Volume 29, Iss 25 - The Link Newspaper

Transcription

concordia’s independent newspaper
love is sweeter with black eyes since 1980
Ballin’
volume 29, issue 25 • Tuesday, March 10, 2009 • thelinknewspaper.ca
STINGERS RISE ABOVE UQAM TO TAKE
QUEBEC FINAL • SPORTS PAGE 22
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• News page 9
Poster Night: the slates, the promises, the posters
page 12
Czechs get trapped in the middle of a U.S./Russia power struggle • Features
NEWS 03
THE LINK • MARCH 10, 2009 • THELINKNEWSPAPER.CA/NEWS
Full-time professors
negotiate new contract
Agreement in principle reached, bargaining still ongoing
• JENNIFER FREITAS
Concordia University and its full-time
faculty are close to signing a new collective agreement which will last until 2012,
said union president Charles Draimin.
“We announced to our membership
that we have reached an agreement in
principle with the administration,” said
Draimin, president of the Concordia
University Faculty Association, which
represents over 900 full-time faculty.
Draimin wouldn’t release any details
of Concordia’s new proposal, but the university posted a version of their proposal
on the school’s website on March 5, which
irritated CUFA.
The proposal cited salary increases of
two per cent for all members as well as up
to $2,000 each of retroactive pay.
Draimin said it was inappropriate for
the university to make their contract offer
public but added, “as far as we are concerned, there are improvements to their
proposal [which they posted online].” He
said that the full details of the changed
contract proposal were not yet addressed
to CUFA’s members.
Initially, Draimin was not pleased with
what the university had to offer because it
did not account for inflation.
Concordia University fulltime associate professors’
average salaries were the
second lowest on the island
of Montreal and fifth lowest
in the province. Quebec has
17 universities.
The Bank of Canada’s Consumer Price
Index, which provides a broad measure of
the cost of living in Canada, was at 112.2
in January—an inflation of 2.3 from the
time CUFA’s last contract expired.
“Our concern is that this two per cent
increase is very low compared to the cost
of living,” said Draimin.
David Graham, Concordia’s provost
and vice-president of academic affairs,
says that employers do recognize the need
to provide salary increases to help
employees adjust to the cost of living, but
that keeping up with inflation isn’t always
the case.
“I don’t think you would find many
employers who would agree that salaries
should necessarily track the cost of living,” said Graham.
Aside from inflation, Draimin said
salaries for full-time Concordia teachers
are behind their colleagues at other universities across the country.
According to a 2007 Statistics Canada
report scaling the salaries of full-time
teaching staff at Canadian universities,
Concordia University full-time associate
professors’ average salaries were the second lowest on the island of Montreal and
fifth lowest in the province. Quebec has 17
universities.
CUFA members have been working on
an expired contract since June 1, 2007.
Graham says both negotiating teams
will be meeting later this week to work out
a number of details.
$101,089
the average salary of full-time professors at
UQAM.
$112,084
the average salary of McGill professors.
$78,733
June1,‘07
the floor salary for Con U professors.
the date CUFA’s contract expired.
Toronto Stock Exchange caught in $1 billion lawsuit
Complicit in aggressive tactics to coerce Ecuadorian mining operation
• CHRISTOPHER OLSON
A billion dollar lawsuit filed against the
Toronto Stock Exchange was the inspiration for a documentary film by Toronto
filmmaker Malcolm Rogge.
The lawsuit against the TSX, filed by
Marcia Ramírez, Israel Pérez and Polibio
Pérez on behalf of the residents of Intag,
Ecuador, claimed aggressive coercion tactics in acquiring the natural resources of
the village by Copper Mesa Mining
Corporation—formerly
known
as
Ascendent Copper.
“Once I had heard that the company had
actually resorted to using paramilitaries, I
went to Ecuador right away,” said Rogge,
who has a Masters in Environmental
Studies and Law from York University.
Rogge has studied transnational corporations and transnational tort, as well as negligence law applied to the transnational
context.
Rogge met with the inhabitants of Intag
and was provided with footage taken by the
residents themselves that showed Copper
Mesa employees firing handguns into the
air to ward off peaceful demonstrators.
That footage was incorporated into his
2008 film, Under Rich Earth, which
screened at Concordia University’s Cinema
Politica film series on Feb. 23, where Rogge
fielded questions from Concordia students.
Copper Mesa, on the other hand,
refused to communicate with Rogge oncamera. “[The Chair of the Board] was very
apologetic,” said Rogge. “[He] said it was
too much of a risk. Obviously, events had
not unfolded the way that they had hoped.”
The events of Dec. 2, 2006 ignited a
national discussion on the “issue of mining, and the balance between economic
development and ecological impact,” said
Rogge.
An earlier environmental impact assessment endorsed by Bishi Metals in 1996
concluded that large-scale open-pit mining
in Intag mining would result in a gradual
desertification of the valley of Intag.
The lawsuit claims that the TSX, which
financed Copper Mesa’s open-pit mining
project in Intag in 2006, is complicit in
Copper Mesa’s use of aggressive tactics,
including the hiring of an “armed military
brigade” to intimidate residents. In the
document, Ramírez also cited death threats
against her for leading the effort to have
the company’s mining claim withdrawn.
“The TSX’s stock market listing of
Copper Mesa [...] allowed the company to
obtain over $25 million in capital funds,
some of which paid for the armed attackers
who injured Marcia and Israel on
December 2, 2006,” according to a legal
summary released March 3.
At one point, Copper Mesa announced
to Rogge that they would be making their
own documentary film about the positive
Armed attackers are shown here in Under Rich Earth.
work they are doing for the residents of
Intag. Although Rogge was given a private
viewing of elements of the documentary
they were producing, the film was never
completed. “At that point it probably
wouldn’t serve their interests to draw more
attention to those conflicts,” Rogge said.
Under Rich Earth received an endorsement from The Northern Miner, one of the
leading mining newspapers in Canada, saying that it serves as a classic example for
Canadian companies on how not to handle
community relations. “And that’s from a
pro-industry newspaper,” Rogge said.
Rogge said the actions of Copper Mesa
struck a nerve with him, since he’s a
Toronto filmmaker.
“The project was financed through the
Toronto Stock Exchange, which is governed by Ontario law—the Ontario
Securities Act—which is administered by
the Ontario government, which is based in
Toronto, which is where I live. So the connection is very close to home.”
To review the lawsuit filed against the
Toronto Stock Exchange, please visit
ramirezversuscoppermesa.com.
04 NEWS
eConcordia headliner cancels for ABC primetime show
Summit rescheduled, almost $28,000 lost
• CLARE RASPOPOW
The prestigious eConcordia
Summit has been pushed back
until Sept. 10 because keynote
speaker Steve Wozniak signed up
for another gig: Dancing with the
Stars.
According to Dalia Bosis,
eConcordia’s special projects
coordinator, the co-founder of
Apple Computer didn’t speak up
about his TV show committments
until around Feb. 12. The Summit
was scheduled for March 12.
“[Wozniak] only notified us
about a month before the summit,” Bosis said. “He told us that
with the intensity of his dancing
schedule he would be unable to
take the time off.”
“We knew he had signed a
GRAPHIC
GINGER COONS
contract with ABC to do something [after he had agreed to
appear at the Summit],” Bosis
continued, “but we only just
found out it was Dancing with the
Stars.”
The Summit’s unexpected
change of date will cost
eConcordia close to $28,000 in
registration fees alone.
“There will still be 400 people,
but we have dropped the price of
the [Sept. 10] Summit to $350
[from the original $420],” said
Bosis.
The eConcordia Summit is
billed on its website as “a unique
event designed to offer academics, professionals and key decision makers a better understanding of the cultural paradigm of
technology and learning.”
There are currently nine
speakers, including Wozniak and
eConcordia president Andrew
McAusland, scheduled to speak
at the Sept. 10 Summit.
Despite the fact that only one
out of the eight speakers was
unable to attend the original
March 12 date and that
eConcordia would be incurring
financial losses, Bosis did not
entertain cutting Wozniak from
the speakers list.
“Steve Wozniak is the draw,”
said Bosis. “A lot of people signed
up just to see Steve Wozniak.”
Due to the date change, there
could be cancellations from other
scheduled speakers.
“The speakers list is changing,” Bosis said. “We may have
new [ones].”
Con U engineering students at high velocity
You ‘don’t have to get shit-faced’ to learn and have fun
• JOHNNY NORTH
It took the Engineering & Computer
Science Association three days to put up their
greatest accomplishment during National
Engineering Week: a 42-foot-tall Eiffel Tower
model that stands in the atrium of the EV
Building.
“The best [event] by far was the Eiffel
Tower because of where it is located in the EV
building,” said Anthony Tanzer, a second-year
Engineering student who helped build the
tower, while CTV, Global and TVA were filming.
“So many people, Concordia students,
Concordia faculty, or just people walking
through going to the metro, […] get to see it
and see how Concordia engineering does cool
projects like that.”
For seven days, the ECA hosted over 10
events that included a speaker series, a game
night, a movie night, ‘lunch & learns’ and
much more.
Alex Brovkin, president of the ECA, said
the engineering program is “very diversified.
You have to cater to different cultures, different values and different interests. I think we
had a better turnout. I think by adding new
topics every year, we’ll continue to make it
exciting for students.”
“As much as we are university students,
not everything is alcohol-related,” said
The Link
CONCORDIA’S INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER
SEBASTIEN CADIEUX
opinions editor
Concordia University
Hall Building, Room H-649
1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W.
Montreal, Quebec H3G 1M8
features editor
TERRINE FRIDAY
student press liaison
JOELLE LEMIEUX
literary arts editor
CHRISTOPHER OLSON
sports editor
DIEGO PELAEZ-GAETZ
BRUNO DE ROSA
business manager
OPEN
CLARE RASPOPOW
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graphics editor
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managing editor
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PHOTO JOHNNY NORTH
Brovkin wanted to give engineering students
something that wasn’t just “pure engineering.” Speaker Raymond Luk, founder of consulting firm Flow Ventures, addressed around
layout manager
JUSTIN GIOVANNETTI
copy editor
news editor
[email protected]
http://thelinknewspaper.ca
Tanzer. “There are many events you don’t
have to get shit-faced at.”
This year National Engineering Week was
centred on the theme of entrepreneurship.
editor-in-chief
Volume 29, Number 25
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
editorial: (514) 848-2424 ext. 7405
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Concordia’s engineering students crafted this Eiffel tower re-make.
CHRIS BOURNE
ROBERT DESMARAIS
DAVID KAUFMANN
The Link is published every
Tuesday during the academic year
by the Link Publication Society
Inc. Content is independent of the
University and student associations (ECA, CASA, ASFA, FASA,
CSU). Editorial policy is set by an
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member. The Link is a member of
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70 students with his talk on entrepreneurship
on March 9.
“People were really excited about it,” said
Brovkin. “People stayed afterwards and talked
to him. There was a lot of energy in there.”
The week ended with the annual bridge
building competition that saw around 300
people get involved—the most of any event
during the week. Twenty-nine teams from
across Canada and the United States competed.
“They had to build a bridge out of sticks
and dental floss,” said Marc Lindstrom, VP
External of the ECA. “They were rated on originality, on the niceness of the bridge and on
how much weight the bridge can hold.”
CEGEP de Chicoutimi’s “Les impontdérables” placed first, despite the fact that the
school had only one team competing.
Concordia’s “Bridgesickles” placed fourth,
which was the highest finish of the three
Concordia teams.
Lindstrom was pleased with how smoothly
the week went after all the hard work of the
ECA.
“The last activity, when it was done, I was
like, ‘Finally it’s done!’ It was a long week, I
didn’t get too sleep much. ”
For the full results of the 25th
Bridge Building Competition, please visit
csce.ecaconcordia.ca.
Letters to the editor are welcome. All letters 400 words or
less will be printed, space permitting. Letters deadline is Friday at
4 p.m. The Link reserves the right
to edit letters for clarity and
length and refuse those deemed
racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, libelous, or otherwise
contrary to The Link’s statement
of principles.
Board of Directors 2008-2009:
Giuseppe Valiante,
Ellis
Steinberg,
Matthew
Gore,
Jonathan Metcalfe; non-voting
members:
Rachel
Boucher,
Sebastien Cadieux.
Typesetting by The Link. Printing
by Transcontinental.
CONTRIBUTORS
Deni Abdullah, Sima Aprahamian, Esinam Beckley, Laura
Beeston, Annabelle Blais, Matthew Brett, Raffy Boudjikanian,
Justin Bromberg, Madeline Coleman, Cynthia D’Cruz, Lee
Eks, Ion Etxebarria, Matthew Fiorentino, Jennifer Freitas,
Chris Gates, Toya Gratton, Owain Harris, Cody Hicks, Kamila
Hinkson, Vincent Hopkins, Elsa Jabre, Aaron Lakoff, Tristan
Lapointe, Les Honywill, Ian Lawrence, Evan LePage, Vivien
Leung, Madelyn Lipszyc, Charlene Lusikila, Jackson
MacIntosh, Alex Manley, Elgin-Skye McLaren, Marlee
McMillian, Andre Pare, Barbara Pavone, Sinbad Richardson,
Stephanie Stevenson, Cat Tarrants, Rachel Tetrault, Kristen
Theodore, Giuseppe Valiante, Jessica Vriend, Natasha Young
cover photo by Jonathan Dempsey
inside graphic cover by Gaïa Orain
NEWS 05
Canadian Federation of
Students hopeful interferes
in Concordia election
Quebec representative caught on film violating election rules
1
2
1. Stewart-Ornstein takes down the
first poster...
2. ...and walks away...
3
4
2. ...then returns to the poster
boards...
4. ...and leaves with seven posters
in total.
• JUSTIN GIOVANNETTI
Newly-elected Deputy Chair of the
Canadian Federation of Students, Noah
Stewart-Ornstein, violated Concordia election rules on Feb. 8 by tearing down seven
campaign posters during the Arts and Science
Federation of Associations’ general election
campaign.
Stewart-Ornstein—former
VP
Communications of the Concordia Student
Union—is currently employed as spokesperson for the Quebec wing of the CFS, a lobby
group that Concordia students pay money to.
Stewart-Ornstein was caught on security
cameras tearing down all the posters belonging to the ASFA president-elect and her running-mates in the Hall building corridor leading to the Mackay street exit.
When first asked by The Link if he had
torn down posters during the ASFA campaign, Stewart-Ornstein denied the allegations. Moments later he conceded, “after the
election I took some down to help clean up
and I took one down to have.”
When Stewart-Ornstein was then told of
security footage showing him tearing down
seven posters before the Feb. 17-19 ASFA
election, he replied, “I took a couple to have,
but why would I steal anyone’s posters? It’s
fun to have to look at them. Weird posters,
though. Not very nice looking.”
Two minutes later Stewart-Ornstein said,
“I remember grabbing a couple of posters, but
I don’t remember if it was before or after the
election.”
Leah Del Vecchio, the president-elect of
ASFA—whose slate’s posters were torn
down—worked alongside Stewart-Ornstein
during the 2007-2008 academic year as the
CSU’s VP Student Life.
“I was shocked. I had received a text message from [Stewart-Ornstein] a day earlier
[Feb. 7], adamantly suggesting that he was
not going to get involved in this year’s election,” Del Vecchio said. “This was not only
personally insulting, because we shared an
office last year, but it was professionally
insulting because he denied getting involved
in the election.”
Del Vecchio did not believe StewartOrnstein’s argument that he took down the
posters for posterity.
“As you notice in the video, [StewartOrnstein] doesn’t take them down and fold
them, he crumples them.”
This was not the first controversy surrounding posters during the ASFA electoral
campaign. Del Vecchio’s slate also had most
of its posters across campus torn down during the first weekend their posters were put
up.
“On Friday morning [Feb. 6] at 8 a.m. we
were allowed to poster, the other team didn’t
poster at all. I had a hunch all our posters
would be torn down, I’ve been around for a
few years and I know how it works. And, lo
and behold, coming in on Monday morning
[Feb. 9], every single one of my posters were
torn down,” said Del Vecchio.
In ASFA Standing Regulations, Item 14 of
Part 2, Section 4 states, “The CEO shall
ensure that the election is properly conducted.”
Section 4, line 188 of the CSU’s standing
regulations states, “Candidates shall campaign in accordance with the rules of fair play.
Breaking the rules of fair play include, but are
not limited to, breaching generally accepted
community standards, libel, slander, general
sabotage of the campaigns of other candidates, and misrepresentation of facts.”
Because Stewart-Ornstein was not a candidate but rather an employee of Quebec’s
chapter of the CFS, the CEO could not take
any corrective measures. But Del Vecchio
does not think Stewart-Ornstein’s actions are
without consequence.
“The CFS has long had problems with local
sovereignty and representatives getting
involved in local elections. It is not allowed,
by any means, for individuals employed by
CFS to get involved in school elections,” said
Del Vecchio.
“For getting involved, he should be reprimanded. As the new deputy chairperson of
CFS he is a figurehead, making this more
shameful.”
The CFS was not available for comment by
press time.
NEWS 07
Something academic
Dissenting views: trying to keep the history of a people alive
• SIMA APRAHAMIAN
Dr. Sima Aprahamian is a sociology and anthropology
professor at Concordia University.
Aprahamian, a graduate of McGill University, specializes in gender and contemporary issues within the study
of anthropology. She has coordinated panel discussions
for the Canadian Federation of Humanities and Social
Sciences Congress.
“Can we escape the past which does not pass?”
—Nellie Hoghikyan, 2005
Can genocide denial be given a place in academia in the
name of freedom of expression?
A recent such denialist lecture in Montreal had recently
prompted an outrage among Montreal Armenian
Students.
“The neo-Nazi or the denier of the Holocaust and the
Armenian, Rwandan and Cambodian genocides has now
an academic environment to host their lectures in Canada.
On Friday the 20th of February 2009 [sic], McGill
University decided that its campus was an appropriate
scene to allow the Turkish professor T. Ataov to deny the
Armenian genocide of 1915, during which 1.5 million
Armenians were massacred by the Turks,” wrote Ara
Hagopian, Université de Montréal’s president of the
Armenian Students’ Association.
Recently, Armenians have been faced with political
pressure to stop asking for the recognition of the Genocide
of 1915 and are being asked to engage in normalizing relations with Turkey.
Can there be normalization when Turkey has collective
amnesia when it comes to 1915 or has a twisted way of representing the events of 1915?
Extermination in dissent
The Turkish version is that Armenians killed Turks in
spite of the massive evidence that Ottoman Turkey
engaged in a pre-determined extermination plan of its
Armenian citizens.
As Hagopian states in his letter, “The Armenian genocide is officially recognized by the Council of Europe, the
European Parliament, the Human Rights Council of the
United Nations and 20 countries including Canada,
France, Russia, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium and Germany.
The International Association of Genocide Scholars, representing the majority of historians from Europe and North
America, published an open letter to the Turkish Prime
Minister on June 13, 2005, in order to remind him that it
was not only the Armenian community, but hundreds of
historians of different nationalities, independent of any
government, who had studied and established the reality
of the Armenian Genocide.”
Barbara Coloroso, a former nun and author of The
Bully, The Bullied, and the Bystander, approached genocide as an educator, parent, and former nun. Her book
Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide … And
Why It Matters is based on work with orphan-survivors of
the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. For her it is a short walk
from bullying to hate crimes to genocide.
In Coloroso’s book tour, which included an event in
Montreal, she recounted the stories of Rwandan genocide
survivors who’d begun identifying the various bully and
bystander roles that were played out in 1994. It is at that
moment that for her “it became apparent that the walk was
even shorter” from bullying to extermination than she had
thought and that “it was true that genocide had its roots in
utter contempt for another human being. Genocide is not
an unimaginable horror. Every genocide throughout history has been thoroughly imagined, meticulously planned,
and brutally executed.”
Through an examination of three clearly defined genocides—of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire; the Jews,
Roma, and Sinti in Europe; and the Tutsi in Rwanda—
Barbrara Coloroso attempts to deconstruct the causes of
genocide and its consequences, and proposes conditions
that have to exist in order to make the commitment of
“Never Again.”
To recognize the beginning is step one in eradicating
this horror.
Conflict vs. Genocide
The textbook definition of conflict is a situation in
which two or more goals, values, or events are incompatible or mutually exclusive. It sometimes arises out of a
small insignificant event, which does not describe genocide.
Claudia Card, a social activist and well-respected professor of Philosophy, Jewish Studies and Women’s Studies
at the University of Wisconsin, states that genocide “targets people on the basis of who they are rather than on the
basis of what they have done, what they might do, even
what they are capable of doing.”
What sets genocide apart from other forms of atrocities
and mass killings is what Card rightly stresses: “the harm
inflicted on its victims’ social vitality.” Indeed what happens after a genocidal killing is that the “survivors lose
their cultural heritage and may even lose their intergener-
ational connections. To use Orlando Patterson’s terminology, in that event, they may become ‘socially dead’ and
their descendants ‘natally alienated,’ no longer able to pass
along and build upon the traditions, cultural developments
(including languages), and projects of earlier generations.”
A language of conflict resolution, needless to say, cannot lead to reconciliation when effective post-conflict
phase commissions have not been set. In the Armenian
case, the 1919 Turkish military tribunal did set to establish
the truth and punish the perpetrators. However, the 1923
newly established Republic that replaced the Ottoman
Turkish Empire introduced a complete rupture with the
past.
Armenians everywhere faced with the denial are continuously in need to remember and study the genocide.
The next generation
Over 90 years have passed since the 1915 genocide of
the Armenian people yet, in spite of unanimity in research
and documentation, there continues to be an active denial.
The healing process has been long. As academics
Katherine Bischoping and Natalie Fingerhut have pointed
out in Border Lines: Indigenous Peoples in Genocide
Studies, survivors of genocide typically document psychological and physical symptoms that could be characterized
as post-traumatic stress syndrome. Studies of Armenian
and Jewish survivors indicate that active remembering is
perceived positively as a way to honour the dead.
Efforts by the Turkish government to obliterate evidence of the Armenian genocide, and the same mission of
Holocaust deniers, are believed to hinder the healing of
survivors.
As Lorne Shirinian has aptly pointed out, in his
Survivor Memoirs of the Armenian Genocide, “the literature of the generations since the end of World War I has
seen the unfortunate rise of a new genre; namely, the literature of testimony, specifically survivor memoirs.”
Survival as a witness and writer has led to reflections
on testimony as literary form. Recent years have seen a rise
in fictionalized literary works along the publication and republication of eyewitness accounts and memoirs. In the
subsequent generations, the Armenian genocide is
recounted such that it takes on the characteristics of a
story-like narrative.
Armenians are also still traumatized at the face of the
continuous denial of the calamity. As Bamberger said:
“Until that moment when Turkey finally admits to its culpability, this generation of grandchildren, finding its inspiration in the terrible experiences of the survivors, will continue to write and speak out about unspeakable events.”
Women’s rights
are human rights
• TERRINE FRIDAY
Members of Montreal's March 8
Committee of Women of Diverse Origins took
to the streets on Sunday to celebrate
International Women's Day 2009 and
demand rights to security of the person.
The demonstration, which started at Cabot
Square and made its way east, compared the
situation of women with the critique of social
issues “from Barriere Lake to Palestine to
Afghanistan, from the field to the factory and
the kitchen table, from the local park to the
jail cells to the battlefield.”
PHOTO ION ETXEBARRIA
08 NEWS
Missing women panel
• JOELLE LEMIEUX
QPIRG Concordia, the 2110
Centre, the Simone de Beauvoir
Institute and the Women's Studies
Students' Association will be holding a speakers series called 510
Missing & Murdered Native
Women Since 1980 on March 16
and 17.
According to a 2008 federallyfunded report by the Native
Women's Association of Canada,
510 native women have gone missing in the past 30 years, though
some estimate the actual number
to be much higher.
Speakers include Ellen Gabriel
of the Quebec Native Women's
Association and Beverly Jacobs, an
Aboriginal rights lawyer and president of the Native Women's
Association of Canada.
The panel discussion on March 16
will take place at the McCord
Museum, 690 Sherbrooke Street W,
at 7 p.m. The discussion on March 17
will take place at the Atwater Library,
1200 Atwater Avenue, at 6 p.m.
Trashy audit
• TRISTAN LAPOINTE
Sustainable Concordia and
Environmental group R4 are
teaming up this week for their
annual waste audit. Student volunteers will be sifting through piles
of rubbish from around campus in
hopes of determining just how
much of our waste could be recycled rather than simply tossed out.
In the 2003-2004 academic
year, the university spent over
$63,000 on removing 746 tonnes
of waste, most of it ending up in
the Lachenaie landfill.
For more info, please visit sustainable.concordia.ca.
Former P.O.W. calls for solidarity with Palestine
Imprisonment an honour, says freedom fighter
• GIUSEPPE VALIANTE, CUP
QUEBEC BUREAU CHIEF
Soha Bechara has never been to
Israel. Nor have her toes felt the
sand lining Gaza’s beaches. She
has never seen Jerusalem. Yet this
timid-looking, middle-aged mother of two commands immense
respect internationally as a symbol
of resistance to occupation, especially for Palestinians.
When Bechara took the stage
the evening of March 3 in
Montreal’s north end to give a
speech called “Prisoners of
Occupation,” the 200-plus crowd
rose in unison and clapped with
respect and admiration.
The respect comes from the 10
years Bechara spent in the notorious Khiam prison inside Israelicontrolled southern Lebanon. She
was captured for the attempted
assassination of Antoine Lahd,
leader of the South Lebanon
Army, during Israel’s 18-year
occupation of Lebanon. The SLA
was a Shiite militia force supported by the Israeli forces. Bechara
was beaten, electrocuted, and
endured other tortures at the
hands of the SLA. She was
released from prison in 1998.
Bechara, invited to speak as
part of Israeli Apartheid Week,
called on the audience to take their
Canadian passports and visit the
Palestinian territories and come
back to Canada to testify about
what they have seen.
“It’s not because I’m Arab, it’s
because I’m human that I say we
must do something,” said Bechara,
who was born in Lebanon.
The weeklong conferences,
held in over 25 cities around the
world, aimed to highlight what
organizers see as Israel’s discriminatory policies towards the
Palestinians and to grow support
for the international Boycott,
Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel. Activist group
Tadamon! hosted Montreal’s conference.
“The occupation has strangled
the leadership,” Bechara said.
“When at 14 years old you find
yourself in prison, […] this is a
society that can no longer produce
leaders.”
Bechara said the movement to
impose sanctions on Israel is
important because only the collective international community can
make a difference in the lives of
Palestinians.
The Palestinians should not be
negotiating for peace, she said.
“I know my position is more
militant than [that of Gaza’s governing] Hamas. No negotiations
[…] The occupied doesn’t negoti-
Bechara calls her stay in prison a test of survival.
ate with an occupier. You negotiate with someone when you are on
an equal level. The Palestinians
are very far from this.”
She said all the Palestinians can
do is resist and it is the world that
must act on their behalf.
“Its not an Arab or Israeli question. It’s a fundamental question
for humanity,” she said.
And on the subject of her torture and imprisonment for 10
PHOTO GIUSEPPE VALIANTE
years, Bechara said it doesn’t
affect her life negatively. She has
mothered two children since her
release, wrote an autobiography
and teaches mathematics at home
in Switzerland.
“[My imprisonment] was an
honour. It was a moment very
important for me,” she said. “That
I could resist it until the end […] It
brings nothing but pride to have
passed this test without failing.”
Former South African Congressman on Israeli Apartheid
Con U talks carbon
• TRISTAN LAPOINTE
The recent rejection of a proposed Liberal carbon tax, combined with the election of an
American president who claims to
have an environmentally friendly
platform, has prompted a panel
discussion hosted by Concordia's
School of Community and Public
affairs.
The panel on carbon credits,
carbon neutrality, and worldwide
emissions trading will feature several guest speakers including
Quebec Green Party founder
Daniel Breton.
Carbon credits are a system of
reimbursements available for
companies and individuals to offset-or in some cases legally
enlarge-their carbon footprint.
The talk will take place at 2149
Mackay on March 10 at 6 p.m..
PHOTO RACHEL TETRAULT
• RACHEL TETRAULT
Ronnie Kasrils, a former member of the
African National Congress and Minister for
Intelligence Services for the South African
government, spoke at McGill University on
March 4 as part of Israeli Apartheid Week.
Kasrils addressed the apartheid in Israel
and the growing Boycotts, Divestment and
Sanctions global movement as a method to
stop human rights violations.
Kasrils frequently equated Israel’s policies to South African apartheid.
PHOTO RACHEL TETRAULT
ELECTIONS 09
Democracy’s alive!
Political pros, newbies duke it out during poster night
• LAURA BEESTON
& R. BRIAN HASTIE
Ideals of substance versus flash
came to the surface during last
night’s poster night as the two most
visible teams, Change and Vision,
postered up the Hall and Library
buildings of the Sir George
Williams campus.
Memories of last year’s dismal
poster night turn-out were quickly
forgotten as a large throng of hopeful politicos, adorned in costumes
and war paint, waited anxiously to
cover our university from head to
toe in campaign slogans.
Last year’s “two-party” race
(which was easily won by the current administration as postering
unofficially ended at a record-setting 12:07 a.m.) was a distant
thought as four slates, one referendum question, two independent
councillors and a mysterious “Pay
Attention” campaign vied for the
reserved space.
The prevailing slates, Change
and Vision, offered up posters that
were not unlike the ones seen in
recent years, with promises of battling tuition freezes and “complete
transparency.”
Their
similar
posters are differentiated only by
the names of the slates, the
colours—Change’s green to Vision’s
purple—and slight variance in
stances.
The other interested parties
vying for poster space, such as the
People’s Potato, the New Union,
“Pay Attention” and independent
councillors Adam Slater and
Stefan Lefebvre, wouldn’t allow
their concerns to be lost in the
mayhem and hoopla of this mid-
night campaign sensationalism.
All three multi-candidate parties
that were present called each other
out on petty postering infractions
all over the school: postering on
spaces reserved for school events,
having too many of the same poster
in the same space and covering
other candidates’ posters.
Unfortunately, the People's
Potato has to contend with the fact
that they are sharing space with the
electoral candidates even though
they are running a referendum
campaign separate from the elections of individuals to Council.
Many members were dismayed at
this fact, leading one member of the
collective to declare that the “fighting for poster space is ridiculous.
There is plenty of room for everyone.” Another member mentioned
that referendum questions should
have their own space reserved for
them so as to not have to fight with
the other candidates.
In a similar vein, the sole New
Union representative present at
poster night was VP Internal candidate Spencer Bailey, who said he
was elected to take on the postering
challenge without the pretence.
“My party is committed to student union responsibility; we have
a comprehensive plan to restructure the student union, rewrite the
bylaws to create 'true' transparency, and open meeting initiatives to
generate accountability,” said
Bailey, who travelled the campus
with only a computer bag of
posters and a stapler. “I'm [alone]
here and I have the smallest
poster, but it's the most different
and I managed to poster everywhere I wanted to. Talk is cheap.”
The Fresh party made the best of
their evening as six candidates—the
executive slate and one councillor—
trying their best to steal away whatever space hadn’t been claimed by
either Change or Vision.
“We’re first-time runners, we
were here to show students we
could put together a team, despite
being the underdogs here. This year
has been very intense, the rules
have changed and we’ve only been
formed for the last three weeks,”
said Allan Guindi, Fresh’s candidate for VP finance. “We’re here to
get more people engaged, involved
and voting; we’ve hung out at
Reggie’s and the bike shop. We feel
like the other teams are lacking the
personal touch.
“Last year only 10 per cent of the
student population came out to
vote. We’re 30,000 students at
Concordia, and I was guilty as
charged [as far as not voting goes],
because I wasn’t involved and didn’t know the issues.”
Team Change decided to go the
flashy, short-term route, hoping to
win votes by playing to the voters’
love of hockey. Their Habs-themed
poster, declaring “Road trips to
Habs away games in Boston and
Ottawa!” as well as a Canadiens
team speaker series and the chance
to win tickets to both games and
practices, was a cheap grab in a city
united by the NHL.
Elie Chivi, current VP communications, mentioned that the
ambiguous “Pay Attention” posters
were meant as placeholders that
would be replaced at a later time.
The same can be said for the
reversed Vision posters, which will
be substituted in the following days.
PHOTO JONATHAN DEMPSEY
Clockwise from top: students dash to
poster boards in the Hall building; waiting in line for security to check ID;
slates tape their cmpaign posters
together; a Change campaigner reconsiders her choice of bandeau; and students dash up the stationary escalator.
PHOTO PIERRETTE MASIMANGO
PHOTO IAN LAWRENCE
PHOTO CLARE RASPOPOW
‘Calm and sedate … just what we wanted’
Midnight on poster night through the eyes of the man in charge
If Tuesday morning’s pint-sized
poster night was the most docile in
nearly a decade, the man standing
at the centre of the event will claim
credit with glee.
Oliver Cohen, dressed in a
white shirt and jeans and armed
with a bullhorn, a Blackberry and
driven
demeanour,
is
the
Concordia Student Union’s new
Chief Electoral Officer.
Cohen’s
introduction
to
Concordia politics was swift as he
stood for nearly three hours
among an undersized crowd of
warpaint splashed politicos. But
with ample security and a thin yellow rope, Cohen and three
deputies on hand kept order and
dealt with groups of students, one
Oliver Cohen (centre) with volunteer Josh Rabinovitch.
by one.
Just before midnight the new
CEO stood at the top of the first
flight of the Hall building’s escalators, looking down on the event’s
small crowd; banning the large
crowds of the past by limiting the
participants to candidates was
Cohen’s most obvious contribution
to the evening, and it set the tone.
Standing at the edge of the second floor mezzanine, Cohen called
“for a fair and clean poster night.”
Moments later a crowd of yelling,
poster-bearing hopefuls thundered past while Cohen backed
into a newspaper box of The Link
to avoid the rush.
After catching his breath, the
CEO took to the footprints of the
herd. Walking among hundreds of
tacks that had fallen from
unsteady hands, his face bore a
small smile. “This evening is calm
and sedate; this is just what we
wanted,” he beamed.
As the school descended into
mayhem with students running
back and forth, yelling “where are
the tacks? I need posters!” Cohen
simply paced the floor. “So far so
good,” he said as he waited, occasionally turning to his Blackberry
for updates.
The monotony of the evening
soon set in for the CEO, but the
yelling continued. Cohen spent
nearly an hour walking from
poster board to poster board,
telling slates to move posters an
inch and remove offending sheets,
managing the minutiae of electoral
propaganda.
Each new board was greeted
with a scream: “I need a [insert
slate name here] representative.”
As the evening wore on, the
CEO continued to joke with his
deputies. “Why are we having so
much trouble with those [bulletin
boards]?” Cohen asked one.
“Maybe they need to ‘Change’,” the
unknown deputy, who refused to
give his name, answered. Cohen
laughed and boarded the escalator
for another floor.
Pay attention! A fresh vision
for change ...and a new union
• COMMENTARY BY R. BRIAN HASTIE & MATTHEW FIORENTINO
ELECTIONS 11
Former
electoral
officer turns
videographer
Another year, another poster night. What a terrible adage, but unfortunately it’s true. We’re starting to suspect that:
CHANGE
• True to their name, the candidates took a long, hard look at Evolution’s
2005-2006 series of posters and decided to move their hands from their hips
into a bold cross-armed position. This year’s posters also introduced a daring
hands-covering-crotch stance, as evidenced by Boue’s daring new pose.
• Hey you! Flock of Seagulls: Get a new haircut. Post-new-wave grunge has
already come and gone.
• No poster is complete without the classic “rising sun” gradient, indicating a
real “change” in leadership. Funny how it kinda looks like last year’s Unity
posters.
VISION
• They kept their hands on their hips in defiance of the standard pose.
• In a true sign of “our bad,” placeholder posters made with cheap paper and
felt markers were mounted in strategic points across the university. Politico
fairies will be putting up the real posters over the course of the next week.
• The hands-down best use of cardigans in candidate photos. Cardigans are a
tasteful addition to any wardrobe and indicate a “smart yet sassy” attitude.
TEAM FRESH
• The thing about trying to emulate the look of Warhol’s Debbie Harry posters
is that you all end up looking like you’re wearing too much lipstick, regardless of
self-identified gender.
• Slogans written in bad street lingo might work in Montreal, but don’t ever
plan a day trip to Baltimore.
• Braggadocio: when you absolutely, positively want to use Sand font but realize it’s a stupid move. Accept no substitutes.
PAY ATTENTION
• To our adeptness at waving a can of spray paint over a stencil?
NEW UNION
• Huey Newton (R.I.P.) is certainly not impressed by your use of the Black
Power Fist. The Supreme Commander will strike your asses down from beyond
the grave, if Assata Shakur has anything to say about it. Has anyone on this slate
even read Soul On Ice? I give up. If you need me, I’ll be in my log cabin.
• Also, the fist is already used on campus by CUPFA, and has been for a good
amount of time. They called it first, guys. Play fair. The devil horns, for example,
are fair game. Way to engage the proletariat, comrade.
• It seems that every Council meeting will be a defacto family reunion, as
would-be president Robert Sonin and daughter Donia are running side-by-side.
Potential hazards of this sort of relationship include point 1.1 of the next executive meeting agenda being “Can I have a car dad?”
Beisan Zubi.
Zubi calls 2009
campaign a ‘very
important election’
• CLARE RASPOPOW
Video cameras were rolling as
political hopefuls nearly trampled
each other last night for a piece of
prime bulletin board real estate.
The cameras were at poster night
as part of a documentary being
filmed about this year’s elections.
First-time video director Beisan
Zubi, a former Chief Electoral
Officer of the Concordia Student
Union, is known to many on campus for her involvement in—and
vocal criticism of—Concordia politics. This project represents the
newest incarnation of her political
activism.
“I didn’t know what else to do,”
said Zubi. “[The documentary] lets
me get involved in a new way.”
Zubi is currently taking POLI
368, a class that explores how the
media affects politics. She’s making this film to document what she
believes will be “a very important
election” for Concordia.
“Unity cut its leg off and [tried
to start] walking,” said Zubi, referring to the fragmentation within
the current Unity executive. Over
the past year, two opposing slates
spawned from Unity’s political
breakdown: Change and Vision.
Until this year, there had been a
steady reincarnation of the executive slate each election: Evolution
not Revolution (2003), New
Evolution (2004), Evolution
(2005), Experience (2006), Unity
(2007) and then Unity (2008).
Zubi has promised that she and
her documentary crew will be filming for the entire campaign period
to observe the candidates in
action. The only problems, she
said, are knowing where the action
is and navigating the security on
campus.
“We don’t know where we
have to be [or] where we’re going
to be filming. So when the security guards ask to know where
exactly you’re going to be, there’s
a problem.”
12 FEATURES
THE LINK • MARCH 10, 2009 • THELINKNEWSPAPER.CA/FEATURES
A price
too high
• RAFFY BOUDJIKANIAN
ROZMITÁL POD TREMSINEM—
About 88 kilometres southwest of Prague,
the Czech capital, a military area lies in an
evergreen forest, shielded from public view.
Barriers block off trails leading toward it,
signposts stuck to trees warning against trespassing. The words “U.S.A. NO” have been
spray-painted in Czech over the signs.
Treaties signed by the U.S. and Czech governments (but yet to be ratified through the
Czech Chamber of Deputies) would have the
site host a military radar base. In conjunction with missile interceptors in Poland, the
base would be part of the U.S. missile
defence system. While ostensibly aimed at
protecting Europe from Iranian or North
Korean missiles, the Russian government in
Moscow perceives the project as aggression
aimed at Russia.
For many Czechs, the memory of Nazis
marching through their streets in World War
II and the Soviets doing the same in 1968,
has had a lasting impact. The thought of
more foreign troops still raises alarm today.
Activist Jan Tamás—who is also chair of the
federal Humanist Party, which has no elected representatives—has been at the forefront
of anti-missile radar protests with a group
called the Non-Violence Movement since
2006. He recalls high school years during the
height of nuclear hysteria under the Czech
Communist regime in the late 1980s.
“The bell started ringing in a certain fashion, and we all knew it was a [nuclear safety]
drill,” Tamás said with a measured voice that
did not betray the emotion of recollecting
those intense moments. “There were masks,
and we had to put them on.”
He and his classmates were then rushed
to an old building near the school serving as
a makeshift nuclear shelter and had to stay
there, perfectly still.
These are the kinds of memories Tamás
draws on in his struggle against the radar
project, going so far as staging a 21-day
hunger strike with a colleague in May and
June 2008.
“I want to have a clear conscience when
my children grow up and perhaps ask me one
day ‘daddy, what did you do when this plan
was going on? Did you try to stop it?’”
explained Tamás, who is married but does
not have any children.
In 2002, the Bush
administration mandated the
U.S. Missile Defense Agency
to kick-start a defence shield
against ballistic missiles.
North Korea and Iran were
named as two key threats
to the security of the U.S.
and its allies.
This past December, he helped coordinate
30 local mayors in the region surrounding
the military site, who signed and sent a letter
to the U.S.’s then-President-Elect Barack
Obama asking him to “re-assess the attitude
of the U.S. government [and] put a stop to
this very dangerous project,” citing fears it
could plunge Europe into the centre of a new
“potential international conflict” where “the
Czech Republic would be, due to the radar,
the target of a first attack.”
Speculation runs high on what Obama’s
administration will decide. “Our concerns
about missile defence are primarily technical,” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
said at a press conference in Washington
D.C. on Feb. 10 after meeting with Czech
Foreign
Affairs
Minister
Karl
Schwarzenberg. “We expect any system we
deploy to be able to operate effectively to
achieve the goals that were set.” She also
added the plans for the system could be
revised if Iran backed away from its nuclear
ambitions, but that there is little evidence to
suggest the Islamic Republic was doing so.
However, the U.S. government may soon
have to clarify its ambiguous position. A few
weeks ago, an anonymous Russian insider
leaked that Moscow might slow down the
planned instalment of new missile bases in
Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave located north
of Poland, if Washington did not immediately push through with its own initiative.
“The plans have been suspended
[because] the new U.S. administration is not
speeding up its plans,” the military official
was quoted as saying to the Russian news
agency Interfax. The Russian government
had originally announced the Kaliningrad
project as a counter to the U.S. missile
defence sites in Poland.
In 2002, the Bush administration mandated the U.S. Missile Defense Agency to
kick-start a defence shield against ballistic
missiles. North Korea and Iran were named
as two key threats to the security of the U.S.
and its allies. The Russian government
protested the presence of the missile defence
base, particularly after 2006 when
Washington came to an agreement with
Poland and the Czech Republic.
Professor Jiri Pehe, a political analyst and
director of a Prague branch of New York
University, said that for the Czech government, the radar represented an important
symbol of friendship to the world’s only
remaining superpower, the U.S., as well as a
potential defensive measure for Central
Europe.
“If you lived in a neighbourhood that was
unsafe, constantly under threat,” he said,
“you would want to have an alarm system.”
However, even Pehe agreed the radar was
a hard sell. “I am not happy with the project
as a bilateral project,” he said. “I really think
it should be a NATO project.”
Pehe did not want to speculate on what
the Obama administration may finally
decide. Should it want to go ahead with the
project, it would have to work hard on con-
vincing the federal Green and Social
Democrat parties of its worth, he said.
Currently against the radar, the two progressive parties would be able to block a
parliamentary ratification process with
their elected representatives due to the
governing Civic Democratic Party’s
minority status, he said.
Meanwhile, a recent national poll by
the state-funded CVVM polling institute
suggests two thirds of the Czech population are opposed to the base.
For many Czechs, the
memory of Nazis marching
through their streets in
World War II and the
Soviets doing the same in
1968, has had a lasting
impact. The thought of
more foreign troops still
raises alarm today.
At the small headquarters of the NonViolence Movement near downtown
Prague, Tamás remained sceptical of
Iranian threats. “It would be suicide for
Iran to attack the U.S.,” he said, thinking
instead this is a move by America to gain
the upper hand on Russia.
However, Steven Pifer, a long-time
U.S. foreign services officer and current
expert on missile defence at the progressive Brookings Institution think tank,
disagreed during a telephone interview
from Washington, D.C. “I don’t think
that it’s about Russia,” he said, arguing
the geographical placement of the U.S.
missile shield would make it ineffective
against attacks from Moscow.
Since Iran and North Korea are
further south than Russia, he added,
missiles from those two countries
could be potentially thwarted by the
THE LINK • MARCH 10, 2009 • THELINKNEWSPAPER.CA/FEATURES
FEATURES 13
Czech protesters fear
being part of the
American missile
defence shield will
make them the target
of Russian bombs
missile shield.
While a vote in the Chamber of
Deputies has been postponed beyond
mid-March, the 30 mayors who signed
the letter recently traveled to Brussels in
order to state their case against the radar
at the EU Parliament, where the Czech
Republic currently holds presidency.
“Surely nothing good will come of the
radar,” said Josef Vondrásek, mayor of
Rozmitál and one of the signatories. “On
the contrary, it might even prevent some
tourism in the region.”
Jan Neoral, his mayoral counterpart
in Trokavec, a village of just 90 inhabitants a stone’s throw from the base, was
equally displeased. “The Czech government tried to push this through without
public consultation,” he said, a claim
vigorously denied by the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs.
Meanwhile, all those involved wait to
see how the Obama team will address
this issue. “He could say, ‘No it doesn’t
work, so I’m cancelling it,’” Tamás said,
but conceded that the ambiguous statements released so far could mean the
opposite as well.
Pifer said it is too soon to figure out
what the president will do. “He’s protecting his options,” he said, adding,
“missile defence isn’t cheap.” He suggested Obama would have so many
urgent matters to deal with that he may
very well decide to delay the radar project.
In the event of such a delay, which
would push the base’s operational date
beyond 2012, Pifer hopes talks can
resume between American and
Russian leaders. “That would defuse
the issue on the U.S.-Russia agenda
and give some time to work the missile
defence issue further, perhaps to see if
a more co-operative approach could be
found,” he said.
GRAPHIC ALEX MANLEY
14 LITERARY ARTS
Dealing with Quebec’s history of slavery
Quebec historian, on the history of Montreal’s black community
• JUSTIN BROMBERG
When historian and author Dorothy
Williams speaks about the history of slavery in
Quebec, her message is clear and consise.
“What my writings try to project is that this
is the present, but we need to understand the
past,” she said, emphasizing the need for comprehensive black history education in both
Canadian and Quebec curriculum.
Today, Williams is quite possibly the
province's foremost researcher of black communities in Montreal. In addition to being a
regular lecturer and community figure, she
has penned two books: a demographic study
entitled Blacks in Montreal: 1628-1986—
which has also been translated to French—and
a narrative, The Road to Now: A History of
Blacks in Montreal.
Naturally, as she explains, the historian
came first—her road to authorship began in
1989, when the Quebec Human Rights
Commission asked her assistance in preparing
a study. The study, which eventually became
her aforementioned first book, was instigated
after the QHRC “realized [the discrimination
of blacks in the housing market] wasn't a
series of isolated incidents.”
“The people at the commission—like everyone else—didn’t have a clue,” she recalled.
“The study was supposed to be an internal
document, and a current document. But I'm a
historian, I’m not just going to write about
what happened in 1984, or 1985. I'm going to
do the whole thing.”
Her lecture, part of the Atwater Library’s
Lunchtime Series, combined readings of her
books with a discussion of the current state of
black history education. Among several topics,
Williams highlighted the Canadian government's domestic workers’ scheme of the 1950s
and 60s, which required and maintained itself
with the immigration of many West Indian
women to Canada (and, at the time,
Montreal).
“Many families in Canada started as a
result of the program,” she explained, noting
the existence of an already well-established
black community in Montreal at the time.
Historically, most families were concentrated
along St-Antoine Street, southwest of downtown; from 1968 to 1977, both the domestic
scheme and the relocation of other residents
established new demographic trends: the predominantly anglophone West Indian community moved into areas like NDG and Cote-desNeiges.
“They did not readily accept the poor housing conditions on eastern St-Antoine,” while a
more recent francophone Haitian community
“moved north and east of the St-Laurent corridor within a generation.”
While Williams’ words emphasized the
long-standing roots, and diversity, of the city's
black communities, they were equally reflective of the ever-present need for recognition.
“There’s an assumption that blacks are the
newest immigrants,” she said. “Generation
after generation, one’s ‘blackness’ is a sign [of
his ‘newness’].”
Dorothy Williams takes center stage at Atwater Library.
As an educator, Williams’ research has
brought her to local schools, colleges, and universities. Most notable, she recounted, is the
post-secondary students’ lack of knowledge of
Canadian black history: “It’s not a part of the
curriculum. Our children are still leaving
school without any knowledge of this, at all.”
Though she’s been asked by Quebec's education ministry to look at their material, and to
contribute in part, she hasn’t been formally
asked to prepare any of her own. Yet the historian also readily acknowledges that culture
and historical myths have played an integral
PHOTO JUSTIN BROMBERG
part in preventing the fruition of black education in the province.
Quebec historians, notably including
Marcel Trudel, quite often faced internal criticism for countering the traditional notions of
black history and the role slavery played in
New France. In fact, reminded Williams, the
first underground railroad between Canada
and the U.S. was actually to free slaves living
north of the border.
“It’s taken Quebec a long time to live
up to its history, and understand its roots
in slavery.”
Eighth Wonder of the World
André The Giant masked his physical pain in the ring
• JOHNNY NORTH
One would have had to have been be
blind to not notice André Roussimoff—
he was a 7”3’, 500-pound man who
would ask a waitress to fill up a trash
can with beer.
Roussimoff travelled the world as a
professional wrestler known as André
The Giant. His career started in 1964,
but it was only when he was recruited by
Vincent McMahon Sr. that North
American audiences truly appreciated
the larger-than-life athlete.
In André The Giant: A Legendary
Life, author Michael Krugman takes
readers on a trip through Roussimoff’s
near three decades in professional
wrestling with descriptive match details
on some of his most famous battles.
With the aid of Roussimoff’s friends
in the wrestling business, the type of
party animal, prankster and gentle giant
Roussimoff was is illuminated. A trend
pops up throughout the book—“If he
liked you he called you ‘boss,’ but if he
didn’t like you he wouldn’t mind imitating you.”
His size protected him in the ring and
allowed him to become one of the most
well known wrestlers of all time, earning
him the moniker “Eighth Wonder of the
World.” However his size was also his
curse—he suffered from acromegaly, a
disease of excessive growth hormones
that produces a tumor.
Regardless of his deteriorating
health, he continued to enjoy life to its
fullest, drinking as much wine as possi-
“Every day I’d get on the
bus and he’d say, ‘You
wanna watch [The
Princess Bride]?’”
—Terry Funk, fellow wrestler
ble and travelling to Japan and North
America for his wrestling bookings.
His size continued to get him noticed
in other forms of entertainment, as he
appeared on the TV show “The Six
Million Dollar Man” and performed in
the film The Princess Bride, something
he was consistently proud of despite
being in constant pain during the making of the film.
“We were in Japan together, and
every day I’d get on the bus and he’d
say, ‘You wanna watch the movie?’”
remembers Terry Funk, a fellow
wrestler. “Next day, ‘You wanna watch
Princess Bride again?’”
Unfortunately, A Legendary Life is
focused heavily on his wrestling
career. His humble beginnings are
kept short and vague at the
beginning of the book. His
work on The Princess
Bride is only mentioned
sparingly in a few paragraphs with no details on
what went down on the
set. Keeping the references mainly to his
friends in wrestling
paints a one-sided picture that gives you the
idea that all he had for
family and friends were
wrestlers and their families.
You get all the details of
Roussimoff’s career inside of the
ring, but outside of the ring
you’re left wanting more.
André The
Giant: A
Legendary Life
Michael Krugman
World Wrestling
Entertainment
January 2009
352 pp
$16.00
GRAPHIC GINGER COONS
volume 29, issue 25 • Tuesday, March 10, 2009 • thelinknewspaper.ca
concordia’s independent newspaper
this special issue is late since 1980
k • page 4
Lin
e
Th
th
wi
s
at
ch
ut
na
tro
as
e
al
m
fe
st
Canada’s fir
• page 8
Concordia students pay the rent using chat rooms
Edgy women take over March with festival • page 13
WOMEN 03
THE LINK • MARCH 10, 2009 • THELINKNEWSPAPER.CA/WOMEN
30th
Women’s special issue
Welcome to The Link’s
In years past, The Link’s annual
Women’s Issue was edited entirely by
women and all male staff were temporarily relieved from the office.
But 30 Women’s Issues later, it is being
coordinated and edited by a man. Does
this speak of progress, that men are now
valued partners in the struggle for
women’s equality and freedom of expression? Does it reflect waning support for
feminism by the very women who have
been the greatest benefactors of their hard
work? Was I simply the right man—or person—for the job?
Any or all of those explanations seem
insufficient. For better or for worse, a man
is editing The Link’s 30th Women’s Issue.
But this is not about me.
An editor’s job isn’t to impose his views
on a paper but to facilitate the voices of
his or her writers.
This year’s special issue contains a
plethora of women’s voices, as told by
women—and sometimes men—about
women.
Some of the stories contained in this
issue deal with women who have made a
difference, either in expanding our knowledge of the universe, or ensuring the education of women who might not otherwise
be able to learn of their achievements.
Analyses of the media’s continuing
objectification of women is coupled with
stories about women who are establishing
their own identities—thigh-high boots
included.
The writers of this issue are owed a
debt of gratitude for exercising their freedom of speech and for lending their voices
to women in disadvantaged positions
everywhere.
—Christopher Olson,
Women’s Issue Coordinator
Women’s Issues
March 6, 1981
Check out thelinknewspaper.ca for a pdf
version of the original.
THIS WEEK IN HERSTORY
• COMPILED BY SEBASTIEN CADIEUX
1980- Constitutional equality
Question: What will the proposed
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
mean for Canadian women?
Answer: “…an end to all forms of discrimination against women, that is if the
Constitution Committee accepts our proposals,” said Hellie Wilson, vice-president
of the Canadian Advisory Council on the
status of women.
In light of the failure of the current
Canadian Bill of Rights to provide equality
to women, the council has come up with
several changes to the new Charter of
Rights and Freedoms proposed by the government's constitution committee.
The purpose is to protect women and
other minorities from discriminitory laws
already on the books. The current bill of
rights provides for “equality in the administration of the law” as interpreted by the
courts.
A prime example of the inadequacy of
this interpretation is the fate of Native
women who marry non-natives and subsequently lose all of their rights as natives for
themselves as well as their children. This
penalty does not apply to native men who
marry non-native women.
Clearly a law that discriminates on the
basis of sex, this has been tolerated by the
courts because minorities have not been
given equal protection and benefit of the
law.
1985- Feminist-Man
Is it possible to be both a man and a
feminist? What's the difference between a
feminist and a pro-feminist man? If one
defines feminists as people who affirm the
MARCH 3, 1980 TO MARCH 7, 2006
right of girls and women to lead lives of our
own choosing, then yes, in theory at least,
men can be feminists.
However, many feminist women and
men supportive of feminism are unwilling
to define any men as feminists. We prefer
terms such as pro-feminist or anti-patriarchal.
Why the distinction between feminists
and pro-feminist men? Women and men
have a different relationship to feminism.
Someone who hasn't experienced racial
discrimination doesn't have the same relationship to racism as someone who has.
Similarly, men haven't gone through the
sexism that women face. Men can play an
important part in encouraging the creation
of a feminist society: most of all, they can
work to alter the anti-women attitudes to
define our needs and goals. But it is up to
women to define our needs and goals. A
pro-feminist man's one supportive of our
efforts.
1994- Montreal profs try to
define women’s history
“Women's history has been neglected by
mainstream historians for so long. It's time to
address the balance,” said McGill professor
Andrée Lévesque who believes the subject
must be taught from a feminist perspective.
Simply highlighting the women in history
doesn't do justice to the contributions of
women throughout history.
“We have to look at how many women's
actions may have contributed to making
these events happen and not always assume
that women are passive and affected by history, because we shape it too,” said Diana
Pederson of Concordia's history department.
“There was a lot of optimism in the late
‘70s that we just had to do the research and
produce all these new studies and the change
in the traditional narrative would just
change, but it didn't,” said Pederson. The
only solution is truly to re-write the history
books from the ground up to include the
impact of women in history.
2000- Montreal shelter helps
immigrant women gain independece
Imagine the following scenario: you are
a young woman from Eastern Europe waiting for the Canadian government to accept
your application for permanent resident
status. In the meantime, you hope that you
or your husband will find a job to support
yourselves and your daughter. But this is
difficult because of your limited French
and English and the fact that you did not
finish your post-secondary education. You
stay in a one-bedroom apartment, sleeping
in the living room so your daughter can
have her own room.
Women from different cultures face
some trouble integrating into Canadian
society, Milena* for example had to deal
with the language barrier. From giving
directions to something as difficult as
explaining a domestic abuse case to a francophone police officer.
Milena ultimately got a job paying $7.25
per hour. Then she had to deal with her
husband, who was still unemployed and
jealous of Milena for having work, and
financial independence. Free services such
as the CLSC, religious institutions, or
L'Hirondelle—an organization dedicated to
helping immigrants get integrated into
Canadian society, specifically women.
2006- Women’s health a joke
in Quebec
Pharmacists in this province can refuse
women access to the morning-after pill
based on their own moral objections. This
denial of access to a drug that requires
timely usage suggests that there may be
more to the problem than meets the eye.
Why would Quebec health professionals
want to restrict women's reproductive
rights—particularly since this is the
province where abortion rights were first
legalized?
“Quebec's government is concerned
with increasing the population, so the very
fact that birth control is available is
astounding to me. Nobody I've spoken to
thinks I'm capable of deciding, at the age of
27, to get a tubal ligation, which makes me
feel as though I'm seen as some sort of baby
factory,” says Virginia*, a Concordia
employee. Her own treatment has involved
repeated misdiagnoses of yeast infections,
the advice that her cramps would “go away
after [she] has a baby” and the apparent
unwillingness of gynecologists to take her
complaints seriously.
Women should not have to submit to
interrogation in the doctor's office as
though they are criminals, nor should they
be treated as though they are children who
are unable to make up their own minds
regarding reproductive health. Their complaints must be taken seriously and without judgment, and any health practitioner
who violates this doctor-patient trust
should be found guilty of malpractice and
disbarred. After all, if you haven't got your
health, you haven't got anything.
* Names have been changed
04 WOMEN
Suspended above a turquoise
bubble
Dr. Roberta Bondar speaks with The Link
about being Canada's first woman astronaut
into space, the privilege is coming back
knowing that we're on a planet and exploring
it down here, I mean that's the privilege.”
So how much of her perspective has
changed since going into space?
“I look at the world probably through a
different—and I don’t mean to use this
expression lightly because I’m a photographer—but through a different lens. I think
stepping off of it made me realize how much
of a planet it is. The majority of space is black
with stars that don’t twinkle. It’s almost restful to look at the Earth, and it’s exciting
because it’s almost like looking at a crystal
ball that's huge and has a vibrating,
turquoise cover to it. People sometimes sell
our planet short, I mean we have life all over
this planet, and we’re trying to find life elsewhere and to study it. But we have tons of it
here.”
Chances are you heard of her exploits in
primary school, or memorized her name
alongside other space pioneers, like Buzz
Aldrin, in science class.
Last week, Concordia honoured Dr.
Roberta Bondar with the Loyola Medal, recognizing her achievements as an astronaut,
neurologist, advocate for the environment
and her historic 1992 trip into space.
Bondar spoke with The Link about the
privilege of experiencing what only 500 others have in human history.
Role model for women everywhere
Bondar holds the honour of being the first
Canadian woman, as well as difficult the
world’s first neurologist in space. But deciding which comes first is difficult at times
says Bondar.
“I have a background in so many things,
one minute it’s one thing; if someone's choking to death I go into my doctor mode. I
know others look at me as being a role
model, but I look at myself as being a cheerleader. I’d like to make people excited about
learning.
“When I was growing up in Sault SteMarie, I really identified with the original
seven astronauts, and to tell you the truth, I
didn’t even realize that none of them was a
woman. I didn’t even think about that. It didn’t even occur to me. It just occurred to me
that they were people.”
To date, 10 per cent of the astronauts
who’ve flown in the American space program
have been female.
“In Canada we have only one woman in
the program now and we only had two when
I was there,” says Bondar.
“When you look at the countries who have
flown women in space, you could probably
count them on [two hands]. There are not a
lot of them around, but there are a lot of support staff who are women and there are a lot
of women scientists doing incredible, incredible things.”
Bondar hopes that men take notice of the
accomplishments of female astronauts and
engineers.
“I hope to inspire men to know that
women can do this stuff, can be good team
members and have a sense of responsibility
and discipline that people can count on.
We’re there as equal partners and it’s sort of
hard removing biology from some of these
equations.
“I think it’s always important to show that
if one woman can do it, that means other
women can do it.”
Canada's space legacy
“I was reading the list of very impressive
people who have gone on before me,” says
Bondar, on receiving the Loyola Medal. “I
think it’s not so much honouring me, it's
Future of womanned space flight
honouring tradition and honouring
what legends we
have in this country. I
often don’t personalize
these things. The very fact that
there’s a community in Canada that
will honour people that have accomplished things for their country is wonderful.”
People need a reason to be proud of their
country, says Bondar.
“They need a touchstone. They need to
know that their country is as good as any
other country. We’re a small player when it
comes to the human space program, that’s
why there hasn’t been so many of us who’ve
flown when you look at all the other countries of the world, except for the United
States and Russia, of course. I mean, let’s
face it, the Russians did such great work.
Most of the craters on the far side of the
moon are all named after Russians.”
Bondar knew she had been sent into
space for a reason—not by God, but on behalf
of taxpayers.
“There was a position open and I had the
credentials,” says Bondar. “I think that I
would look at it as a sacred trust, as a responsibility. We’re not going up just for the view,
or just to snap pictures of the Earth. We’re
doing work on behalf of scientists who are
left back on the ground whose experiments
are in the hands of people in space who we
hope have the right stuff. I hate to use that
expression, but that's really what it is.
During her eight-day mission, Bondar
had little time to stop and wax poetic.
“To tell you the truth, because our flight
was so complex—we had two 12-hour
shifts—that it probably wasn’t until day three
that I even had time to look out the window,
and that was the window in the bathroom in
one of the portholes. We had one tiny window in the space lab. The rest of the windows
are up in the flight deck and the galley. The
bathroom, the sleep
cabinets are all downstairs where there are no
windows. There just weren’t enough
windows to look out of, so for me to grasp
that kind of epiphany, I had to force myself
to take the time to get to the window, as tired
as I might have been, with the commander
yelling at me to get to bed, just to try to get a
look at the Earth.”
Now that she’s come back down to Earth,
Bondar sees her mission as one of an educator.
“I would look at is as not just going up
there to do a job, but coming back and trying
to explain to other people who will never go
up there what it’s like and what things we
can learn, to try to pass it on.”
A turquoise crystal ball
In recent years, Bondar has been known
for her outspokenness on the environment, a
lifelong fascination that was only made
stronger by her trip into space.
“When I was nine years old, I enjoyed
looking up at the night sky at Lake Superior.
It’s impossible for me to think that someone
could look up in the night sky and not be
amazed and totally awestruck by it,” says
Bondar.
“When I was in the Girl Guides I was collecting leaves all the time. I was just
absolutely imbued with the natural world
and so were my parents. In space you don't
see any of that stuff. It’s sheets of land with
pastel colours, and mountains look like little
blobs of whip cream. To understand the fabric of what makes up the beautiful rug we see
up in space, we have to be on the surface of
the planet. Talk about the privilege of going
Bondar would rather be optimistic about
the economy right now than the future of
space flight.
“I think there’s important consideration of
whether it's really ethical at the moment to
use funds to do those kinds of things when
there are people dying here on Earth from
diseases that we could solve if we put a bit
more money in.”
Howeer, as a doctor, Bondar believes the
benefits to medical knowledge through the
space program are priceless.
“We’re unravelling great secrets of the
body just by going into space. I’m interested
in space medicine and how the human body
changes, so we can look at theories we have
on the Earth and we can test them in space
and find out that, oh gosh, it’s more than
gravity that explains how the blood is being
distributed in the body, or why immature red
cells coming out of the bone marrow or
immature white blood cells are coming out of
the bone marrow in space, but not here.
“There are very poorly understood mechanisms. It’s not easy going into space. All the
fluids float and you end up with almost borderline congestive heart failure every time
you pop up there.
“There are things that we can use in space
flight to help us here on Earth, so we don’t
want to stop the space program. It’s like going
to the moon. By cancelling the Apollo program, the Americans really lost all that corporate knowledge, they lost that momentum. To
build that stuff back up again is very difficult
and even more costly. I do think that we will
persist in having human beings in space,
whether or not we are ever able to protect
people against radiation and bone loss in
space flight.”
As far as space goes, says Bondar, “it’s
always going to be out there, and I think
Canada is always going to be able to participate. Whether or not our human endeavours are going to be as notable in the long
run, I don’t know.”
WOMEN 05
Teen magazines: yay or nay?
Looking pretty is the least of women’s problems
GRAPHIC MADELINE COLEMAN
• MADELINE COLEMAN
Seventeen magazine once published a letter from a girl asking what to do about a fat
crotch.
“Dear Seventeen,” she had written fervently from her bedroom in Michigan, Arkansas or
any other similar U.S. state. “My crotch is fat.”
I was 13 when I read this and my own body
image was predictably bad, but even to me
crotch fat seemed like a non-issue. Seventeen
disagreed; crotch fat was addressed as a problem, and possible solutions were offered.
“Yes!” trumpeted the advice columnists
from the glossy pages of the magazine. “You,
too, can join the ranks of the slim-crotched!”
While the owner of the fat crotch must have
been soothed, we the good reader of
Seventeen magazine had just been alerted to
something we never knew we might need to
fix.
Herein lies the contradiction of the North
American teen magazine.
Seventeen, YM, CosmoGirl, Teen Vogue:
mainstream teen magazines are not created
equal, but the basic formula remains the
same. They are each veritable bastions of
advice, with a smattering of cute boys and a
thick gratin of shopping to seal the deal. The
attitude is always upbeat; the tampon advertisements, omnipresent.
The commonalities sounds inane, but teen
magazines are, arguably, an invaluable
resource for the young and hormonal. If I'm
knowledgeable about the symptoms of toxic
shock syndrome, it is certainly a magazine to
which I am indebted. I can only imagine how
many CosmoGirl readers in abstinencepreaching communities managed, with the
help of a magazine, to avoid unwanted pregnancy. Seventeen publishes reams of information about handling college applications.
Knowledge is, as they say, power.
But something is rotten in the state of the
teen magazine.
The publications I grew up reading are rife
with hypocrisy and major purveyors of insecurity, adding to the worries of teenage girls as
they try to assuage them. Teen Vogue publishes 10 photographs of impossibly lanky models
to every article about anorexia. One page
would reassure me I didn't need a boyfriend to
be happy, but the next would offer a master
class in flirting. Back and forth, back and
forth: I would repeatedly find myself dragged
between self-acceptance and anxiety with
every turn of the page.
Contemporary teen magazines find themselves at an impasse between a kind of third
wave feminism and their own long tradition of
monetized adolescence. The contradictions
arise when they try to have it both ways.
Seventeen and its ilk struggle to find balance
while also addressing one of the most delicate
and impressionable audiences a publication
could have: teenage girls.
On one hand, a girl with a visible moustache in suburban Toronto is likely to be
grateful for an article explaining how to
remove it, and the magazine is acknowledging
the reality that feminine facial hair is considered undesirable and helpfully providing a
way out. The newly moustache-free citizen of
the GTA may now find herself more confident.
However, said magazine will also happily contribute to the culture that made her feel bad in
the first place with language designed to hammer beauty ideals deep into the psyche. “Get
pretty!” trumpets the cover of Seventeen. The
qualifier “because you aren't right now”
remains unpublished and implicit.
My own interaction with teen magazines,
especially as a preteen unhip to the ways of
the world, always came with a heavy dose of
newfound insecurities culled from the pages. I
have never had particularly prominent facial
hair, but reading an article about how to eliminate it was enough to convince me I did. YM
dedicated as much space to frizzy hair as it did
to eating disorders and consequently came off
as just a serious a problem. While I laughed at
the letter about the fat-crotched girl, the fact
that Seventeen had considered the problem
common enough to publish legitimized it as a
threat to one's beauty.
It's time for teen magazines to take the next
step and plunge wholeheartedly into an
endorsement of self-acceptance. Is it unrealistic to hope ad-driven corporate entities will
ever truly dedicate themselves to the self-fulfilment of their readers? Maybe so. But as teen
publications continue to move forward, I hope
they will acknowledge that prettiness is the
least of our problems.
MILFS, GILFS and cougars
The paradox of older women in advertising
• LAURA BEESTON
Increasingly, you can find them on television, on billboards and in all the American Pie movies. MILFs,
GILFs and Cougars: advertisings new angle of older
women.
This contemporary trend has seen older women
occupy an increasing amount of visual and sexual space
in the media, which has raised a debate: is this a breakthrough or a backlash? Is this empowerment or another
age of sexism in our generation?
In a quest for answers, I picked the brain of Pulitzer
Prize winner Linda Kay, Professor of Gender and
Journalism of Concordia’s Journalism Department, to
gain some insight.
“Personally I think that it is great,” said Kay. “[What
is] quite interesting is how my students look at it and
how I look at it. I see it as recognition of older women
and as a sign we are getting away from this stereotype
that everyone has to be young, or that youth has to be
venerated. My students, however, saw it as a very clever
marketing ploy.”
Speaking predominantly about the Dove “Campaign
for Real Beauty” that launched in 2004, Kay discussed
the representation of “Pro-Age” as an alternative to the
traditional beauty ads that came before.
“I think that [there are] very clever people behind the
campaigns, but I also think that it does open up space for
older women, which is positive. What do we make of
that? This is the continual paradox for women, even if
we are in 2009.”
Although Kay mused that perhaps this was a sign of
empowerment for women in visual and commercial
media, she wasn’t sure what the solution was for the sexist backlash.
It is difficult to flat-out condemn an ad campaign
which deviates from the skinny-youth norm, since representations of ‘real’ women, ‘real’ bodies and an
expanded sense of what qualifies as ‘sexy’ in media
seems long overdue; however isn't sexualizing older
women just applying tired beauty preoccupations on
another demographic? Are milfs, gilfs and cougars the
sign that our society is finally catching-up, embracing,
and celebrating women’s identity and sexuality at whatever age it may be? Or is it a calculated attempt to strategically market the baby boomer consumer?
Visit Laura Beeston’s blog at, manstreammedia.blogspot.com
GRAPHIC KALI MALINKA
WOMEN 07
What wave are we, anyway?
Fourth wave feminism: is it already dead?
has come to be known as “commodity
feminism.”
In a nutshell, commodity feminism
describes the ways in which media incorporates the cultural power and energy of
feminism while neutralizing the force of
its social and political critique.
A shift from objectification of women
to commodity feminism is evidenced by
such classics as the Virginia Slims “You've
Come a Long Way, Baby” ad campaign.
Though far too dated, white and middle class for the non-essentialist model
of modern feminism, these ads bare an
eerie and annoying likeness to modern ads for birth control, firming
lotion, or any other commercials
that equate freedom with product.
By associating buying with
“empowerment,” capitalism
has co-opted feminist
rhetoric and symbolism
and this could very
well be the reason
why Sex and the
City is so damned
popular.
When asked
about
this
materialist
culture
in
the form of
backlash,
• ANALYSIS BY LAURA BEESTON
Alas, a neat little description of what it
means to be a “feminist” in these modern, North American times does not formally exist. Feminism is an elusive term
that means many things to many people.
Like the suffragists, mystiques and Riot
Grrrls that came before us, feminists
have an identity problem that is
difficult to pin: Who are we?
Where are we? And what
wave are we, anyways?
An extremely flexible feminist space can be both liberating and problematic for the
modern feminist trying to
navigate her or his way
though history, theory and
identity. It also doesn’t help
much that Ally McBeal,
amongst
others,
have
declared feminism dead for
over a decade.
Feminism died?
Many theorists and
activists agree that this
death sentence is premature and Western-centric
at best, considering the
practice and signification
of variants of feminism
continue to radiate across
cultures, symbols and languages.
You don’t have to look very far to
find feminist forms in music, art and
action, in written and spoken word and in
other forms and guises. These things are a
direct result of the feminists who came
before us, indicating that feminism is
alive and well, and that it has a pulse.
For contemporary feminist organizations, such as Concordia's very own 2110
Centre for Gender Advocacy, the postfeminist movement is seen as “working in
support and solidarity with broader social
movements built on the principles of feminism, anti-racism, anti-colonialism and
gender self-determination,” according to
outreach co-ordinator Bianca Mugyenyi.
“Feminism, like all movements for
social justice is always changing its priorities [as it] ebbs and flows, becoming
more self-reflexive with an aim to leave no
one behind.”
The closest historical touchstone for
the feminist movement today is the
ambiguous and highly debatable “third
wave” of the late ‘80s and ‘90s. This time
was unique in establishing that feminism
does not exist in a vacuum. It was also at
this point in history that feminism pluralized itself to account for a relational and
generational crisis occurring between a
neo-plethora of waves and types of
women’s lib.
As differing strains of feminism broke
down into a variety of subcultures and
factions, anti-universal ideas of the movement were advocated: the Riot Grrrls, Girl
Power girls, anti-porn movements, prosex movements, the pro-choicers, the
What wave are you?
GRAPHIC VIVIEN LEUNG
post-modern, the post-colonial, Third
World, standpoint, liberal, radical, materialist, lesbian, queer, Marxist, socialist,
post-structural, et al; the list just goes
on… ending, dramatically, with “postfeminism.” By 1998-before many of us
were old enough to appreciate that the
battle of the sexes had been won–it
appeared that the third wave of western
feminism rose and fell.
trayed either as men trapped in women’s
bodies, or as frigid harpies. In the realm
of media, the “pink ghetto” of women’s
participation was a place of paradox:
opening up a space for women's visual and
political presence, while simultaneously
prescribing many social mores of the
newly industrialized culture. In response
to women's increasing presence in the
urban and public landscapes (also known
“Feminism, like all movements for social justice is always
changing its priorities [as it] ebbs and flows, becoming more
self-reflexive with an aim to leave no one behind.”
Mugyenyi
agreed: “rampant consumerism
pushes us to be more concerned about 'stuff' than
social justice, political
rights, or equality.”
Media commoditization of feminism
(and blackness, and queerness, if you
want to go there) drives a cultural illusion
that the political battles have been won.
This type of attitude diverts and distracts
the movement away from its power of
resistance, but perhaps it is in this shift
that a fourth wave can figure out the feminist post-mortem and re-emerge.
Is it wave time?
Epic third wave feminist Bell Hooks has
a perfect term for what ails the potential of
—Bianca Mugyenyi, a fourth wave today; she calls it “lifestyle
2110 Centre for Gendre Advocacy outreach coordinator feminism.” In her explanation, Hooks
accounts for the growing disinterest in
Luckily, feminism forms didn’t waste as a massive male inferiority complex), feminism as a political action among
time mourning the untimely death of the advertisements began to endorse the women as directly linked to the romantic
third wave and this is likely because it dichotomized “nature” of 20th century notions of personal freedom found in popshares a commonality with the waves that womanhood as being “virgins” or ular culture.
preceded it: the unmistakable stench of a “vamps.”
From this, perhaps the only way varibacklash.
For the second wave, media was used ants of feminism of the future will get back
as a publicity tool. Alongside the other into a wave formation is when a radical
Buying the backlash
social movements of the era, the women's consumer-power-as-action is realized.
It is necessary to understand a couple movement staged elaborate happenings How we buy, where we buy and what we
buy might be the difference between femiinteresting things about feminist back- and protests to raise consciousness.
In response to this, two things hap- nism that is “worn” and feminism that is
lash. First of all, the backlash is about as
old as feminism itself. Secondly, the rep- pened in terms of mass feminist presenta- “done.” Perhaps a fourth wave will come
resentation of feminism in the media is tion: the birth of the hairy, bra-burning, around in the awareness that, just as femman-hating, f-word stereotype reared her inism is not passive, neither is being a
detrimental to the movement itself.
For starters, suffragist sisters were por- radical head, and the phenomena which female consumer.
06 WOMEN
Adverti
sement
lol
08 WOMEN
A chat hostess
is smarter than you think
Concordia students pay bills through Internet thrills
• ESINAM BECKLEY
What is it like being a woman
who attends Concordia by day, but
is a “chat hostess” by night?
A chat hostess is someone who
has a camera set up to a web site
that hosts however many girls,
guys or both online at one time.
Ladies and gentlemen can choose
the room of the girl or guy they
desire with one click of a mouse,
where they will be presented with
live video feed of their chosen host
or hostess.
There are two forms of chatting: free chat, and paid chat. Paid
chat is how the host or hostess
makes his or her money. Once in
paid chat, the user will usually ask
to see a little more of their hostess.
A hostess has to be hot, sexy,
charismatic, witty, or whatever
they think will get customers to
pay up. Nudity is almost always
involved, but there is the occasional user that will pay for some oneon-one companionship, or who is
just interested in striking up a conversation.
I sat down with Catherine*, a
Concordia Fine Arts student and
chat hostess. I was curious to know
what she thinks about her own privacy.
Catherine moved to Montreal
because she needed a job, but she
didn't speak French. Catherine
had lost her virginity that year and
said she wanted to make up for
lost time while learning a thing or
two about sexuality.
Learn a thing or two she did.
Catherine had her first clitoral
orgasm on camera using a vibrator, which she was introduced to
for the first time at her new job.
Catherine felt the concept of
taking off her clothes was not really a big issue. In fact, she was more
worried about her figure and actually drawing in an audience.
“[At first, I thought], ‘Dear God,
how is anyone ever going to pay to
see this, [I’m] all skin and bones.
‘But then I quickly realized that it’s
much more about who you are
than what you look like.”
Catherine claims she's not an
exhibitionist, but considers herself
much more of a companion and an
entertainer to her clients. She's
only an “actress” when she's roleplaying with one of her clients.
I asked Catherine if there was
any particular freedom or inde-
A chat hostess has to be able to do whatever they think will get their customer to pay up, including taking it all off.
pendence the job offers.
“Above all else,” said Catherine,
“the fact that I can do this from
anywhere in the world—so long as
I’m connected to the internet.”
“I get to sit in this
room by myself,
practicing the safest
sex possible, and
people want to pay to
see me?”
—Catherine,
Concordia chat hostess
There’s no way she could be
making this kind of money working
minimum
wage,
says
Catherine.
“The job also requires a lot of
your attention, so the less you put
in the less you get out of it, naturally.”
So are people starting to change
their views on women and sex?
Catherine isn’t so sure, but in
the “cam world” it’s not enough to
just sit there looking pretty.
That's not what Catherine’s
clients come back for.
In a world where tits and ass
are freely available nearly everywhere, and where ways of communicating are rapidly increasing,
you need brains to keep with the
demands of stimulation, be they
sexual, emotional or intellectual,
says Catherine.
Devon* is a student at
Concordia studying Sociology, and
got into the “chat hostess” profession after seeing an ad in a local
paper. She had come across the ad
several times before, but the idea
of nudity always scared her off.
One day Devon decided to go
for it. She went to the office and
got the job.
“The first day was extremely
liberating,” says Devon, who says
she always had a love for the art of
masturbation. She couldn’t believe
that people would pay to see her
pleasuring herself.
“It’s something I do every
night, sometimes three or four
times a night. I get to sit in this
room by myself, practicing the
safest sex possible, and people
want to pay to see me?”
Devon had issues with her body
image growing up as a teen and
says the compliments of the customers have done a lot to boost her
self-esteem.
“Many people think that the
main customers to these sites are
sleazy guys who can't get laid,”
says Devon. “People don’t think of
problems such as disability, or not
having time to go out and meet
someone because you work 24
hours a day.”
She also said that she loves the
array of different sexual fetishes
she encounters, from cross dressing males, to getting to be a dominatrix for a day.
Unlike Catherine, however, she
says she has a hard time telling
people what she does to make her
money.
“I shouldn’t be ashamed,
because I’m a very smart woman. I
go to school, I'm an intellectual,
some may even say a nerd, but I do
come across people I just know I
can't tell. Ironically, I wouldn’t
want to be friends with someone
who judges me based on this issue,
but I’m not about to go running in
the streets screaming ‘I take my
clothes off and masturbate for a
living.’”
Devon says that there’s a strong
sense of camaraderie between chat
hostesses. Many of them are young
and in school, and there’s little
competition, since each girl is
online in her own room.
People have a preconceived
notion that if you work with your
body, you lack intelligence, says
Devon, who admits to her own
preconceived notions, however
positively.
“To me a woman who has the
guts to take her clothes off is someone I want to learn about and
could potentially be someone I
admire. I like people that go
against the grain, you know? I'd
rather be in a room full of people
willing to do something different
despite people’s views rather than
a room full of androids—unless
that's your fetish!”
* Names have been changed
WOMEN 09
Women on the edge
Art festival takes over Montreal in March
• ANDREA PARE
If, as the saying goes, March comes in like
a lion, the fierce lioness takes over by midmonth with the opening of Edgy Women, a
contemporary feminist festival which showcases performances by female multidisciplinary artists from here and all over the world.
The festival is a production of Studio 303,
which is itself a gathering place for independent performance artists in Montreal. Festival
co-ordinator Miriam Ginestier, who is also the
artistic director of Studio 303, has been organizing and choosing talent for the festival for
the last sixteen years.
“The birth of the festival was pretty accidental really, but is has evolved into a fun
space for exchange and experimentation,” she
says.
“I kind of take feminism for granted, but
it's still a dirty word in many circles for many
reasons. While much of the work doesn't
directly or consciously address feminist
issues, I consider edgy artists to be feminist
role models.”
Among the artists featured this year is drag
king performer Mildred Gerestant, a
Brooklyn-based drag king performer who has
brought her drag show Dred: Daring Reality
Every Day to stages across the world. She has
also performed in and out of drag in theatre
productions and onscreen, most notably in
Venus Boyz, a documentary about the female
masculinity that was shown at the Sundance
film festival. She says that Miriam had asked
her to perform at the Edgy Women Festival
before, but that this year everything finally
came together.
“I’m excited and glad that they wanted me
to be a part of it. It’s going to be a lot of fun, my
show is funny so be prepared to laugh, be prepared to be surprised and be prepared to have
your boundaries pushed and learn all at the
same time.”
Gerestant describes her show as “a mix of
ValDesjardins in “pure laine,” a multidisciplinary performance.
poetry monologue, storytelling, dancing, and
lip-synching.”
The performance will feature her character
Dred as Shaft, P Diddy, and P Diddy, as a drag
queen, she says.
“Dred is the man born out of my woman
self,” she says. “It’s an extension of me, it’s a
part of who I am. At the end of my shows I like
to strip into being a woman, I like to show people that they just finished watching a woman.”
Although the show is dealing with gender
perception, Gerestant says the show is meant
to be enjoyed by all.
“I do the show, not just for gay people or for
straight people or for women or men, but for
everybody, so we can live in a world where
everybody has the freedom to express their
gender in a way they choose and not be
oppressed by it.”
PHOTO DANIEL F. HABER
Also taking the stage is Montreal native Val
Desjardins, who will be premiering her
dynamic performance piece Peur Laine at the
Edgy Women Festival.
Desjardins came up with the concept of
“Peur Laine” (a play on words of “pure laine,”
an expression that refers to being of pure francophone heritage in Quebec) during the
Bouchard-Taylor Commission, a cultural
accommodation inquiry that took place this
past summer all across Quebec. She says she
felt the commission was homophobic in addition to being racist and decided to create a
show around this idea. She says the show is
her experience growing up as a queer woman
in the context of being French Canadian with
the backdrop of Quebec “pure laine” culture.
“It’s linking Quebec history but then
also talking about my personal experi-
ence,” she says.
With actress and Studio 303 artist Nathalie
Claude by her side as her mentor, Desjardins
has been hard at work on Peur Laine, which
she describes as a combination of “live recorded sound, photography, video and live performance.”
It will even feature rollerskating, as
Desjardins is also a skater in Montreal's roller
derby league. Even though it isn’t acting per
say, she says she will express different parts of
herself. In one part of the performance, she
rollerskates in a big prom-like dress and dons
a blonde wig. She describes this look as sort of
like “a girl in a music box… you can tell it’s ‘off’,
its not pretty. You can tell there is something
going on, it’s not pristine, it’s not Barbie, but
it’s referencing that, that we all wanted to grow
up a certain way.”
She agrees that performance art can be
very therapeutic, although she seems to cringe
at the word, asking, “Can we invent a new
one?”
“It’s work that's very personal, so it
becomes a way to laugh at things you’ve lived,
and just to connect with the audience too, with
your experience, we've all been there, there is
a lot of common threads that everyone can
identify with.”
The Edgy Women Festival takes place March
14-21 at different theatres and venues in
Montreal. Check the Edgy Women website,
edgywomen.ca, for more information.
Mildred “Dred” Gerestant performs at the
opening show at The Eastern Bloc on March 14,
at 9 p.m.
For more information about Dred, email
her at [email protected] or
check her out on Facebook. Val Desjardins
performs on March 20 at 7:30 p.m. at
Theatre Tangente. Check out Val Desjardins’
page at valdesjardins.com.
Pour la suite du monde
Polyechnique does justice to 1989 shooting
• ANNABELLE BLAIS
Polytechnique is not a film that can be
watched without considering its historical
context. The events that took place at Ecole
Polytechnique on Dec, 6, 1989 still live on in
the minds of many Montrealers.
The debates that followed the shooting
could have posed some serious risks for director Denis Villeneuve. For instance, he could
have gotten lost in the endless debates about
who or what was responsible for turning Marc
Lépine into a killer.
Some argued that every man has the
potential to be a murderer, like Lépine, or
that the massacre had something to do with
the fact that he was a son of a Muslim
Algerian—his real name was Gamil Gharbi.
Luckily, Villeneuve avoids those possible
explanations, neither of which he would have
been able to satisfy inquiry.
However, it’s impossible to ignore the fact
that Lépine claimed, in a suicide note, that he
was fighting feminism. But at what point
could such an extreme action be considered a
political statement rather than an act of madness? Should a society feel responsible for the
actions of one man? The film doesn't provide
answers and this is not its goal.
Villeneuve and Jacques Davidts, the
scriptwriters, wisely chose to focus on the
shooting itself. It is an interpretation of what
happened, but one based on interviews done
with the victims themselves.
The movie does tackle one issue that was
lobbied at survivors, namely, why didn’t the
men attending Ecole Polytechnique intervene? The movie illustrates that few could
have known, expected or reacted the way that
society usually dictates in these circumstances.
The movie isn’t guilty of overarching acts
of voyeurism, as some originally feared.
Where Villeneuve masters his art is by using
sound instead of shocking images. The cinematography is successful in illustrating the
suddenness of the event. Steady camera shots
are used to depict the calmness, the everyday
life. They are contrasted by a shaky camera
and extreme close ups to illustrate the confusion and the fear as the massacre begins. But
this is not an action movie, and neither is it
insensitive or sensationalist with its subject
matter.
Villeneuve cautiously breaks the rhythm
so the viewers can breathe, and better understand the human trauma that affects the survivors.
Just little over an hour in length,
Polytechnique is a brief, if not intense, experience. True, it could awake bad memories in
more than a few Montrealers, especially those
who witnessed the events first-hand, or
through relatives who were there.
But as a poster in one of the victim’s
rooms suggests—a reference to a Pierre
Perrault and Michel Brault film—this movie
was perhaps needed pour la suite du monde.
For the people to come.
Movie poster for Polytechnique.
10 WOMEN
If this
twat
could
talk
• KRISTEN THEODORE
You may have heard it
referred to, or have heard it
called a cunt, vag, pussycat,
monkeybox, cooter and twat.
But make no mistake, it's actually your vagina.
The word “vagina” is terminology you might be otherwise
too embarrassed or insecure to
use as promiscuously as any of
your other body parts. And guess
what? You aren't alone.
“I bet you're worried,” muses the
opening line of The Vagina
Monologues. Worried? Sure. Who
knows what else these bold, young
actresses are going to say next? That
unsettling feeling is normal, expected
even. Once it passes, though, you will
be filled with a sense of astonishment,
awe and even something that resembles
assurance.
Coming to Concordia courtesy of The
Association of Alms, The Vagina
Monologues is one of the most raunchy
plays to grace the stage in recent times. The
Concordia version promises to be every bit
as unconventional and no less shocking as
one might come to expect a vagina-centric
production to be.
Featuring a Concordia-only cast and
crew, this is the first time the Monologues
will be performed on campus since 2005.
The play is a series of monologues, originally crafted by Eve Ensler. While all parts
of the play discuss the vagina in various
lights, from the funny—like a dialogue
about a woman feeling empowered by her
pubic hair—to the serious, such as rape
and insecurity, it is nothing short of, well,
graphic. This year’s version will also feature a role about violence against women
in the Congo.
The Association of Alms, a non-profit
organization, is all about charity work and
how best to serve the community. After
having felt inspired by a production of the
Monologues, president of the Association
Eileen Wong saw it as ample opportunity
to spread awareness for International
Women’s Day and decided to put together
a production.
Since the play hadn’t been done in
a while on campus, she felt Concordia
was about due. It was through V-Day,
a global organization, that Wong was
able to follow through with this initiative.
This particular event's proceeds will
benefit the violence against women in
Congo, supported by none other than
V-Day operations.
V-Day offers willing
volunteers the chance to
put together their own
version of the play.
“They have this special
campaign that sends you the
script, the guidelines to putting
together
The
Vagina
Monologues,” says Wong. “It was
just something I wanted to do, it
was sort of a personal thing for me.”
After holding auditions some two
months, five young actresses were chosen to be the leading ladies of the production. The stars all have—you guessed
it—vaginas. They hope audiences will
open up to the idea of a play about genitalia and they themselves aren't afraid to
talk about what kind of reaction the word
inevitably invokes.
Generally, today’s society plays up the
taboo nature of using the word “vagina,”
however that stigma changes after popping your Monologues cherry: “You’ll
walk out desensitized to the word vagina,”
advises Allie Uhrig, one of the actors.
Pretty much everyone can agree.
Throwing the word “vagina” around tends
to be a touchy subject, more so than when
discussing male genetialia. The stars of
the Monologues hope to erase the stigmatic label associated with the word. They
warn that the audience might feel the subject at hand is important to discuss.
Going deep with The Vagina
Monologues at Concordia
at the female demographic, there are persistent concerns among the cast members
that too many men won’t consider coming
because the general assumption is that
The Vagina Monologues is meant to hate
on the opposite sex. Wong invites men to
come, insisting that there is much to be
learned about women through the play's
variety of monologues.
“I would really like to see a lot of men,”
says Wong, adding that the play is not a
means to rage against dudes, but rather a
learning tool: “It’s fun, it’s a comedy in
some ways and it’s also to create awareness. Like, if people want to laugh, they
can come. If people want to learn, they can
come.” She pauses. “So it's not exactly
feminism. It's more about femininity.”
For those reluctant males, the director
of the production, Will MacGregor, also
dismisses the belief that the play is
strictly geared for women.
“Speaking from the penis perspective, I’ve seen the play before,
and it’s such an interesting play.
It’s just such a unique piece. I
remember seeing it for the
first time and saying, man,
how come there aren't
penis
monologues?”
Asked to join the production when he and
Wong were brought
together through a
mutual
friend,
MacGregor feels that
the experience has
—Erin Brahm,
been nothing short of
actress
rewarding.
“It’s this piece about
sexual identity and how you
relate to your body. Of course,
not having the requisite equipThough graphic in content, ultimately ment is a bit of a barrier, but that means
you have to work hard to kind of relate to
the message is strong.
“I was pretty uncomfortable with talk- it.”
In addition to a great soiree of entering about the smell and crustiness of some
areas,” says Erin Brahm, another actress taining monologues, the Association of
in the play. “I can’t say this to myself. I Alms will provide snacks, conveniently
thought, how am I supposed to say it in a enough in the shape of vaginas, for the
weary wanderers and hungry audience
room full of strangers?”
But, with time and practise, soon the members. While The Vagina Monologues
fear subsided and for the most part, the may not seem like your standard
word “power” and “vagina” becomes all Wednesday or Thursday night, the cast
the more synonymous. The play also abol- invites you to take a chance on something
ishes many of the myths attached to the new.
This play is anything but generic,
vagina, instead bringing power to terms
that were once, and may still be, consid- and from its reputation, The Vagina
ered derogatory to most women. Adds Monologues doesn't plan to hold
Brahm, “I always thought ‘pussy’ was a anything back. Uhrig sums it up
bad word, but it’s not a negative thing, it's best: “We’re saying all the things
that everyone thinks but are too scared
a positive thing. It’s empowering.”
Although it is not specifically targeted to say.”
“I was pretty uncomfortable with
talking about the smell and
crustiness of some areas. [...] I
thought, how am I supposed to say it
in a room full of strangers?”
WOMEN 11
60 million strong
Montreal foundation reaches out to women without access to education
• KAMILA HINKSON
While studying for your fourth
midterm in as many weeks, with
your social life in shambles and your
coffee addiction at its zenith, have
you ever sat back and thought:
“Wow, I’m fortunate to be in this situation”?
Chances are that if you attend
Concordia University, then at some
point in your life you have also sat in
a desk at a CEGEP, a high school
and an elementary school. Though
getting an education is a universal
human right, things don't always
play out the way that they should.
Wanda Bedard, who made a stop
at the Atwater Library and
Computer Centre on March 5 for
International Women’s Day, founded the 60 Million Girls foundation
in 2006. The foundation, which is
based in Montreal, is dedicated to
giving the sixty million girls in
developing countries around the
world access to education.
Bedard says most parents want
to send both their children to
school, but it’s a better investment
to send boys to school, and so girls
stay at home.
Nine years ago, Bedard kept seeing newspaper articles about
women in Afghanistan and their
struggles under the Taliban regime.
“I couldn't believe there were
women still on the planet with no
rights at all,” she explains. Bedard
continued to inform herself about
their plights and was amazed by
Wanda Bedard, the founder of 60 Million Girls, during a trip to Kenya in
2004. PHOTO 60 MILLION GIRLS
how she, a successful businesswoman, has “been able to do anything I wanted,” while women elsewhere were suffering.
UNICEF puts the current estimate of children with no access to a
formal education at 93 million.
Close to 80 per cent of these children live in sub-Saharan Africa and
South Asia. According to the
Canadian
International
Development Agency, one third of
children who start school will drop
out before grade five. Of the children with no access, two thirds—
about 62 million—are girls. They
make up most of the students who
drop out as well.
One day, the oldest of Bedard’s
two daughters turned to her and
asked, “‘Mom, what are you going to
do about it?’ It was great to read
about these problems and complain
about them but if you don't take
action, nothing ever happens.”
Soon after, Bedard began volunteering at UNICEF Quebec. There,
she was involved in the construction of a satellite school in Burkina
Faso, West Africa. Satellite schools
are built in places where access to
other schools is difficult. According
to UNICEF, their two main purposes “are to increase access to primary school, especially for girls,
and to link children’s education to
their cultural context.” These
schools are used to educate children until they’re old enough to
walk to “classic” schools.
Bedard was named UNICEF’s
Volunteer of the Year for Quebec in
2004. The success of her ventures
with UNICEF encouraged Bedard to
create her own initiative.
But sending a girl to school is
actually a better investment than
most think. An educated girl has
positive impact on society, says
Bedard. These girls are better able
to take care of themselves. An educated mother is more likely to send
her own children to school.
UNESCO lists improved health and
family planning, poverty reduction,
and better overall economic performance as some benefits to girls’
education. “We want to make sure
no girls are left out,” Bedard stresses.
In the past five years, 60 Million
Girls has funded projects in Zambia,
Kenya and African refugee camps.
Projects are selected based on proposals from different NGOs. 90 to
95 per cent of their funds come from
donations and because the foundation is run by volunteers, 100 per
cent of those donations go towards
funding the projects. Each project
receives 100,000 dollars.
In 2008, the foundation doubled
their fundraising target in order to
begin supporting two projects a
year. This year, the Zimbabwe Girl
Child Network and an indigenous
tribe in rural Honduras will be the
recipients of funding from 60
Million Girls.
The factors preventing girls from
attending school vary depending on
which country you look at, but
Bedard says poverty is the number
one hurdle. According to the United
Nations Girls’ Education Initiative
website, only 18 per cent of girls are
literate, compared to 50 per cent of
boys.
Afghan girls are faced with a lack
of accessibility, security, basic
school infrastructure and female
teachers. Bedard says one of her
dreams was to do a project in
Afghanistan, which was realized in
2008 when 60 Million Girls funded
community schools in Afghanistan.
The money went towards the
“establishment and support of 37
community—based schools and the
training of 80 female teachers in a
child—centred and gender-sensitive
new curriculum,” according to their
website.
Bedard spends a lot of time
speaking to students in Montrealarea schools. Her message to them
is that making a change in the world
isn't all that difficult.
“I’m just an ordinary person, not
the head of a country or a diplomat
of something like that, [but] it only
takes one person in a community to
make a change.”
To find out how to volunteer at 60
Million Girls, visit their website at
www.60millionsdefilles.org.
For more information about girls'
education,
start
with:
www.unicef.org/girlseducation/,
www.ungei.org, www.unesco.org
A woman’s wish for her son
Migrant workers: the story of Melca Salvador
• TERRINE FRIDAY
Melca Salvador came to Canada in 1995
as part of the federal government's Live-in
Caregiver Program.
Salvador, a native of the Philippines, was
fired two months later after it was discovered she was pregnant.
A few years later, in 2000, Salvador was
ordered by the Canadian government to
leave the country because she had not fulfilled the LCP requirements: two years of
domestic work within three years of landing
in Canada.
“All I want is to stay legal and raise my
Canadian son,” Salvador said in her feature
documentary, Standing Ground: The Melca
Salvador Story. “What’s wrong with that?”
Salvador’s story is only one of many that
highlight the injustices towards women—
especially migrant women, said Tess
Tessalona, spokesperson for the Immigrant
Workers’ Centre in Montreal.
“The working class has been exploited
and oppressed on a global scale,” Tessalona
said on Feb. 28 at “Women Demand a New
World Order,” a series of discussions about
imperialism, occupation, war, exploitation,
and repression. “No one should be illegal,”
continued Tessalona, who attributes the
crippled economies of developing countries
to debt-driven consumption on a global
scale.
Tessalona, who came to Canada as a
migrant worker in 1988, defended the expatriot mass move away from the developing world as the search for “a means to survive.”
“They have no rights or less rights,”
Tessalona continued, noting most migrant
workers pick up the “3D” jobs nobody else
wants to do: “they’re dirty, difficult and dangerous,” she explained.
According to Statistics Canada, over
300,000 Filipinos were living in Canada by
2006. Two-thirds of them arrived after 1991,
during the authoritarian regime of thenPresident Fidel Ramos.
Connie Bragas-Regalado, founder of
Migrante International, estimated over one
hundred Filipinos leave the Philippines
every hour. Most are in search of work outside the country.
“If there were an anti-Christ, Gloria
Tess Tessalona (centre) shares the stage with Richard (right), son of migrant worker Melca Salvador.
PHOTO TERRINE FRIDAY
[Macapagal-Arroyo, president of the
Philippines,] would be the ultimate antifeminist.”
Arroyo, accused of committing electoral
fraud to win the 2004 Philippines presidential election, has been criticized for her economic reforms.
Salvador—who actively campaigned for a
year and eventually went into hiding—was
finally granted residency in 2001, allowing
her to stay in Canada with her son Richard.
The grounds were “humanitarian and compassionate,” as per the Immigration and
Refugee Protection Act. During her time
away from the LCP, she rallied with the
Filipino Women's Association in Quebec for
human rights.
“If I need to die, I’ll do it, but I’ll fight for
Richard’s rights,” Salvador said.
Salvador died of breast cancer in 2004.
12 WOMEN
The Cirque
de boudoir
From the fetish scene to the circus, Bunnyguts bears all
• ESINAM BECKLEY
Ms. Bunnyguts is the kind of woman
we can look up to in this day and age.
Bunnyguts, along with her boyfriend
and financial partner Davide, is the
founder of Cirque de boudoir, an environment of liberation: sexually, mentally and
physically.
For her it is a creative baby matured
into a chance to explore weird aspects of
sexuality, a “kinky community organization” as she puts it.
CDB will be three years old in October,
and it gets bigger with every passing
event. CDB hosts parties that are full of
fun, costumes, performance art, dancing
and silliness.
What should you expect at a CDB
party? A broad range of people, that’s for
sure. Straight, vanilla types wearing just
lingerie, drag queens, trannies, people
from the gay scene, club kids, swingers,
people hard into the fetish scene, from all
kinds of sub cultures, goth, punk, etc.. All
of them fit right in.
Bunnyguts started doing burlesque in
Halifax for about 4 to 6 years. Even back
then, she says, Halifax had a thriving art
scene that wasn’t afraid to explore weird
and new concepts.
“[It was] a real kind of variety show,”
says Bunnyguts. “Really creative, really
crazy.”
It was a cohesive catering to one theme
or one group of people but at the same
time everyone was really doing their own
thing or had their own creative ideas, she
says.
When Bunnyguts arrived in Montreal
she realized there wasn’t anything like
that here. She knew she wanted to do
something avant-garde futuristic and less
‘50s retro pinup, which she thought had
already been done to death.
She met her partner Davide—the other
half of CDB—through his work as a DJ.
After going to so many fetish and electro
parties, they began to ask themselves why
they always had to listen to the same
music at the fetish parties, and why they
stood out so much during the electro parties.
“When I do something I like to be the
best at it,” says Bunnyguts. “I love the
fetish scene but they don’t necessarily
want to innovate.”
Bunnyguts felt their needs just weren’t
being addressed in the kinky community
and felt that they could not be the only
ones missing this.
“How many other people are kinky or
curious, or afraid to go to a fetish party?”
asks Bunnyguts. “But, they want to go and
meet new people that are sexy and fun, but
at the same time they don’t want to go to a
swinger’s party. How can we reach those
people?''
Most of Bunnyguts’ outfits are handmade and you don’t have to spend $5,000
on a latex outfit. “For your outfit to look
A day at the gym, or an average night at the Cirque?
totally kinky, totally fun, totally sexy, that
you’ll look good in, you can do it yourself.''
“[Society]'s starting to be more acceptable but still not at the level I think it
should be,” she said. “There’s still many
people that are totally afraid. It’s such a
taboo subject, and I don’t think that’s really necessary because it’s natural.”
PHOTO CIRQUE DE BOUDOIR
after-hours club like Circus , Bunnyguts had
20 guys grabbing at her breasts.
“A woman should have the right if she
wants to wear thigh-high boots and not be
considered a prostitute,” says Bunnyguts.
“And what if she really likes the way they
look? And right now they are actually in
fashion! So what if you’re very fashion for-
“A woman should have the right if she wants to wear thigh-high
boots and not be considered a prostitute.”
—Bunnyguts,
founder of the Cirque de boudoir
Bunnyguts finds the fetish scene
empowering, but with the Cirque, she
notices that more women are actually
becoming empowered because of the parties. Women are realizing that, “Hey, I can
ask for things and I'm not a bitch. If I want
somebody to dress up in a dog costume
and follow me around all night it doesn’t
mean I’m a bitch, it just means that’s what
I want.”
Once, while wearing nipple pasties at
ward and you want to wear thigh-high
boots? You shouldn’t be made to feel like
you’re a slut or a prostitute, or that a man
has the right to grab your ass.”
In the fetish scene that is not often the
case, since most everyone knows the rules
and abides by them.
“Women need to learn that they have
to stand up to men. If men think that it’s
OK to grab a woman and you just let
it slide they’ll never learn that’s not
OK,” says Bunnyguts.
“Too many women just don’t realize they
have power over their own bodies. They feel
powerless when a man is trying to take control. No, you can control that. But you have
to stand up for yourself. You don’t have to
be afraid of a man. Too many women feel
that they have to be subjugated and subservient to a man.”
Within the Cirque she has seen women
stand up to newcomers or misbehavers, laying down the law and reinforcing the mentality of being in charge of your own sexuality, your own environment. Being a strong
woman while at the same time making sure
others realize that you have the right to do
just that. “It’s up to women to take that control and that power.”
Growing up in Halifax, Bunnyguts had a
very supportive and creative environment.
Her parents never gave her the option of
having to rebel. She did her own thing and
they accepted it. When her photo appeared
in the paper for a story covering her burlesque performance, her mom made a point
of showing it to all her friends.
“I think whatever someone wants to
choose as long as its consensual and not
harming anyone, I don’t care.”
While Bunnyguts believes in equal
rights for men and women, she does not
think you have to be a feminist to try and
fight for equality. However, elements from
feminism, such as the idea of taking control of her own body and not needing a
man to live a happy life, were definitely
something she could identify with.
When she isn’t taking care of the Cirque
she's running her own business, which
deals with website construction and ecommerce, but her and Davide are now
starting to bring more Cirque projects into
their regular line of work. They have more
companies asking for design work that are
sex toy providers, latex clothing providers
and people who are throwing events.
At a certain point Bunnyguts and
Davide just asked themselves why they
should be doing boring business in the
day, when at night their passion is the
Cirque?
A few months ago, she asked Davide,
“Why can’t I spend my whole day just
designing icons of dildos?”
Bunnyguts started learning how to
build websites when she was only 15. Her
mother works for the Department of
Defence as a computer technician. They
always had fast new computers around the
Bunnyguts household growing up, and her
mom was always beta testing.
“Some people started hacking, I started
building websites,” says Bunnyguts.
The Cirque is planning their next event,
BodySlam, which will be opening on
March 28 at the Just for Laughs Museum.
The party will feature a full-size wrestling
ring as a stage, a Jello wrestling competition and a series of performances inspired
by boxing. Remember to dress up because
no effort = no entry.
WOMEN 13
The
woman
in
black
The truth about Islam isn’t
what you see on TV
• DENI ABDULLAH
Growing up being Muslim meant
that I was different due to an unusual last name or because pork was not
part of my daily diet. Recently,
Muslims have been subject of negative attention as portrayed through
the mass media and there has been
an emphasis on the treatment of
women in Islam.
The Middle East has been in the
public spotlight for decades, but in
the last few years it’s been the go-to
site for news reporters on developing diplomacy. A particular target of
the media has been Islam .
This exposure has led to questions and doubts about what some
have called “gender apartheid,” the
notion that Muslim women living in
Islamic nations have limited rights,
if any at all.
Being born in an Islamic country
myself, I know for a fact that Islam
does not limit women from achieving their goals, nor does it condone
gender inequality. All the women in
my family are working individuals
while they all sustain a family life at
the same time. Islam encourages
women to obtain an education and
working Muslim women are far
from being a rarity.
The status of women in these
countries has been overwhelmingly
negative, and based almost entirely
on preconceived notions that
women are regarded as second-class
citizens in Muslim countries.
However in most cases, men and
women living in Muslim countries
are treated equally and are seen as
equal in the Qu’ran.
We have all seen images of
Muslim women wearing the veil or
the burqa. Many see this religious
undertaking as an act of submission
to the opposite sex. In actuality, the
head scarf is a religious duty for
women in Islam but the decision of
covering the head is one a Muslim
woman makes based on her relationship with God. If she ultimately
decides to cover her head or her
entire body for that matter, she does
it as an act of submission to God,
and not as an act of subordination to
a man. Ultimately, the veil is used as
a tool for piety and modesty, and is
far from a reflection of the lower
stature of women in Muslim communities.
It is very easy to assume that
Muslim women are the subject of
inequality when we consider the
many patriarchal societies in which
Islam is the religion of the majority
of citizens. In Saudi
Arabia for example, women are
not given the right to vote in municipal
elections.
However
in
Indonesia, the most populous
Muslim country in the world has
already had a female president,
something which few countries can
make claim to even in largely secular
or non-Islamic countries in the west.
Islam is sometimes used as a
scapegoat for those patriarchal governments that seek to limit female
rights. But Islam does not impede
women from achieving higher status
in society. It’s powerful men who
hold women back.
There has also been a lot of criti-
GRAPHIC SYLVIA
cism of Muslim countries where
women are not equally represented
in the work force. But this is an issue
that doesn’t limit itself to the Middle
East. Women in western countries
are struggling just as hard to compete against their male counterparts
for salary equity and most are still
unable to break though the infamous “glass ceiling.”
Muslim women have unfairly
been made poster girls for sexual
discrimination, when the real identifiers of sexual discrimination in
today's society are far subtler and
run deeper than simply looking at
what a woman wears.
The next time you watch the
news or read the newspapers and
see the eyes of a fully clothed
Muslim woman, keep in mind that
her garments do not define who
she is and where she stands in societal hierarchy.
¡Hola guapa!
A guide to the matings calls of the Medterranean misogynist
• BARBARA PAVONE
We all know that Mediterranean men are,
stereotypically, very upfront and always
ready to offer hoots and hollers. I was very
aware of this fact upon my departure for
Barcelona but I was definitely not prepared
for what I would find.
Until you spend several months living in
one of these seaside villages, it is hard to
grasp the normality of this somewhat primitive habit.
Although it must be said that it is in no
way harmful, from my experiences, it can get
bothersome and old quickly. This is why I’m
here to help you all out, my fellow globe trotting ladies, in case you one day decide to set
foot into the perils of the Mediterranean jungle.
Here you will find a list, in order of
pompousness, of the four breeds of outspoken men you may encounter and, more
importantly, advice on how to proceed.
1) The Yeller/Whistler
The most insecure of the bunch, The
Yeller/Whistler will keep it short and sweet.
He'll let you know he thinks you’re “guapa”
but will not intrude your personal space. He
is the least pushy and frankly, the most likely
to succeed.
What to do: It’s really up to you. Walk on
by or stop and say “¡Hola!”
2) The Walker
More intrusive than The Yeller, The
Walker does not give up easily. He will begin
to walk by your side, no matter where you are
going, and try to engage in a full-blown conversation with all the rusty English skills he
has. The Walker’s secret weapon? No matter
how well you try to blend in to the Spanish
crowd he’ll always be able to find you and all
your English friends.
What to do: Regardless of how inclined
you are to be polite, if you're not interested,
keep walking. I suggest with more pep in your
step than before and remember; no eye contact is the key.
3) The Singer
The entertainer of the bunch, The Singer
will join you in bars, or in front of them with
a little too much alcohol in his system. He
begins with The Walker’s tactic of engaging
in a semi-English conversation (even if your
Spanish is perfectly fluent) and will compliment everything you say. If you're asked
what country you’re from, answer “Canada”
at your own risk. Across the ocean and very
exotic, this will cause him to intensify his
show. He may just tell you he's a DJ and
begin singing his “Hot new remix 2009”
filled with up-to-the-minute tunes like “Hit
Me Baby One More Time” and “Everybody:
Backstreet’s Back.” At which point, he’ll
surely take out his phone to show you a pic-
ture of him and his Lamborghini. Can anyone say Photoshop?
What to do: Enjoy. The Singer will not
get offended if you laugh, after all that is his
intention. But once you are done be sure to
point out a new gang of girls who happen to
be walking by. The Singer’s weakness is that
he's distracted by girls he has yet to impress,
just like birds are by shiny objects.
4) The Foreigner
The worst of the bunch by a landslide.
The Foreigner has no real excuse to hoot as
he is not Mediterranean. It’s not in his culture, but something inexplicable occurs
when he touches down at the airport and the
“Let’s try to get girls like the Spaniards do”
switch goes on. The Foreigner does not realize that speaking perfect English while using
the aforementioned tactics is more creepy
than flattering. Besides, “Damn girl, those
are some glasses'” will not work in any of the
195 countries on this planet. Jupiter?
Maybe.
What to do: Roll your eyes and walk
away. Or if you're up for some fun, tell him
off in your flawless English and laugh at his
stunned look. Didn't think I'd fully understand did ya?
And there you have it ladies; you've been
warned and prepared. You can now book
your tickets to Barça with peace of mind.
You’re welcome.
Get used to the cat calls in Barcelona.
14 WOMEN
In their own voice
Women’s empowerment is the key to ending poverty in Africa
In today’s tough economic climate, many
charity organizations are having difficulties
fundraising. But something that shouldn’t be
ignored is the continuing education of African
women, according to the Campaign for
Female Education.
“There were a lot of people in the ‘90s saying that educating girls had all of these benefits,” says Brooke Hutchinson, the director of
Camfed USA in San Francisco, which targets
needy women in African countries for outreach.
“But once people like Laurence Summers
[the former head of the World Bank] started
to say that the economic benefits of educating
girls is huge, it really started to move up on
people’s agendas.”
Camfed started in Zimbabwe and has since
branched out to Ghana, Zambia, Tanzania and
soon Malawi, and works with the Ministries of
Education in those countries to improve
school curriculums.
“We started in Zimbabwe because our
founder, Anne Cotton, travelled to Zimbabwe
to do research about women's exclusion from
secondary schools, because at the time there
was this perceived wisdom that it was culture
that was keeping girls out of school,” says
Hutchinson.
Cotton spoke to community leaders and
parents, “and the message that she was getting
was that it was about poverty, and it was actually an economic choice by parents because
they didn't have money to send all of their
children to school. Their sons are more likely
to gain paid work after school. So they were
having to make this difficult decision to pull
their girls out of school and continue to educate their sons,” says Hutchinson.
“Sometimes you might go into a school and
ask boys and girls what they might achieve,
and you might find that the boys are more
inspirational than the girls in some cases, and
the boys also might think that the girls can't
achieve as much as they can.” But studies
show that women invest a larger portion of
their income back into their families than
men, says Hutchinson.
“What we’re also finding is that women are
then supporting children outside of their own
immediate families. Eventually, we see that
surpassing anything we can do directly.”
Giving women a voice of their own
In Zamfia, which is located in the nation of
Zambia, the Bimba tradition discourages
women from speaking their minds in front of
their husbands.
“What Camfed does is to create those kinds
of forums for people to talk about these
issues,” says Hutchinson. “We’re giving girls
and women a voice of their own, to speak on
their own behalf rather than Camfed speaking
for them. But we're also trying to work with
men.”
Men are some of Camfed's key allies and
advocates, says Hutchinson. “It’s just as
important to bring men, and frankly, people
who have authority—whether it’s in the school
system or in the community, to bring together
people in these discussions.” One of Camfed’s
initiatives was a filmmaking course in the
Mikolina Mgola in Mgama Primary School.
PHOTO MARK READ/CAMFED
83
per cent of sub-Saharan Africa do not
attend secondary school.
town of Zamfia, located in the nation of
Zambia.
Although only a small group of women
took part in the filmmaking course, the resulting film, The Way Back, which deals with
issues including HIV/AIDS and prostitution,
has a much wider impact on public discourse
and the dissemination of public health information, says Hutchinson.
“Film just has an ability to unlock something in people to get them to talk about something they might otherwise not. Things that
just normally wouldn't be openly discussed.”
Even though many of the women filmmakers had similar struggles growing up, “they
hadn't shared those experiences with each
other,” says Hutchinson. “They’re isolated,
despite being surrounded by people in their
communities who had gone through the same
things.”
Where the water meets the sky
The making of The Way Back was documented by filmmaker David Eberts, in Where
the Water Meets the Sky, which has been an
effective tool for raising donations.
“Looking back on it,” says Eberts, “I
wish we could have spent a little more time
just delving into how male-dominated this
society is.”
There were no overt hostilities from the
men in the village of Zamfia, says Eberts, but
that doesn’t rule out what might take place
when the cameras aren’t rolling.
“No woman wants to make her husband
look bad on camera. We got a few people who
said it's very hard for women to be able to
speak out, and not because they were fearful,
but because people generally don't want to
criticize their own culture.”
One of the many problems facing women
in Zamfia, and children in particular, is the
phenomenon of property snatching.
“That happens in many, many African
countries,” says Eberts. “It’s a tradition that
has become distorted. The original tradition
was if a husband dies, their brother, if he’s
unmarried, will marry the widow as a gesture
to take in that family and try to support them.”
The tradition remains, says Eberts, but
without the support.
“What rural Africa is seeing is a real deterioration of the family networks that used to
exist because AIDS is having such a devastating impact,” says Hutchinson. “So where there
used to be that safety net where this extended
family would take care of the children, that’s
falling apart, in many cases because so many
parents of this generation are passing away.”
Poverty is the problem
During a screening of Where the Water
Meets the Sky in Concordia’s Hall Building
last week, one audience member took issue
with the film’s suggestion that the women of
Zamfia were living in poverty—an entirely
Western perception, he argued.
Catherine Boyce, the head of Enterprise
and Leadership and leader of the Goldman
Sachs 10,000 Women Initiative, which trains
women to develop careers of their own, disagrees wholeheartedly.
“Absolutely, these women are living in
tremendous poverty,” says Boyce. “Imagine
such poverty that you couldn’t afford to buy a
pair of shoes. If you can’t go to school because
you can’t afford a pair of shoes that’s tremendous poverty in my mind.”
Even a subsistence economy is becoming
“less and less secure,” says Boyce, due to overfishing in Zamfia’s local river, whose name
“where the water meets the sky,” became the
title of Ebert’s film.
A business education is what impoverished
women really need, said Boyce.
“Traditionally, women may not be allowed
to manage the money in the household,” says
Hutchinson. “And if they’re successful with
their small businesses, male relatives might
try to co-opt their profits. By building a network of support around young women, we
help them to address those challenges. If that
young woman is being mentored by a community member that Camfed is working with, he
can go to the family and say this is how the
program is running, she's earning her own
money.”
“The Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women
Initiative is about helping young women
become leaders so that they can become
change makers within their communities, and
identify opportunities, where perhaps they
had previously seen only seen challenges,”
says Boyce.
“What’s happening now, is that the students have gone out and set up and run projects of their choice,” says Boyce. “We didn’t
give them a list, they actually identified whatever projects they wished to pursue, created a
business plan and some of them developed
actual commercial ventures designed to make
profit.”
Exponential impact
The women helped by Camfed go on to
become not only “more successful themselves, but they become philanthropists
within their communities,” says Boyce.
Nwa Nagla had to drop out of school
when her father died. After she received support from Camfed, she was able to build her
mother a house. “She did this when she was
22 years old,” says Boyce, and now Nwa
Nagla is a member of the Camfed team as a
Seed Money Scheme Administrator, who
oversees schemes to provide business advice
and small grants to members of the Cama
network—Camfed’s alumni.
Starting literally with a class of 32 girls in
1993, the number of women and children
who have benefited from Camfed is now
645,000.
“The effect of intervening and supporting
one girl, however, is multiplied many, many
times over because those women who are
supported go on to have that strong commitment to give something back to their community, and to support many more girls or
boys within their communities,” says Boyce.
“You help one girl, and then she in turn
goes on to help many people around her.”
WOMEN 15
A social history
of menstruation
2
1
3
4
GRAPHICS
ALEX MANLEY
5
Menstrual huts
1. During a woman’s period,
she would be sequestered in a
residential area reserved for that
exclusive purpose until the end
of her menstrual period.
Menstrual dance
2. In the Wasco Indian tradition
after a woman reached puberty
she was expected to perform a
menstrual dance in order to see
her individual guardian spirit.
6
Extreme daintiness
3. For a long period, women in
western societies did not talk
about their periods, or menstrual
cycles. Period.
Menstrual segregation
4. During a woman’s menstrual
cycle, it was often instructed
that she stand in a river in order
to be washed clean.
Menstrual superstition
5. Approaching a woman’s menstrual cycle, it was believed that
garden plants would parch up
and fruit would fall from the
tree.
The pill
6. Women can finally be open
about their sexuality, and what
birth control they use. At least
in some parts of the world.
—compiled by Christopher Olson
LITERARY ARTS 16
THE LINK • MARCH 10, 2009 • THELINKNEWSPAPER.CA/LIT
Forget what you just heard
Montreal’s Zen Poetry Festival questions the efficacy of words
• JACKSON MACINTOSH
The slogan found on the advertisements for the
Montreal Zen Poetry Festival, which ran from the March 6
to 8, was “Forget the Words!”—a provocative sentiment
for a poetry festival, to be sure. What would a school of
poetry that eschews the primacy of the words themselves
even look like? Isn’t a primary pleasure of poetry the
sound of words knocking up against one another and mysteriously making meaning?
True to the slogan of the festival, the poetry reading at
a multi-book launch on March 7 reminded the audience of
the Zen belief that words fail to access absolute truth.
“Once you’ve got the meaning, you can forget the
words,” reads a poem by Chaung Tzu posted on the festival’s website. A philosophy of poetry that finds language
ineffective at communicating meaning seems self-defeating—it limits your subject matter a lot, clearly.
I spoke to one of the festival organizers, Matrix reviews
editor Darren Bifford, who confirmed that the Centre Zen
de la Main, which organized the festival, decided to limit
the program to poets who practice Rinzai Zen. This included renowned translator and poet David Hinton, Peter
Lit Writ
Of A Broken Heart
• LEE EKS
The little invisible bacteria crawled
through the needle into her bloodstream,
pumped into her heart, and settled on a
valve. And grew. The bacteria had vegetated, the doctors said. “A healthy heart has
four valves, which pump blood through the
heart in a coordinated way. Endocarditis
causes a heart valve to become infected, the
bacteria vegetates on the valve and blood
doesn’t pump through the heart the way it
should.”
The infection caused fevers of 106
degrees Fahrenheit that pushed her body
into febrile convulsions. Her lungs filled
with fluid so she couldn’t breathe. Her
joints and muscles ached so she could
barely walk.
But she got to the hospital too late. The
infection won over antibiotics, like a joke.
She could hear the infection laughing,
spreading. They had to stop it. I wasn't
there when they pumped her full of morphine and broke open her chest, the breastbone cracking wide to reveal the heart. I
was thinking of her when the surgeon cut
out the diseased valve, placed it in a steel
dish, bloody, and replaced it with a pig's
valve. She could never eat pork again.
Out of the hospital and back in her parents’ home, I went to her. Three thousand
miles from my home I lay in her bed, kicking and sweating. She lifted her shirt to
show me her scar—thick, sinewy, purple—
and called it ugly. I traced it with my finger
and touched the plastic tube that stuck out
of her left upper arm: an open line that
went straight to her heart. It was for the
Levitt, and Red Pine. Other
elements of the festival
included morning
Zazen meditation,
seminars on translation and calligraphy, and a fundraising
event organized in collaboration with Matrix magazine.
Happily, not everything read
dealt with the conundrum of language. The poetry also dealt with life
experience, meditations on life and
aging, and even a poem about sex and
love. The reading took place at Alred
Dallaire Memoria, a funeral parlor on StLaurent Blvd, which lent the proceedings a
somber air despite the optimistic, buoyant
tone of many of the poems. Nonetheless, a selfconsciousness about language remained prominent, and made you question whether this gathering was more concerned with Zen or with poetry,
and if the two could be reconciled.
intravenous antibiotics she sucked in for
four hours every day. I fell asleep listening
to her explanations of how she hooked herself up to the intravenous machine.
I woke up alone. She walked into the
room and started to hit me. I was soaked
through with sweat. Dope sick. I cried,
apologized, for arriving in this state. She
shook her head, began to tie her shoes and
I began to pray.
On my knees I begged her not to, we
couldn't, she wouldn’t, her precious heart,
had to keep it clean. She was clean for a
few months. Had to, doctors said, but I
was afraid. I felt like I was the one who
would be responsible if she died, a murderer. But the anticipation of dopey relief
overcame: the feeling raw, getting it hot,
turned on, hard on.
The next thing I knew we were in her
car on the highway, bumper-to-bumper
traffic, the destination, downtown L.A.
Destination cheeba.
Then an hour later back in her bedroom, the black tar dirty, smelly and
brown in the barrel, like the barrel of a
gun. But warm, a warm gun, soon to be
shot, lemon juice, cook it hot. We had
brand new rigs, but the dirty dope seemingly ruined their sterile appearance. Don’t
use your open line, I whisper. She hesitates, and then the thin needle pierces her
hand. I pierce my inner elbow, my veins are
good, don’t even need to tie up my arm.
My muscles relax, head back, mouth
open slack. But her lips turn purple and she
falls, slides off her chair. I realize she’s
dead on the floor. I turn up the music on
her little stereo, don't want her parents to
think something is wrong, Nirvana blasts,
so cliché. I breathe deep into her mouth,
slap her face, scream in her ear, shake her.
GRAPHIC MONTREAL ZEN POETRY FESTIVAL
GRAPHIC SEBASTIEN CADIEUX
Can’t compress her chest, because her ribs
are still healing. If I pushed down on them
they would snap and crush her lungs and
heart, puncture all the organs.
I throw a glass of water on her face.
Glass and all, and a second later she rises
from the dead, and the pink colour, the
fleshy vessels, return to her face. The gray
and blue complexion fades. I sigh with
relief.
But that day the bacteria had crawled
into her vein again, another army with
knives, and the blood holding it pumped,
pumped back into her heart, shredding,
destroying, eating away.
And I was back in Montreal when her
illness returned.
She telephoned me, she sounded sick,
she was back in the hospital. I didn’t,
couldn’t do it anymore. I said goodbye. Her
heart broke. I don't know if it was ever
fixed.
To submit your fiction or poetry to
the Lit Writ column, email them to
[email protected].
17 LITERARY ARTS
Meet the Flanaghans
Author Elizabeth Kelly offers no apologies for new book
• PASCALE ROSE LICINIO
Meet the Flanaghan family: “Pop was a
stray, a drinker, and a womanizer, professionally Irish, a guy of mixed pedigree
that Ma plucked off the streets because
she was mad for his hair colour, the same
shade as a ruby red King Charles spaniel,”
says Collie, their elder son and narrator of
Apologize, Apologize!
“A lot of families are crazy
and unconventional. Yet,
somehow, they work.”
—Elizabeth Kelly,
author of Apologize, Apologize!
The novel is mainly set in
Massachusetts, during the 1960s and ‘70s,
and tells the story of Collie and his
immensely rich yet bohemian family.
“They are terrible,” admits author
Elizabeth Kelly. “But you can encounter
people like them.”
Collie’s father is certainly no role
model. On the train or at home, he spends
a lot of time passed out. His brother,
Uncle Tom, who ended up in charge of the
household, is better at breeding racing
pigeons than parenting the family’s two
sons.
As for the mother, there’s very little of
the maternal in her approach to parenting.
“She is evil,” said Kelly with a large
smile. “I really wanted her to be awful.”
She hates her cold, hyper-capitalist father
so much that she has developed an obsession for Marxist causes that she finances
all around the world with money she gets
from him. She has a passion for her
younger son but cares much more for the
dozens of dogs that she has gather into
her house than for her elder son.
“Actually, a lot of families are crazy and
unconventional,” said Kelly. “Yet, somehow, they work.” The Flanaghans are
endearing in their own brutal, extravagant kind of way. “They are everything at
once,” said Kelly, “but they have their own
harmony.”
The Flanaghans’ eccentric lifestyle may
catch you off guard in the first chapters.
But read on. You will find out that
Apologize, Apologize! is not another easy
parody about a rich, dysfunctional
American family. The book is dense but
you will soon be able to enjoy the casual
craziness of the characters and the sensitivity of the smart, sweet and rational narrator.
“Collie is not a neurotic, not a performer. He’s just a nice person,” explains
Kelly. Collie is the only responsible family
member but passes for a conservative
among them. He seems typical of the generation that was born in the 60s and had
to compensate for the parents’ refusal to
conformism. His position is extreme,
however, because his family has the
means to indulge in an unrestrained way
of life.
He is the only one who openly shows
his affection in a family where everyone
masks their real feelings. It is his love for
his family that really makes it hard to
resist their unusual charms. The book
reads like a tribute from him to his
younger brother and to the full-blown
humanity of his family. It reads like a love
letter to all his relatives—the ones he has
suffered because of, the ones he keeps trying to connect with, and the ones he lost.
“We also love people for their weaknesses,” commented Kelly. By illustrating
this, despite the peculiarity of the family
she describes, she managed to write a
novel that speaks to everyone, because,
whether we are aware of it or not, we all
have distinctive family cultures. Also,
almost everyone has experienced family
tragedies, and the novel addresses the
delicate issue in a way that can resonate
with all of us.
Apologize, Apologize! is Kelly’s first
novel, but the Ontario-based magazine
editor and award-winning journalist is
currently working on a film script based
on the book, for the same production
company that produced The Cider House
Rules and The Bourne Identity.
Elizabeth Kelly
Knopf Canada
February 2009
336 pp
$29.95
GRAPHIC
GINGER COONS
16 LITERARY ARTS
Meet the Flanaghhans
Author Elizabeth Kelly offers no apologies for new book
• PASCALE ROSE LICINIO
Meet the Flanaghan family: “Pop was a
stray, a drinker, and a womanizer, professionally Irish, a guy of mixed pedigree
that Ma plucked off the streets because
she was mad for his hair colour, the same
shade as a ruby red King Charles spaniel,”
says Collie, their elder son and narrator of
“A lot of families are crazy
and unconventional. Yet,
somehow, they work.”
—Elizabeth Kelly,
author of Apologize, Apologize!
The novel is mainly set in
Massachusetts, during the 1960s and ‘70s,
and tells the story of Collie and his
immensely rich yet bohemian family.
“They are terrible,” admits author
Elizabeth Kelly. “But you can encounter
people like them.”
Collie’s father is certainly no role
model. On the train or at home, he spends
a lot of time passed out. His brother,
Uncle Tom, who ended up in charge of the
household, is better at breeding racing
pigeons than parenting the family’s two
sons.
As for the mother, there’s very little of
the maternal in her approach to parenting.
“She is evil,” said Kelly with a large
smile. “I really wanted her to be awful.”
She hates her cold, hyper-capitalist father
so much that she has developed an obsession for Marxist causes that she finances
all around the world with money she gets
from him. She has a passion for her
younger son but cares much more for the
dozens of dogs that she has gather into
her house than for her elder son.
“Actually, a lot of families are crazy and
unconventional,” said Kelly. “Yet, somehow, they work.” The Flanaghans are
endearing in their own brutal, extravagant kind of way. “They are everything at
once,” said Kelly, “but they have their own
harmony.”
The Flanaghans’ eccentric lifestyle may
catch you off guard in the first chapters.
But read on. You will find out that
Apologize, Apologize! is not another easy
parody about a rich, dysfunctional
American family. The book is dense but
you will soon be able to enjoy the casual
craziness of the characters and the sensitivity of the smart, sweet and rational narrator.
“Collie is not a neurotic, not a performer. He’s just a nice person,” explains
Kelly. Collie is the only responsible family
member but passes for a conservative
among them. He seems typical of the generation that was born in the 60s and had
to compensate for the parents’ refusal to
conformism. His position is extreme,
however, because his family has the
means to indulge in an unrestrained way
of life.
He is the only one who openly shows
his affection in a family where everyone
masks their real feelings. It is his love for
his family that really makes it hard to
resist their unusual charms. The book
reads like a tribute from him to his
younger brother and to the full-blown
humanity of his family. It reads like a love
letter to all his relatives—the ones he has
suffered because of, the ones he keeps trying to connect with, and the ones he lost.
“We also love people for their weaknesses,” commented Kelly. By illustrating
this, despite the peculiarity of the family
she describes, she managed to write a
novel that speaks to everyone, because,
whether we are aware of it or not, we all
have distinctive family cultures. Also,
almost everyone has experienced family
tragedies, and the novel addresses the
delicate issue in a way that can resonate
with all of us.
Apologize, Apologize! is Kelly’s first
novel, but the Ontario-based magazine
editor and award-winning journalist is
currently working on a film script based
on the book, for the same production
company that produced The Cider House
Rules and The Bourne Identity.
Elizabeth Kelly
Knopf Canada
February 2009
336 pp
$29.95
GRAPHIC
GINGER COONS
FRINGE ARTS 17
THE LINK • MARCH 10, 2009 • THELINKNEWSPAPER.CA/FRINGE
Steal this film
Concordia grad wants you to tear his film to shreds and then make it better
Originality is when you mix two
things that have never been mixed
before, claims filmmaker Brett
Gaylor, a Concordia graduate who
has spent the last six years, or most
of his adult life, exploring copyright
law.
The result is a documentary film,
RiP: A Remix Manifesto, to be
screened at Cinema Politica next
week.
“That’s the originality that we
have to think about in the 21st century,” says Gaylor. “In this day and
age it’s pretty hard to say that a certain chord progression hasn’t been
done before, especially in rock ‘n’
roll. There’s only so many notes on a
guitar and only so many ways you
can combine them.
“It’s funny that all these people
that owe this huge debt to the performers that came before them feel
this need to sue anyone who is
encroaching on their originality.”
Gaylor credits his knowledge of
filmmaking to his time in both
Concordia’s Fine Arts program and
Communication Studies program.
“All of my career is because of
Concordia. Professionally for sure,
but artistically too, because to have a
grounding in Fine Arts helps you
create a certain kind of film. It’s
based more in arts practice than in
commercial practice, which I think
helps you in the long run, because it
gives you a vision.”
It was during his time at
Concordia that Napster, the first
peer-to-peer filesharing network,
took off. “I could already tell that it
was going to upend the music industry, but it took a little thinking to
realize that this would affect all
aspects of an information society,”
says Gaylor.
also appears in Gaylor’s film.
“I don’t think Yoko would sue my
film,” says Gaylor, where “Imagine”
is sung by former President George
W. Bush using excerpts from some
of his speeches. Expelled, a creationist film that denies evolution, however, uses original song samples in
after their original releases—are
coming from.
“Filmmakers are the ultimate
control freaks. Since the premiere of
the film, I’ve had a chance to change
it based on scenes that the audience
felt dragged or felt didn’t get right,
so I can appreciate how 20 years
Brett Gaylor, the director of RiP: A Remix Manifesto, is a Con U graduate and supports the creative commons license.
“When I started making the film,
it felt like such an underground
film,” but then internet hot spots
like YouTube and Facebook were
born, says Gaylor. “Now we’re opening at the AMC, and it’s become this
really relevant populist issue.”
Just last year, a documentary
film called Expelled: No Intelligence
Allowed was sued for copyright
infringement for its use of the song
“Imagine” by John Lennon, which
order to criticize it.
“On the one hand I was like, ‘Oh
God, poor Yoko, here she’s trying to
defend John.’ But on the other
hand, you know Yoko, you can’t
have that level of control over John
anymore, he’s really in the public
domain now, whether the law says
so or not.”
Gaylor says he knows where
filmmakers who make changes to
their films—sometimes decades
later someone like George Lucas can
be like, ‘I didn’t get that scene right.
Han should have talked to Jabba the
Hutt outside of the Cantina.’”
At the same time, he says, “It’s
funny that George Lucas wants to
take another stab at Star Wars, but
when someone removes Jar Jar
Binks from The Phantom Menace,
the lawyers are sent out. Directors
need to learn that the era where
audiences are just consumers of
their works is over.”
Gaylor is helping speed things
along with opensourcecinema.org, a
newly launched website where RiP
will be available in all its alterable
glory.
“That’s a big focus of my work
now,” says Gaylor. “We made it so
that there’s actually editing software
built into the website, so you don’t
need to have a Final Cut Pro Studio,
you can actually do it with really
easy tools that we give you right on
the website itself.”
With Open Source Cinema, says
Gaylor, “anyone could take this
approach to filmmaking, so that it’s
a collaborative conversation with
the audience instead of this real separation between creators and users.”
The film is licensed under the
creative commons license, “which
means, ‘I grant you the freedom to
remix it and share it, but if you want
to sell it to a TV station, you have to
ask my permission first,’” says
Gaylor.
“If everybody licensed their films
under creative commons license,
the film wouldn’t be as necessary as
it is. The creative commons motto is
some rights reserved, not all rights
reserved.”
RiP: A Remix Manifesto will be
screened on Monday, March 16 at
7:30 p.m. in Room H-110, 1455 de
Maisonneuve Blvd. Visit opensourcecinema.org to help remix the
movie, and have the chance to see
your work in a future release.
Life outside of the womb
Weirder, noisier, and drenched in reverb
• CODY HICKS
With all this talk of recession
and everyone losing their jobs,
I’m a little concerned that my
degree will end up about as useful
as a rolled-up Garfield comic. So
it’s especially refreshing to hear
the perspective of Matt Perri, an
artist who lives on a dime and
couldn’t be happier about it.
“This is the only thing I wanna
do now. It’s the only thing I can
do,” he says. “You’re only young
once so why not just scrape by.
Sooner or later everyone’s gonna
get a job, get fat and not wanna
get drunk and play songs all the
time.”
Perri is an unassuming young
man who lives in a shoebox apartment and plays what I can only
describe as dreamy ghost-rock—
which is fitting because he writes
all his music in bed as soon as he
gets up.
This is party rock for the
ghosts in the graveyard who are
blind drunk on mulled wine. His
quavering vocals are infectious
and he has managed to come
across one of the most gloriously
creepy guitar tones I’ve heard in a
while. Every song is strangely
familiar but weird enough to
sound totally unique, probably
because he claims to have no
influences other than “life, wine
and jerking off.”
Perri is as DIY as they come,
as evidenced by his last release
The Moon, which came in individually stapled and painted covers. After listening to that record,
I was frustrated that this kid
doesn’t have a major record deal.
Perri is notoriously anti-promotion and frustratingly noncha-
lant about his music. There were
times during the interview where
I wanted to smack some sense
into the kid and tell him, “You
could be huge!”
songs.”
Paradoxically, his live show
can get pretty fierce. “I like to
rock out on stage,” he says. “Who
the hell wants to go see someone
Every song is strangely familiar but weird
enough to sound totally unique, probably
because he claims to have no influences other
than “life, wine and jerking off.”
Although he’s been living in
Montreal since September he has
only played one show, a fact that
he casually shrugs off. He is a
man of simple pleasures and
alternative ambitions.
“I never went to school, and I
couldn’t be happier about it,”
says Perri. “While everyone else
is going crazy studying for
midterms I’m drinking cheap
wine, jerking off and writing
stand there and play all his songs
note for note.”
When I saw him play a show
in Edmonton over the break he
rocked hard enough to inspire a
tender, skinny-boy mosh pit.
Well, it was more of a flail pit, as
everyone was doing a variation of
some kind of no bones octopus
dance.
The prolific Perri is putting
the finishing touches on his third
record in two years, called Girls,
a concept album about the “easiest subject to write songs about.”
He promises the new one will be
weirder, noisier and drenched in
reverb.
Shoot
over
to
myspace.com/mattperri
and
feast your eyes on the painfully
cute DIY music video for “I Want
You” and his frustratingly gorgeous cover of “Dreams” by
Fleetwood Mac that will wipe
Stevie Nicks’ vocals clear from
your mind.
You can catch him in the flesh
on March 14 at Galerie Artefacto
for the Art Matters Closing Party
I alluded to in last week’s column, 8 p.m. at 661 Rose-de-Lima
Street. If you’re foolish enough
to miss the Art Matters party you
can catch him at Le Cagibi, 5490
St-Laurent Blvd. on March 18.
18 FRINGE ARTS
Super stressfest
Psyopus guitarist Christopher Arp sympathizes with you
if you’re stuck at the border or looking to replace your bassist
• JOHNNY NORTH
“When you show up in another
country and they treat you like the
second coming of Jesus fucking
Christ, it’s an awesome vibe for
sure,” said Christopher Arp, guitarist for technical metal band
Psyopus.
“At the 2005 [edition of] Hellfest
[we got an encore]. That was when
the band first started, we were all
super hungry, we’re going that big
festival and you don’t get encores at
stuff like that. That was fucking
awesome. Russia was pretty cool.
The people were so overwhelmingly
excited to have us there.”
But it isn’t all fun and games for
the tech metal quartet. The recently
released Psyopus album, Odd
Senses, took a lot of time and energy to produce—especially with the
need to get a new bassist for their
2009 tours.
“It’s like, ‘oh shit, we got three
tours scheduled for the next three
months, and we have a new album
coming out and there’s press
involved.’ Losing a band member
puts a lot of pressure on us,” said
Arp. “We couldn’t just get someone
who could play a couple of Nirvana
tunes, we needed someone who
could play [tech metal].”
Despite initial problems, new
bassist Brent Glover is a great fit.
“It’s working out, but we need to get
him some better gear. He had just
moved before joining the band and
he had to sell his gear for the move.
He came into the situation with
only so much money.”
They also had to go looking for a
new vocalist after problems with
Adam Frappolli, member of the
band since 2002, forced the band to
pick up Brian Woodruff.
“The first album was very well
received, the only negative thing
that got brought up was people didn’t like the vocals. I can see where
they’re kind of monotone. For Ideas
of Reference, I spent a lot of time to
do the best we could with
[Frappolli]. I had all the lyrics written, I coached him through everything. I think Ideas of Reference
was leaps and bounds better—
much more expression and well
thought out. As far as the new
album, I would say we really
worked hard to the deadline to get
the album done.
“There were a number of songs,
where I was coming home from the
studio and passing out at 7 p.m.,
waking up at three in the morning,
downing a bunch of Red Bulls, and
writing the lyrics for the song we
were going to do that day.
[Woodruff] did a pretty good job,
making us sound good. We hope to
take advantage in the studio the
versatility that Brian has. Adam
had a very limited range—it was
They may not look like the second coming of christ, but the fans can’t get enough of this mathcore metal band.
him doing the mid- to high-range
grindcore screams and the best you
could do is coach him through each
part to bring some emotion.”
The song “Ms. Shyflower” is one
song off the new album Arp is
pleased with. “It’s not as flashy, it’s
not as intense as some of the other
material is. It’s just a different trip,
it came from me realizing how miserable I was. With that song [came
an opportunity to] express myself
in ways that other bands that aren’t
necessarily tech metal appreciate.
Like Tool, it can go to some dark
places—it’s about being buried
alive.”
Psyopus also delivers a change
of their usual grindcore with “The
Burning Halo.” Arp finds the harmonic riff in it “really stands out,”
but has received some harsh criticism for their change of style.
“Some of the more traditional
grind kids don’t like that song
because it’s heavier and has more
low tones. But you know what? It is
what it is, I felt we haven’t done it
before and if anyone has a problem
with it they can kiss my ass.”
This April will mark the first
time Psyopus will be coming to
Canada.
Psyopus will be coming to
Montreal on April 16 at Underworld,
251 Ste-Catherine Street E. For
more info call 514-660-2372 or
514-284-0667.
Part-time band
Radiohead reminiscent Holler, Wild Rose! plays Montreal with first EP in two years
• JOELLE LEMIEUX
What keeps a band who hasn’t released an
album in two years relevant?
If you’re Holler, Wild Rose! it’s an unending series of gigs, and a Radiohead-reminiscent appeal that still feels new.
In 2007, Holler, Wild Rose! released Our
Little Hymnal, their most recent LP. Toted as
one of the year’s best albums, it’s hard not to
wonder why there hasn’t been a follow-up.
Lead singer John Mosloskie cites full-time
employment as a reason, but promises a next
album to be “record[ed] towards the end of
this year” with most of it already written. “I
would love to be able to record and create,” he
says. At this point, it’s more “logistics” than
lack of desire.
For Holler, Wild Rose! time away from the
studio has been a chance to get their name
out into the ears of the public, “hitting blogs
[and] online publications.”
What was originally a foursome
(Mosloskie, drummer Ryan Smyth, bassist
Scott Vangenderen, and guitarist Ryan
Cheresnick) has become, over the years,
seven with the addition of Mosloskie’s sister
Morgan as keyboardist, as well as rhythm
guitarist Lou D’Elia and newest member
Steve Oyola on guitar.
Fresh out of Jersey, Mosloskie says the
band often comes up against some “unfair
media stereotypes” borne of TV shows like
“The Sopranos,” but stays true to his Jersey
roots. “What our music will do is give us a little cred,” he assures me. Besides, Jersey’s not
all bad, “there are mountains and oceans and
it’s good here,” he says, so I accuse him of
sounding like a travel brochure.
He laughs, and in that moment I realize
that he is the voice behind the band. “I’m just
getting over a cold,” he says defensively,
“Although, I did say I would be honest. This is
pretty much what I sound like normally.”
So, what’s the significance of Holler, Wild
Rose! and where did all the punctuation
come from? Like all bands there came a time
when things had to change. The band, then
called A Dive, “were at this show, supposed to
play at 11.” Mosloskie remembers, “the time
just kept getting pushed back, we all got really frustrated [and] started taking it out on
each other.
“It got pretty heated,” he admits. “We all
Holler, Wild Rose! play Montreal this Saturday.
believed in the music,” and in the end, it
“opened our eyes to the need. [...] It was just
that song [Holler, Wild Rose!], the direction
of the music, something we had to pursue.”
They changed the name, and they didn’t look
back. To this day, they close all shows with
Holler, Wild Rose! and it’s Mosloskie’s
favourite song to perform.
This week, they’ll be coming to Canada for
a second time since their inaugural trek in
2007. This time, the band will be touring with
a new four song EP, The Yarn, which includes
a live song and a previously unreleased
instrumental. “Montreal was a great show,”
he remembers, and when asked to describe
his band’s live show, had only one thing to
say: “a wall of sound.” I know Mosloskie’s
“excited to come back,” so you should get
excited to see them.
Holler, Wild Rose! are playing Saturday,
March 14 with Broadcast Radio and Urban
Aesthetics at Le Divan Orange, 4234 St-Laurent
Blvd. at 8 p.m. Pay what you can.
FRINGE ARTS 19
Put another dime
in the jukebox
Toronto’s Dean Lickyer bring rock ‘n’ roll
to a Canadian venue near you
Fuschia Epieceri Fleur owner, Binky Holleran, successfully combines her
two passions (food and flowers) at this unique vegetarian alternative.
PHOTO GINGER COONS
Would you like
flowers with that?
The journey to Dean Lickyer’s success began back in Hamilton, Ontario where the rock ’n’ rollers to be met in high
school.
• STEPHANIE STEVENSON
It appears as though no one
was quite ready for such a brilliant
performance from a gang of 19year-olds who live, eat, breathe
and sleep classic rock.
“Whatever makes you happy,
I’m doing all right!” howled Josh
Alvernia into the microphone during a recent performance on
MuchMusic. His band, Dean
Lickyer, received unprecedented
acclaim from the judges who
reviewed their performance on a
new MuchMusic TV show called
Disband.
With Alvernia on vocals, Sean
Royle on guitar, Justin Bozzo on
bass and Eric Martin on drums,
the band has played more than 125
shows to date despite the fact that
they’ve only been around as a
band for a year—hardly a small
feat for a young group of friends
barely out of high school.
They may be young, but they
aren’t wasting any time.
At the Rogers Spring Music
Festival, they won Best of Fest out
of the 60 bands that played, and
won over $10,000 in recording
and prizes as a result. The prizes
included six songs to be recorded,
mixed
and
mastered
at
Mastermind Studio, and the band
decided to take the opportunity to
record their entire EP at that same
time. However, this meant that
they had a matter of weeks to write
the remainder of the songs for the
album and record all the tracks.
“It was kind of a patchwork
job,” said Alvernia. “Most of the
vocals were done in one take,
which can be risky. But the reactions to the record were very good
so, we’re happy.”
In fact, reactions in general to
both the EP and the band’s live
performances have been fantastic.
Songs such as “Witching Hour
Moon,” “Get Your Own” and
“Never let You Go” have
impressed industry professionals
like Tommy Brunett, CEO of
Universal Buzz NYC: “These guys
are fucking rockstars. Their CMJ
showcase was the best set I saw all
week!”
The journey to Dean Lickyer’s
success began back in Hamilton,
Ontario, where the guys met at
Bishop Ryan High School and
began listening to classic rock
bands such as The Rolling Stones,
Led Zeppelin and The Who.
Growing up, Royle had been
influenced by the musical tastes of
his father’s friend, Dean Lickyer,
who was, as Alvernia explains,
“that kid who always had the
underground records.” Lickyer
passed away in 1995, around the
time classic rock died out in the
mainstream, so the band took on
his name to “signify the rebirth of
rock ‘n’ roll,” as Alvernia puts it.
Since the band’s formation,
they’ve employed some rather
unusual methods to promote
themselves. For instance, busking
is an old trick of theirs.
“We do it all the time,” said
Alvernia. “It helps us make extra
money and pay the bills when
we’re on the road.”
The guys also drilled a hole
through the roof of their van in
order to blare their songs through
it and into the ears of random
passersby. By all accounts, their
strategies have been working, as
their friend count on MySpace
continues to grow exponentially,
as do the crowds at their shows.
This year, the band aims to play
more than 200 shows and release
an album or EP. When it comes to
long-term objectives, though,
Alvernia says, “I would love for us
to play headlining tours at big venues. We want to make a living
playing rock ‘n’ roll.”
Dean Lickyer play Toronto’s
Canadian Music Festival March 10
and 12 at the Horseshoe Tavern. In
addition, look to see a Montreal date
added to their MySpace page in the
coming month.
Fuchsia Epicerie Fleur offers
dinner and dessert for the
green thumb in all of us
• TOYA GRATTON
Having a meal at Fuchsia is
kind of like going to grandma’s
for dinner—that is, if David
Suzuki were your grandma.
Owner
Binky
Holleran
opened the café with the goal of
combining her two favourite
things: food and flowers.
Everything is made in-house
with seasonal, local ingredients
and accented with edible flowers. The food is always vegetarian and usually gluten-free.
The setting is cozy and
serene,
with
mismatched
chairs, communal tables and
Ella Fitzgerald crooning in the
background. After sitting on
the chair cushions and taking a
look at the menu board, one
feels immediately relaxed and
excited for the culinary adventure to come.
The menu is set daily and
served from lunchtime through
to the evening. It always
includes a beverage of the day,
main course and dessert.
On my visit, the menu is
cheerfully called ‘La Tartiflette!’
and consists of jasmine tea, an
oven-baked potato casserole
with smoked gouda, salad and
strawberries with cream.
First comes the tea, served in
mason jars and teapots and
sweetened (if you like) with the
chunky unrefined sugar that
waits at each table.
The casserole comes next,
perfectly cooked and enhanced
by the smoky gouda. With a
sprinkle of coarse black pepper
and cumin-seed sea salt, the
dish is excellent.
Paired with mixed greens
and an edible flower, the salad
is topped with a delicious, light
vinaigrette. I hesitate to bite
into the flower, but when I do
I’m pleasantly surprised by the
soft, almost buttery flavour it
holds.
Dessert is a subtle, yet
savoury parfait of fresh strawberries covered with whipped
cream and basil syrup.
It was the perfect end to a
perfect meal, but I couldn’t help
but be tempted by another cup
of tea.
Fuchsia Epicerie Fleur is located at 4050 Coloniale, Tuesday and
Wednesday 12-5 p.m., Thursday
and Friday 12-9 p.m. and
Saturday 12-7 p.m. They also sell
many take-home products and
offer
catering
services
at
epiceriefleur.com
20 FRINGE ARTS
The
My, What Big Teeth You Have
DOWN-LOW
Solo act turned band talks EP and taking on more than you can chew
Events listings
Mar.
10-Mar. 16
MUSIC
Greater Minds
With Gabrielle Papillon and open mic
Friday, 8:30 p.m.
Yellow Door
3625 Aylmer Street
Tickets: $8, $5 for students
A.C. Newman
With Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele
Thursday, 8:30 p.m.
Il Motore
179 Jean-Talon Blvd. O.
Tickets: $12
Charles Spearin’s “The Happiness
Project”
With Andrew Whiteman (Apostle of
Hustle)
Friday, 8:30 p.m.
Il Motore
179 Jean-Talon Blvd. O.
Tickets: $18
Edgy Meow Mix
Edgy Women Festival, Opening Party with
performances by DRED: Daring Reality
Every Day (Mildred Gerestant from New
York), Coral Short, Pinkie Special
(NY/Lyon), Miss Saturn (NY), Mimi and
guest DJs
Saturday, 9 p.m.
Eastern Bloc
7420 Clark Street
ART
You’re Too Close: Body Politics, Spatial
Relations
Curated by Sara Lawlor and Robert
Vitulano. This mixed-media show depicts
art concerned with representations of
body politics as it relates to surrounding
space, encompassing themes relating to
sexuality, drugs, race/ethnicity, and public space. You’re Too Close challenges
dominant thought of the normal self.
Today until March 14, vernissage March
12, 5-8 p.m.
Art Mur
5826 St-Hubert Street
Recent Works
Galerie l’Envol presents recent works by
members of l’Association indépendante
de l’art.
Wednesday until April 25
Galerie l’Envol
372 Ste-Catherine Street O. #522
For info (514) 489-0356
FILM
The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni
Riefenstahl
The Goethe Institut presents the last film
in their Carte Blanche to Marie Brassard,
The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni
Riefenstahl by Ray Müller on the controversial but highly talented filmmaker
who made The Triumph of the Will and
Olympia
Thursday and Friday, 7 p.m.
The Goethe Institut
418 Sherbrooke Street E.
—compiled by Joelle Lemieux
• NATASHA YOUNG
“A wise man once told me that a
good song should be able to be
played with just one guy and a guitar,” muses Jonathan Chandler, the
man and voice behind Ottawa’s
Amos the Transparent.
The band’s name, says Chandler,
comes from a musical. But when
asked
which
musical,
the
singer/songwriter will be hard
pressed to give it away. “Some people have gotten it right,” he says,
with playful mystique.
Other than the curious title of the
project, Amos the Transparent isn’t
too difficult to figure out. “I like to
keep the songs kind of minimal so
you can play with the range,” says
Chandler. “It’s good to keep it
straightforward to begin with.”
Chandler began the project solo,
about as simple as a musician can
get. “I was playing with a couple of
other bands, and the music I was
writing didn’t really fit either of
them,” he says, explaining his decision to branch out and begin Amos
spins
Robyn Hayle
Arms Full Of Roses
Independent
Some people have just got it. A voice that grips
you from the first note and imprints itself in
your memory. Montrealer Robyn Hayle has definitely got it, showcasing it beautifully on her
debut album Arms Full of Roses. Tracks are
delivered effortlessly in a voice that is as
smooth as butter. There are some great new
takes on classics like “Look of Love” and
“Can’t Take My Eyes off You.” However, they
are not the stars of this debut gem. As it turns
out, Robyn’s song writing skills are just as
impressive as her voice. A blend of jazz,
cabaret and Broadway tracks like “Crazy
Melody” and the title track “Arms Full of
Roses” are sure to seduce you into a mellow
trance of romanticism. “Tomatoes,” one of my
favourites, takes you on a bluesy country
detour offering up some banjo and fun with
nonsensical lyrics like “I got my red shoes on
and my alligator hat and tomatoes.” Arms Full
Of Roses is a well-rounded collection of 11
strong, wonderfully sung songs—a damn
good debut.
4/5
—Barbara Pavone
The Monster Show
And In Our Final Days
As Archipelago
Independent
Ontario’s The Monster Show delivers a
painfully overdone effort at “originality” in
their album And In Our Final Days As
Archipelago. The album peaks about 45-seconds in, after an impressive instrumental
intro to the first song. Musically, the album
has its moments but they’re overshadowed
the Transparent.
“This wasn’t really supposed to
be a band,” he says. “It was really an
outlet for me to write. I had a lot of
guest musicians come in and play,
but there really wasn’t a band for the
first record.”
Things are different now—
Chandler has picked up a few fine
musicians to supplement his songs.
The full band’s first EP, My, What
Big Teeth You Have, is soon to be
launched and sold at their shows.
“For this EP,” Chandler says,
“[the band] arranged songs with me,
which for me is cool... I’ll still write
the words, and I’ll present the band
with ideas for musical parts, but
whether they keep them or not is
totally up to them. When we made
the first EP, I constantly had an
instrument in front of me. I played
countless different instruments. It’s
kind of nice [having other musicians].”
It seems Amos the Transparent
has taken on too much for one man
to maintain alone. Besides their new
EP, Chandler says, “we started our
by less-than-mediocre vocals. Frequent
“attempts” at falsettos and vibratos don’t
work with the simple, indie feel of the music.
Even the use of many instruments (from dulcimer to accordion, trumpet to violin) can’t
make up for a vocalist who tries way too hard
to sound good at singing.
The lyrics seem corny at best, as if the lyricist
wanted to sound artsy and edgy at the same
time. A perfect example is the sixth track,
“Roadwork,” where the listener is offered
“orange vest, hardhat, tar fumes, aphrodisiac. Josie’s got sweet tits and cutoff shorts.”
What?
Highlight of the album is the bluegrass feel
of “We could Make Dinner at Your Place” with
simple, layered vocals and a banjo in the
background. Overall, this album is too slowpaced to keep me entertained. If soft rock
with a tint of country music sounds appealing, The Monster Show might be worth a listen; a few too many handclaps for my liking.
2/5
—Evan LePage
Psyopus
Odd Senses
Metal Blade Records
Spazzmetaltastic is definitely the keyword
when it comes to Odd Senses, Psyopus’ third
album. The Rochester, New York’s strange
(yet enjoyable) mix of crazy guitar noodling,
drumming in odd time signatures and incoherent yells, yelps and other noises make this
an interesting album containing many
unforeseen twists and turns. Odd Senses is
sort of like Mr. Bungle’s metallic, bastard
child without the vocal talents of Mike
Patton. Yelper/screamer Brian Woodruff does
a fine job, but rarely breaks out to try something beyond his throat-gurgling scream. The
band loves to eschew the standard song
structure, deciding instead to take things on
Onstage, Amos the transparent is anything but.
own label, so it’s totally self-produced.” Their first music video is
due this summer, which, Chandler
lets on, will be a fully animated cartoon.
Chandler and his band have a
busy schedule ahead of them, but he
doesn’t seem to mind. This new venture is “a big departure” from the
first EP, he says, but he’s proud of it.
“I’d rather say, ‘sweet, that worked.
the fly, incorporating abrupt changes in
tempo and style, sometimes resulting in a
messy cacophony of sounds (“Medusa”, “X
and Y”), but sometimes hitting the mark, as
evidenced in the musical peaks and valleys
of “Boogeyman” and the so-annoying-itgets-funny-then-annoying-then-funny-again
vocal sampling contained within album
stand-out “Choker Chain.” The last,
unnamed track is a 20-minute narrative (one
that starts off as a conversation between two
dorky guys at band practice, hoping to get
signed to Metal Blade before going onwards
and upwards) that almost undermines the
rest of the album, but given the band’s odd
sense of humour, it actually kind-of works.
Music to keep you on your toes.
3.75/5
—R. Brian Hastie
The Prodigy
Invaders Must Die
Now, let’s try something new.’”
It’s that drive to create that
promises longevity in the indie rock
world, and Amos the Transparent
isn’t stopping any time soon.
Amos the Transparent will be playing Jupiter Room 3874 St-Laurent
Blvd. with The High Dials, First You
Get the Sugar, and Michou. Tickets
$7 in advance, doors at 8 p.m.
tunes—something
2004’s
Always
Outnumbered, Never Outgunned could not
claim to be.
Where AONO had a bevy of special guests, the
only guest of note on this record is Dave
Grohl, who sits on the stool for two tracks
(“Take Me To The Hospital”, which definitely
sounds like a FOTL out-take and “Stand Up,”
a big beat tune that ends the album),
although his inclusion sounds as if it
could’ve come from a sequencer and some
drum samples. Invaders Must Die is a
marked improvement over AONO, and a definite welcome back into the recording world, a
long-overdue record that hopefully sparks
more like it in the future.
4.5/5
—R. Brian Hastie
Auresia
Auresia
Moonsplash Records
Take Me To The Hospital
Reuniting for the first time (on record, at
least) in a decade, the three members that
made The Prodigy the world’s premier electropunk act throw down and display a more
dance-oriented side that harkens back to the
band’s earlier output, marrying the nascent
sounds found on The Prodigy Experience with
the hardcore edge that made Fat Of The Land
a landmark in hardcore techno. The opening
title track starts off with a shimmering bass
line before kicking into a dance floor stomper
with a one-two kick, as an electronic voice
announces, “invaders must die.” The fun
doesn’t stop there, as second single “Omen”
offers up a high-octane stroll through Techno
Park. The entire album teeters between fullon dance party and Atari Teenage Riot-lite, a
continuation of the sound found on the 2002
stand-alone single “Baby’s Got A Temper.”
The record itself is a cohesive collection of
I must admit that I have never followed the
world of Reggae music and, other than Bob
Marley, could not name a famous artist from
the genre. Reviews of Edmonton-born
Auresia, rave about the debut’s ingenuity and
I approached it with high expectations—
maybe too high. The beats are catchy and
strong but the vocals fall short, with the tendency to become overly high pitched and at
times shaky, making for uncomfortable listening especially on ¨Nice Day¨ and “Jah Make
It Right.” What’s more, they often seem separated from the melodies. On “Hot Spot” and
“Give a Little Time” there are occasions
where it sounds as if she missed her cue and
wants to catch up. While “(Nearly) Genuine
Smile” is well written and witty, tracks like
“Jah Goddess” seem repetitive and uninspired.
2/5
—Barbara Pavone
SPORTS 21
THE LINK • MARCH 10, 2009 • THELINKNEWSPAPER.CA/SPORTS
McGill wins battle of Montreal
Concordia women’s hockey team cannot match
McGill’s speed, skill and stamina in best-of-three semi-final playoff games
• JOHNNY NORTH
The powerplay led the way for
the undefeated defending champions McGill Martlets as they
easily defeated the Concordia
Stingers women’s hockey team in
their first round playoff series.
Concordia 2
McGill 11
In game one last Wednesday
at McGill’s McConnell Arena,
Concordia got their only lead
against McGill this season a little
over three minutes in—Stingers
rearguard Catherine Desjardins
scored on the powerplay.
However, four straight goals
by McGill quickly ended any
hopes of Con U pulling off an
upset. Rookie forward Mallory
Lawton, daughter of Stingers
head coach Les Lawton, was able
to score late in the first period to
make it 4-2.
Ann-Sophie Bettez and MarieAndrée Leclerc-Auger of McGill
both registered hat-tricks in the
rout.
Concordia 1
McGill 4
In their 28th consecutive victory, McGill was far from a dominant
powerhouse, but their powerplay
went three-for-eight in a 4-1 win at
Concordia’s Ed Meagher Arena last
Friday.
McGill scored once when
Stingers forwards Devon Rich and
Keely Covo both went to the penalty box for high-sticking around the
five-minute mark of the first period. McGill’s Vanessa Davidson
scored when she tipped a point
shot past Stingers goalie Audrey
Doyon-Lessard.
“I saw it was tipped, but I was a
little too deep into my net,” said
Doyon-Lessard.
“Their powerplay is almost
unstoppable,” said coach Lawton.
Despite the goal, McGill could
have been up by more if it wasn’t
for Doyon-Lessard making countless saves and McGill missing several opportunities close to the
Stingers net. McGill looked like
they scored late in the first period,
but the puck was kicked in and the
goal waved off.
“Our attention to detail was off,”
admits Peter Smith, head coach of
the Martlets. “There was no sense
of urgency in the first period.”
“Their weakness is they don’t
always read their passes,”
said Doyon-Lessard. “They just
want the perfect play. I chipped
some passes, but they missed a
lot of chances.”
“We have a number of young
players with a lot of pride going
through some growing pains.”
—Les Lawton,
Con U women’s hockey head coach
Stingers forward Donna Ringrose tries to fight way out of corner.
McGill’s Alessandra LindKenny received a pass right in
front of Doyon-Lessard on the
powerplay to put McGill up 2-0 a
few minutes into the second period.
A little more than three minutes
later, the persistence of Con U’s
offence paid off on the powerplay—a point shot was saved by
McGill goalie Charline Labonte,
but the rebound went right to
Stingers forward Donna Ringrose.
Ringrose, while falling, put the
puck past a sprawling Labonte.
“I didn’t want to give them the
shutout,” said coach Lawton. “I
didn’t want to give them that satis-
faction. I’m sure Charline was
pissed.”
A three-on-one opportunity
and another wild scramble in front
of Doyon-Lessard a few minutes
later quickly put an end to
Concordia’s attempted comeback.
Facing a 4-1 deficit, the Stingers
were not able to generate enough
chances to put themselves back on
track.
“We made some costly
turnovers and some poor passes,”
said coach Lawton. “It has a lot to
do with the youth of our team. We
have a small roster and I think
some teams take us for granted.”
Despite the slow start McGill
wasn’t too concerned of sweeping the series as they outshot Con
U 38-19.
“I would be concerned if we
didn’t have the opportunities,
but we did,” said Smith.
Concordia ended the season
with a 3-13-2 record, finishing
fourth in their division. “We didn’t get the results in our league,”
said coach Lawton. “We played a
really tough division, with really
tight games. Because of our lack
of experience sometimes it’s better to lose before you win.”
The Stingers will be looking to
build up their size and talent
next year with the addition of
Erin Lally, a former captain of
her women’s midget AAA club in
Calgary and Emilie Bocchia, a
top ten scorer with Dawson
College. The majority of the team
are expected to return next year.
“We have a number of young
players with a lot of pride going
through some growing pains,”
said coach Lawton.
Coach Lawton expects DoyonLessard to have a big year next
year, as she will be looking to
make the most of her last season.
“I think we’re going to be better,” said Doyon-Lessard. “It’s
going to be a new team, it’s going
to be different.”
22 SPORTS
Concordia point guard and Quebec player of the year Damian Buckley navigates his way through UQAM defence.
On the way to Ottawa
Stingers survive early barrage, advance to national championships
• DIEGO PELAEZ GAETZ
Concordia 79
UQAM 76
Concordia’s men’s basketball
team rebounded from a poor start
with a thrilling comeback to keep
their dream season alive in a hardfought 79-76 defeat over the
UQAM Citadins in the QSSF final
at the Loyola Sports Complex on
Thursday night.
The favoured Stingers came out
of the gate flat despite a raucous
sold-out home crowd. Despite
having eight rookies on the roster,
UQAM wasn’t intimidated playing
in a hostile environment. Citadins
forward Souleymane Diagne’s
three-pointer pushed their lead to
18-7 and forced the flustered
Stingers to call a timeout.
Stingers star guard and QSSF
player of the year Damian Buckley
managed to keep the Stingers
close for the rest of the half, knifing through the defence and either
finishing or drawing the foul.
However, the young Citadins
would not back down, as guard
Adil El-Makssoud continually
used his size advantage over Con
U’s guards to get easy shots near
“Five years of hard work… are you gonna let that
go down the drain, or are you gonna step up and
make something happen?”
—Jamal Gallier,
Stingers centre
the basket to guide UQAM to a
ten-point halftime lead. ElMakssoud finished with 17 points
and five rebounds.
Despite the deficit, Con U’s veteran leaders were up to the task of
keeping the team focused. “I told
the guys that we weren’t losing
this game, that this wouldn’t be
my last game,” said Stingers guard
and spiritual leader Dwayne
Buckley.
Senior centre Jamal Gallier had
a similar message; “Five years of
hard work… are you gonna let that
go down the drain, or are you
gonna step up and make something happen?”
Stingers coach John Dore was
less animated in his address to the
team. “I just told the guys we have
lots of time left, let’s get some
stops on D,” said Dore. “They shot
55% in the first half, which is
unusually high. They had a good
half, we didn’t.”
The Stingers responded right
away to the challenge when the
teams took the floor for the second
half. Con U rookie forward Evens
Laroche came out like a man possessed, using his athleticism and
energy to create havoc offensively.
“We weren’t tough enough
early on,” said Laroche. “Coach
always tells us toughness wins
games. It’s about working harder,
and we went out and did that.”
Laroche scored inside and out,
using his incredible leaping ability
to finish inside, and his soft outside touch to punish UQAM for
backing too far off of him. He finished with a team-high 28 points
and six rebounds while shooting
an incredible 11 of 12 from the
floor.
Diagne tried his best to stem
the bleeding for the Citadins, but
he couldn’t prevent the Stingers
from coming all the way back to
tie the game with just over three
minutes left in the third quarter.
“We came out a bit flat in the second half,” said Diagne, who led
UQAM with 30 points. “[Laroche,
#]23 was the difference for them,
he came out and got a lot of
rebounds and just played with
more energy than us.”
The final quarter turned into an
absolute dogfight, as the lead
changed hands on what felt like
every possession.
“The biggest thing for us was
our veteran leadership,” said
Damian. “Even when we were
down ten, I knew in my heart that
we were going to nationals.”
Damian seemed to be at the
centre of every play for the
Stingers in the fourth quarter. He
started with a well-placed alleyoop to Laroche to start the frame,
and continued to lead the team
with his unselfish play and incredible passing ability. He finished
the game with a double-double of
21 points and 11 assists.
“I told him he should be player
of the year nationally,” said UQAM
coach Olga Hrycak after the game.
“He took leadership of the team
and showed them the way.”
Despite Damian’s heroics, the
game was up for grabs with under
a minute remaining. Up by one
point, centre Jamal Gallier
missed a shot from in close, only
to have Laroche barrel in for the
rebound and get fouled in the
process. Laroche hit both free
throws to ice the victory with
under five seconds remaining.
“Evens seemed to take [the
early deficit] personally, which is
nice to see,” said Hrycak. “The
experience that Damian brings,
that Dwayne brings, that Jamal
brings… Evens fed off that. We
were often playing with four
rookies on the floor, so we didn’t
have that [experience.]”
“The older guys here have
helped me a lot to mature and I
thank them for that,” said
Laroche after the game, fresh
from parading around the floor
with the provincial championship
banner slung over his back like a
cape.
For the seniors on the team,
this is their last chance to accomplish something special with a
special group of players. “We’ve
gotta refocus now,” said Dwayne.
“If we do what we do, we can take
home the big prize.”
SPORTS 23
Wrestlers capture
third-place at Nationals
Zilbermans blame wrestling politics for costing former Olympian gold
at World Championships
• JOHNNY NORTH
Rookie
wrestler
David
Tremblay dominated his competition en route to a gold medal performance two weeks ago at the
Canadian Interuniversity Sport
Wrestling Championships held in
Calgary, Alberta.
In the final 61 kilos category
match, Tremblay, a Leisure
Science student, outscored his
opponent Raj Virdi, a 2006 gold
medallist from Simon Fraser
University, by a score of 6-1.
Tremblay was named the outstanding male competitor of the
tournament, the first time a
Stinger has won the award since
1996. He also had to defeat CJ
Hudson, the defending 2008
champion from Brock University,
in the preliminaries.
The Concordia men’s team
ended the two-day championship
tourney with 56 points, two behind
Brock and 24 points behind Simon
Fraser.
In the 90 kilos category, Alex
Dyas, a second-year Leisure
Science student, won the gold
medal in his category. In his final
days with Con U, Steve Rennalls, a
fifth-year Master of Science
Administration student, captured
the silver medal in the 68 kilos category.
Con U’s Olympian David
Zilberman won the bronze medal
in the 130 kilos class. He came in
with an injured left pectoral and it
was the first time he has competed
in university wrestling in two
years.
“I’m a little disappointed with
the third-place finish,” said
Zilberman. “There was something
that happened that was out of my
control. I don’t understand what
happened.”
Zilberman won the match
against Arjan Bhullar from
Simon Fraser originally, but it
was protested and the decision
was reversed.
“I don’t truly understand why
he won the match,” said
Zilberman. “According to the rules
I won the match, but there’s politics involved and the call was
reversed.”
Simon Fraser officials believed
the winning point Zilberman
scored where he pushed his opponent out of the wrestling mat
shouldn’t have been scored.
“The head referee said if it was
international rules that David
would have won,” said Victor
Zilberman, head coach of the
Stingers and David’s father. “It’s
all politics.”
Coach Zilberman believes his
son will learn not to leave his
matches in the officials’ hands.
“He’s capable of doing better, but
he had a severe injury before the
Olympics and he wrestled [in a
higher] weight class.”
On the women’s side, Nikita
Chicoine, a second-year Athletic
Therapy student, took home the 67
kilos bronze medal.
Filling a roster was difficult for
the Stingers. They can barely fill
up the minimum roster requirement of 10 active wrestlers when
everyone is healthy and passing
their courses.
“It’s one person out and that’s
it [out of the tournament],” said
coach Zilberman. “We have top
individuals, world-class athletes,
but the numbers have been a problem.”
Next year, coach Zilberman
isn’t confident about who will
show up to compete for the men’s
and women’s wrestling teams. He
believes times have changed since
he first started with Concordia in
the ‘80s.
“I used to be able to predict how
things would go, but athletes and
the league have changed,” said
coach Zilberman. “It’s impossible
to predict. There’s too much politics in this sport.”
scoreboard
Away
Home
Men’s Basketball
Women’s Hockey
Concordia 79
VS
UQAM 76
McGill 11
Concordia 1
VS
Concordia 2
McGill 4
VS
“According to the
rules I won the match,
but there’s politics
involved and the call
was reversed.”
—David Zilberman,
Concordia wrestler
Wrestling coach Victor Zilberman imparts some advice to his son, David Zilberman, during training.
Record
12-4-0
3-13-0
PHOTO DAN PLOUFFE
schedule
Who
Men’s Basketball
VS.
Calgary
When
Friday, 12:30 p.m.
Nationals
thelinknewspaper.ca
24 OPINIONS
THE LINK • MARCH 10, 2009 • THELINKNEWSPAPER.CA/OPINIONS
York is burning
Concordia takes notice as a mob of students surround Hillel’s office
• MITCH SOHMER
On Feb. 11, 2009, months of tension between Hillel and
the York Federation of Students exploded in a shocking display of racial intolerance and hooliganism that saw Jewish
students barricade themselves in their office to escape a
rowdy mob.
Leading up to the events of Feb. 11, Jewish students at
York University had been uncomfortable on their own campus.
For four years, Students Against Israeli Apartheid had
been extremely active at York. Graphic displays demonizing Israel as a Nazi regime, with flags of Israel emblazoned
with swastikas were erected on a regular basis. Some of
those graphics featured the names and photographs of
Jewish York students who had voiced their objection to the
exhibitions.
Many students claim they have been afraid to openly
identify themselves as Jewish. Thanks to SAIA, York is a
campus where wearing a Star of David or a yarmulke often
leads to dirty looks and harassment.
Because of the York student government’s overwhelming
support of SAIA’s harmful campaign and targeting of
Jewish students, Hillel had to intervene. It is clear to me
that the YFS was not interested in representing the Jewish
student body or in maintaining a safe learning environment
on campus.
When he opened the door,
he was bombarded with cries of
“dirty Jew,” “fucking Jew” and
“die bitch, go back to Israel.”
Hillel began to organize a recall of the YFS.
By Feb. 11, Hillel students at York had collected the
5,000 signatures required to force a recall election. The YFS
argued that the recall signatures were gathered due to the
student government’s public criticism of Israel and its military incursion into Gaza. But York Hillel President Dan
Ferman countered, “this campaign was about making student government accountable.”
Hillel held a public press conference to announce the
petition. With over 40 people cramming into the 30-person
room, the organizers had to turn people away. When YFS
supporters showed up and were denied access to the room
they began to chant, “let us in, let us in.”
After only a few minutes, the shouting outside the room
grew so disruptive that the “Drop YFS” students cancelled
the press conference, gathered their belongings, and headed
back to the Hillel office. A 100-strong pro-YFS crowd followed in pursuit. The “Drop YFS” campaign hurried into
their small room and locked the door behind them. As they
hid in their office, the angry buzz outside intensified into a
furious roar.
Inside Hillel’s office, Jewish and non-Jewish students
paced the room. Students leaned forward on the edge of
their chairs, stunned at the wild scene that was erupting just
outside the door. Most were terrified. The chants of
“Zionism is racism” and “shame on Hillel” grew louder. The
rage outside the door boiled into a fever pitch. At least one
cry of “let’s break the glass and drag them out” was heard.
Ferman decided to face the crowd. When he opened the
door, he was bombarded with cries of “dirty Jew,” “fucking
Jew” and “die bitch, go back to Israel.” Ferman ducked
back inside and the police were called.
Under a police escort, the students left their office in single-file with their heads down, surrounded by a jeering mob.
In 2002, Concordia’s Jewish students were given similar
treatment when Hillel invited Israeli PM Benjamin
Netanyahu to speak on campus. Jews who tried to attend
the event were bullied by a massive mob of students and had
their kippahs pulled off their heads and thrown to the
ground. Others were spat on or shouted down as they
draped themselves in Israeli flags and sang Hebrew songs.
The demonization of Israel and the targeting of those
who support it had manifested itself in acts of intimidation,
hatred and vandalism. At a school with a tremendous
amount of history, this was one of Concordia’s darkest days.
In 2009, the mindless Israel-bashing continues. Over
the past several days, Concordians have been subjected to
another round of the so-called Israel Apartheid Week. This
year’s version at Concordia has been surprisingly low-key
and insignificant, with a few minor events and an absurdly
one-sided display on the seventh floor.
Despite the relative quiet at Concordia, the incident at
York should remind us that unabashed hate-speech about
Israel cannot go unaddressed.
“Isreali Apartheid Week goes beyond reasonable criticism into demonization. It leaves Jewish and Israeli students wary of expressing their opinions, for fear of intimidation.” This came not from a Jewish leader or Hillel member,
but Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff.
Freedom of speech and healthy debate are the cornerstones of any vibrant university campus. With that openness
comes the responsibility to avoid preaching hatred and
inciting violence. This is a reality that those at York and
Concordia who mindlessly blame Israel for all the woes of
the Middle East must understand.
Freedom of speech as a principle was not meant to legitimize the silly ranting of the wilfully ignorant.
“Isreali Apartheid Week goes beyond
reasonable criticism into demonization.
It leaves Jewish and Israeli students
wary of expressing their opinions,
for fear of intimidation.”
—Michael Ignatieff
Criticism of Israel is not inherently anti-Semitic. Too
often though, the so-called “criticism” is so absolute, so constant and so damning that it sends Jewish students who
might otherwise disagree with some Israel policy into survival mode, making a healthy dialogue on the issue nearly
impossible.
As we have learned at York, if the Jewish state is exclusively, disproportionately, and maliciously singled out on a
constant basis, a calm campus environment can quickly
descend into a mire of hatred and intolerance.
Concordia’s more fervent detractors of Israel and those
who are charged with monitoring them would be wise to
learn from the lessons of York. The time has come for them
to consider the potential consequences of their inflammatory actions, and to reflect on whether their efforts, as they are
currently fashioned, do more harm than good.
OPINIONS 25
The STM’s OPUS card
is unsafe and unsound
One cent of aluminium foils the $217 million OPUS system
One penny can keep identity tHieves from making away with your personal information and where you have been on the island of Montreal.
• GINGER COONS
Here’s an experiment: take your OPUS
card, take some aluminium foil and wrap the
foil around your OPUS card covering it completely. Now, find a metro turnstile and try
swiping your OPUS card. What happens?
Absolutely nothing.
An OPUS card wrapped in aluminium foil
is completely useless and unreadable.
Your OPUS card has a special component
called a Radio Frequency Identification tag.
That means that there is an integrated circuit
and antenna inside every OPUS card—and in
the wallets or pockets of nearly every student
in this city.
RFID tags are used to transmit information through the air using radio waves. The
OPUS card uses a passive tag, meaning that
your metro card doesn’t transmit on its own
but replies to signals emanating from RFID
readers—the turnstile you pass through in
the metro station.
RFID tags have a lot of uses: they track
inventory, livestock and people; they are also
used to time races more accurately, store
personal information on passports and even
bill users of toll highways. Whenever you
wave a card to get through a locked door,
that’s RFID in action. The same goes for contactless credit cards.
As the price of RFID technology has gone
down, their adoption has skyrocketed.
Mifare
What we call the OPUS card is actually
based on the Mifare chip. Sold by the Dutch
company NXP Semiconductors, Mifare is the
most widely used contactless smart card in the
world—over one billion Mifare cards exist.
There exists one major problem with
Mifare. The most widely adopted version,
Mifare Classic, isn’t safe. It was cracked in
March 2008 by a team of Dutch researchers at
Radboud University Nijmegen—it was
cracked even before the Société de transport
de Montréal decided to buy it.
A hobbyist with about $100,
an internet connection, and a
little technical knowledge can
collect and decipher the data
kept on Mifare Classic cards.
After the researchers broke the encryption
on the chips, they brought an RFID reader to
a subway station and began to read data from
the cards kept in the pockets of transit users.
The researchers went on to publish a paper on
the subject. You can read it on their website.
Now, a hobbyist with about $100, an internet connection, and a little technical knowledge can collect and decipher the data kept on
Mifare Classic cards.
Mifare Classic chips can be hacked,
cracked and cloned.
A hack to not pay fare for the Charlie Card
in Boston was published by a group of MIT
students. For a class project, the students
identified several security problems in the
Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority
smartcard system. The vulnerabilities they
documented were accompanied by instructions for cloning and overwriting Charlie
Cards.
Lessons from London
One of the most well documented uses
of Mifare chips is the Oyster card in
London, England. It’s a case of security
gone wrong. The Oyster card used on
London’s transit system works like OPUS,
but with more sophistication. Oyster
cards can be charged online, over the
phone, in machines or in ticket offices.
They’re swiped on the way into the
Underground, but unlike Montreal they
are also swiped on the way out. That’s
important. It means that Transit for
London, the organization controlling
Oyster cards, knows where a given customer has come from and gone to, as well
as their name and personal information.
That data is stored for eight weeks.
It gets worse. Over the course of two
years, TfL received 436 requests from
police for information on people’s movements in the system. Of those requests,
409 were granted, with no warrant
required.
Oyster cards are also based on the
Mifare chip.
Why OPUS?
The STM has spent $217 million implementing the OPUS card. OPUS is currently used on STM buses, subways, AMT
trains and Laval, Longueuil and Quebec
City’s transit system. By July 1, 2008,
16,490 OPUS cards were in use in
Montreal’s system—a shadow of the 219
million who use the system annually.
The OPUS card is meant to save the
STM $20 million dollars a year by preventing fraud. If it works as planned, the
system’s cost could be recouped in 11
years.
Does the OPUS card prevent fraud?
Let’s just say that on my way to school
today, I watched three teenage boys jump
the turnstiles without attracting the attention of the STM agent on duty.
Why aluminium foil?
For as little as a $100 and with readily
available materials, it’s possible to build an
RFID reader. That may not seem like a problem to regular users of the OPUS card, used
to pressing it against the turnstile. If all
RFID readers were as weak as the ones
owned by the STM, potential identity thieves
would have to get pretty cosy with their victims.
There’s a problem with that assumption.
Not all RFID readers are as weak as the ones
in metro stations. A good reader can read an
RFID tag from 10 metres away.
Different RFID tags work on different frequencies. OPUS cards have high frequency
RFID tags. They use radio frequencies
between three and 30 MHz. These frequencies become very difficult to read when
they’re shielded by metal. By wrapping your
OPUS card in aluminium foil, you prevent
RFID readers from querying it. The radio
waves just don’t make it through.
Should you really wrap your OPUS card in
aluminium foil? It’s a little impractical.
You’d need to unwrap it every time you
wanted to use the metro. That’s a personal
decision.
Should you be worried? Maybe. We don’t
yet know how much information the STM
keeps about ride history and personal
details. We don’t know whether that information is stored on your card or in a central
database—and that’s the problem. Until we
know more about what the STM is doing to
protect its users, it’s worth being cautious
and vocal.
Until I know just what they’ve got on me,
I will refuse to buy an OPUS card and will
pay more for an adult magnetic swipe card.
Too much is at stake.
26 OPINIONS
Green
space
WANTED: Heroes.
Billions of positions available.
• BETTINA GRASSMANN
In 2002, I followed courageous activists to a small town in India to protest
a large-scale hydro dam on the Narmada River. The dam was threatening the
environment and lifestyles of tribal Indians in Maharashtra and Madhya
Pradesh.
We wandered about the town, raising awareness and recruiting protesters.
While I was trying—unsuccessfully—to make chapattis, the press showed
up. They interviewed the activists, who spoke extensively about the issues.
But the article that appeared in the paper the next day had less to say about
the protest than it did about a white girl making crippled chapattis.
I was annoyed that the reporter had such a poor sense of priorities.
I could speak almost no Marathi, the local language, and didn’t have much
to contribute to the campaign. Then I realized that my presence attracted
locals to the protest. As I listened to one of the activists deliver a rousing
speech in words I couldn’t understand, I started realizing something important about the human psyche.
People don’t rally around issues. Issues are abstract. People rally around
people. So I am not going to talk about environmental issues, I am going to
talk about people, specifically about women.
Medha Patkar
The orator I mentioned earlier was Medha Patkar, who founded Narmada
Bachao Andolan, an organization that protested the Narmada dam. Patkar
opposed the dam through hunger-strikes, sit-ins and other non-violent methods.
Although Patkar was unsuccessful, her efforts became the impetus behind
several renewable energy projects in the area. These included solar energy,
lights powered by stationary bicycles and a low impact micro-hydro dam—
all designed to provide electricity to villagers.
Sheila Watt-Cloutier
When a CBC interviewer referred to the arctic as “inhospitable,” Sheila
Watt-Cloutier replied that it was “nurturing.” Watt-Cloutier was not being
metaphorical. As an Inuit growing up in Kuujjuaq, Quebec, she knows intimately how dependent her people are on their climate.
Over the years, Watt-Cloutier has watched glaciers, polar bears and caribou
disappear as a result of climate change. She knows that global warming may
very well displace the Inuit and melt away their hunting culture. From 2002 to
2006, Watt-Cloutier was the chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, a federation of Native nations in Canada, Greenland, Russia and the U.S.
In 2005, following the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, she filed a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, stating that
human-induced climate change violated Inuit cultural and environmental
human rights.
Claire Morissette
Hers may not be a household name, but if you’ve ever cycled in downtown
Montreal, you’ve probably seen the name—the de Maisonneuve Blvd bicycle
path is named after this influential cycling advocate.
Thirty years ago, Morissette founded the cycling lobby organization, Le
Monde à bicyclette, with “Bicycle Bob” Silverman. The group staged the first
“Die-in” to raise awareness about bicycle accidents. To this day, activists
organize the same event, scattering mangled bicycles and cyclists covered in
ketchup across the streets of Montreal.
It is largely thanks to Morissette that we can bring bikes onto the metro.
Silverman and Morissette protested the no-bicycle rule by cramming into
metro trains with everything from ladders to canoes to cardboard elephants.
Morissette was also instrumental in bringing the car-sharing organization
Communauto to Montreal. In 1999, she founded Cyclo Nord-Sud, a non-profit organization that has collected over 23,000 bicycles and sent them to the
developing world.
If environmental action is ever to transform from a trickle to a tidal wave,
then it is to inspiring, charismatic leaders like these that we must turn.
These women were not just environmental activists, but they were also
social justice activists. This should not surprise us. Environmental issues are
human issues. This may seem like a formidable task, and it is. But these
women have shown us how much someone can accomplish with no more
than a discerning mind, an outspoken voice—and passion.
Letters @thelink.concordia.ca
_______ for president
Today, after an excellent People’s Potato lunch, I was talking
to an MBA student as a woman approached us. She said she
was collecting signatures for someone and that it was just for
nomination purposes and “you did not have to vote for them.”
She mentioned she had to collect extra signatures as some
students had not put their IDs on the nomination paper and so
they would not be counted. I said I was an independent student
and some nominations I am eligible to sign and others I am not.
She said I could sign this.
As I went to sign I noticed there was no name on the nomination paper. When I pointed this out to her she again repeated you
do not have to vote for this person as it is just for nomination
purposes. I said I could not sign something without a name on
it. For a number of minutes the graduate student and I discussed this matter and I told him, “in all my years of signing
petitions for causes or for people I had never seen a blank nomination paper.”
I went to the CSU office to see if the returning officer was in.
The receptionist said the person was not but she would tell the
returning officer.
David S. Rovins,
—Independent
The Link’s letters and opinions policy: The deadline for letters is 4 p.m.
on Friday before the issue prints. The Link reserves the right to verify
your identity via telephone or email. We reserve the right to refuse letters that are libelous, sexist, homophobic, racist or xenophobic. The
limit is 400 words. If your letter is longer, it won’t appear in the paper.
Please include your full name, weekend phone number, student ID number and program of study. The comments in the letters and opinions
section do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial board.
COMIC SINBAD RICARDSON
Do we actually need university?
My education has become an essential bullet point on my
resume rather than a heartfelt commitment to higher learning
• MALLORY RICHARD,
THE MANITOBAN
(UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA)
WINNIPEG (CUP) – Since when
do institutions devoted to the pursuit
of knowledge advertise on buses?
My university is not alone in this
trend.
The problem is Canada-wide.
Universities have grown so large that
they resemble businesses that dispense
a service to an ever-growing client base
instead of havens for students who
appreciate the inherent value of knowledge.
Many students attend university
because, like young people everywhere
in Canada, they harbour the impression they would not find success by any
other path.
As Mark Kingwell, a professor of
philosophy at the University Toronto,
noted: “Students go [to university]
because their peers do, or because it’s
the logical extension of high school, or
because their parents did. They go
because there is the prospect of a lively
social life, with plenty of beer, chat,
and sex. They go, most often, because
they believe it is the best route to better financial prospects in life.”
The last point is particularly
poignant. As an arts student, I
encounter countless engineering students who feel compelled to justify
their choice of major by conveying
their disbelief that I have chosen to
study something which, by their standards, has no real prospect of making
me wealthy.
The popular misconception that a
university education is something
everyone needs, whether they enjoy
and learn from it or not, leads to a dispassionate student body with an indifferent approach to their coursework.
Have we forgotten that
reading, travel,
socialization and poverty
were once available
outside of the university
experience?
To illustrate how our institution has
become an expensive holding tank for
young people twiddling their thumbs
while waiting to enter the so-called real
world, I beg you to consider what
attending university used to mean.
Though they received no accreditation for doing so, hundreds of students
at the Collège de France used to attend
Michel Foucault’s lectures, keeping
such thorough notes and cassettes that
scholars were able to re-create the lectures in book form decades later.
This is especially impressive considering I have it on good authority that
Foucault did not post Power Point presentations on WebCT.
Perhaps student issues would be
championed more zealously if students
viewed their universities as worthwhile
institutions whose integrity must be
maintained for future generations.
Instead, they are often conceived of
as degree mills where students put in
their four to seven years before gaining
the qualifications necessary for moving
on to the next stage of life.
Kingwell suggests universities are
propagating this characterization of
their function, encouraging prospective students to believe that their service is as essential as groceries and
housing—indeed, the three form a
triad bent on keeping down my
account balance—and that the intelligent consumer will demand more
choice, quality, and prospects.
But why is it a given that we need to
consume post-secondary education? If
we can’t relish the prospect of discovery, encountering new ideas and making our own contributions to the larger
body of knowledge, are the financial
costs and all-nighters worth it?
Have we forgotten that reading,
travel, socialization, and poverty were
once available outside of the university
experience?
What’s wrong with the university
system is that it has become so big that
it has turned learning into a product
that you can put a price on, and too
many of us are paying that price for a
product we may not even want.
Canadian universities want to
give you more, but more of what?
And are you sure this is the only way
of getting it?
OPINIONS 27
crswrdpzzlol
editorial
Why we can’t vote online ConU
THE BROMANCE EDITION • R. “I LOVE YA, MAN” HASTIE & BRUNO “I LOVE YOU TOO, BRO” DE ROSA
ACROSS
3. Place where bros can enjoy watching two
teams playing a game, also an excuse to drink
surprising amounts of booze and walk around
with your belt undone
6. The finest of liquors, meant to be consumed
during a peaceful night out with your best bro.
Also a variety of adhesive tape
10. Restaurant where large slabs of expensive
meat are served. Take your bro here if you want
to display a serious commitment to friendship
12. Best form of shelter when rain strikes, just
make sure it isn’t inhabited by a bear. The place
for bro encounters at the dawn of man
14. Spinning rims and revving motors can be
done here, considered to be the prime spot for
showing off cars and drinking hooch
15. Unlike baseball, this sport wants as many
strikes as possible and occasionally more splits
than a typical acrobatics display. One can reenact scenes from The Big Lebowski if so
desired
18. If the lawnmower isn’t moving, it needs to be
hammered. If the faucet isn’t working, it needs
to be replaced. It’s all a bromantic job
20. Even lost in the middle of “scarytown,” you
and your bros don’t want to ask for these
21. Useful farming vehicle, or the way to beat all
your bros in a game of vehicular tug of war
22. This man has arms the size of most men’s
legs. Green paint for so long will do that to a
man. Still considered one of the ultimate bros
23. The preferred pre-electricity mode of longdistance bro communication
24. These are the activities that bros engage in.
Like regular dates, but more manly
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issue 24
solutionz
ingest. Most bros choose something alcohol
related
C H A R A D E S
H
13. Aerial bro greeting, must be one-handed
O
U
H
14. No bro was born with washboard abs and
P I C T I O N A R Y
N
E
K
G
A
toned thighs. Go to the gym and do this until
B
E U C H R E
D
you look and feel like a superhero. Also, the
A
E
Y
B
L A N P A R T Y
P I N T H E T A I L
title of a movie by a certain state governator
D
L
W
T
U
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16. Handshakes? Fine. Hugs? That’s okay too,
L
I
U
N
D
at times. Placing your hands all over a bro’s
D U N G E O N S A N D D R A G O N S
O
U
T
Y
R
back to help with relaxing? That’s going to
T
E
M
Y
lead to questions
E D W A R D F O R T Y H A N D S
A
N
I
17. With this mode of communication, you can
N
R
O
P
play your favourite sportscast in the backO
P
P I N A T A
ground and pretend to bro talking bro
I N T E R V E N T I O N
O
H
L
R I S K
19. The non-aerial bro greeting. Fellow
I
P A R T Y
bystanders will believe you are attempting to
N
G R A V E Y A R D
punch one another, leading to a stalemate
with knuckles touching. But you and your bro
* solve the crswrdpzzlol and tickets to Ilove you, man. email
know what you are doing
[email protected] for more info.
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DOWN
1. It’s like smoking five cigarettes at once
2. Beard, ‘stache, goatee. As long as it’s on your
face, it’ll make you look tough
4. A place to bring your bro to “relax,” especially before his wedding
5. They’re like normal cars, but with “monster”
chassis and with bigger wheels… and they can
crush other cars
7. Wild animals are the targets. Extreme mode
does not lead to extra points. It just leads to
breaking the law
8. Modern lumberjack’s weapon of choice, or the
most awesome instrument to duel your bro
11. What you do to any liquid that you wish to
6
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12
The 1980s were a bad time for universities in Quebec, and if a report from
the Future Options Group at McGill
was right, it was only going to get worse.
Released the same week as Quebec
education minister Claude Ryan’s
announcement of a 10 to 12 per cent
increase in tuition, the 1986 report by
20 professors at McGill painted a bleak
picture of the university system 20
years later, in 2006:
“At this private, or semi-private
institution tuition fees will range from
$10,000 to $15,000, ‘A’ grades will be
rare and the sons and daughters of
alumni will get special attention for
admissions,” the report continued. “At
this university of the future, undergraduate students will prepare for life with
joint degrees in the arts and in science.”
The report was “harkening back to
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THIS WEEK IN HISTORY
“Education lost in fog”
9
7
MARCH 7, 1986
principals and practices of the good old
university days before the 1960s,”
wrote The Link reporter, Catherine
Bainbridge.
McGill professor Storrs McCall was
on the FOG committee at McGill, “[this
report] was released to save the university before its present state of mediocrity sets in for good,” McCall said.
The FOG report called for a 100 per
cent increase in tuition so that universities could be financially independent of
the government.
“It really comes down to dollars and
cents,” McCall told The Link, arguing
that a preferential system for alumni
would also result in much more generous financial support.
McCall made reference to the notorious Indian Civil Service exams of the
late 19th century to explain the need for
joint degrees in the arts and science.
Written by Cambridge and Oxford
graduates, the ICS exams required a
Thanks to technology, students can avoid long lines and
manage their academic lives, even under the pressure of difficult schedules. They can also register for classes, buy
books, pay student fees and take courses without leaving the
comfort of their homes.
With the Concordia Student Union electoral season upon
us, the argument could be made to extend this digital convenience to student elections.
This would be sorely needed.
Only 11 per cent of Concordia undergraduate students
voted in last year’s election, a turnout the CSU executive
proudly proclaimed as “high.”
With only an 11 per cent participation rate, the state of
democracy at our school is dismal.
When other Canadian schools like the University of
Ottawa—a school with nearly as many students as
Concordia—have moved their elections online, they have
seen turnout records shattered. The University of Victoria
has even seen campaigning go paper-free, by moving to the
web in an effort to become more sustainable.
The unfortunate truth, however, is that this is a bad idea
for Concordia. In the past few weeks alone, CSU councillors’
email accounts have been hacked and sensitive documents
have been leaked.
During one of the two Council meetings held on March 5,
a motion was passed to “rectify weakness within the electoral process,” adding additional security for the transportation and tallying of ballots.
We need to see more than one consecutive year of student
politics that isn’t riddled with backdoor dealings, shady
coalitions and broken promises of transparency before we
can enjoy the convenience of e-voting. Until then, three days
with limited hours and high voter apathy is all that
Concordia students will, and can, get at the polling booth.
Sebastien Cadieux,
—Editor-in-chief
deep knowledge of the literary and visual arts as well as an exceptional grasp of
all the sciences to pass.
The proper school for the 21st
century was, according to the FOG,
based on the dying traditions of the
British Empire’s colonialism nearly
200 years earlier.
Mayor Tremblay is an idiot
For the past two years the Société de transport de
Montreal seemed to be turning itself around: service is
increasing, broken escalators are being replaced and new
STM chief Michel Labrecque—a metro riding, public transit
expert—is a breath of fresh air.
That was until March 4 and Mayor Tremblay’s newest
attempt to balance the city’s books.
Now $40 million is gone from the STM’s budget—in what
seems like a move motivated more by panic than actual
planning—and the city’s entire public transit system has
been thrown into doubt.
With four per cent of its budget gone, the STM is now in
an impossible situation: with all its money allocated, the
transit system must cut four per cent of its spending without
increasing fares, decreasing service or altering its highly
unionized labour force.
Mayor Tremblay has now shown his true cards. Despite
years of making grandiose statements about the importance
of public transit, the mayor has turned his back on the STM
when they needed him the most.
Betraying the yellow-bellied bean counter he is at heart,
Trembley has passed on the responsibility for maintaining
public transit to Quebec City, to the federal government, to
the cash-strapped suburbs, and to the STM itself.
Whatever happens to public transit in this city, it will not
be the mayor’s fault anymore. Or so he hopes.
Tremblay could fight the cuts. He could go to Quebec City
and tell Premier Charest that the anti-deficit law forcing
cities to cut essential services is dangerous. The mayor
should also look at his budget and see that his business-asusual shrug of the shoulders isn’t working, $455 million has
been cut from the city budget over the past four years—a new
approach is needed.
One thing is sure, Mayor Tremblay, if the STM changes
its ad campaign to “on va se voir moins souvent” next year, I
wont blame them, I will blame you.
Justin Giovannetti,
—Opinions Editor

Volume 29, Iss 25 - The Link Newspaper

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