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Volume 103, Issue 20 Monday, February 17, 2014

Big words since 1911 mcgilldaily.com

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

Gentrification and dispossession in Hanoi Page 8

SACOMSS Sexual Assault Center of the McGill Students’Society

Contents 03

February 17, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

16

NEWS

Quantifying the self with wearable technology

Annual march for Missing and Murdered Indigenous women

18

McGill students talk about mental health on campus

19

Sustainable student living project receives

www.sacomss.org

We’re here to listen.

514-398-8500

HEALTH&ED

Unequal access to HPV vaccinations for males

Protesting increased police presence in the Village

Free.

Confidential.

Non-Judgmental.

SCI+TECH

SPORTS

College athletes unionize against extortion

McGill hosts “Who Needs Feminism?” campaign

20 CULTURE

Scarcity of halal food on campus

The Musée d’art contemporain presents Adrian Paci’s “Lives in Transit”

08

TNC takes on Greek tragedy

COMMENTARY

Gentrification and dispossession in Hanoi

International Mother Language Day

A reflection on internalized racism and self esteem

22 COMPENDIUM! Innovative winterizing technology for reptiles

On the human element of mental illness

Campus Cuties

12

FEATURES

The fight to guarantee everyone enough money to live

23 EDITORIAL The misuses of Canadian citizenship and Bill C-24

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

Wednesday, March 26th Leacock 26 5:30pm Members of the DPS are cordially invited.

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

The Daily Publications Society (DPS), publisher of The McGill Daily and Le Délit, is seeking candidates for

a student position on its Board of Directors.

The position must be filled by a McGill student duly registered during the current Winter term and able to sit until April 30, 2015. Board members gather at least once a month to discuss the management of the newspapers, and make important administrative decisions.

Candidates should send a 500-word letter of intention to chair@dailypublications.org by 5:00 PM on March 26th.

For more information, please contact chair@dailypublications.org

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February 17, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

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Montrealers march for missing and murdered Indigenous women Demonstrators demand government action, increased awareness

Demonstrators march down Ste. Catherine.

Janna Bryson The McGill Daily

O

n February 14, over 500 people gathered in the snow at Place Émilie-Gamelin for the annual March for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, organized by the Missing Justice Collective. According to organizers’ estimates, it was the biggest march since the collective began organizing it in Montreal in 2010.

The first March for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women took place in Vancouver in 1991 after the murder of a First Nations woman. In an interview with The Daily, Bianca Mugyenyi, the Programming and Campaigns Coordinator at the Centre for Gender Advocacy, explained the continuing legacy of the event.

“These marches are meant to symbolize a spirit of women’s resistance, [of ] women standing up for themselves – specifically with the goal of being free of violence regardless of race or gender,” said Mugyenyi. “We are trying to gener-

ate a public presence, we are trying to generate solidarity, and we want to see less violence in the future.”

According to a 2010 report from the Native Women’s Association’s Sisters in Spirit (SIS) initiative, 582 Indigenous women have gone missing or been murdered, with roughly 75 per cent of those cases estimated to have occurred from the 1990s onward.

Later in 2010, SIS lost its federal funding and was unable to continue its research; however, a similar project was conducted by Maryanne Pearce at the University of Ottawa in 2013. Pearce’s research led to a database that has recorded 3,329 missing and murdered Canadian women, 824 of whom are Indigenous.

This year’s march began with an opening prayer, music from the Buffalo Hat Singers, and motivational words from a few speakers. Maya Rolbin-Ghanie, a member of the Collective, shared with the crowd some of the reasons why she participates in the march.

“I march because we lose track

Ralph Haddad | The McGill Daily of what is urgent and what is not.

Our sense of collective urgency is skewed and stunted. Some would have us believe that violence against women is no longer urgent in these parts, or that it is never urgent when measured against more pressing ‘life and death’ issues like war or climate change. I wish that they understood that dealing with any issue in a vacuum makes no sense at all, and will only create more work for all of us.”

From 6:45 to 8 p.m., the hundreds of protesters took to the streets of downtown Montreal with chants, banners, and flyers. Attendees participated in the march for a variety of reasons. Stephanie Guico of the Montreal organization Head & Hands felt both personal and professional connections to the event. “[At Head & Hands] we work partly with First Nations populations and First Nations women offering social legal and medical services,” Guico told The Daily. “Also on a personal level, my experience as a racialized minority in Montreal, and to a certain extent having known people

These marches are meant to symbolize a spirit of women’s resistance, [of] women standing up for themselves – specifically with the goal of being free of violence regardless of race or gender.

Bianca Mugyenyi, Programming and Campaigns Coordinator at the Centre for Gender Advocacy

who have been marginalized [...] I feel a particular affinity with this cause.”

Some demonstrators, like Hannah Harris-Sutro, sought to show solidarity with the cause from other communities.

“I’m here this year, and especially tonight, because there was a demonstration scheduled in the Village by another collective [tonight],” Harris-Sutro told The Daily. “It felt really important to be here as a queer presence [...] because I thought that it was just completely inappropriate [for the other demonstration] to be competing with this march.”

The demonstration ended at Place des Arts with more music from the Buffalo Hat Singers, some closing words, and hot chocolate for the frozen protesters.

Addressing the demonstrators prior to the march, Rolbin-Ghanie encouraged people to think critically and empathetically in the face of social issues. “We need to ask ourselves continually and repeatedly, ‘Am I motivated by love or by fear?’ and then make adjustments accordingly.”

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February 17, 2014 The McGill Daily | www.mcgilldaily.com

Student mental health gains national attention McGill students talk to The Daily about their experiences Trevor Rajchgot News Writer

“

When I skipped a [chemistry] midterm to sit alone in the library, I knew I needed help,” Dylan*, then a U0 Science student, told The Daily. He never thought that he would be affected by anxiety; he was in many ways a typical, easy-going undergraduate student.

“I had a great time at Frosh, I was making lots of new friends, and was generally taking it slow for the first part of the semester.”

Then, around his first midterms, panic set in.

“At first, I thought it was just normal stress. Everyone goes through crunch time in October.

Then, it started to get worse; I skipped classes because I felt unprepared and stressed out. At a certain point, I just couldn’t leave my room anymore.”

Dylan’s story is one of many at McGill. Mental Health Services saw an estimated 20,000 visits in the 2010-11 school year, double the figure seen five years prior.

Nina*, an Arts student who met with a counsellor in her second semester, also found the transition to McGill very trying.

“McGill was scary […] I did really poorly in my first semester, and felt pretty lost,” she said. In addition, she was coping with family mental health issues and the stress of working part-time. By the time her second semester began, Nina was suffering from depression.

A recurring theme in conversations about mental health at McGill is the role of academic stress in triggering or exacerbating mental health issues. Students who spoke with The Daily pointed to grade deflation and adjustment to life in a new city as triggering mental health issues.

This issue is gaining a great deal of attention nationwide. According to The Globe and Mail, after having experienced a rash of student deaths in the last few years, Queen’s University established a committee in 2012 to reduce the impact of mental health issues at the university. The committee produced a report outlining 116 recommendations for change,

ranging from proactive intervention, to the rescheduling of exams, to the extension of the semester.

According to Katrina Bartellas, co-founder of the McGill chapter of Unleash the Noise, a peer support group run as a supplement to campus mental health services, student mental health issues often go unaddressed until they reach a breaking point.

“We are not helping ourselves by neglecting our mental health until it reaches a critical point,” she told The Daily by email. “Instead, we need to be mindful of our mental health on a continual basis, especially as students.”

Nina, for example, only sought help at the suggestion of a professor at the end of her first year. By this point, she had already reached a low point and was considering dropping out.

Like many others, Nina encountered difficulties in relating her experience to her peers. “McGill creates a very competitive atmosphere that’s conducive to harsh judgment between peers […] some people have serious difficulties that require specific support.”

Bartellas spoke to the stigmatiza-

tion of mental health issues by pointing to the “Bridge the Gap” speaker series run by Unleash the Noise.

“The mandate of the speaker series is to bridge the gap in understanding between McGill students, faculty, and staff with either direct or indirect lived experience[s] with mental illness and those without,” she said. “Simply put, individuals at McGill with mental illness, or with a friend or family member with mental illness, share their personal story with others to decrease stigmatized attitudes on campus.”

The Queen’s University report ultimately recommended greater administrative and academic flexibility, comprehensive stress-management strategies, and longer semesters with less dense coursework to help prevent many students from experiencing severe anxiety and depression.

This year at McGill has seen various initiatives at McGill to address mental health. The Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) has formed an ad-hoc mental health committee, and the University’s joint Senate-Board of Governors meeting

this year featured a theme on mental health. Additionally, according to information provided by McGill’s Director of Internal Communications Doug Sweet, wait lists at Mental Health Services have gone down this term from 270 to 56 people.

According to Bartellas, a new mental health policy created under the SSMU ad-hoc committee will soon be presented to Council.

As for Dylan, his outcome was fortunate; not wanting to wait for help from McGill, he decided to see a private therapist. “It’s expensive, yeah, but I was facing academic probation and I knew that I couldn’t go on suffering.” With cognitive behavioural therapy and stress management planning, in addition to informing and working with professors, he learned to manage his anxiety and organize his thoughts positively.

“I know there [are] lots of people who are nervous to get psychological help; I was one of them. Just go for it, and don’t worry about others; your health matters first.” *Names have been changed

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February 17, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

5

Protests over police in the Village Demonstrators clash about increased police presence Adam Finley News Writer

F

riday saw two protests in Montreal’s Gay Village, one calling for increased police presence in the neighbourhood, and a counter-protest of around 100 people opposing the calls for more police. The call for an increased police presence stems from an alleged spate of violent attacks in the Village, the most recent dating back to December 12.

The march and rally in favour of an increase in police presence was organized by a group called the Collectif Carré Rose Montreal (CCRM). According to the CCRM’s French-language Facebook page, the group, which uses the pink square as a symbol, aims to fight homophobia and “promote security in the Village by using preventative and positive actions.”

Not everyone agrees with the goals of the CCRM. Mona Luxion, one of the organizers of the counterprotest and a former Daily columnist, asserted that police do not make a neighbourhood safe for everyone.

“When you look at the role of the police, they’re not simply a neutral body that exists to protect everyone,” Luxion said. “They serve specific interests – namely, protecting private property and the interests of the capitalist [and] colonial state.”

The founder of the CCRM, Louis-Alain Robitaille, works as a real estate agent in the Village and around the city. According to Luxion, the commercial interests of Robitaille, along with other CCRM members, are apparent in the CCRM’s goal to make the neighbourhood safer for “businesses, customers of all the area’s businesses, workers in the area, tourists, et cetera.”

Robitaille could not be contacted for an interview by press time.

The counter-protesters took to the streets at around 5:45 p.m. and were met with immediate police resistance. The Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) declared the protest illegal within minutes of demonstrators moving from the sidewalk to the street. After an altercation with an officer, where one protester was pushed to the ground, the group blocked the intersection at Ste. Catherine, just steps from the CCRM rally.

Separated by a police line, the majority of the demonstrators eventually dispersed to join the March for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women down the street at Place Émelie-Gamelin.

Yet some protesters remained.

Approximately 300 people supporting the CCRM began their march at around 6:45 p.m. and tensions rose between the pink square wearers

Robert Smith | The McGill Daily and the Pink Bloc, an anti-capitalist queer activist group. Throughout the CCRM rally and march, the Pink Bloc often broke out into song and dance, and denounced the CCRM as a ‘social cleansing’ project.

Pink Bloc members pointed to the open invitation extended to Denis Coderre, Montreal’s mayor, as an illustration of the alleged gentrifying and social cleansing

goals of the CCRM. During the march, one Pink Bloc member argued with a CCRM member about the role of the police moving forward. The CCRM member denounced the number of social service organizations in the neighbourhood, saying that they “attract homeless people” and other people that make the neighbourhood feel “less safe,” and suggested that the police were

needed to fix the problem.

The Pink Bloc member disagreed, and said, “Police can never be part of the solution because they are part of the problem.”

Luxion agreed with the sentiment, and stressed, “We have to ask who is made safer by police presence and at whose expense.”

The CCRM march dispersed at around 7 p.m..

Sustainable student living project funded

Educational Community Living Environment looks forward to new house Sarina Gupta The McGill Daily

T

he McGill student-run initiative Educational Community Living Environment (ECOLE) has obtained the necessary funding to officially launch for its pilot year in September 2014. The ECOLE house will be located at 3559 University, across the street from McGill’s School of Environment, and will take the place of a current MORE residence house. “[It was a] very long process to put together all of the different pieces [... and] find a physical house within residences, reach out to the Milton-Parc community, put together a student working group that’s empowered to take ownership [among other things],” Lily Schwarzbaum, one of the coordinators of ECOLE, told The Daily.

The house is designed to be a sustainable living environment and community centre for McGill students and the surrounding MiltonParc community. The top floor of the

house will be home to the facilitators of the project, with the ground floor and basement serving as public space for use by anyone in the community.

Currently, ECOLE is still in search of eight to twelve facilitators who will live on the top floor and aim to live sustainably. The facilitators will simultaneously conduct independent studies on a component of their sustainable lifestyle.

“We are looking for diversity [of facilitators] in terms of various backgrounds and all types of social group memberships, but also diversity in terms of academic majors and research interests,” Courtney Ayukawa, head project coordinator and U3 student in Sustainability, Science and Society, said in an interview with The Daily.

“We don’t want a house full of environmental students or students in Environment and Geography [...] We want a student in Engineering looking at the carbon footprint of the house, and maybe one student in Environ-

ment looking into urban agriculture, and one student in Management looking at conflict resolution and how that could be applied to businesses, or a Philosophy major looking into the dualism of man and nature and how that plays out in the house,” said Ayukawa.

Ayukawa and Schwarzbaum plan to have the facilitators hired by reading week. They also intend to hire two summer interns and a summer project coordinator in the coming month.

After hiring the full staff, the coordinators intend on brainstorming ways to create house rules together.

Approaches include deciding, “What conflict resolution techniques will facilitators and coordinators be doing?” Ayukawa said.

The idea for the ECOLE project began approximately three years ago. The project has encountered financial hurdles since its initiation.

When members of the sustainable Greenhaus classroom, sponsored by an Alternative University Project (AltU) comprised of McGill

and Concordia students, applied to the McGill Sustainability Projects Fund (SPF) in the summer of 2012 for ECOLE sponsorship, they were turned down. The students applied for a second time later that year to see their application rejected again.

When the ECOLE project later received Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) support in Fall 2012, members began to create partnerships with other groups at McGill, deliver presentations, and eventually hire coordinators in the spring of 2013 who were previously uninvolved with the initiative. After learning of ECOLE’s mission, the coordinators put together a timeline for the establishment of an ECOLE space to ensure that it would be adequately funded and prepared by Fall 2014.

“Where we are right now is that we’ve received our funding from the SPF, which is so incredibly exciting because [now that] we have the funding, the project is definitely going to launch in September 2014,”

said Ayukawa.

Living costs for ECOLE facilitators will also be partially subsidized.

Although rent for the current MORE house is approximately $1,000 per person, rent stipends bring individual rents to around $400 per month, according to Ayukawa.

The coordinators are optimistic about the public spaces of the house.

“The common spaces will have things like a couch, and a projector [...] and a whiteboard if people wanted to have meetings there,” Ayukawa said.

“We want ECOLE to last for many years. The two main goals are to be a model for sustainable living, and for ECOLE to serve as a catalyst for a surviving connected community for sustainability that integrates community outreach, sustainable living, and equity into the very definition of what sustainable living at McGill is,” said Schwarzbaum.

The deadline to apply for the position of ECOLE facilitator is midnight on February 19.

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February 17, 2014 The McGill Daily | www.mcgilldaily.com

“Who Needs Feminism?” campaign returns to McGill Organizers attempt to address criticism of last year’s campaign Nina Jaffe-Geffner News Writer

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his past week marked McGill’s second “Who Needs Feminism?” campaign, a movement initially created in 2012 by 16 women at Duke University in North Carolina. According to the “Who Needs Feminism?” website, the goal of the campaign is to “challenge existing stereotypes surrounding feminists and assert the importance of feminism today.”

A key component of the campaign at McGill, both this year and last year, has been the creation of a Tumblr page consisting of photos taken by students expressing what feminism means to them. Elizabeth Groeneveld, the Faculty Chair of the Women’s Studies Program at McGill, highlighted the merits of this aspect of the campaign, and addressed some of the criticism it has received.

“I think that the format is really accessible. Some people have criticized the campaign for just being about making little blurbs about feminism, but I think that if you’re new to feminism it feels really accessible as a campaign, and if you’re not new to feminism it can maybe spark a moment of reflection on how you would want to sum up what feminism means to you,” she said.

Groeneveld stated that another criticism of the campaign has been that it portrays feminism as individualistic, rather than as a movement about collective change and social justice.

Eden Haber, the Community Engagement Facilitator for Residence Life, questioned the legitimacy of this complaint. “First of all, I would sort of question how problematic the individualization even is. I think that finding a personal connection to feminism through understanding how it can affect one’s own life can really help a person to contextualize him or herself within the feminist movement.”

“But I think that my overall response to the individualization of feminism is that if you look at the individual photos you might get that impression, but if you look at them as a collection they actually do present very much a holistic view,” Haber continued.

Nevertheless, organizers of the campaign at McGill this year tried to make changes based on the feedback that was received last year. “One of the other main criticisms with the campaign is that people don’t think very critically or engage critically with feminism which is something that I agree with,” Haber explained.

As a result, in an effort to en-

Tanbin Rafee | The McGill Daily courage deeper analysis and critical engagement, this year’s campaign included an Anti-Oppression and Feminism workshop, a Faculty in Rez discussion about feminism held

by Groeneveld, and a discussion on feminism in the media focusing on Beyoncé and her new visual album.

Commenting on these additions to the campaign, Haber voiced her belief that the workshops did have a beneficial impact. “I think that people who did a picture after at-

tending an event tended to be more in that headspace of engaging critically and that produced a pretty interesting result,” she stated.

The last criticism which Haber claimed campaign organizers tried to address this year was the potential exclusivity of the phrase “I need feminism.” In order to combat it, the campaign “tried to really open up the statement, and so if you look online a lot of people wrote, ‘I support feminism’ or ‘I need womanism’ or ‘I

am pro-feminist,’” Haber stated. “We thought that that would make it more inclusive and help the campaign reflect a greater breadth of voices.”

As organizers wait to receive feedback on this year’s campaign, Haber said that she is generally satisfied with its results at McGill. “I think it’s important to recognize everyone [has] to start somewhere. I’m happy with the campaign. Even if the campaign creates a dialogue about what’s wrong with it, I will still be happy.”

Halal options on campus scarce University and food service provider blame low demand Igor Sadikov and William Manning News Writers

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racticing Muslim students continue to face limited availability of halal foods at McGill, and the situation remains largely unchanged since The Daily last reported on the issue in 2008.

Halal meat, which must come from an animal raised and slaughtered according to Islamic rules, is available at several McGill dining halls, including Bishop Mountain Hall, New Residence Hall (NRH), and Carrefour Sherbrooke. Additionally, vegetarian meals are also suitable for those who eat halal.

However, the lack of variety in the options offered is unsatisfactory to some students. “The only halal food [in NRH] was beef and

chicken burgers,” said Umar Kahn, student and member of the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) Policy Advocacy Resource Committee. “After a while, you can’t keep eating the same thing.”

Others pointed to the prohibitive cost of the halal options. “New Rez is ridiculously expensive,” said Tanbin Rafee, student and member of the Muslim Students’ Association (MSA) and Daily staff member. “Food is expensive on its own, and halal options [are] even more [expensive].”

On campus, halal options are even more scarce. “There’s none that I know of in terms of meat,” said Karim El-Baba, a U1 Engineering student.

Instead, Muslim students turn to off-campus locations for halal food. “I don’t think there’s [many halal options] around. I have to eat

at Arabic or Egyptian restaurants,” said Rafee.

“Sometimes, we have to go to Concordia to get food,” added Kahn.

The food service provider Aramark, which manages many food outlets on McGill’s campus, justified the lack of availability by citing low demand. “Halal being for a very small minority of students, they are not regular items. We accommodate them on a case-by-case [basis]. If we supply the cafeteria with halal food and nobody buys it, then we make a loss,” said Aramark representative Monique Lauzon.

MSA President Nazem Husseini suggested that the demand is in fact substantial. “The demand is pretty high among Muslim students,” Husseini wrote in an email to The Daily. “If the Food and Dining services [show] that they are willing to offer halal

meals, they will find a huge number of Muslim customers to add to their regular customers.”

Lauzon placed the onus on students to make sure that their needs are met. “They would have to manifest an interest. We haven’t received [much] communication from Muslim students. If we suddenly had lots of interest in halal food, we would adjust,” she said.

Rafee spoke to the accessibility problems posed by this requestbased approach. “Not everyone is confident enough to ask in front of people,” he said.

Husseini echoed that sentiment, blaming the administration for its lack of cooperation. “Most just opt for the vegetarian meals or get halal meals from food outlets off campus [...] as they don’t expect the University will address their demands for halal meals,”

he wrote. “McGill’s administration has not been very cooperative in accommodating religious needs on campus, and this definitely discourages students from taking initiative.”

According to SSMU VP Clubs and Services Stefan Fong, the SSMU building stands as an exception and provides a greater variety of options suitable for Muslim students than other outlets on campus.

“There are many more available options in the SSMU building than I would expect there to be on campus, namely all of the vegetarian and vegan options we have,” he wrote in an email to The Daily.

“While they may not include meat, Midnight Kitchen offers free vegan lunches and The Nest provides more vegetarian options than I, as a vegetarian, have seen at any other restaurant on campus.”

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Commentary

February 17, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

8

Just what is gentrification anyway?

Looking at Hanoi to shed light on a global process Aaron Vansintjan A Bite of Food Justice

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e hear the term ‘gentrification’ often nowadays.

The news is full of it. Protests against Google and Microsoft buses, people in Vancouver fighting condo development by burning condos, food co-ops in Brooklyn worried about whether they’re displacing the local Hispanic community. Even The Daily recently featured an article discussing the possibility of McGill students driving up rent. The news almost always frames the wealthy new residents as the culprits, and those unable to afford rising rent and property taxes as victims.

A month ago, I was staying in Tay Ho, a neighbourhood of Hanoi known for its growing expat population. Here I found chain supermarkets, unfinished luxury apartment complexes, brand-new chic boutiques, and dog spas. In between all of this, there remain some thin strips of orchards, garden plots, and vegetable markets hidden in the alleyways. A wealthy and mostly foreign social class seems to be increasingly encroaching on agricultural land. These, I thought right away, are the telltale signs of gentrification.

I wanted to find out more. Unable to interview in Vietnamese, hire a translator, or glean accurate information from the English media, I found the next best thing: Roman Szlam. Roman is a volunteer guide for Friends of Vietnam Heritage, an English teacher, a blogger, and also happens to be a walking Wikipedia on the history of Hanoi.

“I’ve noticed everything you’ve noticed,” he noted, recognizing my discomfort. “I see all the farms disappearing, all the high-rises coming in here. All the luxury development.” But Roman didn’t seem too troubled by the changes in Tay Ho. Apparently, everyone who originally owned land in Tay Ho has been able to sub-lease it at high prices.

“Even the farmers,” noted Roman, “who are losing their farms here directly around West lake, tend to be happy. There are no protests from anyone.” What’s more, agriculture in the neighbourhood was primarily for decorative plants – in no way would the sale of this land affect the need for food access in the city.

I wondered whether it was really all that rosy in Tay Ho: were there

In Hanoi, urban gardening is a means of survival. some people that weren’t as happy as others? Nevertheless, to Roman, the real gentrification problems were occurring in the outskirts of the city and in the city centre.

There is no doubt that gentrification is an international phenomenon, and what links each case is the opening up of markets, privatization of public goods, and collusion between the market and state.

What’s really happening in Hanoi?

In the early 2000s, Hanoi was facing mounting traffic problems, while the Old Quarter, the prime tourist attraction, was being slowly destroyed by untrammeled development. In 2008, the Vietnamese government allowed Hanoi to expand its borders significantly. To do this, they re-zoned huge swathes of land for commercial and highincome residential uses.

The re-drawing of Hanoi’s borders coincided with a spate of farm acquisitions by the land management department. Officials offered farmers a small payment in return for the land and then leased it to developers – often acquaintances – at inflated prices. In other words, outright corruption.

These developers thought it was the perfect time to build houses for Hanoi’s new upper-middleclass. But this didn’t go so well.

“Nobody bought any of these developments,” Roman explained. “As they began to go bankrupt, these people who had borrowed 90 per cent of the money could no longer repay the banks.”

At the time, many governmentowned corporations had started investing in the stock market.

Come the crash of 2008, Vietnam’s

Aaron Vansintjan | The McGill Daily banks had no more money, and foreign investors started pulling out, causing a banking crisis that still hasn’t been resolved. What’s more, a group of farmers started making a stink, holding in-yourface protests in front of the government buildings.

“This huge land grab,” remarked Roman, “became a national scandal. It couldn’t be hidden anymore. There was no money to be had anywhere. Consequently, a lot of the food production around Hanoi has been lost.” In a city where 62 per cent of the vegetables consumed are locally produced, you can imagine the effect on food prices.

Around the same time, the city cleaned up its downtown core by, on the one hand, criminalizing street vendors, and on the other, promoting supermarkets and shutting down two of the city’s open markets, replacing them with highend – but mostly empty – malls.

Noelani Eidse, a PhD candidate at McGill, has been researching the case of Hanoi’s street vendors and how their livelihood has been affected by land grabs on the urban fringe. “It’s all part of this larger push for Hanoi to become a global city,” Eidse said. “The

rationale behind banning vending is that vendors are adding to traffic congestion. A less explicit reason is that vendors are seen as uncivilized and their livelihoods are considered to be anti-modern, and a hindrance to development.”

Eidse has found that it’s often the same people who were pushed off their land who are also forced to make a living in other ways. “For a lot of these people,” she explained, “it’s either working in factories or working informally.”

Those who choose informal work, like street vending and trading trash, are now being targeted by these new laws. Arrests and fines are more and more common, making it difficult for these people, mostly women, to practice their livelihood.

In sum, the unfair leasing of farmland to developers, shuttered and empty markets, lack of space for food vendors, and the inaccessibility of supermarkets for most Hanoians, has meant that many people in the city centre are now facing increased food insecurity and precarity. And so, the cycle of dispossession, precarity, and criminalization continues.

(Continued on page 9)

Commentary

February 17, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

9

Half-Asian sublimation My unexpected, internalized racism Sarah MacArthur Commentary Writer

M

y ethnic background is halfAsian, and it’s something I’ve grown to really like about myself. My mom was born in Taiwan, and my dad, with his Scottish and Austrian ancestry, was born in Montreal. There was a time when I resented any Asian blood in my body. Growing up in London, Ontario (a city with an 84 per cent non-visible minority population, according to the 2011 Census), combined with the fact that I lived in a particularly white neighbourhood, I certainly stuck out.

Constantly feeling like an ‘other’ among my blue-eyed friends was kind of exhausting, especially in an environment that felt so much like the set of Sixteen Candles (if you’re familiar with 1980s American teenflicks, I was given the token role of Long Duk Dong by even some of my closest friends). Let me recall my affectionate ninth-grade nickname, given to me by the cool, older boys in high school: “Chinatown.”

Cheers, jerks.

When I was 17, my family moved to Toronto, and shortly after, I began my first semester at McGill.

I was astounded by the multiple ethnicities surrounding me in both cities. Suddenly, with a measly half-Asian background, I actually embodied more of the ‘Westernstandard’ physical body than many of my peers. And nobody seemed to give a fuck.

It was then that I truly began to embrace my Taiwanese heritage without fear of being mocked for it (be it in ‘good fun’ or not). I could identify just as much with

(Continued from page 8) The all-too-real effects of gentrification In Hanoi, top-down decisions to make the city more appealing to foreign investors helped trigger a nationwide banking crisis, followed by a shortage in food production and access locally. This is gentrification at its worst – far more devastating than a fancy boutique in the expat neighbourhood.

The changing of land rights, the corruption that came with privatization of land, and the increase in high-end development projects – all of these happened at about the same time that Vietnam opened its markets to foreign investment and encouraged foreign

my burns-in-the-sun, folk-musicloving dad’s side, as with my ravenhaired, Mandarin-speaking mom’s side. It felt like a perfect balance – and for a while, I lived out this delusion of accepting myself, of being completely enlightened on matters of diversity.

But an interesting thing happened to me the other night. I was out at a bar for a friend’s birthday, talking to some men I didn’t know, and didn’t intend to get to know – admittedly for my own validation.

One of the men asked about my background, something I’ve experienced before; however, he acted quite surprised with my half-andhalf reply. “You could be full,” he remarked, before proceeding to compliment me in that pseudocharming way that unfamiliar people in bars do. But I had tuned him out – I was shocked that he only saw one side of my treasured dual-ethnicity. I could feel an odd sinking sensation of dissatisfaction, though I had consumed a few too many pints to rationalize why.

The guy was still blabbering away about something when I turned around and walked away, sheepishly floundering by the bar for the rest of the night.

The dissatisfied feeling stuck with me for a couple of days until I was forced to confront it. Why would such a small, passing comment bother me so much? Why was I so frightened by being placed into just one ethnic category – specifically my Asian side? Was this a sign of my internalized racism?

Was my self worth as a mixed-race person threatened by the idea that I couldn’t cling to the white half of my genes?

The Western world seems to have recently romanticized mixedraced people, who are appearing in fashion, film, and television ever more often. But this romanticization might also moonlight as racial fetishism, in a moderate, ‘safe’ form. At least in terms of half-white mixed people, it seems that they are perceived as not ‘too ethnic,’ but just different enough to fetishize as exotic. This is problematic in its exclusion of other people of colour – not only in its fetishization of arbitrary ethnic origins, but also its ultimate coveting of whiteness as

a necessary element for acceptable and attractive figures in society.

My older brother of three years looks a lot more like my blondehaired, green-eyed dad. People compliment him for looking ‘so handsome, so white’, as if the two adjectives are synonymous. Yet I’m sure he would not receive such compliments if he were purely white (because of the lack of fetish), or purely Asian (because of non-inclusive Western beauty standards).

It is this strange phenomenon that underscores just how volatile one’s self-worth can be, based on

arbitrary messages determined by the dominant narratives in society. It also exemplifies how deeply ingrained these ideologies can be, even when one thinks they’ve faced, and shed them. As a mixed-race person, I’m still struggling to accept myself, not only battling against the racism I’ve experienced, but also the self-directed racism that I perpetuate through these fetishistic, racist, internalized ideals.

factories to set up shop. The criminalization of the informal sector, which grew in large part due to land dispossession, in turn sets the conditions for the creation of a cheap new labour market.

People have no choice but to start working in the new factories run by foreign corporations.

Before I go on, I have to stress that Hanoi is unique. Vietnam, as a socialist state, also has an unusual land rights system and one-partyclosed-door-politics. Pair this with increased liberalization, and a system of state-owned corporations, and you have a one-of-a-kind situation. It is also important to reiterate how sometimes it isn’t all that bad, like in the case of Tay Ho and its wealthy expats.

But it’s striking how these patterns repeat in other cities, like Lagos, Nigeria. Eidse noted that Singapore’s model of development and regulation has been a reference point for Hanoi’s own city planners.

Gentrification in London and New York is well-documented. There, social housing and tenant rights were increasingly eroded through active government policies encouraging outsider investment. There is no doubt that gentrification is an international phenomenon, and what links each case is the opening up of markets, privatization of public goods, and collusion between the market and state.

It’s easy to vilify the upper-middle class – those taking the Google bus or the expats moving into the

new high-rises – but if you really want to address the problem, you need to follow the money.

In all cases, gentrification should be understood as the concerted effort, by a coterie of businesspeople and government officials, to profit from communal wealth. In Hanoi, this came in the form of land grabs and policies targeting the informal economy, but elsewhere it can happen through the privatization of social housing, or the branding of a city as a haven for the creative class.

It all seems a bit hopeless. Yet, there are plenty of avenues for resistance. In Hanoi, a group of villagers who had been pushed off their land started protesting in ways that made it hard for the media to ignore them, or for the police

to beat them up. As a result, they were able to bring national attention to endemic corruption and initiate a series of laws to protect against land seizures.

While gentrification hurts those who have little to start with, those who have lost the most often have the loudest voice. If we want inspiration for future actions, it’s these voices we should listen to.

These villagers have it right – they followed the money, smelled something fishy, and created a stink.

Zoma Maduekwe | Illustrator

Sarah MacArthur is a U2 Cultural Studies student. She can be reached at sarah.macarthur@mail.mcgill.ca.

A Bite of Food Justice is a column discussing inequity in the food system while critiquing contemporary ideals of sustainability.

Aaron Vansintjan can be reached at foodjustice@mcgilldaily.com.

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Commentary

February 17, 2014 The McGill Daily | www.mcgilldaily.com

Coming in from the cold Remembering Madison Holleran, and facing depression James Mayers Commentary Writer

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n January 30, a team of my brothers from Alpha Delta Phi and I participated in “Stand in the Cold For Suicide Prevention.”

The premise of the event was to represent those privately struggling with mental illness and suicidal ideation just by standing outside in the cold. We also made pamphlets, collected donations for the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention (CASP), and offered free hugs.

Though the event was enjoyable and accrued a modest amount of $600 for the CASP, I still feel that some of the point was lost. The free hugs were mostly afforded by those who were receptive enough to accept them, and able enough to even show up to campus. Most of all, we wanted to discourage the privacy of affliction, which can terminate in suicide. Personally, I cannot say what you saw, but I can say what I wanted you to see.

What I wanted you to see was Madison Holleran, a girl who grew up ten minutes away from me in our wooded cradle of northern New Jersey, and who inspired a truly rare adoration from everybody. She was a freshman runner at the University of Pennsylvania, having arguably compiled the most impressive athletic profile her high school has ever seen. On January 17, around 7 p.m., she jumped from a Philadelphia parking garage near Rittenhouse Square. She was the inspiration for the event, the girl around whom my fraternity rallied.

I asked my cousin Juliet, who was one of her best friends, to describe her for this article.

“Driven, compassionate, personable, and friendly [...] she was what some might call close to perfect. From a best friend’s point of view, though, she was just another teenage girl trying to balance the hard juggling of social life, school work, and sports. She was one of those people you could immediately catch up with after months of not seeing and always had the biggest smile on her face. Regardless of her busy schedule she always made time to be there for you, and really be that shoulder to lean on through hard times.”

Her death has galvanized my entire community into substantial charity engagements, while her family is in the process of forming a foundation in her name to prevent suicide. Personally, I could not help but be vividly reminded of my own family’s encounters with the strains

Jasmine Wang | Illustrator of mental illness I don’t hear or talk much about.

This, I think, is the critical point: mental illness tirelessly provokes an unresolved fear in our society. The undeniable fact is that mental illness is terribly mysterious to those who do not experience it. Depression is uniquely insidious in ways other illnesses aren’t, but it is also more intuitively comprehensible.

Other mental illnesses haunt, like hands from behind a door.

Disturbing auditory hallucinations are a hallmark of schizophrenia, for example. You might react with fear if you begin to hear voices in your head; however, it is now known that many people hear voices without suffering any of the other symptoms of schizophrenia, like paranoia or delusion. Even so, schizophrenia and other mental illnesses present an ethereal strangeness which effortlessly fazes. This is problematic, as instead of trying to empathize, we shift our interpretation to ease our fear. Our trusted impressions become suddenly deformed, our perceptions and memories of afflicted friends are suddenly, yet distinctly, tinged.

So, we cast out the mentally ill, we distantly commiserate, and, by detaching ourselves in this way, we

sever the ties of humanity that once bonded us to them, and which they need now more than ever.

I emphasize perception for a reason. While I might say, hypothetically, that my friend’s illness has made them a different person, that they have been transformed, I don’t act as if they’re an entirely new person. I don’t reintroduce myself, nor engage them with a fresh politeness. If my friend is suffering from depression, I don’t regard them as I might regard someone who has suffered severe head trauma, as I acknowledge their illness is not physically grounded. There is a continuity to the transition that I accept, but instead of treating my friend like they are still the same person, I assume they were never the person I thought they were.

There has been a kaleidoscope of analyses interpreting Madison’s death. Some have perhaps oversimplified her plight, and, in so doing, we learn little (except that, of course, depression is no mere slump of happiness). Others have, I think, overcomplicated her struggle by emphasizing the unflagging subtleties of depression, which means that we cannot learn much, a recipe for estrangement. I do not think we are impotent in uncovering the

reasons for her suicide; her sickness, after all, was a progression.

The caustic climax was just that: a climax. To understand it we have to look for the steps leading up to it.

Would she be unable to explain their path? Would we say that her once-happiness was as inexplicable as her depression? We now agree she could have been saved, and so we also agree that she could have been understood. She was still, to the end, completely recognizable as the same Madison Holleran, to others and to herself, and in the same way that we once knew her well enough to compliment her, so too can we now seek to understand her last moments. Even to the end, Madison was no different from us, and I think her struggles, though complex, are not unfamiliar.

My intentions are (also) therapeutic: if you have never grappled with mental illness, I want to destroy your fear of it by suggesting that there is an understandable component to each illness that can be the basis for support and healing.

That ‘beneath’ a riddled exterior, a friend is there and always has been, and that you too can abstractly envision some circumstance in which you might be prone to, say, depression. In the same way that a tragic

event can spark the onset of depressive symptoms, so too can an unremitting love, I believe, help undo them. This means, then, that we must be brave enough to try to understand. On the subject of Madison’s death, we should not distance ourselves from what we knew of her, a girl whom my cousin described best: as an angel.

I think that Madison’s death has a substance to it of incomparable importance. Her magnetism averts our old tendency to distort and distance her as another uncanny victim of mental illness. In the end, I think, more than anything else, Madison demonstrates what we have always seemed to refuse: that there is a humanity to mental illness, and though complex, it is not insuperable, nor is it unfathomable.

Mental illness is not a great vanishing act, and it is not a shout in the street. I think it is, instead, the darkly beautiful picture Madison took an hour before she jumped, that she spent the time to upload in a sort of final signature, of the trees in Rittenhouse Square which remind me so much of our home.

James Mayers is a U1 Mathematics student, and can be contacted at james.mayers@mail.mcgill.ca.

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Features

February 17, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

ENOUGH MONEY TO SURVIVE THE STRUGGLE TO GUARANTEE INCOME FOR ALL Written By Anqi Zhang Infographic by Alice Shen

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Features

February 17, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

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n the 1970s, Manitoba was the site of a social experiment. Everyone in the town of Dauphin below a certain income level received a living wage from the government, no strings attached. The project ended five years after it began, and was never renewed.

The pilot project was a hard-won victory in a decades-long fight by basic income advocates, a fight that has yielded little-to-no fruit.

Oftentimes, there is conflict about an even more basic issue: whether poverty in developed countries is a problem to begin with.

On May 16, 2012, then-Minister for Immigration Jason Kenney dismissed the United Nations (UN) Right to Food envoy’s report on food security and poverty in Canada as “a political exercise.” In the report, which prompted retaliation and defensiveness on the part of Parliament Hill, Olivier De Schutter, the envoy, noted a widening gap “between those living in poverty and the middle- to high-income segments of the [Canadian] population.” According to De Schutter, around 3 million people in Canada live in poverty, and 1.92 million lived in food-insecure households in 2008.

Kenney based his argument that Canada should not be scrutinized around the fact that it is a “developed” country. He’s right: Canada is “developed.” In fact, it is in “developed” countries with sufficient resources to invest in social assistance programs that activists

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and interest groups are now focusing on the widening inequality gap, and the existence of poverty amidst plenty.

In October 2013, the Basic Income Initiative in Switzerland submitted 126,000 signatures in favour of its proposal for each resident to receive an unconditional basic income of 2,500 Swiss francs a month (or $3,072 in Canada). Unconditional basic income is exactly what it sounds like: the proposed project would provide each recipient with an amount deemed sufficient for survival, without consideration of participation in the workforce. The number of signatures collected in the Swiss case surpassed the 100,000 needed to call a national referendum, so the unconditional basic income proposal will be put to a vote. No date has yet been announced, but laws stipulate it must take place within two or three years.

If the Swiss referendum question were to pass, it would be the first permanent implementation of universal basic income in Europe.

Basic income pilot projects have taken place elsewhere in the world, though, and once upon a time – in Manitoba.

The Mincome experiment The basic income pilot project ran in Dauphin, Manitoba from 1974 to 1979. It was funded jointly by the Manitoba and federal gov-

“If we as a society believe that we are all equal, then from a moral perspective our society should ensure that we are all equally free from poverty.”

Kelly Ernst Basic Income Canada Network Chairperson

MINIMUM INCOME AND BASIC INCOME AROUND THE WORLD COUNTRIES WITH MINIMUM INCOME CYPRUS: Minimum income will come into effect in July 2014.

BRAZIL: President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed a basic income project into law in 2004, and it’s in the process of being implemented through the Bolsa Familia program. Families whose children are vaccinated and go to school are eligible to receive the money, and about 12 million families were receiving the money in 2010.

COUNTRIES WITH BASIC INCOME

NAMIBIA: A two-year pilot project in the small rural area of Otjivero-Omitara began in 2008, but wasn’t renewed at the end of 2009 despite positive initial results. Participating families received about 100 Namibian dollars/ month (approximately $10 Canadian).

INDIA: Several pilot project experiments have been carried out in India in the past couple of years. The largest was a 17-month project that gave a minimum of 4,000 rupees/month (approximately $70 Canadian) to residents of eight randomly-selected villages. Compared with residents of 12 “control” villages that did not receive the money, receiving the money showed positive results in terms of school, healthcare, nutrition, and saving.

Features ernments, and was held to determine the effects of an unconditional guaranteed annual income on labour market participation, education, and healthcare. A corresponding experiment was carried out in Winnipeg, focusing solely on labour market participation. It set out to tackle one of the primary arguments against universal basic income initiatives: if people are given a living wage without having to work, they won’t.

The experimental payout was provided to about 30 per cent of the residents, and was far from extravagant. The conditions for receiving the money were fairly stringent; families with no other source of income received 67 per cent of the low income cut-off (LICO) value, a commonlyaccepted measure of the poverty line, while the amount decreased for families with other earnings, and disappeared once a family reached 120 per cent of the LICO. The experiment ended rather unceremoniously, without even a formal analysis or final report, but the data was retained (albeit somewhat poorly). In 2009, Evelyn Forget at the University of Manitoba revisited it.

In response to an email asking why she thought the experiment ended so abruptly, Forget blamed politics. The 1970s were rife with both political and economic upheaval, including replacement of both the New Democratic Party (NDP) provincial government and Liberal federal government by conservative administrations. “Both of these meant that when Mincome researchers asked for more money, they didn’t receive it,” she explained. “The 1970s were a difficult political and economic time. There were two big oil price shocks which drove inflation to 10 [per cent], interest rates to almost 20 [per cent], and unemployment higher than it had been since the 1930s. The old economic policy tools didn’t seem to work anymore,” diverting the attention of policymakers from eradicating poverty, and toward immediate solutions to the current economic concerns.

Furthermore, the researchers – primarily economists – focused on labour market research, and therefore were more interested in parallel experiments conducted in Winnipeg. So the results from the small Manitoba town were shelved for the following decades, and the experiment was never renewed.

February 17, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily during that time. The high school dropout rate diminished in the years that Mincome was available to families in Dauphin, indicating that teenager withdrawal from the workforce was correlated with a higher proportion of students finishing high school in the town.

“I think the results for healthcare and other social programs would be similar to the effects in the 1970s,” she wrote. “Specific aspects of program delivery have changed, but poverty is still a fundamental determinant of health status.”

Forget’s analysis of the Mincome experiment is one of the more comprehensive views on the effects of a basic income system; however, because permanent implementations of basic income structures are scarce, longitudinal analyses over decades are hard to carry out.

A minimum income proposal for Quebec There is a different but related form of social assistance – minimum income – that’s more widely implemented.

Minimum and basic incomes differ in one crucial way. While basic income is given on an unconditional basis, minimum income plans stipulate conditions that individuals must meet, usually including participation in the workforce.

In 2009, a Quebec group, the Comité consultatif de lutte contre la pauvreté et l’exclusion sociale (CCLP) made a minimum income proposal for Quebec. It included a recommendation for baseline financial support at 80 per cent of Statistics Canada’s Market Basket Measure (an alternative measure to the LICO for poverty) for disposable income. That means that individuals who worked an average of 16 hours a week at the minimum wage would receive 100 per cent of the Market Basket Measure. The initiative was only stipulated for municipalities of fewer than 300,000 individuals.

In Montreal, the 2011 Market Basket Measure for a family of four was $33,614 a year, and $16,573 for a single person. 11.8 per cent of the population lived below this line. Yet the measure is less expensive in municipalities of fewer than 300,000 individuals, a consideration that Guy Lacroix, an economist at Université Laval, says may have influenced the CCLP’s decision to limit the initiative to those communities. Lacroix, along with NicholasJames Clavet and JeanYves Duclos, also from Université Laval, conducted an analysis of the CCLP proposal in 2011, simulating a sample of working individuals between the ages of 18 and Evelyn Forget 65. They were looking On the insufficiency of social assistance at present into the same criticism that motivated the Mincome study: the possible When Forget conducted her analysis on this impact of the proposal on workforce participaguaranteed annual income (GAI) experiment tion.

Their simulations of a representative popuin 2009, she stepped beyond the labour market impacts, though there were interesting findings lation of Quebec suggest that implementation of there as well. She found that there was only a the CCLP’s proposal could cause some to drop slight decrease in the number of hours worked out from the workforce, but that those most by men, married women, and single women. likely to leave are those who have the lowest curSpecifically, tertiary and secondary earners were rent earnings. Even this level of work disincenmost likely to withdraw from the workforce – tive can have a large effect on the cost of the plan. meaning teenagers and new mothers formed Additionally, the CCLP’s proposal only extends the majority of the cohort that worked less un- itself to municipalities of fewer than 300,000 people, preventing its application to Montreal, der the guaranteed income scenario.

Forget went on to analyze the impact of the where the cost of living is higher.

“Guaranteed income [plans] are always initiative on other social structures, such as education and health care. Specifically, she found implemented on a small scale and targeted tothat hospital visits fell by 8.5 per cent in the years wards a very specific population,” said LaCroix when Mincome was implemented, and mental by email, noting that though the plans are a good health-related consultations were also reduced idea, they are typically very expensive. In their

“The biggest gap in our current programs is the way we deal with the working poor.”

study, the Université Laval researchers determined that if work disincentives did occur, the total costs would be around $2.2 billion a year, 85 per cent of which would be borne by the provincial government. In contrast, the Swiss basic income plan is projected to cost $220 billion a year.

It is because of this cost that David Rothwell, a professor in the School of Social Work at McGill, worries about the potential unintended consequences of basic income initiatives. He fears they may come at the expense of redistribution from our current social assistance programs – programs such as the child tax benefit – that are helpful to specific populations. If such consequences were to arise, the basic income model could prove exclusionary or even contribute to inequality.

Such a concern is not unfounded. The UN, Statistics Canada, and the Ontario Association of Food Banks have found that poverty is not distributed equally, nor does it affect individuals to equal extents throughout Canada. In 2013, Citizens for Public Justice reported in their annual Poverty Trends Highlights report that the number of single, unattached working-age adults had doubled in the 30 years prior to 2011, while poverty had been reduced in other family types during the same period. Not only are there proportionally more single working-age adults who are living in poverty, but the LICO poverty line is also slipping farther away from them; their incomes are on average 44 per cent below the poverty line. Lone-parent families, Indigenous peoples, recent immigrants, and people with disabilities are also more likely than others to live in poverty. According to “The Cost of Poverty,” a report by the Ontario Association of Food Banks, “The chances of being impoverished [...] are not set by a lottery-like mechanism, in which everyone’s number has the same odds of coming up.”

But Forget believes that current programs themselves can be exclusive. “The biggest gap in our current programs is the way we deal with the working poor.” She asserted that elements of a basic income have already been implemented for “the easy groups,” including seniors and families with dependent children, in the form of the Old Age Security and the Child Tax Benefit, respectively. It is on the point of adults who are able to work that Forget sees the sticking point, but she remains convinced that a GAI is not only feasible for this group, but “a necessary way of dealing with economic changes that have led to so many difficulties faced by young people attempting to establish themselves in careers.”

The Basic Income Canada Network (BICN) is advocating for exactly this income security for working-age adults. In its BIG Push Campaign, the organization hopes to raise awareness about and build support for basic income in Canada, such that all three major age groups – children, working-age adults, and seniors – can be covered.

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standard arguments in the Danish debate against basic income is that it is simply morally wrong to allow able-bodied people to live on public transfers without doing anything in return.”

Such a fear of ‘freeloaders’ is fundamentally built into a system where work is deemed virtuous – its own moral good. Psychological experiments aplenty have shown that when individuals believe someone is ‘cheating,’ they display hostility and seek to punish that individual.

As the authors of the paper emphasize, once economic feasibility is put aside, the morality of basic income becomes the crux of the question. One imagines that even if a proposal were

“One of the biggest benefits of a [Guaranteed Annual Income] is that it treats people with respect. It encourages independence,”

The moral problem While economic feasibility of basic income plans already provide significant fodder for debate, “Most arguments against basic income have [...] concentrated on moral considerations,” as Danish academics Erik Christensen and Jørn Loftager report in their 2011 paper “Ups and Downs of Basic Income in Denmark.” Christensen and Loftager state, “One of the prominent

Evelyn Forget On the value of basic income wholly economically sound, the moral question would still be relevant, and perhaps prohibitive to the implementation of basic income.

Similar questions of morality are frequently raised in response to efforts to widen the social security net for all. In the 2012 Quebec student strike against tuition hikes, the strike’s critics prominently targeted students’ pursuit of educational goals that would not be ultimately lucrative (media coverage was awash in attacks on Arts degrees) and argued that students should work in order to afford higher education. The criticism is based on the same premise that government handouts are in some way morally unfair, and that if individuals want financial security, they should should work for it; this premise is a cornerstone of austerity.

“If we as a society believe that we are all equal, then from a moral perspective our society should ensure that we are all equally free from poverty,” said Kelly Ernst, BICN Chairperson.

“We are to be valued all equally regardless how we contribute to society.”

Other moral concerns that have been raised, according to Christensen and Lofthager, include the impact of basic income on keeping individuals away from the labour market. The worry is that basic income would contribute to existing marginalization forces within society, and create a dependency upon the state that could detract from the individual autonomy of people receiving the money; however, many supporters of basic income emphasize that a basic level of funds is necessary to give individuals autonomy within society, and a social contract with the state is no greater in the case of basic income than in any other social assistance program.

“One of the biggest benefits of a GAI is that it treats people with respect. It encourages independence,” emphasized Forget. Though she believes in the feasibility of a GAI, Forget acknowledges an overarching program like that introduced on a small scale in Dauphin is a “long-term goal,” achievable by tying together and expanding related existing programs. Before that goal can be realized, we must understand the role that capital plays in our society. It is a means of survival, rather than a good that is doled out or withheld as reward or punishment for playing by the rules of capitalist structure.

Sci+Tech

February 17, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

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Quantifying the self Lifelogging and its possibilities

Tanbin Rafee | The McGill Daily Daniel Vosberg Sci+Tech Writer

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magine a miniaturized version of yourself clinging to the head of a bullet as you travel through space, while hopelessly struggling to observe the world around you.

At any given moment, our visual systems are being flooded with information from the world around us. Amid this stampede of stimuli, our brains have evolved to attend to significant incoming data and ignore irrelevant distractions. For instance, one is more likely to pay attention to a sexual partner than a cardboard box, because one poses a far greater evolutionary advantage than the other. Because we never see the world exactly as it is, our memories will also reflect these biases, revealing that our perceptions and recollections of reality are distorted.

These inherent limitations of our species have given rise to lifelogging technologies, first-person video recorders mounted on the us-

er’s body that intend to capture the entirety of a person’s life. The LifeLogger camera records high-definition video and is coupled to a cloudbased online database, which serves to process and organize the mountains of data. The device, positioned to the side of one’s face, has a GPS, is motion-sensitive, and is able to livestream events from your perspective to anyone in the world. Further, the GPS permits one to know exactly where they were and in which direction they were facing during these recordings. It is even possible to search for a sound recording and extract other moments when this sound was heard. The device is not only capable of face-detection, but stores every instance of every face ever observed, and permits one to search and replay their moments with this particular person.

It is not difficult to imagine the implications of this technology on social media. If individuals begin to share their video-logged data, rather than scrolling through photos of a friend on Facebook,

we will be able to search through every instance of their life; perhaps searching for our own face in their LifeLog, and experiencing ourselves from their perspective.

Another lifelogging device known as Memento is marketed as a “searchable and shareable photographic memory.” It may become normative to upload one’s entire life for public viewing.

In addition to visual and auditory stimuli, it is possible that future lifelogging will include information about smell, touch, and spatial location, allowing one to fully experience another person’s life. Although this may appear unrealistic, consider the iPhone, a device that records and shares smells, which was developed by Le Laboratoire in Paris in collaboration with students at Harvard University.

Despite undeniable privacy concerns, the benefits of such a technological social revolution are limitless. These technologies may be implemented to overcome the inherent limitations of subjective

reporting and anecdotal evidence.

The benefits to psychologists, epidemiologists, historians, and other scholars would be stupendous.

Lifelogging devices may also be used to assist those with untreatable neurological conditions. For instance, researcher Lorena Arcega and her colleagues at San Jorge University, published an article in the open-access journal Sensors to advocate the use of Lifelogging to combat the fallibility and deterioration of memories, particularly with regard to Alzheimer’s disease.

Further, those with prosopagnosia, a neurological condition that renders the patient unable to recognize faces, would be greatly assisted by the face-detection enabled by LifeLoggers. More generally, those with visual agnosia, a neurological condition where a person can see but not recognize objects, would be assisted by pattern-detection algorithms that identify objects in one’s environment.

Though the possibilities are fascinating, there are potential haz-

ards to remembering everything.

One person who is naturally endowed with this ability, Jill Price, describes her inability to forget as a curse. Her affliction is known as hyperthymestic syndrome, and the overwhelming information she stores affects her ability to relax and compromises her capacity to sleep. Nonetheless, it is unfair to equate innate photographic memory with an external LifeLogger.

Whereas Price felt internally overwhelmed, one who lifelogs is not obliged to rewatch difficult experiences in their lives and is free to delete these recordings.

Lifelogging will revolutionize the way in which we perceive the world, our own lives, and the lives of others. In addition to quantifying our bodies by sequencing our genomes, our species is likely to continue the quantification of our subjective lives. Though subjectivity is an inherent property of an individual, lifelogging may assist in erasing the barriers that separate our subjective selves.

Art Essay

February 17, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

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Waterlilies In Bangladesh Tanjiha Mahmud

Health&Ed

February 17, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

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Gender inequality in HPV protection Government-funded vaccination policy ignores male population

Saad Salahuddin | Illustrator Emily Saul The McGill Daily

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hris* was 16 when he was taken to the doctor and given a Gardasil vaccination. “Honestly, I didn’t choose anything. My mum signed me up to get the shot,” he said. Now a U3 History student at McGill, Chris doesn’t think about his inoculation much. “I really don’t know how many of my friends have it. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of my other guy friends had it, but I would be shocked if it was as prevalent as amongst my female friends. I think it’s somewhat stigmatized because it’s considered a disease that only affects females. That isn’t true, but I feel like that is the perception.

Guys don’t want to get a shot for what they think of as a disease only women get.”

Human papillomavirus (HPV) is primarily conceptualized as a women’s ailment, with the majority believing that it is affiliated with cervical, vulvar, and vaginal cancers alone; however, it is also linked to penile, anal, and head and neck cancers, associating it with around 5 per cent of cancers worldwide. The vaccinations Gardasil and Cervarix can protect individuals if they are vaccinated prior to being exposed to the virus. Both vaccines protect against different strains of the virus,

and while Gardasil has been approved for both females and males between the ages of 9 and 26, Cervarix is only available for females between 10 and 25.

In 2007, the first girls received HPV vaccines in Canada. By September 2008, all provinces in Canada had school-based vaccine programs targeting girls as young as nine. This is a cost measure, as at age nine a child will only need two injections, instead of three, to be immune. Depending on the province, girls have the option to begin the shots in Grade four or five, and have another opportunity in Grade nine, or seek the inoculation for free at a clinic or from their practitioner.

In April 2013, Prince Edward Island became the first province in Canada to include boys in their HPV vaccination campaigns. In September 2014, Alberta will follow suit. According to Alberta Health’s website, the government decided to extend coverage of the HPV vaccination to boys because it can “save lives, reduce disease and reduce future health care costs.” They estimate that the cost savings for the system from this policy change could amount to over $13.4 million.

Quebec has chosen to not fund vaccination programs for boys, based on the assumption that inoculating females will indirectly pro-

tect males, and that if males want it, they will seek it on their own. Even though this inoculation policy does regard women as sexual beings, it assigns them a one-sided HPV burden in the responsibility and prevention paradigm. And while the shot is available for men, its high cost makes it inaccessible to many, with three doses of Gardasil costing $500. Furthermore, males are not educated about the virus to the same extent as females, and many men don’t even know that they are vulnerable, believing HPV to be responsible only for cervical cancer.

NovaRogue**, a Political Science, Sociology, and Sexual Diversity McGill alumnus to whom I spoke via a thread on the McGill forum on Reddit, only found out that the vaccine was an option for him when he was advised by a nurse at age 21. He feels that men are “not at all” informed or advised to learn more about the vaccine in the same way women are.

In Chris’ understanding of vaccines, “maximum inoculation is when they are most effective. If men can carry the disease and women can contract it from a male sexual partner, then not vaccinating men seems like it is ignoring a huge factor in the spread of HPV.” According to Eduardo Franco, professor in the departments of Epidemiology and Biostatics, director of the divi-

sion of Cancer Epidemiology, and chair of the Oncology department at McGill’s Faculty of Medicine, the Quebec government decided not to cover male vaccination because of the cost. “In Quebec they did a lot of evaluating; [the Quebec government] evaluated the cost and decided it was too much. They’ve done a good job covering women, and so did not adopt a publicly-available vaccine for boys. By covering women they are also indirectly covering men,” noted Franco.

This assumption also leaves the category of men who have sex with men at risk and wholly responsible for ensuring their safety in a way that women and men having sex with women are not. This subset of the population is in fact getting no publicly-funded protection. If men can be vectors of transmission, it seems ineffective not to vaccinate everyone. NovaRogue thinks that the current policy is discriminatory toward men who have sex with men (MSM), and calls the decision “short-sighted,” and “very possibly another example of institutionalized/systemic homophobia/heteronormativity.” Kristina Dahlstrom, postdoctoral fellow in the division of Cancer Epidemiology of the Oncology department, agrees, “By vaccinating only girls we are effectively not protecting MSM against HPV.

MSM have a high prevalence of HPV and are at an increased risk of developing anal cancer.”

Franco says that as vaccines go down in cost, it is likely that more inclusive public coverage will happen. He hopes that his current study at McGill, the TRAP-HPV study, will shed light on opportunities for this. The TRAP-HPV study differs from other studies because it looks at non-genital sites, like oral and anal regions, and aims to determine whether unvaccinated partners of vaccinated individuals benefit in terms of protection from their partner’s HPV vaccination. Dahlstrom told the McGill Newsroom, “Increasing the knowledge about HPV transmission dynamics will benefit cost-effectiveness studies and have implications for decision-making when implementing populationlevel vaccination strategies.”

Andrew Doyle, an English Masters student at McGill, believes that, “In an ideal world, we would vaccinate everyone against everything, but in reality it costs too much. Me or my girlfriend might have it even though we’ve never had symptoms. [sic] I don’t really think about it differently than other STIs, but if there’s a vaccine for it, why not?” *Name has been changed **Reddit username

Sports

February 17, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

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A system of exploitation College athletes fight for healthcare and compensation Evan Dent The McGill Daily

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n January 28, a group of football players at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois, announced that they had filed to form a union for college athletes, the College Athletes Players Association (CAPA). These players are hoping to gain support and membership from athletes across the country in football and basketball (though expansion is possible).

They hope to gain some concessions from the colleges that they are establishing as their employers, with the biggest request being health insurance for injuries, extending beyond graduation. Though the union is not yet official, this is a huge first step in getting college athletes represented within a system that has for years exploited them.

Yes, I say exploit, because despite what the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) would like the world to believe, college athletes are unpaid employees. The NCAA contends that they are only “student-athletes,” who are compensated by scholarships and room and board. Yet these benefits monetarily pale in comparison to the hundreds of millions of dollars that many big athletic programs and the NCAA itself gain from these players through tickets, TV deals, and merchandise. It is in merchandise sales that we see the collegiate system at its most nefarious.

Jay Bilas, an analyst for the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN), skewered the NCAA’s hypocrisy this summer by posting pictures on his Twitter account that showed the results of certain searches on the NCAA’s online shop. Although the site doesn’t specifically sell the jerseys of individual players ( just generic jerseys for each team, with no player names on them), Bilas searched individual player’s names and, amazingly, the results always pointed to that player’s “generic” jersey. For instance, searching for Johnny Manziel, the former quarterback for Texas A&M University, would bring you to all the Texas A&M number 2 jerseys. (Since Bilas’ tweets, the NCAA has stopped selling these “generic” jerseys.) So while the NCAA doesn’t expressly sell Manziel’s uniform, they’ll get the money when you buy that number 2 jersey. Exactly 0 per cent of that sale goes to Manziel. In addition, the NCAA bars players from profiting off of their own fame;

Eleanor Milman | The McGill Daily Manziel was punished last summer for accepting money in return for autographs. This is twisted logic: the NCAA will unofficially profit off of an athlete, but god forbid an athlete earns money off of their own individual talent.

And, if you’re an athlete who doesn’t become a professional – as is the case for the vast majority of student-athletes – you would never see a cent from your playing days.

While some can use their college experience as a springboard to future earnings, there’s a huge class of players who will go into some other profession. These athletes’ packed, nearly year-round schedule, prevents them from having a normal student life or the ability to get a job during school. This leads to many players graduating with a different kind of education than that of a non-athletic student.

Perhaps more troubling is that those who have to stop playing due to injury are often not financially supported for medical costs, and

scholarships can often be revoked for minor cause, forcing someone to have to pay their way through the rest of school or leave. All in all, you have a situation where universities draw tons of money from a group with almost no power.

The proposed union would allow these athletes to have a voice in how they’re treated. As it stands, the NCAA can basically do whatever it wants, and challenging its various rules and decisions is very difficult. Just recently, Oklahoma State University basketball star Marcus Smart was suspended for three games when he shoved a fan after a verbal altercation. Smart has no way to challenge the ruling himself; he either complies with the suspension or tries to get the school to appeal on his behalf. While it’s likely small potatoes for Smart, who will still in all likelihood be drafted to the pros, for other players these arbitrary decisions can have farreaching effects, and at the moment they have no means of personally

challenging the system outside of university appeals.

When the plans for the union were announced, many were quick to assume that the union would eventually push for compensation for athletes, although the Northwestern players contend that it is not one of their current goals. Still, it seems that if the union is initially successful, they may eventually push for this.

The debate on whether college athletes should be paid has been hotly contested for the past decade or so, almost to a tired ad infinitum. Proponents see the players as exploited and deserving of some small measure for what they produce for the universities; detractors believe that compensation would be financially unfeasible and would ruin the spirit of ‘amateurism’ within college sports. Intangible arguments aside, the economic arguments against athlete compensation have been debunked; pretty much every university has enough money to compensate their play-

ers (one needs only to look at the exorbitant salaries given to athletic directors and coaches, who are often the highest-paid public employees in their state), and richer schools would not gain more of an advantage than they already have in terms of recruiting players.

Regardless of whether this union succeeds in the short or long run, there is clearly a problem within the American college sports system. Not paying athletes is a nice idea, born out of an era when sports wasn’t the gigantic money machine that it is now. The spirit of “amateurism” made sense when an education was the main point of an athletic scholarship, when playing a sport was not the primary reason for attending a school, and when the games weren’t million dollar enterprises. But today, it’s a mask for exploitation, a way for universities to continually bring in another group of profit machines ready to be disposed of without a second thought.

Culture

February 17, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

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Moving pictures Adrian Paci’s exhibit captures “Lives in Transit” Lindsey Kendrick-Koch The McGill Daily

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Lives in Transit,” the newest exhibit at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, provides a unique look at the work of Albanian-born artist Adrian Paci.

The exhibit, comprised primarily of video projections, is steeped in the artist’s personal cultural background, and the experience of living through violent conflict in Albania in the early 1990s.

Paci makes a bold statement by relying on the use of film as a medium. In fact, Paci himself has said that photography and painting are “primitive” artistic modes.

This assertion seems appropriate, as the majority of his pieces depict scenes of transition that could not have been captured as aptly in a single photograph or painting. He manifests this idea by juxtaposing The Visitors, a four part video installation of a wedding procession with Façade and Passages which are located across the gallery. Both of the latter consist of panels of a film strip-esque series of stills, one frame next to the other. Paci intriguingly uses art to critique the media forms themselves, mocking non-video forms and elevating the purpose of his exhibition.

There is no doubt that media inspired by new technologies have given artists diverse tools to capture different moments of life;

Still from Adrian Paci’s Per Speculum.

however, Paci’s theme of transits lacks direction and clarity. In The Visitors, he attempts to communicate the manner in which an entire Albanian community plays a role in a bride’s wedding procession, without ever portraying the actual wedding. But the jump from watching the filmed procession of figures in the countryside to recognizing, interpreting, and appreciating the value of the ceremonial tradition is somewhat challenging. Similarly, Inside the Circle, a black and white video projection of a nude woman pursuing a horse, fails to draw attention or make a connection to the exhibit’s wider theme of life transitions, experiences, or Albanian culture. This piece would have benefited from deeper explanation and analysis, and without it, the viewer is left wondering what sort of bizarre life metamorphosis it is intended to represent.

Equally puzzling was one of the main pieces designed specifically for this exhibition, The Column. The piece is a video projection showing Chinese workers carving a marble pillar from a block while on a factory boat at sea. While Paci’s work clearly exemplifies the concurrent nature of everyday processes, his example of the column, shown in a slow-paced 25-minute film, does not share a deep connection with the themes of the exhibition, and fails to arouse any real emo-

Still from Adrian Paci’s Last Gestures. tion. Paci’s Vajtojca also leaves the viewer confused as to the seriousness of the sentiments of the ‘transits.’ In this piece, the artist is filmed staging his own death rites, only to wake up in the end in a quasi-satirical way as lively music beings to play.

Paci devotes an excessive number of his creations to the motif

Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, and Kaufmann Repetto, Milan

Courtesy of Kaufmann Repetto, Milan

of marriage as vital life ‘transit.’

While this may ring true for some viewers, Paci’s pieces centering on weddings only reaffirmed the superficiality of the tradition of marriage. In Last Gestures particularly, Paci focuses on the critical moments before a young woman leaves her family forever to enter marriage, slowing down the looped videos to a painfully sluggish rate, seemingly highlighting the critical importance of a life transition that no longer retains the same significance in the modern age as it long did.

The most captivating aspects of Paci’s work are undeniably his pieces Per Speculum (“Through the Looking Glass”) and Albanian Stories, both of which engage with political messages, referencing the uprising in Albania in the mid1990s. Per Speculum, a video showing a group of children, speaks very clearly to the disillusionment of the younger generation who, in the face of militarism, is forced to pick up the pieces of society. This is represented in Per Speculum by the shards of mirror the children carry into a sort of ‘tree of life,’ symbolizing rejuvenating of the life of the nation. Similarly, Albanian Stories highlights the devastation of the war for the younger generation on a deeply personal note, with Paci filming his own three-year-old daughter telling folk stories in which she incorpo-

rates military vocabulary like “soldiers” and “international forces.”

This piece is bound to resonate with most viewers, especially as the vintage box-like TV that plays the clip recalls memories of our own childhood in the 1990s. In this regard, Paci lives up to the title of his exhibition, demonstrating how critical societal events affect the transitional period of youth.

Overall, Paci’s focus on the superiority of certain art media contributes to an atypical exhibition that is refreshing in some senses.

Ironically, in line with Paci’s claim of the inadequacy of still-life representations, the photos of “Lives in Transit” in the museum’s promotional material fail to do justice to the film-based exhibition, giving the show a banal appearance. Furthermore, in asking us to appreciate the life transitions he finds most important, Paci leaves viewers discombobulated by his diverse examples which together fail to deliver a coherent narrative. In fact, it comes across as inappropriate that emotion-evoking examples of a younger generation’s trauma in a war-torn nation are compared to a staged death ceremony and the hollowed-out significance of the common marriage ceremony.

“Lives in Transit” will be on display at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (185 Ste. Catherine W.) until April 27.

Culture

February 17, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

21

Redefining Greek tragedy Tuesday Night Cafe Theatre presents Antigone

Anushe Parekh Culture Writer

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hile many may think of ancient Greek tragedy as dry and depressing, Tuesday Night Cafe Theatre’s (TNC) newest production, Antigone, spins this conception on its head with a captivating portrayal of duty and the ties of loyalty. In this tragedy, directed by Harrison Collet and set in Ancient Greece, Antigone (Kay Min) struggles over her uncle King Creon’s (Alex Bankier) denial of proper burial rites for her traitorous brother Polynices following a civil war. When she decides to defy Creon’s ruling by sprinkling earth on her brother’s corpse, each character is faced with a difficult choice.

Antigone, written by Jean Anouilh, was inspired by Greek mythology and by Sophocles’ classical tragedy of the same name. Antigone was first performed in Nazi-occupied France in 1944. The charm of this play lies in its ambiguity. Given the political situation at the time, Anouilh had to tread carefully when representing the rejection of authority, represented by Antigone’s actions against her uncle’s law, and the twisted effects power has on Creon himself.

Antigone’s set is focused on a

stool under a spotlight, where all the drama unfolds. On this stool, we see Antigone’s transition from someone who committed a crime to someone who accepts they must sacrifice themselves for what they believe in. On this same stool we see the struggle of Creon, a man who is not only a king but also an uncle. Creon resorts to begging Antigone to save herself and stop her madness, but his words seem to have no effect on her. Because he must appear as a strong ruler, Creon sentences Antigone to death.

The focus on the stool and the bare-bones set creates a sense of intimacy between the audience and characters. This is especially the case in Antigone’s soliloquy, when she hunches over and bares her soul. The passion of Antigone’s entire cast and crew really brings this play to life. Bankier’s performance as Creon particularly stands out, as he navigates the intricacies of his character’s internal conflict. Overall, the simplicity of the set and lighting contrasts nicely with the complexity of the play’s tragedy.

When asked about the relevance of Antigone’s themes today, Collett explained that the tragedy shows the difference between an individual and society, and the difference between what one can do and what one must do. These

Khoa Doan| The McGill Daily themes are most obvious in Creon’s internal struggle regarding the fate of his niece and soon to be daughter-in-law. Collett also went on to mention that the message of the play is even more important today than it might have been when it was first performed, especially in terms of the ideas of state control and surveillance.

Antigone’s complexity is only

fueled by the difficulty of pinpointing who is the villain and who is the hero in the narrative. Is Antigone too stubborn and impulsive, or is Creon too severe? Collett, on his part, said that his sympathies lie with the guards who watch over Polynices’ body, Antigone’s fiancé Haemon (José Camargo), and Antigone’s sister Ismene (Vanessa Combe). In his view, they are all in-

nocent bystanders who have to deal with Antigone and Creon’s actions.

Ultimately, it seems like the finger of blame cannot be pointed at any particular character. Rather, the intricacies of political power themselves lie behind Antigone’s tragedy.

Antigone runs from February 19 to 22 at TNC (3485 McTavish).

Tickets are $6 for students.

International Mother Language Day The fight for native tongues in a multilingual culture Tamim Sujat The McGill Daily

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ur mother tongues are considered to be one of the most significant components of our identity. The language we speak outlines our culture and heritage while helping us create a powerful sense of self. February 21 is International Mother Language Day, a day that should serve as a reminder of the rich variety of mother tongues across the world. However, February 21 isn’t only a day to cherish the language you spoke as a child.

It’s also a day that commemorates the struggle for language rights in many places, such as Bangladesh, where conflict over language inspired the creation of the International Mother Language Day in the first place.

The significance of February

21 dates back to 1948 when thenpresident Muhammad Ali Jinnah declared Pakistan’s language to be Urdu, a minority language spoken mostly by the elite in West Pakistan. The people in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) responded to the military administration’s enforcement of the ruling by starting what later became known as the Bangla Language Movement. On February 21, 1952, demonstrators at Dhaka University protested the ‘Urdu only policy’ and demanded that the government recognize Bangla as one of the official languages. The police fired bullets to try and halt the protest, killing several students and activists.

In November 1999, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) officially recognized February 21 as the International Mother Language Day to raise

awareness of linguistic diversity. Since then, several countries around the world have started to celebrate the day.

But the idea behind International Mother Language Day shouldn’t only resonate with Bangladeshis. In a multilingual country like Canada, language is a central component of many people’s identity. Over 20 per cent of all Canadians, and 30 per cent of McGill students, speak a first language that is neither English nor French.

The Official Languages Act of 1969, heavily amended in 1988, enshrine Canadian bilingualism into law and is – at least in part – meant to support French-speaking and English-speaking minorities in different parts of the country. Despite this, a 2004 report found that only 86 per cent of ‘bilingual’ posts in the federal public service were actually occupied by people who had

mastered both languages.

Additionally, according to a 2011 census, over 60 Indigenous languages are spoken in Canada. These Indigenous languages have little or no official recognition and support, and are often at risk of extinction. In fact, a recent report from UNESCO lists 88 of Canada’s Indigenous languages as critically close to becoming extinct. The agency estimates that these 88 languages will disappear within the century. Much of this is due to the fact that English, the socially and economically dominant language, has been forced on Indigenous people. The residential school system, where Indigenous children were removed and isolated from their families and communities, has also played a huge role in the decline of Indigenous languages and cultures.

Still today, there is a dire lack of

political infrastructure to ensure the maintenance of Indigenous languages, and native speakers are almost always marginalized if they don’t assimilate. The International Mother Language Day should be taken as a reminder to fight for the preservation of Indigenous languages and cultures.

Yet celebrations of the day in Canada have been scattered, and often have fleeting effects. At McGill, February 21 has the potential to provide an opportunity to raise awareness of the pressures many people are fighting to simply speak their mother language.

The threat of many languages disappearing around the world is very real, and February 21 should serve as a reminder to preserve and strengthen the languages and associated cultural identities most threatened by powerful pressures of forced assimilation.

Compendium!

February 17, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

22

Lies, half-truths, and irresistable cuties

McGall Engineering innovation a step forward for mammal-reptile equity Inventor hoping for reptiles in 2018 Olympics Alexandra Di Grassa The McGall Weekly

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ast week, McGall Engineering students and faculty gathered in the T. Trottier-Trottier building to hear an important announcement from the Dean of the faculty. Rumours had been circulating for weeks that something had been invented in the McGall Civility Engineering department that would change the way humanity interacted with its scaly counterparts, the reptiles.

Dean of Engineering Jaime Icedhell announced the results of an undergraduate student’s research, Louise Pea, who completed a Sort of Uninterested in Research in Engineering (SURE) project last summer

in the field of solid water mechanics. The story goes that Pea spent a busy Fall semester causing ruckus in Red’s Pub, selling churros in McConnell Hallway, and inventing the #neknomination phenomenon.

But through an engagement in critical thinking that “came out of nowhere and surprised the crap out of her” one evening at Red’s Pub, Pea identified a problem that stemmed from her appreciation of the class Reptilia that could be solved with her experience in solid water mechanics, and could make her a lot of money.

At once, Pea conducted a metaanalysis of work done in the field of solid water mechanics, spoke to a number of zoology profressors, and attended a number of reptile-aware-

ness colloquia in San Francisco to learn as much as she could about the problem. After three weeks of skipping Red’s Pub and telling her friends “I have too much to do,” Pea submitted her idea straight to the Dean of Engineering herself, and the news diffused out immediately.

Icedhell proclaimed at the gathering, “Pea has closed the discriminatory gap between the prevalence of winter sports (namely ice skating) at McGall, and Reptilian society, as exclusionary mass invitations to ice skating are clearly offensive to reptiles and owners of reptiles due to their inability to withstand the bitter cold conditions of living in Canada.”

“Over the last month, Pea has put a lot of genuine thought into how the

limitation of cold-bloodedness can be overcome so that winter sports can be as accessible to reptiles as they are to their human owners and allies. We know that many of you find it ‘sad that anyone would be offended by this,’ because, like, why do you have to be so sensitive, right?

But I have reptile friends, and I can see what you mean as a fellow mammal, but this invention will probably make a lot of money.”

“The details of the innovation are quite technical, cannot be discussed before the patents go through, and so far are only applicable to the genus Iguana. We had to choose one kind of reptile to prototype the design, but we can assure you that it will soon be made available to all mem-

bers of the class Reptilia. What we can tell you is that it has something to do with small reptile foot-shaped skates, and iguana-sized wool onesies containing heating cables powered by a small solar cell situated on an adorable rainbow coloured toque that sits on the iguana’s head.”

Following Icedhell’s description of the invention, the crowd erupted in squealing applause. A networking reception followed the announcement, and Pea was busily adorned by reptiles, reptile enthusiasts, and lab-to-market investors, so the McGall Weekly could not ask her for her thoughts on the announcement, but one could easily say on her behalf that she is very pleased with the outcome of her invention.

Campus cuties

His & Her Campus exclusive interviews Moss

Andy

Species: Hypsibius dujardini What are you currently reading?

Honestly, I don’t read that much. They don’t really make books with print small enough for me to see.

What’s your first date nightmare?

I’m a little older than most of the people I see (by a few hundred million years), so it can get really awkward really fast if people bring that up.

Do your good looks come naturally?

I’d like to say so, but I actually stick to a super strict skin care regiment.

What advice would you give to first years?

Stress can get to you. I advise curling up into a ball, dehydrating, shutting down all metabolic processes, and waiting a few thousand years until all your deadlines have passed. Works every time.

Dream travel destination?

A nice mossy swamp.

Species: Andrewsarchus mongoliensis If you could move anywhere in the world, where would it be?

I like my walks on the beach, so I’d definitely move somewhere coastal and breezy. Good place to pick up ladies too.

With my mouth.

Favourite midnight snack?

Bone marrow. Anything encased in a ribcage is always a nice treat too.

What is your best feature?

TEETH

Brady Species: Brachylophus vitiensis What’s the first thing you look for in a girl?

I’m not really into girls but if I were, I’d keep my eyes out for something frilly and colourful.

Secret career aspirations?

I’ve been admiring the elegance of skeleton athletes in the Olympics. I feel like I could totally do that.

Any weird kinks?

I would totally eat insects off your body if you wanted.

Timmy Species: Titanus walleri What’s the best way to get your attention?

Show me ur feathers, gurl!

Any guilty pleasures?

I listen to the Spice Girls pretty much every time I’m feeling kinda down.

What’s your favourite thing about girls?

Soft features, delicate flesh, you know. I’m not really into angular and bony, to be honest. #unpopularopinions What’s your go-to place to have a beer and chill out in Montreal?

Gert’s.

Favourite pickup line?

HEY What’s your favourite meme?

Insanity wolf.

Biggest pet peeve?

Small noisy things. So small. So NOISY! Who’s your celebrity crush?

I LOVE Jennifer Lawrence. She is so relatable!

Editorial

volume 103 number 20

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February 17, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

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Molly Korab Jordan Venton-Rublee Dana Wray

Alice Shen | The McGill Daily

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culture editor

Nathalie O’Neill features editor

Carla Green

science+technology editor

Diana Kwon

health&education editor

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Evan Dent

multimedia editor

Hera Chan

photo editor

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Alice Shen copy editor

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Igor Sadikov le délit

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rec@delitfrancais.com cover design Aaron Vansintjan contributors Janna Bryson, Tara David, Khoa Doan, Adam Finley, Sarina Gupta, Ralph Haddad, Nina Jaffe-Geffner, Lindsey Kendrick-Koch, Sarah MacArthur, Zoma Maduekwe, William Manning, James Mayers, Eleanor Milman, Anushe Parekh, Tanbin Rafee, Trevor Rajchgot, Saad Salahuddin, Emily Saul, Robert Smith, Aaron Vansintjan, Daniel Vosberg, Jasmine Wang

L

ast week, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Chris Alexander proposed a sweeping series of alarming changes to Canada’s immigration code. If passed, the omnibus Bill C-24 would make it more difficult to become a Canadian citizen. It would also make it possible for Canadians with dual citizenship to be stripped of their Canadian status if the government deems them unworthy of it.

The bill reflects a xenophobic ideology that has recently garnered growing acceptance in Canada and much of the Western world. It views citizenship as a government-wielded tool used to separate two classes of residents: those who are accorded basic rights, and those who are denied them. Those who live in Canada without status (citizenship or permanent residency) do not have access to a wide range of the most basic services, including access to health care and education.

Bill C-24 proposes an extension of the amount of time necessary to become a citizen: four out of six years after acquiring permanent resident status must be spent in Canada, as opposed to the three out of four currently required. Any time spent as a student in Canada would not count toward becoming a citizen.

It would also allow the government to fast-track the citizenship applications of members of the Canadian Armed Forces. These provisions betray a partiality toward awarding citizenship to certain members of society while creating barriers for others.

In addition, Bill C-24 augments the breadth of double punishment to include Canadians with dual citizenship – up until now it has only targeted non-citizens. Double punishment is the policy of revoking status from and/or deporting people convicted of crimes; doubly punishing them with immigration-related sanctions in addition to

their criminal sentence. The practice of double punishment disproportionately targets visible minorities, who are more likely to be convicted of a crime and deported as a result. Alexander is proposing that this alreadyabhorrent practice be applied to Canadian dual citizens who are convicted of terrorism and to permanent residents with criminal convictions in other countries. This risks specifically targeting refugees who may be fleeing to Canada precisely as a result of politically-motivated criminal convictions in their home countries.

The bill’s provisions limit the revocation of citizenship to Canadian dual citizens (because stripping citizenship from a Canadian without status elsewhere would leave them stateless). Yet in the particular case of Deepan Budlakoti, the government has already shown its willingness to allow one of its residents to become stateless, despite the ratification of the 1961 United Nations Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness calling for the reduction or elimination of statelessness whenever possible.

The Canadian government’s actions in this case, and its patent disregard for the well-being of non-status people in Canada (including asylum-seekers), makes it naïve and erroneous to believe that the enactment of Bill C-24 – or, in Alexander’s words, “reinforc[ing] the value of Canadian citizenship” – would lead to anything more than further violations in kind.

Bill C-24 would hone the government’s capacity to use citizenship as a means of deciding what kind of person deserves basic rights. The idea that anyone, regardless of nationality, should be denied these rights is shameful.

—The McGill Daily Editorial Board

Errata 3480 McTavish St., Rm. B-26 Montreal, QC H3A 1X9 phone 514.398.6790 fax 514.398.8318

In the article “Student unions struggle to leave student federation” (January 27, News, page 6), the subheader stated that CFS was suing its member associations. In fact, PGSS and CSU are suing CFS. The Daily stated that the UVSS and the SFSS won court cases; in fact, UVSS had its referendum vote ratified by the CFS, and SFSS settled with CFS out of court. The Daily also wrote that RAE was formerly CFS-Quebec. In fact, RAE is a separate entity.

The Daily regrets the errors.

advertising & general manager Boris Shedov sales representative Letty Matteo ad layout & design Geneviève Robert

Mathieu Ménard Lauriane Giroux

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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23

Personal Credits Notice

If you received a Common Experience Payment, you could get $3,000 in Personal Credits for educational programs and services.

The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement.

The healing continues.

Since 2007, almost 80,000 former students have received a Common Experience Payment (“CEP�) as part of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. CEP recipients are now eligible to receive non-cash Personal Credits of up to $3,000, for either themselves or certain family members, for educational programs and services.

Personal Credits of multiple CEP recipients can be combined to support a group learning activity.

How can I get Personal Credits? Each CEP recipient will be mailed an Acknowledgement Form. If you do not receive an Acknowledgement Form by the end of January 2014, please call 1-866-343-1858. Completed Acknowledgement Forms should be returned as soon as possible and must be postmarked no later than October 31, 2014.

What are Personal Credits? Personal Credits may be used for a wide range of educational programs and services, including those provided by universities, colleges, trade or training schools, Indigenous Institutions of Higher Learning, How do I redeem my Personal Credits? Once approved, or which relate to literacy or trades, as well as programs and you will be sent a personalized Redemption Form for each services related to Aboriginal identities, histories, cultures individual using Personal Credits at each educational entity or languages. or group. Once the Form is received, CEP recipients have the option of provide it to the educational entity or How much are Personal Credits? sharing their Personal Credits with group listed. The educational entity or Adequate funds are available for each certain family members, such as: CEP recipient to receive up to $3,000 group must then complete and mail back š Children š Spouses in Personal Credits, depending on your the Redemption Form postmarked no š Grandchildren š Siblings approved educational expenses. later than December 1, 2014.

Which educational entities and groups What happens to unused Personal Credits? The value of are included? A list of approved educational entities and unused Personal Credits will be transferred to the National groups has been jointly developed by Canada, the Assembly Indian Brotherhood Trust Fund and Inuvialuit Education of First Nations and Inuit representatives. If an educational Foundation for educational programs. entity or group is not on the list, please consult the website for more information.

For more information, including how Personal Credits can be Will I receive a cheque? No. Cheques will be issued directly redeemed by certain family members of CEP recipients that are deceased, visit www.residentialschoolsettlement.ca or call to the educational entity or group providing the service.

1-866-343-1858.

Who can use Personal Credits? CEP recipients can use the full amount themselves or give part or all of their Personal The IRS Crisis Line (1-866-925-4419) provides immediate Credits to certain family members such as a spouse, child, and culturally appropriate counselling support to former grandchild or sibling, as defined in the terms and conditions. students who are experiencing distress.

s WWW RESIDENTIALSCHOOLSETTLEMENT CA