Jesse Brown is the journalist at the helm of the popular media criticism podcast Canadaland. With his new book, The Canadaland Guide to Canada, he’s aimed his criticism – usually reserved for Canadian media – at the rest of the country. The result is a scorched-earth satire policy that leaves no aspect of Canadiana and no member of the Canadian elite untouched: from our “drunk, racist dad” John A. Macdonald to the “union-stomping, queer-hunting, barn-burning posse of farm boys” known as the Mounties. And if you’re not already sold, there’s an entire section ranking our venerable Prime Ministers from most to least fuckable.

The Canadaland Guide to Canada delights in exposing the hypocrisy of Canadian image: “You can dig up the world’s dirtiest oil and be known as environmentalists! You can sell billions of dollars of weapons to murderous tyrants and be known as peacekeepers! You can deprive Indigenous people of clean drinking water and be known as multiculturalists!” This book isn’t just funny – it’s full of little-known facts, sordid history, and merciless commentary on topics that many Canadians would rather avert their eyes from.

The Daily spoke to Brown, who’s currently touring across the country for a stage show to promote the book.

The McGill Daily: At the beginning of the book, there’s a key to how to read it and decipher the difference between a joke and a fact – for example, jokes are often in blue italics and facts are in infoboxes. But when those sorts of stylistic cues aren’t present, there’s the assumption that the reader will use basic common sense to determine that something that sounds absolutely absurd is meant in jest.

What are the dangers of writing funny stuff these days – in the days of “fake news” and low media literacy?

Jesse Brown: The kind of book we wrote is of a tradition that we grew up reading. I grew up reading Mad Magazine, Spy Magazine, The Daily Show’s book about America – just funny and mean and absurd joke books that are all about taking shots at the most powerful people. And that’s nothing that has been done in Canada. It’s kind of shocking – you can’t really point to a Canadian version of that. And that’s why we wanted to write the book.

But what I found out is there’s a reason why those books haven’t been made in Canada. And going through the process of dealing with the libel lawyer and permissions for copyright – there’s this perception in Canada that we’re actually not allowed to do that kind of humour. It’s why I wanted the book to be published in America – to get around that kind of stuff. We still ran into it and we just fought, and the publisher ultimately could be swayed and I didn’t want to do it if we couldn’t really do it. So I feel like we got there, and I insisted that the book be as vulgar and profane as it is. I thought that was really important.

MD: Is it to challenge the image that Canadians are restrained, or more sophisticated than Americans?

JB: Absolutely. First of all, if you can’t depict the most powerful people in your country fornicating, how free are you?

And also, yeah, the book is an assault on this phony notion of Canadianness that we’ve been telling ourselves and the world. And part of that is always trying to be gentle and fair and decent – sometimes at the expense of telling the truth.

MD: Right, and it’s not just that the book is vulgar or funny – it’s that it also brings up a lot of uncomfortable facts. It mixes facts seamlessly with satire – which I imagine would be nerve-wracking to publish, when you’re considering whether you’re going to face a libel claim.

JB: It’s not so much [that Canada] is so litigious as it is that it’s so sensitive and everybody knows each other. America is litigious. People sue each other all the time and they get huge payouts – like the Gawker [verdict] was over 100 million dollars. There’s never been a libel ruling like that in Canada. […] So the answer’s something else: we’re afraid to criticize one another, and it’s not because we’re so litigious but because we’re so interconnected, we know who the powerful are.

Everyone knows everyone and everyone works with everyone – like Simon & Schuster [the publishing house for The Canadaland Guide to Canada] also published a book about hockey by Stephen Harper.

“First of all, if you can’t depict the most powerful people in your country fornicating, how free are you?”

MD: In the past you’ve been criticized by Simon Houpt in the Globe and Mail for having “a track record of playing fast and loose with facts” on Canadaland. Is this book, in any way, a response to that?

JB: [Laughs] No, this book was written with Simon Houpt about as far from mind as could be imagined.

But it’s definitely a fair question, because I think that there’s been this category confusion of “what is this Canadaland thing?” and “Who is this Jesse Brown guy? Is he a reporter? Is he a pundit? Now he’s doing satire.” There’s this feeling that you can’t do all those things – I’ve been told you can’t do all those things. And I don’t know why you can’t.

I appreciate that the responsibility is on me to very clearly communicate when I’m reporting a news story, when I’m telling rude jokes, and when I’m just offering my opinion – and make sure that those are not confused with each other – so that’s why we have a very deliberate, almost hilariously didactic “how to read this book” section. But it feels ridiculously limiting to me that I have to choose one role and stick to it throughout my career. One of the nice things about being an independent media company is that we can kind of do what we want.

“Who is this Jesse Brown guy? Is he a reporter? Is he a pundit? Now he’s doing satire.”

MD: One of the things I loved about the book was that you declared Justin Trudeau “absolutely unfuckable.” You called him “a scrub with fuccboi tattoos.” I love it! Do you think the Trudeaumania 2.0 fever has broken?

JB: [Laughs] Yeah, I think we’re starting to get the sense – the way that you do after a few months where you’re sleeping with somebody who looked too good to be true, and then you start to think “oh, didn’t he promise that thing?” And not just that, but the smell of their Axe body spray starts to grate on you, and there’s a patchouli scent on your pillow that you can’t quite get rid of – you just start to see through the whole thing. I think Canada is experiencing that right now with Justin Trudeau.

MD: Yeah, it’s incredible how fast the winds shifted; though the criticisms of him are very, very valid.

JB: Yeah, the whole thing about having, like, an Indigenous tattoo – like, have you ever met a white guy who had an Indigenous tattoo, or an Asian tattoo, who’s actually been a decent dude? It’s impossible!

I think he just let a lot of people in Indigenous communities down with some of the dumbass shit he said about Indigenous kids just wanting “a place to store their canoes.” You know, it’s all surface.

“We’re afraid to criticize one another, and it’s not because we’re so litigious but because we’re so interconnected, we know who the powerful are.”

MD: How is this book situated in the midst of Canada 150 celebrations? Especially given this book is really honest about Indigenous issues, at a time when Canada 150 is being dragged for being a very clear manifestation of the colonial imagination.

JB: Well, we wrote the book knowing that there was going to be this massive half-a-billion-dollar propaganda campaign for Canada 150, and we thought, “somebody needs to push back – we’re going to be drowning in maple syrup, and we need a little vinegar.”

I guess what I didn’t anticipate was that the propaganda would be so ludicrous, and so factually and historically incorrect that it would essentially spur the most hilarious and amazing and righteous [backlash]. It is incredible to see Indigenous Canada just dragging – that’s exactly the right term – just dragging the CBC and the government. […] This book is just a minor part of what we’re seeing – [the Canadian government has] opened the door in addressing Canada’s history, and they kind of want to point people down one path and they try to create a little bit of space like, “yes, we acknowledge that there are bad things that happened” and that door’s just being blown up. And it’s awesome to see.

It pains me to say it, but this actually may be a good thing when it’s all said and done. Because these festivities that they want us to patriotically enjoy – which most Canadians just ignore completely, because one good thing about Canadians is that we don’t do patriotism – but their insistence that we try it on for size is actually having this reverse effect, and the backlash is getting stronger than the propaganda campaign. So we’re a silly part of a very serious resistance.

“Somebody needs to push back – we’re going to be drowning in maple syrup, and we need a little vinegar.”

MD: I’m interested in that idea of backlash, satire, or opposition being stronger than whatever’s earnest or original. For example, I’ve noticed a really sharp uptick in quality in The Beaverton in the last year.

JB: Yeah, the Beaverton got good, that’s true.

MD: Right – I’m curious about what the health of a country’s satire says about the health of the country and its politics.

JB: I think that for a long time, the satire was as thin and vapid as the Canadian narrative itself. So when the Canadian narrative was just “oh, donuts n timmies, and we like to say sorry a lot,” then you get Rick Mercer and you get Air Farce, and you get This Hour Has 22 Minutes. But if we’re actually gonna go there – and talk about the history, even when you get it wrong you’re creating a really good setup for a killer jagged punchline.

So, yeah, CBC wants to do “the story of us” – well, there’s a lot of people who would really like to have a crack at the story of us.

“I think that for a long time, the satire was as thin and vapid as the Canadian narrative itself.”

MD: Do you have a favourite scandal or surprising fact that you learned during the course of writing this book?

JB: I think that my favourite thing is actually something that happened as a result of the book. I was tweeting about how crazy it is that our charter of rights and freedoms had to be signed to us by the Queen of England in 1982, and all of these Queen-loving Canadians were so angry with me, which is nothing new to me. But the fucking former Prime Minister, Kim Campbell, called me a “wingnut.”

That was my favourite thing – it just proved to me that the desire to maintain the status quo is just so important to a lot of people in Canada. And it really stops us from getting anywhere, in a lot of cases.

“The backlash is getting stronger than the propaganda campaign. So we’re a silly part of a very serious resistance.”

MD: So what can we expect at your show on Saturday?

JB: I’ll be doing a night of comedy, which is well outside my comfort zone. But I didn’t just want to go to bookstores and do readings. The book is really visual, and it’s a humor book, so I thought “okay, I want to do a funny show” and I’ve been taking it across the country. And it’s so much fun on stage.

I’m really excited that Montreal’s own Josh Dolgin will be on stage with me, playing some music, and I’m gonna leave in the Quebec stuff, and see what happens.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Brown will be performing in Montreal at the Rialto on May 20; tickets are $28 at the door. You can buy his book, written with Vicky Mochama, Nick Zarzycki, and other contributors, on Amazon.

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On Thursday April 13, Bissan’s father, Hadi Eid, held a press conference alongside two supporters: Norma Rantisi, a Geography professor at Concordia, and Rami Yahia, the Internal Affairs Coordinator of Concordia Students’ Union (CSU). “We’re asking the Canadian government to help us, to let Bissan come back to Canada as soon as possible,” said Hadi Eid.

Bissan travelled to Gaza in June 2016 to visit her grandparents and get married. She is now eight months pregnant and due to give birth in the first week of May. According to a press release, when Bissan tried to travel back to Canada, she was prevented from leaving due to the slow processing of her exit visa by Israeli authorities, “who seldom prioritize the applications of Palestinians from Gaza who hold other passports.”

“She needs [medical] support because her doctor told her that she has a difficult pregnancy. It’s better that she gives birth in Canada,” said Hadi Eid. In 2009, according to data from the Palestinian Ministry of Health, the infant mortality rate in the Gaza Strip was 21.5 per 1000 live births – compared to 4.9 per 1000 live births in Quebec in 2013.

“We’re asking the Canadian government to help us, to let Bissan come back to Canada as soon as possible.”

“In December, Bissan contacted the Canadian embassy at Tel Aviv, and she told them about her situation, and they told her, ‘We can’t help you,'” explained Eid. Eid has also contacted his Member of Parliament, Pierre Nantel of the New Democratic Party with Bissan’s medical reports, to no avail.

Entry to occupied Palestinian territories is controlled by Israeli authorities. Travellers must apply for entry and exit, and even if approved, Israeli authorities can turn them away with no explanation. Since 2007 there has been a land, air, and sea blockade that restricts medical supplies, construction material, and certain food items from entering and leaving the Gaza strip. 1.8 million Palestinians are currently being held captive in the Gaza strip, unable to move freely within the rest of the territory.

“The movement of people into and out of the Gaza strip is highly restricted,” explained Rantisi. “Residents are largely cut off from the outside world and from access to some of the most essential services like healthcare and education. At the same time, Gaza has been subject to recurrent bombings – and this includes bombings that have occurred since the time that Bissan had arrived there.”

“This is an ordeal that no Canadian – or Palestinian – should have to endure,” continued Rantisi. “And yet, after trying again and again to leave for the past four months, she’s been denied an exit permit.”

“This includes bombings that have occurred since the time that Bissan had arrived there.”

The CSU and the Concordia Graduate Students’ Association (GSA) are also calling on Concordia to support Bissan, by pressuring the Canadian government to intervene. Concordia has a responsibility to “a member of its own community – a member whose freedom of movement and even physical health is being compromised because of their Palestinian nationality,” said Rantisi.

In December 2014, Concordia’s undergraduate students voted to approve the CSU’s support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel. “After the massacre in Gaza [Operation Protective Edge], the CSU was given the mandate by the students through Council to hold a position against illegal settlement and disproportionate use of force, as well as the blockade on Gaza,” explained Yahia.

“This is an ordeal that no Canadian – or Palestinian – should have to endure.”

Though the Canadian government says that “Canadian consular officials have very limited ability to intervene on behalf of Canadians who choose to enter or remain in the Gaza Strip,” there is precedent for government intervention for Canadian citizens in Gaza. In August 2014, Canadian officials escorted 8-year-old Salma Abuzaiter out of Gaza, after she became trapped in Gaza city when Israel launched Operation Protective Edge.

“The Canadian government can make an appeal to the Canadian embassy in Tel Aviv, the foreign affairs department, and resolve the situation,” said Stefan Christoff, a community organizer who has been helping the Eid family with their campaign. “It’s been done before, and it can be done now.”

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The letter outlines a number of concerns with Counselling and Mental Health Services (CMHS), and makes three demands: address concerns that have arisen over the failings of CMHS; stop diverting Student Services funding away from wellness services; and implement a “comprehensive, campus-wide, evidence-based” plan that would focus on mental health literacy and mental illness prevention.

A short history of inadequate care

The beginning of this academic year saw McGill Mental Health Services (MMHS) and McGill Counselling Services combined into Counselling and Mental Health Services (CMHS). While the two services were previously siloed, students are now processed by a single system.

The change came with the introduction of a “stepped care model” whereby a variety of new treatment options – online therapy, group therapy, and referrals to other organizations such as the Peer Support Centre – act as “steps” to one-on-one psychotherapy.

The new model aimed to reduce strain on an overloaded mental health care system, but many students have continued to experience long wait times and inadequate care.

“I used to be able to go to MMHS for drop-in [appointments] if I was having waves of panic attacks or side effects I couldn’t deal with [from medications],” explained Marie*, who has been accessing mental health services at McGill for 4 years. “But with their new conditions that’s impossible.”

In December 2016, Nancy Low, the Clinical Director of McGill’s Counselling and Mental Health Services (MCMHS), was suspended from her position on “administrative leave.” According to Erin Sobat, VP Student at the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU), Low had been advocating for the concerns staff and students regarding the new stepped-care model, though the University refused to disclose the reasons for Low’s suspension.

In January, the former Director of McGill Mental Health Services, Norman Hoffman, told The Daily in an email that “a stepped care system for a Mental Health Service makes no clinical sense.”

Hoffman said he had “been told directly from Mental Health and Counselling staff that the stepped care system is not working well,” but that staff “were told that they are not allowed to object to the stepped care system.”

“I used to be able to go to MMHS for drop-in [appointments] if I was having waves of panic attacks or side effects I couldn’t deal with [from medications]. But with their new conditions that’s impossible.”

“While not all of these [changes to CMHS] have been negative, we are appalled by their hasty implementation without due consideration for the impact on students and staff,” the open letter explains. “Communication regarding major changes has been treated as an afterthought, with limited efforts to involve service users and student leaders in the decision-making process despite their repeated requests.”

Students who access services at CMHS are randomly assigned to a counselling or clinical psychologist, without any triage process.The open letter calls for CMHS to hire specialized triage staff and to dedicate more clinical psychologist time to specialized therapy, while also expanding the range of lower-intensity and prevention initiatives.

Other Canadian universities have also implemented stepped-care mental health services, sometimes with greater transparency than McGill. On their website, the University of British Columbia has a clearly outlined stepped-care triage model. It involves a 15-minute online assessment, followed by a 15-to-20-minute consultation with a wellness advisor, at which point the student is directed to one of six levels of care ranging from self-directed programs and tools to psychiatric care.

Mental Health horror stories

“In early November, I had rushed to the [CMHS] office in hopes of getting an emergency appointment as I had been undergoing an anxiety episode that left me sure of my immediate death” explained Leila*.

Leila was told that there were no available appointments for the next month. When she was eventually able to book an evaluative appointment for three weeks later, she was left lacking coping mechanisms or long-term treatment plan. “The waiting room time as well as the apathy towards my condition shocked me at the time, since no one seemed concerned considering my ailment was neither physical nor would it require me to “do something to hurt myself.’”

“This sort of limit on mental health resources only yields an insufficient resource for a huge undergraduate body that might require immediate care and attention as well as longterm plans for treatment,” Leila continued.

In January, the former Director of McGill Mental Health Services, Norman Hoffman, told The Daily in an email that “a stepped care system for a Mental Health Service makes no clinical sense.”

After being sexually assaulted by a male Frosh leader during their first year at McGill, Lucie accessed Mental Health services. Lucie’s first therapist, after repeatedly asking whether they were comfortable talking to a man, abruptly refused to continue therapy and reassigned Lucie to a female therapist. “He referred me to another therapist who was really helpful, but who told me that at the end of 16 sessions I could never access mental health services again,” Lucie told The Daily. For the following year and a half, Lucie was left commuting and paying out-of-pocket to access affordable therapy.

Lucie identifies as non-binary and uses “they” pronouns, and says that they have been repeatedly misgendered by multiple therapists at CMHS, despite constantly correcting them. “I also spoke to the director of MMHS, Giuseppe Alfonsi, about the situation, and he addressed them one-on-one. They still continued to constantly misgender me despite this,” explained Lucie. “I was constantly on edge, hoping they wouldn’t speak about me, only to me, so I wouldn’t have to hear them misgender me again.”

Marie*, who sees a psychiatrist at CMHS for severe depression and anxiety, told The Daily that her doctor had overprescribed her medication. “I felt that for the most part I was just prescribed medication at random,” explained Marie, “at times at very high doses and switching from one medication to another pretty quickly. A lot of time this ‘pill-pushing’ was justified by my doctor as a way to get me ‘better as soon as possible,’ which for her meant before finals or midterms.”

As a result of switching rapidly between high doses of different antidepressants, Marie experienced severe side effects. “Some of them could have been potentially fatal if it wasn’t for the support of friends,” she explained. “I was pretty much left on my own and unmonitored to deal with those side effects.”

“They still continued to constantly misgender me despite this. I was constantly on edge, hoping they wouldn’t speak about me, only to me, so I wouldn’t have to hear them misgender me again.”

“I often feel like the underlying causes for my mental illnesses are sort of ignored because [my psychiatrist and I] only have 15 to 30 minutes together every two weeks, and so it’s easier to just prescribe meds and numb/sedate/maintain a certain chemical balance than to address anything else. It almost feels like these sessions are for liability reasons than providing actual help.

Underfunded and overexerted

“Reconfiguring psychological services without also addressing structural and environmental conditions that exacerbate mental health issues is short-sighted,” notes the open letter. As such, it demands a “comprehensive, campus-wide, evidence-based Mental Health Strategy that addresses the spectrum of mental health needs” – a strategy that was first promised by Dyens in 2014.

These programs would look like mental health literacy initiatives, and “consistent, fair, and accessible” procedures for requesting academic accommodations.
In October 2016, the process through which students obtain medical notes suddenly changed, provoking student outcry. Now, students can only receive same-day notes if they are in imminent danger of harming themselves or others, or if they have already been assigned a counsellor or a clinical psychologist.

The letter also raised issue with the fact that $650,000 in annual overhead is deducted from the Student Services budget by the central administration – money which is being diverted away from wellness initiatives. Further, over the past seven years, $2.5 million has been pulled from Student Services in the name of “overhead charges” and cancelled university transfers.

“These critical services, which include Counselling & Mental Health Services and the Office for Students with Disabilities, are unable to keep up with dramatic increases in demand due to a lack of resources,” reads the letter.

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The statement condemned “the history of sexualized and gendered violence committed by Aird both before and during his time as VP External,” and asserted that Aird’s resignation was the direct result of the group’s demands for him to step down from his position.

On February 9, the CDN circulated an anonymous online form to collect disclosures regarding Aird’s behaviour and alleged history of sexual violence. According to CDN’s statement, multiple people disclosed through the form, and “the disclosures were to be presented to the SSMU Board of Directors as part of an established process demanding Aird’s resignation.”

On the evening of February 21, the Community Disclosure Network (CDN), “a group of survivors and allies who have united to take action against David Aird,” published a statement online alleging that Aird had sexually assaulted various McGill students.

Melody*, member of CDN and U3 Arts student told The Daily that Aird found out about the online form and contacted CDN with an offer to resign. Aird’s offer to resign came with three conditions, said Melody: “that he would get a week to resign, […] that he could write a letter of apology to all the people that [disclosed or submitted complaints], and that he would leave quietly. Of course, for safety reasons, we do not want him to resign without having to disclose the real reasons behind his resignation. The McGill University community deserves to know.”

Disclosures of alleged sexual assault

The Daily has obtained statements that were submitted through the online form, both of which indicated that the writers were comfortable with their comments being quoted publicly.

Nina Hermes is a floor fellow and U3 social work student, who first spoke with Aird on Tinder in early 2016. She wrote that “David has made me feel extremely uncomfortable many times since I first met him, has asked me out repeatedly to the point where it borders on harassment, and I do not feel comfortable at all having him in a major leadership position at the University.”

The statement condemned “the history of sexualized and gendered violence committed by Aird both before and during his time as VP External,” and asserted that Aird’s resignation was the direct result of the group’s demands for him to step down from his position.

“A few months later I saw a public status posted by a friend of mine [wherein] multiple women shared that they’ve also experienced similar things from David. That was when I realized that his pattern of repeatedly asking women out on dates to the point where it is borderline harassment was not a singular incident with me, but a much deeper pattern that I find deeply concerning.”

The second disclosure The Daily obtained alleged a case of sexual assault wherein Aird had penetrative sex with the writer of the complaint without their consent, despite them repeatedly telling Aird that they didn’t want to have penetrative sex. The writer connected with Aird on Facebook via a mutual friend, and first went on a date with him on June 12, 2016.

The Daily has obtained statements that were submitted through the online form, both of which indicated that the writers were comfortable with their comments being quoted publicly.

After the author invited Aird to their apartment and stressed that they did not want to have penetrative sex, “David asked me if he could tie me to the bed. I was hesitant and resisted for a while, but eventually allowed him to tie only my arms to the bed frame. We continued to kiss and I continued to stress that I was not planning on having (penetrative) sex with him. He said that was fine. After a few minutes he asked if he could take off my underwear because he wanted to go down on me. Once again I was hesitant, but he started to beg so I eventually gave in. He then began to say he wanted to have (penetrative) sex, to which I firmly said no. He kept on bringing it up and I kept saying no. We went back and forth on it for a while; he was getting impatient and whiny and I was becoming uncomfortable because he was on top of me and my arms were tied up above my head. David then decided to disregard what I was saying to him because he proceeded [to] put his penis inside me. Not only was this done without my consent, but it was also done without a condom which is not something I would ever agree to. My reaction was something along the lines of ‘Woah, what the fuck are you doing?!’ and so he did stop. I told him to get off of me and untie me immediately, which he did, reluctantly.”

“Not only was this done without my consent, but it was also done without a condom which is not something I would ever agree to.”

On July 2, 2016, the author sent Aird a Facebook message explaining to him that “he pushed me when I was clearly hesitant, and it made me very uncomfortable. I told him that, in combination with his aggression, some of the language he used during our sexual encounter was not okay. For example, phrases like ‘you’re going to like it,’ ‘you’ll get used to it,’ or calling me derogatory names.” Aird responded, saying that “I’m a different person when I’m horny, which is something I hate but that’s just how it is. Doesn’t mean I stop caring about consent, but yes, it does mean that I’ll try to push through hesitancy and ‘advance my own interests.’ Regardless, fundamentally, I care very much about consent and I’d never fuck around with unambiguous answers.”

“The quotes I have inserted are directly from my Facebook conversations with David, and I did my best to contextualize them properly,” the author writes. “Essentially, David Aird believes that, while he deeply cares about consent, he cannot actually control himself in sexual situations and that he loses his principles in that moment. He believes that it is the other person’s responsibility to tell him to stop, using only ‘unambiguous answers,’ because his intention is to ‘push through hesitancy.’”

“I was sexually assaulted by [Aird] the night of November 1st, 2016,” Lilith*, a McGill student and member of CDN, told The Daily in an email. “[Aird] knows that coercion is not consent, and that actively refusing to listen to ‘no’ is sexual assault. [His] actions were violent.”

According to Lilith, after she went over to Aird’s house and consented to cuddle with him, he then proceeded to grope, penetrate, and spank her without her consent, or in situations of coerced consent.

“[Aird] knows that coercion is not consent, and that actively refusing to listen to ‘no’ is sexual assault. [His] actions were violent.”

Melody* told The Daily that she had also felt pressured into agreeing to sexual acts with Aird. “He asked if he could take off my shirt, and at first I said ‘no’ but he asked two or three times, and eventually I said ‘yeah.’ […] I could tell that my body was saying no, but he wouldn’t listen to that – he wouldn’t even listen to ‘no’ – he would only listen to ‘yes’ or even ‘I don’t know,’ which to him meant ‘convince me,’” she recounted.

“He’d also talk about how important consent was, and so I thought, ‘this man is a feminist.’ So I guess he knew how to [practice consent], but, more than that, he knew his way around it,” she continued.

A history of resignations and removals

According to the CDN statement, “two student societies that Aird was involved in — McGill Against Austerity and NDP McGill — received complaints of sexual violence in October and December of 2016, respectively.” Both societies were unable to take action against Aird, since those affected by his actions wished to remain anonymous.

According to the CDN statement, “two student societies that Aird was involved in — McGill Against Austerity and NDP McGill — received complaints of sexual violence in October and December of 2016, respectively.”

Angèle Pineau-Lemieux, the VP Communications of the Jeunes néodémocrates du Québec (JNDQ) – the youth wing of the New Democratic Party – told The Daily that Aird was elected VP Politics of the JNDQ in late October, 2016. Within the days following, three to four complaints were brought to the JNDQ executive by McGill students who were NDP members, and who were uncomfortable with Aird being in a position of power, said Pineau-Lemieux. The JNDQ brought the latter to the attention of the Quebec NDP, at which point Aird chose to resign rather than have the case presented to the NDP Administration Council.

“The revelations regarding David’s behavior came to our attention on October 30, 2016,” Malaya Powers, co-president of NDP McGill, told The Daily. “At that point we were contacted by the JNDQ with formal requests that David be removed from all online communication forms associated with NDP McGill. So listservs, Facebook groups, Facebook pages – anything that was affiliated with the NDP club on campus.” The JNDQ was representing the wishes of a person who had been sexually assaulted, Powers added.

“At that point we were contacted by the JNDQ with formal requests that David be removed from all online communication forms associated with NDP McGill.”

A member of McGill Against Austerity, who wished to remain anonymous, also confirmed that Aird had been removed from the group earlier this semester “for the same reason CDN called for his resignation: gendered and sexualized violence.”

Regarding Aird’s resignation from the position of VP External, “the position will stay empty until someone is elected for the incoming year,” Ger told The Daily. “We’re discussing potentials of reaching out to previous VP Externals to have them come in on a contract or something like that.”

Calls for a SSMU sexual assault policy

According to the CDN statement, several students brought Aird’s behaviour to the attention of SSMU Executive, which Ger confirmed in an interview with The Daily. “The only action undertaken by SSMU in response to these students’ complaints was to establish weekly ‘check-ins’ between Aird and the President of SSMU,” the statement says.

Ger confirmed that he had been meeting with Aird weekly to “actively review specific events that had happened throughout the week” which included reviewing equity and consent training materials. “So, if I was in a meeting with him, or we were ever around the office together and something that could be deemed ‘inappropriate’ happened […] making sure he understood changes in language that needed to happen,” explained Ger.

A member of McGill Against Austerity, who wished to remain anonymous, also confirmed that Aird had been removed from the group earlier this semester “for the same reason CDN called for his resignation: gendered and sexualized violence.”

In her statement submitted through the online form, Hermes criticized the “weekly check-ins,” saying that “[Ger’s] response to the problem included having a ‘talk’ with David. Someone who is in a position of power who has a history of harassing women is very rarely going to change after a ‘talk,’ and that proved to be the case with David.”

While McGill’s sexual violence policy applies to all McGill students, faculty, and staff, SSMU does not have a clear outline of procedures for receiving or responding to disclosures. “I don’t believe that [weekly check-ins] alone were adequate,” said Ger. “There was definitely a desire to do more.”

In her statement submitted through the online form, Hermes criticized the “weekly check-ins,” saying that “[Ger’s] response to the problem included having a ‘talk’ with David.

Within SSMU, “a lack of clear, binding policy has lead to multiple instances of disclosures being mishandled,” says the CDN statement. As a result, the CDN demands that SSMU issue a statement condemning Aird’s actions as well as issue public apologies to survivors and the community for the lack of action on the part of some members of the SSMU executive who failed to “immediately [take] steps towards pro-survivor disciplinary action” upon being approached with disclosures. CDN also demands that SSMU develop “a concrete stand-alone sexual assault policy” and “easily accessible complaint procedures and response protocols related to sexual assault,” and that all elected representatives undergo training on how to respond to disclosures of sexual assault.

At the time of publication, SSMU executives had yet to release a statement regarding Aird’s resignation.

*names have been changed

The Daily has not yet been able to verify the allegations of sexual assault.

The CDN is organizing a support group open to those who may have experienced any degree of sexualized or gendered violence by Aird; email community.disclosure.network@gmail.com. The CDN statement also includes a list of Montreal-based resources for those who have experienced sexual assault, including crisis centres, active listening services, self-care material, and 24-hour support services.

The post SSMU VP External resigns amid allegations of sexual violence appeared first on The McGill Daily.

I’d struggled with depression and anxiety for years, mostly silently, and always unmedicated. I’d never considered that my mental illness could be linked to politics, because my depression started long before I developed any significant political consciousness. But, last summer, while obsessively refreshing Twitter for hours while crying, I started to suspect that my social justice work and my declining mental health had somehow gotten entangled.

Now, as I write this, my social media is filling up with the news of six Muslim men murdered at a mosque in Quebec City. In the last two weeks since Donald Trump’s inauguration, and the accompanying onslaught of Islamophobia, racism, and misogyny, I’ve felt hopeless, numb, terrified, and overwhelmed. I don’t know if this is proportional shock to the state of the world, or if it’s my depression. I can’t tell the difference – maybe because they’ve started to bleed into one another.

I explain to myself and others over and over that depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain. I’ve been told that I’m just “too sensitive,” that I should “snap out of it,” that my depression can be cured by doing yoga or eating kale or smiling more. Those messages are dangerous and invalidating, tossed out casually by well-intentioned people who insinuate that I’m just “weak” or even making it up for attention. I cling to that chemical imbalance, to tell myself that I’m not just delicate, or self-centered, but that my mental illness is as valid and real and deserving of medication as any physical illness.

And yet, I’ve begun to wonder if that’s the whole story.

Mental illness is political

I’ve often thought about the heavy overlap between activists and people living with mental illness. For a long time, I assumed that this was because social justice spaces, with their commitment to fighting ableism, were simply environments in which people felt safe being honest about their mental health. This is true in many ways – at The Daily, for example, we check-in with each other before every meeting, and editors often remind each other to take their meds or ask for help during a difficult week. Often, people who have mental illness that stems from trauma from sexual assault, or racist or imperialist violence, become activists to fight for a world where people don’t have to live through what they experienced. Many of us are racialized, women, queer, trans, physically disabled, or poor.

More recently, though, I’ve started to believe that mentally ill people don’t just self-select or feel comfortable outing themselves in social justice spaces. Maybe the high prevalence of mental illness is caused – or at least contributed to – by the nature of our work. Our work is to stare straight at injustice, to document violence, to analyze both the political and the personal through a lens of unequal distributions of power. Working in social justice spaces is intense because your work follows you home – you can never justify not thinking about systemic oppression. There’s no conversation that’s safe from an analysis of hierarchies of power.

Our work is to stare straight at injustice, to document violence, to analyze both the political and the personal through a lens of unequal distributions of power.

In February 2016, MarShawn McCarrel, a 23-year-old Black Lives Matter activist, committed suicide on the steps of the Ohio Statehouse. It opened a conversation about depression and trauma amongst Black Lives Matter activists under the hashtag #BLMhealing. “In the movement you’re just constantly engaging in Black death, seeing the communal impact,” said Jonathan Butler, the University of Missouri graduate student who went on a hunger strike for seven days in protest of a series of racist incidents at his university, in an interview with the Washington Post. “You’re being faced with the reality that I’m more likely to be killed by the police, that I’m being discriminated against. You start to see all of the microaggressions.”

“White supremacy often feels vast and hopeless. I believe suicide is what happens to some of us when our minds are in a place of, ‘We need freedom, but we can never be free here,’” Angel Carter, a St. Louis-based organizer, told the Pacific Standard. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Black people are 20 per cent more likely to have a severe mental health condition than the general population, and women of all races are nearly twice as likely to have clinical depression than men.

As Laurie Penny writes in her incredible essay on wellbeing ideology, “The lexis of abuse and gas-lighting is appropriate here: if you are miserable or angry because your life is a constant struggle against privation or prejudice, the problem is always and only with you. Society is not mad, or messed up: you are.” It’s even worse when you decide that you’re going to be an activist, to dedicate yourself to fighting the worst and most violent instances of oppression, to field harassment or hate-mail or shouting at your parents over the dinner table about Ferguson. For me, that’s grounds for depression and anxiety.

“In the movement you’re just constantly engaging in Black death, seeing the communal impact.”

Maddie, who worked at Planned Parenthood on queer and trans allyship, and has worked with QPIRG-McGill on various social justice initiatives, agrees that systemic oppression is a factor in mental illness. They have dealt with an eating disorder and depression for five years, alongside lifelong anxiety, and they identify as queer, non-binary, and a person of colour. “Maybe some people are genetically more predisposed to mental illness – but I think that living under this fascist system is a huge contributor to people’s illness,” they told me. “I don’t see how it could be otherwise, if the world isn’t built for you to exist, and you are constantly having to struggle to survive in it. Some people don’t have to struggle so hard. There’s a huge strain, all the time, just trying to exist.”

We need to think about mental illness as the product of social and economic situations. Reducing mental illness to brain chemistry implies that the only way to manage or cure it is by taking pharmaceuticals. Medication is crucial to many people for managing their mental illness – but at the same time, it’s undeniable that the medical-industrial complex makes a staggering amount of money off (over)medicating people. Reducing mental illness to brain chemistry also feeds the idea that we’re all responsible for only ourselves, an individualist ethic that’s the result of neoliberalist capitalism, which relies on the idea of a meritocracy to foster competition and self-interest. It works to isolate us from the broader injustices that are implicated in how shitty we feel – and prevent us from dismantling them together.

Trauma, psychosis, healing, and exhaustion

“Even when we do try to make room for people who are mentally ill in organizing, we usually do it in the easiest possible way, by focusing on depression and anxiety,” Sonia Ionescu, the coordinating editor at The Daily, told me. “It’s easy to identify with depression and anxiety because everyone’s nervous, everyone’s sad. But not everyone feels the urge to hurt themselves, or not eat, or experiences mania – that’s a really hard thing to grasp even a symptom of.”

“I’ve been self-harming since I was twelve,” she continued. Sonia has been diagnosed with anorexia, chronic depression, generalized anxiety, and social anxiety, with a possibility of bipolar II disorder.

“Of mental illness, depression and anxiety are the most common, and so it makes sense, in a way, to give them the most attention. But also it’s really easy to just ignore everything else if we do that, and to just pat ourselves on the back and be like ‘we’re being inclusive!’” I have depression and anxiety, and I don’t lack the space to talk about them, so for this piece I turned to activists I know who have more severe or different mental illness from me, and who work more directly on specific struggles.

Hannah* is a member of the #ConsentMcGill campaign and has worked on sexual assault awareness and prevention. “Two and a half years ago I was raped, and that has led to me having PTSD,” she told me. “I think one of the ways that I tried to deal with that was by really immersing myself in fighting the cultures that contribute to [rape].”

“There’s not a day that goes by when it doesn’t come to me in any shape or form as a reminder that it happened to me. But I realized why [Trump’s] election and the subsequent actions have impacted me so much,” she explained. “It was the single biggest reminder I’ve had since it happened to me that nobody gives a shit about sexual assault. When a man has twelve [alleged] counts of sexual assault against him, and he gets elected as President of the United States, with almost half of Americans voting for him – it was just the biggest reminder that no-one cares.”

During Trump’s campaign, and especially the last month, Hannah’s had to have more discussions about rape culture. “It’s really hard having conversations with friends where they’re saying something that’s really offensive, especially when it’s surrounding sexual assault, but I don’t have the energy or the strength at that time to talk about a subject that’s so personal to me,” she said. “In those situations it becomes a big moral dilemma, because I can’t justify staying silent, but I also don’t feel strong enough to defend what I believe at that time.”

“When a man has twelve [alleged] counts of sexual assault against him, and he gets elected as President of the United States, with almost half of Americans voting for him – it was just the biggest reminder that no-one cares.”

The last week has been characterized by a widespread sense of helplessness – a feeling familiar to many mentally ill people. I’ve heard from many who feel like they don’t know what they can do – and even when they do act, it’s never enough. “I feel very hopeless in terms of not being able to do anything tangible that will help – and for that reason, I feel less functional. A lot of my self-worth is tied to [social justice work],” Maddie told me.

“A lot of the time I feel bad for not being a functional mentally ill person, which is fucked up,” they explained. “I know so many people who also struggle with mental health, but they’re still able to do things, they’re still able to go to protests and demos that matter. And then I question, am I really putting in effort, am I really trying? I think that’s really contributed to me feeling even worse.”

CJ* has been organizing around Palestinian human rights and the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement for three years. She’s had severe depression for five years. “Yesterday I worked for twelve hours, and then came home and cried, because I was so tired,” she said as we began our interview.

“Sometimes I feel like there’s a never-ending amount of organizing one could do. This is something I feel I’m quite bad about, in terms of regulating how much I do,” she told me. “I guess I really struggle because everything is pressing and urgent. Palestine, which is what I usually organize around, is just so important – and it feels more important than me. And so I’ll often sacrifice my mental and physical health because I just know I’m contributing to an important struggle.”

“This past month or so I’ve been in a manic state,” explained Sonia. “I feel like I can do so much more organizing and [attend more] actions, and the validation I get from contributing to those things – not just from other people, but from myself – kind of feeds into not wanting the mania to end, which is dangerous in that mania is not sustainable. It’s just not a healthy way to live – I need more sleep than I’m getting, I need more food than I’m getting, I can’t keep going at this rate, but it feels good to, and it feels good because I’m making a change.”

“I’ll often sacrifice my mental and physical health because I just know I’m contributing to an important struggle.”

For the mentally ill, social justice work feels like a constant coin-toss, where the two faces are being either exhausted, demoralized, and triggered, or galvanized, motivated, and hopeful.

“Social justice is one of the ways that I self-care,” Hannah told me. “I was really lucky in that sense, because that helped my recovery and finding a really healthy thing to pour my energy into, and my anger into – because there’s so much anger. Obviously you don’t want that anger directed at yourself, and I don’t know who it was [that raped me] or how many people there were, so I can’t direct it at a specific person. So I kind of directed it at the system that would be oppressing me and anyone else who experiences [sexual assault].”

CJ told me that even when her depression made it impossible for her to go to class or do schoolwork, she was still able to organize. “I feel like organizing is maybe one of the best things that I can do for my mental health. If one of the problems I have is that everything I do is pointless and meaningless and empty, this feels like something that is clearly meaningful, and has a point.”

On identity and interconnectedness

Over the summer, when Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were killed, I was working in the News and Features editorial team at a high-profile women’s magazine in Toronto. The team met every morning to pitch stories and discuss breaking news that was relevant to Canadian women. The morning after Philando Castile’s murder, scrolling through my Twitter feed, I felt a mixture of deep rage and sorrow. But when I got to the morning meeting, visibly shaking, no one said a word about the shootings. I returned to my desk in tears.

Part of my rage was because during the course of that job, even as an intern, I felt unfairly burdened with the responsibility of advocating for coverage that acknowledged issues of race. I was one of the very few women of colour on the editorial team, and there were no Black women working at the magazine at all. At a magazine mostly run by – and marketed to – white women, I felt that if I didn’t talk about race, no one would.

The next day, I didn’t go to work, because I woke up and immediately started having back-to-back panic attacks that made it impossible for me to even get dressed. Instead, after years of refusing medication, I went to my doctor and got a prescription for an antidepressant.

I’m not a Black man living in the U.S. under the increasing militarization of the police. I’m not a refugee, or a Muslim person, or an undocumented immigrant facing deportation under the Trump administration. I’m not one of the women or other people living in the Global South who will be condemned to death by his global abortion gag order. So why is my mental health so deeply affected by these atrocities?

I worry that it’s a performative mourning: that I’m participating in an economy of horror and outrage that’s not sincere, and focuses attention on myself rather than on the affected communities. This is the voice that tells me that my mental illness is a ploy for attention – a self-indulgent wallowing in misery or angst. I worry that my anger and sadness is only contributing to a voyeuristic culture that loves to spectate, consume, and commodify the suffering of marginalized people. This is the voice that tells me that my activism and commitment to social justice is in bad faith. All these voices insist that I should care less – that the pain I feel is insincere or exaggerated. Against these voices, how can I justify feeling affected?

So why is my mental health so deeply affected by these atrocities?

Some of these concerns are valid – there’s a way that the privileged can (and do) appropriate the pain of marginalized people, and turn the attention back on themselves. There’s a way that support floods in for affected communities in the days after a well-publicized mass murder, but dies out as soon as the topic disappears from the mainstream media. In a couple weeks from now, non-Muslim people expressing outrage following the terrorist attack at the Quebec City mosque will move on, and we’ll go back to not talking about Quebec’s long history of state-sanctioned Islamophobia.

And yet, while I’m a proponent of staying in one’s lane and not speaking over those with lived experiences of a certain form of oppression, I also believe that there must be a way for us to feel the pain of another community without it being self-serving. In Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Judith Butler writes: “No one person suffers a lack of shelter without there being a social failure to organize shelter in such a way that it’s accessible to each and every person. […] This means that in some of our most vulnerable experiences of social and economic deprivation, what is revealed is not only our precariousness as individual persons – though that may well be revealed – but also the failures and inequalities of socioeconomic and political institutions.”

This is not a new idea – that one’s life is not lived in isolation, but is always already a social life. The injustice levied against a single body is always indicative of systems of injustice that we are all implicated in. By no means do I pretend to feel or understand the pain of those directly affected by Trump’s agenda. But I understand that my life does not exist separate from the lives of other marginalized people facing more direct violence. That I, a brown woman in Canada, am engaged in a common fight with the same systems of white supremacy, misogyny, and border imperialism that threaten Black people and trans femmes and Syrian refugees. That the systemic oppression that undergirds my mental illness also works to uphold police violence and fascism.

“Bodies in the streets” and the ableism in organizing

Our worth as activists is measured by our ability to throw down in the street, to stand at vigils or strikes for hours in the cold without food, our willingness to risk being arrested or pepper sprayed or kettled. We’re expected to be constantly active on social media, constantly debating and educating our less-political friends and family, constantly up to date on the news, constantly offering emotional support to affected communities. Physical, emotional, and mental exertion are used as yardsticks of commitment to the cause – without taking into account our differing abilities and skills. It ends up replicating structures of capitalism, where our bodies are juiced for labour and then disposed of when they can no longer work – the workers become what Marx, in Capital, calls the “conscious organs of the automaton.”

“There’s a hierarchy in mental illness, where the people who are the most productive are at the top, and the people who are the least productive are at the bottom, which is ingrained in us by capitalism,” said Sonia. As a result of all of this, a lot of the discussion around activism and organizing is incredibly ableist. It’s coming from seasoned organizers as well as the recent influx of new activists that perhaps haven’t done the work to interrogate their ableism.

The rhetoric of “bodies in the streets” activism most strongly excludes people with physical disabilities and mobility restrictions, as well as many undocumented, racialized, and trans folks who simply cannot risk arrest in the way a white dude can. But ableist activism also affects those of us with mental illness. People with anxiety are excluded from protests. People with PTSD are side-eyed for not shutting down a sexist comment at a dinner party. People with bipolar disorder are judged for not showing up for the vigil, when in reality they couldn’t get out of bed that day.

Our bodies are juiced for labour and then disposed of when they can no longer work.

“I feel like there’s no room for people who can’t make those protests for various reasons. And even if people say that they don’t have that mentality, I think it’s very ingrained,” Maddie told me. It’s the mentality that creates the idea of the Platonic form of the activist: a young white man who’s necessarily able-bodied and infinitely resilient, who can scream at the cops without risking being beaten or deported. “That’s definitely internalized in many activist communities: that you need to put your body on the street, you need to be out there, and be ready to face violence,” Maddie continued.

For those who organize in communities or alongside friends, withdrawing from high-intensity work means not only feeling like a bad activist, but a bad person overall. “We have to keep loving people when they’re not able to organize, and not able to do as much,” CJ told me. “And I think that’s hard because I definitely idolize or deeply respect and admire people who spend their life organizing, and really do a lot – but that’s also just not possible for so many people, for so many reasons.”

Part of this ableist rhetoric of activism is the idea of “slacktivism”: posting, sharing, liking, or donating via social media, which is considered ‘lazy’ or ‘shallow’ activism. But creating a hierarchy of activism, where violent protest is at the top, not only excludes those who cannot attend protests or smash windows, but also underestimates social media’s value as a tool for organizing and community-building.

“We have to keep loving people when they’re not able to organize.”

“During high school I isolated a lot from my physical community because of my depression, but I did a lot of online community stuff; I had this screen and I felt more comfortable behind it, and I didn’t have to move out of my bed, also,” Maddie told me. “I created a community through Twitter and Tumblr – that was my initial introduction into social justice spaces.”

Protests and vigils are wonderful and necessary forms of political action. But we also need to value other forms of resistance, and make space for people to resist in whatever ways their bodies and brains allow – lest our work become anti-oppressive in name alone. This has never been more important to understand than now, when mass protests are erupting in Montreal twice a week, when we’re inundated with calls to “step up,” and “show up,” when tapping out of visible, high-intensity, or physical activism is seen as inexcusable. When Trump has a history of mocking disabled reporters, his possible repeal of the Affordable Care Act will strip many disabled people of healthcare, and his federal hiring freeze is going to make it even harder to appeal for Social Security Disability Insurance, activists need to make sure that we’re not excluding the very people whose rights we should be fighting for.

Staying sane in the time of Trump

I have a lot of friends who have never been politically engaged before who are coming to me and asking how to attend a protest for the first time, or which grassroots organizations to volunteer with. I’m really excited about this wave of popular resistance, but I also know that this intensity of fear and rage amongst activists is not sustainable. I know that this work erodes your sanity. If we don’t start talking about mental illness in activism – and not just as a throwaway acknowledgement, not just as an afterthought – then we’re facing mass burnout in the near future.

This chunk of writing is how I’m staying sane in harrowing times. I’m writing to try and open a more honest conversation about mental illness amongst activists, but I’m also writing to help myself untangle my complicated relationship with the politics of mental illness. I’m writing because I feel helpless and sad, and journalism is my activism and my catharsis. This is my act of resistance – against Trump, against ableism, against burnout and desensitization, against my own creeping depression.

CJ told me, “it would be good for me to prioritize my own mental and physical health. I should do that for my own sake. But also to actually do the most good, my organizing has to be sustainable, and I have to find ways that it doesn’t kill me.” Four years is a long time to keep up a fight, and it’s imperative that our work survives – but to do so, the activists have to survive too.

*names have been changed

The post Organizing our way through mental illness appeared first on The McGill Daily.

On Thursday February 2, the Newman Catholic Students’ Society of McGill (NCSS) organized a panel at the Newman Centre on the topic of “Gender Mainstreaming and Transgender” – which featured two cisgender panelists speaking on the topic of Catholic faith and transgender issues.

Approximately thirty activists, many of whom identify as trans and are members of either Queer McGill, QPIRG McGill, and/or the Union for Gender Empowerment (UGE), protested the event, holding signs that read “Respect existence or expect resistance” and “We’re here, we’re queer,” and challenging the speakers during their presentations.

The two panellists were Douglas Farrow, a professor of Christian thought at McGill and the current Kennedy Smith Chair in Catholic Studies, and Moira McQueen, a professor of moral theology at the University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto.

McQueen has previously referred to gender dysphoria as a “condition” – a term no longer used, due to its insinuation of trans identity being a mental or physical illness – and has argued against the use of pre-puberty hormone blockers for transgender youth.

Farrow penned an essay denouncing Canada’s Bill C-389, which would have made crimes committed against people based on their gender identity a hate crime. In it, he wrote that “gender identity and gender expression are not actually positive or constructive additions to the prohibited grounds of discrimination. Rather, they constitute a deliberate attack on one of the existing grounds: sex.”

Prior to the event, many community members had voiced their discomfort on the event’s Facebook page: “Can you please explain why you’re hosting an event about transness featuring two non-trans, and actually highly transphobic, speakers? And literally no trans representation?” asked Lucie Lastinger, a U2 Women’s Studies and Anthropology student and a representative of the Union for Gender Empowerment.

“Can you please explain why you’re hosting an event about transness featuring two non-trans, and actually highly transphobic, speakers? And literally no trans representation?”

“The kind of ideology embodied by this event’s speakers rejects the lived experiences of trans people, and enacts violence against trans communities by producing and reinforcing a culture that views trans people as medical and psychological anomalies, instead of real people,” wrote Benjamin Oldham, a U2 Linguistics student. “This kind of hateful ideology has no place on McGill’s campus.”

After concerns voiced on the event’s Facebook page, Raphaële Frigon, the outreach coordinator at QPIRG-McGill, Michelle Li, a student from Queer McGill, and Lastinger met with the executives of the NCSS in the morning before the event.

Though the NCSS was unable to cancel the event, they changed the format of the event to include time for questions from the audience, and later chose to dissociate themselves from the event.

Farrow began his presentation with a quote from the writer G.K. Chesterton: “For the next great heresy is going to be an attack on morality – and especially on sexual morality.” He then began to describe the case of Eva Tiamat Medusa, a transgender woman, at which point Lastinger asked, “so why are you using ‘he’ pronouns?”

When Farrow repeatedly refused to answer the question, multiple protesters continued to request that Farrow use the correct gender pronouns, at which point McQueen joined what had quickly escalated into an argument, saying that “there’s no such thing as the wrong pronouns.” When the protesters expressed dissent at this statement, McQueen replied “Well, how many pronouns are there on Facebook, to cover everything?”

“The kind of ideology embodied by this event’s speakers rejects the lived experiences of trans people, and enacts violence against trans communities by producing and reinforcing a culture that views trans people as medical and psychological anomalies, instead of real people. This kind of hateful ideology has no place on McGill’s campus.”

“You don’t have the vocabulary to talk about trans people, and you’re acting like an expert,” said Frigon.

One member of the audience asked Farrow, “would you please just use ‘they’ in order to keep them [the protesters] quiet?” to which McQueen responded “No, we don’t have to do anything.”

“You can either be silent, or you can leave,” said Farrow. When protesters continued to ask questions, Farrow retorted, “Okay, so we will wait for the police to arrive and escort you out.”

“Are you really that afraid of dialogue? Are you afraid of trans women?” asked Frigon.

After about ten minutes of heated debate, Farrow continued his presentation, with the activists calling out “she” when Farrow repeatedly misgendered multiple trans women as “he.”

Farrow’s presentation focused on how what he called “gender ideology” – acknowledging gender and sex as separate – has made its way into educational systems and human rights legislation. “This is the ‘self-indulgent madness’ of which Chesterton spoke,” he said. “It seems to me that we have seen a profound attack on objective value in the time in which we live.”

“Are you really that afraid of dialogue? Are you afraid of trans women?”

His presentation concluded with four points: “gender ideology alienates us from our body; gender ideology alienates us from our natural communities; gender ideology makes all identity a legal fiction; and gender ideology subjects us to tyranny,” to which many audience members expressed loud opposition.

McQueen’s presentation, which followed, focused on Catholic schools’ “dealing” with transgender students. “Many psychiatrists call the ‘trans idea’ a delusion,” she said. “A fixation in our mind that doesn’t change is a delusion.”

In response to objection from the crowd, she countered “don’t mistake ‘delusion’ as a pejorative term; it’s a psychiatric definition.”

The Merriam-Webster dictionary’s definition of “delusion” is “the act of tricking or deceiving someone.” When used in the context of psychiatry, it is “a persistent false psychotic belief regarding the self or persons or objects outside the self that is maintained despite indisputable evidence to the contrary” – both of which are pejorative, and neither of which is accurate to describe trans people.

McQueen spoke about responses to trans minors, expressing resistance towards or outright rejecting the use of puberty blockers or gender-affirmation surgery, saying that “the surgery is ineffectual in the sense that what’s created does not work reproductively,” to which protesters objected that genitals’ sole purpose is not reproduction. Instead, she advocated for the use of “psychotherapy as a treatment for trans identity.” One activist retorted, “If you’re talking about conversion therapy, that’s a form of abuse.”

“If you’re talking about conversion therapy, that’s a form of abuse.”

During the half-hour reserved for questions, many activists objected to the poor scholarship of Farrow and McQueen, counter-referencing studies that supported the use of puberty blockers for transgender youth, and which showed that transgender children supported in their identities show positive mental health.

Farrow was asked about Jordan Peterson, the notoriously transphobic University of Toronto professor who refuses to use gender-neutral pronouns because he believes there is “no evidence” that non-binary people exist.

He responded: “I reference Peterson’s principled – as I see it, and as he sees it – refusal to be told how he must speak the language, and I support him entirely in that. The insistence that I speak a certain kind of language is an insistence that I adopt the ideology that governs that language, and I simply – like him – would refuse to do that.”

The event ended with the activists thanking the NCSS for deciding to dissociate from the event.

“I cannot condone their refusal to acquiesce to really basic and simple requests, such as honouring someone’s pronouns and not misgendering people – it’s just a matter of human decency,” a member of the protest, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Daily after the event.

“Obviously, they were not listening to the trans members of the audience, which leads me to believe that they don’t listen to trans people in general.”

“While I respect the purpose of this event, and their presenting an alternative perspective – with which I’m familiar, having been raised Catholic and also being trans – I, however, cannot condone bad scholarship in the presentations,” he said. “Several times Wikipedia was cited as a source which, as we all know from high school, is not acceptable.”

“I cannot condone their refusal to acquiesce to really basic and simple requests, such as honouring someone’s pronouns and not misgendering people – it’s just a matter of human decency.”

“In an ideal world the event would have been cancelled,” Lastinger told The Daily, speaking to the fact that the NCSS did not stop the event from occurring. “Trans people shouldn’t be forced to engage in this dialogue; they shouldn’t be forced to come to this event and fight for basic respect.”

The NCSS executive has asked the UGE, Queer McGill, and QPIRG-McGill to collaborate on an event, to take place in March, featuring a panel of trans people talking about their experiences with Catholicism.

The post Protestors disrupt transphobic talk appeared first on The McGill Daily.

“The people, united, will never be defeated.”

Thus began a performance of What the Fuck Am I Doing Here? – An Anti-Folk Opera, a co-production of Tuesday Night Cafe Theatre and Fishbowl Collective. Under a flickering red light, actor Alysa Touati twirled a red flag painted with a black anarcho-punk symbol. With a megaphone and bandana over her mouth, she led the audience in the chant, who grew louder with each repetition.

What the Fuck was written by Caytee Lush, an organizer during the 2012 Quebec student uprisings, also known as the “Printemps érable.” During April and May of 2012 over a quarter of a million students took to the streets to protest a proposed tuition hike under then Liberal Premier Jean Charest. What the Fuck is the story of “the mythos of a certain generation of student organizers,” director Hannah Kaya told The Daily – and the 2012 student movement has, indeed, been turned into a myth. But the issue with a myth is that it often obscures the humanity of its gods.

The play is Lush’s attempt to humanize the activists behind the uprising, and destigmatize anarchism. It’s her semi-autobiographical story of a McGill student – a “part-time waitress, part-time revolutionary” – who gets involved in anarchism and the 2012 student strikes. Through song and monologue, Touati, Sarah Mitchell, and Summer Mahmud explain the highs and lows of being a student organizer during the strikes – from paint-bombing Charest’s office to dealing with police brutality and burnout.

What the Fuck serves to educate, to incite resistance, and to allow current students access to the energy and history of years of student organizing.

Student directors Kaya and Connor Spencer are also the co-founders of Fishbowl Collective, an emerging theatre company that aims to combine “unique imagery and visceral storytelling” and illustrate “a distorted view of society.” Their adaption of What the Fuck complicates the history of student organizing in Quebec. It critiques the male-dominated organizing spaces, the lack of self and collective care, and the internal divisions between anarchists and other organizers that contributed to the quiet demise of the 2012 movement. Much of this clear-eyed critique can be credited to Lush’s lyrics, but Kaya and Spencer took pains to create a cast and crew, a theatre space, and an experience that embodies the woman-led, sustainable, and accountable radical future of anti-capitalist activism that they want to see.

Their addition of three songs to the show – created as a collaborative effort between Kaya, Spencer, and the rest of the cast and crew – connected Lush’s text to the modern climate of anti-austerity organizing in Quebec. Kaya told me that their guiding question was “how do we take up that history, how do we continue to learn from that history, and deploy that history for our own movement – which is explicitly, now, not about tuition fees, but about austerity – something that is much larger in scope, and affects many more people?”

The performance space was strung with fairy lights and plastered with posters, which read “fuck patriarchy,” “fuck resource extraction,” and “fuck borders.” Rather than chairs, audience members sat cross-legged on cushions on the floor. The show integrated videos of Spencer and Kaya, projected onto whiteboards, giving mini-lectures on anarchism and austerity measures in Quebec, over the soft doo-wop crooning of the performers. It was like the most rad in-class presentation I’ve ever seen.

The performance itself was punctuated by missed words and stumbled lyrics – but what would an anarchist theatre piece be without a few rough edges? While the play is structured by Lush’s text, Touati opted to use her own words each night of the performance, while adhering to the general narrative. The effect is sometimes awkward, but usually disarmingly intimate, with the performers laughing along with audience members over forgotten lines.

Above all else, What the Fuck is also an act of resistance itself.

The highlight of the show was “Betrayal song,” a slow ballad performed by Mitchell, the strongest vocalist of the three. “We threw snowballs / and then bottles and then rocks / striking fear into the hearts / of those damn cops,” she sang. Touati, on the other hand, performed her songs at a rapid pace, combined with an ever-changing set of ad-hoc instruments – including ukuleles, a banjo, and two bricks that Mitchell tapped together. The performers incited audience members to sing or shout along, bang pots and pans in the style of the “casserole” protests, and perform stand-in characters like “the McGill Bro.” Touati’s expansive energy and obvious commitment to the ideology behind the show made her performance convincing and engaging. But since the lyrics weren’t always displayed on-screen or provided for the audience, the words to Lush’s intricate narrative songs were often swallowed in the chaos.

But for all the talk of smashing the state, perhaps the most radical parts of the show were its all-female cast and crew, and its focus on collective care. “That was something that we asked for when we were casting, and auditioning, and recruiting crew: that we had people who identified as women,” Spencer told The Daily.

“There is a dialogue that tends to happen predominantly within women who are organizing: a dialogue of care and emotional labour, that’s just assumed that women will take up – and therefore is not spoken about and not addressed properly, and not given the proper value, time, space, or facilities,” she continued.

What The Fuck doesn’t try to sugar-coat the soaring highs and plummeting lows of activism. Rather, Lush’s lyrics lay bare the self-doubt, emotional and physical exhaustion, and power dynamics inherent in organizing. But in its honesty, it also manages to capture the overwhelming sense of kinship, hope, and collective struggle that comes with hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets.

There’s no attempt to pretend that the 2012 student strikes did anything but fizzle out – and the play had a fitting anticlimax. Even so, the performance lingered. The guitar kept strumming softly, and the audience members broke off to talk to representatives of McGill BDS, McGill Against Austerity, and Demilitarize McGill who had been invited to set up tables in the space.

“There is a dialogue that tends to happen predominantly within women who are organizing: a dialogue of care and emotional labour, that’s just assumed that women will take up” – Connor Spencer

“Basically, by having a show here every night, we have created a space where, for eight nights, people can come in, and discuss, and organize, and create change,” Spencer told The Daily. “On McGill campus, specifically, there are not many spaces where that can happen – or [those discussions] are relegated to back rooms, or lightly discussed over coffee.”

Spencer and Kaya succeeded in providing an Anarchism and Anti-Austerity 101 course that was so fun and free-wheeling that I barely noticed how much I was learning, until I found myself in my seminar class the next morning, arguing passionately for the appropriate uses of violence against the state. In this way, What the Fuck serves to educate, to incite resistance, and to allow current students access to the energy and history of years of student organizing. Above all else, What the Fuck is also an act of resistance itself.

“To get a group of folks together in a space – led by women – to talk strategy, to create together, to inaugurate something unpredictable and unexpected; that is real politics,” Kaya told The Daily. “The exchange of ideas and opinions in a room – that’s world-building.”

What the Fuck Am I Doing Here? runs from November 23 to 26 at Tuesday Night Cafe Theatre (Morrice Hall, 3485 McTavish). The venue is on the first floor and wheelchair accessible. The show is pay-what-you-can.

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There is arguably no place wherein bodies are regulated quite as aggressively as a prison. Society sanctions, or even encourages, violence against bodies we deem to be ‘criminal’ or ‘dangerous’ – by virtue of their actions, or sometimes just their skin colour. In prison, this violence looks like isolation from friends and family, mandatory underpaid labour, physical brutality, and sexual assault. For many incarcerated LGBTQ+ people, it also looks like replacing one’s right to self-determination with a rigid gender binary, where one’s genitals are assumed to indicate one’s gender.

Imprisoned LGBTQ+ people face a higher risk of social isolation, sexual violence, HIV/AIDS, and lack of access to medical care or hormones. The Prisoner Correspondence Project (PCP) is a non-profit initiative based out of QPIRG Concordia, which pairs imprisoned LGBTQ+ people with LGBTQ+ penpals outside the prison system, to exchange letters. The McGill Daily spoke to Parker Finley, a collective member of the PCP, about queer communities, policing bodies, and Trudeau’s record on prison justice.

The McGill Daily (MD): Why is it important for queer people inside prisons to correspond with other queer people?

Parker Finley (PF): Prisons work by taking people’s bodies out of communities and putting them in a separate space from the world that they were in before. So the point of the PCP was to try and connect people with a sense of community that they wouldn’t have otherwise. The reason that we specifically reach out to LGBTQ+ people is that those are people who are in prison and maybe don’t have a queer community or a gay community or a trans community inside prison. It’s important for all queer people to have other queer people in their lives that they’re in touch with, just for support and to have someone who ‘gets’ some of the stuff.

MD: How could relatively privileged university students be a helpful support mechanism for imprisoned people?

PF: This is the beautiful thing about the fact that we pair people up because they both identify as [queer]. And yes, often our penpals on the outside are privileged university students and often people on the inside are very much not that, but it is amazing that even that small sliver of some sort of commonality does give people enough to talk about, especially just in the beginning. For example, I started writing to my penpal, and then we spent two letters both talking about our coming out processes as teenagers, and our first few boyfriends. Almost everything else about us is very, very different, but that gave us enough to start, and once you start this conversation with this stranger you just talk about what’s going on in your lives.

“Jail forces people into smaller and smaller boxes – physically and in terms of identity categories.” – Parker Finley

MD: What are the effects of removing queer folks from communities of other queer people?

PF: A lot of times, trans women get placed in men’s prisons, which puts them [at risk of] much more danger and abuse from fellow prisoners and also guards. And in those instances where trans women are in men’s prisons and they are in danger, they often put them in what’s called “administrative segregation,” which is the same practice as solitary confinement. It’s the same size of cell, and it’s the same regimen of 23 hours in there a day, with one hour of outside time. But in this case it’s for safety, it’s not as a punishment. But it’s the same box, so it’s punishing people for being placed in the wrong place – for their identity to not fit in the box that they’ve been placed in. That’s what makes prison, often, an even more evil and torturous thing for people to go through. Because once you enter that space, they take away this part of you that you have been identifying with, in the outside world and your own community. They separate you from all your friends and all your people, and then tell you that your name isn’t your name, and your pronoun isn’t your pronoun, and you can’t wear what you want to wear. The prison system not only separates bodies from their communities, but separates people’s understandings of their own bodies from themselves. Jail forces people into smaller and smaller boxes – physically and in terms of identity categories. There has been a movement to push back against the policies around the placement of trans prisoners, but it’s always been within an unacknowledged framework of a binary. Usually the change in policies make it sound like “trans women can now go to women’s prisons and trans men can go to men’s prisons” but where does that leave people who are more fluidly in between those two things? There are no prisons in Canada that have a mixed population.

MD: There’s this moral panic about men infiltrating women’s prisons, which echoes the bathroom debate – about whether trans women should be allowed to use women’s bathrooms. Can you speak to the parallels between these sorts of public/private spaces that regulate bodies and have this particularly intense worry about the wrong genitals being in the wrong space?

PF: Yes – it’s bathrooms, prisons, shelters. There is just something about there being certain places in the world where there is a separation between the two groups of people we [supposedly] have, and something about mixing those two groups terrifies people. And it also happens in places of intense vulnerability for people – perceived or real. So people feel vulnerable, so they want that space to be kept safe, and the thing they think keeps it safe is keeping it segregated.

MD: Can you speak to the intersections of race and LGBTQ+ prisoners? Does racism heighten the existing problems we’ve talked about, or does it introduce a new set of problems?

PF: Both. In the Canadian context, the over-incarceration of Indigenous peoples is outrageously awful. In Manitoba, [over] 70 per cent of prisoners in Manitoba prisons are Indigenous, whereas [Indigenous people are] only [15] per cent of the provincial population. There’s also a huge over-incarceration of Black bodies in Canadian and especially [U.S.] prisons […] and then obviously, there’s a lot of racialized LGBTQ+ people in prison as well. The reason I say it does add to existing problem is people might find it even harder to find community, because maybe the only other LGBTQ+ people are white, and there’s that gap in understanding between each other. Also for two-spirit people, maybe they aren’t able to find community with other trans prisoners.

MD: PCP encourages people to send porn or erotica – especially queer porn or erotica – to prisoners. Where did that idea come from?

PF: Along with other things that prison tries to regulate in people’s lives, people’s sexualities is definitely one of them. Like, often prisoners aren’t allowed to have sex with each other. There was actually this law that got passed in the States over the past decade, that was called the Prison Rape Elimination Act, it’s a very famous piece of legislation that was aimed at reducing sexual assault rates in prison, but what it actually did was make prisoners having sex with each other illegal. The argument that we’re putting forth is that people really need access to sexuality, in order to have a healthy life. Especially in a time of being in prison, having access to your own sexuality and having access to sexual materials that are in line with your sexuality is so important, and something the prison really tries to keep away from you. And that’s why we’re trying to fill that in. We have a lot of written smut, because you often can’t send naked pictures, and we have some softcore stuff. It is a really important thing, people find it therapeutic. It’s one of the thigs that people on the outside would take for granted – that once you go inside it becomes much harder to masturbate and have access to things that help you do that, that are in line with your sexuality.

“The prison system not only separates bodies from their communities, but separates people’s understandings of their own bodies from themselves.” – Parker Finley

MD: What is Trudeau’s record on prison justice, and does that signal a change in how imprisoned people will be allowed to express their gender identity?

PF: [Trudeau] has been recognized as this ally to the gay and trans community because he’s so open and friendly and whatever. But on the other hand, we’ve had one of the biggest cuts to frontline HIV/AIDS gay organizations and trans organizations in a long time, under the Liberal government. That’s what’s really frustrating – it’s so classic, people always make fun of the Liberals for “campaigning left, leading right.” But this is what they do – [Trudeau’s] such a photo-opper that he chooses these things that aren’t that controversial to push through to happen, but then on the other hand, cutting the resources to help people on the ground.

The good thing out of all that, though, is that with the addition of gender identity and expression to the hate crime legislation, that does give people a legal grounds to be able to sue the government on certain policies around placement of trans prisoners in prison. Like, in the federal system – which is everyone who has a sentence of over two years – people get placed based on their birth sex, but also taking into consideration whether they have a diagnosis of dysphoria. If they have a diagnosis and  a couple letters, then a trans woman can be placed in a woman’s prison. But otherwise they’d get placed in a man’s prison. Which, under the new hate crime legislation, is actually illegal. But it takes someone to do the suing and take it up to the court. Or, for that to happen and the government to change the policy. So it doesn’t just happen over night with adding that to the hate crime legislation – it just gives people the grounds to actually file a case.

Those wishing to get involved locally can contact the Prisoner Correspondence Project at  info@prisonercorrespondenceproject.com, Open Door Books, and Solidarity Across Borders. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.[special_issue slug=”body_special_issue” element=”piece_footer”][special_issue slug=”body_special_issue” element=”init”]

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Gareau is a Métis student from rural Manitoba, who also suffers from chronic back pain. He’s endured everything from vulgar messages written on his locker, to having to wait two years for a modified dental chair for his disability – all of which have made his time in Dentistry “a nightmare,” he told me. “I have been told by dental supervisors that people like me are ‘too slow’ to ever succeed in dentistry,” he said.

“Sit down or get out”: treatment of students with disabilities

Gareau was in a serious car accident when he was 17, in 2005. “The seat belt broke two vertebrae in my neck, and it cut one of my muscles under my right armpit, and it sliced through my abdominal muscles. I lost six bags of blood. I tore ligaments in my knee and in my right shoulder. I broke teeth. One of my quad muscles was put in to reconstruct my abdominal wall – I still have a flank hernia, I had a colostomy bag for 9 months,” he told me.

Gareau said all of this is known to the Faculty of Dentistry, since he’d included it in his application to the Dentistry program. “I had applied using my story […] to explain why I am going to be a great healthcare professional, why I have the potential to be a healer, because of what I’ve gone through and my experiences on both ends of the spectrum of the doctor-patient relationship,” he explained.

After the crash, a portion of his intestine was removed, and he has been diagnosed with liver hemangioma – a tangle of blood vessels in the liver – as well as gallstones. In order to minimize his stomach pain, he needs to eat frequent, small meals. With a doctor’s note, which was provided to the Office for Students with Disabilities (OSD), the OSD made the recommendation that he be allowed to eat in class.

“I was sent to the Students’ Promotions Committee [SPC] in second year because they were not sure that I was ‘professional enough’ to move from second year to third year, because I was eating in class,” Gareau said. Faculty have repeatedly challenged his accommodations, with one instructor “yelling at me in front of my classmates, stating multiple times that I was told not to eat in class,” he said.

“The seat belt broke two vertebrae in my neck, and it cut one of my muscles under my right armpit, and it sliced through my abdominal muscles. I lost six bags of blood.”

Gareau is a patient at the Chronic Pain Management Unit of the Montreal General Hospital, and part of his treatment includes taking daily medication to control his back pain, another residual effect of the car crash. “The Faculty of Dentistry has, on multiple occasions, ordered me to not take any medications at all on days which I am to treat a patient,” he continued. “In fact, the changing nature of my prescriptions has been scoffed at by the faculty in email correspondences and used […] to discredit my requests for accommodations.”

As another accommodation for his back pain, Gareau requested a modified dental chair which helped support his lower back, since the standard-issue dental chairs which students receive caused his pain to be so severe as to be “incapacitating,” he told me.

Although Gareau was assured in a letter from the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Shahrokh Esfandiari, that he would “find an expedited way” for Greg to receive a modified dental chair, it took him two years to actually receive a new chair. “There were so many barriers put in: after I got the doctor’s note, after I registered with the OSD, [the faculty member] drew it out. He would always say, ‘Now we need this, now we need that, now we need you to see an occupational therapist.’”

“On Monday I may have seemed okay, but […] I was not leaving my house from Friday when I got home from school, till Monday morning when I went back to school, because I would be laying on my floor to alleviate my back pain,” Gareau said. Another dentistry student, Nathalie* told me that, during those two years, she had seen Gareau flat on his back on the floor of the Dentistry locker room many times, to reduce his pain.

“I’ve been made to feel ashamed of my disability in Dentistry.”

Other times, Gareau has to stand up during lectures due to his pain – an accommodation he says was made explicit to the Faculty by the OSD. Nathalie described an incident where Gareau was standing during a class, and the professor interrupted his lecture to tell Gareau to “sit down or get out” of the classroom.

“The way they treat him is ridiculous,” Nathalie told me. “Once he was standing in clinic, because he has problems with his back. The profs always make fun of him, they look at him in a weird way.”

Because of his back pain, Gareau uses loops – small lenses that sit on top of eyeglasses, which change the wearer’s field of vision so they don’t have to bend their neck to work at a desk. But the loops that Gareau ordered – paying $1500 out of his own pocket even after a student discount was applied – were too heavy, and had a “working distance” between his eyes and the desk that was too short. When he sent a request to the faculty to have his loops exchanged, “they outright refused, and they admonished me again for daring to question them,” said Gareau.

“I’ve been made to feel ashamed of my disability in Dentistry,” he told me. “I’ve been forced to apologize for the impact that my need for accommodations has had on the faculty. It’s been really hard for me, to go to so many people [and request accommodations] and say, ‘because I am a person with a disability.’ It doesn’t look like I have a disability, but chronic pain is an invisible disability.”

Anti-Indigenous sentiments in Dentistry

“I come from a small village named Woodlands. The town consists of 250 people with the surrounding area; it’s an hour north of Winnipeg,” Gareau told me. “It’s the kind of place where people play horseshoes, and have town barbecues and rodeos. It’s an Aboriginal area – it’s not a reserve – and mainly Métis people, or people of Métis descent, live in the area,” he explained.

Gareau, like most people in his community, is Métis – a term which refers to someone of mixed European and Indigenous ancestry, recognized as Aboriginal under Canadian law. He’s the first in his immediate family to go to university.

During our first interview, he told me immediately, “I like to talk with my eyes closed to try and concentrate when I try to recall events. For me, this is normal, when we speak in Aboriginal ceremonies, everybody gets a turn to talk and you’re not necessarily looking at each other. I say this because I’ve been made to feel very self-conscious about the way that I act while at McGill, while in Dentistry, by faculty, by other students.”

Gareau said that he’s been dealing with harassment and alienation since the beginning of his time in Dentistry. He’s found messages written on whiteboards in the Dentistry locker room, such as “suck a dick Greg,” and had his locker vandalized with drawings of a penis.

Some of the anti-Indigenous sentiment in Dentistry is subtle – for example, Gareau told me about how a professor in the faculty would carelessly call meetings with students “pow-wows.” But, more alarmingly, Gareau has been accused of being high or drunk while working in the dental clinic – a stereotype often used to discredit Indigenous people.

Gareau told me about how a professor in the faculty would carelessly call meetings with students “pow-wows.”

“I’m always told from faculty that I look high, that I look ‘weird,’ that I’m ‘too slow to ever succeed in dentistry.’ I’ve been asked if I ‘smoked drugs,’” Gareau said. The letter from the SPC to Gareau notes that “The committee members have expressed great concerns about your professional behavior and agreed with the DENT310 directorship that you are not ready to be promoted to DMD-IV.”

He recounted an instance in which, during his time working in the Dentistry student clinic, he was taken aside by the clinic manager and was told that there was an “anonymous complaint” from a staff member that he smelled like alcohol.

“I came in from the front doors, went up the stairs, and started setting up my station, and immediately I was pulled aside. It was the first week of treating patients in third year.

“I’m always told from faculty that I look high, that I look ‘weird,’ that I’m ‘too slow to ever succeed in dentistry.’”

I didn’t even talk to anybody, I just walked in the building,” Gareau told me. After being pulled aside by the clinic manager, “we went into a small radiograph room, and she started smelling me, my clothes. I took off my shoes and she smelled my shoes. And she said ‘nope, you don’t smell like alcohol,’” he added.

In an email to Gareau, the clinic supervisor explained that after pulling Gareau aside, she noticed that he had been chewing gum, which was what she had smelled.

“Alcohol has devastated Aboriginal communities, and personally I’ve been touched by alcohol abuse, within my own family,” said Gareau. “This happened about ten or 15 minutes to 9 a.m., when I’m supposed to see a patient – and I did. I put it aside, and dealt with it. But I was shocked.”

Indigenizing the University

Since coming to McGill, Gareau has coordinated dental workshops for youth through the Native Friendship Centre of Montreal, as well as participated in the Indigenous Student Mentorship Program under McGill’s First Peoples House. He began studying Dentistry with the aim of working in a rural Indigenous community, since children in Indigenous communities have some of the highest rates of severe tooth decay in Canada.

“I am so grateful that I have escaped generations of family abuse, alcoholism, and as a Métis man, colonialism, in order to be in a position to become a healthcare professional,” he told me. But in his appeal letter, Gareau wrote, “I am concerned that my repetition of third year will be seen as evidence that Western professional programs are incompatible with Aboriginal worldviews and beliefs.”

In an interview with the McGill Reporter, McGill professor and Indigenous rights advocate Cindy Blackstock said, “You don’t recruit Aboriginal students; you change your university environment so that they’ll come.” And despite McGill launching a task force on Indigenous Studies and Education this year, it seems like McGill’s faculties may still be a hostile environment for many Indigenous students.

“You don’t recruit Aboriginal students; you change your university environment so that they’ll come.”

“The first step towards healing is for the Faculty to announce that ‘yes, there are reports of unfair treatment’ and ‘yes, our faculty and everyone who steps through our doors is going to get a lesson on cultural safety,’” Gareau said.

Paul Allison, Dean of the Faculty of Dentistry, told me in an email that while the Faculty didn’t systematically collect data about Indigenous students, “we know there are currently three self-declared Indigenous students across the four years of our program of approximately forty students per year (i.e. three in a current total of 157 students).”

Allison also noted that “faculty have attended university-wide training on cultural sensitivity, diversity and equity offered in collaboration with the Office of Social Equity and Diversity Education (SEDE) for, among others, search committees and human resources.”

He added that the Admissions Committee, which oversees the selection and admission of applicants to the Dentistry program, “seeks to promote as diverse an applicant pool and as diverse a pool of students admitted to the program as is possible, while recognizing the demanding academic, social, behavioural, communications and ethical qualities all our dental students should have in order to be admitted.”

What does this mean for McGill Dentistry?

In the Faculty of Dentistry, failing any supplemental or remedial examination means that the student is required to repeat the year. Gareau had failed two courses, DENT 310 and DENT 318 – failing the supplemental exam for the latter – which led to the decision not to promote him to DMD-IV.

However, Gareau told me that while he was writing exams, including his remedial exam for DENT 318, he was interrupted multiple times, and called the interruptions a “tactic.” “I would be writing my exams at the dental building with an OSD invigilator. Someone would continuously come in and ask me if I needed a washroom break, every 15 to twenty minutes,” he told me. “Finally I said, ‘the protocol is that I request a stopwatch break time as part of my accommodations, and I go to the washroom, and I just let the invigilator know.’”

The letter from the SPC cites “low productivity,” and “not adhering to clinical guidelines” as reasons why Gareau failed DENT 310, even though Gareau provided documents that show he completed well above the average number of restorations (also known as fillings) for the class, and his student evaluation forms consistently show him “meeting expectations” or “exceeding expectations.”

In a letter Gareau received from Shahrokh Esfandiari, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, in 2015, Esfandiari wrote, “Greg, I remind you that you were admitted into the DMD program based on your qualifications that have placed you above many other highly competitive applicants, and for this reason I am confident that you have the ability to become a competent health care provider.” Esfandiari was a member of the SPC which, almost a year later, had to vote unanimously to have Greg repeat the year. He also represented the SPC at the Student Appeal Committee on October 11.

Gareau appealed the decision to the Student Appeal Committee on October 11, 2016. His appeal was denied on the grounds that “the Committee decided that there is not enough evidence to question the decision taken by the Student Promotions Committee,” according to a letter Gareau received from the Student Appeal Committee Chair. Gareau is currently seeking a year-long leave of absence from the Dentistry program, after which he plans to graduate in April 2019.

“The denial of the appeal means that I have an opportunity to raise the issues of discrimination that I have witnessed and have faced to an audience outside of the Faculty of Dentistry, where fresh ears will hear them,” he told me.

In June 2015, McGill’s medical school was put on probation after it received a failing grade from the Committee on Accreditation of Canadian Medical schools (CACMS). One of the concerns was that there was “significant under-representation in the student and faculty body of identified groups, including women in leadership positions, and aboriginal faculty.” Then, in April 2016, The Daily reported that a McGill medical student filed a lawsuit against the Faculty of Medicine after he was put on academic probation, alleging that he had not received adequate accommodations for his disability.

“The denial of the appeal means that I have an opportunity to raise the issues of discrimination that I have witnessed and have faced to an audience outside of the Faculty of Dentistry, where fresh ears will hear them.”

Gareau believes that McGill’s Faculty of Dentistry faces similar issues of systemic discrimination to those alleged against the Faculty of Medicine. “This is just my story – just one – and there are forty students in each year,” he said. Aside from the concerns of discrimination, he also cites a lack of adherence to clinical protocols and sound teaching practices as reasons for his appeal.

“I wish more students stood up, but they’re so scared,” said Nathalie. “[Dentistry is] not like mathematics, where it doesn’t matter if they like you or not, if you have the right answer. Dentistry is […] very subjective. If they don’t like you, they’ll give you hell.”

“I’m having nightmares of the people who told me that I would never succeed when I first started going to school,” Gareau told me. “It is hard to remember all of the supportive words from the elders in my life because I am so far removed from that kind of support.”

“I have also made it clear to the Dean of Dentistry that, when I am confident that my safety has been made a priority by the school, that I am willing to once again open my heart and move the faculty of Dentistry’s relationship with Indigenous communities forward.”

*name has been changed

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Roughly 50 people gathered in McGill’s Frank Dawson Adams auditorium on Tuesday, September 27 to hear Gray speak at an event called “Defending Land Defenders.” The event consisted of three parts, including a presentation by Gray and her sister Lindsay, a discussion by panelists about direct action, and an open conversation with the audience on how students, researchers, and scholars can help support Indigenous land defenders. The event was organized by CKUT radio, Climate Justice Montreal, Economics for the Anthropocene, and Divest McGill, as part of Divest McGill’s Fossil Free Week.

Other panelists included Darin Barney, an associate professor of Art History & Communication Studies at McGill; Geoffrey Garver, who recently received a PhD from McGill’s Geography department; Bradley Por, a doctoral candidate who studies Indigenous blockades as a source of law; Nicolas Kosoy, an associate professor at McGill’s Natural Resource Sciences department, specializing in environmental economics; and Normand Beaudet, co-founder of the Centre de ressources sur la non-violence.

Life in Chemical Valley

Vanessa and Lindsay Gray are women from the Aamjiwnaang First Nation, just outside Sarnia, Ontario. They live in what is called “Canada’s Chemical Valley”: an area which houses over 60 oil refineries and chemical plants that produce plastics and gasoline. Recently, plans to build a new polyethelyne plant were announced.

“There’s a lot of cancer in my community. I’ve noticed there’s a lot of breast cancer in the women,” said Vanessa at a press conference prior to the event, in response to The Daily’s question. 39 per cent of women surveyed in the community of 800 have experienced a miscarriage or stillbirth. Many community members experience severe or chronic headaches, asthma, rashes, and thyroid and kidney problems.

“As a child, I was worried for my own sake, when I would constantly have asthma attacks,” explained Vanessa during the panel. “This is ongoing violence on the land, and violence on our bodies. It’s a chemical war zone that we’re dealing with.”

Then, in December 2015, a tar sands pipeline owned by Enbridge, called Line 9, began shipping diluted bitumen – a liquid form of petroleum – between Sarnia and Montreal. According to many Indigenous activists, Line 9 violates Indigenous sovereignty and treaty rights.

“This is ongoing violence on the land, and violence on our bodies. It’s a chemical war zone that we’re dealing with.”

“Line 9, Enbridge’s pipeline, is an unsafe pipeline,” said Vanessa, noting that changes to the pipeline were made without consultation with the Indigenous people living in communities along the pipeline. “And so now a lot of communities – not only Indigenous communities – are faced with their drinking water at risk, with little to no emergency plan for a tar sands spill, anywhere between here and Sarnia,” she continued.

The charges

Vanessa Gray, Stewart, and Scanlon have been charged with counts of Mischief Over $5,000 and Mischief Endangering Life – the latter charge carrying a maximum sentence of life in prison. Stewart was also charged with resisting arrest. Vanessa’s preliminary hearing will take place on February 24 in Sarnia, she explained at the panel.

During the panel, Garver noted that governments don’t have the resources to prosecute every instance of civil disobedience. “Every act of enforcement is an exercise of discretion – so it’s really a political choice,” he explained.

“And so now a lot of communities – not only Indigenous communities – are faced with their drinking water at risk, with little to no emergency plan for a tar sands spill, anywhere between here and Sarnia.”

According to the Line 9 Shutdown website, there are no other known instances of activists who have been charged for Mischief Endangering Life, “which leads us to believe it is a scare tactic to discourage land defense and resistance against the fossil fuel industry,” the site states.

“When we look at my case, you see the extreme charges that I have,” Vanessa told The Daily. “I think we should be thinking of my actions as less radical, and looking at our own government and our own justice system as more extreme. Because there’s nothing radical about Indigenous people protecting their own lands, and their own Indigenous territory.”

Why direct action?

Beaudet explained to the audience that, in a representative democracy like Canada, individual citizens rely on elected representatives to act in their best interests. “But you start feeling that if your representative can’t do anything, then you need to go to actions that are direct,” he said.
But according to Beaudet, direct action is not acknowledged by the Canadian government as a legitimate part of the democratic process, which leads those who attempt civil disobedience to be arrested for various charges.

“Every act of enforcement is an exercise of discretion – so it’s really a political choice.”

“You have charges of mischief, assault, obstructing police officers,” said Beaudet. “All of these rules are very vague, and permit officers to arrest anyone in almost any situation.”

Vanessa added, however, that Indigenous land defence is distinct from other acts of civil disobedience. “When it comes to Indigenous people there is a history of law enforcement escalating quickly,” she explained. She cited the 1995 Ipperwash Crisis, where the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) shot and killed an Ojibwe protester, Dudley George, as he walked towards officers with a stick in his hand during an Indigenous land dispute.

Barney believes that acts of civil disobedience by Indigenous people to protect their land are both morally and politically justifiable.

“The conditions which typically produce this kind of direct action are some kind of historical criminal injury; current conditions of ongoing material, psychological, bodily, social harm; an imperative to act to protect the future against some known and present threat or danger; and the demonstrable incapacity of existing institutions to address those first three conditions,” he said. “I would say that it’s clear that each of those conditions is present in the case of Vanessa’s action.”

“I think we should be thinking of my actions as less radical, and looking at our own government and our own justice system as more extreme. Because there’s nothing radical about Indigenous people protecting their own lands, and their own Indigenous territory.”

“For Indigenous people, it’s our lives that are at stake when it comes to defending the land and the water,” Vanessa continued. “Indigenous people had to resist in order to survive up until this moment – and that’s who we are as a people now. We are nothing but survival.”

In defense of disobedience

Those who would seek to delegitimize direct action argue that’s it’s ‘undemocratic,’ Barney explained. “But […] that democratic ideal, under certain conditions, is thwarted by organized power and by agents who seek to undermine it – which are the conditions that pertain around resource extraction and petrochemical development.”

“When those conditions of thwarting of the democratic process and ideal are present, actions which seek to expose that, and to enforce the possibility of autonomous collective decision-making by the people who are most affected by the kinds of conditions that we’ve been discussing, those actions don’t undermine democracy – they serve it,” Barney concluded.

“Indigenous people had to resist in order to survive up until this moment – and that’s who we are as a people now. We are nothing but survival.”

Por argued that recognition of Indigenous legal systems would legitimize the actions of Indigenous activists in the eyes of the Canadian government. “We need to recognize that […] there’s a different legal system that actually requires people, out of a duty to the land, to protect the land,” he explained.
Vanessa encouraged audience members to consider taking direct action as a form of activism, but also stressed the importance of being an ally to Indigenous people in their defense of their own territory.

Speaking to The Daily, Andrew Stein, a U3 Environment student and member of Divest McGill, said that it’s essential for activists to recognise that climate change impacts Indigenous people more than others, in what Vanessa called “environmental racism.”

“It’s important to support people on the front lines of extraction, support people in Indigenous communities who are being underrepresented elsewhere, and recognise that they are the traditional custodians of the lands and waters,” said Stein. “They’ve been fighting this fight for a long time, and it’s time that we recognise that and support them however we can.”

The post “Defending Land Defenders” appeared first on The McGill Daily.

While this is not the first year that corporations have tabled at Activities Night, the Tangerine tent drew the ire of various student groups. Midnight Kitchen posted a photo of the tent on their Facebook page, with the caption “whose idea was it to put our anticapitalist food service and radical political hub’s table next to the bank tent? whose idea was it to set up bank tents………?”

Kian Kenyon-Dean, a U3 honours cognitive science student and a member of the McGill chapter of Socialist Fightback, was tabling on Thursday night for the group.

“I think it’s absolutely [ridiculous] that we had this bank take up a fourth to a third of the entire space, and none of the rules apply to the bank – they can have more than two people, they can sell a bunch of shit – while at the same time, all of the actual student organizations had to be crowded in a bunch of tables where they’re all squished together and everyone’s fumbling around,” he said in an interview with The Daily.

According to the Policy on Space Allocation in the SSMU Building, “Student endeavours shall be prioritized over any other sort of endeavour in SSMU space,” and “SSMU space, when it is to be used for revenue-generating activities, shall be given to such operations that are run by and for students.”

“Banks, corporations – I don’t think they have any place in student organizations,” Kenyon-Dean continued. “SSMU is democratically elected by students to represent the interests of students, not the interests of banks.”

According to Kenyon-Dean, on Thursday, September 8, tabling members of McGill Against Austerity began chanting “SSMU is for students, not banks,” and were joined by members of Socialist Fightback.

A Tangerine representative later approached members of Socialist Fightback, accusing the chanting students of “being bullies,” he added.

No sanctions for violation

In an interview with The Daily, Elaine Patterson, SSMU’s VP Student Life, called the Tangerine tent “very large and unexpected.”

“It was ten square feet larger than we were expecting,” she said. “It resulted in an entire floor-plan switch-up on the third floor about two hours before the event began. Unfortunately, that meant additional crowding for existing clubs.”

Patterson told The Daily that in consultation with SSMU’s Sponsorship Coordinator, Security Manager, and Communications and Publications Coordinator, she decided that there would be no repercussions for Tangerine having violated its contract. She declined to supply a reason for the decision.

In addition to Tangerine, there were three other corporations that sponsored Activities Night, each of which had smaller booths: JanSport, Scotiabank, and TD Bank. The revenue from corporate sponsorship covered 100 per cent of the expenses of Activities Night, said Patterson. She extended Activities Night to three days this year – rather than two, as it had been previously – which meant an extra day of paying for security guards and renting tables.

“In the past, SSMU-affiliated groups have been asked to pay for the tables that they use,” said Patterson. “Part of why sponsorship started getting sought out years ago was so that student groups would be relieved of having to pay fees in order to table at activities night.”

Corporate advertising in Shatner

The Shatner building has also seen new, larger advertisements on its walls and floors, for companies including Tangerine, Fido, and Uber. According to Sacha Magder, SSMU VP Operations, SSMU recently signed a contract with Rouge Media, a company that connects corporations seeking to advertise with venues like SSMU.

“The corporatization was already in motion before I got into this position; that was a decision made by the previous exec team based on the budget,” said Magder, who is responsible for approving the content and location of the ads. “So I assume that those were decisions that were double-checked against the [SSMU] bylaws, although I didn’t personally have any say in that.”

“Banks, corporations – I don’t think they have any place in student organizations.”

The SSMU Policy and Plan Book also states that “in such cases as revenue-generating activities are to be contracted out, that they shall be contracted out only to such companies that are socially and environmentally responsible.” For example, said Magder, accepting advertising from a company invested in the tar sands or the fossil fuel industry would violate SSMU’s divestment mandate.

Julie Skarha, a U3 Environment student, raised issues with the Uber ad in the basement of the Shatner building. “Personally, I’m not a fan of Uber,” she told The Daily. “They treat their employees horribly, in terms of the benefits their employees get. There are safety issues surrounding it. I’m not really sure it’s something we should be pushing onto students.”

Magder said that he sought to avoid “anything that might be offensive, or violate our policies, or make anybody feel unsafe.”

However, Niall Carolan, SSMU VP Finance, told The Daily there has been no student consultation on the ads, and no specific mechanism or committee to research the social and environmental responsibility of the advertisers.

“I think that would be a good idea, to review [corporate sponsors] and have more student consultation, if that’s what students would like,” Carolan noted.

The financial strain at the base (fee) of it all

Patterson explained to The Daily that the more aggressive corporate sponsorship at Activities Night, as well as the bigger ads in the SSMU building, are a direct result of students voting “no” to increasing the SSMU membership base fee by $5.50 last February.

“What people fail to notice is that our operating budget still funds their activities, as well. So they may see it as us selling out, but really what we’re doing is making sure that we can keep funding their initiatives,” said Magder. “The reality is that we have to make sure that SSMU is financially sustainable before anything else.”

“If people feel that the sponsorship of these events is not in their interest, unfortunately they’re mistaken. It’s directly in their interests, and they’re benefiting from it directly,” he concluded.

The post Tangerine tent at Activities Night faces student criticism appeared first on The McGill Daily.

According to Fall 2015 enrolment rates, women make up 56.8 per cent of the McGill student body. Historically, the number of women on the SSMU executive has rarely reflected the composition of the student body. In the current year’s executive, there is gender parity, but next year Patterson will be one woman among six men, five of whom are white.

“Bossy” and “bitchy” women in politics

“When I found out that I was going to be the only female-identified person running, I was kind of taken aback,” Patterson told The Daily. “It’s remarkable that there is only one woman on this executive team.”

“At the debates it was brought up […] three times that I was the only woman who was running for these positions,” she said. “That’s kind of when it hit me more, that, wow, I’m really determined to be successful in this election because not only do I think that I do have the qualifications to be in this position, but I do think that it would be really horrible to have an executive made up of entirely seven men.”

Asked why she thought so few women ran in elections, Patterson cited the “harmful” personal attacks launched against candidates Céleste Pagniello and Alexei Simakov during the by-election for VP Internal in November.

“Putting yourself on a very public pedestal when you’re running for these elections can be kind of scary.”

“It’s no secret that SSMU elections have been tumultuous in the past,” Patterson explained. “Putting yourself on a very public pedestal when you’re running for these elections can be kind of scary.”

“I think that women who pursue leadership positions have been, and still are, labelled as being ‘bossy’ in the workplace, or hear things like ‘she’s such a bitch because she told me to do this,’” continued Patterson. “That kind of language and that kind of attitude might be a reason why women aren’t really interested in putting themselves out there to run for these leadership positions.”

Emily Boytinck, the current VP External, said in an interview that she “can’t imagine what it’s going to be like for [Elaine] next year.”

“She’s going to be held to a higher standard of diplomacy than anyone else. If she responds to an aggressive email in an aggressive way, then it’ll escalate rather than the club being like ‘Oh, she’s right,’” said Boytinck.

“Politics do not bode well for women with opinions”

Boytinck explained that one of the most significant challenges she faced as a SSMU executive was tone-policing from others, as well as an internalized form of “self-censoring.”

Boytinck continued, “I’ve felt a strong need to self-censor a bit, to use arguments that I think will make me sound cool and logical – basically doing everything in my power to not be stereotyped as a rad, passionate woman, even though in many ways that’s who I am. […] Sometimes I do leave feeling like no matter what I could have said, men in the room wouldn’t take me seriously,” Boytinck continued. “Politics do not bode well for women with opinions.”

She also said she has “noticed that over the years, women [on the executive] tend to leave the SSMU feeling just exasperated, totally overwhelmed, shut down, or angry.”

She added that, as a white woman, the tone-policing and self-censorship that she experiences is less severe than that faced by women of colour, or other marginalized identities. “Maybe that’s why there are so few women of colour who run for SSMU,” she suggested.

Asked if she has experienced tone-policing as a female executive, VP University Affairs Chloe Rourke said she “absolutely” had. However, she added that she was very hesitant to call out observed or experienced instances of sexism because she felt that the burden of proof is placed impossibly high. “My personal interpretation of the experience is often immediately viewed as biased and thus untrustworthy due to my identity as a woman,” she continued.

“My personal interpretation of the experience is often immediately viewed as biased and thus untrustworthy due to my identity as a woman.”

Rourke added that many spaces within student politics, like meetings with the administration, Senate, and Legislative Council, “reject feminine qualities.”

“Emotion and sensitivity are viewed as weakness, or that they somehow render individuals incapable of rational thought,” explained Rourke.

Student media has also been complicit in tone-policing of student executives. For example, in 2010, the McGill Tribune editorial board endorsed Sarah Woolf for SSMU President, but noted that they were “concerned, however, about Woolf’s ability to control her emotions when she becomes passionate about an issue,” and called on Woolf to “employ more diplomacy and tact if she is elected.”

Patterson also expressed apprehension about being heard and taken seriously in her work next year. “My voice is very light and airy sometimes, and I feel like people don’t necessarily hear me when I am trying to interject,” she commented. “I think that next year I would have no problem raising my voice or, if necessary, taking on a masculine tone in order to get a point across. But I say that and it makes me cringe; it kind of makes my heart break. If that’s the way I’ll need to be heard, then are we really progressing?”

Facing constant scrutiny and unreasonably high standards can take a toll on the mental health of student politicians, as well as their ability to perform their duties. “I’m exhausted from feeling that I have to be extra competent, extra careful in how I am presenting myself, and work extra hard to be treated with the legitimacy and respect of a man,” said Rourke.

“If that’s the way I’ll need to be heard, then are we really progressing?”

The Daily reached out to 2014-15 VP External Amina Moustaqim-Barrette and President Courtney Ayukawa in an attempt to include perspectives from women of colour. Both cited their difficult experiences within SSMU as reason for declining to be interviewed.

In an email to The Daily, Ayukawa said, “My term as SSMU President last year was incredibly stressful and unhealthy (both physically and mentally). Notably, one of the reasons why I initially ran for the position in 2015 was the fact that all of the other 3 candidates for President were men and and only 1 of the 3 was a person of colour.”

Not enough women at the table

Boytinck also spoke about how the underrepresentation of women extended beyond SSMU into provincial student politics. “At the last UEQ [Union étudiante du Québec] meeting I went to, there were 28 men and 8 women. Furthermore, of the people who did speak, even in delegations where there was a woman, it was the man speaking – even if the woman was the VP External,” she said.

Since 2006, only six non-male candidates have run for the role of SSMU VP External, within a pool of 19 candidates. Out of the past eleven VP Finance & Operations executives, ten have been men.

“SSMU does give you a really big voice to speak to important things that are happening on campus and elsewhere, and if women aren’t stepping up, then women’s voices just won’t be heard in those spaces, and that’s a really big issue,” said Boytinck.

Rourke, however, said that she doesn’t believe SSMU has a chronic underrepresentation of women. “In general, I believe that SSMU executives have historically been quite diverse, at least in comparison to other universities,” she argued.

“I’m proud because I’m glad that there is at least some kind of representation, but I’m disappointed because I will not be able to represent various different intersectionalities of women.”

Since 2006, there have been 26 SSMU Presidential candidates, only 6 of whom were non-male. Of the 11 Presidents elected, just 3 were not men. The first female president was elected in 1965, and in 2011 The Daily reported that in over 100 years of the students’ society, only nine of our presidents have been women.

Patterson said that she was both “proud and disappointed” to be the only woman on next year’s executive. “I’m proud because I’m glad that there is at least some kind of representation, but I’m disappointed because I will not be able to represent various different intersectionalities of women,” she elaborated. “I am a straight, white, cis woman, and that comes with an incredible set of privileges that I am aware of.”

Patterson added that next year she hoped to “hire as diverse a team of student staff to work for [her] portfolio as possible” to rectify the homogeneity of the current executive.

Rourke similarly noted that “having females in positions of power also does not guarantee that issues of all women are heard or even that women’s issues are heard, particularly if the women who are elected are themselves very privileged and ignorant of principles of equity and intersectionality.”

The post Female SSMU executives decry tone-policing in student politics appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Speaking of complexities, the fact that PGSS Council meeting documents remain highly inaccessible to undergraduate members of the student press is concerning. Trying to obtain Council meeting documents to report accurately on PGSS procedures has been an ongoing problem for The Daily this year. The purpose of journalism is to keep organizations accountable, and that cannot be done if the organizations don’t make information at least minimally available. Hopefully, future executives will understand this problem as significant enough to warrant a solution.

Of course, all this can only be possible if there are any executives in the first place. The abysmal candidate turnout at this year’s elections is indicative of a broader problem within PGSS. Similarly to SSMU’s relationship to undergrads, PGSS is the most powerful instrument grad students have to protect their interests. Given that it’s an instrument, however, it must have competent people to wield it. Unopposed candidates tend to win elections at McGill, meaning that voters rarely evaluate these candidates critically. As such, it is the executives’ responsibility to find and train multiple successors and foster healthy competition, so that students can elect executives that will really represent their interests.

Secretary General Danielle Toccalino

Danielle Toccalino ran on a platform she described to The Daily as being “very ambitious,” since many of her goals turned out to be out of her reach. She had promised to visit each of the 57 post-graduate student association (PGSA) meetings at least once a semester in order to solicit broad opinion, but could not do so due to time constraints. That being said, she actively encouraged PGSAs to reach out to her if they had questions or concerns, to some success.

As PGSS Representative to the Board of Governors and Senate, she said she felt torn between representing students and representing the University. She also expressed a desire for more discussion within meetings, saying that concerns she raised often went unaddressed.

As a self-described “policy person,” she highlighted her work in refining PGSS’s bylaws and Society Affairs Manual (SAM), in an attempt to make them “accessible and comprehensive.” Though she spearheaded two rounds of bylaw changes and various SAM edits, Toccalino said that the project was also overly ambitious, and she lacked the time to refine them as thoroughly as she would have liked.

She has also put together an information policy to govern and mandate access to information such as council minutes and executive meeting agendas. In addition, she has created the first PGSS code of conduct, and has instituted a conflict of interest disclaimer for PGSS employees and Board of Directors members. She also worked to ensure that all executive officers and commissioners underwent equity and diversity training, and most underwent mental health first aid training.

Member Services Officer Brighita Lungu

This was Brighita Lungu’s second year as the Member Services Officer (MSO). Recent disagreement over the severity of PGSS’s budget deficit has meant that the most recent Financial Affairs Officers (FAOs) have targeted services for cuts. Lungu said that this has increased the burden of her job because she has to advocate for the protection of services not only at the university level but also within the executive committee.

In terms of services, Lungu has highlighted Study Sundays as among her biggest accomplishments. Originally an initiative by the McGill Office of Religious and Spiritual Life (MORSL) and taken over by PGSS in 2012, Study Sundays are organized once a month and aim to provide students who are also parents with a quiet study space and free childcare. This year, the project came close to cancellation, but Lungu salvaged the program by sacrificing the free lunches provided by Thomson House. It is disappointing to see Lungu forced into these kinds of concessions, especially considering her original desire to increase the amount of services PGSS provides, but she has remained a strong and passionate advocate for PGSS services.

Hopefully Lungu’s firm stance on the importance of PGSS services will be reflected in institutional memory, and future MSOs will also fight back against cuts demanded by FAOs.
On the university level, Lungu has been working with her counterparts at SSMU to lobby the office of the Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning) (DPSLL) to be more transparent with the student services budget. A huge chunk of the student services budget is paid for by student fees, yet the University, until recently, has been reticent in sharing this information with the student body. It has taken her two years to convince DPSLL Ollivier Dyens to increase transparency of the budget. Hopefully her successors will be able to use the released information for more targeted and efficient advocacy.

Internal Affairs Officer Mina Anadolu

Just like her SSMU counterpart Omar El-Sharawy, Mina Anadolu took the Internal Affairs Officer (IAO) position in the middle of the academic year, following the resignation of her predecessor Sahil Kumar. Anadolu’s biggest concern this year has been the lack of awareness by members of PGSS of the society’s existence and the extent of its activities. As such, Anadolu reached out to clubs and services on campus to involve them in PGSS events. Anadolu tried to change the function of the Internal Affairs Committee (IAC) from being a “party-planning committee” (a definition at which she balked) into a more politically charged entity. In Anadolu’s words, “You come to board games night, you leave knowing more about the Syrian refugee situation; you come to speed dating, you learn about safe partying and safe sex.” Her pushback against the stereotype of an apolitical IAO is definitely commendable.

As stated, Anadolu believes that the biggest problem PGSS faces is its visibility. At the end of this year’s official nominations period, PGSS had only one candidate: Anadolu herself, running for re-election. After extending the nomination period, only one position out of six was contested. As the IAO, Anadolu’s task has been to communicate with the student body, yet student apathy appears to have been especially acute during the Winter 2016 PGSS General Elections. Fortunately, Anadolu is forthright about this issue. She admitted that she hasn’t been in touch with postgraduate student associations (PGSAs) as often as she’d like. In order for PGSS elections to be fully democratic, and more than just an opportunity for student politicians to pad their resumes, increasing the level of student engagement will be one of the most important tasks that Anadolu will shoulder next year.

External Affairs Officer Bradley Por

While Bradley Por did not have much experience in student politics prior to becoming External Affairs Officer (EAO), he told The Daily, “This has been, personally, one of the best experiences I’ve had, particularly because I’m actually a student of politics and law, so to experience it on the ground has been really enlightening.”

Por ran on a platform emphasizing more active student engagement in the Quebec student movement. One of the difficulties he faced was communicating to students the importance of student federations. While Por said he was successful in presenting the two student unions – Union étudiante du Québec (UEQ) and the Association pour la voix étudiante au Québec (AVEQ) – to students and in creating an affiliation policy, he maintains that engagement at the provincial level is one of the major challenges for external officers. He further emphasized the importance of having EAOs who are political and do their best to fire up students’ interests.

Another one of Por’s platform points focused on building a coalition of student associations to confront austerity. In working with both UEQ and AVEQ, Por has taken admirably firm stances against austerity. This week he will be organizing a forum on PGSS and the Quebec student movement, with an emphasis on austerity – though he noted that he wished he held more forums during the year, and we’d tend to agree.

While Por campaigned with the promise of making himself available through office hours in Thomson House, he told The Daily that he did not succeed in doing so, citing the fact that students do not show up to these kinds of office hours as much as he’d like them to. The Daily wonders, however, how Por would know whether students wanted to attend his office hours if he did not hold them in the first place. Por said he often found himself communicating with students just by being in Thomson House, though it should be noted that this does not pass as sufficient consultation.

Academic Affairs Officer Devin Mills

Devin Mills ran on a platform highlighting communication and transparency, and told The Daily he believes he has been successful in these regards. For instance, Mills has revised the PGSS reporting and committee structures. He stated that prior to this revision, the Academic Affairs Officer (AAO) was considered the point person for everyone, which, he argued, was inefficient. The revised structure makes individuals already on specific committees within PGSS representatives to a range of university committees. According to Mills, the goal is that the “reporting will become very organic in nature.”

Mills has also worked extensively with the Dean of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (GPS) Josephine Nalbantoglu on several projects, including creating a revised template for the annual graduate student progress tracking system, which now includes an additional section on conflicts of interest. Mills added he hopes this will create “an opportunity for dialogue between the professor and [their] students,” and it will also ensure everyone is aware of the existing regulations.

Mills admitted that he did not sit on library advisory board meetings as often as he had initially pledged, nor did he host as many focus groups and workshops as he had planned. However, he has taken steps to resolve the lack of structural support that he encountered during his time in the role for the benefit of future AAOs. Mills revised the structure of the Academic Affairs Committee to help the AAO with their primary duties. He highlighted recruitment as one such priority, adding that over the past year he took “some of the easier roads as far as trying to recruit people [through] emails, invitations, flyers.” Mills believes this restructured committee would have helped him by working with people committed to the position’s portfolio and goals. His work in creating a more sustainable committee structure will hopefully have positive effects next year.

Financial Affairs Officer Behrang Sharif

Behrang Sharif has worked hard to provide PGSS members with a clear and understandable breakdown of the budget. Sharif emphasized the importance of structural changes to the budget, noting that the current structure is difficult to understand, and redoing the whole budget is a large, time consuming task. He told The Daily that it took him a few months to understand the budget, and he has been trying to make it understandable for students.

Sharif is particularly proud of the new budget templates, which he believes will be in use for many years to come. He consulted with previous Financial Affairs Officers and an accountant at PGSS, and so far he said he has received very positive feedback on the functionality of the template. He also noted the fact that the event budget is one of the biggest budget lines and was not balanced. Sharif has implemented a broad budget structure that he believes will be “self-maintaining.”

While improvements have been made in how PGSS runs events, the services the society provides, and in how the budget is balanced between the business side of PGSS and the society, Sharif wishes he could have had the time to “focus on the bigger picture improvements.” One of these goals included focusing more on improving how the business is providing services for members.

Sharif also shared some of his frustrations about the position, remarking that “when I started this, and still in some cases, we’re doing things not because they make sense, but because they have been historically done like that.” The yearly turnover of PGSS executives coming soon means that momentum for implementing programs or changing procedures is often cut short. Hopefully with Sharif’s improvements, institutional memory will be strong enough to withstand the quick turnovers.

The post PGSS End of Year Reviews appeared first on The McGill Daily.

SSMU’s predicament, however, points to a broader trend in student politics. In SSMU, a student culture of caffeine-fuelled late nights collides with the rigor of a daytime office workplace.Facing unrealistically high expectations for a thankless task, most executives have commented that their mental and physical health have been negatively affected. President Kareem Ibrahim told The Daily, “I don’t have the emotional energy to do [this job] again.”

Perhaps this is why the number of candidates for executive positions was so low this year. Being a SSMU executive is perceived to be very harmful – not to mention the toxic environment that always seems to emerge during elections. This is a problem that SSMU and the undergraduate student body at large need to address. Our student union is our foremost instrument in lobbying for student interests. If it is increasingly inaccessible, this is to the detriment of all of us. A long-term investment in a healthier environment for student politicians is in all of McGill students’ best interests.

President Kareem Ibrahim

Kareem Ibrahim has spent most of his year as President shouldering the responsibilities of other executives and staff. Ibrahim’s work was fettered by a few notable staff vacancies this year: SSMU was lacking a VP Internal, an events manager, a Building Director, a General Manager, and a Daycare Director at various points throughout the year. As a result, Ibrahim devoted time to tasks outside his portfolio, such as managing the daycare and working on Indigenous Affairs, a task that falls under the VP University Affairs’ portfolio. He made significant strides in the latter project, supervising the Indigenous Affairs Coordinator, and drafting a policy on Indigenous solidarity, which was adopted at Council last week.

Ibrahim’s most visible accomplishment was organizing the 2016 Winter General Assembly (GA), which he called a “solo mission.” It involved fitting over 900 students into the Shatner building to discuss multiple motions, including the motion to support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement at McGill.

In the meantime, some smaller things have fallen through the cracks. For instance, the Know Your SSMU event series was shelved. Speaking to The Daily, Ibrahim expressed frustration at the myriad of projects he didn’t have time to follow through with. Ibrahim also faced roadblocks in his communication with upper administration. As the sole student representative on the Committee to Advise on Matters of Social Responsibility (CAMSR), he said he was “heavily outnumbered” in the recent decision to not divest McGill’s holdings in fossil fuel companies.

Next year, the SSMU executive team will see the addition of a seventh executive, as well as a reshuffling of tasks between portfolios – all without an increase in the SSMU membership fee, which was voted down in a referendum earlier this semester. Ibrahim says he’s focusing on preserving institutional memory in the face of such a significant transition. Instead of having exit reports, he’s working on creating guides for all processes – including how to run for an executive position – since the current lack of institutional memory means that, in his words, “the wheel is being reinvented annually.”

VP Clubs & Services Kimber Bialik

Kimber Bialik has been focusing on long term projects this year, with a particular emphasis on a protracted vision for the Shatner building and its accessibility. Bialik said that she regretted being less accessible this semester, compared to last semester, which was due to the resignation of some essential student staff and a resulting increase in her workload. Even so, she’s been highly active on Council, bringing forth a slew of motions pertaining to her platform – though she commented that her workload has also meant that she couldn’t thoroughly research some of the motions presented at Council, and too often abstained from voting as a result.

Bialik has worked hard on the creation of an accessibility policy, calling it a “special interest project,” even though it falls somewhat outside her portfolio. She should be commended for her choice not to remain bound by the specific duties of her role, since SSMU has taken significant steps toward physical accessibility this year under her guidance. An accessibility audit occurred in February, and while Bialik is still waiting on the final report, she’s envisioning changes to the physical accessibility of Shatner, such as transitioning to non-fluorescent lights and installing more automatic doors.

Her largest accomplishment, however, is the restructuring of the twenty SSMU Services. Bialik raised concerns about the current services structure, saying that it lacked accountability because of a need for more SSMU oversight. With six services failing service reviews this year, the services review committee has recommended moving away from an autonomous model of service provision. Services are notoriously resistant to change, and hopefully next year, the VP Student Life will work more closely with services to implement a more integrated model of service provision, rather than ignore the concerns that Bialik has worked hard to elucidate this year.

VP Internal Omar El-Sharawy

Omar El-Sharawy’s term as VP Internal only started in January, meaning that he had much less time than his colleagues to adjust to the job. El-Sharawy has focused most of his attention on the events part of his portfolio, fulfilling his elections promise by working to increase the inclusivity of the events SSMU organizes. His biggest and most challenging event was Faculty Olympics, and he relied heavily on the support of his committee to organize it.

El-Sharawy has opted to decentralize the organization of Frosh, scaling back SSMU’s role in Frosh to one of harm-reduction and general support for the individual faculties. For that purpose, El-Sharawy has helped create three new positions: a harm reduction and logistics coordinator, a community engagement and outreach coordinator, and a Frosh administrator. Letting faculty associations have more leeway in the planning and organizing of their own Frosh is a novel approach, and could be welcome, considering the troubles encountered this year, such as the logistical nightmare that was the Beach Day. Hopefully, El-Sharawy’s successor Daniel Lawrie will be able to uphold this harm-reduction approach that El-Sharawy and his staff have attempted to create.

As a member of SSMU Council, El-Sharawy told The Daily he has attempted to “step in when there’s a need for me to step in.” When he ran last Fall, The Daily expressed reservations about El-Sharawy’s stance on SSMU’s position as a political actor. Unfortunately, our reservations were well-founded as El-Sharawy has maintained his apoliticism, going as far as saying that students want “SSMU to be more fun, and less political” while discussing a motion regarding solidarity with Black Lives Matter Toronto (BLMTO) at the March 28 Council meeting. While his stated aim was to avoid alienating the broader student body and to represent the interests of each of his constituents, the mindset that has characterized his term – that “fun” and “politics” must preclude each other – is indicative of a broader misunderstanding of the student society’s role.

VP External Emily Boytinck

Emily Boytinck took over the position of VP External last year when momentous change began to take place in the Quebec student movement. The Féderation étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ), Quebec’s largest provincial student federation, was at the point of dissolution; the Spring 2015 anti-austerity movement was gathering momentum; and the SSMU Winter 2015 General Assembly (GA) had seen SSMU adopt multiple political positions, including one regarding the creation of a climate change policy.

Boytinck attempted to address all of these issues during her tenure as VP External. Over the summer, she was involved in discussions on the creation of the two new provincial federations: the Union étudiante du Québec (UEQ) and the Association pour la voix étudiante au Québec (AVEQ). She worked hard to educate both SSMU Council and the entire student body about the implications of affiliation with each. While undergraduate students ultimately voted against affiliating with AVEQ, Boytinck’s dedication to making Quebec student movements part of McGill’s internal student politics is commendable and very welcome at an anglophone university that’s too often isolated from provincial student politics. That her successor David Aird plans to continue the dialogue on student federations is proof that Boytinck’s contribution to SSMU’s institutional memory has been significant.

Under Boytinck’s tenure, we have also seen the creation of McGill Against Austerity, which started off as a SSMU initiative, but has now taken a life of its own. Similarly, Divest McGill’s work has reached a new high this year: despite the fact that the University has refused to divest from the fossil fuel industry, Divest McGill’s resolve remains stronger than ever. Instead of directly assuming control of these entities, Boytinck has helped them to remain autonomous, thereby ensuring the long-term sustainability of anti-austerity and environmental activism.

VP University Affairs Chloe Rourke

Chloe Rourke has been tasked with managing a broad, diverse portfolio this year, and she says she has largely managed to do so without significantly neglecting any one area of the portfolio – a feat in itself.

Rourke has been most vocal in advocating for mental health, especially important at a time when many students are decrying the insensitive, inefficient, and impractical nature of mental health care at McGill, as well as the gaping disconnect between McGill Mental Health Service (MMHS) and Counselling Services. She has been pushing to implement a step-care model to reduce wait times, and is working toward a common triage system between Health Services, Counselling Services, and MMHS, hopefully to be implemented in September.

Rourke has also been collaborating with President Kareem Ibrahim to institutionalize Indigenous Affairs within SSMU and organize the first ever Indigeneity and Allyship event series. They are also advocating for the University to recognize and implement aspects of the Truth and Reconciliation report in consultation with Indigenous student groups. Earlier this year, The Daily criticized Rourke’s inattention to equity initiatives. This semester, Rourke has strived to do more in this regard, by working in projects such as the SSMU Accessibility Policy spearheaded by VP Clubs & Services Kimber Bialik, which will be discussed at this week’s Council.

Rourke faced significant challenges in the Memorandum of Agreement negotiations with the University, saying that during negotiations, she felt she was “working within a system that really just doesn’t get it, and that’s really frustrating.” The Sexual Violence Policy (formerly known as the Sexual Assault Policy) which was completed last month, has also stalled in the upper administration. Hopefully her successor Erin Sobat will not lose sight of the initiatives that have gotten stuck in the gears of McGill’s bureaucracy.

VP Finance and Operations Zacheriah Houston

With the splitting up of the VP Finance and Operations portfolio next year, Zacheriah Houston has been working on overhauling the relevant internal regulations. He has successfully developed new internal regulations wherein funding can only be allocated by the funding committee and groups can now apply for funding through said committee.

Restructuring the funding committee has also been a major success for Houston. He told The Daily the funding application forms have been revamped: instead of asking for cover letters, the funding committee asks very specific questions with word limits on the answers. Furthermore, the applications have been moved completely online. In turn, this has significantly reduced meeting times for the committee, making the volunteers more engaged and the process a lot faster.

Houston also noted that one of his biggest successes was supporting SSMU Services, remarking that he has a meaningful understanding of the activities of each one, which allows him to be a better resource.

One of the difficulties Houston faced was committing enough time and attention to the operations aspect of his portfolio. He admitted that he was more involved with the SSMU budget instead of finding solutions for the Student Run Cafe’s deficit. “I take this quite seriously, I am disappointed with this,” he told The Daily.

This past year has seen a large number of fees that were passed or renewed. Houston noted that “it took a lot of time, but a lot of really good positive fees passed,” citing the renewal of the equity fee, and mental health fee, among others. While the referendum question to increase the SSMU membership fee did not pass, Houston emphasized that a lot of work went into calculating the proposed fee increase of $5.50, which has helped him acquire a thorough understanding of SSMU’s budget. Houston claims that SSMU became unsustainable financially because previous VP Finances and Operations focused too much on the short-term, but he has taken the long-term seriously, not only to balance the budget, but to develop a sustainable future plan.

This article has been edited to remove impertinent personal information in Chloe Rourke’s review.

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Council also considered 12 notices of motion, which will be brought back for debate at this week’s Council meeting on April 7. These include motions regarding the proposed Smoking on Campus Policy and Accessibility Policy, the service status of Elections SSMU, and amendments to the Internal Regulations of the Elections and Referenda.

Club status for Indigenous groups

SSMU Indigenous Affairs Coordinator Leslie Anne St. Amour explained to Council that the proposed policy on Indigenous Solidarity includes consultation protocols for matters that have a direct impact on Indigenous students at McGill. The policy also outlines ways in which SSMU can support Indigenous students, like accommodations for access to the Shatner building, and ways that SSMU can lobby the University for continued support of Indigenous students and an increase in Indigenous course content.

There was discussion regarding which SSMU events would require a traditional territory acknowledgement. VP Clubs & Services Kimber Bialik explained that certain events, like Activities Night, would be exempt, “because that would require running floor to floor with a megaphone,” she said.

“All it does is water down what a club is.”

The motion also saw debate over access to status as a SSMU club: some councillors advocated removing a clause that would waive the membership requirements for creating and maintaining Indigenous student groups due to the underrepresentation of Indigenous students at McGill. Under other circumstances, the interim status application for clubs requires a list of at least ten McGill students who are interested in being members of the club.

Bialik argued that the clause was unnecessary because the Club Committee already waives the ten-member requirement at its discretion, so “all it does is water down what a club is.”

“This is something that multiple Indigenous student groups have asked for, because it’s something that they have struggled with over the years,” retorted St. Amour. “I take issue with leaving this decision of whether or not to allow Indigenous student groups to become clubs with less than ten people […] in the discretion of [the Club Committee] because we have no assurance that that group will understand […] just how underrepresented Indigenous students are at McGill.”

According to St. Amour, there are fewer than 230 Indigenous students at McGill, from the undergraduate to the postdoctoral level.

“This is something that multiple Indigenous student groups have asked for, because it’s something that they have struggled with over the years.”

The wording of the policy was amended to mandate the Club Committee to consider the underrepresentation of Indigenous students at McGill when assessing applications for club status from Indigenous student groups, and waive club requirements when appropriate.

The motion passed with 23 in favour and 1 abstention.

Other motions

Council voted unanimously to approve an update to executive job descriptions, as well as a motion simplifying appointments to vacant CKUT representative positions.

A motion to amend SSMU’s Policy on Support for Family Care also passed unanimously, mandating event organizers to provide child care regardless of the hour of the event. For example, the organizers of an event like 4Floors, which continues until the early morning hours, would be mandated to provide child care throughout that event.

“[It] isn’t the most appropriate for a student group that’s run by first-years, which generally requires more support than a lot of our autonomously run services.”

Finally, Council passed a motion regarding First Year Council (FYC) restructuring.

With the FYC having failed its service review earlier this year, the motion sought to revoke the service status of FYC, instead institutionalizing it as a SSMU body under the portfolio of the VP Internal. Bialik said that SSMU service status “isn’t the most appropriate for a student group that’s run by first-years, which generally requires more support than a lot of our autonomously run services.”

The motion passed unanimously.

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