Union representatives from the Syndicat des Employé(e)s du Centre Hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (SECHUM) and the Alliance du personnel professionnel et technique de la santé et des services sociaux (APTS) were also present. Both unions represent workers who would be affected by the hospital’s closure.

Activists have been fighting to keep the Hôtel-Dieu open since the administration council of the Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM) – a healthcare network to which the Hôtel-Dieu belongs – adopted a resolution to sell the building in March 2013. Although the decision to close the hospital has already been announced and public consultations regarding the future of the site have already been held, protesters claimed that the consultations were not sufficient, and that the city will suffer if the Hôtel-Dieu closes.

SECHUM president Claude Talbot said that with the closure of the Hôtel-Dieu, the remaining emergency hospital services will be insufficient to satisfy the demand.

“They won’t be able to take care of the whole population,” he told The Daily in French. “That’s the raison d’être for the Hôtel-Dieu to stay open. […] But the population is getting older, and we need healthcare. We have to keep an establishment like the Hôtel-Dieu open to take care of the population.”

The planned closure of the Hôtel-Dieu is closely linked to the construction of the new CHUM, which will consolidate the three hospitals of the network – Saint-Luc, Notre-Dame, and Hôtel-Dieu – into a single facility. The new hospital, to be located at the intersection of René-Levesque and St. Denis, is scheduled to open in 2016.

The McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) – the McGill-affiliated anglophone healthcare network – is undergoing a similar consolidation, with its six hospitals being condensed into one super-hospital, currently under construction and slated to open in 2015, and two satellite hospitals. The controversial transformation has prompted concerns about accessibility and sufficient availability of services. At the rally, several speakers highlighted the necessity for unity between francophones and anglophones in fighting against hospital closures.

“We’re in a neighbourhood that’s slightly more anglophone, and francophones want to continue with the struggle [to keep the hospital open],” said Talbot. “And anglophones are participating, too. So it’s a union that means that the hospital will stay open.”

The Comité logement du Plateau Mont-Royal – a community group dedicated to the defense of tenants’ rights – was also at the rally, and several speakers expressed concerns about the possible conversion of the hospital into condominiums following its closure.

One attendee conjectured that even if the Hôtel-Dieu were to remain open, parts of the hospital would nonetheless be shut down following the consolidation of CHUM. Advocates at the rally called for those parts of the hospital to be converted into social housing.

One speaker, dressed up as the hospital’s founder, Jeanne Mance, reflected the overarching sentiment at the protest that the hospital holds deep historical, as well as practical, value.

“If I came to this protest after 372 years [since the hospital opened in 1642], it was for a good reason,” she told The Daily in French. “The hospital was founded because people had health problems and it was necessary then. […] And it’s just as necessary today.”

The post Protesters continue fight to save Hôtel-Dieu appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Despite the relatively small number of attendees and peaceful nature of the rally, the police presence was significant. Dozens of Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) officers surrounded the crowd, with some in riot gear, and over thirty SPVM vehicles were parked in the adjoining streets at the outset of the rally. Toward the end of the demonstration, two protesters were pulled out of the crowd and handcuffed by SPVM officers.

Pascale Brunet, a Montreal-based community organizer, called the SPVM’s presence at the demonstration “stressful.”

“Just [with] their physical presence and how they’re occupying the space, they’re intimidating protesters and people who want to question the established order,” said Brunet.

Several victims of police violence spoke at the rally, including Robert Fransham, who was at an anti-austerity protest on April 3 when he was knocked off his bike by a member of the SPVM riot squad, mid-charge. He subsequently spent three weeks in the hospital for injuries incurred as a result of the incident, including a minor concussion and six stitches on his leg.

Although Fransham had had previous altercations with the police, he told The Daily, “I’m more aware of their violence now than I was before.”

“There will be some legal action taken [for the injuries],” he added, declining to provide more details before his meeting with a lawyer next week.

Several members of the crowd had had personal encounters with the police that had spurred them to get involved in anti-police brutality initiatives. Katie Nelson, a participant at the rally, said that after being kettled multiple times and receiving thousands of dollars in tickets, she was filing a class action lawsuit against the SPVM for “systemic and constant political profiling.”

Following the speeches, one of the rally organizers announced that “contrary to [the SPVM]’s expectations,” the demonstration would not turn into a march, thereby avoiding the possibility that protesters would be kettled and ticketed $638 under municipal bylaw P-6. The bylaw, which prohibits demonstrating without submitting a planned itinerary to the police, is often used by the SPVM to break up marches that they have declared illegal.

Instead of marching, organizers distributed SPVM conduct complaint forms in stamped envelopes. They included a printed exemplar detailing Fransham’s injury on April 3rd with the suggestion that participants file a complaint on his behalf if they didn’t have an incident of their own to report.

Although the demonstration remained peaceful, tensions were visibly high between protesters and SPVM officers throughout, and heightened further following the two targeted arrests made by the police as the rally was winding down.

Adis Simidzija, one of the arrested protesters, is an independent journalist responsible for a highly-publicized video of an SPVM officer threatening to tie a homeless man to a post. Since then, he has been “a victim of the SPVM’s political profiling,” he told the Daily in French. He was arrested during the rally after placing a piece of paper reading ‘P-6’ in front of an SPVM officer, in protest of the municipal bylaw.

“[The officer] told me to pick it up while advancing toward me, and I didn’t even have a chance to pick it up before he handcuffed me in the plastic tie-ons [zip ties] and twisted my wrists, hard,” Simidzija said. “He kept telling me not to resist, even though I wasn’t resisting.”

Simidzija received a $101 fine for “dirtying the public domain” and was released approximately 45 minutes later.

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The Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (ASSÉ), one of the student unions behind much of the mobilization during the 2012 student strike, organized the protest. Approximately 60,000 students voted to strike on the day of the demonstration.

The Service de police de la ville de Montréal (SPVM) declared the protest illegal before it left Place Émilie-Gamelin, but let the protesters march for about three hours before intervening. In some instances, SPVM agents blocked off streets from traffic, and in others, protesters wound their way through cars on crowded streets.

At around 5 p.m., the SPVM’s riot squad charged on protesters and ordered the crowd to disperse, using rubber bullets and tear gas to break up the crowd. At least two people are known to have been injured as a result of the SPVM intervention – including a photographer from The Daily – while six were arrested.

Austere times

Benjamin Gingras, finance secretary and co-spokesperson of ASSÉ, said in an interview with The Daily that ASSÉ decided to organize the protest to emphasize that austerity was not the only option.

“We’re here to show that there are alternatives to austerity, there are alternatives to the systematic impoverishment of people who are already precarious, we’re here to show that there are alternatives to cutting social services and reducing their quality,” he said.

Alexa Conradi, president of the Fédération des femmes du Québec, noted that austerity policies particularly affect women and other marginalized groups.

“Yes, we’re always surprised that […] we can’t protest peacefully without being repressed and brutalized by this police force that [decides arbitrarily] when a protest can take place and when it cannot take place, but at the same time we’re not surprised because we know how the SPVM behaves.” – Benjamin Gingras

“We’re looking for a government much more […] engaged in social justice-oriented policies, or policies […] directed towards equality, and that’s just not happening, so we’re supporting the students here,” she told The Daily. “Women have been working in [areas where jobs are precarious] for many years, and it’s just getting worse under neoliberal paradigms, so we’d like to see that change.”

Although ASSÉ had already planned the march before the provincial elections were announced by the Parti Québécois (PQ) for April 7, Gingras said that it was nonetheless “a pleasant coincidence that this is a just a few days before the actual vote.”

Although ASSÉ has declined to endorse a political party, several contingents of provincial political parties were in attendance, including Québec solidaire (QS), Option nationale, and the Parti vert du Québec.

Geneviève Dick, the QS candidate in the Acadie riding, said that the coming to protests like the one organized by ASSÉ is an important part of the party’s platform.

“We’re not solely an electoral party in the sense that we’re not solely concerned with winning elections. We also want to support groups that put struggles [like this one] on the map every day,” she said. “As you can see, though, we’re at the back of the protest, because it’s very important to us to not take up too much space, and to really be there in support.”

Many protesters criticized the current PQ government. “[The PQ’s record] is horrible. I voted for the PQ, but I am very disappointed,” Carl, a student at Université de Sherbrooke, told The Daily in French. “Their big promises haven’t really been realized, such as the tuition hike, which they’ve hypocritically slipped through.”

Philippe Hébert, a software engineering student at Concordia, said he was there to protest how the current government has dealt with economic issues. “They’re pushing us into a corner and […] trying to tell us that […] our debt is too big, so that we won’t ever be able to have any services,” Hébert said. “But the only thing they’re actually trying to do is to take […] the wealth from us and be able to keep control.”

À qui la rue?

The otherwise peaceful march turned violent about three hours in, as protesters arrived at the intersection of Sherbrooke and Parc. Commotion began after SPVM agents ran into the crowd and made several targeted arrests. The police also used tear gas on the crowd, and in response, protesters threw projectiles – such as bottles – at the police.

Some protesters viewed the SPVM’s actions as a provocation. “It’s horrendous. […] The police are always provoking us,” Louis-Philippe, a student who attended the demonstration, told The Daily in French.

“I voted for the PQ, but I am very disappointed. Their big promises haven’t really been realized, such as the tuition hike, which they’ve hypocritically slipped through.” – Carl, protester

One of the several riot squad charges toward the end of the march left a man lying on the ground, bleeding from his head. The man, who looked to be in his fifties or sixties, was later taken away by an ambulance. A video clip from 99%Media’s livestream of the protest shows the man falling off his bike and clutching his head following the riot police’s charge.

Daily photographer Shane Murphy was also injured during the protest while he was taking pictures of the protesters getting arrested. One of the SPVM officers, he said, shot him “point blank” with a rubber bullet. He has since gone to the hospital for his injury [warning, gruesome image]. “[The impact was] like if you can imagine getting shot by a paintball times ten,” he said.

Before the protest began, many protesters believed that even though the march had been declared illegal, the police would not intervene. “I’m an older woman […] I’ve been to a lot of protests, usually everything goes fine,” protester Martine Lacroix told The Daily in an interview before the protest began. “The police presence seems reasonable to me, I hope that everything goes alright on both sides.”

In a phone interview after the protest was over, Gingras told The Daily that ASSÉ was both surprised and unsurprised by the march’s conclusion.

“Yes, we’re always surprised that […] we can’t protest peacefully without being repressed and brutalized by this police force that [decides arbitrarily] when a protest can take place and when it cannot take place, but at the same time we’re not surprised because we know how the SPVM behaves,” Gingras said, adding, “The protest went very well; it was peaceful, until the police decided to get involved and ruin everything.”

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The post Tear gas and rubber bullets end first protest of the spring appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Click on each quote to read more.

“I, for example, do not believe in the concept of nation, but would undoubtedly vote ‘yes’ if there was a referendum tomorrow.”

Mathilde Michaud, former McGill student and current Université du Québec à Montréal student, on separatism

in “Monolithic? I don’t think so,” March 17, 2014

“We can co-exist, but never touch.”

Bethany Douglas, a Mohawk from Kahnawà:ke and a graduate of Concordia with a Bachelor’s degree in History, on the meaning of the Two Row Wampum Treaty

in “Another idea of sovereignty,” March 17, 2014

It’s impossible to talk about Quebec without talking about separatism. In two parallel pieces, Graham MacVannel and Mathilde Michaud looked at the complex concept of separatism from two completely different angles. In “Monolithic? I don’t think so,” Mathilde laid out the wide variety of ideologies that exist under the banner of separatism, including her own, anarchist brand. Graham investigated the implications of separatism for First Nations and indigenous peoples in his piece, “Another idea of sovereignty.”

“Do you ever feel, or have you ever felt, self-conscious of your race?”
“A better question would be, ‘Do you ever not feel self-conscious about your race?’ and the answer would be — fucking never. I feel self-conscious in classes. I reflexively worry about being ‘too Asian’ when responding to questions I know the answers to.”

Amina Batyreva in conversation with a U3 Biology student who identifies as Chinese

in “Colouring the conversation,” September 16, 2013

Many students at McGill deal with racism on a daily and permanent basis, and although the conversation surrounding race is seldom easy, it is an important one to have. Amina Batyreva compiled several accounts of racism on campus, giving students of colour a voice and debunking the myth that North American society has finished talking about race.

“[Calling prostitution violence against women] names the experience for us without asking us.”

Amy Lebovitch, current sex worker, executive director at the Sex Professionals of Canada, and one of three women who brought forward the landmark case Bedford v. Canada

in “A legal void,” January 27, 2014

When the Supreme Court struck down three provisions that regulate (and criminalize) sex work in Canada, the country exploded with speculation about what will happen to sex work when the provisions lapse a year from December 20, 2013, the date of the ruling, and leave sex work in a legal void. If Parliament doesn’t pass any new legislation before that time, sex work will become completely decriminalized in Canada. Janna Bryson spoke to activists all over the map to get a picture of who was advocating for which model of sex work legislation, and why.

“It’s bullshit, it’s a cop-out. You know, unintellectual. It’s fearmongering, it’s childish.”

Aaron Lakoff, Palestine solidarity activist and anti-Zionist Jew, on anti-Zionists being characterized as anti-Semitic

in “An eye toward Zion,” January 20, 2014

Ralph Haddad reported on dissent in the Jewish community, and how it’s often repressed and/or dismissed as anti-Semitic hate speech, specifically when it comes to anti-Zionism or critiques of Israeli policy toward Palestine.

“[As for] my personal practices, I don’t eat children, I don’t burn babies (I have a baby, thank you) [and] I don’t fly on a broom, but that would be cool.”

Robyn, member of the Montreal witchcraft community for over 20 years, on stereotypes of Wiccan practice and the importance of maintaining the sanctity of her personal practices by keeping them secret

in “Ding-dong! The witch is not dead,” October 28, 2013

With Halloween around the corner and the usual proliferation of stereotypical images of witches, Grace Harris and Samantha Shier explored the connection between feminism and witchcraft to understand what it truly means to be a contemporary witch. After interviewing several Wiccans, the authors learned that Wicca and witchcraft are all about fluidity and constantly redefining one’s identity and beliefs without letting external societal structures impede their own self-realization.

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The post Year in review: Features appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The making of the ‘McGill Ghetto’

Despite the recent news, the neighbourhood around McGill hasn’t always been so student-laden. Over the years, it morphed from a working-class neighbourhood to a home for hippies, draft dodgers, and counterculture. Finally, in the mid-1990s, it became the expensive, student-filled ‘McGill Ghetto’ that we know today.

According to an interview published in Satellite magazine in 2012, Phyllis Lambert, founder of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, said, “In the [19]70s through the [19]80s, there was a huge not-for-profit cooperative housing project for about 600 to 700 people just to the east of the McGill campus, in the downtown.”

Lucia Kowaluk, president of the Milton Parc Citizens’ Committee, said that she has lived in the neighbourhood since its ‘hippie’ days in the 1960s, when she was a student at McGill’s School of Social Work. “McGill was small at the time,” she said in an interview with The Daily. “Not many students lived there.”

Now, with almost 40,000 students enrolled at McGill as of 2013, student housing has become a central issue in the neighbourhood. Notably, private investors, rather than university residence systems, are currently the most active in the student housing market. Campus Crest Communities Incorporated – one of the investors in both the Holiday Inn and Delta transformations – is a major player, with a 35 per cent stake in the Holiday Inn project and a 20 per cent stake in the Delta project.

In an e-mail to The Daily, Ted Rollins, CEO of Campus Crest, wrote, “We have big plans for Canada. We believe that the Canadian market is in need of this type of project. We have already experienced a tremendous amount of interest from students.”

As the McGill student population continues to grow, the University has also been rapidly expanding its residence network. Three hotels have been converted to residences in less than ten years: New Residence Hall, Carrefour Sherbrooke, and La Citadelle, in that order. In addition, private investors from Toronto and the United States have plans to convert the Quality Inn on Parc to a student residence in the near future.

According to Éric Michaud, coordinator at the Comité logement Ville-Marie, a housing advocacy group in the downtown core, the flood of students into the areas around the McGill campus has made it less accessible for families to live there.

“[The growth of the student population] diminishes the accessibility of housing for families because students can split the costs and pay more than a family could for the same space,” he said in French in an interview with The Daily.

Conversely, Kowaluk isn’t worried about the ongoing hotel-student residence conversions. “That’s fine,” she said. “From the board chatting about it, we’re glad that students are moving into hotels so they don’t take over [the neighbourhood’s] Victorian houses.”

Michaud somewhat agreed, saying, “Unfortunately, there’s not enough student housing built by the universities,” he said. “We think that it’s a good thing to have student residences built by universities because [then] students pay less [for it].”

For an individual student, the average rent for a double room, shared with an assigned roommate, at New Residence Hall, Carrefour Sherbrooke, or La Citadelle, is $1087.67 per month, with La Citadelle the most expensive at $1112 per month.

Rollins declined to specify exactly how expensive the converted Holiday Inn residence would be, writing only, “We aren’t the cheapest, but we believe that students will receive a compelling value.”

“McGill is a terrible landlord. There are things you have to pay for that would never stand up if they had to face a renting board,” said Fred Burrill, community organizer at Projet Organisation Populaire Information et Regroupement (POPIR) of the St. Henri, Petite Bourgogne, Côte-Saint-Paul, and Ville-Émard areas.

Prime real estate

In recent years, McGill has turned to hotels to build cheaper residences, with all three of its most recent residences the product of such renovations. While these residences may take students out of the renting pool for private apartments, it won’t necessarily drive rent down in the apartments they would be leaving behind.

Paule Provencher, a real estate agent in the McGill area for around 25 years, said that after the renovation that turned the former Renaissance Hotel into New Residence Hall several years ago, there were far fewer students looking to rent, but that the dip in demand had little impact on rent prices in the neighbourhood.

“[The prices go down] a little bit, but not that much,” she told The Daily. “You have to understand that people have purchased their condo at a high price and they really cannot just give it away.”

“Families and professional couples don’t want to [live in the McGill area]. When I tell them that it’s in [that] area, they say ‘no thank you.’ They hang up,” she said, adding, “Just a few families live in the area, but really not that much.”

“A trend that has been happening in the last couple years in Montreal, roughly since when McGill opened up Solin Hall [in 1990], is that universities – and McGill is on the forefront of this – are becoming developers, even if not for-profit, making the neighbourhoods more upscale,” said Burrill, adding that, “The university as developer is a phenomenon that McGill started but is no longer the only participant in the process.”
A soon-to-be-released study, conducted by the Comité in conjunction with the Université du Québec à Montréal, indicated that in the borough of Ville-Marie (which includes most of the Golden Square Mile), property prices have soared since 2004.

“They have doubled between 2004 and 2011, which has had an impact on, among other things, [property] taxes and rent [in the neighbourhood],” said Michaud.

It’s not only renters who pay the price of the shift to private investors in the residence market. “I think that as universities like McGill and Université de Montréal are moving increasingly toward the corporate model, they need revenue streams. That comes with increase in tuition, increase in ancillary fees that McGill has students have to pay,” said Burrill.

It’s unclear exactly what impact private investment will have on the situation, but Provencher said that if it will impact rent prices in the neighbourhood, it would most likely drive them up even further.

“If it’s a private [company], of course they’re making an investment; they want money, and [residences] they develop will probably be more expensive than McGill’s,” Provencher said.

The students’ legacy

Despite the dizzying climb of rent prices in the McGill area since the 1990s, a typical feature of gentrification, both Provencher and Kowaluk argued that the neighbourhood hasn’t been gentrified.

“I don’t see students moving in as gentrification,” said Kowaluk, although she wasn’t happy about the change.
Provencher agreed. “I don’t think [of it as gentrification]. Because the families with kids, they don’t want to come [to the neighbourhood], the professionals, they don’t want to come,” she said.

“The number of students is overwhelming the demographic mix,” Kowaluk added. “It’s not the majority of students, but enough who don’t have a sense of living in a neighborhood [and] don’t know how to behave or hold their liquor […] I know people who say their neighbours have left because they were tired of the noise.”

Burrill described McGill’s view on incoming students as a “captive tenant population,” saying that “[The University] is targeting them as a revenue source.” Burrill believes that the conversion of hotels to residences downtown do contribute to a form of gentrification, pushing lower-income tenants out.

“The main way students can not contribute to gentrification is living a certain way, getting to know their neighbours,” he said. “There are certain legal things student[s] can do. You can transfer your lease, insist on having repairs done.”

The post The student role in gentrification appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Budlakoti’s immigration troubles began when he was in prison for five months in late 2009 and was put into solitary confinement.

“I had an altercation with a guard, I was thrown in the hole, and a guard came up to me and asked me, while I was in the hole, if I was a citizen or not,” he said.

After providing his birth certificate and passport as proof of his Canadian citizenship, Budlakoti was informed that he was nonetheless not a citizen.

The government’s claim was based on the sole exception to the act granting Canadian citizenship to babies born on Canadian soil. The exception denies automatic citizenship to children born in Canada to diplomats without Canadian status. Although Budlakoti’s parents did work for the Indian High Commissioner in 1989, according the family diplomatic status in Canada, they stopped work there several months before Budlakoti’s birth.

After a series of hearings and investigations by the Canadian government, he was served with a deportation order in 2011 while serving a second prison sentence in Ottawa.

Doubly punished

The term “double punishment” is used to describe the phenomenon of non-citizens being deported in addition to serving time in prison for a crime.

Double punishment is enshrined in a provision of the Immigrant and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), which states that a “foreign national” can be deemed inadmissible on the grounds of “criminality” or “serious criminality” if they are convicted of a crime in Canada landing them with a sentence of over six months in prison.

“I had an altercation with a guard, I was thrown in the hole, and a guard came up to me and asked me, while I was in the hole, if I was a citizen or not.”

“[Double punishment] is racist, because it’s highly racialized in terms of who gets criminalized and how people get criminalized. There are certain communities that are disproportionately affected by double punishment, and that happens to completely coincide and completely correlate with those communities that are racially profiled,” said Jaggi Singh, No One Is Illegal activist, during a panel on double punishment co-hosted by CKUT and The Daily.

A stateless man

A person is considered stateless when, as in the case of Budlakoti, they no longer have citizenship in any nation of the world. The implications of statelessness are far-reaching and complex; when a person has no official citizenship they have no status where they are, but also no papers to cross any borders and go elsewhere.

The 1961 United Nations (UN) Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness entered into force in 1975. The convention pronounced it “desirable to reduce statelessness by international agreement.”

It is unclear how many people in Canada are currently stateless. Many of them are likely living in detention centres, something mandated by Canadian law if they are judged to be a flight risk or a risk to society, or if their identity is in question according to the IRPA. (This is also the policy for refugee claimants and other people without status in Canada.)

Budlakoti himself was detained for several months at the Toronto West Detention Centre, but was released after Peter Stieda, his lawyer, successfully made the case that he did not fulfill the conditions for detention under the IRPA.

According to a document obtained by The Daily, Budlakoti found himself under many restrictions as a condition for his release, including a curfew and an order to “keep the peace and be on good behaviour.” The restrictions were later lightened, but only slightly. He also found himself bound by his newfound statelessness and lack of Canadian status: everything became a struggle.

“I had to apply for a work permit, I had to apply to get my [driver’s] license back, I had to apply for a social insurance card. Everything was a challenge,” he said at a talk on his case in Montreal on January 21.

Justice for Deepan

“It doesn’t matter what I think, but Deepan will stay. There’s no way they can let [him be deported], there would be an uproar,” offered Singh during the panel.

Budlakoti and his supporters haven’t always been so sure. In December 2012, just before he was released from prison, the Ottawa Citizen reported that Budlakoti was “resigned to the fact that his life outside prison will begin in India.”

The situation took a turn once he found out through an access to information request that India was refusing to accord him status and wouldn’t accept him if the Canadian government attempted to deport him there.

Now, Budlakoti has thrown himself entirely into a campaign for his case and against his deportation. The Justice for Deepan campaign has social media support, and several high-profile human rights associations have written letters of support for the campaign, including Amnesty International and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

“[Double punishment] is racist, because it’s highly racialized in terms of who gets criminalized and how people get criminalized.”

As part of his campaign, Budlakoti is currently on a speaking tour through several cities in Canada. When he passed through Montreal on January 21 and 22, he paid a visit to Justin Trudeau’s office with supporters from Solidarity Across Borders (SAB).

According to Budlakoti and SAB, Trudeau had pledged his support to Budlakoti’s case in 2011. Trudeau, who was elected as the leader of the Liberal party in April 2013, now remains silent on Budlakoti’s case. In response to Budlakoti’s campaign’s repeated requests that Trudeau take a stand, his assistant recently wrote, “I am very sorry to have to inform you that unfortunately Mr. Trudeau will not be able to intervene in this file.”

When Budlakoti and his support team arrived at Trudeau’s Montreal riding on January 22, they were met by Max Roy, the office manager. Once they had passed over a prepared letter and made prepared statements on Budlakoti’s situation, they found that Roy wasn’t willing to set up an appointment with Trudeau, the real goal of their visit. When the group insisted, Roy escorted them out of the office, punctuated by different permutations of a request to “please leave the office now.” They left empty-handed.

“Some [politicians] have been [supportive], some neutral, and some don’t respond. Thomas Mulcair’s [the leader of the New Democratic Party] office, in general, [has been supportive],” said Budlakoti, standing outside Trudeau’s office’s glass double-doors after the visit.

Mary Foster, an activist with SAB, jumped in. “But [Mulcair] has refused to take a public position […] when we’ve asked him to speak out actually where it counts on the public scene, it’s been zero,” she said, adding, “The hypocrisy of these people…”

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It would happen within steps of my front door. First, the eye lock. Then, as I pass by on the street, a hiss in my ear that grows until it hangs still in the air, lingering menacingly: hermosssssa. I am in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and it is every morning of the five months I lived there.

If you ask anyone who identifies as a woman and has lived in Buenos Aires, this happens to her at least once a week, and more often, multiple times a day. People usually divide piropos – the Spanish word for a catcall – into two categories: nice piropos, and aggressive ones. It is commonly agreed that the difference between the two lies in the eye (or ear) of the piropo-ed, and that usually depends on the catcaller’s tone of voice.

Beyond this basic dichotomy, the culture of catcalling becomes a roaring jungle of subjectivity and contradiction. During the dozens of conversations I’ve had about catcalling over the past six months, I’ve heard one woman speak ferociously against the machismo of catcalling, only to sheepishly admit later on that she had catcalled a man once, or maybe twice, but only as a joke. I’ve had men tell me that they catcall frequently, but only when they’re drunk, and it is always a joke. I spoke to a bisexual man from Colombia who told me that he likes getting catcalled by men, but only in gay neighborhoods, and only if they use “sweet words,” a rarity in Buenos Aires, according to him.

I want to be clear: Argentina is not the only place in the world where I have been catcalled, and it is most certainly not the only place in the world where it happens. But it is the place where I became interested in understanding why it happens. Growing up in New York, I was catcalled, but sparsely. I could probably count on two hands the number of piropos I received in 18 years of living there.

In Buenos Aires, on the other hand, walking the streets can be, at times, like walking under an avalanche of piropos (the quantity varying based on weather, time of day or night, neighbourhood, clothing choice, and/or the judged propriety of such clothing choice for all the above conditions or, frustratingly, none of the above, just pure subjectivity). I lived there just long enough to get fed up with the avalanche of piropos, but not long enough to get used to it.

“To men who [say] ‘well how am I supposed meet a woman on the street?’, I’d say ‘well, first of all, know that most women don’t want to meet you.’” Holly Kearl

Even more than getting fed up with the epidemic of catcalling in Buenos Aires, I found myself becoming rabidly curious about why men catcall. I know what goes through my head when somebody catcalls me: confusion, delayed comprehension, fear, anger, and/or exhausted indifference. But I had no idea what was going on in the minds of the men who catcalled me and other women all day, every day in Buenos Aires. So I decided to go for a walk with a friend and a recorder to interview the first person who catcalled us.

A man’s perspective

A friend and I found our subject walking through a plaza across the street from the Universidad de Buenos Aires’ medical school. Ricardo (the subject) is a med student. He was sitting, drinking beers with some friends after class, when he called out something unintelligible to us. We looked doubtfully at each other, turning slowly to look at him. All doubt was blown away as we were hit by a flurry of suggestive air kisses. “Mi amor!” he shouted. I took out my recorder, heart pounding in my chest.

But the conversation turned out to be deeply unsatisfying, because his answers were mostly what I had imagined they would be. Why had he catcalled us? Because we’re cute, he said, because he liked the way we were walking, and we have beautiful eyes. What goes through his head while he catcalls? “Nothing,” he replied dismissively, “I don’t know, I don’t think.” What was he expecting or hoping for when he’d catcalled us? A smile maybe, or that we would come for a chat.

I had been hoping for entirely something else, maybe a glimmer of misogyny, a hint that he purposefully and knowingly degraded women by catcalling them. Zilch. I had been refusing to accept that catcalling is a systemic, societal phenomenon, and could only be explained in those terms, with the frustrating everyone’s-to-blame-so-nobody-is logic that seems to always accompany societal problems.

Even more frustratingly, I had to admit that women were partly to blame, and that some women actively encourage catcalling. When I asked Ricardo, incredulously, if piropos ever actually worked for him, he smiled gently at me as if I were a bit stupid. “Of course,” he said. He had even been on dates with women he reeled in by piropo. “Women are just like men,” he told me, adding, “women are looking for something, too.”

He may be right, in a way. Women are sexual creatures too, and we can also be on the prowl. But women become, overwhelmingly, the passive subjects of piropos, whether we choose to answer or not. Does that mean that we, women, are just naturally sexually passive, waiting to be admired before we move in for the kill?

Holly Kearl, founder of stopstreetharassment.org, says no. And the fact that some women respond to piropos in a positive way, she claims, has more to do with plain old sexism than anything else. “We’re taught that the highest praise we can get is male attention, whether it’s positive or negative, but especially if it’s positive,” she said. “So I think it’s common – especially for young women – to feel complimented on some level [by street harassment].”

A woman’s perspective

Many of the women I spoke to, catcalled regularly or not, felt conflicted, stuck in the gap between liking and resenting being catcalled. “I think I’ll miss it when I go home,” my roommate, Iris, told me. She’s Dutch, 26 years old, and had been living and traveling in Latin America for over a year. “[When I go home,] it’s like, why isn’t anyone telling me anything anymore. What happened to me? It’s really contradictory because it’s nice and not nice at the same time. It’s really weird.”

One of my Argentine roommates, Kim, chimed in. “You would definitely miss it. You get comforted by it. It may sound stupid, but it’s like, if you put makeup on and then somebody [tells you] something, [you think] ‘I look pretty today.’ It’s like, I don’t like to hear it, but if I don’t receive it, I’ll get mad.”

But there are also women who don’t feel conflicted about piropos. Mariam, an exchange student in Buenos Aires who grew up in Abu Dhabi, hates being catcalled. In Abu Dhabi, she said, the streets are even more inundated with piropos than in Buenos Aires. She was about eight years old when it first happened to her there. And she realized a long time ago that men catcalling her has nothing to do with the way she looks. She told the story of how one time, as a teenager there, she made a conscious effort to dress in a way that wouldn’t attract male attention, and got catcalled anyway.

“I was having a really bad day, and I walked out of my house in an outfit that I specifically hoped would hide me, so I wouldn’t be seen. So I kind of dressed like a guy would, with sweatpants and big tennis shoes, a huge sweatshirt, and I put my hair in a beanie. No makeup, no nothing.”

“And ironically enough,” she continued, “just as I walked out of my house, I got catcalled by [someone] driving by in their car and slowing down. That was very surprising because I walked out with the preconceived thought that I did not want to be solicited in any way possible, not even in a friendly social way.”

Mariam’s story validates a perspective that I’ve come to take on after months of daily piropos: nothing I do matters. My appearance has nothing to do with the piropos I receive. But the idea that piropos are inspired by women’s beauty – rather than by men’s desire – is as tenacious as it is false. And no matter how baggy your sweatpants or neutral your appearance, it’s almost impossible to stop automatically checking your appearance after every piropo, searching for a cause.

Was that a catcall?

Miguel, a good-looking guy in his twenties from Buenos Aires, says that it’s the beauty of the women he passes on the street that inspires his piropos. “It could be 30 [times], if 30 women pass by [who inspire me],” he said. “I think that women enjoy it, because I know how to do it well.”

“I’m looking for a smile, and the women know that. Usually, I get a smile, because my piropos aren’t an offensive thing,” he added with a wry smile. He refused to give an example, explaining that he thinks up piropos on the spot. But as I was getting the mic set up before the interview, he asked me what a woman so colourfully dressed and with such beautiful hair could possibly want to talk to him about. This was, of course, before he knew that I’d be interviewing him about piropos. There are many people – men and women alike – who would say that what Miguel does is a perfect example of piropos done right. But what it’s really a perfect example of is why they’re a problem.

Miguel gives the name piropo to the things he says to women in the street (and the women themselves would probably also call them piropos) because that’s the format men know for talking to women in the street. And catcalling has become so dominant as the de facto form of street communication that if someone just says hello in passing, women will ask themselves: was that a catcall?

“People will ask me ‘what’s the difference between a compliment and harassment?’” said Kearl. “I think the difference is consent. It’s respect. And yeah, it’s really hard to give consent in a public space, because you don’t know each other. To men who [say] ‘well how am I supposed meet a woman on the street?’, I’d say ‘well, first of all, know that most women don’t want to meet you.’”

Emma, an exchange student from Dallas studying in Buenos Aires, had never been catcalled before going to study there. Since everyone drives everywhere in Dallas, she told me, there isn’t much opportunity for it. And the first time she was catcalled, she said, “I felt objectified and bad. It was definitely a negative feeling.”

“I was walking by some construction workers, and they just did the standard ‘hey’ and the kissy noises. But I just walked by and ignored it. It wasn’t like they were really saying anything. They were just making random noises at me, like I was a cat, a fucking animal. And I don’t understand how that’s supposed to be a compliment or how it’s supposed to feel good in any way, in that form.”

That’s not to say that all piropos are equally bad, or that there aren’t even some that can make you feel good. If someone calls out to me that my smile is a ray of sunshine that brightened up their day, I clearly take it differently than someone whispering in my ear that they’d like to fuck me blind. But if I’ve been told my smile is a ray of sunshine, I’ve also been commanded to smile – in passing, on the street – because I am beautiful. Nice or aggressive, a piropo is a piropo is a piropo.

A beauty sick society

Piropos both reveal and perpetuate our attitude toward women and their bodies as public objects to be soliloquized about and/or abused at will. When someone catcalls me, it unconsciously, and against my will, refocuses my attention to what society tells women and girls is our most valuable attribute, that is our looks, our bodies. In addition to the piropos themselves, it is their inherent nature of objectifying women that has very real and devastating consequences for women.

Renee Engeln, a psychology researcher at Northwestern University, calls these consequences “beauty sickness.” It’s a ‘sickness’ that, according to Engeln, has become epidemic among young women, although it does affect older women and even men to a lesser extent. She defines beauty sickness as an excessive preoccupation with one’s appearance, to the point where the amount of time, energy, and resources spent on trying to maintain and improve one’s attractiveness as judged by the public leaves little room for other pursuits.

She explained the paradigm at the TEDxUConn conference, going on to talk about the way that from early childhood, little girls are taught that they are, above all else, beautiful (or, if not, that they should aspire to be). She invites us to think about how the go-to compliment for a young girl is not that she is intelligent or courageous or creative, but rather that she is beautiful. These compliments could be considered a pint-sized version of piropos, eyedropper doses of objectification, administered – with the best of intentions and without a hint of malice – from birth.

Compliments that come at a cost

If this still seems hard to accept, talk to any woman about the way she feels when she gets catcalled walking alone at night. Iris, my roommate who said that she will miss catcalling when she goes home to Holland, also admitted that if someone catcalls her when she’s walking alone at night, she feels uncomfortable.

“[When I feel uncomfortable,] I’ll just smile or say thank you or goodnight. I’m just like, ‘okay, I’ll be nice and then quickly walk away,’” she said. “Maybe because I think if I’m arrogant or un-nice [sic] it’ll get worse.”

If women feel uncomfortable or intimidated or scared, if they feel obligated to smile or graciously accept a piropo, it’s because they are well aware of the violence that lurks behind them that could emerge at any moment. Catcalls are a daily re-assertion of the position of power that men hold over women, the power to tell us that we are beautiful and to punish us if we don’t take it well when they say so. They are a mechanism that ‘put women in their (our) place’ by reminding us what that place is, sexual objects subject to the whim of men.

“They were just making random noises at me, like I was a cat, a fucking animal. And I don’t understand how that’s supposed to be a compliment or how it’s supposed to feel good in any way, in that form.”
Emma

And piropos also have a concrete effect on many of the tiny decisions we make every day, from what route to take to work, to what time to come home, to what to wear out of the house. Mariam, who told the story of getting catcalled when she was dressed ‘as a boy’, said that when she was living in Buenos Aires, she would always consider the possibility of piropos when getting dressed to leave her apartment.

“If I’m wearing something with a little cleavage, I always [take] care to bring a scarf with me, in case I’m going to have to be walking at some point alone or taking a bus at night. Not because I’m afraid to get cold, necessarily, but [because of piropos].”

Piropos para todos?

Almost all the men I interviewed for this piece – lifelong catcallers or catcalling virgins, Argentine or not – shared one point of view: if the world changed tomorrow and women catcalled the way men do, they (the men) would probably be pretty happy about it. And several people, women and men alike, proposed it as a ‘solution’ to catcalling. Why doesn’t everyone just catcall everyone?

It turns out that the internet offers a wealth of material (here and here, to start) for people who dream of such a world. The videos are usually funny, but most are designed to shoot down the beloved proposal of piropos para todos (piropos for all) with the message being, you wouldn’t really like it if this happened to you.

The videos also get at a deeper truth, which is that the equal-opportunity catcalling world that they portray does not exist. There are men who get catcalled, of course, some of them even by the small minority of catcalling women. But they make up an exceptional slice of the overwhelming rule that piropos are designed to objectify women. The videos are funny because they are so untrue to life. We don’t live in a world where women objectify men in that way, and in any case, we’re probably better off for it.

So rather than trying to convert women into catcallers, we should make an effort to convert everyone to something else entirely. Humans are incredibly creative animals, and we can find a different, better way to talk to each other. I challenge everyone, catcallers and catcall-ees alike, to stop feeding the monster of street harassment and find another way to communicate. This one is broken.

Listen to the Unfit to Print podcast broadcast on CKUT 90.3fm on Friday, January 17th.

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While P-6 has been in effect since 2001, the municipal government amended the by-law last spring in the midst of the student strike. It began to draw particular attention after the annual anti-police brutality protest on March 15, when the Service de Police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) used the recently amended bylaw to shut down and encircle the protest within minutes and give out $637 fines to all the participants. Since the SPVM began enforcing the ticketing provision of P-6, several hundred people have been kettled and fined under the bylaw.

A representative from QPIRG Concordia called P-6 “kafka-esque,” adding, “A lot of journalists [have been] saying ‘well it’s just a simple notice you have to give the police, I don’t understand what all the problems are’.”

“[One person] put forward the parallel of, how would journalists feel if they had to submit their articles to the police before they could be published, because we all know words have the potential to create just as much unrest as any demonstration,” they said, adding, “What I’m sure many here would agree would be a very kafka-esque, burdensome, bureaucratic procedure is just as burdensome and kafka-esque to peoples’ ability to assemble peaceably.”

An activist from Solidarity Across Borders spoke about why it is important for people to be able to protest peacefully without fear of being processed and ticketed by the police, particularly for those people who live precariously in Canada.

“There are plenty of reasons not to give your itinerary [to the police], and there are plenty of reasons to want to wear a mask, one of which is solidarity with people who can’t take to the streets because of their lack of status,” the activist said.

Since the amendment of P-6, the bylaw and other activist movements have become inextricably intertwined. April 22 is not just the anniversary of one of the largest protests in the history of Québec’s student movement, with hundreds of thousands of protesters marching province-wide in honor of Earth Day as well as against the Liberal government’s proposed tuition hike in 2012. It was also the day that Montreal’s municipal council was slated to hear a motion from municipal party Projet Montréal to repeal P-6, before the vote was postponed to the next day because of the number of other items on the council’s agenda.

Projet Montréal released a statement on its opposition to P-6 that quotes Alex Norris, municipal councilor from Mile End and author of the repeal motion. “Projet Montréal has always been reticent at the idea of making the right to manifest in public places more constrictive,” he said.

“We believe firmly that we should…repeal [municipal bylaw P-6], which was adopted in the midst of last spring’s student movement, which was drafted hastily and which plays with the democratic rights of the citizens of Montréal,” the statement concludes.

At 7 p.m. on Tuesday, the municipal council returned from a break and was then opened up to questions from the public. As the public question session approached, around 700 demonstrators gathered outside City Hall in protest of P-6. SPVM officers moved in to block off the entrance to everyone except people who were chosen by a lottery to be able to ask questions.

The crowd moved in on the officers, chanting, drumming, and bull horning just inches from their formation. After several minutes of noisemaking, police reinforcements arrived to push the protesters back and allow the people who had won had reserved their seats in the City Hall gallery.

“City Hall is supposed to be the house of the people,” said Norris in French at the meeting, “and tonight people who wanted to ask questions at this council were blocked entry by the police force. Is this something the municipal council will address?”

Harout Chitillian, the city council chair, responded that the council would “look into it.”

“That shouldn’t happen,” said Chitillian, “but it is the police force’s responsibility to make sure that everyone’s safe, and they have to be free to do their jobs effectively. If they have a concern about security, they have the right to act on it.”

Although the subsequent question period covered a wide range of topics, the most popular was P-6, so much so that many of the people towards the end of the list, all of whom had questions on the municipal bylaw, did not get a chance to address the council.

The first member of the public asked his question about P-6 of Louise Harel, who is leader of the official opposition party, Vision Montréal. Harel replied that it would be “irresponsible” to repeal the law without leaving behind some form of regulation.

“Before it was amended to its current version last year, P-6 has assured the security of the people. We have to go back to the P-6 of 2001,” she said in French. “There have always been regulations, and at times the regulations have been excessive. I was part of the student movement when there was a regulation that declared protests illegal, period.”

“We need some kind of regulation,” Harel added, “but we have to fix its implementation and go back to what it was in 2001 and what it’s been for the past twelve years.”

François Genest, a Montréal activist, was the last person permitted to ask a question. His, directed at Montreal mayor Michael Applebaum, focused on Projet Montréal’s motion to repeal P-6. In response, Applebaum said that the police were responsible for “judging when [P-6] should be implemented, and how.”

“Everyone has the right to protest, but the police also have the right to implement the law,” Applebaum argued,  “For me, there’s no question of repealing P-6. I support the bylaw, and I support the police officers who enforce it.”

Among the 25 who voted for the motion were all ten Projet Montréal municipal councillors. Vision Montréal, the official opposition, was split. Its leader, Louise Harel, had expressed her intention to vote for the motion, but had reportedly declared it to be a “free vote”, leaving party members the option to vote against it. In the end, several Vision Montréal members chose to vote against repealing the bylaw.

François Limoges, a member of Projet Montréal, delivered a rousing denunciation of the bylaw. “[P-6] has taken power away from the judiciary branch and given it to the iron arm of the state, which has a role, but not this role,” he said. “The government’s role is to legislate, the judicial branch’s is to interpret, and the police’s is to apply the law. The police cannot do all three.”

What Limoges dubbed the “iron arm of the state” was out in full force the first night of the municipal council, arresting one protester and ticketing at least one other, for spitting on the sidewalk. The second night, the SPVM issued at least one ticket, for $437, to a protester playing a drum outside the doors of City Hall for its excessive noisiness.

When the anti-P-6 motion failed, the small crowd watching the livestream inside City Hall expressed their discontent by forming a blockade at the doors to the council room. They remained there for several minutes, chanting and singing about P-6.

And just moments after the vote, anti-P-6 activists who had been following the debate on Twitter were already posting calls to action to continue resistance.

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Questions focused mainly on budget cuts and the recent protest protocol, as well as the reputation of McGill on the whole as an international institution. Munroe-Blum took the interview as an opportunity to reiterate the fact that the administration is trying its best to preserve academic quality throughout the cuts. She said that the administration has been lobbying the government against the cuts, and that its top priority is to get fair funding. She said that the government cuts are keeping universities “hostage,” and that this was the wrong way of going about cutting government spending – which she felt was important in light of the government’s deficit.

Speaking about the changes at McGill during her tenure, Munroe-Blum said that she thinks the biggest transformative factor has been globalization, motivating universities across the world to do research that “makes a difference socially and economically.”

She felt that democracy is currently in “full bloom” on campus, and she was happy that McGill is such an outspoken community. Student protests, she said, have not necessarily been bad for McGill’s reputation, and when asked about the new protest protocol, Munroe-Blum said that she was proud that McGill had seen “more demonstration in the last 24 months, of all kinds.” She felt that the new protocol managed to support the safety and sense of well-being of students and professors.

The McGill Daily (MD): McGill is the only university thus far that has decided to cut so drastically and immediately. Other universities are either dipping into their capital budgets, waiting on new directives, or counting on the promised $1.7 billion reinvestment. Why?

Heather Munroe-Blum (HMB): [McGill] dominantly delivers programs by our tenured professors, the majority of Quebecois universities run on a very different model, which is very much a chargé-de-cours and part-time student model. There’s no question that it costs more to run a research-intensive, graduate student-intensive university, with a range of professional faculties, and that is our mission […] Our credit rating is a credit rating that Quebec depends on. Quebec borrows money on our credit rating.

Le Délit (in French): Since the quiet revolution Quebeckers have been fighting against deregulating tuition fees, however, you have said that we have been treating tuition fees as a “vache sacrée,” that we have been giving this struggle too much importance. How can you say that McGill is part of Quebec but still have this view?

HMB: I don’t believe that professors should say things they don’t believe, and I look at the different data, and I see that in my first years here a frozen, low tuition fee, did not get accessibility, and it did not build quality. We don’t want American tuition fees here, but I think that it’s very important to be honest about what builds educational strength and what creates degree completion.

MD: The police have been especially heavy-handed with demonstrators this year. Do you think they could have had different tactics?

HMB: I don’t think I need to tell the police or the government how to run their circumstances. I was very surprised last spring that a range of universities in Quebec did not stand up for the right of students to attend their classes. And I did express this in the context of the university system.

MD: When we came in, you asked us “where are the women?” Do you consider yourself a feminist, and if so, what does this mean for you, and how does that translate into university policy?

HMB: I never thought of myself as a feminist or not, but I did hear my mother every day saying, education is the source of all things good. She believed very powerfully in that, and [she] lectured my brothers every day on how to treat women. That was the culture I grew up in. […] I saw in the days after [my appointment as Principal], how powerful it was, not just to women and girls, but to visible minorities, to older men who were immigrants, that McGill, this traditional university that everyone had seen as far off and untouchable, was suddenly open. And it was really a dramatic example, for me, of the power of symbols.

— Correction appended April 5

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From 1995 to 2005, Ste-Croix worked as a technician at McGill’s Animal Resources Centre, and, like most of the people I spoke to who are involved in non-human animal testing, she’s a little touchy about it. “You learn not to bring it up that much,” she admitted.

McGill is no stranger to criticism over its use of animals in research. Ste-Croix was working here in 1996 when a group of activists demonstrated in front of McIntyre Medical building and allegedly tried to set the centre’s research animals free. They didn’t manage to get into the building, but did break one of its windows, and, according to Ste-Croix, thoroughly rattled the staff working there at the time.

“[Supervisors] told us to be careful and not advertise that we worked [at the centre],” she said. “When you work with animals, you always have to be aware of these things.”

The attempted break-in was part of the larger movement against animal testing in the nineties, much of which centered on McGill. As one of Canada’s biggest research centres, McGill is also one of the country’s most frequent users of animals as research subjects. In 2011, its labs and affiliated research facilities used a staggering 69,894 test animals, including 25,661 that were subjected to procedures McGill classifies as “invasiveness D,” or “moderate to severe stress or discomfort.”

Rebecca Aldworth, who is now the executive director of the Canadian Humane Society, was a Concordia student in the nineties and a member of the Concordia Animal Rights Association. She took part in the 1996 protest, and told the McGill Reporter at the time that she was upset when the window was broken, because the point of the protest was “to let people know we’re enraged…not damage things.”

“We want to expose [McGill] for the cruel and sadistic practices it allows and supports,” she said.

 * * * * *

Fast forward almost twenty years. Robert Balk chairs one of McGill’s committees that assesses the ethics of animal research proposals. He remembers the 1996 demonstration well. “I guess I was more annoyed than anything else,” he recalled. “I certainly don’t think there’s any reason to be protesting animal research; each experiment has been reviewed very carefully, and the results have been beneficial to animals as well as humans.”

Nonetheless, using animals in research has long been contested, and historically, its divisiveness has sometimes led to more demonizing than constructive dialogue. This divide shone through when I spoke with Suzanne Smith, a former lab technician in an animal research lab, and the director of the Animal Compliance Office at McGill. When I was leaving her office after our interview, she stopped me at the door and asked, sounding disheartened, whether I was going to write “another negative article about animal research at McGill.”

“We try so hard to make sure the animals have good conditions, and then people go and write about us like we’re evil,” she said.

Jim Gourdon is a trained research animal veterinarian, and the director of Comparative Medicine at McGill. He, too, has had the experience of being stereotyped for his work with animals in research. “If you look at movies and at pop culture, the myth of the evil scientist is quite strong. It’s easier to convince people that there’s been an abuse of animals, even if it’s false, than that we work really hard to take good care of the animals. Good news doesn’t make the headlines,” he said.

Along with Smith, Gourdon serves on one of McGill’s Animal Care Committees (ACC), which review all research proposals involving animal subjects, and have the power to veto or request modification of any aspect of the proposal relating to animals. The ACC were created in 1968 by the Canadian Council on Animal Care (CCAC) in an attempt to implement more oversight of the use of animals as test subjects. They’re made up of at least one researcher who uses animals, an administrator not involved in animal research, a veterinarian, a community representative, a student from any faculty, and a lab technician, and can include other members “as needed.”

Yet the structure of the ACC, and the people who serve on them, still trouble people like Liz White, a director of the nonprofit Animal Alliance of Canada. “Animal Care Committees are mostly staffed by people who are in research, and you usually don’t have a balance of opinion between people who support research and people who are opposed to it. If there were, there could be quite a vigorous debate about the kind of research that the committee is reviewing,” she said.

Even Smith admits that “every member of the committee must accept that, if there’s a strong scientific merit to the project, then it’s acceptable to sacrifice some animals to it.” For her, if someone is completely against animal research, “there’s no point in being a member on the committee.”

As evidenced by White and Smith, there seems to be a strong ideological difference between researchers and animal rights workers regarding the merits of research, despite a common concern for animal welfare. White further protested that even if members of the committee disagree with its final decision, confidentiality agreements disallow the public from hearing anything about it. “This is a closed, encapsulated system, so that nobody knows what the debates or problems are.”

 * * * * *

The CCAC oversees the use of animals in public, private, and university laboratories, including animals used for cosmetic testing. Cosmetic testing, which includes everything from skincare to shampoo to bleach, is considered to be separate from scientific research. It’s illegal in Europe, and does not happen at McGill. To give you a better idea about cosmetic testing, it involves tests like the median lethal dose (or LD50) test, which involves force-feeding a group of animals a certain product until half of them die from it, almost always after intense and prolonged suffering with no anesthesia.

Cosmetic testing, even among those who work with animals in research, is widely unpopular. “I find it totally irrelevant,” said Ste-Croix. “I think there’s no point in doing it at all.”

But when it comes to using animals for scientific research, the ethics become much more foggy. Is it okay to use animals for research when many of them are treated better than most farm animals? When the research might greatly benefit humans?

The CCAC is supposed to deal with precisely this problem, and ensure that animal research is carried out according to what they have dubbed “the three Rs” of humane animal experimentation: replace animals when possible, reduce the use of animals when not, and refine the process to “minimize pain and distress.”

Ste-Croix argues that the CCAC does a good job of making sure animals are treated well. “Everyone’s taking care of the animals and making sure that researchers use alternatives if they can. I just hope that people understand that we’re not a bunch of Nazis trying to torture animals.”

“Every researcher I talk to tells me they love animals – and I’m sure they do,” said  White. “But when you have 1,300 mice for research, are you telling me that that researcher loves and cares for each mouse? I don’t believe all researchers are bad and I don’t think they all want to do bad things to their animals. But there is a systemic intellectual laziness about getting away from the use of animals in research.”

White and other animal rights activists also argue that the CCAC doesn’t do nearly enough to hold researchers accountable and reduce the use of animals in research.

“There is virtually no platform for transparency and accountability. There is no platform for discussion about the ethics and morals of the use of animals in research, and there is no mechanism by which we begin to reduce the numbers of animals that we use in Canada,” she said. “The CCAC says they’re working hard to make change, but that’s just nonsense. We’ve been at them for ten years to try to get them to make a change, and they simply refuse.”

If there’s a lack of alternatives to animals as test subjects, Gourdon faults the government and other bodies that provide research funding. “Researchers will do research if you give them money,” he said bluntly. “Looking into alternatives for animal research isn’t an area that’s currently supported by granting agencies; there are some private agencies that will fund that kind of research, but it’s really marginal.”

 * * * * *

Moral and ethical discussions of animal rights issues, from research to factory farming, often circle back to the concept of speciesism. Speciesism questions the very notion of there being a clear-cut line that we can draw between beings we call humans, and beings we call animals. As the argument goes, according to animal rights philosophers, the distinction is arbitrary since certain ‘animals’, like chimpanzees, have the same capacity for language and rationality as a human infant. Why don’t we test on infants? If we agree that this line is arbitrary, our treatment of what we deem ‘animals’ seems horrifying.

People who talk about speciesism use it to draw a parallel between our treatment of animals and the racism and sexism of human society. The analogy is that treating an animal as inferior just for being in the category ‘animal’ is the same as treating a woman as inferior just for being in the category ‘female’. It’s especially salient in the case of animal research, in which animals are used as surrogates for humans. While animals’ biological similarity to human subjects justifies the research, our perceived distinction between the two allows us to think it’s okay.

“The majority of people put the line between animals and humans, and I’ve accepted it,” said Smith. “If having all the benefits of research for my children means that some animals were involved in research, as long as they don’t suffer, I’m okay with [the fact that the distinction is arbitrary].”

And this arbitrary distinction tends to be the focus of arguments against animal research. Animal rights activists often use the example of pain research, which tends to be conducted on primates and necessarily involves the animals being in pain. The primates used for pain research make good poster children for the cause, especially because pain studies rarely result in grand discoveries. To many activists, the end doesn’t justify the means.

“There’s research that I’ve reviewed that’s been ongoing for ten to 15 years, and not a published paper out of it,” said White, speaking generally about animal research. “What’s the point in treating all these animals as though they were disposable widgets for, apparently, the betterment of mankind?”

But let’s think about the example of mice instead of primates (and this is where the researchers find people hypocritical). Most people wouldn’t contest the usage of mice for cancer research. But if the question is of monkeys enduring pain, everyone is up in arms.

While we as a society don’t like to think about hunting endangered species, many people have no problem wearing leather or eating pigs. Animal research, on the other hand, might evoke images of a mad scientist performing vivisection on a chimp – something that would make most people squirm, ethically.

And this leaves us in a morally sticky situation. While one would hope the CCAC could work to be more transparent and develop alternatives to animal research, we can’t stop doing it outright. At least not right now.

 * * * * *

Millions of animals every year are raised for the sole purpose of testing and scientific research, and many of them suffer greatly in the process. Right here at McGill, a portion of the animals used in research come from species, like macaque monkeys, that have been shown to be quite similar to humans, and, as far as we know, all animals used in research are capable of suffering. They are also all, necessarily, subject to conditions that would be considered unacceptable for human participants in research.

We don’t like to think of ourselves as complicit within a system that exploits animals. But most of the scientific benefits that we enjoy wouldn’t be possible without the suffering and death of millions of animals every year. How can we advocate for changes in animal research without acknowledging our own dependency on animal exploitation? We’re able to avoid this uncomfortable question because people like Ste-Croix end up doing the dirty work behind the scenes. “You shield yourself a little bit,” she said to me toward the end of our phone call, “because otherwise you’d end up crying everyday.”

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Women make up almost 60 per cent of McGill’s overall undergraduate population; however, the math department estimates that between one-third and one-half of math majors are female.

SUMS President Catherine Hilgers told The Daily that she was more concerned with the low number of female honours students. According to Hilgers, between 10 and 15 per cent of honours math students are female.

Hilgers also pointed out that of the Math department’s 37 professors, only one is female.

In an interview with The Daily, Math Departmental Chair Jacques Hurtubise said that the department was “working on” hiring more women.
“There is a desire to get more women [into the department],” he told The Daily. “There’s a policy in the faculty, which we entirely support, to interview at least one woman for every opening. We’re actually in the process of hiring a second woman right now.”

At Wednesday’s meeting, Colleen Alkalay-Moulihan, an honours student in Applied Mathematics, spoke about having felt marginalized as a female, by her peers and certain professors.

“Someone once told me that it’ll be easier for me to get into graduate school because I’m a girl,” she said. “My second year I had a rude professor – my male friends didn’t notice, but his attitude affected me. I felt like he treated the male students like peers, and me like an idiot.”

“We should identify the environmental factors that make [the Math program] unfriendly to women, and figure out how to change them,” Michael Snarski, an honours Math student, explained during the meeting. “Confidence is key to being in math – if you don’t believe you can solve a problem, you won’t solve it.”

Students at the meeting underlined a number of areas the department could work on.

“We’re going to suggest that the department work to increase the number of women in math, increase the sense of community, and increase the number of female mathematicians hired,” Hilgers said.

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What is sought is a permanent, sound financial structure for the Social Equity and Diversity Education (SEDE) office.

SEDE was founded in 2005 in response to a McGill initiative to foster more equity on campus. It has been involved in organizing a variety of programs, including, most recently, Homework-Zone, which recruits McGill students to mentor children in Montreal’s less privileged neighbourhoods.

While SEDE’s permanent budget comes from the McGill administration, this money is not enough to fund all of its programs and pay its entire staff. This means that it also relies on an amalgamation of other funding sources to make up the difference.

In the past, these other sources have included McGill’s Sustainability Office, McGill Student Services, and several external groups. This portion of SEDE’s budget is temporary, as it must renegotiate funding from these organizations each year.

SEDE office manager Veronica Amberg acknowledged in an email to The Daily that this perpetual need to renegotiate funding “does create certain challenges for long- term planning.”

Since the Parti Québécois cancelled the tuition hike proposed by the previous Liberal government – and then made additional cuts in university funding to the tune of $124 million – the McGill administration has been vocally distressed about balancing its budget.

As the University moves to cut costs, McGill community members committed to equity and diversity are battling to keep the SEDE office from going under the knife.

On January 14, the Post-Graduate Students’ Society’s (PGSS) Equity and Diversity Committee put forward a motion to “actively support permanent funding for SEDE from McGill by writing a letter…to Associate Provost Lydia White and Deputy Provost Morton Mendelson that acknowledges SEDE’s achievements and requests maintaining financial support for SEDE’s ongoing work.”

PGSS Council failed to pass the motion, but Equity Commissioner Gretchen King believes that it wasn’t for a lack of support for the SEDE office or its mandate.

“We drafted the motion because some of SEDE’s permanent funding had been cut, and we wanted to support the continued existence and institutionalization of SEDE, which is also a funding issue,” King said. “Unfortunately, the debate got sidetracked by a conversation about how the McGill budget should be run in general.”

At their General Assembly (GA) on March 20, PGSS’s Equity and Diversity Committee is hoping to pass another motion “that expresses support of SEDE, forgetting the budgetary issue,” said King.

In the wake of the PGSS motion’s failure, the SSMU GA on February 4 will also hear a motion in support of SEDE, albeit one that is a more general endorsement of the office without any discussion of its funding structure.

SSMU Equity Commissioners Shaina Agbayani and Justin Koh drafted the motion. Koh explained that the motion came out of a desire to show that students support SEDE and care about equity at McGill.

“In this time of financial austerity, a lot of organizations are worried about budget cuts,” he said. “Because of SSMU’s commitment to equity, we thought that it would be a good time to officially affirm our collaborations with SEDE, because we’ve been working together for a long time.”

Lydia White is the Associate Provost for Policies, Procedures and Equity, making her the liaison between SEDE and the McGill administration. According to White, the problem is that SEDE has an insufficient budget to begin with.

“It’s clear to me that to fulfill all its goals, SEDE needs more money. Under the current [financial] climate, it might be quite difficult, at least for a while, to increase what they have,” White said in a phone interview with The Daily. “They have some wonderful initiatives, and they do need more funding. It’s not so much cuts, as lack of increases, that I think would be the concern.”

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“The Mohawk Traditional Council (MTC) can’t directly support the Idle No More movement,” he said, reading from the statement that the Council had released that day. Myiow is a temporary Wolf Clan representative of the Council.

The MTC statement goes on to outline its criticisms of the Idle No More movement, saying it has “too many voices saying too many different things, including some radical and controversial demands, allowing those responsible for the problems…to hijack the movement.”

Initially, the crowd didn’t seem to register the potentially controversial content of the statement, which, like the other speeches that day, was peppered with cheers and applause.

Wahéhshon Shiann Whitebean is a female chief on the MTC and one of the co-signatories of the statement. She explained why she saw the breadth of opinions in Idle No More as problematic.

“People are standing up, but they don’t know what to do to make a difference, which is why there needs to be leadership and direction,” she said. “If Idle No More is the beginning of something, it would be good to see people take it somewhere.”

Melissa Mollen-Dupuis, a Montreal-based Indigenous rights activist and one of the march’s organizers, said that she thought it was really important that the MTC have a say, even “if we don’t agree with everything they have to say.”

“I’m not scared of people not being okay with the movement, that’s for sure. I think it would be more scary if everyone agreed with everything.”

In response to the criticism of there being too many voices in the movement for it to accomplish anything, Mollen-Dupuis said that she saw Idle No More’s ideological openness as one of its greatest strengths.

“Idle No More definitely has a lot of voices and a lot of different ideas. They can see that as a negative thing, but I see it as a very positive thing,” she said. “Voices are like twigs: if you have one twig it will break, but many twigs won’t break as easily. People might want to have a clear unilateral voice that says the same thing, but that’s not going to happen.”

The MTC of Kahnawake co-exists with its Mohawk Band Council. The latter is one of 630 Canadian First Nation band councils whose chiefs are represented by the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), the current governing structure of First Nations on the federal level. In the past, some of the band councils have suffered heavy criticism after charges of corruption and failing to be properly representative.

Contrary to the electoral system by which a native community’s band council is formed, traditional councils’ representatives are nominated by clan mothers and confirmed through consensus.

The MTC’s statement listed a series of demands, including that band councillors fight to “dissolve the structure of the AFN, […] formally pull out of the self-government agreement [and] dissolve the elective band council system.”

Joe Delaronde is a spokesperson for the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake, on Montreal’s south shore. He acknowledged that the AFN has had its share of problems in the past, but doesn’t see the dissolution of the Assembly as a viable road to solving the problems of Indigenous peoples in Canada.

“The AFN is not perfect, the council system is not perfect, but is there any other body that brings Native peoples together? I don’t see one,” he said in a phone interview with The Daily. “If people don’t like the AFN, I invite them to come up with some other method that brings people together and gives them a chance to have a voice about issues of national importance.”

Whitebean, however, said that complete dissolution of the structure of the Assembly of First Nations and of the band council system is a perfectly reasonable and realistic goal.

“It would be stupid to support anyone in the band council system because it’s something that has destroyed our people,” she said. “The elected system does not work for our people. In fact, we’ve been contacted by other nations to help them set up their own traditional councils.”

In contrast to the electoral system by which a native community’s band council is formed, traditional councils’ representatives are nominated by clan mothers and confirmed through consensus.

“[Saying we’re going to dissolve the AFN is] like saying we’re going to dissolve the federal system of Canada,” said Mollen-Dupuis. “I don’t think it’s the best idea, I think we have to be realistic. We’re going to have to repair the relations we’ve already weaved, and get the knots and the holes out of the fabric that’s already been weaved.”

Chief Theresa Spence, who has been something of a lightning rod for the Idle No More movement, also came under attack in the MTC’s statement, calling her a “spectacle.” Spence is an elected band council aboriginal leader who has been on a hunger strike since December 11 with the goal of obtaining a meeting between Stephen Harper, Governor General David Johnston, and aboriginal leaders. Her goal that has yet to be realized.

Delaronde noted that Kahnawake’s Band Council has received several messages from people who didn’t understand the MTC’s decision to read an anti-Idle No More statement at a rally for the movement.

“It’s a free country, they can say what they want, but we were certainly surprised,” he said, adding, “We received a couple of emails from non-native people who thought that it was ill-advised to release such a statement at a rally by and for native peoples, and who thought that the movement should have a more united front.”

Despite their multiple, harsh criticisms of Idle No More, the MTC nonetheless maintained that it does “support the movement of all people in this struggle to correct corrupt governments and return truth as the standard of our societies.”

“[Our problems with Idle No More] don’t mean that we won’t stand with people or support them,” said Whitebean.

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The protest marked Montreal’s second rally as part of the indigenous rights and environmental protection movement that has come to be known worldwide as Idle No More.

Daphne Mitchell, a demonstrator, said that Friday’s protest was her first, after decades of living in Montreal.

“I think that it’s important to open up a dialogue about aboriginal issues between aboriginals and non-aboriginals,” she said. “I don’t know that much about it, but I’m here to learn.”

Lise Yolande, an Atikamekw woman who moved to Montreal from Obedjiwan, a reserve in the Mauricie region of Quebec, held her three-year-old daughter among the crowd of protesters.

“Everyone always says that aboriginal people are invisible, but I’m here to show that we’re visible, that we’re always here, and that we’ve always been here,” she said.

The demonstration was part of an international day of action in honor of the meeting that took place between aboriginal leaders and Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Friday.

Since early December, Attawapiskat chief Theresa Spence has been fasting with the goal of obtaining a meeting between Stephen Harper, Governor General David Lloyd Johnston, and aboriginal leaders.

Because the Governor General did not attend Friday’s meeting, neither did Theresa Spence, although both attended a ceremonial reception with hundreds of aboriginal chiefs following the Harper meeting.

The chief is continuing her hunger strike, and has said publicly that she is “ready to die for [her] people.”

The meeting between the Prime Minister and aboriginal leaders resulted in a promise by Harper that he would participate in “high-level talks” about the situation of native peoples in Canada.

Some aboriginal leaders and activists have already expressed disappointment at the meeting, citing a lack of commitment to concrete change.

The Idle No More movement, which has continued to grow even despite Harper’s meeting with aboriginal leaders on Friday, has come to represent a general indignation about the situation of aboriginal peoples in Canada, as well as tense relations between First Nations peoples and the government.

“It’s terrible to see that native communities [in Canada] live in poverty without housing, without electricity, without schools, without proper health care, even though we consider them to be fellow Canadian citizens,” commented Ahmed Mashouf, a retired doctor who marched in the Montreal protest, holding a sign for progressive provincial party Québec solidaire (QS).

The movement has also singled out federal omnibus Bill C-45, which has been criticized for weakening environmental regulations and aboriginal land rights.

The Montreal Gazette reported that QS MNA Françoise David was in attendance, and quoted her as criticizing the PQ’s plans for development and resource extraction in the north of Quebec, stating that “we can’t just hand out mining permits to the highest bidder. There has to be oversight and there has to be consultation and meaningful participation from the aboriginal communities affected by this.”

Idle No More struggles to encompass the wide swath of complex problems faced by Canada’s aboriginal population. In Montreal on Friday, the Mohawk Traditional Council expressed its ambivalence about the movement.

“The Mohawk Traditional Council cannot directly support the ‘Idle No More movement’,” began a statement released by the Council, “due to the fact that there are too many voices saying too many different things, allowing those responsible for these problems within the Assembly of First Nations to hijack the movement.”

The Council called on native and non-native peoples to take specific steps to “undo the wrongs they have perpetuated on native peoples”, including dissolving the Indian Act and renouncing the band council system.

Stewart Myiow is the Wolf Clan representative to the Council, and he read its statement publicly at the protest.

“[Idle No More] is only positive in the sense that everybody is here today, together. Everybody here knows that something is wrong. But the way it is currently, the government has all the people like a dog chasing its tail, getting nowhere,” he told The Daily. “This is why we had to present our position, to identify clearly what the steps are that must be taken.”

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