Anyway, what I’d really like to talk about here are The Daily’s editorials, which throughout the year were both sensible and gutsy. Occasionally they took on softball issues – like, for instance, their plea that readers adopt some of the 500 puppies rescued from an errant puppy mill in September. But they also stuck it to the man two weeks ago when they revealed that McGill had recently threatened The Daily with a lawsuit for their coverage of the McGillLeaks story. Calling the University out on these tactics of legal bullying takes definite chutzpah.

The editorial board – of which, to be clear, I am no longer a part – recently decided to change the writing process for editorials. For the past six years, at least, the process has been this: at the Monday ed-board meeting, a topic is chosen, and an outline hammered out. Someone volunteers to write the draft, and on Wednesday or Friday evening the entire board sits down to collectively edit the thing. Those meetings were prone to go on for as long as two hours – or until everyone’s hunger and exasperation pushed them into total acquiescence. They highlighted and exacerbated the political differences among the editors, but also brought them closer together.

Few, if any, publications today are so rigorously democratic, and from here on in, the collective edit will be a thing of the past. Which is fine. It’s not the case that collective decision-making is entirely gone. Editors will still have some input on the draft, and the topic and structure of the editorials will remain a consensus-based decision. Plenty of cases of bad syntax and awkward uses of certain words and aphorisms were the result of those screwy negotiations. The text, meant to anchor the publication, often wound up looking like a discombobulated stir-fry.

This may seem like more of the same navel-gazing that The Daily is often criticized for, and it is, but it also bears some important lessons for anyone interested in collective decision-making. Bringing the entire board – and any contributors unlucky enough to be in the office at the time – into the discussion fostered an atmosphere of humour and solidarity. While I’m not concerned that the paper will transform into a totalitarian fiefdom under the iron fists of the Coordinating and Commentary editors, I also want to emphasize that the collective decision-making processes at The Daily are a big part of what makes it so beautiful.

At the end of the day, however – and this might be an example of what people talk about when they say that ideals are abandoned with age – I’ve come around to the conclusion that collective decision-making isn’t always ideal.

The readers’ advocate column written by Niko Block addresses the performance, relevance, and quality of The Daily. You can reach him at readersadvocate@mcgilldaily.com.

The post The collective burden appeared first on The McGill Daily.

There’s been some trouble in paradise lately, though. A dizzying amount of misinformation about CKUT has been flying around on the internet lately, and I think a comprehensive explanation of what’s going on is in order. I’ll try to make this as sexy as possible.

The first thing to clarify is that CKUT played no role whatsoever in organizing the occupation of James Admin. In fact, we were taken completely off-guard by it. CKUT supports the right of students to defend their own democratic processes, however, and maintains the validity of the fall referendum results.

We have been negotiating with McGill since December, and those talks have led to an agreement in principle that the admin will recognize that referendum as a validation of our existence. In the upcoming referendum period, we’ll be asking students for permission to change our fee from opt-outable to non-opt-outable, just like the Daily’s or the Trib’s. (Our tentative understanding with the admin is that if we do win, we will be able to offer a refund from our own offices, as per our internal policies.)

MORT BY A THOUSAND CUTS

Opt-outs are historically a student-initiated institution, and it is by no means unprecedented that the opt out-ability of a fee has changed in an existence referendum. CKUT’s fee became opt-outable at the behest of SSMU when we needed council’s approval of our last existence referendum question in March 2006. At that time SSMU assured CKUT that would be able to manage our own opt outs. We won that referendum, but we also entered a period of arduous negotiations with the University, which didn’t end until we finally signed our MOA in December of 2007.

In March of that year, with no warning hitherto, the admin demanded that we abruptly stop calling ourselves “CKUT Radio McGill.” After much back and forth, CKUT reluctantly agreed to drop McGill for our name. But it was impossible for us to do this within the timescale they demanded, given that such a decision can only be made by a resolution at our annual general meeting. They consequently decided to withhold our student fees for the third time in the previous six years to pressure us into signing an MoA on their terms. This past fall, over 130 other student clubs and services have gone through a similar name-changing rigmarole. (I’ve looked into this quite a bit, and still don’t fully comprehend the admin’s justification for all this.)

Our situation went from half-Nelson to full-Nelson in September of 2007 when the Minerva system was suddenly imposed upon CKUT, QPIRG, Queer McGill, Nightline, the Union for Gender Empowerment, Midnight Kitchen, and TV McGill.

Student backlash against Minerva was overwhelming. At the Fall 2007 General Assembly, students voted overwhelmingly in opposition to the system, and a similar question was passed through referendum the following semester.

Throughout the previous year and a half during which we had been trying to negotiate our MoA with the admin, their plans to implement the online opt-out system had never been disclosed. We argued that they had been bargaining in bad faith, but we sorely needed the student fees to keep our heads above the water, so we reluctantly signed the MoA, name-change and all.

90.3 BY THE NUMBERS

Alright, here comes the really sexy stuff.

In that first year, opt-outs knocked $14,000 out of our budget; last year, it was about $27,000. Our total budget last year was about $450,000; of that, $170,000 came from student fees. The rest we raised through our funding drive, advertisements, and grants.

Given the size of our total budget, the $27,000 we lost to opt outs in the last fiscal year may not seem like a lot, but with overhead costs eating up the lion’s share of our budget, it makes the difference between viability and unviability.

Those overhead costs include over $8,000 in mandatory royalties for the music we air; $26,000 to rent our broadcast tower on the top of the mountain; $12,000 for our transmitter; over $44,000 in rent and other fees goes to McGill; and $10,000 goes toward insurance. (Many of these expenses have increased over the years, while our fee has remained at $4 – exactly what it was when we became incorporated in 1988.)

That leaves a series of relatively negligible costs – things like printing or software upkeep – until we get to our largest single expense, which is the $255,000 we pay in salaries to our six full-time workers and two part-timers. (On top of that we have a few non-permanent staff, including two students in McGill’s work study program.)

The annual salary for the average full-time staff member at CKUT is $26,000. After taxes, this would put it closer to $21,000. With kids, which some of them do have, it puts them below the poverty line. There has been no cost of living increase in their earnings since Minerva was set up in 2007, and they work more than fifty hours per week on a regular basis – sometimes as much as eighty. You do the math, and it works out to less than minimum wage. We’ve already cut two full-time positions in the past five years, and meetings have ended in tears when we’ve tried to cut paid labour-hours further than we already have.

The station is suffering tremendously as a result of all this. Some of our most dedicated and talented staff members have quit in recent months, given the overwhelming workload and miniscule remuneration offered by CKUT.

The most important thing to clarify here is that the station is by no means living gluttonously off the fat of student fees. The campus-community radio model, as it is practiced throughout the country, is one that relies on a stable income of student membership fees. Under our license with the CRTC, there are certain grants we can’t apply for. And, so as not to encroach too much on the commercial market, we cannot advertise for more than four minutes per hour. McGill, however, is the only university in the country to implement this kind of opt-out system on their campus radio station.

This situation of decreasing revenues and increasing expenses is unmanageable.

Ultimately, McGill needs to ask itself if it is a community – and a university – that deserves a top-notch local radio station. I do. And I am of the humble belief that virtually any of the thousands of students who have volunteered at CKUT over the years would agree.

Niko Block is an undergraduate representative to the Board of Directors of CKUT. He is also the Daily’s Readers Advocate columnist and former Daily News and Features Editor. The opinions expressed here are his own. He can be reached at niko.block@gmail.com.

A previous version of this article stated that CKUT is regularly ranked as either the first or second most listened-to radio station in this city; rather, CKUT is regularly ranked as the number one or the number two best radio stations in Montreal, according to the Montreal Mirror reader’s poll. The Daily regrets the error. 

The post Do you want a radio station or not? appeared first on The McGill Daily.

It’s no secret that Compendium! has been sagging lately. Typically an afterthought, the product of whatever happens to cross one’s mind – or one’s web browser – amidst those interminable marathons in the Daily office every Wednesday and Friday night, Compendium! is often the neglected urchin lurking in the corner. Content is not discussed at Monday editorial meetings, or even uploaded to the website.

I am sympathetic, however. In time I may even come to forgive their trespasses. Those nights are known for their bitter editorial debates, acid reflux, myoclonic twitches, and – at least in my own experience – frequent bouts of coffee-induced diarrhea (I know it sounds romantic and fun, but it’s not.)

Compendium is valuable because it lacks all the pedantry of the Culture section, the tedium of News, the lengthiness of Features, and the irrelevance of everything else. It draws people in.

But it’s also political. There is something beautifully juvenile about a section of the paper that has a mandate to take potshots at our own principal. It’s an institution dedicated to indulging our Ninja Turtles-era fantasies of burning down the school, and to our rants about the jerk who sits at the front of class and raises his hand every three minutes to talk about Ayn Rand or some shit.

Compendium has seen better years – but even at the best of times, most of its jokes fell to Carrot Top lows of unfunniness. Typically it’s been strongest with the Onion-style headlines, flippant caricatures, and lewd cartoons.

I’m not asking the editors to be funnier, but rather to put more effort into fostering a community of contributors. There’s been some decent shit this year. But the inside jokes, the meaningless and uncaptioned images, and vacuous Metrometre columns, (“Last night was Zach Lewsen’s birthday! Cake! Plus 45”; “I’m going to Igloofest for the first time ever tonight. Plus 30”) have definitely drawn my ire at times. “I <3 U MUNACA, but I’m tryna watch a movie” – in which the author earnestly complained about the noise emanating from the picket lines last September – provoked a unique fire in my belly.

Anyway, this is all to cordially demand that Zach, and Olivia’s replacement – whomever you may be – put a little more energy into the funnies. Thank you.

The readers’ advocate is a twice-monthly  column written by Niko Block addressing the performance, relevance, and quality of The Daily. You can reach him at nikoblock@gmail..com.

The post Back in my day, Compendium! was funny appeared first on The McGill Daily.

I can only hope that my neighbourhood will one day move beyond these petty spats. But if that is to happen, we’re going to need journalism that depicts religious communities not as “special interests” or zealots attempting to impose a religious system of governance upon Canada, but simply voters, citizens and members of their own neighbourhood. Though Christina Colizza’s recent feature on the whole debacle (“The secularist and the synagogue” November 3, Page 8) did convey the latter perspective, it also failed to chide people like Lacerte who subscribe to the former. Instead, the author chose to emphasize Lacerte’s “faultlessly good manners,” the fact that he smelled like French cologne, and claimed to speak six languages.
“The writing on [Lacerte’s] blog is red hot with secularist fervour,” writes Colizza to preface Lacerte’s pronouncement that “For more than half a century, the Satmar sect has sacrificed thousands of children on the altar of religious ultraorthodoxy in Quebec.”

Yet the historical tradition with which I would associate that particular quote is not secularism, but rather anti-Semitism.
That’s not an accusation I make lightly. For the past several years I have dismissed the vast majority of such accusations out of hand. At times my response to people who are prone to making them – and who are equally prone to justifying the ongoing atrocities of the Israeli state on the basis of what they call widespread contemporary anti-Semitism – has been rude and abrasive. Jewish identity has been so deliberately and powerfully conflated with the narrative of the Holocaust and the triumphant birth of Israel that these conversations are usually doomed to failure and hurt feelings.

The problem is that the Israel camp has ruthlessly exploited the history of Jewish oppression to tarnish its critics. Lacerte, whose rhetoric often smacks of Jewish conspiracy theory, is in turn exploiting the extent to which we have now been inured to such flippant accusations of anti-Semitism. “That’s the easiest thing to say,” has been his retort to those who have called him anti-Semitic.

Another of Colizza’s interviewees is sympathetic: “This guy is not anti-Semitic; that word is thrown around way too easily.” In other words, it’s a tragic instance of a boy who cried wolf.

I’ll admit here that at times I have experienced a certain visceral fear of a potential rise in widespread anti-Semitism, ridiculous though that may be. Having grown up with so little of the fear-mongering Holocaust obsession that characterizes many Jews’ upbringing, these moments can be dizzying. What triggers them, however, is not people like Lacerte as much as mentions of an Israeli massacre or settlement expansion drifting across the bottom of a TV screen.

That Israel itself has galvanized, and in many ways benefited from, anti-Semitism in recent years is natural; the logic of Zionism is deeply rooted in the assumption that people everywhere will always hate Jews. The dividends the state has reaped for at once provoking anti-Semitism and then sensationalizing it have come in the form of increasing Jewish immigration to Israel.

Lately, I’ve tended to steer clear of news about Israel, lest I sink into a stupor of anger and depression such as I did during Operation Cast Lead in early 2009. It becomes more difficult to ignore when the issue begins to impact my own neighbourhood.

Still, the conversation surrounding Israel/Palestine inevitably puts us in a difficult position with a case such as the Gate David synagogue. Frivolous accusations of anti-Semitism obviously play into pro-Israel rhetoric, yet stopping short of accusing someone such as Lacerte of anti-Semitism can have an equally damaging effect. Coming out of last summer’s dispute, an entire congregation of Jews might understandably feel considerably less welcome in Montreal.

The post In which the author opens up a gigantic can of worms appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Few things in the past month have boiled my blood quite like the contention that the Occupy movement is struggling with its own “inchoate demands,” or that it is too idealistic, naive and angry. The reality of the situation is far from confusing. In 2006, the richest one per cent of the globe controlled 40 per cent of its wealth, and we’re pissed off about it.

For as long as I can remember, issues of class have been completely neglected by the mainstream press. Far more seasoned activists and journalists who I’ve talked to recently have said the same thing. Occupy is starting to change that trend – not just here but also in the thousand or so cities worldwide that are participating in the movement. Never before in history have people from around the globe stood so explicitly in solidarity with one another, combating the same systemic issues of marginalization and impoverishment. It’s exciting.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the historic development of capitalism: the fact that so much of the organizational, physical, and legal technologies that it employs were first established within the context of colonialism, displacement and genocide in the Americas. The oil industry’s foundation on the frontier of south-western Ontario in the mid-19th century, for instance, and its rapid proliferation throughout Europe, South America, the Middle East, and the South Pacific. Or the advent of the modern mining industry around the same time as with the gold rushes that led to the creation of California and British Columbia.
These processes in North America generated a lot of wealth for a few people – most of the followers of resource booms are not quite so lucky. But the situation becomes even more complicated when those same technologies that built the colonial frontier – entitlement to mineral deposits, open shop labour practices, land grabs, the physical extraction and export of wealth – are applied globally. What we’re seeing today is the result: huge disparities in wealth, political marginalization, and environmental degradation.

We’ve been spoon-fed a lot of bullshit in the process. A lot of the time, we ingest it eagerly. Occupy is an important and inspiring movement to me is because it indicates that more than a handful of us are beginning to move beyond the rhetoric with which we and our parents and grandparents have been indoctrinated. It suggests that we may be moving towards a time when we forfeit the myth that inhibiting markets means inhibiting progress, and choose, instead, to fight for a society that is simply livable for everyone, globally.

It is true that it’s difficult to see at this juncture how the movement might move from a few ruminating articles in the press – such as this one – to a historical event that palpably improves the lives of single mothers, indigenous peoples, and impoverished individuals the world over. At what point exactly will the furor of the masses become so great that the prince has no choice but to step out onto his balcony and accede? The answer is that, although this movement may be revolutionary, its resolution will not be tidy. Banks sometimes have the luxury of being too big to fail; social movements do not. For now, it may be best to allow these democratic spaces to grow in hopes that they may eventually engulf the entire earth.

The role of the media in the development of this movement will no doubt be critical in shaping it, and, if it has any chance of affecting real and positive change, that coverage will have to be fair and engaged. In that sense, I’m earnestly gratified to see the editors of this newspaper taking such a participatory role in it. The last thing that we need is disengaged journalists deriding the movement for its idealism.

The readers’ advocate is a twice-monthly  column written by Niko Block addressing the performance, relevance, and quality of the Daily. You can reach him at readersadvocate@mcgilldaily.com.

The post We need Occupy, Occupy needs the media appeared first on The McGill Daily.

There has been much discussion lately of the perks and the pitfalls of corporate sponsorship at McGill, and I relate the above story just to emphasize that horrible things do, in fact, happen when we are not careful about who does our science. The story that ran in the September 8 issue of The Daily on the fiasco surrounding McGill Professor Barbara Sherwin is a case in point. Despite the story’s numerous errata and lack of context, it provides a good window into the authentically baleful effects that corporate money can have on academic research.

For those unfamiliar with the story, I’ll attempt a quick primer: At a conference in the early 1990’s, Sherwin, a psychology professor specializing in hormonal science, met and befriended another medical doctorate named Karen Mittleman. In 1998, Mittleman asked Sherwin to write an article in her precise area of expertise for the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, and Sherwin didn’t hesitate to seize the opportunity. Mittleman, an employee at the Princeton-based medical communications firm DesignWrite, offered some light editorial assistance on the article, which Sherwin accepted. The extent of Mittleman’s involvement later became the subject of intense scrutiny, and, ultimately, it appears to have been fairly minimal. By the time Mittleman contacted Sherwin about collaboration on a second article, things had started to heat up and Sherwin smartly kept her distance.

The problem was this: DesignWrite had made a secret business deal with a drug company called Wyeth. The idea was essentially that, in exchange for cash, DesignWrite would write articles endorsing Wyeth’s new hormone replacement therapy and launder them into respectability by finding medical professionals willing to take credit for them. Sherwin was privy to none of this.
Following revelations by the Women’s Health Initiative in 2002 that Wyeth’s new drug therapy led to a 41 per cent increase in strokes, a 29 per cent increase in heart attacks, a 22 per cent increase in total cardiovascular disease, a 26 per cent increase in breast cancer, and a doubling of rates of blood clots, the company understandably came under some heat.

In the subsequent class action lawsuit brought against Wyeth by 8,400 women who had received the drug therapy, it became evident that the company had commissioned at least forty scientific articles endorsing the drug treatment. This is where Sherwin came under fire. According to McGill’s own investigation into Sherwin’s academic conduct, the paper Mittleman had helped edit did not contain any clear endorsement of Wyeth’s drug treatment. The investigation did reprimand her for not noting Mittleman’s contribution to the article, however slight it may have been. (Sherwin claims that Mittleman declined credit).

Nonetheless, the disaster surrounding Wyeth starkly demonstrates the dangers that private interests pose to academic integrity. DesignWrite was quite obviously successful in distorting the medical discourse on hormone replacement therapy – and at tremendous human cost. This story is not a unique one: several other prematurely marketed drugs are currently falling under legal scrutiny, both for their adverse medical repercussions and for the ghostwriting rackets associated with them.

For these reasons, I was completely baffled by the ambivalent confusion of “The oil patch and the ivory tower: a science student explores her mixed feelings about corporate research” (September 19). It was interesting to find out that McGill is host to a research lab bankrolled by Imperial Oil, but the article came to no substantive conclusions whatsoever. It waffled back and forth, never addressed manifest stories of damage wrought at the hands of corporations, and wrapped up with some noble story of a former student’s wind farm project being set out for display when the lab’s patrons came to visit.

The lab in question (the WOW lab – Winners of Wonderment) may not be doing any direct harm to humans or the environment. But it is clearly the sort of PR project that allows companies like Imperial Oil – which has an atrocious record of environmental degradation – to greenwash its image and continue business as usual.

Can The Daily please decline to buy the myth of corporate social responsibility?

The readers’ advocate is a twice-monthly  column written by Niko Block addressing the performance, relevance, and quality of The Daily. You can reach him at readersadvocate@mcgilldaily.com.

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The motion came on the heels of a BoG decision earlier that morning to re-appoint Frederick Lowy as interim President while the university attempts to sort out a governance crisis that has sent the campus into turmoil in recent weeks.

Though she initially claimed she was stepping down for “personal reasons,” the circumstances of Woodsworth’s resignation remain shrouded in mystery and conjecture. She later confirmed that she was discreetly forced to resign by the BoG itself. The board’s motivations may remain unclear, and students and faculty alike are incensed by the administration’s lack of transparency in this matter.

The past two weeks have seen a spate of resolutions from the union’s faculty departments, student groups, and employee unions – all roundly criticizing the BoG’s silence on the matter of Woodsworth’s resignation.

Another serious concern has been the severance packages the university has doled out to the numerous high-level administrators who have resigned in recent months. Woodsworth herself will receive a payout to the tune of $703,500 – the equivalent of two years’ pay – stipulated in her contract. Her predecessor in the university’s presidency resigned under similarly opaque circumstances in 2007, and received over $1 million as part of his severance package.

Concordia’s VP Advancement and Alumni Relations Kathy Assayag, and VP Services Michael Di Grappa have also resigned this year – McGill has since hired Di Grappa as its new VP (Administration and Finance).

Maria Peluso, the president of the university’s part-time faculty association, has stated that, as a “conservative” estimate, the university has shelled out $10 million in severance packages and early retirement payouts in the past decade.

This number remains subject to speculation, however, given the confidential nature of the contracts the university has signed with its upper-level administrators.

“They seem to be signing non-disclosure contracts, leaving everyone in the dark,” said Erik Chevrier, one of the graduate students on senate. “This is extremely problematic to university governance, especially given that the university is a public institution and they seem to be giving out all these golden parachutes.”

When pressed for details on Woodsworth’s resignation, Kruyt has emphasized that her contract with the university demands a certain degree of confidentiality, and that those stipulations should be respected.

Many of the statements issued by faculty groups call for a full independent audit of “all extra payments made to former senior administrators as well as others still working in the senior administration.”

In addition to the motion urging Kruyt’s resignation, the senate – composed of 27 faculty members and 16 students – passed two other motions Friday afternoon demanding reform at the BoG level. All three passed unanimously. One called for the establishment of a Special Governance Commission to investigate the details of Woodsworth’s resignation and make recommendations accordingly.

The other demanded that the university strike a hiring committee composed in equal parts of senate members and BoG members to oversee the future appointment of board members chosen to represent the community at large – a task that has hitherto been undertaken by the board itself.

“It’s problematic if they’re appointing themselves, and we’ve seen the results of that,” said Chevrier.

Concordia Student Union (CSU) president Heather Lucas acknowledged that several students feel a serious “disconnect” with the BoG, and said she hopes that Friday’s senate meeting will have some sort of meaningful impact on the Board’s operations

“It’s a good start for clarifying governance at Concordia,” she said. “This is not a problem that’s going to get solved overnight. … It takes a whole collective effort to move forward.”

Half of the BoG’s 46 members represent the “community-at-large,” meaning they are not on the university’s payroll. The vast majority of these members hold executive positions at large Montreal-based businesses.

Many of the public statements made by the faculty departments in recent weeks also express concern that these BoG members intend to further reduce faculty representation on the Board.

“We are concerned that the community-at-large members should represent the community-at-large, and not just elite business members,” said Chevrier.

He added that none of these members attended the Senate meeting in the afternoon, where they could have addressed the concerns being raised by students and faculty. “I think that’s extremely troubling. It seems this is a situation that was made by them, but they’re unwilling to explain anything.”

The development speaks to a growing distrust among students and faculty of the external members of the BoG. Many have seen their terms expire, but remain on the BoG. A motion passed by CSU on January 12 called for the immediate resignation of all of these members “as per their own by-laws.”

Despite the turmoil and widespread distrust of the BoG, Lucas is confident that Lowy, the incoming interim president, will help solve the crisis of confidence the university’s governance structures seem to be facing.

“He seems very genuine about meeting everyone at the table – students, faculty, and staff. All the professors he met with couldn’t say anything negative…so this is a sign of hope for us to get us back on track. … We need to move forward and learn from our mistakes and make sure this never happens again.”

The post Concordia senate calls for resignation of BoG chair appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The Mcgill Daily: How did you get involved in Palestine solidarity activism?
Ewa Jasiewicz: I first got involved through the [International Solidarity Movement] in 2003, because of friends of mine who had been out to Palestine. … I didn’t know that much about Palestine when I went there. This was just about six months after [Operation] Defensive Shield, so there were still a lot of incursions and curfews and, you know, once you see what the Israel army and state is doing to the Palestinian people – you see people’s homes destroyed, blown up, people killed, people injured and just daily violence – you can’t really forget it, can you? You can’t not be active around it because it becomes personal.

MD: What were the objectives of the flotilla that was attacked in May?
EJ: The objective primarily was to break the siege. The carrying of humanitarian goods was for us symbolic. … It did physically ease the blockade because the Rafah crossing [between Egypt and Palestinian-controlled Rafah] is now open. Okay, still not far enough, and Egypt is still a co-oppressor in the siege, but thousands of people were able to cross who wouldn’t have been able to cross before. That’s one measure of success. But it was also the boost it gave to the [Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS)] movement because it shifted many people into supporting the BDS tactic who before had maybe been on the fence. So many artists, musical acts cancelled their acts afterwards – [like] the Gorillaz and the Pixies. And then of course the United Nations fact-finding mission report just shows you again how Israel has violated international law. But it is a success to have brought in effectively another country. The government of Turkey reacted strongly and demanded a NATO emergency meeting and got it and really diplomatically put the spotlight on condemning Israel. And that’s a really positive thing and the whole of Turkey was really behind that. And it has really changed the relationship between those two countries.

MD: Israel has claimed that some of the members of the flotilla are linked to Al-Qaeda and that IHH [The Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Aid, a Turkish NGO] is also linked to Al-Qaeda.

EJ: This is just absolute bullshit. Because if Israel really believed that there’s no way they would have let everybody go and released everybody. … They didn’t do that because it’s not true.

MD: Can you describe the flotilla raid?
EJ: The flotilla raid began in the early hours of the morning while it was still dark. That was a political decision by the Israeli navy, because they wanted to use the darkness to terrorize us and also to hide the actions of their soldiers. … So they continued trailing us and we were outrunning them for a while, maybe half an hour. We did hear shooting [from the Marmara], that was really horrible, but we were carrying on and then our captain decided to stop because he was feeling like they were going to cut us off and ram us and he didn’t want that. So he cut the engine and then they came closer and closer and then they just opened fire on the boat with plastic projectiles, smoke bombs. And they hit my friend in the face and she had blood all over her face and they wouldn’t let me treat her, they wouldn’t let anyone get to her, they were beating [my friend] Huwaida, and smashed the glass door open on the inside of the boat, they tasered the Sydney Morning Herald journalist, they cuffed me, they cuffed Huwaida, they put a hood on Huwaida and [another friend] Anna, they threatened to taser us, they were really brutal, they stomped on my face and then they took us into custody. … When it came to us being deported we kept saying that we wanted to see our council or our lawyer, that we didn’t want to leave, that we didn’t agree to this deportation, and they were just physically very aggressive with us and forced us out. They were beating people with truncheons and throwing chairs, and it was really horrible.

MD: And that’s when you were in detention?
EJ: Yes, we were still in detention.

MD: Were any of your fellow activists carrying weapons?
EJ: No, there were no weapons. Every single boat was searched. there were absolutely no weapons aboard any of the boats. That’s why people on the Marmara had to blowtorch some of the railings to make primitive weapons, to make crowbars, because they didn’t have normal weapons. They did have the right to defend themselves. You even have the right to defend yourself using firearms if you’re attacked at sea [in international waters].

MD: Do you feel that Hamas needs to be engaged diplomatically?
EJ: Without a doubt.

The post The Gaza flotilla raid, first hand appeared first on The McGill Daily.

On July 6, Bedard had announced his intention to lay off 107 of his employees, prompting the union to stop working overtime hours immediately. In the two weeks that followed, 16 freighters were backlogged in the St-Lawrence seaway after a diesel tanker upstream ran aground and started leaking into the river; the weather got so hot that it caused Montreal’s death rate to spike; and tensions between the union and the MEA were steadily rising.

For Bedard, the decision to lock his employees out was just a matter of numbers.

“The productivity in one week went down 30 to 40 per cent, depending on the terminal,” he says. “At 40 per cent it’s cheaper to close the port than to keep it open.”

But Tremblay was blindsided by the move.

“I was angry,” he says. “I was angry because we were not so far [from reaching a settlement]. We did not have the Grand Canyon to cross. It was only like the street here.”

Beyond the overtime stoppage, the pace of work on the docks was noticably lagging.

“It was very slow on the dock,” says Tremblay, “because they were angry about the employer, so they were making their [own] pressure tactic. But there was no order from the union.”

The night Tremblay received the call from Bedard, however, 450 of the union members had just convened and decided to officially call for a slowdown – but they were pre-empted by the lockout.

Bedard had insisted that his payroll was too large ever since the Port of Montreal’s business plummeted due to the financial crisis, but by July the longshoremen had been working without a contract for a year-and-a-half and negotiations were at an impasse.

When Bedard initially proposed the layoffs, the union balked, insisting that the MEA’s bottom line could be improved by less drastic measures. At least three union heads were kicked out or resigned in the wrangling that ensued, until Tremblay was nominated in September 2009. Tremblay – who in his 20 years at the local was on his fourth contract negotiation – managed to hammer something out by May, but it was voted down by his members. The same thing happened again in June.

“The last contract negotiation was a lot smoother,” he says.

The main sticking points in these negotiations had to do with job and income security. Payment for the equivalent of 40 hours a week was guaranteed to the longshoremen, regardless of the hours they actually worked. In exchange, they had to be available to work eight hours a day for nineteen days straight before their guaranteed two-day break. “When the ship is in we have work; when the ship is not in, we don’t have work,” says Bedard. “I guarantee your salary every year. In exchange you give me your availability. That’s the deal.”

They all had more time off when shipping traffic dropped precipitously due to the recession, but the MEA, adhering to the terms of its expired contract, had to continue forking over the same old wages to the same number of workers.

These contract stipulations are the product of the extraordinary amount of flexibility demanded of labour by the shipping industry. “There’s a schedule, but we can’t really follow that,” says Bedard. “So you can’t set your agenda for the next six months, who is going to work and when. The ship that was supposed to be in today might be late because there was a storm in the Atlantic. Or you’ll have three ships coming in at the same time because they were all blocked off by ice in the river.”

For longshoremen like Tremblay, who operates the docking cranes, not having the ability to make dinner plans throughout the week is a hassle, but it comes with the territory.

“It’s an open-air warehouse at the biggest scale you can possibly imagine,” says MEA labour relations consultant Guillaume Couture as he drives through the port’s western gate after flashing his ID to a security guard.

On the docks, a freighter full of sugar was being unloaded by means of a gigantic metal clamp that deposited what Couture estimated to be 10 tonnes of sugar at a time into a 25-foot funnel. A diagonal shaft then carried the sugar to the top of the seven-storey Lantic sugar refinery on Notre-Dame. Further along, Couture drove past a series of titanic mountains of salt that had just been dropped off from Africa and South America, waiting to be deployed on the icy streets of Montreal this winter.

The containers go on for miles. Steel, food, copper, furniture, wine – everything. “A container we unload here can get to Chicago inside 24 hours,” says Couture. “We don’t know what’s in ‘em, we don’t care what’s in ‘em. If it has to be shipped to Detroit, we’ll do it as fast as we can.” He adds that up to five and six hundred trucks visit each of the port’s seven major terminals every day.

The Port of Montreal sprawls across 25 kilometres of the island’s southeastern shore. Three of its terminals are located at the bottom of Peel, near the Farine Five Roses plant, where you’ll also find storage space for 260,000 tonnes of grain and 15 million barrels of “liquid bulk,” or petroleum. The remaining 12 terminals lie east of the Old Port, where most of the container handling takes place. Following Vancouver, Montreal is the largest port in the country, and the largest inland port in the world, giving it a huge advantage over New York and Halifax in accessing the Midwestern American market. Last year, more than 1.2 million containers carrying over 11 million tonnes of cargo passed through the port.

“If a ship leaves Antwerp, Belgium, to come to Montreal,” says Bedard, “he’s closer to Chicago and the Midwest and Toronto – the big markets. That’s what Montreal is good at.”

About half of the cargo the port handles is either entering or exiting the US, and the whole operation accounts for approximately 70 per cent of the consumer goods that go to Ontario and Quebec. When the lockout struck, ships already en route were forced to dock in Halifax, which didn’t have enough capacity to keep things running on schedule, while others charted for New York. A handful of boats already in the seaway simply dropped anchor – adding to the backlog created by the oil spill – and hoped for a quick resolution to the dispute.

Adverse effects made themselves known immediately. The Quebec Trucking Association said it feared layoffs would ensue shortly if the situation didn’t resolve itself, as did North America’s largest manufacturer of newsprint, AbitibiBowater Inc. Wal-Mart emphasized that “if the shutdown is not resolved quickly, it will have a serious impact on all businesses who rely on the Port of Montreal.” The Gazette ran an editorial stating, “Too much is at stake to allow this labour dispute to hold the province ransom.”

The union’s ability to hold the province “ransom” has doubtlessly played a role in its overall success in bargaining with its employer. (The average longshoreman earns upwards of $80,000 a year.) But if the strike revealed the “strength of the working class,” as marxist.ca put it, it also demonstrated the federal government’s alacrity in protecting these flows of capital. Labour minister Lisa Raitt immediately issued a press release expressing her “disappointment” with the dispute. “I urge the parties to resume bargaining and reach a negotiated agreement as soon as possible,” it read. Two days later, amidst a chorus of demands for immediate intervention, transport minister John Baird followed suit. “We’re tremendously concerned about the impact, not just in the Montreal area but indeed southern Ontario and southern Quebec, the manufacturing sector, the auto sector, which is still in a fragile state of recovery,” said Baird. Though the government never intervened, aside from its appointment of two mediators, both parties got the message.

“At the time [Bedard] decided to put a lockout, I think it was because he wanted the government to apply a law or something to be in the way of negotiation,” says Tremblay. “About two months before the lockout we were talking with people at the government to say don’t [interfere] in our negotiation. Let us make it like the [Labour] Code says, and I think Lisa Raitt listened to us.”

Perhaps even more urgently affected by the lockout than Wal-Mart was the island of Newfoundland, and premier Danny Williams’s office had good reason to ask Ottawa to step in. One hundred per cent of the food, pharmaceuticals, toilet paper and countless other products that arrive in St. Johns pass through Montreal first. Raitt deferred the question to the Canadian Industrial Relations Board (CIRB), which quickly began moving towards deeming Newfoundland’s cargo an essential service.

“That was fucking crazy,” laughs Tremblay. “They said that they’ve only got inventory for about ten days, so if they don’t have the stock they will have to shut down some companies.” In August, the CIRB determined that loading shipments to Newfoundland is an essential service, but the specifics – in particular how many men need to stay on the docks – have yet to be determined. The longshoremen aren’t particularly enthusiastic about having their hands tied.

“To us [Newfoundland shipping company] Oceanex is not an essential service, because they can do business in Trois-Rivières, they can do it in Sorel, they can do it in Quebec – so it’s only a logistic problem for the company.”

Tremblay is primarily concerned here about the potential for managerial abuses of the Labour Code.

A labour dispute at the Port of Vancouver last year led to management there pushing for the classification of docking work as an essential service across the board, which would paralyze the union’s ability to strike.

“In the west coast, the employer there doesn’t want to negotiate with the [longshoremen],” says Tremblay. “He wants to have a new reglementation and he’s pushing very hard there…so that if [they] don’t reach an agreement, they’re going to have to go to arbitration, and that’s very bad. We need to do what Canadians have always done – negotiate. It’s normal here. We’re normally a democratic country.”

Bedard points out that the government has intervened in each of the Vancouver port’s major labour disputes in recent memory. In Montreal, on the other hand, “we’ve always managed to find a solution and negotiate a solution,” he says.

He adds, however, that he thinks the government should amend the Labour Code to impose a deadline of some sort to otherwise-interminable negotiations. Bedard himself was in charge of negotiating a collective agreement with the union in Trois-Rivières, but infighting within the union stymied the process and it ended up lasting 14 years.

“Vancouver is going for forced arbitration. Maybe that’s the solution, but at the moment there is none so you end up with an open-ended system.”

The MEA’s exclusive source of revenue is a $3 fee on every tonne of cargo that passes in or out of the port. As president, Bedard is accountable to a board of directors that includes representatives of many of the world’s largest shipping and loading companies, like Hapag-Lloyd, Hanjin Shipping Co., and Maersk – as well as exclusively local operations like Montreal Gateway Terminals (MGT) Partnerships.

The association was judicially mandated as the representative of each of the longshoremen’s employers in the early 1970s. This was largely due to the near-constant labour disputes between the handful of unions and the various shipping companies operating at the port. Income and job security have been mainstays of the union’s contracts ever since.

“We needed to settle [on] something,” says Tremblay, “because for the Canadian economy we needed to fix all those strikes and lockouts at that time. It was mostly strikes.” Tremblay’s father worked at the docks when he decided to abandon his day job as a photographer for Journal de Montreal and became a longshoreman himself.

But the early 70s was also a pivotal moment for the industry worldwide. Shipping was growing rapidly at the time, especially given the recent introduction of standard containerization – a key innovation in the development of global trade.

“When I began here we were working a lot with our arms,” recalls Tremblay. “Now it’s only machines.”

The industry has steadily grown more flexible and more lucrative ever since. According to MGT, shipping has grown three times faster than GDP since the early 1990s. One firm called Drewry Shipping Consultants estimates that global container flow will rise by 7.2 per cent per year on average between 2009 and 2015. (This figure lags noticeably behind the double-digit growth the industry saw in the early years of the last decade.)
Large-scale projects to increase shipping and port capacity are almost perpetually underway around the globe. New York’s container terminal – which competes directly with Montreal – recently announced plans to double its service capacity. The Panama Canal likewise plans to double its capacity by 2014 – a development that will open up ports in the Southeastern US to ships from China, which typically only dock on the west coast before their cargo is carted east by rail and truck.

The recent recession was in fact the first time the industry had seen a net decline. “Container shipping is not a very old business,” notes Bedard. “It’s what, 40 years old? Fifty at the most? I would say [2008-2009] was a huge slump, when you lose 20 per cent of the business. And we didn’t do worse than the other ports.”

In recent years, the industry’s rapid growth has garnered billions of dollars in investment capital, breaking up the traditional vertically-integrated business model of the past. “The big difference is that ten years ago the major player in Montreal, the major shipping line, was CP ships,” says Bedard. “CP ships owned the biggest terminal in Montreal, so it was their ships unloading on their terminal; then they would put the containers on their rail cars, on their railways.”

The first major investment fund to move into the Canadian ports, he says, was the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan (OTPP) – the largest pension fund in Canada with over $87 billion in net assets – which in 2007 established Global Container Terminals Inc. (GCT). GCT now handles 70 per cent of the containerized flow through Vancouver’s port in addition to ten per cent at the ports of New York and New Jersey.

Morgan Stanley, awash with more money than it knew what to do with at the time, followed suit the same year after hiring one of the OTPP’s investment managers. The investment bank bought an 80 per cent share in the MGT, which operates the terminals that had once belonged to CP. And this was right on the heels of the acquisition of other terminals in Vancouver and Halifax by an Australian investment bank.

What this expanded growth and diversification in the industry means for longshoremen, as far as Bedard is concerned, is that the union no longer has the same leverage it once did, because Montreal can no longer monopolize any shipping routes whatsoever.

“Montreal was CP’s only port of call in North America,” says Bedard. “So if the union went on strike they would virtually close off North America to CP ships. So for a long time, the union felt that they had some bargaining power because of that. All that’s changed in the last ten years. The biggest terminal in Montreal is now owned by Morgan Stanley. The lines that call Montreal, one is Chinese, one is Danish, one is German, and one is from Geneva. They all have terminals either in Halifax or in New York. So if Montreal is not a good place to come, or if it is too expensive, or the longshoremen don’t want to play the game, they’ll just do like the birds and flock off to their terminals in Halifax and somewhere else, that’s all.”

In terms of traffic volume, the port has weathered the rise of the Canadian dollar in the past decade relatively well, but it has inevitably affected its competitiveness.

“It’s much more volatile a business than it used to be,” says Bedard. “The liners can go anywhere. The decision is made in Hong Kong or Stockholm or Hamburg. They don’t care about the place where the container will be unloaded, whether it’s Savannah Georgia, or Boston or Halifax. These are just names for them.”

By the July 23, Tremblay and Bedard were both anxious to open the port and resume negotiations – and both hoped they would progress faster that the glacial pace that had characterized talks up until that point. Bedard simply wanted an end to the work-to-rule tactics; the union simply wanted an end to the lockout; and the business world breathed a sigh of relief when work resumed that weekend.

The union voted on the new contract proposal last Thursday, and approved it. It encompasses severance packages for 50 employees – mainly older ones – in addition to a pay-raise of between 1.5 and 2.5 per cent, and a bit of finagling with job and income security that gives the MEA more options in case of a future slowdown in business. Their pensions won’t be affected.

“It’s a start,” says Bedard, noting that container traffic in Montreal has bounced back approximately to 2006 levels, which to a certain degree has helped ease some of the tensions between the MEA and the union local.

“These guys are business men,” shrugs Tremblay. “I’ve got a good relationship with [Bedard] and everyone there – also the board. Yesterday I was with the CEO of Morgan Stanley. I’m going to take a glass of wine with him in New York in maybe two weeks.”

The post Containerized Capital appeared first on The McGill Daily.

In fact, the most recent edition of the Master Plan is dated April 2008, and makes no explicit mention of the bike ban – just a single sentence buried on page 57 stating that “[i]n order to encourage a pedestrian-oriented lower campus, alternative recommended cycle routes and bicycle traffic-calming measures will be considered, in collaboration with City authorities.” That’s it.

At the open forum, only one statistic on the popularity of the bike ban was cited, and it was by McGill Urban Planning alumnus Jacob Larsen, who a few years ago had conducted a poll of 400-odd students. Only about 10 per cent favoured the idea of banning both bikes and cars from campus. And that was prior to the implementation of a car-free campus and the construction of the University bike path, which have substantially opened up space here and reduced the volume of commuters cycling through.

Have Nicell and his task force polled students at all on this? When I asked, all I got was yet another list of “stakeholders” I’d never heard of, but who, importantly, had been “consulted” in the construction of the Master Plan. Clearly they have no such data, and I genuinely would have appreciated an admission of that fact.

It might be smart, in the sense of Realpolitik, to consult a bunch of people and come out of the whole process with some arbitrary and unilateral decision, but it’s not classy, it’s not fair, and it’s undemocratic.

—Niko Block
Features editor

The post Cut the shit on the bike ban appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Management at Montreal’s largest broadsheet French newspaper has announced that it will go out of print unless its workers accept a new contract by December 1.

La Presse’s unionized workers issued a public statement “deploring” the publisher’s hard-line tactics after the announcement was made on September 3, but the two sides have since commenced negotiations toward a new contract which Gesca Ltée – the paper’s parent corpoation – hopes will be $13-million less than the current one.

Like dozens of other daily newspapers across North America squeezed by declining ad revenues amid the current recession, La Presse has sought to cut its costs wherever possible. After announcing last June that the paper will be running a deficit of over $200-million by 2013 unless it radically restructures, management has sought to decrease its expenses by $26-million annually.

Having already decreased the physical size of the newspaper and discontinued its Sunday edition, Guy Crevier, the president of Gesca Ltée, is demanding that the remaining cuts must come from the unions – namely, that the 600 unionized employees there start to work five days a week, as opposed to four, and accept a six per cent cut in pay.

In a press release issued last Friday, La Presse announced that while negotiations are ongoing, representatives of Gesca Ltée and La Presse’s unions would not make comments to the media.

In recent months, labour relations have deteriorated much more dramatically at one of La Presse’s rival publications, the daily tabloid Le Journal de Montréal. After the contract of the Syndicat des travailleurs de l’information du Journal de Montréal (STIJM) expired on December 31, the union and management were unable to agree upon a new contract, and the STIJM’s 253 employees have been locked out ever since.

Pascal Filotto, the Secretary General of the STIJM, said that the problems workers at the La Presse currently face are similar to those of his own union.

“We thought that we had offered them a lot of concessions, but they really haven’t budged much from their initial position,” he said. “They want to essentially outsource accounting, and a lot of the classified ads workers they want to get rid of. That’s more than a third of our membership.”

Filotto added that negotiations at La Presse are likely to fare better than they have at Le Journal because Gesca will be forced to disclose its financial accounts during the course of its discussions with the union. Le Journal’s parent company, Quebecor, on the other hand, has kept its numbers hidden.

“If you have real numbers then you can talk seriously,” Filotto said. “[Management] is asking us to make concessions that really are not in proportion with the actual crisis and the way it’s affecting our paper.”

STIJM’s previous contract included stipulations designed to keep corporate interference out of the newsroom. Filotto said that the union intends to maintain such agreements in its next contract, despite management’s intentions to omit them.

The Montreal Gazette, Montreal’s most popular English daily, also switched to a smaller-sized paper last spring as a result of the financial pressures it has been facing.

Gazette columnist Henry Aubin stated that workers at his paper have “backed off from pressure tactics” as the financial problems facing the paper, and its parent corporation CanWest Global, have come to light.

“I think everyone’s going to have to reduce their expectations. French news has had four-day papers, and I think it’s very naive to think that’s going to continue,” said Aubin, adding that workers at La Presse typically make more than those at The Gazette.

The post La Presse threatens to go out of print appeared first on The McGill Daily.

It has, after all, created an antagonistic relationship between students and security guards, pissed off most of my friends, and caused many of us to lose faith in the motives behind its traffic-reduction initiative. It’s bad enough that this campus is designed like a gated community to begin with; now each of its three access points are now monitored by someone threatening to knock you off your bike with a baton.

Bike traffic has been a thorn in McGill’s side for as long as I’ve attended this school. This was mainly the result of an faulty urban plan that led bikers from Mile End down the bike lane on Parc, then down Hutchison and along Milton to University, from which point they had nowhere to go but through campus to get to the downtown core. Associate Vice-Principal (University Services) Jim Nicell told me in a recent interview that according to a study by Vélo Québec, on any given weekday morning, 3,000 bikes entered campus through the Milton Gates and 2,500 left through the Roddick Gates. Only 500 stayed on campus. This was the rationale behind the construction of a bike path along University between Sherbrooke and Milton. But the admin categorically refused to wait and see if things would improve, instead opting for a total ban within three months of that bike path’s completion.

Yet it wouldn’t be entirely fair of me to paint the admin as a diabolical campus-zoning tyrant. I do appreciate the expansion of bike parking on campus, and I applaud them especially for working so enthusiastically and effectively with the long-standing student campaign for a car-free campus. These are real and positive projects that the admin has undertaken.

(Most frustrating of all in my investigation of how this came about was the revelation that both of the admin’s representatives I talked to are themselves bikers. Will they never just let us remorselessly hate them?)
Nicell did convince me that the University’s primary concern here is student safety. He mentioned that in the three years he’s spent at his current job, his office has received several reports of pedestrians being hit by cyclists, and not a single one about a motor vehicle doing the same. He himself was clipped by a cyclist flying through campus earlier this summer – his computer was knocked to the ground and the guy rode on. And that does suck. Even I feel pretty confident that some day one of those oblivious bikers riding down the left side of the road will put me in crutches for a while.

What it comes down to is that the admin has lost its faith in the ability of the pedestrian and the biker to co-exist harmoniously. The admin’s online FAQ on cycling emphasizes the infeasibility of returning to the good old days more or less because “once pedestrians become accustomed to the reduced amount of vehicular traffic on campus, we believe the risk of such injuries would increase, should cyclists be permitted to circulate as in the past.”

These arguments scarcely affect my opinion that this approach is misguided, excessive, that we were not given adequate warning, and that they’ve dismissed certain planning alternatives out of hand. Speed bumps or a bike path would both contribute tremendously to controlling the flow of bikes through campus. Bikes are unwieldy animals from an organizational perspective, but they are not the inherent menace the administration has made them out to be.

Niko Block is The Daily’s Features editor and a U3 History student. Write him at nikoblock@gmail.com.

The post Bikes deserve a place on campus appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Along the walkway between the two main venues was a beer garden that consisted of two fifteen-foot tepees, staffed by two platinum blondes in cowboy boots and push-up bras (the purpose of which I had trouble understanding, since we could drink anywhere anyway). Next to this was a tent that seemed to be jointly sponsored by an audio-visual company and War Child, where I saw some really cute teenage emo bands. And then there was a gigantic metal shipping container on which was perched a DJ against the backdrop of a billboard for a cellphone company, the name of which I’ll keep secret. When the front side of the thing would open, a bunch of employees ensconced by a thick cloud of fake smoke would run out in a hurricane of techno and team spirit, encouraging people to play some shitty games on the six iPads in there “for prizes.” The first step in this process was to enter a bunch of personal information, which I faked and then somehow accidentally deleted – so I said Fuck It and walked off.

The sun kept most of the crowd sitting under a patch of trees on the hillside like sweaty raisins, occassionally flagging down the big-breasted bitties who meandered the crowd in tight T-shirts that said “Shooter: $4” and carried 25-ounce bottles of Jägermeister. This was, incidentally, the same price as a bottle of water, which you could otherwise only access by refilling your water bottle at these green plastic presumably-African-inspired masks that sprayed a heavy mist out of their mouths. I visited these green plastic presumably-African-inspired masks several times throughout the weekend.

At the same time, I did appreciate how 4:20-friendly the whole thing was. In the event that I was collared by a security guard for smoking pot, the plan was to point to the STM bus parked at the top of the hill that was covered in grass sod and solar panels as some sort of mitigating factor. But fortunately I never had to rise to that occasion.

I was also impressed by how many couples in their thirties and forties were in attendance, though the absence of a number of friends who had wanted to come did make me lament the $135-ticket, which I had managed to bypass as a member of the press.

Part of the draw for the comfortably-settled was definitely due to performers like Sarah Harmer, the folk singer-songwriter from Burlington, Ontario who migrated around the Toronto country scene for over a decade before releasing her breakthrough solo album You Were Here. After that album landed her on the cover of Now magazine at some point in 2000, I downloaded her single, Basement Apartment, and put in on the first CD I ever burned for myself. (Yep, she was right up there alongside Sarah McLaughlin and The Cranberries.) And after almost a decade of facetiously revisiting that disc every year or so I was glad to catch her performance, which was about as somber as her lyrics (save for the cameraman at the side of the stage, who was perpetually blasted by a pointless smoke machine). She opened her set with her new single Captive, which is still stuck in my head, and continued with some of her more recent material. Harmer’s new album, Oh Little Fire – her first in five years – strikes many of the same catchy, though despondent, chords as her first, albeit with more innovative production and instrumentation. “Saccharine” was the term Erin used to describe her music, which was a fair point, but with her sensitive voice and well-grounded tunes it was impossible not to let my heart flutter a little. I think I was the only person smoking in the audience, and the entire time I was scheming for a way to score a candid interview with her, as her agent at Universal Music hadn’t responded to my email. I definitely would have asked her thoughts on her new album, but the main thing I wanted to hear about was her involvement in the movement to save Southern Ontario’s prison farms, which are currently being threatened with closure by the Harper government. She didn’t talk to the audience much, nor did she experiment wildly with her songs on stage. In her denim dress and big brown sunglasses, she struck more the pose of a high school teacher. Which is all to say that her music would appeal to anyone who grew up on a healthy diet of Canadian folk artists like The Crash Test Dummies and Joni Mitchell, of which I am certainly one.

The next act on the docket was Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes – an authentically cute band whose first LP debuted only a year ago, and who have been on tour pretty much ever since. Led by the stylish and flirtatious Alex Ebert of Ima Robot, the nine-piece group of twenty-something Californian rockabillies played a solid set, with Ebert occasionally foraying into the audience and getting smothered by the hands of the crowd.

They were good, but nothing had prepared me for the act that followed, as the legendary Jimmy Cliff leaped onto the stage wearing a red jump-suit with a bright yellow collar and a backward red ballcap. His band – a crew of about ten musicians, each of whom wore an orange T-shirt that said “JimmyCliff.com” on the back and looked to be at least three decades younger than Cliff himself – were deservingly talented performers. But it was impossible to upstage the main man himself, in spite of their soulful percussionist, steady guitarist, and relentlessly groovy bassist and horn section. Cliff – who, by the way, moves his body better than any contemporary singer in the world – opened with Beautiful People, followed by Many Rivers to Cross, I Can See Clearly Now, and Afghanistan, set to the tune of his anti-war classic Viet Nam. At one point he got the audience chanting the words “save our planet Earth” – which Jade Castrinos of Edward Sharpe, standing at the side of the stage, obligingly took part in – then wrapped up his set with a rendition of Rivers of Babylon that brought me near the verge of tears. Anything else and I may have ODed on good vibes.

Cliff’s charisma went unmatched for the rest of the weekend, save for the likes of Snoop Dogg, whose tyrannical domination of the stage gave me an absolute boner. Dressed entirely in black and rapping into the most extravagantly decorated microphone I have ever seen, Snoop galvanized the crowd almost effortlessly by laying down early singles like Gin and Juice, newer ones like Drop it Like it’s Hot, and House of Pain’s ‘92 smash hit Jump Around. Flanking the stage during his performance were two body guards wearing immaculate three-piece suits, with silk handkerchiefs folded immaculately into their breast pockets. “There’s someone over there too? My God,” Snoop parenthetically said to himself when a third materialized next to the back curtain.

Less ecstatic though equally legendary were two of the great lo-fi bands of the late 80s in attendance. I definitely respect Sonic Youth for being the one band to refrain from playing their biggest hit – which is a truly incredible song so I was also a little pissed off. Ultimately I can’t think of anything to say about their set except that it was pretty good I guess.

Pavement’s show opened with Steve Malkmus notifying us that they had come on as early as possible and planned to play for as long as possible: “we’re gonna party like it’s 1996.” The audience demurely bobbed their heads as they sang along to the playfully depressing lyrics of Gold Soundz, but the mood decisively changed when, halfway through their second song, a plastic cup full of the overpriced, tepid version of Budweiser that was impossible not to buy and then regret was launched into the air about 20 metres from the spot where Malkmus was contemplatively soloing. Time stood still as we watched this thing sail towards him, until it finally smashed perfectly into his head, completely drenching his shirt and guitar. None of his bandmates seemed to notice though so he dejectedly resumed playing after a moment of shock. Aside from that, their act was one of the most predictable, but it was great to hear some of my high-school favourites off their album Crooked Rain. Their tambourine player and backup singer Bob Nastanovich reminded us all of what our dad would look like if he lost his mind one afternoon and decided to become a rock star.

Which is a trait Nastanovich had in common with every single member of Devo, who are so old, so pudgy, so funny, and whose beats were so incredibly heavy that I had trouble figuring out why their not still on Top 40. On stage, Devo vaguely resembled the Ghostbusters with their dystopian 80s humour and their yellow hazmat suits, which they eventually tore to shreds and cast into the audience, thus inaugurating their fifth outfit of the set. It would not be their last. The group, who also mirror Pavement with their quotidian themes and call-and-response duets, undoubtedly put on the most psychedelic act of the weekend – a title they claimed hands-down toward the end of their set as they played their sarcastic psalm Beautiful World, with lead man Mark Mothersbaugh dressed as an ice-cream cone, monologuing about the resurrection of Michael Jackson against the backdrop of a pixelated footage of oil spewing from BP’s broken pipeline in the Gulf of Mexico. The teleological direction of their aesthetic tends toward a sort of subversive corporate cyberpunk – which is exactly what makes it funny when they erratically deploy the F-bomb or produce loincloths from the depths of their shorts and fling them into the audience. The great irony of their send-ups of branding and fascism is that they use their name in their own lyrics at least as often as Limp Bizkit used to, and have maintained their own brand through their ever-present hats known as “Energy Domes,” their “Everybody Masks,” and their ongoing campaigns a-la 50s laundry detergent.

And now for the randos:
I had never heard of this band, The Arcade Fire, but I found their use of strings really cool and their lyrics really spoke to me. I kid. In all seriousness, their show was predictably solid, though amid the tacky light-effects and the sheer scope of the venue, it was nothing to write home about. And I did get really annoyed at Win Butler’s younger brother, who mainly just bounced around the stage overzealously hitting things with a stick. My recommendation to the band is that they terminate him immediately.

The Cat Empire are an Australian group trying their hand at being white rudeboys, and are for the most part failing, though they did play one salsa tune that was fairly energetic and catchy.

British-born Parisian Charlie Winston was the big surprise of the festival for me. His guys on bass and keyboard laid down some creative beats, while his guitarist played consistently good 50s-style rock licks. The lead man himself – who managed to pull off the fedora in the same way that British people always manage to get away with terrible jokes – sings with a soulful tremour in his voice, and opened one or two of his tracks with some skillful beatboxing.

And finally: while Edward Sharpe’s brand of country captures the naivety and flippancy of what it must have meant to be a young Californian in the 60s, Horse Feathers’ is more likely to evoke Kentucky coal miners and The Great Depression. With their simple instrumentation of guitar, banjo, cello and violin, the group struck a salt-of-the-earth chord that I really dug. But I had to ditch them in order to catch The Black Keys, whose guitar was a hundred times heavier than either of those bands, and whose vocalist sounds like he’s singing into the cheapest, crappiest and best-sounding microphone available.

It was an eclectic mix of musicians, with a roster ranging from one of the monarchs of hip-hop to a golden girl of Canadian folk to a few promising local acts I’d never heard of like Daniel Isaiah Schachter and Marie-Pierre Arthur. The sound quality at every venue was pretty good; the whole thing was a bit sleazy when it came to corporate advertisement and there was some absolute trash on the playlist, like Stars and Keane. Nonetheless, if the organizers’ objective was to pack as many hit songs as possible into a two-day festival, they definitely succeeded.

Now, I absolutely abhor Weezer but after feeling my body vibrating from musical tremors for two days straight it was pretty god-damn wonderful to meander out of the park as they played my grade-six anthem Buddy Holly, and then hop on my bike.

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Further discussion – and potentially litigation – on the federation’s relationship with the graduate student society is likely to follow, however, as the CFS has not recognized the plebiscite as legitimate.

The referendum follows a lengthy round of as-yet unresolved negotiations between CFS and PGSS on the appropriate process for defederation.

PGSS filed a petition to hold the referendum earlier in the year, though CFS failed to respond to the request by the end of its mandated time for doing so. PGSS subsequently filed for an injunction that would ratify the request at the Quebec Superior Court, but the judge deferred a final decision on the matter.

PGSS VP finance Eric Pollanen said that another court date on the referendum’s validity is slated for late May.

“Now the question is whether they’ll recognize this referendum after the fact,” said Pollanen.

He added that in the preliminary negotiations on the referendum bylaws, the CFS had pushed for the voting period to be no longer than two days, while PGSS pushed for four.

“Two days is very unlikely to reach quorum,” said Pollanen. “It’s very difficult to agree to a referendum with little possibility of reaching quorum.”

Between Monday and Thursday, during which time the referendum was held, twelve percent of PGSS students voted, thereby surpassing the five per cent quorum.

Just prior to the referendum Pollanen and Eric Reed – both representatives to the referendum oversight committee – received an email from CFS staffer Lucy Watson indicating that CFS may run a parallel two-day referendum.

In response, PGSS president Daniel Simeone sent an email to all members of PGSS warning them that the federation may make an attempt to undermine the referendum.

Alex Anderson, a member of the three-person pro-CFS Yes committee, argued that the email on the PGSS listserv was premature, and cast the CFS in a negative light without giving them to opportunity to publicly respond.

“Given that students didn’t have the chance to understand the benefits of remaining in CFS, it’s unsurprising that they voted against sustaining PGSS’s membership,” said Anderson.

PGSS has accused CFS of being litigious, corrupt, and undemocratic throughout the year.

Last week, members of the Concordia Student Union also voted overwhelmingly in favour of leaving the national student lobby.

For more on this topic:
Concordia, Calgary grads leave CFS
PGSS Council approves CFS referendum
CFS involved in three lawsuits in Quebec
Students at 13 unions petition to leave CFS

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What this means in the case of Canada and Europe is a sport called Crashed Ice. The sport’s first-ever world championship was held in Quebec City on March 20.

The idea behind the game is that four athletes at a time – each clad in skates, helmets, and promotional jerseys – race through the course’s jumps, turns, and ramps as quickly as possible. According to an athlete with a broken wrist I met after the event, Crashed Ice had resulted in eight separated shoulders and two broken legs that day. It’s a sport that, in the words of one of its press releases, “certainly isn’t for ice princesses!”

The four-day occupation of the province’s capital that accompanied the world championship saw 120,000 spectators heaped into the old city’s streets, the installation of nine jumbo LED screens and 2,000 spotlights, two million watts of energy expended, several thousand cans of Red Bull consumed, and a massive private security contingent on site. The event’s centrepiece was a half-kilometre-long downhill ice track that started at the Chateau Frontenac and wound down toward the port.

The crowds of people who flocked to the event should not have come as much of a surprise. Few other marketing ploys in history have been quite so appealing to Quebeckers as one that turns hockey into an extreme sport, gets hosted in the downtown core of their capital, and abandons any enforcement of open-container laws whatsoever.

Quebeckers, in fact, were so enthusiastic about the event that a few months prior, when it looked like Red Bull might actually make good on its pledge that the event would never visit the same city twice, Quebec’s mayor endorsed an idea that had been floated by a local DJ and held an official buy-a-Red Bull day, which cleared three weeks’ worth of product, and obviously achieved its intended effect at Red Bull HQ.

Bull nation
The first spot I visited was the media centre at the Chateau Frontenac. The woman at the desk there didn’t seem to mind that I hadn’t been placed on her list of accredited media, and handed me a generic lanyard with nothing but the words “media/medias” on it. Throughout the rest of the night, I found that I could bypass virtually any security guard, line up, or entrance fee just by flashing this thing.

There was a lot of Blur’s “Song 2” (“Woo Hoo”), Limp Bizkit, spotlights, crane cams, and here and there a sign reminding me that “your face and/or voice might end up in the media (especially if you’re good looking)… [and be] used for commercial purposes.” Red Bull’s logo was projected onto the sides of buildings, silkscreened onto most of the drinking tents, and shaved into the heads of athletes and bartenders. Hot Hot Heat played a few sets live onstage during intermissions, though they struggled to captivate the audience the way the sport itself did.

I wound up at the event after being approached by Dave Gourlay, the student brand manager (SBM) for Red Bull at McGill. His job description – and that of his female counterparts, the wing team members (WTMs) – is a relatively loose one: “to bring the Red Bull brand to life in the world of all things college. It can be as simple as providing Red Bull for a party or…it can go a whole lot further,” according to the web site of “Red Bull University.” The WTMs, he said, in particular are expected to show up at parties with free Red Bull and their good looks.

“It’s just a bunch of fun people doing cool things,” said Gourlay. “If people have good ideas for crazy events – since that’s what Red Bull’s image is, they just go ahead and they do a good job.”

Extreme stunts, extreme altitudes, extreme poverty
Decadent though it was, the Crashed Ice World Championship is just one of dozens of events staged worldwide each year by the Thai- and Austrian-owned company, events that are simply too big, too absurd, and too expensive for the news media to overlook.

Other sports invented and operated by Red Bull include, among many others, the air race, which involves one-person aircraft being flown through slalom courses; the “favela flyers,” a mountain bike race through some of Rio de Janeiro’s poorest neighbourhoods; and “stratos,” an attempt to drop skydiver Felix Baumgartner from a space pod in the stratosphere, while wearing a spacesuit and parachute both emblazoned – naturally – with the Red Bull logo. If the stunt succeeds, Baumgartner will be the first person to break the sound barrier in freefall in what is slated to be the highest skydive of all time.

The company’s fixation on bionic athleticism, coupled with the quasi-spiritual attitude of some of its online videos – a number of which feature aerial shots of the Christ the Redeemer statue – all communicate the message that Red Bull is on a mission to advance the human race to a state that is harder, better, faster, and stronger than it was before.

A small but manageable controversy erupted last year when it was discovered that Red Bull Cola contains trace amounts of cocaine; the drink was subsequently banned in Taiwan and six German states.

Crashed athletes
Once the race had ended and the finalists doused each other in champagne, I returned to the Chateau Frontenac for a press conference with the four top-ranking male and female athletes.

“Can I have a Red Bull?” asked one of the men to an attendant WTM.

The fragrance of sweat and energy drink permeated the room.

Most of the athletes didn’t know exactly what to say in response to the host’s repeated question, “So what do you have to tell us about this whole experience?”

When she came to Martin Niefnecker, a 19-year-old Bavarian water engineer who had come in second that day, but first in a previous round held in Munich, the host asked him how it felt to be the first-ever Red Bull Crashed Ice world champion and wished him good luck with his “future career as a Red Bull crasher.”

“For me this is an event just like an ice hockey game,” said Niefnecker when I approached him afterward. “I have to do my best and I want to win; it doesn’t matter if it’s marketing or not.”

The streets had emptied rapidly outside of the Chateau Frontenac, as the fans poured out of the old city toward the bars and clubs along Grande Allée. The security guards for the most part were absent too, leaving a few cops lackadaisically sweeping up the broken glass with their feet.

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