Recently reported food insecurity on McGill’s campus reflects a city and nation-wide trend. Overall, the leading causes of food insecurity are poverty and an economic climate that has recently further exposed and entrenched people in poverty. Indeed, since 2019, food bank visits have skyrocketed, with the highest year-over-year increase in usage since the aftermath of the 2008 to 2009 recession. Stagnant provincial social assistance rates, end of pandemic-related benefits, and soaring inflation have all affected the ability of individuals in Canada to feed themselves and their families. Statistics Canada stated in January that Canada’s Consumer Price Index rose 6.3 per cent year-over-year in December 2022, fuelled by an 11 per cent jump in prices for food purchased from stores. Food inflation hovered around the 11 per cent mark during the last five months of 2022. To face this food crisis, various people and organisations are mobilising and trying to meet rising need. Among these, Resilience Montreal, created in 2019 by the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal,  is a community-led project to support the homeless population in the Cabot Square area.

The number of individuals experiencing food insecurity in Montreal has continued to increase since the onset of the pandemic. According to Moisson Montreal’s Hunger Report, nearly 900,000 requests for food assistance were made to Moisson Montreal’s partner organizations in 2022 – an increase of 25.8 per cent  from the previous year. Rising inflation and the pandemic have given way to this rapid rise in food insecurity. For context, Moisson Montreal reported 600,000 requests to food pantries made in 2019, which was a continuation of a downward trend in previous years. 

Furthermore, food insecurity is a crucial issue in Montreal because it persists in circumstances of already existing crises regarding homelessness. In March 2020, the city of Montreal declared a state of emergency regarding the population of homeless people. Montreal has the highest number of homeless people in Quebec. The Canadian Observatory on Homelessness estimated in 2018 that 3149 people were experiencing homelessness at the time. While the effects of COVID-19 cannot be fully measured yet, many experts believe this number could be multiplied five or ten times this year. According to a 2020 report from the Milton-Parc Citizens Committee, out of these individuals, an Indigenous person is 27 times more likely to experience homelessness than a non-Indigenous person, and an Inuit person is 80 times more likely to experience homelessness. According to the Milton-Parc Citizens Committee, Indigenous people often find inadequate support systems in cities and discrimination in housing and job markets. 

Organizations like Resilience Montreal have noticed an uptick in their number of clientele seeking food support and services. They provide access to sleeping areas, showers, computers, clothing, first aid, a host of intervention services, and notably, three meals a day. Resilience offers a hot breakfast, a hot lunch, and a takeaway dinner for after the shelter closes every day at 3 PM. 

Margo Buchanan, Logistics, Community Program and Volunteer Coordinator, tells the Daily that Resilience’s food services have changed since the onset of the pandemic. When the organization started in 2019, they served three hot meals a day to roughly 60 to 80 people, Buchanan explains. Because of COVID-19, they had to begin providing their services outdoors in the park mid-2020. Individuals seeking meals went up to 100 per meal, as they were serving an open park and anyone could now get food. Consequently, they had to reduce their services to two hot meals a day and one takeaway meal. In September 2020 they moved back inside, but the demand kept climbing. “When we moved back inside, […] we started at 100 and then word got out that the food was good and we hired a lot of kitchen staff and then it went from 100 to 150, and then within three months, we were already up to 300,” says Buchanan. As of January 2021, Resilience serves around 300 people per meal. 

Buchanan stresses the importance of ensuring their food is not only nourishing for their clientele, but also delicious. Once a week, Resilience Montreal has “Traditional Food Tuesdays,” where they provide traditional meals for Indigenous people. On these Tuesdays, they will serve seafood, often raw, and other traditionally Inuit cuisine, as that is the largest group of Indigenous peoples served by Resilience. She further explains that if there are First Nations clientele in the area, they will also serve a traditional First Nations meal – such as caribou, tacos with local meats, or moose burgers – alongside the Inuit meal. “The overall goal of providing traditional food Tuesdays is to give people a sense of home and community and make them feel seen and understood and highlight how important their culture is to us as well,” adds Buchanan. Meals from recent weeks include cold caribou, arctic char and hot caribou ribs with rice, and caribou heart stew with bannock, frozen caribou and arctic char.

Buchanan explains that it is mostly the intervention workers at Resilience who coordinate and prepare the hot meal service. Because of the large clientele that they serve, Resilience mostly relies on big collectives – such as the Community Cooks Collective – to make individual elements of the meals for them to then be combined on site at Resilience. They also have networks of organizations and individuals throughout Montreal who donate baked goods for the takeaway lunches, Buchanan says, and the organization Bread and Beyond makes sandwiches for Resilience (which they need by the thousands every week). They also get a large amount of food every week from Moisson Montreal. “It’s a huge group effort [from] people across the city,” says Buchanan, “That’s the only reason we’re able to reach the numbers that we are.” 

Resilience does everything possible to ensure they provide the best quality food for every single person. Buchanan explains that Resilience “[tries] to do our best to remind them that they’re important despite their experience in the street every day.” Buchanan adds that for Traditional Food Tuesdays, because it’s often seafood they offer for Inuit clientele, they will often buy ingredients in store if they don’t have the donations. “We take so much pride in the work that we do, which is why we spend so much money despite having this huge network of people that make us food, because we really do try to give them the best quality food,” she says, “and honestly, [the food] is great.” 

Despite this large network of support, Resilience is always looking for more people to get involved. Buchanan stresses that donations from Bread and Beyond to Resilience often drop off over the summer in particular, as the organizations partners with elementary and high schools to make the sandwiches. She explains that a great way to help would be to volunteer for Bread and Beyond over the summer, or other organizations like the Community Cooks Collective, which also in turn help support the other shelters across the city. Beyond that, Buchanan says that they are always looking for volunteers at Resilience to help serve and make food, either on site or at home. 

If you are interested in getting involved, you can email resilience.volunteer@gmail.com.

The post Hot Meal Services in Montreal Meet Increasing Demand appeared first on The McGill Daily.

History of It Takes All of Us

ITAOU was originally designed and implemented in 2019, prior to which McGill had no sexual violence prevention training. ITAOU was McGill’s first mandatory, online, and university-wide sexual violence education program, according to OSVRSE’s website. 

Much of the sexual violence prevention infrastructure on McGill’s campus today – including the OSVRSE – arose from the adoption of the “Policy Against Sexual Violence” in 2016. Prior to the adoption of the policy, there was no explicit policy against sexual violence, and cases were only handled in accordance with the Student Code of Conduct of the time. Jean Murray, a member of the working group for drafting the policy, told the Daily in 2016 of the policy’s two central aims: “One, make it so that folks who’ve experienced sexual assault don’t have to go to the police, and that doesn’t have to be their only recourse, and two, that there will be institutionalized safety measures in place so that folks can feel safe and comfortable in their community.” The policy was officially passed in November 2016. OSVRSE was founded in 2016 as well, under the Office of the Dean of Students, to help implement the policy.

Then, in 2017, Quebec adopted Bill 151 – “An Act to prevent and fight sexual violence in higher education institutions.” The bill stated that higher education institutions in the province “must, before 1 September 2019, adopt a policy to prevent and fight sexual violence,” and further stipulates that “mandatory training” be an element of the policy; McGill failed to meet this deadline. While the university had the “Policy Against Sexual Violence” in place, it had failed to comply with the updated standards of Bill 151 – specifically that of mandatory training and mandatory consultation with students in creation of the policy. Thus, in January 2019, the working group reconvened, and later in the year to address these groups, the policy was revised and re-approved. 

The original ITAOU was made available in September 2019 for students, and in January 2020 for staff and administrators – months past the deadlines set by Bill 151. The program was modeled off of Concordia’s similar program, “It Takes All of Us – Creating a Campus Community Free of Sexual Violence,” launched in the same month as McGill’s. The training, however, received backlash from students at Concordia. “I have always been very concerned with the idea that the training they’re offering is online,” a recent graduate of Concordia told the Link in 2019, “[studies have] showed empirically that in-person consent and sexual violence training was more effective than online training for this specific topic.” Another then-current student on the standing committee added: “[With] online trainings, you can’t really monitor who’s not paying attention or just clicking random boxes, or rolling their eyes and joking with their friends while they’re doing this […] People have begged [the university] to have in-person training and they just don’t particularly want to put the resources into it.” 

The introduction of ITAOU at McGill in 2019 was met with similar concerns and criticism. An editorial from the Daily on the new program in 2019 pointed out that all of the sections were skippable, allowing students to complete the program in mere minutes. “In order to be truly effective, McGill must follow up with tangible support it is not currently providing,” the editorial board wrote, “A 45-minute online program cannot, and will not, solve McGill’s sexual violence problem.” They ultimately concluded that “a revamped ‘It Takes All of Us’ could potentially serve as an introduction to the topic, but in-person follow-up sessions are necessary.” 

A revamped version of “It Takes All of Us”

Three years later, McGill has indeed introduced an updated version of ITAOU – the modules, however, are still online. According the McGill Reporter, ITAOU was intended to be updated at least every three years, as “sexual violence education is an ongoing, iterative process.”

Over the last year, representatives from TLS, OSVRSE, and the Office for Mediation and Reporting worked together on a “thorough overhaul” of the original content, considering both formal user feedback and “thoughts expressed on social media and other platforms,” per the media relations office. “The ITAOU refresh […] puts sharper focus on the intersectionality of sexual violence and gender, race and different abilities,” they explained in a written statement to the Daily, redesigned to be more survivor-centric. 

Whereas the previous version of ITAOU contained four modules that used “character-driven scenarios,” the new program is longer, featuring five modules on the subjects of 1) sexual violence, 2) sexual consent, 3) McGill’s Policy Against Sexual Violence, 4) bystander intervention, and 5) supporting survivors. The program also includes the “Take a Break” icon, which you can click on if you feel overwhelmed or distressed by the content of the program, and the program will subsequently guide you through a calming breathing exercise. Students, faculty, and staff will now all take the same modules – unlike in the previous version. 

All current members of the McGill community must complete the new program by April 28, 2023. Students who do not complete the program by this date will have a hold placed on their account, per the media relations office. As for staff and faculty, the Office did not specify a system of accountability for completion of the updated program, just that those hired after January 30 are required to complete the training within three months or before the end of their probation period. “The goal is for everyone who studies or works at McGill to have a shared understanding of what sexual violence is, the populations that it affects most, notions of consent and what resources and policies are available on campus that relate to these issues,” the office writes. 

Closure of OSVRSE

The new ITAOU has been introduced at a time when the university’s sexual violence prevention infrastructure has recently come under fire. OSVRSE temporarily closed early in the Fall 2022 semester. Documents obtained by the Daily indicate that a staff departure in July 2022 left the office staffed by one employee. This information was not disclosed to the greater McGill community until December 4. 

Yara Coussa, collective member of the Union for Gender Empowerment (UGE), founder of McGill Neurodivergent Self-Advocacy Collective, and Queer McGill coordinator, wrote to the Daily that she “found out the service was not functional by directing a student who needed support to it, which is devastating and unacceptable.”

As of January 3, OSVRSE has reopened, but at limited capacity. 

If you are a survivor of sexual violence, you can access support services apart from the OSVRSE through the Sexual Assault Centre of the McGill Student’s Society or through SSMU’s Anti-Violence Coordinators, who can be reached at avc@ssmu.ca. Other community resources include the Montreal Sexual Assault Support Centre, which is open 24/7.

The post “It Takes All of Us” Revamped appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Apartment-hunting tips and red flags: 

1. Dwelling Unit By-Laws: While dense, it might be a good idea to familiarize yourself with Montreal’s By-laws concerning the sanitation and maintenance of dwelling units to make sure the apartment you’re looking at is safe and adheres to these regulations. 

2. Pests: If you can spot mouse traps, droppings, or other signifiers of pests, chances are those pests will still be there when you move in! While pests can be fairly common, it’s important to keep in mind, and might be important to ask the current tenants about the severity of the problem, and how their landlord has helped them. Landlords are required to take corrective action within 10 business days upon alert of the presence of vermin, harmful insects, rats, or mice. 

3. Ventilation and mold: Old buildings – particularly those with poor ventilation – tend to be more susceptible to mold and other water damage related issues. When touring the apartment, the presence of mold can be indicated by spots in all colors (though often black or green) on walls, ceilings, carpets, around windows, in closets, etc. An earthy smell can also indicate the presence of mold, along with the presence of stains, buckling, peeling, or other signs of water seeping through walls or ceilings. When touring, notice if there is a build up of condensation on ceilings or windows, which could be a sign of poor ventilation. While exposure to damp and moldy environments may not cause any adverse health effects, some people are particularly sensitive and can experience a reaction to a “mold allergy” – an overall unpleasant experience! According to the City of Montreal’s by-laws, there may be no accumulation of moisture causing damage to the structure of the building, nor may there be visible presence of molds. Furthermore, ensure that bathrooms are installed with a window or mechanical ventilation, in line with the city’s by-laws concerning sanitation and maintenance of dwelling unitsunit. 

4. Heating, air conditioning, and insulation: With hot and humid summers and cold frigid winters, climate control is a crucial consideration to make when apartment-hunting. Notice if the apartment is properly insulated – are the windows double-paned? Do the walls feel thin? Can you feel a draft? Are there radiators, or another form of heating, throughout the apartment? The cost of hydro is also important to consider. Some landlords include the cost of heating and electricity in their rent, while others don’t. With the former option, you’d likely be paying a fixed cost month to month. With the latter, however, depending on the rate you pay with Hydro Quebec, you may be paying depending on your consumption for the months. In the winter, with the cost of heating this bill may go up significantly (which is why it’s especially important to make sure your apartment is well-insulated!). Pro-tip: after having been subscribed to Hydro Quebec for one year, you can enroll in the Equal Payments Plan, wherein the invoice will be the same price month to month regardless of consumption. Whether or not you can control the heating is also an important consideration to make. 

5. Light and Windows: Light and windows can be an overlooked yet very important factor to consider when looking for an apartment. A not-so-fun fact is that in Montreal, landlords can rent apartments with “bedrooms” listed that do not have a window. Rather, in bedrooms in Montreal without windows are only required a partition that allows for “borrowed light” from another room. 

What to look out for on the lease: 

1. Repairs: Ensure that the landlord is assuming responsibility for all repairs in explicit terms, and not using coded language to slouch off responsibility. Considerations for repairs should also extend to furniture as well, if the apartment is already furnished, considering that the furniture has likely been used by many tenants before you. 

2. Payment: The lease should clearly specify an agreement on the terms and conditions for paying the rent. However, notably in Quebec it is illegal for landlords to require postdated checks and/or charge additional amounts in the form of a security deposit or other charges. 

3. Rent: In Quebec, when a lease is signed, it is within your right to ask for a written notice stating the lowest rent paid in the 12 months before the start of the lease, or the rent set by the Tribunal Administratif Logement (TAL). However, this request must be made within 10 days of signing the lease. 

4. Subletting: Are you going on exchange for a semester or want to go back home for the summer? Subletting your room or apartment allows for this flexibility without having to pay rent for a place you are not staying in. A lease cannot state that a tenant is not allowed to assign or sublet the unit. 

Know and protect your rights: 

1. Visiting rights: Have you ever had your landlord or repairman randomly knock on your door? You should know that landlords must give 24 hours notice before entering the apartment – whether that’s inspecting the dwelling, or doing minor repairs. The same rule of 24 hours notice applies to scheduling visits for future prospective tenants, which can only be scheduled between 9 AM and 9 PM. 

2. Major repairs or renovations: Generally, major repairs or renovations must respect the tenant’s right to stay in their home – it is illegal for landlords to violate the “right to maintain occupancy.” If major work is being done, landlords must notify the tenant in writing at least 10 days before the work begins. This notice must include: the type of work being done, the date it will begin, an estimate as to how long it will take, and other conditions under which the work will be done. Also, work can also only be completed between 7 AM and 7 PM. Furthermore, tenants may ask to postpone the work and to reduce their rent while work is being done.

3. Heating: In an apartment wherein the heating is controlled by the landlord, the landlord is legally required to maintain an appropriate room temperature regardless of the time of year. There is actually no law nor municipal bylaw that specifies a temperature apartments should be kept at, but it is generally accepted that around 21 degrees celsius is a comfortable temperature. If you find that your landlord is overheating your apartment, you can file an appeal with the TAL. 

4. Rent increase: Landlords must notify you of rent increases within 3-6 months before the lease ends for leases of 12 months of more. For leases of less than a year, you must be notified within one or two months of the lease ending. Did you know, you can refuse a rent increase? By notifying your landlord that you refuse a rent increase, they can either accept your refusal, try to enter a friendly negotiation, or contact the TAL to rule on the change of rent. 

Finally, it’s always good practice to keep a copy of your lease as well as dated proof of all communications with your landlord.   

If you have any concerns or are wanting to appeal any changes your landlord has made, access the Tribunal administratif du logement where you have access to your rights as a tenant and can contact an informations clerk to aid in your applications and documents. You can also find resources with the Syndicat de locataires MTL; they meet biweekly every week on Saturdays at 3 PM, in person and over zoom. You can also consult educaloi.qc.ca, which has a useful guide for navigating housing and property law. 

The post Renting 101: Montreal Tenant’s Rights appeared first on The McGill Daily.

So without further ado, the Daily presents a non-exhaustive guide to secondhand shopping around Montreal’s downtown and Plateau neighborhoods!

Bazar Vintage du Plateau: Hosted monthly, this bazaar boasts over 30 local vendors and is a great place to find eclectic vintage homeware, kitchenware, books, records, lighting, knicknacks, and just about any other item you can think of. The event has no entrance fee, and it takes place from 10:00 to 5:30 on Saturdays, announced by the group’s Facebook page. It is located in the basement of Église Saint-Denis, across from the Laurier metro station in the heart of the Plateau. Many of the vendors are cash-only, so be sure to account for that when you go. Also keep in mind that  organizers ask that you bring your own bag. Be sure to check out their next event coming up February 11. 

Bazar Vintage Montreal: This is another pop-up style event. Organizers boast that you can find “the thousand and one” finds collected by the vintage and antique enthusiasts present. The event is hosted once a month over one weekend with over 35 vendors. It’s open on Saturdays from 9:00 to 4:00 and on Sundays from 10:00 to 4:00. These weekend events are often hosted at Église St. Jean Berchmans around the Rosemont neighbourhood. They also host smaller pop-ups on an irregular basis at different locations throughout the city. You can follow their Facebook page for details on future events. 

Chaînon Magasin: Le Magasin du Chaînon, located at the intersection of St. Laurent and Marie-Anne in the Plateau, sells a multitude of donated clothing, furniture, and homeware at a very affordable price. Furthermore, the store is run by the organization Le Chaînon, which provides women in need with safe accommodations, assistance, and support. Revenue from Le Chaînon is the main source of income for this organization’s operations. They are also accepting donations of gently-used items in excellent condition. All you have to do is drop them off at their donation reception at the back of the store on St. Dominique. 

La Boutique des Petits Frères: This boutique is located on the corner of Gilford and Garnier, near avenue Mont-Royal. The store boasts “treasures at friendly prices,” including clothing, shoes, jewellery, accessories, books, records, and more. The upstairs section  is particularly fantastic for finding antique home items and furniture at a great price! Proceeds of the store go towards the organization Les Petits Frères, which aims to  support single elderly folks living in Quebec. You can also donate your used items at their collection box located outside the store. 

Vintage Parc: This antique store in the Plateau boasts beautiful secondhand antique furniture. Most of their items are higher-end antiques, with genuine vintage pieces in art deco and mid-century styles. While many of these pieces tend to be more expensive, certain items go on sale for reasonable prices, and in my experience, the owner is generally open to negotiation and cutting a deal where he sees fit. Plus, delivery is offered for a nominal additional price for larger items. 

Arté: Located in Griffintown, Arté is a depot where locals leave their unwanted wares. A spot frequented by artists, sculptors, and prop and set designers, the space can be intimidating at first, but it’s full of vintage accessories, furniture, and knicknacks. There are a range of price points for items, but sellers are generally open to negotiation. 

Facebook Marketplace: Looking for a specific item? Looking for a good deal? Looking to pick up an item within walking distance? When in doubt, Facebook Marketplace is the place to go. The search tool on Marketplace is great for finding that one specific item that you don’t want to spend a lot of money buying new. There are some things you just don’t want to spend time hunting down in the thrift store – like a keyboard, an essential oil diffuser, or an S.A.D. therapy lamp. It’s a great platform for individual sellers, so you know that the money goes directly into their pocket. Plus, if you’re looking to resell your items, it’s a great way to ensure they get a second life. There are many buyers and sellers around the Plateau, Milton-Parc, and downtown areas in general due to their high student populations. 

Milton-Parc and the Plateau on May 1: Foraging the sidewalks of Montreal’s student neighbourhoods on moving day is one of my personal favourite ways to accumulate gently-used items – and it’s completely free! Just be sure that items are sanitary. Happy scavenging!

The post A Second Chance appeared first on The McGill Daily.

For four short weeks between November 20, 2022 and December 18, 2022, billions tuned in to watch the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, with an average of 26 million viewers for the final games on Fox, Telemundo, and streaming services in the US alone. The games were set in new, refurbished stadiums constructed for the event; shots of the intricately-detailed Al Janoub Stadium, the strikingly tent-shaped Al Bayt stadium, and the glistening Lusail stadium were spliced with shots of game footage as viewers watched from around the world. The culmination of this 12-year development project inaugurated since Qatar first won the World Cup bid in 2010 ended on December 18. As Gonzalo Montiel secured Argentina’s victory in a nail-biting round of penalty kicks, the question arose regarding the now empty stadiums – what now? 

The short term costly infrastructure projects that precede mega-sporting events like the World Cup or the Olympics have been described as “white elephants” – that is, structures like stadiums that put financial strain on a city and become largely unused after the event. These investments and infrastructure projects (and mega-sporting events in general) not only put stress on local economies, but can also have adverse effects on the environment due to increased carbon emissions, human development, consumption, and waste. These stadiums are rarely used to their full capacity after the one-time tournament event, and often incur millions more in costs for annual maintenance over time. For example, South Africa spent $1.1 billion USD to build 10 stadiums for the 2010 World Cup, many of which are now unused or underused. After the 2014 World Cup, four cities in Brazil were left with underused stadiums despite the country spending $4 billion USD on building and renovation, such as the 46,000 seat Arena Pernambuco in Recife, a city that does not even have a team. Of the 12 stadiums constructed for the Russia 2018 World Cup – on which Russia spent $10.8 billion USD – only eight host top-tier matches that are generally scantily attended as the stadiums continue to incur high annual maintenance costs. 

One of the most notorious of these white elephant structures is the Olympic Stadium here in Montreal, constructed for the 1976 summer games. In 1970, Montreal won the bid to host the Olympics, with the promise of being modest in design and inexpensive to stage. Mayor Jean-Drapeau famously said that “The Olympics can no more run a deficit than a man can have a baby.” What ensued for the following six years was a string of corruption, mismanagement, fraud, security concerns, and bad weather, leaving organizers in a frenzied push to complete the stadium on time. In the final months before the games, 3,000 workers had worked in teams for 24 hours a day to make the Olympics even possible at all. At the opening ceremony, the promised retractable roof had yet to even be constructed, and in typical Montreal style, the Greek athletes who traditionally open the Parade of Nations reportedly found their way up to the stadium to be almost blocked by construction workers. The 1970 cost estimate when Montreal won the bid was $120 million CAD; in reality, the games cost 13 times as much, coming in at $1.6 billion CAD and taking the city a whopping 30 years to pay off. Upkeep of the stadium continued to incur millions for the city; for example, a fixed roof was finally installed in 1998 for another $37 million CAD, only to partially collapse under a heavy load of snow in the following year. 

Notably, organizers of the Qatar World Cup have made special efforts to prevent the tournament’s stadiums from becoming white elephants. “We have used materials from sustainable sources and implemented innovative legacy plans to ensure our tournament doesn’t leave any ‘white elephants,’” writes Hassan Al Thawadi, Secretary General of the Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy of the 2022 World Cup in a report on the tournament’s stadiums and sustainability. “We canvassed local communities to find out what facilities they needed – and implemented their ideas and suggestions into stadium developments and precincts.” Indeed, the majority of Qatar’s World Cup stadiums will be reduced to half-capacity; half the seats will be offered to other countries in need of sporting infrastructure. Other stadiums – specifically the Lusail stadium and the Al Bayt stadium – will be repurposed, the former becoming a community hub and the latter incorporating a five-star hotel, a shopping center, and a sports medicine hospital. Notably, Ras Abu Aboud stadium was constructed with 974 shipping containers, which will be demounted and can be shipped and reconstructed elsewhere that needs a stadium. 

Despite these considerations, the question remains whether the infrastructure’s lasting effects on the economy are truly sustainable. Qatar reportedly has spent $220 billion USD on the tournament since it won the bid to host the World Cup. While this exact number is unclear due to a lack of official reports, it is clear that a record amount of money was spent on this mega-sporting event. The cost of construction extended past the seven stadiums constructed, and included infrastructure developments across areas such as transportation, telecommunications and security, hospitality, and hotels, among others. The planned dismantling of the stadiums will additionally incur further costs. While there are indeed other non-monetary advantages for Qatar to being the host country, including the phenomena of sports washing, many are even still skeptical whether the country will see their massive investment returned. 

Furthermore, Qatar’s sustainability considerations failed to take into account workers’ welfare. Many mega-sporting events generate high “human costs,” that is, negative impacts and even casualties associated with construction and relocation. A pattern of labour abuses has been highlighted in the infrastructure projects of the 2008 Olympics, the 2014 Olympics, the 2014 World Cup, the 2018 World Cup, and most recently, in the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo and in the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. The structure of labour when it comes to mega-sporting events is often embedded in a convoluted system, involving the internationalization of labour, national versus international standards, and authority dispersed and parcelled between domestic and local governments, organizations and corporate entities. With the Olympics, for example, many different entities sign a ‘Host City Contract,’ including the Host City itself, the Host National Olympic Committee, an Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, national governments, public and private financiers, contractors, and so on. Responsibility is diffused through this intricate, layered structure, allowing the organizing bodies to avoid repercussion for harms. World Cups are organized with a similarly structured process under the Organizing Association Agreement signed by FIFA and the host country’s football association. 

And indeed, for years since Qatar won the World Cup bid, evidence has pointed to poor physical and contractual conditions for migrant workers employed to build adequate infrastructure for the athletes and crowds of the tournament, including but not limited to stadiums, metro lines, roads, and hotels. A 2016 report from Amnesty International identified eight ways that workers building the Khalifa Stadium and the Aspire Zone were being exploited, including but not limited to expensive recruitment fees, appalling living conditions, lies about and delayed salaries, being threatened, and being subjected to forced labour. All of the workers interviewed for the report had had their passports confiscated, and many were denied ID cards required by Qatari law, therefore they were unable to leave the construction site, much less leave the country or change jobs. In 2017, Qatar introduced labour reforms, covering working conditions and a minimum wage to address the global widespread concern. Yet a report published by Human Rights Watch in 2021 revealed that migrant workers were still suffering “punitive and illegal wage deductions, and […] months of unpaid wages for long hours of gruelling work,” ultimately pointing towards evidence of forced labour. Furthermore, thousands of these workers have died over the past decade of construction, due to poor working conditions worsened by Qatar’s extreme heat. 

On an economic, environmental, and most importantly human level, the impacts of mega-sporting events like the World Cup far outlive the four-week long tournaments that necessitate such infrastructure projects. While Qatar’s World Cup may not leave behind many, if any, obvious white elephants, the huge loss of human life is what remains to scar the nation and the future of the tournament itself. 

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And indeed, it seems that content about the hyper-wealthy truly has dominated entertainment in recent years. In the number of weeks since its release on December 23, Glass Onion has become the third most-watched movie Netflix has ever released. HBO’s recently aired second season of The White Lotus has become a massive hit met with widespread critical praise. Triangle of Sadness, from Swedish director Ruben Östlund, was also commercially successful as well as well-received by critics, winning the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes festival. Other popular films and TV series in recent years are similarly concerned with the lives of the ultra-wealthy: Succession, the Gossip Girl reboot, Selling Sunset, Elite, Inventing Anna, and The Dropout are all examples. Many of these have become viral sensations, and several were even nominated for Emmys in 2022. 

These stories often contain valuable underlying political messages about power dynamics and wealth. The actions of the characters are defined by who works for who, their relationships by those who have and those who have not. The uber-wealthy guests in The White Lotus are generally selfish and flawed, exemplified by how they treat the hotel employees as disposable. Tanya in particular crosses all boundaries of respect with her assistant Portia, abusing her conference of wealth and privilege. Similarly, in Glass Onion, all the characters are subservient to the ultra-wealthy Miles Bron, treating him with deference and respect because of the power he wields over them due to his great wealth. And in Triangle of Sadness, scenes depicting the extent to which the ultra-wealthy demand subservience from  the employees and staff that surround them are excruciating and uncomfortable to watch, demonstrating the dehumanizing power wielded by the ultra-rich. 

Yet I wonder if this anti-capitalist political message becomes lost amidst the spectacle of wealth in such content. The lives of the rich sure are entertaining – beautiful and fantastic, even. When watching The White Lotus, I couldn’t help but gape at the magnificence and beauty of the show’s setting, marveling at how much I would like to stay in a palazzo in Sicily. I found myself coveting Harper’s chic and quietly luxurious wardrobe, composed of luxury brands like Loewe, Sandro, and Bottega Veneta. The dark, luxurious-looking wood interiors and the bright, clear pools on the sundeck of the cruise in Triangle of Sadness were equally enticing. And Miles Bron’s elaborate, exclusive private island in Greece situated right in the middle of the Aegean Sea is certainly seductive. It’s clear that the producers of these works have invested in the image and spectacle of wealth, and it sure looks sexy. 

And yet it is also true that by the end of these stories, the seduction and spectacle of wealth has often shattered. In The White Lotus, it is the hotel employees that wind up on top, as the audience watches the interpersonal relationships of the guests implode. In Glass Onion, Miles Bron is exposed as a fraud and gets the retribution he deserves. And in Triangle of Sadness, the rich guests all drown after violently losing their dinner in a literally stomach-turning scene, while those remaining are subject to the authoritarian rule of Abigail, who formerly worked as a crewmember on the ship.

These instances of retribution are certainly satisfying. After watching these ultra-wealthy characters be aloof and entitled assholes to everyone around them, one can’t help but cheer while watching them get what they deserve. Yet this begs the question, is this satisfying because of a cognizant political condemnation of the hyper-wealthy? Or is it simply pleasurable to watch shitty people – particularly those who seem to have everything you yourself could ever want – get what they deserve? 

I’m certainly not one to talk, as I’m just as hooked on these shows and movies as everyone else. I wonder, however, if the massive success of this burgeoning genre depicting the ultra-wealthy really needs to continue. I can imagine that television and film producers across their respective industries are trying to come up with the next hit like Succession or The White Lotus. But do rich people really need more representation? I argue that the sheer amount of content currently being produced about “rich tears” – about a group of people who only make up a small percentage of the world’s population – is concerning and unsustainable. And while it certainly is satisfying to watch the ultra-wealthy fall down from their spot atop the social hierarchy, the inundation of content pointing out the flaws of ultra-wealthy fictitious individuals in ways that are voyeuristically pleasing and entertaining to the audience is not truly a meaningful way to deconstruct privilege and wealth. While this trend itself is not inherently problematic, I worry that the future of television and film will stray further from telling the experiences and stories of low- and middle-class people, skewing representation towards this alluring spectacle of wealth.

The post Overrepresentation of the Ultra-Wealthy appeared first on The McGill Daily.

As 1:00 PM grew nearer, over a hundred students gathered at  the intersection. Counting down from three, Divest organizers prompted everyone to scream. The cacophony of anger that emanated from the centre of campus ensued for one whole minute, expressing the crowd’s exasperation toward grievances like the McGill administration’s climate inaction, finals stress, and general frustration. At 1:01, the screaming ceased and students dispersed to head back to class, go to the library, or otherwise continue on with their day. 

“We wanted to […] get people to just kind of vent out their grievances with the university,” Carley, a member of Divest McGill, told the Daily, “whether it be related to climate justice or divestment, or unpaid student internships, or the extremely high cost of living or food on campus, the undemocratic student bodies, literally anything that you’re mad about.” 

The collective scream is distinct from other actions organized by Divest, such as the #OccupyMcGill occupation of the McCall MacBain Arts Building last winter which lasted almost two weeks. Carley explained that that action was particularly “risky,” able to be done because of the privilege afforded to many Divest McGill members. “We’re trying to have a diversity of actions, that […] students, staff, faculty, anyone can really join,” says Carley. She explained that the scream served as a way to engage as many students as possible through a “really easy action” to get involved in. 

She also added that the scream served as a reminder to McGill’s administration that Divest is still calling for divestment, 10 years after the creation of the organization. She explained that the scream was effective in “reminding [the Board of Governors] that we’re still here after ten years, despite their PR campaigns trying to prove us wrong. We still believe in this, and many other people do.” 

In her opinion, the event had great turnout, garnering over 1,000 likes on their Instagram post promoting it. “Having these accessible events […] that you can repost online, no matter your status, is really important to create a movement that is serving the people that it’s impacting the most.”  

Additional reporting done by Emma Bainbridge.

The post Scream for Divestment appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Introduction

When it comes to anti-oppressive research, sifting through  “open source” data, which is available for anyone to access and share, is a good place to start. Every province in Canada possesses an institution that compiles the documents – such as annual reports and financial statements – of public bodies that are required to deposit information. In Quebec, this is the Assemblée Nationale du Québec. You can use the search tool on their website to peruse and download public documents, such as the financial statements from McGill that show the salaries of senior administration officials. StatCan has data available pertaining to the census, population, and other aspects of Canadian life, such as the consumer price index. Données Québec offers provincial data, and Données Montréal offers municipal data. Finally, it can’t hurt to directly contact an individual for the documents you need – sometimes people will give you information if you just ask nicely.

If you can’t find the information you’re looking for in the open source data, it’s time for an ATI request! In Quebec, under the Act Respecting Access to Documents Held by Public Bodies and the Protection of Personal Information, section 9 contends that “every person has a right of access, on request, to the documents held by a public body.” More broadly speaking, the act allows you to issue access requests for documents withheld from public access and kept by public bodies. You may request documents with administrative or personal information that contain information about yourself. The act additionally grants the right to correct inaccurate personal information.

Where you can request ATIs

A public body is typically a body that is granted existence and authority from a statute enacted by a legislature, and whose functions affect the community of the persons to which its authority extends. More specifically, the designation of public bodies is applied to federal, provincial, and local governments and agencies. Organizations that receive government funding – such as public school boards, universities, and law enforcement – also fall under this definition. When filing your access request, it’s important to consider which public body will hold the document you are looking for – for example, is it a university? The Ministry of Education? Or the Ministry of Labor? 

If you’re interested, you can also submit an ATI request on the federal level under the Privacy Act and the Access to Information Act. However, you must be a Canadian citizen, a permanent resident of Canada, or an individual or organization currently present in Canada.

Some public bodies regrettably have fees for filing ATI requests, which usually must be paid online with a credit card. You can consult the table below to find fees of bodies that may be relevant to you. 

Determining the documents you need

It can be helpful to look at previously-submitted ATIs to get an idea of what sorts of things you can request and what documents you may need. The aforementioned Données Montréal includes a list of ATI requests filed within the past few years organized by category, subject, and borough. Categories include finances and financial evaluation, environment, infrastructure and public works, and permits and regulations, among others. Montreal residents have requested everything from street-cleaning schedules to the number of certified daycares in the city to information pertaining to climate change. Additionally, the federal government makes completed ATIs available online, the CBC updates a list of completed ATIs each month, and MuckRock is a website that tracks public records requests in the US. In general, meeting minutes, internal correspondence, and financial documents (e.g., audits or purchase receipts) are helpful to ask for.

In any case, you should do your homework to deduce what has already been requested and what has been made accessible.  

Writing your request

Once you’ve figured out what you’re looking for, it’s time to actually write your request! While the Quebec government has ATI templates available in both English and French, ATIs are more of an art than a science – it may take some trial and error to get your wording exactly right. Still, there are a few general principles to keep in mind: 1) make sure you mention the Act in your opening statement; 2) make your request as narrow as possible; and 3) do your best to indicate where the documents can be found (i.e., who the ATI commissioner should contact to get what you need). 

When writing, make sure to make your request as clear as possible to not only ensure you will be satisfied but that your request can be processed in a timely manner. In the request, include the specific administrative documents you are looking for, whether it be meeting minutes, digital (email) and physical correspondence, expenses and financial reports, contracts, opinions, briefs, internal memos, etc. If you’re looking to obtain a large yield of documents, you can write “including but not limited to […]” before listing the desired document types. When requesting documents, you can also request key words as well – just be sure to be specific. As an example, if you are looking into McGill’s proposed Sustainability Sciences and Public Policy Centre at the contested Royal Victoria Site, requesting correspondence and documents with the word “sustainability” would probably get you thousands of documents. However, if you narrow down your search to include “sustainability centre” or “New Vic Project,” you are likely to get a much more pointed and useful response. You can also request datasets, especially machine-readable data such as spreadsheets. For example, if you are interested in investigating a particular office, you may request to see a list of employed staff, hired staff, and/or staff leave. You can also request data to be organized in accordance to your liking, for example: per time period (i.e., per year, per month, per academic term, etc.) and/or by type (i.e., of staff, of department, etc.).

To help make your request as specific as possible, you should additionally specify the time period within which the documents you are looking for should be. For example, if you were investigating the hiring of McGill’s new principal, you would want to request documents and/or data between March 2022 (when the advisory committee to elect the new principal was formed) and November 2022 (when H. Deep Saini was appointed as the University’s new principal). 

Sometimes, your request can be summed up in merely one or two sentences. This would look like something to the effect of: “Under section nine of the Act, I hereby request a copy of x documents.” However, for more lengthy requests, we recommend presenting the documents you need in a bullet-pointed list, organized by category. The examples we’ve included here are organized based on the series within McGill’s University Classification Plan, but you can come up with categories of your own. For example, part of a request to the City of Montreal may fall under “Urbanisme et habitation,” while another may be more suited to “Permis et règlementation.” Categories are also helpful because you may then ask for an “interim release,” a method whereby a public body releases documents intermittently. This can be helpful since you may receive documents from one category sooner than another, rather than waiting to get them all at once. This is only common practice within federal bodies as of yet, and even then it’s not obligatory. Still, it can’t hurt to ask. 

Again, ATIs are not an exact science – the bottom line is, you should make your request as specific and easy to follow as possible.

What to do if you get stuck

In theory, ATIs should be fulfilled within twenty days of filing them, or 30 days if the commissioner invokes a 10-day extension; in practice, this is seldom the case. We’ll discuss how to file an appeal with the Commission below, but there are a few things you can do to try and speed up the process before taking this step.

Perhaps the easiest thing you can do is consistently follow up with the ATI commissioner working on your request. There are plenty of reasons a request may be delayed that are outside of their control: people may be dodging their emails and phone calls, or the relevant public body may be extremely reluctant to release the documents you’re seeking (especially if you’re a journalist). In that case, you can try to offer solutions to their problem: figure out if another entity also holds the documents you need, or if there’s a way you can narrow down your request so it doesn’t yield an impractical volume of documents. In general, ATI commissioners want to help you, so it’s wise to negotiate a compromise with them when you can. If you have reason to believe your commissioner is being intentionally inefficient or just plain lazy, you can always CC their boss in later follow-up emails.

If possible, it can be helpful to file the same request with multiple public bodies. For example, if you’re looking for internal correspondence between the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and Agri-Food Canada, file a request with both of these entities. Different bodies have different standards for what information they redact and what sorts of documents they consider exempt from ATI mechanisms, so you should cast a wide net to maximize your chance of success.

If the commissioner has not returned your request within 30 days of your submission, or if they have rejected your request without legal grounds in your opinion, it’s time to file an appeal! You can appeal to the Commission d’Accès à l’Information du Québec within 30 days of the deadline, or within 30 days of refusal. You can address your appeal to cai.communications@cai.gouv.qc.ca, with your reason for appealing, relevant correspondence between yourself and the commissioner processing your request, and your original request. The appeal will go to mediation and a meeting with a judge. 

Putting the process in action

Request for documents pertaining to wastewater testing – by Saylor Catlin

This request was fairly straightforward to file. I was suspicious that McGill had not published certain information about the wastewater testing project on their website, so I knew that I was looking for three things: 1) the methodology and implementation of wastewater testing, 2) raw data collected at each site over the course of the project, and 3) what amount of positive results for COVID-19 defined the thresholds for each of the alert levels on the website. I thus structured my request with this in mind. Because I knew the project was initiated as of October 2021, I asked for any documents, correspondence, and data from that point up until the moment I had filed the request (January 2022). I also knew that I was requesting documentation from McGill, but more specifically from the Emergency Operations Centre (which was in charge of COVID-19 policies at the time) and the head researchers who led the project. Naming these entities in my request helped specify what I was looking for, and, I can only imagine, expedited my request. 

Luckily, the office was able to fulfill my request within the 20-day limit! However, what was returned to me was a 25-MB zip drive full of months of email correspondence, testing procedures full of scientific jargon, and pages and pages full of wastewater data. So, needless to say, even though my request was fulfilled in a timely manner, the yield from it was so large that it took weeks for me to read through everything, analyze it, and translate it into an article. Regardless, I think this is fairly common, and for the most part all of the documents really helped me to get a full sense of what was going on. The bottom line: remember that even once you have waited 20 to 30 days for your request to be filled, the work isn’t over yet!

Request for documents pertaining to NHP use at McGill – by Abigail Popple

This ATI is a good example of a broad request that had to be narrowed down later but was ultimately successful. As Le Délit’s Rafael Miró and Philippe Bédard-Gagnon pointed out in March 2021, animal research at McGill is shrouded in secrecy, and while I did plenty of homework to figure out what information I needed, it was still a shot in the dark. Nevertheless, I got what I was looking for, and here’s how:

I began by taking a look at the information already available to me. Thanks to a previous ATI request, I knew that McGill subjects the vast majority of its non-human primates (NHPs) to Category D procedures. The second-most invasive category of procedures, Category D includes things like major surgery and subjecting animals to severe emotional distress. By reading through the university’s Standard Operating Procedures for NHPs, I also knew that cranial surgery, water deprivation, and genetic engineering are practiced in McGill’s NHP program. Finally, some more sniffing around on McGill’s website taught me that animal deaths are reported to the Animal Policy and Welfare Oversight Committee as well as the Canadian Council on Animal Care.

Armed with this knowledge, I then began formulating questions that filled in the gaps that remained: How many NHPs had died in recent years? What exactly were the Category D procedures being conducted? How frequently was McGill importing primates to use in its labs? Consulting the University Classification Plan told me I could probably obtain the meeting minutes, research files, and import permits relevant to these questions. I first attempted to acquire meeting minutes by contacting the animal care committee responsible for NHPs. When that failed, I set about writing my request. (I also suspect that my contacting the committee prompted the university to publish its FAQ on NHP use about a month later – it definitely caused alarm in the Media Relations Office!) 

Unfortunately, not all of my requests could be fulfilled. An ATI commissioner emailed to let me know that my request for documents pertaining to genetic engineering and Category D procedures would have yielded an unreasonably large number of documents, allegedly totalling over 8,000 pages. The commissioner offered to meet with me to narrow down the scope of my request, but I decided to withdraw those parts of the request entirely so she could focus on obtaining meeting minutes and reporting forms instead. The remaining parts of my request were fulfilled in a timely manner and revealed some chronic issues within McGill’s NHP program, so it was a win in my book! The moral of the story is that you should work with ATI commissioners when you can, and do thorough research to ascertain which kinds of documents will be the most useful to you before filing a request.

Suggestions for anti-o ATIs

Knowledge is power. It’s incredibly cliche, but it’s true. ATIs are one of our most accessible means of holding power to account, so even though Canada’s ATI system is archaic and inefficient, it’s important that activists and community members know how to navigate it. Here are some general suggestions on anti-oppressive ATIs to file:

• Check on the SPVM: Valérie Plante has given so much money to the municipal police force during her time in office. You could ask for a breakdown of the police budget over the past several years, or ask to see receipts from any weapons purchases that have been made in that time. You may be interested in seeing the internal correspondence that’s sent within the SPVM prior to public demonstrations or in trying to figure out the exact number of police deployed at various events. If you’re part of an activist organization or suspect you’ve earned a reputation as “Someone Who Incites Dissent,” it may be worth asking for internal correspondence mentioning the names of you or your organization to see what the police think of you. You can also get your own police records via ATI request; The Globe and Mail has produced a video with journalist Robyn Doolittle on how to do just that.

• Has your landlord abruptly started elaborate renovations or other construction work? Check and see if they’ve acquired the appropriate permits to carry out construction.

• ATIs can be a useful tool for prison abolitionists. Since it’s so hard to get information on prison conditions, consider filing an ATI to find out more about prison health care, medical isolation, or any other abuses of power that have occurred.

• The RCMP and branches of the military are also subject to ATI requests through the federal government. Again, requesting financial documents may yield some insight as to how these bodies wield their massive budgets.

• Here at McGill, you can file an ATI at no cost for personal documents, such as correspondence mentioning your name or medical documents which the university may have withheld from you. There are plenty of other opportunities for ATI requests: what goes on in EDI committee meetings? What precipitated the sudden “restructuring” of OSVRSE? How much money was spent on the university’s bicentennial celebrations compared with EDI initiatives?

If you have any questions about writing your own ATI request, or are interested in publishing the findings of your own institutional investigation in the Daily, you can reach out to news@mcgilldaily.com. We are always excited and eager to assist and platform anti-oppressive research from the community!

The post The Daily’s Guide to Anti-Oppressive ATIs appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The QPIRG Alternative Library also buys books and educates people, Dong adds, and is therefore not that different from a regular library. Yet it is distinctly “alternative,” he explains, as they “collect and distribute knowledge related to justice” in the “specific activist context.” QPIRG’s Alternative Library is part of a larger network of other loosely related independent, alternative libraries in Montreal, including – but not limited to – those at QPIRG-Concordia, the Center for Gender Advocacy at Concordia, Queer McGill, the Labour Library at AMUSE, and the Simone DeBeauvoir Institute. Most of the libraries in this network are led by students, and most have a non-hierarchical approach to functioning and archiving, per Dong. 

Those who work at the QPIRG Alternative Library collect donations whenever possible. Dong explains that they often gather freely-distributed materials from activist movements on campus and then add them to their collections. “Even though it is very hard to achieve and hard to maintain,” he says of the collection process, “it is a crucial part to let people know that this part of history existed so that organizations and activists of later generations can refer back.” However, the library is not structured as a formal archive. “The challenge is how to make [our materials] publicly accessible and easily navigable, in a database that people can search in an easy way,” Dong says. “But our goal has always been collecting these things as material evidence of activist existence.”  

The QPIRG-McGill Alternative Library also organizes justice-based activities. On October 27, they hosted a free, virtual presentation from the ArQuives, one of the largest LGBTQ2S+ archives in the world, located in Toronto. Similar to the QPIRG Alternative Library, the ArQuive’s mandate is to “acquire, preserve, organize, and give public access to information and materials in any medium, by and about LGBTQ2+ people, primarily produced in or concerning Canada,” and to “maintain a research library, international research files, and an international collection of LGBTQ2+ periodicals,” according to the organization’s website. The presentation was delivered by Ariana Ho, senior archivist at the ArQuives, and Daniel Payne, reference archivist at the ArQuives. 

Ho started the presentation by giving an overview of the history of the ArQuives and how they functiom today. She first explained that the ArQuives came out of the Gay Liberation Movement in Toronto, which happened from 1969 to1973. Following a series of protests and gay and lesbian organizing, in 1971, the Body Politic was established – Canada’s first gay and lesbian magazine. The magazine was organized as an informal collective, and remained influential for Canada’s gay and lesbian community throughout the ’70s and ’80s, explains Ho. In 1973, the Body Politic established the Canadian Gay Liberation Movement Archives with the goal of  preserving documents generated by the Gay Liberation Movement. The name has since been changed to the ArQuives to reflect the organization’s mandate. 

“Traditional archives have typically excluded marginalized folks from their collections, including but not limited to BIPOC, LGBTQ2S+, disabled, underhoused or newcomer experiences,” Ho wrote to the Daily. “The ArQuives aims to fill some of these archival erasures and gaps.” She emphasized that the ArQuives is a community archive, started and led by the community.

Ho says that the ArQuives have historically been volunteer-run, with volunteering just recently picking back up again after the pandemic slowed their operations. “We had somewhere around 150 volunteers, some of whom have been involved since the 1970s,” she adds. Today, there are eight people on staff on short-term contracts. Ho explains that the ArQuives do not receive operational funding, and while they do occasionally receive government grants and foundational support for specific projects, they are heavily reliant on generous donations from community members. 

Researchers can go to the ArQuives in Toronto and visit the research room to see the collection, Ho continued. It is here where reference archivists like Payne work and help researchers navigate the collection. “We receive hundreds of reference requests every year, and that’s from researchers across Canada and internationally,” Ho says. “Most of our researchers are academics, filmmakers, artists, etc.” 

She explained that a lot of digitization occurred during the pandemic in order to accommodate researchers. Researchers can now explore digitized materials by using the reference services to search the ArQuives’ collections. Those who are curious can also visit the Digital Exhibitions page on the ArQuives website, which allows you to explore highlights from the collection digitally. “You can learn about things like Halloween Drag Balls in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, the first gay and lesbian protest in the early ’70s, the history of trans health care activism in Ontario, and much more,” Ho says. 

When it comes to their collections, Ho says that they generally don’t turn away donations unless they don’t have the capacity or space to house materials. “Donors will oftentimes bring in T-shirts, buttons, horns, personal papers, and organizational papers from organizations that they were a part of,” she says. They look for donations that relate to everyday queer life. “We don’t simply collect the records of those who have a big impact,” Ho told the Daily. “Preserving the histories of everyday folks is important to us.”

The ArQuives are also home to a multitude of fonds, or materials grouped together that share the same origin and that are the product of a singule agency, individual, or organization. Ho spotlighted the Bernard Courte fonds, the Dykes on Mykes fonds, and the Chris Cushman fonds, all available for perusing. 

Ho ended her presentation by acknowledging that a large percentage of the ArQuives’ records centres around the lives and work of gay, white cisgender men, and have historically failed to preserve the records and history of racialized queer and trans folks. She highlighted some of the ongoing initiatives in efforts to increase the representation of marginalized members of the LGBTQ2S+ community in the ArQuives. For example, Ho discussed the Trans Collection Project, “which consists of conducting outreach with members of the trans community, assisting in the collection of trans materials, and preparing the records for permanent storage.” She also spoke of the ArQuive’s collaboration with the Roots and Rites/Routes and Writes Project, when they hosted a creative non-fiction writing workshop for young queer and trans South Asian writers to create an archive of their experiences to be preserved at The ArQuives. 

Next, Payne presented strategies to use when searching the collection. He demonstrated that you can sort results according to collection source, description level, collection/fonds, material type, decade, and more when searching online to narrow your search. He emphasized that it’s important to keep in mind that the archive is not a library. “You oftentimes go to a library that is organized through broad subject headings,” he explains, “and an archive is kind of almost a hacking of that whole system.” Alternatively, the archive is organized from the “bottom level up, based on individuals that lived through various time periods in history. We build up our collections through the way they saw their worlds.” 

You can explore the ArQuives’ collection through their website or by filing a reference request. There’s also an open call for on-site, remote, and hybrid volunteers; you can apply at arquives.ca. In Montreal, you can visit the QPIRG-Alternative Library at 3516 Park Avenue, open on Mondays and Wednesdays from 2:00 to 6:00 PM. You can also check out material from the Alternative Library by registering to become a member through the library’s Linktree.

A previous version of this article incorrectly implied that the majority of the ArQuives’ collection has been digitized, that QPIRG stands for “Quebec Public Interest Research Group,” and that the QPIRG Alternative Library charges an additional fee of $5 for use. The article has since been updated for accuracy.

The Daily regrets these errors.

The post Archiving For Social Justice appeared first on The McGill Daily.

In an update shared on October 11, the Mohawk Mothers stated that they are “wholly opposed to the archaeological intervention in its current form, which dismisses all the guidelines and frameworks that have been developed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and by archaeologists engaged in searching for unmarked graves since the first findings in Tk’emlúps in 2021.” They say that the Société québécoise des infrastructures (SQI) and McGill previously told them that they wouldn’t start any archaeological interventions until “information meetings” had been completed. 

The Mohawk Mothers have repeatedly requested the use of remote sensing technologies rather than breaking ground on the site. They emphasized that “we must have an idea of what is underneath the ground before breaking it, so that we will follow our cultural burial practices and the will of survivors.” Requests to be present to monitor intervention at the site were also denied; therefore, the Mohawk Mothers have taken it upon themselves to monitor the site themselves from the sidewalk.

The Daily recently visited the site and took some photos to document the work that’s been happening so far.

Updates about this campaign are shared on the following platforms:

@takebacktekanontak (IG)

@stopthenewvic (Twitter)

The post Arkéos at Royal Vic appeared first on The McGill Daily.

“An agreement in principle is essentially where you say, okay, we’ve gotten through everything we need to negotiate,” explains Mo Rajji Courtney, president of SSMUnion. The bargaining parties reached this agreement through verbal understanding on May 27, and they later followed up via email to discuss ratification by the union’s members. 

The agreement was reached after a year and a half of negotiations, which began in summer 2020 when SSMUnion sent SSMU a notice of presentation. That summer, SSMUnion worked toward presenting SSMU with a draft collective agreement. “Typically, you go in with a bunch of demands, and you talk about those demands, and then you draft things afterwards,” explains Courtney. “But we knew that SSMU has a lot of issues with turnover, that they are slow on things, […] so we decided to draft up a collective agreement based on similar collective agreements from similar unions.” SSMUnion management studied other unions in the university sector and student unions. Management worked with their parent union, CUPE, which also represents the Concordia Student Union, which has what Courtney cited as “the Lamborghini of collective agreements” and has been quite successful. 

Both Courtney and Tali Ioselevich, Vice-President of SSMUnion, explained that one of SSMUnion’s biggest goals in the CA is to get rid of the casual staff designation on SSMU contracts. Most SSMU employees are currently designated as casual staff – meaning they don’t have access to health insurance, paid time off, and other basic protections. Furthermore, many of these employees have been working for years at SSMU, but the casual position makes it very difficult to accumulate seniority and qualify for EI and other benefits. “All of these problems made for very precarious employment,” says Courtney. They added that there are currently between 100 and 150 employees under the casual staff designation versus about a dozen permanent employees. 

When presented with the draft collective agreement, SSMU told SSMUnion management that they wanted their attorneys to look over the draft before they voted on it. “That is okay, that is your right,” comments Courtney, “But the problem is that […] it took us two years to negotiate. In that time the laws have changed.” They explained that, for example, a section of the law or an article cited might now be outdated. “The attorneys on the other side […] might say, this phrasing isn’t quite clear,” they continued, “We can make this better phrasing or we can make this align better with our obligations by doing this.” 

Instead of honouring the agreement in principle and recommending it for ratification, SSMU moved to reopen negotiations on July 14. To the knowledge of SSMUnion management, no vote was held on July 14 – the day SSMU said they would hold it – because the organization wanted to send the CA to their attorneys first. Thus, between May 27 and July 14, SSMU never sent the agreement to the attorneys and did not obtain their input until July 14, Courtney says. “They have had 18 months to get the attorneys involved, and they haven’t,” they commented, “And then when they brought back the attorneys’ comments, it was almost entirely renegotiation.” 

Ioselevich added that this CA has now seen three separate student executive committees and at least two different HR directors negotiating on SSMU management’s side. “What the failure to consult their legal team on this shows is that no one bothered to do their homework by reading minutes or leaving exit reports, which points to SSMU’s lack of institutional memory,” wrote Ioselevich in an email to the Daily. “Only after the agreement in principle was reached did they think to consult legal counsel, after which point reopening negotiations was no longer on the table.” 

Instead of discussing the renegotiated terms in a meeting, on July 21, SSMUnion management received an email from SSMU containing an 11-page document with 50 amendments. Courtney suggested that it was clearly a document that SSMU had received directly from its attorneys. According to them, it was apparent that SSMU management had not reviewed the document, as it was not reformatted to make it more understandable, and there was no indication of which items were of higher priority. “[The attorneys] weren’t in the room when we were negotiating, so we actually disagree with their proposed amendments,” Courtney commented. SSMUnion management responded to the email that they were opposed to reopening negotiations after reaching the agreement in principle, and that in principle the proposed amendments were unacceptable. In response, SSMU management promised they would send back a revised document. 

Courtney explained that SSMUnion did not receive the revised document until hours before ratification on August 29. “They had been notified, I believe, three weeks in advance of the collective agreement ratification being when it happened, and they chose until then to finally respond to us,” says Courtney. 

Consequently, SSMUnion management intends to file a complaint with the Quebec government, specifically the Tribunal administratif du travail. The complaint will be filed in accordance with Article 53 of the Quebec Labour Code, according to Courtney, on the grounds of bargaining in bad faith. 

“The longer SSMU waits to sign this agreement, the longer the workers of SSMU have to go without […] basic protections that we’ve been bargaining for for two years,” writes Ioselevich. “The execs have a responsibility to do their jobs while they’re here and ratify this Collective Agreement.” 

The post SSMUnion to Present New Collective Agreement appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The wastewater testing page is updated on a “rolling basis” with current alert levels – high, medium, or low – for each residence based on the results of the sample testing. While the page provides protocol for each alert level, it does not provide definitions for what constitutes a positive result, information on how samples are collected, or historical data from when the initiative was started. 

Given these gaps, the Daily filed an Access to Documents Request earlier this semester to gain access to data and definitions created by researchers. Here’s what we found. 

Testing Procedures

One sample is collected daily from La Citadelle, Carrefour Sherbrooke, New Residence Hall (NRH), Solin Hall, Royal Victoria College (RVC), Upper Residence, and Laird Hall. To collect the samples, researchers use a “torpedo,” a device developed in early 2021 specifically for testing the presence of COVID-19 in wastewater. They are constructed with cotton buds, medical gauze swabs, and electronegative membranes encased in narrow 3D-printed shells. The device is a “passive sampler,” meaning it can be left in a waterbody for set amount of time during which pollutants in the water will interact with the device. At McGill, torpedoes are placed in wastewater (either in a building’s outdoor man-hole or indoor washout, depending on the site), and after 24 hours, they are removed and then transported to a McGill lab in the McConnell Engineering building to be analyzed. 

The lab protocol – “SARS-CoV-2 detection by absorption” – was developed by Dominic Frigon of McGill’s Civil Engineering department and Sarah Dorner of Polytechnique Montreal’s Civil, Geological, and Mining Engineering department. First, analysts obtain a concentration of the sample; Bovine Respiratory Syntactical virus (BRSV) and Pepper Mild Mottle virus (PMMV) are also added to the sample at this stage as external controls. Next, ribonucleic acid (RNA) is extracted from the sample’s concentration. Then, a molecular detection sample PCR test is performed on the RNA extraction using a testing kit, yielding a negative or positive result. There are notes throughout the lab protocol giving guidelines for analysts; for example, the protocol notes that precision is important while obtaining the concentration, as “a precise external control is needed for data processing.” 

Indeed, data shows that results are often inconclusive. Under the “PCR notes” column, analysts were instructed to “record any departures from typical analyses and observations.” Oftentimes, inconclusive results were the result of low PMMV and/or BRSV in the sample. On other occasions, inconclusive results were the result of a lost torpedo, cross-contamination with the SARS-CoV-2 positive control, or a blocked pipe that prevented the sample from being collected, among other causes. Under the PCR notes, when there was a positive result, analysts occasionally noted whether the signal was “light,” “moderate,” or “strong.” 

Alert Level Definitions

The university outlines three different alert levels: low/vigilance level, medium/precursor level, and high/outbreak level. Low/vigilance level is the “normal” alert level, with the usual COVID-19 safety protocols in place. Medium/precursor level is reached in a building following two days of consecutive positive results. At this level, a message is sent to all residents and staff of the building advising them to wear masks, reduce their contacts, get tested, and report any positive results to Case Management. The alert returns to low/vigilant following four consecutive days of negative results. The high/outbreak alert level is reached when two or more residents report testing positive; thus, transition to this alert level is not directly through wastewater testing but is instead through Case Management. McGill’s guidelines indicate that “the alert level to which the building transitions will depend on current wastewater testing results.” 

These definitions and guidelines indicate that if a singular positive result is found, residents and staff of the building are not notified, and there is no update made to the wastewater testing website. The data collected revealed that this happened several times over the course of the semester; a positive result was found on one day, and no one in the corresponding residence was notified, nor was the website updated.

The guidelines also don’t take into account the prevalence of inconclusive results. For example, in a situation where a positive result is followed by an inconclusive result the next day, the alert level will not be changed. Testing between January 26 and January 28 at NRH yielded positive-inconclusive-positive results; however, the alert level was not raised because there were not two consecutive days of positive results. Email correspondence and meeting minutes obtained by the Daily show that research directors and those in the Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) were considering adjusting the definition for the medium/precursor level to account for a situation such as this in early February, but the project’s page does not reflect that the definition was redefined, and inconclusive results remain unexplained. 

Alert levels sent to those in residence alert them of protocols to follow when the alert level is raised, but these do not offer insight into the state of the outbreak. Uncovered email correspondence between Case Management and Student Housing and Hospitality Services revealed that there was a confirmed positive case in NRH on November 23 following two days of consecutive positive test results. However, the email sent to residents on November 23 notifying residents that the alert level was raised did not disclose the positive case in the building. 

COVID-19 in Residences

A current resident of NRH told the Daily that as of December 2, residents are no longer receiving emails about alert levels and protocols. Now, this information is only posted on the university’s website. “To my knowledge, the alert levels haven’t led to any actual changes in measures,” the resident wrote: “if anything, the measures have become more relaxed.” The past few weeks have seen an outbreak of COVID-19 at McGill, with a staggering 473 cases most recently reported on campus. On March 23, students in residences were alerted that there were no more isolation rooms available and that those who tested positive would have to isolate in their own rooms. 

When recently reporting her positive case, the aforementioned resident of NRH was instructed by case management to book a hotel room or double-mask around her roommate, who had tested negative for COVID-19. “Not the smartest since masks don’t work indefinitely, and we sleep about five feet from each other,” she commented. 

The post Wastewater Testing Explained appeared first on The McGill Daily.

At the rally, calls for “Free, free, Palestine!,” “No peace on stolen land,” and “the students, united, will never be divided” bounced off the exterior walls of the James Administration Building, echoing through campus. Attendees waved Palestinian flags, while one individual mounted the scaffolding in front of the building’s entrance to lead the crowd in chants. Multiple speakers delivered speeches to the crowd, celebrating the passing of the Palestine Solidarity Policy, shaming the university, and encouraging SSMU to stand its ground. 

The Palestine Solidarity Policy was passed in the most recent SSMU referendum, announced March 21. The policy mandates that SSMU boycott corporations complicit in settler-colonial apartheid against Palestinians and advocate for the university to do the same, that SSMU campaign for the university to publicly condemn Canary Mission and other surveillance or smear campaigns against Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students, and that SSMU form a Palestine Solidarity Comittee, among other points. The referendum received a 71.4 per cent “yes” vote, meaning it was passed with a supermajority. 

“It’s the first initiative to actually represent and make Palestinian activists and their allies feel seen and supported on campus,” commented Erin*, an SPHR member, on the policy. They continued to tell the Daily that it’s the bare minimum that Palestinian activists are emboldened to “advocate without fear of repurcussions, fear of falling to a smear campaign, or just being blatantly doxxed.” 

In the MRO announcement, Labeau claimed that the policy echoes the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. He continued to characterize it “as an initiative that can only bring more division to our community,” arguing that the policy will “create excessive polarization in our community, encourage a culture of ostracization and disrespect due to students’ identity,” and is “in contradiction with the university’s values of inclusion, diversity, and respect.” 

“I’d like to draw attention back to our policy and ask where exactly in that policy do we threaten Jewish identity,” Erin commented, “where we promote discrimination, and how sanctioning [and] divesting from companies complicit in settler colonialism is going to affect students on campus.”

Furthermore, Labeau claimed that the initiatives described in the policy are “in contradiction with the principles expressed by SSMU in its own constitution.” He explained that he had communicated this to SSMU leadership and “advised them to take prompt and appropriate remedial action.” At the March 24 Legislative Council meeting, SSMU President Darshan Daryanani, who was unable to attend live, shared a message with the council explaining that Labeau had sent him a Notice of Default on March 22 in regard to the MoA. According to article 12.2 of the MoA, in the event of such a default, the defaulting party has 30 working days to “remedy such default.” 

In his notice, Labeau allegedly claimed that “in no way can such a policy be considered to ‘facilitate communication and interaction between all students from all McGill communities’ or to ‘act in the best interests of [SSMU’s] Members as a whole.’ It will also clearly lead to discrimination based on characteristics such as race, national or ethnic origin, and religion.” Daryanani commented that “[SSMU] requires a certain degree of autonomy to effectively carry out our roles, and we fear that the statement made by McGill University severely encroaches on this ability.” 

“Democracy that McGill has championed so much ends where discourse that challenges the administration begins,” said Erin. “That’s such a fucked up, fragile demonstration of democracy […] it reveals that McGill does not actually champion democracy, but only extends it to narratives that don’t threaten its position,” they continued.

In the MRO, Labeau further communicated that if SSMU leadership fails to “take prompt and appropriate remedial action […] the University will terminate this Memorandum of Agreement.” Daryanani comments that the threat to terminate the MoA is of “particular concern.” The MoA allows SSMU to work alongside the university on many matters, namely the assessment and collection of fees from students and the operation of university accounts for such fees. Essentially, the termination of the MoA would prevent SSMU from receiving the fees that it currently solicits. 

“Anything that can actually bring some form of representation to Palestinians is deemed as controversial […] it’s ridiculous,” says Erin. According to them, the terms outlined in the policy are necessary, “and for McGill to condemn that […] and for that to be conflated with antisemitism, [it is] very clear on McGill’s part that it’s willing to do absolutely nothing for Palestinian students on campus.”

* Name changed to protect anonymity.

The post “We cannot stay silent” appeared first on The McGill Daily.

It was a Thursday night when we met Dameer at Else’s. He gave us both a hug as we stood among the snow, briefly chatting before turning our attention to the queue outside the door. We decided to head elsewhere, and a walk down St. Laurent brought us to a cozy pub on Prince-Arthur. We were seated at a table next to a club’s trivia night, which became a running joke throughout the evening… “I feel like this is what my parents think I do on a weekend,” he joked. 

The McGill Daily (MD): What kind of music do you listen to? Let’s start with that.

Dameer Khan (DK): You know, that’s like a crazy question to ask a musician because it’s everything all the time. I get really engrossed with whoever I’m listening to. Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of Dionne Warwick, I love Dionne Warwick with all of my heart. I’ve been listening to Dionne Warwick too much. I’m going through a bit of a break up right now, that’s why. It’s great, just like self deprecating, gets in your feels. I’ve also listened to a lot of Dijon, a producer out in LA. Listening to a lot of [Montreal-based] rapper Skiifall, he’s my favorite artist in town right now. Yeah, it changes all the time.

MD: What does your songwriting process look like?

DK: It changes every time. Sometimes it starts with a tune, sometimes it starts with words. My song “Sun” started with a Charles Bukowski poem…I don’t know if that’s a red flag or whatever. I have Nietszche tattoos, that’s a red flag, too. I’m full of red flags. I’m not into Nietzsche anymore, I half regret these. 

So I was reading a Charles Bukowski poem, and he was talking about something along the lines of using knives as a metaphor for trauma. He was like, “this knife was stuck into me in 1971 when this girl got me, this knife was stabbed into me in 1953 when my mother did whatever to me.” I thought that was really fun. So then I wrote the line “Stick your steely knives from 1985.” My song is about familial generational trauma – my mom, who grew up in a very abusive household, had knives stuck into her in 1985 when she was a kid, and she took them out and stuck them into me. And that’s how trauma moves from generation to generation.

So sometimes it starts with a word, and then I’m really inspired by that, and a whole song will come out of that. Sometimes it’s a tune. Sometimes I hum a melody in my head or I find a riff on my guitar. And once you get good enough at music, melody starts to sound like words. Certain consonants and certain syllables and certain words will fall perfectly. You develop a sort of instinct of translating melodies into words and seeing what works.  

MD: How long have you been playing music?

DK: I come from a very musical family. My father’s a musician; he [and his brother are] in a very famous band in Bangladesh, Renaissance. My dad put me in guitar classes when I was nine or ten, I think. I started producing around 14 or 15, started uploading stuff around 15, 16, 17. And at 18 I got my record deal. 

I grew up in Bangladesh, and in 2017 I moved to Malaysia. I lived in Malaysia for four years, and then I lived in Ghana for a few months. The Bangladeshi music industry is very underdeveloped, so I knew I would never be able to make it just from Bangladesh. It’s changing now, but it felt like that when I was a kid. So as soon as I started gaining some confidence in my production, I would send it to big YouTube channels, labels, music blogs, and stuff like that. I would send them as little Hail Marys. I just kept sending them and years passed by and one of them finally replied. And that’s the company that eventually signed me.

MD: We saw on your Instagram that you recently left your label. Why did you decide to go indie?

DK: The label setting didn’t work for me. It took a really long time to put out my first EP, For We Are Distant. They were lovely people, though, and taught me everything I know about the music industry. It was a great stepping stone; I think if you’re a young artist, there’s nothing wrong with getting that initial deal to get your first project out. So you get good quality studio sessions, photoshoots, music videos and stuff like that. It’s a good first step to take. Then when you gain your control, you can always go indie. It’s never been easier to go indie.

MD: Why do you say that, that it’s never been easier to go indie?

DK: The music industry as we know it really sort of starts in the ’50s. And the thing about music contracts – and I have a feeling contracts in any creative field – is that they don’t stay up to date with current events. The contracts artists get when signed to a label are often quite archaic. They’re templates from contracts that were written decades ago. Slowly, slowly things change and things get added. Like, when MP3’s first came along, you started having MP3 clauses. When streaming first came along, you had piracy clauses and download clauses. When CDs started going away, you had less words about physical sales. But they lag behind significantly. So labels would give you a deal, let’s say you get 15 per cent? Fifteen per cent to 20 per cent is an average deal these days for an artist. But back then, you had to pay for shipping of your vinyls, for vinyl pressing, for various distribution, you had to pay each vinyl store the specific rights to sell your product. There are various other costs and certain things used to cost a lot more.

But as the world has digitized and the music industry has developed, labels have lesser overhead and lesser costs. Most labels don’t even press vinyl anymore, it’s all online. You just need to upload something, pay the distributor to plug it to Spotify playlists. How that works is that you have artists, you have labels and you have the streaming companies, but there’s a middleman between the streaming companies, and those are distributors. So most of the major labels have in-house distribution. If you go to a smaller label, chances are they work with an independent distributor, the biggest of which is called The Orchard. That’s who I work with right now, and who I used to work with when I was with my label. 

So to this day, labels don’t have the cost they used to, but they’re still going to hand you a contract that’s similar to what they used to be in the 80’s. They’re handing you an archaic contract, but the situation is different.

But today we have SoundCloud. Today we have Distro Kid. You don’t need to pay a distributor anymore, you can pay through Distro Kid and anybody can upload to Spotify. You get people blowing up on TikTok all the time now. My manager has a distribution deal with The Orchard, so I don’t need a label to send to [them], I can send them myself because [they are] an independent distributor that allows anybody to set up deals with them. 

The other really enticing thing about being indie is that you can create your own team. So we have a freelance graphic designer right now. As this project starts to go and we start to make more money, we’re going to start to bring more people on board: an independent social media manager, an independent PR person, an independent brand dealership person or sync person. You have that autonomy. You have that modularity where you can move things around and you can make your own team. 

Imagine, I grew up in Bangladesh and my label was based in Berlin. I love them, but they’re all white boys. If I’m indie, I could construct my own POC team full of people from parts of the world that understand what I went through and understand my worldview and my lived experience. So that’s how the music industry is changing, and it’s great. I’m all for it. This is the golden age for music, or is at least on a precipice of being a true golden age I think.

MD: Tell us about your new song, “Bashbo Bhalo.”

DK: It’s my first independent release, and my first song in full Bangla, my native language. It’s a song I’m super, super proud of. It’s a story about an old man who’s just lost his wife. He’s at the end of his life and he’s been married to her for so long, that now that she’s not in his life anymore, he’s in a limbo. He’s confronting matters of death and existentialism and love. But it’s not a longing for death, it’s more like, “I can’t wait to be with you again, so when death comes rapping on my door, I would take him in with open arms because the only thing that matters to me is to be with you.” This was written during a time when a lot of elder relatives were passing away from [COVID-19] in Bangladesh, and it just made me think, like, “what happens when you lose someone that you love so much and what happens when both of you get sick with COVID and one of you passes before the other and you’re like, is it coming for me, too, maybe I kind of hope it’s coming for me because I’m in pain.” So, it’s about “one day I’m going to hear the tune of your voice again,” and stuff like that. It’s an optimistic song in the end. 

MD: How do you incorporate language into your music?

DK: In my EP, I had seven songs; all of them were in English except “Amaar Jaan,” which was mostly in English, only the chorus was in Bangla. “Amaar Jaan” didn’t do the best streaming wise, but it sure did the best cultural impact wise in Bangladesh. That’s the song that put me on the map in Dhaka. [In the Dhaka scene,] that’s the song that everyone really got to know me through. And it’s [definitely] my most popular song in Dhaka. I did my first ever live show this winter and that was my last song, and it was electric. Everybody knew every word; it was crazy.

MD: How have the places you’ve lived influenced your creative process?

DK: Wherever I go, I try to absorb as much of the artistic culture I can –  not just musical, but film and art and dance. I really want to be a multidisciplinary artist.

When I went to Malaysia, I was introduced to so much Chinese music, Japanese music, Korean music, Thai music, Cambodian music, Indonesian music, Sri Lankan music, all sorts of cool shit. And then when I went to Ghana, that was awesome because it opened me up to the music of Africa. I’m primarily a guitarist, I’d say; some of the traditional folk guitarists from Mali are so interesting, they play the guitar in a completely different way, with different tunings and stuff. The desert rock that’s coming out of the sub-Saharan area of Africa, like Niger and Chad. There’s a band called Mdou Moctaur, which is a band from Niger, they’re absolutely awesome. They make desert rock. Then I got introduced to people like Tony Allen and Fela Kuti, who are like the fathers of Afrobeat. And then you get more into reggae, modern African hip hop, African trap, African drill and African folk music. It’s been absolutely wonderful. I try to just take in as much as I can. I’ve been to the UK a lot too, I love UK music so much. Listen, this is like my world. I surround myself with as much music as I can 24/7.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

The post An Exclusive Interview with Singer-Songwriter Dameer Khan appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Principal Suzanne Fortier started with remarks on the subject of campus updates, government relations, and community relations. She referenced Quebec’s plan to lift most COVID-19 restrictions by March 14, explaining that the university community will soon be receiving correspondence as to how this will take effect at McGill. She claimed that since McGill’s resumption of in-person activities on January 24, “we have not been informed of any significant outbreaks in our classrooms or in our research activities.” She continued to say that decision-making related to COVID-19 guidelines has been transferred from the Emergency Operations Center to the Operations Resumption Committee for the foreseeable future. At the municipal level, Fortier claimed that Montreal mayor Valerie Plante has been very supportive of the university – specifically of the university’s initiatives regarding the New Vic Project and the Fiat Lux library renovations. At the federal level, Fortier explained that Marc Miller, Minister of Crown Indigenous Relations, has also expressed support for the New Vic project. Despite backlash from the Montreal community in regard to the project, Fortier claimed that Miller is “very supportive of the New Vic Project, and will help us, serving as a champion in Ottawa.” Fortier stated that the university started decontamination work on the Royal Victoria site the week of January 24. 

Next, Christopher Buddle and Angela Campbell, the co-chairs of the Ad Hoc Advisory Committee of Senate on COVID Academic Planning and Policies, presented the committee’s report. Campbell reported that since the January 24 senate meeting, the Ad Hoc Advisory Committee has discussed at length the questions of 1) accommodations for students and instructors who have to miss class on account of issues related to COVID-19, and 2) whether to require instructors to offer recordings of lectures and provide online synchronous participation for students who are not physically in the classroom, and how to implement such a requirement. In a January 31 memo sent to Provost Christopher Manfredi, the committee recommended that, for this term, instructors should continue to provide accommodations for students who are not able to attend class due to COVID-19. At the same time, however, “there could be no mandatory or required recording or online synchronous participation for a range of important reasons,” per Campbell. The committee also stressed that there would be cases where it would not be possible to have accommodations in the form of recordings or online synchronous participation on account of the particularities of the class or the learning activity in question. The Provost accepted the advice the same day the memo was received and subsequently communicated it to the faculties, who were asked to pass along the information to all faculty, staff, and students. Campbell stressed that this memo only pertains to the Winter 2022 term and that it “has provided greater reassurances to all members of the community about where things stand for this term.” 

Buddle then transitioned to an open discussion, seeking input and feedback from senate members in regards to the committee’s new mandates. He asked, 1) “Are there any particular signals or points of concern that should be on the minds of the ad hoc committee between now and the end of term?,” 2) “What measures in place pursuant to the ad hoc committee ought Senate to recommend through a more long-term lens?,” and 3) “What are the views [on the trend of] a move away from centrally administered final examinations as a mode of student assessment?” The Senate was then split into nine breakout sessions, reconvening after 15 minutes for group discussion. 

After hearing feedback from each breakout group, Buddle remarked that the idea of gathering more data on aspects of assessment would be feasible in collaboration with Teaching and Learning Services. He commented that “it’ll be interesting to think about as an institution how we think of especially those very traditional gymnasium style final exams […] I liked the thought of thinking about multiple modes of assessment and having some parameters but also some flexibility.” He then acknowledged concerns regarding updating the university’s classroom technology to enhance remote learning, and how that is something in discussion in the Ad Hoc Advisory Committee. Buddle continued to comment on COVID-19 accommodations mentioned: “elements of those are things to consider more long term as well, but there’s always trade-offs when we talk about accommodations, and it puts additional strain on other parts of the system.” Finally, Buddle discussed the point made about COVID-19 regulations and compliance, and referenced a video made by the committee regarding managing aspects of compliance with masks as a community member in ways that aren’t confrontational. He concluded by urging Senate members to send further feedback to the Ad Hoc co-chairs or to the Secretary-General, so they may return to the next senate meeting with a follow-up. 

Next, Senator Manfredi presented a report from the Senate Nominating Committee containing three items requiring the senate’s approval: 1) a set of appointments to the McGill Equity Diversity and Inclusion Committee and the senate committee on Physical development, 2) proposed appointments to statutory selection committees and university tenure committees, and 3) a proposal for the election of senate representatives to serve on the advisory committee for the selection of the principal and vice chancellor. All three motions passed, concluding Manfredi’s report. 

Professor Patricia Faison Hewlin then presented a report from the Office of the Ombudsperson for Students, which provides dispute resolution services to students, faculty, and staff. She highlighted that the overall number of concerns raised by students increased by 45 per cent; the categories that experienced the highest increase were academics, finance, and discrimination. Hewlin expressed that power dynamics often inhibit students from expressing their concerns due to fears of reprisal, offending the professor, or being considered a troublemaker – “the majority of students that come to my office are concerned about raising concerns.” She stressed the importance of creating policies that promote safe disclosure. She concluded by urging senate members to “take the time and evaluate issues that come to your office […] in a way that they’re not viewed as one-offs […] because when that occurs, sometimes those issues [don’t] go beyond to really evaluating the unit’s role.” 

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