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“The two main goals [of ECOLE] are to be a model for sustainable living, and […] to serve as a catalyst for a surviving, connected community for sustainability that integrates community outreach, sustainable living, and equity.”

Lily Schwarzbaum, ECOLE coordinator

Sustainability at McGill faced advances and setbacks this year. On the positive side, two important sustainability projects were approved by the University, Vision 2020, and the Education Community Living Environment (ECOLE) project. Vision 2020, which seeks to create a long-term sustainability plan for the McGill community, was approved on March 21.

The ECOLE project, also approved in the Winter semester, aims to create a sustainability hub in the Milton-Parc community and a model for sustainable living. The ECOLE project will operate in a house off-campus, and see 8 to 12 students live there while completing an independent study project. These student residents will receive subsidized rent and academic credit for their independent study. ECOLE will launch its pilot year in September 2014.

However, sustainability on campus also took a hit when SSMU abruptly lost the position of Sustainability Coordinator. The position which entailed working to align the activities of SSMU with a culture of sustainability, was ended in the Fall semester. Since then there has been little movement from SSMU to create a new position.

As per a motion passed at the SSMU Winter General Assembly (GA), the Ad-hoc Committee on Sustainability will make an “actionable recommendation” for sustainability at SSMU by the end of the Winter 2014 semester. After the recommendation is made, it will be the job of the President and executive to look into the feasibility of the proposal and steps for implementation, and an update will then be brought forward to the Fall 2014 GA. As such, much of the work to implement sustainability on campus remains to be seen in the next academic year.

—Jordan Venton-Rublee

“If this isn’t social injury, then McGill needs a new definition.”

Divest McGill banner

Divest McGill was created in 2012 to campaign for divestment from University holdings in the fossil fuel industry. In February 2013, the group submitted two petitions to McGill’s Committee to Advise on Matters of Social Responsibility (CAMSR). The petitions – one seeking McGill’s divestment from the tar sands and fossil fuel industry, and the other seeking divestment from companies associated with the Nord pour tous (formerly known as Plan Nord), a natural resource exploitation project started under former premier Jean Charest – gained momentum, with support from McGill student unions, as well as numerous climate justice advocacy groups across the city.

In May 2013, McGill’s Board of Governors rejected both petitions that Divest McGill submitted. The decision was based on recommendations from CAMSR that indicated that the petitions failed to prove “social injury” had occurred under CAMSR’s Terms of Reference – that is, their mandate and guidelines for reviewing the social responsibility of the University’s investments.

Divest McGill continues to be very active working with other climate justice advocacy groups and Indigenous communities who are also opposed to fossil fuel and tar sands extraction in Canada, and raising awareness on campus. This year, the group held workshops, organized a bike protest, and spoke out against the Petrocultures conference hosted by the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. Divest McGill acted, and will continue to act, as a key player in increasing the pressure on McGill to divest from fossil fuels and become a leader in ethical investments among universities worldwide.

—E.k. Chan and Hera Chan

“It is important to break [the invisibility of equity issues] down. We have to be intentional about it and actually make changes and work against it.”

Sarah Berry, course lecturer

Equity was a buzzword on McGill’s campus this year, at times due to missteps by the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) executive and staff. During the first semester, the SSMU executive was met with criticism for its Costume Campaign, which intended to educate students on culturally appropriative costumes, but used posters featuring people wearing the sort of costumes SSMU sought to ban.

Despite both the Arts Undergraduate Society (AUS) Equity Committee and SSMU Equity Committee holding forums on the subject in the second semester, the issue of equity at McGill seemed to become larger than life following a complaint filed toward SSMU VP Internal Brian Farnan over a GIF of Barack Obama included in a SSMU listserv email. Part of the Equity Commission’s ruling in the complainant’s favour was that Farnan would issue a public apology – an apology that took a life of its own, attracting international media attention. Back on campus, SSMU eventually decided to retract the decision to make the apology public at a Council meeting, on “the basis that the apology trivializes the legitimacy of equity and racism on campus,” according to the motion moved.

Efforts by the Engineering Undergraduate Society (EUS) to create a more equitable environment were positive, but flew under the radar for many students. Christopher Tegho, who was appointed Equity Commissioner for EUS in October, worked to educate engineering students on the meaning of equity, rape culture, and safer space through workshops held in the Winter semester. The workshops, held in a mandatory first year course for Engineering students, broke down such concepts for students, many of whom were hearing of them for the first time – a phenomenon that is all-too common at McGill.

—Jordan Venton-Rublee

“[The] industry went on a mission to developing countries to get them to use chrysotile asbestos.”

Kathleen Ruff, anti-asbestos advocate

McGill attempted to address accusations of research misconduct in October 2013, when it hosted a conference on asbestos that included panels and discussions about research ethics and asbestos. The University found itself involved in a long-running academic dispute surrounding the work of Professor John Corbett McDonald, who undertook research in the 1960s and 1970s on the health impacts of chrysotile asbestos. His work demonstrated that the use of this asbestos was safe in controlled circumstances; however, McDonald received direct funding from the Quebec Asbestos Mining Association, “an [asbestos] industry-funded body.”

Starting in 2002, numerous scientists began lodging complaints with McGill over the methodology of the research, with some claiming that data had been chosen selectively to give the result desired by industry, and to green-light the commercial exploitation of a cancerous substance.

In response to mounting criticism, the University hosted a day-long conference focused on both asbestos and academic research ethics. Yet while most people at the conference agreed that McGill needed greater ethical oversight in research, no solution was put on the table for discussion, and critics – notably Kathleen Ruff and David Egilman – argued that hosting a conference was not enough and that McGill needed to decide on an ethics policy and retract the study.

Rejection of McDonald’s findings are almost unanimous within the scientific community; however, McGill still refuses to completely retract the paper. To date, critics maintain that the asbestos industry uses McDonald’s findings as evidence for the harmlessness of the substance. This is particularly true in developing countries. The Brazilian government’s position, for example, is that chrysotile asbestos is harmless; this view is based on McDonald’s findings. All that needs to happen to stop the sale of harmful chrysotile asbestos around the world, according to critics, is for McGill to denounce McDonald’s research.

—Emmet Livingstone

“[We should protest] until it is taken seriously by the government [and] they actually put some effort [into] helping these Indigenous women.”

Cleve Higgins, an attendee at the October Sisters in Spirit vigil

Every year, Montrealers take to the streets calling for justice for missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. This February, Missing Justice, an Indigenous solidarity collective, organized the annual march, which saw over 500 protesters participate in the march, higher than all previous marches.

Despite the fact that the march has occurred annually for years now, the response from the government continues to be lacking. Even after years of demands for a formal inquiry into the issue, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative government have refused to heed the demands to hold a national inquiry.

Public attention was once again drawn to the issue after the murder of Loretta Saunders, an Inuk woman. In March, to coincide with International Women’s Day, Mohawks blocked CN rail lines in Tyendinaga in a plea for a national inquiry into the issue. Despite all of this initiative, the government is unwilling to take any action.

—Dana Wray

“You reach a point where you realize that there is a huge power differential between SSMU and McGill, and no matter what, we are going to be in this building and they are pretty much setting the terms of the negotiation.”

Joey Shea, SSMU VP University Affairs

It appears that the tipping point that Shea mentions in the above quote has come to pass. After several years of negotiations, SSMU has signed a ten-year lease with McGill for the use of the Shatner building. The newly-signed lease will take effect retroactively, beginning in the 2011-12 school year – the most recent SSMU lease expired in 2011 – and the lease will be in effect until 2020-21.

Lease negotiations have raised financial concerns for three cycles of SSMU executives. At the beginning of the 2012-13 school year, McGill announced that it would no longer pay the entirety of the utilities cost for the Shatner building, and the lease, signed earlier this month, is the first indication of what this means for SSMU. For the 2013-14 year, SSMU will pay an increased rent of $130,000, as well as $100,000 in energy costs. Both rent and utility costs will increase yearly; rent will increase by $5,000 a year for the next seven years, and utility costs will increase with inflation.

In an effort to mitigate the negative financial impacts of these steep rent increases (compare the total $230,000 to be paid out this year to the $110,000 paid in 2010-11 under the previous lease), the SSMU executive attempted to pass a referendum question regarding a Shatner building fee in the Winter referendum period. This question failed to pass, with many questioning the executives’ lack of advertisement of or emphasis on the fee’s importance. Some have also questioned the executives’ role in negotiating a lease that places such a high financial burden on the Society. The building fee may be proposed again in a referendum in the Fall 2014 semester.

—Anqi Zhang

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“There’s many applications: fire surveillance, harvest surveillance […] Police forces are using UAVs to help them with search and rescue operations.”

Inna Sharf, McGill professor of mechanical engineering, and researcher at the Aerospace Mechatronics Laboratory

UAVs, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, are colloquially known as drones, and have attracted attention in recent years for their role in wars waged on foreign turf, and for allowing those wars to be waged in a detached, methodical fashion. In the above quotation, Sharf defended her lab’s research, which has the goal of making landings and take-offs for UAVs more autonomous, by pointing to its potential use in civilian matters. Sharf’s lab receives funding from the Canadian military; this came to light this year through the release of documents obtained through the Access to Information Act.

Resistance to military-funded research has developed on campus in recent years. Demilitarize McGill, a campus group founded in 2009, seeks to end military research at McGill and raises awareness through walking tours of campus, workshops, and articles published in student press. Its members also engage in direct action. On March 14, in response to revelations that defence contracts fund Sharf’s lab’s UAV work, Demilitarize McGill blockaded the Aerospace Mechatronics Laboratory for close to four hours. Seen as an obstruction of university work, the demonstration was dispersed by invoking McGill’s protest protocol and the arrival of police on campus.

McGill has responded that research at the university is “[conduct[ed] with integrity and adhere[s] to the highest ethical standards.” While researchers point to potential applications outside of warfare, Kevin Paul, member of Demilitarize McGill, asserted that military-funded research at McGill is dependent on the possibility of warfare, “McGill benefits when war is being waged by virtue of the wide array of military research opportunities and labs that arguably would not exist without military funding.”

Demilitarize McGill continues its ongoing campaign to disrupt, and eventually end, drone research on campus. In the meantime, McGill has released a series of heavily redacted documents in response to Demilitarize McGill’s access to information requests regarding military research at the university.

—Drew Wolfson Bell and Anqi Zhang

“Among the opponents to the Charter, a number of people fall within a fundamentalist movement. […] They become the first victims of the large-scale manipulation orchestrated by Islamists under the pretext of an attack on individual freedoms.”

Martine Desjardins, former student leader and current Parti Québécois candidate, criticizing opposition to Bill 60, the ‘Quebec Charter of Values.’ (translated from French)

On September 10, 2013, Parti Québécois (PQ) Minister Bernard Drainville officially proposed a ‘Quebec Charter of Values.’ The Charter includes five proposals seeking to regulate interactions between state officials and the public, but only one proposal has garnered significant attention. This proposal would “limit the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols” for state employees. In practice, this means that state employees would be prevented from freely expressing their religion if the Charter passes, potentially at the expense of their jobs. Banned religious symbols would include hijabs, burqas, turbans, kippas, and ‘large’ Orthodox crosses.

Debate erupted after the Charter was proposed, leading to numerous anti- and pro-Charter rallies. Those opposing the Charter have claimed that it unfairly targets religious minorities, and as such, is racism barely disguised under a label of secularism. This claim has been reinforced by a reported increase in hate crimes against religious minorities, such as Muslim women, as part of the public fallout since the Charter was first proposed. A Léger survey released in January 2014 found that 60 per cent of Quebecers polled support this component of the Charter.

In early March, the PQ called an election for April 7, with the intention of emerging from the election as a majority government. If this occurs, the PQ will likely push the Charter into law. Other major parties have failed to explicitly condemn the Charter in its entirety, and have instead endorsed altered versions that still prevent certain religious minorities from freely practicing religion. As such, the fate of religious minorities’ place in the public workforce in Quebec remains unclear, regardless of the outcome of the upcoming election.

—Davide Mastracci

“That’s what food justice is: working with those most affected by an unjust food system, rather than creating spaces outside of it only accessible to the privileged.”

Aaron Vansintjan, “The potential of food banks”

This year, the column “A Bite of Food Justice” by Aaron Vansintjan turned a critical eye to contemporary narratives of food politics and sustainability. In tackling topics like land grabbing, gentrification, and dispossession, Vansintjan created a narrative that included broader themes of food security in the face of ongoing colonialism and capitalism. Alternating between a historical context and current events, and between a specific Montreal focus and case studies elsewhere, from rural Ontario to urban Hanoi, Vansintjan investigated and reported on a broad range of social politics in his seven columns.

—E.k. Chan

“Every story we tell of our dead is also a story of those of us who still live: a cautionary tale, a political fable, a remembrance of what happened, and what is still happening.”

Kai Cheng Thom, “For moonlight siblings on the Transgender Day of Remembrance”

In Kai Cheng Thom’s second year of writing as a columnist, they took a different stylistic turn by penning a series of open letters, in From Gaysia with Love. Addressing their letters to personal role models like Janet Mock and CeCe Macdonald, as well explicitly addressing broader audiences at times, Thom wrote with poetic flare on a broad range of subject matter in their nine columns. Covering intersections of transness, sexuality, race, class, and other factors, the intimate nature of epistolary writing drew personal connections and contrasts between Thom and their addressees, which in turn related to broader, societal issues, such as rape culture, transmisogyny, homophobia, and racism. Writing about their own experiences cast a tangible light on normally abstracted concepts, grounding these discussions in a daily, lived reality.

—E.k. Chan

“All of those expectations for me to be masculine, to act a certain way and to live up to an ideal, were thrown out the window.”

Eric White, on dressing in drag for the first time, in “Sore feet and smokey eyes”

White Noise, a column by Eric White, broached topics of queerness in Montreal, using personal experience as a jumping-off point. In his writing on heteronormativity, polyamory, drag, and the contemporary notions of what it means to be ‘queer,’ White broached critical discussions that remained accessible to the student body. In his columns, White refrained from invoking highly academic terms and instead focused on a relatable narrative, through which urban queerness could be explored and critiqued.

—E.k. Chan

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The idea that an opinion is worthwhile only when palatable to others – and usually, this means to your opponents – is absurd. And yet it is everywhere. Feminists have been hearing for years that their expressions of anger are irrational, and therefore illegitimate, expressions of criticism. On campus, some of our readers subscribe to this ethos, as do generations of SSMU executives unable to make political decisions for fear of divisiveness.

Even those politicians, speakers, and writers who are respected for their ‘passion’ are not viscerally angry; theirs is a passion that deals in eloquence, rhetoric, and Standard Written English. Given these concessions, their passion fits within the bounds of civility, and is therefore deemed acceptable, productive. Not everyone can afford to deal in such currency; not everyone is given such currency.

I have heard this argument again and again – that the tone of this newspaper, of its writers, is one of anger and accusation, and that this devalues the words printed on the page.

It is this demand for civility above all else – never mind that the ‘all else’ can encompass important personal experiences or gross injustices – that I have failed to understand, despite my efforts to grapple with it.

The idea seems to be that even if you disagree, you have to be nice. Let me just say, right off, that there is neither moral superiority nor egalitarian value to being everyone’s friend. Not everybody needs your friendship – or support, or kindness – in the same way. It is much less important to the billionaire chairperson of a multinational conglomerate that you are kind, than to someone recently evicted from their home.

But too frequently it is painted as a matter of moral superiority. A good person would be kind while disagreeing, would never raise their voice, would never alarm their opponent. A good person, for example, would not accuse their peers of being products and perpetrators of systemic racism. Such a desire to coat convictions in a smarmy exterior removes the urgency of the issues, and, in many cases, places the onus on the individual to tailor the presentation of their own experiences to the tastes of others.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t think all unfiltered sentiments are equal. Many are hateful, racist, sexist, classist, homophobic, and transphobic. But to demand that people who have experienced these exact sentiments, to varying and sometimes extreme degrees, continue to filter their experiences to be pleasing to the white, middle-class, male eye that so frequently lays judgement (whether solicited or not), is to deepen these insults.

Choosing to take a side and feel strongly can create anger and frustration, but it can also move us to fight against injustices. The loss of anger and frustration leads to quiet acceptance.

This desire to be amenable to both sides, to avoid displeasing anyone at all, manifests itself as moderatism within the political sphere. Certainly, believing in a stance that is squarely between left and right can be based on many factors. But increasingly, and increasingly at this school, and within its political bodies, I see moderatism for the sake of moderatism.

But moderatism is not apolitical; representation of none is not representation of all. When our student council does not throw its weight behind a student organization like CKUT, it is not saying that it agrees with all students’ opinions on that organization; it is saying that the status quo can take care of itself.

Moderatism throws strong support, in fact, behind the politics of the status quo. These are politics that allow our University to threaten student groups’ existence through systematic existence referenda and extreme financial pressure, all while removing their ability to use the McGill name. These are the same politics that allow our elected officials to manipulate voters by capitalizing on singular issues, only to renege and leave those same voters with no support. These are politics that allow our society to turn a blind eye to the disproportionate incarceration, assault, and murder of Indigenous people, while plundering their unceded territory for resources and short-term economic gain. Not one of these things is apolitical. But they are the status quo, and they are what you implicitly choose when you choose to stay in the centre of the road. The default. No opinion.

Choosing to take a side and feel strongly can create anger and frustration, but it can also move us to fight against injustices. The loss of anger and frustration leads to quiet acceptance. Students were angry when riot police were brought to campus on November 10, 2012 to end a peaceful demonstration. We have since gained a document (the ‘protest protocol’) that institutionalized the administration’s ability to continue this practice. In fact, this has become the standard response, yet students no longer raise concerns about its implementation. The enactment of the protocol to bring riot police to the Demilitarize McGill protest on March 21 – and the lack of student outrage following – demonstrates that, far from inciting students to more anger and action, this sort of intervention has bred acceptance of the status quo.

I want to celebrate our writers for daring to be angry. For daring to put down their convictions and their experiences in a way that is raw, and real, and galvanizing.

Our university administrations and our governments alike, count on us to not get angry. They profit when individuals, groups, and communities are not angry enough to fight. When they are not angry enough to resist. There is value in centrism, but not usually value for the individual. Deferring to both sides implicitly supports the systems and structures that make up that status quo, benefitting the side that already wields control.

We study and work at a university that charges its own student union $130,000 in rent, and that has added utilities to boot. A university that violates its collective agreement with a union of its workers mere days after reaching that same agreement. A university that swears its industry- and military-funded research “adhere[s] to the highest ethical standards.” Yes, we are angry about the way the University treats student space, its workers, and concerns about its role in globally and humanistically destructive endeavours. Tell me why we shouldn’t be.

I want to celebrate our writers for daring to be angry. For daring to put down their convictions and their experiences in a way that is raw, and real, and galvanizing. I want to challenge those who criticize their anger to consider why they may be angry, and you may not.
So call us radical. Call us angry. Those aren’t insults.

Anqi Zhang is the coordinating editor of The Daily, but the opinions here are her own. Get angry with (or at) her at anqi.zhang.92@gmail.com.

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“This is really the last stage of what has been an immensely long project, starting from the early 2000s and beating so many obstacles along the way [such as] lack of institutional support [and] lack of faculty support. It was really a big student push that catalyzed this.”

Claire Stewart-Kanigan, Arts Senator

After around a decade of advocacy and struggle, McGill finally approved the Indigenous Studies minor at a Senate meeting on February 19. The minor, which will start being offered in the 2014-15 academic year, will provide a chance for Indigenous and non-Indigenous students to learn about history, culture, and worldviews, and develop a broader understanding of contemporary issues. Student groups have supported the minor this year, such as when the Arts Undergraduate Society (AUS) passed a motion regarding support for an Indigenous Studies program, but this is not the only support it has garnered.

Since the early 2000s, advocates have been pressing for the establishment of an Indigenous Studies minor, but were constantly faced with hurdles, such as lack of support from both the University and the Faculty. Since many other universities around Canada have comparable programs, some established as early as 1969, the creation of this minor is a long-overdue step at McGill. The University is complicit in colonialism, which is still ongoing: investment in resource exploitation plans in Northern Quebec is one example. Proponents see this minor as a first step toward a better relationship with Indigenous people, whose rights are still abused by the government and many institutions to this day.

—Joelle Dahm

“It’s not about doing more with less. It’s about finding things we don’t need to do anymore.”

Christopher Manfredi, Dean of Arts

2013-14 saw continued debate over the People, Processes & Partnerships initiative, the Arts faculty plan that would restructure Leacock and adjacent Arts buildings in order to consolidate administrative positions within the faculty. The discussion began in 2012-13 when the faculty unveiled plans to create administrative “hubs” within the Leacock building, though it has since backed down from its proposal to turn the third floor of Leacock into a reception area. This year has seen a continuation of question-and-answer periods and presentations to AUS Council, coming on the heels of last year’s complaints that the faculty had not done enough to elicit feedback from the Arts community.

Critics of the plan, including students, faculty, and non-academic staff, have cited failed examples at other universities. They have also expressed doubt over the feasibility of increased workload for administrative staff, if they were to become responsible for several departments instead of a single department. The administration continues to cite the context of austerity and the Quebec provincial government’s imposed hiring freeze on administrative positions as reasons for moving ahead with the plan. As of November 2013, the plan includes creating two administrative hubs in the Leacock building.

The proposed changes to the departmental structure and organization within the Leacock building are set against the backdrop of parallel changes made at the Ferrier building and 688 Sherbrooke. The Department of East Asian Studies was moved out of its rowhouse on McTavish last summer to 688 Sherbrooke, and the Department of Jewish Studies is expected to follow suit by moving into the Leacock building.

—Anqi Zhang

“A diagnosis can have a major impact on the way one lives, and yet here we have groups of people who can’t access resources if they don’t fit into the proper category.”

Ethan Macdonald, Inclusive Mental Health Collective

The past decade has seen a dramatic major increase in students seeking help at the McGill Mental Health Services (MMHS), following the larger trend of increased mental health issues among university students. Attempts have been made in recent years to improve services at MMHS, with the implementation of non-medicinal anxiety treatment, mindfulness groups, and an eating disorder treatment program. Yet, MMHS’ shortage of staff and expedited care require additional funding and structural reconfiguration in order to address the needs of students who may require long-term care.

Moreover, both Mental Health and Counselling Services, which receive funding from Student Services, have recently suffered a loss of almost $500,000 as a result of the university-wide budget cut. These cuts have put additional strain on an already struggling system. As a result of this, a $20 registration fee for Mental Health and Counselling services was implemented in September 2013. It was removed later in the month after being brought forward to the Fee Advisory Committee in September, since the fee was not approved in a student referendum. Officials from the Mental Health Counselling Services, however, noted that this would not have an impact on the quality of mental health services within McGill.

This February, a new mental health policy focused on creating a mental health network of student resources was adopted by the SSMU Legislative Council. The adopted policy includes a five-year plan, which aims to hire a SSMU mental health coordinator, improve student-accessible resources on mental health, and increase awareness and advocacy of mental health on campus.

—Diana Kwon and Alice Shen

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

The pilot project was a hard-won victory in a decades-long fight by basic income advocates, a fight that has yielded little-to-no fruit. Oftentimes, there is conflict about an even more basic issue: whether poverty in developed countries is a problem to begin with.

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

Kenney based his argument that Canada should not be scrutinized around the fact that it is a “developed” country. He’s right: Canada is “developed.” In fact, it is in “developed” countries with sufficient resources to invest in social assistance programs that activists and interest groups are now focusing on the widening inequality gap, and the existence of poverty amidst plenty.

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

If the Swiss referendum question were to pass, it would be the first permanent implementation of universal basic income in Europe. Basic income pilot projects have taken place elsewhere in the world, though, and once upon a time – in Manitoba.

The Mincome experiment

The basic income pilot project ran in Dauphin, Manitoba from 1974 to 1979. It was funded jointly by the Manitoba and federal governments, and was held to determine the effects of an unconditional guaranteed annual income on labour market participation, education, and healthcare. A corresponding experiment was carried out in Winnipeg, focusing solely on labour market participation. It set out to tackle one of the primary arguments against universal basic income initiatives: if people are given a living wage without having to work, they won’t. The experimental payout was provided to about 30 per cent of the residents, and was far from extravagant. The conditions for receiving the money were fairly stringent; families with no other source of income received 67 per cent of the low income cut-off (LICO) value, a commonly-accepted measure of the poverty line, while the amount decreased for families with other earnings, and disappeared once a family reached 120 per cent of the LICO. The experiment ended rather unceremoniously, without even a formal analysis or final report, but the data was retained (albeit somewhat poorly). In 2009, Evelyn Forget at the University of Manitoba revisited it.

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

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

When Forget conducted her analysis on this guaranteed annual income (GAI) experiment in 2009, she stepped beyond the labour market impacts, though there were interesting findings there as well. She found that there was only a slight decrease in the number of hours worked by men, married women, and single women. Specifically, tertiary and secondary earners were most likely to withdraw from the workforce – meaning teenagers and new mothers formed the majority of the cohort that worked less under the guaranteed income scenario.

Forget went on to analyze the impact of the initiative on other social structures, such as education and health care. Specifically, she found that hospital visits fell by 8.5 per cent in the years when Mincome was implemented, and mental health-related consultations were also reduced during that time. The high school dropout rate diminished in the years that Mincome was available to families in Dauphin, indicating that teenager withdrawal from the workforce was correlated with a higher proportion of students finishing high school in the town.

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

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

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

A minimum income proposal for Quebec

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

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

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

In Montreal, the 2011 Market Basket Measure for a family of four was $33,614 a year, and $16,573 for a single person. 11.8 per cent of the population lived below this line. Yet the measure is less expensive in municipalities of fewer than 300,000 individuals, and the dollar amount was calculated based on those municipalities. Lacroix, along with Nicholas-James Clavet and Jean-Yves Duclos, also from Université Laval, conducted an analysis of the CCLP proposal in 2011, simulating a sample of working individuals between the ages of 18 and 65. They were looking into the same criticism that motivated the Mincome study: the possible impact of the proposal on workforce participation.

Their simulations of a representative population of Quebec suggest that implementation of the CCLP’s proposal could cause some to drop out from the workforce, but that those most likely to leave are those who have the lowest current earnings. Even this level of work disincentive can have a large effect on the cost of the plan. Additionally, the CCLP’s proposal only extends itself to municipalities of fewer than 300,000 people, preventing its application to Montreal, where the cost of living is higher.

“Guaranteed income [plans] are always implemented on a small scale and targeted towards a very specific population,” said LaCroix by email, noting that though the plans are a good idea, they are typically very expensive. In their study, the Université Laval researchers determined that if work disincentives did occur, the total costs would be around $2.2 billion a year, 85 per cent of which would be borne by the provincial government. In contrast, the Swiss basic income plan is projected to cost $220 billion a year.

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

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

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

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

The moral problem

While economic feasibility of basic income plans already provide significant fodder for debate, “Most arguments against basic income have […] concentrated on moral considerations,” as Danish academics Erik Christensen and Jørn Loftager report in their 2011 paper “Ups and Downs of Basic Income in Denmark.” Christensen and Loftager state, “One of the prominent standard arguments in the Danish debate against basic income is that it is simply morally wrong to allow able-bodied people to live on public transfers without doing anything in return.”

Such a fear of ‘freeloaders’ is fundamentally built into a system where work is deemed virtuous – its own moral good. Psychological experiments aplenty have shown that when individuals believe someone is ‘cheating,’ they display hostility and seek to punish that individual. As the authors of the paper emphasize, once economic feasibility is put aside, the morality of basic income becomes the crux of the question. One imagines that even if a proposal were wholly economically sound, the moral question would still be relevant, and perhaps prohibitive to the implementation of basic income.

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

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

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

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

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

In an earlier version of the article, The Daily stated that the Comité consultatif de lutte contre la pauvreté et l’exclusion sociale (CCLP)’s proposal for minimum income would exclude municipalities with populations greater than 300,000, therefore excluding Montreal. The CCLP’s proposal would, in fact, include all municipalities, but the dollar amounts are calculated based on municipalities of fewer than 300,000.

The post Enough money to survive appeared first on The McGill Daily.

High-profile injuries in university-level athletics can also bring about policy changes. After Bishop’s University football player Jonathan Fortin suffered a neck injury on October 4, on Molson stadium’s artificial turf, CBC reported that McGill’s athletics director was reconsidering policy concerning keeping an ambulance on-site for future games.

But many injuries at the university level go largely unnoticed by those outside of the team, and though student athletes don’t get the amount of media attention that professional athletes do, their injuries can still put them out for a season, and can impact their lives outside the sporting world as well. Kuzi Murwira, a McGill Rugby player between 2010-12 who experienced five concussions over a span of two years, has since stopped playing for McGill Rugby on the advice of his doctor and sister. “They weren’t major concussions, but because they happened over two years – that’s a relatively short time frame.”

The accumulation of injuries can end athletic careers, as it did with Murwira, but a single injury can end a career as well. “I don’t think at first anybody realized what had happened,” said Steve Eldon Kerr of his partial shoulder dislocation in 2010. Eldon Kerr was a player on the then-varsity McGill Ultimate Frisbee team, and suffered his injury during practice on the Molson stadium field. After attempting to play through the pain for a little while longer, Eldon Kerr was told to leave practice to have his shoulder checked. As a player in a sport that lacked “the resources of, say, Football or Hockey,” Eldon Kerr dealt with his injury on his own through physiotherapy.

Though he noted that “the attitude from coaches nowadays is pretty professional,” and that “[they] seem aware of the danger of playing with an injury,” Eldon Kerr still perceives the existence of a sports culture wherein players force themselves to play, and some fear the label of ‘injury-prone.’ This can lead to hiding injuries from coaches, and also poses potential physical dangers to the athlete, something Eldon Kerr has personal experience with. He noted that in high school, he often played through a knee injury, relying on painkillers. “A phrase that comes up in your mind is: ‘play through the pain.’”

Murwira agreed that “people definitely do play with injuries,” but added that small injuries could add up, and so, “once the season starts, you never continue at 100 per cent.” The problem of individuals playing with injuries is somewhat mitigated, though, by the fact that each injured player seeking to get back in the game is required to obtain clearance from the team’s athletic therapist. Murwira said that though many “always want to push [themselves],” he had never personally felt pressured to play before achieving full recovery.

Though student athletes have a range of experiences with recovery, just as they have a range of experiences with injury, both athletes noted the importance of providing information, as well as care. “I think people working with young athletes should be really serious about communicating the importance of a proper recovery,” said Eldon Kerr. Murwira noted that the athletic therapists he worked gave him good advice on how to deal with his injuries, leading him to be “grateful for the support structures that are there already.”

Making information available to student athletes can happen at the physiotherapy clinic, or it can happen before an injury occurs – hopefully with the possibility of preventing that injury. In a move toward this goal, the McGill Athletics and Recreation has published articles entitled “Female Athletes and ACL Injuries” and “Female Athlete Triad,” – under the Sport Medicine section of their website – to educate female athletes about the types of injuries they might try to either prevent or handle. Though these offerings do address important sports medicine topics, they fall woefully short, in that they leave a range of situations unexplained.

Education is key, not only for athletes look to prevent and treat ‘visible’ or ‘obvious’ injuries such as joint dislocations, sprains, and broken bones, but it also seems to be a factor in controlling head injuries and concussions. Dr. Scott Delaney, a team physician for the Montreal Alouettes who also practices at McGill, told the Niagara Falls Review that in a ten-year period at McGill, there were a total of 226 reported concussions from the hockey, soccer, and football teams. However, 80 per cent of male athletes in his study reported possibly having a concussion but never seeking treatment, citing reasons such as not wanting to be pulled from play, echoing the words of both Murwira and Edon Kerr.

McGill varsity teams should encourage their athletes to recognize signs, speak up, and educate themselves about injuries and the limitations of their bodies. While coaches should be commended for recognizing the dangers of athletes playing with injuries, the reality of players hiding their injuries or “playing through the pain” cannot cease without a change in the culture that makes student athletes feel they have to play no matter what. Making a change to this culture, however, may not be as simple as publishing comprehensive statistics on athletic injuries in university-level sports; Kurwira asserted that a top-down effect, from the professional leagues, may be the most effective vehicle for changing the predominant conceptions, noting that, “Once these concerns are raised at the top level, […] it trickles down to the juniors.”

In the meantime, Murwira noted that his own post-varsity experience of “helping out with coaching, […] at some of the junior leagues as well as at my old club” has helped him to appreciate both the impermanence and beauty of sport. Murwira stressed that, “What’s important is that [athletes] understand there’s always life after sport.”

The post “Play through the pain” appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Series like Culture Shock, said Kira Page, External Coordinator at QPIRG, are important in a “broader context of neoliberalism that is telling people that racism is not an issue – that colonialism is not an issue.”

“At McGill specifically, I think there’s a comforting discourse [about] multiculturalism – that this is a diverse school, it’s all good, there’s a lot of diversity,” Page said. “Representation is certainly a barometer we can use […] but just the fact that it isn’t just white people who go to this school doesn’t mean that people don’t experience institutionalized racism in a McGill context.”

Another motivation for Culture Shock is McGill’s position on unceded Mohawk territory, Page said. “The fact that McGill is on stolen land is not just a historical issue. It’s a current issue.”

See The Daily’s Culture section for more coverage of Culture Shock events, or head over to Multimedia to listen to an interview with and performance by Lady Sin.

“Canada Behind Bars: On the Incarceration of Indigenous Communities”

Written by Hannah Reardon.

Statistics Canada findings show that 30 per cent of female offenders in federal prisons are Indigenous, and this figure is steadily climbing, according to Patricia Eshkibok, one of the speakers at the Canada Behind Bars panel on October 10.

Panelists Eshkibok, Jessica Danforth, and Kawate Tawe, focused mainly on the incarceration of Indigenous women in Canada, while also highlighting the crisis facing Indigenous youth. The “pipeline from school to prison,” as Danforth referred to it, is an intergenerational effect of the residential school system. Many of its effects, such as alcohol and drug abuse, identity loss, and high suicide rates, are all serious and pervasive problems, the panelists stressed, which push Indigenous youth disproportionately out of the education system and into the prison system.

Dismal health conditions, extreme homophobia, racism, and violence are all issues that face Indigenous people within the prison system. However, some efforts are being made to improve the rights of Indigenous people in the prison system. Danforth is the founder and executive director of the Native Youth Sexual Health Network, an organization that works to protect the health rights of incarcerated individuals. “You don’t lose your right to health as soon as you enter prison. Just because you’re incarcerated doesn’t mean you lose your rights as a human being,” she said.

“Colonization is happening,” said Danforth, adding that racism and loss of identity are day-to-day realities for Indigenous people. There is a pressing need, according to the panelists, to spread the truth [about] the present-day effects of colonization. Raising awareness and fighting for justice for marginalized Indigenous people is the only way to move forward, the panelists stressed. “We are here to speak truth to power,” said Danforth.

For more on the incarceration of Indigenous communities, visit the Life after Life Collective.

“Roundtable Discussion on Solidarity City”

Written by Olivia Larson.

QPIRG McGill and SSMU co-hosted a roundtable discussion on Montreal’s Solidarity City declaration, presented by migrant justice network Solidarity Across Borders. Dozens of public service organizations across Montreal have signed the declaration in an effort to make basic resources such as education, food, and housing accessible to non-status migrants. At the roundtable discussion, representatives from various public service organizations were present to share their successes and to discuss the challenges they have faced in implementing the declaration.

Quebec’s residency clause bars thousands of undocumented children from free schooling every year, pointed out Anne, a CEGEP teacher. She works with the committee on education, which has successfully “made this problem exist” for the government through persistent lobbying in the hopes that the word ‘resident’ will be omitted from the law.

The Food For All committee, a part of the Solidarity campaign, reaches out to food aid organizations and banks, asking them to adopt the declaration and implement a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy in regards to immigration status. So far, the committee has had relative success in signing organizations on, and thereby increasing “food justice,” as one representative put it, for non-status migrants.

Several organizations are working with Solidarity City to increase the number of subsidized housing projects across Montreal, and to make shelters for those who identify as trans* or as women safe spaces for those who are undocumented.

The shortage of available social housing for Quebec residents has made the government reluctant to expand the list of people who qualify for public housing, leaving many who are non-status homeless. Shelters have had issues with the Canadian Border Services Agency raiding and subsequently deporting paperless immigrants. The declaration, for both social housing agencies and shelters, has been extraordinarily difficult to implement, as the struggle for increased accessible living is being waged at all levels of government.

Despite myriad obstacles, Solidarity City’s powerful declaration to “fight back with solidarity, mutual aid, and direct action” is making headway in achieving equal status for all those living in Montreal.

For more information on Solidarity City, visit Solidarity Across Borders’s website.

“Race at McGill”

Written by Dana Wray.

Racial microaggressions, systemic and institutional racism, and the specific experiences of racialized people at McGill were all topics of discussion at a workshop co-facilitated by Shaina Agbayani and Annie Chen on October 16. The first half of the workshop, presented by Chen, focused on the basics of racial microaggressions, in addition to systemic and individual racism.

Microaggressions are small, everyday actions – whether verbal, behavioural, or environmental – that are hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights. Although not always done intentionally, the slow accumulation of these microaggressions over a lifetime adds up to a marginalized experience.

Agbayani gave an example of the McGill-centric website McGill Microaggressions, where people at McGill send in their experiences with racism on an interpersonal, often casual and everyday level.

Chen’s part of the workshop also debunked the myth of reverse racism. A term thrown around to describe discrimination against white people, reverse racism is often used in arguments against programs such as affirmative action.

Agbayani focused more specifically on race at McGill, and how racism manifests itself on an institutional, day-to-day, and curricular level. She highlighted that there is an underrepresentation of people of colour within McGill’s faculty, as well as a lack of financial support for initiatives addressing racism, such as the Social Equity and Diversity Education Office.

Agbayani attributed the underrepresentation of faculty and staff of colour at McGill to a “feedback loop” between a lack of diversity in the student body and in staff. “Some [people of colour] who were offered jobs at Counselling Services rejected the offers because they noted that they wanted to serve student populations that [was] more diverse, and they wanted to be a mirror of identity in a position of authority for students of colour, which they didn’t see a lot of at McGill.”

In interviews with a former McGill dean and his daughter, a current staff member, Agbayani said the lack of diversity appeared to be a systemic problem that wasn’t getting any better. “[The former dean and his daughter] haven’t seen much progress [over the past few decades]. They’ve seen a decrease in diversity visibly – not of students, they noted more students of diverse backgrounds – but in terms of faculty and staff.”

According to Agbayani, diversity is used as a superficial buzzword for McGill. “Diversity for McGill [as stated online] would reflect a pursuit of diversity as a pursuit of cosmopolitanism, as opposed to diversity as a pursuit of social justice and [a process of] redressing historical injustices.”

Want to read more on issues of racism at McGill? Read Amina Batyreva’s feature “Colouring the conversation” or read our editorial on racism at McGill. 

“Ongoing colonization: Addressing systemic violence against Indigenous women”

Written by Dana Wray and Anqi Zhang.

At the trial of two men for the brutal murder of an Indigenous woman named Pamela George, the judge presiding over the case lamented that it would be “dangerous” to convict the “bright, promising young men” that were her murderers, and that George was “just a prostitute.”

According to Candice Cascanette, a member of Missing Justice, a Montreal-based organization and the leader of the workshop, this racist and sexist language is common in the media and the broader Canadian society when talking about Indigenous women. In Canada, there are 600 missing or murdered Indigenous women, although some activists argue that the number is closer to 3000. In addition, Indigenous women are five times as likely to face violence, a fact Cascanette called proof of “ongoing colonization.”

“Talking about the colonial present requires us to go to the colonial past,” asserted Cascanette, before giving a brief historical account of the theft of Turtle Island and subsequent colonization. As Indigenous women had power connected directly to this land within their communities, Cascanette explained, they were a threat to the patriarchal European forces, and therefore a target.

More recent practices like the residential school system continued the process of colonization by separating families, forcing Christianity upon Indigenous children, and attempting to destroy Indigenous culture. According to Cascanette, the “cultural genocide” extended past the schools, into the forces – such as the Indian Act – that imposed patriarchy, capitalism, and other oppressive European structures on Indigenous communities.

However, Cascanette also dispelled the notion that Indigenous people were victims without any agency. “There have been over 500 years of colonization and over 500 years of resistance – I just want to make that clear.”

Be sure to read The Daily’s annual coverage of the March for Murdered and Missing Indigenous women. As well, read The Daily’s editorials on the subject: one from October 2013, another from February 2013, and one from October 2012.

“Teach-In Against the Charter of Values”

Written by Cem Ertekin.

In preparation for the October 20 demonstration organized by the Ensemble Contre la Charte Xénophobe Coalition, Aishah Nofal, Bochra Manaï, and Vincent Tao facilitated a teach-in on resisting the proposed Quebec Charter of Values. The event focused on what the Charter is presently, and what social ramifications it could have.

Tao, one of the lead organizers of the upcoming demonstration on October 20, outlined the Parti Québecois’s proposed content of the Charter. The Charter aims to ban the wearing of religious symbols, a goal which Tao critiques as discriminatory. “This is state sanctioned social exclusion of women of faith who need government services,” said Tao.

Manaï, a PhD candidate in Urban Studies at Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, said that the Charter has a clear electoral agenda. After conducting research looking at inter-ethnic relationships in middle class neighbourhoods, Manaï has concluded that people see diversity mostly when there is political discussion surrounding it.

Nofal, a second-year Law student at McGill, called the Charter blatantly discriminatory. “The PQ claims that the ban of religious symbols will neutralize [the] public sector. It deprives minorities of choice. They can’t simply discard their beliefs. What this Charter is saying is that some beliefs are suitable while others are not. […] This is really frightening. As a person wearing the hijab, I feel I’m subject to public scrutiny.”

Read The Daily’s coverage of the first anti-Charter of Values protest. 

“Political Prisoners’ Struggles in Palestine”

Written by Ralph Haddad.

Tadamon!’s workshop on October 16 discussed the harsh reality that Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip face when arrested by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Tadamon! – an Arabic word for solidarity – is a Montreal-based collective that works in solidarity with struggles for self-determination, equality, and justice in the Middle East as well as diaspora communities in Montreal and beyond.

As of 2013, there are an estimated 5,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israel. These prisoners are illegally held in poorly-maintained facilities, tortured in interrogations, and are subject to immediate maltreatment upon arrest. Israel was condemned by the UN earlier this year for its “abusive” treatment of prisoners, who are also denied family visits, Palestinian-based education, and basic healthcare.

What is important to note is that Jewish settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank are subject to separate legal systems – Jewish settlers are seen by an Israeli civilian judge, while Palestinians are seen by an Israeli military judge. Furthermore, rates of incarceration for Palestinian children are almost ninefold compared to those for Jewish children in the occupied territories, according to the workshop. Some Palestinians are arrested using administrative detention, supposedly used in times of emergency for strict security reasons (though Israel has an almost perpetual state of emergency). This form of detention allows for prisoners to be prosecuted without trial and charge, and are kept in prison for a period for up to six months, subject to renewal.

Today, there are around 178 Palestinians under administrative detention. The number has decreased “due to international grassroots pressure,” claimed Paul Di Stefano, a member of Tadamon!, “but the number is still extraordinarily high.” He continued that this form of detention allows the state to “circumvent” people’s rights.

According to Tadamon!, Israel also outsources its human rights violations by employing a private security company, G4S, to run its prisons. This privately-owned British security company also provides the IDF with equipment for checkpoints. Pressure in the form of hunger strikes on behalf of prisoners, or from movements such as Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) are still used today in order to pressure Israel to stop its maltreatment of prisoners and give them better care and humane services.

“Palestinians can be tried as adults as young as 16, and are interrogated by Israeli soldiers,” said Amy Darwish, an organizer for Tadamon!

For more resources, visit Tadamon!’s website.

“Unsettling and Decolonizing: An Introductory Workshop”

Written by Joelle Dahm.

Heidi Pridy and Philippe – who preferred not to give his last name – of the Anti-Colonial Solidarity Collective led an introductory workshop on unsettling and decolonizing, urging settlers to be respectful and effective allies to Indigenous populations on Turtle Island – also known as North America.

After an introduction to the vocabulary of decolonization and the history of colonialism in Canada, and specifically in the Montreal area, participants engaged in an interactive discussion on works by Cree artist Kent Monkman and documentaries dealing with decolonization.

Later in the workshop, Pridy explained that people often react to negative stereotypes, but feel comfortable about positive stereotypes that might glorify the group in question and give it a preconceived identity. “It does not matter if a stereotype is negative or positive. The problem is that it’s is a fixed representation and an abstraction of a complex dynamic.”

“When one group is marginalized, another one is benefitting. We need to understand ourselves as complicit in and beneficiaries of the illegal settlement of Indigenous people’s land,” said Pridy. “This appropriation often leads people to experience feelings of guilt. Guilt is a state of self-absorption that upholds privilege in a lot of ways and can really immobilize people from doing anything. We would encourage people to embrace that discomfort as a sign of a much-needed shift in self-consciousness.”

In special regard of upcoming Halloween festivities, Pridy urged people to be conscious about their self-representation, especially considering “sexy Native women costumes” sold in stores.

“Given the grade of sexual violence against Native women, that is really problematic,” Pridy stated. “Using someone else’s cultural symbols to exercise a personal need in self-expression is an exercise in privilege. That does not mean that cultural exchange never does happen and that we never partake in someone else’s culture, but there needs to be some element of mutual understanding for it to be a true exchange.”

Additional resources for decolonization can be found through Missing Justice, or read Mona Luxion’s column on decolonization and Idle No More in The Daily. 

“Indigenous feminisms and historical and contemporary two-spirit identities in North America”

Written by Hannah Besseau.

On October 10, Molly Swain and Lindsay Nixon facilitated a workshop on contemporary Indigenous feminisms, anti-capitalism, and two-spirit identities. The workshop tackled what Swain described as ‘the sexist and racist colonial values” of Canada’s ongoing violence against Indigenous people.

“We hear a lot about the victimization of Indigenous women, but not a lot about the resistance,” Swain told The Daily. “I wanted to introduce people to the topic of Indigenous feminisms and get them thinking of it not just in terms of within [academic settings], but in their daily lives.”

Swain emphasized environmental degradation and the role of capitalism in the oppression of Indigenous peoples. “Canada was […] founded very much on the principles of resource extraction, pushing further and further inland. […] John A Macdonald, the first prime minister of Canada, and his project of the Canadian Pacific Railway, was very much an extension of that need to keep pushing and [to] quell Native dissent and any Natives’ resistance to bring these dissenters under the fold.”

According to Swain, “colonialism, misogyny, and capitalism are deeply intertwined.” Decolonization – a continuous process whereby settlers, or non-Indigenous people, attempt to help heal the consequences of colonialism – is a crucial step in the struggle.

“It’s one thing to talk about decolonization and to acknowledge the land that we’re on, but it’s another thing to go out there and actually get involved in the struggles that are taking place, and to learn from those communities to figure out how to engage in a real responsible relationship with these folks. I think that’s a really important aspect of decolonization.”

Swain and Nixon are both co-founders of QPIRG McGill’s new working group, the Indigenous Women and Two-Spirit Harm Reduction Coalition. The group aims to provide resources and materials to Indigenous women and two-spirit people.

“We’re hoping to provide people with free materials such as needles, condoms, as well as resource guides to things like consent, safe sex, good drug-use practice, navigating the prison system, and guides to Montreal services,” said Swain. “Our group is open to Indigenous-identified folks only because we wanted this to be very much work we’re doing for our community.”

Culture Shock also featured a workshop on decolonization for settlers – scroll up to read Joelle Dahm’s article on it. For more information on the Indigenous Women and Two-Spirit Harm Reduction Coalition, contact ndn.harmredux@gmail.com.

The post Culture Shock appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The dearth of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields as a whole has garnered some much-needed attention in recent years. But the tech industry is singular in the challenges it presents to women who want to break in. A large part of this is still due to lack of technology education for women. Andrea Wood, a market analyst who has worked with Youth Employment Services (YES) Montreal to investigate gender issues in the tech sector, hasn’t seen much change in gender balance in the 14 years that she’s been involved in the tech world. The reason, she believes, is that “enrollment for women in technology, engineering, and math [postsecondary] programs has been completely flat or declined,” while female enrollment in sciences, particularly biological sciences, has increased.

But even disregarding discrepancies in skillset, the technology culture is one that is particularly difficult to break into for those outside of the club – and women, as we know, definitely are. This is a culture that includes advertising for hackathons with women listed as a “perk” and then calling it a “joke” about the male-dominated tech industry (Sqoot, I’m looking at you), a culture that breeds apps that consist of feeds of men looking at breasts, a culture where sexual assault and harassment are such common complaints in the workplace and at conferences that anti-harassment policies had to be adopted by such heavyweights as the Linux Foundation, the Wikimedia Foundation, and the Python Software Foundation.

The closed culture of the technology sector has direct impacts. Because it is so difficult for women to ‘get in’ to the exclusive club that high-tech has become, many who do effectively clam up for fear of losing their hard-won memberships. This very phenomenon was outlined in Shanley Kane’s recent Medium post, “‘Fuck you, I got mine’: Women in Tech for the Patriarchy.”

And then there are the Sheryl Sandbergs, who can afford to speak up, and do. There has been so much commentary on the Sheryl-Sandberg-Lean-In motivational trope – which encourages women to adapt to the tech industry and devote themselves entirely to obtain success – that nobody really knows how far or which way to lean anymore. Notwithstanding the legitimate criticism of “Lean In” as a movement for privileged women who can afford to spend all day leaning because there are no second jobs to work, or childcare is taken care of, Sandberg’s plan espouses individual internal change as the key to societal and structural change. The onus is on women who want to succeed to make sure that they do. Which provokes concern, if only because it’s unclear how this logical leap will manifest itself in reality.

* * *

The state of gender issues in the technology sector has also given rise to movements that seek to address the paucity of women in the field by hosting workshops, offering education, and promoting mentorship. These are organizations that, in the words of Sandy Sidhu, current Public Relations & Communications Director of Montreal Girl Geeks, “are focused on taking action.” Grassroots organizations like Montreal Girl Geeks, Ladies Learning Code, and their ilk, exist to challenge the old boys’ club by creating a community of their own. Tanya McGinnity founded Montreal Girl Geeks in 2007 as an offshoot of the global Girl Geek Dinners that have been in place since the mid-2000s, “after noticing that there were so few women in attendance [at a Facebook garage event], specifically in the technology/developer room.” The goal, she says, was to create a community for “girl geek and girl geek supporters […] interested in connecting, collaborating, and networking,” a community revolving around the sharing of specializations, passions, and interests.

McGinnity has since left the organization, but Sidhu says that their mandate remains to “inspire the next generation of girl geeks to get involved in tech.” Having worked at high- tech firms prior to becoming involved with Montreal Girl Geeks, Sidhu says that when she found out Montreal Girl Geeks existed, “this would have been amazing to know of when I was in university or the earlier phase of my career when I didn’t have access to other women mentors, or [even] just a community.” She emphasizes the importance of community to both herself, and to the organization. “It’s a great place to learn, exchange, share ideas, and you can never have enough role models in your life.”

In a world where female role models in tech companies are few to begin with, giving exposure to women in technology as a means of creating these role models is just one way in which Montreal Girl Geeks is building a community. “We profiled local Montreal women working in tech to […] spread the message that we are here, there are women who are working in tech, and to get the word out […] that there are women doing big things.”

Sidhu points to the importance of organizations outside the work environment in creating this kind of community. “It’s not always easy to build these [communities] within a company,” she explains, because individuals are not sought out based on common interests, but simply co-occupy the same space. In this way, she sees Montreal Girl Geeks as providing a necessary complement within the technology scene. “We fit in as a piece of the […] larger community.”

The Girl Geeks website doesn’t make prominent use of the word ‘feminism,’ but it’d be hard to deny that their actions are feminist in nature. Beyond the clearly gendered term in the organization’s name, there is also the fact that most events, while not exclusive, are largely promoted to women. This semi-exclusivity, according to Sidhu, is justified by the overwhelming male dominance of the technology sector in general. “There are a lot of events that women don’t go to. We’re not being super exclusive, like ‘no men allowed,’ but it’s kind of tongue in cheek – like if you want to come, tell a bunch of your girl friends to come too.” This kind of approach also extends to speakers who are invited to lead events: “I don’t think […] since I’ve been part of [Montreal Girl Geeks] that we’ve had a male speaker,” reflects Sidhu. “We know there’s a lot of events where they already do speak, and we’re trying to foster that support for women.”

The turnout at these events, Sidhu says, reflects a variety of backgrounds, occupations, and demographics. “Not everybody who comes is working in the IT or the high-tech industry right now, but they’re curious, or they want to find out more about how to apply that particular topic to their business.”

“In terms of background and ethnicity, it’s as diverse as Montreal is,” Sidhu continued. This is dramatically different from the technology sector’s employee demographics. Wood’s research had revealed an underrepresentation of racial minorities in the tech sector, and furthermore, an overrepresentation of non-Quebecers in Quebec’s industry. “Over half of the tech sector employees in Quebec are not from Quebec,” she told me, hinting at the politics of language that could lie beneath this statistic. Tech – at its basis an English-driven field – is perhaps already more accessible to anglophones; Sidhu admitted that this is a problem the Montreal Girls Geek team is attempting to address. “We’ve talked about it […] it just hasn’t really happened yet.” The reason is that Girl Geeks is run by volunteers, and time is tight. Wood agrees that general busy-ness and financial priorities are what’s holding up the sector as a whole from working toward more inclusion. “Start-ups are just thinking about keeping their balance sheet in the black.”

Perhaps this is why Wood predicts that the gender balance of the industry will take somewhere in the range of 20 to 30 years to change. In the years since she founded Montreal Girl Geeks, McGinnity says, “I think that progress has been made over time but women are still being harassed, fighting the same battles of sexism and engaging in the same debates that I’ve seen since starting the group.” She points to the ‘fake girl geek’ argument – which, as outlined in a New Statesman article published this August, states that women feign interest in tech, science fiction, and other similar male-dominated ‘geek’ spheres to attract men and jump on the ‘geek chic’ bandwagon – as proof of how women’s interests in the tech sphere are still challenged.

But like Sidhu, McGinnity believes the answer to this lies in the power of community organization, seeing it as the key to giving women “a seat at the table.”

* * *

Technology is not the only sector in which women are marginalized as a group. The artistic and creative sectors have been male-dominated since long before David Gilmour started even thinking about the seriousness of men. With the increasing technologization of communication, work environments, and our daily lives, it is no surprise that the artistic world and the technological world are starting to intersect. Ximena Holuigue, Programming Coordinator at Studio XX, a bilingual feminist artist-run centre that seeks to support “women at the forefront of contemporary technological landscapes,” explained that there are two ways in which technology is increasingly incorporated into art: firstly, by influencing the content of the artistic message, and secondly, on the level of dissemination – through personal websites, social media, and engaging multimedia presentations.

Rosa Mei, current Artist in Residence at Studio XX, includes technology in both of these facets of her current media art project. “One thing I wanted to do with this project is to demonstrate how far technology has come. […] My goal is actually to show how cheap can you go. You can actually buy all this stuff that you need to build a fully functional green screen studio from Dollarama and Canadian Tire. […] There are two components; that’s sort of the technological background, and then I’m going to be playing all the characters of 2,000 years of women warriors. So I have a background in martial arts […] so I’m going to use that with a lot of sword fighting and popping, which is a style of funk dance that uses a lot of micromovement and animation. So there’s a combination of the animation we have from technology combined with real life animation.” Mei views technology as a necessary next step for the creation of art, as a means of creation and dissemination, especially within an arts landscape that faces significant funding cuts from the government.

With media art projects like Mei’s made possible by increasingly technological power, and with technology integrated into the production process of art, Studio XX is highly necessary, for both the workshops and resources it offers, and because it is uniquely placed to deal with the issues facing women in both the art and technology sectors. Founded in 1996, the organization operates to give women artists both a physical and virtual space for exchange and discussion within the media art landscape. When it was created, Holuigue says, “It was an era when it was the beginning of internet and it was still very very basic in terms of technology access at that time for everyone – not just for women.” Even then, though, “there was already […] a need to have specifically a space for women […].” Highlighting the necessity of such a space, she notes that there are “still media arts festivals where the programming is mostly men.”

Operating several projects, including an online publication, .dpi, artist in residency programs, and maintaining a computer lab area open to all members, Studio XX seems to be fulfilling its goal of acting as a resource centre and space for women artists. However, Holuigue sees their role shifting as technology itself – the very thing Studio XX seeks to make accessible – develops and changes the landscape. “Since the beginning of Studio XX – and that’s the interesting thing – [technology] has evolved so fast and so drastically […]. People have access to it so easily today. […] We used to have all of these books on software and tools […] We were doing a team cleanup yesterday and […] then we realized that not that many people will need them because all of it is actually just accessible online today.”

However, the fact that information is more accessible online does not mean that Studio XX has no more work to do; on the contrary, Holuigue believes it is important to create a space to “allow artists to be physically present where there can be an exchange, discussion, acting and reacting between one another that you’re not necessarily able to do when you’re by yourself.”

Accessibility is an important issue for Studio XX, which strives to be accessible to both the francophone and anglophone populations. “We’ve opened up that discourse of giving [access] to all genders and we are bilingual as well. It’s really important for us to […] make sure we reach out [to] those two communities.”

* * *

Both Studio XX and Montreal Girl Geeks are focused on creating community for women in these male-dominated tech-related fields, but how does this impact the culture within those industries?

Wood pointed to a video Etsy published earlier this year describing how they increased the number of women on their team, so as to demonstrate how increased numbers can undercut the “brogrammer” culture in the tech sphere. “If it’s one woman, it’s like ‘oh, she’s a girl.’ When there’s three, there’s four, there’s five, [it’s] ‘oh she’s just my colleague,’ there’s no problem,” said Wood, adding that the inclusion of new people also stimulated innovation.

McGinnity echoed Wood’s sentiment, saying, “By being present – being seen and participating – I believe that inclusiveness will emerge.”

If true, this is a strong justification for the creation of communities of women who are increasingly educated about technology and who can support each other through their presence in the tech sphere. However, as Wood points out, the existence of qualified women does not mean that they are always hired and allowed to be present in the tech industry. Promoting awareness, according to Wood, is the first step, but in particular, promoting awareness to employers. “It requires employers’ awareness to do outreach. People can apply all they want, but the employer needs to realize there’s an imbalance. Imbalance can actually cause negative consequences in the workplace, but if you try to rectify that balance, it actually creates innovation in the group.”

* * *

When asked about the possible exclusivity of branding spaces, organizations, and communities as belonging to women, Wood replied, “It definitely will not alienate other people.” Instead, she worries that the community will become insular. That insularity, potentially leading to lack of outreach, can make this community unable to produce increased employment rates for its members. “The problem with the geek girls and the all-girl hackathons is you’re creating a community but they don’t open doors to help you make the jump to financial realities. There’s no alienation. Instead there is a sense of community that needs to be bridged into the community at large […].”

And yet, even without the potential for active alienation, a lack of awareness or focus on including marginal groups within society can allow that marginalization to carry into organizations whose goals revolve around inclusivity. Ignoring marginalization can breed exclusivity. This allows microaggressions to carry over from a society from which many of the tech world’s problems stem.

About a month ago, I went to one of these  events, a talk given by a woman passionate about her work and the power of a public well-versed in the possibilities of technology. During the question and answer session following her presentation, I watched her struggle to answer a question posed in accented and slightly uncertain English. And then, a follow-up question or two later, I watched the speaker cut off the questioner – no “Talk to me after,” just a flat “Other questions?” To be sure, it’s a microaggression, maybe even nano, but it was substantial enough to make me question who is encouraged, and who is encouraged just slightly less.

I mean to diminish neither the value of these events nor these organizations by pointing out the microaggressions committed on their premises. After all, microaggressions are entrenched within our society, and as instances of our society, we can all be guilty at times. But the idea that marginalized peoples will enter and feel comfortable within these communities is as false as the idea that more women educated in coding will lead to improved hiring practices. Wood asserts that community is valuable, but not enough, and that employers must become aware and diligent in working for inclusivity in order for the tech scene – and culture – to change. In that vein, the organizations that seek to create a community should become aware and diligent in reaching out to marginalized groups, including, but not limited to, racialized communities and low-income women.

* * *

Even within these organizations, there is ambivalence about how community should be formed, and whether providing women-oriented spaces and opportunities is the way to tackle the problem. While Mei is thankful for the space and technical support Studio XX offers for the development of her project, she notes that “this is the first project I’ve ever done with a women’s centre.”

“I’m really used to testosterone-fuelled environments,” she says, “Really it’s the only thing that I’ve experienced my whole life is being the only woman involved in a project, and so it’s really great to be in an environment where it’s supported by women.”

On the other hand, she expressed concern about the use of gender to offer special opportunities, due to possible further marginalization. “It’s been a theme throughout my life that I don’t like this sort of gender-specific – where you have to offer special opportunities for women because it’s a field not dominated by women.” Though Mei ponders her possible hypocrisy, there is a crucial difference between wanting to be “good for a girl popper” versus a regular popper (funk dancer), and needing a community of support.

* * *

The fundamental point made by each of the women I spoke to was the necessity of education, from a young age, to break the stereotypes that both prevent women from entering the tech field and keep the “brogrammer” culture alive. While most advocated changing the educational system to make technology more accessible to young girls, Mei had a different suggestion. “It’s a level of confidence,” she said, noting that “there’s this whole underground movement that’s happening now,” in both the technology and artistic fields. However, these underground movements are dominated by men, in part because where young men are taught to play with combative and aggressive toys, young women are given the role of nurturer. Perhaps, in the end, involvement and leadership in technology is not just a matter of where you lean or which community you find, but also a matter of empowering women from the most fundamental – and seemingly unrelated – of levels.

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From within the Landry et Filles truck comes another voice. “In case you meet that special someone!” adds Marc Landry.

Landry & Filles is one of more than thirty food trucks that form the L’Association des Restaurateurs de Rue du Quebec (ARRQ), an organization that aspires to come out of the festival-areas-woodwork where they have spent recent years avoiding restrictive city bylaws. Later this month, a select number of ARRQ members will occupy the nine coveted food truck spots set to open for business throughout downtown Montreal.

Last Friday, many of these trucks assembled at the Esplanade Financière Sun Life, which neighbours the Olympic stadium, for the ARRQ’s First Fridays event. The idea behind the monthly gathering is to provide an amalgam of some of the best parts of summer: a rooftop locale, live music, and intriguingly unique street food. And, of course, to drum up some excitement for the upcoming introduction of these food trucks on the city streets.

In theory, it is a fine idea: in a city deprived of street food for over sixty years, what better way to entice residents than with the food itself? But on this day – when the sun refuses to emerge, a heavy mist floats and coats everyone and their once-warm food, and reggae blasted from central speakers falls depressingly short of the promise of live busking – the intent to create the perfect summer food festival falls a little flat.

Yet the food is, after all, the centrepiece. The menu offerings are often complex, and at times, over the top. And yet, for all the novelty of eating steak tartare or oysters from a restaurant on wheels, some of the items on offer merely provide a middling gastronomical experience. Route 27, steak tartare bar Marché 27’s on-the-road counterpart, offers up a tuna tartare taco that, while refreshingly light, draws much of its flavour and delight from the mango salsa topping. Meanwhile, Chaud Dogs’ NWA (nachos with avocado) hot dog offers a quirky spin on the typical steamie – one that might be better spun without the surprise feta topping.

The unconventional food pairings and one-of-a-kind dishes are borne of an institutional desire to be unique. Mayor Michael Applebaum, when introducing the new street food initiative in April, expressed a vision of Montreal’s street food scene serving up dishes “that can’t be found anywhere else.”

Novelty predictably boosts price, and nothing is different with these trucks. A typical sandwich from one of these trucks will set you back a good $7 or $8, for pulled pork that is comparable in quality to that sold in the SSMU cafeteria (and without the passion fruit kick!). But these steep prices are unsurprising – after all, the trucks are not meant to be a service to frugal pedestrians, but instead, an upscale ‘cultural’ experience rolled into the trend of food on wheels.

One wonders if such a heavy-handed attempt at novelty will backfire. While poutine au canard may be an attempt to reject the somewhat standard street food fare of hamburgers and hot dogs with a dash of Montreal flair, many of the foods cater to very specific – and in some cases, obscure – tastes.

The limited number of truck locations further compounds this problem. While other cities also have strict guidelines on the locations of food trucks (Toronto, for example, only allows trucks in specific areas, and other cities regulate the minimum distance between a food truck and a fixed-location restaurant), Montreal restricts the total number of trucks deployed at any given time to nine. When I ask what this means for individual trucks, the vendor at the Gaufrabec waffle van answers, “We’ll all take turns,” as he takes my order from behind the wheel. For customers, though, this could mean disappointment and no other choice but to come back another day in search of a specific truck.

But beyond the underwhelming and overpriced food are the intangible elements of street food culture – those that can’t be dampened by the rain. It’s in bantering about a ring pop, discussing the mythology that inspired a truck name, or being introduced to the various members of a family-based team that the spirit of street food shines through. Ordering at the truck door is nothing like ordering from the cash counter in your typical casse-croûte; the exchanges are livelier, friendlier, and touched, even on a day without sun, by a certain human warmth. It’s a novelty of interaction that, unlike that of the food, is uncontrived, and ends up ringing even more true. If only for this novelty, a visit to a food truck on your lunch break come June 20 is not a bad idea – maybe you could even get some oysters on the side.

Food trucks will be on the streets beginning June 20, until the end of the summer. For food truck locations, visit streetfoodmontreal.com/food-truck-locations. First Fridays continues the first Friday of every month at the Esplanade Financière Sun Life. Admission is free. Food is not.

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Existing to promote “students’ interest in media, technology, and information policy,” the McGill chapter of OpenMedia was established three years ago, but had been largely inactive during its first two years of existence. Technically a branch of OpenMedia.ca, a non-profit that focuses on a broader range of media issues, OpenMedia @ McGill is largely independent, though they do have a representative to the parent organization. This year, it was approved for full club status under SSMU, and has offered events and blogging opportunities (in both French and English) to its members.

In an interview with The Daily, Esenler and Habib emphasized the importance of having a club that specifically deals with issues related to technology use and internet policy. Esenler spoke about the goal of OpenMedia as one that “hopes to engage McGill students” in such a way that students feel “empowered” in the choices they make with regards to technology and improve their understanding of how internet policies influence the online experience.

The group seeks not to inspire, alarm, or deter individuals from online activities; instead, it seeks to promote discussion and debate about important issues. Habib stressed that “anyone can be interested in [media policy]; whether you’re coming from a business background, social background, technology background, you can have a different stance on it. That’s what we’re trying to promote as a club.”

While promoting media literacy is the official mandate and major focus of the club, Esenler also stressed that she hopes to develop the role of the club in helping students interested in internet policy find internships. Both she and Habib are Communications minors, and they spoke about the lack of networking opportunities at McGill for students in the program. Habib told The Daily that “people are like, I’m in Communications Studies, but what does that mean for the future?”

Though both Habib and Esenler are graduating and will be stepping down from their roles as club directors, Esenler hopes that next year’s executive will continue to work toward providing opportunities for students interested in media policy issues. They also hope that OpenMedia can partner with other campus media such as TVM and CKUT, groups that they feel are “directly affected” by the policies OpenMedia is interested in, to raise awareness at McGill.

The world today is increasingly technological – and increasingly online. “It is important to think of the politics behind [technology] and…know your rights as a consumer online,” Esenler stressed. At a university where media literacy is not a major focus in program curricula, the importance of a club that allows students to explore and understand issues relating to media – particularly online media – is paramount.

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In the basement of the building under consideration, students directed questions to Dean of Arts Christopher Manfredi, Associate Dean (Academic Administration and Oversight) Gillian Lane-Mercier, and Associate Dean (Student Affairs) Lucyna Lach.

The major points of discussion were the process of student consultation and the effectiveness of the advising systems in the Arts faculty. Students voiced concerns similar to those raised at previous town halls and council meetings regarding departmental integrity and community.

On the topic of changing advising structures in the Arts faculty, Lach explained that the proposed central advising hub for the third floor of Leacock would include an Arts OASIS advisor, thereby allowing “cross-pollination” between faculty and departmental advisors.

Upon criticism of this kind of advising restructuring, as well as more general criticism of the advising system, Manfredi called upon students to explain “how it’s been ineffective.” Students responded with concerns about already existing problems such as new students no longer having assigned advisors.

A second major focus of the night was the process of student consultation, and the effectiveness of efforts designed to attract student involvement. Noting that between 40 and 50 students out of 3,000 invited attended a consultation co-hosted by AUS and OASIS, the question of how to reach a larger proportion of the student body was raised.

“We sent out information and expect[ed] it to be cascaded,” said Manfredi. Several student association representatives proposed ideas for better communication.

Morgane Suel, president of the Anthropology Students’ Association, suggested to Manfredi that they should communicate with the student associations rather than the student body, and allow the representatives to reach out on a broader scale.

History Students’ Association VP Internal Affairs Laure Spake suggested that delegates be sent to consultations from student associations so that they can better communicate with their constituents.

Other ideas for facilitating student involvement included sending emails over departmental rather than faculty listservs, or creating a board of ideas in a common space.

In an interview with The Daily, Manfredi reflected on the ideas raised with regard to student consultation. “We’re always trying to communicate with students and get their feedback…and I think we got some great ideas. […] We have an incentive to communicate effectively; we want to communicate effectively.”

While focusing on the restructuring of Leacock, the Town Hall also cast light on the plans to relocate departments in 688 Sherbrooke and the Ferrier building.

Manfredi described the plans – scheduled for this coming summer – that would see 688 Sherbrooke become the location of the East Asian Studies department, instead of the current location of the French Language department, as “not particularly problematic.” Plans for 688 Sherbrooke, according to Manfredi, are not part of the People, Processes & Partnerships initiative.

To train administrative workers to work for multiple departments in 688 Sherbrooke, a cross-training program will be implemented. This same program is proposed for training administrative workers in the Leacock building should the restructuring be approved.

Manfredi said that the administrative officers that will be affected are “quite happy about the possibility of having other people to talk to.”

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I was first introduced to TED somewhere around the tenth grade. At that time, it seemed the peak of intellectualism, far more relevant than the basic functions we were taught in math, or the names and shapes of clouds taught in science. It was learning, we thought, without tedium or coercion by way of grading. In other words, it was the ideal learning experience, and that’s why we liked it. But if we had been just slightly more honest with ourselves – something quite difficult for tenth graders to do – we would have admitted that we liked it because it made us feel smart, like we were beyond the grind of high school.

This phenomenon – the drive to partake in something because it makes you feel smarter, or like a better person (even if doesn’t actually improve you in any way), is what TED relies upon to keep afloat its brand, its talks, and yes, to sell its $3,750 to $7,500 event tickets.

TED describes itself as devoted to all “Ideas Worth Spreading,” having broadened its scope beyond the original Technology, Entertainment, and Design fields from which it takes its acronymic name. Its cultural cachet, though, extends far beyond ideas. Watching TED Talks is a means of accruing cultural capital – twenty minutes and you come away with one more topic you can pretend to know something about. This type of cocktail party education is exactly what draws viewers into the fold, promising to deliver bite-sized pieces of knowledge that can pave the way to the top of Maslow’s hierarchy. But if the talks are steps toward self-actualization, the elite annual events form the peak of the hierarchy itself. As quoted on the TED website, event attendees have called it the “ultimate brain-spa.” Holding the same kind of cultural – and social – value as a spa experience reflects the elitist nature of the events themselves.

There are certainly valuable things on TED – off the top of my head, I can recall Jill Bolte Taylor‘s story of how she consciously witnessed her own stroke, Isabel Allende‘s exploration of feminism and creativity, and Luis von Ahn’s discussion of the power of large-scale online collaboration. But for every Allende, there is a Cameron Russell, telling us that though she makes money as a model, “Looks Aren’t Everything.” For every Bolte Taylor, there is a preachy platitude about being beautiful, about making the most of our time, about being the best we can be (see Elizabeth Gilbert’s talk on how we all have a little genius in us). For every truly unique story, there is a twenty-minute lecture that pats you on the back for learning an elementary-school-level moral lesson rather than imparting you with useful adult knowledge.

And yet we are all drawn in by TED’s promise of earth-shatteringly bright speeches – myself included. Though my scrolls through the list of TED talks in search of enlightenment are becoming increasingly infrequent, I do find myself drawn at times by a prominent neuroscientist exploring the search for consciousness, or the visualization of global poverty statistics to debunk stereotypes. But more than this, I am drawn by the big names, the names of leading intellectuals I can drop while talking to friends. And against my best judgment, I also feel the urge to appropriate the knowledge available on the TED platform to elevate my own perceived intellectualism.

The extraordinary stories TED uses as its selling point exist not because of TED, but because they belong to extraordinary people. Their stories would still exist without the events in Whistler, San Diego, or New York, and they may well still be easily unearthed. Though TED does provide a platform, we cannot attribute any of its amazing content to the organization; it’s simply a launchpad like any other. And while its online platform – launched in 2006 – is accessible to all with a web connection, the elite events – pinnacles of all that is TED – are not nearly as open.

After a TEDx McGill event in 2011, I wrote about the selection process for speakers, in which the event organizer told me that speaker selection was based on personal connections with organizers rather than name recognition. While TEDx, created to give communities “TED-like experiences at the local level,” is just dissociated enough from TED to be labelled ‘independent’ (though there was a situation recently where TED exerted its power to shut down talks it deemed illegitimate at a TEDx West Hollywood event), its tone varies little from that of its parent organization. Like TED, it selects the stories they want to bring to the forefront based on some hard-to-define notion of what is interesting and valuable.

TED’s mandate is fundamentally inspiring, professing to believe in the “power of ideas to change attitudes, lives, and ultimately, the world,” but its curatorial position and exorbitant fees create an elitist atmosphere that is more focused on developing individualistic cultural cachet than enacting real change. As a result, TED’s mission is diluted to the point where it might be more accurate to see it as celebrating the “power of ideas – for those who can afford them.”

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Robert Zatorre is a professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery. He runs the Auditory Processing Laboratory at the Montreal Neurological Institute and is co-director of the International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research. His lab focuses on cognitive processes involving the auditory system, particularly those relevant to music.

When he first started studying music, Zatorre fought to convince others that his work was valid. “The scientific community was not always completely enthusiastic,” he remembered. “They would reject it out of hand if you put ‘music’ in the title.  They would say it’s fluffy, it’s not hard science.”

Over the years, interest in the field has snowballed. Music casts a whole new light on memory, learning, motor performance, emotion – according to Zatorre, “almost all of the cognitive functions that we think of as representative of being human.”

Musicians have also become more open to a scientific take on their art. “It took a couple of decades,” he said, “but now I give a lot of lectures to musicians at musical festivals, in music departments, and so on.”

Despite burgeoning interest in the field, Zatorre, like many scientists doing basic research, still has battles to fight. When the Quebec government cuts $14.8 million from Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies (FRQNT) in the next fiscal year, Zatorre will be left in the lurch. He and his colleagues have a FRQNT-backed project, but with a 15 per cent reduction in funds, he’s not sure how he’s going to pay all his staff.

Meanwhile, health researchers across the province saw their proposed cuts altered from $10 million to $2 million after launching an ad campaign featuring a woman fighting ovarian cancer. Zatorre said,“They’re going out and finding a cure for cancer –  that’s an easy sell.”

Curiosity-driven research is harder to justify, making it much more difficult to receive funding. Zatorre recalled being asked point-blank: “Why aren’t you doing something important, like curing Alzheimer’s?” Basic research, he responded, provides a crucial foundation for applied research. “When we do an experiment that makes us understand the connection between the auditory [system] and the motor system, that research gives very good background for people using musical interventions for Parkinson’s. That’s a typical result of basic science.”

Zatorre noted that applied researchers are just as supportive of basic research. “It shouldn’t be a zero sum game,” he said. “Scientists are united on this. I understand that there are constraints, but you don’t get something for nothing, either.” The funding agencies, it seems, have yet to realize the importance of the synergy between applied and basic research.

On languages and learning 

Very few places flow seamlessly between languages the way Montreal does. With many growing up in bilingual homes, children in Montreal are naturally immersed in the city’s polyglot environment. Fred Genesee, a professor in the Department of Psychology, draws the city into his research by studying second language acquisition in preschool and school-aged children.

Genesee’s work has been influential in debunking the myth that learning a second language can hinder a child’s educational progress. On the contrary, children simultaneously learning two languages reach the same developmental milestones – speech segmenting, babbling, and first words – at the same age as monolingual children. “It’s not a challenge to the children,” Genesee said. “The challenge is for the parents to provide enough [linguistic]input.”

In fact, Genesee pointed out that there are cognitive advantages to learning two languages. Bilinguals tend to be better at executive functions, processes which control the flow of attention for decision-making and everyday problem-solving. Children who learn two languages constantly control which language they use. Genesee called it a kind of “mental calisthenics.”

These advantages carry into adulthood as well. In bilingual people who develop Alzheimer’s disease, the onset of the disease is delayed compared to monolinguals.  Bilinguals are also less likely to suffer from dementia and age-related cognitive decline.

Canada is a bilingual country, and immersion programs have been offered in schools since 1965; however, some of these programs still suffer from the misconception that bilingual language acquisition may delay progress. In addition, immersion programs don’t always provide the same range of resources as regular schools.  As a result, children who are struggling in school are often discouraged from participating in immersion programs.

Genesee sees this as a serious ethical concern.  “In a sense, these programs can become elitist,” he noted, adding that “all kids should have access to these programs and discouraging kids that might struggle in them is exclusionary. You’re potentially depriving them of skills they need later in life.” Conversely, students who struggle in math are not discouraged from learning math – it’s a skill they need to function in the world.

With globalization, bilingualism is more valuable than ever. In areas outside North America, English immersion is in demand, and many schools use the immersion programs initiated here in Canada as models. “If you know French and you learn English, your possibilities explode,” Genesee reflected. “You have far more access if you’re bilingual.”

On research in the age of the internet

Cognitive training tools, brain games, cognitive exercises: call them what you will, personalized online games that supposedly make you smarter have grown rapidly in popularity as computers have become ubiquitous in our society. Lumosity, arguably the best-known of these, calls upon its users to “harness [their] brain’s neuroplasticity and train [their] way to a brighter life.” But these cognitive tools are used in a slightly different way in the Prevention of Neurodegenerative Diseases in Everyone at Risk (PONDER) initiative currently underway at the McGill Centre for Studies in Aging, under the guidance of Jens Pruessner.

In an interview with The Daily, Pruessner defined PONDER as “a cognitive training program that…[allows people] to train in areas of cognition that have been shown to benefit from routine exercising and repeated training.” However, it is also a research project that makes use of the users’ results to analyze the changes in cognitive data over time, in hopes that this will identify variables related to age-related disease. Eventually this may aid in the prevention of disease onset, though Pruessner says that at this point, the timespan for such developments is not clear.

The research conducted through PONDER is targeted at adults who are forty to sixty years old, and while the online interface allows the project a broad reach, it also introduces unique challenges, for example, the difficulty of accurately identifying an individual’s age from behind a screen. The researcher must rely on the information the subject provides.  This is why Pruessner emphasizes that the cognitive training tools are available to all. If the program was restricted to a certain demographic,  the scientific controls of the experiment could be compromised, by causing, as Pruessner told The Daily, “people [to] claim to be forty and over even though they’re not.”

This is one example of the challenges related to the control elements of the experiment. Pruessner also mentioned other typically controlled aspects of experiments that are made more difficult through an online interface, such as testing environment and time of day. On using this online interface for conducting an experiment, especially in an age of increasing technological literacy, Pruessner noted that “it’s attractive to think of the amount of time and resources you can save,” but stressed the importance of finding “a good question that can be answered with these types of tools.”

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According to Dean of Arts Christopher Manfredi and Associate Dean Gillian Lane-Mercier, the initiative is a response to concerns that specific departments may be left without qualified administrators after a voluntary retirement program is put in place. This program, coupled with a recent provincial administrative cost-cutting initiative, Bill 100, will reduce the number of administrators in the faculty.

Two potential restructuring plans to be carried out by Summer 2014 were put forth by Manfredi.  The plans would group administrative officers (AOs) and services on the sixth floor of Leacock. A welcome centre and student service hub would be built on the third floor. The Faculty has estimated that this could cost up to $2.5 million.

The plans would also move the Jewish Studies department into Leacock, from its current location on McTavish. This building would subsequently be used to house Arts faculty course lecturer, TA, visiting scholar, and student association clusters.

The first of the two plans moves department chairs to the sixth floor, keeping them in close proximity to their AOs, moving a total of 68 people. However, the second plan, which would move a total of 57 people, would keep departmental chairs with their departments, but separate from their AOs.

The response at the Town Hall was one of concern. Art History professor Amelia Jones, who came to McGill from the University of Manchester  after similar centralization of administrative services, said that this restructuring would lead to a “dysfunctional noncollegial community.”

At Manchester she said, “students had no interface directly with the departments […] academic staff became the only possible interface with the students, [and are required to do] low-level administrative tasks.”

Manfredi said that the project team would attempt to avoid such issues and pointed to other faculties, such as Engineering, that have already implemented similar structures.

Professor Elsbeth Heaman noted that such a restructuring could change the nature of the university itself by removing departmental inertia.

“If I wanted to completely transform the university, to make it into a political creature, make it into a corporate university, […] I would begin by weakening departmental cultures,” Heaman said.

Manfredi responded by saying, “If there are serious risks to our current mission, we won’t do them. I don’t want to replicate bad mistakes made somewhere else.”

While many faculty members prefaced their concerns by acknowledging current administrative and organizational issues, Communications professor Darin Barney told The Daily by email that these changes would potentially have detrimental effects on important qualities of the university.

“These qualities include departmental autonomy and solidarity, collegiality, and personalized relationships among faculty, staff, and students. Losing these would be too high a price to pay for whatever economies or efficiencies might be gained – especially as it is far from certain that ‘clustering’ support staff and removing them from departments would make things more, rather than less, efficient,” he wrote.

VP Internal Affairs of History Students’ Association Laure Spake and other student association representatives present at the Town Hall criticized the lack of outreach to students, and the lack of clarity from the administration. While Manfredi had previously held eight poorly attended consultations on the new advising services that the Leacock space reallocation would provide, Manfredi told The Daily: “the Town Hall was the first opportunity to discuss the proposed Leacock space scenarios publicly and collectively.”

Spake especially took issue with the means of communication from the administration, pointing specifically to the inaccessibility of their website. “The administration is saying that they’re putting out this information for us, but they’re not putting it out in a way that we can easily reach,” she said.

She pointed to the miscommunication regarding the advising consultations as an example, suggesting that if students had been informed that the advising services would be linked to the Leacock space reallocations, “more than one or three students would have showed up.”

However, Manfredi told The Daily: “Department chairs and student leaders also have an obligation to keep their constituents informed, and to communicate the concerns of their constituents back to me and others.”

Lane-Mercier presented the two reallocation at the AUS Council meeting on Wednesday. In an interview with The Daily, Lane-Mercier stated that the consultations were and would be “ongoing.”

In response to a question as to the next step, given the recent feedback, Lane-Mercier said that the project team is “pausing to reflect.”  Particularly, she suggested that some of the previously rejected plans may now be revisited in light of student and faculty comments.

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The performance is put on by V-Day McGill, the local chapter of the international organization founded in 1998 by Vagina Monologues playwright, Eve Ensler. On the day of sweet romance and passionate love, the performers on stage candidly confront subjects like rape, female genital mutilation, misogyny, and feminine self-discovery with a mixture of poise and frustration.

In all, nine monologues are performed, with old standbys like “Cunt” and “The Woman Who Loved to Make Vaginas Happy.” A few monologues stand out in particular. In “The Flood,” the actress connects with the audience through a soft voice that begs you to pay the utmost attention, and though you need to strain a bit, the voice somehow never becomes inaudible. The audience hangs on her every word, coming to understand the character of the sexually repressed elderly woman who comes to life in depth and colour. It feels like she’s having an intimate conversation with every individual audience member; her intermittent, shameful silences provoke the audience to address internalized echoes of erotic embarrassment.

“It stopped being a thing that speaks a long time ago,” she says, referring to her inner sexual self. “You got an old lady to talk about down there. You feel better now?” she demands, and we nod yes. Yes, we feel better. The silence we’re steeped in every day of our life is painful, and the monologues in this play give voice not only to the characters’ stories but to all the things we, as women, have hidden inside. Yes, we feel better – we feel liberated.

“I felt like an astronaut re-entering the atmosphere of the earth,” Lucile Smith’s character affirms in the “Vagina Workshop” scene. It’s an apt description of the bewitching, enlightening experience of watching the entire play, as the topic of female sexuality and the ubiquitous vagina that the women in the audience take for granted is illuminated in a novel way that makes the commonplace seem unfamiliar and delightful.

The beauty of this play is the agency it gives all the characters in the play, the women whose stories they tell, and the audience members themselves. In the “My Vagina Was My Village” monologue, inspired by a Bosnian woman who was raped by soldiers during wartime, the actor’s nervous body language under the smothering weight of her terrible memory transforms into a cleansing anger as she builds toward a cathartic expulsion of her shame, silence, and fear. Through her performance, we give form to the haunting spectre of sexual oppression, misogyny, and violence – and forcefully exorcise it.

Although there’s an occasional lull in energy, and the performances and choreography could at times be uneven, it’s fruitless to judge Vagina Monologues as a traditional play. It’s more about creating an environment of openness, a visceral experience, full of emotional catharsis. To reduce it to its minutiae is to misunderstand the piece’s point.

The play’s final scene is a monologue performed in chorus by the ensemble cast: a rousing speech about One Billion Rising, the campaign launched by Ensler for the 15th anniversary of V-Day. This is not the first time the chorus is used in the performance, but it is by far its most effective implementation. The show’s end is defined by motion, as the chorally-delivered words swell into a beat that takes over the performers’ bodies, and infiltrates into the audience. The clapping and stamping beat stands out, especially against the stasis that has defined the majority of the performance. A dynamic ending to a dynamically imagined performance piece. A standing ovation. And scene.

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