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Transcription

Volume 101, Issue 29
February 2, 2012
mcgilldaily.com
McGill
THE
DAILY
Not adding up since 1911
Published by The Daily
Publications Society,
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McGill University.
News
The McGill Daily | Thursday, February 2, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com
2
AUS GA loses quorum after an hour
Devin Kesner and
Jordan Venton-Rublee
The McGill Daily
A
fter losing quorum slightly
over an hour into its proceedings, the second Arts
Undergraduate Society (AUS) General
Assembly (GA) of the year saw multiple challenges to the Speaker’s authority, as well as to the representative ability of GAs in general.
Some of the issues discussed at
last Tuesday’s GA included formation
of a strike committee, tuition hikes,
and reforms to AUS Frosh. The GA
was held in the Stewart Biology
building rather than the Shatner
building, as it was last semester.
After reaching quorum, the
assembly began debate on a motion
for recognition of an AUS strike
committee. Following a number of
amendments and debate periods,
and just prior to voting procedure
on the motion, the GA lost quorum.
The loss of quorum results in all
motions passed acting as recommendations to the AUS Council,
as opposed to binding resolutions.
However, Council lost quorum at
its meeting on Wednesday before
having time to vote on many of
these recommendations.
The motion regarding the recognition of an AUS Strike Committee
passed at the GA as a recommendation to Council.
The GA then passed a motion
regarding accessible education, which
would require the AUS to “adopt a
policy in favor of accessible education
and against all tuition hikes.”
Both of these motions were
tabled at Wednesday’s AUS Council
until the next scheduled Council
meeting on February 15.
At the GA, one AUS member
motioned to suspend the rules and
indefinitely suspend AUS Speaker Ben
Lerer, in which case AUS President
Jade Calver would replace him.
Lerer noted that the motion to
suspend the Speaker of the GA was
allowed, but if there were a desire to
suspend the Speaker as a position on
AUS Council, “it would have needed to
be added to the agenda [earlier].”
The motion was voted on, but
ultimately failed without a twothirds majority.
A motion for the AUS to pursue membership of the pro-strike
organization Coalition Large de
The Department of Social Studies of Medicine presents
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Friday, February 10, 2012 at 4:00 PM
Arts Council Room
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The public is cordially invited. For further information, call the
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or visit www.mcgill.ca/ssom/upcoming-seminars-events
l’Association pour une Solidarité
Syndicale Étudiante (CLASSE) was
tabled to be voted on at the next GA
due to the loss of quorum.
A related special referendum
will be held in February. The question to be voted on amends the
AUS Constitution so that the GA is
the supreme governing body of the
Society. The amendment would make
the AUS eligible to join CLASSE.
The next motions passed called for
the AUS to “be mandated to transform
the current AUS Frosh model into a
safe space,” and a request for the relocation of the historic Hochelaga Rock.
Both of these motions were
passed with minor amendments
by the AUS Council on Wednesday
before it lost quorum.
Following the GA, there has
been criticism regarding the conduct in which the assembly was run.
Jaime Maclean, one of the movers of the motion for recognition
of an AUS Strike Committee, and
a member of the AUS Mobilization
Committee, stated that, while
debate is important, at the GA, “The
debate period and question period
were used almost as stall tactics to
avoid voting on the question and to
lose quorum before we could actu-
Sam Reynolds | The McGill Daily
ally have the chance to vote.”
Daniel Wolfe, another member
of the Mobilization Committee,
emphasized that part of the issue
lies in the fact that the people do
not have “the right to choose the
Speaker,” as it is a hired position.
When questioned about the
motion to suspend him, Lerer stated
that he believed he performed his
duties “without bias,” and that he
“ensured that debate was not stifled
by the majority” during the assembly.
Calver also weighed in with an
assertion that “the motion [to sus-
pend the speaker] was invalid under
the Robert’s Rules of Order.”
During the GA, Lerer referred
to either Calver or the text of
Robert’s Rules several times to
look up procedure.
Following adjournment of the
Council
meeting,
Mobilization
Committee member Amber Gross
called the two tabled motions “very
disappointing” as they are “really
important and time-sensitive” issues.
Calver and Lerer are looking into
planning another GA within the next
two weeks.
News
3
GA loses quorum after passing two motions
Newburgh and Steven motion to reinstate J-Board fails
Juan Camilo Velásquez
The McGill Daily
O
nly two of seven motions
were passed as binding decisions during SSMU’s 2012
Winter General Assembly (GA), as
the necessary quorum of 100 students lasted for less than two hours.
SSMU Legislative Council will discuss
all other motions passed next week.
Before the agenda was approved,
students Zach Newburgh and
Brendan Steven moved a motion
from the floor “in support of an
independent judiciary.” The motion
sought to reinstate Judicial Board
(J-Board) activities immediately.
The SSMU Board of Directors
(BoD) suspended all J-Board activities last week citing a legal need to
clarify their relationship with the
J-Board in the SSMU Constitution.
The decision suspended a J-Board
case Newburgh and Steven filed
disputing the results of QPIRG referendum question last November.
During debate on the motion,
Newburgh said he considered
the BoD decision “entirely out of
order, illegal, and an affront to
democracy in our Society.”
“I am concerned about the faultiness of the advice that the SSMU
lawyer provided to the SSMU, our
corporation, our student union,”
he continued.
After a vote and a reconsideration vote, the motion did not attain
the two-thirds majority necessary
to be added to the agenda.
Following the executive reports,
the motions “Regarding the Selection
of the Financial Auditor” and
“Regarding Student-Run Café” – both
moved by VP Finance and Operations
Shyam Patel – passed.
However, quorum was lost halfway through debate on the motion
“Regarding Frosh Reform,” rendering the GA a consultative body with
no binding decision-making power.
The Frosh Reform motion passed,
as well as a motion regarding policy
on negative corporative influence on
campus moved by Clubs and Services
representative Adam Winer, the latter
after intense debate.
Winer responded to student
concerns that severing ties with
corporations could harm potential
student employment.
“We live in a social context, and you
cannot just abstract away from that and
use finding jobs as a way to obscure
that entire discussion,” said Winer.
The motion “Regarding a
Student Strike Solidarity Fund,”
which would provide assistance to
students affected by an extended
student strike, also fuelled extensive debate before passing.
“If you want to protest, fine…
that’s your right. But ultimately,
Gandhi did not ask for a handout
and neither should any of you here,”
said one member of the assembly,
speaking against the motion.
The last motion to be discussed,
Blair Elliott | The McGill Daily
The GA lost its 100-student quorum in under two hours.
“Regarding the Commission of a
Portrait of Karl Marx,” was the only
motion that failed to pass.
Other motions passed by the
consultative body included a motion
“Regarding the Denouncement of
Bill C-10,” and a motion to lobby
SSMU Council to buy chess sets for
Gerts.
SSMU President Maggie Knight
spoke to The Daily after the GA about
the chronic lack of attendance at GAs.
“We could have offered food,
but you know that’s expensive,
so people would get upset about
that. There are tales about a lack
of successful process out of the
[Arts Undergraduate Society] GA
last night – that may have put some
other students that are not in the
Arts faculty off,” said Knight.
Knight also referred to the exten-
sive debate at the start of the GA.
“We were very bogged down
in procedural matters at the start
of the GA, which delayed things
and probably made people a little
bit more frustrated ... I think that
there is also a responsibility for
all students who attend the GA to
act in good faith with the process
and try to facilitate a meaningful
exchange of ideas,” she added.
Board of Governors adjourned due to student protestors
Discussion of Jutras Report recommendations on agenda
Esther Lee
The McGill Daily
M
cGill’s highest decisionmaking body adjourned
five minutes after beginning an open session to discuss the
Jutras Report last Tuesday.
Following opening remarks from
Principal Heather Munroe-Blum and
Board of Governors (BoG) Chair
Stuart Cobbett, a group of students
in the gallery, most of whom were
dressed in pirate costumes, stood
and began to sing a rendition of
“Barrett’s Privateers.”
After several attempts to call
for order, Cobbett adjourned the
meeting.
Speaking to The Daily, MunroeBlum said the goal of the open session was to encourage discussion on
the Jutras Report and to incorporate
the feedback into her own report.
Munroe-Blum has announced
that McGill accepts all recommendations made in the Jutras Report,
and that a report concerning the
implementation of the recommendations will be forthcoming.
“What we were supposed to
have [at the meeting] was lost, and
that’s unfortunate,” she said. “I
won’t get the benefit of consultation
before responding, though I would
encourage various communities to
engage in conversation.”
Minutes after the students’ singing started, members of the BoG
began to leave the room.
According to one student who
participated in the action, “I acted
to hijack the proceedings and plunder the macadamia nut cookies of
the BoG. We committed mutiny and
vanquished the scurvy scoundrels
of the captain’s chambers.”
Several administrators and
board members remained in the
room to discuss the demonstration
with students who participated.
Sunci Avlijas, a biology graduate student, spoke to reasons
behind the action.
“[BoG] is a place where we don’t
have real input – we just come here to
listen and watch them make decisions
for us... The point of the action was
to delegitimize their power to make
decisions for the rest of the University
without any accountability to the student body and rest of the community.”
Gallery members do not have
speaking rights in BoG meetings.
SSMU President Maggie Knight,
one of two student representatives
to the BoG, spoke to The Daily after
the meeting was adjourned.
“I guess I’m not surprised,
because [the students] want to pressure the system, and this was their
way to voice their opinions,” Knight
said. “But [the administration] didn’t
have to hold an open session.”
BoG meetings are comprised of
a public open session and a closed
session in which only BoG members are permitted. On Tuesday, the
closed session of the meeting took
place before the open session.
PGSS President Roland Nassim,
the other student representative to
the BoG, said he was disappointed
that the meeting was interrupted.
“This is not the student voice – 19
people hijacked the student voice;
they eliminated it for thousands
and thousands of people.”
“How am I going to approach
the principal tomorrow and tell her
we need to have open conversation
[when] she asks me: ‘Are [students]
going to come and sing again?’”
Nassim continued. “This is the ramification of these kinds of things: it loses
our credibility as student leaders.”
David Kalant, administrative and
support staff representative to the
BoG, said he understood the stu-
dents’ concerns but had reservations.
“I was elected to represent similar concerns – to open things up,
make things more transparent, but
I don’t think this is going to achieve
that,” he said.
Philosophy professor Alison
Laywine, who is not a member of the
BoG but was present for the open
session, said that she felt energized.
“I think [the action] drew attention [to the need] for the conversation between the Board of
Governors and the constituents in
the University,” she said.
It was the second BoG meeting
in a row in which students have
staged protests.
At the time of press, it was
unknown if an open session to discuss the recommendations of the
Jutras Report will be rescheduled.
—With files from Queen ArsemO’Malley
4 News
New research on biofilms could
decontaminate tailings ponds
Environmentalists skeptical of University of Calgary professors’ research
Rachel Reichel
The McGill Daily
U
niversity of Calgary (UC)
professors Howard Ceri
and Raymond Turner have
been working to develop a biofilm
that will be able to absorb much
of the toxic metal residue associated with tar sands’ tailing ponds,
which store contaminated water
from processing oil.
Turner, a biochemistry professor, explained that the technological discovery began as a side
project, when the team decided
to start researching biofilms naturally occurring in the tailings
ponds ecosystem.
“What’s novel about what we’re
doing,” Turner said, “is that we
are growing these communities as
biofilms.”
When explaining the benefit of
using biofilms, Turner likens the
communities to that of a city.
“We don’t have everyone in a
city, every single organism, every
human in the city, can do every
job. We have the specialist; we
have the plumber; we have the
accountant; we have all these
specialty organisms within a city
community. Every individual
species within the biofilm will
only be able to degrade a certain amount of one kind of compound,” said Turner.
“As a community, in the biofilm,
they are close together like we are
in a city,” Turner added. “They can
work together to get things done.”
Currently, remediation of tailings ponds occurs in a multi-step
process.
“The tailings ponds have a lot of
microbial activity. The problem is
that, there would be metal contamination such that, with that metabo-
8
launch
ways to
lism, [degradation] happens quite
slowly. If you can isolate the community organisms that can process
all the organic pollutants as well as
deal with the heavy metal components, you’d have a super community, if you will,” Turner explained.
This led Turner to collaborate
with Ceri, who has spent much of
his career looking at metal tolerance comparison between bacteria
growing in a biofilm versus other
forms of growth. Together they are
trying to develop seed organism
inoculants to treat the water layer
that could be integrated with traditional water treatment.
The goal, Turner said, is “to create metal resistant bacteria that
would lead to better organic, and
maybe metal remediation, and be
able to generate a water treatment
process for remediation.”
Biofilms have been used in
water treatment and bioreme-
diation before. Water treatment
plants in municipal facilities use
some forms of biofilm in treating
human waste. Other mining tailings have used biofilms for tailings, such as copper. But while a
precedent has been set, biofilms
are not widely used in the treatment of tailings.
There are many stakeholders who want to emphasize that
the success of treating the tailing
ponds doesn’t diminish the negative aspects associated with them.
Ramsey Hart, the Canada Program
Coordinator of MiningWatch Canada,
stated that while this discovery will
improve the situation, it does not significantly alter the argument.
“If the water and sediments in
the tar sands tailings ponds could
be made environmentally benign
then certainly that would improve
the situation,” he said.
“However, there are still issues
of the amount of land and energy
the whole system is using, but storing millions of meters cubed of
clean water and sediments would
be better than the status quo,”
Hart continued.
He also expressed reservations
about the large-scale application.
“I’m quite skeptical that this could
be scaled up, but it’s kind of my job
to be skeptical,” he said.
Turner and Ceri are nearly
done their portion of the research.
Turner said they will soon pass the
research over to a team of engineers at the University of Alberta,
who will begin testing the biofilms
in a water treatment system.
“We gave the project six months
to see if it would work,” Turner said
in an interview with the Canadian
University Press. “I never thought it
would work in a lab... Where we are
now is where we thought we would
be in five years.”
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News
5
CKUT will run second referendum; QPIRG won’t
Radio station wants fee to become non-opt-outable
Tamkinat Mirza
The McGill Daily
W
ith the positive results
of their respective existence referenda questions
voided by the administration three
weeks ago, CKUT intends to field
another referendum question this
winter. QPIRG, however, does not.
The administration cited a lack
of clarity in both questions as the
justification for its decision. In an
email to The Daily, Deputy Provost
(Student Life and Learning) Morton
Mendelson said that, in the past,
“some fee referenda have not been
implemented, because they also
lacked clarity.”
Kira Page, a member of the
QPIRG Board of Directors, said
QPIRG is still trying to get last semester’s referendum results recognized.
“We’ve just been sitting down
with Mendelson and his negotiation
team in the last couple of weeks to
explore other options,” said Page.
“We’re not currently looking into
the possibility of running another
referendum,” she continued.
QPIRG’s referendum results
have also been challenged by students Zach Newburgh and Brendan
Steven in a Judicial Board (J-Board)
case. In a press release, Newburgh
and Steven said they shared “serious concerns about the integrity of
the referendum process.”
SSMU Council suspended the
case until further notice last week,
however, citing a need to clarify
the relationship between the SSMU
Board of Directors and the J-Board
in the Society’s Constitution.
“[The J-Board] is part of the student democratic process for people
who want to challenge the referendum results,” said Page, who added
that the administration has “no
right” to void the results.
“We had 132 students on our
campaign who worked so hard and
tirelessly,” continued Page. “We think
it’s very disrespectful to the work of
those people to do it all again.”
According to Page, QPIRG is
committed to its current funding
model, and is not looking into other
financial sources.
“We’re not interested in turning
into an NGO that is always scrambling for funding and applying for
grants,” said Page, “especially in the
context of the kind of political situation we are in Canada, where fund-
ing is being cut anyway.”
CKUT Funding and Outreach
Coordinator Caitlin Manicom said
the radio station does not currently
have the financial capacity to legally
contest the University on the case.
Manicom maintained that
CKUT’s referendum results were
valid, however.
“The administration should recognize the results of that vote,” she
said, “especially given the fact that
the University…has no legal right
to unilaterally interfere with the
administration of [our fees].”
According to Manicom, CKUT
will be running two questions in
the winter referendum period. One
question will seek to affirm student
support for their continued existence, and the other will ask that
their fee become non-opt-outable.
“It is crucial that we become
non-opt-outable,” said Manicom. “It
is otherwise impossible for us to balance our books, while offering the
types of events and opportunities to
students that we currently do.”
Differences between the respective organizations’ Memoranda
of Agreement (MoA) with McGill
underlie their respective strategies.
“We need to maintain a working
relationship with the administration because we depend on them to
deliver those fees to us, as per our
MoA,” said Manicom.
In the station’s last MoA negotiations five years ago, McGill withheld CKUT’s fees until it agreed to
drop “McGill” from its name.
McGill has given the two groups
have until February 16 to submit student-initiated referendum questions.
CKUT
November: CFRM
switches from the
AM to the FM
dial to become
CKUT Radio
McGill 90.3FM
1987
SSMU takes over the role of
collecting student fees from
the McGill administration
1988
QPIRG holds first existence referendum;
referendum questions asks students whether
QPIRG should exist as student organization at McGill and receive fee levies
Fall: CKUT enters MoA
negotiations with McGill;
McGill withholds student
fees until CKUT drops
“McGill” from its name
1990
Spring: CKUT’s first
existence referenda, students vote yes; SSMU
approves referendum
question, amending it to
include online opt-outs
2003
QPIRG implements
self-administered
refund option
for students
QPIRG
“Existence
referendum”
coined at McGill
Spring: Fees withheld until MoA signed;
CKUT call it “11th-hour request”
Winter:
Referendum
question
to increase
student
fee fails
November: SSMU General
Assembly votes to mandate SSMU
to end online opt-out system
September: Minerva online
opt-out system goes live
2007
2006
“Existence
referendum”
coined at McGill
August: CKUT drops
“McGill” name; administration releases fees
For the first time
McGill administration tells
QPIRG they must
pass existence
referendum to
renegotiate MoA
September: Minerva
online opt-out system
goes live days before
opt-out season; QPIRG
is not given any
prior warning about
online opt-outs
Organized
opt-out
campaigns
begin
2008
November: SSMU General
Assembly votes to
mandate SSMU to end
online opt-out system
Fall: QPIRG existence
referendum passes
Organized
opt-out
campaigns
begin
Winter:
Students vote
against online
opt-outs in a
SSMU referendum question
PGSS announces anti-tuition campaign for 2012
Conference coincides with McGill email warning of potential demonstrations on campus
Jessica Lukawiecki
The McGill Daily
L
ast Tuesday, the Post Graduate
Students’ Society of McGill
(PGSS) announced its 2012
campaign to fight against the $1,625
tuition fee hike planned over the
next five years.
The press conference – hosted by PGSS VP External Mariève
Isabel and attended by eight
people, most of whom were student journalists – took place on
the same day that VP (Finance
and Administration) Michael Di
Grappa warned, in an email to all
staff and students the day before,
that tuition demonstrations could
intrude on campus.
Di Grappa’s email specifically
referred to demonstrations supposedly planned by the Fédération
étudiante universitaire du Québec
(FEUQ) and the Fédération étudiante collégiale du Québec (FECQ) .
The email stated: “We are
writing today to alert you to the
possibility – however remote – of
some turmoil on our downtown
campus tomorrow.”
At the press conference, Isabel
expressed concern that the message was directed toward PGSS,
explaining that, as far as she knew,
the press conference was the only
event connected to FEUQ or FECQ
that had been planned on campus
for Tuesday.
According to Isabel, PGSS is
the only McGill student organization that works closely with
FEUQ. She added that FEUQ does
not come onto campus for events
or demonstrations.
“[McGill administrators are] not
defending this email,” said Isabel in
an email to The Daily. “Rather, they
apologized for singling out FEUQ.
They mentioned that they didn’t
mean to damage anyone’s image.”
According to Di Grappa, the
email “was not about anything
specific, although there were
examples given of some events.
We just were aware of a number
of activities that were happening
in the run-up to the call for the
general strike in March, and in
light of circumstances in the past,
we thought it was important to
inform members of the community about this.”
Tuition hike demonstrations
have twice this year spilled
onto campus: on October 4 and
November 10.
When asked whether the
University will continue to send out
similar emails regarding demonstrations on and around campus,
Di Grappa said, “We’ll think about
it on a case-by-case basis, depending on what’s being planned.”
According to FEUQ President
Martine Desjardins, the group
had nothing planned for Tuesday,
although some of its member associations had independent plans for
“symbolic action.” Among these was a
delivery of 1,625 letters to the Minister
of Education by Université du Québec
à Montréal (UQAM) students.
Desjardins confirmed that the
only event planned at McGill was
the PGSS press conference.
Referring to the email, she said,
“We’re not that kind of association.
It’s great visibility for us, but it’s not
what we’re planning. We reserve
the right to make the government
back down, but it’s very pacific demonstrations and symbolic actions.”
This is not the first time McGill
has been criticized for mass emails
sent to staff and students.
“During the MUNACA strike,
there were a lot of messages that
were sent that were criticized for
being biased,” said Isabel. However,
she pointed out that this is the first
time she has seen a specific student
group targeted.
At the press conference, Isabel
laid out the PGSS’ plans for the winter semester. “We will continue to
campaign against the raise in tuition
fees – we are more convinced than
ever that it is necessary.”
The campaign includes a conference in March about alternatives
to raising tuition fees, and ongoing
research on the effects of ancillary
fees on students.
PGSS is also planning on participating in the March 22 one-day student strike, a demonstration Isabel
hoped will be “peaceful and festive,
and humongous.”
6 News
Who represents you?
LSA President Catherine Coursol
Part of a series on faculty association presidents: LSA gets political
Naomi Desai
News Writer
L
aw Students’ Association
(LSA) President Catherine
Coursol’s main job is to coordinate amongst the VPs, meet the
dean weekly, and stay on-pace
with SSMU and the administration. “The president last year convinced me to run,” said Coursol,
who also served as LSA’s VP
Internal two years ago.
Comparing the LSA to other
faculty
associations,
Coursol
said, “It’s easier because we’re
smaller and people are just really
involved.”
Although she sits on the presidents’ round table, Coursol admitted to not knowing much about the
undergraduate side of McGill’s faculty associations, SSMU included.
The LSA does collaborate with the
Medical Students’ Society during
small events, because of their similarities in size and demographic.
Two years ago, the LSA tried to
leave SSMU. Coursol insisted it is
not a plan this year. “I think this
year the faculty presidents are all
really close,” she said.
She also describes the LSA’s relationship with the administration
as positive. “We don’t agree about
everything, but at least we talk.”
The LSA wavered between
stances of neutrality and support
for MUNACA during the union’s
strike last semester. At first, LSA
Council voted to stay neutral. In
the LSA General Assembly, however, a motion to support MUNACA
passed. Finally, another LSA student filed a petition that led to an
online and offline referendum on
the issue; the result was a renewed
LSA stance of neutrality.
Although LSA executives were
present at the protests on
November 10, Coursol did not
meet with Dean of Law Daniel
Jutras during the two months he
worked on his investigation into
the day’s events.
“Some people from other
faculties were saying it maybe
was not neutral, but…he’s really
someone you can trust,” said
Coursol. “I’m sure he did his best
and that it was neutral.”
In Coursol’s last meeting with
Jutras, she said they discussed the
Jutras Report for “only one minute.”
Coursol explained that she is
impressed at the level of political involvement within the faculty
this year, having never seen similar levels of involvement in her
four years in law. She said that she
was surprised that the LSA came
out against tuition increases.
Coursol insisted that this initiative was not about strikes or
protests, however. “We gave solutions that weren’t, ‘We want free
education.’” The LSA wrote a letter to the Montreal Gazette, for
example, outlining their plan for
increased bursaries.
This year, the LSA has also
been advocating for renaming the
undergraduate LL.B. (Bachelor
of Law) degree to the J.D. (Juris
Doctor). Coursol said the switch
would benefit students who want
to work internationally, where
the J.D. is more recognizable. The
name change could be accompanied with program changes.
Ultimately, the decision to rename
the degree rests with the faculty.
“If the faculty knows it will benefit students, they will change it,”
said Coursol.
This year, the LSA also introduced smaller initiatives to encourage faculty involvement, including
an open-door policy and biweekly
“breakfast with the execs” in the
LSA office. Coursul said having
two VP Internals also made things
smoother this year, a success evidenced by 95 per cent attendance
at LSA Frosh this year.
Victor Tangermann | The McGill Daily
LSA President Catherine Coursol in front of the Nahum Gelber Law Library.
McGill launches new emergency notification system
Erin Hudson
The McGill Daily
T
his past Tuesday, McGill’s
Emergency Measures Office
(EMO) launched its new
emergency communication software,
Alertus. The software is a part of
McGill Attention! – the University’s
mass emergency notification system.
In order to function, Alertus
must be downloaded and installed
onto a computer. When the program is triggered, pop-up messages appear on computers that
have it installed. Computer users
must click an “Acknowledge” button in order for the message to
disappear. According to Alertus’
website, the process is tracked by
the system on a unit-by-unit basis.
McGill stated in an email to all
students on Monday that Alertus
would be activated only in the
event of an emergency, evacuation, or University closure.
The email also stated that
Alertus is part of the EMO’s ongoing efforts to improve emergency
communications at McGill, based
on the recommendations of Dean
of Law Daniel Jutras’ report on
November 10.
The Jutras Report states that
“Security Services should...establish fixed lines of communication
with the different constituencies
on campus, particularly with student groups and University community organizations.”
A major criticism following the
events of November 10 was that
McGill failed to communicate to
students about what was occuring
on campus.
Director of University Safety
Louise Savard said that McGill was
made aware of Alertus a year and a
half ago, when approached by the
company, Alertus Technologies.
“It’s been in development here
for I would say probably more
than half a year,” she said.
Savard added that Alertus is “a
complement to our mass notification tool kit…that doesn’t replace
anything that we’ve previously
been using.”
Alertus
Technologies
was
founded in 2002 after a tornado killed two students at the
University of Maryland. The company specializes in alert systems
for large-scale facilities.
According to Savard, most
computers on campus will have
Alertus software installed. The
software was first tested on 1,413
computers. As of Tuesday morning, 3,625 computers are now registered with Alertus.
If activated, Alertus’ message
can only be targeted to computers
on McGill’s downtown campus,
Macdonald campus, or laptops.
A valid McGill username is
needed to install Alertus.
“The service is intended for the
McGill community,” Savard said.
Commentary
7
Midori Nishioka for The McGill Daily
Dresses, drinks, and misogyny
A night at the annual rugby banquet
Ayla Lefkowitz
Soap Box
I
love getting all dressed up. I do.
I love my pretty dresses. I love
the way my heels sound as I walk
(or strut) around my apartment. I
love the Beyoncé pump-up music
my friends and I listen to as we get
ready to head out. I feel carefree and
unburdened by my thoughts and
worries. I don’t see anything wrong
with me sincerely enjoying these
simple, gendered cliches of womanhood, as long as they don’t limit my
self-expression. I understand where
these norms originate.
Every so often, when I’ve decided
to put on one of my sexy dresses
and go out on the town, my critical
feminist perspective slithers in unannounced and bites the head off my
“carefree” night.
On one such day, my boyfriend,
who is on the McGill rugby team,
nonchalantly invites me to his annual
formal rugby banquet. Unable to control my excitement, I enthusiastically
try on every dress that I own. I decide
on my sexy, low-cut, red prom dress
that is much better suited to me now
than it was back in high school.
I anxiously anticipate the ban-
quet for an entire week, imagining
the pictures we’ll take and the time
I’ll spend with my boyfriend’s rugby
friends, whom I had only met a couple of times. The day finally arrives
and I excitedly get ready while dancing to Beyoncé. Satisfied and filled
with anticipation, we head out.
Sitting at the table with my boyfriend, some other rugby boys, and
their dates, I relax and begin to enjoy
myself. Everyone seems really nice.
Then I hear, “Hello rugby boys! …and
their sluts!” I turn to see the MCs at
the microphone. “You know girls, you
don’t have to dress like that for your
professors to give you good grades.”
Everyone laughs. My jaw drops. What?
I suddenly begin to wish I were wearing a less revealing dress. The sexist
jokes continue and so do the laughs. I
feel like I am the only one in the whole
room of 100 people who finds these
“jokes” offensive. I look at the faces of
the dates at my table. They are giving
that half-smile, roll your eyes look that
you give when someone says something you shouldn’t think is funny.
As the MCs leave the stage, my
boyfriend can clearly tell that I am
distressed. He tries to cheer me up by
reminding me that the food is incredible here. I don’t want to ruin his night,
so I put on a smile and head to the buf-
fet. Food usually puts me in a better
mood. The meal is as good as advertised, and I am beginning to forget the
MCs and enjoy the banquet.
Just as the meal ends, the MCs
take the stage again. “Now we’ve been
scoping out the dates for the past
hour, and we would like to announce
the winner of the hottest date contest!” The rugby boys cheer, while the
dates seem to squirm in their seats. I
am pretty sure that I’m not going to
win, but I decide to be prepared just
in case I do. Should I get up there and
rant about feminism? Or simply give
them the finger? I am still contemplating when I hear them declare that the
winner is the date of a first year player.
The MCs ask the rugby player and
his date to come up to the front. The
rugby boys cheer. I watch as a skinny,
17 year old blonde girl in a short dress
and very high heel walks all the way
to the front of the banquet hall. Every
eye in the room is openly looking her
up and down. Is there envy in the eyes
of the other dates? At the front of the
room, the girl stands quietly beside
her date as he chugs a beer. The MCs
don’t ask her name. They don’t let her
say anything into the mic. The rugby
boy got the prize, not his date. I feel
absolutely disgusted by the whole
thing. This girl and the rest of the
banquet hall is getting a very strong
message that all that matters about a
woman is her looks. She is blatantly
turned into another person’s object.
I still have a hard time grasping how
these kinds of contests can be common practice in our society.
At this point in the night, I can’t
hide the fact that I am disturbed.
How is every other date not fuming?
It’s as if everything is just going on as
normal. I guess it is… We leave the
banquet hall and get into the school
buses headed for the after-party. The
rugby players begin to chant. Not
surprisingly, every chant is sexual,
which is not inherently a bad thing.
But the chants are not just sexual. “I
wish that all the ladies / were like the
statue of Venus / because then they
wouldn’t have any arms… to shove
away my penis!” Everyone laughs,
and repeats the chant. Tears rush
to my eyes. How dare they! I fight
them back. I feel surrounded, like
the world is closing in on me. All the
stories I am confronted with working
at the Sexual Assault Centre of McGill
Student Society as a facilitator for the
Outreach branch come rushing into
my head. I want to run right into my
bed under my covers and never see a
man again.
This event was my breaking point.
Now that it’s over and the shock and
fear have worn off, I simply feel anger.
The misogyny is so apparent and
horrifying! I want to put on a boxing
outfit, rather than my sexy red dress,
and kick the shit out of the guy who
jokingly sang about raping women.
I want to be powerful. I want to be
strong, physically stronger than those
rugby guys. It frustrates me that my
petite body could never be.
So I admit it. I love getting dressed
up, showing a little skin, and doing
those “girly” things that I feel feminists are not supposed to enjoy. And I
think that’s okay. But sometimes I am
afraid of the misogyny I see around
me. I feel as if I need to be tougher.
Boots instead of heels. Cargo pants
instead of dresses. Angry female singers instead of Beyoncé.
And that’s too bad because I like
wearing dresses.
In writing this piece, I did not
intend it to be solely focused on the
McGill rugby team, but rather, my
hope is to spark a discourse that
confronts all forms of rape culture in the McGill community. Ayla
Lefkowitz is a U2 Philosophy and
Women’s Studies student and you
can reach her at ayla.lefkowitz@
mail.mcgill.ca.
8 Commentary
It’s all connected
How tuition fee increases are part of a larger issue
Robin Reid-Fraser
Hyde Park
A
s you are probably aware,
tuition in Quebec is slated to increase by $1,625
over five years beginning this
September. Students across the
province are mobilizing against
the hikes with increasing enthusiasm, and thousands are preparing to walk out of classrooms for
an unlimited student strike, likely
beginning in the next few weeks.
Many McGill students seem
on the fence about it all – international and out-of-province students especially, since $325 per
year is proportionately a much
smaller increase than it is for
Quebec residents. Compared
to schools of similar reputation
in the U.S., McGill tuition for
Quebec students may seem minimal, and can lead to the question: why are they so upset about
this anyway? And, why should we
non-Quebec residents care about
and support their movement?
I’m here to argue that fighting a tuition hike in Quebec by
supporting a province-wide student strike could be your chance
to help make the world a better
place, for everybody.
This may seem far-fetched,
but I bet anyone reading this has
some cause they spend time and
(possibly) money championing.
Whether environmental sustainability, women’s rights, food security, or primary school education
for children in the Global South,
they are all big, important issues
that deserve all of that time and
attention. This tuition hike would
harm these issues by hampering
much student research on them,
given that the fee increase would
deny 30,000 people post-secondary education. Furthermore,
tuition hikes are part of a global
trend towards economic liberalization and private sector involvement that has created the majority of the world’s problems.
I aim to convince you that
these issues are all related.
Just as people shouldn’t be
living in poverty or hunger, and
our planet shouldn’t be warming at unnatural rates or losing
huge amounts of biodiversity, nor
should students pay more money
from our own pockets on an education that the province is perfectly capable of funding.
The Charest government and
McGill administration tell you
that there simply isn’t enough
money to pay for universities any
other way.
What they don’t tell you is that
the $620 million they tout as a
“funding deficit” is actually calculated to be what Quebec does
not gain in tuition compared to
other provinces. Nor will they tell
you that, since 2001, the Quebec
government has cut taxes in a
way that makes it lose roughly $5
billion of revenue per year. Nor
will they tell you that thousands
of students will be prevented
from accessing university, making
it harder to obtain a good job in
this increasingly post-secondarydependant economy.
The tuition hike is part of a
trend of government austerity
measures in which progressive
taxation is reduced, the powerful
minority increases their profits,
and ordinary people must pay
for previously available services
such as health care and education. It is the same system of
economic liberalization that created unequal trade deals with the
Global South, trapping vulnerable citizens in cycles of poverty;
the same system that treats the
planet’s resources as market commodities, rather than the foundations to our very existence.
There are a lot of scary problems in our world. Many of them
happen far away such that we can
do little to make an impact.
But the tuition hike is here
right now, and this is our chance
to stop it and begin to change
the world.
Robin Reid-Fraser is a U2
Environmental Studies student.
She can be reached at rkeifra@
gmail.com
Is McGill really progressive?
The need for radicalism
Balaclava Discourse
Davide Mastracci
[email protected]
U
niversities are places of
higher learning, knowledge, and debate. They
also tend to be dominated by
left wing politics. At least that’s
what I was told before I arrived
at McGill. When I came to this
University, I wasn’t let down,
at first. Institutions like Safer
Spaces: Allies on Campus,
QPIRG, and the diversity university brings were quite new to me.
As such, I was impressed. On its
surface, McGill seems to be quite
a progressive school. But after a
year and a half as a student it has
become quite clear that this is
hardly the case.
In terms of allowing people
on campus to feel comfortable
with who they are, McGill students do a decent job; at least
from the view of a straight white
male. From my interactions, most
students seem to display tolerance and acceptance, some out
of genuine belief, others likely
out of fear for the punishment
or social stigma that comes from
breaking Safe Space. In this
sense, McGill isn’t bad because
those who aren’t tolerant of others should feel uncomfortable
expressing their views on campus. Yet this is hardly progressive – it is merely what should be
the standard. And judging by the
public perception of most universities across Canada, this is the
standard – despite the cries of
the privileged students who feel
inconvenienced by the fact that
they need to think twice about
what they say out of concern for
offending someone.
Beyond this bare minimum of
decency and humanity, though,
the nature of McGill students
is quite detestable. By virtue of
McGill’s high academic ranking,
a great deal of McGill students,
simply by being McGill students,
think that they are superior to
their peers at other universities.
From my interactions, I’ve seen
that many McGill students are
also wealthy or have access to
greater financial resources than
students at other universities may
have. These students believe that
because they, or their ancestors,
have accomplished something in
the liberal capitalist society, all
others would be able to do so as
well, if only they had the talent
or the work ethic to do so. What
these individuals fail to recognize is that this is a great myth
of capitalism, and if this system
ensured financial success for
all who worked hard or had talent, it could not function. McGill
students are a bright bunch, but
despite their inflated egos and
sense of accomplishment, most
are not particularly special and
are at McGill largely due to the
financial well-being of their parents. This is not to say that McGill
students aren’t talented, but rather that many are at McGill simply due to their financial background. Essentially, many McGill
students were born on third base
and believe they hit a triple.
This belief, which is prevalent
in “elite” universities, is what fuels
the reactive nature of many McGill
students, especially those who are
wealthy. There is nothing inherently wrong with being well-off, yet
it seems as if most McGill students
who are well-off have bought into
the capitalist status quo entirely.
McGill students may encourage
reforms to the capitalist system,
but they’ll rarely call for it to be
replaced. Even the few students
who have fought for basic reforms
such as free education, with pretty standard tactics such as sit-ins,
have been labelled as “radicals,”
“thugs,” and “lunatics.”
While these students aren’t
thugs, they’re the closest thing
to radicals McGill has. And this
is a compliment, not a criticism.
Universities should be radical.
The status quo of our inadequate
society should not be safe in
universities. Universities should
be pushing new “radical” ideas
into the mainstream with the
goal of eventually having them
embraced. University publications should also be part of this
process, and lately, The Daily
has been lacking, as it has been
filled with conservative articles
defending capitalism, tuition
increases, and the police on
November 10. However, university should not be a high priced
assembly line, building the perfect product to be exported into
the cruel nine-to-five world upon
graduation. If you are attending
university for this reason, fine,
but your journey to the posh
law firm or business shouldn’t
be shielded from the factory of
injustice surrounding it.
University students have a
long history of leading and participating in various struggles
and forms of activism. McGill
seems to have lost this fighting,
radical spirit. As the possibility
of an upcoming general student
strike against tuition increases,
the student body has a chance to
become progressive and embody
the role that universities should
play as institutions serving the
public interest. I can only hope
that this opportunity to become
a truly progressive student body
will not be squandered.
Balaclava Discourse is a
column written by Davide
Mastracci on the structures of
authority, hierarchy, and domination in society. It appears
every other Monday in commentary. You can email him at [email protected].
9 Art Essay
LUKE
THIENHAUS
10 Features
SOCRATES LIKES YOU FOR YOU
RYAN HEALEY ON NORMAN CORNETT’S DIALOGIC HEMLOCK
L
et’s start with a composite of his “Dialogic
sessions.” Through the vestibule in Birks
and down into the basement, Vegetable
Lasagna asks, “Where is the balance
between Britney Spears and Darfur?” This is
answered in its way and seven unique fingers
soon spear up, and oh is that, yes – Infinite
Wonder? Infinite Wonder stands: “Do we
have free and fair media anywhere?” Some
oral hot air rolls around to a gamy No. A mustachioed man in a well-weathered, all-purpose sweater vest moderates. Sometimes he
goes by Destiny’s Child, sometimes Lumière,
sometimes Carole K, but mostly he’s Bubba.
Bubba looks across twenty engrossed students in the very gray room #017, his own
private Akademia, and says something like,
“Think what you want, write what you want,
say what you want. There is no right or
wrong, true and false, bad and good.” (His
expressive hands ping-pong for these binaries as if nursing a mildly live grenade.) “All
of it’s open. This is open learning.” Another
question, this time from The Gift of Love:
“Why can’t journalists take more responsibility and try to drive the public agenda?” The
Guest gathers his thoughts, and like a buoy,
tide-rooted and mute, Bubba nods.
I THINK:
There is a robust consensus on the extraterrestrial qualities of Dr. Norman Cornett.
The Dark Motorcyclist, the imitable occasional Daily letter writer from 2008 to 2011,
once claimed that he was “privy to certain
information that is withheld from the wider
McGill community, and the withheld infor-
mation is this: Norman Cornett landed on
our planet in the spring of 1992.” While still
teaching at McGill, Cornett/Bubba fittingly
referred to himself in the plural, as his person is sharp split between two ontological
modes: a very kind and quotidian vanilla
warmth; and then the side exclusively
reserved for his classes – the celebrated and
maybe brainsick dialogic mode. In dialogic
mode, Dr. C talks as if in communion with
Hegelian forces, in oneiric jazz cadences
that command attention. People liken this
guy to both evangelical preacher and 19thcentury-artist-at-work, and he acts the part
in class, prophetically aflame.
His sizable fan base lionizes this
steep Jekyll/Hyde division as fitting for
a subversive in active infiltration mode.
Some assessments by former students:
“Dr. Cornett’s mild appearance is deceptive, because he is a rebel through and
through.” “A revolutionary in the staid
world of academia.” “An exemplar of the
Montreal state of mind.”
Certain classes would begin with the
arena rock anthem Raise a Little Hell, while
Cornett avoided the full word himself, preferring to spell it out H-E-L-L. Ratemyprofessors.
com comments underscored his physical
likeness to Ned Flanders and John Cleese,
while elsewhere pedagogical comparisons
were often made to Robin Williams in Dead
Poets Society and Socrates. Many speak of
coming across him in a Montreal art gallery,
a “quiet man sitting unobtrusively in the corner, writing notes,” “a quiet man really looking at paintings…from different points of
view, slowly, and coming back to it.” And he’s
a real habitué: go to a vernissage this semes-
ter and he’s definitely there – just look for
the sweater vest.
But his real genius lies in arrant self-marketing, the Cornett phenomenon as the intellectual equivalent of the Slendertone Flex Pro
Ab Belt. When the time comes to scramble
together guests for his dialogic sessions, he
is squirrely industrious with varying degrees
of success. Christina Colizza, a Daily Culture
editor, receives a lot of these oddly formatted, vaguely personalized e-mails of roundabout self-promotion that tend to close with,
“Perhaps it will interest you?” (And I’ve begun
receiving the same.)
David Amram, a pretty esteemed jazz
composer and pianist, told the McGill
Reporter that Cornett “called me up about
11 times and finally inveigled me to come
to his class. He was so nice and so enthusiastic – I liked his spirit.” There is acute
energy around this active verb of a man,
his educational project and sad story. Oh
come let us adore him.
I REMEMBER:
Dr. C is an American protestant from
Oregon. Upon moving to California in the
late 1960s, a young Norman quickly ran
for student president in a new school and
town, and won. He spent his summers
working in American national parks to save
up to attend Berkeley. He started studying
at McGill in 1987 to dog after a Ph.D. while
supporting his family by working for Air
Canada. His thesis was on Lionel Groulx,
our favorite Catholic crypto-Nazi with an
eponymous metro station. (Groulx’s bilious
hatred of Jews was documented by Esther
Delisle in her The Traitor and the Jew). For
his thesis defence in May 2003, Cornett
used the allocated 25 minutes to turn to the
audience and tell them why he immigrated
to Quebec. He had been saddened by the
American contempt for black people, and
moved to Québec only to become saddened
by the contempt for French Canadians.
He became interested in studying Groulx
because the latter was a great defender of
French Canadian identity.
He started lecturing in religious studies
in 1992 with “the usual suspects”: quizzes,
midterms, final exams, one-way pedagogical flow, teacher Upon student. He did this
until, several years later, a 21 year-old student
came to Dr. C and had a nervous breakdown
in his office. An ambulance was called. Dr. C
regularly relates this breakthrough: “You say
to yourself, there’s got to be a better way. I
saw this again and again, I would see people
absolutely paralyzed, just in agony.”
His solution was to radically redesign
his teaching practice into squirreled-away
McGill havens that accommodated words
like “open,” “freedom,” “dialogue,” “community,” “human,” “creative,” “as an artist,”
“my vernissage,” and “experience.” Each class
had a theme song and everyone required a
blindfold, earplugs, and reams of paper to
write Reflections. In Cornett’s Eden, the students gave themselves “Off-World” names
that he never forgot even years later. Classes
convened with eighty students called things
like Unintentional Matchmaker, Lieutenant
Dan, Jacko Jonestown, Stork of the Future,
Warrior Heart, Fascinated Peeker, Ghost
of Storytime, Tragically Gabriel, Karma
The McGill Daily | Thursday, Fenruary 2, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com
Karmeleon, Spice Spears, Jefferson Cake.
(I could go on.) Class would consist of art
consumption followed by writing stream
of consciousness Reflections in response.
Much of the class was field trips to galleries,
theaters, and concerts where students would
write furiously en famille into Reflection
notebooks. People often wrote poems for
Reflections, which I really want to avoid
quoting. The stress fell on Honesty above
everything: the Reflections were submitted anonymously and he would read them
aloud in class and point-blank to relevant
Guests. Over the years he perfected a reading voice of great élan, like an off-Broadway
Shakespeare monologist challenging a parking ticket. “Upon hearing your piece, you
would sit there bubbling with pride, wondering, ‘Wow, did I really write that?’” said
student Emily Rose Antflick. Robert Verall, a
former National Film Board producer, once
told The Daily, “Dr. Cornett is a dream teacher for a filmmaker.”
He based grading entirely on participation – no papers, no exams. Everyone began
with 100 per cent and lost 5 per cent with
every missed Reflection, absence, and cellphone ring. There was homework every day,
hundreds of pages to read weekly, but most
students got As. You could occasionally tell
him you were too busy or strung-out for his
class, and there was no fear of penalty. A corner of McGill was beginning to be coloured
by the teen emancipation/kids rool the skool
themes of Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” and
“Max Keeble’s Big Move.”
The courses inevitably came unmoored
from their titles – “Religion and the Arts”
or “The Soul and Soul Music” instead
housed a table d’hôte menu of topics:
First Nations land rights, the Holocaust,
the status of witches in Ghana, the relationship between music and medicine,
the truth about death and dying. (I could
go on.) But the selling point of these
classes was the notable Guests that would
come to class and field student questions.
Topics began to revolve around whatever
Guests Cornett gathered by tapping into
his oceanically near-bottomless network.
And what a network it was – the McGill
Reporter just salivates as it reports his
lineup between 2002 and 2007: archbishops, imams, rabbis, monks, the composer
of the Sesame Street theme, Balkan ethno-trance singers, novelists, the producer
of Chicken Run, former Quebec premier
Lucien Bouchard (who enjoyed having
to prepare nothing), actor Ethan Hawke
(who was there to talk about his um, second novel (?)), and former Prime Minister
Paul Martin. Cornett told the prime minister to put in a good word with Bono.
The Tribune ran a headline in 2006 that
read, “Religious Studies prof has a cult following” – dialogic education was catching
on, kind of. At least an affected cabal of disaffected McGill students was huddling: “It
was like a slumber party you know, sooner
or later the parents are gonna knock on the
door and say, okay, that’s it, enough, like
everyone pipe down, it’s done,” said Leon
Mwotia, who, as a Daily columnist in 2007,
went by The Armchair Potato. “I was wondering, I’m sure everyone was wondering,
how does this guy have his job? How is he
able to teach in the McGill environment?”
said Planting Roots (née Jesse Gutman).
His students were beginning to smile and
behave like his courtesans, sounding exactly
like him, fluent in his argot, empowered and
ready to strike when threatened. Per one
person who Rated Their Professor, “This is
one of the greatest teachers in the history of
the modern institution we call university. He
inspires, he engages, he electrifies.” Cornett’s
wife said to him before his last class, “You are
having so much fun.” He replied, “I’ve never
had so much fun in my life.”
On the last day of the winter 2007 term,
there was a note from the Dean, which
Cornett paraphrased as, “Empty your desk.
Remove all your personal effects from the
building. You’re not coming back. You’re
not teaching.” An outcry from the citizenry
was raised. Cornett’s network reared its
ambiguously sublime/creepy head. Letters
came in cultishly coordinated scattershots,
as if crop circles were threshed into the
pages of The Daily. The quantity got so bad
that The Daily started smirking at the spam
with headlines for the letters like “I’m compelled to write because Norman Cornett
probably told me to”, “How many Cornett
jokes can one editor make?” and, “Do you
people have a newsletter or something?” A
petition was signed by 13 filmmakers and
published in the Gazette in June 2007. 747
students and professors signed a petition
online. Cornett’s lawyer Julius Grey wrote
an editorial for Le Devoir with a subsequent response from Provost Anthony
Masi that was an opus of casuistry. (Masi
also refused to speak with me about any
of this.) A National Film Board-sponsored
documentary entitled Professor Norman
Cornett: “Since when do we divorce the
right answer from an honest answer?” was
made and given a modest distribution.
Even now, McGill has never issued a
formal explanation of Cornett’s dismissal
and that only spurs a lot of vague, unsubstantiated talk of the administration
enacting pro-Zionist policy or bludgeoning students into conformity.
But there are some more plausible
explanations out there. Norman Miller, the
ombudsperson at the time, told me that
some students were dissatisfied with his
unconventional approach to grading, that
their grades were a mystery until it appeared
on the transcript, and they were left without
any way to challenge that mark. And there
were always some heretics hiding behind
ratemyprofessors.com: “unique methodology. but you’ve done one you’ve done them
all. he might seem available and present but
actually will not ever help you. apart from
‘discovering’ we are all unique in our own
precious and special way it’s a major waste
of time.” “He is never shy to ask students for
favors but he never reciprocates. He is ‘too
busy’...” (His overall rating stands at 3.5.)
The most viable explanation is also the
blandest – Ellen Aitken, the current dean
of Religious Studies, told The Tribune
that she would prefer giving sessional lec-
turer positions like Cornett’s to doctoral
students. It’s not like he was a tenured
professor or anything. He may have just
been a dude, four years after getting his
doctorate, hanging around.
I WISH:
McGill definitely has a pedagogical problem. The general mass class product is like
Starbucks coffee beans universally burnt and
drained of quality in order to homogenize
the taste. I mean, I’m meeting tomorrow
to facilitate a class as part of the Alternative
Learning Project, a group of dissatisfied
students taking their classes off-campus to
learn stuff not offered at McGill, or offered
poorly. Norman Miller told me that the cardinal complaint of students was that they “feel
that they’re not cared for.” This is commonplace enough a sentiment at McGill, even
a platitude, and it drove students in herds
to Cornett’s classes. A YouTube comment
on the Cornett documentary trailer: “That
sounds awesome. I kinda wish I could have
that experience since lectures nowadays are
just boring.” Emily Rose Antflick wrote in to
The Daily, “I despised the formulaic, institutional learning style that was being imposed
upon my once-agile mind.”
Cornett’s “theater of learning” was an
answer to this. It fused affect and entertainment: students were to laugh and never get
bored. (A student wrote microscopically of
Cornett’s laugh, that it “resides in the strange
no-man’s land between a full-blown guffaw
and a wheeze.”) Dr. Cornett said in an interview with The Tribune, “My goal became
to figure out how we can put delight back
into education. That became a mission, a
pedagogical spirit-quest: how could we love
learning, so that knowledge became a natural high?” Student Madina Baxindall says
with a laugh in the documentary, “Who ever
said education should be a bore?” Alongside
entertainment, issues were brought up in
class with a real sense of moral weight and
CONTINUED ON PAGE 12
11
12 Features
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11
students had to take positions fixed in their
actual sentiment, moving from distant theory into visceral praxis.
Now this is where I ruin everything
by taking Cornett’s cue and getting honest myself. I cringe at a lot of the language
around Cornett, specious shit like “I feel
privileged and inspired to have met and listened to Dr. Mendez,” or, “Dialogue with it.
Answer it. Question it. Challenge it. Accept
it. Reject it. Dialogue WITH that medium.” I
dislike seminars for the very reason people
love Cornett’s classes – I really do think
there are stupid questions and right/wrong
answers, and if you’re an existential asshole
like me who measures out his life in coffee
spoons, (you really might be if you think
about it), hearing out even 15 minutes of
airy questions feels like an error. I am in
many ways McGill’s ideal student: comfortable, even happy in crowds as a selfish
autodidact left to my own devices. I prefer
the authoritarian lecture format that holds
me fast to books that don’t immediately
compel – when I get bored, I want the professor to bite, not sing.
Cornett’s classes are admirably passionate and alive and somewhat revolutionary.
I submit that they are also completely perfidious and bad. The dialogic sessions ache
to avoid becoming a boring automaton in a
market system, but in practice it’s not just
that anti-conformity conformity you recognized in high school emos and goths,
but also an insidious grooming for company boardrooms and versatile cable news
shows, an education in sophistic, insipid
Dialogue qua Dialogue that cuts deals and
networks well. Consider the people skills.
Something striking among Cornett disciples is that while half go on to become
Artists, schoolteachers in the selfsame
Cornett vein, or organic farmers somewhere, there’s another half in MBA and
Juris Doctor programs that seem to take
his gospel to the market. (Leon Mwotia,
in a gasp of weirdly privileged anger over
Cornett’s dismissal, says in the documentary, “But when I’m a rich man, McGill, I won’t
give them anything. Not a dime, McGill.”
Mr. Mwotia is now a Manager at RBC.)
Rousseau in Émile: “Count on its being
more important to be a charlatan than
a capable man.” Cornett student Sara
Gidding actually said this: “At most universities, they celebrate the authority of reason
and logic, and a paper that I turn in to a
professor is guided only on its rational aesthetic, its logical symmetry. You know, it fits
with the exact format of a thesis paper, and
it’s all proven, rationally. How it affected me
is totally irrelevant to the final product.”
What sometimes pisses people off in faculties other than Arts is how subjective and
relativized the labour is in the humanities
– their essays, their interpretations, their
feelings. Intelligent Arts students know
that the internal logic and rational process
of their thesis is what supersedes the relatively unscientific grounding of their work,
but here we have the radical abjuration of
even that credit. Following this, Cornett
becomes a connoisseur of the near-nothing
who peddles a solipsism that mistakes selftruth as truth. This is why Cornett’s principal question, “since when do we divorce
the right answer from an honest answer?”
is so disturbing to me. For Cornett, real
truth terminates in honesty.
So what happened when Cornett’s
students got honest? In the documentary,
they write their Reflections with brio and
one says, “It’s the way I write now. When
The McGill Daily | Thursday, Fenruary 2, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com
I write emails or letters to my friends, it’s
the way I write in my journal, and that
raw reaction to the art, or the situation,
is just so incredible.” I paused the film on
a chance shot of a Reflection and it read:
“My mind was everywhere! When I heard
that flute type instrument I pictured it
like: [here’s an image of a bar graph in
decrescendo], and a train playing it dancing around.” A lanky man with a mustache,
Dr. Cornett looks nothing like Socrates.
I WANT TO KNOW:
I gathered in the chancel of St. James
United Church with 36 other congregants to
have a dialogue about a film about dialogue.
Dr. Cornett now conducts dialogic sessions throughout Montreal for sometimes
upwards of $300. Dr. Cornett introduces
me to Nine Lives, who is the only person
within five years of my age, and talking to
her I briefly apperceive the two of us as volunteers assisting an enlightened retirement
home activity. We all take scrap paper and
a pencil from the top of a grand piano. We
watch a documentary on the BouchardTaylor Commission and the issue of religious
accommodation in Quebec, which is a good
watch that’s sure to provoke divisive emotions. As soon as the film ends, Dr. Cornett
gives us prompts that he demands we treat
absolutely honestly: “I remember—,” “I
think—,” “I feel—,” “I wish—,” and “I want
to know—.” I wrote about my ambivalence,
which was honest. Then there’s a sophisticated question and answer series between
the film’s director and a transcultural psychiatrist, all chaperoned by Dr. Cornett.
Off-stage, Cornett has been all bonhomie
and warmth, but once the session kicks in,
there’s a metamorphosis. He is demonstrably louder than everyone else and seems
aggressive in his responses. He’s in good
dialogic form and allows only interstices
of silence, with shifty eyes that don’t really
seem to alight anywhere. The audience is
impressive – a young Frantz Fanon scholar
and other overall articulate people. It’s an
affecting scene, an earnest, dedicated body
politic. The name of the game throughout
has been Dialogue, and here it is at last:
Q: How is it that French-speaking
Quebecers don’t relate to being a minority to other minorities when they come
to Quebec, how is it that they don’t
relate to this larger context, you know,
am I making myself clear? This is what is
problematic to me.
CORNETT: As a historian of Quebec
society, allow me to say, yes indeed they
have. How do we understand the work
of Pierre Vallieres? Les nègres blancs
d’Amérique. Why did the Quiet Revolution
take place in the fifties and early fifties?
Because it is Quebec’s version of the Civil.
Rights. Movement. WE CAN only understand what happened here in Quebec
when we see the big picture of the Civil.
Rights. Movement. As a PARADIGM.
Q: The civil rights movement in the
United States?
CORNETT: Yeah. Listen. I’m quoting
the translation, it’s not an expression I want
to use: the White Niggers of America. This
is a seminal text. Dr. Martin Luther King
Junior is a MODEL for the Quebec nationalists. And keep in mind, GANDHI, who we
ALL see as PEACE loving, is the FATHER of
what? Indian NATIONALISM.
Some snicker almost imperceptibly when
they realize his answer is over and then
more hands are raised. Everyone gets their
dialogue on and their intelligence flattered.
Dr. Cornett asks us to place our Reflections
on the piano and promises to use them in
his next session. There is something singularly terrifying about the thought of him
reading my bare honest Self alone at home.
According to Planting Roots, his office in
Birks overflowed with these Reflections,
which he always kept in large boxes vertically stacked. Because of the structure of
the dialogic sessions, Dr. C is the antenna
for the most deep-seated political gripes,
private idiosyncrasies, and harrowing psychodramas of every student’s naked Id. I
was terribly honest in my Reflection, and if
he hasn’t read it yet, he’ll certainly read it
after this sentence, and he can do whatever
he wants with it.
I FEEL:
But I myself have spent a lot of invasive
mental/emotional time with this man, and
to read the last lines of his 438 page Ph.D.
dissertation makes me incredibly sad, after
all this Reflection’s unstinting honesty:
By the end of his polemical career,
which spanned more than half a century,
Groulx had taken on the aura of a sententious prophet of doom, leftover from a troubling era which Quebec sought to put decisively behind itself. Groulx’s once prophetic
stance in French-Canadian society now
seemed nothing but irksome, unreasonable railing against Quebec’s long overdue
modernization. Painfully conscious that
many dismissed his message as a throwback to French Canada’s dark ages and
considered him obsolete, Groulx’s memoirs
attest that the last years of his life brought
home to him the bitter truth that
“a prophet hath no honor in
his own country” (John 4:44).
Pages 10 and 11: Stills from the
documentary, Professor Norman
Cornett: “Since when do we
divorce the right answer from
an honest answer?,” courtesy
of YouTube. Cornett in Dialogic
extremis (10); The essence
of Cornettian thought, boiled
down to Comic Sans (11).
This page: Letters the Daily
received in early 2010, sparked
by the seminal piece of the
Cornett insurgency, “Paging
Dr. Cornett” by Emily Rose
Antflick. Also a template for the
inevitable hordes of letter-writers
we’re expecting to saddle up
once this piece hits stands.
Ian Murphy
13 Art Essay
Health&Education
14
Weyburn
Mental
Hospital
All photos by Peter Shyba | The McGill Daily
Health&Education
15
We flew over the cuckoo’s nest
Peter Shyba breaks into an abandoned mental institution
Courtesy of the Soo Line Historical Museum
W
hen you’re a teenager
in a tiny Saskatchewan
town you are bound
to get into trouble. A sheer lack of
things to do leads young people
in these towns to do stereotypically devious things like making
crop circles in cornfields and joyriding while drinking Pilsner. In
the case of my own brief time in a
small town a few summers ago, this
troublemaking came in the form of
an attempted break-in at an abandoned mental institution.
I should contextualize. My
mom grew up in a town called
Weyburn, Saskatchewan, about an
hour and a half south of Regina.
My nonagenarian Oma and Opa
still live there – and have for nearly fifty years, since they moved
from Germany to Canada. A couple of times every year – usually
in the summer – various family
members trek ten hours east from
Calgary to visit them. It was during one of these trips, two years
ago, that I found myself in the
company of my sister and older
cousin. Slipping away after the traditional German afternoon snack
of coffee and cake (which my Opa
always prefaces with “how about a
cup coffee and piece cake?”), we
found ourselves victims of our
own curiousity.
Driving aimlessly around town
looking for something to do, we
soon found ourselves on the outskirts of town, turning down
the thin, tree-lined road to the
Weyburn Mental Hospital, colloquially known as just “the mental”.
The treed road to the hospital provides a bizarre introduction to the main building. Over
a kilometre long, it’s lined with
overhanging deciduous trees,
creating an aura of Transylvaniacum-Saskatchewan, almost like a
cartoon-like image of something
haunted. At the end of the long
road, there is a clear view of
the imposing turreted entrance,
evoking the overused – but here
apropos – theme of Foucault’s
panopticon.
We neared the building and
parked the car around back, hiding
any evidence that we might be illegally trespassing. Walking around
the building, we made jokes about
the horribly done graffiti (“GoD
HAtEs YoU”? Really?) and periodically looked into open windows.
Through one of them we saw a cell
with peeling blue paint, filled with
garbage, the door askew. We had
trouble deciding if it had been a
prison cell or a patient’s room.
We talked about how scary
it would be to actually go in and
explore the building. Very gradually, these ruminations became more
serious plans. It was in this stage of
mounting seriousness that we came
across the open door we would
use to try to get into the Weyburn
Mental Hospital.
***
The hospital was opened on
December 29, 1921 with a capacity of 900 patients and sixty live-in
nurses. The initial building was
roughly 275,000 square feet, which
costs the equivalent of $27,000,000
in today’s dollars. It was demolished
in the winter of 2009 after being
unused for almost twenty years, the
advent of modern psychiatric drugs
making the treatment of mental illness increasingly focused on outpatient, rather than inpatient, therapy.
In a period spanning the latter19th century, formal pyschiatric
institutions like Weyburn became
widespread. Early psychologists like
Thomas Story Kirkbride founded
what would come to be known as
the Kirkbride plan for building psychiatric hospitals, which dictated
that hospitals be built in a staggered V, with the most “troubled”
patients being housed in the wards
further out. The Weyburn hospital, although not an archetypical
Kirkbride, was obviously inspired
by such a plan.
The treatments at the hospital,
while often at the forefront of contemporary psychiatric research,
were troubling. They included
electroshock therapy, lobotomies,
insulin therapy, and hydrotherapy. A history of the institution
describes the latter process as follows: “The patient was restrained
in a bathtub by means of canvas
sheets, then ice cold water was
run into the tub… In some cases,
ice was added directly to the tub
to further lower the temperature.
Naturally this caused hypothermia
in the patient and no doubt would
dramatically reduce the activity
level. Without doubt they were in a
state of real shock.”
But what “the mental” is most
famous for is that it was here where
Dr. Humphrey Osmond first tested
Lisurgic Acid, or LSD, on patients.
Osmond, a Cambridge trained
biologist, hypothesized that psychological disorders like schizophrenia
were caused by an imbalance of
chemicals in the brain. Since the
effects of Lisurgic Acid (LSD) mimicked that imbalance by increasing
levels of dopamine in the body,
it could possibly assist in treating
the disease. According to “Under
the Dome: The Life and Times of
Saskatchewan Hospital, Weyburn,”
an almost yearbook-like account
of life at the hospital, “such exotic
drugs as LSD, peyote, muscatel, and
magic mushrooms were used in
these experiments”. Indeed, according to an article in the Journal of the
History of the Behavioural Sciences,
the taking of LSD by hospital staff
was seen as a rite of passage.
While one would likely not
describe the Weyburn Mental
Hospital as “groovy”, it is interesting
to note that because of Osmond,
Weyburn is considered to be the
birthplace of the term “psychedelic”
due to his experiments with LSD.
***
We came back at night with a
crowbar stolen from my grandpa’s
garage, a screwdriver, a flashlight,
and a renewed sense of courage. We
were really going to do it.
We parked the car near the
entrance we had found and
walked to the plywood door,
armed with a flashlight and
sweaty palms, our fight or flight
responses on red alert.
Thus began the effort of opening this portal to the hospital. We
started by attempting to remove
the many green screws holding the
plywood, which boarded the door
to the hospital shut. Being successful with some and stripping others,
we felt confident enough to bring
in my grandpa’s blue, rusted, foot-
long crowbar to finish the task. We
gained leverage, and the plywood
began to peel back.
We slipped a wooden block
behind the plywood to secure the
leverage we had gained. The wedge
created a roughly 15 degree angle,
and a promise that entrance was
close. I began to work again, lower
on the board, to gain the final pry.
As I was about the deliver the final
hard thrust, we heard what sounded like water rushing in the pipes
above us, bizarre for a building that
had been abandoned for twenty
years. Then suddenly, a magnificent, visceral, booming SLAM came
from behind the plywood. The plywood snapped back into its original
position, shutting the entrance with
a gust of air.
And we ran.
Throwing our tools into the
back of the car and flooring the gas,
we maintained our blood-curdling
screams until the end of the road.
Stopping the car at the downtown
7/11, there was a period of detente.
Adrenalin production stopped; we
began breathing more slowly, and
we began to reflect.
What had we just seen? Could
it have been just a force of physics, slamming the plywood back
onto us? We went back to the picture evidence. From the photos,
we could see that there was a blue
light behind the door, and it was
fucking spooky. There was no reason for there to be any light on in
that building.
To this day, we still have no
idea. It makes a better story that
way. The summer we broke into
“the mental” will sit in our reperhtoires for some time.
Culture
16
Culture Essay
More blood than honey
Lela Savic provides a Yugoslavian perspective on Jolie’s new film
I
t was at the AMC theatre that I
gathered the courage to watch
Angelina Jolie’s new film, In the
Land of Blood and Honey.
Let’s all be honest here,
Angelina Jolie makes a film about
the Bosnian war? Now we’ve
heard it all. During the shooting, a great deal of controversy
surfaced based on the rumoured
plot. I had read in an article in
February of last year, that stated
that Jolie wanted to make a film
about a Bosnian woman who falls
in love with her Serbian rapist. I
could not believe that someone
could be so insensitive. Being
from the former Yugoslavia, I felt
that this would do nothing but
serve as an insult, both to those
involved in the conflict, as well as
to any rape survivor.
“Does Angelina Jolie think that
by giving some nonsense portrayal of what happened in this war
from her ignorant perspective, we
should feel thankful for adding the
war in Bosnia to her list of philanthropic efforts?” observed one of
my Bosnian friends when she found
out about the film.
I wasn’t too excited about the
film even before walking into the
theater. I felt as though she made
this film without thinking about the
effect it would have on the locals. I
was not wrong.
Yet it seems she did revisit
the plot to an extent. While the
film was marketed as a love story
between a Serbian army officer and a Bosnian prisoner who
knew each other before the war,
I personally did not see how this
could be the case. The film is rather about the tense relationship
between a captor, a Serbian army
officer responsible for rounding up Muslims in Bosnia, and
a female prisoner, a woman he
was interested in prior to the war
and who he is now able to exploit
while simultaneously protecting
as his “personal property.”
Ajla, the Bosnian woman is not
really depicted as having feelings
for her captor. Rather, it seems that
she feels abused and responds to
his “love” out of fear rather than
romantic feelings. Danijel, the
Serbian army officer, is portrayed
as a caricature – a very aggressive, self-centered man, with no
remorse except for the very little
he shows to Ajla.
The film could have done more
had we seen the two characters
share passion, and in doing so,
subvert discrimination, especially
in Danijel’s case. But his abusive
character and his violent response
to her confrontations destroy this
possibility. At the end of the film,
I wished I could have seen more
remorse – a more nuanced portrayal of Serbians. A balance between
nationalists and non-nationalists
would have been more fair and
would have had a positive effect on
the relationships between the people of the former Yugoslavia.
Being from the region, I was
particularly concerned about the
consequences of such a film for all
the people in the former Yugoslavia.
I must admit that the film was very
well shot, the actors were great, and
I particularly appreciated that it was
filmed in the local language. What
was portrayed in the film was true.
During the war, ethnic cleansing and
mass rape were common, and many
people were killed.
My issues with the film do not
stem from any feelings of Serbian
nationalism. I am not a Serbian
nationalist, as are some who want
to deny what happened and call war
criminals heroes. Being from Serbia,
I am actually very much against
Serbian nationalism and dream of
days when we could all go back
to being the same in the beautiful
country of Yugoslavia. Some Bosnian
women I spoke to after the film
agreed with me, they, too, lamented
that the country had, at one point,
been together, and had to descend
to that point. But they seemed happy
with the film, and felt more comfortable that an outsider made such
a film (instead of a person who had
been a part of the conflict).
I agree with their point of view.
But, while Jolie said in an interview
that she thinks this film will help
people in the region to move into
transition, I think it will do exactly
the opposite. A film that focuses on
a conflict’s atrocious events, with
only a shallow historical background
does not help people move into a
transition, nor does it help the rest
of the world understand what happened. Like one of my friends from
Sarajevo said, “Westerners have to
understand why these types of movies annoy us locals. There is rarely
any historical background provided as to why any similar events
would’ve taken place. Then there
are always some dramatic scenes to
make it look better. They just always
show a black and white story.”
Today, I still see some anti-Bosnian, anti-Croatian, and anti-Serbian
comments on many social media
outlets from all regions of the former
Yugoslavia, particularly in the trailer
of the film on YouTube. The tension
is still there. And the worst part of it
is that these nationalist sentiments
are often advocated by youth, which
did not live in the Yugoslav era and
don’t know what happened. They
represent our future. The future who
Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily
will decide if we will unite and make
peace or keep fighting and make
more wars. It’s very unfortunate that a
person such as Jolie, who commands
so much of the international media’s
attention, and is often seen as a role
model, did not think about the consequences of her film on – I dare say
– the present and future of those who
live in the former Yugoslavia. With
her film, Jolie only nourished the
conflict. She could have done a lot of
good for today’s political situation in
all parts of former Yugoslavia had she
just shown a little bit more nuance.
Had she portrayed some characters
in the film with Yugoslavian values,
she could have reached the hearts
of many more. Today, we need to reestablish those values so that we can
avoid another war, another massacre,
another tragedy.
People today are in post-war
transition and are slowly trying to
get past their differences so that conflicts do not re-surface. Hence, creat-
ing a graphic reminder of the events
without providing appropriate context can only aggravate the situation.
When making a film about a political
conflict, one factor that many directors disregard is the consequences
their film will have on the people
who actually lived it. Though her film
represents a harsh reality of what happened in Bosnia, Jolie – like many
other directors who are strangers to
the conflicts they portray – failed to
consider this too.
Culture
CULTURE
BRIEF
Leonard Cohen’s new album, Old Ideas
I spend my evenings wandering St.
Denis near Marie-Anne, pining for a
glimpse of the tall man in the flowing dark
overcoat. The confluence of snow-capped
pavement, drunken revelers, and store
lights in the vast darkness of the Montreal
night might as well be humming, “So Long
Marianne,” as I am told Leonard Cohen,
poet and prophet, sometimes sleeps nearby. As of yet, the exact location remains a
house of mystery.
Fans of Westmount native and McGill
alumnus Leonard Cohen have a new way
to lift their spirits from the annual winter
gloom. Old Ideas, released January 31,
is Cohen’s first album of new material in
eight years. Cohen – an incessantly mythic figure, born before Elvis, who came to
light only after more than a decade as
Canada’s favourite poet, merely adds to his
mystique with age. Old Ideas is no exception to that habit.
Featured as a poem and sound clip in the
New Yorker two weeks before official release,
the opening track, “Going Home” is an instant
masterpiece, and undoubtedly the finest gem
on the album. At a CD-launch gathering in
London, Cohen said, “I think this particular
album invites you to be swept along with it.”
Cohen leads you on the journey, as he has
with earlier efforts, but now he’s seen more
of the road- and has aged during his travels.
In Going Home, we hear the Cohen who
led us down to the river in “Suzanne,” the
Cohen whose name claims ancestry from
priests in the temple of Jerusalem. Here,
Cohen is both Moses and Odysseus, in per-
manent exile from a home that in fact may
never have existed.
While critics and listeners hail Old Ideas
as a return to form, the songs are consistent with Cohen’s early songs only in theme
– love, sorrow, sex, pain, and prostration,
the idea of a return to form is as illusory
as the concept of homeland. Going Home
offers an illusion of home, but the home we
remember is never the one we experienced;
one can never truly return home. The chorus, where Cohen sings, “going home without my burden/ going home behind the
curtain/ going home without the costume
that I wore” is like Moses accepting a life of
wandering for salvation, or Odysseus, whose
return home after ten grueling years at sea.
is as cultural critic Svetlana Boym writes,
“about nonrecognition.”
Cohen might return to old ideas, old
forms, the scraps of songs and broken love,
but he will never be old Leonard, as his gradually deepening voice confirms. Without a
vision of the future, and unable to decipher
the past, Cohen opens up the cavernous
grace of his voice and says, “follow me.”
Nonetheless, like the melodious promise of a return to home, it’s a song I can’t
stop listening to, and can’t get out of my
head. You wouldn’t need to know that an
entire album follows Going Home. After all,
the Ten Commandments have kept people
spiritually and intellectually stimulated for
thousands of years.
Cohen’s 1960s-era music is unparalleled,
but these are more developed musically,
they are sharper, as is Cohen’s wisdom.
Today Cohen offers a wider musical palette,
more crisp production than when he was
younger. Even as he’s matured, Cohen is
still haunted poetically by all the things in
the world which make him feel small.
Hailed by NPR as a “unique sound that
brings the temple to the cabaret,” Old Ideas
is as eminently cool and intensely poetic
as Cohen’s ever been. At the release-party,
Cohen also said, “I was like Ronald Reagan in
his declining years, who had a vague memory
of playing a really great role of the president
in a movie. I’d forgotten I was a singer so it felt
good to feel like a worker in the world again.”
Another song, “Darkness,” could stand
in for the entire album: part eulogy, part
lament, part victory march, part party, and
if this is Cohen, perhaps an orgy too.
In “Anyhow,” a song which rings heavy with
the phrase, “both of us are guilty anyhow”,
every word, like an onion, has hundreds of layers, and the more you pull each layer back, the
more you can’t keep your eyelids dry.
While many critics note similarities to
Bob Dylan’s 1997 record, Time Out of Mind,
described as the “beginning of Dylan’s epic
lion-in-winter phase,” Dylan’s roots are in
early blues singers and guitarists. Alternatively,
Cohen’s musical roots are in poetry and early
folk music. Cohen came of age before rockand-rollers perfected the formula for preteen
screams, and he’s always been an elder statesmen not because he came before the others,
but – with the exception of the embarrassing
1980s – he has always seemed wise beyond
age. Unlike Dylan, who has become earnestly
morose – and wacky – with age, Cohen, for
all his prophetic attributes, won’t let you take
himself too seriously.
The closing track, “Different Sides”, with
its opening organ shots like the opening of a
new world or dawning of an age, seems based
on a ridiculous erotic premise, but we might
have to take the Ladies’ Man at his nearly
octogenarian word. Cohen moans, “you want
to change the way I make love, but / I want to
leave it alone.” It seems less about resistance
to change as about the desire to explore
the same hallowed grounds that inevitably
change with time.
— Matt Herzfeld
17
Caravel
Rinsed, simply, in water. Shining and white
As a tooth.
A farther sea. The distance
from Maine to Wyoming.
When the grass hisses like rising seawater.
A caravel on the rising sea, a sleek hull
and sea-worthy spine. A Portuguese flag.
Rolled and eggy, yellow and smooth. Slipped
Into the hold.
White, island weather.
A history, Barbadoed,
Black and Irish as slaves, as
tropically, brown, mixed
Children of finally painless sex
After long caravel rides. An all-white crowd,
Grilling bratwurst at Coney Island, except
Blacks cleaning brass, like rubber and gold,
The little unseen tasks of little black men.
Broken and bent, like a tailpipe in a scrap yard
In Scranton. Rusted and red.
On the thin, watery wind,
the words of Gullah
Bringing news of blackened reefs
of Congo and Carolina,
A history suppurating in sugar
And lost in the wash of time
and in the losing sea.
— Eric Andrew-Gee
Inkwell
TAKE US
SOMEWHERE
SUBMIT TO THE DAILY’S
ART SUPPLEMENT
[email protected] BY MIDNIGHT, FEBRUARY 5
18 Culture
These boots are now made for walking
The advantages of repair over retail at Imperial Boots
Mercedes Sharpe Zayas
Cuture Writer
A
s fleets of trucks armed
with salt and sand disperse
through
the
Montreal
streets, it’s inevitable that your soles
will fall victim to a ruthless combination of saltwater stains and gritty
wear-and-tear. By the end of the
season, most shoes serve as dilapidated reminders of strolls through
the city, and have been trudged
beyond salvation, or at least beyond
looking publically presentable. My
own have been reduced to: vintage
suede converse with stuffing bursting at the seams, scuffed-up leather
lace-ups with worn down heels, and
unstitched lining, salt-lined oxfords
with a hole in the toe.
Nothing is more aggravating
than having to shoe shop when
your perfectly-worn-yet-slightlydamaged kicks support your
feet better than a grandmother’s
orthopedic loafers. So, instead of
tossing out your old shoes and
dropping cash on a new pair, it’s
time to start considering a smarter alternative.
This year, when my recently purchased pair of leather boots began
detaching at the sole, I decided
that it was time to seek out some
repair expertise. This brought me
to Imperial Boots, an old shoe
repair shop below the intersection
of Bleury and Sherbrooke, easily
distinguished by its cowboy boot
window paintings and timeless
shoe displays. The store itself bears
the atmosphere of a place frozen
in time, with its dated red and
yellow paintjob blending into the
classic wooden backboard, setting
the retro tone. Handmade leather
boots of all styles line the room,
matching the colorful myriad of
leather swatches hanging from
the back wall. Sturdy metal sewing machines and sanding devices
hide in the back room, their labels
more than a half-century old.
When I first entered the store,
the elderly Greek owner was bent
over on all fours, carefully examining a pair of handmade boots
on one of his patrons. “This is too
long for you, madame,” he insisted, and began taking intricate
measurements of her feet to craft
a custom pair. The man behind
the business, who prefers to
remain anonymous, not only sells
his own styles of boots, but also
takes custom orders. Just bring in
a design of your ideal leather footwear, and he’ll see what he can do.
Of course, this luxury comes
with a cost. Prices for custommade boots start at around $200,
and while this is a stretch for most
students, it could be a worthy
investment for quality and longevity. Unlike the shoes in a retail
store, which often distance the
consumer from the manufacturer,
having your own personal cob-
bler would not only bring support
to a local business, but also slow
down your annual trend of mass
consumption and disposal. “I’ve
owned this shop for 42 years,” he
often reassured me, “these shoes
will last you a long time.”
Shoe repair is an economically friendly venture for students
– the cost for my boot repair was
only $5. Rather than stretching
your credit limit for replacements,
repairs allow you to maintain the
balance of durable footwear and
the familiar feel of broken-in comfort. Pay a little extra for reconditioning and protection, and your
shoes will last you as long as a new
pair at a sliver of the cost. However,
you must remain mindful of the
condition of your shoes before you
bring them in. The owner is known
for abruptly turning down customers that have shoes that he deems
hopeless cases.
So, for those of us who prefer to
Camille Chabrol | The McGill Daily
explore the city by foot, it’s time to
find preventative measures against
the deadly streets and put an end
to the yearly boot casualties. Think
twice next time you are about to
throw out those winter-worn shoes.
Instead of burning a hole in your
pocket, you could mend those holes
in your soles for the price of a cup
of coffee.
Imperial Boots is located at 2117
Bleury.
Holy chip!
Fishing for deep sea deliciousness at Comptoir 21
Steve Eldon Kerr
The McGill Daily
B
eing stood up on a date is
probably not the best experience. However, while waiting
for my friend to join me, I concluded
that Comptoir 21 is exactly the type
of friendly establishment that would
soften the blow. Why? Firstly, all the
customers sit elbow-to-elbow along
two wooden bar tops, so you never
feel too alone. This pseudo-table also
makes up the most prominent decorative feature of the restaurant. It is a
long, horseshoe-shaped bar that juts
out from the kitchen area at the back of
the building up to the window, which
looks out on the corner of St. Viateur
and Clark. Secondly, the mise-en-place
is simple: a knife and fork in a paper
napkin. Condiments are in large sharing bottles dotted around the bar. It
would be quite simple to pass off your
unfortunate lack of company as a preplanned solo meal. Thirdly, Comptoir
21 is a fish and chips restaurant, which
should provide, in your lonesome hour
of need, a timely reminder of a useful
phrase concerning the sea and the
number of its scaly inhabitants.
I won’t lie. I’m British. One of my
favourite meals is fish and chips. I
love few things more than eating
cod and chips from a seaside “chippy” while being sheltered from the
wind along a waterfront. Keeping the
chips (there will be no “fries” in this
article) away from the seagulls is half
the fun. So when The Daily asked me
to review the relatively new fish and
chips restaurant, I agreed, but sharpened my critical pencil. A couple of
obvious criticisms to begin with:
First, Comptoir 21 is a boring
name. A good fish and chip shop
name ought to be a pun. It is difficult
for me to trust a non-punning chippy.
My personal favourites include “Lord
of the Fries”, “Moby Chip”, “A Salt
and Battery”, “The Codfather”, “The
Frying Scotsman”, and “Batter the
Devil you Know.” I understand these
names may not suit the hip mile-end
scene, but sometimes it’s necessary
to take a stand for what is right.
Secondly, the beer selection is
poor. I concede that most chippies in Britain do not have alcohol
licenses, but Comptoir 21 does, and
it must try harder. “Brit and Chips” in
the Old Port not only wins the game
of puns, but serves London Pride: a
proper British ale. Boreale Blonde,
Boreale Rousse, and Guinness out
of a can does not constitute a “selection” of beer.
Nevertheless my companion –
who did eventually show up – and
I made do with a couple of canned
Guinesses and waited for our meals.
I ordered the $9.95 small fish and
chips, and my friend the $5.95 fried
calamari. All the fish meals come
with coleslaw, a slice of lemon, and
your choice of sauce.
We didn’t have to wait long for
our meals, but they were definitely
freshly cooked. The batter on my
fish was exquisite – a gorgeous dark
golden hue. It fractured crisply at the
touch. There was neither too much
nor too little of it. The mark of high
quality battering, nuggets of honeycombed batter at the tip of each end
of the fish, was clear to observe and
pleasing to taste.
The fish itself was more disappointing. My cod was a touch watery
and bland, although it still flaked off
in pleasingly large chunks. Given
the overwhelming flavour of deep
fried batter, the cod used should be
firm and succulent.
In light of the fact that I was served
the blasphemous “fries” and not
proper thick-cut chips, the chips were
excellent. The hand cut potatoes,
still with the skin on, had absorbed
just enough oil to remain warm and
tempting without succumbing to the
disastrous hollow and crunchy cardboard sticks that characterizes far
too much of the fried potato world
on this side of the Atlantic.
I was delighted to have a very generous portion of creamy tartare sauce
to dip both my fish and chips into, and
the coleslaw was fine.
I did not try whatever weird
“paprika” or “jalapeño” sauce
my friend had ordered because
I am an upstanding member of
the Commonwealth and will not
mix such foreign plants with my
fish’n’chips. Yet, he did assure me
the sauce was more than passable.
The same could not be said
about his calamari batter, which
was soft and bland. The squid itself
was actually fresh, moist, and well
cooked. The same care that went
into the cod batter was unfortunately nowhere to be found with
that of the calamari.
All in all, not a bad fish and chips,
despite the numerous and overt
blasphemes. I thought the batter
outstanding, and although the fish
neared mediocrity, these problems
can be easily fixed or could have
been supplier or seasonal issues. Or
perhaps the issue is that we have
over fished the cod stocks to near
extinction. Meh.
In any case, if you like fish and
chips or will probably be stood up
at your next date and need a backup
plan, I’d give Comptoir 21 a go. Try
and sneak in some real beer though.
Sheesh.
Comptoir 21 is located at 21
Saint Viateur West.
volume 101
number 29
editorial
3480 McTavish St., Rm. B-24
Montreal, QC H3A 1X9
phone 514.398.6784
fax 514.398.8318
mcgilldaily.com
coordinating editor
Joan Moses
[email protected]
coordinating news editor
Henry Gass
news editors
Queen Arsem-O’Malley
Erin Hudson
Jessica Lukawiecki
features editor
Eric Andrew-Gee
commentary&compendium! editors
Zachary Lewsen
culture editors
Christina Colizza
Fabien Maltais-Bayda
science+technology editor
Jenny Lu
health&education editor
Peter Shyba
sports editor
Andra Cernavskis
photo editor
Victor Tangermann
illustrations editor
Amina Batyreva
production&design editors
Alyssa Favreau
Rebecca Katzman
copy editor
Vacant
web editor
Shannon Palus
le délit
Anabel Cossette Civitella
[email protected]
cover design
Victor Tangermann
Contributors
Camille Chabrol, Naomi Desai, Lola Duffort,
Blair Elliott, James Farr, Ryan Healey, Matt
Herzfeld, Clara del Junco, Steve Eldon Kerr,
Devin Kesner, Esther Lee, Ayla Lefkowitz,
Davide Mastracci, Tamkinat Mirza, Midori
Nishioka, Rachel Reichel, Robin Reid-Fraser,
Sam Reynolds, Lela Savic, Colleen Stanton,
Juan Camilo Velásquez, Jordan VentonRublee, Mercedes Sharpe Zayas.
The Daily is published on most Mondays and Thursdays by the Daily
Publications Society, an autonomous, not-for-profit
organization whose membership includes all McGill
undergraduates and most graduate students.
3480 McTavish St., Rm. B-26
Montreal, QC H3A 1X9
phone 514.398.6790
fax 514.398.8318
Boris Shedov
Letty Matteo
Geneviève Robert
Mathieu Ménard
advertising & general manager
sales representative
ad layout & design
dps board of directors
Anabel Cossette Civitella, Marie Catherine Ducharme,
Alyssa Favreau, Joseph Henry, Olivia Messer, Sheehan
Moore, Joan Moses, Farid Muttalib, Mai Anh Tran-Ho,
Aaron Vansintjan (chair [at] dailypublications.org)
The Daily is proud to be a founding member
of the Canadian University Press.
All contents © 2012 Daily Publications Society. All rights
reserved. The content of this newspaper is the responsibility of The McGill Daily and does not necessarily represent the
views of McGill University. Products or companies advertised
in this newspaper are not necessarily endorsed by Daily staff.
Printed by Imprimerie Transcontinental Transmag. Anjou, Quebec.
ISSN 1192-4608.
EDITORIAL
More than a month
This February marks Canadian Black History Month. There is a common misconception
in Canada that racism and the oppression of people of colour are mainly American issues.
Canadians tend to point to their role in the Underground Railroad and the fact that slavery
was outlawed much earlier than in the States, while stressing the obvious atrocities violating human and civil rights that black Americans have endured. Indeed, Canada didn’t even
have a Black History Month until Jean Augustine, an Etobicoke-Lakeshore MP, proposed it
in 1996. Augustine was the first black woman elected to Parliament, and later the first black
woman in the federal cabinet.
Canadians are by no means innocent. Not only did slavery also exist in Canada (it started to be phased out in 1794; and most slaves were freed by 1834), there is also an alarming
amount of systemic oppression still present in our country. Systemic racism, unlike individual racism (which occurs when a person or a small group of people participate in racist
activities), is present when larger societal structures such as governments, corporations,
and educational institutions discriminate based on race. Furthermore, while schools in the
US dedicate sections of history classes to America’s racist past, Canada often ignores black
history in its textbooks. Black history is Canadian history and although it is marked by
oppression and racism, it is also a story of monumental accomplishments, made against the
odds, and without which Canada would not be the country it is today.
Oppression faced by black Canadians is both institutional and systemic. An obvious
example of this institutional oppression is the racial profiling by the SPVM, who continue to target people of colour. A leaked internal Montreal police report revealed that
between 2001 and 2007, out of a sample of 63,000 records of police identity checks, 30
to 40 per cent of these checks were done on black males. Only 6 per cent, however, were
done on white males.
Another example of this systemic oppression can be found on our own campus. In
2009, Principal Heather Munroe-Blum launched the Principal’s Task Force on Diversity,
Excellence, and Community Engagement. The goal of the task force was to produce a comprehensive report on diversity at McGill in the winter term of 2011. The report’s findings
indicated that “minoritization and marginalization are endemic to the fabric of Western
educational practice and are a historically engrained and ongoing problem.” Furthermore,
the task force noted that many argued “McGill’s record of faculty diversity – where the
number of people of colour, women, and LGBTQ persons are limited and where many individuals from these groups feel excluded – points directly to a culture of institutional exclusion and racism.” Despite these findings, McGill has yet to implement any real changes that
could create a more inclusive atmosphere.
While celebrating Black History Month is certainly a step in the right direction, we
should not limit this celebration to a single month. Moreover, by talking about racism as
solely a historical issue, it’s too easy to make it someone else’s problem or someone else’s
past. Canadians tend to think of discrimination as a thing of the past, and that needs to
change. Historicizing racism obscures contemporary problems of racial discrimination.
While there’s unquestionable value in celebrating Black History Month, reflecting on the
past should not be an excuse for us not to demand change now. Munroe-Blum’s task force
explained that, “the structural aspects of this ongoing problem need to be addressed swiftly, dramatically, and universally, throughout the University,” and The Daily agrees.
19
Compendium!
The McGill Daily | Tuesday, February 02, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com
Lies, half-truths, and see ya l8er.
AUS and SSMU GAs struggled with quorum
Minus 10 Students
Minus 108
The Help was nominated for best picture
I’ll miss you guys. You have no idea
what you’ve meant to me. Love, Liv.
So was The Artist and Midnight in Paris
Plus 216
Reading week is in less than four weeks
Plus 78
Awkward
Herman Cain endorsed Newt Gingrich
People are still talking about Normand Cornett
20
PLUS 3 PAGES
PLUS 45
The Super Bowl is coming up
Minus 38
Watching it is gonna put me behind on my readings
PLUS 193
TOTAL
I was more concerned with pretty fonts
than getting the crossword right
MEA CULPA, Here you go
The Crossword Fairies
The McGill Daily
Across
1. “Beowulf,” e.g.
5. Office papers
10. Kind of school
14. Bananas
15. Vital
16. ___ Against the Machine
17. Deutches lady
18. ^
19. Diva’s solo
20. Hitchcock direction
23. Put one’s foot down?
24. In the near future
25. Computer symbol drawing
28. Boozehound
30. Blue-book filler
34. Soup dish
36. Cabernet, e.g.
38. Cousin of an ostrich
39. Boxing buddy
43. Comics shriek
44. Drag queen accessory
45. Fails to
46. Bell Centre, e.g.
49. Gert’s Thursday special
51. Middle English gift
52. Church arch
54. What Jay-Z does
56. Pedagogical placement
62. Aromatic balsam
63. Curie or Antoinette
64. Britich comedian Eric
66. “... happily ___ after”
67. Japanese port
68. Caboose
69. Initiated into the mob
70. Flower part
71. London art gallery
Down
1. Wee person
2. Pocket pool material
3. Passport standard setter
4. Royal attendant
5. Hairy-chested
6. African antelopes
7. Catalan painter Joan
8. Go too far
9. Begin
10. Scampi
11. Pink, as a steak
12. Protection: Var.
13. Bog mummy preserver
21. Judge
22. Clod chopper
25. Befuddled
26. Man or woman?
27. Oryx and ___
29. J. S. Bach instrument
31. Intuit
32. Alter
33. Mongolian homes
35. Pen part
37. The old man
40. Billfold
41. Frolics
42. Souvenir shop item
47. Character
48. 30-day mo.
50. Soviet triumvirate
53. Japanese wrestlers
55. Pinocchio wants to be
____ boy
56. Thing
57. PBS science show
58. Toboggan
59. “Shut your ___!”
60. It comes to mind
61. ___ du jour
65. Before, to Burns

McGill - StudentUnion.ca

Transcription

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