On the night of October 5, 2001, Gladys Tolley was struck and killed by a Sûreté du Québec cruiser near Maniwaki, Quebec. Part of Bridget Tolley, her daughter, also died when she heard the news. Bridget went looking for answers about what happened, but only found more questions to ask. A year later, she discovered that the police had terminated the investigation into her mother’s death without informing her. She took arranging a second investigation into her own hands. Those hands balled into fists that knocked on the doors of cagey police. Those hands clutched telephones as she spoke to politicians and grasped signs bearing Gladys’ face as she spoke at vigils. The fingers of those hands also massaged her temples as she slumped over her table and wondered how much longer it would take before a second investigation was ordered.

It’s been fifteen years so far.

Part One: Sugar Mountain

Gladys Tolley was born in 1940 in Maniwaki, Quebec, a town an hour and a half drive north of Ottawa. She grew up on the nearby Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg reserve, though attended school in Maniwaki until she dropped out to support five younger siblings. Nothing came easy on the reserve. “Everybody’s just trying to live day by day,” Bridget explained. Gladys and her mother, Agnes Cayer, worked as chambermaids in a hotel. Some might have resented having to drop out of school, but “that was one of her things that she really liked to do, clean the rooms at the hotel,” Bridget recalled.

She liked the forests of Kitigan Zibi even more. There she watched animals, hunted, and fished. The spaces between her toes filled with hot sand as she walked down the shore of Cayer’s Lake, named after Agnes, then waded past rocks slimy with algae before she dived into the water. Gladys’ grandchildren and great-grandchildren still swim there today.

Gladys grew into a woman who radiated gentle happiness. Smiling, Bridget said, “everyone gets mad now and then, but she didn’t have a cross bone in her body […] She was a really, really happy, soft-spoken woman.” In the photo of Gladys that Bridget shows at rallies, Gladys beams with high eyebrows and a smile that bunches the cheeks beside her large, round nose. In a photo of a 1996 family reunion, Gladys sits with a laidback grin, her arm around her mother’s shoulders.

Gladys married John Tolley and gave birth to Bridget and her siblings. She took her children on rides through the forests of Kitigan Zibi.

Then she couldn’t.

When John and Gladys divorced, John wouldn’t let Gladys visit the children. “We didn’t really get to grow up with her, but she was always there. She would come and visit us every chance she got, even if it was for five minutes when my dad wasn’t there,” Bridget laughed. “So those were really good memories of her.”

But not all of Bridget’s memories are good. When she was eleven, John Tolley “shot himself in the heart, and he died instantly too.” The children then lived with their grandmother, assisted by social workers.

As the children grew into teenagers and adults, Bridget and her siblings visited their mother, who they often found listening to Conway Twitty’s crooning and the spunky songs of Loretta Lynn. Her children introduced her to Neil Young. Especially “Sugar Mountain”:

“Oh, to live on Sugar Mountain
With the barkers and the coloured balloons,
You can’t be twenty on Sugar Mountain
Though you’re thinking that you’re leaving there too soon,
You’re leaving there too soon . . .”

They played it so often that Gladys joked her children were the Sugar Mountain gang. It became one of her favourite songs.

She turned to the Sugar Mountain gang when she lost three family members in two years. In 1998 and 1999, Agnes, Gladys’ husband Xavier, and Gladys’ sister, Della, died. Della’s death in a car accident reminded Gladys of her brother Wallingford, who was hit by a drunk driver when he was only sixteen, and Camille, another brother who died in a car accident in 1983. Gladys was lonely, and on October 5, 2001, she went to visit Bridget’s sister at her house on the other side of Highway 105.

At around 11:30 p.m., Gladys stepped from her daughter’s house and into the rain to return home, curlers still in her hair. She began crossing Highway 105, and then was hit by the Sûreté du Québec cruiser.

Part Two: Digging

When Bridget learned her mother had died, she wanted to speak to the police who had been at the scene of the collision. “They all didn’t want to meet with me because they said I was too upset and too mad […] but I would have met with them,” she explains. “They didn’t want to give me no information.” Bridget learned, however, that an investigation was under way.

She was awaiting its outcome when the phone rang one day in November 2002.

She answered the phone.

A reporter from Le Droit had a question for her.

“Yes?”

How did she feel about the police closing the investigation into her mother’s death, having concluded that the collision had been due to the negligence of a pedestrian?

Shortly after she had spoken to the Le Droit reporter and hung up the phone, she picked it back up. “It [the phone call] was what made me start digging. I said, well I wonder why they’re not telling me anything. What are they hiding?”

Her phone was “the way I did my justice […] ‘cause I did live on the reserve, and was kind of far from the city. Bills were pretty high for me,” she chuckled. One of the calls she made was to the police, requesting police reports. They refused.

“I had to also get a lawyer […] It took me almost 13 months.”

Finally she received the police report. As she read it, however, her confusion only grew.

Officer Serge Chalifoux had hit Gladys. The officer in charge of the scene was Michel Chalifoux. Not only were both officers from the Sûreté du Québec, a disturbing fact given that the Kitigan Zibi Police Department had jurisdiction and should have taken over the scene – they were also brothers.

In 2001, the policy in Quebec for investigating deaths caused by police mandated that the Minister of Public Security would appoint a second police force to investigate the police force implicated in the death. The Service de Police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) were called, but they arrived eight hours later, after the Sûreté du Québec had removed Gladys’ body and taken the cruiser to a garage. How could the SPVM conduct an impartial investigation if there was no longer a scene to investigate? Instead, they had to rely on the testimonies of Sûreté du Québec officers at the scene – especially that of Michel Chalifoux.

Not only were both officers from the Sûreté du Québec – they were also brothers.

The police reports were also full of misinformation. According to Bridget, Gladys died at 282 Kichi Mikan. The police marked her address as 281 Kichi Mikan. Though the police report said that the family had identified the body, “we weren’t allowed to identify my mother,” Bridget says.

Gladys’ family weren’t the only ones who didn’t see the body.

“The coroner’s never even seen my mother’s body. My mother was killed on the night of October 5th around 11:30 p.m.. Police reports were done February 8th 2002. The coroner […] he never even seen the body, so he had to wait for the police report before he made his own report, and the coroner only finished his report in June.”

The coroner ruled the death to be the result of alcohol-induced negligence. “In their report, it’s all about alcohol. They [the police] took pictures of alcohol,” Bridget said, referring to how the police went into Gladys’ house and took pictures of beer bottles on her table. “The coroner said she died because she was intoxicated […] and not because she got hit by the police car. I can just imagine all the other cases like my mother’s that are very badly done, saying we’re ‘drunken Indians.’ I can just imagine the other Indians.”

“I can just imagine all the other cases like my mother’s that are very badly done, saying we’re ‘drunken Indians.’”

The accounts of Serge Chalifoux and the officer in the passenger seat differ as well. Serge Chalifoux said that he thought Gladys was a road sign, but the other officer stated that Gladys was on all fours when she was hit. Gladys was also allegedly in the middle of the road when she was struck.

None of this makes sense to Bridget.

“It’s hard for me to believe that she was in the middle of the road and two of them didn’t see her. So one thought she was a sign, another one thought she was a dog or something. And this is at 11:30 at night. […] It was raining that night, but still, if it’s raining, and if it’s dark, where else would they be looking besides the road? And how come they didn’t see her if she was in the middle of the road? And the car itself […] is all broken on the right side of the car. […] So if my mother was in the middle of the road, they had to be way over on the other [left] side of the road to hit her on that side of the car, or else they would’ve hit her on the left side of the car, if she was in the middle of the road.” Bridget took a photo of the police cruiser in the garage as evidence.

Bridget also has other questions:

Why did police not take a statement from Gladys’ neighbour, who was on the scene first?

Why did police reports not include a statement from a policewoman who was on the scene, when other officers’ statements were compiled?

Why did the Sûreté du Québec take control of the scene and not the Kitigan Zibi Police Department?

Only a second, independent investigation can answer these questions. Even if the evidence that Bridget compiled doesn’t prove Chalifoux’s guilt, it demonstrates that the original investigation was so poorly conducted that it should not have been the foundation on which a decision to press charges or proceed to trial was made. Moreover, Quebec failing to commission a second investigation would indicate that the provincial government accepts investigations riddled with contradiction, conflict of interest, and inconsistencies. Would the law enforcement officers that investigated the collision clear a suspect from another similarly inadequate investigation if their suspect wasn’t also a police officer? If they would, then why the low standard for investigations? If not, then why did they clear Serge Chalifoux?

Quebec nonetheless denied Bridget’s request for a second investigation in 2010.

Part Three: “If It Was Easy, They Wouldn’t Call It Struggle”

If you met Bridget and didn’t know what she’d gone through, you’d still get the impression that she was a juggernaut stuck trudging her way through a mire. She has an air of determination as intense as her frustration. In one photo she stands tall, unshakeable, and unfazed beside Justin Trudeau. She looks at people with eyes that are at once friendly, intelligent, and flustered. When she speaks, at vigils and on the phone, her indignation and drive grow until she shouts. But her voice becomes hoarse and her words quiver. Bridget’s determination has come at a price.

When I interviewed her, Bridget started speaking about trying to arrange a second investigation by mentioning the unexpected ways in which Gladys’ death changed her life. When Bridget was in ninth grade, she dropped out of school and started drinking to escape from the pain of her father’s suicide. “After […] they said that my mother died because she was a ‘drunken Indian,’ I quit drinking. The death of my dad got me drinking, and the death of my mom made me stop drinking. […] So if anything happens to me they can’t say I’m a drunken Indian woman.”

She also got up early in the morning and worked on her mother’s case until late at night. She sifted through reports, made phone calls, and met people non-stop for close to a year before realizing that she needed to slow down or she risked burn-out. “And I didn’t waste my time too. I went straight to the top. […] I didn’t mess around.” She has written to Members of Parliament. She didn’t just stand with Justin Trudeau; she spoke to him. She is also in touch with a lawyer from the Indigenous Knowledge Centre.

This hasn’t made her struggle easier. If anything, the number of influential people who have heard her story might only make her lack of success even more painful. Sometimes when she speaks, it sounds as if the weight of the past fifteen years is squeezing against her lungs. “Every day is a struggle. Every day to get up is a struggle. You know, I never thought justice would be political. You know, that didn’t cross my mind when I started this,” she says, her words strained between her quick, upset breaths. Even after a decade and a half, her mother’s death still causes her “raw pain.” But “nobody’s going to stop me. So many have tried to stop me already,” she said, her voice breaking as she held back tears. “And it hasn’t worked. I’m not going to stop […] What happened to my mother is real, and true, and it’s wrong.”

“The death of my dad got me drinking, and the death of my mom made me stop drinking.”

She worries constantly that her struggle won’t result in anything, and that people don’t even need to try to stop her. “It feels like I’m still in the same place that I was fifteen years ago.” When she feels hopeless, however, she remembers something that her friend Matt told her: “If it was easy, they wouldn’t call it struggle.”

Friends such as Matt are like a new family. Bridget lost a mother, but gained many sisters by joining Sisters in Spirit, a campaign led by the Native Women’s Association of Canada. They gathered information on violence against Indigenous women until the Harper government cut their funding in 2010. “This is one thing the government was trying to do – is silence us again by not funding the Sisters in Spirit,” Bridget said. “I thought that they were making us disappear again.”

Bridget refused to disappear. She co-founded Families of Sisters in Spirit, a grassroots organization that undertakes much of the same work that Sisters in Spirit did, and that draws on many of the same networks. “It makes all this worthwhile, seeing the families come together and supporting each other. […] It gives you the strength to keep going. […] I need to have that at least one percent hope to keep going.”

“I thought that they were making us disappear again.”

Bridget formed another family when she met people recovering from losses similar to her own in 2010 at the Forum Against Police Violence and Impunity. Several family members of people killed by police expressed a desire to unite. Out of death, Justice for the Victims of Police Killings was born. Finally she had met people who understood the sensation of “begging and begging and begging, and even though they hear us, they don’t hear us.”

Few things explain this feeling of being both heard and not heard better than the newly opened Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes.

Part Four: “Even Though They Hear Us, They Don’t Hear Us”

According to the “Historique” section of the Bureau’s website, the Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes arose after much public criticism of the practice that allowed police officers to investigate serious incidents implicating other police officers. The public drew attention to the potential for conflicts of interest, lack of transparency, and the absence of impartiality and objectivity.

Then, according to the website, “the government of Quebec heard the population.”

In 2012, politicians suggested modifying the “Loi sur la police” to create the Bureau, which would investigate police officers whose actions had resulted in death, “serious injury,” or were linked to illegal activities. After three and a half years of legislative wrangling and administrative organizing, the Bureau opened on June 27, 2016.

It states that its values are impartiality, rigour, and independence, and asserts in the “Mandat et Pouvoirs” section of its website that “the Bureau of Independent Investigations maintains a relationship without any link of dependence to the government of Quebec in its activities, and is not subordinate to the State or any police force in Quebec.” This statement is reassuring, until we learn that the Bureau cannot initiate investigations. Only the Minister of Public Security can prompt a Bureau investigation. The Minister initiates an investigation based on a report that the chief of the implicated police force writes after an event resulting in death or serious injury. A Montreal-based civil rights organization called Ligue des droits et libertés has expressed concerns about the chiefs being the ones who initiate the process of a potential investigation. In a document entitled “Entrée en fonction du BEI: des lacunes importantes subsistent!” they state, “Now, that implies, except when the event has resulted in someone’s death, that this chief will be the one evaluating if the nature of the injury requires a BEI investigation to take place.” The Bureau cannot even press charges. It must submit reports to the Directeur des Poursuites Criminelles et Pénales, the office of provincial prosecutors, who decide whether or not they will prosecute. Can the Bureau really be “not subordinate to the State or any police force in Quebec” when it cannot press charges, or act without authorization from the government, when the government itself is informed by reports from the implicated police forces?

This statement is reassuring, until we learn that the Bureau cannot initiate investigations.

The Bureau’s independence becomes more uncertain when one considers who it’s composed of. A selection committee consisting of Bureau director Madeleine Giauque, a representative of the Minister of Public Security, and the director of the National Police School of Quebec sifted through the applications of people wanting to work for the Bureau. Even if the committee genuinely had the independence of the Bureau as its top priority, the fact that those who handpicked the future investigators were representatives of the police training school and Ministry of Public Security, excluding Giauque, already skewed the selection. It indicated that those who’d be selected would conform to an evaluative framework that prioritised the procedures, ethos, and values of the government and the police – the organizations that the Bureau is meant to be independent from. Consequently, those chosen might not have sufficient critical distance from the organizations that they’d be investigating. There’s no evidence that the committee was some sort of cabal intentionally engineering a team of investigators who would perform great cover-ups, but without representatives from civil rights organizations or coalitions against police brutality, the selection process was skewed. As such, 14 of the 18 investigators have been police employees. Nine investigators and the three supervisors have been police officers.

Furthermore, the Bureau states that an investigator cannot take the role of principal investigator among an investigative team if said investigator was once employed at the police force under investigation. Does this imply that regular investigators can investigate the police departments where they were employed? When I called the Bureau to ask, they refused an interview.

Other organizations like Montreal Noir have criticized the Bureau for being predominantly white, and for having no Indigenous members. It claims that the Bureau “does not represent the communities most affected by police brutality; those of us who are Black, Indigenous, Latinx, trans, and otherwise marginalized.”

I asked Bridget Tolley if she would be satisfied if the Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes led a second investigation into her mother’s death?

“Absolutely not!” she replied. “It’s police investigating police – this is the big problem.” Bridget wants a civilian committee of investigators.

“It’s police investigating police – this is the big problem.”

Giauque has claimed that the Bureau needs ex-police because the investigations are very “advanced.” “I have a grade nine education and I did this alone,” Bridget said in response. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure this out.”

Part Five: The Vigil

Justice for Victims of Police Killings hosted a vigil outside of the Fraternité des policiers et policières de Montréal on October 22. The large building of beige brick and glass walls covered in “Libre Négo” stickers was surrounded by a few dozen people. A row of police officers stood at the top of the building’s granite steps, at the bottom of which were Bridget and Julie Matson, another co-founder of Justice for Victims of Police Killing. The sound of their quiet conversation mixed in with the French hip-hop playing from speakers covered in a blue, crinkly tarp. In front of the speakers were framed photographs of victims of police killings. Through the raindrop-covered glass of the frame, Gladys Tolley beamed at the sombre crowd.

Bridget was holding a large poster of that photo, and a braid of sweetgrass. Her eyes glimmered, but, unlike Gladys, she was sombre as she and the other organizers moved in front of the granite steps. Jaggi Singh, a local organizer, introduced the speakers to the crowd. Soon he passed the microphone to Bridget. Singh manoeuvred around her, stepping onto the second of the five granite steps so that he was behind her, and tilted a black umbrella over Bridget. Her face was glum.

“Hello. Bonjour. Thank you for coming out today on this rainy day,” she began.

Staring out at the crowd, Bridget paused and Julie Matson put a white mitted hand around Bridget’s shoulder as one of the police officers tapped Singh’s shoulder. When Singh didn’t respond, the officer tapped his shoulder again. Then the officer stepped down and leaned toward Singh, perhaps whispering something.

“We’re here today to honour our loved ones who were killed by police,” Bridget continued.

The officer nudged Singh who stood still, staring ahead with tense resolution in his eyes and tight-set lips. The officer flashed an exasperated smile to a partner on his left, then pushed Singh, and this time his body rocked forward, and his fingers tightened around the steel railing beside him. A third officer stepped toward Singh.

“I think this rain is appropriate for today,” Bridget said. The officer smirked with amusement and annoyance before returning to the top step. Singh held the umbrella with that same determined half-frown. Bridget fixed the crowd with her weary but stony eyes. “‘Cause I feel it’s tears from up above, happy tears because we’re here, and sad tears because our cases are not being done right.”

This story used the following sources: “Rapport Annuel,” by the Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes; “Tenue d’une enquête indépendante” in the “Loi sur la police”; “Règlement sur le déroulement des enquêtes du Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes,” in Gazette officielle du Québec; “Règlement sur la procédure de sélection et sur la formation des enquêteurs du Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes,” in the “Loi sur la police”; “Tripartite Police Agreement” between Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg band council, Quebec, and Canada; the website of the Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes; Ligue des droits et libertés, “Entrée en fonction du BEI : des lacunes importantes subsistent!”; Interviews with Bridget Tolley; “Histoires troublantes sur la surveillance des enquêtes policières” in La Presse; “Le Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes clame sa transparence,” in Journal de Montréal; “La directrice du Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes se veut rassurante, in Radio-Canada; “Police Killings in Canada: Anatomy of a Crisis,” in Ricochet; “Bridget Tolley’s search for justice for her mother,” in Rabble; “Police Impunity,” in the McGill Daily; “Journey for Justice: Story of Gladys Tolley” by Native Women’s Association; “Interview with Bridget Tolley” by Black Coffee Poet; “Montréal Noir et les familles de personnes tuées par la police rejettent le Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes,” on the website of Collectif Opposé à la Brutalité Policière.

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“It’s the third time we’ve had a fire at the station,” CPAM 1410 station manager Jean-Ernest Pierre told CTV News in French. In 2012, a similar Molotov cocktail attack damaged the building. In May of this year, a car was firebombed in the parking lot.

The motive behind the arson remains unclear. “I think that some people might have a problem with the opinions that I express, and when I express my opinions, they’re always very clear and bold,” Pierre said in French, in a phone interview with The Daily.

“It’s the third time we’ve had a fire at the station.”

Controversial opinions may have been behind the 2012 firebombing the radio station as well. That attack occurred not long after Jean-Claude Duvalier, the former dictator of Haiti, made a surprise return to the country. Duvalier, nicknamed Baby Doc, ruled from 1971 until an uprising broke out in 1986 and he was forced to flee to France. He was arrested two days after his return to Haiti and charged with corruption. Prior to the 2012 firebombing, Pierre had said on-air that Duvalier should face a criminal trial.

“But apparently he had some ‘fans’ who made threats over the phone,” Pierre said in French, according to an article from La Presse. People speaking in Haitian Creole had called the radio station and threatened to set it on fire. “Is that the cause? I don’t know. We’ve also received threats this year after criticizing president Michel Martelly.”

The 2012 firebombing caused significant damage. The studio suffered water damage from firefighters dousing the building’s flames, and was unusable. Speaking to the Toronto Sun, Pierre described the scene of people coming to the station to see the debris as “like a funeral.” Despite that, CPAM was back on-air ten hours later. Pierre had announced from a temporary studio: “the culprit has disturbed our routine, but he can’t disrupt our ideas.”

“I think that some people might have a problem with the opinions that I express, and when I express my opinions, they’re always very clear and bold.”

Fortunately, damage from the September 18 attack was not as serious. There was water damage from the firefighting and the toilet had been destroyed, amounting to a few thousand dollars’ worth of damages, Pierre told The Daily in French.

The media liaison of the Montreal Fire Department, speaking to The Daily in French over the phone, provided an outline of what happened that night. “We received a call to 3990 Boulevard Crémazie […] at 3:21 am. We sent out two fire engines and a truck […] for a total of 15 firefighters. We left the premises at 4:29 [a.m.]. For us, it took about an hour before we transferred the case over to the police.”

The police are considering other potential motives for the attack. CTV News quoted Service de Police de la Ville de Montreal (SPVM) spokesperson Manuel Couture, who said, “Is it someone who’s been fired and who wants to get revenge? What happened exactly and why is it a target?”

Couture went on to say that police were also looking into whether or not the crime was racially motivated. CPAM is the only ethnic, Francophone radio station in North America, according to the station’s website. If the attack was racially motivated, the investigation would be transferred to the SPVM’s hate crimes division. However, as of September 27, the SPVM told The Daily by phone that there had been “no new developments” in the case.

Although the arsonist is still at large, Pierre is not worried. According to CTV, he is playing music until the damage is repaired, but listeners won’t have to wait long before a return to regular programming. “We’re going to keep having the same positions,” Pierre told The Daily. “The risks are there [but] it’s the choice that we’ve made to work for the people of our community.”

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Division Gallery is a strange, swanky contrast to the brownstone buildings and abandoned lots that surround it in the Little Burgundy neighbourhood of Montreal. Its high ceilings allow plenty of wall-space for Baier’s sprawling works. Upon entering the gallery, the viewer encounters Rayonnement fossile, which was stippled black and white to evoke the static of a television screen. In the label beside the piece, Baier informs us that the traces of cosmic rays, dating back to the Big Bang, are still perceptible in television monitors. The work was also reminiscent of a grainy photo of a wind-blown and choppy sea, suggesting that Baier undermines rigid distinctions between the man-made and the natural by making us recall that everything — from televisions to oceans — is the progeny of the Big Bang. The piece forces viewers to acknowledge the awe-inducing immensity that lurks all around us, even in those parts of our lives that we consider the most banal.

[With] recent technological developments, can mankind recreate nature’s sublime?

The piece beside it, Forêt, reflects on the immensity and infinity of both time and knowledge. The piece, in bas-relief and made of mousse and epoxy paint, was a monochrome white that, according to the label, “evokes the untouched, the original, the initial, and thus the unfathomable: colour without data, void of even zeros.” The piece depicted bookshelves stretching back eternally and crammed with dossiers representing “a forest of information storage devices — knowledge accumulated in an infinite library” reflecting the eternal “quest for knowledge.” If Rayonnement fossile excavated the fossils of the Big Bang embedded all around us, then Forêt was a metaphysical thought-experiment (What was there before the Big Bang?) meets the Library of Babel, Borges’ universe-as-library.

In Réminiscence 05 and Réminiscence 06, Baier shows the extent to which our ceaseless quest for knowledge has developed. We’ve gone from gawking at the sublimity of eons-old fossils to tackling the task of conjuring epochal immensity in all its majesty. The works are computer generated images of the moment 66 million years ago when a meteorite fell to Earth and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Réminiscence 05 shows a crimson cloud-bed, roiling and tumultuous, looming in angry pillars. The dramatic shadows and yellow haze add to the sense of fatal grandeur. On the other hand, Réminiscence 06 is beautiful for its serenity. It depicts gently rising and falling, sediment-brown clouds stretching back to misty sunlight.

We’ve gone from gawking at the sublimity of eons-old fossils to tackling the task of conjuring epochal immensity in all its majesty.

With displays like this, “Astérismes” draws our attention to how advances in technology are opening up a new dimension of experience and meaning via its ability to reconstruct nature in all its grandeur, capturing moments that may not be registered by the human eye. But it also raises the question: just how genuine are these digital analogues of the natural sublimeÉ Baier even admits that the two Réminiscence pieces, though they give us the “point of view of God,” are “only artifice since this image is but a supposition of what the sky looked like.”

Perhaps “Astérismes,” with its large amount of research on physics, would answer the question of whether mankind can create a sublime to match nature’s by reminding us that the universe is ever-expanding, its circumference an eternal elastic, and that though humanity will invent new technologies to simulate its grandeur, it is the universe that will implode and destroy all. And what’s more sublime than that?

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McGill and Enbridge

The ruling was has been lauded by Divest McGill, a student group campaigning for McGill to divest from fossil fuel corporations like Enbridge. McGill had invested $3.4 million in Enbridge according to McGill’s latest investment portfolio published in March 2016.

Divest McGill submitted petitions in 2013 and 2015, urging McGill’s Committee to Advise on Matters of Social Responsibility (CAMSR), to recommend to the Board of Governors (BoG) that McGill divest from fossil fuel corporations.

“There is not the degree or extent of injurious impact at this time that results from the activities of fossil fuel companies that would warrant a finding of grave injurious impact.”

Accompanying the 2015 petition was a 150 page document titled “Carbon at All Costs,” which outlined Divest McGill’s arguments and singled out Enbridge as a particularly harmful corporation, both environmentally and socially.

In response to that petition, CAMSR released a report to the BoG in March 2016, stating that divestment from fossil fuel companies “would not be an effective means of addressing climate change.”

“Arguably, cutting off access to fossil fuels would be more likely to result in grave injurious impact in the short-term than the continued reliance on fossil fuels.”

One reason the committee gave for this decision was that fossil fuel companies allegedly do not cause “social injury,” which CAMSR defines as a company’s “grave injurious impact” on “consumers, employees, other persons, or on the natural environment.”

“There is not the degree or extent of injurious impact at this time that results from the activities of fossil fuel companies that would warrant a finding of grave injurious impact,” the CAMSR report continued. “Arguably, cutting off access to fossil fuels would be more likely to result in grave injurious impact in the short-term than the continued reliance on fossil fuels.”

Grand Chief Stewart Phillip speaks out against CAMSR report

Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, President of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs, decried the CAMSR report. He states that McGill “should have been divesting [from fossil fuels] a decade ago.”

“Without question, we’re the canary in the mineshaft, because it’s impacting us the most since we’re more reliant on the land.”

He stressed that Indigenous people are the first to suffer the effects of climate change, adding that McGill’s refusal to divest is in a “contradiction” with the its launch of  an Indigenous Studies minor and its hosting of the Annual Indigenous Awareness Week.

“Our message has to be clear with respect to the urgency of climate change to Indigenous peoples,” he says. “Without question, we’re the canary in the mineshaft, because it’s impacting us the most since we’re more reliant on the land.”

“As an Indigenous leader, more importantly as a grandfather of 15 grandchildren, I applaud the efforts made to divest [McGill] from dirty oil money.”

The “inherent support [for fossil fuel companies] within major Canadian institutions, whether they be educational, economic, or media […is] disturbing,” Phillip says, and forms a network of support for neocolonialism.

Phillip made it clear that he doesn’t disapprove of everything happening at McGill however, commending Divest McGill’s actions after the publishing of CAMSR’s report. “As an Indigenous leader, more importantly as a grandfather of 15 grandchildren, I applaud the efforts made to divest [McGill] from dirty oil money.”

Looking ahead

Jed Lenetsky, a U2 Environmental Sciences student and Divest McGill organizer, echoed Grand Chief Stewart Phillip’s remarks, adding that, “It’s definitely very hypocritical and falls into the larger pattern of McGill professing concern for societal issues on campus while ignoring the impacts of their policies off campus.”

Lenetsky went on to note that “It’s indicative of McGill’s desire to address these issues in name only; if McGill truly and sincerely wants to do more to address these Indigenous and environmental crises, then more is required of them. Much more.”

“If McGill truly and sincerely wants to do more to address these Indigenous and environmental crises, then more is required of them.”

Although Jed admitted that he did not think that the Court of Appeal’s decision would significantly impact Divest McGill’s cause, he was optimistic, hoping that the decision might “create a domino effect for the denial of other fossil fuel projects in Canada” in the near future.

Grand Chief Phillip also spoke of a possible fossil-free future.

“As a grandfather, I want each and every one of them to think about their own children and grandchildren,” he stated. “We all have a duty and obligation to protect the interests of the future generations, and that work needs to start now. With respect to climate change, it should have started yesterday. And I want them to think very seriously about that.”

“With respect to climate change, it should have started yesterday. And I want them to think very seriously about that.”

A spokesperson from McGill could not be reached by the date of the article’s publication.

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According to The Globe and Mail, McGill received 170 ATI requests in 2012, a huge increase from the 37 it had received in 2011. In December 2012, the University submitted a motion to the Commission which would allow McGill to disregard ATI requests from any McGill student, any member of a McGill or Concordia University student newspaper, or anyone who “could reasonably be linked” to people who had made requests that McGill deemed problematic. In October 2013, this motion failed to pass.

“[Requests] are abusive because of their systemic character.”

The McGill administration argued that the requests were part of a coordinated attempt to overwhelm the University and waste its time and resources. The motion read that the requests “are abusive because of their systemic character,” and that the University had “serious grounds and reasons to believe that the same system will be used in the near future by the respondents and others in order to achieve the same illegitimate purposes.”

O’Neal believes that the University’s accusation that she was “participating in a complex system to undermine university functioning by overwhelming the system with access-to-information requests” was a ploy to avoid releasing sensitive information. “Many of us [the students deemed to be making so-called problematic requests] didn’t know each other,” O’Neal continued.

“There’s a lot of information and a lot more detail than we’ve ever really had before.”

Although O’Neal described the University’s allegation as “absurd,” she also expressed cautious optimism following the release of the documents.

“There’s a lot of information and a lot more detail than we’ve ever really had before,” she said. However, she added that “other current and former organizers of Demilitarize McGill are still waiting for their response to the access-to-information requests they made in 2012-2013.” The documents received pertain to requests that were made prior to 2013 which is “one of the most frustrating things about this information,” she added.

When asked about the documents’ contents, O’Neal said that she hadn’t had a chance to look through them thoroughly with other members of Demilitarize McGill. She elaborated, however, that “the nature of the documents that I have so far is extremely dense, [including] mathematical and engineering equations […done] by and for engineers.”

“Other current and former organizers of Demilitarize McGill are still waiting for their response to the access-to-information requests they made in 2012-2013.”

Also included in the documents are Powerpoint presentations and progress reports, mostly consisting of “presentations done by Professor [Wagdi] Habashi or his research assistants or PhD students,” according to O’Neal.

Professor Habashi is the director of the McGill Computational Fluid Dynamics (C.F.D.) Laboratory, and Demilitarize McGill has long documented his research. The group cited one of his articles on their website to demonstrate his involvement in military research, in which Professor Habashi noted that “UAV Missions during the NATO ‘engagement in Afghanistan’ were marked by mid-level icing encounters.’” According to Professor Habashi, this signalled “a need for new forms of ice protection, to be modeled and refined with FENSAP-ICE,” which refers to a technology he researches.

“I’m thinking I’ll find more juicy information about the applications and motivations for the research when McGill gives me 6,000 pages of emails that I’ll be looking at over the next few months.”

Demilitarize McGill hopes that information on Professor Habashi’s research will become clearer as they study the documents. “I haven’t found the nuggets of information that I’m looking for yet,” O’Neal stated.

However, O’Neal made it clear that for her, the best may be yet to come. “I’m thinking I’ll find more juicy information about the applications and motivations for the research when McGill gives me 6,000 pages of emails that I’ll be looking at over the next few months.”

The administration chose not to comment on the matter. Doug Sweet, Director of Internal Communications at the University, said in an email, “the University does not comment on matters that are or have been before a tribunal or court.”

Professor Habashi could not be reached for comment.

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