“The public policies around HIV determined by governments and the United Nations were largely set out by the activists on the ground,” Lewis said, going on to explain that in Africa, for example, it was a number of grassroots gay men’s movements that spurred the initiatives in HIV awareness and policy. He traced the impact of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) in South Africa, which set out a model for the entire continent in terms of non-state actor (a person with signficiant power not tied to a government) strategy. Using empirical research and the concept of treatment as prevention, Lewis worked with TAC to communicate the message that “we have a crisis, the government isn’t sufficiently responding, we need some help,” until the government was forced to acknowledge the public health movement and its demands. “That’s what advocacy is,” Lewis stated. “It isn’t simply about making sure people will survive, it’s about making a discernible impact on actual public policy.”

Lewis went on to say that advocacy also depends on not giving up, that, “You go out on what you feel is an uncompromising position, you’re tenacious, you’re emphatic, you alienate everyone. We’re experts at alienation, but you keep the work going, and ultimately, you will break through.”
Throughout his talk, Lewis stressed what he called “the exquisite dimension of advocacy, whether one be a student, or a member of a discipline unrelated to a particular cause – a difference can be made if you grit your teeth. One day, the pendulum shifts and real change can be achieved.”

Advocacy and safe space at McGill

Lewis’ words provide a useful lesson for the youth advocate who wants to press for change at the campus level. In that vein, we can find many useful examples of advocacy groups at McGill, most of them student-run – most notably the Quebec Public Interest Research Group (QPIRG).

The Inclusive Mental Health Collective

The Inclusive Mental Health Collective is one example of the new working groups within QPIRG. The Collective offers “open meetings to connect, collaborate, get input from, and build community allies,” Ethan Macdonald, one of the organizers of the Collective, told The Daily by email.

The Collective provides a “base camp” for individuals with “shared experience” when dealing with distress, trauma, emotional or psychological diversity, diagnosis, et cetera. Macdonald highlighted the importance of mental health advocacy in a society where few have the chance to define their psychology for themselves. This is because the vocabulary of psychology revolves around ‘disease’-oriented language, which is not typically used outside of the doctor’s office. Macdonald asserted that such language is not reflective of individuals’ experiences.

The Collective tries to provide a safe space for individuals with these “shared experiences,” where they can be free to share a non-judgemental space. Macdonald went on to state that there is a “continued silence about marginalization, coercion, discrimination (ex. racism, cissexism, et cetera), and abuse within psychiatry and medicine.” People may be coerced into seeking help or taking medication that isn’t legal yet – or that may have long-term negative side effects.

An individual with “shared experience” can feel a “shame over emotions, thoughts, behaviours, and perceptions, even when they are harmless,” Macdonald continued, probably because of stigma attached to mental health. The Collective helps do away with that stigma layer by layer, and is an invaluable safe space at McGill in a time when other mental health services are lacking.

The Indigenous Women and Two Spirit Harm Reduction Coalition

The Indigenous Women and Two Spirit Harm Reduction Coalition emerged this year as a new working group of QPIRG McGill. The Coalition aims to provide harm reduction resources and materials to Indigenous women and Two Spirit (a member of an Indigenous community who doesn’t identify with their biological gender) identified people.

McGill student Molly Swain and Concordia student Lindsay Nixon started the coalition in hopes to work toward “[providing Indigenous and Two Spirit people] with resources and materials that will contribute to the safety, respect, and legitimization of their choices and circumstances,” the Coalition told The Daily over email. “Whether it be clean needles, condoms and dental dams, or zines about navigating the prison system, we want to ensure Indigenous women and Two Spirit people can access what they need to make the best choices for themselves.”

The Coalition functions under a non-hierarchical and Indigenous feminist framework and is open to all Status and Non-Status First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people, and Indigenous people from other lands. “We wanted this very much to be work we’re doing for our community,” said Swain. “We wanted the chance to do things that are really important for our communities and outside the academic context.”

“Indigenous students can have a more difficult time navigating university services, loans programs, etc., or experience racism, sexism, cissexism, or homophobia within the institution, all of which can make their post-secondary experience more challenging,” Swain and Nixon continued in their email to The Daily.

“Groups and organizations run by and for Indigenous people are important as spaces of activism, community, and solidarity in an institution like the university where we have historically not been permitted,” and where Indigenous people are highly underrepresented within “settler academia.” The Coalition is a way to re-make settler space, and “bring [the organizers’] work as Indigenous Feminists strongly committed to decolonization and resurgence into the wider community of urban Native people in Montreal.”

One recommendation for a starting point is the SSMU equity council for undergraduate students looking to get more involved in social equity and campus advocacy building efforts. “They’re consistently so thoughtful and so aware of what’s going on around campus, and so prepared to help students find a variety of options for what they want to do and what their needs are,” said Sarah Malik, Social Equity and Diversity Education (SEDE) Office Equity Educational Advisor, agreeing that the avenues for different types of advocacy and inclusion initiatives are already in place at McGill. The challenge for some students lies in discovering the opportunities that are out there and connecting with them in relation to their needs.

Social Equity and Diversity Education Office

Initiatives looking to make McGill a more inclusive space exist beyond the spheres of action and student advocacy. One example of this is the wide array of workshops offered by SEDE. Malik explained that SEDE’s mission is “to inform members of the community on equity, diversity, and education in order to create a better, more inclusive campus climate.” Workshops touch upon a variety of topics, such as anti-racism, equity, inclusion, and the originating concept of safer space. These workshops have expanded to offer a certificate to students who participate in the full suite of workshops, so that students can carry out their knowledge and apply it to real-life situations, and educate their peers.

Partnerships have branched out across the McGill Community from SEDE. One such example is an alliance with Teaching Learning Services (TLS), in the form of workshops offered, named “Skillsets,” which have a mandate to provide transferable skills to graduate students and faculty staff. The Daily spoke to David Syncox, Graduate Education Officer at Teaching and Learning Services, on the efforts being made to create a wide variety of workshops for graduate and teaching staff, using input from various groups. “Partnerships include a variety of faculty and departments[…] not just at a higher level of the Skillsets suite, but for something which is available for consumption of all, for any departments who want to help their student groups become more aware,” said Syncox.

The workshops are designed to create an engaging learning experience, with an aim to “create an experience where participants can take away practical things, as well as where they can really engage in a framework with analytic concepts and issues,” said Syncox. This, along with the expansive material and supporting documents offered on the SEDE website, aims to give people the opportunity to practice values and ideas in the hopes that it will empower them to respond to discrimination.

In the future, SEDE hopes to advance a “public awareness strategy that will take a lot of the concepts [they] use in the Safer Spaces workshops and will engage in a lot of the concerns raised [to be put to use] by students and the partners we work with.” The Safer Spaces workshops (in collaboration with TLS, First Peoples’ House, and the Office for Students with Disabilities) have focused on issues ranging from disability and universal design, to race and cultural identity, to Indigenous perspectives on campus, to sexual orientation and gender identity. SEDE also hopes to raise the level of discourse on campus, to “move away from the topic of whether or not we should care about these [issues],” Syncox concluded, “to talking about[…]what kind of campus community we want, to move the conversation beyond one that’s about debate and one toward which is more constructive and creating an inclusive environment that so many people seem to be asking for.”

The post Spaces you can count on appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The relay
A Relay for Life event goes something like this: teams, made up of ten people each, are responsible for having at least one member on the track at all times, either walking or running. The event lasts for 12 hours, from sunset on the first day, to sunrise on the next.

There are three main themes of the relay: celebrate, remember, and fight back. To ‘celebrate,’ cancer survivors (including patients who have cancer and are currently undergoing treatment) are invited to start the relay and start the first lap. For ‘remember,’ members light luminaries (white paper bags with candles in them) dedicated to someone who is either currently fighting cancer, or someone who has passed – and place them around the track for the remainder of the night. ‘Fight back’ is the end of the relay, and, as Fentiman continues, “We had a ‘fight back’ wall where people could write messages, why they were fighting back against cancer, for [whom]…”

It’s hard to find someone who can’t relate to the cause. The Canadian cancer rate is one in three people, and, as the saying goes, if you don’t know someone who has cancer, you know someone who knows someone who has cancer. Even though that rate is sadly very high, for Fentiman, it allows people to relate and open up to others in ways that they may not have been able to under different circumstances. Bossio recalls seeing a few younger survivors at the relay, who, according to her, “maybe would never have told people at McGill that they had battled cancer […] They were able to open up to their friends.”

The planning
For Smith, it was nice to see something that everyone had spent a long time on finally come together before their eyes. “It was really something we were all so passionate about and had spent so much time putting together. I know it’s a cliché, but it was a success beyond any of our imaginations.”

The event planning took a year in total. “When I think of team effort, the Relay exec committee is what I think of,” confesses Fentiman. It’s hard to describe one VP’s duties, because all McGill Relay executive members were involved in each other’s work. “[…] You don’t always get along with your team and we were very lucky that way,” added Fentiman.

The process was delayed because the executive committee needed to gain the approval of the Canadian Cancer Society (CCS), which was a long process. The CCS has a lot of turnover. The CCS representative to McGill Relay changed halfway through, when the executives were presented with Myriam Lemieux, “who worked overtime and helped us [a lot],” explained Fentiman.

“[McGill] is always a little behind in school spirit, so it took us a while to realize that it was something that could be successful,” continued Bossio.

The executive mainly dealt with McGill Athletics, who waived the rental fee for the Fieldhouse for the event. They are also very grateful for the McGill Plate Club, who provided all the plates, mugs, and champagne flutes for the survivors, as well as the platters for the cupcakes and vegetables. In an effort to keep the event sustainable, big canteen containers were filled with frozen juice and water from the fountain, and participants had to get their own bottles. In the end, over 200 people’s waste fit into four garbage bags.

The money
Over $32,000 was raised. The biggest fundraisers were the Plumber’s Philharmonic Orchestra (those people in labcoats who stood at the Roddick gates and asked for donations for the CCS), a team that raised $6,000 in five days, as well as Peter Clarkson – a McGill residences floor fellow – who raised $1,500 on his own.

The money goes directly to the CCS, and mainly to research funding. Cancer research is expensive, and finding funding for it proves difficult. Smith believes, people are wary of donating to big charities because they don’t know where their money is going, but, “Having [Jonathan Cools-Lartigue] telling us that our money directly funds his research [on detecting lung cancer earlier] was very cool because… It was like validation of why [we] were there.”

The CCS also funds support groups and prevention and awareness campaigns. Fentiman mirrored Smith’s opinion: “CCS is huge and you think the money is [going to] salaries, but then you find out that it’s going somewhere productive.”

Relay fundraising is also provided from corporations such as banks, investment groups, pharma companies, et cetera. Hailey Bossio admits that, ethically, these companies “receive [positive] visibility for their funding, if not a tax receipt.” But they also get fundraising from small businesses. A bakery in the West Island donated 100 muffins and a woman from Atwater Market also donated. “I think it’s because they’ve been personally affected, or they just believe in what the [CCS] is doing,” Bossio continues.

The limits
One of the organizations’ limits included the timing of the event – which took place right before midterms. Another was encouraging people to raise $100 each which, Fentiman admits, can be off-putting for a lot of students. The executives present also indicated that another limitation on McGill Relay is having to go through the CCS. Some people who had already donated to the CCS refused to donate to Relay for Life. Other times, they couldn’t access some information regarding the event, or see who was registered.

Hope
The executive committee has hope for future McGill Relays. Fentiman points out that it’s a great way to get people from the Montreal community together (there were participants from UQAM, Concordia, and people who weren’t even students).

For Bossio, it’s a way to bring the truly lacklustre school spirit back, albeit in one way that isn’t purely academic.

Collectively, they hope it will become a legacy, and an integral part of the McGill experience. Smith continues, hopefully, “Give it three more events and you won’t have a kid at McGill who doesn’t know what Relay is.”

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The theme of this year’s forum was the social impacts of technology. While the forum itself may have been sparsely attended – mainly due to insufficient marketing or not targeting diverse groups of people – the panels were thought-provoking. They featured talks from researchers all around the world, and covered a wide range of topics relevant to our modern lives. Below, we provide reviews of some of the most notable panels.

“Social Transformations and the Digital Age”  

The internet has become a channel for the flow of huge amounts of information. This panel explored the need for a change in self-governance and a push for collaboration between the public and the government to meet the needs of a digitized society.

“What we’re moving to is a digital society that is fundamentally different to what we’ve seen before,” said John Verdon, a member at Defense Research and Development Canada.
Social computing and the digitization of society have given rise to democratization of services such as journalism and science.

Since the beginning of civilization, humans have formed communities that allowed individuals in a society to generate collective benefits through the diverse contributions of its people. According to Christopher Wilson, a professor at the University of Ottawa, for communities to prosper, there must also be strategies in place to prevent conflicts.

“While the government has traditionally performed both of these functions, the government today is being transformed as conversation is being enabled through the internet,” Wilson told the audience. The internet has enabled wider discourse around today’s major problems – such as climate change, global access to resources, and the aging population – putting increased pressures on today’s governments.

Thom Kearney, a part-time professor at Algonquin College and a change agent at management consultation website Strategy Guy, described the current government’s fail-safe structure is inherently oppressive. He explained that the fail-safe mechanisms put in place in today’s government try to design for every possible contingency, limiting people’s freedoms.

A general consensus among the panelists was that the existing government infrastucture is insufficient to meet the demands of a digital society. “What leadership has become is a romanticized myth, an avenue for obtaining perks and benefits,” said Wilson, citing the recent construction industry investigation into Montreal’s municipal government. “Leadership is an opportunity for [people] to service themselves […] An increasing number of studies are showing that the population no longer has confidence in their leaders,” Wilson asserted.

Wilson went on to explain that current governments have put mechanisms in place to limit the free and open exchange of information – providing the example of intellectual property regimes. However, the internet is reducing the government’s monopoly on goods and services by allowing greater public access to resources.

“We have asymmetry. [The internet] is not open and transparent for anyone,” Wilson described. While anonymity has provided a means for people to more openly express themselves on the internet, it has also opened avenues through which new threats to society’s well-being could emerge – cyberterrorism being one example. The current governments are not properly prepared for these types of issues.

Steps are being made by the Canadian government to try and catch up to the changes of the digital society. GCpedia is an internal wiki made to increase collaboration and sharing of information between government staff. However, this is not enough. Wider access to the public is necessary in a society where information can be easily shared.

In some ways, the internet is forcing governments to become more transparent. Organizations such as Wikileaks have leaked secret government documents, making information available to the public.

Whether they like it or not, governments will eventually need to change to meet the standards of a digital society.

“Knowledge as Commons”

An academic paper goes through a whole series of obstacles before being published in an online journal. The problem with online journals is that they’re usually looking to publish ‘hot topic’ papers in order to increase their readability. Often, journals in the West look for papers that may only concern their part of the world. Furthermore, a user has to pay to access these journals – usually an exorbitant fee. Ongoing competition among journals means that budding online journals from developing countries cannot compete with those from the West. The solution? “Creating platforms which incorporate putting symbolic value on the journal articles: their level of quality, legitimacy, and visibility,” said one of the lecturers.

Two of these platforms were presented at the panel: Redalyc, a system made up by the leading journals of all the knowledge areas edited in and about Latin America, and Social Science Research Network (SSRN), a platform dedicated to the dissemination of academic articles in the social sciences and humanities. These open access platforms help archive and preserve data by taking into account the relations of production and the geopolitical sphere within which academic articles are written. Furthermore, they guarantee transparency on behalf of the producer, and protection of intellectual property for the author. On SSRN, for example, a user can download any article for free with the click of a button.

While open access websites like SSRN and Redalyc seem to be on the right track with making academic articles – whether from the developing world or otherwise, – accessible for everyone to read, open access is not without its faults. Most open access content is subject to a system of hierarchy when it comes to the structuring of knowledge. This comes in many forms: inequality in the process of distribution of academic articles, the nature and topic of one’s work, journal bias, and one’s position in the academic system and the world. Peer review, a largely successful system, can still be highly subjective.

Unfortunately, there is a long way to go in the social sciences, where academics witness a marginalization of their alternative and radical views from the mainstream journal publishing process.

“Minority Languages”

Most of the roughly 8,000 languages of the world are endangered. 97 per cent of the world’s population speaks 4 per cent of the its languages.

Sarah McMonagle, a European minority language scholar at the University of Hamburg, asserted that “Indigenous languages of states have been actively marginalized,” either by a harsh, dominant school system, or by marginalization of the Indigenous community.

This is where, for her, language sustainability comes in. In the same vein, for the world’s endangered languages, the interactive internet – or “Web 2.0” – is a key player in trying to keep linguistic diversity alive, asserted McMonagle.

Most Europeans speak languages that are not the official language of the state. The emergence of blogs in local or minority languages, local government websites (such as one in Welsh and English for Wales), and Wikis (which are available in over 300 languages), all play a part in promoting local languages. Facebook and Twitter pages in local languages also exist, with Facebook in the lead in terms of application of local languages.

Grassroots organizations that promote the use and education of minority languages, along with digital technology, can help revive some of these local languages that are threatened with extinction, especially in the West. Niamh Ní Bhroin, the second speaker, emphasized the role of homogeneous minority groups in promoting their own languages within and outside of their group. “Birds of a feather flock together,” she said – the slogan for a phenomenon called Homophily, where relatives, friends, or acquaintances write to each other in minority languages on social networking websites such as Facebook or Twitter.

“Privacy & Surveillance”

The issues of privacy, surveillance, and control over our personal information are worse than we believe. This panel sought to address the threats concerning privacy in the digital age, rethinking privacy in the 21st century, and the ways in which people can work their way around the top-down surveillance methods actively employed by government and conglomerates. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) – tech that enables users to access, store, send, and interact with information – are a huge issue regarding this topic, as they allow for easy breach of privacy. The legal framework governing their use is very weak. Governments and conglomerates store all our daily activities from these ICTs, “but most people don’t care,” said Panayotis Antoniadis, a lecturer and senior researcher at ETH Zurich, because we willingly give up our personal information in exchange for self-promotion or other services. One of the ways around this issue is to establish local neighbourhood networks, similar to Facebook, but that are not internet-based. Antoniadis’ aim is to create a simple software that anyone can configure, allowing users to connect privately with the people around them, whether familiar or strangers.

Another issue that was brought up at the panel was shaping privacy in Facebook. Professor María Belén Albornoz, a professor and researcher at FLACSO Ecuador, asserted that Facebook’s technical code (the code programmers use within Facebook) “makes users do what Facebook [wants them] to do.” This code creates an illusion of freedom and privacy within the social networking website. Facebook then turns users’ information into profit through advertising revenue. According to Albornoz, “Control of the content shared can fade away without notice.” People will simply forget that their private information is being controlled because of the seemingly ‘free’ framework of the site.

The talk then moved to the fact that, as full-time users, we cannot switch off our connection to the web. Furthermore, there is no idea of consent when our personal information comes into play, because our relationship with the entities utilizing our privacy is unequal. The panel closed with a lecture on rethinking transparency, focusing on creating internet infrastructure that certain countries cannot shut off or censor, and demanding access to information about private data and internet habits from government and businesses. According one of the lecturers, Christopher Leslie, Co-director of the Science and Technology Studies at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, the transparent society works and is revealed when blockage or censorship is a blatant practice of the regime. In Antoniadis’ words, “Everything we do is recorded.”

“Higher Education and Research”  

As information moves online, education is slowing following suit. This panel explored how technology is changing and impacting the educational institution.

Imtiaz Ahmed, a researcher at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, described technology as “post-nationalist” because of its ability to go past borders and allow discussion across different countries. According to Ahmed, future universities won’t be “land-based,” but will instead become virtual. Ahmed has been involved with developing technology to connect students in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka through the virtual space. He believes that virtual universities will have the ability to overcome conflict and foster better international relations through broader discourse across countries.

Ahmed’s ideas were met with some criticism from other panel members for being too idealistic. Jennifer Jenson, a professor at York University, pointed out that “Current models of online universities were far from being perfect.” Massive open online courses (MOOCs) has been a buzzword as of late, but these courses have yet to go beyond the traditional university lecture structure and make themselves more compelling for students.

Jenson asserted that we need to change existing frameworks before we make them into virtual structures. The problem with online education is that we have huge educational institutions that are very slow to change, or adapt to it. Though a hopeful picture, education that transcends borders and virtual schools still have a long way to go.

“From Technostress to Online Intimacy”

This panel explored how the use of social media is changing human connections. As online social networks are easy platforms for people to make connections, they have also become avenues for researchers to look at human behaviour.

With a study assessing the different ways people use the social media sites Facebook, Badoo, and Couchsurfing, Cristina Miguel ñ a researcher at the University of Leeds, found that there are three main functions of social media websites: making new friends, dating or hooking up, and maintaining relationships.

The way that people view intimacy is also changing in a society where relationships are increasingly moving online. For some people, the level of intimacy that can be achieved online is greater than what they can achieve offline, but for others, online relationships are believed to be more superficial compared to those made offline.

Social networking also has a large impact on adolescents. Jennifer Lavoie and Daniel Vallée, researchers at McGill, spoke about how technology has affected adolescent sleep patterns. As late-night cellphone use and multitasking with technologies increase, sleep deprivation is becoming a harder problem for teenagers. Technology is largely an identity-building platform, and is valued more than sleep by many adolescents.

Psychotherapy is another area in which technology is creating change. The hope is that technology can used to enhance psychotherapy. According to Terra Kowalyk, a researcher at McGill, traditional methods are not always effective for all individuals.

Kowalyk explained that studies have found that the majority of clinicians thought they were doing much better than they were in terms of client assessment. Technology will help mitigate this issues as well as barriers such as access to information, time, and cost.

From romantic relationships to physician-patient interactions, the impact of social media has been found in various modes of human relationships around the world.

The post The World Social Science Forum appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Genocide is how Eberts likens the treatment of Indigenous people by Canada. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on the December 9th 1948, states that there are five elements of genocide: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the whole of part of the group, imposing measures intended to prevent birth within the group, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. “Certainly the intent was there [on the government’s behalf],” she asserts. Little doubt exists about whether there is substantial evidence to back this claim up.

Stephen Harper, Canadian Prime Minister, proudly exclaimed to the world at the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh in 2009 that, “[Canada…has] no history of colonization.” Conversely, Duncan Campbell Scott, a Canadian bureaucrat, prose writer, and poet, once proclaimed, “The happiest future for the Indian [sic] race is absorption into the general population, and this is the object of the policy of our government. The great forces of intermarriage and education will finally overcome the lingering traces of native custom and tradition.” He later followed up his previous comments with with, “Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian [sic] in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic […]” Contrary to Harper’s claims, there are clear examples of colonization tainting Canada’s history.

Canada, by definition, is a settler colonial state. It is also one of four settler colonial states to vote against the UNGA Resolution on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007 (originally accepted 114 to 4). In 2010, it endorsed the resolution, but called it “aspirational” and not “legally binding,” reiterating that Canada was really trying to implement good and fair measures for Indigenous peoples because they had already apologized for the ‘Indian’ residential schools disaster. The fact that the Canadian government feels like it can wipe its hands clean of any responsibility with just an apology is in itself highly problematic, because, according to Eberts, “The dominant society coexists on and exercises exclusive jurisdictions over the territories and jurisdictions that Indigenous people refused to surrender.”

The Canadian Supreme Court has made it clear that Indigenous communities and the Canadian government should not resort to litigations in order to solve their problems, claiming instead that they need to turn to the negotiating table. To Eberts, the negotiation is an unequal one because the government has sovereignty, and First Peoples only have a right of occupation. “The First Peoples are going into this world of negotiation with more than one foot and one hand tied behind their back,” Eberts said.

Historically, Canada has a dreadful track record with negotiations. In 2007, it was reported that there were more than 1,300 claims filed against Canada. A professor at the University of Western Ontario made a conservative estimate that it would take the government approximately 50 years to resolve the claims filed at this rate. René Dussault, co-chair of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, stated that Indigenous communities have less than a third of the land base accorded to them by the written terms of their historic treaties struck with the government. These failed, mainly because treaty terms were not carried out, or allocated land was later expropriated or sold, for highways, railways, hydro-lines, seaways, and cities.

Given the facts, one has to wonder what will happen at these negotiating tables. Eberts noted that the Federal government approaches these negotiating tables with a ‘take or leave it’ approach: “If the First Peoples don’t want it, then everything stalls.” The Crown’s Constitutional Duty to Consult and Accommodate Aboriginal and Treaty Rights makes it mandatory for the Federal government to sit and consult with First Peoples about whatever development project is being proposed or seeking a license.

Eberts stressed that, “The process does not give Aboriginal groups a veto over what can be done with land […].” She added that, “The basis of consultation, or the duty to consult, is said to be the honour of the Crown: it is a principle that servants of the Crown must conduct themselves with honour when acting on behalf of the Sovereign.” So far, the representatives of the Crown in Canada have blatantly not conducted themselves with honour when dealing with Indigenous communities and land.

“The Supreme Court of Canada [acknowledges] that before the settlers came and stuck their flag on the shore, that Indigenous people had sovereignty over the land,” continued Eberts. The Supreme Court also fully acknowledges that Canada has a duty of reconciliation of land (among other things) to the Indigenous population, “but in my moments of cynicism,” Eberts claimed, “I think that the duty of reconciliations means that First Peoples have to reconcile themselves to the fact that they’re going to get kicked around by Canada yet again.”

In Ebert’s words, words that cannot be paraphrased, “Canada, do not do this in my name anymore, because I am sickened by what you do, I am ashamed by what you do,.Please treat First Peoples with respect and with dignity, and share Canada with them. Do not leave them [to] occupy the margins.” One solution to the problem is the answer of shared sovereignty over the land.

In direct response to her proposal, an Indigenous audience member responded, during the question and answer portion, that, “A shared sovereignty would be the Native people sanctioning thieves coming into our homes and stealing what is in our house, and then for us to say [that] we’re okay sharing what they have stolen from us.”

Essentially, Eberts’ closing statement holds an inherent truth that resonates with a long and problematic history of colonialism in Canada: “Canada does not have an [Indigenous] problem,” she declares, “Canada has a settler problem, and we have to fix it.”

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Some of us can’t get to class in a building without elevators, or can’t get past the barriers at Milton gates. Some miss out on a decent bite to eat because most places are inaccessible to people with limited mobility. I use the term ‘limited mobility’ in this article, as it does not only encompass people with physical impairments, but also, for example, those who need to use canes or walkers, parents with strollers, and people with broken limbs.

Our modern capitalist society is based on getting ahead. In essence, it is built on staircases, and it revolves around staircases. McGill’s campus is no different. “McGill is way behind,” asserted Ahmed El-Geneidy, associate professor in the School of Urban Planning. “[It] considers people with limited mobility as second-class citizens,” he says, because the University has barely broken any ground in terms of retrofitting all the buildings in order to make them fully accessible. In El-Geneidy’s opinion, maintaining the historical facade of a building (an argument used against incorporating ramps into old buildings on campus) should come secondary to ensuring that all students and staff, able bodied or not, can easily get where they have to go. “You do not even have a campus map that tells you how to get from point A to point B in a wheelchair,” he continue. “A person with a limited mobility should not be stopped from taking Arts or Engineering [because of the way the campus is planned].” In order for McGill University to advertise itself as an institution open to everyone, it needs to make sure that the campus is 100 per cent accessible to all, and, according to El-Geneidy, “[needs to] place people with limited mobility as [its] top priority.”

“You’re the first person who comes and talks to me about [accessibility], after seven years [of being at McGill],” El-Geneidy told me. The university does not accompany text with Braille everywhere for the visually impaired, captioning for the hearing impaired, or even disability buttons for opening doors in every building. The fact is the same: there are efforts, but they aren’t enough. Rather than investing in new benches for students, “I would take some of that money to make the campus more accessible to people with limited mobility,” explained El-Geneidy.

“The campus is poorly built for students with all kinds of disabilities,” Frederic Fovet, Director of the Office for Students with Disabilities at McGill (OSD), told The Daily. “The argument you will hear is that the buildings are historical […]”, he said. “We still have a reflex where we think about access at the end, [this] is very costly, [and] it is not dignified to certain people.”

The Ministère de l’Enseignement supérieur, de la Recherche, de la Science et de la Technologie du Québec (MESRST) gives half a million dollars to McGill annually (the same amount is also given to other universities) in order to improve access to buildings and facilities. The problem is not whether funds are available or not – they clearly are – but rather a lack of executive decision. Lydia White, Associate Provost (Policies, Procedures and Equity), is in the process of setting up the Universal Access Capital Projects Working Group, which would allocate the funds given by MESRST to the University, effective this term. White told The Daily over email that “The Working Group will solicit, receive, and prioritize eligible proposals for capital projects to improve access to our buildings and facilities for persons with disabilities. Recommendations will be presented to the Provost for final deliberation and decision.”

“There’s light at the end of the tunnel […] but this is still retrofitting. A separate issue is universal design and access,” argued Fovet. One of the problems is the failure to hypothesize that people would have a problem with accessibility before a certain project is undertaken. Great examples of this issue are the barriers at Milton gates, which the Director of the School of Architecture, Annmarie Adams, calls a dreadful addition, adding that, “The very design of them assumes an able-bodied tall person, as the swinging arm tends to hit the rest of us mid-body or even hits kids in the head. Imagine what it will mean for those in wheelchairs or with canes.” Another example all students are struggling with is the construction on the entrance to the Redpath Library; it is currently physically impossible for a student with limited mobility to access the library through the tunnel – the only entrance. Furthermore, if a student with limited mobility is registered in a class that is located in an inaccessible building, the OSD still has to contact the faculty and change the location of the whole class. “It still goes through that hands-on plugging holes [approach], because we have a number of buildings that aren’t accessible,” maintained Fovet.

A huge equity and human resources problem also exists, since employing new staff with limited mobility is difficult given the current state of campus. In terms of other impairments (such as sight or sound), accessibility is very sporadic and non-standardized. “Every time someone thinks about access they push it back to this office,” Fovet explained, “but it’s not the end with this office. Everyone on campus has to get ownership of access and that’s not happening.” Individuals should not brush it off because the matter may not directly concern them; they should be the ones to mobilize in order for change to occur. Fovet affirmed that a person doesn’t need to know someone with limited mobility to be conscious of disability and universal access. “I think it’s important for people to go through the deconstruction of ableism; that you are in a position of privilege because of [you happen to be able-bodied],” he added.

Historically, McGill has been an ableist institution, but Fovet is hopeful. There have been improvements, especially in the OSD, and Fovet optimistically declares that, with a little awareness, McGill could become a leader of accessibility in Canada.

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