The Tariq Khan Drama

The Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) saw its fair share of the short-lived SSMU President Tariq Khan this year. Elections SSMU invalidated Khan’s election as SSMU President on April 1, 2014 – a week after he was elected president by a margin of only 78 votes – due to SSMU bylaw infractions committed during his campaign. The violations included the participation of individuals external to SSMU in his campaign, the sending of unsolicited text messages to the public – for which he had been censured on March 21, the last day of the campaign period – inconsistencies in campaign expenditures, and the impingement of the spirit of a fair campaign and of the voting process.

Following his invalidation, Khan filed an appeal with the SSMU Judicial Board (J-Board), which upheld his invalidation on April 29. Khan later took this issue to the Superior Court of Quebec and filed a request on May 29 for a preliminary injunction to reinstate him as SSMU President until the full hearing for a permanent injunction. The Court dismissed his application on June 3, reasoning that his reinstatement would have incurred additional costs and caused undue inconvenience on the part of SSMU. Khan later withdrew his court case in October before its full hearing due to financial motivations and the decreasing timeliness of the case.

Khan resurfaced on the first day of the 2015-16 SSMU elections when screenshots of a Facebook conversation were released on reddit, revealing recently-elected SSMU President Kareem Ibrahim’s suggestion to hack Khan’s Facebook account last year. Upon news of the screenshots, he revealed his intentions to update the police report that he filed after his account was allegedly hacked on March 27, 2014.

—Emma Noradounkian

Campus unions get moving

Compared with 2011’s McGill University Non-Academic Certified Association (MUNACA) strike, the past few years have been fairly quiet on the union front. This year, however, has seen a flurry of activity at McGill unions.
Floor fellows began a union drive over a year ago in November 2013, driven by the University’s earlier push for a change in residence models. Since then, floor fellows have succeeded at forming a union, and joined the Association of McGill University Support Employees (AMUSE) last May. The process, however, has not been without hiccups: this January,collective agreement negotiations between the University and the floor fellows bargaining unit stalled over the exclusion of the “core values” of floor fellows (namely their anti-oppressive mandate and harm reduction approach) from the proposed agreement. The negotiations have started again and are currently ongoing.

McGill’s Teaching Union, AGSEM, has also been working to unionize undergraduate teaching support staff, which include course graders, note-takers, and teaching assistants (TAs). Despite receiving support from post-grads and undergrads, the process has not been without tensions: McGill challenged AGSEM’s promotion of its own union campaign due to disputing interpretations of the Quebec Labour Code. At the date of publication, the union drive is still ongoing.
This year also saw a merger between AMUSE and MUNACA, despite some internal trepidation over their differing sizes. Joint bylaws are on the way.

—Molly Korab

“I cannot celebrate the status quo of mental health support at McGill.”

The mental health landscape at McGill for the 2014-15 academic year has been a disappointing one. Though a working group was struck under the purview of Senate in October 2013, most of the recommendations issued by the group in June 2014 have yet to be implemented. Of the 36 initiatives on the roster, only two have been completed, the first being the development of a student services app, and the second publicly presented only as “further [development] of a robust early alert program.”

While both the administration and student government have been pursuing mental health services reform, they do not appear to be working closely. SSMU VP University Affairs Claire Stewart-Kanigan told The Daily in October, around the time the University announced its intention to create a ‘wellness portal,’ that the relationship between the two was “a consultative arrangement, not a partnership. Given that SSMU is named as a partner on the website, consultation is not enough.”

There have been no updates on the ‘wellness portal,’ projected to be launched in Winter 2015.

Most of the visible events that have taken place this year – in particular, the second annual Students In Mind conference on mental health in October and the Mental Health Awareness Week in November – were largely student-driven and student-led initiatives. Additionally, the most vocal advocates for mental health reform have been students.

In addition to managing the planning and execution of the Mental Health Awareness Week, Stewart-Kanigan oversaw the successful launch of SSMU’s new mental health department, which involved the hire of a coordinator and the development of a mental health listserv to promote peer and professional support services for students and forward student-led anti-stigma initiatives.

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—Emily Saul

Tense debates at General Assemblies

After years of SSMU General Assemblies (GAs) that have failed to reach quorum or present particularly political motions, portions of this year’s GAs saw huge turnout – with over 700 students attending the Fall 2014 GA and over 500 students at the Winter 2015 GA – as well as plenty of controversy.

Most notably, both GAs saw motions that poked at the long-dormant Israel-Palestine divide on campus. At the Fall 2014 GA, a motion to stand in solidarity with the people of the occupied Palestinian territories and condemn Israel’s violence toward Palestine over the summer was postponed indefinitely, with 402 in favour and 337 against, after hours of debate. At the Winter 2015 GA, a motion to divest from companies profiting from the illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories garnered the endorsement of many campus groups (including The Daily), but failed by only 64 votes.

Despite the intense attention given to these two motions, a number of other political motions passed, mandating SSMU to take action on diverse issues such as unpaid internships, military research, climate change, and austerity. SSMU also saw a J-Board challenge after the contentious postponement of the Fall 2014 Palestine motion, where the judicial body ruled that simplified standing rules should be adopted and publicized at GAs to better facilitate debate.
More broadly, this year’s GAs have prompted a campus-wide (and still ongoing) dialogue on the political role of the student union – which most notably played itself out in the recent 2015-16 SSMU executive elections – with some students questioning whether SSMU should take stances on ‘divisive’ political issues.

—Dana Wray

Students against austerity

This year has seen a whirlwind of opposition against austerity measures and budget cuts set in place by the Liberal provincial government, which have reduced funding to social services, including welfare, healthcare, and education. In the fall, as part of an ongoing push that began even before this academic year, students at UQAM organized a group to allow students and community members to work together to protest these cuts: the Comité Printemps 2015, which helped mobilize around 80,000 students to go on strike on Halloween, and over 80,000 students planned to strike against austerity during March and April. This mobilization has not evaded McGill, as French language and literature students recently voted to go on strike for a week, and other departments have planned strike votes.

These student initiatives contrast with the stance taken by the McGill administration, which has been accommodating of austerity measures. McGill has been making cuts of its own, after undergoing $45 million in cuts from the provincial government over the last four years. The results of these cuts have been felt by workers at McGill, as the administration has set up a hiring freeze, decreasing the number of jobs available, and increasing the workloads of many employees. To combat the administration’s decrease in the number of full-time jobs at McGill, as well as the fact that many positions with benefits have been replaced with lower-paid, part-time jobs that do not receive benefits, AMURE recently voted to start a fund for counselling services for its members.

In response to the austerity measures taken by both McGill and the Quebec government SSMU and the Post-Graduate Students’ Society (PGSS) have taken stances against the government’s measures and asked McGill to oppose these huge cuts. At the SSMU Fall 2014 GA, students voted to add advocating against austerity to the portfolio of the VP External, and SSMU has since hosted an anti-austerity activities night to show students just how wide-reaching the damaging effects of austerity can be.

—Jill Bachelder

Sustainability at McGill

Many important initiatives that began in previous years were continued and strengthened over the course of this one. Divest McGill helped organize a bus to take McGill and Concordia students to the People’s Climate March in New York City, where over 400,000 people marched in the streets of Manhattan to protest the United Nations Climate Summit and raise awareness about global warming. Divest also submitted a new petition for McGill to divest from fossil fuel companies to the Board of Governors (BoG), making a comeback two years after its first petition was presented to, and rejected by, the BoG. In addition, over 100 faculty members signed on to an open letter submitted to the BoG in support of divestment.

SSMU also continued its efforts to promote sustainability on campus, starting a composting program in the Shatner building, and joining Étudiant(e)s contre les oléoducs (ÉCO), after the a motion passed at the Fall 2014 GA that mandated SSMU to stand alongside groups combatting climate change.

Finally, the McGill Office of Sustainability launched its Vision 2020 program, an initiative aiming to create a more sustainable McGill by the year 2020.

—Jill Bachelder

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Only a few years ago did the growing clout of the U.S.’s for-profit prison industry come into sharp relief. 2011 and 2012 saw a flurry of investigative journalism documenting the industry’s political influence, combined with its steadily increasing prison expansion over the course of several decades.

Less apparent in the media landscape, though, are the financial holdings that keep the system of private incarceration running. The two largest for-profit prison companies in the U.S. – the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group – are publicly traded. Investors range from cities, to investment firms, to mainstream banking institutions and hedge funds.

And perhaps unexpectedly, mixed into the fray of investors in these companies’ portfolios, there are universities. Students at some American universities have found concrete evidence of their schools’ investments in the prison industry, and there are certainly others where the investment portfolios have yet to be revealed.

Divestment push at Columbia

A student group at Columbia University discovered in 2013 that the university was not only invested in CCA, but also G4S, a British multinational accused of abuse of prisoners in its South African prisons. The group’s information was limited: they knew that in June 2013, Columbia held 230,432 shares in CCA, worth a market value of roughly $8 million, but they only have access to 10 per cent of the university’s investment portfolio.

“We outlined three main demands that we delivered to our [university] president in a letter in February,” said Gabriela Pelsinger, a core organizer with Columbia Prison Divest. “We saw that they had these investments, and we didn’t want our tuition, our school – our community – profiting off of what we see as profit from putting bodies in cages.”

The letter demanded that the university divest from its direct holdings in CCA and G4S. It also requested that university fund managers urge other companies the university is invested in to divest from private prison companies, and asked for more transparency in the university’s investments.

Since then, the group has been working within their community and with neighbouring organizations to shed light on the structures of mass incarceration – to, as Pelsinger put it, see how “these structures of incarceration and criminalization and profit work together and how we fit into it. And how us being kind of aloof college students at this university kind of played into these larger structures.”

“Our objective is to break the lobbying power of the private prison industry, so that we can get to a place where criminal justice reform and immigration policy reform are possible in a way that will allow people to live with dignity.”

Columbia Prison Divest has been negotiating with the university’s ethical investments committee, and succeeded in meeting with the university’s president in November 2014. They have also been working with the Responsible Endowments Coalition (REC), a national organization that focuses on university divestment.

“University investments have become increasingly complex,” Ian Trupin, a national organizer with REC, told The Daily. “In the eighties, most universities had most of their endowments invested directly in the stock market – so it was relatively easy to see what universities were invested in. […] Universities [now] invest in vehicles like hedge funds, commingled funds, whereby they’re all about maximizing returns, but there’s no emphasis whatsoever on transparency or accountability.”

A spreading campaign

While current prison divestment campaigns are small in number, there are more on the horizon. The Daily spoke with student organizers at two separate universities who are spearheading upcoming campaigns. The organizers spoke to the difficulty of obtaining information on university investments, both direct and indirect, and the importance of building a network of support before going public.

“We’ve been trying to get support under a veil at this point,” one organizer at a private university in the northeastern U.S. (who requested anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the upcoming campaign) said. This support has come from certain deans, administrative units tasked with supporting diversity and students of colour, and other student groups.

Beyond prison divestment, the movement will push against the criminalizing elements of university policy – promoting a “ban the box” campaign for university employees, and lobbying to banish regulations that allow for the revoking of financial aid when students are convicted of drug misdemeanours.

Nancy Uddin, another organizer in a public university in the northeastern U.S., began her school’s campaign after a retreat with groups like Enlace, which runs the most prominent prison divestment campaign in the country, and REC. The fledgling campaign has requested information about its university’s investments under the Freedom of Information Act, and is still waiting on a response before taking further steps.

“We’ve been meeting down low and discussing ways to begin our campaign, and we haven’t been publicized because we don’t want to scare anyone off or tell the administration that we are coming,” she told The Daily.

Is divestment enough?

While G4S did not respond to an email request for comment from The Daily by press time, CCA pushed back against private prison divestment.

“Discussions about important issues such as criminal justice and corrections are only productive when informed by facts and rooted in honest discourse,” Jonathan Burns, Senior Manager of Public Affairs at CCA, told The Daily by email. “These campaigns are yet another unfortunate example of the lack of seriousness with which political activists approach the very real and practical challenges our nation faces.”

Mariame Kaba, the director of Project NIA in Chicago, which works against youth incarceration, and who tweets and blogs under the handle Prison Culture, noted the limited scope of prison divestment campaigns.

“The concept that prisons are about profit-making [is] putting us in a place where I think it’s comfortable for people who are liberal to latch onto that as the thing,” she told The Daily. “But the focus isn’t on profit-making. It’s on the friggin’ inhumanity of locking people up in the first place. It’s on the root problem, which is that we are actually using prison systems and punishment systems to control, manage, and oppress […] black people, poor people, and people who are trans, LGBTQ.”

However, Jamie Trinkle, Campaign Coordinator at Enlace, noted that to a large degree, private prison divestment campaigns do not aim to end the prison-industrial complex as a whole.

“Our objective is to break the lobbying power of the private prison industry,” she said, “so that we can get to a place where criminal justice reform and immigration policy reform are possible in a way that will allow people to live with dignity.”

Private prison companies – CCA being the most prominent – engage in extensive lobbying, campaign contributions, and political relationships, with their political influence largely being used in the interest of securing contracts for prisons, detention centres, and other security-related ventures. According to a Justice Policy Institute report, the three largest private prison companies spent $6,092,331 in gifts for state politicians from 2000 to 2011.

While many of the companies’ lobbying efforts have been focused on securing contracts in both prisons and immigration detention centres, they also benefit from harsher legislation that increases incarceration and criminalization overall.

Within this context, prison divestment campaigns will continue to spring up, with a continuing push for anti-private prison activism, compounded by the as-of-yet unseen investments hidden within university portfolios.

Ultimately, though, prison divestment makes up one piece of the spectrum of prison abolition. “This is not the end-all, be-all,” Kaba said. “The thing is, this is one way for us to chip at the huge behemoth of an issue that has its roots in the basic fabric in how our societies are operated and how they’re structured. This is a window for us to use – to try to get people to care about this issue in a very significant way. ”

A previous version of this article stated that REC was a university divestment campaign. In fact, REC is an organization that supports several campaigns. The Daily regrets the error.

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The students, who attended a rural teaching school known for its revolutionary politics, disappeared after being attacked in September by local police suspected to be affiliated with criminal networks. The attack left six dead and 43 missing; a motive for the attack remains undetermined. Last weekend, a mass grave was discovered with at least 28 badly disfigured bodies, feared to be the missing students.

The tragedy has sparked nationwide and global protests. Many have pointed to the incident as evidence of endemic corruption, lawlessness, and the Mexican state’s failure to protect its citizens.

“I think it’s the tip of the iceberg. It’s a small sample of what is happening in Mexico,” Dagoberto Acevedo Hernandez, a Mexican studying in Montreal, told The Daily in French.

“The situation in Mexico is impossible… it’s truly terrorism,” Leticia Vera, a Mexican attendee at the vigil who has been living in Montreal for eight years, told The Daily in French. “Everything is out of control… it’s just organized crime and narco-politique.”

The crowd formed a circle outside of the entrance of the consulate, chanting, singing, and listening to speakers, who mostly spoke in Spanish. The mood was sombre, but angry. Later in the event, attendees joined hands in a moment of silence to commemorate the missing students, some holding Mexican flags and others handwritten signs.

“We will not forget,” a woman standing toward the side of the crowd called to the others in Spanish. Attendees later chanted together, remembering the victims and calling for justice.

Tealights and candles lined the outside wall of the building alongside photo printouts of the missing students. A banner hung overhead, reading “stop the terrorism of the Mexican state,” in French.

“It’s very obvious that there’s no longer any rights, that justice is no longer respected in Mexico,” Patricia Vejar, a Mexican student at the Université de Montréal who helped organize the event, told The Daily in Spanish.

Approximately 70,000 Mexicans have died over the past few years in the drug wars, according to estimates. The Mexican government has been ineffective in the combat against the cartels and criminal networks terrorizing the country. State agents – such as the army and municipal police forces – are plagued by corruption and often complicit in the violence.

Vejar called for action, not only on the part of the Mexican government, but also other states, particularly Canada and the U.S.. “Why won’t they help Mexico?” she asked. “They go there to exploit natural resources, but they won’t help people.”

She also spoke to the importance of seeking justice for the missing students and protesting the Mexican government, even from afar. “I love my country, I love my homeland,” she said. “Even though I’m here, I’m still thinking of my homeland – I’m still Mexican.”

[flickr id=”72157648160468157″]

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The vigil marked six years since Fredy Villanueva, an unarmed 18-year-old, was shot by Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) officer Jean-Loup Lapointe after police approached Villanueva and his friends while they were playing an illegal game of dice. Neither Villanueva, nor those he was with at the time – his brother and friends – were armed.

Villanueva’s murder continued a longstanding tendency toward racial profiling on the part of the SPVM, particularly within the Montreal North area, which is home to various racialized communities.

“I came here to contain my anger,” Monique, an attendant at the vigil, told The Daily in French. “Because I am a mother of three, a grandmother of three – I am an educator, a social worker [intervenant social], I am of African descent. […] There are these historic elements that have made it so the police shoot at us.”

Multiple families were present at the vigil, which began before dusk with a candlelit memorial standing alongside soccer games in the adjacent park. The vigil took place at the spot where Villaneuva died, in the parking lot of the arena. Small children and adults wrote in chalk on the ground next to the memorial, tracing out names, small messages, and drawings.

Nearby, two SPVM officers watched from their bikes – a source of frustration for some, such as one man who stated that the “surveillance” was unwelcome.

“There hasn’t been justice. There isn’t justice.”

Alex Popovic, from the Coalition against Repression and Abuse by Police, spoke to denounce the City of Montreal’s failure to implement the recommendations given in the coroner’s report regarding the case. The 2013 report recommended the creation of an action plan to fight poverty and social exclusion in Montreal North.

“How can we move on when we know that the City of Montreal and the Montreal North borough have both decided not to follow up on [the coroner’s recommendation]?” Popovic told the gathering in French. “The City of Montreal’s nonchalance is all the more aberrant when we recall that [Montreal mayor] Denis Coderre has represented Montreal North’s citizens at the federal parliament for 16 years before becoming mayor. Were I in his position, I would be very ashamed of having turned my back on [this community].”

“But in spite of the impatience and frustration that we sometimes feel, we remain determined to go give it our all for justice for Fredy Villanueva,” added Popovic.

The vigil had the air of a small community gathering, attracting fewer people than the vigils for Villanueva in years past. Some there were family, others activists, and many came in solidarity, such as one family residing in Rosemont, who didn’t know Villanueva before he died, but have been coming to the vigils for the past six years.

“You’re asking if the criminals have been sentenced, indicted – if there has been justice? No,” one member of the family said in Spanish, responding to a question posed by The Daily. “The police killed [him] in cold blood. Because this is what they wanted – to shoot a bullet at a boy who didn’t have a gun, who didn’t have anything.”

“Because me, I can’t kill a person just because I have some sort of quarrel, or because of profanity. I can’t even hit them, let alone take a gun – [a gun that is] supposed to ‘maintain order.’”

“There hasn’t been justice,” he said. “There isn’t justice.”

While Lapointe, the officer who shot Fredy Villanueva, has been cleared of any responsibility and has faced little consequence for his actions, the coroner’s report found ‘human error’ in multiple aspects of Villanueva’s death. The report recommended multifaceted reforms at the SPVM, including giving police officers training for the appropriate use of force, and training in dealing with racialized groups with a history of being unjustly targeted.

Monique, reflecting on the time since Villanueva’s death, spoke to continuing institutional racism on the part of police.

“Our children, our grandchildren, are subject to be confined in one way or another,” she said. “And that will continue until their death.”

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Due to multiple campaign violations on behalf of Tariq Khan, who won the Winter 2014 Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) presidential election on March 21 by a margin of only 78 votes, the runner-up Courtney Ayukawa is now the president-elect. Elections SSMU has invalidated the results of the Winter 2014 presidential election; this was announced in an email sent out to the student body.

The email, sent out on April 1 by Ben Fung, Elections SSMU’s Chief Electoral Officer, stated that Khan’s campaign “did not reflect the spirit of a fair campaign and compromised the integrity of the election,” and the body had decided to invalidate the results based on SSMU’s bylaw regulations.

Although Fung refused to disclose the details of the campaign violations, they included “involvement of individuals external to [SSMU] in Mr. Khan’s campaign, unsolicited messages regarding campaigning sent out to members of the Society[,] inconsistencies with campaign expenditures[, and] impingement of the spirit of a fair campaign and of the voting process.”

Notably, the infractions listed did not include Khan’s original censure. On March 21, the last day of campaigning and the day of the elections results, Khan was publicly censured by Elections SSMU for violating campaign bylaws.

According to an email sent out by Fung on behalf of Elections SSMU regarding the original censure, Khan had “explicitly asked a non-campaign committee member to send unsolicited text messages to members of the public.”

However, Fung told The Daily that the bylaw infractions for which Khan was disqualified come from inquiries and investigations conducted by Elections SSMU.

“At the point of elections results, all of the information that we were made aware of, or all of the leads that we possibly had, had already been investigated,” he told The Daily. “At the point of the elections results, we had followed through with our due diligence, and at that point we didn’t have any issues. It’s since the time following the elections results – it’s been a rolling process – that we’ve been made aware of additional information.”

The invalidation comes after a case was filed against Elections SSMU in SSMU’s Judicial Board, though the case was still in the preliminary stages, as the Judicial Board had not yet decided whether to move forward with the proceedings.

The case alleged that Elections SSMU did not hold up the spirit of a free and fair campaign, and featured numerous complaints against Khan, the details of which have yet to be made public.

The case was spearheaded by incoming SSMU VP Finance & Operations Kathleen Bradley.

She told The Daily that she had the support of “about 20” people who got together after the results to strategize.

“It was a group of people [from] across all the other campaign teams, and it was really great to see it wasn’t about an individual candidate or platform,” she said. “People just really wanted to see the most qualified candidate win. There were a lot of feelings of injustice.”

“[Executives] should really be the upstanding citizens of the student body, and the other three candidates really demonstrated that,” she continued. “So it was pretty disappointing for me, and I think a couple of the other executive, to see that that didn’t come through in the election results.”

However, Bradley told The Daily that she would not continue to petition the Judicial Board case in light of Khan’s recent invalidation.

Ayukawa, the new president-elect, reacted positively to Elections SSMU’s decision to invalidate the results, specifically in regard to the cohesiveness of next year’s SSMU executive.

“If anything, the [executive] team might function better, and that’s because of the lack of trust that hasn’t been established yet, which I’m fairly confident that I’ve established with a lot of the other candidates already,” she told The Daily in a joint interview with the McGill Tribune.

Ayukawa also spoke to implementing many of Khan’s campaign ideas, though she expressed that she has not communicated with him in a personal capacity since the election results.

“He had some really great ideas and some really valid concerns for next year,” she said. “A lot of [his campaign] seemed to be a lot of retraining councillors to better access their constituents, and better represent their constituents, which is directly related to [my] communication point.”

Ayukawa declined to comment when asked if she thought the recent upset would have any effect on her presidency.

There is little precedent for this situation; the last time elections results were invalidated by Elections SSMU, according to Fung, was in 2004.

There are five days available after an election’s invalidation for appeals, according to Ayukawa and Fung.

Khan could not be reached for comment by press time.

Update: On April 7, Khan released a statement to the media regarding the invalidation of the election.

“On April 1st, 2014, Elections SSMU sent all students a message announcing my invalidation as SSMU’s President-elect. I will be the first to acknowledge that my campaign has not been without fault and first to express the importance of respecting both the spirit and technical aspects of democratic process.  However, I must express my firm disappointment with the nature, language, and methods through which accusations have been levied towards not only my campaign but also my person. I wish to assure all members of the Society, regardless of their participation in the election, that I am taking these claims very seriously.

I will be working closely with an advocate to take swift and appropriate actions to ensure that, for at least my part, I have and will continue to do all I am capable of for democracy on McGill’s campus to remain undeterred.”

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“We are pleased with the compromise with McGill.”

Sean Cory, president of the Association of McGill University Research Assistants (AMURE)

Satisfaction with compromise is not something our writers are used to hearing from unions on their negotiations with the University. Nevertheless, in January of this year, Sean Cory, president of the Association of McGill University Research Employees (AMURE), expressed satisfaction with an agreement made between labour unions and McGill to avoid harsh salary decreases for low-paid employees, which would have otherwise occurred as a result of proposed changes to the payroll frequency. The payroll compromise has been a high point in a relatively slow, and at times frustrating, year for labour at McGill.

This year saw the beginning of a campaign by AGSEM: McGill’s Teaching Union to unionize note-takers, graders, tutors, and undergraduate course assistants, responding to concerns about their current pay and work conditions. In October of last year, AGSEM’s invigilator unit also unenthusiastically signed its first collective agreement – though it filed a grievance against McGill only a week later when the University violated the agreement – while AGSEM’s course lecturer unit split off to form an independent union.

The years-long back-and-forth between unions and the administration over pay equity escalated this year in a challenge of the University’s pay equity adjustment calculations for 2001-05 by the McGill University Non-Academic Certified Association (MUNACA). This concluded in an agreement that will give McGill until February 2015 to account for employees who were not considered in the first round of calculations.

Beyond our own campus, at the University of New Brunswick (UNB), we watched for a full three weeks in January as professors and library staff went on strike mainly to advocate for fairer salaries for UNB professors. The Daily editorialized on the issue, urging students to resist an all-too-common rhetoric that pits students’ interests against those of workers.

This year, like any other, McGill unions have negotiated for their members’ best interests. These institutions provide a level of support and bargaining power for many workers at the university, and their value cannot be ignored by the student body that shares its space with these groups.

—Jill Bachelder and E.k. Chan

“The motion was clearly an abuse of power on McGill’s part […] They basically wanted to have the law rewritten to suit their needs.”

Mona Luxion, ATI respondent

This year saw a continued struggle to access information at McGill – but the fight is not yet over. In January, the University settled a case that had been before the Commission d’accès à l’information du Québec since last year, agreeing to uphold long sought-after access to information (ATI) requests, and release documents related to military research, fossil fuel investments, and sexual assault complaints, among others.

The settlement came after the University refused to uphold such requests, instead accusing students, journalists, and other interested parties of filing requests in a “systematic” and “abusive” manner. In arguing its case to the Commission, the University requested the power to deny all future requests from a blanket group of students and their associates. This power, however, is legally unprecedented, as only the Commission can make that sort of delegation.

The Commission ruled against the University in October, though the University sought an appeal – which later turned into a settlement, something respondents alleged was a “decision to cut its losses.” According to the settlement, documents would be released starting at the end of February up until the summer.

The most recent documents released by the University have been heavily redacted, to the point of being unreadable, due to concerns about the release of information related to third parties. The next few months will tell if information continues to be limited, or if the long-standing requests will finally be fulfilled.

—Molly Korab

“Direct action costs them money, and the more expensive we make it for them, the closer we get to winning.”

Amanda Lickers, organizer at Swamp Line 9

Two years after the protest-heavy academic year of 2011-12, direct action continues to be a tactic of choice for student groups. However, direct action has also faced a increasingly hostile environment courtesy of the administration. In 2013, McGill adopted two documents, commonly called the protest protocol, that limit the scope and the types of direct action on campus. Outcry from campus and civil rights groups did not alter the protocol, and it still remains in effect today.

Some campus groups, such as Divest McGill – which seeks to pressure the University to divest from fossils fuels – and Demilitarize McGill – which aims to stop military research at the university – still protest on campus. In addition to workshops, petitions, and other forms of action, Divest McGill held a bike rally earlier this year. The group Support Our Staff at McGill (SOS-McGill) also handed out letters outside of a Senate meeting. February saw the blockade of the Petrocultures conference, where demonstrators unfurled a banner outside the Faculty Club to protest fossil fuel extraction.

The bike rally, the demonstration outside of Senate, and the Petrocultures blockade went off with little to no blowback from the administration, but not all demonstrations got off scot-free. A few weeks ago, on March 14, Demilitarize McGill blockaded the Aerospace Mechatronics Laboratory after revelations that some researchers in the Lab conducted military-funded research related to drones. The peaceful blockade lasted almost four hours, but the administration eventually called the police to campus to shut down the protest.

—Dana Wray

“The Charter of [rights and freedoms] protects the right to freedom of expression, but there is no right to protest.”

SPVM spokesperson Jean-Bruno Latour, in French to La Presse

Although the municipal bylaw P-6 has been in effect since 2001, the city only saw the grim results of its stipulations on March 15, 2013 when the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) used the bylaw to shut down the annual anti-police brutality march.

On that date, the police kettled – sectioned off and detained different parts of the crowd – and doled out fines of $637 to the demonstrators. According to the SPVM website, bylaw P-6 prohibits any participant at a demonstration – defined as an assembly, parade, or gathering – from covering their face; this includes scarves, hoods, and masks. Additionally, it is mandatory to disclose the location and itinerary of a demonstration to the police at least 24 hours beforehand. Failure to comply with these requirements results in the demonstration being declared illegal, and potentially a heavy fine for demonstrators.

The bylaw was most visibly enforced at the height of the Maple Spring – the Quebec student strikes of 2012 – and has since been cited by many as extraordinarily repressive. Last year, 78 community groups endorsed a public statement issued by the Anti-capitalist convergence in Montreal (CLAC) that called for solidarity against police repression in Montreal. Although the bylaw is largely associated with the Maple Spring, its enforcement continues to make waves, such as during this year’s anti-police brutality march, which was shut down within minutes of its initiation.

Currently, collective defences and class action lawsuits that plead not guilty are challenging the legality of the arrests and the conditions of detention in last year’s kettles. The lawsuits are just beginning to be heard in court, and many other individuals are challenging their tickets without a lawyer. CLAC, an advocate for individual challenges of tickets, continues to host workshops, sharing information on how to defend oneself, and what to do in case of arrest.

—Hera Chan

Year in review: News | Commentary | Culture | Features | Sci+Tech | Health&Ed | Sports

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The post The year in quotes appeared first on The McGill Daily.

She now works with formerly incarcerated women at the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Collaborating Centre for Prison Health and Education, helping the women take care of their healthcare needs within the first three days of release.

The first 72 hours are a critical step in protecting many prisoners from relapse. Because so many are imprisoned due to addiction-related issues, those three days are also crucial in terms of ensuring quality, continuous healthcare.

If the prison system were to meet a rehabilitative ideal, the transition from prison to mainstream society would be seamless. It would be taken care of entirely by the state, with the goal of preventing recidivism – or relapse in criminal behaviour that often ends in re-imprisonment. Even though crime rates have been on the decline since the early 1990s, the Harper government implemented a “tough on crime” policy that involved both cuts to the prison system and a skyrocketing prison population. Far from prioritizing the needs of prisoners, such an attitude sidelines their most basic well-being by failing to provide adequate healthcare. Quite frankly, most governments in the world don’t, because for most people, prisoners are criminals, and criminals are considered the scourge of society.

“When we see a growth in the population, not only do we see an increase in the number of men and women going to prison, we’re also seeing an increase in the amount of time that they stay [there],” said Howard Sapers, the correctional investigator of Canada, whose office oversees the corrections system and is charged with evaluating the system through a human rights lens.

“This is very important for Corrections because the health profile of federally-sentenced offenders is a far different health profile than Canadians as a whole. Offenders tend to […] have more illness […] – they tend to have more complex health demands.”

Sapers’ office fields over 20,000 corrections-related complaints per year. And although prisoners are an incredibly vulnerable and high-needs population in terms of healthcare, the need hasn’t translated. Healthcare complaints, particularly complaints regarding access to healthcare in prison, make up the biggest category of complaints that the correctional investigator’s office receives.

Peter Collins has been imprisoned for the past 30 years in Ontario. During his time in prison, he has worked as a peer health counsellor and has been an outspoken voice for prisoner justice. In 2008, he won a Human Rights award from the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network and Human Rights Watch due to his work in prisoner health education. Peter spoke plainly about the challenges that prisoners face in acquiring decent healthcare.

“It’s always been a challenge to be seen by healthcare at all the prisons that I’ve been in, and it’s getting worse now that there’s less money and more people being squeezed into these places,” he says. “But before that, aside from the recognition that there’s obviously […] some good nurses and doctors working in these places, the culture of prison lends itself to being dismissive and not really attentive, or being non-responsive to people’s needs.”

“[Healthcare] is not a priority, and it’s because they don’t care about us,” he added. And for that indifference, Peter blames a society that stigmatizes anyone who passes through the prison system.

“You can see that in society’s general stance toward prisoners. We’ve educated ourselves as a society to consider anybody who’s been convicted of a crime to be some kind of pariah not deserving of many, many things – and it’s just so ingrained in our social structure that often taking away certain things is viewed as the right thing to do by the majority of people who don’t think about it. Because they’ve been desensitized to the fact that there’s people in these places, and that these people are their brothers, fathers, mothers, sisters, children.”

Not only are prisoners’ needs just as urgent as those who are not imprisoned, the health of prisoners is intrinsically linked with public health; the overwhelming majority of prisoners are eventually released and then need to be reintegrated into society. Their health issues are a matter of public health, and the debate over whether or not we should “care” about prisoners should be recognized as utterly irrelevant.

Anne* spent almost 20 years in and out of the prison system, and was most recently in a mixed federal-provincial level women’s prison in BC. She’s been out for five years now, and works as a peer health counsellor to help women transition their healthcare needs from prison to reintegration.

Her story begins with problems that she attributes to a challenging childhood, leading her to make decisions that took her into prison for nearly two decades of her life.

“I ended up getting involved with drugs at a very young age – like 12 or 13 – and I left home at like 15,” she said.

“By the time I hit 24, I had been in prison half a dozen times, but once I hit 24, I began chemical addictions. I was into heroin and a cocaine addict, and I used to do property crimes – shoplifting, sell drugs, fraud – to support my addiction. So I was in and out of corrections all the time.”

Anne’s addictions also led her to contract Hepatitis C, which contributed to her poor health. Although she was never in prison for a particularly long time, she got trapped in the “revolving door” of recidivism and corrections – an issue closely linked to the problems with continuity of healthcare once outside prison walls.

“I started out with small sentences, like 30 days, 60 days, and my sentences didn’t really get that big, but it was consistent. Sometimes, the longest I could stay out was two months – three months was like a record for me.”

But for Anne, prison provided her with more resources to rehabilitate herself than those available to her on the outside. She associates this with a sense of stability that she found everyday life lacked. And many former prisoners said that maintaining their health behind bars provided them a sense of agency over their own bodies – a sense of ownership and personal control that’s typically lost in the highly-regulated prison environment.

“I never saw any healthcare providers when I was on the street. I would go to prison and I would get tests done, and start looking after my health, start getting healthy, looking good, feeling good, and then, boom, I’d get kicked out of the door with absolutely nothing but the clothes on my back and nowhere to go.”

“A lot of people say, ‘Oh, prison’s so bad,’ but I don’t say that because prison saved my life,” she said. “It saved my life numerous times. […] I wouldn’t care if I went to prison. I would be using as hard as I could, as much as I could, and I didn’t care how much crime I did, because I really didn’t care if I got caught.”

But while some people, like Anne, find that their health benefits from time in prison, not everyone has the same experience. Prisoners face rates of HIV and Hepatitis C 10 and 30 times higher (respectively) than that of the general Canadian population, often due to sharing needles – both behind bars and in the outside world.

In prison, healthcare works differently. Prisoners must file requests to see a doctor. Because doctors are typically busy, they often end up seeing nurses, and sometimes, serious issues fall through the cracks. Prisoners have little power to see a doctor of their own initiative, because they first have to be approved to see one.

Tammy spent about ten years in the provincial and federal systems, serving multiple sentences. While in prison, her health and well-being came at the expense of security concerns.

During her sentence, Tammy came down with what felt like a cold. In her mind, though, going to see a doctor was not worth the trouble.

“After you’ve dealt with healthcare a number of times in prison, you never get the same doctor twice, there’s all kinds of things, like you kind of have to almost be half-dying before you even bother, because it’s not worth it, right?”

Soon – after about three days – she found she wasn’t getting any better, and she put in a request to see a doctor. Because her symptoms appeared to align with those of a common cold or flu, she never saw a doctor.

“At that point, I was so deathly ill that I couldn’t even get out of bed. Like it was terrible. And so then, the correctional officers that work on the living units were like, ‘Oh my god, what is wrong with you?’ Like eight days later.” Tammy was taken to the emergency room after about two days – though the process of getting to the hospital was much slower, due to security concerns.

“When I got to the hospital, because you’re handcuffed and shackled, which means you’re chained around your ankles, and all of those things are attached to something called a belly chain, which goes around your waist, so you’re attached to all that, so of course when I got to the hospital the treatment was –” she paused, taking a deep breath, “Holy smokes, jeez, even thinking about this stuff makes me emotional because I haven’t thought about it in so long.”

“Of course I was treated as a sub-par human being, because people are scared,” she continued. “They’re scared of what they don’t know, right? And then it took ten hours to get into the emergency [room], and when I did I had to have emergency surgery right then and there – I almost died.”

“I had the surgery all handcuffed and shackled to the table, which was crazy, and the guard even wanted to come in with me, but the doctor was kind enough to let me have a modicum of respect and privacy and told the guard no, to wait outside the door, that I would be fine. […] I didn’t have to stay overnight – they sent me back to prison right away with instructions on how to stay well. And they gave me a prescription for painkillers, which I was not allowed to have in prison because they were a narcotic-based painkiller, so they didn’t let me have them.”

Instead, Tammy says, she took over-the-counter painkillers after her surgery – and never received any follow-up treatment. While the use of narcotics in prisons is limited, again, because of security concerns, spending on prescription medications within the healthcare system has gone up overall, according to Sapers.

And according to Tammy, the most proactive healthcare that she and many other prisoners received while incarcerated was in the form of prescriptions for psychotropic medication.

“If you talk about the fact that you feel depressed or down, they immediately want to put you on some type of medication so that you’re not an issue for security within the prison,” she said. “[But] I don’t know all the inner-workings of the correctional system, I just know what happened to me.”

The increase in spending on prescription medications appears to largely be related to mental health concerns, as several regions of the country – particularly the Atlantic region – have seen a spike in the use of psychotropic medications.

Tammy, who now works as a peer health counsellor with women upon release, hears of the same patterns continuing.

“When [women] come out, I hear the same stuff, like, ‘Oh my god, it would just be easier if I was – you know, you have to be half-dead before I want to go to healthcare.’ […] You have to go through this whole line of security, right? First, you have to get through the guards, and then you have to talk to the nurses, and then sometimes the nurses end up thinking they’re doctors, and they’re diagnosing you, when all you really want to do is see a doctor and let them tell you what’s wrong. And then when that’s done, unless you follow up yourself – unless you have the mental stamina or the ability to advocate for yourself, it is really hard, you get lost in the system.”

In 2008, Christine Hemingway filed a lawsuit against BC Corrections, Surrey Pretrial Services Centre, and Alouette Correctional Centre for Women. She claimed that there had been a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the poor healthcare she received while in provincial prison.

After Christine’s initial illness, she only grew sicker while continuously being denied care. Christine’s case, in many ways, demonstrates the tension between security and healthcare found behind prison walls – a tension that is only made worse by the fact that in BC, prison healthcare is private.

Christine’s troubles began with a basic bladder infection. While she requested an appointment with a doctor – a standard practice for prisoners seeking care – she was denied. That bladder infection soon turned into a kidney infection, later to morph into kidney stones. Christine’s health soon spiraled downward, resulting in blood infections, blood clots, and multiple visits to the emergency room.

“Every time I was ill, I kept requesting to see the doctors and saying, ‘There’s still something wrong with me,’” she says.

Christine’s medical problems eventually snowballed into an emergency blood transfusion – though she claims that, instead of being allowed to stay in the hospital for supervision after the transfusion, she was shuttled straight back to the prison.

“I survived all these illnesses which were unnecessary to start with,” she says. “So I decided that I’m going to take them to court.”

After spending approximately $5,000 of her own money, Christine settled with BC Corrections in February – making the system acknowledge its wrongdoing in handling her healthcare.

“It was never really about money,” she says, “It was about getting them to admit that they had not given the proper treatment inside the jail.”

BC is unique in that its provincial system outsources prison healthcare to a private contractor, creating a dynamic that Christine sees as pushing profit over well-being or safety – greater, even, than the already-existing tension between security and healthcare.

Advocates have been pushing for BC’s provincial prison healthcare system to be transferred and placed under the Ministry of Health, arguing that it would reduce recidivism rates, result in more consistent treatment of tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C, and STDs, and help ensure continuity of care upon release.

But for Christine, the fact that her healthcare was provided by a private contractor meant something far more insidious.

“It’s all about the bottom dollar,” she says. “It’s all about saving money. So they’re going to cut corners wherever they can.”

The complex healthcare needs of prisoners seem daunting. According to Sapers, 70 per cent of federally sentenced women have histories of sexual abuse, and 86 per cent have been physically abused at some point in their life. 80 per cent of federal prisoners face addiction or substance abuse issues – and two-thirds of federal prisoners were intoxicated when they committed their index (the most serious of the crimes that landed them in prison).

And according to several former prisoners, drug use is rampant even behind bars, contributing to the spread of infectious disease within prison walls – an issue that only grows worse with increasing crowding in prisons.

But the system is still working to catch up with their needs – or arguably, isn’t working all too hard to meet them in the first place. And the ongoing friction between security and healthcare has only grown worse with crowding, according to Sapers.

“Crowding creates a scarcity of resources – and that’s all kinds of resources, including human resources. When you’re operating your prisons at capacity or over capacity, you’re really faced with some real operational issues. […] Everything is okay, as long as nothing out of the ordinary happens. But as soon as an extraordinary event happens – as soon as there is a medical emergency, as soon as there’s things like a power outage […] it interrupts the prison routine. It just has a cascading effect.”

Bridging the gap between release and community remains a crucial issue – but even more pressing is the need for better harm-reduction measures to ensure quality care before putting people behind bars.

“I would never say that prisons shouldn’t be health providers because people in custody will always have health needs,” says Sapers. “But on the other hand, it seems to me to be counterproductive and extraordinarily financially inefficient to meet healthcare needs for people by putting them in jail. If you’re dealing with somebody who is profoundly ill, we should be dealing with them primarily as patients. And if they also happen to be offenders, we can deal with the security needs. […] I believe that we’ll get a much more therapeutic outcome and a more financially responsible outcome if we deal with their healthcare needs primarily.”

Peter echoed the sentiment, noting the general societal indifference to prisoners.

“If you’re truly interested in dealing with social problems, you would deal with poverty, and you would deal with disenfranchisement, you would deal with the systemic racism – all the negative things in our society that impact this. The inequality, the disproportionate – all that stuff. If you’re interested in solving crime. But [Harper]’s not. He’s interested in having a scapegoat.”

*Name has been changed

The post An abatement of care appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The Canadian TRC, established in 2008, aims to document the legacy of the Canadian Indian residential schools system, and the lived experiences and histories of those affected by it. Residential schools, the last of which closed in 1996, were notorious for their brutal treatment of Indigenous children, who experienced physical, sexual, and emotional abuse at the hands of caretakers.

Children also suffered the more insidious effects of forced assimilation and separation from their families and native cultures. At least 4,000 children died while attending the schools.

Commissioners stressed the longstanding, intergenerational effects of the school system, and emphasized the need for healing, mutual understanding, and respect between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians.

“Recognition, for us, is about changing this history of oppression and negativity, and allowing Canadians to relate to each other in a more positive way,” said Murray Sinclair, Chair of the Commission, and former judge.

Marie Wilson, another one of the commissioners, implicated Canadian culture and society as a whole, and stressed that the residential schools system was a product of Canadian policy, and not solely an Indigenous issue.

“It says right here, in the agreement, that reconciliation is ongoing – it’s individual and collective, and it names all the parties to the agreement – and it also names the people of Canada,” she explained.

“How will we get that word out there, and how will we make it so that the people of Canada register that this belongs to us all?”

Commissioners also noted that many of the challenges facing Indigenous people today are reflective of the damage incurred by the system, not only on the survivors of abuse, but also, through them, on their families and their communities.

One audience member, who identified as an Aboriginal woman, asked commissioners about the need for action regarding missing and murdered Indigenous women.

“While the government doesn’t see a commission on Aboriginal women as a necessity at this time, could you please find some safeguards for Aboriginal women on our behalf? Because we trust in your vision, we believe in your mandate, and all we want is pretty small compared to what the world offers,” the audience member said.

Research has shown that while Indigenous women make up approximately 3 per cent of the Canadian population, between 2000 and 2008 they represented 10 per cent of all female victims of homicides.

“I think that the fact that [the Commission] is given the trust as widely as they are and given a justice mission, that we have to respect that opportunity,” the same audience member later said to The Daily. “They’ve asked us to care and to be involved, and so caring and being involved means asking them to consider ideas that matter to us, that we suffer silently around.”

Chief Wilton Littlechild, another one of the commissioners, agreed with the audience member, emphasizing to The Daily not only the urgency behind growing numbers of missing and murdered Indigenous women, but also the connection of the issue to the residential school system.

To illustrate the connection, he related a story to The Daily in which he attended the funeral of a murdered woman, who turned out to be the daughter of classmates of his from his time in the residential school system.

Littlechild also pointed to the recent release of a report by Members of Parliament on the Special Committee on Violence Against Indigenous Women that failed to recommend a public inquiry into the problem – a move that advocates have long pushed for.

“Our first sacred teaching that we use in our hearings and our national events is respect,” Littlechild said. “What I’m seeing here now, through the parliamentary committee, is a lack of respect for life.”

The post Truth and Reconciliation Commission visits McGill appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Starting in late February, McGill will respond to a variety of long-standing requests. The requests pertain to, among other things, the University’s contracts in military research, internal policies regarding sexual assault complaints, and university research contracts with fossil fuel extraction and mining companies. Some of the requests that were dropped include those pertaining to the Winter 2012 occupation of the James Administration building.

The settlement comes after an appeal motion filed by the University in December after the Commission d’accès à l’information du Québec – the provincial body overseeing ATI appeals – decided against McGill in October.

Along with withdrawing certain ATI requests the University was contesting, the new settlement also required that certain ATIs to be answered be redrafted and updated, and that respondents withdraw official complaints regarding the University’s conduct regarding ATIs.

Notably, the University will also be prohibited from designating requests as systematic or abusive in nature. Prior to the settlement, McGill’s legal argument stated that the various requests it was fighting were “abusive because of their systematic nature,” and requested that the Commission grant the University the power to deny future ATI requests at its discretion.

The respondents’ lawyer called the request legally unprecedented in a hearing in September – a fact that some respondents saw as part of the reason behind the recent settlement.

“In my view, today’s settlement does not represent a fundamental change in direction on the part of McGill, but rather a decision to cut its losses. I do not believe that any court would have accepted either its factual claims or its demand to pre-emptively deny information requests,” said Kevin Paul, one of the respondents, in a press release sent to The Daily.

“I think it’s important to avoid defining victory through the terms of a legal dispute. I would consider an important victory not only the actual disclosure of information but the freedom to act on that information in ways that challenge McGill’s authority to conduct research that helps militaries kill more efficiently.”

The University and respondents also released a joint statement outlining the details of the settlement.

“The University does not see this as a ‘win-lose’ situation,” McGill’s secretary-general, Stephen Strople, told The Daily by email. “We want to respect the law, and that is what we do. In this case, the requests for access were too broad, too general, and asking for too much considering the time within which disclosure had to happen.”

One of the respondents, Isaac Stethem, said that part of the reason behind the settlement may have been the University’s legal standing in its request to preemptively deny ATIs, which the Commission rejected last October. Stethem also added that the length of the legal battle could be due to the legal efforts on the part of the respondents.

“I think it may also have been the case that, originally, the University didn’t expect this level of effort on the part of the respondents in the case,” he told The Daily.

Paul also spoke to the broader importance of the information to be released later this year, in the context of the recent settlement.

“I think it’s important to avoid defining victory through the terms of a legal dispute. I would consider an important victory not only the actual disclosure of information but the freedom to act on that information in ways that challenge McGill’s authority to conduct research that helps militaries kill more efficiently,” he told The Daily.

The outstanding ATIs will be released from February 28 to August 15.

“I’m looking forward to seeing what’s in [the ATIs],” said Stethem. “The one thing that we do have to be on the lookout for is that, especially in some recent cases, the University does have a history of very heavily redacting some of the documents it releases when it does actually release ATI information. So definitely we’re not all the way there yet.”

The post McGill settles access to information suit appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Montreal’s mayor, Denis Coderre, campaigned on homelessness, and his suggestions for structural change in treating homelessness show promise. They would include an agency encompassing various levels of government, as well as businesses, community, and health organizations – and an increase in spending on the issue.

At the moment, many community organizations in the city address the immediate and long-term needs of the homeless. Included in this list – which is non-exhaustive and does not include facilities with confidential addresses – are various facilities located in or close to the downtown area. Typical services offered by shelters and day centres, some of the most vital resources available to the homeless, include access to some form of social services, hot meals, clean clothes, and access to showers. Additional resources offered are noted on a case-by-case basis.

The post Winter in Montreal without shelter appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Pascal Abidor, a doctoral student in Islamic Studies at McGill, was riding an Amtrak train from Montreal to New York in May 2010 when border agents removed him from the train, handcuffed and questioned him in a holding facility, and confiscated his laptop for 11 days. A dual French-American citizen, Abidor found himself singled out by border agents due to his earlier travels to Jordan and Lebanon recorded in his French passport, which culminated in a preliminary search of his laptop on the train and its later confiscation.

Soon after the incident, Abidor worked with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to file a complaint, and later a lawsuit, against the Department of Homeland Security. The plaintiffs, which included Abidor, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and the National Press Photographers Association, sought to challenge the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) suspicionless search policy, which allows for the search and seizure of travellers’ personal belongings, including laptops and other electronic devices.

The ACLU argued that such searches were illegal under the first and fourth amendments.

“This is part of a broader pattern of aggressive government surveillance to collect information on too many innocent people under lax standards, and without adequate oversight,” said Brian Hauss, a legal fellow at ACLU who spoke with The Daily regarding the case.

The judge, Edward R. Korman of the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of New York, dismissed the lawsuit on the grounds that the plaintiffs did not have standing for the lawsuit – due to the lack of “substantial risk that their electronic devices will be subject to a search or seizure without reasonable suspicion.”

According to DHS data, device searches, at present, stand at about 15 searches a day.

“My immediate reaction was [… ] New York just had the lowest crime rate in 50 years, so are they going to just stop prosecuting murders, because they don’t happen often?” Abidor told The Daily, referencing the judge’s grounds for dismissal.

“In terms of our rights, quantity and quality are equal,” he continued. “When someone’s rights are violated, all of our rights are violated.”
As the government did not break any laws, the plaintiffs’ standing in the case was very unlikely to be decided upon.

“If the government looks at your stuff and decides that it doesn’t want to prosecute you, and it just invades your privacy and has not found any evidence of wrongdoing, there’s basically nothing you can do, under this judge’s interpretation,” said Hauss. “It’s like, ‘tough luck.’”

Aside from the plaintiffs’ standing in the case, the primary reason behind the case’s dismissal, the judge also questioned the case’s merits, writing that reasonable suspicion need not be required for routine electronic device searches at borders, as it would be within the U.S. interior.

“Effectively, we think that the judge’s ruling, in this case, makes the border a constitution-free zone,” said Hauss.
Aside from the other grounds on which the judge dismissed the lawsuit, the judge also questioned the necessity of bringing a laptop when travelling.

“As a human being today, it is not plausible [to travel without a laptop],” Abidor said. “He said I don’t have to travel with a laptop, which by extension is… I don’t have to be in school? […] I made a choice to study outside of my country, so that choice makes me susceptible to having my rights violated?”

After the recent decision, the ACLU is still waiting on its decision to appeal the case, which would go to the Court of Appeals.

The post McGill student sees civil liberties lawsuit dismissed by district judge appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) has seen its share of challenges this past semester, but these have resulted in little tangible action on political issues. Attempts to campaign against issues such as the Charter of Values and cultural appropriation failed to gain significant clout. SSMU did finally open up the long-awaited student-run café, but it fell short of expectations. General assemblies have been poorly attended and poorly organized. Although the Legislative Council and the executive are internally cohesive, they have remained distant from the student body.

Katie Larson – President

Katie Larson’s first semester as President has left much to be desired. The SSMU executive has presented a united front, but has accomplished little in the way of political stances. Larson herself has not been particularly vocal in Senate or the Board of Governors, and fails to connect with the student body about relevant issues.

Communication with campus media is also a weakness for Larson, and should be improved upon to better provide information to the student body.

Unlike her predecessor, Larson hasn’t made improvements toward the dismal attendance of the General Assemblies (GAs), and has been criticized by both campus media and Legislative Council for the lack of advertising. However, Larson recognized the GA as a weak spot in an email to The Daily, and said that open discussions on changes to the GA format will be scheduled for this semester.

Lease negotiations continue to stretch on into their fourth year, and although Larson told The Daily that the negotiations were progressing well, due to their confidential nature, it is difficult to know if they will wrap up by the end of this school year.

Larson pointed to the amendment of the out-of-date SSMU constitution, to ensure it was still legal in Quebec, as a success for her and the executive. However, this success did not come without some confusion over the by-laws surrounding the constitution’s approval.

As for next semester, Larson told The Daily she was looking forward to a discussion about SSMU’s sustainability mandate. However, part of this discussion was spurred by the abrupt departure of the Sustainability Coordinator – an issue about which SSMU has not been transparent.

Brian Farnan – VP Internal

One of the main duties of VP Internal is Orientation Week, including Frosh. For yet another year, SSMU and other groups introduced small initiatives that aimed to make Frosh more inclusive of underage and non-drinking students, as well as more sustainable and with more equitable events.

However, one of the biggest failures on Brian Farnan’s part was the $21,000 lost on Frosh. According to Farnan, simple budgeting mistakes – such as failing to calculate PayPal commission, miscalculating taxes on sponsorship, and overspending on new initiatives – accounted for most of the loss. To avoid a similar situation in the future, the responsibility for Frosh’s $200,000 budget will be put into the hands of SSMU’s accounting department instead of students.

Farnan’s communication with The Daily has been poor at best, and he often fails to respond to emails and phone calls. As an elected and paid official, Farnan needs to seriously improve his communication with campus media if he wants to be transparent about his duties.

Samuel Harris – VP External

The VP External portfolio is usually the most politically charged of SSMU’s executive positions. As this year’s VP External, Samuel Harris was tasked with working with the Montreal and Quebec community through various campaigns and associations. One ad hoc campaign, in opposition to the Charter of Values, was slow to get off the ground, though Harris told The Daily that it was limited by the lack of quorum at the Fall GA.

Harris continued the street team project started last year as a part of a community relations initiative during Frosh. Although Harris called Frosh a “mixed bag,” he stated that he believed that there were less noise complaints this year than last.

However, Harris hasn’t followed through on some of his campaign promises, such as opposition to the indexation of tuition and the integration of students into the Milton-Parc community. Although Harris did work on the issues in the beginning of the semester, any further work since that time has not been visible.

Instead, Harris has focused on the Table de concertation étudiante du Québec (TaCEQ), one of the main student lobbies in Quebec, of which SSMU is a founding member. Harris told The Daily that the promotion of TaCEQ became a case of damage control after the failure to host a TaCEQ congress. However, TaCEQ has faced criticism in the past from campus media, SSMU Legislative Council, and SSMU executives.

In the upcoming semester, Harris told The Daily he would be hosting a forum between Montreal student unions, something that failed to happen last semester.

Joey Shea – VP University Affairs

The VP University Affairs portfolio is primarily in charge of negotiating student affairs at the University level, among other responsibilities – sitting on Senate and University committees, Equity at SSMU, library improvement, and research. Shea has been noticeably vocal at Senate, and has also been transparent and open with campus media.

Shea’s biggest accomplishments of the term include the creation of an ad hoc mental health committee at SSMU with the goal of creating a substantive mental health policy by the end of the year – which Shea expects to see at Council by late January or early February. As well, Shea drew attention at Senate to a surplus in the Student Services budget. Plans to spend the surplus on administrative affairs instead of student services were soon corrected.

Additionally, Shea saw an unexpected turn of events – the sexual assault allegations levelled against three Redmen players in November – as an opportunity to start an important campus conversation about rape culture and sexual assault.

Shea considered one of her bigger failures to be Legislative Council’s failure to pass a motion banning the song “Blurred Lines,” as well as SSMU’s much-criticized Costume Campaign, which ended up misusing cultural appropriation in an attempt to denounce it.

Next semester, Shea will be focusing on passing a mental health policy, as well as following up on the sexual assault allegations, and potentially terminating lease negotiations in conjunction with SSMU’s president.

Stefan Fong – VP Clubs & Services

While not as politically active as his predecessor, Stefan Fong has steadily dealt with the myriad challenges of the Clubs & Services portfolio. Fong told The Daily that he focused on the logistical and administrative aspect of the job, rather than the sometimes problematic dynamics between clubs. Fong has revamped many logistical aspects of the portfolio, including club audits, the room booking system, activities night, and the fourth floor of the SSMU building.

The changes to the room booking system allow rooms to be booked earlier. Fong told The Daily that the new system has received mixed reviews, but that it eased the pressure on both groups and the administrative side of SSMU.

The allocation of offices on the fourth floor of SSMU to clubs faced some problems. According to Fong, problems with a mice infestation and fire hazards complicated the allocation, causing delays and frustration with clubs.

Fong’s most ambitious project for the next semester is the creation of ClubHub, a management portal. Due to the length of SSMU executive positions, it is almost sure that it will not be finished this year, but the initiative is a crucial foundation for the future VP Clubs & Services.

Tyler Hofmeister – VP Finance and Operations

Tyler Hofmeister’s first semester has largely been marked by lease negotiations, SSMU’s budget, and the financial questions surrounding the opening of the new student-run cafe (SRC). Hofmeister’s communication with campus media has been reliable but tenuous, as the VP Finance and Operations requests that all communication be done over email.

Hofmeister faced a deficit of $90,000 in the 2013-14 SSMU budget due to the uncertainty of lease negotiations and utilities expenses, but managed to rearrange it so that the operating budget broke even. This was largely achieved through cutting costs in the General Administration category, as well as executives’ personal budgets, Building, Club, and IT budgets. Hofmeister also outlined a long-term project that he has been working on in which SSMU is doubling the rate of interest on its account holdings, projected to save SSMU thousands of dollars per year. Hofmeister is also working on institutionalizing this approach in order to continue the process.

However, many long-term expenses were shifted, putting forward the possibility that SSMU will face a deficit in the future.

Hofmeister wrote to The Daily in an email that his biggest accomplishment was the opening of the SRC in the cafeteria space formerly occupied by Lola Rosa. The SRC, while certainly a step in the right direction, reneges on former promises by SSMU to create a student space with the new opening, instead opting for a lunch counter. The true success of the SRC in the future will hinge on an ability to create and expand into a space for students.

In an earlier version of this piece, The Daily stated that Tyler Hofmeister rearranged the SSMU budget to project a $50,000 surplus. In fact, this money was transferred into the Capital Expenditures Reserve Fund, and the operating budget broke even. The Daily regrets the errors.

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Richard Bergeron – Projet Montréal

Richard Bergeron of Projet Montréal focuses largely on transit issues in the city. Bergeron has a master’s in urban planning, as well as a PhD in regional planning. His transit plan’s most notable aspects include a Montreal tramway, encompassing 37.5 kilometres, that would extend from Côte-des-Neiges to Pie-IX. The tramway, according to Bergeron, is intended to complement the city’s current public transportation system, which he has noted is at full capacity, as well as move the city’s dependence away from automobiles. His transit plan also includes funding through measures such as changing tolls and imposing steeper city parking fees on suburban commuters.

Bergeron’s housing plan includes projects designed to transform vacant space into affordable housing, with the ultimate goal of creating a total of 50,000 homes that will house 100,000 to 125,000 inhabitants. Additionally, Projet Montréal has promised that housing developments would include access to local services within walking distance and a “reasonable level” of green space. New development projects would also be mandated to include 15 to 20 per cent social and affordable housing.

Bergeron recently made headlines  for alleging that the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center were possibly the work of the Bush administration, though he later distanced himself from the comments.

Denis Coderre – Équipe Denis Coderre

As the leader of Équipe Denis Coderre, Denis Coderre is posed as the current front-runner in the race. Plateau Borough Mayor Luc Ferrandez once called Coderre a “Rob Ford-style politician” – after the embattled mayor of Toronto – with little interest in actually effecting change. Insults aside, Coderre has gained populist support since announcing his candidacy in June 2013.

In the past, Coderre has worked for six terms as a federal Member of Parliament (MP) in Ottawa, filling a number of positions including Minister for Citizenship and Immigration, before he resigned in May 2013 to join the race for mayor.

A large number of Coderre’s councillors come from the defunct Union Montréal party, which ended following the resignation of Gérald Tremblay in 2012 following a massive – and still ongoing – corruption scandal. Other opponents have used the large number of former Union Montreal candidates in Coderre’s party to question his commitment to change.

If elected, Coderre has promised to install an inspector general in City Hall in order to combat corruption, something modelled on the New York City system. The proposed position of the inspector general will, according to Coderre, have the power to launch inquiries and take people to court, and is his answer to the insidious corruption within City Hall.

Like many of his other contenders, Coderre is standing behind the creation of bus rapid transit in the city, an extension of the orange metro line, as well as amenities like wi-fi on buses and cellphone service in the metro.

Marcel Côté – Coalition Montréal

Marcel Côté, an economist, is the leader of Coalition Montréal. He has a background in politics at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels, and also served under Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa. Côté received a large boost of support when Louise Harel, leader of the Vision Montreal party, stepped down and instead placed her support behind the Coalition.

While Côté is currently trailing in the municipal polls, he has a historical presence in the city as he was one of the founding partners of SECOR, one of the largest management consulting firms in the country. Côté stated in a Radio-Canada interview this year that “the Mafia is more democratic than the student associations,” something that came up when candidates debated the P-6 by law during the Plateau-Mont-Royal debates.

Côté is a staunch federalist – in 1995, he co-wrote a book on the costs of federalism with the current Governor General David Johnston. Côté is running on the implementation of what he calls a “Quiet Revolution” at City Hall to combat issues like language watchdogs and city hall corruption.

On transit, Côté is more conservative: he believes in utilizing the structures already in place, implementing bus rapid transit (BRT), and creating more reserved lanes for bikes. In regards to housing, Côté has promised that he will create 2,000 more affordable three-bedroom housing units per year in the hopes of keeping people in the city instead of leaving for the suburbs.

Mélanie Joly – Le Vrai changement pour Montréal

The youngest candidate of the front-runners, and the only woman, Mélanie Joly’s campaign slogan and party name is “Le vrai changement pour Montréal,” or “Real change for Montreal.” Joly is also the founder of a group called “Génération d’idées,” a political reflection group targeted toward people aged 20 to 35.

Joly is a strong advocate of implementing a bus rapid transit system (BRT) in order to improve public transit and reduce congestion in Montreal’s busy streets. The BRT would involve around 130 kilometres of rapid bus service, with specially designated bus lanes. In focusing on the BRT, Joly has spoken less directly to other transit initiatives like bike lanes.

Joly’s plans for the city are focused on preventing urban sprawl and keeping families in the city through affordable housing and zoning measures, such as promoting the construction of family units. Housing plans more specifically applicable to students include the promotion of affordable housing and the revitalization of central and downtown Montreal.

Joly also made headlines for coming to the defense of one of her candidates, Bibianne Bovet, a trans woman who came under public scrutiny for her past as a sex worker. However, Bovet was later removed from Joly’s campaign, though Joly claimed that it was because of an ongoing financial investigation.

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This week, Quebec’s Commission d’accès à l’information dealt a major setback to McGill in its ongoing battle against information access, with the Commission deciding that McGill does not have the authority to deny future access to information (ATI) requests at its discretion. That power can be solely exercised by the Commission, although McGill’s request, if approved, would have delegated the Commission’s power to University administrators.

McGill’s lawyers, in a pre-trial hearing in September, requested the power for McGill administrators to deny future ATI requests from a specified list of individuals or anyone who could be connected to those on the list, as well as those who fall under a specified list of categories. The categories included “persons associated to McGilliLeaked” or “persons that could reasonably be linked to such requestor,” and requests that show characteristics such as being “overly broad,” “frivolous,” “target[ing] trivial documents and information,” or “associated to one or more categories of documents and information published on McGilliLeaked.”

The website McGilliLeaked compiles various documents about the University, such as contracts, security reports, and investments, billing itself as “for all your Access to Information needs.”

ATIs are a means of legally obtaining otherwise unavailable information – such as administrative documents – from public bodies like McGill. In Quebec, if a public body declines to grant ATI requests, the Commission acts as an administrative tribunal to mediate negotiations and make decisions.

“The motion was clearly an abuse of power on McGill’s part, or an attempt at an abuse of power. They basically wanted to have the law rewritten to suit their needs.”

In this week’s decision, dated 7 October, the Commission stated in French, “The Commission cannot delegate to the University the power to decide in its place which demands meet its criteria and which it can ignore.”

The decision also denied a last-minute amendment from McGill which would have required certain respondents to obtain authorization from the Commission before requesting ATIs from McGill in the future.

The Commission’s decision rested upon the grounds that granting the University’s request would represent an “illegal” delegation of its powers to a third party, according to a press release sent out by Kevin Paul, a McGill student and one of the respondents.  “[It] would involve passing judgment on requests which have not yet come under the Commission’s jurisdiction.”

“The motion was clearly an abuse of power on McGill’s part, or an attempt at an abuse of power,” Mona Luxion, a former columnist for The Daily and one of the respondents, told The Daily. “They basically wanted to have the law rewritten to suit their needs.”

The request, in fact, was one that would be legally unprecedented if it had been approved, as the respondents’ lawyer made clear during the hearing in September.

“This type of demand has no precedent in the law,” she said in French at the September hearing.

“It’s really disappointing to see an institution that’s supposedly committed to sharing knowledge and educated debate about issues trying to keep people away from information that would help us have a conversation about what’s going on… I can’t say I’m surprised.”

The Commission’s decision is the latest in an ongoing case between McGill and several respondents who submitted ATIs to the University dating back to November 2011. In lieu of divulging the information requested in the ATIs – which pertained to categories such as University fossil fuel investments, alleged military research at the university, and administrative finances – McGill sought an exemption from the requests, calling them “abusive because of their systematic character.”

“It’s really disappointing to see an institution that’s supposedly committed to sharing knowledge and educated debate about issues trying to keep people away from information that would help us have a conversation about what’s going on,” said Luxion. “I can’t say I’m surprised.”

Stephen Strople, Secretary-General of the University, would not respond to questions beyond a single statement, due to the fact that McGill does not typically comment on matters before tribunals or courts.

“We are disappointed by today’s ruling and we are considering our options regarding an appeal. This ruling does not resolve the issues,” he wrote in an email to the press. “We are, however, encouraged by the fact that both sides remain interested in seeking a mediated settlement.”

Luxion expressed uncertainty regarding the outcome for the possibility of a successful mediation, stating that making such a prediction at this point in time would be difficult.

The sections of McGill’s motion that revolve around the outstanding ATI requests currently remain in litigation. If mediation does not work, then the case will go to trial.

Update:

The University has appealed the Commission’s decision. The Québec Court of Appeal is expected to decide on the motion at a hearing on December 4.

For more on access to information requests, see this week’s “How-To” from The Daily’s radio section, where Nicolas Quiazua gives an update on McGill’s ATI case and provides a step-by-step guide to filing your own ATI.

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Questions remain on University’s research ethics policy

The conference left Kathleen Ruff, senior advisor to the Rideau Institute, who presented on McGill’s failure to adequately address asbestos research at the university, largely unsatisfied with its outcome.

While Ruff congratulated McGill on holding the conference in her initial presentation, she also critiqued what she saw as the University’s silence on its contentious history with both former professor John Corbett McDonald’s research and corporate-sponsored research at large.

“I absolutely do not think at all that the conference was enough,” Ruff told The Daily. “It’s not a substitute for doing the right thing. […] The shadow on McGill’s reputation will not go away until it addresses this issue properly, and so the conference was a fine thing to do.”

Ruff said that conference guest speaker David Egilman’s presentation, “The Past is Prologue: Universities in Service to Corporations: The McGill-QAMA Asbestos Example,” brought up a litany of criticisms against the University that remain unaddressed. Furthermore, she noted that such behaviour represents a pattern of ethical leniency at the university.

“If a professor at McGill goes and lobbies to advance the interests of the industry and to oppose health measures, and not only does not disclose, but falsely says, ‘I have no connection with that industry,’ does McGill feel this is appropriate conduct?” Ruff asked. “McGill has always refused to answer that question. I think they need to answer that question, because they need to set an ethical standard.”

However, David Eidelman, Dean of Medicine, pushed back against the notion that the University’s ethical standards are unclear. Eidelman also emphasized that the criticism brought forth by Ruff and Egilman is a significant source of contention.

“There are people who believe that Kathleen Ruff and Dr. Egilman are misrepresenting what [McDonald] said. There are other people who say, ‘no they’re not misrepresenting it, they’re absolutely correct,’” Eidelman said. “That to me sounds like an academic controversy. Universities are about academic controversies.”

“I believe the function of a university is to allow people to say what they have to say, and where possible, to put data behind it to prove it,” he said.

SSMU VP University Affairs Joey Shea, one of the primary actors involved in organizing the conference, also pushed back against some of the criticisms brought forward by Egilman, calling parts of his presentation “a bit sensationalist, regardless of where you are on the political spectrum.”

Despite pointing to the criticisms of McDonald’s research as largely an academic controversy, Eidelman acknowledged that there are certain questions to be addressed at the university.

“The fact that there’s no research misconduct doesn’t mean that there’s no problem. That’s why I wanted the conference,” he said.

No easy solutions to questions of for-profit research in academic settings

The conference’s closing panel had a broader scope, addressing the ethics of corporate research at McGill. In recognition of the controversy surrounding McDonald’s asbestos research, Eidelman highlighted the last panel as crucial for talking about the larger issue of private sector investment in universities.

The speakers tackled various ethical complications of for-profit research at publicly funded universities. All were unified in stressing the need to reconcile private with public interests, though not at the expense of academic freedom.

“Academic freedom is a terribly important topic that universities have to take perhaps more seriously than they have,” explained Daniel Weinstock, a professor in McGill’s Faculty of Law and one-time director of the Research Centre on Ethics at the Université de Montréal. “But we have to approach this in an all-encompassing manner, [and] that includes both government and corporate threats to academic freedom.”

Weinstock warned tha too often, “Ethics [are] very superficial, [they are] something that we think about at the tail-end.” He added that research ethics are divorced from moral implications and have come to be seen as a bureaucratic control.

Though the speakers all recognized the importance of the issues discussed, none offered  any solutions, inviting criticism from some audience members.

“The afternoon panel didn’t address the issues we put forward. It dealt more with general issues about communication. It spoke about corporate social responsibility,” said Ruff.

“They didn’t address any […] of the issues in our complaint or any of our criticisms, and they didn’t provide any answers on the very serious and disturbing questions we’d raised about the failure of McGill to [deal] with our complaints. The evidence I put forward, I think, was very clear and damning.”

The Research Ethics Office (IRB) at McGill operates a review process of research proposals that Ruff criticized as “biased, lacking in transparency, and incorrect.”

Eidelman, in part, agreed with Ruff. “We think that the biggest challenge for this university in terms of research ethics is post-monitoring.”

He elaborated that mechanisms to assess whether research has been carried out as planned should exist, alongside procedures to see whether IRB approvals are justified.

“That’s something which we’ve never done at McGill,” Eidelman admitted. “Right now, to be honest, I don’t think we have the resources to do it. This is something we should certainly think about.”

After the conference, Ruff sent an email to conference participants and organizers to reiterate her questions surrounding the University’s research ethics policy, which was also made available to The Daily.

The first situation that Ruff addressed involved the hypothetical situation of an industry-funded McGill researcher intervening at a public policy hearing and using their privately funded research to influence policy in that field. Ruff asked if the University’s ethical standards “require or expect that the academic should disclose the fact that his/her research is financially supported by the industry in question.”

Secondly, Ruff asked if it were “acceptable,” under University standards, for the academic to deny any connection to the industry financing or supporting their research.

After inquiring if McGill’s ethical standards address such a situation, Ruff requested documentation and asked if the University is concerned with such an issue. “Is McGill prepared to examine and to adopt ethical standards so that these actions would be addressed and so that McGill academics and the wider public would know what McGill’s position is?” she wrote.

The question of research ethics at McGill remains up in the air. Echoing an earlier discussion with Principal Suzanne Fortier, Shea told The Daily that when it comes to ethical standards and corporate-sponsored research, McGill has “a reputation of having particularly tricky regulations in comparison to other institutions.”

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