The strikes have resulted in reduced metro and bus service: the metro is currently running between 6:30a.m. and 9:30a.m., between 2:45p.m. and 5:45p.m, and from 11p.m. to closing time; buses are running between 6:15 a.m. and 9:15a.m., from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m., and between 11:15 p.m. and 1:15 a.m. Most buses will complete the routes they have started. Paratransit services will continue as normal.

The Syndicat des chauffeurs, opérateurs et employés des services connexes-1989 has also expressed intent to strike on November 15 and 16, but the STM stated on Thursday, October 30 that they had not yet received official notice of these strikes.

Since public transit is an essential service, the striking union and the STM must discuss what threshold of services to maintain after a strike is announced. The STM claims that they have been attempting to negotiate an increased level of metro service during the strike through discussions over the past week. The final decision is then made by the Tribunal administratif du travail (TAT), who rule on the adequacy of the level of essential service provided.

The month-long Syndicat du transport de Montréal-CSN maintenance workers’ strike is the third instalment in a year-long struggle with the STM, while the SCFP-1983 strike will be the union’s first in 38 years. The maintenance workers’ union stated in April that they are striking against the creation of atypical work schedules, staff relocations, reduced job protections against subcontracting, job insecurity through the creation of part-time positions and additional shift workers, the rejection of vacation quotas, and the removal of clauses protecting weekday work schedules. The SCFP-1983 said in an October 14 statement that it is asking the STM for more humane working hours, fair wage increases that reflect the current economic climate, a better work- life balance, and no rollbacks in job security.

The STM strike comes at a crucial moment for workers’ rights and union power. Bruno Jeanotte, president of the Syndicat du transport de Montréal-CSN, told the Montreal Gazette that “we wouldn’t be in a strike of this magnitude” without the looming Bill 89, as the bill “forces [the union] to apply much more aggressive pressure tactics.” As of November 30, Bill 89 will come into effect in Quebec, which will give the Minister of Labour the power to unilaterally end strikes if they are deemed detrimental to the public, and expands the amount of essential services which must be maintained while workers are striking. The bill, which was sponsored by Quebec’s current Minister of Labour Jean Boulet, purports to “give greater consideration to the needs of the population in the event of a strike or a lock-out,” but has been criticized as a “major retreat in workers’ rights” by three labour law professors at the Université de Montréal and members of the Interuniversity Research Centre on Globalization and Work (CRIMT).

McGill students who rely on public transit to go to and from campus are struggling to work around the strike. Lindsy Yang is a fourth-year neuroscience student who commutes to school every day via metro. When metro service is regular, Lindsy’s commute usually takes 30 minutes. On days when she has an 8:30 a.m. class then choir in the evening, she would normally go home in the interim. But due to the strikes, stranded by the gaps in service, she is spending up to 14.5 hours on campus. “[The strike] very much fragments my time,” Lindsy told the Daily.

Eva Leblanc is a U4 history student who has also been impacted by the STM strike. She sees the strike as a differentiating force which acts disproportionately on some students. “Students who have to commute are put at a disadvantage academically, and are at the whims of the metro,” she says. Mariana Monsalve, a U1 political science student minoring in sociology, identifies this disparity as based in social class: “[The strike] will disproportionately affect… poorer students that don’t have the means to pay for an Uber or a car, or students that aren’t able to bike or use alternative modes of transportation.”

There have been attempts to close this gap between students who can easily get to campus during the strike period and those who cannot. The Student’s Society of McGill University (SSMU) posted on Instagram last Wednesday that they will be reimbursing students for transport-related expenses incurred as a result of the altered transit schedule. Organized by the SSMU Equity Commissioners and Vice President University Affairs Susan Aloudat, the Emergency Transportation Subsidy Project evaluates submissions based on the information submitted alongside the application and uses equity programming funds to reimburse SSMU members for transportation costs throughout the duration of the strike. Acceptable submissions include Bixi fees, fees for rides between campus and the home address listed on a student’s enrollment letter, parking passes, and other transportation passes.

During the November 6 SSMU Legislative Council meeting, as of the third day of the support project, Aldoudat expressed to the Daily that while she hopes students can recognize that this is an unprecedented pilot project, “the intention is to subsidize and support as many students as we can.” Requests will be evaluated based on which submissions yield the greatest “return on investment,” but SSMU is focused on accessibility and will thoughtfully consider the explanations students provide in their submissions. “I really hope that students will feel that this is one way that [they] can get support from SSMU and that they can benefit from [it] more than anything,” Aloudat shared. SSMU is open to hearing commuter experiences as feedback on this program to ensure that members are being adequately supported throughout the strike.

Subsidiary requests can be submitted throughout the duration of the strike through a webform on the Resources page of SSMU’s website, under Funding Opportunities.

Some McGill professors are accommodating students’ inability to attend classes, and McGill has posted a statement encouraging employers and instructors to “show flexibility.” However, there is currently no blanket mandate for McGill faculty to accommodate students’ transport needs. Monsalve said we sees this as a failure on the part of the university: “The university is capable of accommodating,” she says. “It’s that they don’t want to.”

Editor’s Note: In the print version of this article, it was written that the Emergency Transportation Subsidy Project was organized by the SSMU Equity Committee rather than the SSMU Equity Commissioners. This is the correct version.

The post STM Workers on Strike Again as Negotiations Continue appeared first on The McGill Daily.

That being said, we can’t ignore the significance of “queer” as a pejorative. Western capitalist society, which in many ways is inherently conservative, tends to revile and ridicule strange things — unless they can generate profit. From pop culture’s appropriation of the ballroom scene, to the annual inundations of gay-coded products every Pride Month, the cultural expressions of queer communities have been pillaged for profit countless times throughout history. Even today’s apparent progress in global queer acceptance has been coupled with an aestheticization, commodification, and “unqueering” of queerness which poses a profound threat to queer life. Indeed, when acceptance is predicated on a group of people being palatable, de-radicalized, and profit-yielding, it is poor acceptance indeed.

To examine the commodification of queer culture, we must begin with the commodification of Black queer culture. The ballroom scene is one prominent site of such commodification. Ball culture began in the 19th century at the Hamilton Lodge, a Black fraternal organization in Harlem. The balls were originally intended for heterosexual men, but became a place for queer men to experiment with gender expression through cross-dressing and drag. From their inception, drag balls were exploited for mainstream entertainment. The balls were illegal, but drew a wide, culturally diverse audience. This audience included white heterosexual elites who could enjoy the pageantry of the balls without risking legal persecution (unlike the queer Black participants providing the entertainment). Ball culture was initially racially integrated, but in the 1970s, Black drag queen Crystal LaBeija spearheaded ballroom’s evolution into an explicitly Black and Latine space in response to racist biases in competition judgment. Nevertheless, the straight, white appropriation of ball culture abounded, as exemplified by Madonna’s hit single “Vogue”, which was based on the ballroom act of voguing and which has reached triple-platinum status as her most successful record. This appropriation can also be seen in the controversial documentary Paris Is Burning. The documentary is an exploration of ball culture directed by an (albeit queer) white woman, and was panned by bell hooks as an exploitative presentation of the “exotic” world of ball culture to white audiences.

The commodification of ball culture — and Black and queer culture at large — is insidious because it profits from a scene born from oppression without confronting the sources of that oppression. Drag balls were by necessity an underground phenomenon throughout the 20th century as homosexuality was a crime in Canada until 1969 and in the United States until 2003. Yet today, pop culture contains a myriad of ball culture influences, from the successful reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race to the colloquial use of “throwing shade” (a term invented at drag balls). RuPaul’s Drag Race in particular has been called an example of the neoliberalization of ball culture, as it positions each contestant’s queerness as a commodity which can be exchanged for material wealth and fame. Mainstream society has picked and chosen the aspects of Black queer culture that they find entertaining, while upholding the conservative capitalist system which still largely persecutes Black queer folks in a multitude of ways

Over the past few decades, queer acceptance has skyrocketed. Gay marriage is now legal in 40 countries and Gen Z is much more openly queer than previous generations. The explosion of sapphic visibility in the 2020s has led some to announce that we are experiencing a Lesbian Renaissance. But while mainstream, socially-acceptable queerness has grown, the radicalism once essential to queer culture has dwindled. Queers have always been radical, necessitated by their rejection from mainstream society. The famous Stonewall Uprising, credited with turning the tides of queer liberation, was one chapter in a long history of Black resistance against police brutality. Queer liberation has always been connected to radical Black liberation, as seen in the Black Panther Party’s construction of sexual repression as a tool of race and class repression and their alliance with queer causes. Queer culture is also closely entwined with the punk scene, another radical movement which has historically resisted police brutality and welcomed the disenfranchised. But today, queerness seems to be de-radicalizing.

We are experiencing an aestheticization of subcultures, which ignores their radical political basis and prioritizes the “look” of transgression. This is in part due to fast fashion marketing schemes for “alternative” clothing, which bastardizes anti-consumerist (and queer-coded) styles like punk and goth. The rise of social media has also played a role in this aestheticization, as visual platforms like Instagram and TikTok encourage creators to prioritize appearances over substance. Yet another factor in the decline of queer radicalism is the marked shortage of third spaces post-COVID-19 pandemic, which have historically been sites of solidarity-building and community for radical groups. Although queerness is more socially accepted than ever before, social acceptance has come at the cost of political potency. Amidst this crisis of queer radicalism, rainbow capitalism and pinkwashing have furthered the de-politicization of queerness by selling queer-coded products which propagate the
insidious lie that capitalism is a friend of queer folks.

Indeed, under Charlie Glickman’s definition of “queering,” the commodification of queerness by mainstream culture is a process of “unqueering” — of rendering an inherently radical group familiar, orthodox, and therefore benign. We see unqueering in the appropriation of ball culture. We see it in rainbow capitalism, pinkwashing, and the aestheticization of radical subcultures. In a sense, a loss of queer radicalism has been the price of queer acceptance. This is by no means an argument that societal acceptance of queerness is a bad thing. Countless lives have been improved, and saved by the increased availability of trans-affirming care, the legalization of homosexuality and gay marriage, and the diminishing stigma around queerness. But in the face of growing anti-queer (and especially anti-trans) legislation, in the United States as well as Europe and Asia, it is imperative that queer communities maintain their political, radical roots. Our acceptance by mainstream capitalist society is transient, based on our value to the profit-generation machine, and can be revoked at any time. In a time in which organizing the left has been harder than ever, we must nurture our community spaces and maintain our radical roots if we are to persist through the darker times to come.

The post Unqueering Queerness appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Settler media has dubbed the event the Oka Crisis. Those involved or in support of the blockade prefer a different name: the Mohawk Resistance. 35 years later, we examine the history and legacy of the resistance, as a microcosm of the struggle which continues to define our nation.

The Kanien’kehà:ka struggle for sovereignty against colonial powers stretches as far back as 1761, when they petitioned British authorities for the return of land which had been stolen in 1717 by New France. These requests were repeatedly denied, and a part of Kanesatake was renamed the town of Oka by settlers. In the 1880s, the Kanien’kehà:ka of Kanesatake planted around 100,000 pine trees outside the town of Oka, which would come to be known as The Pines. In 1961, a golf course was built bordering the Pines and, subsequently, near a Kanien’kehà:ka burial site. 

When an expansion of the golf course was proposed in 1989, the Kanien’kehà:ka were not consulted at all. Under the settler legal system, they still had not been granted any claim to the land after having seen their claims rejected three years prior. The expansion would not only encroach on the burial site, but also clear out the remainder of the Pines.

To prevent construction vehicles from breaking ground on the expansion, a group from Kanesatake erected a blockade in March of 1990. Despite an injunction allowing the municipality of Oka to dismantle the blockade, the resistance gained strength with support of Kanien’kehà:ka from Kahnawà:ke and Akwesasne, as well as an activist group called the Mohawk Warrior Society. After another injunction which failed to dismantle the blockade, Quebec’s provincial police force, the Sûreté du Québec (SQ), arrived slinging tear gas and concussion grenades. In the ensuing violence, an SQ corporal was killed and the SQ retreated. 

The Mohawk Resistance continued to grow, drawing support and solidarity from Indigenous communities across the country through communications networks between locals. The movement had grown bigger than the golf course, bigger than Kanesatake — it came to represent the fight for stolen land which is shared by Indigenous peoples across so-called Canada. Kanien’kehà:ka from Kahnawá:ke blocked the Honoré Mercier bridge. The RCMP and Canadian Armed Forces were soon called in to help the SQ, and forcefully dismantled the blockade. Then 14-year-old Kanien’kehá:ka girl (and future Canadian Olympian) Waneek Horn-Miller was stabbed in the chest by a soldier’s bayonet. In response to the Mercier Bridge blockade, local Quebecers engaged in racist protests, including the burning of a Kanien’kehà:ka effigy. 

The resistance ended 78 days later, with Prime Minister Brian Mulroney conceding to some of the Kanien’kehá:ka demands, such as cancelling the expansion of the golf course and the purchasing of the Pines by the federal government. The government promised that no further development would proceed. 

Ellen Gabriel is a Kanien’kehà:ka filmmaker, artist, and activist, who became a spokesperson for her community during the Mohawk Resistance. She recently published a book, When the Pine Needles Fall: Indigenous Acts of Resistance, detailing the complicated history and legacy of the Resistance. In an interview with The Philanthropist Journal, Gabriel gives a retrospective account of the crisis.

“It wasn’t a crisis for Oka,” she says, explaining why the moniker “Oka Crisis” is misleading. “Oka caused the crisis. We [the Kanien’kehà:ka of Kanesatake] were the ones occupied.”

Indeed, the media has framed the “crisis” as an unfortunate breakdown of Indigenous and settler relations. State-sanctioned violence against Indigenous people is portrayed as the regrettable, but inevitable consequence of resistance which is deemed too radical. As Gabriel says, the media largely portrayed Kanien’kehà:ka protesters as terrorists, “focus[ing] on the men in camo gear and ski masks holding guns.” 

Pauline Wakeham’s 2012 analysis of the Mohawk Resistance draws a parallel between the resistance and Operation Desert Storm (an offensive campaign by Western powers during the Persian Gulf War), which occurred within a year of each other. To illustrate the continued anti-terrorism panic sparked by the Mohawk Resistance and violence in the Middle East, Wakeham cites a collection of letters from 2006 titled “Home-grown Terror in Caledonia, Ontario,” which compares the Haudenosaunee Grand River land dispute to the violence of the Iraq War. Bizarrely, the equating of Indigenous land-rights activism to the wars in the Middle East was not limited to posthumous media exaggeration: a staggering four thousand soldiers were sent to Kahnawà:ke and Kanesatake, a more aggressive reaction than was deployed to the concurrent Persian Gulf War. This conflation of Indigenous land-rights activism with terrorism does immense damage to the movement, and is a lasting legacy of settler institutions’ mismanagement of the Resistance.

35 years after the Mohawk Resistance, regrettably little has changed. As Ellen Gabriel puts it, “the government just learned different ways to be sneakier about extinguishing our rights to our land.” Although the 1990 golf course expansion at Kanesatake was cancelled, ownership of the land was never transferred to the Kanien’kehá:ka—it is considered an “interim land base” for the Kanien’kehà:ka to use, meaning that they have some jurisdiction over the land but no title to it. And today, 308 years after Kanesatake was first stolen, the government continues ignoring petitions to return it. The battle against the development of the Pines was won, but the larger struggle for Indigenous sovereignty over their land continues. It seems Canada had yet to learn the lesson which the Mohawk Resistance should have taught us decades ago: if we keep refusing to listen, Indigenous land defenders will make themselves heard.

The post Rethinking the Crisis appeared first on The McGill Daily.

As we watch the United States – our closest neighbour and gargantuan cultural influence – descend into fascism, science has come under unprecedented fire from its federal government. From slashing federal science funding to allowing a political appointee to decide which science needs to be “corrected,” the Trump administration has been abundantly clear: scientists pose a threat to far-right values. In a world where truths – for example, the difference between sex and gender – are constantly subject to ideological debate, science may seem more political than ever before. To the mainstream, this probably feels deeply wrong. “Science should be objective,” you cry, “not political!”

But as historically marginalized people know, science has always been political. And while the right currently sees scientific progress as undermining their anti-truth dogma, science has also been weaponized by right-wing oppressive powers since its inception.

The scientific method we know today is based on inductive reasoning, meaning the extrapolation of general principles from specific observations. Our modern inductive scientific method was pioneered by Francis Bacon, 17th-century lawyer, philosopher and politician. He was also a major proponent British imperialism and colonialism. At a glance, the development of the scientific method and the expansion of the British empire might seem to be two unrelated branches of Bacon’s career. But Bacon’s scientific method embodies an ethos which can be applied to imperial projects: if we can classify and catalogue the world, we can control it.

When science emerged as the dominant epistemology in Western Europe, colonialism was already in full swing, and the two complemented each other well: colonies provided numerous specimens – human and nonhuman – for scientific research. Indigenous knowledge was also co-opted and re-packaged as scientific findings, as seen in the 19th century “discovery” of the antimalarial compound quinine (which was introduced to Jesuits by the Indigenous population of Peru).

The Baconian catalogue-and-control ethos drove the work of countless future imperialist-cum scientists, including the fathers of scientific racism Carl Linnaeus and Samuel George Morton. Carl Linnaeus, the 17th-century father of taxonomy (the classification of living things into groups), classified human races as taxonomic groups with behavioural and moral differences which he believed were rooted in biology – he refers to Europeans as “wise” and “inventors,” while referring to Africans as “sluggish” and “sly.” Samuel George Morton, meanwhile, wrote extensively in the 19th century on the idea that cranial differences in races were correlated with intelligence levels.

History saw countless examples of oppressive and exploitative science. These ranged from pioneer gynecologist James Marion Sims’s brutal experimentation on enslaved Black women in the 19th century to alleged CIA-funded brainwashing experiments done on McGill campus in the 1950s and 60s, which used Indigenous children as test subjects. Sure, these cases could be dismissed as pseudoscience, rather than treated as evidence that science is inherently oppressive. But within the scientific community at the time, these ideologies and actions were excused as reasonable, necessary even, in the name of progress. And a “progress” which systemically exploits the bottom rungs of fabricated social hierarchies is inarguably political.

Don’t get me wrong: the scientific method, and the technological and epistemological advancements it has allowed, are incredibly important. Far be it from this humble writer to contribute to the spread of anti-science rhetoric. As we saw firsthand during the COVID-19 pandemic, and continue to see in vaccine denialism and a host of other anti-science behaviours, mistrust in science and scientists can be disastrous. But we cannot pretend that science is somehow divorced from the hierarchical and oppressive power dynamics of our society. And as we would regard any institution which has repeatedly justified enslavement, racism, and torture with a critical eye, so should we regard the institution of science.

So get your vaccines, folks! And vote for administrations who don’t de-fund research. Science is a pillar of our society. But as many students (myself included) pursue our science degrees, we must remember: our field has oppressive roots, and its nature is perennially political. By thinking critically, recognizing oppressive structures, and denouncing them, we can try to make science a little bit better.

The post Weaponizing Objectivity appeared first on The McGill Daily.

David Suzuki, academic and climate activist, made headlines earlier this year with a sobering statement on climate action: “It’s too late.”

The reverberating panic in activist spaces was immediate: “if David Suzuki’s given up, we’re really screwed!”

Admittedly, he hasn’t given up, per se. But rather than calling for large-scale legal, economic or policy changes — as he has for decades — he is now encouraging communities to build resilience in the face of the climate crisis. Suzuki’s new stance might be apt, as we have surpassed six of the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s nine planetary boundaries which define our habitable Earth: climate change, biogeochemical flows, freshwater change, land system change, biosphere integrity, and novel entities— synthetic chemicals emitted by technological developments. Yet investments in fossil fuel capital continue to grow, alongside climate anxiety and ensuing feelings of defeatism.

By the end of the 2010s, climate activism had obtained immense popularity, especially among youth and students. Greta Thunberg’s Fridays For Future movement was the most visible of its type — inspiring school strikes, protests, and die-ins by young people around the world. Protests calling for the Canadian government to ban fossil fuels had reached a fever pitch, or so it seemed.

Then, the unprecedented chaos of 2020 changed it all. During these years, the world grappled with illness, social isolation, economic uncertainty, police brutality, and countless other injustices. However, in the face of those challenges, we showed an unprecedented capacity for collective action. The New York Times called the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement the largest protest movement in U.S. history, with between 15 and 26 million participants.

Ironically, amidst all this politicization and protest, the climate movement fell flat on its back.

Although the pandemic is over, climate activism has not recovered. The Canadian Press
calls the current Canadian government “noncommittal about meeting 2030 climate goals” and climate issues have been pushed to the back of the Canadian mind. However, they fuel every other issue we face. The climate crisis is not impending, it is current. Places across the world, including Iraq, Somalia, and the Gulf Coast of the United States, are experiencing extreme natural disasters that herald a new era of climate devastation. Meanwhile, the school strikes, marches, and dialogue around climate action are notably absent from the global stage. In a sense, it is “too late” to prevent the catastrophe we predicted decades ago. But is it too late to call for government action, and to limit the scope of destruction?

To answer this question, I interviewed McGill students from a range of fields and backgrounds. I wanted to know whether climate defeatism has taken hold of our student body and whether McGill students see a path forward through this crisis. I wanted to know whether we, as students and as global citizens, can still be mobilized in the name of climate action.

My first conversation was with Cam*, a U2 student double majoring in Physics and Latin
American and Caribbean Studies. Cam has been involved in climate activism since the age of 12. I asked him what he thought about environmental defeatism.

“The idea that we won’t face catastrophic climate change is a fallacy,” he claimed, “but I am not a defeatist in that I don’t believe there is nothing left to be done.”

It is a daunting thought that catastrophe will strike regardless of the action we take now. Cam knows that “the rest of [his] life will be spent in a constant battle to mitigate the
effects of fossil fuel emissions.” And yet, we can still lessen these effects by taking a stand against the fossil fuel industry. “There’s an infinite amount of difference [between] category 5 hurricanes happening twice a year and four times a year…every human life is a massive difference.” says Cam.

For every degree of warming and every extreme weather event, human lives hang in the
balance. Such high stakes have led to ample debate over the best protest practices; namely, whether or not peaceful protest is enough.

“[New fossil fuel investment] is a crime,” Cam told me, “not just against society but against humanity as a whole. So I think that as citizens of Earth, it’s completely justified to take direct action.”

According to the Activist Handbook, direct action can refer to a range of physical tactics, from civil disobedience to property destruction and violence. In his notable book How to Blow up a Pipeline, climate activist and author Andreas Malm asserts that historically, direct action has proven to be highly effective in toppling status-quo systems, and was instrumental in ending oppressive regimes throughout the 20th century, from racial segregation in the United States to Israeli occupation of Lebanon to South African apartheid.

While direct action involves higher physical and legal risk to protesters, and is not always
popular with the masses, many argue that it is sometimes necessary to make a movement heard. Cam pointed out that “resistance is not the same as assault. The destruction of the physical infrastructure of fossil capital is completely justified, [and] it is something we should be doing more of.”

To investigate the feeling underlying student inaction, I talked to Max*, a U2 Biology and
Philosophy major who characterizes himself as a “realist.” Max is skeptical of the
power of protest, especially radical protest which might alienate those unfamiliar with the movement.

“Government structures are set in place […] and they’re very protected,” Max pointed out,
when asked whether he thinks protests are effective in promoting systemic progress.
“The best way to create impactful change is not to try to dismantle social structures from the bottom up. It’s to infiltrate and move top-down.”

Top down initiatives for climate action have been advocated for and attempted ad
nauseam over the last five-plus decades, to very little success: the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2015 Paris Agreement, arguably the two most prominent top-down climate efforts, have been largely ineffective. John S. Dryzek and Jonathan Pickering, in their book The Politics of the Anthropocene, name the 1987 Montreal Protocol for protection of the ozone layer the only example of successful top-down climate action in history. This has pushed many frustrated people to campaign from the bottom up, through protests, civil disobedience, and NGOs. Young people like Cam describe a feeling of obligation to fight for climate action, from whichever elevation they can reach — Max is not one of these people, despite believing in the severity of the crisis.

“Everyone feels [obligated to] do the little things that provoke a more sustainable lifestyle,” he told me. “[But] I don’t think […] I have to go the extra mile.” Some further key insights came from Emily,* a U3 Biodiversity and Conservation major in the Bieler School of Environment. As an American studying in Canada, Emily has a valuable outside perspective on Canadian climate politics. Emily tells me that the current government’s stance on climate action reminds her of many previous U.S. administrations, which she says were characterized by a dissonance between words and actions.

“The executive branch is making speeches about the importance of this or that,” she said, “but it often stops at rhetoric and doesn’t continue into reshaping policies.” As an environment student, Emily’s coursework involves a lot of discussion about climate change, and the myriad potential approaches to the crisis. While she recognizes that full societal upheaval will be necessary, Emily also knows that critical change can also happen on a small scale.

“Speak with people about [climate change…] and [get] them to participate in lowering their consumption with you,” she told me, when asked what McGill students can do about the crisis. “Get them to do actions with you.”

In the face of government inaction, it is difficult to remain hopeful. But while Emily characterizes herself as “somewhere in between” climate optimism and defeatism, she definitely errs on the side of hope.

“There’s no capacity to maintain ‘normal life,’” Emily told me. But there is still room for optimism in her eyes. “The place where [it’s relevant to be] defeatist or optimistic is […] what degree of human rights will maintain themselves during the climate crisis,” she said. “I believe we have the capacity to confront the problems we’re facing.”

Let’s hope she’s right.

*All names have been changed for anonymity

The post Is It Too Late? appeared first on The McGill Daily.