Aslani arrived in Canada by boat in 2004, after he had been imprisoned and tortured in Iran for two years. “In jail I mean I was about two years and half I was under torture in Iran, so, I mean about 35 per cent of my body I lost it.”

His detention ended in a hunger strike, beginning on August 22, 2005. For 31 days Aslani consumed only water.

Although his stay in detention and his resistance were extraordinary (most are only detained for one to three months), what he spoke about was the way the system works people over. For him and many others, this is what it means to become Canadian.

Although the system is ostensibly about protecting Canadian society – about security – from the inside it appears as a series of filters. It didn’t seem like these barriers were filtering out “security threats” – Aslani said those interrogating him seemed to know nothing of Middle Eastern politics. Rather, they tend to ensnare those who want to “rock the boat” – fight for democracy in their home country, pursue their education, find a good job.

“They teach us, the first step is that they are better than us,” says Aslani. “Political refugee means a person who has enough balls to fight with the dictator in their country. Most of them are educated, most of them are very brave.”

The barriers to gaining status, Aslani said, give way once frustration sets in, once people acquiesce to the quotidian control that comes with the system of detention.

Action Réfugiés is an organization that, for twenty years, has visited the immigrant detention centre and tried to give moral and legal support to those on the inside. They wouldn’t allow any of the refugees they are in contact with to be interviewed, fearing for their refugee claim proceedings.
This is why you can call it a system, a regime. It is not mistreatment by a particular agency, a hidden experience of brutality that must be exposed. Rather, it teaches people to exist a certain way – docile, and in fear. This way of being reaches beyond the detention centre, beyond those deported back to their home countries. It follows immigrants around, making sure they check in every week. It looks at them suspiciously on the metro, and walking down the street at night. It comes between them and their landlords or their bosses, creating fear of speaking out about mistreatment. It ensures that things run smoothly.

Detained upon arrival

In the naming of the Laval centre, “detention” becomes “prevention.” What were called “deportations” are now called “removals,” and those that will not be staying in Canada, those that are subject to “immigration prevention” and “removal orders,” are called “inadmissible.”

Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) was passed on November 1, 2001, in the wake of 9/11. It is the primary legislation currently guiding Federal immigration policy.

The Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) manual for enforcement officers, stipulates that the power to detain permanent residents and foreign nationals meet the objectives of the IRPA by “protecting Canadian society.”
People are detained either because border officers aren’t sure of their identity, their documents are insufficient, they are a “flight risk,” or they are a “threat to security.” Those who are arrested at the port of entry – arriving by ship, car, bus, or plane – are treated, in Aslani’s words, as “absolutely criminal.”

“It’s like the Hollywood movies,” he says. “In the Hollywood movies, what they do with the criminals – like with the psycho criminals. Where there are very calm people but they put the chain on their hand, on their neck. … They act like that with us.”

For many years, those who were able to get past the border with the documents they had were not detained, even after presenting themselves to the authorities. At some indeterminable point in the last few years, increasing numbers of migrants began to be detained even after successfully entering Canada.

“If you are not that good, if your passport is not good, if you didn’t pay enough to the smuggler, and your passport is false then you have to go to detention: this is the first punishment,” Aslani said.

On the streets

Sarita Ahooja is a local activist, and a founding member of Montreal’s Anti-Capitalist Convergence, which was formed back in 2000 to build a resistance movement against the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. She is also a founding member of No One Is Illegal, and part of the Solidarity Across Borders network, connecting several different organizations, refugees, and immigrants who are fighting against deportations and for status for all.

Beyond that moment at the border, detention and deportation reach into communities – seeking out those with precarious status, those that might be “flight risks,” dangerous to the public. Ahooja has a lot of stories about those who are swept up in Canada’s immigration regime like this.

One woman in her community was detained after being robbed. When the cops showed up at her place and found that she was undocumented, they took her in. (She had been underground for eight years, but with the help of activists, was able to secure a work permit.) “They don’t care about the robber. Next thing we know she’s deported back to Bangladesh,” said Ahooja.

Racial profiling by Montreal police also sweeps people into the system. Ahooja recounted the story of a Latino youth who was deported after his ID was checked arbitrarily at a metro station.

Be they non-status migrants living underground, or permanent residents who have lived here for several years, anyone in this vast space of liminality can be arrested and deported with little more than a removal order from the Canadian Border Services Agency.

Another man Ahooja knows, who was originally from Algeria, was stopped by police one night while walking through Outrement. “Apparently there’s a rule that Algerians or Arabs can’t walk in Outremont. So he’s stopped – he’s taken in, he got accused of uttering death threats. So then he had a criminal record,” she says. “For some time he was barred and he was going to be deported, because if you get a criminal record here – it’s like one strike you’re out.”

In detention

For Aslani, once in detention, you lose your humanity.
“I was 205 Delta,” he says.

Time and space in the detention center are strictly regimented; those detained are shuffled from one event to the next.

“Food is always on time, medication on time, doctor on time, sleep on time.”
Every morning, they would wake up at 6 a.m. The officers would walk down the corridors, going to each door in order, each room occupied by five or six detainees. Security would kick the door until everyone inside was awake: “Pow pow pow – Wake up! It was like the military.”

Fifteen detainees at a time would be given ten minutes to shower and shave and go to the bathroom. If they took longer than ten minutes they would be escorted back to their cells.

The officers would bring them razors, and once they were done shaving, they would take the razors back – in order to minimize suicide attempts.
While shaving, officers would stand within an inch of the detainees’ faces. “205 Delta, shave.”

By 6:30, all the detainees would be moved into the waiting room – “Everybody in the waiting room – they lock the door.”
After the detainees had sat, waiting, the guards would start yelling – breakfast is ready.

“They talk about the breakfast like the breakfast is the most beautiful thing,” says Aslani. “You just want to go have breakfast, and you start thinking, ‘Oh my god – if [the officers] were not here we wouldn’t have anything to eat!’”
They line up the detainees, 15 by 15, to get into the cafeteria.

“Mentally it makes you sick. Everything routine.” But, he says, “You cannot, we have expression, you cannot swim against the river.”

The security guard lines up 15 in a straight line. “Fifteen here!”

“They talk in their walkie-talkies, like a Hollywood movie, like a kid.”

One guard will speak to another across the room into their walkie-talkie: “Fifteen is okay?” – “You are ready?” – “Yes, ready.” – “Okay open the door.” The detainees begin walking through the passage: “Un, deux, trois…”
As the detainees wait in line, some of them sit on the ground to rest: “NO! No sir! Don’t sit!”

Aslani waits in line at 6:30 a.m. “Goddammit I just want to eat something, fuck!”

It’s 7 a.m. Breakfast has finished, the detainees have been filed back into the waiting room. Security officers ring the entire perimeter of the room, guarding 100 detainees.

“And then you sit there… You have to sit until 11 – lunch time.”

One of the detainees’ heads begins to nod over and rest on their shoulder: “Sir, you are not allowed to do that.”

Another detainee folds their arms and rests their head in front of them: “Sir, you are not allowed to do that.”

Someone puts their feet up on an empty chair near them: “Sir, you are not allowed to do that.”

11 a.m. “Lunch time!”

“Oh my god, beautiful things happen! The world is exciting!” says Aslani in his ironic, theatrical manner.

Fifteen by fifteen.

“The food is absolutely jelly food, but thank God.”

Eat it, and then go sit – until 4:30.

There is a courtyard the guards sometimes open. The detainees are allowed to go outside and walk.

“You cannot run, you cannot exercise, because you might bump into somebody else – you just walk. And for every two people – one security.”
They are led inside, and there is a TV room with videos – in English and French.

“There are about seven movies,” he says. “Sixty-two times I watched Gladiator.”

The detainees were lined up and counted three times a day.
“It was the most fun ever.”

The guards would line up the detainees and begin to count, “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.” One of the detainees was not looking at the officer, so the officer starts over.

“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight…” One of the detainees coughs, and the count starts from the beginning again.
“Maybe for two hours they would count us.”

Interrogation

Every morning, detainees are brought either to CIC’s offices at 1010 Saint-Antoine Ouest for questioning, or to court. The officers are given a list of names – some are going to Immigration, others to court.

(Since Aslani’s time in detention, the facility has changed from being run by CBSA officers to having guards from the private security company Garda.)
While all the detainees wait in line for breakfast, the names are called out.

Someone forgets their papers in their cell. A guard is called via walkie-talkie to escort the detainee to their room. Everyone waits.

“This slowly gets under your skin. You hate yourself in front of the mirror. You hate everything,” says Aslani. “They play with your brain till you are ready to accept.”

The detainees going to 1010 or to court are brought into another room. The officers put handcuffs on the detainees one at a time. Another officer walks down the line, shaking the handcuffs, testing them. The first officer walks down the line again, grabbing the handcuffs and shaking them harshly – testing them again. Another officer walks down the line, connecting all the handcuffs to the same chain – and tests it again.

The detainees are then led into the back of a van. A metal barrier separates them from the drivers, and the door is locked. The van then drives from the Detention Centre in its desolate corner of eastern Laval into downtown Montreal.

Aslani described seeing the world through the small window in the back of the van.

“When you come out, it’s a miracle. It’s the most beautiful thing – you see kids, you see colour: red, green, blue. You see old women. You see people, and you start to cry. When am I going to be there?”

The detainees are filed out of the van and into a waiting room at 1010, where they wait to be interrogated, one by one, by an immigration officer.

Inside the interrogation room, the officer puts Aslani’s file on the table and taps it with his finger: “Write where you were,” taps the file again, “No lies!” This is how the questioning process begins.

Aslani requests a translator. The officer responds, “We know that you know English, and that you know perfect French. Shut up, you don’t need a translator.”

The officer continues with the interrogation: “We found your fingerprints, we know you were in Saudi Arabia. What were you doing over there?”
Aslani, in fact, has never been to Saudi Arabia. It’s clear, he says, that the officer knows this too.

“I swear to you! No Saudi Arabia!”

The CIC’s enforcement manual elucidates their interrogation strategy.

“Instability of the person associated with mental imbalance at the time of the examination may be a very important indicator in the assessment of the danger, and may point to future violent behaviour.”

This aggressive questioning, Ahooja explains, is systematic.

“They really try to crack people, make them have some kind of crisis or some kind of violent reaction which then gives them a pretext to deem them ‘inadmissible.’ And then we don’t have to deal with them at all,” says Ahooja.
“You’re being questioned about your story, again and again. Canada has a crown commissioner on the other side who is continually trying to trap you into somehow proving that you’ve lied. Detailed questions. ‘Do you remember where you lived three years ago – the address and the postal code?’ ‘Can you say it right now?’ ‘In October, 2005, where did you live?’”
Phrases like “I think” are taken to mean the detainee is lying.

“They try to provoke you, they keep asking you questions to see if you’ll slip and change your story,” says Ahooja. “If someone violently reacted and was indignant about this poking and provoking, they’d get deported right away.”
As detainees are released, or their friends and family interrogated, the effects of questioning spread to the community.

“Within the community it is taboo to talk about ‘Oh, there is a deportation facing you.’ It’s blaming the victim, so that’s what communities start doing,” says Ahooja.

“There is an internalization of the criminalization, who’s good? Who’s bad? So then I want to be really good, and you don’t even defend your minimal rights in the workplace, in your house, in your apartment.

“So you live in abominable conditions because you’re so worried about not rocking the boat. In this neighbourhood, people live in apartments that are horrible – you’ve got mice infestation, cockroach infestation, typical ghetto situation – molding roofs, infiltration of water, holes in the door, air coming in, no Hydro – but people don’t say anything. You don’t want to rock the boat, you don’t want to have trouble, potentially the cops coming in, checking your immigration, and then,” she snaps, “you’re in detention.”

Women and Children

Women and children, and the elderly are also held in the Laval Detention Centre.

The CIC’s manual stipulates that “it is affirmed as a principle that a minor child shall be detained only as a measure of last resort.”

According to Ahooja, minors are treated much less delicately.

“We had a case where six kids were detained,” she says. “Two year-old, five year-old, six year-old, eight year-old, and seventeen year-old.” She adds that CBSA officers raided the family’s apartment at night, when both parents were at work.

The medical services provided in detention, according to Aslani, focus on getting the detainees to sleep.

“If the doctor writes ‘ten [sleeping] pills,’ you don’t have any choice to take them – the nurse is going to put them in your mouth.”

When detainees need medical services outside the Centre, they are never let off their chain. Those taken to the hospital, including pregnant women, are handcuffed to their beds.

In court

Detainees are brought to two different courtrooms. One is a “detention review,” where the decision is made to release the detainee under certain conditions, or keep them in detention. The other is refugee court, where a decision is made as to whether the person can stay in Canada, or be subject to “removal.”

In order to keep someone detained, they must be brought before a court for a “detention review” after the first 48 hours, then seven days, and then every thirty days.

At a detention hearing there are two adversarial parties, the person who is being detained and the Minister’s counsel for the CBSA. Presiding over the court is a “member,” not a judge, from the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB).

During his 11-month detention, Aslani was in and out of detention court many times. These kinds of hearings seldom accomplish anything beyond maintaining the legal basis for detention.

At one of his refugee hearings, Aslani’s first lawyer sat beside him in court for five hours, not speaking, and then told the judge, “He’s a good boy.”
Aslani compared his time in Canadian court to Iran. In Iran’s military court, Aslani was given a lawyer who didn’t even have a high school diploma.
“For people like us, people fighting in third-world countries – we’re fighting for democracy right? We believe that in Europe and North America at least they know something about democracy. For us it’s important, like a movie you desire to watch.”

After his experience with these courts, Aslani said, “Oh, this is democracy! That’s cute. We’re not that different. Same shit.”

For him, the power dynamic in the courtroom was a big reason he was stuck in limbo. As he explained, the IRB official presiding over the hearing was often younger than the CBSA counsel in charge of his case.

At first, Aslani was detained for identity reasons. Then, they might say something like, “we need another month, we need to translate some documents.” The fact that Aslani had already been detained was an argument, in the member’s mind, that he should be detained further.
As the CBSA counsel would lay out reasons to detain Aslani further, they would end by telling the member that “it was their decision.” Afraid of bringing some unknown horrors down on their head, signing Aslani into further detention made a lot of sense.

A trip through Europe

As Aslani and his “big mouth” were sent back to detention month after month, the reasons for his detention began to centre around his time attempting to pass through what some call Fortress Europe – a continent which has become concomitantly more open for those with EU passports, while becoming more fortified against those people Europe does not want moving freely. What is striking about the Canadian authorities’ suspicion of Aslani’s route through Europe – using false documents and being detained for it – is how typical this experience is.

The member presiding over the courtroom told Aslani that he was suspicious because he had access to false documents in Europe.

“Europe is amazing,” says. “In Amsterdam, you can buy a passport for 60 Euros, maybe 100 Euros.”

Aslani explains how the only way to travel from country to country is through smugglers. “You don’t have any choice – you have to do that!” If the passport he got was bad, he would be detained in the next country he went to. He’d go to jail, and then be released.

“So you’re coming out, you lost your money, you lost your time, you were in jail. You work in an apple orchard, you make money – 5 Euros per hour. Again and again you don’t eat anything – you keep [your earnings]. Another, stupid, nasty smuggler, you pay – passport – you go, you travel, they arrest you and put you in jail again you lose your money.”

Arash’s experience, he says, is not uncommon for migrants to Canada.
“This is the last hope, this country.”

Fewer refugees

Within the framework of this system, there are many pressure points. If the government wanted to, say, reduce dramatically the number of refugees coming into, and being admitted into Canada, they could change the law. But at every step in this process, the way officials interact with people is a place where immigration policy can unfold – where people can be squeezed out, frustrated into changing their lives to fit the government’s narrative.

The CBSA released an evaluation of their Detentions and Removals Programs on January 31, 2011. The problem areas, for them, were reducing costs, reducing inconsistencies in the application of detention and removal policies, and carrying out removals more “efficiently.”

Bill C-49, the “Preventing Human Smugglers from Abusing Canada’s Immigration System Act,” is one of those legal changes. The legislation was first introduced by the Conservative government in October, and is now in its second reading in Parliament. According to the Canadian Council for Refugees, the bill could bring even more enforcement, detention, and discriminatory filtering into the lives of those caught up in this system.
Another legislative change, Bill C-11, was passed last June, and is expected to be implemented as of early 2012.  Annick Legault, Aslani’s second attorney, is not optimistic about the new system.

“It’s absolutely hell. The whole idea is to be able to kick someone out of the country within a year.”

This acceleration of the deportation process takes place at several levels. In the new system, several steps that were done through a lawyer will now be done through an officer. Another important step is making more distinctions between “safe countries” and “unsafe countries,” or even parts of countries will be deemed “unsafe.”

This creates big problems with countries like Mexico or Israel, where, even though they are regarded by Canada as liberal democracies, persecution exists for large parts of the population.

These distinctions, Legault insists, destroy any illusion of due process. “You’re going to be able to apprehend losing.”

“It’s not normal when you’re going to court, you’re supposed to feel like there’s someone to listen, a due process, that everyone’s impartial, no one’s going to be pressured to render a negative decision – which – even if it’s not the truth now, it’s still supposed to give that impression. Whereas that new system doesn’t even give the impression.”

The last two forms of legal recourse that those with removal orders have are currently the Pre-removal risk assessment (PRA), and the Humanitarian and compassionate claim for permanent residence (H&C). The PRA is supposed to determine if the person to be deported will suffer torture or even death upon removal to their home country. The H&C is a statement claiming connections to the community in Canada, and requesting permanent residence because they have built a life here.

Ahooja explained that for a few years now, the PRA has seemed like a formality, with almost every applicant being rejected. What is new, however, has been an increase in the PRA and H&C being decided at the same time. The problem here is that there are supposed to be two different organizations, the CBSA and CIC, and thus two different perspectives – one based on security and one based on community, making this decision.
According to Ahooja, the frustration this intransigence, this series of dead-ends, can create is very powerful.

“They realize at some point they might never be able to be heard or understood,” she says. “And that the person in front of them who has the power to decide over their life doesn’t give a shit about them. Some people would rather take their lives here and not be deported back to what awaits them.”

Hunger Strike

After seven months of going to detention reviews and a refugee hearing, Aslani found out he was not going to get refugee status, and would be kept in detention until his deportation.

It was a week before the guards realized Aslani hadn’t been eating. Every time he refused a meal, a yellow slip would go in his folder. Eventually, a guard realized that his folder was overflowing with yellow slips.

“It doesn’t show how strong I am, it shows how frustrated I was. I was feeling that I was going to die, and I was ready for that.”

Aslani sat in his bed everyday, watched by two guards.

Maurizio Mannarino, then director of the detention centre, eventually confronted Aslani.

“The director came and said you are not allowed to [hunger strike]. I remember the director told me, ‘Here is Canada, here is not your country, where you can do anything you want.”

The doctor at the centre tried to sneak some chocolate to Aslani: “Eat this, I won’t tell anybody. At least keep your energy.”

Aslani responded that “I want to die, finish. I want to show the world that Canada is not that country they think – at least I can do that.”

Other detainees began hunger strikes in support of Aslani.

One of the other detainees, a friend of Aslani’s, sent a fax to the Red Cross. A piece was published in the Montreal Gazette, and a few Iranian newspapers picked up the story. At his next detention review, a crowd of supporters filled the gallery.

Other detainees were inspired by Aslani to hunger strike in solidarity.
Aslani credits his eventual release to his new lawyer – Annick Legault. Aslani was released on $15,000 bail and condition that he report to 1010 Saint-Antoine Ouest every week. He did so every Tuesday from September 2005 until January 2011, until his lawyer sent a request and he was able to stop.
“If you miss it, the next day, they’re at your house – they arrest you, you’re in detention, forget about it,” says Aslani, who spent that time working, making the various appeals, fighting off a deportation order, marrying, and starting a family in Canada.

“Monday to Friday, working, Saturday and Sunday go to Casino. I know that I’m not one of the Canadian guys… I’m the stranger forever.”

Acceptance into Canada, he says, has broken his will.

“When you are absolutely frustrated and disappointed, you say ‘so what, fuck that.’ then you are welcome. But if you have something to say, or you are creative, or you are a fighter, they don’t like it: ‘calm down, calm down’” says Aslani.

“We are all zombies. I’m saying if we are like that, it’s not because we are bad people. It’s because of what happened to us. This is what they want. They don’t listen to news, when the news is talking, they’re washing dishes.

The post “We are zombies” appeared first on The McGill Daily.

All those polls show that almost everyone was explicitly worried about the economy. The way the Democrats approached this problem was to “get the car out of the ditch.” In other words, the economy was fine, it just needed some tweaking – it was a temporary problem, not something systemic.

What they want is to continue with a kind of solution-based politics, a “post-politics” where the “smartest” solution wins the day.

This sort of technocracy thrived when the credit markets were flying high: “What? Inequality is increasing? Let’s give everyone loans!” In this way, administrations like Clinton’s Democrats, Blair’s New Labour, and Paul Martin, when he was Finance Minister here, were able to achieve – temporarily – the liberal goals of “helping marginalized people” without engaging in any kind of systemic critique.

But now the loans are due, and someone has to pay.

Where did the rage go? After 2008, most people would agree the “system” was flawed, and yet, we were given more “solutions” that were born from, and extensions of, this system – only this time without the smiley face.

The angry among us would call bullshit.

But this inchoate anger at the system is a powerful recognition.

This passionate response comes when every solution offered comes in one flavour, where the roll-backs of austerity are always-already paired with a roll-out of the market: privatization, corporatization, structural adjustment.

When we begin with the assumption that what is good for speculative capital is good for everyone, compromise always goes in one direction.

And so the Democrats sound confused, because they won’t call bullshit.

There are plenty of people, in the United States and around the world on the left, who have their analysis ready, who are on the streets, who are actively building an alternative while they fight the imposition and continuation of these systems. But their anger, in a way, cannot even exist, cannot become intelligible within this ideology of post-politics.

The thing that mobilizes the ordinary everyday, that causes the facts and figures to harmonize is passion – it’s faith.

It’s what makes you reach out and love someone else, what makes you sacrifice for something, maybe it’s the only thing getting you out of bed in the morning.

So far in this piece, I’ve been setting up a binary – the boring technocrats versus the passionate activists. But what I really want to do is shift away from this realm of the boring, and join the fight to delineate something we can have faith in.

My uncle back in the States is pissed at the system – he wants to throw the whole gang in the ocean, et cetera, et cetera. This passion is appropriate to the enormity of the problem – crisis after crisis, with each solution simply moving the crisis around geographically, and growing into the next crisis.

The political movement that he feels is expressing this rage is the Tea Party.
Behind the technocracy is a faith in markets; behind the Tea Party is a passionate anger, and a faith – this is where the politics lie.

So, rather than ignoring that realm, regarding it like some “gateway drug” into irrational madness, we need to join in, making interventions at that level – having that discussion.

Faith is a powerful force, but as long as we cede this ground, there’s going to be that “enthusiasm gap” – which in real terms means a choice between this post-politics which gradually makes the inequality and suffering in our system permanent, or fascism, or both. We’re going to need some faith.

The post Have faith appeared first on The McGill Daily.

In the spirit of this special War issue, I’m going to start off with Foucault’s notion of security – or rather, the “techniques of security” he talks about in his lecture series Security, Territory, Population.

Unlike Foucault’s disciplinary institutions (the prison, the school, the barracks), apparatuses of security are powers that let things happen.

They create a space for processes of circulation – circulation of goods, ideas, people. “It was a matter of organizing circulation, eliminating its dangerous elements, making a division between good and bad circulation, and maximizing the good circulation by diminishing the bad,” he said.

 Foucault isn’t trying to say this way of thinking about the world is wrong. What he’s trying to do, and why this is useful, is to see the logic by which power operates today – for better or worse. So although we could argue with this positioning of circulation above all else, right now I want to look at how this logic plays out…

…and that brings us to the G20 summit going on right now in Seoul, South Korea.

 What we have here are twenty or so nation-states coming together over one common goal – the economy, i.e., circulation.

 And this is where power comes in – not in the form of orders from on high, but from the management of circulation – flows for some, trickle for others, walls for many. Financial deregulation and bailouts for some, deep cuts to public programs for others, border controls and repression for many.

 Another example from the lectures: Foucault looks at the idea of “risk” as developed around smallpox inoculation in the 18th century. You identify different risk groups: the young, the healthy, the elderly – and treat them differently.

 So security acts differently on these different “risk groups.” When the G20 in Toronto decided that all these twenty states had to halve their deficits by 2013, they weren’t making orders from the throne, but rather creating a “milieu” where certain processes are set in motion, and where the “old armatures of law and discipline” are going to have to be remobilized in certain ways – and toward certain desired economic effects.

They don’t have to say, “Destroy public services, use riot police to put down the inevitable dissent.” They just say “deficit” – and who can argue with that economic logic?
It seems straightforward, but it puts into motion all those forces that currently manage inequalities in power and income.

So even if the policies encouraged by institutions like the G20 ostensibly act only on economic processes, the economic and social pressures they unleash remobilize and reinforce the sorts of policing mechanisms – homophobia, sexism, racism, ableism, et cetera – which constantly divide us into manageable “risk groups.”

People in one part of the world may be losing their means of subsistence, having their water privatized, their homes destroyed, their land expropriated, but for us here at McGill, we just get corporate food, tuition increases, and more and more “competition” to secure dwindling funds and space. The same logic and institutions justify both – increase circulation here, shift it there, cut it off somewhere else 
But to bring it back – it’s not the logic of security we’re fighting, but the priorities behind it, the desired effects that have been chosen for us.

This system is not some diabolical Illuminati spider web shit – it’s a creaky machine with lots of cogs that work together intermittently, without actually agreeing on much.

This is where you come in.

If you look at the news, students in London yesterday weren’t taking this sitting down – and they’re following the huge protests worldwide against misplaced priorities in Puerto Rico, France, California, Japan, Greece, Ireland, and the truly global convergences that occur at international summits like the WTO and the G20. This latest wave of protests joins those in developing countries that were subject in the past thirty years to the same austerity measures we’re seeing now – but that time, they were called “structural adjustment programs,” and administered by the IMF and the World Bank. 
I think as students and citizens and people, we should see our role in this system, and go out and protest the G20 this Friday. There will be a demonstration from 5 to 6:30 p.m. at Cabot Square (corner of Atwater and Ste. Catherine) in solidarity with those in South Korea. It should be fun, and will be family-friendly.

The post Whose security? appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Oops, but this isn’t really about Arch Café.

It’s about the fact that our roots are being pulled out, and how that’s supposed to be a positive thing.

The administration seems to think it is a burden to give students access to University space. They think that it’s an outrage they should have to hand over student fees to student clubs without being able to control those clubs. Or if you’re like QPIRG, that being a student group should mean focusing all your time on campus to saving yourself. They are just so annoyed that they should have to figure out how to let the McGill community use bikes on campus. And undergrads should be happy that the admin were so nice to you during the tour, because you’re definitely not getting any funding or attention now that you’re here.

And if you’re a grad student who’s supposed to be the centre of this research-centred university, you’d better have your nose to the grindstone – but we really don’t care about the quality of your research, just that it’s being churned out.

If you’re a Muslim person at McGill, you have to file a complaint with the Quebec Human Rights Commission, and the admin still won’t give you prayer space on campus.

If you’re in a union on campus (or trying to organize one) – don’t expect the University to be some sort of sanctuary – while the students are learning about social inequality, you’d better get your ass back to work.

The list goes on and on (we don’t have to listen very hard to hear these groups speak out for themselves) – and that’s the point, it’s not about specific policies, compartmentalizing us into interest groups, but rather about a total way of doing things – of calculating value and making priorities.

This column will explore how ways of thinking connect all the grievances above – not through some diabolical web of money and influence, but rather through series of compromises, processes with perverse trajectories, decisions that went through, rather than being fought out.

Maybe we should see that we’re not just at school, we’re also neck-deep in the machinery that makes the world turn, and maybe we should wriggle around a bit.

I work with Mobilization McGill (MM), a collective founded on the idea that these issues stem from a central source – so we need to work together and protest together. The strength of MM comes from the fact that everyone brings their own perspective and energy to the group. I bring my own perspective to the group and to this column.

Starting next Monday, we will be rolling out the boycott of McGill food services. It will end with another big, noisy rally during Senate next Wednesday at 2 p.m. in front of Leacock.

This isn’t just about food, this isn’t just about Arch Café: let’s show the admin that we can do more than choose from their “high quality and nutritious food selection,” let’s show them that we can fight back, that we can build something – build something that isn’t just for ourselves.

A bunch of us have decided to wear white ribbons. White so you can put whatever is bothering you on it, but also so that we can, in solidarity, protest the way the administration (for starters) interacts with the McGill community and people in general.

Thank you.

The post I’m sick of this bullshit appeared first on The McGill Daily.

I’m making generalizations, something I don’t really want to do, because I want to talk about the situation on the ground – between people, and not below a line graph. What we should look at is the relationship between the addict on the one hand, and on the other, authority – those who represent whatever detox centre, church, jail, hospital, or needle exchange that the addict is reaching out to or being punished by.

I see how a more rational discourse about drugs could help. Moralistic judgments about marijuana versus other drugs for example, shouldn’t be the basis of our drug policies in North America. So when we talk about legalizing marijuana because it’s safer than other drugs, that seems like a prudent drug policy.

But what we should see is how this construction of safety and security, this grading of drugs in a rational manner, can also have a negative and violent effect. The goal might be to eliminate drug use – you could argue for this rationally or moralistically – but we can’t ignore the way this gets played out on the streets.

People working in harm reduction programs for street kids in Montreal don’t take a side for or against drugs, because they understand the unique position of power they are in. While they have the power to weigh the options, the person seeking help is at their mercy – without clean needles or pure drugs, they’ll overdose, they’ll get hepatitis C or HIV.

We need to understand how this person-to-person power works. While politicians argue endlessly about method, this monolithic macro-discourse limits what actors on the ground can do – or worse, justifies brutal enforcement.

The problem here is the same problem we find in many government plans to move from welfare to “workfare.” Although workfare, which incentivizes certain behaviours, makes rational sense at the macro level, on the ground it is often felt as a harsh sort of discipline. Workfare brings down on the heads of the poor the dual forces of both policy discussions detached from complex reality and a gutted welfare state that asks them to do more with less.

In an even more clear, and violent, way, policy-makers’ inability to cope with the complexity of addiction means underfunding of treatment and the obvious and uncomplicated violence of enforcement.

“Addict,” the label recovering drug users in 12-step programs must self-apply, acknowledges this complex reality. It translates to meaningless relapse after relapse and a battle that doesn’t stop until the day they die.

This reality doesn’t fit neatly within a rational framework. We want to “cure” drug abuse. When programs like treatment or harm-reduction, which acknowledge the harsh reality of addiction, fail to “cure” this problem, we reject those solutions or openly talk about punishing addicts.

Any possible move toward a systems that values life – as opposed to the cold logic of economic calculations – will not be found – at all – in the simple logic of enforcement, but only in the complexity of treatment.

Treatment of addiction means dealing with constant failure and death. Ignoring this only resigns addicts to being trapped outside, dying on the streets.

This isn’t about “coddling” addicts – that’s just another top-down model – but rather opening up and funding places where the intense person-to-person interactions of recovery can take place.

An addict can only recover, can only engage with that never-ending process, if they themselves are committed to getting clean. This process is never easy and might need a harsh push, but this push can only come from somebody who knows the addict and understands addiction – not from an uninterested, monolithic system of discipline.

We can’t “cure” the problems because they are in large part symptoms of a system of intersectional oppression. It doesn’t look like this system is changing any time soon, but the enforcement of prohibition is still punishing addicts for falling between the cracks of society’s logic.

This piece doesn’t necessarily mean we need an intervention at the policy level. Perhaps it’s just a plea to stop having Cactus hand out clean needles at one end of a Montreal park while the SPVM arrests addicts for using those needles at the other end.

Sam Neylon is U3 Cultural Studes & IDS student. He’s also one of The Daily’s news editors. Write him at samuel.neylon@gmail.com.

The post Stop punishing addicts appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The McGill Daily: What is it like having addicts helping addicts?
Amy G.: Addicts have serious self-esteem problems, and now they’re helping other people. You can imagine the shit you bring into that. But on the other hand, addicts – or a lot of them – can be really, really sensitive and smart in that way…. They are going to be able to see, or be willing to see, a lot that other people just don’t want to.

My sponsor has put up with so much fucking shit from me it’s unreal. No human being would ever put up with that in the way that he has – that’s all – no one would do that. With him, it’s not to help his ego, it wasn’t to fuck me, it wasn’t to try and control me, it was none of those things. It was because he saw in me what I was too blind [to see]. I don’t think that someone who hasn’t been an addict would. It’s not that they wouldn’t have the heart to, it’s that they won’t understand when four months later you relapse and sell everything again…. Why would someone who’s not an addict even tolerate that? And if they did, it would probably be some kind of weird pity-contempt kind of shit going on which wouldn’t be effective for either of us.

MD: What are some of the other organizations that help addicts in Montreal?
AG: There are organizations that will help addicts out, like Cactus. But those are not programs of recovery. Those are programs of “Let’s try to not let people die on the streets.” I’m totally pro anything that helps people not die on the streets – but that’s not recovery.

There’s other places I know of that do [heroin] maintenance programs [centres that provide medicinal heroin], but I have my issues with that, too. I understand, and it’s probably better that you get your shit from somewhere and not have to rob a bank – fine. But there is no God damn way you are going to have a life as long as you are putting a needle in your arm – you’re not. And I can say it because I did it.

I didn’t get clean to get clean; I got clean to have a life. The idea was that life is big and wonderful, right? We were missing out as an addict, and now you are going to live.

Like I said though, there are detoxes and rehab programs, which are very valuable – I want to make that very clear. Getting clean is essential. Some people need some downtime, some fucking safe-place time.

MD: What do you think about addicts that are ordered into programs by courts?
AG: In most rehabs, you will find people who were ordered there by the courts. It was be jailed or get clean. I’m gonna say nine out of 10 times, unless within that time that you’re there you realize [you want to get clean] – it’s not gonna work. I really, really don’t think that someone else is going to ram the love of life down your throat. It doesn’t even make fucking sense to me – “you have to love God or go to jail!” No, that’s not gonna happen.

I think interventions have a place too. My friends and family intervented on me, but I was ready to be intervented. And so it was effective. They have a place.

Sometimes the best support you can give might not appear that way from the outside. I think some people might have watched my sponsor and thought he was pretty fucking brutal, but I needed a lot of serious encouragement. I’m not talking about some kind of yucky work-camp ethic where it’s like “Destroy the person! Make them nothing!” I mean I’m already nothing coming in there. If you are doing intervention, or that kind of really urgent [work] – trying to bring a person out of hell – someone you see is ready, but you want to bring them out of hell as quickly as possible, it’s really important that you don’t enable them in their lies. It’s awful; it’s a drag; you love the person so you kind of want to believe they’re really gonna try.

MD: How would you define what is different, what separates that work-camp ethic from a sponsor being harsh because they see that there might be a desire to get clean?
AG: Maybe for the average cop or person, watching someone who’s drunk peeing themselves on a park bench, you kind of have a lot of judgment going on – or you have this weird sort of pity. I think that what most addicts know – even if they don’t want to say they know it – is that they are always that man peeing himself on the park bench, and they always will be that man. When you really know that you’re always going to be that man, you are much more interested, and [you] much more urgently move to get that fucking man off the park bench.

—compiled by Sam Neylon

The post Interview with an addict appeared first on The McGill Daily.

“I don’t think [graffiti] is a fléau – it is and it isn’t,” said Proulx. “It depends on what graffiti you are talking about. There is bombing art and talented art.” L’Association Graff-X seeks to give youth a creative outlet through graffiti workshops and a legal graffiti wall – which Proulx says is an important resource.  
“The kids want to have walls, and the City keeps knocking down the walls to put up condos…. There is a fléau, but at the same time it’s an art in development – what can you do? Frankly, I think it’s kind of sad that people don’t realize that it would be best to stop doing vandalism and focus on murals,” Proulx said.

The post STM struggles over graffiti appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Polls closed on the Fall referenda questions at 5 p.m. Thursday. The results revealed the second largest voter turnout on record, with around 5,300 students, or one quarter of the downtown campus undergraduate body, participating.

The non-opt-outable Sustainable Projects Fund, which would be supported by student fees matched by administrative funding, and run by an equal parts student and administration committee, passed with 79 per cent in favour.

The referendum at Macdonald campus had 27 per cent turnout, and voted 88 per cent in favour of the Sustainable Projects Fund.

For Jonathan Glencross U3 Environment and Sustainable McGill coordinator, this was the successful end of a long fight for a well-financed Sustainable Projects Fund with students and administrators on an equal footing. “Having that many people vote, with such a huge majority voting yes, means students are not only excited about the types of change this fund will bring, but also the way that change will be governed – by consensus – a collaborative model, breaking the culture of us versus them [with the administration],” Glencross said.

The question of whether to renew student fee funding for the McGill Legal Information Clinic, which will also be non-opt-outable, passed with 74 per cent in favour.

The question establishing an opt-outable Ambassador Fee to help fund extracurricular and academic trips passed narrowly, with 51 per cent in favor.

The non-binding plebiscite question asking students what they thought of moving coursepacks online received 52 per cent in favour.

The other non-binding plebiscite question, asking students whether or not it was a good idea to shorten the add/drop period in order to facilitate the early release of the finals schedule, lost with only a 30 per cent approval.

The post Sustainability fund approved appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Speaking first was Jonathan Glencross, U3 Environment, on behalf of the Sustainable Projects Fund. If passed, the fund will provide the University with a large sum of money to distribute to projects aimed at making McGill more sustainable, especially, Glencross said, at culture-changing, behaviour-changing projects.

The administration has committed approximately $1.3 million to the project, but only so long as the students vote to match these funds. The referendum will create a non-opt-outable 50-cent fee on every credit (capped at 15 credits per student), toward this goal.

Glencross left immediately after speaking, hurrying off to lobby other student groups to support the question.

“There are thousands of not currently engaged, but not necessarily apathetic, students at McGill who are literally gleaming when I talk to them in class – they’re so excited,” Glencross said. “Yet, in the past three months leading up to this, a lot of the people actively involved were very concerned about the student perception – how the money was going to be spent. Clearly, they’re not representative of the average student.”

The next speaker was SSMU President Ivan Neilson, who addressed the audience on behalf of VP Clubs and Services Sarah Olle, in support of the “Ambassador Fee,” a one-dollar opt-outable fee that would create a fund for groups to travel to academic and extra-curricular competitions.

“Trips are still able to happen, but they’re just not as accessible to all students because the cost is more, and we would like to [help out] with that,” Neilson said.

The final speakers were Kelly McMillan and Charles Gauthier, law students who help run the McGill Legal Information Clinic (MLIC). As per the Administration’s new policy, groups such as the MLIC, who have a Memorandum of Agreement with the University, have to go to referendum every five years to maintain their funding.

The speakers emphasized the legal information and advocacy services the MLIC has provided to students and members of the Montreal community since 1976, and that they are the only organization on campus providing legal assistance to students.

McMillan and Gauthier were frustrated by the time and energy running a referendum every five years has taken away from their work, but stated that this proces was a good opportunity for students to learn about and show their support for the service.

Neilson and Glencross both said that it is important for students to vote, as the 2008 fall referendum did not reach quorum.

The Daily’s referendum endorsements

Sustainable Projects Fund: Yes
This large fund for sustainable projects has been the result of months of planning and lobbying, and presents a real step for the McGill student body and administration. The fund will be overseen by a committee made up of equal parts students and administration appointees, and will decide which student or University proposals should receive money. The 50 cents levied per credit are no big thing, but can create big change (especially because the administration will be matching student contributions). Let’s get a whole bunch of YES votes tallied to show the administration that students really care about this issue.

Ambassador Fee: Yes, with reservations
This one-dollar opt-outable fee will enable a more active student life for those clubs that travel. Currently, these clubs do so largely without assistance, but this fee will enable them to lower their costs and make these trips more accessible. While we support this motion, we encourage transparency from the committee that will ultimately decide which groups will receive this funding.

MLIC Fee Renewal: Yes
The McGill Legal Information Clinic (MLIC) is an invaluable resource for students and members of the Montreal community – as well as a practical learning tool for students in McGill’s Law Faculty. The MLIC must now go to referendum, putting their funding up to a vote every five years, so an overwhelming yes vote would prove that students value these resources.

The post Fall referendum begins appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Wayne Wood, the Associate Director for Environmental Health and Safety and chair of the Pandemic Contingency Planning Committee, explained that the policy was enacted as part of the University’s efforts to contain the virus.

“We don’t want to send people out there who are sick and infect others,” Wood said.

Mendelson explained that although cases of the flu are not yet prevalent, McGill set up the system, in part, to gain information on the spread of the flu.

“We have the self-report in play before we have lots and lots of sick students. By having a self-report, it allows us to better track cases, and estimate how prevalent flu is on campus,” Mendelson said.

Rebecca Dooley, SSMU VP University Affairs, who also sits on the Pandemic Contingency Planning Committee, explained that the committee is focused on ensuring that McGill’s response to the virus will be effective and dynamic during the flu season.

“A lot of the planning was around how do we make ourselves flexible, and how do we make our courses flexible. So that if a professor gets sick, if a student gets sick, it doesn’t throw everybody completely off track,” Dooley said. “It was understood that there would definitely be a point where there would be a spike in cases, and we would have to move to an honour-system.”

Dooley explained that there were some difficulties dealing with specific labour laws, but the committee felt the notion of flexibility was essential.

“Everybody would say, at least once at every meeting, in the event of a pandemic, you have to be flexible, you have to make sacrifices,” Dooley said.

Though Mendelson said the new self-reporting policy is only temporary, Dooley stated that she hopes the practice of encouraging professors to have more frequent and varying examinations during regular flu season would become common practice once H1N1 has passed.

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Allegations and consternation over the contract started last April, when it was revealed that Tremblay’s former “right-hand man,” Frank Zampino, had taken a lovely Caribbean vacation on the yacht of construction magnate Tony Accurso during the bid-tendering process. By the time these revealtions surfaced, Zampino was already out of politics and comfortably positioned as vice-president and chief financial officer of Dessau Inc., a partner in the consortium, which included businesses owned by Accurso, that received the water-meter contract.

Zampino resigned from his corporate positions, and following an announcement that some of Accurso’s businesses were being investigated for tax fraud, the water meter contract was “put on ice.”

Montreal’s auditor-general, Jacques Bergeron, was put on the case and announced on September 21 that the water meter contract should be cancelled, and that the City needs to overhaul the way it makes deals, saying that the process was “too fast, too big, too expensive.”

Tremblay announced that the deals were kaput – along with the City’s top two civil servants. But the mayor may have breathed a sigh of relief, as Bergeron blamed no one except a general climate of incompetence for the mishaps. Tremblay owed the situation to “administrative shortcomings” and “procedural oversights,” and played it up as an opportunity to improve.

The post The affair of the water meters appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Beaudry alleged that firms now control who is awarded municipal contracts and the prices of those contracts. Beaudry went even further, revealing the forces behind this widespread collusion.

“It’s Montreal’s Italian Mafia that controls what is going on in road construction. They control, from what we can tell, 80 per cent of the contracts,” Beaudry told Radio-Canada.

The “Fabulous Fourteen” were 14 construction firms that would decide amongst themselves who would receive a contract and for how much. The agreement would be communicated through code: “We’ll start on the fourth hole; we’ll be a party of nine,” meant that the winning, lowest bid would be $4.9 million, according to Radio-Canada.

This report also stated that this system of collusion has inflated the cost of road construction in Quebec up to 35 per cent compared to other provinces.

These revelations have ignited a shit storm of accusations and political brouhaha at the municipal and provincial levels, with the top three parties in Montreal’s upcoming election and the opposition parties in Quebec all asking for a public inquiry.

On Thursday it was announced that Quebec was initiating the ominously named Opération Marteau (Operation Hammer), a special Sûreté du Québec (SQ) police squad, to investigate allegations of Mafia influence and widespread corruption. Quebec Premier Jean Charest has rebuffed calls for a public inquiry. The federal government has indicated that it will let the province handle the investigation.

The Montreal Gazette reported that some of the issues of serious concern to the police squad are that a man with close ties to the mafia sat in on a meeting to decide who would repair City Hall’s roof, and that “the Hells Angels have been using the construction industry to launder profits from drug trafficking by muscling their way in as subcontractors on large projects.”

After being up for one day, the Gazette reported that the SQ squad’s corruption hotline has already gotten many tips.

The post Mafia runs road construction appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Two consortia are competing to build the hospital for the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC or CUSM), which will be constructed at the Glen Yards, a large empty field south of Vendôme metro station, located between the NDG, St. Henri, and Westmount neigbourhoods.

Provincial officials have grown less fond of the PPP method, but the MUHC is already deep into the bidding process, and expects to begin construction this winter.

While there are still many critics of the PPP, such as the MUHC employees’ union, the wide swath of stakeholders – ranging from doctors to those living in the neighbourhood – are attempting to negotiate this changing terrain and have their concerns addressed over the course of this enormous project.

Megaprojects like this, that immense sort of construction that brings together and hopes to solve all problems at once, are a favourite of city planners and politicians alike.

The sheer size of these projects demands that many visions synthesize and provides an opportunity to use the latest technologies, implement the best practices, and use donor funds. They also provide a constantly shifting target for critics of the ideologies and agendas that these projects represent.

In an email to The Daily, Dianne Fagan, Chef des communications, projet du redéploiement du CUSM, said that the MUHC believes the PPP offers “several important advantages.”

The advantages she refers to include the competitive process that will create two “innovative plans,” the consortium taking on some of the financial risk, and a 30-year contract that creates incentive for the consortium to build and maintain the facilities well, Fagan wrote.

The actual design and construction of the superhospital has already involved, and will continue to involve, hundreds of committees, thousands of reports, hundreds of thousands of people, and billions of dollars. These micropolitics are the real place where contentions must be hashed out.

Unions and the PPP
Olga Giancristofaro, the president of the MUHC Employees’ Union-CSN, said that PPP option will cost more and do less.

“We’re a big hospital at McGill, and McGill shouldn’t be used as a guinea pig to see if PPP works or not – we have professionals and good technology, but with the traditional method we will be getting a better quality hospital,” Giancristofaro said.

Giancristofaro, along with the Syndicat des employé(e)s du centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal-CSN, Médecins québécois pour le régime public, among others, have spoken out and protested against the PPP-method.

“We are not fighting not to have a new hospital. We want a new hospital – we are just fighting the method of construction – that the consortiums are in control of construction and not the public,” she said.

In her email to The Daily, Fagan insisted that “no clinical or para-clinical services will be overseen by the private consortium,” but that “support services directly related to the physical plant (building maintenance and public utility management, for example),” will be managed by the consortium.

This privatization of some former union positions is bound to set off alarm bells at the union, but with the PPP apparently moving forward, Giancristofaro implied that the union must be involved in how the hospital is run.

Union members had been invited to Great Britain to tour PPP-run hospitals.

“Some of [the hospitals] did work, but the PPP that worked best was the one where the unions and the employees are involved in the administration – that is what McGill has done, but the costs [in the long run] are [still] going to be more,” Giancristofaro said.

The surrounding neighbourhood
McGill urban planning professor Lisa Bornstein, who heads the “Making Megaprojects Work for Communities” research team – a partnership between academics from six Montreal research institutions – has worked with the neighbourhood, hospital, community health, and government stakeholders to closely monitor the superhospital process since 2007.

Bornstein outlined the multivariate and overlapping concerns that neighbourhood stakeholders, represented by the Concertation Interquartier (CIQ), a group of neighbourhood associations from St. Henri, Westmount, and NDG, have with such a large project.

These concerns included, but were not limited to, the effect that retail within the “mall-style hospital” will have on local business, concerns around massive new traffic flows, insufficient public transit infrastructure, and more.

“There are hopes that there will be employment that’s drawn from the local area, that it just won’t be people relocating into the area…which can provoke displacement of lower-income people and negative aspects of gentrification,” Bornstein said.

As this series of both small and large negotiations happens between the community and McGill, the researchers try to make interventions – providing both sides with appropriate plans and models from past development projects around the world.

With the bidding process beginning and the consortia being brought in, Bornstein points out how complicated and unclear things are quickly becoming.

“Last year the community groups asked to participate in the PPP-process. They said they wanted to have a community rep in the PPP-process, we want to meet with the consortia, we want a community benefits agreement, and I think they asked for a community auditor position to watch the PPP-process,” Bornstein said.

“The PPP exec said, ‘no way to this community-auditor position, no way to a community benefits agreement within the PPP,’” Bornstein added.

The MUHC did let one community rep sit on a design committee. This was one of the “hundreds” of committees at the hospital that the consortia have to meet while putting together their bids.

Pierre Gauthier, an urban planner from Concordia University and a member of the research project, was chosen as the community representative, bringing community concerns to the MUHC and consortia.

However, Bornstein said, during the bidding process itself, Gauthier was not allowed to communicate any details of the two projects.

Bornstein explained that the two consortia must be given identical information, and for confidentiality reasons, no one in the process can talk about what either consortium is designing to anyone outside of the process. So the community representative can at no time communicate ongoing plans with the community groups. This is a legal restriction to ensure fair competition.

“So fine, community groups agreed to this ‘black box’ because they have faith in their representative,” Bornstein said. “So if you want to think about advantages and disadvantages to the PPP, it may be that having this competition, this intensive set of meeting and co-creation between the hospital and the consortia, it does mean there’s been limited opportunities for the community groups to provide input.”

Government control
While the relationship between the superhospital and its surrounding neighbourhood is being hashed out, the stakeholders must also worry about the day-to-day operations of a PPP-run hospital and how to prepare for these operations during the planning phase.

McGill urban planning professor Raphael Fischler lays out the context of a PPP, explaining that the profit-motive is both the raison d’être and most complicated part of this method.

PPP projects, Fischler explains, are undertaken to “let the government off the hook in terms of massive one-time investments. Now the private sector does not do that out of charity, it does that at a profit. Which means that when you calculate the total amount spent by the public sector on this public facility, it comes out to more money than what the private sector spent [initially].”

Fischler explained that these PPP plans are entered into with the assumption that not only will the private sector (and requisite bidding process) bring a level of efficiency to the construction and administration of a hospital, but also that they’ll have large amounts of capital on hand.

“It’s like going to the bank to get a mortgage, you pay interest, you pay more than if you had the cash – but the government does not have the cash – the private sector has the cash,” Fischler said.

“The experience with PPPs in the U.S. has not been extremely favourable to the public sector unless you have very very strong expertise and political will to really squeeze the private sector as best as possible,” Fischler said.

The problem here, is that although PPP’s have been run well in other parts of the world, it is only with experience and abundant political will, something that Quebec will be tested on often while the hospital is running under a PPP.

“The Quebec government does not have a long track record yet with PPP; it’s not something we’ve done for many years,”wFischler added.

The post Superhospital plods forward appeared first on The McGill Daily.

In the wake of the auditor general’s report, Tremblay fired the City’s general manager Claude Léger and the City’s director of corporate affairs, Robert Cassius de Linval.

At a news conference last Tuesday, Bergeron pointed out that the entire process had been, “too fast, too big, [and] too expensive.”

La Presse columnist Michèle Ouimet wrote in French about the incident last Wednesday.

“At the beginning the city simply wanted to install water meters in businesses, industries, and residences containing more than 12 lodgings. The bill: $32 million,” Ouimet wrote.

“The project got out of control, and the City found itself with a gold-plated contract, a luxury Cadillac, by adding a component: a sophisticated system that measures water pressure – a contract that goes over $618 million and will only generate $20 million in savings a year,” she wrote.

The massive contract was initially suspended last April amid allegations of conflict of interest. There was also an announcement by the Canada Revenue Agency that they were investigating Tony Accurso, a Montreal entrepreneur involved in the contract, for possible tax fraud.

Suspicions arose after it was revealed that the Frank Zampino, ex-president of the City’s executive committee and who the CBC called the Mayor’s “former right-hand man,” had been long time friends with Accurso, and vacationed on Accurso’s yacht during the bidding process.

Michel Parent, president of the City’s blue-collar worker’s union, expressed anger over the private contracts to the press last Tuesday. He insisted that instead of training hundreds of plumbers from private firms, the City could have used in-house plumbers.

“By contracting out the maintenance for a 15-year period, the City of Montreal would have completely lost its expertise, and would have been at the mercy of the private sector,” Parent told the media.

The Montreal Gazette reported in August that the contract had been changed “at the 11th hour,” so that the City would regain control of 30,500 water meters near the end of their functional life.

The post Tremblay cancels Water Meter contract appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Leading Questions
Senate Caucus Representative Sarah Woolf questioned President Neilson’s nomination of SSMU Speakers of Council. Woolf asked the Co-Speakers Zach Newburgh and Lauren Hudak to state their current club affiliations, questioning whether the speakers could be trusted to act as impartial facilitators. Newburgh revealed that he is president of Hillel Montreal, which oversees anglophone Hillel organizations across Montreal, but insisted that if any “matters of interest” come up, he will defer to his co-speaker.

Hudak revealed that she had been a member of the McGill club Choose Life, but had stepped down, as she “took this job very seriously, and the impartial nature of it,” and also promised to defer to the other co-speaker in cases where a conflict of interest might arise.

Last year SSMU dealt with the controversial approval of Choose Life as a full-status club, paired with the raucous Gaza motion at last year’s General Assembly.

VP Finance Jose Diaz addressed concerns over clubs getting their funding late by promising speedy election of a finance committee.

Tightening Up
The SSMU exec’s summer reports revealed concerted efforts to tighten up and improve SSMU services and facilities, in addition to making them easier to access. VP Clubs and Services Sarah Olle pledged that her initiative to bring room bookings online will be up and running this Monday.

Ask us first
VP University Affairs Rebecca Dooley made a short report from the first Senate meeting, expressing dismay that Principal Heather Munroe-Blum had dismissed the possibility for student consultation in the selection process for a Secretary-General.

She said that the larger issue here was the administration not consulting the governing bodies.

Greener Syllabi
Guest speakers from the SSMU Environment Commissioners presented their work on coordinating different sustainability-oriented groups, and their plan to create a five-year sustainability blueprint.

One of their new initiatives is to encourage each faculty to integrate topics on sustainability into their course curricula, and to set up a faculty roundtable toward that goal.

The Student Movement
VP External Sebastian Ronderos-Morgan presented SSMU’s role in the new student consortium Table de concertation étudiante du Québec (TaCEQ). The group will oppose Provincial Bills 38 and 44 that would impose a quota of external representatives on post-secondary institutions’ boards of directors.

Science Representative Joshua Abaki asked Ronderos-Morgan why SSMU is slated to pay for 40 per cent of TaCEQ’s expenses. Ronderos-Morgan replied that the number was a rough estimation that had been hashed out in consultation with other TaCEQ members, and stated that SSMU only spent $345 to support the student federation during the summer – a figure that he said will not increase in the future.

Ronderos-Morgan also said that he wishes to be a dynamic part of Quebec’s student movement, pushing for accessibility and trying to mend the education funding crisis in Quebec, which he pointed out, “came from Quebec [City] and Ottawa.”

A 10-year plan
SSMU’s five-year lease of the Shatner building will expire in 2011. SSMU President Neilson said that he wants to start negotiating with McGill a year early, in hopes of securing a longer lease this time around.

If this can be done, President Neilson said that SSMU could form long-term plans with building tenants, student-run food establishments, and looking into sustainable infrastructure changes.

Community Relations
Ronderos-Morgan and VP Internal Alex Brown said that they have worked to foster better relations with the Milton-Parc community, specifically the Milton-Parc Citizens Committee. Brown expressed dismay, however, over the recent behavior of Froshies and Frosh leaders, which had further alienated the local community.

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