both citizens and the environment. “We know that landfills are bad for the environment, right,” Spille explained. “So by destroying these books instead of sending them to landfills, we’re helping the environment. Boom.”

While Spille would not comment on any change in official government opinion on the issue of climate change itself, she heavily emphasized the role the government is taking in addressing its aftereffects, “now that people are starting to complain about it.”

In Montreal neighbourhoods, many of the books come from the dismantled Mori Lamoun-

E.k. EK | The McGall Weekly tain Institute Library, after some were digitized for public viewing. “People don’t use books anymore, let’s be real,” said Spille.

“Not like there’s anything different between reading books in person and online.”

British TV series to be aired as a series of GIFs Cost-effective strategy “cuts out the middleman” E.k. EK The McGall Weekly

T

he newest episode of the internationally acclaimed crime drama Surelack aired last Sunday night, and was almost immediately converted by dedicated fans into a roughly 90-minute long sequence of GIFs, distributed online mostly through the personal blogging platform jumblr.

The show’s producers, Stevie Boffut and Mike Gaffit, have now announced intentions to film and air the next series as pre-made GIFs to most directly serve the interests of their watchers.

When first aired three years ago, the series spurred the creation of a disproportionately large fan community on jumblr. Its members have remained loyal despite an overall decline in plot and/or character development as the new series progresses, in favour of fanservicing tidbits designed largely to appeal to fans’ short attention spans coupled with their appetites for ‘moments’ between the two main male characters.

Boffut and Gaffit made clarifying remarks after the announcement was posted online, saying that “to be clear, these main characters are totally straight. Like,

so heterosexual! And this heterosexuality will continue in the next season as they continue to be really close but really, really straight.

We’re excited. If anything, the GIFs will make it easier to see how close and how straight they are.”

The announcement of the more digestible new format has experienced a mixed reception from fans, some of whom are “thrilled” that the producers “understand what [they] really want,” and some of whom are disappointed, as “all the fun was in getting around the annoying plot to find those clips for GIFs and compilation videos.”

Many American neighbourhoods struggling with power outages and uncommonly cold weather these past few days have begun burning books in kind, and a number of these were supplied directly from closing Canadian libraries.

With many Americans unfamiliar with, and unprepared for, belowfreezing temperatures, book burning has taken off as an easy and “relatively safe” emergency measure.

Spille said the Canadian government is helping in any way possible.

Have some biting satire you want to share with campus?

Drew some comics or made a crossword?

Want to ask The Weekly for advice?

Get in touch: compendium@mcgilldaily.com