vol98iss7

Volume 98, Issue 7

September 22, 2008

McGill THE

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The McGill Daily, Monday, September 22, 2008

Quebec deregulates international tuition

News

3

Only six faculties affected

Henry Gauss

The McGill Daily

T

he Quebec Ministry of Education pushed through new legislation two weeks ago that will deregulate international tuition next year by removing its tuition cap – giving Quebec universities a carte blanche to raise fees.

Noah Stewart, spokesperson for the Canadian Federation of Students – Quebec Division (CFS-Q), predicted the legislation will have a tremendous effect.

“We could see skyrocketing tuition fees,” Stewart said. “We saw the deregulation of international tuition in Ontario for professional programs, and people ended up having to pay thousands more each year.”

The Quebec government, however, will not be involved in determining the fee levies at McGill because the University’s Board of Governors (BoG) sets tuition levels. Devin Alaro, SSMU VP External, explained that realistically BoG would choose to hike fees.

“They’ve been waiting for this announcement,” Alfaro said. “McGill wants this money.”

The BoG will have free reign over the international tuition of six faculties and schools – Law, Engineering, Management, Pure Science, Computer Science, and Mathematics – charging these students more heavily than international students in other faculties.

McGill’s Media Relations Office jus-

tified the hikes in a press release, citing decreases in provincial grants for the six affected Faculties and schools.

They explained that an increase in tuition would compensate for the new funding gap.

Morton Mendelson, Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning), stated the new legislation is not as extreme as many perceive.

“We have in general applied the same rate of tuition increase for international students – 8 per cent – as has been applied in the past several years,” he wrote in a press release. “We have not surprised our international students with an exorbitant fee increase at the last minute, nor would we.”

Despite the apparently innocent and natural incline of these tuition fees, both SSMU and the CSF-Q plan to take action against the new legislation.

“We have a mandate to fight tuition increases,” Alfaro said. “We’ve been consulting with different faculty associations, and we’re trying to get more groups on board.”

SSMU, the affected faculties, and Concordia’s Student Union – affected by the same problem – are planning multiple counter offensives, ranging from petitions to demonstrations.

They will have a year to mobilize before international students feel the crunch next year when the legislation comes into effect.

“The SSMU rep on BoG [SSMU President Kay Turner] won’t be able to stop anything, so our only option would be to go outside official channels. We need to mobilize students,”

Ben Peck / The McGill Daily

said Alfaro. He will be organizing a petition and participation of McGill students at a demonstration against the tuition change to be held in Quebec City next month.

Yet the potential for blocking this legislation is minimal, both provincially and at McGill.

“It’s been hard to develop support because there’s a lot of misinformation circulating,” said Stewart.

Stewart pointed out that inflated international tuition could lead to a decrease in international students

on campus, something that Mcgill proudly draws attention to for its multicultural student body.

“People don’t understand the benefits [of having international students] ...There would definitely be less diversity on campuses,” Stewart said.

Nadya Wilkinson, SSMU VP University Affairs, questioned whether providing an internationally-oriented education should be a priority if it is not financially accessible to the very students that it targets.

“There’s a danger that less people

could enroll than would be able to.

There would be less diversity. An increase in tuition always means a decrease in accessibility,” said Wilkinson.

Principal Heather Monroe-Blum has a targeted plan for recruiting international students to McGill, which may need to be rescaled if a dramatic increase in tutition affects students’ decision to study in Quebec.

“We’re still in the early stages,” said Stewart, “but a public outcry is coming.”

from American airspace. Abdelrazik’s Canadian passport expired while he was in prison, and the Canadian government has repeatedly refused to issue him a new one.

Abdelrazik – who fled Sudan to Canada as a refugee in 1990 after being imprisoned for his political views the year earlier during a military coup – returned in 2002 to visit his ailing mother in Khartoum.

He was arrested and imprisoned several months later for suspected links to Al-Qaeda, allegedly at the request of the Canadian government.

While in prison, Abdelrazik was interrogated by both Sudanese investigators and members of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), but no evidence was found against him, and he was finally released without charge in July 2006.

At the end of that month, he was added to the UN’s Al-Qaeda terrorist blacklist, which bans him from travelling to or through any country except

his own. An objection from one of 15 UN security council members denied Canada’s request to remove Abdelrazik from the list.

Hameed pointed to Canada’s refusal to accept an offer from Sudan to fly Abdelrazik home as evidence of their unwillingness to return him to Canada.

“There are no ifs, ands, or buts – the UN travel ban explicitly permits citizens to return home, thus giving the Canadian government the right to repatriate Abdelrazik,” he said.

Foster stressed that Canadians should mobilize in favour of repatriating Abdelrazik.

“The government is banking on people’s indifference, cynicism, and racism to not speak out against these atrocities and demand change,” she said.

Representatives from the Department of Foreign Affairs were unavailable for comment on Abdelrazik’s situation.

Canadian citizen still stranded in Sudan Abdelrazik missed flight to Toronto because government failed to produce necessary travel documents Lucy Mair

News Writer

C

anada is again refusing to allow one of its citizens to come home, leaving Abousfian Abdelrazik holed up in the Canadian Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan.

The plight of Abdelrazik – who is alledgedly linked to Al-Qaeda – struck a chord with the People’s Commission on Immigration Security Measures, which led simultaneous campaigns for his immediate repatriation on September 12.

Organizer of the street theatre action in Montreal for the People’s Commission Mary Foster explained, “It has become clear that the Canadian authorities are complicit in outsourcing torture

in the name of national security, which is a frightening trend for Canadian citizens and extremely harmful to the individual victims, like Abdelrazik.”

After a lengthly ordeal, the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs promised in writing on April 18 that Abdelrazik – who holds dual Sudanese-Canadian citizenship – would be given a temporary travel document to fly to Canada provided that he could find an airline willing to fly him home. Despite his status on several no-fly lists due to alleged terrorist involvement, Abdelrazik finally booked a ticket with Etihad Airways, the national airline of the United Arab Emirates. They agreed to fly Abdelrazik on September 15 via Abu Dhabi to Toronto. Given nearly three weeks notice of the flight,

Canada balked at its promise, leaving Abdelrazik in Sudan as his flight departed.

Abdelrazik’s lawyer, Yavar Hameed, is appalled by the behaviour of the Canadian government, which he accused of hypocrisy.

“We’ve been given a number of different excuses by lawyers for the Canadian government,” said Hameed. “They say it is a very complex issue, but from my perspective it is a very simple one.”

“They keep returning to the issue that Abdelrazik is banned from travelling on commercial jets, and although this sounds reasonable, Abdelrazik has been on the no-fly list since 2006 and that was made known to the Canadian government when they promised to issue his travel documents in April [2008],” Hameed added.

Abdelrazik’s name is also included on a no-fly list specific to the U.S., meaning any airline that flies him could be permanently banned

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News

The McGill Daily, Monday, September 22, 2008

5

QPIRG challenges McGill Community awareness group says online opt-outs breach legal agreement with University

John Lapsley

News Writer

Q

uebec Public Interest Research Group (QPIRG) McGill is preparing to take legal action against the University administration to prevent the fate of its funding from being determined by the click of a mouse.

QPIRG officially accused McGill of breaching its agreement with them by introducing an online opt-out policy last September through Minerva.

The policy enables students opt out of the portion of their annual fees that supports the community-awareness student group.

Should the administration deny their agreement was breached, QPIRG will pursue legal arbitration through Montreal’s legal system.

Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning) Morton Mendelson hailed the decision to make opting out of semesterly fees – like QPIRG’s $3-a-term – a simple point-andclick process on Minerva as a more “legitimate” and “convenient” way for students to reduce their tuition.

Midnight Kitchen and Queer McGill were among the seven organizations whose fees McGill made optional on Minerva over the summer of 2007.

QPIRG’s Internal Coordinator Leila Pourtavaf criticized the ease with which students can write off opt-outable fees without knowing what servivces they provide.

“Opt-outs should allow students with moral objections to make informed decisions about their funding,” said Pourtavaf. “They shouldn’t be rebates.”

Pourtavaf stressed that QPIRG objects to the process of Minerva opt-outs, but thinks students should be given the option to refuse fees. QPIRG actually introduced the concept of optional fees to McGill 20 years ago – but they did so to remain accountable to students. Until last summer, they

handled the process manually with paper forms.

The new system’s emphasis on quicker savings for students has had disproportionate repercussions for the groups involved. QPIRG relies almost entirely on student fees for its funding and saw an $11,000 drop in revenues following the system’s implementation this past year, whereas prior to 2007 opt-out losses totaled roughly $500 a year. QPIRG estimated the new system’s annual cost at about ten per cent of their former funding.

QPIRG McGill – a student-run organization that forges the primary link between McGill and the greater Quebec community – uses funds it collects from students’ tuition to promote student activism and sponsor various working groups such as Greening McGill and the McGill Global AIDS Coalition.

Pourtavaf saw the administration’s action to overtake QPIRG’s control of its incoming funds as part of a wider campus trend.

“The administration sees student groups as a liability,” said Pourtavaf, “when in fact they’re the life of the campus. This situation is part of a series of events that have led to the Reclaim Your Campus movement, which is indicative of the general atmosphere of students being fed up.”

Dean of Students Professor Jane Everett will mediate the conflict between QPIRG and McGill by collecting the facts and then bringing the accusation and relevant data to the administration’s attention.

“My only role in this situation is as an intermediary between the student groups and the organization,” she said.

Last year, QPIRG unsuccessfully attempted to regain control of optouts through referendum. Though students voted overwhelmingly in favour of QPIRG’s autonomy, the administration’s policy on online opt-outs remained unchanged.

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Shu Jiang / The McGill Daily

A few shoppers continue to stalk up on cheese at Fromagerie Atwater where sales have dropped by 40 per cent since the listeriosis scare.

Cheesemongers struggle Madeleine Ritts and Sarina Isenberg News Writers

O

ne death and 28 cases of listeriosis linked to the province-wide outbreak of listeria in semi-pasturized and rawmilk cheeses has forced fromageries to discard large quantities of potentially uncontaminated stock.

Though cases of listeriosis – a bacterial disease that can lie dormant in patients for up to 70 days without being noticed – are found every year in Quebec, Marie-Claude Gagnon, a representative for the Quebec Ministry of Health and Public Safety, stressed the gravity of the current situation.

“It is a really serious case. We have one death related to the outbreak....

For now we hope that we are not increasing in cases, but we must be careful what exactly to predict,” said Gagnon.

Quebec’s Ministry of Agriculture (MAPAQ) introduced temporary screening measures on September 6 to control the spread of the contamination, which is unrelated to a listeria scare that triggered recent recalls of Maple Leaf meat products. The provincial crisis has led to the immediate disposal of thousands of dollars worth of products for manufacturers and small retailers alike.

According to MAPAQ’s press release, 32 of the 43 processing plants inspected were deemed safe to continue selling products in retail counters, while the results of nine others are still pending.

Clement Falardeau, a communications representative for MAPAQ, explained that two of Quebec’s major manufacturers, Les Fromagiers de la Table Ronde and Fromagerie Médard,

were identified as probable sources for the outbreak, although MAPAQ has yet to identify a link between the two sites.

“These locations are quite far apart from one another,” Falardeau said. “This makes us wonder why the same kind of bacteria was found in those two places.”

Ronald Alary, a producer at Les Fromagiers de la Table Ronde, expressed what he feels is a common sense of frustration throughout the industry. “[MAPAQ] were sure that we were the ones who had contaminated the whole province, but they are not so sure anymore,” Alary said. “I don’t think they know where it is coming from.”

According to Alary, the prolongation of the investigation places a serious economic strain on many businesses, estimating his own future losses at $100,000.

“If it lasts much longer, I know some smaller fromageries will not make it through the crisis,” he said.

“Nobody will reimburse us, and there is no insurance. We have already had to put some people on unemployment.”

But Falardeau did not see reimbursement for manufacturers and small businesses as a feasible option.

“Our goal was to protect public health,” he said, citing Minister of Agriculture Laurent Lessard, who declared that the government would not be an insurance company. “There is still discussion of what could be done. It might not be a refund, but of course we will help the industry as much as we can through promotions and any other means possible,” Falardeau added.

Yet Danie Blais of La Fromagerie Hamel and several other cheesemongers believe that there has been a

lack of communication between the government and local retailers.

“All the rules seem to be changing from store-to-store. Everyone is cleaning, but not the same way,” said Blais. Along with ten other fromageries from around Montreal, Blais has formed a collective to appeal to the government for more standardized criteria and some form of monetary compensation. Blais’ Jean Talon location has been forced to discard 2,500 kg of cheese, resulting in losses of well over $100,000.

Gil Goureonays, the owner of Montreal’s La Fromagerie Atwater, calculated his sales have dropped by 40 per cent within the past week.

“The Quebec Health Board is not dealing with the situation appropriately,” he said. “We [retailers] are not getting information.”

Maxime Arseneau, agriculture critic for the Parti-Quebecois, criticized the government for hurting the agriculture sector by not refunding business owners.

“Their reluctance to reimburse the businesses is irresponsible,” Arsenault said. “With the mad cow crisis, a lot of money was spent to support farmers. The same thing should be done now.”

Though MAPAQ has been financing most of the investigation, Falardeau noted that eventually manufacturers will be expected to conduct their own inspections.

Falardeau said that losses at this stage were unavoidable.

“The fact is there was nothing else the [MAPAQ] could do,” he said. “To take each cheese in for analysis would have taken a lot of time, and the products would not have been good for consumption by the time we finished. It was not practical and could not have been very conclusive.”

6

News

The McGill Daily, Monday, September 22, 2008

Bookstore mould triggers student worker rights violation Management prefers students don’t contact University services Olga Redko

The McGill Daily

An employee-employer tiff that stemmed from an outbreak of mould in the McGill Bookstore over the summer may be indicative of student employee mistreatments on campus, some students maintain.

A summer Bookstore employee, also a U2 student at McGill, developed a cough and sore throat when the Bookstore installed several dehumidifers. Because he and other employees at the Bookstore were uninformed about the dehumidifiers and unaware of the reason for them, he contacted the University’s

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office of Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) – the office responsible for ensuring safety and resolving hazards on campus – to determine if the dehumidifiers were treating whatever was causing his respiratory condition.

The student said that he explained the situation to an EHS representative, who said that he should expect a phone call response to his inquiry later that day.

But the student never received a call. Instead, Bookstore manager, Barry Schmidt, confronted the student about his inquiry. Schmidt had been notified about the call by the EHS. The student, who asked to remain anonymous, said that he was disrespected and resented that his case was not treated professionally.

“That’s the thing I found inappropriate. [I] called this office...asking what I thought to be a reasonable question, and instead of answering directly, [the EHS went] to my boss and had my boss essentially ask me not to call [them]...which I thought was completely rude and dishonest,” he said.

The Bookstore’s mediation of the student’s grievance, according to Schmidt, was not antagonistic, but meant to facilitate the employee’s access to information.

“I suggested to him in the nicest possible way that in the future should he have an issue about a matter in the store...if he spoke with us first, he might get the answer,” Schmidt said.

“If he wasn’t satisfied at that point, he’s more than free to talk to anyone

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The Bookstore has been particularly cold since dehumidifiers were installed. they try to get answers they end up being reprimanded,” Silverman said.

Although AMUSE does not currently have official demands, Silverman said that if the group is successfully unionized, there will likely be an effort to improve employee

complaint structures and to ensure that workers are not forced to go through their direct employers when problems arise.

At press time, the McGill Office of Environmental Health and Safety did not respond.

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Conservative drug bill shelved during elections Critics worry that Bill C-26 will target young marijuana users

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he likes in the McGill organization,” Schmidt continued.

The Bookstore’s management had independently called the EHS to report the mould growth several weeks before the student made the inquiry to report the situation, but the management did not inform its employees about of the issue.

The student employee suspected a collusion existing between the Bookstore and the EHS that violated his rights as a worker.

“They had some vested interest for looking out for the management of the store,” the student said. “I’m not sure why they couldn’t answer my call personally. That’s the part about it that bothered me.”

Over the summer the Bookstore was cleaned and the Bronfman air conditioning system was repaired, resulting in a perpetually colder temperature in the store to eradicate the growth.

While the mould was ultimately decided not to be the cause of the student’s health condition, some are still convinced the situation is indicative of a larger problem for student workers employed by McGill and their rights to information.

Max Silverman, a former SSMU VP External who is organizing the creation of an undergraduate student labour union – the Association of McGill Undergraduate Student Employees (AMUSE) – said that the mould episode fits snugly into a general pattern of disrespectful treatment of on-campus student employees.

“There’s no grievance structure in place [for student employees]. When

Jeffrey Bishku-Aykul News Writer

I

f reintroduced and passed once Parliament reconvenes following the election, a Conservative bill to impose minimum sentences for drug production and trafficking would bring major changes to Canada’s Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA).

In response to the lack of minimum penalties under the CDSA, Bill C-26 proposed new mandatory sentencing ranging between six months to three years for certain

drug offenses, particularly those with aggravating factors, such as using violence or committing an offence near a school.

“Drug producers and dealers who threaten the safety of our communities must face tougher penalties,” said Conservative Justice Minister Rob Nicholshon in a November 2007 press release.

Although the legislation did offer offenders the option of attending drug treatment in exchange for a reduced or suspended minimum sentence, it has spawned criticism from both marijuana legalization activists and drug policy reform advocates.

Tara Lyons, head of the Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy (CSSDP), believes that such legislation would greatly affect youth for the worse.

“A big part of the bill, and the bigger political context of this is that the Tories are tough on crime. This is really frustrating for me running a

Marc Emery – dubbed the “Prince youth-based organization like this, because [these policies] ruin young of Pot” – is a Vancouver marijuana people’s lives,” Lyons said. “Drug use legalization activist and the publisher is such a complex issue that requires and editor of Cannabis Culture magcomplex solutions....Young people azine. He is wanted by the U.S. government for selling marijuana seeds have to be in this conversation.”

The CSSDP organizes peer drug over the internet. education and harm reduction projects for Canadian Drug use is such a complex youth. According to the Canadian Addiction Survey, issue that requires complex a study sponsored in part solutions....Young people have

by Health Canada, 42.7 per to be in this conversation cent of Canadians between – Tara Lyons 18 and 19-years-old have Head of Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy smoked marijuana in the past year.

Citing safe injection sites Emery maintains the Conservative as an example of innovative drug policy in other countries, Lyons worried government wants to tighten drug that Canada is criminalizing drug use laws to garner votes from specific without approaching the problem demographics.

“They’re trying to scare old peocreatively.

“It’s such a backward and naive ple about crime...and scare young way to look at things. And the bill mothers about their children being abducted any moment now,” he said. exemplifies the approach,” she said.

“

News

The McGill Daily, Monday, September 22, 2008

Erin Hale

The McGill Daily

S

SMU Council convened for the first time last Thursday to introduce new members and review the result of SSMU executives’ work this summer. With the deadline for the General Assembly (GA) creeping up on October 7, and the cut-off for motions September 27, The Daily summarizes some key issues SSMU may be featuring on the GA menu and on everyone’s minds.

International tuition VP External Devin Alfaro promised SSMU would to start mobilizing against the deregulation of international student tuition, legislation that affects international students studying management, law, computer science, the pure sciences, engineering, mathematics, and medicine.

“Many students on our campus will be negatively affected by this change,” Alfaro wrote in his summer report. “It poses troubling questions about who will be able to attend McGill in the future, and also opens up the possibility of favouring admissions of international students, and favouring more ‘profitable’ faculties.”

He promised to start working

with affected faculty societies and potentially with Concordia’s student society – who also faces international tuition hikes – to issue a public letter.

Campus crackdown Last March the University attempted to establish guidelines – that SSMU President Kay Turner claimed were poorly written and overly vague – regulating student events on campus.

“The real problem with the guidelines is the stuff sounds wishy-washy.

But because it’s institutionalized, it’s problematic,” said Turner. “They give almost no paper trail.”

VP University Affairs Nadya Wilkinson said she will present Senate with a revised version of the administration’s guidelines – albeit in an uphill battle to regain student access to space on campus.

tus to the McGill Anti-Racist Coalition after its creation only a year prior.

Wilkinson has yet to declare concrete plans.

event archive, and an events calendar. All major SSMU documents will also be available in both English and French.

Student parents

Greening SSMU

Turner wants to put the issue of student parents front and centre at SSMU, though she has yet to outline exactly how her plan will be executed.

“There is absolutely no policy for student parents at McGill – they are literally invisible in terms of representation, so we are hoping on the Senate Subcommittee on Women (SCOW) , on which I sit, will be able to make some motion on policy creation for student parents in the Senate,” wrote Turner in her summer report.

A GA for daycare employees will be held on October 1.

SSMU will be completing its 100-page environmental audit by October 15. Turner said she hoped to use the audit as a basis for developing a five-year plan to green SSMU. She also suggested revising the bylaws to accommodate the proposed changes.

New SSMU web site (finally) Clubs and Services Overhaul Wilkinson has promised to improve the transition from club to service for groups under SSMU’s umbrella. Currently within the SSMU by-laws lies a delineation between a club and a service, and how a club becomes a service.

The issue was partially prompted by Council’s decision to deny service sta-

VP Internal Julia Webster promised a brand-spanking new SSMU web site to be up sometime this semester – extending her earlier promise that it would be up and running last week. The website – which cost between $7,000 and $10,000 – should feature new advertising, stream headlines from The Daily and The McGill Tribune, feature a photo

McGill Plate Club The McGill Plate Club – created last year to provide reusable plates and cutlery to students to use in the Shatner cafeteria – disappeared this fall. According to the SSMU Council, last year’s SSMU President Jake Itzkowitz arranged for the service offered by the Plate Club to be taken over the by the Work Study Program so that workers would be paid when the service returns shortly. The Plate Club will now only in order to cater larger events.

Adieu Faculty Olympics What will we do without Heather Monroe-Blum in a swimsuit? Hearts will break!

Campus eye

What’s the haps

SSMU Council highlights important issues for this fall

7

Car Free Day Monday, Sept 22, All day Don’t let us catch you trying to park on campus.

Hopefully the SecurityGuards-turned-TrafficDirectors will take the day off.

Envirofest Monday, Sept 22, All day Roddick Gates Greening McGill and McGill Environmental Students Society will host a celebration for greening initiatives at McGill. Free.

Tap Thirst Workshop Tuesday, Sept 23, 5 p.m. – 10 p.m.

1500 de Maissonneuve O., suite 204 Explore the dark side of bottled water, from corporate exclusivity contracts to detrimental environmental effects of an industry that rakes in $75-million in Quebec alone each year. Free.

Labour activist speaks about Global South Monday, Sept 22, 6 p.m.

South Asian Women’s Community Centre, 1035 Rachel E. , third floor Meena Menon, who has been active for 20 years in trade unionization in India, will speak on grass-roots activism to challenge globalization, neo-liberalism, and militarization. Free.

CURE Launch Wednesday, Sept 24, 3–6 p.m.

Centre for Gender Advocacy, 2110 Mackay The Community-University Research Exchange – which matches university students with independent research projects – is celebrating its launch at McGill. Free.

MISC Lunch & Learn Lecture Series Wednesday, Sept 24, 12:30 p.m.

3463 Peel Street, Room 201 David Thompson delivers his dissertation on leftist social movements of the unemployed in Canada from 1890 to 1960. Note: despite the event name, lunch is not provided. Free.

General Assembly Motions Deadline is Sept 27, 5 p.m.

SSMU Office, Brown Building Care about an issue on campus? Want to make McGill more democratic? Submit a motion for the GA! Farmers’ Market at McGill Tuesday, Sept 23, 11 a.m. – 6 p.m.

Three Bares Park Organic vegetable vendors bring their local wares for sale at bargain prices.

Midnight Kitchen will dish their by-donation vegan lunch at 12:30 p.m.

Nadja Popowich/ The McGill Daily

As part of the First Peoples’ House (FPH) annual Pow-Wow, Iroquois men perform in a tradtional drum circle as part of a singing and dancing performance Friday. FHP exists to provide a sense of community and a voice to Aboriginal students studying at McGill. Their Pow Wow is the University’s largest Aboriginal arts and crafts showcase.

Looking for some free advertising for your nonprofit event? Email it with “HAPS” in the subject line to news@mcgilldaily.com

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

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The position must be filled by a McGill student belonging to any faculty other than the Faculty of Arts, duly registered during the upcoming Winter term, and able to sit until April 30, 2009. Board members gather at least once a month to discuss the management of the newspapers, and make important administrative decisions.

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Science + Technology

The McGill Daily, Monday, September 22, 2008

9

Evolution simulation gets the facts wrong And intelligent Design gets a little boost Kevin Wei

Sci+tech Writer

I

t begins when you crash down to earth as a microorganism on a meteorite. As the computer game, called Spore, progresses, you evolve from tiny cell, to sea creature, to land animal, to a civilization capable of intergalactic domination.

With each new evolutionary step, you direct how your organism evolves by changing its form or giving it more brainpower. Spore, as an evolution simulator and civilization-building game, is addicting. But it’s also inaccurate.

Spore does a rudimentary job portraying some of the criteria for evolution, such as the passing of traits from parent to offspring, and the superiority of some traits over others for reproduction and survival.

The game falls short on other crucial criteria for evolution. It doesn’t

portray variation between individuals or high mortality, two important aspects of the process. Nor does it portray random mutation that causes new forms. Instead, it does just the opposite, having the player – an intelligent being – direct the evolutionary path that the creature takes.

This not only makes the game “un-evolutionary”, but worse, it instills the game with a tint of creationism. Divinely directed evolution is the basic idea behind Intelligent Design, a modern, prettified version of creationism.

Creationism holds that life was created and guided by one or multiple higher beings. As such it is the main competititor with evolutionary theory. Its popularity is mostly due to public misunderstanding of how evolution works. Creationism is not a scientific theory, and therefore is not considered seriously in the scientific community.

Aside from failing to portray ran-

Noelani Eidse / The McGill Daily

dom mutation, Spore also warps the chronological scale of natural history.

In less than 20 minutes, you can see your microorganism grow into an aquatic creature and then grow legs to climb onto land. In about the same amount of time, you can play through the next phase, in which your creature develops an adequate brain for social behaviour with members of its own species. Much more time is spent on the following three phases: the tribal phase, civilization phase, and final

outer-space phase. To get a flavour of how inaccurate this is, recall that if the history of life on earth was condensed into a 24-hour video, human civilization would last less than one second.

Of course, that would make a disastrous game.

Spore also misrepresents evolution by giving it a direction. No matter how many times you play through the game, you’ll always end up as an advanced race of beings, zooming around the universe. Real evo-

lution has no direction: whales are mammals that returned to the sea, ostriches are birds that returned to land, and it’s possible that humans might one day return to the trees.

Civilization isn’t an inevitable product of evolution, but a chancy one.

One must remember, of course, that Spore is a game. It’s entertainment. This is no different than all the other sci-fi nonsense that we enjoy. And indeed, this is a game to have fun with – so long as we don’t take it too literally.

Fraught laptop project takes aim at digital divide and poverty Project brings Internet access to children in the developing world Elan Spitzberg

Sci+tech Writer

T

he World Wide Web isn’t world-wide in the social sense. While in theory it can be accessed anywhere, billions of people around the planet don’t have the opportunity to log on.

The One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC), founded in 2005, has been trying to solve this inequality with a cheap, tough laptop designed for distribution to children in developing nations. In under two years, the non-profit project has shipped over

600,000 computers to five countries, and has started pilot projects in seven more. OLPC has lofty goals: its mission statement is “to eliminate poverty and create world peace by providing education to the poorest and most remote children on the planet.”

Whether laptops can have an effect on poverty or war is unclear.

One common argument posits that Internet access may help eliminate economic inequality by giving people access to the same educational and business tools used in wealthy nations. And Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of OLPC, believes that universal Internet access could break down divisions between nations: “Twenty years from now, children are not going to know what nationalism is,” he said at an information technology conference in Brussels.

Despite such hopeful forecasts, critics of the OLPC laptop – called

XO-1 – say that introducing widespread Internet access via laptop to developing nations will probably have mixed effects. In a country such as India, where a Western-influenced middle class is already growing, Internet education for young children could be very helpful in accelerating the country’s economic rise.

But in countries with malnourished or war-torn populations and impoverished economies based on local rural traditions, many think Internet access is unlikely to be a silver bullet for poverty. According to McGill Education Professor Aziz Choudry, it’s possible that the Internet might even have the negative effect of suppressing traditional cultures.

“Claims of universality of education need to be treated critically.

Sometimes they are used to silence other histories and types of thinking,” he said.

Another controversial aspect of the

OLPC computer is its use of Windows after years of commitment to open source software. Microsoft, fearful that Linux, an open source, free operating system, could become the standard in developing nations, has offered Windows XP on a new version of the computer which will cost only $75 – compared to today’s $188. These computers will not feature Linux.

Although the move could give Microsoft dominance of the computer market in some developing nations, Charles Kane, OLPC president and Chief Operating Operator, doesn’t think this bears on the OLPC’s objectives.

“It’s about getting it into kids’ hands. Anything that is contrary to that objective, and limits that objective, is against what the program stands for,” Kane said in an interview with Technology Review.

One aspect of the OLPC laptop that has helped it overcome opposi-

tion from corporations and public controversy is its design. The keyboard is the first to come in 18 languages; the machine has the same resilience as Nalgene bottles, and can survive being dropped, immersed in water, or generally scuffed-up. Its screen can switch from colour to a black-and-white mode that’s visible in direct, Sahara-intensity sunlight. And the computer supports a kind of local Internet called a mesh network, which allows nearby computers to link up without an Internet connection – a resource that is often hard to come by in the remote areas where many children use the computer.

All of these design elements have helped keep the project going despite opposition from corporations such as Microsoft and Intel, and difficulties with pricing. It will take more than design for this project to succeed, though. The true test will be its longterm effects on developing societies.

10 Features

Aditi Ohri turns to Griffintown’s artists for new perspectives on the neighbourhood’s fate

W

alk south on Peel, turn left on Ottawa, and you’ll find nine streets with anglophone names that span south towards the Lachine Canal and east toward the expressway. Sandwiched between the Old Port and St. Henri is the crumbling charm of Griffintown, Montreal’s first and largest faubourg. Once home to a proud community of working-class Irish immigrants and their descendents from the 1840s onwards, Griffintown is considered by many to have been the first of Canada’s industrial slums.

Today Griffintown is somewhat of a rough jewel in the city’s landscape, largely forgotten due to years of negligent planning policy and harmful zoning bylaws following the area’s deindustrialization. Now, this ex-village tucked into Montreal’s southwest borough is finally being remembered and respected – at last, it is being mourned.

This past weekend’s three-day event, “Remember Griffintown”, was planned in an attempt to educate and inform Montrealers about Griffintown’s rich past, fruitful present, and uncertain future. Many attendees were unaware of the issues confronting Griffintown before showing up to the event. Even coordinators Elizabeth Bono and Paul Alecko confessed they had been unfamiliar with the area’s history until news of its plight reached their ears six months ago. The pair shot a film together in Griffintown and were floored by the experience. “We fell in love with the presence of the place, the feeling of being in a place detached from downtown but still so much a part of Montreal,” said Bono.

Like the “Remember Griffintown” organizers and attendees, most Montrealers don’t

know much, if anything, about Griffintown – but you might know more than you think.

You may have heard of the Friendship Cove on Murray street, an artists’ loft and venue, and you have most definitely seen the letters of the Farine Five Roses sign glowing from Montreal’s southwest tip. If you take the train in and out of this city, you have departed from and been received by Griffintown’s grungy exterior, a passageway that is not without its beauty, crumbling and grimy though it is. Leo’s Horse Palace on Ottawa street is where Old Montreal’s horses are kept when they’re not trotting for tourists; The Darling Foundry, a thriving art gallery perched on the edge of Griffintown, is a testament to the potential for revitalized industrial structures.

Despite these indications of Griffintown’s burgeoning culture, Montreal’s powers-that-be have made plans that will permanently alter the neighbourhood. On April 24, 2008, the City of Montreal released a PPU (Plan Particulier d’Urbanisme) for Griffintown. Devimco, a private developer that specializes in the construction of large scale, consumer-driven shopping centres in suburban areas – like the Quartier Dix30 on the south shore – will invest $1.3-billion to radically transform Montreal’s Peel basin. The company plans to fill the area with luxury condominiums and what is expected to be the largest shopping center in the city, obliterating the historic structures and street grids – the first to be built in North America – that make up the unique landscape of this Montreal community.

But the development planned for Griffintown is not only an architectural and historical concern. Residents will be forced to relocate or sell their property to Devimco. This is troubling

for Griffintown’s artists: rather than fostering the growth of a creative community, the city is forcing it to disband. According to Jack Dylan, a Montreal poster artist who has lived in Griffintown since 2005, “Montreal is running out of artist-friendly neighbourhoods and spaces.”

Creative resistance Many artists have gone beyond the studio in their efforts to shape Griffintown’s past and future – and their place within it. Caroline Andrieux, the founder of Quartier Éphémère – an artists’ collective that exhibits their work in the Darling Foundry – was hoping to turn the New City Gas company, a converted gas production facility, into an artists’ community centre prior to the city’s recent project announcement. Andrieux has been pushing the city’s developers to alter their plans, to at least leave space for artists in its new buildings.

Even the Darling Foundry’s guest residents, German multimedia artists Stephan Koeperl and Sylvia Winkler, took up the “Save Griffintown” cause before the Devimco plans were approved. A few days after their arrival in Montreal this April, the pair accidentally stumbled onto a protest march just outside the Darling Foundry loft. The “Funeral for Griffintown” was a mock procession held on April 27, three days after the city’s project was announced. The two were amazed by the passion and commitment of all those involved in the demonstration, and immediately offered their support. They participated in last weekend’s event not only by performing a protest song, but by donating $1,000 to a Montreal curator with plans to create an installation of

alternative, sustainable design possibilities for Griffintown.

Last Saturday’s highlights included a walking tour of the neighbourhood guided by Dennis Delaney, an Irish-Canadian who grew up in Griffintown, a presentation by Irish-Canadian urban planner Stephen Peck, and an art show at the New City Gas Company.

The art show featured paintings and photographs by artists based in southwest Montreal.

Harvey Lev’s canvasses depicted Griffintown’s transformation as he had witnessed it over the decades: images of the Bonaventure expressway in its early construction; backgrounds of fire engulfing Irish tenements; the site of St. Ann’s church before and after its demolition. Lev, having lived in Griffintown since 1963, boasts his status as its longest-standing resident and has been an eyewitness to its de-industrialization.

“Remember Griffintown” offered important insight into a part of the city that drew little to no media attention until this past year. The evidence of such thriving artistic activity provided a glimpse into the diverse community that makes up Griffintown, despite the visible decay of its physical milieu.

There goes the neighbourhood Griffintown’s Irish community fell into decline during the 1960s. At this time Mayor Jean Drapeau imposed a zoning bylaw restricting all newly-built structures in the area to industrial purposes. Subsequently, the Bonaventure was constructed and many parking lots were paved.

This forced out most of the area’s remaining residents, since they could not build new residential structures and were denied the opportunity to

The McGill Daily, Monday, September 22, 2008

improve their existing homes. At this point, the Irish community had achieved upward mobility: No longer impoverished, many residents migrated to wealthier neighbourhoods. In 1970, St. Ann’s church – the heart of Griffintown’s Irish Catholic community – was demolished due to the gradually diminishing size of its parish. Until now, investment in Griffintown has been minimal. Five years ago, the population of Griffintown was 87; today it is estimated to be around 50. Despite the area’s dwindling population and 0 infrastructure, many see nothing but potential for the faubourg.

Griffintown: the next Plateau?

Griffintown has been called an “up-and-coming” neighbourhood in the last year, although neither the municipality nor the enlisted developers have recognized its potential to develop as an urban community. At a city council meeting in April, Devimco co-president Serge Goulet referred to Griffintown as a “decimated neighbourhood that [Montrealers] have to pass through on their way to the South Shore via the Victoria Bridge.” In response to his critics, “we have listened to the people of the Southwest and we’ve accepted the challenges the city of Montreal demanded that we meet. Our new project will be of an international scope and Montrealers will be proud of it.”

Chris Gobeil, a community activist from the Committee for the Sustainable Redevelopment of Griffintown (CSR Griffintown), believes that with small-scale reinvestments the area could be transformed into a neighbourhood similar to the Plateau. The Plateau is appealing for many reasons: the streets are lined with small-

scale mixed-use businesses; the demographic ranges from starving artists and sloppy students to young middle-income families; most necessities are at biking if not walking distances; and it is a short commute to downtown. The Plateau is dotted with public parks and recreational spaces, and unlike vertical high-rise landscapes that restrict one’s capacity to physically interact with one’s surroundings, the Plateau’s mid-range density and horizontal layout foster familiarization with the neighbourhood’s social and physical geography. CSR Griffintown has made suggestions to urge development in such a direction: the inclusion of mixed-income housing; building height restrictions as well as the enforcement of a human density cap; a horizontal building configuration with smatters of green space as opposed to the placement of condos in stacks and blocks; sidewalk space taking precedence over parking lots; and the dispersal of small shops throughout various streets as opposed to a concentrated mega-mall. While a few of these suggestions have been incorporated into Devimco’s latest plan, such as the inclusion of lower-income housing, these concessions have been insufficient in the eyes of commentators and activists.

The current project proposed for Griffintown is a large-scale investment over ten years; however, Gobeil believes that in the same amount of time, positive changes in the direction of a “modern Plateau MontRoyal” could easily be made. Likeminded activists see this urban crisis as an opportunity to set a precedent

in sustainable urban development. “Our city has to welcome young families,” Gobeil urges, “not just single people in 400-square-foot condos like the kind they want to build here. We need to have an urban redevelopment that isn’t just for consumers, but for citizens and residents. We need a community where people can go down to the street and find something to do other than shop.”

Montreal’s governing powers have been criticized by Montrealers for tuning out public opinion and ignoring the desires of Griffintown residents. The municipality maintains that this development is in the city’s best financial interest, a claim that has been hotly contested. Southwest Montreal borders the shops of Ste. Catherine and Atwater market; a mega shopping-centre poses the threat of detracting business from these smaller, independently-run businesses.

11

Mayor Gerald Tremblay and Devimco have failed to heed the advice of expert urban planning institutions in the city, such as the Commission d’Urbanisme and the Conseil de Patrimoine de Montréal. Both panels have assessed the plans and have strongly advised against the project.

Even the Ordre des urbanistes du Québec have sent a petition to the municipality urging them to reconsider the decision.

For years, the city of Montreal has adhered to outdated planning practices that have angered its citizens. An obvious example is the destruction of countless historically unique and architecturally important Montreal mansions during the 1970s. The demolition of these buildings opened up space for skyscrapers in the city’s financial district, as well as various commercial endeavours that could likely have been accommodated inside the formerly existing structures.

Activists with CSR Griffintown believe that, after years of negligence, it is finally time for responsible urban planning to be prioritized in Montreal politics.

“It’s a historic opportunity here,” Gobeil claims, “in a 50-acre site in downtown Montreal to create a vision for the future. What do we want? Do we want towers of shopping centres or do we want a community?”

Devimco plans to begin its construction of the Griffintown project in the summer of 2009.

Ben Peck / The McGill Daily

12 Commentary

The McGill Daily, Monday, September 22, 2008

Must doctors perform procedures they deem immoral?

volume 98 number 07

Christopher Leo

editorial 3480 McTavish St., Rm. B-24 Montreal QC, H3A 1X9 phone 514.398.6784 fax 514.398.8318 mcgilldaily.com

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POINT

A

debate has arisen in Ontario that cuts to the core of staunchly held conceptions of morality and individual rights.

This summer, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) – the licensing body for doctors in the province – released a draft policy entitled Physicians and the Ontario Human Rights Code.

The document describes physicians’ current obligations to their patients under the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) regarding matters of discrimination and the accommodation of disabilities.

Causing concern among members of the Ontario Medical Association is the policy’s new code of conduct regarding a doctor’s personal, moral, or religious beliefs, and the impact such beliefs may have on decisions made within a professional capacity.

The central policy passage instigating the most intense ire states the new direction clearly. “Personal beliefs and values and cultural and religious practices are central to the lives of physicians and their patients. However, as a physician’s responsibility is to place the needs of the patient first, there will be times when it may be necessary for physicians to set aside their personal beliefs in order to ensure that patients or potential patients are provided with the medical treatment and services they require.”

The implications of this policy are that doctors who refuse to perform abortions, prescribe birth-control pills, or refer same-sex couples to

a fertility clinic may be engaging in professional misconduct subject to disciplinary measures under the Ontario Human Rights Code, up to and including the loss of their license to practice medicine in the province.

A series of articles and commentary on the issue in the National Post this August prompted Dr. Preston Zuliani, president of the CPSO, to write a letter to the editor, which reads, “All services that doctors provide...are [already] subject to the obligations of the Human Rights Code.”

“If physicians feel they cannot provide a service for [moral or religious] reasons, the draft policy does expect physicians to communicate clearly, treat patients with respect, and provide information about accessing care.”

Zuliani is correct. Public health care is funded by our government and by taxpayers. Ever since the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in R. v.

Morgentaler (1988), our country is one of only a few worldwide with no legal restrictions on abortion, just like none exist on birth control, or for same-sex couples, and so on.

While it is well within the purview of each individual to decide his or her personal beliefs, the fact is that doctors are performing a public service in a public sphere, and therefore should not be able to deny taxpayers those services that the government has deemed legal, acceptable, and medically necessary.

The vital question is this: to what extent should a doctor’s personal, moral, and religious beliefs affect the professional decisions he or she makes in the performance of a public service? Should a Jehovah’s Witness doctor be allowed to refuse the provi-

sion of a life-saving blood transfusion?

What happens when a young woman in a small rural town seeks an abortion referral from her local doctor and is denied? Should doctors be held responsible for this invocation of personal moral beliefs that could have a negative impact on a patient’s life?

An examination of access to abortion services in Atlantic Canada illustrates just how important these new recommendations are. A detailed study released in the summer of 2007

by Canadians for Choice showed that in Nova Scotia, only four out of 30 hospitals offer the procedure; Labrador and P.E.I. hospitals offer no abortion services; Newfoundland has three hospitals that will perform the procedure; and in New Brunswick, strict regulations mean that a woman seeking an abortion must obtain two testimonials from doctors willing to say it is medically necessary before she can proceed.

In many instances, researchers who contacted Atlantic hospitals about abortion services were greeted with personnel largely unfamiliar with their abortion policies who failed to provide referrals if no doctor at the hospital performed the procedure.

While the Supreme Court has deemed there should be no legal limits on abortion in this country, the health care sectors of many provinces still make it difficult for a woman to exercise personal choice in this matter. It is sobering and shameful that 20 years after R. v. Morgentaler, women all across this country still remain vulnerable to such discrimination.

Canada is not alone in examining this issue. On August 18 of this year,

when a medical clinic in California refused to artificially inseminate a woman in a same-sex relationship, the Supreme Court of California ruled that the rights of religious freedom and free speech do not exempt a physician from compliance with the state’s Civil Rights Act’s prohibition against discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Undoubtedly, if the new draft policy of the CPSO is successfully implemented, the effects will be far reaching. Medical schools in the province will need to talk more openly about the procedure and teach it to more students, and physicians providing medical services will have to be especially careful that the way in which services are rendered complies with all provisions in the Ontario Human Rights Code and does not constitute grounds for discrimination.

There is no real legal precedent in place in Canada regarding the balancing of patient-physician rights. In this way, the draft policy of the CPSO is setting up new territory for the courts to define how best to balance freedom of conscience and religion with equality rights.

This issue goes far beyond abortion. Just as the separation of church and state helps to ensure respect of personal beliefs and equality of rights, so too must we respect the rights of patients to receive publicly funded medical services without discrimination from those individuals paid to provide them.

who refuse to perform abortions, or prescribe morning after pills, would be stripped of their ability to practice medicine in the province.

They would no longer be able to object because “‘moral beliefs,’ per se, are not protected by the Code.”

Unfortunately, the CPSO appears prepared to comply.

This is an appalling turn of events.

Regardless of one’s personal views on the preternaturally controversial issue of abortion, it is undeniable that a significant population finds the practice to be morally abhorrent.

One must ask if it is not reasonable to allow Catholics, Orthodox Jews, Evangelical Christians, and devout Muslims the right to conscientiously object to the performance of an act they equate with murder. A reasonable person would say it is. However, the members of the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) are clearly not reasonable people.

This is not surprising, as those in left-wing circles often do not grasp the stakes involved in the abortion issue for pro-life individuals. Much of the abortion debate currently centres on the point, in terms of biological development, at which a fetus becomes a person and qualifies for

legal protection.

People argue over whether brainwave activity or a child’s capacity to survive unassisted outside the womb is the critical factor. But to a pro-lifer, the conversation over this or that trimester is just so much horse-trading by self-interested politicians and agnostic scientists. They argue that since human rights are morally, rather than biologically, derived, it does not make sense to use a biological definition to ascribe them.

Even if you’ve never taken a scalpel to a corpse in search of its freedom of speech, you have to admit they have a point.

According to this perspective, every fetus, during every stage of pregnancy from conception to birth, is a human being with a genuine right to life. For pro-lifers, forcing an Ontario doctor to perform abortions against religious convictions is the moral equivalent of forcing a Bavarian doctor to euthanize Jews.

Right-to-life organizations routinely place Holocaust counters on their web sites ticking up the 40-million lives they claim have been lost to legalized abortion.

Now, comparisons to Nazi Germany are often over-wrought, but

in this case, it bears mention as a religious minority is once again facing government persecution, albeit of a clearly different scale.

You may not agree with the prohibition of abortion. In fact, if you’re attending university, it’s highly likely you describe yourself as pro-choice.

But, what we are currently facing is not a legal challenge to abortion rights. On the contrary, the status of abortion in Canada is enshrined for the foreseeable political future.

Rather, the OHRC has thrown down the gauntlet over a doctor’s right to conscientious objection.

Freedom of conscience is as essential in a democracy as freedom of speech or political assembly. We cannot allow our rights to be stolen from us by hook or by crook, or even whittled away from those with whom we might disagree.

If we don’t speak up now for prolife doctors and surgeons, if we fail to halt the predations of this unaccountable bureaucracy, we may one day live to regret our moment of inaction.

Christopher Lee is a student at Acadia University. This piece was originally written for the Canadian University Press.

Contributors

Erica Adelson, Jeff Bishku-Ayku, Chelsea Blazer, Madeline Coleman, Noelani Eidse, Henry Gass, Sarina Isenberg, Shu Jiang, Christopher Leo (CUP), Conor Lynch (CUP), Ming Lin, Lucy Mair, Suzie Philippot, Sasha Plotnikova, Olga Redko, Madeline Ritts, Elan Spitzberg, Kevin Wei

Conor Lynch

COUNTERPOINT

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uman rights – real and fundamental human rights – are facing an unprecedented assault in this country by an organization that, at least in name, is intended to protect them.

I am referring, of course, to the notorious Human Rights Commissions at both the provincial and federal levels. These ineffably infallible institutions are now recommending that doctors be forced to provide abortions, regardless of their religious beliefs, and in violation of charter rights to freedom of conscience.

On September 1, the Ontario Human Rights Commission issued “guidance” to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) – Ontario’s licensing body for doctors – on its compliance with the Ontario Human Rights Code.

Specifically, they noted: “Doctors, as providers of services that are not religious in nature, must essentially ‘check their personal views at the door’ in providing medical care.”

Reading further we find that, should the policy be applied, doctors

Conor Lynch is a student at Concordia University. This piece was originally written for the Canadian University Press.

Commentary

The McGill Daily, Monday, September 22, 2008

Picketing is nice, but use your brain first Sarah Flatto

HYDE PARK

T

oday, it seems everyone has to have an opinion on everything.

But that’s not a bad thing.

New media has resulted in a communicative democracy unimagineable even 20 years ago. But in terms of democracy and campus politics, the slightest action on the part of either student leaders or the administration is an object of immediate and often exaggerated scrutiny by the opposite party. I believe that this ready-to-condemn attitude, this lack of basic listening skills and empathy, is what needs to be placed underneath the proverbial microscope of our student body.

The recent Reclaim Your Campus campaign is an admirably choreographed effort to refocus the McGill authority’s concerns back toward the heart of the University: us, the students. The campaign is attractive and sensible, as it attacks recent actions on the part of the University administration to restrict the liberties of students and to succumb to corporate donors. Simultaneously, a union for undergraduate student employees is building support to petition for official labour status from the Canadian government.

But this raises an archetypal danger, that of confusing causal mechanisms with effects. It is certainly true that the notorious bureaucracy and apathy of the administration has frustrated and daunted McGill students for numerous generations, but one has to understand that this isn’t due to haphazard disregard for the benefit of students. Without students, obviously this University would have nothing – no appeal to donors, no impetus for innovative research, no need for faculty renewal or structural management.

The notion that the administration is purposefully trying to erode the success of the students is absurd, but it is true that in seeking

Letter Daily ousted as copyrighted hypocrite RE: “Copyright this” | Commentary; “Creative Commons: some rights reserved” | Culture | Sept. 15, 2008 Despite two pieces in last Monday’s Daily about the evils of the current copyright regime, including an editorial slamming the very notion of it,

We like AMUSE, with qualifications The Daily is pro-union, and pro-student initiatives that recognize flawed systems and seek to fix them. But we’re holding back on the praise for AMUSE, the proposed union for McGill’s undergraduate employees, until they explain how they plan to work and what they hope to do.

The nascent Association of McGill Undergraduate Student Employees, which made its campus debut at Activities Night, is scurrying to advertise its campaign, rally undergraduate employees, and convince at least 35 per cent of them to sign union cards. The union’s main purpose, according to organizers, is to provide protection to student employees, a luxury sadly absent from many of their work experiences at McGill.

We commend AMUSE for endeavoring to remedy the problem. Employment conditions for undergraduates at McGill are far from perfect – few things here are. No standardized wage scale exists for McGill undergraduate employees, who generally work without contracts or any real job security. It’s not right, for example, that a student working for three years in McGill’s computer store has only seen one raise, doesn’t know if she can expect – or if she even deserves – another, and is afraid to ask. Such conditions are unacceptable in any workplace, but seem prevalent among undergraduate employees here. Unionized protection could go a long way to resolving these and other problems.

But employment conditions for undergraduates are also incredibly varied.

Often, the only thing that undergraduate employees have in common is that their paycheques come from McGill.

Student workers are also very unique. Most do not hold long-term employment, as they work for only one semester, or sometimes less. The Bookstore adopts a team of cash-strapped undergrads at each semester’s start, but when the book-buying rush ends, so do the their shifts. Such conditions make undergraduate employees potentially difficult to unionize. Despite these reservations, however, we know that unions can function well with similarly diverse members.

Still, we have many questions and concerns about AMUSE, which means undergraduates do as well – and that’s a problem. If formed, will the union accommodate every undergraduate employee? Will they all be forced to join?

For how long will students be tied to the union past their employment terms?

These uncertainties are compounded by the fact that McGill undergraduates tend to be extremely apathetic. A free beer and pizza event that AMUSE hosted last week to attract undergraduate employees garnered few relevant guests – the Shatner Ballroom was embarrassingly empty, with AMUSE organizers and freeloading Daily editors comprising the bulk of the crowd. Over boxes of free pizza, it hit us: if student employees can’t be lured with free booze, AMUSE has some pretty lofty hurdles to clear.

Undergraduates employed at McGill need to know how AMUSE affects them, why it’s relevant, and how it may change their working conditions.

Ultimately, it is up to them to decide the union’s future. Right now, we can’t say what we want that future to look like; we only know that we want it to be decided appropriately and fairly, and that it needs be decided by the people it seeks to help.

If AMUSE gets its feet off the ground – and we truly hope that it does – we urge undergraduate employees to be informed, passionate, and to simply care. AMUSE organizers need to get the word out, need to motivate students to be informed and interested. We’re all for more free beer and pizza, but we’re also for seeing AMUSE getting the chance it deserves. For now, it’s in your hands, AMUSE. Keep advertising and pushing those signing cards – it’s annoying, but it’s worth it.

Editorial

Ming Lin / The McGill Daily

improvement it has stumbled upon a less than desirable means to an end.

This includes but is not limited to an unacceptably oligarchic decisionmaking process that largely excludes student representatives. But there are logical reasons why the most important authorities behind university-approved resolutions are corporations. With an approximate 60 per cent of McGill students coming from within Quebec and the tuition freeze still in effect, McGill must cope by compensating for this lack of income.

Whereas most American schools charge upwards of $10,000 annually for in-state students – a figure most Canadians routinely complain about – McGill has raised its ancillary fees and catered to large companies in efforts to maintain a vibrant and appealing atmosphere for prospective students and researchers, much of which (unfortunately) has a direct correlation with our level of financial resources.

In a perfect world, a universal right to education would be undisputed and tuition wouldn’t

exist. But we must understand the realities the administration faces in governing an institution that educates a populace the size of a small city. We can’t demand for higher wages for Teaching Assistants and employees, demand for a more sustainable campus, and then unequivocally demand that tuition freezes last forever.

I am all for protesting authorites’ abuse of power and standing up for freedom of expression, but I believe that we must meet authority halfway.

How? By attempting to understand why and how certain actions are taken, and avoiding the pitfalls of self-negating triviality.

Activism is a surprisingly sensitive art. Without an analytical viewpoint on the construction and motivations of power share-holders, we might as well wave our pretty banners around and enthusiastically chant our mantras in a vacuum.

what does one find at the bottom of the masthead?

“All contents © 2008 Daily Publications Society. All rights reserved.”

This line – and The Daily’s use of it – is what copyright is about. The editorial team (or an author, musician, software developer, etc.) has put a lot of effort into producing a product, and they should have the right to prevent other people from profiting from it for a certain amount of time. Without copyright, there would be nothing preventing someone from taking all The Daily’s contents, republishing it as the McGill Dainty, and making money off the advertising they sell.

Yes, the current system has many problems – it lacks some sorely-needed exemptions and in many cases

lasts too long – but the notion of copyright is sound, and it does a pretty good job of giving people a reason to invest the time and money to produce new and innovative works.

As for The Daily itself, it’s high time that it follow its own advice and Creative Commons-license all its content, and “put society’s interests above the failing business model of these [small student-run] corporations.”

Sarah Flatto is a U3 Political Science student. When she’s not on the picket lines, she can be reached at sarahflatto@gmail.com.

Daniel Langer U3 Engineering Send your letters to letters@ mcgilldaily.com. More letters were received for this issue than could be printed. They will appear in the next possible issue. The Daily does not print letters that are sexist, racist, homphobic, or otherwise hateful.

13

SAY SOMETHING. And then write it down in about 500 words.

Send potential Hyde Park submissions to commentary@mcgilldaily.com.

Culture

The McGill Daily, Monday, September 22, 2008

14

More than fifteen minutes later ...the still-famous Andy Warhol reappears in a Montreal loft

Andy Warhol experiments with the Pop Art special effect on his MacBook’s photo booth.

Suzie Philippot Culture Writer

W

hen Andy Warhol predicted in 1968 that “in the future, everyone will be worldfamous for 15 minutes,” he was certainly underestimating his own fame’s durability. We’ve all seen his pop art portraits of Marilyn Monroe and now we can even replicate personal versions on our MacBooks for all of Facebook to see. Even if you’ve never heard of him, Warhol’s 15 minutes seem to have reproduced themselves as easily as his iconic screen prints.

It seems that even after Warhol and his Silver Factory made their way into history books, the collaborative atmosphere and experimental spirit of the Factory lives on. That is what the organizers of Montreal’s The Factory Project hope to convey when they take over a loft in Montreal’s Little Italy and fill it with various interactive installations that grapple with notions of identity, public life,

the media, and performance that still resonate from Warhol’s Factory.

David Allan King, one of the Factory Projects curators, explains that reviving an artistic environment that “happened” 40 years ago is not just a retrospective work. “There are so many parallels with then and now – political climate, ideas about gender and sexuality, Vietnam then versus Iraq now, the interdisciplinary work we do now compared to back then, [and] our continued obsessions with celebrity,” explains King. “I’d say a big challenge [today] has been the idea of risk-taking experimental residencies, in a world where artists are so [restricted by] scheduling and budgets and presenting a “finished” piece as opposed to simply playing, studying, creating, [and] shaping....”

While collaborative artistic spaces are no longer as prevalent as they were in the 1980s and 1990s, King believes the Factory Project’s intention of taking the Silver Factory of the 1960s as a “springboard” for the production of contemporary work

is coming at just the right time. “We have soooo many gadgets to play with that Andy and the gang didn’t.

Our notions of celebrity and death – from Britney Spears to Facebook’s ‘15 minutes’ to the idolatry of past celebrities like Heath Ledger – has it really changed?” King asks in an email. “If Warhol were alive, I’m sure there would be a painting of Heath Ledger floating around somewhere.”

Warhol’s Factory was notorious for playfully challenging conventional notions of fine art and popular culture, subverting expectations placed on artistic production, and staging collaborations between major companies, celebrities, and Warhol’s constantly changing collective of eccentrics. The diverse contributions from participating Canadian artists at the Factory Project promise to further this dynamic.

Exhibits range from Sherwin Tjia’s peaceful tour of the video game Grand Theft Auto IV, to fellow Montreal artist Gray Fraser’s on-thespot Warholian portraits, to an exhib-

Leah Pires / The McGill Daily

it called fifteen by Beau Coleman and Mieko Oucki of Edmonton who have conceived “the city’s most exclusive hotspot.” And for those who wish to learn more about Warhol, Calgarian actor Steve Gin will play the “host” himself, mingling with the crowd and enacting scenes from the artist’s life in Eight Portraits of Andy Warhol.

Warhol’s exploration of his own queer identity serves as a catalyst for the Factory Project. The event is co-produced by Studio 303, an interdisciplinary arts centre, and Out Productions, whose mandate, King explains, is “to explore and celebrate queer history, identity, and culture.”

Today’s Montreal seems to be the perfect environment from which to look back: “Things are just as queer now as they were then, including in Andy’s work – queer in all senses of that word. Montreal’s a fantastic place for ‘queerdom’, much like New York.”

With a variety of queer perspectives represented, the project draws from a rich pool of local and trans-Canadian artists.

For those still skeptical that the project is simply reproducing a past artistic moment, the organizers emphasize that the event is about play, interaction, and relating to our own contemporary experience; visitors can expect installations with modern media, from iPods to Rock Band video games. With exciting parties planned for the opening and closing, the Factory Project is set to reflect not only Warhol but those who King says were “magnetized at the Factory – all those artists who had gifts to offer him via their areas of expertise. And of course I also hope spectators will participate in the interactive installations and have the opportunity to see some of Canada’s exciting installation artists, as they develop new material that stands alone today.”

The Factory Project opens on September 20 and runs from the 24 to the 27 at the Eastern Bloc (7240 Clark). For more information visit factoryproject.ca.

Culture

The McGill Daily, Monday, September 22, 2008

Brief interviews with recently deceased men Remembering David Foster Wallace Madeline Coleman The McGill Daily

I

t was just one item on a list of a newspaper’s top ten cultural happenings of the week. Sandwiched somewhere between “TV star demands pay raise” and “Bombshell gives birth” were the lines: “David Foster Wallace, author of the novel Infinite Jest, was found dead in his California home last Friday.”

His September 12 death was called “an apparent suicide” – and that was it. Wallace, a skillful satirist of American pop culture and

consumerism, would have expected nothing more.

Perhaps it’s for the best that this impromptu obituary was kept so sparse. Print has its limits; it can’t push a book under its readers’ noses and say, “Why was Wallace so important? Find out for yourselves.” And with Infinite Jest running at over a thousand pages, Wallace’s talent required a lot of legroom.

The 46-year-old American, most recently a professor at Pomona College in California, also authored the less wordy novel The Broom of the System and the short story and essay collections Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, among others. “I’m no good at titles,” he once said; we

beg to differ.

Despite myriad comparisons to Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, Wallace’s writing style was nothing if not iconoclastic. He was often cited as a proponent of his generation’s newly forged addiction to irony, when, in fact, he saw it as a literary tool like any other.

“When irony and ridicule become cultural currency,” he once said in an interview, “then the great terror is not that you’re gonna hit me or that you’re gonna disagree with me – it’s that you’re gonna make fun of me.”

Rather than cashing in on this cultural currency, Wallace’s protagonists are remarkable for their earnestness.

Setting his stories in a world shaped by branding, where the omnipresence of technology keeps people disconnected and aloof, Wallace

both celebrated and lamented North Americans’ bumbling pursuit of emotional connections. “The idea of writing realistic fiction where people aren’t spending six hours a day watching TV seems absurd to me,” he said, “because that’s what people do.”

Infinite Jest, published in 1996, is set in the United States of the early twenty-first century, a world where even calendar years have been sold to the highest bidder (resulting in such monstrosities as the “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment”).

Wallace explained he wanted to write a book about what it was like to live in America at the turn of the century, saying he felt “there [was] something particularly sad about it, something that [didn’t] have very much to do with physical circumstances or the

15

economy. It manifest[ed] itself as a kind of lostness.”

Jay McInerney, a New York Times book critic, criticized Infinite Jest, saying that Wallace’s momentum “seem[ed] to be sideways rather than forward.” Wallace was undeniably wordy and unapologetically intellectual, and for those reasons he will never appeal to everyone.

What was refreshing about him, in a world dominated by ratings, was his acknowledgement and acceptance of his own marginalization. “If novelists were treated the way TV stars or musicians are,” he reasoned, “it would so warp us and so distort our capacity for standing on the sides and watching.”

Sorry, Mr. Wallace, but all eyes are on you.

Beginning to blossom Eco-minded bakery settles into its new location Ming Lin

The McGill Daily

O

ld fashioned ambiance, flower-flavoured delights, and eco-friendly products are just a few of the thrills to expect at the recently re-located Fuchsia café.

Specializing in pastries made with fragrant flowers, Fuchsia not only offers a treat for the senses of taste and smell, but also features local produce, minimizing the use of refined ingredients. With a fixed daily meal that includes an entrée, dessert, and drink for $12, one can sit and digest while diving into the café’s archive of Martha Stewart magazines – undoubtedly a source of inspiration for their brilliant concept.

Walking into the café on the corner of Duluth and Coloniale, visitors are pleasantly confronted with earthy brown walls and flowered curtains reminiscent of a country cottage. A big white dog with one blue and one grey eye comes to greet you at the front door. The counter lies adjacent to the wall and cake-stands featuring cookies, cakes, scones, and other tea time varieties – many visibly speckled with flower petals – invite you to take your pick. Lemon-rose cake, lightly dusted with powdered sugar, is just one of the daily-baked confections, standing majestically at the centre.

The establishment’s owner, Binky, grew up in Delaware where her father was an avid fruit and vegetable grower, and her mother tended to a garden as well. As a result, much of her childhood was spent picking fruit and learning about plants. Later on, culinary school taught her to experiment with different flavours.

“I started getting into Iranian cook-

ing with rose and orange blossom,” she recalls. From then on, her love for the ingredient flourished. “Once I started using flowers, I couldn’t imagine cooking without them!”

When she’s not helping out a customer, Binky can be seen spending time with family and friends who hang around the café and often help out. Having first visited Montreal in 1987, the owner now considers it her true home and is eager to provide fellow Montrealers with a unique taste that is both healthy and affordable.

The café’s array of mismatched plates and teacups exemplifies its dedication to providing an “ecoresponsible” eating experience.

Fuschia encourages customers to bring their own containers for carrying home leftovers, and a discount is awarded to those who bring back the mason jars in which products like luscious bath salts and scented scrubs are carefully packaged – even the labels are made from post-consumer recycled paper. Other products offered from their impressive collection of garden-infused delights include rosebud-chai lip balm, vintage aprons, and orange coriander blossom jam.

Fuchsia’s attention to environmentally responsible practices and its community-oriented setting make it an inspiring place to visit. The café’s web site proudly states their affiliation with Greening Duluth, a local organization seeking to promote “a green community in the heart of a thriving metropolis.” Hand-sewn curtains, pillows, and salvaged table cloths all contribute to the comfortable, homey atmosphere. Fuschia is a place to lunch and lounge, surrounded by the clink of cups and the aroma of a freshly brewed pot of tea.

Flower-flavoured delights and sparrows alike can be found at the Plateau’s Fuschia café.

Ming Lin / The McGill Daily

16 Culture

The McGill Daily, Monday, September 22, 2008

VANCOUVER FILM SCHOOL is on the road searching for

Miriam Toews writes the highs and lows of dysfunctional family life Chelsea Blazer

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ccess stories

elcome to the wacky world of the Troutman family – or, as the 12-yearold Troutman daughter would say, “Welcome homeys.”

In her newest novel, The Flying Troutmans, Governor General Award winner Miriam Toews introduces us to characters that are both original and comedic. With characters like the purple-haired daughter of the family, Thebes, and her dark and rebellious brother, Logon, Toews has the ability to perfectly capture the complications of growing up in an utterly dysfunctional family.

The book begins with a phone call that forces narrator Hattie to quit her exciting life in Paris and return to her roots in Manitoba.

Upon arrival, Hattie faces what she has been running away from her whole life: her sister Min has fallen into another “episode” triggered by her chronic depression. Though she is completely unqualified for the job, Hattie becomes a surrogate parent to her sister’s two children, Thebes and Logon.

Rather than dealing with Min, Hattie decides to flee. “If she was again at a point where she wanted to die, where she was begging me to help her die, then there was no point in keeping [our father] at bay.

What difference did it make?” And so, the threesome jams into the family Volvo and escapes to California in search of Hattie and Min’s father, giving Min the final choice to live for her family or give up once and for all.

One of the most compelling aspects of the book is the unique writing style and strange lack of punctuation. Rather than using quotation marks, Toews narrates the book through the eyes of Hattie. While nothing about this writing technique or the lives of the characters is what we would classify as “normal,” Toews has a distinct style that captures the unique and charismatic qualities of each character.

Even Min, who we meet only through flashbacks and anecdotes, has a strong presence in the book.

One anecdote recounts the time that Min reluctantly agreed to go hunting with her uncle, and then, rather than

breaking the plans, tried to kill herself to avoid killing an animal. It is no surprise that her family is as dysfunctional as they are.

While the novel begins with the line, “Yeah, so things have fallen apart,” the road trip develops into an opportunity for the three characters to overcome the constraints of Min’s disease and rebuild their family on their own terms.

“

She tried to kill herself to avoid killing an animal.

From encounters with wacky characters to stopovers in hazy drug-infested hotels, the Troutman family embarks on a quirky mission that proves to be anything but simple. Although their relationship appears completely deranged, in the end one comes to realize that, given the Troutmans’ situation, chaos is the only thing that keeps them together.

The Flying Troutmans is 322 pages long and available in hardcover from Random House for $32.

Culture

The McGill Daily, Monday, September 22, 2008

What goes around, comes around

17

At Marché MTL’s Swaparama, vintage fiends trade their old clothes for, well, more old clothes Erica Adelson

Culture Writer

I

am probably the last person on earth to buy into the vintage clothing trend. I am a skeptical consumer, and I guess you could say I jumped on the “urban renewal” train late in the game. For years, I could think of nothing less original or mundane than rocking an outfit that made its debut around the time I was born.

If Yves Saint Laurent was correct in suggesting that clothing is a reflection of the self, how do we let ourselves become robed in, for lack of a better term, sloppy seconds?

Montreal is a style-soaked cosmopolitan city, and Montreal girls are notorious for wearing the latest trends, while adding their own personal touches to complete the look. Currently, the look is vintage. Not only can vintage clothing be locally acquired – either from the closets of mothers and grandmothers, or the aisles of little-known shops in the Plateau – it’s also costeffective. With a little creativity and a sharp eye, vintage shopping becomes a lifestyle.

My questions are simple: why has the vintage trend taken hold and what is its appeal?

Are we trying to re-live eras passed? Are consumers simply becoming more environmentally conscious, or is buying vintage a means of indulging our high-fashion impulses without breaking the bank?

Embracing the old I may be a cynic, but I am open to change.

I’ve forever assumed that moderately-priced, vintage clothing catered to a group of grungy yet chic, hipster-esque girlies whose style is reminiscent of the early 1990s. To me, the repopularized high-waisted Levi’s jean shorts don’t scream “high style” – they just scream.

But when I was given the opportunity to attend vintage boutique Marché MTL’s annual clothing swap, I decided to stop fighting change and embrace the old.

“Swaparama” is an all-you-can-carry vintage clothing swap hosted by one of the city’s most selective vintage boutiques. Marché asks patrons to donate a bag of used clothing and pay a $15 donation prior to the event. The cover charge, which was raised $10 since last year’s event, is needed to cover the cost of the venue as well as the human power required for such an undertaking. Once at the swap, participants can browse through clothing, shoes, and acces-

sories, accumulating as much as their reusable bags allow.

The idea of a Swaparama came to storeowner Kafi Dublin after noticing a clothes-swapping trend amongst her own friends. The store claims that the event encourages sustainability while offering customers a unique vintage shopping experience.

Cutthroat couture?

My hour at Marché MTL’s Swaparama was certainly unique. I arrived at the swap just after 6 p.m., 30 minutes before the event was scheduled to begin. There were over 50 girls in line, each with her unique brand of brandless street couture. Soft flannel shirts, sexy fringe boots, brightly-coloured chipped nailpolish, and oversized eyeglasses à la Woody Allen were everywhere. The high energy and anxiety exuded by my vintage-clad fellow shoppers was comparable to cutthroat Boxing Day zeal.

I found my spot at the back of the line and began conversing with my fellow swappers.

It goes without saying that every girl attending Swaparama was hoping to find beautiful clothes, but also believed she was doing something good for the planet: reusing clothing means not having to buy anything new. A group of CEGEP girls remarked that a surge in vintage’s popularity has made aged clothing too expensive or too highly coveted. They were attending the swap because, as they put it, “Fifteen dollars and a bag of old shit won’t get you anything on St. Laurent.” At the swap, the possibilities were infinite.

The doors of the Swaparama opened just after 6:30 p.m.. The crowed cheered and pushed its way up the narrow staircase of the venue, Academy, and into the midsized lounge.

As I walked inside, the racks of clothes and hoards of girls overwhelmed me. There was no rhyme or reason to their browsing, and I came to an immediate realization: this is a Hobbesian jungle, a fashionista state of war. If I don’t act fast, there will be nothing left.

Remembering a similarly overwhelming experience I had at the Marc Jacobs store in New York last winter – during which I was nearly trampled over a t-shirt – I decided that if I couldn’t beat the madness, I would have to join it. I headed immediately to the coats.

Every girl had the same technique: they quickly scanned the tables, picked up the pieces they liked, threw them into their bags, and

moved on. To me, that’s what is so interesting about vintage shopping: you know what you like, you understand your creative limits, and no two girls want the same pieces.

It was a high-pressure hunt, but there was neither cattiness nor conversation between swappers while they browsed. About 20 minutes later, I had seen all I wanted to see and headed to the bar. I refueled with an adorable complementary cupcake and white wine.

The underage CEGEP girls who I met in line were enjoying some cocktails and asked me what I had found. “Cuuuuuute,” they squealed as I held up a Christian Dior trenchcoat and some other chance finds. As I witnessed again, there were no petty jabs or jealousy to be had.

As David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” came on the sound system, we did just that. Maybe it was the alcohol, but once the vintage hunt was over, the group was remarkably civilized.

On my way out, I thanked the Marché employees and handed them my contact information for future sales. Sabrina, the store manager, was grinning widely. She remarked that the event had gone off without a hitch and everyone was having a great time.

Old-school creativity Style is inherently personal, and I will not attempt to understand why people dress the way they do. I can, however, make observations on the shopping process. My vintage shopping experience changed my opinion in several ways. I realized that, first and foremost, vintage shoppers value creative expression. A girl’s ability to put together an outfit is tested when she digs through a smorgasbord of garments of different sizes, colours, and materials.

Vintage shoppers can also be proud of the fact that they’re aiding sustainable living and saving coin at the same time. Finally, used clothing enthusiasts are constantly surprised by the clothing they discover, and always on the hunt for the next great piece.

I can’t say I will become a regular vintage shopper, but I respect anyone who is. It requires immense patience, perseverance, and oodles of energy. Ultimately, though, vintage shopping is highly rewarding. Girls left this Swaparama with bags full of clothing and contended smiles. For Marche MTL, this is exactly the kind of promotion they desire: the happier the girl, the happier the clothes that adorn the girl. It’s a beautiful thing.

Sasha Plotnikova / The McGill Daily

18 Art Essay

The Hands That Feed

Sasha Plotnikova

The McGill Daily, Monday, September 22, 2008

Compendium!

The McGill Daily, Monday, September 22, 2008

Lies, Half-truths, & Animal protein

Racing in cars toward death In Part I of Compendium’s series on major motion pictures, The Daily’s Nicolas Boisvert-Novak writes a review of a Hollywood action movie

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theless are contributing a negligible sum of money to this good paper’s operations, and thus expect – nay, deserve to be catered to.

Thus comes Death Race, spraying mace in the face of every single film scholar in history; sticking rods in the gears of all those who wouldn’t watch anything they couldn’t call a film; and, most significantly, reviving exuberant vehicular pornography as an art form movie execs can no longer continue to ignore.

The movie wastes no time – its TTCE (Time-To-Car-Explosion) falling squarely under the five-minute mark. Elegant and aerodynamic, shedding all of its obligations to logic and decency, it concentrates on the things that matter: post-hoc replays of each character’s gruesome death, passing mentions to the villain’s homosexuality, straight-faced paeans to gender inequality, etc.

But somewhere along the way, the movie spirals out of control, leaving the brain-atrophied viewers dazed, paralyzed. But make no mistake – it’s all for the best. In the face of Death

Race’s virtuosic command of impressionistic imagery, sense would only serve to kill its unflappable momentum. And should you be so benevolent as to trust Death Race, and let the film do what it does best, the resulting experience hits something like fecal play during intercourse – a vicious assault on all the senses, but intensely appealing to the undomesticated wolf-man in all of us.

At 105 minutes long, the movie ends all too soon. Still, a sense of puzzlement lingers past its running time, as a single, vital question remains unanswered: “How much fucking money did this fucking movie cost? And how many endangered species could we have saved with this money?”

A fair query, to be sure, but – honestly – you’re all looking at it the wrong way. Instead, think of how much these movies make, and how many starving kids we could feed with that money. You heard it here first, folks: Death Race – bringing the developing world back from the brink. The future is finally here!

Daily staffer ousts Andy Warhol classic as just triangular piece of cheese on plate

Daniel Stefan / The McGill Daily

When Daily staffer Daniel Stefan (see credit above in tiny writing) bought this cheese from a nearby Provigo, he was just trying to add a little somethin’-somethin’ to his otherwise use-of-animals-free sandwich. But before he chowed down on this Triangle Of Easy Protein, he put it on a plate, took a picture, and totally ousted Andy Warhol, like the headline says.

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9. English race place 14. “Your turn” 15. Helper 16. Bloodsucker 17. Alaskan ‘ocean’ 19. Desert bloomers 20. Brazilian dance 21. Southest Asian 23. Action film staple 25. “Get ___ of yourself!”

26. Mario’s street food?

32. Creole vegetable 33. Adams 34. Doh ray mi fa 37. Handle roughly 38. Newspaper div.

39. “Holy ___!”

40. To look at 41. Retro car 44. Substance of universe 45. Where crash bandicoot eats?

47. Arab leader 49. ___ Wednesday 50. Reason for missed class 54. Next generation tropical fruit?

58. Romulus’ buddy 59. Rise above 61. Got up 62. Quip, part 3 63. “Giovanna d’___” (Verdi opera) 64. Destroys cells 65. Ballyhoo 66. Loyal Down 1. Yakuza, e.g.

2. Eye layer 3. Course 4. Court type 5. Card 6. Motorolla chip 7. “I had no ___!”

8. “Go, ___!”

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he Daily is on a pretty massive indie trip right now.

Sorry to have blown your minds like that, but I just couldn’t let the lies stand any longer. Face it: the good ole’ days of single-page sports stats are long gone, and with them, our editors’ sense of obligation to all of us still swimming in the mainstream.

Again, sorry for having knocked all of you off your chairs, but in all seriousness, it’s not as though the editors were doing a great job of hiding it either. I mean, have any of you even heard of a single movie that’s been reviewed in The Daily since you started reading it? And before you answer, morally ambiguous, cultural-relativist foreign love epics don’t count.

Regardless, there’s no denying that most students my age walk into theatres expecting nothing more than the honest pleasures of car explosions, shitty one-liners, and Jason Statham ass-shots. And of course not a single one of them actually reads The Daily, but they never-

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11. Rhodes of Rhodesia 12. Group of eight 13. Dilute 18. Hitler, e.g.

22. Commanded 24. ___ and outs 26. “Where the heart is” 27. “Comme ci, comme Áa” 28. Real 29. Be silent, in music 30. Be theatrical 31. Cancels 34. Arias, usually 35. Blue Bonnet, e.g.

36. Mass number 39. Fictictitious 41. Prays over 42. Benjamin Disraeli, e.g.

43. In-flight info, for short 45. Examine closely 46. Says “When?”

47. “___ Heartbeat” (Amy Grant hit) 48. Office papers 50. Face-to-face exam 51. Carve in stone 52. Beseech 53. Ball field covering 55. “___ #1!”

56. Ancient Andean 57. “American ___” 60. Born, in Paris

Solution to “Ghetto fabulous”