As a writer and editor of The Daily, I got to know my city and my world in a way I never could have from undergraduate classes in McGill’s huge lecture halls. In 2007-2008, we used to joke around the office that The Daily was McGill’s journalism school. From one vantage point, the office certainly does look like a teaching institution – students learn from one another in a non-hierarchical, equal opportunity setting. From another, The Daily is a service to McGill students and the Montreal community at large, offering an independent media portrayal of issues that are often made invisible in the mainstream press. It is because of both these roles that The Daily is an institution worth preserving.    
 
The Daily makes students into grown-ups. McGill Daily writers and editors have a responsibility both to the people they write about and the people they write for to deliver accessible stories. I took this responsibility so seriously that it kept me up at night. When I edited at The Daily, my stress dreams always revolved around typos, stories falling through, and misinformation getting through the four sets of eyes that edit each and every article printed in The Daily’s pages.

Sometimes, my nightmares came true. We don’t always get it right – few papers do. But the commitment that I saw from my fellow editors and writers is unparalleled by anything I’ve seen out here in the “real world” in the year since I left The Daily. Editors and writers often made themselves available at all hours of Wednesday and Friday night to make third and fourth edits on stories before they went to print. We sought out writers from different departments and demographics. We sat with our writers while editing their stories in the hopes of seeing them improve. We spent the first half hour of every weekly meeting looking back at the previous week’s papers to see where we went wrong and what we could do better next time. We chased after stories we thought were important, and we attended to the ones writers and the McGill community brought to our attention.

Sometimes, we wrote because we saw the smokescreen around an issue that deserved more comprehensive and critical consideration. Other times, we wrote because we wanted to represent the stories of people whose stories don’t come through in the mainstream media.

In the year that I lived in the windowless McGill Daily basement, I was a student of The McGill Daily School of Journalism. It was the most valuable aspect of my four years at McGill. Every student at McGill deserves that same opportunity.

Shannon Kiely was The Daily’s Coordinating News editor, 2008-09.

Read more alumni letters here.

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Derina Man, SSMU’s Environment Commissioner, held a meeting Friday with SSMU executive members and other students to shape guidelines regarding prices, menu options, and sustainability that SSMU will present to parties who submit proposals for the space. The deadline is February 1 and SSMU Council will decide on a new food vendor in March.

Man said she was pleased with the students’ input from the meeting and hoped to incorporate their suggestions – including more organic and local foods – into the contract with the future vendor.

“The students suggested vegan and vegetarian options; they asked ‘why can’t you find soymilk on campus?’” Man said, adding, “There was also a lot of interest in plates and minimizing waste.”

Tenants like Tiki-Ming in Shatner’s second-floor cafeteria offer a 10-cent discount to students who bring own their own plates or use one supplied by the Plate Club.

Although waste reduction efforts haven’t yet reached the first floor due to the Plate Club’s limited resources, Man explained that SSMU is committed to coordinating efforts with the Club to make plates available there.

Like many food vendors on campus, Caferama serves food in styrofoam containers and customers add sugar from individual containers to their single-use coffee cups, generating a considerable amount of garbage.

Man hoped the negotiation process between SSMU and prospective vendors would ensure that the third floor’s increasingly environmentally friendly practices trickle down to the Caferama space.

“We want to maintain an environmental standpoint during the negotiation process,” Man said.

“In the development of a new business, we want to see sustainability stay on the forefront.”

Imad Barake, SSMU VP Finance & Operations, explained that the Society has already received one proposal from a group of students interested in giving the space an environmental facelift.

“The students who approached us about a student-run café proposed an environmentally-friendly concept using fair-trade coffee and local food,” Barake said.

Barake was enthusiastic about the employment and managerial opportunities a student-run café could offer to the student body, and urged any student groups interested in renting the space to email him.

Yet the McGill administration has admitted that the decision to shut down and then assume financial control over the Architecture Café – formerly the only student-run café on campus – was in line with the University’s plan to centralize food services on campus.

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According to the McGill Model Gros teaches, the big picture rules.

The McGill Model of Nursing – a health care approach developed in the 1970s in the Faculty of Nursing under Professor Moyra Allan – privileges the relationship between nurses and families, and takes a holistic look at patient care. According to the McGill School of Nursing web site, the McGill Model of Nursing encourages patients and their families to participate more actively in treatment.

“Nurses are caregivers and families are caregivers, so we have a natural connection…. If we can see the strength in [the family], we can see the strength in our profession,” Gros said in an interview.

This family-centric ideology of the Model is why Gros invited Simon Boyer, a 12-year-old boy diagnosed with an ulcerative colon condition, Crohn’s, this past summer, to give a presentation at her Practice of Nursing Part 1 class last Wednesday.

Crohn’s disease, a chronic auto-immune disorder of the digestive tract, usually manifests itself as an inflammation of the bowels. Although management of symptoms is possible through treatment, there is currently no known cure.

While hospitalized at the Montreal Children’s Hospital, Simon worked on a Powerpoint presentation called ‘’Me and My Crohn’s,’’ which he presented to the class of 21 male and female students.

The students, who were floored by Simon’s presentation, queried him, his ten-year-old brother Ethan, and his mother Genny about how their lives changed when a family member got sick. From their questions, it was clear the students were raised on the McGill Model, and believed strongly in the power of active family support to heal patients.

Simon mentioned that when diagnosed, he wondered if Crohn’s was fatal, a topic the class took particular interest in during the question-answer session.

“[The possibility of dying] was the first thing that went through my mind – ‘I have a disease.’ They said I could die and that made me really nervous. But the doctors told me I’d die only if I don’t take meds, which gave me motivation to take the meds,” Simon said.

A student later told Gros how inspiring it was to listen to Genny and Ethan’s stories of coping with Simon’s illness. It was difficult for Genny to watch Simon in so much pain when doctors performed a colonoscopy on the ulcerated part of his bowel. It was an exhausting and invasive procedure that required Simon to stay on clear fluids and take vile-tasting laxatives. Every time Simon was hospitalized, Ethan was scared it was that the last time he’d ever see his brother.

Gros thanked the family for their responses, letting them know that this sort of insight into their personal feelings was exactly the kind of information her students needed so that they could learn to become more effective nurses.

Gros then led the class in acknowledging the strength of the Boyer family in a time of crisis. Positive feedback on family caregiving is central to the McGill model and sometimes lacking in traditional doctor’s visits, which focus on medical strategies or unsatisfactory test results.

Looking back on her 24 years in the McGill nursing faculty, Gros pointed out that it’s taken a long time for the health-care community to recognize the value of the McGill Model. McGill itself resisted establishing a PhD program that would allow nurses to develop and refine their own theoretical approach. The nursing PhD program was finally approved in 1994.

“[The McGill] School of Nursing fought very hard to get a PhD program because we wanted the ability to direct research and develop the theory [of the McGill Model]” Gros said.

She attributed the resistance of the academic community to a nursing PhD program to the way society sees women and nurses.

“The biggest hurdle is still society’s view of women. Unfortunately, nursing has not always been valued by society – it’s related to women’s work, mothering and nurturing,” she said. “Under the hierarchy of the health-care system, nurses were always seen as assistants who carried out the doctor’s orders, handmaids for the doctors, mini-doctors. But we are doing something completely different.’’

The McGill Model, as a dynamic, ever-expanding model, is a result of the reevaluation of the nurse’s role in health provisioning. A study performed soon after the PhD program’s establishment showed that patients treated with the McGill Model have more favourable health outcomes.

In explanation of it’s growing acceptance over the past 30 years, Gros offered that members of the health-care community have become increasingly accepting of more holistic care. She mentioned the recovery-based model in psychiatry, which values patient goals over those of the system, as another example illustrating how patient-based care is gaining momentum.

The post The McGill Model, 30 years in appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Southeast Asia on a Shoestring was so crucial to my six-week trip through Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam in 2007 that my boyfriend, Ian, made a bus full of travellers wait in Hanoi on our way out of town while he ran close to a kilometre back to our hotel room to retrieve it. Ian found our forgotten Yellow Bible glowing under the bed, full of maps and recommendations that we didn’t think we could travel without.

When I look back on my trip, I often return to our decision to go back for our Lonely Planet guide. Our Yellow Bible knew so much more than we did about Bangkok restaurants and sleepy beach resorts that until that point, we had never put it down. Maybe if we’d left it under the bed at the Lonely Planet-recommended hotel in Hanoi, the pictures from our remaining three weeks wouldn’t have looked so similar to ones posted by friends on Facebook who did the Southeast Asia circuit with their very own copy of the travel guide in tow.

I thought the Yellow Bible read like a real life choose-your-own adventure, and that it would be impossible for anyone to replicate the decisions Ian and I made from the options in the book. But as I swapped stories with travellers my age on the road and back home, I started to realize just how unoriginal my trip had been.

For starters, I was one of countless university-student-age travelers who flock to Southeast Asia from all over the world. Emely Oliveira, who has helped university students book trips for eight years with Voyages Campus, said she’s seen travel to Southeast Asia rise steadily. Students come into her McGill office every day asking about cheap flights to Bangkok, Vietnam, or Cambodia.

“Europe is still a killer, but there is a lot of demand to go to Southeast Asia. People who have already done Europe will turn to [Southeast Asia],” Oliveira said.

Stats back up what Oliveira has observed over the years; according to Tourism Authority Thailand, 19,165 Canadian tourists hopped off international flights to the steamy air outside Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport in January 2007.

Even the recent bombings in Bangkok, which prompted the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) to issue a level-wwwwwwwwwtwo warning (exercise high degree of caution), haven’t stalled interest in the region, according to a representative at the Thai Consulate in Ottawa who processes visas for stays of more than 30 days.

“I have people who go every year, sometimes twice a year. And that’s stayed about the same [after the bombings]. They still go because they enjoy the country,” she said.

Well of course. The danger of the unknown is part of the thrill.

Kristen Wilmot knows travelling in Southeast Asia isn’t always easy, and that’s exactly what makes her proud of her trip. She did the Southeast Asia circuit ultimate justice. Most backpackers I met had only visited half the countries she’d knocked off her list in the span of two months: Laos, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Malaysia. When I caught Wilmot on the phone for an interview, she was browsing pictures of Facebook to jolt her memory of the trip she took by herself in September 2007.

“I did get sick and I got stuff stolen out of my backpack. When I left, a coworker told me he thought that was the last time he was ever going to see me,” Wilmot said.

Ryan O’Connor, U3 Anthropology, who crowned a short whirl around Southeast Asia with a ten-week volunteering post teaching English on the Thai-Burmese border, prefers developing world destinations to Europe or the States.

“[Travel to the third world] is cheaper and it broadens my horizons much more than going to places where things are safer. Travelling in Europe is easier; everything works on time and there are fewer hassles. But in the third world, there’s an array of challenges,” he said.

O’Connor spoke contentedly about food poisoning in Thailand and late buses in Guatemala, experiences he said he came to appreciate with time.

Chuck Thompson, seasoned travel journalist and author of Smile When You’re Lying (2007), a collection of tidbits, observations, and rants about travelling that mainstream tourist magazines just wouldn’t print, thinks Southeast Asia’s appeal for university-age students applies to all poor countries where language barriers and cultural difference make travel challenging.

“Rich people spend a lot of money to look at poor people, and you kind of earn your travel stripes by suffering through hardships along the way: meeting a con artist, getting ripped off or lost somewhere. Adventures happen in places with a different economy and political system,” Thompson said in an interview.

Thompson’s got a point. For months after I got home, I never grew tired of telling my friends that when our motorbike crashed in Pai, a town in northern Thailand, locals fixed it up so we could make it to our elephant riding appointment on time. I sat myself down on the elephant’s head when we arrived, lodging my knee – gashed open from the accident – behind his ears. I thought I was earning my travel stripes that day, one baby elephant ear slap at a time.

But in all the times I told the elephant-motorbike story, I always left something out. The Pai doctors and nurses at the hospital where we later went to get our wounds cleaned told us they treat Western tourists who crash their motorbikes every day. Ian and I rented a motorbike because Lonely Planet told us to. Without one, the authors cautioned, accessing the waterfalls and elephant reserves surrounding Pai is next to impossible. It took me a few months to let go of the glory of the motorbike accident: it just wasn’t the same once I realized I had earned my travel stripes the same way as thousands of others.

Neil Manning, who let his Lonely Planet Mekong Delta navigate his six months on the Southeast Asia circuit in 2007, worried that his guidebook’s pages even led him to the experience that felt most unique: trekking with a local guide spontaneously in Laos.

“You kind of feel like everyone is following this one route and it’s hard to get off the beaten path. Lonely Planet tells you the best things to do and it’s hard to find something to do that’s not in there. You can go on a trek with a local but the idea to do that is in the book,” Manning said.

Thompson dedicates a whole chapter to Lonely Planet in Smile When You’re Lying. He recounts an anecdote about venturing out to a Lonely Planet-recommended Bangkok café located far from the tourist hubs, only to find it full of backpackers with their doggie-eared guidebooks next to their plates.

“You are set up with an expectation and you’re looking for that. [Guidebooks] tell you what you are gonna get, and that is kind of what you get,” Thompson said.

Not only can Lonely Planet-guided travel feel unoriginal and artificial, it can also be problematic because it directs tourist dollars specifically to the hotspots it plugs. Tourist dollars would be better spent spread out across Southeast Asian regions and shared between local businesses.

Lonely Planet culture has a life of its own. O’Connor effortlessly stereotypes Lonely Planet travellers as sloppily dressed 20-somethings artificially concerned with connecting with locals. Even though the guidebooks include historical information and notes about cultural sensitivity, some diehard readers skip right to the part about Koh Phan Ngan’s Full Moon Party and the strip clubs on Patpong Road.

“If they read all their Lonely Planet from front to back, maybe we’d have more respectful travelers. [In Thailand], there are ghettos of tourists who create their own culture: they want to go and enjoy themselves. It’s free-for-all sex, free-for-all drinking, and free-for-all drugs. [That kind of tourism] doesn’t have anything to do with culture,” said Christine Mackay, founder of Crooked Trails, an educational non-profit organization based in Seattle that organizes sustainable trips, which combine volunteering and tourism to stimulate the economic growth of local economies. Crooked Trails’ Thailand trip includes combating sexual slavery among the hill tribe people and replanting mangrove swamps in Andaman fishing villages.

As Mackay continues on about tourists that swarm Thai villages happily snapping photos of people they don’t have time to get to know, I start to realize what it takes to make travel meaningful. Lots of people have got aspects of it right: it needs to be ecologically responsible, culturally respectful, and should channel money to the local poor rather than to big corporations. But more than anything, it needs to tap into local knowledge about what to do and where to go. I pushed through mob after mob of pushy touts in the Southeast Asian cities I visited, confident in dismissing their skills as guides because I thought everything I needed to know was just waiting to be read in my Yellow Bible. Without it, I would have been completely dependent on local people to help me get around, and my tourist dollars could have pumped life into the informal economy.

The post Every backpacker’s bible appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The American girl was nervous. She looked a little shell-shocked, maybe a tinch homesick, and I started to wonder if there was anything I could do to make Montreal less scary to her. I had just come back from a summer in Europe where a compassionate Londoner had put me up on his couch for three weeks and a French girl in San Sebastian shared her apartment when there wasn’t a free hotel or hostel bed in the city. My hosts showed me where to eat and party, and I felt more safe and oriented in those two cities than any others I visited.

I wanted to give back, befriend this freshman so I could take her to the oratory and Old Montreal, to tour little known neighbourhoods, and to sample Tibetan dumplings or Mauritian noodles.

I waited until the next week to offer myself up as Montreal-guide-extraordinaire. This time, she walked into class giggling with two other girls and she sat with them on the other side of the auditorium.

It took me almost six months at McGill before someone explained to me what residence was. Then I finally understood that the American girl had no doubt bonded with the giggle girls on her floor, making my services completely unnecessary.

The few acquaintances I made at McGill would always run into people en route from McLennan to Leacock, and explain to me that they met in rez. It seemed what residence you spent your first year in was almost as paramount to the McGill experience as what major you studied. Soon, I understood that residence was a friendship goldmine, and that because I went to CEGEP and was a Quebecker, I had completely missed out.

See, Montrealers face a cruel and unforgiving dilemma. It’s laughably cheap to come to McGill and relatively easy to get in. One of the best schools in Canada is right at our doorstep, and we can even keep living with our parents! How can we refuse? And trust me, we don’t. With Concordia and Université de Montreal in the mix, I can count on one hand the number of people from my high school graduating class who went away for university.

But it’s undeniable that by missing that real first year of school, Quebec students miss out on a fundamental part of the university experience. My closest friends went to McGill, but every one of them was from Montreal. And no matter how close I became with an out-of-town student, I could never penetrate her rez clique.

No matter how willing I was to drop cash on cabs back from the St. Laurent strips or savvy on the metro, the fact I lived at home and out of the Ghetto always seemed to matter in my friendships with non-Quebec students.

Shannon Kiely is The Daily’s coordinating news editor. You can cheat on your Anglo cliques at news@mcgilldaily.com.

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The 18-to-27 set – confident and optimistic – seems to adore going to far-off places that have problems to fix. Voluntourism has become an institution. There’s an entire Lonely Planet guide dedicated to helping readers find an organization well suited to their talents and budget. 3.7 million Americans volunteered abroad in 2007, according to Corporation for National & Community Service.

But Matthew Hood and Devin Wells, the two photographers behind “Limbo,” know that not all volunteer abroad organizations are created equal, and some can help more than others.

Hood and Wells think Unyama, the camp they photographed, could benefit from a local approach that capitalizes on residents’ expertise and energy – aspects that are lacking in the work of the many organizations who try to address overarching problems in the community.

Proceeds from a silent auction at “Limbo” will be directed to Wells’s and Hood’s brain child: a community development program for Unyama that would work with camp residents on solutions to disease, violence, and malnutrition. They are inspired by projects in other camps in the region that focus on community farming co-ops, daycare, sports, and dance.

“The huts [in the camp] literally touch each other. Privacy is given up. You can’t fend for yourself; you can’t farm. You can’t go back home to farm. There are 20,000 people and half a dozen wells,” Hood said.

The residents of Unyama camp are Ugandans who have been internally displaced by the civil war between the rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the government. The LRA raids villages to build up its army, prompting the government to coral citizens to camps to minimize the risk of abduction.

Wells and Hood approached the Concordia Volunteer Abroad Program with the idea to shoot documentary photographs at Unyama. Pairing their photos with narratives about the faces captured, they hope the vernissage will awaken their audience to the reality facing internally displaced people in Uganda. The two worry that short Western news stories fail to communicate the human side of conflict.

“We read things in the news and it’s another earthquake, another tornado. What am I supposed to do? But if you really get into the person’s story, and relate to it, people can see themselves in it, and people’s minds can change hopefully for the better,” said Wells.

When Wells slept in the camp during his last week at Unyama, he learned things that were impossible to glean from the day trips they took there for the majority of the trip, while staying at a hotel four kilometres away.

“When I slept in the [camp], I got a full understanding of the breadth of people’s situation at night. Everyone is drunk, but the women get up early and go to bed early,” he said.

Hood and Wells are aware of the politics of the camera, of the way their photos can tell certain stories and keep others silent. Shooting on digital, Hood tried to take his camera out of the equation completely, hoping to capture pure moments of action. “I took the fly on the wall approach…. I feel like they are doing what they’d be doing if I wasn’t there. There is no presence of the camera,” Hood said.

Wells, who used film while at Unyama, took a different approach. “My approach is to try and create a relationship, I am present as a photographer. I want to have the intimacy to let them present themselves as who they are,” Wells said.

The vernissage features photos of men watching European soccer games in makeshift video halls and women who were mutilated in the conflict – blown up to almost life-size. The title, “Limbo,” channels the sense of stagnancy in the transition between conflict and peace, village, and camp.

The post Unyama through the lens appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The provincial election – falling smack in the middle of McGill’s exam period, and following on the heels of the federal and American elections – comes at a bad time for students, explained SSMU VP External Affairs Devin Alfaro.

“It’s unfortunate because we wanted to bring potential decision makers to McGill so [students] could gage who they will support,” he said.

Green Party candidate for Westmount—Saint Louis Patrick D’Aoust believed students today feel politically disempowered and urged for election reform.

“It would be nice to get more people here interested,” D’Aoust said. “The only time people are asked [what they think] is during an election. There’s no dialogue.”

D’Aoust said a good place to start would be challenging the Premier’s exclusive right to call an election, which allows the party in power to schedule a vote at politically opportune times. He also suggested increased consultation between politicians and the community throughout their time in office.

Catherine Emond, running for the Liberal party in the Plateau area, was happy to have one-on-one discussions with students.

“It was very intimate. It was nice to have the time to chat to students – to have a real conversation,” she said.

Thirty-year-old Emond thought it was important for young people to engage in politics because their priorities and perspectives can differ from the older generation. She was excited by the idea of representing her generation in the National Assembly.

“Voting takes a few minutes and it’s only a day. It’s a small investment, but it pays off. It makes a difference,” she said.

In her campaign, Emond has highlighted the changing demographics in the Plateau. She noted that the influx of new families in the area necessitates day-care services, breastfeeding rooms, and stroller-friendly sidewalks.

“The moms and dads of today aren’t the moms and dads of yesterday,” she said.

Québec Solidaire candidate for Westmount—Saint Louis Nadia Alexan downplayed the importance of her party’s pro-sovereignty agenda to curious students.

“We don’t have the same cowboy ideology they have in [western Canada],” Alexan said. “But let’s talk about the issues. Even if we get [elected] a referendum isn’t going to happen tomorrow.”

Alexan explained that Québec Solidaire wants to increase corporate tax, regulate private corporations, prioritize environmental protection over financial gain, and provide education and housing for all citizens.

“We believe the economy should be in the service of human beings, not vice versa,” Alexan said. “It’s one big mess in this country, with corporate greed and the collusion of our government.”

The event attracted six candidates: three Liberals, one Green, one Quebec Solidaire, and one Action Démocratique. No candidates from the Parti Québécois attended.

SSMU sent invitations to all the parties.

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Inside, Giovanni D’Amico, a middle-aged small businessman, was on trial for sexually assaulting Montreal sex workers between 2001 and 2008.

When D’Amico was originally charged in July, four sex workers had come forward to the police with accusations. But both the police and Stella – a Montreal organization created for and by sex workers – suspected D’Amico may have assaulted more women. They urged those with information to alert the police.

“We want to tell sex workers they have to bring complaints to the police [about violence and sexual abuse by clients]. It’s not a lost cause. Violence shouldn’t be part of the job,” said Elsa Le Maire, the director of Stella.

Three sex workers will testify against D’Amico in the trial.

The 25 women at the protest, staged by Stella, participated in solidarity with the sex workers abused by D’Amico.

Matthew McLauchlin, a member of the NDP’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and transexual (LGBTT) committee, encouraged Stella and the sex workers demonstrating, and commended the community for respecting their demands.

“It’s great that these complaints by sex workers have finally been taken seriously. It happens all too rarely,” McLauchlin said.

Dealing with police officers is often challenging for sex workers because prostitution is criminalized in Quebec, Le Maire said – though she was impressed with the way the police handled the D’Amico case.

“The police are becoming more and more responsive,” she said. “But for some sex workers, it’s a double-edged sword. They see the police as their enemy since sex work is criminal, but the police are also supposed to protect them.”

La Maire pointed to clauses in the criminal code – such as those that criminalize bawdy houses – that make sex work dangerous. According to Stella, current conditions hamper safety and make it difficult for sex workers to judge their clients.

Disturbed by the 50 sex workers who have disappeared from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, McLauchlin remarked on the national lack of attention paid to violence against sex workers.

“If 50 bankers went missing, it would be a national emergency. But since it’s sex workers, it’s allowed to pass in silence,” he said.

Sorouja Moll, a Concordia PhD student in history and gender studies, and attendee of the event, commended Stella for providing an inviting forum for often isolated sex workers.

“In the seventeenth century, prostitutes were flogged, and it was a spectacle. That type of abuse and brutality can become so normalized in our lexicon and it’s just accepted. [The trial] says that it’s wrong,” she said.

The post Demonstrators denounce violence in sex work appeared first on The McGill Daily.

“AIDS is the elephant in the room. No one wants to talk about it,” explained McGill Global AIDS Week coordinator Dasami Moodley, U3 Political Science. “It’s [a sexually transmitted infection (STI)], and you can get it from having sex. World AIDS Week at McGill is about starting conversation.”

Moodley hopes the events planned by the McGill AIDS Coalition (MCAC) will break down clichés and taboos attached to AIDS. She pointed to next Wednesday’s coffee house discussion with Philip Osano, a PhD candidate in geography, on HIV among eastern Africa’s Lake Victoria fishing communities.

“We want to make the student population more aware of special issues they wouldn’t otherwise be able to know about. Something students would[n’t] see on the news,” Moodley said.

Other events include a workshop Tuesday on being an ally to HIV-positive people and a documentary screening Monday of A Closer Walk, which tells the story of the human side of AIDS from Cambodia to Switzerland to South Africa.

“We want to bring a face to HIV that isn’t black, necessarily,” Moodley said.

Dr. Kenneth Mayer will give a keynote address next Friday that looks back on 30 years of progress and challenges of the global AIDS epidemic. Mayer is on the frontlines of research into microbicides, a gel applied to the vagina or rectum that doctors hope could protect against HIV. No effective microbicide has been developed as of yet.

Nikki Bozinoff, a former Daily editor who sat on the MCAC Global AIDS Week committee, explained that microbicides could empower women in the face of the AIDS epidemic.

“Women don’t have a choice whether their partners wear a condom. [If micobicides are developed], women can make a choice without their partner’s knowledge or consent,” said Bozinoff.

The theme of the 20th annual Global AIDS week is Take the Lead, a message Moodley considers particularly relevant to the McGill student body.

“As students, it’s very important we step up as youth activists,” she said.

Students gathered in the Shatner Building’s fourth-floor club space yesterday to train tabling staff. At the tables, students can buy AIDS ribbons or sign a petition urging the Canadian government to increase national donations to the Global AIDS fund and basic foreign aid.

Bearing in mind local populations, MCAC will distribute business cards at tables that encourage students to get tested for HIV. MCAC collaborated with Head & Hands, a community health centre in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, to offer students two days of free, anonymous AIDS testing.

In the four years Moodley has worked with MCAC, she has noticed that students are reluctant to get tested for HIV.

“You’ll get a Pap smear but people don’t get tested for HIV because they think it has nothing to do with them. [But] we want to get it into people’s faces.”

The post AIDS elephant in the room appeared first on The McGill Daily.

“When I go to the cafeteria, I feel like I’m on display. [Other students] stare at you. When you get up to leave, they take inventory of how much you’ve consumed. I try to be better than them. To deny more than they can,” she said.

Five years ago, Erica was diagnosed with perfection anxiety disorder and anorexia nervosa. Her condition improved greatly with the support of her parents and psychologist before she came to McGill, and now she blames its recent flare-up on her living conditions as a first-year student in an Upper Residence.

“I was okay at home. It was a more controllable environment, and there wasn’t the X-factor of 14 18-year-olds living with me on a floor,” she said.

According to Molson Hall floor fellow Anna Lambert – a registered nurse and upper-year student whose job is to help foster a sense of community in residence – there is at least one student suffering from an eating disorder at every McGill residence. In her two years as a floor fellow, Lambert has seen and heard of many students with eating disorders whose symptoms have worsened upon enrolling in residence.

“Usually they had a more supportive environment at home; parents and friends know their history and recognize their eating disorder,” said Lambert. “First year university is a fresh start, but [eating disorders] become more severe.”

Lambert also noticed a large percentage of students in residence halls with disordered eating habits, which encompasses all potentially dangerous eating patterns. She described students picking at meager portions of the cafeteria food and working out or fasting the day after binge drinking as common patterns.

On her wall in her single-room dorm, Erica charts the days she has gone without eating. Her fridge is stocked with take-away lunches and dinners from the BMH cafeteria, a compulsion she described as food hoarding.

Susan Campbell, the manager of Food Services at BMH, explained that their menu caters to the majority of students by offering a variety of balanced food choices.

But both Campbell and BMH’s staff dietician Monique Lauzon said that faced with so many choices, many students gain weight while living in residence.

“Students sometimes tend to overeat, students gain a little weight and that can maybe lead to compulsions,” Campbell said.

Working with a facilities that are 30-years-old, Campbell was looking forward to a renovation next year that will expand the steam table so a wider variety of hot entrees can be served.

Lambert made a presentation to all the floor fellows in August about recognizing disordered eating patterns. She urged the group to be more observant by eating with students and making referrals to the appropriate health professionals when an unhealthy pattern is identified.

But Lambert said floor fellows and others have been without appropriate referral resources as the Eating Disorder unit at McGill Mental Health Service (MMHS) Clinic was non-operational for the past year and a half.

When Erica approached MMHS in early September with a referral from both her hometown general practitioner and psychologist they requested an additional note from her psychiatrist before scheduling an appointment. Erica will sit in her first psychiatry appointment next week, more than two months since she walked into the clinic.

“I went [to MMHS] because I can’t do four years of not eating. Studying becomes near impossible. You eat so little that sometimes that you can’t think,” Erica said.

According to Denise Rochon, who is in charge of the MMHS eating disorder unit, they are in the process of restarting operations, but faced a rocky rebirth this year with its staff dietician on maternity leave.

Lauzon felt external psychiatric help was crucial to helping students with eating disorders.

“We are alerted by the floor fellows or the dons that a certain student is loosing a lot of weight and our red flag goes up. My implication [with those cases] is very limited because very often these students don’t want to come see us, unless they want to seek help they are more or less in denial,” Lauzon said.

In her clinical work with first years at MMHS, Rochon noticed a high level of competitiveness over body perfection.

“It is possible [eating disorders] will develop associated with a competition over marks – perfectionists are always looking at someone whose body is closer to perfection than one’s own – and the residence environment tends to encourage that,” she said, adding that McGill attracts perfectionists given its high acceptance standards for prospective students.

“I can study my ass off and still fail an exam, but I can control my eating. It becomes a game,” Erica said.

Erica has made a deal with other first years to skip dessert and work out three times a week to slim down before returning home for Christmas vacation.

Dr. Howard Steiger, director of the eating disorder program at the Montreal Douglas Mental Health University Institute, pointed to studies that establish a link between the exacerbation or development of eating disorders and dormitory living.

“Eating disorders are activated at times of stress or when a person’s sense of control is challenged,” Steiger said. “Some students moving into dorms are not quite prepared for the transition to more independent living and becoming responsible for structuring one’s own eating for the first time.”

Steiger also cited high stress levels associated with academic performance, the discomfort of weight gain caused by binge drinking and heavy cafeteria food, competition among students for body perfection, and pressure to integrate into a new social group as potential factors that could cause disordered eating among first years in residence.

*Name has been changed

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Forty-two of the approximately 60 Senate members present at the Wednesday meeting supported the motion, which was proposed by Faculty of Medicine Senator Bernard Robaire.

“[The directive] is not good enough. It deserves careful consideration and will be enhanced in substance and buy-in from students through consultation,” said Robaire.

The directive, drafted by Deputy Provost (Student Life & Learning) Morton Mendelson, would deny undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral fellows credit for research projects and internships undertaken in countries classified as dangerous by the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

Carl-Eric Bouchard, a student Senator in the Faculty of Medicine, spoke in favor of passing the motion for further consultation. “No one is against student safety, but it’s important for the policy that we discuss it so it is made in a proper way,” Bouchard said.

SSMU VP University Affairs Nadya Wilkinson, who also spoke in favour of the motion, hoped Senate will strike a working group to negotiate the guidelines before they are brought to Senate for approval.

“This directive cannot stand as it is – we have no idea how this policy really works or what the parameters are. It was not developed according to procedures of the University,” Wilkinson said.

Wilkinson, who has been working on a Senate committee dedicated to reconnecting the body with its mandate, was pleased that the motion passed.

“That was definitely a reinvigorated Senate reclaiming its role as an active member in the creation of academic policy at McGill. Senate is sometimes seen as a rubber stamp; this was Senate standing up and saying ‘We need to be involved,’” she said.

In the University statues, Senate is mandated to “exercise general control and supervision over the academic activities of the University.”

Over 40 post-doctoral fellows lined up along the back row of the Senate meeting seeking answers as to why the University did not inform them that they could pay $7,000 in taxes on their stipends for the first time this year.

Emmanuel Blanchard, who will start his Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Faculty of Education in January, was upset that he decided to sign a contract with McGill without knowledge of the possibility of the tax.

“Students who started this September weren’t aware that they should have saved money for this year. Would we still have agreed to [our contracts] given the tax?” he asked. “My advisor told me that if I got the [student] status, I wouldn’t be taxed. It makes a big difference. It’s one-fifth my income. It’s huge,” he said.

Postdocs are considered trainees by the Canadian government, and as their stipends – $35,000 annually at McGill – aid in their training, they are not taxed. Beginning in 1992, postdocs who filled out the tax form T2202A could qualify as student status.

But the Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA) sent a letter to the University of Laval and the University of Sherbrooke in early October reversing their previous policy that exempted postdocs from federal taxes.

After an article was printed in Le Devoir about the letter, the McGill post-doctoral students’ office issued a memo about the possibility of taxed stipends, but no official notice was issued by the McGill administration until November 4. In a letter, the University explained they would collaborate with other institutions across the province to oppose CRA’s position, and lobby for the continued recognition of postdocs’ student status.

Postdoc Senator Dr. Harry Karmouty asked the Senate why the University hadn’t informed students earlier of CRA’s letter.

“[It’s] not clear why postdocs were not advised earlier. Had the article [in Le Devoir] not been published, we would have remained uninformed,” Karmouty said at the Senate meeting.

He further argued that faced with few benefits and new taxes, McGill will have trouble attracting high-quality postdocs.

Dean of Graduate and Post-Doctoral Studies Martin Kreiswirth, however, said the University was not at fault.

“The University community was not informed because the letter was not sent to McGill; it was sent to Laval and Sherbrooke. This is not a simple issue. We have to make sure we have all the information we want to take a conservative, comprehensive stand on this.”

Kreiswirth explained McGill is participating in a working group under the Conference of Rectors and Principals of Quebec Universities (CREPUQ), which formed in response to CRA’s letter and will offer advice to participating universities, leaving each institution to make its own decision about whether or not to issue the T2202A forms.

According to the November 4 letter, the University remains undecided about whether or not to issue the forms for the 2008-2009 academic year and will only proceed once substantial legal and tax information is gathered on the issue in the coming weeks.

Yet Blanchard said Kreiswirth’s response to postdoc monetary concerns at the meeting did little to subdue his stress about his budget for next year.

“It’s a reasonable position for McGill, but it won’t solve any of our problems,” Blanchard said. “I can’t ask my advisor to pay me more because if I’m paid more, other students are paid less.”

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Because Dinka society is centred on cattle in bride wealth exchanges and inheritance, some academics consider this employment ironic because Southern Sudanese at the plant slaughter cows.

“The meat-packing world is a harsh world…. It’s physically and psychologically exhausting…. It’s not the kind of work most Canadians want to do,” explained Carol Berger, sessional lecturer in the Anthropology Department at McGill who carried out fieldwork in Brooks between 1999 and 2005 for her masters thesis on southern Sudanese Dinka immigrant workers at Lakeside.

Berger, however, cautioned against romanticizing links between the Dinka and their cattle, explaining that cattle shaped their worldview because it ensured their livelihood.

“[The Dinka in Brooks] are practical people,” Berger said. “[Cattle] are bank accounts on hooves.”

Assured or anticipating employment, foreign workers immigrated to Brooks.

Some of the southern Sudanese in Brooks have bought houses, married, and begun having families, demonstrating a commitment to their lives in Alberta, Berger said. According to Lakeside, some immigrant employees have been with the company for 15 years. ­

Yet over the course of her fieldwork, Berger observed systematic discrimination against some of the Dinka living in Brooks.

“Sudanese have trouble getting rental accommodation, [experience] racial epithets, and simple, stupid prejudice that suggested that people coming from Africa will by definition be a problem… It’s real cowboy county,” she said.

Of the 1,100 visible minorities in Brooks, the majority are Dinka. The 2006 Canadian census reported that 2,080 immigrants live in Brooks, up from 640 in 1991. In the same time frame, Lakeside Packers underwent a massive expansion that saw the installation of machinery capable of slaughtering 4,700 cows daily, creating 1,600 new positions.

The slaughterhouse employees also face difficult work conditions. Lakeside employees may be stationed on the kill floor, where the animals are slaughtered, “on the knife,” where they cut cows into pieces, or on trimming duty where fat is sliced off of slabs of beef. The kill floor is the only area of the plant that isn’t refrigerated at temperatures below 10 degrees Celcius. Some of Berger’s informants who found the cold stressful requested to work on the kill floor where temperatures rise to about 30 degrees.

According to Andrew Plumbly, the Director of Global Action Network, a Canadian environmental organization that investigates the treatment of animals in the meat-packing industry, said slaughterhouses are known for some of the worst working conditions and highest injury rates in the country.

“You’re freezing…there are sharp saws, blades, and the rest of it. It’s hard and dangerous. You slaughter animals that don’t want to be and tend to become very animated,” Plumbly said.

Lakeside maintains injuries are few because routine machinery checks are performed nightly. The company has staff doctors constantly on site.

Faced with such difficult work, its high employee turnover rate is not surprising. Chronically understaffed, Lakeside is forced to look outside of Canada for employees like the Dinka. Currently a slaughterhouse recruiting team is on a mission in the Philippines.

A Lakeside employee who requested anonymity explained that the company undertakes recruiting missions across Canada and in the developing world that include numerous information sessions, interviews, and medical exams to place candidates in the appropriate department.

“You go and bring back new workers. We’re always looking,” she said.

Yet recruitment missions targeting foreigners are not characteristic of all slaughterhouses across the country.

Elizabeth Dembil, the general director general of Carrefour de liaison et d’aide multi-ethnique (CLAM), an organization that helps immigrants in Montreal find employment, said meat-packing plants around Montreal are not staffed by immigrants.

“[Slaughterhouses] try to recruit, but [immigrants] are not interested. Canada chooses [immigrants] that are educated…. Are you going ask an engineer to be a meat packer?” she said.

Lilydale, a chicken processing plant 45 minutes outside of Montreal, does not deliberately recruit immigrant workers.

“We collect resumes and hire employees like any other company,” Connie Smart, Lilydale corporate communications manager, said.

Outside the Lilydale plant, older Quebecois women in lab coats and hard hats took smoke breaks while there were no visible minorities in sight.

Statistics Canada’s 2006 census reported that visible minorities make up 22.8 per cent of Quebec’s population, and only 13.9 per cent in Alberta.

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SSMU President Kay Turner argued in Thursday’s meeting that Council could justifiably adopt the policies on its own initiative, based on what she said was high participation in the online ratification.

“It’s rare for us to get that number, and it would be a huge waste to throw it away,” Turner said.

By-laws adopted last fall require GA motions passed with fewer than two per cent of SSMU members in attendance – 397 students – be submitted for ratification online over the following two days. Only 250 showed up to the GA, with no more than 110 present at any one time.

But the online vote also failed to reach its quorum – set at 15 per cent of SSMU membership – with only 1,669 students – 8.4 per cent – voting online.

Club rep Cameron McKeich supported Turner’s motion and was satisfied with the GA turnout. He said voters were part of a core group of interested students that SSMU would have trouble expanding.

“The constitution is a malleable document. There’s no point in defending a process that’s clearly broken,” said McKeich. “To ignore that input because of a technicality would take away the integrity of the GA.”

Many councillors objected to bending SSMU constitutional by-laws. Engineering representative Manosij Majumdar was worried the motion would set a dangerous precedent for rejecting quorum.

“That would be like winning a video game by reprogramming it,” he said.

Turner maintained the motion respected SSMU’s constitution, claiming that SSMU Council is a separate body allowed to set policies.

Turner argued that the bylaws were nonsensical, and suggested amending them to avoid future grey areas in quorum debates. She stressed the GA motions would be voted on again at the Winter GA regardless of Council’s decision.

Alexandre Shee, the Law Student Association’s VP External, wondered what number of votes Council considered sufficient for creating SSMU policy if quorum is to be ignored.

“Should we listen to the silent majority or the vocal minority? Maybe some students read the motions and decided they weren’t interested,” he said.

Devin Alfaro, SSMU VP External, thought the eight per cent of students who voted online was a substantial number compared to the 29.8 to 35.8 per cent voter turnout in the last four SSMU elections, given that GA by-laws prohibit campaigning and restrict the voting period to 48 hours following the GA. He added that there are typically about 100 people actively campaigning to encourage voter turnout over the six-day election periods.

Engineering representative Courtney Lessard objected to the motion based on the contention over certain GA question and the razor-thin margin with which those questions passed at the event.

Alfaro hoped the motion would help SSMU improve on the criticism it most often meets – that it doesn’t prioritize student consultation, as was the case last spring, when SSMU informed The Tribune they would force the newspaper into independence only two days before the motion went to council.

“The [GA] system is broken, and this is an interim, band-aid solution.”

While Council debated, VP Finance & Operations Tobias Silverstein giggled and whispered with Tribune editors in the gallery. He returned to his seat at the table when it came time to vote.

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At an open meeting held by the Quebec Essential Services Council on September 24, Delorme said the pants would remind immigrants, – specifically Montrealers from Latin American Countries who had lived under military regimes in their home countries – of the violence and repression they fled.

Community organizations took offense to Delorme’s remarks, which they say are out of touch with the reality of minority interactions with officers.

Dan Philip, president of the Black Coalition of Quebec – a Montreal-based human rights organization representing the black community – was unimpressed with Delorme’s comment.

“It is unfortunate that when it’s convenient for [Delorme], he uses these instances to talk about how [the police] affect minorities,” Philip said. “[His comment] does nothing to bring into light police brutality toward minorities.”

Will Prosper, the spokesperson for Montreal Nord Republik – a community group that sprang up in response to the police shooting of 18-year-old Montreal North resident Freddy Villanueva – thought Delorme’s comment overestimated the power of camouflage pants to remind minorities of traumatizing past experiences.

“People aren’t in their country any longer, and camouflage pants aren’t going to make them feel like they’re back,” Prosper said.

The pants are the newest phase of sartorial tactics applied by officers in an ongoing labour dispute between the Montreal police union, la Fraternité des Policiers et Policières, and the city. For nearly two years, Montreal police officers have been working without a contract with the city, but have been unable to legally hold a strike because they provide an essential service.

Martin Viau, the Fraternité’s director of communication, explained that many officers opted to go with camouflage pants.

“The camouflage pants are popular because they’re more comfortable than the others. They have pockets, and it’s easy to attach their police belt to them,” Viau said.

The city issued a formal complaint to the Essential Services Council that the camouflage pants put the police in danger and deprived the public of their right to an essential service.

“The clothes they’re wearing aren’t police clothes, and that could confuse the public,” said Bernard Larin, a press attaché for the mayor, in an interview with The Daily.

Following the open meeting, the Council had a closed meeting – attended by council members, city representatives, two unionized police officers, and Delorme – in which it ruled in favour of keeping police officers outfitted in camo pants.

But Montreal spokesperson Celine Jacob stressed that the Council’s decision didn’t rule out the possibility that the pants could deprive the public of its right to an essential service.

“If it’s necessary, the Council could re-intervene in this file,” Jacob said, adding that the Council will observe how the camo pants influence the public’s ability to access police service.

Prosper also worried that the force’s colourful pants would particularly undermine their authority in Montreal North, an area where tensions between police and residents have run high since the August riots.

“When they wear those pants, it’s hard to respect their authority – they look like clowns,” Prosper said. “For any citizen of any race, it’s hard to take them seriously.”

Prosper stressed that the police should improve their interpersonal skills and tune into the pulse of the neighborhoods they patrol.

“If a police officer wants to play with guns, he should join the army. But as a police officer, you have a wider responsibility, because you have to interact with the population,” he said.

Montreal Nord Republik will present suggestions to the city in the coming months on how to improve interaction between the police and youths in the neighbourhood. Prosper complained that interaction between the two is limited to arrests and tickets. Prosper hoped the city would consider their proposal to have police officers assigned to the neighbourhood spend two weeks getting to know Montreal North teens at community youth centres.

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The three-day conference will focus on the concerns and issues of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) individuals, who will participate in the 2009 Copenhagen Outgames – an international event started in Montreal in 2006 that offers LGBT individuals and supporters the chance to compete in athletic tournaments of 38 different disciplines.

Stephen Barris, the head of Communications at the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA), thought it was crucial that conference attendees represented diverse areas of the world.

“[The Outreach program] creates a space, a platform where people who can’t afford to travel can share the work they’re doing,” Barris said.

Expected to bring together 1,000 attendees without regard to their sexual orientation, the conference will focus on the global struggle to fight discrimination against LGBT individuals. It will feature keynote speakers, including gay Muslim filmmaker Parvez Sharma, and up 90 workshops on themes ranging from family and relationships to LGBT history.

Julie Thaarup, the project manager for Copenhagen’s 2009 Outreach, explained why the participation of delegates from the developing world was crucial.

“The conference will create awareness and build knowledge so that participants can affect change in their country,” Thaarup said.

Bruce Amoroto, the coordinator of Team Pilipinas, further explained the importance of the conference.

“For gays and lesbians who are either out or not out it builds on their confidence,” said Amoroto. “When they go back to their country, they can share with other people, and inspire them to come out or be strong with whatever discrimination they have here in the country. “People are still not comfortable or fully accepting so these are communities who live silently.”

Amoroto added that Team Pilipinas – named after the Filipino word for the Philippines – is a good example of more localized outreach by Outgames participants: the team networks with smaller LGBT communities through sports that allow locals to share ideas and information about sexual diversity without attracting hostile attention.

“To be able to talk about sexual health, sexual rights, and sexual diversity you need to take other avenues that won’t be strongly opposed by [Catholic] church and other conservatives,” said Amoroto.

The added that although the intensity has decreased in recent years, bystanders of Manila’s annual Pride March still heckle and call the participants names.

While the Outreach Program only grants funding to enable individuals to attend the conference, chosen applicants can apply for additional funding for sporting and cultural events at the Outgames.

The program aims to fund 200 people from Eastern Europe and 200 from the Developing World, with an equal number of men and women. The program has so far secured enough funding to subsidize 130 participants. 170 applications have been received.

The online application requires hopefuls to declare their annual income, list any sport, cultural, human rights, or community organizations they are involved in, and submit a 100-word explanation of why they would like to participate in the 2009 Outgames. The Outreach Program will be accepting applications until October 1.

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