Volume 103, Issue 23 Monday, March 17, 2014
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Police crack down on anti-brutality march Page 6
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March 17, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily
3
Truth and Reconciliation Commission speaks at McGill
Demilitarize McGill blockades site of campus drone research
Police crack down on anti-brutality march
Police end demonstration after several hours
NEWS
Demilitarize McGill blockades lab Union campaigns seek to represent graders
Post-grads discuss freedom of association SSMU conference talks health and equity
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COMMENTARY
Anonymous grading is commonsensical Literature and the rural-urban divide Hipsters emulate the upper class, perpetuate class bias
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FEATURES
Quebec’s First Nations and sovereigntism The different forms of sovereigntism in Quebec,
Quebec Issue Pullout
16
SCI+TECH
Startups and waffle epiphanies Sustainable engineering Hacking health in Montreal
18
HEALTH&ED
Learning Indigenous languages in Quebec
19
SPORTS
On the desire for athletes to give everything for the team
20 CULTURE McGill students and off-campus theatre If Snow White were deaf
22 COMPENDIUM! The Reanimated Corpse of Roland Barthes. And friends.
23 EDITORIAL Political action doesn’t stop at the ballot box
Jordan Venton-Rublee The McGill Daily
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n the heels of the disclosure of access to information (ATI) requests that revealed that researchers at the Aerospace Mechatronics Laboratory at McGill have received over $500,000 in contracts from the Defence Research and Development Canada centre in Suffield since 2004, Demilitarize McGill took action the morning of March 14 to blockade the Laboratory. The blockade, which took place in the Macdonald Engineering building, was organized by Demilitarize McGill, a campus group that protests military research at the university. It lasted nearly four hours before the Service de la police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) ended the demonstration. “The research creates a process by which McGill invests itself in warfare, because [...] military conflicts provide both marketing opportunities and testing grounds for weapons developers and military researchers,” said Kevin Paul, a member of Demilitarize McGill. “Meaning that McGill benefits when war is being waged by virtue of the wide array of military research opportunities and labs that arguably would not exist without military funding,” Paul continued. The demonstration remained peaceful for the majority of the time, with most people popping their heads into the hallway to take a gander at the demonstration before carrying on. The Daily approached several students around the site of the blockade for interviews, though they declined to comment. There were only two instances of brief scuffles between those trying to access the labs and those in the blockade. One of those instances saw Meyer Nahon, a mechanical engineering professor at McGill, and a researcher with the Laboratory, engage with the demonstrators, telling them that they “have the wrong laboratory.” Nahon told The Daily that the research being done in the Laboratory “has huge positive applications [and] potential applications. The only way we are going to find out if these applications can come
SPVM in front of McConnell Engineering building to pass is if we do some research on them.” “UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] can be used in a hundred different ways. Yes, one of those ways is to do [and] cause harm. But there are 99 other positive things that it can do – so does that mean that you do absolutely nothing? That you don’t do the work?” Nahon asked. At times the interaction between Nahon and the demonstrators became heated; in one instance a demonstrator told Nahon to “fuck off,” and in response to demonstrators taking photos of him, Nahon wrestled a phone out of a protester’s hand, later giving it back. Nahon insisted several times that he was “personally opposed to military research.” He added that he believed in open, publicly available research. “In order to assert my own views, to retaliate – because I’m not going to start breaking down the blockade – I feel the best way to fight back against it is to do more of what they don’t want me to,” Nahon said, referencing a claim he made that he would go out and seek further military funding. Following the blockade, one of the participants of the demonstration stated that they understood where Nahon was coming from, but that they doubted his assertions of academic freedom. “I think that there is a very
Nicolas Quiazua | The McGill Daily
strong case to be made that military-funded research is being funded by the military because it obviously has military applications. Certainly that research can be used for other purposes,” the demonstrator said. “That being said, that doesn’t change the fact that the military has technical problems and therefore commissions research and provides funding for research that presumably will help it overcome these problems.” The participant also spoke to Nahon’s claim that he was morally opposed to military research. “He claimed to have an ethical opposition to military research, I think that [...] if that statement was made in good faith [...] you wouldn’t do that, even if you were frustrated with us and our tactics.” “I guess he presents a dangerous and liberal idea, in that the freedom to research what you want is a freedom that trumps all other freedom,” the participant added. “Like the freedom to not be destroyed by, say, a drone.” Despite the demonstration being peaceful, McGill security remained watchful, guarding the demonstration on both ends of the hallway and occasionally reading out warnings from what they described as “the higherups,” telling the demonstrators that if they did not move, the police would be called.
Around 11 a.m., two SPVM vans arrived at the scene. As soon as the police moved into the hallway, the demonstrators left, with the SPVM eventually giving up pursuit. When asked why the SPVM was called to campus, Dean of Students André Costopoulos stated, “The demonstration is always fine on campus, expressing an opinion is always fine – obstruction is where we start having a problem. We have a protocol that says if we have obstruction, we have to reestablish the ability of the University to carry out its activities.” Costopoulos referenced the “Operating Procedures Regarding Demonstrations, Protests and Occupations on McGill University Campuses,” a document introduced in early 2012 following the occupation of the James Administration building. The document, which received criticism from student unions, campus groups, and human rights organizations, seeks to govern when and how protests and demonstrations can be held on campus. In response to the SPVM presence, Paul said, “It sets a precedent that ultimately the University will defend its research activities that are helping the military be able to kill people, through the use of force, [and] through police intervention, repression, and intimidation of students.”
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Campaign begins to unionize graders AGSEM seeks to further represent teaching support staff Jill Bachelder The McGill Daily
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he Association of Graduate Students Employed at McGill (AGSEM) has recently begun a campaign to unionize all teaching support staff that are not currently unionized. This includes graders, tutors, and undergraduate course assistants. According to Benjamin Elgie, AGSEM Teaching Assistant (TA) Bargaining Chair and Daily Publications Society Chair, the campaign stems from a growing need for union protection of currently nonunionized teaching support staff. “Graders and tutors have both seen greatly increased use,” Elgie wrote to The Daily in an email, “but while they do very similar jobs as TAs, they get paid quite a lot less, and enjoy none of our
protections in terms of hiring, leave, the ability to file grievances, etc.” Over the past several years, TAs have seen increases in their salaries, and a decrease in the amount of work they do. Elgie noted that it was possible that the increased use of graders and tutors, along with the decreased use of TAs for doing almost the same job, may be the University’s way of decreasing the amount that it pays its employees. According to Elgie, AGSEM had made two previous attempts to include graders in their union: first in 2001, and then again in 2008, when invigilators were added. “But because the original 1993 unionization drive had excluded graders, the province ruled against us,” Elgie told The Daily in an email. Currently, AGSEM rep-
resents only invigilators and TAs. “Unions can only officially bargain on behalf of those bargaining units (groups of employees such as ‘graduate Teaching Assistants’ or ‘casual non-academic employees’) for which they have been legally accredited,” AGSEM Invigilator Grievance Officer Jamie Burnett told The Daily in an email. To represent these positions, AGSEM must apply to a provincial labour board to become accredited as a union that represents the currently non-unionized teaching staff. This means it must receive membership forms from at least 50 per cent of each employee group it hopes to represent, or, if it wins a union election, between 30 per cent and 50 per cent in order to prove that their bargaining is in the interests of the employee groups in question.
AGSEM also hopes to reach out to the undergraduate teaching staff, a population that has grown significantly since 1993. As of now, this would be against its collective agreement, which states that TAs are graduate students. “But [the exclusion of undergraduate teaching staff ] comes from 1993,” said Elgie, “when it was extremely rare for undergrads at McGill or elsewhere to work as TAs. The practice is much more common now. And again, undergraduate course assistants/ TAs lack union protections, are paid much less for doing the same work, etc.” Though the campaign only recently became public, it has already garnered support from various groups. “We’re planning on unionizing teaching support staff as a unit
of AGSEM,” Elgie told The Daily. “At the moment that means we’re working on this project ourselves, but we’ve had some unofficial indicators of support from some campus groups, and we’ll be receiving assistance from our affiliate the Confederation of National Trade Unions.” As AGSEM’s campaign will be completely public, affected employee groups will have many opportunities to determine whether or not they would like to be unionized under AGSEM. “We chose to make the campaign public partly because we think it will make it a lot easier to reach potential members,” said Burnett, “but we also think that it gives teaching support employees a clearer, fairer choice about whether or not they would like to be represented by AGSEM.”
Truth and Reconciliation Commission visits McGill Commissioners connect residential schools to violence against Indigenous women Molly Korab The McGill Daily
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n March 13, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) visited McGill, as part of a conference entitled “Whose Truth? What Kind of Reconciliation? The Importance of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions for Promoting Democratic Good Governance,” sponsored by the Institute for the Study of International Development. The Canadian TRC, established in 2008, aims to document the legacy of the Canadian Indian residential schools system, and the lived experiences and histories of those affected by it. Residential schools, the last of which closed in 1996, were notorious for their brutal treatment of Indigenous children, who experienced physical, sexual, and emotional abuse at the hands of caretakers. Children also suffered the more insidious effects of forced assimilation and separation from their families and native cultures. At least 4,000 children died while attending the schools.
Commissioners stressed the longstanding, intergenerational effects of the school system, and emphasized the need for healing, mutual understanding, and respect between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians. “Recognition, for us, is about changing this history of oppression and negativity, and allowing Canadians to relate to each other in a more positive way,” said Murray Sinclair, Chair of the Commission, and former judge. Marie Wilson, another one of the commissioners, implicated Canadian culture and society as a whole, and stressed that the residential schools system was a product of Canadian policy, and not solely an Indigenous issue. “It says right here, in the agreement, that reconciliation is ongoing – it’s individual and collective, and it names all the parties to the agreement – and it also names the people of Canada,” she explained. “How will we get that word out there, and how will we make it so that the people of Canada register that this belongs to us all?” Commissioners also noted that
many of the challenges facing Indigenous people today are reflective of the damage incurred by the system, not only on the survivors of abuse, but also, through them, on their families and their communities. One audience member, who identified as an Aboriginal woman, asked commissioners about the need for action regarding missing and murdered Indigenous women. “While the government doesn’t see a commission on Aboriginal women as a necessity at this time, could you please find some safeguards for Aboriginal women on our behalf? Because we trust in your vision, we believe in your mandate, and all we want is pretty small compared to what the world offers,” the audience member said. Research has shown that while Indigenous women make up approximately 3 per cent of the Canadian population, between 2000 and 2008 they represented 10 per cent of all female victims of homicides. “I think that the fact that [the Commission] is given the trust as widely as they are and given a justice mission, that we have to respect that opportunity,” the
same audience member later said to The Daily. “They’ve asked us to care and to be involved, and so caring and being involved means
“Our first sacred teaching that we use in our hearings and our national events is respect. What I’m seeing here now, through the parliamentary committee, is a lack of respect for life.” Chief Wilton Littlechild
asking them to consider ideas that matter to us, that we suffer silently around.” Chief Wilton Littlechild, another one of the commissioners, agreed with the audience member, emphasizing to The Daily not only the urgency behind growing numbers of missing and murdered Indigenous women, but also the connection of the issue to the residential school system. To illustrate the connection, he related a story to The Daily in which he attended the funeral of a murdered woman, who turned out to be the daughter of classmates of his from his time in the residential school system. Littlechild also pointed to the recent release of a report by Members of Parliament on the Special Committee on Violence Against Indigenous Women that failed to recommend a public inquiry into the problem – a move that advocates have long pushed for. “Our first sacred teaching that we use in our hearings and our national events is respect,” Littlechild said. “What I’m seeing here now, through the parliamentary committee, is a lack of respect for life.”
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News
March 17, 2014 The McGill Daily | www.mcgilldaily.com
Scenes from the anti-police brutality march
Photographs by William Mazurek
Tamim Sujat
Shane Murphy
News
March 17, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily
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Police crack down on annual anti-police brutality march Protest ends with large-scale kettling William Mazurek The McGill Daily
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he 18th annual anti-police brutality march ended this Saturday not long after it started, with riot police descending on the scene and kettling demonstrators under bylaw P-6. According to CTV, nearly 300 demonstrators were handed fines of $638 for participating in the demonstration that was declared illegal merely minutes after its start. “This is a paramilitary response to a completely legitimate antipolice demonstration,” community organizer Jaggi Singh told The Daily while observing the line of riot police. “There’s a pattern that the police have established with this particular demonstration on March 15 where they try to shut it down right away, they did last year and they’ve just done it right now.” “Obviously the police will treat a demonstration that targets them
directly differently than other demonstrations,” Singh added. A little after the protest’s 3 p.m. start outside of the Jean-Talon metro station, the march was declared illegal under bylaw P-6, which requires organizers to give the protest’s itinerary and route to police 24 hours in advance. Riot police, including some mounted officers, from the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) and the Sûreté du Québec (SQ) pushed around 150 protesters onto Chateaubriand and JeanTalon, where they were kettled for the duration of the protest. “There [were] two people who had banners, they went into the street and said, ‘À qui la rue?’,” a protester who identified only as Cécile told The Daily, referring to a popular protest chant. “Then the cops just smashed [them], took the banners out, and pushed everybody, [on the] sidewalk and street, to Chateaubriand.”
A group of protesters quickly regrouped, and faced off against the riot police controlling access to the kettle. One protester seen confronting riot police was subsequently arrested and placed in a police cruiser. The group of protesters was eventually dispersed by a line of riot police who charged at the crowd. Passengers inside Jean-Talon metro station were kept in the station by police during the protest, and an announcement from the Société de transport de Montréal (STM) blamed interrupted service on an “incident.” Along with the hundreds kettled and fined, five people were also arrested at the march. Those in attendance pointed out to The Daily the unequal nature of the police intervention. “The police [...] intervene quickly, and I think that they’re pretty merciless,” said Vincent Roy, a protester who told The
Daily that he was attending the march for the first time. “There are definitely more armed police officers, ready to attack, than there are protesters.”
“This is a paramilitary response to a completely legitimate anti-police demonstration.” Jaggi Singh Community organizer Commenting on why many people don’t come to the protest, Roy said, “I think that most of us aren’t ready to get beaten with a nightstick, or get arrested, or receive an impossibly expensive
QPIRG McGill’s Annual General Meeting Thursday, April 3rd, 18h00
Bronfman Building, Room 151 (1001 Rue Sherbrooke O) Audited financial statements Annual reports from Board, Staff, and Working Groups Election of the Board of Directors and Conflict Resolution and Complaints Committee
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For the agenda and Board nomination packages, go to qpirgmcgill.org/annual-general-meeting.
ticket, for a cause that doesn’t concern us directly.” “I think it is important for there to be a demonstration every year against police brutality, it’s a clearly established reality,” Singh said. “I hope this year is a tipping point where folks that are perhaps more mainstream, and not necessarily folks that will come out to a demo like this, will say that it’s totally inappropriate for these demonstrations to be shut down.” “They’re trying to establish a pattern where people are going to be be scared and stay away from these demonstrations. [...] We have to show people that we’re not scared and that we’re going to continue to show up.” The protesters largely dispersed by 5 p.m., two hours after the beginning of the protest. The kettled protesters were processed and released by 6 p.m.. – With files from Carla Green
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March 17, 2014 The McGill Daily | www.mcgilldaily.com
Post-grads discuss freedom of association Society’s purpose reconsidered at annual general meeting Cem Ertekin The McGill Daily
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cGill’s Post-Graduate Students’ Society (PGSS) held its annual general meeting (AGM) on March 12, during which members discussed various amendments to the Society’s bylaws and the approval of a new auditor for the past fiscal year. Titles of PGSS officers A motion to amend the bylaws to change titles of officers could not be discussed, as it was subject to approval from PGSS Council, which had voted against it during its meeting just before the AGM. Under the Quebec Companies Act, corporations like PGSS need to have a president of the Board of Directors, according to Graduate Law Students’ Association (GLSA) president and PGSS’ GLSA councillor Juan Camilo Pinto. Currently, the secretary-general of PGSS acts both as the president and the secretary-general. “You have the title secretarygeneral – slash – the president. I don’t know about you, but it sounds confusing to me. Especially because one is a legal term, and the other one is a term that was brought as a way of saying [that] we don’t have a hierarchy in the PGSS, but in fact we do,” Pinto told The Daily. “It is a very weird thing to have
a dual title,” said PGSS SecretaryGeneral Jonathan Mooney in an interview with The Daily. “On the one hand, almost no other group within McGill uses the term secretary-general, which looks a bit odd. On the other hand, it’s used in the francophone associations. So there are arguments in favour of both.” Expanding the purpose of PGSS Another motion concerned expanding the purpose of PGSS to include the promotion of “freedom of association within the student movement.” Presenting the motion, Mooney explained that the amendment to the bylaws was a statement directed at the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS), with which PGSS has been in legal conflict since 2010. “It’s our purpose as a corporation to promote freedom of association, and we want to work with all the student associations across Canada to make sure that they have a right to choose who they affiliate with,” Mooney said at the AGM. Guillaume Lord, PhD candidate in Economics and former PGSS councillor, said in response that the wording of the motion would make PGSS sound more like a purely political association than a student association. Some attendees proposed to amend the motion, so that the wording could be made clearer.
Tamim Sujat | The McGill Daily Rachel Schwartz, the speaker, explained that since the motion was approved by Council, the AGM only had the power to ratify it, and could not amend it. The AGM finally voted to refer the motion back to Council. “I didn’t like how this motion was set out because it wasn’t about the members,” Lord told The Daily after the AGM. “It was about the general purpose of defending free-
dom of association. Now that, without debate, is a good purpose. We need to keep in mind that we are an association that is here for members, not for defending some various political virtues.” “Now, I understand where the [secretary-general] came from, and that we are in a context of fighting a legal battle against CFS,” Lord added. “Actually, I am in favour of making a strong statement about this, I
just don’t think this is the appropriate way to make it.” Mooney admitted that the motion may have been too broadly defined. “I think that what we’re going to have to do is to take a look at all the different issues that were brought up, and try to find a wording that more appropriately reflects the principle that we’re trying to achieve,” Mooney said to The Daily.
SSMU conference investigates intersections of equity and health Researchers call for increased social support Janna Bryson The McGill Daily
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n March 13 and 14, speakers ranging from undergraduate researchers to PhD candidates came together to discuss their research on equity and health at the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) Equity Committee’s annual Equity Conference. “The goal of the conference is pretty simple: it is to create a forum of discussion and education on the subject of equity and health,” Farah Momen, the Conference’s coordinator, told The Daily. “I think the conference is good not only for the people who are already interested in these issues, but also people who aren’t familiar with them.” During the Conference, researchers presented on a wide array of topics. Sarah Berry, a course lec-
turer in the Sociology department at McGill, spoke about the intersections between poverty, mental illness, and homelessness. According to Berry, increased access to social welfare, healthcare, and mental health services are all needed for Canada to tackle homelessness. However, Berry also insisted that a cultural change is needed as well. “There is a lot of fear around [homelessness, poverty, and mental illness] – fear of violence – and this assumption that you are so fundamentally different from somebody who experiences those things,” Berry told The Daily. “Poverty and homelessness, and exclusion and marginalization can be invisible to other people, or the humanity of someone who is experiencing those things can be invisible to you.” Anvita Kulkarni, a U3 Political Science and Physiology student,
presented research on the “taxi driver MD” phenomenon. According to Kulkarni, international medical graduates are often seen as a solution to a lack of physicians in rural areas in Canada, but this often can mask the various issues they face, such as licensing. “I was motivated to research this topic because I have had a lot of personal experience in knowing people who have immigrated to Canada as physicians, and [knowing] the barriers they faced in getting a license and being able to practice in Canada,” Kulkarni told The Daily. Rania Wasfi, a PhD candidate in the Geography department at McGill, presented research on the link between active transport, health, and the environment. Wasfi explained that when people use active transport – such as walking, biking, and public
transport – they can often meet the World Health Organization’s recommended 30 minutes of daily physical activity. Wasfi also emphasized that accessible active transport reduces greenhouse gas emissions and asthma rates, and is important for people who may not be able to drive, such as seniors. Overall, Momen hoped that the diverse range of topics covered at the conference will help frame the McGill community’s discussion of equity issues. “Around campus, lately, there’s been a sort of negative feeling towards equity, and equity issues. While it’s important to criticize constructively, I think it’s important not to dismiss equity, and to look at the ways in which equity has meaning in different fields,” Momen said to The Daily. Kulkarni expressed similar
views, telling The Daily, “I think it’s really important for people to keep an open mind, and I think that framing the conference [in terms of ] health and equity is a very good way of getting people to think about how equity intersects with a lot of things.” Berry hoped that the conference would help push students from apathy to active interest beyond campus politics. “[A conference] is different than a formal lecture – people have to be [at a lecture], they’re doing it for credit. There is a different level of interest and enthusiasm in actually doing things if you go to a conference,” Berry told The Daily. “It is important to break [the invisibility of equity issues] down. We have to be intentional about it and actually make changes and work against it.”
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Commentary
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Please, don’t tell me your name A TA’s plea for anonymous exams Sidney Lawson* Commentary Writer
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n 2010, Swedish House Mafia released the single One. The accompanying video is uncanny: it starts slowly, with shots of a sleek digital synthesizer, hands hastily adjusting controls, tweaking the sound until it morphs from a continuous buzz into a dropping beat. As the melody kicks in, hands clap, and the first lyrics resonate, “I wanna know your name.” Except I don’t. Unlike Swedish House Mafia, I don’t wanna know your name. Please, don’t tell me your name. Or rather, don’t write it on your exam sheet. Because when you do, and I pick up your exam to grade it, I will recognize the name and remember: “Oh yes – you are the one who talks so much in class.” Or the one who never says anything. The one with those opinions. The one who looks like this. Or who sounds like that. The one whose last assignment was great (or was not). The one from office hours. The one who complained about their grade last time. Or the one who never comes. And I might grade you accordingly. Not consciously, of course, because one strives to grade everybody equally. Nor will it necessarily affect your grade, but whenever there is an element of subjectivity involved – and in my faculty, Arts, there’s usually a great deal – knowledge of the candidate just might affect their grade. This is not right. It certainly seems odd if you came to McGill from a university where all exams were anonymous, like I did. As an undergraduate, that was a given. Examiners only saw what you wrote, not who wrote it. Nor was it much of a hassle – certainly not as much as trying to grade McGill exams while overlooking names. Grab the exam from afar… try to cover the name… don’t look… open the booklet… The whole routine seems pretty silly, which is why both AGSEM (the union for TAs and invigilators) and Post Graduate Students’ Society (PGSS) recently passed motions to “strongly support in principle that McGill move towards a system of anonymous exams, in order to protect the rights and interests of both [graders] and the assessed students.” In the wake of the AGSEM and PGSS motions, the McGill Senate invited its Academic Policy Committee (APC) to consider the issue.
The APC was not impressed: it did not consider anonymous exams either desirable or practical. In fact, it even castigated the Senate Steering Committee for the referral, asking it to “adopt a more judicious approach to accepting and referring questions and motions,” as if the issue were silly and redundant, a mere waste of the APC’s time. Is it? The APC rejected the idea of anonymous exams for three main reasons: 1. Anonymity is not appropriate for all exams in all departments, and should not be imposed top-down. 2. There is no evidence as to whether bias actually occurs if the grader knows the candidate. In fact, anonymity might even compound bias, and is thus not unambiguously desirable. 3. Implementing anonymous exams “would be overwhelming and very labour-intensive.” Let us take these in turn. The first claim, that imposing anonymous exams across the board is undesirable, is valid: anonymity is not possible, needed, or desirable for all kinds of exams. That, however, does not undo the more general argument for anonymity in many routine final exams. The APC’s second claim – about the lack of evidence for bias – gets at the heart of the argument. There are, in general, two possible biases, as summarized by Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) in 2007: “A series of studies in the 1990s is generally considered to have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that bias in marking can occur […] The most significant reasons are [a] preconceptions about gender or race and [b] personal knowledge of the candidate.” Even if ethnic and gender bias were limited, these studies note that personal knowledge of the candidate would “appear to be a much greater problem.” Perhaps for that reason, the British Psychological Society long ago recommended that blind marking should be universal. In a similar spirit (if perhaps with less expertise), the National Union of Students in the UK has long campaigned for blind grading. In the face of such sustained concerns by students, scholars, and institutions, the APC should not have been so cavalier in its dismissal of blind grading. After all, anonymous exams do not prevent individualized exam feedback; nor, in fact, do they cost the world, as
Tamim Sujat | The McGill Daily the APC very well knows, since McGill’s very own Faculty of Law runs anonymous exams (students use an exam ID, different from their McGill ID). The latest rumours suggest this system has not sent the Faculty of Law into financial-administrative disrepair. Ultimately, of course, anonymous exams are no silver bullet. They don’t take the subjectivity out of grading, or remove all kinds of undesirable bias. They do have logistical-administrative costs, and require careful implementation, although these burdens are bear-
able, so much so that most British universities happily run anonymous exams every year. Bias operates silently and is not without its victims; its individualized nature means it often travels invisibly. Next time you get a bad grade and think, “The TA didn’t like me,” don’t just blame the TA. Blame the lack of systematic protection anonymous exams would provide you, and which many other students across the world take for granted. This, then, is a plea for anonymity: not for all kinds of exams, not
for coursework, and not to impose anything on departments, but rather to design a working system of anonymous exams – perhaps based on the Faculty of Law’s model – which faculties can opt into. The APC should reconsider the idea if it is serious about its responsibilities. And if SSMU feels in the least concerned, it should follow in the tracks of AGSEM and PGSS to pass a motion on the matter. Sidney Lawson is a pseudonym. To contact the writer, please email commentary@mcgilldaily.com.
Commentary
March 17, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily
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Country mouse, city mouse Literature and the rural-urban divide Aaron Vansintjan A Bite of Food Justice
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n a children’s story by Beatrix Potter, Timmy Willie, a country mouse, ends up in the house of Johnny Town-Mouse after falling asleep in a wicker basket. Later, Johnny visits Timmy’s own home in the garden. Timmy doesn’t like the danger that the city mice live through daily, and the lavish meals don’t sit well with him. Johnny doesn’t like the modest and quiet life that Timmy lives. The story has its origins in one of Aesop’s fables, “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse.” Its moral advises that it is better to live in selfsufficient poverty than to be tormented by the worries of wealth. City life, while it promises instant gratification and worldly pleasures, does not give us independence and safety. The tale was hugely popular with the ancient Greeks. Then, the polis reigned: city-states in which the majority of labour was done by slaves. Consequently, being from either the city or the country meant a whole lot. However, as the time of the polis came to an end, so did the interest in this story. Centuries later and to the west, Europe was chaotically emerging from feudalism. City-states once again defined politics. As land was bought up by the wealthy, an itinerant and unemployed peasant class flooded the cities. Now, being from the country or from the city was more important than ever, and Aesop’s fable became common once again, with several new translations and interpretations. Yet despite their differences, all versions had one thing in common: a characterization of the country mouse as simple and boorish, and the city mouse as well-bred and well-mannered, perhaps a bit stuck up. Fast forward to 19th century France at the height of the industrial revolution. Most peasants had been kicked off their land, going on to crowd factories and mines at low pay. The nobility inhabited an increasingly precarious position, and the bourgeoisie was growing. In 1856, Gustave Flaubert published Madame Bovary, often considered the first modern novel. In the novel, a doctor, Charles Bovary, marries the daughter of an impoverished farmer, Emma Rouault. They move to a small town. Now ‘Madame Bovary,’ Emma becomes bored and depressed, and
she begins two different affairs. From this point onward, she becomes obsessed with city life, making trips to Rouen, the nearby town, frequently. Emma – spoiler alert – ends up in debt from living beyond her means, and finally commits suicide by eating arsenic. Flaubert deftly depicted the struggle of a country woman to become a city woman, set during a time of unprecedented social transformation in France. As Stephen Heath put it, “The main impression [in the novel] is one of mobility, money on the move, an economic and social transformation in which a truly middle class is finding itself.” Another famous novel, Anna Karenina, was written 20 years afterward. In the novel, Anna has an affair with Vronsky, a dapper military man. The affair goes sour, and Anna becomes ostracized by the rest of society. Tolstoy splices the story with imagery of progress – the train thunders throughout the novel, carrying the characters to the city and back again. Finally, Anna throws herself in front of it. Another character in Anna Karenina, Levin, raises similar questions to Anna’s, struggling to balance his ideals with those of his society. His story ends in a way similar to Tolstoy’s own life: his hatred of the city and the idea of progress that accompanied it caused him to spend his final days running a farm, caring for his family, and writing in peace about art, religion, and anarchism. Both novels bear a strong idealization of on the one hand the city, with its semblance of progress and riches; and on the other the country, with the fantasy of self-sufficiency. Both female characters are crushed by social forces: Emma is overburdened by debt; Anna is no longer accepted in high society. And modernity kills them: Emma swallows poison from her husband’s medicine room and Anna is crushed by a train. Meanwhile, trains, carriages, and money bring all the characters to their destinations, promising pleasure and privilege. *** In a short story by Nguyͥn Huy Thiͧp, “Lessons from the country,” published in 1987, a boy from Hanoi escapes to the country to stay with his friend’s family, intending to work for his keep. There, he meets the village teacher, who asks him, “Do you feel superior to country people because you live in the city?” The boy says he doesn’t. “Don’t
Mimmy Shen | Illustrator despise them,” he remarks, himself a former urbanite. “All city people and the educated elite carry a heavy burden of guilt when it comes to the villages. We crush them with our material demands. With our pork stew of science and education, we have a conception of civilization and an administrative superstructure that is designed to squeeze the villages.” Vietnam, at the time of writing, had recently decolonized. This required reforming the European property rights that had been stamped all across the country by the French. Thiͧp’s story was also written in the context of globalization, when the country opened itself up to foreign investment, eventually resulting in widespread uprooting of the rural class. This passage from Thiͧp’s story crystallized a jumble of ideas in my mind. First, literature is literally shaped by the divide between country and city. Everywhere you look, it defines characters and plot. The history of literature maps neatly onto the history of the changing dynamics between the city and the country, from Aesop to Thiͧp. One historian, Immanuel Wallerstein, sees all politics in these terms: the richest societies – what he calls the “core” – extract a net positive of
materials from the poorest – the “periphery.” In his view, development of one part of the world requires the extraction of resources, labour, and land from another. This, of course, requires transportation, and it’s no surprise that as cities grew, so did the reference to trains, roads, and vehicles in literature. Additionally, the relationship between country and city is one of debt. Cityfolk owe all their material wealth to the country, while at the same time, countryfolk are seen as less civilized or boorish. There is something inherently oppressive in a society that prioritizes cosmopolitanism: the success of one class is dependent on the expropriation and labour of another, more marginalized class. This material oppression is then justified by social oppression: like the country mouse, countryfolk are ‘common,’ ‘peasants,’ ‘uneducated,’ or ‘uncivilized.’ Yet the life of the oppressed becomes idealized – Levin, of rich noble stock, dreams of self-sufficiency in the country. This dynamic can also be seen between Indigenous people in America and European colonizers. While Indigenous land, necessary for the colonizer’s wealth, is taken at gunpoint, they are deemed uncivilized and simultaneously ideal-
ized for their peaceful, ‘more natural’ livelihood. Finally, it drives home the realization that we should always remember what makes living in the city possible. Nowadays, visionary ideas of endless cities and utopian images of pristine cosmopolitan worlds abound. It becomes easy to forget – and therefore erase – how we are indebted to life beyond the edge of the city. Currently, the world’s most materially impoverished people are farmers, peasants, and rural refugees. The most disenfranchised in North America are people who moved into cities to survive after their land was privatized or sold: migrants, Indigenous people or people whose ancestors were ripped from their rural livelihoods and themselves sold into slavery. The current economic system continues to most impact those uprooted from the country, causing shockwaves that ripple across the world, into literature and our cultural imagination. 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
March 17, 2014 The McGill Daily | www.mcgilldaily.com
Too hip to be square How campus style embodies upper class values
Tamim Sujat | The McGill Daily Sarah MacArthur Commentary Writer
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cGill students are hip. Not all of us, of course, but certainly a higher proportion are than at other Canadian universities. Though now a clichéd label, ‘hipsters’ can be found in every McGill faculty, in every organization, at every samosa sale. Hell, even some of our professors are more hip than our hometown friends. And while this unique demographic phenomenon could be chalked up to the fact that we are a concentrated group of academics living in a North American cultural hub, I wonder if there might be an additional reason for this ‘hipness,’ which has less to do with the courses we take, and more to do with the social classes to which we belong. Our student body as a whole is undeniably privileged. In 2009, McGill conducted a demographic survey which revealed the general background of the student population as largely low-debt, and in high socioeconomic standing: “[McGill students’] relatively low level of debt and their parents’ relatively high educational attainment suggest that, as a group, they are from relatively privileged backgrounds.
It further suggests that McGill undergraduates are not as socioeconomically diverse as undergraduates at other Canadian universities,” the survey read. This relative affluence is bound to have an effect on the student body, and on the university’s vibe as a whole. But to link a privileged demographic with our hipster culture might seem irrelevant, or even counterintuitive. Where is the connection between a bourgeois upbringing and the often alternatively-dressed students who attend McGill? Pierre Bourdieu is a sociologist and cultural theorist who can help connect this gap. He is known for examining the relationship between taste and economic class, and for rejecting the one-dimensional notion that each classgrouping defines their taste and consumption patterns by displaying their corresponding wealthstatus. Instead, Bourdieu claims, taste doesn’t directly signify our class, but rather helps us distinguish ourselves from other classes. We define ourselves through our relations toward (and against) others, through what we wear, who we listen to, where we live, and so on. Stick with me on this.
Each class, according to Bourdieu, generally defines its taste in order to echo the class above them, in an unconscious effort to ‘transcend’ into a higher class: the working class dress to emulate the middle class, the middle class dress to emulate the upper class; however, Bourdieu also presents a twist in this linear chain – the upper class (being at the top of the chain) will often cycle back to the working class for inspiration. This cyclical model could explain the dichotomy between economically privileged McGill students and their modest, scruffy, hipster aesthetic choices. In a broader sense, it also explains why dive-bar-inhabiting hipsters are also big consumers, a claim made undeniable with the presence of pricey, hip mega-stores like Urban Outfitters. Upper class youth are reappropriating working class style, and are willing to pay whatever’s necessary to do so. Bourdieu’s notion, that taste is a method of distinction from the lower class, can also explain the ironic distancing from mainstream culture that is so common amongst hipsters. In dissociating themselves from mainstream (or middle class) culture though their disdain for Miley Cyrus, hipsters as-
sert their place in the upper class. Furthermore, their contradictory ‘working class’ aesthetic choices (cheap beer, beat up t-shirts, and cigarettes) act as a novelty and an opportunity to show their ability to pull these things off. Perhaps this ability is the meaning of ‘cool.’ Yet beyond their reappropriation of working-class style, many hipsters maintain links to their upper class roots: with their appetite for trendy restaurants, Herschel backpacks, and access to quality higher education. In the case of McGill students, the latter is the most obvious example (though Herschel backpacks make a close second). Referencing Bourdieu’s idea, while the working class like ‘what tastes good,’ the upper class like ‘what’s in good taste.’ McGill hipsters, it seems, straddle both categories: indulging in the novelty of workingclass style, while subtly maintaining their elite social status. But does any of this matter? The problem, I believe, lies on an ideological level, in which money ultimately triumphs. Privileged students are able to convert their economic capital into cultural capital, setting the cultural parameters for the rest of the community. Despite hipster culture’s celebration of
some aspects of the working class, it still condemns and alienates the middle class, and ultimately, although not intentionally, maintains elite upper class values and advantages. And while not every hipster at McGill is privileged, the privileged students – as the dominant class – set the cultural norms. Bourdieu’s theories provide a coherent way to understand much of McGill’s complex cultural structure, which privileges the upper class through taste and style. But while our education may make us aware of the implications of this on an academic level, it doesn’t enable us to escape participation in the class system in our everyday lives. I still love hipster culture, perhaps because I am part of the privileged student body, with my American Apparel jeans and brand new Doc Martens. Social analysis provides a curious view, however, into the prevailing class dynamics at McGill, revealing a quiet elite, concealed beneath consignment jean jackets and dusty copies of The Communist Manifesto. Sarah MacArthur is a U2 Cultural Studies student. She can be reached at sarah.macarthur@ mail.mcgill.ca.
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THE QUEBEC ISSUE
THE QUEBEC ISSUE T
his year’s special issue on Quebec, and accompanying microsite, comes at a time when we feel it is especially important that McGill students reintegrate themselves with Quebec. While there has always been a fragile and fraught relationship between the University and its students, and the province, this year has seen yet another setback in working to unite the Quebec student voice. This year has seen the disintegration of one of the few tenuous links between McGill students and their greater community, that is the TaCEQ student roundtable, which sought to integrate the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) with other student associations. Around 60 per cent of McGill students are native Quebecers, yet only around 18 per cent of all McGill students declare their mother tongue to be French. And of the students enticed here by McGill’s brand (see the article on McGill branding, entitled “A pipeline to education,” page 4), many don’t stay in the province after graduation
(as we found in our student survey, results in “Where the McGill students are,” page 8). This issue looks at various strands of that relationship: from the role that international students take in navigating the line between Quebec and McGill (“Expectations versus reality,” page 10), to the Quebec student movement in the 1960s (“Who’s afraid of a French McGill?,” page 6), to the importance of French in the university setting (“Maintaining the linguistic status quo,” page 3). Campus media, which includes The Daily, also plays a part in perpetuating this tension. As an anglophone media outlet situated in an anglophone university located in a francophone province, our role in perpetuating the McGill bubble cannot be forgotten. It is crucial that we continue to be aware of our dual position as both students and residents – whether temporary or permanent – of this city and province, and question how we interact with these greater communities.
TABLE OF CONTENTS 3 Bilingualism at McGill
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How international students’ expectations played out at McGill
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Interview with Manon Massé
4 When degrees become
tickets to employment
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The push to make McGill a French university: a history Where do students go after graduation?
Primer on minority parties
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Deinstitutionalization of psychiatic hospitals
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THE QUEBEC ISSUE
Maintaining the linguistic status quo The long road to bilingualism at McGill
Alice Shen | The McGill Daily Carla Green and Igor Sadikov The McGill Daily
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ontreal is a bilingual city, but if you stay on McGill’s campus long enough, you may forget it. The neighbourhood surrounding the campus is markedly more anglophone than most other parts of the city, and it’s common for anglophone students to graduate from McGill without learning a word of Quebec’s official language. In 1969, francophone students comprised only 3 per cent of McGill’s student body. In a time when economic power was overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of Quebec’s anglophone population, McGill stood as an elite institution contributing to the maintenance of this supremacy. The McGill français movement of the time, which was ultimately unsuccessful, sought to make McGill more accessible to Quebec’s working class by changing its language of instruction to French. Now, 18 per cent of McGill students declare French as their first language, the lowest percentage among all Quebec universities. Although the French language’s place has expanded since 1969, the university remains an anglophone bastion often out of touch with the linguistic reality in the rest of the province.
The Parti Québécois’ (PQ) return to power in 2012 has once again brought language politics to the forefront, after the PQ’s Bill 14 proposed amendments to the Charter of the French Language. There was also the infamous ‘pastagate’ incident in February 2013, when an overzealous inspector from the Office québécois de la langue française – the board charged with the promotion of French in Quebec – requested that a restaurant replace Italian words on its menu with French equivalents. Montreal’s anglophone media has been largely responsible for fueling the controversy. McGill, however, generally thinks of itself as having remained immune to this politicization of language differences. “I don’t think that teaching French is political at McGill,” said Josephine Stapenhorst, who teaches French as a SSMU Mini-Course. But outside of McGill, according to Stapenhorst, the choice to learn French is a political one. “What I don’t understand is that there are a lot of anglophones who were born and raised in Montreal and who still refuse to send their small children to French school,” Stapenhorst said. “If you have a child you have to make sure that [your child] learns French.” Calum Mascarenhas, a U4 Materials Engineering student who is learning French through the McGill
International Student Network’s ‘Lingo Buddy’ language exchange program, recognizes that language is political in Quebec. “It’s hard to ignore the fact that this is heavily politically involved, [with] the new rules in Quebec,” he said. Yet he believes that these politics are not reflected in tensions in the McGill community. “I’ve never experienced [tensions]. Sometimes [...] I had to get tutoring from the older students, and they were francophone, but there have not been any issues about, ‘Ah, you should learn French’ and all that,” he told The Daily. For some francophone students, however, this superficial linguistic peace masks a certain discomfort. The pressure to conform to McGill’s seemingly unanimous views on language makes it hard for these students to voice their concerns. “I knew [McGill] would be really anglophone, but I thought, as promised on the website, [that] it would be a little more bilingual than [it is],” Alex*, a U1 Honours Physics student from Quebec, wrote to The Daily. “I wish [other students and professors] were more indulgent. Of course, English is the preferred language, even if the other interlocutor can speak French,” they said. In fact, McGill can feel very foreign and unwelcoming to francophone students. Alex empha-
sized the importance of community among francophone students to deal with this isolation. “I almost felt like [I was] in another country the first few weeks,” they wrote. “But there are a lot of francophone students, which reminds me of home.” While the institution is formally bilingual, communication in French is often treated as an afterthought, which is disheartening to francophone students. “If you’re francophone, you often have a laugh when you look at the [Students’ Society of McGill Univesity] or [Arts Undergraduate Society] executive candidates’ French applications,” wrote Joseph Boju, Arts and Culture editor at Le Délit, in an email to The Daily. “Even if the listservs are getting better, it is always unpleasant to see that French is treated as a formality, when it could be apprehended differently.” McGill has allowed students to write their graduation thesis in French as early as 1835; yet, according to Alex, the right to submit work to be graded in French is not fully respected, even today. “Not all the professors are comfortable with [grading work submitted in French],” they noted. “Last semester, I realized that submitting my lab reports in French gave me a worse grade than [submitting them] in English. I’ve been writing all my work in English ever since.
I don’t feel comfortable writing my work and my exams in French. Except for official McGill information, the institution isn’t bilingual.” Boju was involved in organizing a recent conference on the French language in North America called Méchante langue (“Mean language”). He wanted to hold the conference at McGill, he said, “to see what the few francophone student associations in the Arts faculty could do when they joined forces. There is a francophone debate on campus, but it lacks visibility.” “I find the McGill figure fascinating,” Boju continued. “McGill University being part of an anglophone minority in Quebec, its students tend to act like a minority within Montreal, and often have a very limited knowledge of Québécois culture. Being a part of a minority within that minority is very interesting!” McGill being anglophone isn’t the only reason that its students might feel like a minority in Montreal (and Quebec), but it’s certainly a contributing factor. And as long as it’s possible for McGill students to spend their time in Montreal within the school’s anglophone bubble, McGill will continue to stand apart from the rest of Quebec, and the McGill community will remain isolated. *Name has been changed
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THE QUEBEC ISSUE
A pipeline to the workforce Packaging and selling education as a product
Jasmine Wang | The McGill Daily E.k. Chan and Anqi Zhang The McGill Daily
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Commodification’ is a word frequently heard and seldom defined. Students wrote it on banners during the student movement in 2012, many mentioned it in the same breath as “tuition hikes,” and the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (ASSÉ) cited the attempt to legitimize it as a reason for boycotting the Parti Québécois’ (PQ) summit on higher education in February 2013. But in each of these instances, it remains a word. How does a word – this word – impact the student experience, and even more importantly, the interaction of the student with their greater environment? What is commodification? Commodification of education refers to the packaging of education as a product, sold to the customers of the transaction: students. Benjamin Gingras, finance secretary and cospokesperson for ASSÉ, spoke to The Daily about the shift to a seller-buyer relationship
between schools and the students who attend them. “It removes the notion that students are an integral part of the university or CEGEP. They play no part in the process of the life of the university.” Gingras discussed the financial pressures of student debt and their contributions to the ultimate importance of employability. If a student wishes to ‘purchase’ an education, but does not have the means, “there is a system of financial aid which allows people to access education. The flip side of that is, of course, debt.” A natural consequence of indebtedness is the pressure to qualify for jobs that would allow a graduate to repay those debts. In an interview with The Daily, Association of McGill University Support Employees (AMUSE) president Amber Gross characterized the way the need for employability reframes a university degree as “a pipeline to the workforce.” Instead of a learning institution that encourages critical thought and engagement with one’s communities, commodification “[turns] an edu-
cational experience into one of just adding a skillset to your CV, and [becoming] eligible for work.” Gingras described the process by which “education becomes instrumentalized [...] Programs that are less likely to get highpaid jobs are less privileged, become less attractive.” The higher value placed on educational programs with marketable applications is globally evident, including at McGill. Last year, the Faculty of Arts
moved forward with its decision to cut approximately 100 “low enrolment” courses, in spite of strong resistance through direct consultation with the administration, as well as through campus media. The trend is also evident in other Canadian universities: for instance, last year, the University of Alberta (U of A) proposed cuts to 20 Arts programs, suspending admission to those programs for the 2013-14 academic year. Resistance at the U of A echoed the
“It removes the notion that students are an integral part of the university or CEGEP. They play no part in the process of the life of the university.” Benjamin Gingras 2Q WKH HIIHFWV RI FRPPRGLÀFDWLRQ
MARCH 17, 2014 | 5
THE QUEBEC ISSUE sentiments of students at McGill. An editorial by The Gateway, a student newspaper at the U of A, stated that, “Students across most faculties – most strongly in Arts – have felt the repercussions of the cuts made at the university in the past two years.” This deprioritization of Arts courses and degree programs reflects a broader deprioritization of the skillset such a degree entails. Unemployment rates are steadily increasing for people between the ages of 15 and 24, often reaching more than double the overall national rate. The jobs that are available are rarely relevant to the degree completed, even for students who have completed extensive, industry-specific studies, let alone more generalized or even academically-oriented programs. The packaging of education as a product that can be bought at market price means that the market gains a greater influence over the curriculum that constitutes that education. By dictating certain skillsets as being ‘employable’ by way of the job market, industry practically demands that educations be tailored more toward those jobs, and little else. Universities become more like stores, where one exchanges money for job opportunities.
a community-building measure, to better relate McGill with the greater community. However, when put into practice in curriculum, it can mean something different. “This seems like a transition to a focus on an ‘employable skill set.’ They want students to walk out of the classroom and into the job market,” wrote Sean Cory, president of the Association of McGill University Research Employees (AMURE), in an email to The Daily. Each of these pushes – for better branding, for upheld reputations, for a curriculum of transferrable and employable skills – is pursued in the name of creating a campus that is both internally diverse and wellconnected to its immediate and global community. But the quantification of the ‘value’ of degrees, and the strategic plans toward improved brand recognition, are hallmarks of commodification, which itself has implications for relationships both within and beyond the Roddick Gates. How should a university relate to society? Commodification changes the relationship between students and educational institutions, but concerns about commodification extend beyond the
“Not only are you paying to do [academic] work, but you’re also being usually underpaid, or getting paid very low wages, to do support work at the university.” Amber Gross On students as workers Commodification underway Every product needs a brand, and McGill’s brand has been of particular concern in recent years. Previous Principal Heather Munroe-Blum emphasized the need to use – and promote, in all regions of the world – McGill’s brand to attract more international students. And in an interview with The Daily at the beginning of her current term as principal, Suzanne Fortier stated, “I think McGill has an incredible brand,” adding, “part of my own personal goal is to make that brand even stronger here at home.” The push toward this goal is currently underway. In an email from the office of the principal sent last Tuesday, McGill staff and students were informed that Fortier would give an address on March 28 about McGill’s plan for the next five years. A draft of this presentation, titled “Open, Connected, Purposeful,” was discussed with McGill’s unions early last week, and strongly emphasized reputation and leadership. It pointed to the importance of extending industry relationships and building McGill’s public profile in making these goals feasible. Attendees of last week’s presentations pointed to another focus of the five-year plan: that of facilitating entrance into the workforce. At first glance, the pledge to “cultivate a seamless continuum from the classroom to the world,” as it was stated in the presentations last week, seems like
transaction-based nature of education. Gingras described the role of curricula in students’ interactions with society on a broad level. “When we’re brought to [criticize] or we’re brought to have a critical conscience, we play a more proactive role in society where we think – and it does lead to social change.” But Gingras added that, “those aren’t the abilities being promoted right now.” Instead, as degrees become a ticket to employability, the development of a critical conscience becomes secondary, and frequently neglected. The irony of framing a focus on employability as a contribution to society – whether as a driver of economic development for the city or province, or as a way to integrate students into the workforce – is that such a focus actually inhibits students’ ability to critically engage within that context. The increase in programs that teach industry-relevant skills comes at the cost of teaching skills that allow them to fully understand, critique, and situate themselves within their community. It is that understanding that permits challenges to the current state of society; as Gingras put it, a “humanistic education is an emancipatory education; it’s one that leads to social change, it’s one that leads to a critical perspective on society.” The ability to take on a critical perspective requires its own skillset, one that is useful in a world that faces impending crises in the environment, in political interactions, and in social
injustice. This is what a focus on employability obscures – that the skills that return maximum economic value may not return maximum humanistic value. Students as workers The preoccupation with improving students’ future employability crucially neglects the fact that many students require employment while in university. This, too, relies on and contributes to an interplay of relationships between the university and the community, and between the student and university. Gross discussed the mechanisms by which some McGill students become reliant on the university as an employer, either by status as international students with restricted work permits, or by limitations of language in Montreal. “For those students, it gives McGill a lot of power as an employer; as the only employer you can have.” While the AMUSE membership is not entirely comprised of students, Gross explained that “a majority of [AMUSE members] are in a situation where McGill is both their employer, and they’re also a ‘customer’ of that employer.” Yet, the entire premise of students as customers is worth scrutiny. Education is – as all students know – not a simple process of putting money in and getting a degree or a diploma out; one can instead view education as a labour issue. Certainly, some students are employees of the university in the conventional sense, but all students are also academic workers. “Just because you’re writing papers and you’re attending classes and you’re studying, that’s academic work that you’re doing,” said Gross. The McGill brand facilitates an implication that one should simply be grateful to do work at McGill, whether academic or otherwise. A McGill education is unquestionably a privilege not afforded to many, but, as Gross described, “Just because you’re a student doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be making a living wage, because you still have to live, even if you’re a student.” This exacerbates a sense of indebtedness to the university – not only in strict financial terms, but also as one of few people who wear its brand. This implication is hurtful to student workers, and more broadly, to labour unions who negotiate for increased wages. There is a persistent and insidious mentality that implies that a worker should take what they can get at the university, because “the name is so valuable – the prestige is there – that it doesn’t matter if you’re getting paid really low, or getting barely above minimum wage. That allows McGill to devalue its workers, because it can claim that just by giving students the opportunity to work here, McGill’s doing a favour for them,” Gross explained. “Not only are you paying to do [academic] work, but you’re also being usually
underpaid, or getting paid very low wages, to do support work at the university.” The conflation of students as both workers and customers at the university can, however, be used in a way that subverts the power of the university. A student strike becomes an effective means of voicing dissent, if the strike results in a disruption of the university’s academic work. Similarly, the student as customer, while a non-ideal paradigm, can contextualize strike action as a boycott. Resisting commodification Attention was focused on commodification of education during the student strikes in 2012, with protests explicitly calling out the trends that permeated educational institutions, both in Quebec and more globally. While the threat of tuition hikes provided a manifestation of these trends closer to home, it was – and remains – easy to look to the exorbitant costs of education in the U.S. and elsewhere to find a concrete impetus to resist commodification. Yet, it’s not simply a matter of a percentage increase in tuition. “The number of the dollar amount of education doesn’t make the difference over whether or not it’s commodified,” said Gross, “it’s the way that people are thinking about it. And that’s why ASSÉ demands free education, because you cut out that customer idea.” Now, there is no large-scale hike to alert students to the processes that change our universities. To Gingras, this makes the process of commodification “more insidious,” with “several different mechanisms that are interworking together, that are interacting with each other, and it’s not as clear, as clearcut as it was with a 75 per cent [increase] in tuition fees.” One such mechanism is the PQ’s funding cuts to universities. This has served to increase university reliance on industry and the private sector, and incentivizes the creation of branding initiatives such as the one presented by Fortier. The actions of the PQ demonstrate that commodification is not a process that can be fought solely at the level of universities and curricula. To do that would be to ignore the greater market and governmental pressures that lead to unwanted changes in higher education. Gingras pointed to the interactions between these different interests with a reference to a 1946 statement from the Union Nationale des É-tudiants de France: “The problems of universities, the problems of students, are the problems of society.” The inability to recognize these shared interests is one of the main effects of commodification, as the mindsets that allow us to thoughtfully engage with those problems become lost in favour of employability and integration into the status quo. The insidiousness of commodification is that it disallows us from seeing the problems of society as our problems at all.
This is what a focus on employability obscures – that the skills that return maximum economic value may not return maximum humanistic value.
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THE QUEBEC ISSUE
Who’s afraid of a
A history of the Opération M
Compiled and Hera Chan an
O
n March 28, 1969, over 10,000 CEGEP and McGill st turned to the streets, beginning from McGill campus part of Opération McGill. Chants of “McGill aux trav shouted from Roddick Gates, pushing for McGill to becom largest public demonstration in Quebec since the World War The demonstrators were protesting inequalities in Quebe tion in society. From 1960 to 1965, the student population at in The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Acti school had come to symbolize much more than a prestigiou privileges of settler colonialism and the technocratic and inh At that time, although francophones made up 83 per cen were English. Anglophones made up 17 per cent of the popu received 30 per cent of Quebec government grants. McGill’s cording to The Daily at the time, 51 per cent of McGill gradu The march began from St. Louis Square and headed tow After the Mouvement pour l’intégration scolaire (MIS) p Opération McGill were held. They consisted of anglophone r parliamentary opposition. The MIS was formed to defend F and throughout the province and was led by Saint-Léonard a in 1969, which guaranteed parents the right to choose the lan Education ensuring that children taught in English acquire “ According to The Empire Within, many of the writers fo language journal seeking to connect readers with radical po lish-language Canadian publications born out of the fight for
September 1968: 16 additional CEGEPs were established. Quebec government officials announced that 20,000 CEGEP students would not find places in universities in the fall of 1969 and these numbers would get worse in the following year.
1967: The Union Nationale government opened the first seven CEGEPs, replacing Quebec’s classical college system.
December 3, 1968: Activists close to MIS stormed the McGill campus and occupied its computer centre as a protest against Premier Jean-Jacques Bertrand’s proposed guarantee of English-language schooling rights in the province. Principal Rocke Robertson called the police and the riot squad stormed the building at 1 a.m. Le Devoir reported on December 5 in an article titled “McGill ne déposerait pas de plainte contres ses onze ‘occupants’ francophones” that the 11 students inside had enough provisions for the week but the police had no trouble clearing them out.
October 21, 1968: Between 5,000 to 10,000 students marched through the McGill campus chanting “étudiants-ouvriers,” before making their way to UdeM to hear speeches by student leaders.
October 1968: Quebec students – following the example of the demonstrations in France earlier that year – occupied schools and protested in the streets. According to The Empire Within, “For two weeks, the CEGEP system stopped functioning. Students barricaded themselves inside their buildings, hanging portraits of the world’s best-known revolutionaries, from Lenin and Marx to Castro and Mao. Students wrote tracts, demonstrated in the streets, organized teach-ins and performed revolutionary theater. In one of the more dramatic occupations, students at the École des Beaux-Arts took over their institution and proclaimed it a republic. As the red flag flew above, those inside exercised their creative faculties and put art in the service of humanity.” Montreal’s only French-language university at the time was UdeM. English-language universities included McGill, Sir George Williams University, and Loyola College.
February 10, 1969: Stanley Gray publishes “Mc [ed. note: The Daily’s editors do not support the title here in the interest of historical accuracy.] ers, but as French workers, that Québecois are e “rather peculiar relationship” to Quebec society, porations, saying that the corporations McGill United Fruit Company to Latin America banana my, plundering the nation’s natural resources an
February 5, 1969: Demand by Radical Students’ Alliance was published in The Daily and presented to Senate. Under its education section, the Alliance demanded that, “McGill must give immediate priority to instituting a Functional French Program to provide rapid and effective training to speaking French, so that by 1972 all candidates for degrees and all teaching personnel be able to speak the language of Quebec.”
October 24, 1968: Stanley Gray, a young lecturer in the Department of Political Science and Economics, publishes “For a Critical University” in The McGill Daily Review.
February 8, 1969: A teach-in sponsored by the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) on CEGEPs was held to “to provide information and stimulate discussion on the major changes about to take place in English-language post-secondary education.”
February 6, 1969: Edward Goldenberg and Julius Grey publish an article in The Daily titled, “Bourgeois leftism in the student movement,” which speaks against McGill’s student leaders taking stands in favour of unilingualism and independence of Quebec, calling it “not progressive,” and that an independent Quebec would “not be a socialist paradise.”
February 12, 196 of the Sir George weeks. Students w that time, arson c mum sentence o dents Magnus Fly
February 17 Chris Neube neering Con McGill to “s
February 11, 1969: Stanley Gray given notice of hi dismissal from McGill based on his disruption of Board of Governors meeting, although many believe his dismissal was due to his activism at the universit and in the city. The Sir George Williams Affair – th largest student occupation in Canadian history – end after two weeks when riot police arrest almost 100 Si George Williams students.
MARCH 17, 2014 | 7
THE QUEBEC ISSUE
a French McGill?
McGill movement of 1968-69
d Written by nd Rachel Nam
tudents, trade unionists, unemployed workers, and activists s and heading toward the Université de Montréal (UdeM) as vailleurs,” “McGill aux québécois,” and “McGill français” were me francophone, pro-nationalist, and pro-worker. It was the r. ec higher education, which was epitomized by McGill’s posit McGill grew from 8,795 to 12,728. According to Sean Mills ivism in Sixties Montreal, “To the eyes of young activists, the us site of ‘anglophone’ education; it was a symbol of both the human nature of American imperialism.” nt of Quebec society, three out of six of Quebec universities ulation but made up 42 per cent of all university places and s research budget equaled UdeM and Laval’s combined. Acuates worked outside Quebec. ward McGill campus. protests in the fall of 1968, the first organization meetings for radicals and largely francophone organizations of the extraFrench-language schooling in the district of Saint-Léonard architect Raymond Lemieux. In addition, Bill 63 was passed nguage of instruction for their children, with the Ministry of “a working knowledge of French.” or The Daily went on to establish The Last Post, an Englisholitical movements in Quebec. It is the one of the major Engr Quebec decolonization.
cGill and the rape of Quebec” in The Daily. use of this language, but chose to print the The article stated, “It is not only as workexploited.” Gray further discusses McGill’s , in its service to giant anglo-American corworked with were “similar to that of the a republics – absentee owners of the econond taking profits out of the country.”
March 18, 1969: Montreal police arrest The Daily’s editor-in-chief Mark Starowicz and staff member Robert Chodos, Louis-Bernard Robitaille from La Presse, Stanley Gray, and other activists that included CSN militants, members of the Mouvement de liberation du taxi, a professor, an unemployed man, and a bureaucrat. They were returning from a Montreal Central Council assembly.
Snapshots from The Daily’s archives at the time of Opération McGill March 26, 1969: Flyers announced a teach-in in the ballroom of the University Centre featuring talks by, amongst others, Léandre Bergeron, Michel Chartrand, Raymond Lemieux, and Stanley Gray.
69: Daily journalist David Turoff reports on the occupation e Williams computing centre that had been ongoing for two were charged with arson, conspiracy, and public mischief; at constituted a minimum sentence of seven years and a maxiof life imprisonment, as reported by The Daily. Dean of Stuynn called the police, who arrived at 5 a.m. on February 11.
7, 1969: Daily journalist ert reports on the Engingress, which calls for speak French.”
is a ed ty he ds ir
March 5, 1969: The Daily reports that the Students’ Council passed a motion on March 4 that a special French edition of The Daily be published after March 28, although they had authorized the previous week an extra $1,000 for printing an additional 90,000 copies. The extra expenditure, however, was passed unanimously. The special French edition at question was called Bienvenue à McGill, which was distributed in schools, factories, metro stations, and political meetings.
February 25, 1969: Daily journalist René Sorell reports that McGill’s Faculty of Arts and Science rejected a proposed five-year undergraduate program, affirming its preference for a four-year program with the first year to be phased out as places became available in CEGEPs.
March 28, 1969: 10,000 to 15,000 CEGEP and McGill students, trade unionists, members of the unemployed, and activists turn to the streets, beginning from St. Louis Square and heading toward McGill campus as part of Opération McGill.
April 2, 1969: Daily Review editor Mark Wilson wrote a retrospective about Opération McGill, writing that, “The true division of forces was not on lines of language or race; there were English and French on both sides. It was a division between oppressors and oppressed. One side has people, the other has money and guns.” Organizers of Opération McGill published a statement on violence and oppression in The Daily, denouncing “the police State [that is] developing,” including but not limited to the blatant surveillance of homes, searches of organizers’ homes and confiscation of written materials, and arbitrary arrests. Daily editor-in-chief Mark Starowicz published an analysis of the press coverage of Opération McGill called “Terrorism in the Press,” calling out the refocusing of the issues brought forth by Opération McGill from a worker-accessible and more socialist McGill to one focused on the linguistic divide.
Opération McGill ultimately failed, and in its wake, McGill has continued to be a primarily Englishspeaking institution. Though students can submit written work in French, and outlets and initiatives such as Le Délit cater to the francophone population, McGill has largely retained an anglophone culture. That culture comes with a sense that McGill remains separate from the rest of the city – hence the widely-used term “the McGill bubble” – and that non-Quebecer students often leave Quebec upon graduation. Despite the lack of a modern-day Opération McGill, it is crucial for McGill students to be cognizant of the role they play in perpetuating that tension, and to work to better integrate themselves into Montreal and Quebec culture.
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WHERE THE MCGILL STUDENTS ARE A survey of language and residence trends after graduation WHERE RESPONDENTS RESIDED BEFORE COMING TO MCGILL
Compiled by Janna Bryson and Anqi Zhang Infographics by Rachel Nam
NUMBER OF PEOPLE
0
35
70
Map tiles by Stamen Design, under CC BY 3.0. Map data by OpenStreetMap, under CC-BY-SA.
LOCATION AFTER GRADUATION (ACTUAL AND PROJECTED) YES, IN MONTREAL (35)
= 10 GRADUATES YES, NOT IN MONTREAL, BUT ELSEWHERE IN QUEBEC (3) NO, MOVED ELSEWHERE IN CANADA (34) NO, MOVED TO A DIFFERENT COUNTRY (36)
OTHER COUNTRY (65)
ELSEWHERE IN CANADA (34)
MONTREAL (31)
= 10 CURRENT STUDENTS
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THE QUEBEC ISSUE
LANGUAGE FLUENCY BEFORE ATTENDING MCGILL
ENGLISH (216)
FRENCH (91)
OTHER (49)
SPANISH (21) MANDARIN (12)
= 10 PEOPLE ARABIC (8) ITALIAN (4)
YES (49%)
PERCENTAGE OF PEOPLE BECOMING FLUENT IN NEW LANGUAGES WHILE AT MCGILL
NO (51%)
QUITE ENGAGED (25%)
NOT AT ALL ENGAGED (10%)
EXTREMELY ENGAGED (6%)
ENGAGEMENT IN MONTREAL/ QUEBEC COMMUNITY SLIGHTLY ENGAGED (59%)
NO (11%)
OTHER (3%)
YES (86%)
IMPORTANCE OF BILINGUALISM TO ENGAGEMENT IN MONTREAL/ QUEBEC COMMUNITY
Pie charts courtesy of Plotvar
OF THE RESPONDENTS FLUENT IN ENGLISH
Of the 60 who did not learn a new language at McGill, only 8% reported being “quite engaged” or “extremely engaged” with the Montreal community compared to 38% of other respondents. = ALSO SPEAK FRENCH
= DID NOT LEARN A NEW LANGUAGE AT MCGILL
65% of the 60 said an ability to speak French affected their decision about staying in Montreal compared to 48% of other respondents.
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THE QUEBEC ISSUE
Expectations versus reality Quebec through the eyes of international students
Cem Ertekin and Emma Noradounkian The McGill Daily
E
very year, McGill University attracts hundreds of students from all around the globe. According to the McGill Admissions Profile, 28.2 per cent of undergraduates of 2013 hailed from outside of Canada. Many of these students come to McGill based on its reputation; however, as an anglophone university in the predominantly francophone province of Quebec, McGill might have more to offer students in terms of culture. International students coming to McGill have certain expectations about Quebec and Montreal; expectations which often do not meet reality. In interviews with around 15 people, The Daily asked various international students about their expectations and experiences in Quebec. Almost all of the respondents agreed that, prior to their arrival at McGill and after having done research on Quebec through guidebooks and tourism videos, they expected Quebec to be welcoming to different cultures and ethnicities – despite their concern about having to speak French on a daily basis. Their expectations, however, did not seem to coincide with their current experiences in the province. “I suppose I should have been more conscious of the fact that all the things I was reading and watching were designed specifically to put a positive spin on Montreal,” wrote a Masters student studying physics in the survey. “The [number] of rude people in Montreal is no greater than that in any other North American city,” added a U2 Linguistics student. “Additionally, it is quite easy to get by with just English.” A few other respondents agreed with that student’s assertion on language in Montreal, and by extension, in Quebec. The following interviews have been edited for clarity and space. We recognize that these interviews are not representative of the entire international student population at McGill. McGill Daily (MD): Has Quebec/ Montreal been accepting of you as a foreigner? Anonymous, MSc Physics: “The people – yes. It’s very multicultural here, I’ve never had an adverse reaction to the fact that I’m non-Canadian. People are often interested in my home country and I’m more than happy to talk to them about it.
Jasmine Wang | The McGill Daily The government – no. Quebec is one of the few provinces in Canada that does not allow international students to enrol in Medicare. [...] Instead, I have to buy expensive private insurance. The government of Quebec has also instructed hospitals to charge more to non-Canadians than to Canadians. [...] It feels like the government of Quebec has made a conscious effort to make my life here more difficult and expensive than it need be.” Anonymous, U1 Political Science: “Yes, I never felt any discrimination and people never react negatively when I say I’m from the Middle East, but that is also because my main interactions are with people from McGill, and they are mostly international students too.” Enbal Singer, U3 Political Science: “I would say yes and no. Individuals are often accepting, but I find that people are somewhat judgemental towards anglophones. [...] I often get made fun of for my accent [in Quebec]. Of course it’s playful but it makes learning a language a lot more intimidating.” Anonymous, MSc Computer Science: “Have experienced it all: racist comments and welcoming warmth.” MD: Does the requirement to speak French in Quebec pose any barriers? If so, what kinds of barriers? Anonymous, MSc Computer Sci-
ence: “No barriers whatsoever, as long as we are in downtown Montreal. Outside, it would be a little difficult without French.” Kevin Holt, U1 Environment: “It imposes significant barriers and it’s sometimes really frustrating. People often approach you in French first and it can be difficult to communicate. Finding work here without being bilingual is extremely difficult. “ Anonymous, U2 Linguistics: “The one major barrier is the job availability. If you can speak French, you have many more options for jobs in Montreal. With only English, it is much more difficult to find an offcampus job, especially with the government’s continuing tightening of language regulations.” Anonymous, U1 Political Science: “Not to me but I can see how it can be a hassle for a student who doesn’t speak it because they would be limited in terms of job opportunities [sic]. Also, dealing with basic transactions can be a pain if an employee does not speak English well.” MD: Do you believe you are fully experiencing Montreal, and Quebec? Anonymous, U1 Political Science: “No, I always feel like I don’t have time to get to know Montreal and the region surrounding it. The workload expected from me surprises me every semester and I end up focusing completely on McGill.”
Bartosz Krol, U3 Mechanical Engineering: “Without a shadow of a doubt. With all of the things going on around the international students it is really difficult to waste time. I am sure that in May I will be able to say that it was a wonderful [year, full] of various experiences.” Anonymous, MSc Physics: “Montreal – yes, [but] the only aspect that I feel I’m missing out on is the French culture. [...] Due to my weak French, I’m apprehensive to visit other places in Quebec where it might not be as easy to use English. I’m not afraid to try and use my French [but] I also find it embarrassing when francophones don’t give me an opportunity to try and speak French but just immediately switch to English [...] it makes me feel very self-conscious and really demotivates me from trying.” Enbal Singer, U3 Political Science: “Probably not. I’ve been here for almost seven years now [...] and there are places that I haven’t bothered to explore because French makes me uncomfortable. [...] Being from elsewhere usually means that you want to explore and learn more, though there are limitations to what you can have access to [because of language barriers].” MD: Have recent events (Charter of Values, provincial elections, et cetera) changed your views of Quebec?
Anonymous, U2 Linguistics: “I didn’t really give much thought to Quebec before coming here, nor did I know anything at all about their government. Now I see that their government has quite radical views, which I do not agree with. This is, of course, not representative of the people of Quebec, I believe.” Anonymous, U1 Political Science: “These events, especially the Charter of Values, contradicted my expectations of Quebec. I do not believe it is a place for international students and workers to feel at home anymore.” Anonymous, U2 Political Science: “The Charter of Values has shocked me a little bit, though I was familiar with the ideas it wanted to enforce. It did refine my view of Quebec, or enlarge it, but it hasn’t changed it drastically.” Anonymous, MSc Physics: “It’s made me nervous for the future. I worry about the provincial government’s support for McGill as an anglophone university and what impact that may have on my studies and my research. McGill is already underfunded compared to universities in other provinces and it’s slipping down the world rankings [...]. If this continues I can see myself regretting my choice of university and it would certainly make me think carefully about whether I would recommend McGill to other international students.”
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Manon Massé: “Stand up for your rights” An interview with QS candidate for Sainte-Marie–Saint-Jacques
O
n Thursday, The Daily sat down with Manon Massé, candidate for the Québec solidaire (QS) party in Sainte-Marie–Saint-Jacques to talk about the upcoming election. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. McGill Daily: Could you discuss QS a little bit. How is it different from the other parties in the province? Manon Massé: We are a left wing party. That means social justice, the environment. We say to vote with your head for social justice, for a green Quebec, and for, of course, a free Quebec. The difference is for me, is also that Québec solidaire is there for the people, public services. We have to take the money from where it currently is and put it in public services. This is the big difference. The second thing is, when the Parti Libéral du Québec or Parti Québécois (PQ) [make choices about] environmental issues, they choose petroleum. QS is a 21st century party, and we have to make choices for people of the 21st century. MD: What do you say to students who feel betrayed by the PQ, who participated in the student strike, who believe maybe that engaging in the system hasn’t worked for them? MM: I can understand why they feel betrayed because Ma-
dame Marois pretended to explain to us that indexation is not an increase, but we’re not crazy, we know that. I understand why students feel that, we had this big education forum, we understand nothing, we have heard nothing since then. Here at QS we want education to be free, from babies to grandparents until university. MD: What do you think is the single most important issue of the election? MM: For us it is about petroleum, the environment. Why? Because in the last few months the PQ made a very important choice for us. They chose to have Enbridge, they chose to have the Trans-Canada pipeline. They chose to support drilling for gas. This is a very bad choice for us and our children. I don’t know why the PQ don’t realize this . And of course the second one is health. For us I think these are the two important issues. MD: Going back to students, if students wanted to get involved how can they? What would you suggest to students who are less engaged now; how can they engage more? MM: I mean first of all they need to read. They have to follow their heart, I mean, the most important thing is that when you are 20, 25, 30, you have your life ahead of you and you know you can change
Camille Gris Roy | Photographer things. And of course, politics is not the only way to change this, but at the same time it is pretty important. I mean the National Assembly decides the rules about welfare, and student fees, so it’s pretty important. People should try to understand the differences between each
party and chose the one that makes the most sense for them. Our last slogan was “Get up.” A good person once said you have to get up and stand up for your rights. [laughs] I think that’s good. —Compiled by Emmet Livingstone and Jordan Venton-Rublee
To hear more from Mason Massé on the participation of students in the upcoming election, education in Quebec, and the PQ, check the Tuesday edition of Le Delit for a parallel interview in French, as part of a series of interviews for the upcoming election.
Minority parties in Quebec Compiled by Cem Ertekin and Emmet Livingstone | Illustrations by E.k. Chan
Parti vert du Québec
T
he green movement in Quebec began with the founding of the Parti vert du Québec (PVQ) in the 1980s, which enjoyed 5 per cent electoral support at its height. In an effort to cross ideological boundaries and centre the party solely on environmental issues, the PVQ leadership declared itself “beyond left and right.” It subsequently fell apart in 1998 after left-leaning members became disenchanted and left; the situation was further complicated by competition with the Green Party of Canada in Quebec (GPCQ). The current version of the PVQ was subsequently formed in 2001 by members of the GPCQ. The PVQ now runs a more explicitly left-wing platform, promoting green values and participatory democracy. Its support is mostly in anglophone areas of Montreal, where left-leaning anglophones who don’t wish to vote for sovereigntist, francophone parties are left with little other choice besides the PVQ. Alex Tyrrell, the current leader, is 25 years old, the youngest party leader in Quebec politics.
Option nationale
O
ption nationale (ON) was founded in 2011 by Jean-Martin Aussant, previously a Member of the National Assembly for the Parti Québécois, in order to bolster the salience of the sovereignty question in provincial politics. Considered a centre-left party, ON has not shown a clear opinion on the proposed Charter of Values and has instead called for unity among sovereigntists. The party argues for free education and for the nationalization of Quebec’s natural resources. ON placed fifth in the last election, earning nearly 2 per cent of the vote. ON is formally open to an alliance with any party that shares its stance on sovereignty, which has not happened as of yet. In a surprising move, Aussant abruptly left politics in 2013. The current leader of the party is Sol Zanetti.
Conservative Party of Quebec
N
ot to be confused with the other Conservative Party of Quebec, which folded into Union nationale in 1935, the current Conservative Party of Quebec (PCQ) was revived in late 2009. Support for the party has been extremely low – the party received only 0.18 per cent of the vote in the 2012 provincial elections. Under the leadership of industrialist Adrien D. Pouliot, the PCQ began describing itself as a socially liberal and fiscally conservative party. Pouliot has taken a firm stance against the proposed Charter of Values, and has described it as trying to solve a problem that does not exist. The PCQ’s platform is based on the liberalization of public services. While they believe that the French language should be promoted in the federal level under Bill 101, the PCQ also believes that a working knowledge of English should be a minimum standard for a high school diploma.
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Opening the doors on mental health The deinstitutionalization movement in Quebec Diana Kwon The McGill Daily
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t its peak, the Saint-Jean de Dieu Hospital, Montreal’s largest psychiatric institution, was keeping over 6000 patients. Prior to the 20th century, it was believed that the only way to treat mental illness was to contain people both physically and mentally. Individuals were held inside institutions away from the public eye and were subject to practices like electroconvulsive therapy, insulin coma therapy, and lobotomies. In the 19th century, while other provinces were developing provincial psychiatric hospitals, the Quebec government had a system known as the “farming out” of mental health, where private corporations would be paid to care for patients. This system was less than ideal; these private owners were given an annual fixed sum per patient, which often led to people being cared for with the least financial expenditure in order to rein in personal profit. At this time, most of Quebec’s psychiatric institutions were religiously affiliated. The Sisters of Charity, a religious institute of nuns, ran Saint-Jean de Dieu Hospital (first established as the Longue-Pointe Asylum), the largest psychiatric institution in Montreal. On the west side of Montreal, Alfred Perry and the Protestant clergy opened the Protestant Hospital for the Insane (which later became the Verdun Protestant Hospital). Marie-Claude Thifault, a historian at the University of Ottawa whose research focuses on asylum life in Quebec in the 18th and 19th centuries, described the contrasting situations at the two hospitals. The provincial government underfunded both hospitals, but the Verdun hospital received money from anglophone philanthropists. “Verdun was smaller and got more money from the government and from donations,” Thifault explained. “Another thing about Verdun was that the patients were not the same. At Saint-Jean de Dieu, there were more chronic patients for whom it was more difficult to return to society. Verdun hospital had more patients who needed short term treatment.” There was also a preconception that anglophones were better psychiatrists and received a better education, but in fact, the psychiatrists in both institutions had the same
amount of training. Verdun was associated with McGill, while Saint-Jean de Dieu was associated with Université de Montréal. Having university affiliations was beneficial to the hospitals because it provided research opportunities to improve treatments, and brought a presence of students in medicine and nursing. Because of the differences in their economic situations, more research went on at the Verdun Hospital. It was here that Dr. Heinz Lehmann, the clinical director at the hospital and a professor in McGill’s department of psychiatry, developed chlorpromazine, an antipsychotic used to treat schizophrenia. This discovery, made in the 1950s, allowed people who were previously hospitalized with severe psychiatric issues to re-enter society. The development of pharmaceutical interventions was important, but not enough to make the changes needed for deinstitutionalization. People needed more than just the pills – they needed proper community care and outpatient services in order to make a successful transition into society. The idea to deinstitutionalize patients had been around since 1910. Hospital staff – medical and religious workers alike – were trying to shift the system to a focus on care outside the institutions. They began by allowing some patients to go out on temporary leave, allowing them to go back to their families; however, because of the lack of services to ensure a stable transition, many people would return to the hospital. The need for communitybased mental health services was glaringly obvious. Though many patients were given temporary leave, there was a lack of care for patients who were able to leave after receiving medications. Overcrowding was a major issue by the mid-20th century, but the lack of funding from the government was a hindrance to implementing necessary change. People with all types of mental health issues were being hospitalized indiscriminately. The ratio of patients to caregivers was very high, making it impossible for all individuals to receive adequate care. Mental health workers from both the medical and religious sectors had long known that change was necessary. The 1960s were a turbulent time for mental health. The economic and political situation was changing and both medicine and
Tanbin Rafee and Alice Shen | The McGill Daily mental health care were improving. Quebec was becoming secularized, and the psychiatric instituations were becoming free of religious affiliation. Newspapers were reporting on how bad the situation in psychiatric institutions was. The general population was also beginning to realize that keeping people locked up in psychiatric hospitals was an ineffective and outdated way to care for people with mental health issues. Jean-Charles Pagé, a former patient, published the book Les fous crient au secour, a testimony of his life at Saint-Jean de Dieu hospital. In his book, Pagé describes institutionalization as inhumane, ineffective, and an outdated way to think about mental health care. As a result, the Quebec government finally decided to do something. They developed the Bédard Commission, which released a report in 1962 with a number of recommendations to reform the mental health system in Quebec. Change was swift and effective, since the ideas for deinstitution-
alization had existed for over 50 years. Psychiatric care finally came under the province’s annual operating budget, providing the money needed to move people out of hospitals and into the community. The public generally viewed deinstitutionalization as a good thing. They did not, however, wish to have these individuals in their own neighbourhoods. As a result, many people who were released from psychiatric hospitals were marginalized and subject to discrimination. “People were thinking that deinstitutionalization was a good idea, but they were not ready to receive people into their communities,” Thifault told The Daily. Today, the Verdun Protestant Hospital and Saint-Jean de Dieu hospital still stand, though they are now called the Douglas Mental Health University Institute and the l’Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Montréal, and mainly serve as outpatient hospitals and research institutions. Though there is much collabo-
ration among the two hospitals, the French-English divide is still apparent. The Douglas Institute serves the largely anglophone population in west end, and l’Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Montréal mainly serves the east end of Montreal. In the half century since the first wave of deinstitutionalization in Quebec, psychiatry has changed drastically. The proportion of people kept long-term in institutions has drastically decreased. But mental health care is still far from perfect. People with mental illness are highly overrepresented in the homeless population, and the drugs that once freed patients have now become prisons of their own. People are often overdiagnosed and overmedicated. We look to history to see how slow the process of change was for mental health care, and see parallels to the slow process of change for modern day problems. It is important to remember the need to advocate for policies and funding to improve services in mental health.
Features
March 17, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily
BREAKING
OFF
Another idea of sovereignty
Monolithic? I don’t think so
Graham MacVannel The McGill Daily
Mathilde Michaud Features Writer
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ith the rapid approach of the second election in as many years, Quebecers are once again being called to the polls to decide on the fate of the province. The divisions taking form between the parties are those that have divided the province for years: sovereigntist versus federalist, left versus right, Nordiques fan versus Canadiens. As the rest of Canada (ROC) waits with bated breath for the outcome of the April 7 election and (as ever) for a potential referendum, Quebecers may find themselves at the mercy of a Parti Québécois (PQ)-led majority government ( just as they did with the Parti Liberal Québécois, the PQ’s predecessors). Be it as it may, as Quebecers line up behind their respective parties, the hypothesizing and daydreaming of an independent Quebec is already taking form. Although the PQ is playing coy on setting a date for a future referendum – as they have done since losing in 1995 – talk of a Quebec nation’s borders, monetary policy, or even passports consistently remain in the news. One topic that gets consistently forgotten, however, is the place of Quebec’s First Nations in the discussion. The laws binding Indigenous peoples to
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he elections are at our door. Get ready. Economy, health, education: these are buzzwords you hear over and over in any election, and not necessarily used with any context whatsoever. But in Quebec, we have an extra word to brood over: independence. Whether you’re in favour of it or not, it never goes without mention in an election in Quebec. But what explains its importance in Quebecois culture? Why can’t we just put it to the side when we debate the future of our nation? Quebec’s independence is not a question that everyone agrees on, and for every Quebecois, myself included, it is an issue that we struggle with at least once in our lives in Quebec. Is it possible to be fully nationalist and open-minded? Separatist without necessarily being nationalist? In order to fully understand the scope of these questions, we need to first take a step back into history. Understanding our history The story I’m going to tell doesn’t fall in line with the history of Quebec that most of us have heard. This truth is not one that we usually gather from studying Quebec’s history.
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Features
March 17, 2014 The McGill Daily | www.mcgilldaily.com
Another idea of sovereignty (Continued from page 13) Canada are negotiated through treaties with the Crown and First Nations; not Quebec. With respect to Quebecers, on the questions of sovereignty, identity, and self-determination, many Indigenous peoples consider themselves worlds apart. ‘Nation to Nation’ “We have our own idea of sovereignty,” said Bethany Douglas. Douglas is a Mohawk from Kahnawà:ke, a reservation just outside Montreal, and a graduate of Concordia with a Bachelor’s degree in History. “Our [governing] Bound Council [and] Band Council cards are [both] established through the Indian Act.” The Act sets out the rules governing Canada’s First Nations peoples with respect to the organization and formation of Band Councils. It also deals with the regulation of various administrative processes on reserves, even encompassing rules on spending. Within reserves, there are various other decisionmaking bodies. In Mohawk communities, for example, institutions such as the Longhouse serve as a focal point of traditional decisionmaking where the community comes together and discusses issues with the goal of finding consensus. The Indian Act is deeply problematic for many reasons, and the Act in and of itself isn’t a treaty: it’s a piece of legislation. But it’s true that, as Mohawk journalist Irkar Beljaars said, “Our treaties are with the federal government, not with Quebec.” The Royal Proclamation signed in 1763 sets out the basis for the relationship between the Crown and First Nations, recognizing Indigenous title and governance. At the basis of this recognition is that of Indigenous nationhood. It’s an important distinction when it comes to Quebec, because discussions with Indigenous communities about sovereignty aren’t just about recognizing the legitimacy of Indigenous voices; they’re ‘nation to nation’ talks.
Not so, argued the Quebec government in 1995. The then-PQ government, led by Jacques Parizeau, claimed that in the event of secession, the treaties governing First Nations would be transferred from Ottawa to Quebec. Problematically, such a claim runs up against the very notion of the ‘nation to nation’ negotiations that are required of Canadian governments in discussion with First Nations. Simply transferring treaties without Indigenous consent goes against the very rights of determination that First Nations have been fighting to maintain over the centuries. Separatism in this form, as far as Beljaars is concerned, would be “just another form of colonialism.”
“There will be a lot tension because Aboriginals don’t want to sign treaties with Quebec.” Irkar Beljaars A fraught relationship The interactions between the Quebec government and First Nations over the years have sometimes been complicated. “[Since the Oka crisis in 1990], there have been some improvements, but not enough,” said Beljaars. Indigenous communities are spread out across Quebec, with, to name just a few: Mohawk communities around the island of Montreal, Mi’kmaq peoples in the Gaspe region, the Cree to the North, and Inuit peoples to the far, far North. In the case of an independent Quebec, Beljaars added, “There will be a lot tension because Aboriginals don’t want to sign treaties with Quebec.” Negotiations with First Nations have figured into the post-secession game plan. Both the 1995 and the current PQ election platforms envisage creating a National Assembly
to write a Quebec constitution that includes First Nations participation, and replacing the Indian Act with a law more “adapted to the current realities,” according to the party’s platform. As of press time, the provincial Liberal Party’s platform contains no mention of Indigenous issues; its 2012 election platform is similarly vague. “There isn’t much difference between the PQ and the PLQ,” Beljaars said bluntly. “For the political parties in question, First Nations issues are a second or third afterthought.” Although the PQ promises to increase housing, particularly in the North, government inaction is considered to be the norm. “It sounds good on paper to promise anything, but nothing ever comes of it,” replied Douglas flatly when asked about political promises. The right to self-determination, drawing on Quebec’s distinct language and culture, forms the basis of the PQ mandate for separation. But it’s difficult to imagine seceding from Canada where Indigenous title consists of large swathes of territory and trust in political negotiations is weak at best. Many on reserve First Nations have little interest in Quebec political discourse and engagement. “We don’t vote in provincial or federal elections,” said Douglas. “Engaging in them would be recognition of a foreign government that isn’t First Nations.” This position would be a significant roadblock to any kind of move towards Quebecois nationhood that would take Indigenous communities into consideration. The Cree people of northern Quebec have made clear their interest in retaining a relationship with Canada, which would be a serious concern to any newly seceded Quebec, considering the hefty amount of electricity generated in the James Bay area on Cree territory. “The Cree are on some very valuable land that will come under dispute,” said Beljaars. “And [if it does,] Canada will definitely have some claim to Quebec’s north.” The PQ’s insistence that negotiations with First Nations take place alongside consultations of other minority groups ignores the rights that Quebec’s Indigenous people have that go beyond legal title to their lands.
The PQ’s current electoral platform, notably including its Charter of Values, grates on any idea of fair and considerate treatment of First Nations. “How would they improve relations with first nations if they can’t even build relations with minorities?” said Beljaars. “[Pauline] Marois is using her ideology to instil fear in white Quebecers and promote her own political agenda.” A Two Row path The lack of understanding exhibited by politicians is one that fails to appreciate the political and cultural rights of First Nations people compared to those of the majority of Quebecers. A way that one might envision the situation is through the Two Row Wampum Treaty signed between the Iroquois and Dutch settlers in the 17th century. Drawn on a white belt, the treaty is symbolized by the separation of two parallel purple lines on a white backdrop, one representing a canoe of the Iroquois, the other that of settlers. “We can co-exist, but never touch,” said Douglas. The settler-Indigenous nexus in Canada remains a difficult and complex question; however, as often is the case concerning Indigenous affairs, politicians have shown little appetite for discussing the realities, cultural, legal, or otherwise, of engaging with Quebec’s Indigenous groups regarding sovereignty in any meaningful way. Ultimately, the question of a sovereign Quebec is not one that a majority of Quebecers could unilaterally decide on. Rather, historical treaties and obligations between First Nations people and the government, federal or provincial, demand a commitment to First Nations’ right to decide which country they want to be bound to, regardless of the outcome of a referendum. Alas, the experiences of 1995 suggest that even if there is a referendum in the next few years, Indigenous voices will be once again sidelined. A future sovereigntist government might prefer to ignore the hypocrisy of denying First Nations’ right to self-determination in promoting their own. First Nations rightfully may think otherwise.
Features
March 17, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily
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Illustrations by Alice Shen
Monolithic? I don’t think so (Continued from page 13) Contrary to popular belief, history in Quebec is much more complicated than we’re normally taught that it is. If you do not take the time to understand its twists, a lot can be misunderstood. The conflict between the francophone and anglophone community in Quebec comes from a long history of rivalries between their colonizing nations, France and England, and are the source of Quebec’s independence movement; however, the story of the movement goes back even further. In fact, it really started with a bilingual antimonarchist movement: the 1837-38 rebellions. Even though the vast majority of the protagonists were French-Canadians, their rebellion was directed against the colonial institutions more so than against the anglophone community itself. The conflict had more to do with class; a struggle between the people of Canada and their far away rulers. The fact that most of the supporters of the colonial system were freshly-arrived loyalists from the U.S. helped to shape its narrative into a linguistic one, similar to the francophone-anglophone conflict that we now know so well. But at the time, rebels’ objectives were similar to those of the American Revolution, and had little to do with the construction of a strictly francophone nation. In the following years, there were many unsuccessful rebellions, and all of the rebel leaders ended up sentenced to death or deported to the far-away colony of Australia. The government in place insured that the supporters of the rebellions would stay enclosed within the limits of the province of Quebec. Thus began the construction of the so-called ‘distinct identity’ of Quebec, around which the independentist discourse would come to be organized. Following the democratic Quebecois nationalism proposed by the rebellions, the repression of its proponents led the movement away from secularism, and closer to the
Catholic church. Until the mid-20th century, the Church was the central institution for the French-Canadian community, a difference with the anglophone community that was partially responsible for a greater ethnolinguistic divide. Almost the entire francophone population lived in Quebec following the Confederation, and francophone-anglophone relations were tense. Anglophones controlled the financial and industrial sectors in Quebec, and francophones made up the working proletariat. This division in the social sphere wasn’t necessarily reflected in the political one. Maurice Duplessis, chief of the Union Nationale and Prime Minister of Quebec from 1936 until 1959, was a Quebecois nationalist, and great defender of the provincial jurisdiction. Although he worked very hard to keep the power of the federal state out of the province, he emphasized his support for both French and English industries (although the latter was much more powerful), because they were both part of Quebec’s economic structure. Duplessis’s form of Quebec nationalism did not necessarily mean that he prioritized Catholic French-Canadians over everyone else who lived in Quebec, even though he was extremely religious and kept a close relationship with the Church. Like a puzzle The first concrete independentist movement appeared with the Rassemblement pour l’indépendence nationale (RIN – Rally for National Independence) in 1960, a radical nationalist-separatist group whose militancy was axed toward total independence for Quebec (a step which would be, according to their manifesto, the logical continuity of French Canada’s history). Their case dealt with the need for the French-Canadians – now referred to as Québecois – to fight the oppression put upon the minority they represent within Canada. This rather extreme discourse was slightly toned down as the RIN joined the much more moderate Parti Quebecois (PQ) which asked for associative sovereignty rather than complete separation from the rest of Canada. At the
time, though, the RIN represented one of the most radical-left political approaches to Quebecois independence. Although the sovereigntist movement began to group around the figure of René Lévesque, a moderate social-democrat, and of his former centrist political organization, the Movement Souveraineté-Association (MSA), it nonetheless contained groups from all over the political spectrum. The Ralliement National (RN – National Rally), for example, was a group within the PQ that represented a much more conservative perspective of independence, since most of their members came from the dying clerical-nationalist coalition of the Union Nationale.
Contrary to popular belief, history in Quebec is much more complicated than we’re normally taught that it is. This political diversity within the sovereigntist movement has continued through the years, although it’s generally dismissed or ignored. The PQ, Québec solidaire (QS), Option ationale and even Genération nationale are all members of the sovereigntist movement that represent radically different ideologies. There are indeed independentists – such as the current PQ government – who seem to advocate for an homogenous francophone Quebec and present a narrow-minded view of the world. But anti-separatists who throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater and dismiss the entire separatist movement as narrow-minded, are being just as narrowminded as the PQ. And when they dismiss the movement in this way, anti-separatists
are ignoring those who are both nationalist and open to diversity (like QS, for example). They dismiss those who believe that forming a new country means making everyone a part of it, not just the francophones, those who do not want a part in the Canada Stephen Harper is building; and even those who fight for Quebecois independence as one step towards dismantling a system they fundamentally don’t believe in. I, for example, do not believe in the concept of nation, but would undoubtedly vote “yes” if there was a referendum tomorrow. The two aren’t irreconcilable, just as being nationalist and federalist isn’t irreconcilable. But it isn’t an easy question to answer for yourself, and the PQ’s rise has made it difficult for many young Quebecois to assume a nationalist stance, because they might be seen as (among other things) racist, chauvinistic, or both. All of the terms surrounding sovereignty require a great deal of nuance in understanding them because they do not have one single, straightforward meaning. We have to be very careful in the way we endorse or fight the independentist movement. It is easy to fall into lazy rhetoric and demagogic discourse like the Parti libéral du Québec’s. Separatists are more than a monolithic bloc, and they are anything but one united voice. They differ greatly on the objectives they promote, and their motives for advocating independence. I cannot stress enough how diverse its supporters are, and how affected the movement is by a black and white, anti- versus pro-sovereignty, narrow-minded vision of the issue. Those involved in the movement for Quebecois independence span the political spectrum from anarchist to social democrats, conservative to liberal. There are as many words to describe its advocates as there are visions within this ideal they all look up to. Hopefully, this review of our history will help you see that Pauline Marois’s vision isn’t necessarily one all independentists aspire to, and that there are as many ways to approach independentism as there are to federalism.
Sci+Tech
March 17, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily
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Give a damn, give a lot of damns reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian speaks to students about startups Jeremy Schembri The McGill Daily
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n a talk filled with reddit memes and self-referential humour, reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian reminisced about his early years building one of the internet’s most popular sites. Ohanian shared stories to a crowded room of students on how reddit, the selfproclaimed “front page of the internet,” started off with only the two co-founders producing traffic, and was transformed by its users to become a website overflowing with content. In his talk, he exuded enthusiasm for building things that matter and his optimism for entrepreneurship in the digital age. The talk was engaging – surprising since McGill was the 199th stop on his whirlwind bus tour promoting his book – but just reiterated common advice without leaving much space for personal insight or honest reflection. Ohanian’s grueling tour across North America is meant to inspire students to start their own companies and offer the advice that he wished to have received at university. While at the University of Virginia as an undergrad, he was on track to be an immigration lawyer and obsessed about his GPA. During a LSAT prep course, he walked out to get waffles. While eating, he realized, “If I want these waffles more than I want to be a lawyer, I probably shouldn’t be a lawyer.”
“We had no fucking idea what we were doing.” Alexis Ohanian reddit co-founder Determined to start a company (and live like college students forever) Ohanian and his friend Steve Huffman tried to create a mobile ordering company called My Mobile Menu, or MMM. During spring break in their senior year, Ohanian and Huffman traveled from their homes in Virginia
Alice Shen | The McGill Daily to Boston to see the then-unknown Paul Graham (who is now one of the hottest names in tech) talk about his new startup incubator, an organization that provides resources for new companies, called Y Combinator. Ohanian and Huffman pitched MMM to the new incubator only to find out that they were rejected later in the evening. Luckily, Y Combinator liked them so much that they called back to see if they could come up with a better idea. Ohanian remembers how rocky the first days in the incubator were: “We had no fucking idea what we were doing.” Huffman and Ohanian stumbled upon an idea about creating a news aggregation website, where users would submit links and vote to determine their overall rank on the main page. The first version was “janky,” a word used by Ohanian to mean embarrassingly
awful. With some coding and bit of luck, their user base increased. It grew from the two co-founders submitting links under different pseudonyms to about 10,000 users in four months. Ohanian recalls how he and Huffman were summoned to Silicon Valley, “a magical land of unicorns and term sheets,” by a Yahoo executive. When talking about their internet traffic, the Yahoo executive condescendingly told them that reddit’s number was equivalent to a rounding error of Yahoo’s traffic. The meeting they thought would validate them as a real internet company went terribly, and Ohanian became determined to prove the unnamed executive wrong; he placed the quote on his wall. It became the wall of negative reinforcement. Ohanian and Huffman increased their traffic to over 70,000
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“If I want these waffles more than I want to be a lawyer, I probably shouldn’t be a lawyer.” Alexis Ohanian daily visitors and eventually sold reddit to Condé Nast, a mass media company, for an undisclosed sum in 2006, 18 months after launch. After his retelling of the reddit story, an updated version of the ‘inventors in a garage’ myth, he transitioned to how he believes that the future will belong to the creators. “[The internet] is the largest stage and library in one,” Ohanian told the crowd. He continued to explain that the ability to code will allow anyone with a laptop and internet connection to create a small empire – just as he and Huffman did with reddit. Ohanian’s talk was filled with funny inspirational quotes such as, “It’s okay if you suck, because suck-
ing is the first step of being sort of good at something.” He also explained that an essential ingredient to starting a business is the will to do it. With the cost of starting a business decreasing and the internet expanding, Ohanian encouraged everyone to venture forth and create a business. Statistics show a much more dismal picture, with around 75 to 90 per cent of startups failing. Y Combinator, the incubator from which Ohanian graduated, admits to a 93 per cent failure rate – a statistic not mentioned in his talk. Throughout his 45-minute pep rally, Ohanian enthusiastically spoke about all the ‘cool’ aspects of startups, but did not mention any of the hardships or downsides. In the end, it was another inspirational talk that told the audience exactly what they wanted to hear. The last thought Ohanian left the audience with was that a person will always play their hardest in a video game when they have no more lives left. He encouraged students to try out their ideas and not to worry when they had no idea what they are doing. Ohanian ended the talk by saying, “The shoulders of giants that we stood on were pretty damn big, but the shoulders of the giants that you all get to stand on are even bigger.”
Sci+Tech
March 17, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily
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Hacking health in Montreal Bridging the technological gap in healthcare practices Alice Shen The McGill Daily
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s advances in technology bring novel tools and improvements to many aspects of our daily lives, such as in banking, communication, and diagnostic medicine, it is surprising that technological advancements in medical practices have remained relatively stagnant over the last decade. This is mainly due to the limitations of approaches that introduce technology into the healthcare system, as pointed out in an article in Technology Innovation Management Review by Jeeshan Chowdhury, a researcher on health information systems. Specifically, large-scale applications, implemented by government or corporate organizations, require a long time to develop, and a large maintenance budget. An example of this is OACIS (Open Architecture Clinical Information System), an electronic health record system used by the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) hospitals. Because these systems are often geared toward data collection, they do not serve the specific needs of health professionals for patient care and are often inconvenient to use. On the other hand, smaller applications initiated by software developers are more user-friendly and affordable in comparison, but they tend
to focus more on self-help or fitness and wellness, and lack systematic testing. Therefore, during the implementation of these approaches, fundamental medical and clinical practices are often not addressed. Between February 21 and 23, over 500 individuals gathered to participate in a healthcare-oriented hackathon that aimed to bridge the social and technical barriers among experts across the fields of medicine, technology, and design, to fulfill the growing need for innovation. The event was organized by Hacking Health Montreal in collaboration with HEC Montréal (École des Hautes Études Commerciales de Montréal) and SainteJustine’s Hospital, where the participants gathered for a focused and collaborative journey to develop working technological prototypes to target healthcare issues. According to Etienne Langace, one of this year’s organizers, this was in fact one of the biggest and most attended healthcare hackathons in the world. During the event, teams pitched ideas and developed prototypes for demonstration, which were scored by a judging panel at the end of the weekend. Examples of prototypes ranged from cutting edge diagnostic tools for early autism to mobilebased applications for nurses to organize patient information. The event provided a way to
initiate team momentum by facilitating team communication, management, and business plan formulation. Although the organizers of Hacking Health attempted to promote team formation prior to the start of the event, the amount of time available to develop the projects was extremely limited, and insufficient to develop large-scale projects. In response to concerns about how impactful Hacking Health was, participants of one of the winning teams, “Justine Time,” told The Daily, “It was [a] great [place] to meet people, and get the team started [...] but it’s really now that we are actually developing the product and thinking about longterm developments.” “The crux is what happens after [...] about half of the participants end up continuing their Hacking Health projects with their team after the event,” Lagace told The Daily. While Hacking Health events aim to be impactful on targeting healthcare issues, the reality sometimes falls short of what they claim to deliver. Considering the guidance and support that is required long after the weekend-long event is over, Hacking Health’s current lack of empirical data on the long-term impact to generate lasting entrepreneurship implies that a structured support system for the start-up teams is yet to be put in place.
Tanjiha Mahmud | The McGill Daily Another problem that arises from bringing together experts of very specialized fields such as computer programming, design, and medicine, is that often there isn’t enough experience on managing the transition of the project into a business plan. This can po-
tentially limit the start-up teams from obtaining meaningful economic returns. Though hackathons hold irreplaceable value in bringing experts together, they still have a way to go to establish a structure for lasting impact.
Sustainability in engineering Global Engineering Week aims to fill gaps in McGill curriculum Diana Kwon The McGill Daily
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Sustainability’ may be the buzzword of the day, but it has initiated conversations on how to address current societal and environmental issues and develop a more promising future. We are still far from a truly sustainable society, one where economic demands, environmental resilience, and social equity are fully balanced. Global Engineering (GE) Week, which will be hosted by the McGill chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) this week, aims to address these issues. EWB hopes to promote the global engineering movement and highlight the importance of non-technical skills in engineering that are often overlooked in engineering curricula.
Engineers without Borders is a Canadian not-for-profit organization that aids in global development projects and aims to raise awareness about related social and political issues. They distinguish themselves from other sustainability-oriented groups at McGill such as Trottier Institute for Sustainability in Engineering and Design (TISED), and Sustainability in Engineering at McGill (SEAM). Marc Chelala, director of communications at EWB, told The Daily, “[EWB] has been misconceived by faculty as being another sustainability group and overlapping with SEAM and TISED, but [sustainability] is just one of our goals. There is also a focus on human issues, ethics, and social responsibility.” Topics covered during GE week will include green building, water
justice, and gender equality. “There’s not a lot of focus for electrical engineering students on the impact of their work on the environment. There are discussions in civil, mechanical, and chemical engineering on how to be environmentally friendly, but there is a not a lot for information technology.” said Paul Takayesu, vice president of Global Engineering McGill. One of the ways GE week will try to improve skills outside the classroom is by holding debates on various controversial issues such as nuclear energy and genetic engineering. According to Takayesu, “The idea behind that is that engineers know how to communicate. We’re not really taught that much and some people don’t take it too seriously in class.”
On the national level, Global Engineering is trying to implement GE certificates in universities. The program aims to expand the role of engineers as global citizens while complementing existing engineering programs. Steps are already being made across Canada; the idea has been drafted and accepted at electrical engineering department at the University of Calgary. It is possible that the GE certificate will be seen at McGill in coming years. “They are now looking at McGill and Concordia, and are trying to set up meetings. […] So things are moving, but it’s always going to be slow,” said Takayesu. Many members of the engineering faculty like the idea in principle, but are not ready to implement it just yet. “I think it’ll
take a few more steps to get people on board,” admitted Takayesu, “I think there is not a doubt that profs want to see change as well […] but they don’t want to put themselves out there and put in all this extra time when they don’t have support from everyone else. And that’s where EWB can come in to help and give their support.” Chelala continued, “It’s interesting because everyone defines sustainability in their own way. It’s not just about the environment and being eco-friendly. It’s about being considerate of the cultural, human, and social aspects.” Global Engineering Week will be held from March 18 to the 21. More information can be found on the Global Engineering Week at McGill Facebook event. All events are free.
Health&Ed
March 17, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily
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Revitalizing endangered languages Learning opportunities for Indigenous languages in Quebec Vivienne Walz Health&Ed Writer
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ebruary 21 marked the United Nations’ International Mother Language Day, a day to celebrate linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism. The languages currently spoken by Indigenous peoples in Canada are among the most diverse in the world, with over 60 different responses recorded in the 2011 census. Though this may seem like a large number, Canada’s linguistic diversity is diminishing, with 16 of those languages severely endangered, and 31 languages rated as critically endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. These languages, incompletely and infrequently spoken by the grandparent generation and older, are on the brink of extinction. Though these statistics paint a grim picture, several efforts at language revitalization have had success in producing new native speakers of endangered languages. Language nests, which are immersion-based early childhood language education programs, have been successful in many communities in danger of losing their language. The idea originated during Maori revitalization efforts in New Zealand, and has been implemented in Hawaii and across Australia. In Canada, these programs exist in several provinces and territories, including British Columbia and the Northwest Territories. The latter has over 20 nests, covering all the official Aboriginal languages of the territory. Aliana Parker, Language Revitalization Program Specialist at the First Peoples’ Cultural Council in British Columbia, highlighted some of the challenges associated with developing language nest programs. “Most of the languages have only a handful of speakers left, all of whom are elders. So it’s really hard to create a full immersion environment, as it can be challenging to have the elders in the nest for a long enough period of time, or [to find] other speakers who are younger, and [...] who are able to speak the language and work in the nest.” Kahnawà:ke is a Mohawk community located across the river from Montreal on the south shore of the St. Lawrence. There, Step By Step Child and Family Centre is a grassroots organization that offers early childhood education and daycare programs with language components in Mohawk. One of the Centre’s main objectives is to provide early intervention programs to support pre-
Alice Shen | The McGill Daily schoolers’ development alongside culturally relevant education. The Summer Mohawk Immersion Program, which first piloted in 2008, is designed for three-year-olds to gain enough knowledge of the language to continue their schooling in Mohawk. The program has proven to be so successful, growing from one or two children to 11, that a Mohawk immersion daycare program is in the works. Debbie Delisle, executive director of Step By Step, says that, “There’s not that many speakers [of Mohawk] left in our community so the revival of our language is paramount.” Delisle adds that people start to realize the importance early childhood investment has for the future of language and culture, which became the foundation of the programming at Step by Step. “We used to have a curriculum [that was] very basic. [...] Then we started learning more about our own culture, because we had a lot of learning to do too because of our history. [...] Today, our curriculum is culture and language, and we incorporate activities into that,” says Delisle. Language nests are effective because they target young children during the ideal developmental stage for language learning. Immersion-based
programs have had widespread success in producing fluent speakers of endangered languages. As Delisle says, “All the literature says that from zero to six is the most critical part of a child’s life because it builds the foundation to where they’re going to be in the future.” In April 2014, a new language nest will be starting in Kahnawà:ke. The project, entitled Iakwahwatsiratátie (which translates to “Our Families Are Continuing”), is headed by Karihwakátste Cara Deer and Ieronhienhawi McComber, and has received federal funding from the Aboriginal Head Start program. Deer explained that there was a previous language nest program in Kahnawà:ke from 2005 to 2007, but it stopped mainly due to lack of funding. Meanwhile Deer and McComber planned to revive the nest by researching other language nest programs, applying for funding and learning more of their language. When asked why preserving Mohawk is important, Deer said, “It’s at the core of what defines us. [...] Our language is deeply rooted within our culture as well as within our ceremonies and our ways of life.” Parker observed that, “We’re beginning to see more and more
evidence of when students are able to participate in a language immersion program in their mother tongue or their cultural language. It has huge positive impacts on their academic and social success, health, and well-being.” In Montreal, there are a few opportunities available for adults to learn Indigenous languages. In early 2013, the Avataq Cultural Institute began offering Inuktitut language classes in Montreal. In the fall of the same year, First Peoples’ House began to offer informal Mi’gmaq classes. Paige Isaac, First Peoples’ House Coordinator, said, “The classes started because there is a large enough group of Mi’gmaq students and staff at McGill and in Montreal, and we had a fluent speaker amongst us.” Yet, learning the language in Montreal has its challenges, said Isaac. “There are basically no opportunities to speak the language in Montreal except for this class so far. You need fluent speakers and I only know two at McGill – which is great, but I need to learn more first.” In February, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced “an historic agreement” with the Assembly of First Nations to reform the First Nations educa-
tion system. According to Harper’s website, the legislation aims to establish a statutory funding regime, including language and culture, in the curriculum, while recognizing that “First Nations are best placed to control First Nations education.” The reform, however, is not welcome everywhere – on December 18, 2013, the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) of Kahnawà:ke published a position statement rejecting the proposed legislation and demanding that the government “immediately cease all actions related to [its] development, passage and implementation.” One of the many reasons for this is the trauma endured in the residential schools system, which has demonstrated to the community “the severe harm that can come to our children and community with external control of education.” As Tiffany Harrington, a U2 student at McGill, says, “You have a whole worldview within a language and it’s something that socializes you and ties you in relation with people and land.” If language education is not a priority within the First Nations Education Act, then the already fragile linguistic diversity in Canada will be placed under even more pressure.
Sports
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For the love of the game On the desire for athletes to give everything for the team Evan Dent The McGill Daily
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n March 11, defenceman Rich Peverley of the National Hockey League (NHL)’s Dallas Stars suddenly collapsed while sitting on the bench after a shift. Peverley had been previously diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat and had reportedly been adjusting his medication. When he collapsed, the entire Dallas team knew what had gone wrong, and medical professionals quickly attended to Peverley. These doctors performed CPR and defibrillation, allowing Peverley to regain consciousness. Upon waking, he reportedly asked how much time was left in the period, and if he could get back in the game. For some of the corners of the internet that I detest, this was a sign of Peverley’s status as a hockey player – that he had such grit and determination that nothing would stop him from playing. Various memes emerged comparing Peverley to players in other sports, lionizing Peverley in contrast to other ‘soft’ athletes. Hockey especially has this desire to show its toughness – whether it is as simple as losing a couple of teeth and continuing to play, or as extreme as Boston Bruins forward Brad Marchand playing through game six of the Stanley Cup Finals last year with an assortment of injuries that eventually resulted in a collapsed lung. Barry Petchesky, writing on Deadspin, described this desire to show hockey’s toughness (as a quality of the entire sport) as part of a fan inferiority complex – especially because most of the comparisons use LeBron James, star player for the Miami Heat of the National Basketball Association (NBA), and perhaps the most famous athlete in North America right now. It’s a desire to show that their athletes are the best because of their overwhelming toughness. Of course, the viewpoint that makes the most sense to me, at least, is that this commitment to play through anything is ridiculous, and just plain dangerous. The level of competitiveness that leads someone to wake up after being defibrillated and ask to keep playing is not admirable; it’s scary. But the celebration of devotion such as Peverley’s feeds into the burgeoning trend of a near- fetish for athletes to be hyper-competitive and ‘gritty,’ and to love what they do unconditionally. ‘Gritty’ or ‘hard-working’ are
Jasmine Wang | The McGill Daily meaningless terms that have come to mean far too much, signifying a player (especially in hockey) who just works harder than anyone else. It’s an intangible descriptor that usually refers to anyone who doesn’t have a ton of skill. Synonyms for this include ‘high motor’ and ‘energy guy,’ or whatever bland platitude you desire. Either way, it allows for coaches, the media, and fans to celebrate the seeming passion of a player. With that comes the expectation that every athlete should give everything they have to the game, and that they should love every second of it. There’s a sort of enmity that comes with much of the support for professional athletes, and it increases the more that they’re paid. Never mind that it’s the owners and organizations themselves that decide how much a player should be paid – if someone is paid so exorbitantly, then they should always be working hard. The “love what you do, do what you love” ethos in work has probably annoyed any college graduate entering the job market. For a professional athlete, it’s expected that you love every aspect of your
job and that you give every ounce of effort. Since they play a ‘game’ for a living – something that is the envy of people who grew up playing said games – any sign that they don’t think it’s the best thing to do on Earth is met with scorn. This, of course, ignores the fact that athletes play physically demanding and damaging sports with long-term effects and the fact that they live under constant scrutiny by the media. It’s not hard to see how you wouldn’t love that, and there have been many athletes who claim they hated what they were doing while still being very good at it. Andre Agassi, the famed tennis player, despised tennis throughout his career, and Benoit Assou-Ekotto, a soccer player in the English Premier League (one of the best – if not the best – soccer league in the world) admitted he had no special passion for the game. Like any other job, it’s a way to make a living, love or no love for it. Rashard Mendenhall, a former running back for the National Football League’s (NFL) Arizona Cardinals, announced his retirement last week at the age of 26. In an explanation for his early retirement, pub-
lished in the Huffington Post, Mendenhall somewhat falls into hard work clichés, bemoaning the loss of appreciation for hard-working guys as people now focus on scoring and touchdown dances. He ascribes this grit to the old guard of athletes who really cared about the game, rather than being a celebrity. This idealization of hard work as some throwback to a better age, a nostalgia for when it was all about the game, is ingrained in some of the players themselves, showing its reach. Mendenhall’s column, on the other hand, also displayed why someone might be disillusioned with their job in professional athletics, as he says that he “no longer wish[es] to put [his] body at risk for the sake of entertainment,” and that he would live “without the expectation of representing any league, club, shield or city.” Representing your team in an extremely public sphere means selflimitation of speech and action, and the game itself, especially football, usually leads to long-term post-career injury. Of course, since grittiness and hard work themselves are almost entirely intangible concepts, deciding who is and who is not working
hard enough becomes a rather subjective exercise. As Ryan Lambert on Yahoo! Sports pointed out in a piece on Peverley, ‘grit’ in hockey is almost always assigned to white, North American players, indicating that the issue is at least a bit racialized. Media members with a grudge can start pointing out players who don’t work hard enough for them – usually those players who make the most money – and, cherry-picking certain plays, can make their case that someone is loafing it out there. Once a player is marked as not loving the game, it’s hard to ever come back and prove otherwise (again, because the phrase itself is mostly entirely subjective). The desire for hard-working, for-the-love-of-the-game players may be well-intentioned, but it has gone to extreme levels where someone can receive praise for doing incredibly dumb things and putting their well-being at risk. How much is enough for us now? Sure, there’s something admirable about it, if you don’t think about it for more than two seconds, but remember that these athletes are people too, people who might hate their job just as much as you.
Culture
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Bursting the theatrical bubble A conversation on McGill students involved in Montreal theatre Rochelle Guillou and Nathalie O’Neill Culture Writers
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I think the main barrier [to performing off-campus] is language,” explained Meghan McNeil, who has worked on stage management, lighting, and set design for a number of McGill theatre productions. “Many students heavily involved with McGill theatre are not confident enough in their language skills to branch out of the anglophone theatre community, which more than halves the opportunities. Any monolingual artist will lose audience and some of their medium in a multilingual area.” Montreal has over 50 indoor and outdoor theatre and performance venues, according to the National Theatre School of Canada. The majority of these showcase francophone performances, while the Centaur Theatre Company and the Segal Centre for Performing Arts reign over the anglophone theatrical scene. But a number of independent anglophone theatre organizations have sprung up in the past few decades and continue to develop, often dabbling in bilingualism. Amy Blackmore, director of the St-Ambroise Montreal Fringe Festival told Silo Magazine, “The [Montreal] anglophone community really needs the Fringe. The theatre community doesn’t have tons of opportunities for emerging artists in Montreal. Whereas, on the French side, there’s lots of opportunities all year. So they don’t need it as much as anglophone artists.” The Fringe Festival has recently implemented a quota to ensure it features both French and English productions. Blackmore reports that the festival headquarters themselves have become bilingual. “I’ve been joking about the idea of next year having a Frenglish category for quotas at the festival,” said Blackmore. “Now I’m wondering, is there a need for [a Frenglish category]?” “As an audience member going to see performances I don’t feel that language should be a barrier,” explained Daniel Carter, the Drama
Khoa Doan | The McGill Daily & Theatre Representative for the Department of English Student Association (DESA), and the Publicity Director and Secretary for the McGill Savoy Society, “it is only one tool of many that is used in theatre, and understanding and meaning can come from several outlets, not just language. I’m hopeful to see a more diverse collection of theatre at McGill and in Montreal in later years; witnessing a performance in a different language is pleasantly surprising and enjoyable.” But the number and diversity of people who come to see McGill theatre productions is still very limited, partly due to this language barrier. “Honestly, most of the people who attend [McGill theatre productions] are people who know someone in the show, or who are heavily involved in McGill theatre,” said McNeil. This does not, however, limit the knowledge and experience gained from working with the McGill theatre community. For many, McGill theatre has been the stepping stone for later entering the greater Mon-
treal theatre community. “I have found that the strength of the McGill theatre community lies within the foundation it has provided for many people to move on into various theatrical performances in the larger Montreal community,” explained Jess Banner, Publicity Director for the Players’ Theatre. “Theatre companies have been formed and [have] succeeded in the world of Montreal theatre in part from the experience and support of the McGill community. As the community is fairly small, the sense of support is tangible.” “A lot of theatre buffs from McGill have gone [on] to work within the established Montreal theatre community, and some have even created their own production companies,” said McNeil. “Quite a lot of these people are still in touch with their McGill roots, especially through social media.” Juggling a class load and involvement in campus theatre often limits the time and energy students can put into looking for gigs off-campus.
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“My off-campus theatre experience is a bit limited [and] my main role is being a theatregoer and watching the plays and productions that are in the community,” explained Carter. “However, just this year, I have decided to branch out into the Montreal theatre scene and will be performing in the Montreal Fringe Festival in June.” Despite the language barrier, theatre at McGill provides something unique and invaluable for students trying to turn their passion into a career. “I find that the student theatre at McGill is very politically, socially, and culturally aware, much like many productions that are being mounted in Montreal,” said Carter. “I like to think that both McGill and Montreal theatre [aim] to make a critique and be critical of things, rather than existing solely for entertainment. There’s quite a bit of experimental theatre that happens in Montreal and I think there is a simultaneous mirroring of this between student theatre and professional theatre. At the same [time], I think student theatre is more aware
of itself as being something greater than just theatre and performance. It seems that many directors and performers want to do something with their work – to have an effect on those watching, not just being concerned with entertainment.” Yet most acknowledge that members of the McGill theatre community still need to actively make an effort to get out of the bubble. “It’s difficult to get involved if you don’t have a network and the right resources,” said Carter. “In my experience, so far, it really depends on who you know. And while you are trying to build these connections, it takes a lot of time and patience to find the right opportunities and meet the right people who will be helpful in your theatre career. Also, not knowing the right vocabulary as you start off in Montreal theatre, and any greater theatre community, gets to be a bit inhibiting. It’s important to just keep trying and searching and not being afraid to take those chances [and to know that] something will come along.”
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Culture
March 17, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily
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Reimagining Snow White as deaf Deaf Snow White incorporates English and American Sign Language Louis Denizet The McGill Daily
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now White has been been adapted, recovered, and reimagined multiple times. On their opening night, March 13, Seeing Voices Montréal and Players’ Theatre presented Deaf Snow White, one of the most creative revisions of the story yet. Jack Volpe, the director, a Montreal native who was born deaf, teaches American Sign Language at the MAB-Mackay Rehabilitation Centre, which provides specialized adaptation, rehabilitation, and social integration services to deaf people. His play is meant to raise awareness about the deaf community and to encourage the building of bridges between deaf and hearing individuals. Snow White was originally written and published by the Brothers Grimm in 1811 and rendered famous worldwide by Walt Disney in 1937. The Brothers Grimm’s original version tells the story of two princesses, one of whom becomes queen after the passing of her parents. Despite her power, the queen is cold, bitter, and jealous of her sister’s beauty and cheerfulness. Frustrated by her magic mirror’s constant reiterations of her sister’s incomparable beauty, she asks her hunter to kill Snow White and to bring back her heart in a box. Distraught by this order, the hunter tells Snow White to flee and brings the heart of a
deer back to his master. Meanwhile, Snow White finds refuge in the forest, in the house of seven friendly dwarves who work in a mine. After learning of her sister’s escape, the Queen concocts two potions. In one, she dips an apple with which to kill her sister; the other, she drinks to take the appearance of an old maid. After finding Snow White and fooling her with her old maid disguise, the Queen forces her to take a bite of the poisonous apple. Thankfully, Snow White’s love interest Prince Philip comes to her rescue before it’s too late. Unlike the original, Volpe’s Snow White is deaf and communicates with sign language. Five other characters in the play communicate this way. To render Deaf Snow White as enjoyable as possible for both deaf and hearing audiences, Volpe decided to have his actors transmit information through sign language and spoken English throughout the play. Indeed, stage actors who used sign language were dubbed by voice actors, and stage actors who spoke had their words translated by sign language actors. While voice actors were sitting in the audience, sign language actors were onstage. Volpe developed the onstage presence of the sign language actors in several creative ways. Always positioned atop three black pillars, they blended into the background when unsolicited thanks to attire and makeup that transformed
them into the likes of trees, statues, and paintings. Founded in fall 2012, the McGill club Seeing Voices Montréal is Montreal’s first American Sign Language theatre, and the only deaf theatre company in the country. “Our vision is to close the gap between the hearing and deaf world, with the use of theatre as a common medium,” explained Seeing Voices Montréal’s press release for Deaf Snow White. “To achieve this, we adapt and perform plays of well-known children’s stories which can be understood by both audiences.” Seeing Voices Montréal also aspires to eventually teaching the Langue des Signes Québécoise. In addition to educating and raising awareness, Seeing Voices Montréal wants to make sign language as enjoyable as spoken theatre. After all, theatre is certainly an art form that too often privileges the use of powerful vocal chords as opposed to quality acting. In this vein, Deaf Snow White teaches its audience a little bit of sign language. Snow White teaches the seven dwarves sign language upon their initial encounter, drawing a parallel between real life interactions between deaf and hearing people. The interactions between the deaf and hearing cast were at times choppy, something which might be due to the mixed languages. “People don’t realize that deaf actors have to follow the script differently than hear-
Khoa Doan | The McGill Daily
Khoa Doan | The McGill Daily ing actors,” Aselin Weng, a McGill Physical Therapy student and cofounder of Seeing Voices Montréal, told the McGill Reporter. Deaf actors use a variety of cues to follow the action, including body language and lip-reading. The sold-out show’s success relied on the teamwork at play between deaf and hearing actors. Deaf actress Sera Kessab, in the role of the dwarf Silly, admitted that rehearsals were tough at first, but thoroughly enjoyable as actors got to know each other better. Regardless of the rehearsal process that took place prior to opening night, the audience seemed to enjoy itself from beginning to end, and responded well to the balance between sign language and spoken English. One of the best moments of the evening was the end of the play when everyone was invited to demonstrate their appreciation of the play in whichever way they felt most comfortable, either by clapping or waving their hands (the sign language equivalent of clapping). The set choices were almost as interesting as the use of sign language. Digital designer Gordon Hart provided numerous elaborate backdrops for each scene. Al-
though props were used throughout the play, actors interacted with them sparingly, perhaps in an attempt to keep the acting minimalistic and the focus on the frequently-changing backdrops. Lights, sounds, and vibrations were also used sparsely for dramatic effect, summoned at strategic moments. Kessab certainly stood out among the cast thanks to her zeal, expressiveness, and overall perfectly cued jokes. Lauren Murphy as the Queen, and Andreia Malisia as the Queen in disguise, also offered noteworthy performances. Murphy’s austerity was dark and compelling, and Malisia’s shrill evil Queen laughter was pitch-perfect, her demeanour equally chilling. Deaf Snow White provides a unique opportunity to re-experience a favourite childhood tale in American Sign Language and spoken English simultaneously. On top of being thoroughly enjoyable in itself, Deaf Snow White’s important goal to raise awareness about the deaf community, and to encourage hearing individuals to learn sign language, is delivered in a moving and entertaining way.
Compendium!
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Lies, half-truths, and literature, I guess
Dear Reanimated Corpse of Roland Barthes Advice from philosophers, poets, and bullshitters of old
Some bullshitters Dear Reanimated Corpse of Roland Barthes, I’ve recently started something with a new girl, but I’m worried about ‘defining the relationship’ because we’re both close to graduating. What should we do? Also, what gives you the authority to speak posthumously as the all-encompassing from-the-other-sideof-human-consciousness expert on love? —Worried in Montreal RCORB: • Ah, Worried, you are approaching the point at which the real and imagined must meet, a rapidly approaching horizon that will eliminate binaries. The desired object will now be the real object, and, in that way of lovers, your possession, or what you wish to possess. This is the process of ‘definition’ if you call it, a closing of possibility. • Now, the separation that may occur; why start it if you will both ‘move on’ to different places past the academic? Now, we may think: why start anything at all? There will always be a separation of a sort; in these separations we can breathe new life into our desire, as our possessions are lost for some time, we can pine to have them again. These are necessary things, Worried, not to be feared. • Ah, yes, the question of my expertise, the very idea of me, the dead author, prescribing advice to others from my position as the dead author. I have never claimed to be an expert, though the site of this column as an advice column does assume so. Fine, then; I have decided that I will spread the wealth of advice. I am still in communication with the ‘other side’ (what you imagine happens after death, this is true, and every person will imagine something different, so this is what happens after death, that is, everything) and have asked some other fellows from the post-life space to answer this question, in order to diversify (no, wait, I hate that word), expand, your advice.
E.k. EK | The McGall Weekly • First: T.S. Eliot, the author of one of my favorite texts, The Waste Land: If we were here and also not here If here was not here yet also here If there was no here and no not here And, come spring, we might depart from here, separate Spring would not come, the wheel would never turn Snow pelting us through March, keeping us warm And how should I define? She, sitting high above, asks me to define I stand on the stairs, unable to define For there may be time, though time flits away, Perhaps a hand firmly on the helm, We will sail through waters to Thrace And there we may be happy, Inside a ceaseless scratching, Out out out out, chi-chi-ra, chi-chi-ra, O, were I Arachne, my challenge completed, hanging By my thread. • Now, another great producer of texts, William Gaddis! [Ed. Note: We eliminated four paragraphs of T.S. Eliot’s prose, which, in essence, accused Gaddis of, to paraphrase, ripping off his shit.] – You said what? Define what? – No, no, focus on these here sheets, no, look right here… –… – You said something about a relationship? – Just get your fucking head out the clouds, here, now look, what we’re looking at here is about a 24 month forecast, and, now, if we converted the preferred stock into something offshore, we can flip it for some of these dead properties, and then take these to the market, it’s easy profit, now, come on
now, look, where the fuck is your head? – La Ronde. – Your head is at the goddamn amusement park? – No, no, sorry, I was thinking of… – Jesus Christ… And now his mind, across some amount of time, across a decaying bridge, the one crumbling, just waiting for that one more car to cross over it, into that park where maybe not amusement happens but at least a sense of thrill, maybe you took the yellow for the first time, – Barbe a papa! Barbe a papa! – What is that, Stravinksy? Playing near the Boomerang? – Right, it’s all coming back up, anyway, heh heh heh, – So what are we, anyway? – … which ride? – No, we, like, us? • And, finally, an author from an era before works, Ovid! [Translated from Latin, four poems about erections excised] And, Worried, seeing his bride spurting blood, As if her vein had been hooked up to a sprinkler system, Covered the groom’s face with a coat of blood, And he watched the wedding party, inflamed by a fury, Slipping in the blood, at each other’s neck, felled in a variety of ways, Uncle Johnny ripped out Aunt June’s tongue, while the children Gouged out each other’s eyes, and Grandpa Jim decapitated The flower girl, as she had done before to the Dandelions. And you, O Worried, shouted to whatever God you knew “Dear Lord, take me away!” and with that, Jove, hearing a prayer that might still be for him, lifted Worried out to sea, dropped him, but before transformed him into a Mudskipper, forever to vacillate between land and sea. • And so, if we read the symbols in these texts – going from node, to node, to node – we can see that definition may be fraught with danger, a conversation may define the undefineable. Also, T.S. Eliot hated women.
Editorial
volume 103 number 23
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n April 7, Quebecers will go to the polls for the second time in less than two years. The election, called by Premier Pauline Marois on March 5, is a bid by the Parti Québecois (PQ) to win a majority government in the Quebec National Assembly. The PQ currently holds power as a minority government, and many of its initiatives have been met with resistance from opposition parties. As voters prepare to select their provincial leadership, they would do well to remember that representative democracy is frequently manipulated to appeal to a particular group for whom one issue may be of crucial importance. This is not true representation of the group’s interests, but a perversion through oversimplification and manipulation; and this is what the PQ has done since the last election period. Capitalizing on student strikes and corruption scandals, they won by a slim margin in 2012. Since then, the party has used its term to significantly cut funding for higher education and push an austerity program on the province, directly opposing its own proeducation platform and betraying the voters it swayed with that platform. Representative democracies contain few mechanisms to hold elected officials accountable between elections. Voting is rendered an insignificant exercise, legitimizing the growing gulf between the people and the political class. The Parti nul du Québec takes note of this, and encourages voters to choose it to indicate a protest vote, an option otherwise unavailable in Quebec elections. This provides a potential avenue for disagreement not only with politicians, but with
the very system that empowers them. There are other ways of resisting the flawed electoral setup; direct action is one major and often successful way, as exemplified by protests and student movements throughout the years. Nonetheless, the upcoming elections will return winning candidates. If Marois succeeds in guiding her party to a majority, it’s likely that Quebec will be saddled with a Charter of Values that discriminates against cultural minorities and suppresses freedom of religion. Due to fears of this consequence, this round of elections threatens to again be largely reduced to a single issue. Not only does agreement on a single issue not indicate a party’s investment in their best interests, but parties frequently renege on their own election promises. When operating within this flawed system, voters must be aware of the ways in which issues can be manipulated at election time. Whatever the outcome in April, government policy will continue to reflect the flaws of our democratic system and cause harm. These policies can, and should, be resisted. Voicing opposition through voting is frequently unsuccessful, and can lead to unintended consequences, as was the case in the 2012 provincial elections. It is then crucial that political involvement not end at the ballot box. Whoever wins, whatever initiatives pass, do not wait for the next round of elections; mobilize in whatever ways are available and feasible. Direct action is the only way to prevent the co-option of your interests. —The McGill Daily Editorial Board
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dps board of directors Queen Arsem-O’Malley, Amina Batyreva, Jacqueline Brandon, Théo Bourgery, Hera Chan, Benjamin Elgie, Camille Gris Roy, Boris Shedov, Samantha Shier, Juan Camilo Velásquez Buriticá, Anqi Zhang All contents © 2013 Daily Publications Society. All rights reserved. The content of this newspaper is the responsibility of The McGill Daily and does not necessarily represent the views of McGill University. Products or companies advertised in this newspaper are not necessarily endorsed by Daily staff. Printed by Imprimerie Transcontinental Transmag. Anjou, Quebec. ISSN 1192-4608.
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Daily Publications Society’s
Student Journalism Week March 18-21
The annual DPS Journalism Week is here! Join us March 18-21 for workshops, panels, speakers and discussions about the skills you need to be a successful interviewer, writer, and reporter! Check out www.mcgilldaily.com for last-minute updates and room assignments.
Tuesday
Thursday
Interviewing 101 (bilingual)
Science Journalism 101 (English)
4 pm. 433-A (Green Room, Shatner building)
3 pm. 433-A (Green Room, Shatner building)
Learn tips and tricks to being a great interviewer and news reporter with Anqi Zhang, Coordinating Editor, Joelle Dahm, Health&Ed Editor (McGill Daily), Camille Gris Roy, Editor-in-chief and Alexandra Nadeau, News Editor (Le Délit)!
Wednesday
Radio 101 (English) 3 pm. B-24 (Newsroom, Shatner building)
Join Diana Kwon, Science+Technology Editor, to learn the basics of how to write science jargon for laypeople and how to turn your science knowledge into prose.
Design 101 (bilingual) 4 pm. B-24 (Newsroom, Shatner building)
Join Théo Bourgery (Le Délit) and E.k. Chan (The Daily) for this design workshop. (more to come)
Tired of print? Turn your words into sound at our radio workshop with Hera Chan, Multimedia Editor and Carla Green, Features Editor!
Guest Speaker: Agnès Gruda (Francais)
Culture 101 (English)
Agnès Gruda, columnist at La Presse, has been covering news worldwide for more than 10 years now. She will be talking about international journalism.
4 pm. 433-A (Green Room, Shatner building)
Join Anqi Zhang, Coordinating Editor, to learn about how to turn what you see on the screen, stage, or canvas, into words on a page.
Guest Speaker: Andy Nulman (bilingual) 6 pm. Arts W 215
If you’ve ever gone to Just For Laughs, the world’s first and largest comedy event, you’ve seen the work of festival co-founder Andy Nulman. Mr. Nulman previously worked in entertainment journalism; he has been published in Us magazine, Variety, and Circus Magazine, and he produced over 150 Festival TV shows. He co-founded Airborne Technology Ventures, a company celebrated as a pioneer in the industry of mobile media and marketing. Among other things, he now teaches the revolutionary “Marketing and Society” class in the school’s BCom program at McGill as well. Media have a lot to offer, in so many different sectors. Andy Nulman will give his vision of the media in 2014.
6 pm.
Friday
Science Journalism Panel (in English) 3 pm. Lev Bukhman (Shatner building)
Hear from experienced science journalists Elizabeth Howell (senior writer at Universe Today and freelancer at Space.com, LiveScience, Astrobiology Magazine), David Secko (professor in Concordia’s department of journalism, part of the Concordia Science Journalism Project, and former reporter at The Scientist, CMAJ, and PLOS), and Daniel O’Leary (author of “Escaping the Progress Trap”).