So, let’s talk about the use of the word ‘community.’ For the most part, The Daily intends to use the word positively, and generally tries to apply it to marginalized groups. In doing so, The Daily is contributing to a form of community-building itself. With that in mind, it’s important to think about what kind of ‘community’ it wants to support, and to be careful in using the word community to describe just any group.

The term itself, though, can be described as neutral, for is the silent majority not a community of sorts? The groups of people as included in this term ‘community’ are not so clear-cut.

“Algonquins of Barriere Lake file lawsuit against government, managers,” (February 23, News, page 7) reports that the “community cites mismanagement.” Community in this piece clearly refers to the members of the Algonquins of Barrière Lake.

In “Diversifying environmentalism,” (February 23, Features, pages 13-15) the writer discusses “community-building” in the context of the Green Belt Movement based in Nairobi that has been planting trees in Kenya. Community here describes the women in this organization and those who will be affected positively in Kenya.

On February 2, “‘Living Laboratory’ seeks community ties” (February 2, News, page 8) outlines the McGill and L’École de technologie supérieure’s social development project called Quartier de l’Innovation (QI), which is attempting to reach out to the “Montreal community.” Community, when mobilized by the QI project, denotes a sort of charitable status: those in the ‘community’ must be helped and given some form of aid. Basically, it seems that QI is into helping communities in the same way the West is into aiding the developing world. Within the article, QI’s articulation of community was criticized by the coordinator of the Coalition de la Petite Bourgogne as “not very grassroots.”

Is community, then, something that always has to be built? Or does it exist already?

When using the term community within its pages, The Daily should note the kind of message it is giving. Every single issue discusses different conceptions of community – the vagueness of which is apt, seeing as the boundaries of communities are constantly being renegotiated.

However, the mobilization of the word community can be positive or negative, and The Daily’s use of the word community is not positive enough. Community is a term that is easily co-opted, and as demonstrated by the news article on QI, it is often by corporate interests. Journalists must question the language they use, especially when it comes to words like ‘community.’ For example, ask the interviewees what that word means to them. Ask representatives of QI why they are interested in engaging with the ‘community.’

The Daily has no clear idea of what community has the potential to mean. My question is, why?

Readers’ Advocate is a twice-monthly column written by Hera Chan addressing the performance, relevance, and quality of The Daily. You can reach her at readersadvocate@mcgilldaily.com.

The post Interrogating buzzwords appeared first on The McGill Daily.

We’re talking about digital life and digital identity here. Globe and Mail journalist Erin Anderssen moderated the conversation; apt as this was the first in a series of four conversations this year co-presented by Concordia and the Globe and Mail, called Thinking Out Loud. Before setting my mind free to project conceptions of why anyone would attend a talk about digital life (other than that William Gibson was there), let me qualify my position: to me, digital life is real life.

Generally, I’m never really sure what people are talking about when they bring up the word reality. I didn’t know you could experience non-reality. Aren’t mediated forms of exchange such as Tumblr, Instagram, et cetera, reality? If I remember a scene from a film, isn’t that a part of my reality? My memory?

Gibson offered the model of a cyborg to help us understand our relationship to technology. Think of “your phone [as] a complex prosthesis,” suggested Gibson. That is, think of technology as extensions of human capability, as a way of increasing productivity and displacing mundane administrative tasks such as remembering phone numbers, dates, historical facts onto our technological apparatus. It’s all about the order of the mind. Supposedly, with more technology and cognitive streamlining, humans will get to work less, and play more.

“When we take on a new technology, we become it,” said Gibson. He also said that we’re going to “lose previous modes of existence.” For example, I can’t imagine an existence without my smartphone — not to say that life is contingent on the existence of functioning smartphones — but rather I can’t un-know what I know. I also can’t rid my mind of the multi-screen view I have of the world, so sure, I agree with Gibson.

We’re seeing a reorganization of our sense perceptions with the onset of the digital age. Before, people had to go to the cinema to see a film, but we now have Netflix. The difference there, other than the on-demand factor, is that we don’t have to go sit in a room full of stranger humans in silent collectivity to see the moving image on the big screen. We can just sit at home imagining that all these other humans are doing it at the same time, if we even imagine that.

It’s like a Twitter revolution. No leaders, just hashtags. Now, our journalism is more politically leaning. Our media is increasingly participatory, but the kind of participatory where there are certain necessary conditions. At a distance, without having to physically interact with another human, we can raise our collective voices to air public grievances. We have democratized media! We feel agency!

There is a fine line between a self-defined meaningful engagement with the world, and the feeling of participating in social justice movements without experiencing physiological movement. “While we are being couch potatoes, we imagine that we are being active,” said Gibson. Curiously enough, he himself is a self-declared Twitter addict.

McKelvey raised a question, asking what a true interruption looks like in a constant stream of interrupting feed. Media never stops, and the only calamity is that there is always a new one. Why is being a well-informed citizen – who may very well choose not to take action – considered positive?

Gibson’s latest book called The Peripheral – which was available for purchase after the talk along with a book signing – is described by him as a sort of sci-fi realism, in which the characters from the future are using technology that we would consider incredibly magical, yet they treat it as totally banal.

Even in our contemporary world, we are able to do previously unimagined things – access the collective vault of human knowledge through a handheld phone – that we have come to take for granted. You even have the ability to “rewind your entire life,” as McKelvey put it. More and more human abilities are being placed onto our technological extensions, and we treat these developments as complete banalities. Regardless, we support the drive for technological development, the push for progress.

In a technologically mediated world, our sense of self is spread out through all the devices and applications we use. We divide our identities into little bits of information to be traded publicly on the internet, and select a multitude of hashtags and causes to like on Facebook to demonstrate some sort of individuality. We make digital records of all that we do, and relegate the burden of remembering to our digital spheres. Like McKelvey said, nowadays, “we’re all basically cyborgs.”

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Molly Korab’s News article, “University students push for prison divestment” (February 2, page 7) raised a poignant question within the university context. It described groups of students at certain American universities who had become aware about their university’s holdings in private prison systems and were seeking divestment.

The question of nebulous university holdings has been raised at McGill through the ongoing tar sands and oil pipeline divestment campaign lead by Divest McGill, and in the more distant past with campaigns for the University to divest from the South African apartheid regime and tobacco companies. The latter two were successful, though little movement has been made within the administration regarding Divest McGill.

Groups such as Demilitarize McGill have already revealed damning information relating McGill’s investment portfolio with the military industry, and Korab’s article poses the possibility of a university student’s traceable relationship with the prison-industrial complex.

Continuing the theme of prisons, Nadir Khan’s feature “Mandatory minimums, maximum harm” (February 2, Page 13) focused on proving the claim that mandatory minimum sentences are absurd. The rhetoric imbued in the text juxtaposed the social economic costs paid by the Canadian state with the effectiveness of prison sentences, creating a strange logic of capital whereby the human subjects who are incarcerated are measured by their economic cost to so-called good, tax-paying citizens.

Khan poses the question, “How do we measure the cost of the harm and pain that is caused? Are we prepared to pay it as a society?” The use of capitalistic terms to describe a movement away from the prison industrial complex is paradoxical at best, and perhaps inescapable. It suggests that how we understand our society and the people that constitute it is through the language of capitalism.

In describing the “skyrocketing social costs, the economic cost of mandatory minimum sentencing,” “value as a bargaining chip,” “this process [as transferring] huge amounts of power from the hands of judges to Crown prosecutors,” and so forth, Khan mobilizes the words of economics to describe the absurdity of minimum sentencing in Canadian prison systems.

If words are content, and grammar the context in which those words exist, then is defining anti-capitalistic tendencies using capitalistic terms not just perpetuating the prison-industrial complex? When I write “anti-capitalistic tendencies,” I mean that which is against the commodification and control of bodies via prison systems.

I am proposing that The Daily make a movement toward reflecting on the language it uses in delving into topics that reflect its Statement of Principles (SOP). The most obvious method of upholding the SOP is to seek out topics that showcase the voices of the normatively voiceless. The second most obvious way to uphold the SOP is in following the standards of a more progressive politically correct language.

An additional and necessary engagement with SOP content can be found in the causal relationship between the structuring of the text and the content itself, whereby the difficulty of discussing the privatization of prisons and systems of bodily control without using controlled capitalist language is interrogated. When we say social cost, what do we mean?

Readers’ Advocate is a twice-monthly column written by Hera Chan addressing the performance, relevance, and quality of The Daily. You can reach her at readersadvocate@mcgilldaily.com.

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Criticizing mainstream media is crucial, but should it make up the message of a whole editorial? The Daily’s editorial board reserves the second last page of every print edition to voice their collective concern, outrage, and calls for action. Throughout this entire academic year, the editorial board has taken no audacious stances – that is, using their platform to incite discussion – but instead, have behaved rather politely.

I start with the Charlie Hebdo editorial also because of its lack of discussion of systemic racism. It is the polite thing to do – the anti-confrontational method of discussing something, without really getting to the heart of the matter. Another, perhaps more productive, way to discuss the Charlie Hebdo case would have been to call out the racist structures that already exist in France and elsewhere, which allow a publication like that to exist in the first place. By addressing the mainstream media as the sole agents of Islamophobia, The Daily removes the impetus of individuals, all of whom are complicit in perpetuating Islamophobia and racism.

The January 19 issue also saw the “Black Lives Matter” hashtag take the front page, which was in reference to the feature article (“Ferguson, mon amour,” page 12-13) that discussed whether racialized police brutality was an all-American issue. Turns out, Canadian prisons also have an overrepresentation of people of colour; and yes, generally speaking, Canadian policies also promote colour-blindness and, thereby, racism.

The feature usually takes the centerfold, and is a work of long-form journalism published once per week. The reflection by Margaret Gilligan is an excellent introductory survey to ways in which discourse on racism is erased on campus. And this discussion needs to be continued and taken further. Remember when The Daily published pieces such as “You are racist”?

Instead of taking to the sidelines of anti-racist discourse, The Daily can seek out those nitty-gritty pieces, the ones that make people uncomfortable, and address racialized experience while presenting ideas about how to keep moving forward. Systemic racism is exemplified qualitatively by statistics of diverse representation, et cetera, but to prove systemic racism in the making is a gesture to the invisible. The term describes an absence, thus all so-called proof of its existence outside lived experience is limited to data that can only be generated retroactively – after the harm is done. It functions to erase the viewpoints and bodies of people of colour from institutional spaces. Not including or soliciting writings on race in an alternative student newspaper such as The Daily is a way to erase that discussion from the university.

I get that an editorial board, with a majority of white members, would have discomfort as non-racialized bodies in taking the reins of promoting anti-racist methods, but that ability to ignore those issues itself is a form of complicit colour-blindness.

Readers’ Advocate is a twice-monthly column written by Hera Chan addressing the performance, relevance, and quality of The Daily. You can reach her at readersadvocate@mcgilldaily.com.

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There has been strong and – dare I say – nuanced coverage of the Post-Graduate Students’ Society (PGSS), the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU), the progression of the Indigenous Studies program at McGill, the Redmen sexual assault case, and so forth. Coverage of McGill issues has been strong, but could benefit from a greater scope. The news articles this year have a focus on what happened, not on what those events mean. Many of the political underpinnings of policies and motions passed during those PGSS and SSMU meetings could benefit from greater analysis, and a drawing of the bigger picture.

The articles that do extend beyond the McGill bubble tend to be more social justice-oriented (I write that positively), and the political news has mostly been relegated to the discussion on the provincial budget cuts. The cuts are hitting the Arts Internship Office. The cuts are creating a hiring freeze. We, the students, are all disappointed with the administration’s reaction. Yet beyond coverage of widespread and general disappointment, another possible direction to take while discussing austerity measures should be actual actions being taken against them that are not mere expressions of a vague insular emotion.

Talk of strikes doesn’t just happen at McGill; the discussion must be brought forth.

In the article “Thousands in the streets against austerity,” dated November 1, 2014, The Daily reported that at least 82,000 CEGEP and university students had gone on a one-day strike. Yet, talk on our campus of a potential strike and the Comité Large Printemps 2015 has been limited to instances where groups outside of McGill organize demonstrations. Any form of direct political action, sanctioned (such as a vote to strike) or not, is an option incubated by small, committed groups of people, and by The Daily. Talk of strikes doesn’t just happen at McGill; the discussion must be brought forth.

The Daily editorial board is made up of McGill students, and its pages are filled with writers, photographers, illustrators, and designers who are McGill students. The voices of The Daily hold the ultimate privilege in being able to have a platform to articulate grievances, beliefs, and ideologies, in a way that is legible to the public, yet they do little to address the position of being a member of a purportedly elite institution of higher learning.

At McGill and at The Daily, it is easy not to participate in Montreal and Quebec affairs. It is easy not to learn about anti-oppressive practices and other forms of social organization, because why search for an alternative when the McGill hierarchy prioritizes your voice anyway? Why check your own privilege when you have so much of it? In writing news, why take action beyond writing about disappointment, a passive approach, if you don’t feel personally affected by the austerity measures?

To be more frank, I am suggesting that The Daily’s editors, news writers, and contributors make more of an effort to question their own positionality and privilege, to contextualize news events and McGill happenings in the greater context of Montreal, and to bring in Quebec politics. McGill students are also members of the Montreal community and it is time that The Daily’s news coverage reflected that. This spring, we might be witness to another printemps érable, another #ggi, and maybe, The Daily doesn’t have to just play witness, but it can play participant.

Readers’ Advocate is a twice-monthly column written by Hera Chan addressing the performance, relevance, and quality of The Daily. You can reach her at readersadvocate@mcgilldaily.com.

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The Indigenous Studies program launch brought a little taste of what decolonization could look like to the Faculty Club at the tail end of last semester, on December 10. The program, which will be housed under the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada (MISC), officially launched its interdisciplinary minor program to the rites of formal celebration after many years of students and advocates bringing Indigenous issues to the forefront of McGill’s imagination.

New academic associate of the program and emcee of the launch Allan Downey of the Nak’azdli First Nation described it as “really a historic moment for McGill.” McGill Institute for the Study of Canada (MISC) Director Will Straw cited the program as a result of “research, reflection, and activism that’s been going on for many years on the part of students at McGill and the Indigenous communities on campus.”

According to its description, the minor program will investigate “historical, social, and cultural dimensions of Indigenous life in Canada.” Courses will look at the treatment of Indigenous life, the experience of Indigeneity and gender, Indigenous resistance to the Canadian government, and other topics. In future years, the idea is for the program to expand to include a major option, and many have hopes for an institute on campus one day.

“Decolonizing McGill means that [decolonization takes place] in every discipline and in every field.”

The celebration of the program launch included introductions by Dean of Arts Christopher Manfredi, Straw, Downey, and Elder Jean Stevenson of the Peguis First Nation – all of whom acknowledged the Haudenosaunee land on which McGill continues to be housed, the same land on which this article was written. Performances by the Buffalo Hat Singers and Kahnawake rapper Will E. Skandalz graced the Faculty Club, along with a speech by former student Pamela Fillion, a key player in pushing forward the program.

According to the Indigenous Education Advisor at the Social Equity and Diversity Education office (SEDE) Allan Vicaire, talk of an Indigenous Studies program at McGill can be dated back to the 1980s, when former student and now professor at Yale University Ned Blackhawk put out a callout for one. In a document entitled “McGill Community Vision for an Indigenous Studies Program: Forum Report,” put together by Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) student researcher and Métis person from Manitoba Brett Lamoureux in 2013, the earliest attempt of establishing a program is cited as dating from the early 2000s.

***

Downey, in a preface to the telling of one Haudenosaunee creation story, described the “colonial dust” that has clouded the senses of academic institutions and Canadian society at large. The legacy of McGill, its founder James McGill and his role in colonialism, the placing of the Hochelaga Rock, and what it means to decolonize a space like McGill remain contested topics.

“I’ve learned over the years that for many, the idea of Indigenous Studies as a separate program can be controversial because of how it contains Indigenous knowledge, history, and politics as something separate from what is considered foundational in a university education,” said Fillion in an interview with The Daily, adding, “One of the things that I think would be important for decolonizing McGill is to have Indigenous content in every department, in every faculty. This is why the interdisciplinary aspect of the minor program is so important.”

A phone interview with Straw brought forth similar conclusions. To him, “decolonizing McGill means that [decolonization takes place] in every discipline and in every field.” He described how “that’s starting to happen and it’s way too slow. It’s way too slow at McGill, but there are courses now on Indigenous literature, Indigenous art, obviously history, and so on. Those just have to be a much bigger part of the things we learn here.”

“I can assure you that we are more than feathers and sashes and inuksuks.”

The minor, which all speakers said would not have been possible without the strong student push and collaboration with Indigenous groups at McGill and at large, serves as a first step to Indigenizing these spaces. In his speech, Downey said that “by recognizing that Indigenous knowledge offers legitimate ways of understanding the world, we have an opportunity to accept that Western ways of knowing are not the fundamental truth.”

On reflecting on his research experience, Lamoureux said in a phone interview with The Daily, “Like many other students, I found that there was a lack in integrating the Indigenous knowledge in the university setting, and a lot of it isn’t taken seriously by academics yet,” and that at McGill, he was “pleasantly surprised how non-Indigenous people wanted to study Indigenous perspectives and knowledge.”

In the Forum Report, 70.45 per cent of those polled indicated it was “very important” to have First Nations, Inuit, Métis, and Native American community leaders as course instructors. Zero per cent indicated that this was “not very important,” or “not important at all.”

When asked if there would be preference given in hiring practices to Indigenous course instructors, Straw said, “Clearly, we want to say that we want people who understand the issues the best and have the appropriate level of education. And I think it’s important at McGill that we have Indigenous faculty and teachers.”

The Forum Report also indicated that 80.95 per cent of those polled indicated that it was “very important” that the program offer language learning courses in First Nations, Inuit, or Métis languages. Currently, the minor program does not offer language courses, but Straw is supportive of the idea as a future development of the program.

***

Establishing the minor program was no easy task, as issues arose regarding its housing location, the cost of establishing a standalone department, and program advocates not having enough supporters within the University’s bureaucratic system to get things moving forward. “It took a while for me to figure out the process of how programs actually go through beyond the straightforward process on paper,” said Fillion.

“When we talk about processes that aim to be democratic – there are built-in structural barriers to stop people, even with strong numbers, from getting what they want.”

“I wasn’t a student politician, I was a student,” related Fillion, describing how the minor had to come into fruition sooner or later with all the work done around it – including the 2009 establishment of the KANATA Indigenous Studies community, which also produces an academic journal. KANATA made a formal recommendation and submitted a proposal, with faculty and staff support, for the establishment of the program to the Principal’s Task Force on Diversity, Excellence, and Community Engagement in the winter of 2010. The Aboriginal Affairs Working Group, made up of faculty and staff, also presented to the Task Force, recommending a minor program.

“The administrators have the power, and they need to be using that power. As a student who wasn’t a Senator nor a representative of a student union, I definitely got a really good, and at times confusing, taste of the McGill red tape when I was working on this,” Fillion said.

“When we talk about processes that aim to be democratic – there are built-in structural barriers to stop people, even with strong numbers, from getting what they want,” Fillion added, expressing hopes that what she considers a belated response to the demand for the program will not be replicated in the future.

***

U4 Science student and designer of the program logo Marcy Maracle wrote in an email to The Daily how she conceived of the design. “[Geese are] a Canadian symbol, as well as a prominent animal in many Indigenous stories,” Maracle wrote, going on to outline that the three geese represent the three major Indigenous groups in Canada – First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples.

“Notably, it is part of a well-known creation story, where a woman who lives in the sky world falls through a hole in the clouds. It is a goose that saves her from falling into the water, and helps her rest on the back of a turtle, which eventually becomes earth.”

Embedded in the logo is the same story that Downey told the crowd gathered at the Faculty Club for this “historic moment.”

“I can assure you that we are more than feathers and sashes and inuksuks,” Downey concluded at the end of his launch.

Fillion, in comparing the conversation on campus to other Canadian university campuses, said that there were students she had met who believed that Indigenous peoples existed only in the past.

“We can’t have students leaving McGill who still believe this,” she said.

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Divest McGill – called Decorporatize McGill in late 2012 – is a group on campus that picked up traction with their petition in fall 2012 that demanded the University’s divestment from fossil fuel firms directly involved with Plan Nord.

We saw candidates coordinating their platforms around environmental issues last year in student union elections at Concordia and McGill – although no political slates are allowed on our campus. It is no wonder that The Daily chose to pick at the issue of environmental degradation, or as I like to see it, the imminent apocalypse that will end the possible side-effects of contemporary neoliberalism.

To put it plainly and verbatim, this is the sentence the Environment Issue opened with: “We all inhabit the same planet, but we have gone too long ignoring the fact that our actions can have a profound impact on communities around the world.” I am unclear at what point the introduction for special issues became loaded with empty rhetoric found on the likes of Lululemon tote bags. And just forget about clarifying the totally nebulous use of the word “community” here.

Having previously sat on The Daily editorial board for two years, and the Daily Publications Society for one year, I am no stranger to the high level of organization and extra work it takes to pull off a strong special issue. That said, in terms of writing, this is one of the weakest special issues I have seen in the past three years. Although, I do commend The Daily on the Enbridge Line 9 centrefold and increased online content – in particular the panel discussion among environmental groups on campus.

Beyond that, the writing and so-called ‘analysis’ contained within the issue predominantly criticized government policy. “Harper’s War on the Environment” discusses the details of Harper’s lack of concern with the environment – which I would not readily call a war – with the sole focus of regurgitating the 2014 Climate Change Performance Index report.

“Who is Most Affected by Climate Change?” rolls through the facts and figures provided by the United Nations (UN), complete with quotations from UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Even “Indigenous Resistance to Resource Extraction Around the World” shows no new reporting.

The only original reporting can be found in the “Science and Technology to Combat Climate Change” section, and the “Fighting for Climate Justice” article online. In addition, the purportedly online article regarding Indigenous activism in Canada, which was promoted in the print pullout, cannot be found on the environment microsite at all.

The Daily is upheld by its Statement of Principles and should use its pages to provide space for those voices, which are not readily represented in mainstream media. One only has to look at the nation’s major newspapers today, or any day, to hear the voice of Prime Minister Harper and the UN as funneled to us through the words of journalists. In addition, the weak intersectional approach to class and the environment underserves the community The Daily is written for.

We see no bottom-up movement analysis or hear from the real people and groups active in pushing forth environmental change. Analyzing environmental policy purely through high-power institutional data denotes the agent of change as that of the Harper government, of the UN. When did The Daily forget about the community and look to the government for change?

Readers’ Advocate is a twice-monthly column written by Hera Chan addressing the performance, relevance, and quality of The Daily. You can reach her at readersadvocate@mcgilldaily.com.

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“The two main goals [of ECOLE] are to be a model for sustainable living, and […] to serve as a catalyst for a surviving, connected community for sustainability that integrates community outreach, sustainable living, and equity.”

Lily Schwarzbaum, ECOLE coordinator

Sustainability at McGill faced advances and setbacks this year. On the positive side, two important sustainability projects were approved by the University, Vision 2020, and the Education Community Living Environment (ECOLE) project. Vision 2020, which seeks to create a long-term sustainability plan for the McGill community, was approved on March 21.

The ECOLE project, also approved in the Winter semester, aims to create a sustainability hub in the Milton-Parc community and a model for sustainable living. The ECOLE project will operate in a house off-campus, and see 8 to 12 students live there while completing an independent study project. These student residents will receive subsidized rent and academic credit for their independent study. ECOLE will launch its pilot year in September 2014.

However, sustainability on campus also took a hit when SSMU abruptly lost the position of Sustainability Coordinator. The position which entailed working to align the activities of SSMU with a culture of sustainability, was ended in the Fall semester. Since then there has been little movement from SSMU to create a new position.

As per a motion passed at the SSMU Winter General Assembly (GA), the Ad-hoc Committee on Sustainability will make an “actionable recommendation” for sustainability at SSMU by the end of the Winter 2014 semester. After the recommendation is made, it will be the job of the President and executive to look into the feasibility of the proposal and steps for implementation, and an update will then be brought forward to the Fall 2014 GA. As such, much of the work to implement sustainability on campus remains to be seen in the next academic year.

—Jordan Venton-Rublee

“If this isn’t social injury, then McGill needs a new definition.”

Divest McGill banner

Divest McGill was created in 2012 to campaign for divestment from University holdings in the fossil fuel industry. In February 2013, the group submitted two petitions to McGill’s Committee to Advise on Matters of Social Responsibility (CAMSR). The petitions – one seeking McGill’s divestment from the tar sands and fossil fuel industry, and the other seeking divestment from companies associated with the Nord pour tous (formerly known as Plan Nord), a natural resource exploitation project started under former premier Jean Charest – gained momentum, with support from McGill student unions, as well as numerous climate justice advocacy groups across the city.

In May 2013, McGill’s Board of Governors rejected both petitions that Divest McGill submitted. The decision was based on recommendations from CAMSR that indicated that the petitions failed to prove “social injury” had occurred under CAMSR’s Terms of Reference – that is, their mandate and guidelines for reviewing the social responsibility of the University’s investments.

Divest McGill continues to be very active working with other climate justice advocacy groups and Indigenous communities who are also opposed to fossil fuel and tar sands extraction in Canada, and raising awareness on campus. This year, the group held workshops, organized a bike protest, and spoke out against the Petrocultures conference hosted by the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. Divest McGill acted, and will continue to act, as a key player in increasing the pressure on McGill to divest from fossil fuels and become a leader in ethical investments among universities worldwide.

—E.k. Chan and Hera Chan

“It is important to break [the invisibility of equity issues] down. We have to be intentional about it and actually make changes and work against it.”

Sarah Berry, course lecturer

Equity was a buzzword on McGill’s campus this year, at times due to missteps by the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) executive and staff. During the first semester, the SSMU executive was met with criticism for its Costume Campaign, which intended to educate students on culturally appropriative costumes, but used posters featuring people wearing the sort of costumes SSMU sought to ban.

Despite both the Arts Undergraduate Society (AUS) Equity Committee and SSMU Equity Committee holding forums on the subject in the second semester, the issue of equity at McGill seemed to become larger than life following a complaint filed toward SSMU VP Internal Brian Farnan over a GIF of Barack Obama included in a SSMU listserv email. Part of the Equity Commission’s ruling in the complainant’s favour was that Farnan would issue a public apology – an apology that took a life of its own, attracting international media attention. Back on campus, SSMU eventually decided to retract the decision to make the apology public at a Council meeting, on “the basis that the apology trivializes the legitimacy of equity and racism on campus,” according to the motion moved.

Efforts by the Engineering Undergraduate Society (EUS) to create a more equitable environment were positive, but flew under the radar for many students. Christopher Tegho, who was appointed Equity Commissioner for EUS in October, worked to educate engineering students on the meaning of equity, rape culture, and safer space through workshops held in the Winter semester. The workshops, held in a mandatory first year course for Engineering students, broke down such concepts for students, many of whom were hearing of them for the first time – a phenomenon that is all-too common at McGill.

—Jordan Venton-Rublee

“[The] industry went on a mission to developing countries to get them to use chrysotile asbestos.”

Kathleen Ruff, anti-asbestos advocate

McGill attempted to address accusations of research misconduct in October 2013, when it hosted a conference on asbestos that included panels and discussions about research ethics and asbestos. The University found itself involved in a long-running academic dispute surrounding the work of Professor John Corbett McDonald, who undertook research in the 1960s and 1970s on the health impacts of chrysotile asbestos. His work demonstrated that the use of this asbestos was safe in controlled circumstances; however, McDonald received direct funding from the Quebec Asbestos Mining Association, “an [asbestos] industry-funded body.”

Starting in 2002, numerous scientists began lodging complaints with McGill over the methodology of the research, with some claiming that data had been chosen selectively to give the result desired by industry, and to green-light the commercial exploitation of a cancerous substance.

In response to mounting criticism, the University hosted a day-long conference focused on both asbestos and academic research ethics. Yet while most people at the conference agreed that McGill needed greater ethical oversight in research, no solution was put on the table for discussion, and critics – notably Kathleen Ruff and David Egilman – argued that hosting a conference was not enough and that McGill needed to decide on an ethics policy and retract the study.

Rejection of McDonald’s findings are almost unanimous within the scientific community; however, McGill still refuses to completely retract the paper. To date, critics maintain that the asbestos industry uses McDonald’s findings as evidence for the harmlessness of the substance. This is particularly true in developing countries. The Brazilian government’s position, for example, is that chrysotile asbestos is harmless; this view is based on McDonald’s findings. All that needs to happen to stop the sale of harmful chrysotile asbestos around the world, according to critics, is for McGill to denounce McDonald’s research.

—Emmet Livingstone

“[We should protest] until it is taken seriously by the government [and] they actually put some effort [into] helping these Indigenous women.”

Cleve Higgins, an attendee at the October Sisters in Spirit vigil

Every year, Montrealers take to the streets calling for justice for missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. This February, Missing Justice, an Indigenous solidarity collective, organized the annual march, which saw over 500 protesters participate in the march, higher than all previous marches.

Despite the fact that the march has occurred annually for years now, the response from the government continues to be lacking. Even after years of demands for a formal inquiry into the issue, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative government have refused to heed the demands to hold a national inquiry.

Public attention was once again drawn to the issue after the murder of Loretta Saunders, an Inuk woman. In March, to coincide with International Women’s Day, Mohawks blocked CN rail lines in Tyendinaga in a plea for a national inquiry into the issue. Despite all of this initiative, the government is unwilling to take any action.

—Dana Wray

“You reach a point where you realize that there is a huge power differential between SSMU and McGill, and no matter what, we are going to be in this building and they are pretty much setting the terms of the negotiation.”

Joey Shea, SSMU VP University Affairs

It appears that the tipping point that Shea mentions in the above quote has come to pass. After several years of negotiations, SSMU has signed a ten-year lease with McGill for the use of the Shatner building. The newly-signed lease will take effect retroactively, beginning in the 2011-12 school year – the most recent SSMU lease expired in 2011 – and the lease will be in effect until 2020-21.

Lease negotiations have raised financial concerns for three cycles of SSMU executives. At the beginning of the 2012-13 school year, McGill announced that it would no longer pay the entirety of the utilities cost for the Shatner building, and the lease, signed earlier this month, is the first indication of what this means for SSMU. For the 2013-14 year, SSMU will pay an increased rent of $130,000, as well as $100,000 in energy costs. Both rent and utility costs will increase yearly; rent will increase by $5,000 a year for the next seven years, and utility costs will increase with inflation.

In an effort to mitigate the negative financial impacts of these steep rent increases (compare the total $230,000 to be paid out this year to the $110,000 paid in 2010-11 under the previous lease), the SSMU executive attempted to pass a referendum question regarding a Shatner building fee in the Winter referendum period. This question failed to pass, with many questioning the executives’ lack of advertisement of or emphasis on the fee’s importance. Some have also questioned the executives’ role in negotiating a lease that places such a high financial burden on the Society. The building fee may be proposed again in a referendum in the Fall 2014 semester.

—Anqi Zhang

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“We are pleased with the compromise with McGill.”

Sean Cory, president of the Association of McGill University Research Assistants (AMURE)

Satisfaction with compromise is not something our writers are used to hearing from unions on their negotiations with the University. Nevertheless, in January of this year, Sean Cory, president of the Association of McGill University Research Employees (AMURE), expressed satisfaction with an agreement made between labour unions and McGill to avoid harsh salary decreases for low-paid employees, which would have otherwise occurred as a result of proposed changes to the payroll frequency. The payroll compromise has been a high point in a relatively slow, and at times frustrating, year for labour at McGill.

This year saw the beginning of a campaign by AGSEM: McGill’s Teaching Union to unionize note-takers, graders, tutors, and undergraduate course assistants, responding to concerns about their current pay and work conditions. In October of last year, AGSEM’s invigilator unit also unenthusiastically signed its first collective agreement – though it filed a grievance against McGill only a week later when the University violated the agreement – while AGSEM’s course lecturer unit split off to form an independent union.

The years-long back-and-forth between unions and the administration over pay equity escalated this year in a challenge of the University’s pay equity adjustment calculations for 2001-05 by the McGill University Non-Academic Certified Association (MUNACA). This concluded in an agreement that will give McGill until February 2015 to account for employees who were not considered in the first round of calculations.

Beyond our own campus, at the University of New Brunswick (UNB), we watched for a full three weeks in January as professors and library staff went on strike mainly to advocate for fairer salaries for UNB professors. The Daily editorialized on the issue, urging students to resist an all-too-common rhetoric that pits students’ interests against those of workers.

This year, like any other, McGill unions have negotiated for their members’ best interests. These institutions provide a level of support and bargaining power for many workers at the university, and their value cannot be ignored by the student body that shares its space with these groups.

—Jill Bachelder and E.k. Chan

“The motion was clearly an abuse of power on McGill’s part […] They basically wanted to have the law rewritten to suit their needs.”

Mona Luxion, ATI respondent

This year saw a continued struggle to access information at McGill – but the fight is not yet over. In January, the University settled a case that had been before the Commission d’accès à l’information du Québec since last year, agreeing to uphold long sought-after access to information (ATI) requests, and release documents related to military research, fossil fuel investments, and sexual assault complaints, among others.

The settlement came after the University refused to uphold such requests, instead accusing students, journalists, and other interested parties of filing requests in a “systematic” and “abusive” manner. In arguing its case to the Commission, the University requested the power to deny all future requests from a blanket group of students and their associates. This power, however, is legally unprecedented, as only the Commission can make that sort of delegation.

The Commission ruled against the University in October, though the University sought an appeal – which later turned into a settlement, something respondents alleged was a “decision to cut its losses.” According to the settlement, documents would be released starting at the end of February up until the summer.

The most recent documents released by the University have been heavily redacted, to the point of being unreadable, due to concerns about the release of information related to third parties. The next few months will tell if information continues to be limited, or if the long-standing requests will finally be fulfilled.

—Molly Korab

“Direct action costs them money, and the more expensive we make it for them, the closer we get to winning.”

Amanda Lickers, organizer at Swamp Line 9

Two years after the protest-heavy academic year of 2011-12, direct action continues to be a tactic of choice for student groups. However, direct action has also faced a increasingly hostile environment courtesy of the administration. In 2013, McGill adopted two documents, commonly called the protest protocol, that limit the scope and the types of direct action on campus. Outcry from campus and civil rights groups did not alter the protocol, and it still remains in effect today.

Some campus groups, such as Divest McGill – which seeks to pressure the University to divest from fossils fuels – and Demilitarize McGill – which aims to stop military research at the university – still protest on campus. In addition to workshops, petitions, and other forms of action, Divest McGill held a bike rally earlier this year. The group Support Our Staff at McGill (SOS-McGill) also handed out letters outside of a Senate meeting. February saw the blockade of the Petrocultures conference, where demonstrators unfurled a banner outside the Faculty Club to protest fossil fuel extraction.

The bike rally, the demonstration outside of Senate, and the Petrocultures blockade went off with little to no blowback from the administration, but not all demonstrations got off scot-free. A few weeks ago, on March 14, Demilitarize McGill blockaded the Aerospace Mechatronics Laboratory after revelations that some researchers in the Lab conducted military-funded research related to drones. The peaceful blockade lasted almost four hours, but the administration eventually called the police to campus to shut down the protest.

—Dana Wray

“The Charter of [rights and freedoms] protects the right to freedom of expression, but there is no right to protest.”

SPVM spokesperson Jean-Bruno Latour, in French to La Presse

Although the municipal bylaw P-6 has been in effect since 2001, the city only saw the grim results of its stipulations on March 15, 2013 when the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) used the bylaw to shut down the annual anti-police brutality march.

On that date, the police kettled – sectioned off and detained different parts of the crowd – and doled out fines of $637 to the demonstrators. According to the SPVM website, bylaw P-6 prohibits any participant at a demonstration – defined as an assembly, parade, or gathering – from covering their face; this includes scarves, hoods, and masks. Additionally, it is mandatory to disclose the location and itinerary of a demonstration to the police at least 24 hours beforehand. Failure to comply with these requirements results in the demonstration being declared illegal, and potentially a heavy fine for demonstrators.

The bylaw was most visibly enforced at the height of the Maple Spring – the Quebec student strikes of 2012 – and has since been cited by many as extraordinarily repressive. Last year, 78 community groups endorsed a public statement issued by the Anti-capitalist convergence in Montreal (CLAC) that called for solidarity against police repression in Montreal. Although the bylaw is largely associated with the Maple Spring, its enforcement continues to make waves, such as during this year’s anti-police brutality march, which was shut down within minutes of its initiation.

Currently, collective defences and class action lawsuits that plead not guilty are challenging the legality of the arrests and the conditions of detention in last year’s kettles. The lawsuits are just beginning to be heard in court, and many other individuals are challenging their tickets without a lawyer. CLAC, an advocate for individual challenges of tickets, continues to host workshops, sharing information on how to defend oneself, and what to do in case of arrest.

—Hera Chan

Year in review: News | Commentary | Culture | Features | Sci+Tech | Health&Ed | Sports

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Woo Jin Edward Lee, a course lecturer and doctoral student at the McGill School of Social Work, will enter into a mediation process with the University following his complaint to the Quebec Human Rights and Youth Rights Commission. The complaint was filed last summer based on claims that the School of Social Work perpetuates systemic racism in their hiring practices.

Lee received a letter, sent by the Commission on March 5, informing him of the University’s decision to enter into mediation. Lee will receive the aid of the Center for Research-Action on Race Relations (CRARR) during the mediation process. “This is a positive development because mediation can still lead to mutually satisfactory outcomes at the early stage of what could be a case of prolonged, complex, and costly litigation due to the elements of systemic racism involved,” said Lee in an interview with The Daily.

Lee had solicited CRARR’s aid due to problems he encountered “in the way the Commission addressed the elements of systemic racism,” he said. CRARR had already released a public statement of support for his case on February 18.

According to the public statement released by CRARR, Lee had requested the Commission to disclose a copy of its policy on systemic racism. “We are not sure the Human Rights Commission has a comprehensive policy on systemic racism, particularly in employment. Systemic racism is a very complex form of discrimination that requires a thorough review of the entire employment system of a company or an institution,” said Fo Niemi, Executive Director of CRARR.

Lee filed his complaint after the School failed to shortlist him for one of two part-time faculty lecturer positions. According to Lee, the director of the School, Wendy Thomson, informed him that he was not shortlisted because he lacked clinical experience, a requirement that was not listed on the job posting.

The complaint was received and processed by the Commission on July 4, 2013. In his complaint, Lee claimed that the Employment Equity Guidelines of the School of Social Work, and more broadly across the university, perpetuate hiring practices that discriminate against racialized persons for faculty positions. Shortly after Lee’s case was made public, Wendy Thomson published a letter in The Daily stating that the University “contests the allegations of racial discrimination in the hiring process.”

If the University did not agree to enter into mediation with Lee, the Commission would have been compelled to enter into an investigation of the School. CRARR published a public statement claiming that the University originally rejected mediation; however, McGill’s Director of Internal Relations Doug Sweet says the University never refused mediation. “It wanted to first submit its version of the facts, which it did,” he added in an email to The Daily.

“There are very few tenure track professors of colour, in particular black and Indigenous professors,” said Emily Yee Clare, former Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) Equity Commissioner and VP University Affairs. “That in itself is a limitation on how supported many racialized students can feel.”

“In most institutions, what we see—particularly in the French sector—[is that] racial diversity among professionals in mainstream institutions is very underrepresented,” said Niemi, adding that “a great number of what they call social work clientele are economically disadvantaged – poor – and many of them are racialized.”

CRARR is in the process of producing a statement and organizing a forum calling for a public official policy on systemic racism from the Commission and discussing other action against systemic racism in different fields, such as employment, public services, and education. The forum is being planned for April.

—With files from Nicolas Quiazua

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Enter the square white room, a newly-sponsored gallery space. The cube presents the art, which is supposed to speak for itself – because art can speak to you, really – and the white frames the work, contextualizes it. We are told that the space is there, but not. It negates itself so you can focus on the art. If you feel isolated, have no fear because after the show, you can leave the space, forget the socio-historical context and politics that made the work available to you, and go shoot the breeze about the aesthetics over a cup of third wave coffee and a flaxseed vegan muffin, if that’s your thing.

Street art and graffiti are cool and trendy now; they’re popular. In the 1990s, the rise of graffiti into fashion was exponential. You could wear the elusive culture on your back, an aesthetic without the context of the street and the politics, because politics are only cool if you’re not too intense about it. And now, another wave of commodification of street art and graffiti culture is hitting Montreal.

At what point did we create these structures that institutionalize certain forms of art and criminalize others? At what point did we decide to create a cultural currency for art, including street art and graffiti, determined by the market rate? The demographics of artist visibility are still laden with problems that art historians have picked at in the past. Street art and graffiti have reckoned with demystification over the last few decades, with all varieties of literature, from academic writing to blog posts about the artists and where they are coming from.

Nonetheless, the consumer report on street art – and the focus of this piece is street art, not graffiti, usually defined by medium – is lacking in perspective. Scouring the academic literature, the journalistic articles, the blog posts, you have to ask: where are the women? The people of colour? Where are the people who identify as queer, as trans*? They exist. The feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-corporate street art collective OFFmuralES brings this question to the city of Montreal by creating a visual culture that is available to those who can see it, reimaging Montreal’s cityscape.

“With the idea of collectively joining our critiques of the festival,” reads the first page of OFFmuralES, the collective’s self-titled zine, “many of us met in order to organize our own event, at the margin of MURAL. We wanted to present our work, excluded from the distribution, as an alternative vision to the one presented by the festival.”

MURAL was sponsored by the Osheaga Festival and Desjardins Caisse Portugaise, among others, and employed the rhetoric of community. “Our meeting gave us the opportunity to create new solidarity friendships and a network of support and creative inspiration,” the zine’s text continues, combatting the street art culture that is bred by the monetary-based street art and graffiti festival.
“Street art becomes ‘co-opted,’ the [festival participants] are not about community building and local politics anymore, but about fame and money,” said Zola, an artist who works with OFFmuralES. Lilycuciole, another artist in the collective, said that corporate-driven art “destroys the relationship between the actors in this community. It excludes and breaks the integration of new players who have something to say or share.”

“They can reclaim whatever they want. They can claim our ideas as theirs. They can say, ‘We’re going to have that many women, that many persons of colour.’ They can say that, but as soon as they’re within that system, that capitalist system, these elitist ideas of who’s a great artist or not, then the space will never be safe for people who are marginalized within this system. I’ll never feel safe there,” said Stela, a member of OFFmuralES.

***

“For street art to be effective, you need to think about so many layers. The place you’re in, what [you’re] expecting from it,” said Stela, who has been doing graffiti for over eight years. “The first thing I often decry about Station 16 and MURAL would be the lack of diversity in the artists they feature,” Zola said. “But in fact the problems are much deeper than that. It is the vision of what street art is and how it can be used that marks a radical change with them.”

On its website, Station 16 describes itself as “[an] urban art gallery and creative silkscreen print shop.” It represents different street and graffiti artists through a private gallery system. Zola says the dynamics of MURAL – that is, the question of community, lack of diverse participants, and a sliding scale of payment for artists dependent on the organizers’ choice – existed before its inauguration, but were only amplified during that time.

“The people who gravitate around the ‘community’ are almost exclusively males. Some of them are represented by Station 16, [which] represents very close to no females or trans* [people] at all […] and these people have career interests,” said Zola on the corporate construct of community. “Then there are the others who all have their opinion on Station 16 and most of the time will not like the gallery’s ways and discourse,” said Zola, citing OFFmuralES as sitting on that “other side.”

The domain of the street, through corporate-driven festivals, is divided up among those artists that corporations and organizations judge fit to claim it. The institutional memory of street art and graffiti, through its literature, operates much in the same way. There is no lack of people out writing on the walls who do not conform to the heteronormative male worldview out writing on walls, only a lack of representation in the public imagination and literature.

“As the street is perceived as the domain of man and the site of his adventure, it is therefore not surprising that, in popular imagination, the street artist is first and foremost a solitary male marking his territory,” wrote Harpy in the OFFmuralES zine co-published with the Howl! Arts Collective.

Harpy; from the French word harpie. Nom féminin en français. Monstre fabuleux, femme très méchante.

Jessica Pabón, who runs Bustoleum, “a blog dedicated to graffiti writing women,” wrote to me, “I think the only way to approach street art and grrlz involvement in it is to assume that they have to navigate the same social scene, and follow the same kinds of ‘rules and regulations’ in terms of subcultural dynamics, but that they also have to navigate the material effects of their gender as marginalized minorities in an overwhelmingly sexist male-dominated subculture.” Pabón’s dissertation, which she wrote at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, is entitled “The ‘Art of Getting Ovaries’: Female Graffiti Artists and the Politics of Presence in Hip Hop’s Graffiti Subculture.”

“It is less about essentializing them as ‘all grrlz do this’ and more about taking account of difference within the subculture,” wrote Pabón.

“As a woman you become hypervisible in the city at night, so when we paired together we were already more threatening than when we were alone,” said Stela on the OFFmuralES collective. She believes in empowering other artists by offering “to support other people’s projects in a way that can help them. For example, some of the people in the group are doing textile work, which takes a long time to install, so this is something I can do, to go and help them put it up.”

Zola began creating street art by yarnbombing, the manifestations of knit attacks you see wrapping various structures around the city. It was in the early spring of 2011. She said it was her way of participating in a movement. “It was political, it was artistic, and it was heart warming.” According to Zola, the inherent politics of yarnbombing – aside from the illegality of fixing textile works in the public – is as feminist as it was when Miriam Schapiro first used textiles in the world of fine art in the 1980s.

Displacing the ‘domestic’ to the public realm as a form of cultural production removes a bit of that calibrated secrecy around identity in street art. Identifying as a woman, as a person of colour, as queer, as trans* in your art, and making that visible on the street becomes a political act. “When I began to see my experience in that scene as a sexist experience, I guess I cannot see anything that I do, street art-wise, as not political, because it is. Because I was not supposed to still be there,” said Stela.

***

There is a black and white portrait of a woman of East Asian background wheat-pasted on St. Laurent. The woman is looking upward in the shot, palms clasped together, surrounded by painted flora. On the wall, she is striking. I realized that this was one of the few instances that I saw a face that I could identify with on the streets of this city, leading me to scour the walls looking for more. I spoke to Lilycuciole, the artist behind these works. “An anti-colonial art is an art that does not establish a hierarchy between the creators,” she wrote. “An art that integrates all actors independently of the colour [of their] skin, origins, social class, political affiliation, religious beliefs.” Her project is called “Revelation,” which comes from the “misunderstandings, ignorance, and racism among people both in Montreal and Paris,” according to an interview with Powder Magazine.

Montreal is lacking a public forum for dialogue about street art, a dialogue that OFFmuralES created for their collective. The walls strewn with writing are standing on unceded land, Mohawk territory. When street artists reclaim space, do they think about whose land they walk on? When an artist creates a work, do they pick a corporation’s window as their canvas, or a local business that might not be financially able to remove the paint? Who gets to paint there? Who are they?

“As I started to identify as a feminist and as a rape survivor, and so on, these are things that if I do that, these experiences are with me when I do that, when I reclaim space,” said Stela. Since coming out as a rape survivor in an interview over a year ago, Stela said that she has been approached by girls saying graffiti artists had raped them, adding, “It’s super hard to participate in an interview like this because [what I have to say is] often not what people want to say in their paper.”

Enter the street, white skies, newly-sponsored gallery space. The street presents the art, which is supposed to speak for itself – because art can speak to you, really – and the brick walls and concrete jungle frame the work. The street contextualizes it, marks gentrification, and cannot negate itself.

If you feel isolated, have no fear, because you can find faces or messages in the writing on the walls of Montreal you may identify with, like I did. We don’t leave the public space, and we can’t forget the socio-historical context and politics that make street art available to us. You can shoot the breeze about the aesthetics of street art over a cup of third wave coffee and a flaxseed vegan muffin, if that’s your thing, but the consumer report on street art and graffiti is continuously being written, and feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-corporate artists are still taking to the streets. The work is framed for you. Do you miss the white walls yet?

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The making of the ‘McGill Ghetto’

Despite the recent news, the neighbourhood around McGill hasn’t always been so student-laden. Over the years, it morphed from a working-class neighbourhood to a home for hippies, draft dodgers, and counterculture. Finally, in the mid-1990s, it became the expensive, student-filled ‘McGill Ghetto’ that we know today.

According to an interview published in Satellite magazine in 2012, Phyllis Lambert, founder of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, said, “In the [19]70s through the [19]80s, there was a huge not-for-profit cooperative housing project for about 600 to 700 people just to the east of the McGill campus, in the downtown.”

Lucia Kowaluk, president of the Milton Parc Citizens’ Committee, said that she has lived in the neighbourhood since its ‘hippie’ days in the 1960s, when she was a student at McGill’s School of Social Work. “McGill was small at the time,” she said in an interview with The Daily. “Not many students lived there.”

Now, with almost 40,000 students enrolled at McGill as of 2013, student housing has become a central issue in the neighbourhood. Notably, private investors, rather than university residence systems, are currently the most active in the student housing market. Campus Crest Communities Incorporated – one of the investors in both the Holiday Inn and Delta transformations – is a major player, with a 35 per cent stake in the Holiday Inn project and a 20 per cent stake in the Delta project.

In an e-mail to The Daily, Ted Rollins, CEO of Campus Crest, wrote, “We have big plans for Canada. We believe that the Canadian market is in need of this type of project. We have already experienced a tremendous amount of interest from students.”

As the McGill student population continues to grow, the University has also been rapidly expanding its residence network. Three hotels have been converted to residences in less than ten years: New Residence Hall, Carrefour Sherbrooke, and La Citadelle, in that order. In addition, private investors from Toronto and the United States have plans to convert the Quality Inn on Parc to a student residence in the near future.

According to Éric Michaud, coordinator at the Comité logement Ville-Marie, a housing advocacy group in the downtown core, the flood of students into the areas around the McGill campus has made it less accessible for families to live there.

“[The growth of the student population] diminishes the accessibility of housing for families because students can split the costs and pay more than a family could for the same space,” he said in French in an interview with The Daily.

Conversely, Kowaluk isn’t worried about the ongoing hotel-student residence conversions. “That’s fine,” she said. “From the board chatting about it, we’re glad that students are moving into hotels so they don’t take over [the neighbourhood’s] Victorian houses.”

Michaud somewhat agreed, saying, “Unfortunately, there’s not enough student housing built by the universities,” he said. “We think that it’s a good thing to have student residences built by universities because [then] students pay less [for it].”

For an individual student, the average rent for a double room, shared with an assigned roommate, at New Residence Hall, Carrefour Sherbrooke, or La Citadelle, is $1087.67 per month, with La Citadelle the most expensive at $1112 per month.

Rollins declined to specify exactly how expensive the converted Holiday Inn residence would be, writing only, “We aren’t the cheapest, but we believe that students will receive a compelling value.”

“McGill is a terrible landlord. There are things you have to pay for that would never stand up if they had to face a renting board,” said Fred Burrill, community organizer at Projet Organisation Populaire Information et Regroupement (POPIR) of the St. Henri, Petite Bourgogne, Côte-Saint-Paul, and Ville-Émard areas.

Prime real estate

In recent years, McGill has turned to hotels to build cheaper residences, with all three of its most recent residences the product of such renovations. While these residences may take students out of the renting pool for private apartments, it won’t necessarily drive rent down in the apartments they would be leaving behind.

Paule Provencher, a real estate agent in the McGill area for around 25 years, said that after the renovation that turned the former Renaissance Hotel into New Residence Hall several years ago, there were far fewer students looking to rent, but that the dip in demand had little impact on rent prices in the neighbourhood.

“[The prices go down] a little bit, but not that much,” she told The Daily. “You have to understand that people have purchased their condo at a high price and they really cannot just give it away.”

“Families and professional couples don’t want to [live in the McGill area]. When I tell them that it’s in [that] area, they say ‘no thank you.’ They hang up,” she said, adding, “Just a few families live in the area, but really not that much.”

“A trend that has been happening in the last couple years in Montreal, roughly since when McGill opened up Solin Hall [in 1990], is that universities – and McGill is on the forefront of this – are becoming developers, even if not for-profit, making the neighbourhoods more upscale,” said Burrill, adding that, “The university as developer is a phenomenon that McGill started but is no longer the only participant in the process.”
A soon-to-be-released study, conducted by the Comité in conjunction with the Université du Québec à Montréal, indicated that in the borough of Ville-Marie (which includes most of the Golden Square Mile), property prices have soared since 2004.

“They have doubled between 2004 and 2011, which has had an impact on, among other things, [property] taxes and rent [in the neighbourhood],” said Michaud.

It’s not only renters who pay the price of the shift to private investors in the residence market. “I think that as universities like McGill and Université de Montréal are moving increasingly toward the corporate model, they need revenue streams. That comes with increase in tuition, increase in ancillary fees that McGill has students have to pay,” said Burrill.

It’s unclear exactly what impact private investment will have on the situation, but Provencher said that if it will impact rent prices in the neighbourhood, it would most likely drive them up even further.

“If it’s a private [company], of course they’re making an investment; they want money, and [residences] they develop will probably be more expensive than McGill’s,” Provencher said.

The students’ legacy

Despite the dizzying climb of rent prices in the McGill area since the 1990s, a typical feature of gentrification, both Provencher and Kowaluk argued that the neighbourhood hasn’t been gentrified.

“I don’t see students moving in as gentrification,” said Kowaluk, although she wasn’t happy about the change.
Provencher agreed. “I don’t think [of it as gentrification]. Because the families with kids, they don’t want to come [to the neighbourhood], the professionals, they don’t want to come,” she said.

“The number of students is overwhelming the demographic mix,” Kowaluk added. “It’s not the majority of students, but enough who don’t have a sense of living in a neighborhood [and] don’t know how to behave or hold their liquor […] I know people who say their neighbours have left because they were tired of the noise.”

Burrill described McGill’s view on incoming students as a “captive tenant population,” saying that “[The University] is targeting them as a revenue source.” Burrill believes that the conversion of hotels to residences downtown do contribute to a form of gentrification, pushing lower-income tenants out.

“The main way students can not contribute to gentrification is living a certain way, getting to know their neighbours,” he said. “There are certain legal things student[s] can do. You can transfer your lease, insist on having repairs done.”

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On January 22, an intimate crowd gathered in place of the book carts that usually occupy the Concordia Community Solidarity Co-op Bookstore’s storefront in anticipation of the launch of a new project by the “Free City Radio” show. The project, pioneered by show programmer and community activist Stefan Christoff, is the Free City Radio zine – bringing you transcripts of radio interviews, artwork, photography, and reflections from the airwaves in a tangible physical format.

Created in collaboration with the CKUT community radio in Montreal, the zine is independently published without corporate or state funding and will continue to do so once every season. To paraphrase Christoff’s words, it is better to print editions according to the seasons than to a specified date four times a year.

The interviews, all conducted by Christoff and Mostafa Henaway, are presented in the zine with two focuses in mind, one local and one international. Within this issue there are discussions on local gentrification and displacement. On the international level, the zine features discussions on massive political shifts.

“I think of radio as the medium for imagination,” said Christoff in his closing remarks. It is also arguably an imaginative realm for something better.

The zine also includes an interview with Juan Haro, an organizer with the Movement for Justice in El Barrio in East Harlem, New York City, who talks about the struggles in Harlem as a project of corporate-driven displacement. Independent filmmaker Jesse Freeston, who was interviewed by Christoff in the winter of 2014, speaks about the ongoing political crisis in Honduras that extends beyond the elections and into the new mediascape post-2009 coup d’état. Alexis Stoumbelis from the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) speaks of the struggle there for land and social justice, and San Juan, Puerto Rico professor and writer Maritza Stanchich highlights the historical context of the Puerto Rican student movement.

“I can try to do as many interviews as possible – as humanly possible – to document these issues,” said Christoff.

We are brought closer together through our community radio stations, hemispheres closer. Pushing forth both a local and global perspective, the Free City Radio zine is another tactile step in a much larger social movement, bringing a network of social activists and information to you in another format. Listeners become readers. In all this movement, a world of BuzzFeed, notifications, and sound bites, let’s take Christoff’s advice, read this zine, and “slow down for a minute.”

Free City Radio zine is available for a year-long subscription of $20. More information can be found at freecityradio.org.

The post Expanded radio appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Schools of social work across Canada are reaccredited every seven or eight years, unless they receive an “accreditation with conditions.” “By having the program accredited, a social work degree in one part of Canada is the same in another part of Canada,” said Ross Klein, Canadian Association for Social Work Education (CASWE) Anglophone Co-Chair of the Commission on Accreditation (COA).

McGill’s School of Social Work received an accreditation with conditions in 2012 due to concerns raised by students to representatives from CASWE. This means that the School will have to go through the reaccreditation process again in 2016. The School has operated under accreditation with conditions since 2005. Before that, it was accredited for the full seven-year term for at least four terms.

The three conditions outlined by the COA include developing mechanisms for clear channels of meaningful participation from community members and students, providing support for students in their field placements, and ensuring that “concepts of social justice and anti-oppressive practice are clearly and effectively taught in both the [Bachelor] and [Masters] curricula.”

“We need to make [our criticisms] public because we are not being heard.”

Four reports compiled by various students at the School were submitted to CASWE during their site visit in the 2012 fall semester. The site visit from CASWE was a follow-up to a self-study report that the School is required to write and send to the Association. “The reason [for the site visit] is to see if what [the School] wrote in their self-study is actually implemented on the ground,” Klein explained.

According to a letter from Klein addressed to then-Principal and Vice-Chancellor Heather Munroe-Blum, which was received on March 11, 2013, “While students spoke favourably of their contacts with faculty members and provided high ratings in evaluations and surveys, they were strongly critical of communications within the School, particularly about their ability to have input and influence.”

The letter also urged for the “incorporation of concepts of social justice and anti-oppression into the curriculum.”

“A lot of schools struggle with issues of teaching anti-oppressive practice, a lot of schools struggle with issues of diversity,” said Klein.
According to Klein, “as part of the self-study, the School is expected to consult with students.” Wendy Thomson, Director of the McGill School of Social Work told The Daily that there were difficulties assembling with faculty and students when preparing the self-study during the student strike, but still claimed that all identified stakeholders in the School were consulted during the process of writing the self-study.

A member of the Racialized Students Network (RSN) – a group that was identified as a major stakeholder by the School in its self-study – argued the contrary. “The RSN has never been included on a systemic or structural level in the School’s decision making. It has not been invited to any administrative bodies [or] any student council bodies. It [was] not consulted during the creation of the self-study report.”

“It’s almost laughable how intensely skin colour is felt by students of colour. There is a very large group of racialized students in the School of Social Work and I would go as far as to say that all of us feel racism in the School in some way.”

The RSN submitted one of the four reports to the CASWE accreditation site visitors in response to what they called “a deeply felt need for change around race relations in the School.” The report was compiled by two or three students, and contained the work of many more contributors, in January 2012.

Megann Ayotte, a contributor to McGill Social Work Students Strike Report, one of the four reports, also said, “The problem that people had with the self-study was that no one was consulted.”

“It’s almost laughable how intensely skin colour is felt by students of colour. There is a very large group of racialized students in the School of Social Work and I would go as far as to say that all of us feel racism in the School in some way. That may not be intentional on [the]part of the faculty but it is certainly tangible in the classroom experiences [and] the field experiences,” said the member of the RSN.

The RSN report sought to make recommendations to the School on how it could implement certain equity policies to “foster dialogue” at the School, “develop and advocate for policies and programs that support the retention and successful graduation of racialized students,” and so forth.
A similar report was submitted to CASWE at the time of the site visit as well. Called “Towards a More Social Justice and Human Rights Oriented School of Social Work,” it was written as a “response to the McGill Self-Study Report for the CASWE-ACTFS Accreditation Standards,” as indicated on the report.

Three of the nine recommendations made by this report call for the School to integrate anti-oppressive practice more clearly in the School. A contributor to the report and undergraduate student in the School at the time the report was written said it was prompted by a “group of students who wanted to see an ideological shift in the School.”

Presented by a collective of former and present McGill School of Social Work students, and written by around 15 to 20 students, this report was endorsed – though not created – by the undergraduate Social Work Students’ Association (SWSA) and the Social Work Association of Graduate Students (SWAGS). In total, over 60 students and alumni endorsed the contents of the Social Justice report, according to a presentation on November 7 organized by SWAGS.

No palpable policy change has been made in the School since these reports were submitted last year, according to the RSN member who spoke to The Daily. The School is required to submit a progress report no later than November 1, 2015 to the COA, showing how the conditions, mentioned earlier in the article, were met.

Lucyna Lach, Associate Professor in the McGill School of Social Work and Associate Dean (Student Affairs), told The Daily, “We’ve been working on an ongoing basis on infusing those principles throughout the curriculum. They’re not labelled as [anti-oppressive practices]. I think they aren’t as visible because they perhaps are not called [anti-oppressive practices]. But they are there, I can assure you that.”

“We did get a lot of good things from the students who talked to us,” Thomson added. “Some students, for reasons they can tell you better than me, felt they would prefer to deal with a third party than talk with us. That’s disappointing for us. We like to talk to the students directly.”
However, Ayotte said, “There are these empty opportunities for communication to happen but there’s no effort to really involve people.”

In the Social Justice report, a contributor echoed this sentiment, stating, “We need to make [our criticisms] public because we are not being heard.”

The post Students push for structural change in McGill’s School of Social Work appeared first on The McGill Daily.

This National Day of Action Against Pipelines saw demonstrations across Canada, with groups organizing in more than 120 communities in opposition to the expanding tar sands industry in Canada. Particular attention was paid to the reversal of the Enbridge Line 9 pipeline, which runs through the unceded Mohawk territory that is now called Oka Park. The weakening of environmental protection laws through Bill C-45 and Bill 38 were also criticized.

“[We are] faced with the realities of climate change, faced with governments who will exploit the last drops of oil, and faced with companies who are still allied with those governments.”

At 11:45 a.m. the opening prayer was shared over a megaphone with the people gathered, first acknowledging that the location of the gathering and the whole island of Montreal are unceded Mohawk territory. Following the prayer were singers and a dance that invited all of the women present at the gathering to partake in the centre of the circle of people.

“We talk about creation, but we are creation,” said the opening prayer’s speaker.

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Speeches were made by Idle No More’s Melissa Mollen Dupuis, Patrick Bonin of Greenpeace, Beverly Jacobs of Six Nations, Lily Schwarzbaum of Climate Justice Montreal, and Amir Khadir, Québec solidaire Member of the National Assembly for Montreal’s Mercier riding. The speeches connected the Indigenous struggle with ongoing colonialism and the environmental movement.

“In Idle No More, we used to ask ourselves if we were alone in our fight for the environment, in our fight for the earth, but I can say that today we are feeling less and less alone,” Dupuis told the crowd in French.

Bonin shared views on solidarity with the crowd. “We are here because we realize that we don’t have a choice in being together,” he yelled through the megaphone. “[We are] faced with the realities of climate change, faced with governments who will exploit the last drops of oil, and faced with companies who are still allied with those governments.”

Khadir also shared his concerns about the Alberta tar sands industry, calling it “the dirtiest oil on the planet.”

“Why do the people of Quebec need to kneel before Albertan oil?” Khadir continued.

The Facebook event for the demonstration at Oka indicated the greater problem of long-term environmental sustainability and the lack of consultation with Indigenous peoples, who are key stakeholders in the land.

“The pipelines and this issue of corrupt government, corrupt corporations, and the potential to destroy the beautiful landscape that we have in our community, affects everybody,” protest organizer Ellen Gabriel told The Daily in an interview.

“We need to change how capitalism is working, we need to change how we as consumers allow these kinds of corporations to continue to be exploiting our land.”

“Why do the people of Quebec need to kneel before Albertan oil?”

Saturday’s National Day of Action was partially in response to a deal signed on November 4 between Alison Redford, the Premier of Alberta, and Christy Clark, the Premier of British Columbia, that would lay the framework for future pipeline expansion in both provinces. The basic five-point agreement eliminates what was previously a major obstacle to the expansion of pipelines in Western Canada, notably the proposed Northern Gateway project.

“It’s illegal, it’s illegitimate,” Gabriel said in regards to the agreement in an interview. “I don’t think they consulted with the original people of this land.”

“If it goes ahead, its going to be bad not just for the Indigenous peoples but for [all] Canadians, because if they’re allowed to break the rule of law, what’s to stop them from taking democracy away?” she continued.

“What we have seen is that the Premier of BC seems to want to negotiate conditions which aren’t representative of what the population wants,” Bonin told The Daily in French. “The population has clearly expressed its will as being against the projects.”

“In reality, the decision of Christy Clark doesn’t respect this political will,” he added.

The fight for sustainable development against fracking and tar sands took to Highway Route 344 West, just outside the entrance of Oka Park, where protesters participated in a festive round dance around four singers, taking up the breadth of the road. The gathering dispersed at 1:30 p.m..

According to protesters, the creation of gatherings and protests against unsustainable development will only continue in the future.

The post Hundreds protest against pipelines on unceded Mohawk land appeared first on The McGill Daily.