The Cascade Vol. 23 No. 16

Vol. 23 Issue 16

June 3, 2015 to June 16, 2015

Whimpering softly in the face of adversity since 1993

Separated

from the

school How do international students fare at UFV?

p. 10 - 12

FOAMING AT THE MOUTH UFV biology student Vessal Jaberi’s research finds a connection between stress and saliva

p. 5

YOUNG HEARTS, YOUNG ART Stencilled skateboards, spoken-word poetry, and Nicholas Cage’s face featured at the third Mission Youth Arts Fest

p. 13

WHO LET SNOOP DOGG OUT? The hip-hop maestro teams up with Pharrell for an album full of chill vibes and rich textures

p. 17 ufvcascade.ca

2

NEWS 4

Opinion

8

UFV food: falsely frugal

Culture

13

Canadian nationalism still not dead

Arts in Review

16

Sports & Health

19

Briefs ABBOTSFORD — A new clinic in Abbotsford hopes to create a safe space for gay men to discuss their health concerns. The clinic will be open Monday nights on Marshall Road, but Fraser Health says it will expand the service if there is a greater demand. The clinic will offer condoms, counselling, testing for HIV/AIDS and other STIs, and otherwise promote sexual health.

— CBC

UFV Senate to review Writing Centre ABBOTSFORD (UFV) — The Academic Planning and Priorities Committee (APPC) has sent four recommendations to the UFV Senate to accept APPC’s report, review its findings regarding the Writing Centre and Academic Success Centre, and to develop a process by which the Academic Success Centre, if it continues as planned, is reviewed for educational quality and effectiveness.

These motions are to be reviewed by the UFV Senate on June 5, and will then carry forward to the Board of Governors meeting on June 19. The Cascade will continue to cover this story in the coming weeks.

Chilliwack declines $800,000 Kinder Morgan offer CHILLIWACK — The City of Chilliwack recently refused an offer from Kinder Morgan as a part of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that the City and the pipeline were negotiating. Kinder Morgan offered $800,000 to build a pedestrian bridge across the Vedder River, on the condition that Kinder Morgan gets the go-ahead to run through Chilliwack. Council would have no authority in that decision, and turned down the offer. The City of Chilliwack says the tax revenue it would receive on the pipeline would be much more than $800,000 should it be approved to build. According to a City Council staff report, Kinder Morgan had made a substantial offer to UFV — although this amount is undetermined.

— The Chilliwack Times

Timetable error corrected

ABBOTSFORD (UFV) — When the UFV Fall 2015 timetable was issued on May 15, the theatre practicum for the fall production of Jason and the Argonauts was listed for over $1,000 for a 4-credit course. Theatre department head Bruce Kirkley said in a statement that this was a clerical error, and the timetable has since been corrected to reflect $601.40 to match other four-credit courses.

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Big box retail proposal blasted by locals

News

News

First Fraser Valley gay men’s sexual health clinic opens

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3, 2015

UFV students spoke out against a nearby commercial development that would potentially interfere with U-District planning.

The cafeteria pretends not to be overpriced. Alex Rake bitterly debunks the lie.

Kodie Cherrille sits down with instructor Ron Dart to examine the political relevance of George Grant’s classic Lament for a Nation.

Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya!

Or not. Disney’s latest theme park adaptation and Cameron Crowe’s Aloha aim for utopian destinations, but how do they get there? Michael Scoular’s review is 14 pages away.

The ball’s in your court!

Thinking of taking up tennis this summer? Nadine Moedt has the ins and outs of tennis courts in Abbotsford.

Voting by ideology leads to bad politics KODIE CHERRILLE

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

In a word or two, could you tell me your political orientation?

You might be inclined to respond “left of centre,” or “liberal,” or “not that liberal.” It’s a quick, common way to describe where you stand in political issues. But too often, Canadians don’t think beyond that label, and we vote for parties that seem to line up with our own belief systems. Our point of view is “conservative,” so we vote for the Conservatives.

This reduces our political engagement and responsibility to a minimum — and our federal government takes advantage of that.

Let’s say, for instance, that I vote for the NDP in the upcoming federal election, because their political stance fits closest with my own. If I leave it at that, and the NDP candidate gets elected in, then their duty to me is instantly fulfilled by virtue of being voted in, as long as they do NDP-sounding things for me.

This is where the window for party discipline opens.

To maintain the image of the party, MPs are urged to unanimously agree or disagree on issues, keeping them within the bounds of the party’s interests — this is party discipline. In Canada, the window opens wide.

Volume 23 · Issue 16 Room S2111 33844 King Road Abbotsford, BC V2S 7M8 604.854.4529 Editor-in-Chief kodie@ufvcascade.ca Kodie Cherrille Managing Editor valerie@ufvcascade.ca Valerie Franklin Business Manager joe@ufvcascade.ca Joe Johnson Production and Design Editor anthony@ufvcascade.ca Anthony Biondi Copy Editor katie@ufvcascade.ca Katie Stobbart

Image: Mike Mozart/ flickr

“The particular concerns of individual MPs and their constituents get steamrolled for the sake of upholding the party’s political ideology.”

In a 2012 series of articles called “Reinventing Parliament,” the Globe and Mail documented how NDP Thunder Bay-Superior North MP Bruce Hyer voted in favour of abolishing the long-gun registry — something he promised his constituents he would do, even though the NDP’s official stance was against the abolition and he ran the risk of being “punished” for voting against the party. He was then banned from making member statements in the House of Commons. The

story lends a new meaning to the phrase “Orange Crush.”

In another article in the same series (“Is Canada’s party discipline the strictest in the world?

Experts say yes”), Leslie Seidel, a research director for Institute for Research on Public Policy, states: “In the advanced parliamentary democracies, there is nowhere that has heavier, tighter party discipline than the Canadian House of Commons.”

When a politician is punished for straying from the official

News Editor megan@ufvcascade.ca Megan Lambert

Production Assistant eugene@ufvcascade.ca Eugene Kulaga

Opinion Editor alex@ufvcascade.ca Alex Rake

Advertising Representative jennifer@ufvcascade.ca Jennifer Trithardt-Tufts

Culture Editor nadine@ufvcascade.ca Nadine Moedt Arts in Review Editor michael@ufvcascade.ca Michael Scoular Sports Editor vanessa@ufvcascade.ca Vanessa Broadbent Video Editor mitch@ufvcascade.ca Mitch Huttema Webmaster michael@ufvcascade.ca Michael Scoular

Staff Writer jeffrey@ufvcascade.ca Jeffrey Trainor Arts Writer jasmin@ufvcascade.ca Jasmin Chahal Contributors Sami Al-Abduljabar, Martin Castro, Ekanki Chawla, Ryan Dhillon, Remington Fioraso, and Will Martin.

Illustrations and Comics Dessa Bayrock Cover: Anthony Biondi

stance of the party, they are being punished for acting on the behalf of their constituents. The particular concerns of individual MPs and their constituents get steamrolled for the sake of upholding the party’s political ideology.

And this says nothing about the issue of apathy in Canada. But why would Canadians care about politics when their MPs seem either uncaring or unable to represent their constituents’ interests?

Party discipline discourages MPs from acting as individuals, and forces them to either contribute to the image of the federal party or be silenced.

In order to restore the agency of individual politicians, ideological politics — voting for the Liberal Party because you’re a liberal — needs to be replaced with politics that discuss particular issues over the general — in other words, voting for an MP because he or she will address your concerns in your riding best.

But this is not the sole responsibility of the daring MP willing to stand up to their party. We, as constituents, need to take a closer look at politics, beyond that of seeing only which party’s values line up most closely with our own. Both sides have to pull their weight if real change is to occur.

Printed By International Web exPress The Cascade is UFV’s autonomous student newspaper. It provides a forum for UFV students to have their journalism published. It also acts as an alternative press for the Fraser Valley. The Cascade is funded with UFV student funds. The Cascade is published every Wednesday with a circulation of 1500 and is distributed at UFV campuses and throughout Abbotsford, Chilliwack, and Mission. The Cascade is a member of the Canadian University Press, a national cooperative of over 50 university and college newspapers from Victoria to St. John’s. The Cascade follows the CUP ethical policy concerning material of a prejudicial or oppressive nature.

Submissions are preferred in electronic format through e-mail. Please send submissions in “.txt” or “.doc” format only.

Articles and letters to the editor must be typed.

The Cascade reserves the right to edit submissions for clarity and length. The Cascade will not print any articles that contain racist, sexist, homophobic or libellous content. The writer’s name and student number must be submitted with each submission. Letters to the editor must be under 250 words if intended for print. Only one letter to the editor per writer in any given edition.

Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect that of UFV, Cascade staff and collective, or associated members.

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NEWS

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3, 2015 www.ufvcascade.ca

SUS lays groundwork for fall semester Weeks of Welcome, Leadercast, and SUB among discussion at SUS board meeting MEGAN LAMBERT THE CASCADE

REMINGTON FIORASO CONTRIBUTOR

Although the summer term brings a hush to campus, the Student Union Society (SUS) is keeping busy with plans for the fall.

The SUS Board of Governors meeting started at 6:43 p.m. at the Chilliwack CEP campus last Thursday, May 28. VP internal Ricky Coppola was absent due to illness, so president Thomas Davies read Coppola’s VP internal report. Apart from the usual update on granting clubs and associations funding, Coppola wrote about working with UFV to start opening the new CCR program over the summer.

Then, VP external Sukhi Brar said the dates for Weeks of Welcome are tentatively set for September 8 to 11 for both the Abbotsford and Chilliwack campuses.

“We’re keeping it to one week, because in the past we’ve done two to three weeks and this has become hard to manage,” she says. “We’ll do a week of events on both campuses and really focus on having high-quality events that are well-attended.”

As far as planning is concerned, she spoke about the UFV Student Life Leadership Without Borders retreat, where some of the activities were based on generating ideas for Weeks of Welcome. Brar noted that in addition to these suggestions, the Weeks of Welcome planning committee is looking to gather more student input.

She then went on to say that she attended a UFV-sponsored event at HighStreet Shopping Centre called Leadercast — a livestream of leadership talks.

“Imagine six talks in a row that are super motivational and inspiring. I’ve never had talks like that, that were of that quality back-to-back,” she says.

Brar said she is planning to ask

the university to bring the Leadercast stream to campus for UFV students.

She said she also met with the Alliance of British Columbia Students (ABCS) at their annual general meeting (AGM), noting that SUS is stepping away from its involvement in that organization to focus on what’s happening at UFV. “We were really involved in CASA and ABCS, but it takes so much time and it’s such a commitment. I think we did great work last year. But having been here for seven weeks now, I know how much we do,” she says. “I think it’s a smart move to not over-commit.”

She then gave a brief overview of the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations (CASA) conference.

In Davies’ report, he noted that the Student Union Building (SUB) is going through some kinks prior to its official opening in the fall. For example, there is still some construction to be completed.

“The women’s washroom is missing half the wall.

It’s not supposed to be like that.”

“The [second floor] women’s washroom is missing half the wall,” Davies said. “It’s not supposed to be like that.”

Davies added that he met with the U-District planning committee, but there were no substantial updates. He did say the committee has decided it will not affect the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) on King Road, although it was discussed at the initial meetings in 2012.

Davies did mention that SUS will focus on the Get Out and Vote campaign, as federal elections are approaching in the fall.

Image: Megan Lambert

The Student Union Society (SUS) is working on the Student Union Building (SUB) for its celebratory opening in the fall.

As mentioned at the CASA conference, the purpose is to encourage the young adult demographic to vote.

Brar agreed, adding that because the student voice in elections is currently small, it is easy to ignore. “Governments care about people who vote,” she said.

“Even if you don’t like politics, they are still important.”

Faculty of health sciences representative Ria Geluk brought up a point of order — that student representative reports were not on the agenda. There was a motion to add it, which carried.

After Brar gave her report on CASA and Davies presented his StudentCare annual stakeholders conference report, the reps began their updates.

UFV Board of Governors rep Greg Stickland did not provide an update. However, he mentioned

the UFV Board of Governors retreat is coming up on June 19.

Aboriginal representative Jennifer Janik said aboriginal students are planning for Aboriginal Awareness Day on June 16. Additionally, students are working with Stó:lō Nation in Chilliwack and various high schools to promote mental health initiatives.

College of arts representative Ekaterina Marenkov had no report.

Geluk noted that even though she exchanged email addresses with students in health science programs, she did not hear from them — and assumed no news is good news. She said she will revisit the licensed practical nurse (LPN) program in October to meet the new class representative.

Moving on to new business, Davies gave a brief overview of

the purpose of executive goal plans for the new members of the board. The goal plans were implemented last year to give the SUS president, VP internal, and VP external a timeline to reach their particular goals while in office, and so the Board of Directors could keep up with executive decisions. These plans have not yet been written, but will be drafted in the coming weeks.

The board adjourned at 7:59 p.m. For the next meeting, Sukhi Brar will have a more comprehensive report of Weeks of Welcome planning, and former SUS president Ryan Petersen will give a presentation about the U-District planning.

The next SUS board meeting will be held at 6:30 p.m. on June 25 in room S3103, in the SUB on the Abbotsford campus.

Letter to the editor Dear Editor, I appreciated Michael Scoular’s interview and subsequent article (“Prof Talk: Thirty-seven years of drama”) in the May 20 Cascade. He was more than patient as I rattled on, rather too quickly, in answer to his questions.

However, the article contained two errors which I feel I need to correct. One was the name of a student. Michael asked me if there were particular students I had

learned from. In fact, I have learned so much from so many students that I found the question difficult to answer. But I did mention one very accomplished student whose honours thesis I had directed, and who is now a Ph.D. student at SFU. Her name is Kim Morden, not Kim Warden.

The other error was again likely a result of my talking very quickly. Michael asked me about courses I had taught, and the article reads that “I’m most skilled at teach-

ing the novel.” Actually, what I said is that I feel I am less skilled at the novel, and have concentrated on drama and poetry. I feel I need to set this straight for the benefit of my colleagues in the English department, who may either raise their eyebrows in surprise, or wonder why I rarely teach courses in the novel if I’m so skilled.

Thank you for your focus on faculty in these articles. I have loved sharing literature and ideas with students over the past

thirty-seven years, and I hope we have all gained intellectually and emotionally from the experience.

Yours truly, Dr. Virginia Cooke Editor’s note: These errors have been corrected online.

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NEWS

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3, 2015 www.ufvcascade.ca

UFV students stand up for U-District Students oppose City of Abbotsford’s proposal for commercial development at public hearing MEGAN LAMBERT THE CASCADE

Some said yes — but most said no.

Two weeks ago, the City of Abbotsford called for a public hearing regarding a proposal to build a commercial shopping plaza on the corner of McCallum Rd. and the Trans-Canada Highway. The development would be centred on the outdoor supply store Cabelas, and would have a similar design to Highstreet or West Oaks — with lots of parking and modern-looking spaces for retail outlets. This would change the zoning bylaws from its current 88 per cent residential and 12 per cent commercial to 19 per cent residential and 81 per cent commercial.

The hearing opened with senior vice president at Urban Design Group Architects Aaron Vornbrock, who explained what the proposal would look like. He said there would be six singlestorey outlets totalling at about 138,000 square feet. The new centre would replace a vacated trailer park.

Most speakers opposed the project for similar reasons; after a while, people apologized for be-

ing repetitive. One argument for rejecting the proposal was that it seems to negate the work that the Abbotsforward initiative has put in over the past year — namely, the data collected from Abbotsford citizens and the “7 Big Ideas” that came from it. Former Student Union Society (SUS) VP external Dylan Thiessen was one of those who pointed this out.

“I don’t think this development as it stands works with these ideas,” he said. “Another commercial development equally as spread out as HighStreet and Sevenoaks Mall will not help create a city centre — the first ‘big idea.’”

Thiessen went on to suggest that the structure for parking could be revised to create a multilevel or underground parkade — leaving more room for residential areas.

Among other residents, Thiessen also challenged the validity of the public hearing itself, as there are already bulldozers onsite and advertisements for the new complex online. “[It] makes this entire exercise almost feel useless,” he said.

“Like this is just one more hurdle City Council has to jump over before it finally gets to build its development.” He closed his argument saying he believes City

Council is not ill-meaning, but that it has a responsibility to create a sustainable city.

According to recent UFV geography graduate Derrick Swallow, the project also interferes with UDistrict planning. The U-District has been in the works since 2012 and is looking to develop the areas around UFV into a sort of downtown hub of activity for students and the community. Swallow said there are already vacant big-box developments that once housed A&B Sound, Rona, Target, and Future Shop. He said that instead of building new developments, retailers can use these old spaces. He also noted that these vacancies point to big-box developments not being sustainable in the first place, and that the UDistrict presents an opportunity to change that.

“The McCallum corridor and U-District plan have some of the most promising potential for progressive change in Abbotsford,” he says.

Instead, Swallow says a pedestrian-friendly and mixed-use development would fit in with the livable atmosphere the U-District and Abbotsforward are trying to establish — effectively keeping more young people in Abbotsford.

“I was recently at a 10-year reunion for a secondary school in Abbotsford. Only a small fraction of the grad class was actually in attendance because the majority of the graduates already left Abbotsford,” he says. “If we, as a city, want to keep growing, we need to keep our young people, and that means providing jobs, amenities, and lifestyles that are attractive to them.

“This type of development represents Abbotsford’s past. At best, it does not contribute to redeeming our young population, and at worst it actively pushes them away.”

Some speakers were in favour of the project — three property managers and realtors spoke to the potential increase in property value.

“I believe this project will increase property values,” said realtor and property manager Colleen Floris. “Currently, I see a great desire for people purchasing in mixed-use developments, where there’s residential and commercial on the same property, simply because of the convenience.”

A few residents of the area also mentioned this, noting that the close proximity to their homes would mean amenities in walk-

ing distance.

Another argument for building the complex is that it would bring in traffic from outside Abbotsford, as Cabelas is popular among people who enjoy hunting, fishing, and camping.

“I enjoy the outdoors very much,” one resident at the hearing said. “I think for a company like Cabelas to approach Abbotsford and choose to put their store in our city, we should welcome them and embrace them as they will draw many people to our city.”

After the public hearing, the regular council meeting began and ended within 20 minutes.

Councillor Dave Loewen suggested to move the item ahead because of the feedback heard that evening.

“In light of the opposition tonight, I would defer this to the next council meeting,” he said.

The motion carried, and regular council adjourned shortly after. The next Abbotsford City Council meeting is scheduled for June 15, where the executive meeting will be held at 1:00 p.m. before a public hearing at 7:00 p.m.

SUS finds its footing at CASA Foundations conference provides solid foundation for new Student Union executives MEGAN LAMBERT THE CASCADE

The Student Union Society (SUS) executives recently went to Ottawa and brought back ideas for new campaigns and events.

From May 19 to 22, Student Union Society (SUS) VP external Sukhi Brar, VP internal Ricky Coppola, and president Thomas Davies headed to the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations (CASA) Foundations conference in Ottawa, before Coppola and Davies attended a second conference with StudentCare in Montreal.

CASA is an organization for student unions across the country, generally known for its lobbying attempts directed at the federal government and the resources it provides student representatives. CASA holds four conferences per year, beginning with the Foundations conference in April — shortly after the beginning of the fiscal year,

when new student executives are elected into their respective governments. The Foundations conference is to educate students on policy-making and lobbying efforts, and to recap the previous year.

This year, speakers presented on student mental health, debt and loans, and quality of education. A self-proclaimed “data geek,” president Thomas Davies said one seminar stood out to him in particular.

“I enjoyed the presentation by Abacus Data on recent polling information in a fiscal landscape,” he says.

With student unions from other Canadian universities brought to one place, executives have the opportunity to throw around new ideas and discuss issues pertaining to their campuses. Students participate in group work and have opportunities for social events in the evenings.

“In the downtime, you can talk about it because everyone’s en-

gaged. Everyone wants to discuss that kind of stuff. It’s great,” Coppola says.

Davies agreed, noting that it’s interesting to compare SUS at UFV to other institutions because of the board reform that took effect in 2014.

“We have three executives, whereas I think other student unions have at least four,” he says.

“We’ve kind of twisted the model to have officer positions … That is very critical of organizations, but it’s different in every student union across the country.”

At last week’s Board of Directors meeting, VP external Sukhi Brar presented a report about CASA, noting that a highlight for her was the presentation on mental health by Louise Bradley, CEO of the Mental Health Commission of Canada.

“Mental health is a big advocacy topic in CASA right now,” she said. “People recognize how harmful physical trauma is and it’s important to learn how to deal

with that. But when people are depressed or have some sort of mental trauma, in ... our society it’s not ranked as a priority but can affect people profoundly.”

After the Foundations conference, Davies and Coppola flew to Montreal for the StudentCare stakeholders’ conference. StudentCare is the health and dental insurance provider for UFV students.

According to Davies, there will be no big surprises like last year’s substantial increase in health and dental fees — which jumped from $159.92 to $215.59. Instead, Davies says that StudentCare is working on its mental health focus and customer service.

“They’ll be rolling out additional services on the website regarding mental health,” he says.

“They’re running a new office, as well. They’ve got an expanded call centre, to help with particularly the busy September period … Opt-ins, opt-outs, all that kind of fun stuff.”

Davies went on to say that StudentCare covers the cost of flights, accommodations, and meals for student unions who partner with them.

For the future, Davies says CASA is focusing on their Get Out and Vote campaign, as federal elections are approaching in the fall. Brar also mentioned this at the board meeting, noting that this campaign will be SUS’s main focus, too.

“We got a lot of information throughout the week on the Get Out the Vote campaigns that are happening on other campuses,” she said, noting that the University of Alberta had a particularly successful campaign.

While SUS brainstorms ideas on how to make these ideas come to life, the next CASA conference will be the Poly-Strat gathering to discuss more tangible ways to advocate to MPs, held in July.

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NEWS

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3, 2015 www.ufvcascade.ca

Science on Purpose

Stressed out? It shows in your spit UFV biology student’s research shows correlation between midterm stress and your immune system SAMI AL-ABDULJABAR CONTRIBUTOR

We drool as teething babies, we drool when we sleep, and we drool at the sight of tasty food.

But when midterms come around, drooling turns to nervously licking our lips as we produce stress hormones — which can take a toll on our immune systems.

A recent study by UFV biology student and president of the biology and chemistry student association (BCSA) Vessal Jaberi examined students’ saliva before midterms to determine whether there is a correlation between perceived stress, physiological stress, and immune system functioning. Jaberi explains his interest in this project was piqued from the partnership with his soon-to-be research supervisor Greg Schmaltz.

“We had a conversation when I went to his office hours asking him questions about a different class. At that time he was one of the science advisors at the Science Advice Centre,” Jaberi says. “The way that I came up with saliva wasn’t actually me — Greg said he wanted to use salivary cortisol.”

Jaberi says his immunologyheavy courseload at time and the intensive background research about projects to satisfy his honours biology program requirements also played a role in his decision to take on the experiment.

That decision soon proved fruitful. On April 8, Jaberi showcased his research at UFV Student Research Day and won the Vice-Provost and Vice-President Academic award. Currently, he and Schmaltz are trying to publish his research paper in a scientific journal.

Jaberi collected saliva samples and administered a psychological survey to measure the perceived stress of each subject in a sample of UFV students. From the samples, he was able to isolate and quantify two biomolecules: the stress hormone cortisol and an immune system protein called immunoglobulin A (IgA).

From this data, he was able to draw a correlation between the perceived stress from the psychological survey, the physiological stress represented by cortisol levels, and immune system functioning represented by IgA levels.

Jaberi’s results indicated a positive correlation between each of these variables — meaning that one will affect the other.

As perceived stress levels in-

Jaberi took samples of students’ saliva during midterms and found interesting results. crease, cortisol and IgA levels also increase. Jaberi says the positive correlation between stress levels and IgA levels surprised him.

“I actually thought [IgA levels] would decrease just because it made sense if your stress levels are high your immune system suppresses,” he says.

He then explained that the reasoning behind this might be because he collected the saliva samples the day of the midterm, a time during which students might exhibit a fight-or-flight response that is usually characterized by a heightened immune functioning for short periods of time.

Another surprising finding from his research is that there was no significant difference in the stress levels between male and female participants or different age groups — a result that challenges other research that

suggests differences between the sexes.

During his experimental procedure, Jaberi also administered a self-designed questionnaire to his subjects to determine what coping mechanisms students used to manage stressful conditions.

He provided a range of positive and negative coping mechanisms including physical exercise, yoga, meditation, alcohol consumption, coffee consumption, smoking, and sleeping.

Although the use of these coping mechanisms differed from one individual to another, some general trends emerged. For example, none of the subjects in the sample used smoking to cope, but many students did not get enough sleep the night preceding the midterm. Many participants drank caffeinated beverages — which seemed to affect their body instead of their mindset.

“The caffeine obviously has

metabolic changes [to] your body,” Jaberi says. “Cortisol spikes up, but because you have it so often you don’t really feel it in perception. But it was definitely effective.”

This study wasn’t as simple as handling samples and collecting data; Jaberi says he had to overcome several obstacles in order to finish his research. The first was having to go through exhaustive background research in an efficient yet timely manner. Then the experiment had to be approved by the UFV Human Research Ethics Board. Since Jaberi’s research used human subjects and deals with bodily fluids, approving the experiment was difficult and involved many experimental modifications and a lot of paperwork.

Despite this, Jaberi says the biggest obstacle was trying to come up with an affordable and feasible experiment design that

Image: Vessal Jaberi

would be interesting enough to attract subjects to participate in the research — while being scientific enough to yield valuable data that would allow him to write a successful scientific paper.

“I mean, I had an award for everyone who wanted to do it. Their name was put in a draw, and one person won a $100 gift card to Best Buy,” he says. “At least people had some sort of incentive.”

Although Jaberi is finished his research for now and is soon applying to the UBC pharmacy program, he says he hopes future students will expand on his project and try to investigate the effects of stress on other immune proteins.

“There is a lot that people can do with it; it is just up to their imagination,” he says.

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WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3, 2015 www.ufvcascade.ca

Prof Talk

Hitting the funny bone Deborah Larson on using humour and stories to bring nursing concepts to life to want to be there. If they want to be there then they’ll pay attention and actually learn. So, I try to bring a little humour and little entertainment along the way.

EKANKI CHAWLA CONTRIBUTOR

Prof Talk is The Cascade’s oral history series, featuring the people best qualified to talk about what UFV has been like over the course of its first few decades: its professors. Each week we’ll interview a professor from a different department, asking them what UFV was like before it was UFV, and how they expect things will continue to change here.

Deborah Larson is a nursing instructor at UFV who studied at University of Saskatchewan and earned her Master of Arts in leadership and training from Royal Roads University. She has been a professor here for nearly 14 years, and her teaching has focused on medical / surgical nursing concepts and psychomotor skills.

Included among her listed research interests are critical care, cardiology, and nursing assessments. She was also named “most likely to break out in a Michael Jackson performance in the middle of a lecture” by the UFV Bachelor of Science in nursing (BSN) class of December 2014 Teachie Awards.

What brought you to UFV? I saw an ad in the newspaper that said UFV was looking for faculty in the nursing program.

Prior to that I was an educator for the health authority at the Royal Columbian Hospital for about 12 years.

Did you have to move to teach at UFV? What kind of a change was that?

I initially resided in Pitt Meadows because I was commuting to Royal Columbian. So I commuted out here for 10 of my years, and I only recently in the last three years have lived out in Chilliwack. I love Chilliwack. I mean, I love Pitt Meadows — it’s beautiful there as well. But, it’s so beautiful being out here. Being close to work really helps! The commute took a big chunk of the day.

How would you describe the culture, the feeling you got when you first started teaching at UFV? We were on a small campus here at Chilliwack, so it was a smaller group of people. It was very welcoming and I was treated well as far as the processes of being involved.

In our nursing program, we work in the classroom but we also work in the clinical setting.

My first clinical day with students was on September 11, 2001.

I was driving to work when the

Larson uses real-life scenarios to get students thinking in a certain mindset.

September 11 incident happened.

It was a very interesting first day in clinical because nobody was focused. Students, staff, and patients on the units were aware of this horrendous event that happened and so the focus was on that rather than what we were really there for. That was an interesting welcome! But, the next day was better as well as the days after that.

What kind of courses did you start out teaching? What was that like?

A variety of the nursing courses, in-classroom and lab. I taught psychomotor skills as well as in the clinical setting with students on the surgical board. It was very busy to get up and running with workload but it was very enjoyable because I love the students and I love helping people.

Does that differ at all from the courses you like to teach most now?

It’s very different for me right now because I don’t do clinical.

I currently only teach classroom but I also coordinate the second year (of four) of the nursing pro-

gram. In our program we have the co-ordinator, but each of the years has what’s called a “lead” position.

What kind of changes have you noticed while teaching at UFV? This new facility is lovely to teach in. Most cases, we still run in capacity issues as classrooms are not big enough. It’s a nice facility but we’re already having troubles fitting people in. When I started here, everything was online.

There was a progression of videos and teaching resources being more easily available for students online. In our teaching in our labs, our technology has come up a great deal because we have the ability for simulation now.

We have simulation mannequins that can speak, per se, and make noises and have physical changes such as changes in pulses and breathing. That piece of technology has progressed a lot because we purchased those in the last few years for our new facilities here.

What kind of changes have you made in your teaching approaches or methods over time,

Image: Megan Lambert

or have you found one style that works?

Over the years, I’ve become wiser and better able to bring in my experiential knowledge because in the nursing education process the value I see is that there are so many things one can learn from books, so many things one can learn online — but you can’t replace experience. With my 35 years of nursing, I can bring the experiences I have into the classroom setting. The longer I am a nurse, the more I am able to grow into that professional whom people trust to take care of them.

I am also a big believer in a storytelling, case-study type of approach. It’s not always applicable to the content but, where possible, bringing in real situations, real people, and real life scenarios. I know that students learn and remember so much more when it’s an actual person and an actual event. So I enjoy storytelling situations and that kind of learning environment for students.

I’m also a big believer in humour. If I have the students’ attention and they’re interested then I think they’re going to learn more. I want the students

What kind of projects (research, pedagogy, course development) have you worked on at UFV? A longitudinal research project that our department has just completed — it has taken us five years. We have the regular fouryear nursing program but we also have the fast-track program which students can complete in less than four years. Prior to starting intake of the two separate cohorts, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how this might work best. We decided to do a research project following these students from separate cohorts until their graduation.

That’s why it took four years plus an extra year — because we had to be sure, before we released any results, these students had graduated. So it went through the research ethics and we surveyed and interviewed these students all the way through the program.

Basically, what we were asking them in a variety of ways was what their student experience was like. We wanted to prepare those two groups.

Part of the reason we wanted to do this was because the way that our program is set up for these fast-track students is unique in the world, according to the research. The literature showed no other program was doing it the way that we were, because most people that have this fast-track program require certain levels of either education or credentials or a certain level of marks above and beyond what their regular cohort would require, while our fast-track program does not.

Since we started the study in 2009, it was a tremendous amount of data-gathering and we found a lot of information. So right now we’re in the process of trying to correlate and analyze all of this data about the student experience, whether it’s how well they feel they learned or how their stress levels were, their success in the program, and various aspects. It’s been a really unique and interesting project. It’s given us some interesting results that we’re planning on sharing with the faculty and participants this fall.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

7

OPINION

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3, 2015 www.ufvcascade.ca

SNAPSHOTS

Image: Eugene Kulaga

Curse of the loonie cart

Curtailed commentary on current conditions

Image: Anthony Biondi

A different kind of internet scam

Keep the SUB bathrooms clean

Katie Stobbart

Mitch Huttema

I have always had a problem with the infernal loonie carts of shopping markets. Am I to bear the curse of lugging my groceries around in baskets because my memory doesn’t extend to such trivial things as having a loonie prepared each time I shop?

What purpose does inserting a loonie into the cart even bear!? It might be some sort of anti-theft mechanism, but I sure as hell feel like a dollar a cart is a heck of a deal. Regardless of how lugging around groceries has done wonders for my biceps, I’m starting a movement to de-loonify the shopping cart and end the persecution.

In the past year, I’ve paid $600 more for wireless internet than multiple friends have from the same provider. Unfortunately, when I moved into my apartment two years ago and needed internet, the price was $80 per month — just for wifi.

I just found out in conversation that, for at least a year, more than a couple people I know receive the same services for $30 per month. I’m a student, I work, and I hate junk mail; I don’t have the time or energy to keep a keen eye out for special offers on a service I already have from the company I’m signed up with, nor to cancel and restart service or finagle on the phone. And I shouldn’t have to.

I’m happy for my friends who were able to procure cheaper internet. But if my service provider is able to sell a product for a full year at a certain price, I should be getting that price — especially as a long-time customer in good standing — over or as well as someone who just signed up. Shelling out almost three times the amount a newer customer pays feels like a scam, not a service.

Image: Eugene Kulaga

Image: Eugene Kulaga

Don’t advertise to drivers Valerie Franklin

Alex Rake The SUB is a new building with new bathrooms, and those bathrooms are wonderfully clean. As hard as cleaning staff around UFV might work, public bathrooms tend to accumulate filth — but not these! Obviously not enough people have been in the building for the bathrooms to get too drenched in piss and wads of wet paper towel, but I think they should be this clean always.

I propose we, as users of these public spaces, work to keep the bathrooms as clean as possible. Let’s make a focused effort not to pee on the floor, not to get water and soap all over the counters, and not to wad up several piles of paper and just leave them in the corner right beside the garbage can. I understand it will be difficult, but we are strong people with strong minds. Together, we can keep our SUB bathrooms as tidy as they began!

It’s not like Highway 1 has ever been beautiful — it’s six lanes of roaring, 24-hour traffic — but the last thing it needed was a giant electronic billboard.

The neon monstrosity that towers over Exit 90 beside UFV hits a special nerve for me. Day and night, it draws the gaze as irresistibly as the Eye of Mordor, wrecking the vista of Mount Baker and the Cascade Range — one of the few beautiful sights we can enjoy in Abbotsford. It’s infuriatingly inescapable.

But worse than being a blight on the landscape, it’s potentially dangerous: the screen is so bright, it’s practically impossible not to glance at it as you’re driving. Considering the laws we have against distracting oneself with electronic devices while driving, which marketing genius thought it would be a good idea to deliberately distract drivers with a giant, glowing sign on the side of a busy freeway, right where they need to merge into traffic? And who at the City approved it, especially considering the plans to turn the U-District into an attractive neighbourhood?

Plummeting birth rates and the looming underpopulation crisis WILL MARTIN CONTRIBUTOR

With decreasing birth rates, it’s time that we stop worrying so much about overpopulation, and start thinking about what we will do when we no longer have enough people to keep the country running.

Canada has historically had a strong birth rate, but has levelled out and is now just behind China at 1.61 births per woman, according to the World Bank. It’s no secret that there will be issues supporting social security in the coming years — higher birth rates in the past means more people of retirement age than taxpayers in the present. It’s inevitable, and already becoming a problem in Germany and Japan.

Germany just recently passed Japan with the world’s lowest

Image: Kitt Walker/ flickr

Immigration isn’t the answer to underpopulation problems. birth rate, and is supplementing its population growth by massive immigration, which is causing problems with large numbers of

unemployed migrants having to rely on social welfare. According to BBC’s Berlin correspondent Jenny Hill, in 2013 “the mayors

of 16 large German cities wrote to the government asking for help with unemployed migrants flooding into their regions from Eastern Europe.”

Japan has its own issues with immigration — foreigners have trouble integrating with society and many leave due to alienation.

BBC News’ Chris Hogg reports that Doudou Dienne, an independent investigator of racism and xenophobia for the UN, is “concerned that politicians used racist or nationalist themes to whip up popular emotions” in Japan. Japanese government advisor Ayako Sono even suggested this year that an apartheid-like system be put in place.

“Since I learned the situation in South Africa 20 to 30 years ago, I’ve come to believe whites, Asians, and blacks should live separately,” she writes. It is diffi-

cult for an immigrant to live in such a climate.

Increased immigration then comes with its own potential problems, and is therefore not necessarily the simple solution to the problem of underpopulation. Is there another way? Just as China developed the one-child policy to curtail overpopulation, there might be a case for a twoor three-child policy to increase population. Obviously, you can’t force people to reproduce, but you can reduce the burden on people having multiple children by incentivizing multi-child households and mandating more maternity leave. It’s important that this problem is addressed, or soon Canada too could be finding out exactly what it’s like when there are too many people retiring and not enough people paying the bill.

8

OPINION

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3, 2015 www.ufvcascade.ca

Jedi mind-tricks at the cafeteria ALEX RAKE THE CASCADE

They say you shouldn’t beat a dead horse. They also say, “Hey! Stop pretending to be Jerry Seinfeld!” I’m going to do both anyway: what’s the deal with cafeteria prices?

Until the Canoe opens up in the SUB, hungry UFV students who do not pack a breakfast, lunch, and dinner and cannot wander off campus have three options: something made entirely of bread from Tim Hortons, something huge that requires a 30-minute wait at Finnegan’s Pub, or something both quick and not-bread from the cafeteria.

The cafeteria is expensive and we know this and we accept this and there is not much use discussing it because Lord Sodexo doesn’t read the paper.

But on one of my recent trips to the cafeteria (for a $5 container of wilted veggies and dip), the cashier accidentally overcharged me $40. This wasn’t a big deal. I just said, “Hey, I know the cafeteria’s expensive, but ...”

Her response, besides correcting the price, was that “it’s not more expensive here than

Image: Michael Scoular/ flickr

UFV has an ugly atmosphere of apathy — and no grocery store. anywhere else.” Huh? I understand that she works in the service industry and probably gets a million angry, irrational complaints a day, but I was just making a lame joke. I write this now because she didn’t laugh and because she is actually wrong.

At the Abbotsford campus’ cafeteria, a slice of pizza, albeit a chubby one, is $3.49. A bottle of orange juice is $2.29. A fucking muffin is $2.79. For reference,

that’s about the same price as gasstation food, notorious for being overpriced. A basic balanced meal at our cafeteria is $8.57.

Even compared to cafeterias and food programs at other universities — which I’m sure the cashier meant by “anywhere else” — these prices are high. The SFU dining hall offers an “allyou-care-to-eat” breakfast for $6, lunch for $9.50, and dinner for $11.

In other words, an all-you-can-eat

lunch at SFU is almost the same price as a slice of pizza, an orange juice, and a muffin at UFV. At VCC, the cafeteria is run by culinary students. Yes, so is UFV’s Chilliwack cafeteria, but that doesn’t really benefit Abbotsford students. According to a Yelp review by one Albert H. of Northern Vancouver, VCC’s cafeteria offers a fresh breakfast of potatoes, four half-slices of toast, a cup of fruit, a cheese omelette,

Election results unsurprising as Trudeau takes majority and the hearts of all Canadians SIDNEY FALCO FUTURE CORRESPONDENT

OTTAWA — It’s hard to believe now, in the future, but the summer of ‘15 was fraught with indecision.

“As I recall it,” begins campaign volunteer Maurice Blanchot, “it was a time of crisis. We knew Justin was great, but we weren’t everyone. We sat in a room on a hot summer evening and saw the next few months flash by: us, staring at a computer screen, powerless, with a three-way tie.

Luckily, Justin was there.”

Trudeau re-branded the Liberal party overnight. “It was past four in the morning, and he didn’t tip a cent. They were all holed up, shouting slogans, sending ridiculous demands to the kitchen,” Jean-Paul Curnier, a member of the hotel staff, says in an exclusive interview. “But then I thought — isn’t it I, and all Canadians, who will be in debt to Justin?”

Trudeau’s plans were mocked on social media, in newsrooms, and in the columns of pundits across the country; after registering new domains, and ordering new t-shirts and pins, the plans

Image: Alex Guibord/ flickr

“But then I thought — isn’t it I, and all Canadians, who will be in debt to Justin?” were irreversible. Justin Trudeau was now the leader of the Not That Liberal party.

“A pathetic centrist gesture, as awkwardly worded as it is a sadly accurate descriptor of his celebrity wishy-washiness,” wrote Joe Randall in the Gazette.

Poll numbers plummeted, people forgot, and the news cycle turned to a two-horse race — but then, after a few local broadcasts and several Twitter commentators abbreviated the name, Trudeau’s hidden mastery was revealed!

“The NTL party has enjoyed an unexpected resurgence, and who can say this is not the way Trudeau wanted it in the first

place?” asked J.J. Hunsecker in the Globe, before cataloguing the rich artistry of the now-fashionable party.

“Trudeau may be out of step, but a truly NTL party, one of patriotism, history, and success, is the step Canada needs to take to truly define itself in this increasingly muddled time we live in: like the colours in autumn, so bright,” Hunsecker concluded, “burning red.”

Coupled with Trudeau’s connection to the youth of the country, ready to follow the Boomer generation to disappointment and compromised politics, the faded blue and rusty orange of his rivals slipped out of the

conversation.

“My generation is tired of being left out. They have ideals and ideas that are going to change this country, and I am the person who can speak for them. Think about it. My hair’s still black,” he humbly offered during the penultimate Question Period of the 41st Parliament. “You’re 40!” screamed an unnamed house member from the other side.

“Canadians recognized what I meant,” Trudeau said, lit from within, as only young blood can be. “Some people asked about my age, some didn’t. I might have answered once or twice. I’m really in my 30s, if you don’t count the leap years. It wasn’t a problem during the campaign. I read a book earlier this year too: The Hungry Games. I know what the kids want. People talk to me, but nothing ever hits home. People talk to me, and all the voices just burn holes.”

The NTL party’s 212 seats is the most ever in Canadian history, which some pundits, who covered the election with grace and non-partisan insight, attribute in part to how Trudeau kept promises to a minimum during his campaign. There was, howev-

and hashbrowns for $4.73. That’s about the same price as one of Sodexo’s small breakfast wraps.

Sarine Gulerian wrote an article in Kwantlen’s student paper the Runner in 2010 on public opinion of their Sodexo-run cafeteria.

The results were that students generally thought prices were ridiculous but understood that they were higher because of the convenience. Most responses had the tone of resignation, like they had no power to change prices anyway. One poignant line in the article reads, “It’s no surprise that some students aren’t willing to pay $2.20 for a container of Mr. Noodles when they are available for 99 cents at a grocery store across the street.”

UFV doesn’t even have a grocery store across the street.

UFV also has an ugly atmosphere of apathy. This no doubt plays into Sodexo’s hand; students will continue to buy from the overpriced cafeteria. But please, while I’m buying your mediocre food at two-and-a-half times the proper value, don’t torture me with mind games. Don’t try to tell me this is how prices are everywhere, you dystopian food dispensary, you.

Satire

er, one minor controversy back in August three months from now: Trudeau as a student, shown in a shaky 240p Youtube video, holding court in a bar or dormitory, decrying the party system in Canadian politics.

“It reduces us to sporting enthusiasts, restricts dialogue!

But no one elected by a system will seek to radically change it, even if that kind of change is needed to get anywhere close to what we might call a ‘democracy,’” he said, aggressively airquoting.

After the video was removed, some suggested it was a fraud, and that the blurry Trudeaushaped figure was an actor. NTL aide Alfredo Bandelli addressed our questions.

“We take all ideas that have support in the Canadian political sphere seriously, and the Right Honourable Justin Trudeau — that’s so cool that we call him that now — well, he’s not going to be swayed by financial influence or self-motivated bias, except his own. But don’t quote me on that; we’re celebrating tonight.”

October 20, 2015

9

STUDY BREAK CULTURE

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3, 2015 www.ufvcascade.ca

CROSSWORD Watery places

ACROSS

by KATIE STOBBART

4. If you can’t get this one from the front page, I don’t know how to help you. (7) 6. This water channel is controlled by a gate at its head. A flume, for example. (6) 7. A site of wild mallows, or the Dead Ones, if you’re a LotR fan.

Don’t follow the lights. (5) 10. Think clear, turquoise water separated from the sea. (6) 11. This is where the bottled stuff comes from. (6) 12. A steep and often narrow waterfall. It’s a French word. (5) 13. Indoor, outdoor, or — if you like — with balls and sticks. (4) 14. A pool formed when rain or river water fills a cirque. (4) 15. A cave, shrouded in mystery, which often floods at high tide.

(6)

DOWN 1. This ‘90s English rock band developed from an earlier group, “the Rain.” Desert listening, anyone? (5) 2. Dark and deep where echoes dwell — mind you don’t fall in. (4) 3. A baby river. How cute! (5) 5. Hudson, Fundy, English, Semiahmoo, and Resolute. (3) 6. But not necessarily narrow. (8) 8. Water spurting upward continuously. (8) 9. A natural or artificial lake used for storage purposes. (9)

The Weekly Horoscope

Last issue’s crossword ACROSS 5. ARCHAEOPTERYX 9. ALBATROSS 11. BLUEJAY 12. RAVEN 13. PIGEON 15. BUDGIE DOWN 1. CANARY 2. MACAW 3. GOOSE 4. STELLERSJAY 6. WHISKEYJACK 7. CHICKADEE 8. HAWK 10. BALDEAGLE 14. OWL

Star Signs from Natalie Nebula

Aquarius: Jan 20 - Feb 18: You’ve got the skinny. Dip it. Outdoor inner-city water quality is not so good, so hike up to Hicks first.

Gemini: May 21 - June 21: Greatness will be expected, but it is not for you to indulge in self-doubt.

Pisces: Feb 19 - March 20: June will bring trials along with sunshine. You will not drown if you avoid the water. The teaspoon, too, and the scorpion.

Cancer: June 22 - July 22: Your talents will be greatly appreciated if you devote yourself to the right path. Roll dice to choose. It might be time to quit your day job.

Aries: March 21 - April 19: The internal struggle is a flash in the night, lightning in the mouth of the quail. Dwell upon it as you would a feather, in passing.

Leo: July 23 - Aug 22: Take care to wash the windows with non-toxic cleaner before pressing your nose to the glass. What you see may beg intervention.

Taurus: April 20 - May 20: There is no better feeling than the exhalation after avoiding an angry goose. Don’t visit Mill Lake this week.

Or — to be safe — any lake.

Virgo: Aug 23 -Sept 22: Encounters with new people will be abrupt. Unsettling. Lie back and think of how many cupcakes one can eat in a lifetime. Then go for a swim.

Libra: Sept 23 - Oct 22: The number four will be especially relevant in the weeks to come. It has nothing to do with the lottery — don’t waste your money.

Scorpio: Oct 23 - Nov 21: Protect the goslings at all costs. Ask the turtle to carry you across the lake. Avoid the prying eyes of lions.

Embrace the animal.

Sagittarius: Nov 22 - Dec 21: Let go of anger. Release yourself from drama. Trust in the quail.

Capricorn: Dec 22 - Jan 19: Keep a keen eye on your goals now.

Be as lightning in the dark; think cosmic.

10

BY MEGAN LAMBERT

“It’s two extremes living here:

either you become a total outcast or you become totally outgoing,” UFV student and Baker House resident Jesus Araujo told The Cascade in a previous article about living on campus (“Baker House strives to foster a strong community,” February 2015).

In the article, the culture of Baker House was described as welcoming — the RAs organize small events like smoothie-making days in the kitchen, running teams at charity events, or day trips off-campus. But during that interview, Araujo noted that many residents of Baker House, especially international students, stay up in their rooms alone.

“The problem is there are a lot of people who don’t participate,” he said. “They don’t go to events, and this happens especially with [international students].”

There is a Korean phrase: “The crayfish sides with the crab.” It means that among strangers, a person will tend to stick with people from backgrounds similar to their own. International students often seek a Western education at universities like UFV for the career options it offers them both in their home countries and in Canada — yet when they arrive, they often find themselves alienated by language barriers, homesickness, and culture shock, leading students like Araujo to note their lack of engagement on campus.

According to the 2014 Education at a Glance report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Canada is the sixth most popular destination country for international students after the US, the UK, Germany, France, and Australia. To study in Canada, international students have to pass multiple hurdles, including a passing score on an English language proficiency test, a temporary study permit from the federal government, and proof that they will be able to support themselves financially through school. Post-secondary institutions also have entire departments dedicated to the smooth transition of an international student from home to their study in Canada, but that support comes at a cost. Tuition is usually double what a domestic student pays — and that doesn’t count housing, transportation, food, textbooks, and other costs.

Regardless of the thousands of dollars international students pay, the immigration issues that can arise when they apply to work in Canada after finishing their education, and the social barriers that can isolate them while they are here, international students are still applying for Canadian study permits in large numbers. Meanwhile, universities like UFV increasingly go abroad to recruit new international students, marketing their schools as providing a unique experience and quality undergraduate education.

So, do international students contribute to a multicultural and diverse learning environment, or are they a source of income?

ADVERTISING ABROAD The answer is both. International students spent $2.3 billion in BC alone in the 2012-13 fiscal year. There were over 50,000 international students in private and public institutions, spiking provincial government revenue by $80 million and funding over 25,000 jobs in international education.

These are prosperous numbers — not just for universities but for the cities in which they are located. As the Times Colonist recently reported, international students at the University of Victoria spent upwards of $30,000 per year in food, housing, transportation, and entertainment. Recently UVic partnered with Tourism Victoria to attract international students interested in improving their English at UVic while exploring the city’s culture and beauty, according to Tourism Victoria’s website.

Although UFV has not explicitly partnered with the City of Abbotsford or Chilliwack, it is one of the many universities that go overseas to recruit prospective students. UFV International has gone abroad to countries like China and India to facilitate teaching exchanges in programs like woodworking and art. It hires student recruiters and hosts visits from politicians like BC premier Christy Clark and acting foreign affairs minister Ed Fast.

Whether or not these marketing attempts are the attraction for some 800 international students currently enrolled in programs at UFV is unclear — but students continue to arrive, like the 50 new students enrolled for the Summer 2015 semester.

STEADILY RISING TUITION Newly arrived international students are here just in time for a tuition raise. For the beginning of the fall semester, international student tuition at UFV is increasing by 6.1 per cent — meaning the cost of one credit is jumping from $612.50 to $650.

This is almost five times as much as domestic students pay, at $136.68 per credit.

For 2015, the cost decreases to $520 per credit if a student enrolls in 15 credits.

The year before, UFV approved a tuition increase of 10.1 per cent from 2013 to 2014. The UFV Board of Governors minutes from that year state the jump was meant for UFV to stay competitive: “International enrolments have remained rela-

THE CRAYFISH SIDES WIT

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UFV INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS PAY THOUSANDS IN TUITION, BUT IS TH

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HE CAMPUS WORTH THE COST?

tively flat at UFV over the past two years, despite the BC Jobs Plan challenge to increase international student numbers ... In order to remain competitive we do need to ensure that program offerings remain current, application processing times are efficient, and recruitment agent networks become more focused and effective.”

Currently, this means full-time international students pay about $7,800 per 15-credit semester for tuition — not including living costs, fees, health insurance, or educational materials like textbooks. In comparison, full-time domestic students pay approximately $2,400 in tuition per semester.

Director of UFV International David McGuire says that because of provincial funding cuts to post-secondary education, rising tuition is a matter of cause and effect. He adds that the raise helps UFV stay competitive with other universities.

“We have to position UFV well with the competition in the Lower Mainland. We also have to take into consideration the steps we’re taking to try and provide students with the best undergraduate education here. So, keeping those two things in mind, we came up with a fee that kept us affordable relative to other institutions in BC,” he says.

For tuition, UFV ranks in the bottom half of public post-secondary institutions in the province.

This means even with the recent high tuition increase, UFV is still a cheaper way to go for those considering Canadian universities.

However, cheaper doesn’t mean cheap. According to UFV’s website, extra education and living costs, as well as ancillary fees, can add up to an extra $12,000 per year on top of tuition.

STRANDED IN SUBURBIA Rather than renting, some students choose to live in Baker House, homestay, or with relatives in the area. International students who live on campus generate revenue for the UFV bookstore, food services, and Baker House, while being immediately plugged into the campus community.

However, as many of UFV’s students commute to the Abbotsford, Chilliwack, or Mission campuses from neighbouring communities, they tend to show up for class and go home rather than stay to become involved with clubs or events.

So even for those who live in Baker House, the UFV community can be difficult to become involved in — mostly because it is very small, paling in comparison to the big student communities at larger universities like SFU or UBC. The other issue with UFV is its location, as the Abbotsford campus is surrounded by agricultural land and industrial businesses. For those who live on campus, the nearest bank, clinic, or grocery store is a 30-minute (2.5 km) walk or bus ride away.

SORRY, WHAT DID YOU SAY?

COMING OUT OF THEIR SHELLS Language barriers and geographical isolation aren’t the only difficulties international students face here. As UFV’s global engagement programming co-ordinator Chelsey Laird explains, they often miss what they left back home and struggle with culture shock.

“Maybe they’re missing food that Mom cooks, or they haven’t found that group of friends they can connect with,” she says. “We’re so grateful they come to us and feel they can trust us with that. That’s when we can help! If they don’t come to us and don’t say anything, then we can’t help.”

Laird adds that if a student is having issues, UFV International will refer them to a peer mentor or to counselling services in the university.

To establish a friendly and welcoming atmosphere right off the bat, UFV International greets students at international student orientation. Last year, UFV saw 232 new international students at fall orientation and 129 new students in the winter. Sue Chapman, UFV International’s student medical and permits liason, states that in that year, over 90 per cent of students enrolled attended orientation.

Five global student associates tour the new students around campus, as well as partnering up with smaller groups of students and taking them to get cell phones and open bank accounts. They become well-acquainted. Later in the semester, GSAs often continue to check in with students — even though they aren’t required to.

“It’s not officially part of it,” Alfadel says. “We like to know how they are doing, basically.”

UFV International continues to host events after orientation, too. There is the Friends Without Borders program, where students regularly meet to discuss different cultures and customs; a men-

toring program where domestic student volunteers are matched up with about four international students each; and events like International Inquiry and Ice Cream, an inclusive space where people can gather weekly to share their different cultural traditions and perspectives through discussion.

Despite UFV’s struggles as a commuter campus, there are efforts by clubs and associations and UFV International to create a comfortable and inclusive atmosphere for new students. Maryam Momtahen, founder of the Persian club on campus, says that when she first came to Canada it was difficult to interact because of her English skills, but since then she created the club and is enjoying her education here.

“As a person who speaks English as a second language, I still have many communication problems, and yeah, sometimes I used to [feel] alone,” she says in an electronic message.

“For this reason, I desired to create [the] UFV Persian Club … In general, I like UFV, but I know I have to work on my communication skills.”

There are also clubs in various faculties or areas of study. Business student Fabiana Brusco, originally from Brazil, is looking forward to extending her involvement farther than just the international community.

“I want to join the [Business Administration Student Association],” she says. “I’m applying for SUS … because I want to be integrated with the university.”

FINDING FUNDING A Canadian degree can get pricey: based on the 2015 increase, a bachelor’s degree at UFV can cost upwards of $60,000 in tuition alone for international students. There is financial aid available to them, such as a private student loan, but usually students need to demonstrate that they are financially stable before they begin their studies.

Some countries, like Saudi Arabia, provide scholarships for students to study abroad as long as they use their education to find work in their home country later. Alfadel, for example, has a scholarship like this, as well as financial aid from his parents and his job at UFV as a GSA. “If they provided funding for five years, you have to go back home and work for five years,” he says, adding that this isn’t a strict rule and that he’d like to work in Canada.

“It’s worth it in the long run,” he says, referring to living away from home.

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UBC

There are over 800 international students at UFV, coming from Brazil, South Korea, India, China, and parts of Africa and Europe. Most of these places do not list English as an official language. Even though most English proficiency tests that UFV accepts have oral components, the English language is known for being difficult to learn, and many international students struggle with a language barrier when they come to study in Canada.

According to the 2013 Developmental Student Outcomes (DEVSO) survey prepared by BC Stats, ESL students reported that their English courses helped develop their skills in reading and writing more than they helped with their speaking and listening skills. Unfortunately, a lack of speech skills not only makes it difficult for students to develop social relationships, but can also hinder their abil-

ity to participate in group work and classroom discussions. In many classes, group work is essential; many projects are prepared by a team of students, and marks are often evaluated based on each individual’s performance in front of the class.

Aziz Alfadel, a computer informations systems (CIS) student and a global student associate (GSA) with UFV International, is one of those students. In his upper-level CIS classes, much of his coursework is based on group projects.

“It was a very nice challenge, but at the same time [it’s] difficult with your communication skills,” he says. “In my group, we were lucky. I was with a good group of people.”

INTERNATIONAL TUITION IN CANADIAN DOLLARS

TH THE CRAB

11

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CULTURE

­— CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11 A FUTURE IN CANADA Although many international students choose to pursue a Western education in the hopes of working in Canada after graduation, this may not be as easy as it sounds. In December 2014, the federal government introduced a new system called Express Entry for potential immigrants applying for permanent residence.

Instead of submitting an application and waiting to hear a yes or no, students who have Canadian degrees are put into the same pool as temporary foreign workers and instead wait for an invitation into Canada. Students are subject to a labour market impact assessment, where the government verifies that the students are not in competition with similarly qualified Canadians for jobs. To live and work in Canada, a student must have a positive assessment.

Students can also be given in-province work permits, a component of Express Entry called the Provincial Nominee Program (PNP). For 2015, there are 1,350 PNP spots in BC. This limited number of permits, compared to the tens of thousands of international students in BC universities, means that the chances international students have of getting work in Canada after graduation are fairly slim.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3, 2015 www.ufvcascade.ca

Regardless of the cost, the experience and the education seem to be enough for international students to want to study here. Alfadel says he enjoys his time at UFV, not only because of the social atmosphere but because he likes his classes.

“I had the option to go to the US,” he says, “but the education here is much better.”

This means the demand for an international education for students, with parents who are willing to pay for it, puts a lot of power into an institution’s hands.

As for the isolated international students we originally set out to find, we couldn’t find them. Whether this is because the summer semester tends to be quiet, or whether the excitement of those just arriving is still fresh, the feedback was mostly positive — although the students we spoke to were all involved in clubs and events at UFV. However, this doesn’t mean there aren’t issues facing international students. As Express Entry limitations and rising tuition increases, studying and working in Canada is becoming increasingly exclusive — even as universities encourage more international students to enroll.

With files from Jeffrey Trainor, Michael Scoular, and Ashley Mussbacher.

Illustrations: Anthony Biondi

Familiar flavour and new spirit at Abbotsford flea market KATIE STOBBART

THE CASCADE

The smell of old floors and veteran smokers with a hint of canteen food and sunshine instantly transports me back to many childhood Sundays when, while others may have been smoothing their skirts over their knees and swinging their legs gently to ward off the tingles, my family went to the flea market. I got my first bike there, umpteen books, and the better part of my Pokémon card collection.

Flea markets are named for the French marché aux puces, a caveat that shabby secondhand goods might contain pests you wouldn’t want to bring home with you. There’s no need to fear fleas at modern markets, but the name stuck and such venues still often carry the vestiges of that particular vibe. Something about the combination of kitsch and the average clientele keeps it endearingly low-brow; there’s none of the modern, “vintage” boutique chic — this is the real deal, a strange menagerie of stuff that’s been sitting out decades in some basement, attic, or stagnating parlour. Part of the partiular pleasure of skimming flea market tables both outside and in is the promise of hidden treasure: one person’s junk, and all that.

With the progression of time, the old has made new neighbours, with local entrepreneurs taking advantage of the low table price and moderate to high foot traffic on mornings which usually see closed storefronts city-wide.

It has become cleaner — for one thing, people don’t smoke inside anymore. And, as long time seller Margie Lovatt explains, the odours of the place have changed with shifting ownership.

“You don’t smell the horses and cows in here anymore,” she says, a chuckle erupting. “They have a new owner, and he’s so, so good.

He’s cleaned the whole place up.”

Lovatt, or “Aunt Margie,” has been a flea market staple for nearly 40 years. A WWII veteran, she turns 92 this July.

“I used to go to the old one when it was at the Tradex, before

“This is the real deal, a strange menagerie of stuff that’s been sitting out decades in some basement,

attic,

or

stagnating parlour.” they built the Tradex. That was my first experience; my husband and I did that.” Margie is retired now, but still comes every weekend to sell a variety of tastebudtempting fudge and other sweets.

The market is resplendent with plants, produce, books, wares both modern and vintage, clothing, candles … just about anything you can think of, including services.

“Anything sold has to be legal.”

That’s the only real rule, according to Rod Stoner, a flea market

staff member. “No stolen items, no knock-off product, no outdated food or anything … it’s a mix of different stuff: new and used, old, and services [like] massaging and body art.”

There’s also a key cutter and engraver; Gordie has operated in the far back corner of the market for nearly 11 years. Like Margie, he is retired, his weekly set up a kind of hobby. Gordie didn’t have much to say about atmosphere, but he did note that market-goers aren’t spending as much now as they used to.

“Money is pretty hard to come by, and people are keeping an eye on every cent,” he says. “People don’t want to pay a heckuvalot for items that are valued at a fair amount of money.”

Maybe this is why there were more empty tables inside this week than in my memory of the place, and certain long-time vendors I remember have been noticeably absent a few weeks in a row.

“Now, talk to grumpy over here!” Gordie says cheerfully, gesturing to another regular seller across the aisle. Dave, whose table holds bottled ships, wooden planes and cars, and boxes of records, agrees that business has decreased over the years.

“It seems to be going downhill … I think what’s killing it is the bidding wars on Facebook and the internet,” he explains. He has been at the Abbotsford flea market for five years, and also sells at other markets, like the one at Cultus Lake.

Despite being perhaps less successful than it used to be, new

Image: Katie Stobbart

Abbotsford’s flea market offers everything from plants and produce to bottled ships, model planes, and kitschy housewares, all with a dash of character. entrepreneurs are looking to the market as an opportunity to bring otherwise web-based businesses to a physical location. Karl Lundgren has been to a few markets for various business ventures, but May 31 marked his first day at the Abbotsford location selling earthquake emergency kits.

“This is the first time I’ve done something with a bit of a higher price-tag on it, so we’ll see how that goes,” he said at about 10 a.m., noting that a lot of foot traffic happens between then and 1 p.m. “So far so good.”

For Lundgren, who has also sold jerseys and create-your-own children’s books at the flea market, that traffic makes it worth the price of a Sunday morning. “[The flea market] is a great resource for any small business to sell because it’s so cheap to set up a table, so it’s really just your

time,” he said.

Stoner explains that it ranges from $18 to $29 to rent a table, depending on location inside or outside. The cheapest tables are in the middle of the action indoors; the most expensive are outside in the warm weather in the south lot of Ag Rec. Missing these days from the flea market is Chuck, who has manned the PA system for years, announcing special deals or lost children in the same booming, auctioneer-like voice. Chuck died recently, and the lack of his presence is felt, according to Stoner.

“We really miss him. He was a big part of the market and the whole flavour here,” Stoner says.

The flea market is open every Sunday from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Ag Rec building on Haida Drive, a stone’s throw from Rotary Stadium.

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WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3, 2015 www.ufvcascade.ca

“The Illuminati isn’t the enemy” First Mission Youth Arts Festival offers wisdom and entertainment from local youth NADINE MOEDT

THE CASCADE

Talented youths of Mission offered their take on life, love, and Taylor Swift via poetry, dance, and music at the third annual Mission’s Youth Arts Festival.

Hosted by the Mission Arts Council, the evening presented 12 stage performances from artists aged 13 to 25.

The festival began with a viewing of artwork in the foyer of Heritage Park, featuring five artists and a range of methods.

Stencilled skateboards, animal portraits, Illuminati symbols, and Nicholas Cage’s face set the tone for a night of the sweet earnestness of today’s youth.

The performances were introduced by Tony Loyer, who expressed his amazement at the artists’ ages with contagious enthusiasm throughout the night.

Thirteen-year-old singer-songwriter Rebecca Sichon opened the night with a sentimental guitar performance, 14-year-old violinist Ruth Lindl treated the audience to Sydney Carter’s “Lord of the Dance,” and 16-year-old Britt Grant performed a beautiful and physically trying solo dance. Solo performances were punctuated by a tap and ballet set by the Fraser Valley Academy of Dance.

Image: Nadine Moedt

Despite the wide variety of media, a theme of youthful passion emerged as the night progressed.

Dyllan Singh Thind was introduced by Loyer with a side note that the young man had just that day secured a date for prom. Thind performed a newly composed rap that delved into the confused experience of the adolescent boy bridging on young man; anger, pity, fear mingled in a mass of bravado and an uninformed, if earnest, plea for social change.

The performance offered the unnuanced wisdom of inexperi-

ence— “The illuminati isn’t the enemy / it’s you and me” — and declarations of adult wrongdoing: “Mission is messed ... why is there still poor people?”

Mission poet Vienna Jeffery performed “The first person I ever loved,” a spoken-word poem that won her an impressive third place in Vancouver’s Youth Poetry Slam. The poem, an angry retaliation at an upbringing that tied self-worth with gender roles and an endgame of loving a man, came from the mouth of a feminist who isn’t yet tired of her own

awareness. The experience she relates (“I know that my greatest downfall was / the first person I ever loved wasn’t me”) is all too common. It was her passion that made the poem stand out and struck the audience with a keen hope that this fire is something Jeffery can sustain.

Several performances by UFV students raised the average age, with short films by Mitch Huttema, and a lively banjo performance by Alex Rake, who took part in organizing the festival.

Katie Stobbart presented poems from her English honours project, which explores the link between Greek mythology and perceptions of modern day female celebrities. Emma Watson, Kim Kardashian, and Anne Hathaway were mythologized beside the likes of Athena and Aphrodite; after all, “all myths are true and have one origin.”

The evening wrapped up with a couple of suitably angsty Taylor Swift covers by Chantel Justine. And the audience found themselves reminiscing about the confused, self-conscious, impassioned days of their youths.

Mitch Huttema, Alex Rake, and Katie Stobbart are employees of The Cascade.

Grant’s Lament for a Nation still asks important questions of Canadians Professor Ron Dart discusses political text’s relevance 50 years after publication KODIE CHERRILLE

THE CASCADE

“The impossibility of conservatism in our era is the impossibility of Canada. As Canadians we attempted a ridiculous task in trying to build a conservative nation in the age of progress, on a continent we share with the most dynamic nation on earth. The current of modern history was against us.” — George Grant It’s been 50 years since Grant’s Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism argued that Canada was doomed, and reports of the nation’s death may or may not have been exaggerated.

Canada has yet to be engulfed by the United States, but everstrengthening economic, political, and cultural ties between the countries lend many examples to Grant’s argument that Canada is being swept away by the current

of something larger than it.

Then there’s that ever-persistent question of identity: What does it even mean to be Canadian?

To mark Lament’s 50th anniversary, UFV political science professor Ron Dart has published a 38-page collection of essays titled Lament for a Nation: Then and Now, which contains four brief essays from Dart, each offering a primer to what Dart calls “the mountain range of Grant’s thinking.”

The essays explore the oftignored theological segment of Lament, the political and ethical stance of Grant’s high Toryism, and Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl.”

Grant’s conservatism is not the kind of ideology that most people today would identify, at first glance, as conservative. Grant strongly opposed any policy that aligned too closely with American interests, and pushed for a distinct

Canadian way that would serve its own interests first. It means no wholesale selling-off of Canadian resources to other countries, and an emphasis on distinct, local cultures, as opposed to a single, universal one.

“Grant was not lamenting the passing of a right-wing perspective, but a left-of-centre one,” Dart explained.

But such a perspective in Canada might not be dead. Dart says the Green Party of Canada shares many of the principles that Grant advocates.

“It’s a bizarre misuse of language when the Green Party is seen as the radicals, the tree-huggers,” he observed. “The Greens are the most conservative of all!

They’re trying to conserve the physical world we live in for future generations.”

For Dart, this “bizarre misuse of language” also explains the gen-

eral misunderstanding of what it means to be conservative.

“Conservatism now equals business, or using the physical world any way you want … that’s a rather extremely aggressive liberalism, in which the strongest individuals can do what they want to other people or the world for short-term profit.”

Dart hopes, especially with the federal elections approaching, that the 50-year anniversary of Lament encourages students to learn more about Canadian intellectual history. It is there that any understanding of what it means to be Canadian will be found.

“One of the greatest diseases we face in this culture is our lack of memory,” says Dart. “You cannot reclaim your culture if you have no memory of it.”

Upcoming

Events June 7

FVS presents Roland Gjernes The Fraser Valley Symphony is ending its season with a bang, and a violoncello feature. The symphony will perform from Chabrier’s lively “Danse Slav” and Saint-Saëns’ “Cello Concerto,” followed by selections from Delibes’ graceful ballet “Coppélia.” The concert takes place at the Matsqui Centennial Auditorium, at 3 p.m. Tickets, which are $15 for students, can be purchased online.

June 11 & 12

UFV Convocation Surprise! It’s convocation time! If it’s your time to walk the stage, don your robes and square cap for one of the top five most important times in your life not to trip.

If you’ve been invited by a graduating friend or family member, bring a cushion, some snacks, and a fully charged phone for a good couple of hours of congratulatory ceremony.

June 13

Anonymous Art Show The Abbotsford Arts Council is hosting its second annual Anonymous Art Show! The popular event will showcase anonymous artwork submitted by artists of all ages, experience, media, and styles at the Kariton Gallery. Each work is priced at $100, with half the proceeds going to the artist and half toward further Arts Council initiatives. The name of the artist will be revealed once the art is purchased. Opening night is June 13 from 6 to 8 p.m. Come out and support local artists and Abbotsford’s Arts Council! If you are interested in submitting your art, check out how to qualify at the Council’s website.

June 13 & 20

Coffee house concerts continue The Abbotsford Arts Council’s summer concert series continues with live music every Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Check out the jazzy Red Velvet Music on June 13 at the House of James, and the folksy pop harmonies of Glass Half Full at SippChai Café on June 20.

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WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3, 2015 www.ufvcascade.ca

TV

What was Mad Men? CHARTS 1

METZ II

2

Freak Heat Waves Bonnie’s State of Mind

Bolt 3 Lightning Fantasy Empire

4 Dodgers Bombshells Bee & the 5 Queen Buzzkills

6

Stalk to Me Speedy Ortiz Foil Deer

Kelli Pop 7 Peach III Cronin 8 Mikal MCIII Group Vision 9 N.213’s N.213’s Group Vision To Spill 10 Built Untethered Moon

11

Purity Ring Another Eternity

Cong 12 Viet Viet Cong No! Yoko 13 Oh Pinhead’s Paradise Barnett 14 Courtney Sometimes I Sit And Think,

15

And Sometimes I Just Sit Belle And Sebastian Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance

Aeroplanes 16 Paper Joy Johnston 17 B.A. Shit Sucks

18 Cafeine New Love Mountain Goats 19 The Beat the Champ

20 Wire Wire

Shuffle

Sixties-set melodrama found meaning in the absurd ALEX RAKE THE CASCADE

DAVE CUSICK

CIVL DIRECTOR OF PROGRAMMING

The SUB may be a vacuum zone when it comes to cell service, but luckily CIVL is in the SUB, and they have music, which is just as good! Maybe.

Back to you, Dave.

—Michael Scoular Unknown Mortal Orchestra “Can’t Keep Checking My Phone” This three-piece from Portland has created what, to me, is the official summer jam of 2015. (Imagine Michael Jackson and DJ Jazzy Jeff on a rooftop as the July sun sets.) The band explains the song as being “about missing somebody and that point where you refuse to accept online ‘connectivity’ as a substitute for being with someone IRL.” Blondie “Hanging on the Telephone” The short-lived band the Nerves originally wrote and recorded this song in 1976, but it wasn’t until the ageless Debbie Harry recorded the song two years later that it became popular and a classic staple of college radio for years to come.

Blondie’s plea, “Don’t leave me hanging on the telephone,” pairs nicely with her 1980 single, “Call Me.” Milli Vanilli “Baby, Don’t Forget My Number” This one time in 1992 (I’m old, by the way) my best friend and I were at a diner late on a Friday night.

As we left, we put a dollar into the jukebox, which bought 11 songs.

For our first, we chose “With or Without You” by U2, but for the other ten, we put “Baby, Don’t Forget My Number” on repeat, and left the scene quickly. By this time, Milli Vanilli had been outed and disgraced as lip-syncing frauds, radio had long before played their songs into the ground, and they were considered to have even less critical acclaim than Nickelback does now.

I like to think everyone in the restaurant had a night to remember.

They Might Be Giants “The Guitar (The Lion Sleeps Tonight)” In the pre-internet era, They Might Be Giants created the first on-demand music service, an answering machine with a weekly song called “Dial-A-Song.” It’s no wonder they altered the lyrics of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” to “In the spaceship, the silver spaceship ... the lion’s on the phone.”

A man walks into an advertising firm. He’s half an hour late for his presentation. He’s hungover. It’s a normal day.

He’s supposed to be pitching a commercial for yogurt in a tube or a thing like that. It doesn’t really matter. He takes his time getting to the meeting room he should already be sitting in. “Should.” It doesn’t really matter. The door opens and the clients inside are definitely annoyed, but, before they can voice it, the ad man begins to speak and closes the door. Fifteen minutes pass and the door opens again. The clients — old men who hate change — come out, one by one, weeping and grinning in spiritual ecstasy. Their lives are changed forever, and the ad firm is $1 million richer.

It doesn’t really matter. The ad man lights a cigarette, bangs a secretary, and reads Ferlinghetti. It’s a normal day.

This is Mad Men on the surface: ridiculously cool and pointlessly impressive. The show, however, is not just a surface of cool, cool spectacle, but an exploration of those surfaces and why they work — things like the graphics on a soup can, the fashion of a subculture, the construction of one’s identity, and so on.

For example, the surreal title sequence is both visually impressive and carefully philosophical. It shows a man falling to his death from a top-storey window of a building on Madison Avenue, tumbling through a nightmare of advertisements. Rather than hit the ground, he lands safely and suavely into a couch, in an office, on the top storey of a building on Madison Avenue. This man can’t even kill himself without becoming something, even if

it’s just the same something he was before.

Recappers on the internet like to talk about how very neat Mad Men is as a period piece, how it really shows how bad misogyny and –isms were back in the sixties, how much we ought to hate or love the central Mad Man, Don Draper. These themes are really only on the surface of the show, and I don’t like how they’re talked about as if they were themes of the past that were merely interesting today. So, as Draper says, “If you don’t like what they’re saying, change the conversation.”

Mad Men as a singular body of work is best for the questions it forces the engaged viewer to ask about identity and authenticity today. Yes, the show takes place in the crazy ‘60s — but just how possible is it to authentically grasp the turbulence of a time, and what that turbulence means, while living through it? Yes, everyone hates those darn sodomites — but how often is hatred anything more than posture for acceptance? And yeah, Don Draper is a creative genius who is also incompetent as a husband, father, employee, and boss — but to what degree are husband, father, employee, and boss meaningful roles in the first place? To what degree does a creative genius have the responsibility to use their creativity for anything?

If questions about life and how to live it don’t interest you, you will still enjoy Mad Men for its coolness. Just don’t be surprised when it actually makes you think — and yes, feel — something. Don’t be surprised when it revives some engagement with life itself, and everything at once seems weird and correct, and you’re baffled by the beautiful impossibility of the statement: it’s a normal day.

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ARTS IN REVIEW

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3, 2015 www.ufvcascade.ca

S undBites

Toro y Moi

Mini Album Reviews

Buffy Sainte-Marie

What For?

Power in the Blood

Courtney Barnett

Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit

Oh Village To Rely

Toro y Moi is the pseudonym for South Carolina producer-songwriter Chaz Bundick. His latest album What For? revolves around the 1970s, featuring a dance, psych, and funk-pop fusion soundscape.

Toro y Moi is known to shift between multiple genres from album to album and often Bundick makes the transition successfully, but What For? is perhaps his most sporadic collection to date.

There are some standout tracks on this record: “Buffalo” is a song you’ll feel like you’ve heard on That ‘70s Show back in the day with its groovy guitars, fat bass, and compressed drums, and both “Lilly” and “Run Baby Run” hearken back to the chillwave sound Toro y Moi became famous for on Causers of This.

But issues show up when the songs kick up a notch. Songs like “Spell it Out” and “Empty Nesters” are eclectic and charismatic, but Bundick’s vocal delivery is not. Bundick sticks with his laid-back vocal style when the song really needs something more, causing these tracks to fall flat in comparison to the more solid tracks I mentioned earlier.

There are some great moments locked within What For? but for most of the record you’ll find yourself waiting for them to happen.

I heard Buffy Sainte-Marie for the first time at the Mission Folk Fest a couple years ago, and she was awesome. Her voice was real and unreal.

Buffy’s new album Power in the Blood is just all right. There are some old songs, there are some new songs, and they don’t really transcend like her earlier, folksier works. Perhaps the full electronic band arrangement dilutes the sincerity and therefore the power of the songs, or maybe the lyrics themselves don’t cut as deep. There are some particularly political lyrics, like in “Power in the Blood,” a cover of an Alabama 3 song with new lyrics about GMOs. The problem with political lyrics is that the song still has to be good in its own right, and “Power in the Blood” feels particularly slapped together.

The main problem is something feels off about the production. It’s very cluttered but very clean, producing a sort of “uncanny valley” sound. It’s difficult to get over at first, but later tracks like the amazing “Ke Sakihitin Awasis” and “Carry It On” manage to escape this.

The songs are amazing, the performances are okay, and the production is lame. In any case, I recommend Buffy Sainte-Marie’s other works to anyone who wants some mind-blowing contemporary folk.

Courtney Barnett is no lilter or vocal skyscraper, but her songs are unique, catchy, and approachable. Sometimes I Sit and Think... begins, guitar and percussion setting the scene, with a steady, urgent tempo in “Elevator Operator,” which complements the subject matter and repetition in the chorus: “Don’t jump little boy, don’t jump off that roof / you’ve got your whole life ahead of you, you’re still in your youth / I’d give anything to have skin like you.” There’s an imploring urgency in this line, then Barnett shifts the focus with the boy’s response: “He said, I think you’re projecting the way that you’re feeling / I’m not suicidal, just idling insignificantly.”

The main reason Barnett’s music sticks in my head and keeps me listening over and over is its poetry and unsettling modern subject matter (suicidal seals and pesticide-sprayed apples, for instance). The tempo slows from “An Illustration of Loneliness” to “Depreston,” a quiet, meandering house search in suburbia. The album presses forward with “Dead Fox,” which seems fuelled by similar impulses to “Big Yellow Taxi” (Joni Mitchell), but instead of trees in a museum Barnett suggests cars become obsolete displays. “More people die on the road than they do in the ocean; maybe / we should mull over culling cars instead of sharks / or just lock them up in parks where we can go and view them.” Internal rhyme, as in that last line, weaves the lyrics together and lends them a certain resonance that keeps echoing long after the song — and the album — is over.

Even though Oh Village is apparently a local music staple, I hadn’t heard their music until two months ago, when I attended a three-band show in an old church basement in Abbotsford. I’m not sure if it was the low-lighting or the bandmates’ impeccable taste in fashion, but I fell in love with this band.

Their music is a happy mix of eclectic and commercial. The thing is, this band doesn’t sound like anything else I’ve listened to, but at the same time I’m able to relate to their music because it isn’t too purposely different. To Rely has five songs — all sounding different.

There are common traits in their music: lead vocals, the use of triplets on the piano, and swelling strings. At the tiny show I attended, Oh Village played a new song and that was the tipping point for me. Their music filled the room and many people stopped chatting to one another to watch them. Even though their music is “indie,” Oh Village doesn’t attack the listener with the argument that they are different or special — rather, they just are different. And I noticed.

Jeffrey Trainor

Alex Rake

Katie Stobbart

Megan Lambert

Film

The Rock is unshakeable in new disaster flick San Andreas RYAN DHILLON CONTRIBUTOR

Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson is at the pinnacle of his big-screen career. With hundreds of millions in revenue, the blockbuster journeyman can do no wrong.

His most recent venture, San Andreas, has the former professional wrestler portraying Ray Gaines, a hapless Los Angeles Search and Rescue chief determined to find his daughter Blake (Alexandra Daddario) in San Francisco following a 9.6-magnitude earthquake with the help of his soon-to-be ex-wife Emma (Carla

Gugino). Perhaps expectedly, Johnson excels at carrying most of the film while playing off the superb destruction and constant shrieks of his co-stars. But the true star of the film is the overwhelmingly present CGI, creating apocalypse amid a fleeting plot and hollow supporting characters. With the inherent nature of a disaster film calling for the necessity of crumbling buildings and cracked streets, San Andreas must have been a dream playground for the visual effects editors and cinematography crew.

Aside from bracing action, there are few surprises as Ray and Emma fight to save Blake. In

a moment of plight, when Emma desperately seeks his guidance, Johnson utters the defining phrase of the movie: “We’re going to get our daughter.”Thereafter, the entirety of their search takes place within conveniently accessible vessels of transportation.

Even when a tsunami rolls in, there is little surprise as Johnson uses his well-documented muscular fortitude to swerve a motorboat over Mother Nature’s oceanic roar. But not even the Rock’s behemoth strength could pull this plot out of its ordinariness. Nor could Paul Giamatti’s convincing portrayal of the resident earthquake connoisseur,

who delivers humbling advice to aspiring geologists everywhere, exclaiming, “Contrary to popular belief, scientists don’t know everything!” It seems as though the same could be said for the screenwriters. Indeed, San Andreas offers little anticipation other than the promise of ending credits. Let it be noted, however, that had I been unfamiliar with the nuances of the disaster genre and unexposed to similar productions of the past, San Andreas might have been a worthy escape from the day-to-day.

Although there’s a lack of narrative ingenuity, the sentimentality of Ray and Emma striving

to save their daughter provides enough motive to suspend cynicism momentarily, as you wonder if they’ll actually overcome the CGI-induced disaster that plagues California. And the multiple well-timed obstacles faced by Blake on her quest to stay alive and reunite with her fervent parents were admittedly gripping.

If you can’t resist the unrelenting urge to see Dwayne Johnson in his predictably heroic glory or have been waiting to see Los Angeles and San Francisco crumble due to climatic envy, I’d recommend San Andreas — just don’t expect any new findings.

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ARTS IN REVIEW

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3, 2015 www.ufvcascade.ca

Film

Fly into the sun

Tomorrowland preaches about paradise; Aloha dabbles in deep waters

MICHAEL SCOULAR THE CASCADE

“I wanted to see your utopia ... but now I see it is more of a fruitopia.”

— Stephen Hawking Tomorrowland Two seasons after animator and director Brad Bird left his work on The Simpsons to pursue a feature film career, “They Saved Lisa’s Brain” aired. In this episode, Mayor Quimby flees town, leaving Springfield in charge of the local Mensa group, into which Lisa has just been accepted (“Wow, me, fit in!”). Through their superior education, rational composure, and inherent brilliance, the group, which also includes Principal Skinner, Doctor Hibbert, Professor Frink, Lindsey Naegle, and the Comic Book Guy, believes that now, finally, with them in charge, their small, ignorant town will change. They will elevate the conversation.

This is, of course, The Simpsons, so any hope for perfect governance is tempered by gentle cynicism: turns out everybody has their own ideas of utopia, which clash, devolving into an IQ-ranking in-fight. Then Stephen Hawking arrives. Next episode, the world will stay the same.

Tomorrowland’s Lisa Simpson, Casey Newton (other character names: Athena, Hugo Gernsback; George Clooney appears, unscathed, as Frank Walker), first appears off-screen, just her voice, arguing with Walker over who should tell the story.

After a botched opening, she gets her turn, but this is a feint: Newton, played with as much spontaneity as the script allows by Britt Robertson, is not someone whose individuality overpowers the film, turning viewers to her perspective. Tomorrowland’s scope, and its folly, is much broader than that — like screenwriter Damon Lindelof’s previous work, particularly Lost, this is a story in which ideas are tested out, where characters exist to walk into traps or collide with immovable objects. Unlike those philosophical experiment episodes, this movie is also lashed together with Bird’s story, and with Disney’s; though it contemplates the narrative of the human universe, it never leaves where Bird begins, through Clooney’s opening: “I got fired for, quote, rocking the boat, unquote. They were basically saying that if I’d stop complaining about quality, I could hold onto my job. I said, ‘I’m complaining about stuff your master animators taught me to complain about. So either I’m getting fired or I’m selling out everything you guys supposedly stand for.’”

That’s Bird recounting his firing from Disney as a young animator, years before his two acclaimed works with Pixar. It’s not a coincidence Clooney’s Frank Walker is similarly crushed, banished from utopia, separated from the inventing work he loves and continues to fill his home with. The opening of Tomorrowland illustrates that rise and downfall, and the rest of the film traces a circle around it, nudging toward a coming to terms with the regret of lost years and the creep of bitter, hardened adulthood, even as it is nominally an adventure yarn with parallel dimensions, robot police officers, and a

Image: Anthony Biondi

comic goods shop loaded with Disney and Star Wars kitsch. So, okay, this is a personal film — and personal filmmaking is what we notice, sticking out from the remakes and franchises and fairytale repeats — but everything personal in this film is directed toward either touchy-feely didacticism or conspiracy-theory revisionist realism. Tomorrowland is most like a paranoid confessional album, where the artist simultaneously voices anxieties and tries to convince himself those anxieties have been released and dealt with: climate change will kill us all in 58 days! the end of space exploration is the death of imagination! dumbed-down school curriculum will bore and drain all our children’s curiousity! and worst of all, a young boy’s love will go unreturned!

To escape these dystopic fears, the film flashes back to the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and sideways to the theme park city Disney built, a little aged, leaking promise like a long-vacated Olympic stadium project. Because this is a Brad Bird movie, there are a lot of glowing consoles, whirring action-figure robots who can’t reach their backs, and beeping explosives. Claudio Miranda, the cinematographer, casts everything in his typical antiseptic advertisement matte finish. But the real dream location of Tomorrowland is Los Angeles, where Walt himself dedicated a section of rides to “scientists today opening the doors of the Space Age to achievements that will benefit our children and generations to come.” In a digital long-take glimpse, Casey takes in the glory: basically Los Angeles, but everyone and everything hovers. Scrambling to contact her parents to let them know she’s all right, she tells an answering machine, “I’m not on drugs, I haven’t joined a cult.” The rest of the movie suggests otherwise, beaming a message crossed between The Power of Positive Thinking and a let-us-join-hands Coca-Cola commercial.

Aloha Late in Tomorrowland, Hugh Laurie’s spacearistocrat character delivers a monologue, summing up both his and, he assumes, his audience’s greatest modern fear: that time is slipping away. The damage we do will not be forgotten, and cannot be reversed. He speaks of the death of Earth, and ascribes it to our daily images: every morning, every nightly newscast, every trip to the theatre, we see destruction. In turn, we believe this calamity is inevitable, or that it is merely the stuff of entertainment, and do nothing.

This argument is larger than just one film; it drives a large amount of the discourse around all films when they are released across the world: are they true enough to reality, are they responsibly moral, do they provide us with both a problem and a solution to the personal and political scenarios they depict? While these questions are often an entry-point to urgent, necessary discussions, whether post-screening jokes or magazine essays, sometimes I wonder if they also sometimes suggest a desire for films to do the work of change for us: that they, prophetic works by Great Artists, turn the tide of whatever cause we stand beside. Bird’s and Lindelof’s scripts have this kind of entertainment-activism motivation behind them, and there is that tenor to the overwhelming criticism, some of it made before the film was even viewable, of Cameron Crowe’s Aloha.

Its problems are many: here is yet another movie set in a fictional, tourism-friendly Hawaii, one that erases the real experience of people there who live not at some vacation resort, but in cities and towns that almost never see the light of cinematic day.

Emma Stone is cast as Allison Ng, a quarter-Hawaiian, quarter-Chinese, half-Swedish Air Force pilot, she proudly graphs, so this is also yet another insensitive, whitewashed Hollywood fantasy. Bradley Coo-

per plays the protagonist, familiar to anyone who’s seen any other movie written by Crowe: the 30-something “brilliant, innovative, commanding, sad wreck of a guy,” disillusioned until he meets someone who believes in him. This, too, is a personal film

by Crowe, made from a perspective that can imagine paradise, but lacks the empathy to truly reach beyond his own experience.

And yet, I can’t hate Aloha. Not in the way it is already being hated — I don’t think a complete dismissal accomplishes anything, and I think that even if Crowe somehow had avoided all these missteps, had made a diverse movie that truly reckoned with the effects of colonialism, went beyond, was an inclusive, inter-sectional movie about the politics and history of Hawaii while still also being a romantic melodrama, that audiences across the continent would not be better off — a fluke won’t change Hollywood’s way of doing things.

Aloha is a failure as a representation of a place. Most films are. Furious 7, held up as a way to “do things right” because of its multi-ethnic stars, traipses through Abu Dhabi and Azerbaijan with not a single word about the real people that live there, but perhaps that doesn’t matter, because it’s an action movie. Well, Aloha is a goofy romance, a sentimental throwback, and it’s flawed on many counts there too, but, perhaps owing to its whittled-down runtime (the studio, Columbia Pictures, hated it too: “People don’t like people in movies who flirt with married people or married people who flirt,” Amy Pascal wrote in a nownotorious email), and despite Crowe’s awful tendency for self-flattering redemption stories (Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous, both toxic, unfunny, and filled with annoying children), it has a way of finding emotionally dense, verbally disorienting moments of acting and pushing them to the forefront.

And this works, even if these are the emotional currents of “white people.”

It’s not just Cooper’s character that’s admirable — everyone admires each other, storing away reflective pauses while saying far more than they mean to. It doesn’t make for a lot of conflict, but Crowe includes a plot involving military privatization (Bill Murray plays the financier, Alec Baldwin the near-mock-Strangelove general) and the purchase of native land that’s surprisingly aware of the false compromises and corporate bribing that historically and presently force people like Dennis Kanahele, appearing as himself in the film, into positions with no satisfying exit. Crowe doesn’t stick with the storyline, casually drifting back to romantic quadrangles, kitchen scenes full of memory, and pressure-cooker shortattention-span banter, but it’s there, a transitional point that suggests while there’s plenty in Aloha worth linking to decades of lazy archetypes, the Hawaii depicted here is one not of endless summer and worry-free soft-focus glances, but a place that, upon arrival, is already full of the past, which continues to have a gravitational pull on what happens in the present.

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ARTS IN REVIEW

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3, 2015 www.ufvcascade.ca

Albums

Summer vibes and ‘70s funk mark Snoop Dogg’s return to hip-hop MARTIN CASTRO CONTRIBUTOR

Everyone’s favourite blunt-toting canine is back from his brief foray into reggae, and he’s bringing good vibes with him. Bush marks Snoop D-oh-double-G’s first appearance in the hip-hop arena since 2011’s Doggumentary. However, unlike Doggumentary, Bush is almost entirely produced by Pharrell Williams, and that comes through. Speaking to Complex about the album, Snoop said the driving idea behind the album came from asking, “How much fun can [Pharrell and I] have if we go into the studio and work on this record?” The answer, it would seem, is a lot.

The production on all 10 tracks of the record is lush and strongly influenced by mid-to-late ’70s soul and funk; bass guitars are slapped more often than Moe during a Three Stooges rerun marathon, and the guitars are tight and spongy.

The opener, “California Roll,” which features Stevie Wonder, sees Snoop Dogg crooning silkily over an instrumental that’s sundry with strong ’70s throwbacks.

Rhodes piano and Stevie Wonder’s iconic harmonica surround the elder Snoop as he sings (quite well, actually) about his beloved California homeland.

Immediately we get a sense that this isn’t the gangster / rapper / gangster-rapper the world was introduced to back in 1993. No, this is a man who is doing what he damn well wants to do: make feelgood music for feel-good people, and smoke kush.

“So Many Pros,” which includes a chorus that rubs me the wrong way, is more than saved by a breakdown that was stuck in my head for about a week after I first heard it. This track is unapologetically hooky, and I’m sure that’s just how Snoop Dogg wants it.

One of the most striking things on “Peaches N Cream,” which fea-

tures vocals from Charlie Wilson and Pharrell, is Snoop’s rapping.

At this point, we’re six tracks into the record, and only now is Snoop really delivering full verses. Even

“This is a man who is doing what he damn well wants to do: make feel-good music for feel-good people, and smoke kush.” here, they’re verses interspaced by oceans of silk and Curtis Mayfieldesque kit and bass. The biggest impression on me while listening to this track was: Damn, Snoop sounds like he’s having fun. He’s not just rapping to make money or to show off — he convincingly

sounds like a man having the time of his life grooving in the studio, surrounded by open bottles of Hennessey and an increasingly thick layer of marijuana smoke.

“Edibles” features one of the most understated yet noteworthy features on the entire record (apart from Rick Ross’ later on, but Ross lets his presence be known immediately despite Kendrick overshadowing him). On “Edibles” T.I delivers a verse that, if anything, serves to remind those who forgot why he’s worshipped alongside Killer Mike and Bun B as a defacto rapper / ambassador from the South. The chorus on this track also highlights how at home Snoop seems with singing; he really gets into the groove of the track.

“I Knew That” is a track that probably could have been left off the record, as it’s pretty forgettable compared to its predecessors.

The track that follows it, however, “Run Away,” screams summer

cookout. Aided by Gwen Stefani on the chorus and hook, the track is a bit of a hidden gem.

Traditional hip-hop fans, don’t fret. Snoop pulls through in the ninth with a home-run of a track titled “I’m Ya Dogg” (as if we still had any doubts by now). The track bounces on hi-hat tiptoes for two minutes before Rick Ross rolls in and kills a verse with all the confidence and bravado of a mastiff in a kennel of chihuahuas. Ross’ verse, as great as it would be on its own, is only further bolstered by an immaculately delivered verse by modern slam-poet celebrity Kendrick Lamar. Delivered with a hesitant, almost uneven rhythm, K-Dot’s verse ties the track together and makes for a memorable ending to a funky, smooth, reeferscented, chocolate-flavoured, feelgood Snoop Dogg project.

Not just another ‘80s-inspired summer album: Eclipse is Twin Shadow’s best JEFFREY TRAINOR THE CASCADE

George Lewis Jr. has often been a perplexing member of the indie music landscape. His two albums, 2010’s Forget and 2012’s Confess, were both incredibly inconsistent.

Yes, it should be noted that both records did contain stellar singles such as “Castles in the Snow” and “Five Seconds,” but overall each record felt like it was missing something. Based on this prior experience, I was fully expecting

Eclipse to be another sporadic musical escapade.

Eclipse opens with “Flatliners,” which successfully establishes the tone of the record. With crisp, electronic beats, punchy synthesizers, and reverb-drenched guitar tones as his backdrop, Lewis Jr’s crooning vocals slide gracefully overtop. This mix of instrumentation heavily draws on ‘80s synth pop, and this might make it easy to assume that the sonic palette of Eclipse is old, tired, and overdone — but Lewis Jr., who is a credited co-producer on every track, does an excellent job of avoiding pas-

tiche. He successfully melds the sounds and styles of the past with a very modern production job, which gives the whole album a fresh and polished tone.

This approach highlights a more well-rounded songwriting touch.

There are still some songs on this record you’ll want to skip time and again (for me they were “Eclipse,” “Watch Me Go,” and “Locked and Loaded”), but overall the consistency is much improved: a huge step forward for Twin Shadow.

Some standout tracks include the lead single “To The Top,” which features a strong drumbeat with

bold and bright piano overtop. If it wasn’t for Lewis Jr.’s voice, you’d feel the instrumental was a power ballad by Journey. “Half Life” is anchored by a pulsating bass synthesizer and highlighted by Lewis Jr.’s scaled vocal melody. The most eclectic track on the record comes in the form of “Old Love / New Love,” a Swedish House Mafiainspired house jam. In all honesty, it is the black sheep track of the album, but its catchy rhythm, lively piano, and infectious vocal melody will likely have you moving in one way or another.

Lyrically, Eclipse seems to be

Lewis Jr. searching for something true while also dealing with the push and pull of a relationship — perhaps a relationship with life itself. Lyrics such as, “you’ve got my heart strings pulling in the wrong direction / you got me all alone with my own affections” and “hold onto me / don’t say it’s the end of me” portray a battle between the personal and an outside source, be it life, a friend, or a lover. Throughout the record, Lewis Jr. carries this back-and-forth dialogue well, creating a cohesive image from start to finish.

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SPORTS & HEALTH

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3, 2015 www.ufvcascade.ca

Walks, Hikes, and Bikes

Upcoming

Events June 13

Walk for ALS Help the ALS Society raise funds by joining them in a walk around Mill Lake Park. Registration opens at 10 a.m. and the walk begins at 11 a.m. For more information contact fraservalleywalk@alsbc.ca.

June 13

Abbotsford Police Challenge Run Join the Abbotsford Police Department for a 5- or 10-km run.

The race begins at the Police Department headquarters on Justice Way. Visit abbypd.ca for more details.

June 7

Run for Rest Participate in a 5-km walk / run in support of Matthew’s House, a respite care home for children. From noon to 3 p.m. at Mill Lake Park.

Event starts at the water park off Emerson. Sign up online at mattshouse.ca.

June 13 and 14 APNA Truck Show

Abbotsford’s Tradex will once more host what APNA’s website advertises as “the largest and most anticipated trucking gala event in Western Canada.” Attractions include a Show ‘n’ Shine, booths, a job fair, a VIP dinner, and other entertainment. Start your engines!

Discovering the hidden gem of Hicks Lake VALERIE FRANKLIN THE CASCADE

When I was invited to a rustic wedding on the sandy shores of Hicks Lake, my first question was how far away it was. I thought I knew the Lower Mainland’s geography pretty well, but I’d never heard of it. To my relief, Google Maps showed that it was only a few kilometres north of Harrison Hot Springs. The road to the lake is an intimidating squiggle on the map, but it’s surprisingly easy to get there in real life: as you’re driving into Harrison, turn right down Lillooet Avenue and let it lead you out of town. Follow the lakeside road past waterfalls, craggy cliffs, and cozy vacation cabins until you enter Sasquatch National Park, then simply follow the signs to Hicks Lake along a gravel road.

All told, the drive is about an hour and a half if you’re starting from Abbotsford.

Like the rest of Sasquatch National Park, the Hicks Lake area is dominated by thick secondgrowth forests which are home to all kinds of wildlife; a pair of deer bounded across the road in front of our car as we drove in, and we spotted several bald eagles. But the lake itself is the main attraction: soft, sandy beaches strewn with driftwood and outcroppings of ancient glaciated rock, with Mount Cheam peeking over the hills on the southern side of the lake. The water is clear and fresh with no lake smell — and best of all, there are several small, mysterious islands dotting the lake, waiting to be explored by bold swimmers and

Image: Kyle Pearce/ flickr

If you’re willing to brave the gravel road, the peaceful beaches at Hicks Lake are worth the trip. kayakers. However, swimmer’s itch has been reported in the area recently, so take precautions if you’re planning to get wet and be prepared to towel off quickly.

The main beach in the day-use area is, unfortunately, dominated by a flock of Canadian geese and the mess they’ve left on the grass, but the surrounding beaches are clean and quiet. Many of the best areas are secluded behind tall trees and boulders, perfect for a romantic picnic or privately sunbathing on the warm rocks. If you’re looking for a more lively afternoon, you can rent kayaks, canoes, and stand-up paddleboards at a kiosk near the boat launch during peak season, or, if you prefer walking or biking, a 6 km loop around the lake of-

fers an easy hike with views of the water and the mountains beyond. Much of the path is gravel, so bring closed-toe shoes or you’ll be picking stones out of your sandals for most of the way.

The wedding party rented the group campsite, which is large enough to accommodate up to 40 people and includes its own fire pit, water tap, and outhouses.

The regular individual camping spots are also comfortable, although they’re spaced fairly close to each other, so be extra considerate of your neighbours’ tolerance for noise and mess. If you’re planning to roast marshmallows, you can buy firewood from a vendor on the way into the park, but the price is heavily marked up; it’s better to pick

some up in Chilliwack or Harrison.

Hicks Lake is a refreshing change from the overcrowded beaches at Cultus or Chilliwack Lake, maybe because it’s too far off the beaten path for those who are just looking for a picnic spot.

The 6 km of washboard gravel road was hell on the shocks of our little sedan, especially on the way back, but it’s worth the bumpy trip. If you’re looking for a cheap and not-too-crowded provincial campground, a peaceful place to go canoeing or kayaking, or even an outdoor wedding venue, check this one out. It doesn’t get much better.

June 7 Gutsy Walk for Crohn’s & Colitis Walk, run, or rollerblade around Mill Lake to help advance medical research on these chronic illnesses. Participants meet at Trethewey House at Mill Lake; registration is at 9 a.m., followed by a warmup at 9:45; and the 3-km run begins at 10. Celebrate with refreshments, entertainment, snacks, and prizes! For more information, check out www.gutsywalk.ca.

Image: Wikipedia

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3, 2015 www.ufvcascade.ca

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SPORTS & HEALTH

Tennis is the hot court sport in Abbotsford If you’re looking for cheap summer exercise, there are plenty of places to play NADINE MOEDT

THE CASCADE

The season for outdoor tennis has arrived, alongside summer’s long dry days and warm nights.

With over 20 public courts in Abbotsford, tennis offers a perfect exercise option to save on a gym membership.

When you are considering Abbotsford’s wide range of courts to choose from, think about where you’ll feel most comfortable. If you are a new player, look for something that will offer some privacy; a court that is standalone (you won’t have someone playing right beside you), or more youth-oriented won’t make you feel judged with every missed serve. If you like playing during the day, find a location that is well-shaded. For those of us who prefer playing late into the evening, Abbotsford is home to a handful of lit courts as well.

Here are some options when selecting your home court.

MSA arena courts The MSA arena hosts a four-court cluster on Emerson Street. While the number of courts might suggest a low wait time, it’s a popular destination for tennis enthusiasts. If you arrive at peak playing time (around 7 p.m.), you may find you have to sit out for a match or two. However, the site is equipped with a practice wall to use while you wait. For those who are just starting out, this court doesn’t afford any privacy; if you have a tendency to hit the ball out-of-bounds, you will have unappreciative neighbours. The courts are lit until 10 p.m., so if you’re a shy player, or don’t want to risk a wait, come later in the evening — or during the day if you can take the heat.

DeLair park courts DeLair park offers my favourite of Abbotsford’s free courts, nestled in a treed park beside soccer

and baseball fields. The two lit courts are less popular, likely because they are a little further out of the way of dense residential areas, which means a lower wait time. It’s the perfect court to play on without an audience, and by early evening shade from a nearby tree protects players from the sun.

MEI courts While several of Abbotsford’s schools maintain tennis courts, the courts at MEI are by far the nicest. The facility offers four well-maintained courts in a shaded area of the school. For parents, a nearby playground can entertain children within view of the courts. You’ll find a younger average age of players, which certainly defuses any pressure to perform. The only downside of this location is its limited hours; it isn’t a lit court, so on schooldays public access is limited to after school and before dusk.

Image: Steven Pisano/ flickr

Never played tennis? Summer is the perfect time to start.

Safe Space

Co-ops and campfires Learning to balance the responsibilities of summer without having a nervous breakdown VANESSA BROADBENT

THE CASCADE

Growing up, summer was by far the best time of year. With no school, and therefore no responsibilities, days were spent outside riding bikes, swimming, or doing pretty much whatever it was we felt like doing.

Then we grew up and somehow without our noticing it, summer transformed into one of the most stressful times of year for students.

To an outsider, summer may seem like a break from the hectic life of a student, with exams out of the way and many of us taking a break from courses until September — but in reality, it can be almost as anxiety-filled as the school year. The pressure of schoolwork may not be present, but it has been replaced with the pressure of summer jobs, internships, co-ops, and the stress of trying frantically to save enough money for the upcoming year while still being able to afford to take that road trip with friends and attend at least one music festival.

This perfectly describes my first summer as a student. I was expecting summer to be the same as it was during high school — a time to hang out at the beach with friends and do pretty much nothing more than that — but it turned out to be drastically different. I got my first real internship and instead of spending my days at the lake, I was cooped up in an office praying to God that I was working hard enough to get a good reference.

There was also the added pressure of saving money. As a full-time student, working more than part-time is not an option during the school year, at least not if you’re trying to keep your grades up. This meant that I had the summer to save enough money to pay for the upcoming year’s tuition. It was either that or get student loans — which I did not qualify for because my parents earned more than StudentAid BC thought parents of a student needing financial aid should earn, even though asking my parents to help me out with tuition was not an option.

Because of this, my entire sum-

mer was spent budgeting and barely spending any money on anything other than gas to drive to work. The anxiety only increased when my car broke down during the summer and I had to spend nearly two weeks’ wages to fix it — a lot when your summer job is only 12 weeks long.

Although everything ended up working out, that was one of the most stressful summers of my life. Yes, I had saved enough money for the upcoming year and had scored a great reference, I had spent four months of my year completely full of anxiety — the opposite of what summer should be.

This summer, I promised myself I wouldn’t fall into the same situation. I was much pickier in my job search and rather than taking the job which offered the most money and hours, I settled for a summer job that would still allow me to save for tuition, but didn’t force me to spend my entire summer in an office. As a result, I now have time to enjoy my summer the way it should be enjoyed, with a few road trips and concerts, but while still working

Image: Mark Roy/ flickr

Thanks to summer jobs and internships, summer “break” can be just as stressful as the rest of the year. and earning money.

While I may not be earning as much money as I did last summer, and my job may not look as impressive on my resume, the reduced amount of stress and anxiety has made it completely worth it and I know that when I start courses again in the fall, I will be returning from a relaxing summer and not a stressful one, and I know it will be worth it.

So while working this summer and frantically trying to save enough money for the upcoming year, remember that it is summer after all, and it wouldn’t be summer without a few camping trips and beach days. I’ll take those over anxiety any day.

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SPORTS & HEALTH

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3, 2015 www.ufvcascade.ca