As of yesterday I’ve learned two things: One, the police lie. I listened while their press statements came out and directly contradicted things I saw with my own eyes.

And two, I can no longer take seriously any of the arguments for diversity of tactics. The world is violent and full of suffering, and capitalism has done a lot to advance both in the world. But think pragmatically in context of the streets you are marching through and the people who inhabit them when planning your actions. Who is going to gain from this one? (As far as I can see, the police, and window-glass manufacturers). Who is going to suffer? (People on the streets of Toronto).

The black bloc
The black bloc put so many people in harm’s way yesterday. The people in the black bloc were the ones who had been talking the most about police repression and the police state at earlier rallies. That means they knew what they were in for.

That means they knew how the police would react, yet they brought on that behaviour and then changed outfits and disappeared into the crowd. They must have known that retaliation for their actions would fall to anyone and everyone there.

Both of my parents grew up in police states (Hitler’s Germany; Marcos’s Philippines), so I’ve mostly rolled my eyes at the use of the term for Canada. But yesterday downtown was really starting to resemble things I’ve read and heard about police states – totally being at the whim of the police if you end up in the wrong place at the wrong time, for one thing.

Militancy in self-defense? I’m all for it. But if you take police repression seriously – if you really live in a police state, even a temporary one that’s been brought on by the G20 – you don’t try to bring its wrath on other people for sport. That’s all yesterday’s rioting amounts to, because their message sure as hell isn’t getting out to anyone after last night.

If you take actions knowing that they are going to breed violence to other human beings (if nothing else because they have at so many international summits before) are you not indirectly responsible for that violence?
Here’s a press release explaining the Black Bloc’s point of view:
“Most of the targets are symbols to many of the ethical backwardness of a society in which wealth is systematically stripped from poor and racialized people who produce it, and remains concentrated in the hands of a few corporations, banks, and global elites. Several police cars were destroyed by protestors as well, many of whom felt anger over a week of unlawful searches, arrests, and arbitrary violence that had hurt many, even on the peaceful demonstrations of Friday.”

I don’t believe that the major lesson to come out of last night will be anything about the violence of capitalism. Symbolic, peaceful acts of defiance against a violent system endure. Unless we’re talking about the total overthrow of a government that has left you with no other options (and even this has been done with limited violence), violent acts don’t win hearts and minds. Don’t come back at me with the distinction between property destruction and violence. This property destruction lead to violence against human beings.

vs. the police state
The police let the Black Bloc riot. As Rabble’s David Langille points out, it’s beyond suspicious that 7,000 police and 19,000 security personnel couldn’t stop a few people from breaking windows and setting things on fire. They left two destroyed cop cars near Queen and Spadina for so long, people felt comfortable climbing into their driver’s seats. Stephen was there when one of them figured out how to turn on one of the sirens.

I still don’t believe that Canada is exactly comparable to a totalitarian system, but so many people saw police brutality on the streets last night, and there seems to be no real mechanism to check the police.

Local and federal government showed last night that they will rally around the police without question. Policemen keep repeating that you can report complaints to officers within the police system – how can those complaints possibly be handled impartially and with detachment, if they’re being reviewed by fellow officers?
A line of police on horseback charged a crowd and trampled people in Queen’s Park yesterday.

Journalists were assaulted and arrested.

People were beaten up, dragged into the crowd, and disappeared.

For more photos and reports on the G20, check out firstascents.wordpress.com

The post Black bloc vs. police state appeared first on The McGill Daily.

In order to be accredited, the programs have to meet new standards set by the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB), a process that will involve some restructuring.

It’s created a lot of work for the faculty’s academic committee, whose last meeting had 83 items on the agenda. The academic committee has reviewed every program to make sure it meets all the requirements and has an adequate number of contact hours, or academic units.

Associate dean James Clark, who chairs the engineering academic committee and the committee on teaching and learning, said that there’s a 100 per cent chance that McGill’s engineering programs will pass accreditation, and that it’s more a matter of doing well enough in the review process that each program earns the maximum accreditation period of six years before another review has to take place.

Jonathan Lipsitz, Engineering Undergraduate Society (EUS) VP (Academic) and student representative on both committees, has sensed some skepticism about the new requirements over the past year.

“The professors don’t really like changing around their whole thing, because we’ve been putting out perfectly good engineers for the past 50 years,” he said. “However, they do realize we need to do this to keep being an engineering program.”

“It seems like a lot of work that needs to be done that might not necessarily justify the efforts put into it,” Lipsitz said. “A lot of people are working really hard to satisfy these new requirements, [and] once we’ve satisfied the new requirements, I don’t see us being that much improved from what we were beforehand.”

Lipsitz added that the process stands to affect CEGEP students the most, as their transfer credits may no longer be counted the same way. Clark said that the restriction on transfer credits is nothing new and isn’t going to change with the new requirements, though McGill is constantly pushing the CEAB to count more CEGEP transfer credits.

According to EUS president Andrew Doyle, there was serious concern earlier in the year about passing the accreditation process.

“There’s a certain minimum number of professors that have to be in each program – and a [minimum number] who have to be professional engineers,” said Doyle. “The dean of engineering [Christophe Pierre] is a junior engineer, not a professional engineer. There was a worry that we were going to lose accreditation…. Other schools have failed, and it’s serious.”

According to Clark, Pierre was not certified because he was coming from the U.S., where professors are not required to be licensed in the same way.

Now, Doyle said, with accreditation pending, Pierre will be taking the exam to become a professional engineer. “It looks like we’re on track,” Doyle said. “I have total confidence that he’ll be able to pass.”

Though some of the new CEAB requirements deal with the numbers of instructors with specific credentials each program should have, Clark said that the regulations should not affect personnel changes within the faculty.

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During high school, friends from less sexually conservative families would bring out copies of the real Cosmo to share relationship advice and try to get me to wear makeup. By reading it, I felt like I could bone up on the information I might have missed about American preteen life. I had a lot of basic logistical questions.

I recently heard in a lecture at Concordia that learning to be a woman through what you read is a phenomenon that goes way back. In the late 1800s, major newspapers in North America generally all had one female journalist on staff, to write the women’s column – they were hired to help the papers tap into a burgeoning market to which they otherwise wouldn’t have access. The columns were widely read, and while these journalists were taking great leaps for womankind, they were also teaching a generation how to be women – and a generation of immigrants how to be Canadian women, in particular. This story resonated with me. So I wanted to tell you a couple things about my pulp and fibre comfort food.

In university, the more I started working outside of school, the more Cosmo – and anything else remotely like it, from Nylon to Marie Claire – became the only thing I wanted to read.

I understand that every issue of Cosmo is basically the same; if you line up a handful of issues, you’ll realize even the headlines on the cover don’t deviate from a basic format from month to month. So why do I keep reading it?
Women’s magazines, on the whole, are ingenious products. They come in different flavours for different crowds, but most will sell you just the right combination of mixed messages to keep you hooked. There’s a batch of articles telling you you’re secretly great and the key to attracting a man, getting an awesome job, and having the life of your dreams is usually some comfortingly intuitive thing, like having confidence in yourself, getting more sleep, or cutting a couple toxic foods out of your diet.

Then there’s the undertow that gently undercuts all that. Every article looks like it’s about women; many women’s mags, like Cosmo, are edited entirely by women. But the articles are all about men. Independence? Guys love that shit. Things you can do to console yourself and feel fine when you can’t find a boy? The lady doth protest too much. Male attention is the measure of most things (problem enough if you’re into the opposite sex; if you’re not interested in men, forget it). I’m not going to touch the obvious – articles on how to be a better girlfriend or give the best BJs. (The articles on looking good actually strike me as the most nuanced, but maybe that’s a story for another day.)
With every issue, you’re reading your way into an understanding of a man-centred universe. Throw in the fashion photography and human interest stories according to taste. Season with horoscopes. Makes multiple servings.

Even Glamour, which prides itself on featuring plus-size models, hits just the right balance of telling you that you’ve got all you need to be a happy, desirable, successful woman, alongside articles that tell you everyone needs bronzer. Even you. Yes, you. When you’re feeling overworked and shitty, there’s the right measure of pick-me-up to make you want another helping, and the right measure of put-me-down to need one again later.

These clearly aren’t just problems with Cosmo or women’s mags on the whole, but they provide a point to fix on to help us tackle bigger things – maybe the structural flaws in the addictive brand of pop-culture female empowerment we get all the time.

But anyway. I have a new issue of Cosmo to read.

Related stories:

Don’t turn your boyfriend gay, says magazine, 2/11/10
The story of O-no, 10/9/08
Commentary: Femininity is fucking fierce, 11/19/09
Gender neutral, but not equal, 10/23/09
Women talk success, 3/9/09

The post My fun fearless miseducation appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The amendment was moved from the floor by Faculty of Law professor Robert Janda. Janda proposed that the wording of the policy’s section on hazardous research be changed to account for research with potential harmful applications, in addition to research activities that pose “significant recognizable risk of physical injury to persons or property involving hazardous experiments or materials.”

“This is the kind of thing that institutions take on to increase the transparency around the externalities they generate with public funding,” Janda said.

The amendment would have mandated researchers to consider any potential harmful applications upon receipt of a research grant or contract and report them to their chair or dean. “We have a solemn obligation stated in the preamble to the [conduct of research policy] to remain aware of the potential consequences of our research,” Janda said. “This is not the creation of an academic offense.”

Though Janda said the amendment was conceived with military research in mind, military research was not explicitly mentioned anywhere in the proposed amendment.

Ellen Aitken, dean of the Faculty of Religious Studies, said that she was voting against Janda’s motion because, though she sympathized with its intent, its phrasing was ambiguous enough that it could be applied to almost anything.

“Everything we do causes potential harm,” Aitken said. “Everything we do would have to be registered in this process.”

Several other senators expressed sympathy for the spirit of the motion coupled with concerns over its practical implications, as well as discomfort with combining larger ethical concerns with a section of the policy primarily concerning workplace safety. Dean of Science Martin Grant characterized the amendment as “mixing up safety goggles with potentially dangerous ideas.” Provost Anthony Masi said that the proposed amendment was “so imprecise in its wording so as to create real problems in the administration.”

SSMU VP (University Affairs) Rebecca Dooley voiced her support for the amendment. “I think it produces a moment for reflection by Senate,” she said. “Our social responsibility should be a topic of equal priority with our academic responsibility.”

Law Senator Faizel Gulamhussein raised the question, “Where else does the VP see the preamble having teeth in legislation?” To objections that other universities don’t have such a policy, he replied, “We are no other university. We’re McGill University and we should be leading.”

Arts senator Sarah Woolf proposed that the former military research clause be reinserted after Janda’s amendment was voted down by a great majority.

Her suggestion followed Senator Darin Barney’s remark that he would reluctantly vote against the proposed amendment given the “pathological outcomes” other senators were concerned it would produce. Barney pointed to the previous military research clause, stating that it was “probably a more elegant and relevant way” to address these concerns. “It’s not a matter of research funded by [the military] being necessarily harmful, but more likely to have direct harm than research funded by SHRQ, for instance.”

Woolf said that the discussion made clear to her that the original clause, with its more precise wording, was most likely a preferable solution. “We hadn’t actually had a reason the clause was removed in the first place. It has the teeth and the action guidelines that were so useful over the last 20 years.”

The motion to reintroduce the original clause on military research was defeated with 18 for, 38 against.

Masi and Principal Heather Monroe Blum expressed concern over discussing the proposed amendment at length, as this was the third time that the policy had been discussed at Senate.

“That’s not a reason to expedite the process,” Woolf told The Daily. “The fact that it’s the third time and we’re still having this conversation means people are still not satisfied.”

An abridged version of this story appeared in print on March 29.

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PGSS president Daniel Simeone said at Senate that in the past, McGill postdocs were classed as students, were tax exempt, and received no benefits – in contrast to non-students, who are taxed, and receive state benefits. Now, with the release of the new federal budget classifying their income as taxable, they’re in the worst of both worlds, Simeone explained: being taxed, and receiving no benefits.

“The imposition of the new taxation regulations will have a detrimental effect on McGill post-docs’ quality of life, and will make it difficult for the recruitment of qualified personnel to McGill labs in the future,” Simeone told The Daily.

In a presentation on post docs at McGill, Martin Kreiswirth, dean of graduate and post-doctoral studies, said that postdocs are the most internationally mobile of all types of students, and raised the concern of conflicts between these new classification regulations and immigration rules. Many postdoctoral fellows aren’t authorized to work in Canada, but must now be classified as non-students.

“With very little advertising or forewarning, the government decided all post-doc income was taxable,” Kreiswirth said. “There was very little consultation done, and this flies in the face of other regulation of Immigration Canada.”
Simeone added during Senate that PGSS postdocs are more concerned with total income than their registered status, and asked President Heather Munroe-Blum for McGill to add to the level of monetary support for post-docs. Munroe-Blum replied that she appreciated the intent of the request and is “deeply concerned and committed” to the issue, though she was not prepared to commit to monetary funding on short notice.

“McGill on a policy level is certainly very supportive, though we did not expect to hear on short notice a guarantee for bridge funding for postdocs as we enter into a new taxation regime,” Simeone told The Daily. “If we are going to enter into a new taxation regime, the bridge funding to ease into a new funding reality would ensure that individuals are not hit with immediately disastrous financial circumstances.”
Estimates of the concentration of Canadian post-docs living in Quebec from the Canadian Assocation of Post-doctoral Studies place the numbers between 20 and 30 per cent.

According to Kreiswirth’s presentation, 504 of McGill post-docs are in the faculties of medicine and dentistry, 106 in science, 67 in engineering, 44 in arts, and 31 in agriculture and environmental sciences. They make an average yearly income of $38,000.

At the same time that post-doc income was defined as taxable, the government also created 140 postdoctoral fellowships, paying $70,000 a year each.

“The number of fellowships is 140, compared to 6,000 post-docs across the country…[and] the wisdom of a $70,000 fellowship is questionable,” Simeone said. “It would have perhaps been better to fund more post-docs with a $40,000 salary.'”

An abridged version of this story appeared in print on March 29.

Related articles:

There’s room to improve grad student resources, 10/1/09
Post-doc’s tax and childcare status rejected, 2/11/10
Commentary: real progressives say no to CFS, 3/27/10

The post McGill will advocate for taxed post-docs appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The McGill Daily: What kind of work do you do with the Alfie Roberts Institute?
David Austin: Most of our work has been around community and political public education – organizing forums, guest speakers, book launches for books that we think are important to be out there in the public for members of the black community. We’re invited at times to do workshops, individual classes in CEGEPs and universities – this month is generally kind of busy for that reason.

Part of our mission is to provide and promote a sense of historical continuities.… Much of what we do represents the kind of activities that have been done in this city by…black people for a long time, going back to the twenties.

MD: Why is this kind of work important?
DA: The sixties were considered a turning point for the black community in Montreal…. That was considered a kind of heyday where there were all kinds of possibilities. Today you have high drop-out rates in the schools, and when it comes to employment, education, all-around general life chances, the chance to live and exist in another place in society – all these things come into question in this society for black folks in general.… These are contemporary questions that have social roots.

When we organize forums – around the Sir George Williams affair, for instance – it’s a reflection on where we’ve come from, it’s an intergenerational event. We’re looking at how this community has evolved, and it’s an opportunity for raising questions…and not giving the sense that we just arrived here yesterday – the sense that the black community is new and has no roots in this society. There’s a lot of mythology around that that comes from the dominant narratives of what it means to be Canadian in the broad national sense….

In addition to ignoring the history of indigenous people in this society, it also excludes the fact that this society had slaves in the 18th and 17th century. If you’re talking about the presence of people of African descent in this country, there’s politicians becoming accustomed to talking about Mathieu de Costa, a black explorer who accompanied Samuel de Champlain. He spoke Micmac, and could translate for Champlain. Black History Month is a City-sponsored event, and most local politicians can say they know about Mathieu de Costa, but it doesn’t change our narrative in terms of understanding black people here. If he could translate for Champlain, it’s strongly suggested he was here before Champlain. But that’s never asked as a question. It has a real bearing on the dominant narrative in this country. Everyone else is reduced to visitors.

Just look at the black population in Nova Scotia, for example, the first-wave descendents of loyalists stemming from the American war for independence over 200 years ago. How is it that this narrative still persists, and what bearing does this narrative have on the present? If we’re all perceived as immigrants it has implications for citizenship – who is entitled to live and exist in a society among equals. So I’m making that a long way of saying that history’s important – it has bearing on how people perceive us in the present.

MD: What kind of courses do you offer for young people?
DA: We recently started offering two sessions – one is an art and identity course. It’s geared towards black youth, kids of African and Caribbean descent, to provide them an opportunity to explore their own identity through art, to develop a sense of self and who they are and their place in the world through art. It’s a creative process.

We also do things like workshops in schools…around the same kinds of themes: art identity, popular culture, how people of African descent are depicted in the media, in and through popular culture, and what that means for how they’re perceived in real life. These are questions that are not just about identity but about how people are perceived, understood, and related to in society
MD: How is the institute funded?
DA: We’re not funded, is the short answer. We have several trustees that contribute to our expenses including our rent every month; we have some dedicated donors who give to the institution relatively often…. It’s grown at its own pace, and it’s been very deliberate that we’re not running around chasing funds or tailoring our programming.

MD: Would you say that minorities are under-represented at McGill?
DA: Statistics would probably bear that out – if you look at the composition of society and representation of the schools, for sure. Most black people who attend an institution like McGill – in the past it was always the case that a vast majority were not actually from Montreal. McGill has never lived up to its responsibility to the community – look at the institution and how many professors of colour there are. Even the University of Toronto has a transition year program where they reach out to the community, and kids who have dropped out can enter the institution….

Basically, McGill gets away with murder. Any sense of employment equity – I’m not just talking about seeing black faces or Asian faces. There are lots of qualified people around the world, and they’re not at McGill. Which would be part of what attracts students, right – an openness to other ways of teaching and learning, in terms of who teaches, that attracts other students…. But that pressure has to come from the outside. It has to come from an organized community, from students. The University has to be pressured. Basically there’s no will to bring about change. The canon holds. The past holds, in terms of what’s traditionally been taught. That change comes with pressure and mobilization. That hasn’t been sustained over the years.

In a society as multicultural and interesting as Montreal, there’s no real courses on the Caribbean. There’s nothing on African-Canadian history, [which is a shame] given the long history. It basically reinforces the thought that the histories and cultures of those people don’t really count.

—compiled by Braden Goyette

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Don’t encourage them.

Given their numbers and the scale of their actions, without all the hype, the wind would have gone out of their sails a long time ago.

Which is why I find this GA motion to categorically ban any pro-life group from SSMU particularly distressing. The wording of the motion defines groups with a pro-life ideology as inherently oppressive, a leap of logic that ploughs over any differentiation between all the people out there who aren’t too keen on the idea of abortion: “The SSMU further resolves to condemn any group, student association, or organization whose goals and methods compromise the safety and health of any person or engage in acts of discrimination such as but not limited to pro-life groups.”

You are only giving the people behind Choose Life ammunition and legitimizing their claim to being oppressed by the Left. This idea is central to the way they’re framing themselves as conservative underdogs being put down by an intolerant pro-abortion majority.

You glorify Choose Life by providing them with the epic, forceful opposition their self-image requires. Meet their actions with disregard and disinterest instead of indignation, and this self-image won’t hold water.

If you think their tactics are beneath your dignity, do not dignify them. The best way to oppose people you violently disagree with is to put them in their place. You can achieve this, first, by staying classy and keeping your place firmly in the moral high ground. Proposing censorship has you losing it pretty fast. Please don’t let this lapse pass into policy.

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While the causes of eating disorders are complex and varied, societal pressures are usually involved. University is a place where these can come to a head; a Princeton study found that 53 per cent of patients with lifelong eating disorders say they first developed unhealthy attitudes toward food during university.

“The nature of an eating disorder is that it’s very secretive and not talked about,” said Randi Fogelbaum, coordinator of McGill’s EDP. That’s partially why program staff are excited about this year’s Awareness Week – the more word gets out, the more they’ll be able to reach prospective patients who might not have realized they have a disorder or that help is available.

Many students come to university with an eating disorder, said Vanessa Matic, the program nurse. According to the Canadian Pediatric Society, eating disorders are the third most common chronic illness among adolescent girls, occurring most commonly in girls between 14 and 25 years of age.

“Very often that’s when students leave their home and family….That’s when their eating disorder gets worse because they’re not in a structured family environment with structured meals,” said Valerie Fedorowicz, the program psychiatrist. Samah Fares, the program nutritionist, said they see many students turn to food for comfort when faced with the stresses of university, and that peer pressure and body issues can be particularly acute in a university environment.

“It’s a disorder that has a big cultural component. It’s not just students or this environment, it’s a pressure from all society to be thin, [the message that] that’s what’s valued for women,” said Fedorowicz. “Students at this age come to university wanting to recreate this whole circle of relationships and friends,” she added. For students with eating disorders, she said, making that happen is viewed through the lens of being thin. Being more well-liked and successful can become tied to that goal. Fighting narrow attitudes of beauty and what women’s bodies should look like is one way to combat the development of eating disorders.

Though university students are vulnerable to eating disorders, EDP staff said that there are very few eating disorder programs at Canadian universities.

McGill’s program takes a multidisciplinary team approach that provides treatment from a number of angles, with a dietician, nurse, psychiatrist, nutritionist, and therapists on staff. The team meets to discuss and assess each new case and speaks with the student afterward to share their findings. They do four new assessments every week, and are currently seeing 50 ongoing patients. They have seen about 100 over the past year.

The program offers a variety of entry points for new patients, including psychoeducation groups and meal support groups. Psychoeducation groups combine information sessions about eating disorders with aspects of a support group. In meal groups, students have a group dinner with a nutritionist followed by a discussion session, where they debrief the experience and discuss things like food groups and healthy portions. “It’s to help them have a healthy relationship with food,” said Fares. “Usually people with eating disorders have lots of anxiety around mealtime. It’s to help them feel more comfortable.”

The team is planning a friends and family education session for March 11, on how to best provide support.

Events planned for Awareness Week include film screenings in residences. All McGill students are welcome. Contact the EDP at 514-398-1050 or check mcgill.ca/mentalhealth/edp for more information.

The post If mealtimes are a struggle, don’t face it alone appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) is the largest student lobby group in Canada. It is meant to be an effective advocacy group for student interests nationwide, while its parallel organization, CFS-Services, provides many student unions with health plans and student handbooks.

CFS has also been charged by its detractors with a lack of transparency, antidemocratic internal proceedings, and the use of legal threats to intimidate its critics. For many of these reasons, PGSS filed a petition to defederate from CFS in late October. CFS national treasurer Dave Molenhuis, who was recently elected 2010-2011 national chairperson, says he has received the petition. PGSS is still waiting for the organization to reply to their request and set a date for a referendum.

What is at stake in defederation?
CFS received $68,000 in membership dues from McGill University graduate students and post-doctorates in 2009.

Its supporters stress that the federation allows the Canadian student movement to present a united front in lobbying government. “If we were not united under one federation, we would lose unity in articulating our vision for postsecondary education,” said Molenhuis. “If we aren’t working together, I can guarantee you we will be defeated. We will be carved up, we will be divided, and we will fall.”

PGSS executives, along with undergraduate and graduate student leaders at Concordia, have publicly expressed frustration with what they see as CFS’s lack of transparency and increasingly undemocratic operations, as well as the amount of money spent on legal action against critics of CFS.

According to budgetary documents, the CFS spent $246,646.29 on legal costs in 2008-2009, and between $83,285.70 and $368,657.64 each year over the last decade.

Documents compiled primarily by students at Simon Fraser Univesity and posted on studentunion.ca suggest significant federation involvement in litigation and legal threats against student unions as recently as 2006 and 2008.

Molenhuis denied that the majority of CFS’s legal fees are incurred in suits against students, and told The Daily they can be attributed to producing things like legal language on student ID cards.

Separate from the petition to move members of the PGSS to a defederation referendum, six student unions put together a package of motions to reform the CFS through official channels at the organization’s annual general meeting (AGM) in late November.

PGSS president Daniel Simeone called the reform package “the first draft for what could be a truly effective organization.”

Many of the motions put forward in the package concerned the ability of student unions to leave the federation, as well as to increase transparency with reforms such as putting minutes and financial records online.

The majority of the package’s reforms presented at the AGM were not passed.

“There was this systematic blockage of the motions that had been put forward by Quebec,” said PGSS VP External Ladan Mahabadi. “Instead of focusing on the reforms and discussing the motions based on their merits, they were brought down because they were coming from Quebec and PGSS.”

Molenhuis said that the PGSS was not singled out at the AGM and maintained in an interview with The Daily that the outcome was the result of standard democratic procedure. “It’s the delegates who are deciding what amendments to make and how to vote on each of the motions,” Molenhuis said.

A timeline on the PGSS External Affairs Committee web site’s federal representation page documents times when significant concerns with CFS have been raised, dating back to the late nineties.

More difficult to leave
A reform passed at the AGM, known as Motion 6, doubled the number of student votes required on a petition to leave CFS.

Simeone criticized the reform as compromising the primary right guaranteed to individual student members of CFS: the ability to start a petition to defederate.

Simeone and Mahabadi expressed concerns that CFS bylaws were violated by this reform. CFS bylaws require a two-thirds majority of all voting members present to pass reform to the constitution. Mahabadi stated that during the AGM vote, of 68 present voting members, 44 voted for the reform, 19 against, and 5 abstained – which she thought fell short of the 46 votes required for a 2/3 majority.

Molenhuis added that he has not received any communication or further questions on process and bylaws from members of the PGSS. “They can certainly communicate those concerns to the national executive, but that hasn’t happened at this time,” he said.

Molenhuis said that the reform will not retroactively affect the 13 schools who have already filed petitions to leave CFS.

Mahabadi said she expected the reform to have lasting implications. “Regardless of what happens to the PGSS, [this change] is not going to go away…. Even if it doesn’t apply retroactively it’s very problematic; it contradicts their own bylaws.”

Recent developments in council and the referendum committee
Eric Pollanen, PGSS VP Finance for the past two years, was recommended to chair CFS referendum committee with nearly unanimous approval at Council on Tuesday night.

History representative James Wallace was among three members who opposed Pollanen’s recommendation on the grounds that the role he played in drafting the reform package would not allow him to be impartial. “I don’t believe the wording of the reform package was presented in the spirit of reform. I believe it was presented in very negative language as an ultimatum,” Wallace said.

“I am against it considering the extremely progressive policies that CFS promotes,” Wallace added. “To place someone who I strongly believe has a conflict of interest in this issue and is against CFS National in a position where they are adjudicating the referendum question is abominable…. The good work that the CFS is doing needs to be made known to graduate students here before they make up their minds in a referendum.”

PGSS Council member and former VP External Adrian Kaats, who is also a board member of CFS-Quebec, voiced concern that the council members defending CFS were being swayed by personal affiliations rather than trends supported by documentation. “They’re a very small number of people who are getting information from their friends who are employees of the CFS and who are not doing due diligence. These councillors are not looking at the abundance of information about the Canadian Federation of Students and its very serious problems with transparency, democracy, and accountability”

Members of CFS National Executive have been invited to attend the next PGSS Council meeting in February, along with CFS-Quebec staff.

—with files from Michael Lee-Murphy

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Empire, explains Roland Sintos Coloma of the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies of Education, manifests itself on two levels. “One is the imposition of Global North or metropolitan ontologies, epistemologies, materials, and meanings,” he said in an interview with The Daily. “The second would be the use or the control and the extraction of Global South resources, labours, and bodies for Global North use and desire.”

“For me those two are intertwined at present, and these two processes get operationalized through political, economical, socio-cultural techniques, that include the government, media, business, and education,” Coloma added.

In academia, the assumptions we work off of too often privilege a Western perspective, but they seem so basic to us that they go unquestioned. The fact that we engage with the category of empire relatively little in most fields of study is already indicative of fundamental problems with the way we learn.

As a result, our lines of questioning often do not taking into account the legacy of European and American colonial domination that has shaped relations between the Global North and South, as well as relations between disenfranchised peoples and elites within settler nations like Canada and the U.S. In other words, we’re ignoring factors that have profoundly influenced and continue to influence people’s lives.

“It’s some kind of amnesia – but I think it’s also an abdication to our responsibility to really contextualize our field in our work as academics,” Coloma remarked.

A number of student groups already function on this kind of understanding – groups like the Community-University Research Exchange, for instance, include in their mandate the operating principle that “the University is an institution which maintains systems of privilege and oppression around race, class, and neocolonialism.”

The lack of a postcolonial studies department at any Canadian university – or, perhaps more disconcerting, the lack of indigenous studies departments at many Canadian universities, including McGill – are indicators of this problem.

But while the process has been lengthy, interest in developing an indigenous studies program at McGill has been building steadily, according to McGill professor T’hohahoken Michael Doxtater, director of the Faculty of Education’s Indigenous Studies in Educational Learning and Teaching.

He pointed to networks of scholars and students forming in different departments as indicators that we may be moving toward having this kind of program. “We don’t really need to reinvent anything here,” Doxtater explained. “There are models that exist, that function quite well for years – some of these models are appropriate for a university like McGill, with so many varied interests.”

Doxtater argues in his article “Indigenous Knowledge in the Decolonial Era” that we’ve moved out of the colonial and postcolonial eras into the decolonial era.

The indigenous studies that Doxtater envisions makes connections between a number of anti-imperialist struggles over the past 15 years, as well as in a more historical context. “Since the break-up of the Soviet Union the whole era has been about decolonizing societies – Hong Kong, South Africa, the Sudan…all kinds of examples in the world where the colonizers leave – and then what? You have a lot of social problems, political problems,” he explained. Such a program would emphasize putting indigenous scholars at the forefront of the discourse.

The 21st century university should be a site of decolonization.

Coloma sees students and professors being able to realize this goal in a number of ways – first, to bring analysis of their complicity in imperial and colonial projects to fields like political science and economics, even to “business schools and schools of public health, where this sort of analysis is definitely needed.”

Second, we need “to have more courses that are very explicit about addressing colonialism and imperialism but also have it be integrated in existing courses,” he said. “And three, to have a continuous engagement by the University with communities at large – with diasporic communities, within Canada, but also being mindful with our relationships abroad.”

Decolonial scholarship, Doxtater said, is “much more inclusive and much more humanity-based, rather than Others talking about Others…. In the past people have pretty much ignored our scholars. It’s time we’re included in the discourse.”

The post Decolonize your education appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Here’s what I imagine give-and-take could look like, in the University I want.

Choose Life: you want fewer abortions to be practiced. Speakers from the Silent No More Awareness Campaign said that if they could stop even a few girls from having abortions, that would make their efforts worthwhile.

Why don’t you do this in a way that empowers women, instead of degrading them with signs designed to fill them with guilt?
Specifically, by addressing the material conditions that make it difficult for women to keep their babies, by advocating for a publicly-funded national childcare program.

Your signs don’t help pregnant women keep their babies. Your pamphlets decrying abortion as racist don’t do anything to alleviate the deeply entrenched sources of economic inequality that contribute to higher rates of unwanted pregnancy or teen pregnancy among women of colour.

Helping create the political will to form a national childcare program would benefit women from all backgrounds – would enable them to support their families and advance in the workplace – and would be a pro-woman way of helping individuals choose life.

The post The Choose Life I’d choose appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The Coal Choir has been filling spaces from record stores to churches with their sound since 2006, and raising money for organizations like the Mile End Mission, the Barriere Lake Algonquin Community, and Santropol Roulant as they go.

Performances of Olivia will take place at St. James United Church this Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. The score and script were composed by Coal Choir founder Katherine Peacock, who was a friend of Rabiela’s. She was inspired by an envelope of documents left with her for safekeeping when Rabiela was planning to leave Canada.

“With Olivia’s documents,” she writes, “I felt it was necessary to trace a line through them with music, so that people could hear the undercurrents of their politics. To try and follow the borders that marked her life and the circumstances of her death, finding places to wrench them open with song.”

Proceeds from this performance will go to the St. James’ Mission and the Immigrant Workers Centre, groups whose efforts directly respond to struggles like Rabiela’s.

The group is known for its remarkable sense of community, and, as this performance will mark “the final production of the Montreal Coal Choir in its current incarnation,” it promises to be a charged experience.

Rehearsal recordings suggest Olivia will be powerful, even harrowing, but shot through with life’s vibrancy even in its most mournful passages.

Tickets are $12 in advance and $15 at the door. Advance tickets are available at Phonopolis, Drawn & Quarterly, Cheap Thrills, Bikurious, Co-op La Maison Verte, and online at popmontreal.com. For more information, see oliviasoundings.com.

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Academics drawn from across the humanities and social sciences came to the University of Toronto’s (U of T) Ontario Institute for Studies in Education to discuss challenges facing Filipinos in Canada and their underrepresentation in public life despite being Canada’s fourth largest visible minority group.

“As far as I know there are only seven professors of Filipino descent across Canada,” said U of T professor Roland Sintos Coloma, symposium organizer and featured presenter.

The all-day symposium, entitled “Spectres of In/visibility: Filipina/o lives in Canada,” was organized by the Kritikal Kolektibo, a year-old research group of U of T faculty and graduate students. It featured nearly 20 presenters and performers.

As a first conversation for the Fil-Can academic community, the symposium covered a lot of ground in a short period of time, touching on political participation for migrants in Canada, representations of youth violence in the media, queer Filipino issues, and the role of the arts in community activism. The Daily caught up with a few of the presenters and participants afterwards to further explore some of the points addressed at the symposium.

Filipino migration and Canadian economic interests
The first wave of Filipino migration to Canada began in the sixties. Valerie Damasco, a U of T PhD student in the Department of Adult Education and Counselling Psychology, discussed the findings of her Masters research on Canadian recruitment of Filipino nurses during that time. Her findings suggest Canada had a vested interest in recruiting Filipino health care professionals during the nursing shortage in the sixties.

Moreover, Damasco’s research supported the idea, echoed throughout the day’s presentations, that Canada’s economic needs drove Filipino migration to this country, not just the introduction of the point system or the political and economic crises in the Philippines
Yet coexistent with the need for Filipino labour were discriminatory practices that set barriers in their path once they got here – a paradoxical situation that reflects the conditions immigrants face today.

“The Ontario College of Nurses were very reluctant to bring over health care professionals from the Philippines,” Damasco explained. “They were more interested in bringing over nurses from Europe.”

Collective amnesia
There is a collective amnesia about the history of Filipino migration to Canada. When Damasco asked a spokesperson from the Ontario Nurse’s Association for information about the recruitment of health care professionals during the sixties, the representative replied that Filipino nurses didn’t enter the country until the eighties and nineties as domestic workers and personal support workers.

Coloma presented a paper discussing how Filipinos have been written out of Canadian history textbooks, grouped together with other Asian groups in ways that mask the conditions of Filipino life in Canada. He drew parallels between the current experience of Filipino women in the Live-in Caregiver Program and that of Black Caribbean women in the forties, fifties, and sixties, who also occupied domestic work and caregiver roles.

“If we can connect this to increasing numbers of Latinos and Caribbeans coming through temporary agricultural and service sector work, this starts disrupting certain ways we analyze race and multiculturalism in Canada,” Coloma said.

The Live-in Caregiver Program: scrap vs. review
Heated discussion followed the screening of Scrap the Live-in Caregiver Program, a documentary made by members of the Filipino-Canadian Youth Alliance, that shed light on internal divides within the community surrounding the LCP. The film documented the ripple effects that the exploitative nature of the program has for generations of Filipinos coming to Canada, including the periods of family separation involved, which contribute to young people’s difficulties integrating and high high school dropout rates.

Nora Angeles, a professor of Community and Regional Planning and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of British Columbia, called for review and reform of the program rather than scrapping. “There are only so many doors to immigration into Canada. If we close this door, will there be other ones open?”

Cecilia Diocson, founder of the Philippine Women’s Centre of Vancouver, countered that the program constitutes a form of modern-day slavery.

“People don’t openly ask: is it worth it? Is the violence, is the abuse worth being able to send money to the Philippines to save their families… worth it in terms of being overworked and underpaid? … Some would say it isn’t worth it because ultimately it is about dehumanization – and others would say perhaps it’s not completely worth it, but what are the alternatives?” Coloma asked.

Toward engaged scholarship
Audience members at the symposium left thinking about how to bridge the gap between academia and the concerns of their communities.

Jennilee Austria, a school settlement worker in Rexdale-Etobicoke high schools, who focuses on helping Filipino newcomers, encouraged the academics present to support her students in the classroom, and to work with Filipino youth on a more case-specific basis.

Alex Felipe, who works with the Kapisanan Centre for Philippine Arts and Culture, as well as Migrante and Migrante Youth, thought there was a good deal of potential in Filipino-Canadian scholarship. He expressed the need for a stronger community presence at events like these, particularly reaching out to more live-in caregivers. “Academia, when it’s done well, speaks for the people. It compiles the voices of the people in a manner that’s suitable for academics and scholars, but it’s still the voice of the people,” said Felipe.

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The team, named after the iconic former McGill residence director, is composed entirely of McGill floor fellows, and the atmosphere at their games is an extension of that Rez family spirit – rez directors and Rez kids are like parents and siblings in the stands, and they fill the arena with cheering, even though there can’t be more than 20 of them.

According to co-captain and Gardner Hall floor fellow Beau Johnson, the Flo Tracys formed a few years ago, “when there was a complete lack of a D-league team as bad as we were.” The team, headed up this year by Johnson and co-captain Charlie Walsh, prides itself on being spectacularly unskilled, emphasis on the spectacular part – it’s all about the spirit, and everything else is a plus.

When asked how often they practice, Johnson laughs, “Never!” The Flo Tracy spirit, he says, is “fun and more fun – we don’t do it for anything else but.”

The team is composed of a rotating collection of floor fellows representing all the Residences, with a core of about 20 people. “If someone can’t make it, someone else fills in – everyone’s pumped to play,” Johnson explained.

“You just roll with the punches, you know?” said Vandad Pourbahrami, a McConnell floor fellow. “Sometimes we even get on the ice after the game’s started.”

The locker room is a party beforehand, as people crack open cans of PBR, yell around for jerseys, and generally get pumped. The team is big enough that they weren’t able to find a uniform set of jerseys to accommodate them, and they go onto the ice in slightly mismatching shades of red-orange.

On the ice, the team puts their all into it – chasing the puck, shooting and scoring, with lots of exuberant falling. The goalie’s main strategy seemed to be falling on the puck, but very little got by him.

A Flo game is a game of thrills and spills, a choice selection of artful falls: there are whimsical falls, in slow-motion, as two players crash into the boards, slip down, bounce outwards, and spin in place on the ice. There are jolly slips, with two players sliding past the goal in unison, gliding by the seat of their pants in hot pursuit of the puck. There are graceful, almost choreographed, synchronized falls: two trip each other; one takes a fall and the other trips squarely over him, while, down the rink, the goalie simultaneously falls over the puck to block it and a Flo player on the sidelines yells “Eat ‘em alive!”

It’s the product of the full force they put into the game, the exuberance with which they hit the ice (literally and figuratively). They fall as heartily as they score. Though to be fair, the other team did get in on the fun: at one point, one of the Legalize It!s, thrown off balance, went down on one knee while rocketing forward, sailing under the raised leg of one of the Flos.

All that, combined with the exuberance of the team members and audience, makes them possibly the most entertaining D-team to watch. A comparison of the scene on the teams’ respective benches throws things into perspecutive: Legalize It! players are sitting politely, looking all too civilized as the Flos on the sidelines are hollering, banging the gate to the bench, standing and jumping, totally fixated on the game.

Last week marked the Flo Tracys’ second win in three years, and as the final buzzer went off, the players streamed onto the ice, swarming the goalie, slipping and sliding with glee on the ice, even after Legalize It! had cleared out and the Zamboni was honking them off the rink.

Flo Tracy herself was there for the second Flo win. She was touched when she first heard students named a team after her two years ago, and thinks the team reflects what’s good about the McGill Residence culture.

“It lets everybody equally play, good, bad, whatever, and they have so much heart, so much teamwork. I really admire them. And look how many were there today – really wonderful.”

The post Smells like res spirit appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Montreal’s Greek schools are celebrating their 100th anniversary this year, bringing alumni together, hosting events throughout the city, and looking back on the schools’ evolution since the first school was established out of a basement in 1909. Since then, they’ve expanded to offer trilingual elementary schools with multiple branches around the island and north shore, as well as Saturday schools for high-school students and Greek language classes starting at beginners level.

The Community Centre, a complex of interconnected buildings in Cote-des-Neiges built in the late eighties, is home to the community’s administrative headquarters, as well as housing and services for senior citizens, meeting halls, a church, and the bases of the elementary and Saturday schools. Komborozos, public relations director for the Hellenic Community and formerly president of the elementary schools, showed a couple of Daily staffers around the premises while telling us about the history of the community in Montreal.

The portraits of former presidents of the Community lined one corridoor in wooden frames, sporting the haircuts and thick-framed glasses of past eras. “We call this our small parliament,” he said, showing us into a room with Quebec, Canadian, and Greek flags and partitioned seating on all sides facing toward the centre of the room. The space is meant for representatives from the different Greek communities of the greater Montreal area to converge and discuss common issues.

The schools themselves grew in tandem with the waves of Greek migration to Canada. Immigration to the North American continent swelled particularly following the destruction of the first and second world wars in Europe, as well as after the Canadian government relaxed its migration policy in the sixties.

“Greece had huge casualties in World War II, mostly civilian casualities,” explained Dimitris Karantanis, a teacher at the Saturday schools who also works in the McGill Language Department secretariat. “You had kids starving even in Athens.”

Over the course of the past century, the Greek community has left its mark on the fabric of Montreal – and for a time the Socrates elementary schools were Quebec-government funded, starting in the late seventies when they adopted the Quebec curriculum.This arrangement ended last year, and they’re now in the process of going private.

Greek migration to Canada has slowed since the fall of the Greece’s military dictatorship in 1974. But though the numbers are slowly decreasing at the Saturday schools as migration ebbs, Karantanis feels this kind of education is important.

“I think allowing [students] to have the option of feeling Greek as well, on the part of the Quebec government, kind of makes it easier for them to be here, you know?”

“It’s beneficial for the children to keep the language and the culture,” Komborozos also explained, citing higher parent involvement than at other schools. Being able to preserve their culture, both indicated, has helped the Greek community integrate into Quebec society.

“Greeks are very proud, they kind of feel that the whole Western civilization started based on their culture…. If you’re an immigrant, that’s something you hold onto,” Karantanis explained. “And their parents, they just grabbed onto this and didn’t let go when they came here. Yes I might be poor, I might be an immigrant, I might be washing dishes, but I come from the land of Socrates and Aristotle.”

In the Community Centre, murals representing immigration grace the walls outside of community halls. Gesturing to the murals, Komborozos tells us about the progress of the generations of immigrants, how members of the first generation in the sixties worked largely in factories and public works, while the second and third generations went on to professions like medicine and law. Artifacts of the relationship of Greece and Quebec line the walls – a picture of Trudeau on a visit to Greece, and a memorial to members of the community who gave their lives in WWI.

As attendance at the Saturday schools decreases due to demographic shifts and the strain of doing another day of school in addition to a regular five days of class, Karantanis remains unconcerned. “It doesn’t affect how you teach; it doesn’t affect what you do,” he said. “I think what they’ve offered all these years that they’ve been there is amazing.”

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