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Congratulations

Congratulations

Myriam Zaidi (acclaimed)

Connie Gagliardi (acclaimed)

I am presenting myself as Arts Representative because I believe I can make a great contribution to SSMU Council. I have been active in the Quebec Student Movement for 5 years. I believe that eduction is everyone’s right and I will do everything that is in my power to maintain that right. I will also ensure that Francophones and Montrealers are well represented on Council.

McGill’s student body is diverse, and decisions made in Council should reflect this diversity. In addition, it is my second year on the SSMU External Affairs committee. I am a cheerful person and very approachable!

Hi, I’m Connie Gagliardi and I want to be your next Arts Rep to SSMU! I am a U2 History and Art History Honors student. As the HSA VP External, I volunteered to hold the Arts Rep to SSMU position when a replacement was needed in September. I have been filling this position now for 6 weeks and I have gained important insight into McGill Bureaucracy and the inner workings and commitments of the AUS and SSMU. It is a position and job that I love and feel is essential to student life and the betterment of Arts Students’ lives.

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 12:30 - 2:00 pm Tanna Schulich Hall New Music Building 527 Sherbrooke Street West Information: townhall@mcgill.ca www.mcgill.ca/townhall

Today’s cities comprise over 50 per cent of the world’s population, and it is in the way that these urban agglomerations take shape that we can find the most profound manifestations of the cultural nuances and political interactions that form our everyday experiences. As students at a Montreal university, we’re part of a growing demographic that is both directly implicated in and affected by

the changes in the city around us.

Influential urban theorist Jane Jacobs once said, “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”

The advantages of a metropolis like Montreal come hand-in-hand with corresponding faults and challenges that can only be overcome with ample critique and action provided by the

city’s residents. These issues arise in the city’s architectural aesthetic, changes in urban planning bylaws, gentrification, and the unique identities of different neighbourhoods. By spending a little more time strolling the streets of the city with eyes that are open a little wider and a mind that is a little more inquiring, we can fulfill our duty to partake in processes that shape Montreal’s urban form.

Green, white roofs to come to campus

5 Projet Montréal to lead Plateau

News 6

Crumbling Turcot Interchange

News 10&11

Spatial interventions: new ways of using urban space

Special content 12&13

Outlining steps to a healthy city

Features 16

Too much of a good thing

Art essay 17

Transit: getting around

Special content 18

Food for thought

Culture 19

Shedding a red light on history

Culture 23

Editorial: Paint the town green

Editorial

Table of Contents

5 News

Photos by Sarah Mongeau-Birkett, Dominic Popowich, Miranda Whist, and Andrea Zhu / The McGill Daily

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Green, white roofs come to campus Montreal slowly catching up on sustainable design Henry Gass The McGill Daily

T

he fight for Montreal’s environmental future has recently reached new heights, as various environmental groups in the city promote the installation of energy-efficient green and white roofs.

Green rooftops, or rooftop gardens, are becoming more and more popular in Montreal, while white rooftops, flat surfaces with a white polymeric membrane stretched across, are just starting to be introduced.

In spite of the trend, though, Tim Murphy, green projects coordinator for Santropol Roulant, said that the City could be doing a lot more to promote sustainable design.

“Montrealers are behind in rooftop gardening,” he said.

Murphy did, however, note the presence of community and collective gardens around Montreal, including a community garden in Milton-Parc, as evidence of their growing popularity. There are also rooftop gardens on the Maison de la culture and the library in Côtedes-Neiges, the Quebec RCMP Headquarters in St. Henri, and the McGill Life Sciences Complex.

The environmental benefits of such rooftops are hard to ignore.

“Green roofs reduce the amount of energy needed to cool down a building,” said Patrice Godin, the project manager for the Urban Ecology Centre’s (UEC) “Cool Island” Greening Project.

Murphy, who worked with McGill’s School of Architecture to develop the green space outside Burnside Hall this fall, also com-

mended the efficiency of green roofs.

“They prevent storm water runoff and improve water filtration,” he said. “It also has psychological benefits. It’s soothing and relaxing, and it can help people escape.”

These rooftop gardens are a pricey escape, however: a green roof costs from 10 to 15 dollars more per square foot than a normal roof.

“The green roof is not without issues,” said Dennis Fortune, director of McGill’s Office of Sustainability. “You have to include maintenance in the operations. After a while, someone will have to maintain it.”

That person would be Eric Champagne, the horticultural supervisor for buildings, grounds, and special events in university services, and his staff.

“We have to pull the weeds out before they get too big, and the seeds are so lightweight, they fly on top of tall buildings and grow fast,” said Champagne. “This is on top of everything else we’re doing. We have all the grounds to take care of.”

Champagne did acknowledge that the first year of managing a rooftop garden is the hardest, and that maintenance responsibilities should decrease annually.

“We used [perennial] plants that don’t require much care, [and] once all the weeds are weeded out, it will be easier to maintain,” Champagne said.

The economic burden and time commitment of rooftop gardens has Fortune looking to white roofs as a cheaper, comparatively effective alternative. White rooftops can be constructed using white gravel, or by painting the rooftop with a special white primer.

By increasing the reflectivity of a roof, preventing excess heat from being trapped inside the building, they can lower the heat of urban centres and reduce a building’s use of air conditioning.

And by contrast to the steep price of a green roof, a white roof is only likely to cost two to three dollars more per square foot.

“It changes the microclimate of large buildings,” said Fortune.

“They also make indoor occupants more comfortable. [They can help] people with breathing problems.”

McGill and the Office of Sustainability have already started testing white roofs on campus, installing white membranes on the roofs of the student residence at 3471 Peel and the Strathcona Music Building. A McGill report on the effect of the membrane showed that it could lower the heat of the building by 15 degrees Celsius. White roofs, however, also have their shortcomings, especially in comparison to rooftop gardens.

“Green roofs are more effective in terms of cooling down [a building] than white roofs, [but] they don’t have the same benefits in terms of water management,” said Godin.

At the centre of the roof question is the “heat island effect” – the occurance of warmer temperatures in urban landscapes compared to rural areas resulting from the retention of solar energy on constructed surfaces.

Last year, former McGill Engineering student Philip Sawoszczuk presented a report to the Office of Sustainability describing the heat island effect for McGill’s downtown and

Miranda Whist / The McGill Daily

Green and white roofs can curb energy use.

Macdonald campuses. The report showed that urban construction and waste heat could raise temperatures by almost six degrees Celsius in downtown Montreal.

The report identified flat-roof membranes like the one on 3471 Peel as a means of reducing the temperature build-up on campus.

“We have to look at what’s best for this place,” said Fortune. “We’re looking at reducing the heat island effect on roofs and hard surfaces [like terraces]” at McGill.

Montreal’s municipal government doesn’t seem to be climbing on the rooftop ecology bandwagon, however, and local environmental groups like the UEC and Santropol Roulant are struggling to promote the new energy efficient solutions without government legislation and economic incentives.

“The City hasn’t done a whole

lot to promote green and white roofs in terms of policies and economic incentives,” said Godin.

Godin cited legislation passed in Toronto as an example of how far behind Montreal is. According to Godin, newly constructed buildings in Toronto with more than 1,000 square metres of roof space have to set up a green roof on at least half the area. He also said that Toronto has created an economic incentive for developers to build green roofs, with the municipal government subsidizing five dollars per square foot for people who develop green roofs on their properties. Godin added that this however, is just one small contribution to creating an environmentally sustainable city.

“The green roof is one part of the global strategy to fight urban imbalance,” said Godin.

Projet Montréal to lead Plateau Expected changes include transportation and transparency Eduardo Doryan The McGill Daily

T

he past weeks have been tumultuous for Montreal politics, as charges of corruption inundated the Tremblay administration and Vision Montréal, its traditional competition, on the eve of the election.

Though Tremblay will soon begin his third term as mayor, and his party, Union Montréal, won key positions throughout the City, the up-and-coming third party Projet Montréal saw a considerable growth in popularity.

Headed by Richard Bergeron and espousing a policy of “sustainable urbanism,” Projet Montréal increased their share of the vote for mayor from 8.5 per cent in 2005 to over 25 per

cent this year. On City Council, its presence increased from one to 10 seats, while it gained four additional borough council positions.

When asked about Projet Montréal’s electoral gains, Militza Jean, political attaché of Bergeron, felt there were many reasons her party did well.

“Projet Montréal seems to be more in touch; it is the party of the future,” she said.

Jean also noted that recent corruption scandals within Union and Vision may have played in improving her party’s popularity, as well as some practical measures it took to remain accountable – which included the high profile involvement of the Honourable Justice John Gomery, who headed an investigation into Quebec’s sponsorship scandal in the nineties.

“Along with Gomery, [the chair] of fundraising, we put in place five principles regarding funding. We were different from the others because we financed through the people,” Jean said.

Though the party gained seats in six of Montreal’s boroughs, its biggest sweep was in Plateau-Mont Royal, where it held two incumbent positions and wrested the five remaining ones from ruling Union.

A popular component of Projet Montréal’s platform was a push toward more sustainable transportation. In early 2007, founder and party leader Bergeron, who holds a doctorate in planning from Université de Montréal, unveiled an ambitious plan to introduce a wide-reaching system of tramways across the island.

Alex Norris, a recently elected

city councillor from the Mile-End, said that while elected officials could not discuss specific plans until they were sworn in, transportation would be a likely priority.

“We have a mandate to clamp down on traffic in residential areas and will be more aggressive than previous administrations.

More than 80 per cent of cars in the Plateau are just passing through and don’t stop, using our main commercial streets as freeways,” Norris said.

He cited small and concrete steps his party hoped to take, such as installing stop signs on some streets, which the previous administration resisted until “citizens finally put their foot down,” according to Norris.

Norris also spoke about his party’s goal of creating a more transparent administration. “The

previous administration had, for example, eliminated the televised proceedings of the council online.

That is something we want to restore very quickly. As a grassroots party, we have to be true to our principles in a way that isn’t costly,” he said.

Devin Alfaro, former SSMU VP External and current Projet Montréal volunteer, who also sits in the Borough Coordinating Committee Association, said other planned actions include “pedestrianizing streets, creating more walkable public spaces, and reducing the amount of traffic” around the Plateau.

But Alfaro also pointed out that despite the increased presence of the party in City Council, “The powers of the borough are very limited, so the scale of action will be very local.”

5 Urban form

News

The McGill Daily, Monday, November 9, 2009

Letters

The McGill Daily, Monday, November 9, 2009

Imagine being forced to navigate the judicial system or the university’s complex bureaucracy on your own Stefan Szpajda Law III, former MLIC volunteer, former Daily public editor

Kreitner’s reading coloured by emotion Re: “Racist immigration policy must change” | Editorial | November 2 I wonder whether anyone at The Daily can explain why the hell their newspaper is reciting the recycled talking points from an economic theory which happened to be almost universally discredited before my mother entered grade six.

Your recent editorial recited the standard diatribe faithfully: “It’s no accident that once-colonized countries have weak economies today. The economic status of the countries in the Global South is the result of centuries of colonial violence and exploitation that continue today.”

It’s no accident you used the noncommittal vocabulary you did, curiously neglecting to declare exactly how colonialism led to the present situation. No one still believes “dependency theory” accounts for discrepancies in economic development across the geographical spectrum, mostly due to East Asia’s astounding economic success in recent decades. Had you attempted to plunge into the depths of the literature looking for an answer, you would have floated to the surface sooner or later, panting for fresh air. Why even bother?

You probably expected readers not to really trouble you about it. Nothing wrong with a little moral absolution with your morning coffee.

The same day, Niko Block happened to gloss over a perhaps inconsequential fact regarding a boatload of Tamils sitting in a small Indonesian port (“Sri Lankan Tamils file for refugee status,” News, November 3). In her [sic] zeal to really make the grade for the special “Migrants” issue of The Daily, Block wrote, “Both [Australia and Indonesia] have refused to let the passengers ashore.” The BBC disagrees: “The Tamils themselves have said they will not leave the ship voluntarily and have refused to co-operate with identity checks.”

Perhaps your science columnist, Daniel Lametti, can help us understand these two strange mistakes. He wrote recently (“Controversy clouds opinion,” Science+Technology, November 3) “When it came time to thoughtfully consider information that went against what they believed in, the subjects simply couldn’t – their reasoning was coloured by emotion.”

Ricky Kreitner U1 Philosophy & Political Science EDITOR’S NOTE: From the BBC article (“Australia refuses Tamil refugees,” 28 October) that Kreitner cites: “Australian authorities have said 78 Sri Lankan asylum seekers in Indonesia will not be taken to Australia, their intended destination.” Further on: “Indonesia agreed last week to take the group to have their claims examined, but local officials are refusing to allow the Australian vessel to dock.”

The Revenge of Doctor Cornett

Learn French already!

Re: “Paging Doctor Cornett” | Commentary | October 8

Re: “Supreme Court rejects Bill 104” | News | November 3

Since attending Norman Cornett’s course entitled “The Soul and Soul Music” in the early days of summer 2001, the professor has been a mentor, friend, and inspiration. By now, you have no doubt heard the countless testimonies of former students: how the professor looked you in the eye upon your first meeting and remembered your name and, what’s more, who you are, ever more. Now, Cornett is not orthodox, and McGill clearly is. Perhaps it is time our beloved University took a risk and attempted a return to humanism in its approach to learning. Perhaps it is time McGill reconsider its decision in firing the professor and overturn it to show that it is not a mindless, insensitive institution, turning out graduates like so many cattle into an ever-increasingly austere, cold, and mechanical world. Perhaps it is time the University, and the people in charge of hiring and firing, show that sometimes the unorthodox can and should become the convention, rather than the exception that proves the rule. Perhaps it is time McGill show the world why it is not just an ordinary institution of learning, but that it is a great centre of learning and return humanity to the classrooms, like William Osler brought bedside manner to the medical practitioner’s consulting room. Would someone please come to their senses and hire back Professor Cornett?! It is the only right thing to do. Would the professor accept? Stay tuned...

It’s a shame that the Law 101 loophole was not closed. We’re basically allowing immigrant families to have the option to pay a year’s tuition at an English private school to have access to English public schools. This goes completely against the spirit of Law 101, which is to protect the French language.

Furthermore, it is false that bilingual education is better at English schools than it is at French schools. Most anglophones that come out of the public anglophone school system are not fluent in French unless they have been through the French immersion program.

Canada may be bilingual, but the only official language in Quebec is French. If you want to live here, you have to have the tools to interact with the rest of society. Having the option to pay thousands of dollars so that your children don’t go to French school is unacceptable. I hope that this loophole gets closed by constitutional means eventually.

Eric Touchburn BA History and Humanistic Studies (2002)

Alexandre Courtemanche U2 Computer Engineering

You call that cheap?!

Re: “This week, enjoy a vegasm” | Mind&Body | November 5 Budget, eh? I went rice shopping expressly for this recipe, and let me tell you, I won’t spend $7 on 2 kg. of basmati rice when I can get long-grain for $4. That said, I’m sure it’ll all be yummy, and thank you for giving me meal ideas that will surely last me at least a week.

Naomi Endicott U1 Anthropology Daily staff member

Vote yes on MLIC’s fee renewal This week, SSMU members are being asked to renew the McGill Legal Information Clinic’s (MLIC) $3.25 fee. MLIC’s services are invaluable. Most people do not have to think about the legal system until they find themselves in trouble, at which point they realize just how difficult it can be.

Many McGill students come from outside Quebec, and even those born and raised here are likely unfamiliar with the scope of their legal rights. Moreover, as McGill students, we are all subject to University rules and regulations that, for the most part, elude us.

Imagine being forced to navigate the judicial system or the University’s complex bureaucracy on your own. This could cost lots of money and yield disastrous results.

For 30 years, MLIC has helped students avoid this scenario.

Staffed by volunteers from the Faculty of Law, MLIC acts as a legal first aid service, explaining your rights and outlining your options free of charge. They also participate in outreach programs, and act as a community legal service that grants access to legal information to those in the wider Montreal community who could otherwise not afford it. Similarly, Student Advocacy provides students facing disciplinary measures with representatives that know the University’s rules inside out. If you find yourself in trouble with the administration, you will not have to face it alone. Together these volunteers regularly provide information that would otherwise cost thousands of dollars. Their work impacts people’s lives on a daily basis.

We are all accountable to rules whether we know them or not. By guiding anxious clients through the crucial stages of their legal or regulatory problems, MLIC and Student Advocacy provide a crucial service to thousands of people every year. Please continue to support these organizations. Vote yes in this week’s referendum.

Stefan Szpajda Law III Former MLIC Volunteer, former public editor

Sasha Plotnikova / The McGill Daily

The Daily will publish any letter from members of the Daily Publications Society. Send your letters to letters@mcgilldaily.com from your McGill email address, and keep them to 300 words or less. The Daily does not print letters that are classist, homophobic, or otherwise hateful.

7

8 Commentary

The McGill Daily, Monday, November 9, 2009

Unusual punishment Cruel treatment often awaits trans prisoners

Binary is for computers Quinn Albaugh

Mona Ghassemi for The McGill Daily

Both fellow inmates and guards routinely mistreat trans people in prison.

W

hen I wrote about my fear of being arrested (“‘Don’t get arrested,’” Commentary, October 21), I found it extremely difficult to even think about what it would mean if I went to prison. Prisons are a central part of the state’s policy of gendering its people against their will.

Jails usually don’t recognize transsexual people’s gender identities. In the U.S., only New York State and the District of Columbia respect binary-identified trans inmates’ gender identities by allowing them placement in sex-segregated facilities that respect their identities. Of course, there’s no room anywhere for people who aren’t binary-identified. Instead, in the absence of contrary guidelines, prison staff tend to separate inmates based on their genitalia. Invasive methods, such as strip searches, are often the means of determining genitalia.

This doesn’t just happen in the U.S. – on October 15, the National Post (“Sex changes for inmates a touchy new therapy”) reported that a B.C. prison official frisked a transwoman to determine her sex.

This policy of segregating inmates based on sex organs essentially treats prisoners as their genitals, rather than as human beings.

Furthermore, it places trans inmates in a position where fellow inmates can harass or assault them.

In fact, because of this policy, trans inmates are under particularly high risk for sexual assault.

For example, in California in 2007, a trans woman’s cellmate raped her in a male prison. In the court case following the assault, a criminologist testified that 59 per cent of California’s transgender inmates had been sexually assaulted, as compared with 4 per cent of the general population.

These instances in California are part of a far-reaching phenomenon.

On June 23, the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission (NPREC) recognized this, writing, “Male-tofemale transgender individuals are at special risk. Dean Spade, founder of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, testified before the Commission that one of his transgender clients was deliberately placed in a cell with a convicted sex offender to be raped.

The assaults continued for more than 24 hours, and her injuries were so severe that she had to be hospitalized.”

Two other factors make prisons even worse. First, many trans inmates may fear reporting sexual assault because prison staff may blame them for causing the trouble, either because of the “blame the victim” attitude commonly found in sexual assault cases or because they believe that trans people choose to be trans. Second, as Erin O’Callaghan noted last week (“Pen pals for prisoners,” Mind & Body, November 3), prisons are also places where STIs, such as HIV or Hepatitis C, often spread, which, when coupled with transgender inmates’ higher risks for sexual assault, increases the risk of transmission. But other inmates aren’t the only danger – the prison staff themselves often harass trans inmates. For example, they may call trans inmates “Mr.” or “Ms.” or assign them clothing based on assigned sex rather than gender identity. Even worse, they may see trans inmates as potential (sexual)

entertainment, just as other inmates do. For example, the NPREC also reported a case of a male prison official in D.C. forcing a transwoman to perform fellatio on him.

Prison systems also tend to further punish trans inmates by denying them medical treatment, such as sex-reassignment surgery (SRS) or hormone-replacement therapy (HRT). Prison officials argue that these procedures aren’t medically necessary, and that the public shouldn’t be funding “elective procedures.”

Fortunately, Correctional Services Canada has a policy respecting the need for hormone replacement therapy, and a federal court ruled that banning SRS for trans inmates was discriminatory in 2003 (though Canada still hasn’t come down in favour of respecting non-binary identities).

However, in the U.S., various levels of government often agree with prison officials that procedures like SRS and HRT should not be available. For example, Wisconsin enacted a law banning hormone replace-

ment therapy for trans inmates, which – thankfully – is currently facing a court challenge.

Such attitudes are abhorrent.

For some of us, these medical procedures are very clearly medically necessary. Before I went on HRT, I was chronically depressed and beginning to have suicidal thoughts. After I went on it, I started to become a functional human being. So to hear someone say that this isn’t medically necessary is just like spitting in my face. SRS is likewise medically necessary for some trans people.

Ultimately, the entire system of gendering inmates needs to go, including sex-segregated prisons.

That’s the only way to treat people who aren’t binary-identified as equal human beings. For now, though, simply ensuring the health and safety of trans people would be an immense improvement.

Quinn Albaugh writes in this space every week. Not every other week.

No binary here. Write ’em at binaryforcomputers@mcgilldaily.com.

There is no good reason for unequal marriage

Little bitter Riva Gold

T

he people of Maine may be getting high, but their civil rights standards have proven to be awfully low. On Tuesday, November 3, the people of Maine voted in a referendum that would reverse the government’s ruling on same-sex marriage. This is the second time in just over a year that an American state’s residents have overturned their government’s decision to permit gay marriage, and it constitutes a $4-million loss for the gay rights movement. I’ve had the misfortune of hearing many of the arguments against same-sex marriage: that it’s unnatural, infringes on religious freedom, or lies outside the purview of the state. I’m still convinced that every one of these is deeply rooted in thinly veiled prejudice, or striking ignorance.

Who actually believes that the U.S.’s current legal system operates on the basis of natural-law ethics?

That Thomas Aquinas listed some principles for a moral life, and then everything just pretty much worked out for him, and Western civilization ceased to change? No contemporary system of civil law takes for itself the maxim that “what is natural is good.” For example, I feel a natural inclination to punch everyone who’s ever used the word “intertextuality.” If I punched them, that would not be good. Case in point. Instead, American law tends to operate with more radical, counterintuitive principles like “what promotes happiness is good” or “what promotes equality and civil rights is good.” Appeals to natural law were used to justify a ban on interracial marriages until 1968.

It wasn’t a good argument then and it isn’t now.

This is typically where the religious arguments come into play – that same-sex marriage is contra-biblical, and that marriage is an essentially religious institution. Let’s be clear then: the redefinition of marriage is not in any way an infringement upon religious freedom, as it does not force religious individuals to alter their religious beliefs or action. Religious individuals would still be free to advocate for traditional marriage and continue hating. Here in Canada, for instance, we even extend special legal protection to religious individuals who chose not to perform such ceremonies.

The relevant account of religious freedom – the ability to practice what you believe to be religiously valid – stands only to be enhanced by same-sex marriage legislation. Many religious institutions would like to marry same-sex couples within their religious institutions: Unitarians, the Metropolitan Community Church, Reconstructionist Jews, to name a few. When same-sex marriage is legal, they can actually act upon their religious choices without hav-

ing to break civil law. The legality of same-sex marriage neither limits the freedom of speech or action of religious individuals. It just means religious individuals are not empowered to limit the action of non-religious individuals in this realm, and I tend to think that’s A-okay.

My favourite argument is the idea that same-sex marriage laws are wrong because “the state should stay out of marriage.” As though the state hasn’t been legislating, sanctioning, and incentivizing heterosexual marriage all along.

Interestingly, the people who make this argument rarely follow it to its logical conclusion and try to abolish the institution of marriage altogether. So given that the government doles out legal and financial privileges with marriage, it has a responsibility to do so in an equitable way, and that means non-discrimination against homosexual couples.

“Domestic partnership” status is not enough. Although same-sex couples who register as domestic partners in Maine can receive some limited benefits, there are still substantial legal and financial differences between “spousal” and “domestic partner” status. Federal

and state laws require different tax treatment, pensions, and even survivor packages for domestic partners.

And on top of the fact that “equal benefits” never really amount to “equal” benefits in practice, the formal category of “marriage” affirms a universal recognition of the validity of one’s relationship. Marriage is a deeply entrenched, socially valuable, persistent life goal for many individuals. If you’re going to deny this to anyone, you better have a damn good reason.

For a state that prides itself on its socially liberal and secular attitude, Maine has a lot of explaining to do.

If we learn nothing else from this case, I think it’s time to think federal. Every time voters go to the ballot with this issue, same-sex marriage loses. In a country where roughly one adult in five thinks the sun revolves around the Earth (according to a terrifying article published in the New York Times), civil rights should not be subject to a popular vote.

Riva Gold writes in this space once a week. Once a week. Once a week.

Write’r: littlebitter@mcgilldaily. com.

Commentary

The McGill Daily, Monday, November 9, 2009

9

HYDE PARK

Shame on you all Government, media need to act on climate Aleah Loney

O

n Saturday, October 24, I joined thousands of Canadians on Parliament Hill to demand that the Canadian government stand up to fight climate change. “Be a leader at Copenhagen,” we asked. “Pass the Climate Change Accountability Act (Bill C-311), protect indigenous rights, shift the focus (and subsidies) from coal energy, nuclear power, and tar sands to renewable energies, and provide us, our friends, and our families with green jobs.”

But where were the reporters to see all this? Where were the video cameras, the radio stations? Didn’t anyone want to see us? Didn’t they want to hear us? This event was easily the largest conglomeration of Canadians taking action for the climate in our nation’s history, and no one cared to notice.

I have been let down by my nation.

From October 23 to 25, 2009, 1,000 youth from across Canada flocked to Ottawa for one reason – Powershift.

Students from every province and territory in our great nation spent up to 30 hours on trains and missed days of school and work to attend the weekend’s events – also known as the largest youth conference on the environment in Canadian history.

I look back through time to see May 1968 in France, I see campuses across North America in my parents’ generation during the Vietnam War, I see people fighting for democracy in Tiananmen Square, I see the sitins and bus boycotts in the southern United States during the Civil Rights movement, and I see political and social justice movements in southeast Asia and Latin America over the past 50 years. The common thread connecting these events is the major role played by students in them.

The Climate Change Accountability Act (also known as Bill C-311) was on the table just three weeks ago, and with some 40 days left until the UN Climate Talks in Copenhagen, our government effectively shelved it for another 30 days. What message does this send to Canadians and

the world? I wonder if Jim Prentice, Minister of Environment, knows what message it sends when member nations walk out of climate discussions in Bangkok when Ca nada takes the podium. I wonder what Stephen Harper thinks about the message his absence at climate talks in New York sends to Canadians and the world.

Speakers inspired 1,000 of us during the opening ceremonies of Powershift, explaining why – despite their hardships – they have never given up, and neither should we. No, they told us, do not back down in the face of discrimination, ageism, or racism; do not give up when your government will not listen to you and your representatives ignore you. Do not give up when people tell you that you will never win this fight, and do not give up when your voice is being silenced.

Our demands to the Canadian government are clear: first, sign the Climate Change Accountability Act (Bill C-311) before Copenhagen; second, acknowledge treaty and indigenous rights and shift subsidies from coal, nuclear power, natural gas, and tar sands to renewable energies; and third, provide us with the option of a green economy, green jobs, and a safe and healthy future for all Canadians.

In closing, I say shame on you Canadian media, for not being there while thousands of your daughters and sons, mothers and fathers, stood on Parliament Hill to demand a safe, secure, and green future for all of us. Shame on you, Harper. Shame on you, Prentice, and shame on those members of Parliament who continually refuse to be leaders on climate change while the historic and progressive Bill C-311 is before them. Shame on those in the House of Commons who laughed while students brave enough to stand up for what they believe in were dragged away by police and arrested on Monday, October 16. And shame on me for not having written this sooner.

Aleah Loney is a U3 Political Science and IDS student. Send her a jeremiad at aleah.loney@mail.mcgill.ca.

There’s a chunk of solid, amalgamated General Tao’s chicken right next to me.

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Olivia Messer / The McGill Daily

A Canadian court has convincted a Rwandan national for crimes against humanity.

HYDE PARK

One giant leap for justice Canada starts taking crimes against humanity seriously Adrienne Klasa

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n October 29, a quiet revolution took place in a Montreal courtroom.

Having handed down a guilty verdict in May, Quebec Superior Court Justice André Denis sentenced Désiré Munyaneza with the maximum penalty allowed under Canadian law: life in prison, with no chance of parole for 25 years. The crimes committed: two counts of genocide, two counts of crimes against humanity, and three counts of war crimes.

None of these atrocities were perpetrated in Canada, or anywhere nearby. A Canadian court, however, was condemning Munyaneza for his role as a militia commander for the majority Hutu government during the horrific 1994 Rwandan genocide.

For international humanitarian law, this is a breakthrough.

As part of its obligations as a signatory of the 1998 Rome Statute, which set up the International Criminal Court (ICC), Canada was the first nation to enact domestic legislation that allows it universal jurisdiction over humanitarian crimes. Under Canada’s Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act, our judiciary has the power to indict individuals for offenses they may have committed thousands of miles away.

The Munyaneza case was the first test of the Act’s effectiveness. The precedent set by Denis’s decision is unequivocal: Canada will not tacitly accept the legacy of war criminals.

By bringing them within our jurisdiction, we as nation have taken a concrete step toward accepting the

cosmopolitan obligation to administer justice not just for our own citizens, but also for those who have suffered abominations in other states.

I’m sure Kant is smiling down at us, somewhere.

To be sure, the universalization of jurisdiction over humanitarian crimes is still the subject of criticism from some quarters. However, we should always remember exactly where those quarters lie. When such venerable humanitarians as President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan (whose government is responsible for the policy of genocide in Darfur) and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (whose policies in Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, and Angola, to name a few, led to suffering and human rights violations on a massive scale) disparage international criminal law as a violation of national sovereignty, one can’t help but wonder how much more concerned they are about their own locked cabinets of incriminating files.

Accusations that the internationalization of law as propagated by the ICC mandate is just another neocolonial mechanism that targets the Third World while exempting more powerful nations are not without grounds. The U.S., Russia, China, and Israel have all, for obvious reasons, denied that the Court has jurisdiction over their nationals. So far, all those indicted by the court have been from Africa.

However, that is changing.

On Thursday, the United Nations announced that it was backing the findings of the Goldstone Report on war crimes committed by Israel and Hamas during the Gaza invasion and would, if necessary, refer the case to

the ICC. The statement remains a gesture, but it still signals that norms are shifting. Even Israel, an ostensibly democratic U.S. ally, is not going to escape international legal scrutiny.

Getting the U.S. government to submit to the Court will be another feat entirely, but very slowly the playing field is levelling.

Canada is already playing a leadership role in this process, and it is in a special position to be able to do so.

As a first-world nation with a relatively unblemished humanitarian reputation, Canada is unlikely to be accused of hypocrisy or double standards in pursuing the prosecution of foreign war criminals. Our persistence lends legitimacy to the complex enterprise of eradicating international impunity.

Before we go patting ourselves on the back too heartily for the success of the Munyaneza case, we should remember that we too sat back along with the rest of the world and left Romeo Dallaire, commander of the UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda and one of our own nationals, to helplessly bear witness to “the preventable genocide.” We did not strengthen his mandate. We did not send more troops.

Never again. We have said it too many times, only to necessitate its repetition. In the wake of what has passed, however, we can only offer justice as a small token for all that has already been lost.

Adrienne Klasa is a U3 Honours Political Science and Philosophy student, as well as the editor of the McGill Foreign Affairs Review.

Extend your jurisdiction to her at mcgillfar.editor@gmail.com.

Urban form

10 Spatial interventions

Wall of sound Interdisciplinary art duo recast decaying monument as sound installation Joseph Henry The McGill Daily

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n 1906, near the intersection of the Lachine and St. Laurent waterways, an immense grain silo was constructed – one of many erected on the Atlantic seaboard during the first half of the 20th century. But increased railroad development diminished Montreal’s role as a grain port, and less than 40 years later, the silo was emptied. The remaining cavernous shell – too expensive to demolish – glares over Vieux Port as an empty, seemingly useless building.

“Now we have this industrial ruin towering above Old Montreal,” says Emmanuel Madan, one half of [The User]: a duo of artists, composers, architects, engineers, and computer geeks – often all at once. Madan, along with fellow [User] Thomas McIntosh, seem to have found a use for Silo No. 5 – the Silophone.

Madan describes the Silophone as, above all else, a musical instrument. It usually plays an ominous drone or thud, sounding something like the score for Eraserhead would have if it had been produced by the dubstep artist Burial. Sound sent into the Silophone comes out as a sonorous echo of itself, reverberated within the 20 storeys of the quarter-mile long silo.

The various methods of interacting with the fearsome edifice represent [The User]’s main goal with this now decade-old project: public access to an art creation in a truly public space. Anyone can upload sound files onto the Silophone’s web site and the resonant audio transformation becomes available for all to stream. Other users can call the Silophone’s number and speak into the empty space of the grain warehouse, a decidedly one-way conversation with one’s voice booming back at them as unsettling thuds.

But the most appropriate method to engage with the instrument is the Sonic Observatory, an installation consisting of four concrete pillars, innocuously overlooking the silo and port at large. Any focused sound transmitted through a microphone is reverberated through the silo, surrounding the audience/musician/viewer in an aural corruption of their own vocal, or even somatic efforts. It is an uncanny experience to witness the enormous, silent industrial morgue in front of you instantaneously morph into an (albeit disconcerting) art factory.

[The User]’s first project was “Symphony #2 for Dot Matrix Printers, ” a musical piece based on a dated artifact of the printing industry. Finding artistic functionality with antiquated technology carried over to the Silophone project in 1997. With Madan’s training in electroacoustic composition and McIntosh’s degree in architecture, the two had similar interests in the space, specifically its acoustic properties. The Canadian Centre for Architecture hosted a forum on the fate of Silo No. 5, and with substantial backing from the Canada Council for the Art’s Millennium Fund and other foundations, the Silophone was completed about three years later.

Permission to develop the silo proved difficult to obtain. Various architectural and engineering firms campaigned for luxury developments, such as hotels and condos.

Even the Musée d’art contemporain sought the silo as an expansion for their galleries.

And permission proved to be but the first of many difficulties encountered while developing the project. Naturally, funding was limited and the sophisticated nature of the project necessitated a variety of technological experts and engineers. Madan and McIntosh only planned to keep the Silophone in operation for a year, but – against initial expectations – the duo are currently planning to celebrate its 10-year

Sarah Mongeau-Birkett / The McGill Daily

anniversary in 2010.

[The User]’s control over the project’s future is tenuous: ownership of the silo will soon be decided under a new branch of the federal government, and commercial interests are still seeking to develop the silo in a similar way to the new living spaces rising up in Vieux Port. To Madan, the Silophone is something of a “phonic squat”: art temporarily engaging an unused space.

[The User] sees the space as under public control. On top of transforming an agricultural graveyard into an artistic tool, the duo has made all content free and available on demand. And their altruism is not limited to the civic sphere. Musicians from Vancouver, New York, and various other locations submitted their product to the Silophone’s aesthetic editing, in a series of events held back in 2004. The pair is now developing a new project: a musical piece based on the work of experimental Hungarian composer György Ligeti.

As for the Silophone, it still stands sentinel over Vieux Port, filled with perpetual sonic ruminations. If [The User] has achieved anything with this project, they’ve somehow personalized an enormous concrete tomb. To create one’s own art is to form a connection, regardless of the nature of the two parties involved. No one is allowed inside the actual silo, but this is the purpose of the sonic engagement. As Madan puts it, the Silophone is “a project about distance and communication over various technologies”; if anything, the ideal and ultimate goal of modern urban architecture.

The Silophone is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The Sonic Observatory is located just west of McGill, off Commune.

To upload and play material, go to silophone.net. The number to call in is 514844-5555.

Dancing in the streets Local dance group challenges spectators to reimagine public space Maya Hamovitch Culture Writer

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hile much of contemporary dance is centred on the stage as performance space, Montreal is now witnessing the arrival of a dance group that contests the fundamental codes and ground rules of this art form. This group is leaps and bounds above the norms of form and safety – literally. Spontaneous Dance Combustion is an improvisation community that brings contemporary dance into the urban public space. The group stages outdoor improvisations at various locations throughout Montreal, creating movement that interacts with the city’s form. After just three short public incursions, this collective of passionate and innovative dancers is working toward reshaping and restructuring community interaction, city space, and the perceived boundaries of the urban landscape.

Michael Watts, the group’s co-coordinator, claims that the inspiration for

Spontaneous Dance Combustion came from his reflections on cults and culture; he’s interested in challenging the uniformity that prevails in much of the dance world and, indeed, in life. As he sees it, people are overly absorbed in work life, consumed by those material things that detract from the meaningful moments. He aims to help dancers and the general public to break out of their safe, sheltered, and sometimes alienated existence. Watts explains that this public, improvisational style of dance cultivates intersections between people and place, as the boundaries between dancer and spectator become blurred, and new possibilities are negotiated within the prescriptive urban form. “When you go to see a dance show,” Watts says, “it is closed off.

You are safe in your seat – there is a barrier between you and [the performance]. We wish to destabilize people from this protective zone and engage in audience participation to break that barrier. It is important for people to see a foreign universe.”

The group intentionally invades physical and personal spaces that have been

distanced from emotional expressiveness.

In their first public action, Watts and a community of other dancers (who were still strangers to one another half an hour prior to the performance) found a space where people were on their lunch break, “zoned out,” clad in similar work attire, smoking cigarettes. The group’s aim was to disrupt the normalcy and complacency of this emotional state. Members of Spontaneous Dance Combustion, inconspicuous in normal street dress, blended in with the crowd before erupting into lively dance in this usually safe but stark place. The result was striking. “People, for the first time, appeared to actually be taking a break,” says Watts. The second improvisation was equally stimulating and disquieting; it took place during Montreal’s fashion and design festival.

Dancers, dressed up in eccentric clothing, fused a variety of dance styles and played with fashion as they posed on corners, portraying “vogue” culture. It didn’t take long before a huge crowd gathered to participate.

What’s great about Spontaneous Dance Combustion is that in the same way the group dissolves the line between performer and audience, it also encourages connections within the community. The participants transform city space – space that often triggers inner anxiety, a sense of alienation, isolation, and sometimes panic – into a creative environment where individuals are unchained from routine.

This is exactly what Watts intends; he emphasizes the importance of his work in helping people claim a sense of self. “It is important to say who you are – individuals should experience an odd new sense of freedom and liberty,” he explains.

“Originally, dance was a tribal ritual. It has become so militant – Spontaneous Dance Combustion allows people to show and express themselves,” he continues. The impulsive, bold creativity of this dance form, situated within the urban domain, causes stable sites – and individuals – to become unsettled, and the safe, anonymous homogeneity of the urban form to come alive.

The McGill Daily, Monday, November 9, 2009

Concrete jungle gym Ben Kirwin on parkour’s transformation of urban spaces

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Photos by Dominic Popowich / The McGill Daily

ontreal’s Olympic Stadium is generally considered a disaster of urban planning. Since construction started in 1973, the stadium has cost taxpayers over a billion dollars, the roof has never worked correctly, and it hasn’t even been used regularly as a stadium since 2004. Most of the time the grounds sit virtually abandoned. On Saturday mornings, however, people start to appear – people climbing walls, jumping railings, and sprinting across concrete. The stadium has become a home for the fledgling sport of parkour.

I imagine most people have been introduced to parkour in one way or another, whether it’s from watching Sebastien Foucan barrel through a construction site in the recent James Bond film Casino Royale or Dwight donkeykicking the door of the ladies washroom on The Office.

Some of these representations qualify as parkour and some do not, but the sport is obviously more complicated than it appears on television. For readers unfamiliar with the sport, parkour is the art of moving from one place to another as quickly and efficiently as possible, while using no equipment (besides maybe a good pair of shoes). For many people, parkour is more than just a spectacle or a sport – it’s a way of interpreting and reacting to the world and particularly the urban forms that surround them.

This unique perspective can be traced back more than a hundred years.

The story of parkour starts with the development of the “Natural Method” by Georges Hébert. While serving as a French naval officer in Africa, Hébert was struck by the athleticism of the people there. He began to develop a system of physical training based around “natural” movements: running, climbing, jumping, swimming, wrestling.

Hebert’s novel method of physical education quickly gained in popularity. The method even became the standard physical training for the French military.

Decades later, teenagers in a Paris suburb, inspired

by Hébert’s method, began to further experiment with his ideas of movement. They stripped Hébert’s theory of movement down to a single concept – the foundations of modern parkour – and started developing the

techniques that give the sport its unique visual style.

As in martial arts, however, these techniques were not designed for visual appeal. Rather, they were designed as fast and practical ways of getting from one place to another. Practitioners of parkour (traceurs) are measured not by what they can do, but by where they can go and how directly they can get there. This process is limited and shaped by the environment in which they live and train, just as running in a forest requires an entirely different style of motion than running in a city. In adapting the way they move to every situation, traceurs get a deeper and more intimate understanding of the urban environments in which they live.

At some point fairly early in my parkour career, I remember sitting next to one of those velvet-roped labyrinths used for queues, watching someone painstakingly work their way through to the front. There was no line, and nobody would have objected if they walked around the side. This person went through simply because that’s what those velvet ropes are meant for. These sorts of social rules – driving on the right, walking on the sidewalk, and countless more – are coded into our understanding of the constructed urban environment.

Parkour teaches you to bend these rules and stop thinking just in terms of what’s normal, and start looking at what’s possible.

As a traceur’s skills develop, their options increase, and the city begins to flatten out – their movements becoming less and less restricted. While we might not always need this extra freedom (walking on the sidewalk is still usually a good idea), the fact that these options are available is a fundamentally liberating condition.

This is the attitude that draws traceurs to the Olympic Stadium on Saturday mornings. Parkour offers the chance to push boundaries and to experiment with movement in the urban space. The community of the Olympic Stadium traceurs provides a forum to do this free of preventative or critical influence. The jagged expanse of concrete is not simply an obstacle, but a challenge – and a challenge the traceurs relish.

11

Walking life Max Halparin outlines steps to a healthy city

Ethan Landy for The McGill Daily

Urban form

12 Features

The McGill Daily, Monday, November 9, 2009

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verlooking Autoroute 20 on Angrignon one July afternoon, my friend Elizabeth and I decide it would be a good time to dismount our bikes and document our relative danger. As more and more cars rush to the on-ramp leading to the Turcot, the sidewalks and pedestrian lights seem increasingly out of place in the blatantly car-oriented area. But it’s not just highway interchanges surrounded by industrial parks, barren land, and mega-malls that are ill-suited to bikes and pedestrians. It’s anything designed beyond the human scale. Riding north toward Montreal-Ouest, I wonder how many four-or-more wheelers even noticed the two non-motorists crashing their hurried, gas-guzzling routine.

Any trip beyond the extended McGill bubble reminds me that this is exactly what has defined Canada’s (predominantly sub)urban landscape for the past 60 years. While trekking around Montreal for the better part of the summer and fall conducting a walkability survey of neighbourhoods in nearly every borough, I was struck by how much of the city resembles the stereotypical suburban layout I thought I’d escaped after bidding farewell to the sprawling, monotonous blob that is “outside Toronto.” This would be far less important if the issue was purely one of aesthetics. However, as study after study shows,

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prawling cities have lead to sprawling waistlines. Our reliance on cars as opposed to our feet or pedals is central to the decreasing rates of exercise – especially that which is incorporated into the daily routine. Automobile emissions in turn affect air quality, leading to smog days in cities and respiratory illnesses in residents.

“It’s probably not that my grandparents went to the gym more, or that our genetic disposition has changed significantly over the past 30 years,” explains University of Washington pediatrics professor Brian Saelens when I ask him why he focuses on understanding the built environment’s effect on health. “If I’m to explain increased rates of obesity and inactivity, the only plausible thing is that we’ve changed our environment.”

The transition from dense, streetcarconnected cities to ones with segregated land use patterns, a hierarchy of streets, single-detached homes set back from the often sidewalk-free cul-de-sac, and the low-lying strip malls and parking lots on which they depend (and the traffic congestion they cause) has been anything but accidental. Interestingly, the types of environments partly responsible for North America’s obesity epidemic – and associated conditions like type-2 diabetes and heart disease – were initially built to curb the spreading of infectious disease.

Yet chronic diseases have long since surpassed them as the greatest killer of North Americans and Europeans.

In Health and Community Design: The Impact of the Built Environment on Physical Activity, lead author and prominent public health researcher Lawrence Frank outlines this unwitting irony.

Citizens of industrial cities were plagued by infectious disease that thrived thanks to unsanitary and cramped quarters situated next to smoke stacks. First, the rich were privy to new developments in pastoral settings that allowed for air flow – the presumed remedy for most urban ailments.

Post-WWII suburbanization only intensified this trend, as strict zoning bylaws kept homes away not only from industry, but from every other type of land use, such as commercial, institutional, and office.

Hence the drive to work – and school and the grocery store.

“A fantastic amount of energy has gone into making the cars happy and providing capacity for more traffic, as if there were no other important issues in the city,” explains architect and urban designer Jan Gehl.

Recorded by CKUT-Radio, Gehl’s talk at McGill this past July draws heavily on his experiences making Copenhagen one of the world’s most people-oriented cities, as an example for Montreal to follow.

The urban designer also emphasizes the role that quantitative traffic data collected and analyzed by traffic bureaus plays in putting the interests of the car above those of the people. “People who use the city have been invisible and poorly represented in the planning process,” Gehl says. This may explain why, to reduce traffic congestion, cities choose to add a lane – which only invites more traffic and more fumes to the area – as opposed to eliminating parking spots.

Quoting his traffic engineer colleague, Gehl says, “If they can’t park, they won’t drive.”

Businesses, however, often claim that if customers can’t park, they won’t shop.

Though this line of thinking is often used to derail the installation of bike lanes, data proves these fears illegitimate: other modes of transport increase the number of passersby – to the tune of 8,000 more per year on some Copenhagen streets, Gehl says.

Remarking on the removal of parking spots at a gradual rate of two to three per cent each year starting in the seventies, Gehl told the audience that he has witnessed the adjustments Danes have made to access and experience Copenhagen’s city centre. The latest numbers show that only 30 per cent of commuters drive to work, while 27 per cent take public transit, 37 per cent bike, and the rest walk. Compare that profile to Montreal – often considered one of North America’s most walkable cities – where about 74 per cent of morning commuters drive or take other motorized transport, 19 per cent take public transit, and 10 per cent walk or bike, according to a 2003 origin-destination survey.

Understanding the vital role that data plays in influencing policy and planning circles, public health researchers started amassing it in hopes of pinpointing structural features that influence healthy, active lifestyles. Saelens explains, “We got tired of doing interventions that didn’t modify the environment, that tried to modify attitudes and preferences.”

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he majority of studies attempting to measure the built environment’s effect on physical activity compare the physical attributes of different neighbourhoods with the residents’ walking or biking habits.

Though meta-reviews of the research are difficult due to the varying methodological approaches, a small yet significant correlation is consistently found between the neighbourhood’s built environment – land use patterns, transit systems, and design characteristics – and utilitarian walking.

After reading Saelens’s recent review of reviews on the subject, I ask whether studies that seemingly state the obvious – people walk more in walkable areas – are still worthwhile. “Yes,” he says. “There are likely

10,000 built environment factors. There are important levers in a handful of them, some of which are more readily modifiable, and we need to know what those are.” Still, he and co-author Susan Handy, an environmental science and policy professor at University of California at Davis, both emphasized the need to help establish causality.

Studies would involve observing the same group of people living in two different types of environments and monitoring their behavioural change. “I don’t have the resources [to do my ideal study],” Saelens says, jokingly adding, “I can’t assign people to live in certain places – for some reason we can’t do that.”

Longitudinal studies would also allow researchers to test the idea that people selfselect certain areas based on their behavioural preferences. The logic goes: someone who loves driving chooses suburbia, while someone who wants to walk to work lives downtown. The problem with that, however, is that with such a large percentage of housing in Canada and the U.S. laid out in suburban tracts, it’s hard for people who want to walk to express that desire. This could be true in Montreal, where more than 80 per cent of trips in West Island boroughs are made by car, and only 40 per cent of trips in the Plateau.

The flaws in the logic of self-selection lead many researchers, including Frank and Saelens, to counter that the supply of housing stock in walkable areas either does not meet the demand or is too expensive. “I love the argument – and you hear it from these building organizations: ‘We’re just building places that people want.’ That’s just not true. It might’ve been true before, but it’s not true now,” Saelens says.

Handy adds that changing the normal course of development is difficult: “I think there’s a lot of inertia in development community.” And even when an ambitious developer wants to incorporate features that will make areas more walkable, outdated zoning bylaws often restrict what they can do.

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or now, the majority of longitudinal evidence is anecdotal. Shawn Micallef, an associate editor at the urban design magazine Spacing, blogged about the effect that scale had on his travel habits after returning home to Windsor last Easter. He kept to the usual routine of driving around town to see what has and hasn’t changed (“There’s no other way to get anywhere”) until he drove by the old auto plants.

Driving by the plants every day, he notes, “the thing just zooms by – you never get a sense of its magnitude.” So Micallef had a friend superimpose the areas taken up by GM and Chrysler auto plants over Toronto’s downtown grid to better understand the

difference between the layout of his old and new home. When I ask him how much of Windsor’s pride he thinks is tied up in auto manufacturing, he explains the purpose of the project: “This was a way of making that symbolic thing into something physical. Attaching it to downtown Toronto, the Chrysler plant went from Front to Bloor.

There’s so much stuff in that area – an encyclopedia’s worth of urban junk in there – but in Windsor it’s one thing. It’s a minivan plant...[which I found] striking and radical.”

Micallef’s take on the difference between city and suburban living resonates with my experience. Referring to the changes he’s experienced from driving around Windsor to walking around Toronto, he says, “I’d never thought critically about how I moved around Windsor until I went back.” Similarly, though I’ve noticed a profound shift in the way I perceive daily travel, growing up in the moribund ‘burbs never demanded I think outside that box on four wheels.

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roponents of more liveable cities can find common ground with environmentalists who decry the increased carbon emissions and energy use predicated by suburban living; so can local food advocates fed up with the conversion of arable land to parking lots, buildings, and chemical-addicted lawns.

The same is true for teachers and parents who see a correlation between their child’s health and academic performance. “There’s lots of synergies there, but if [the message is] splintered, it’s not going to be nearly as effective,” Saelens notes.

Since the implementation of all this information produced in academic fields still rests outside institutions, connections between public health researchers and other advocates for liveable cities are key.

There are encouraging signs that this message is getting out there: the U.S. Centre for Disease Control (CDC) recently published 26 different strategies for preventing childhood obesity suggested by researchers, and the Active Living By Design organization links planners with public health researchers to advocate for healthier living through infrastructural change. Further, Projet Montréal’s success in the mayoral elections suggests the growing popular appeal of people-oriented planning.

At a conference discussing the CDC report, Saelens was asked what change would have the greatest impact over the built environment. His response? “Making gas $10-12 gallon, and the reason isn’t because I don’t want people to drive – there is some utility in it.” With people paying the real price for their behavioural choices, Saelens argues, “then you can have serious conversations about land use and true public transportation.”

Science+Technology

The McGill Daily, Monday, November 9, 2009

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Ideal spaces for health care Hospital development team considers patient needs Tara Brosnan Sci+Tech Writer

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n an age in which more holistic approaches to medicine are being normalized, new research is being devoted to the effects of physical hospital environments on patients’ recovery. During a panel discussion offered by Café Scientifique on October 29, entitled “Healing by Design,” three members of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) Redevelopment Project led a discussion on health care design and the uses of hospital space.

Robert Hamilton, an associate architect at Lemay Associés Architecture-Design and member of design and management teams for the MUHC Redevelopment Project, spoke of a need to go back to basics when designing hospitals.

“We’re bombarded by complexity and knowledge, but our objective is to be simple [and] healthy,” Hamilton said.

The two other panelists – Imma Franco, senior planner for the MUHC, and Micheline Ste-Marie, pediatric gastroenterologist and associate director of Professional Services at the Montreal Children’s Hospital – both emphasized patient-

centred directives.

“It’s really about people,” Franco said. “People are coming to facilities who are not well…so the environment has to alleviate some of that concern and stress.”

To improve on this, patient choices and preferences are continually being incorporated into hospital planning. Franco assured the audience that patient representatives have been involved in MUHC’s redevelopment project from the initial planning stages, conducting surveys to better understand a patient’s perspective. She also emphasized that different patient populations have different priorities.

“One of our challenges is to bring together multiple populations. We have children and their families, we have elderly [patients], we have mothers who are delivering, so we have a variety of clientele,” Franco said.

Ste-Marie used the example of a hospital survey conducted in Victoria, British Columbia that showed patients ranked a window in their room looking out onto the corridor as the most important environmental feature.

“When you’re a patient and you’re vulnerable, you just want to know where your caregiver is and how to reach him or her,” Franco said.

One audience member, an acoustical consultant, brought up the effect of noise on patient healing. He cited the work of a Swedish doctor who installed sound-proof ceiling tiles in his ward, and reported a 40 per cent decrease in average time spent in the ward, as well as fewer patient relapses. The audience member urged the panel to take this information into consideration, suggesting that noise – which is often overwhelming in hospitals, especially in urban areas – clearly affects patient well-being and recovery.

Hamilton agreed that this is an important issue: “The acoustic environment gets underrated and gets undersold so often, and not just in hospitals. It has a very important influence on the way you feel, and in health care settings, how you heal.”

In addition to these features, hospitals also need to be constructed with possible future needs in mind.

Montreal’s hospitals are aging and health care is changing – issues that must be addressed. Hamilton pointed to a need for generic spaces that serve a variety of uses, ensuring that hospitals are structurally built to accommodate future architectural change, and creating socalled “soft-spaces” that can be eas-

Constance Lahuna for The McGill Daily

Each facet of the building can be designed to optimize caregiving. ily transformed if need be.

“There are a lot of strategies to make a building more flexible….

In health care, like in other fields, the degree of change is important,” Hamilton said.

Montreal hospitals have been transforming over the years and will continue to change. In the fifties, for example, many more patient beds took up space in hospitals, and much of that space has since been transformed into clinics and treatment areas.

In addition to the structural

space that surrounds the patient, healing by design includes the safety of the hospital hallways, resources and space for patient family members, soothing colour schemes, and accessibility of hospital staff.

In the end, hospitals must cater to their patients. The health care setting should be a calm and relaxing environment that helps patients recover. “[Our goal] is to synthesize all those requirements so at the end of the day, you have a place at which you can feel whole,” Hamilton said.

Make way for intellectual freedom Plus or minus sigma Shannon Palus

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fter navigating the metro and trekking six blocks of sidewalk, fresh with rain, in heels to the Saturday night production of Inherit the Wind at the Segal Centre, I wobble to my second row seat, and find the pointed toes of my shoes at the edge of faux cobblestone flooring. The stage runs right under the feet of the front row audience, placing the entire first set of cherry-red seats on a street in Hillsboro, – a fictionalized version of Dayton, Tennessee – “a sleepy, obscure, country town about to be awakened,” according to the program.

The “Scopes Monkey Trial” took place in 1926, but it’s been played out again and again on stage ever

since the script was published in 1955. School teacher John Scopes, on whom the play’s character “Bertram Cates” is based, was put on trial for discussing evolution with his high school class in a town where God’s six-day creation, as outlined in the Bible, was not to be questioned.

In this iteration, the set consists of a jail with a single cell, a front porch, a general store with a CocaCola ad, telephone lines strung on telephone poles that resemble crosses, and a banner that says “Read Your Bible” hung up in the town centre. In the second act, the little town is converted into a courtroom. With the addition of several rows of chairs, a fast-talking

reporter from Baltimore, a small silver microphone that descends from the invisible ceiling on a long black cord, and Scopes’s defence lawyer, the town is no longer sleepy and is about to become unobscured.

“Helloooo Chicago! This is live from Hillsboro!” shouts a man into the microphone.

The entire cast of townspeople is present for the trial. Clapping and booing at the appropriate times, they act in perfect unison – just like they did while praying and singing hymns in the previous scene’s church service.

Now, in the 100-degree heat of the courtroom, the absolute certainty of the scripture is called into question. The beliefs are still there, but they are slowly fraying and being pulled apart at the edges – giving way to the mere possibility, the simple right to wonder, if man might have been put on Earth by a means other than God. Has the 16-year-old school boy ever thought that his teacher might be right about evolution? Has the prosecution ever even tried reading On the Origin of Species, the text they oppose so

vehemently? The defence wants to know.

Even though Scopes lost the trial on his home turf, the $100 fine did not stand up to the appeal, as outlined in the epilogue of the play.

And the members of the jury that day looked nervous in their decision. The townspeople left the trial, perhaps a little less sure of their convictions. And after the trial, there was no reversing the flood of outside opinion and information let loose into Hillsboro, and every corner of America that could be reached by newspapers and telephones. The space of “small sleepy town” was no longer entirely holy, no longer wrapped up in dogma.

Gone was the space dominated by a single opinion that banned questions or new ideas.

Nearly a century later, the trial is still playing itself out outside the courtrooms of Inherit the Wind productions. Religious believers still take peer-reviewed meritocratic biology up against the law – though time has brought us technologically further than freshly installed telephone wires and

snail-mailed newspapers. Coverage of these trials is accessible by the same means as six-part prime-time specials on Darwin and televised mega-church Sunday morning sermons. The number of books on the subjects of evolution and faith in any given bookstore is enough for many, many sermons.

And the ground being fought for in courts is coming down to the very smallest of physical spaces. In a 2004 trial in Cobb County, Georgia, a courtroom argued over whether or not it was constitutional to place six square inches of sticker in the front of high school biology textbooks stating, in part, that, “evolution is a theory and not a fact.” The court ruled that even the small sticker was not to be granted a place in the science classroom.

These days, dogma is struggling to find its space. It’s a nice epilogue.

Shannon Palus will be writing in this space again in two weeks.

Write to her at plusorminussigma@mcgilldaily.com.

Science+Technology

The McGill Daily, Monday, November 9, 2009

UNDER THE SCOPE

EARTH ON TICKERTAPE

Immortality in sight Mohammad N. Miraly Sci+Tech Writer

I

t now seems inevitable that we will live to ages only dreamed of by our ancestors. At least, according to futurist Ray Kurzweil, who says humans could become immortal in less than 20 years’ time through nanotechnology. Certainly, humans have always quested for immortality, but the quest has usually been interpreted as a spiritual yearning to be united forever with the divine. Contemporary scientific advancement, however, seems to have transformed that lofty spiritual goal into something very tangible.

Science has steadily conquered obstacles to prolonging life, and has increased our life expectancy by almost 30 years in the last century. But our longer lives are pockmarked by new psychological and physical maladies that almost invalidate those extra 30 years. The ultimate goal, then, is not to live longer, but to live healthier, which, many argue, new scientific advancements will ensure.

Indeed, new technologies – stem cell research, the melding of man and machine, nanotechnology, et cetera – can improve our mental and physical capacities. Kurzweil argues that technological advancement will accelerate so rapidly that humans will be unable to keep

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15

pace, eventually augmenting their bodies with cybernetics, and thereby becoming “transhuman.”

The insistence that disease is unnecessary – that death is a false reality – sustains such arguments, and indeed, has done so throughout time. The conquest of disease and the end of aging are eternal obsessions, exemplified by Alexander the Great’s quest for the Water of Life, King Arthur’s quest for the Holy Grail, and even western literature’s oldest tale, “The Epic of Gilgamesh.”

Author Jorge Luis Borges wrote, “Except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death.” It is not unreasonable to suppose that the quest for immortality is born out of a fearful knowledge of impending death. Indeed, this is suggested in Darren Aronofsky’s 2006 film, The Fountain, in which the protagonist overcomes that fear after centuries of questing, eventually dying willingly.

American astrologer Linda Goodman argued that constantly thinking about death makes us “death-conscious,” but, with the strong belief that death isn’t inevitable, we can create within our minds a reality in which we never die. As Queen Sophie-Ann states in HBO’s True Blood, “She’s convinced herself she’s immortal and so she is.”

While the quest for physical

immortality is a story of consistent failure, it also reveals a continual truth – that immortality is not a physical prize, but a spiritual one.

Indeed, the goal of the spiritual quest is to annihilate the self, so that we may live forever, united in the divine oneness. The quest for immortality on earth is a physical allegory of a spiritual reality.

Our literature and mythologies suggest that immortality is an intrinsic human craving. But, as understood from those stories, that craving is a spiritual quest that simply manifests physically, and when the quest is driven by the physical ego, it is doomed to fail. Obsession tends to destruction. While the obsession with living forever may lead to longer lives, without an acute awareness of life’s purpose and meaning it may also lead to the loss of everything that makes life worth living.

Nevertheless, as science continues to progress, we will continue to live longer. Indeed, as our advancements in medical science illustrate, we as a species have exhibited a desire to live longer and to rid ourselves of external forces that cause disease and death.

Freddie Mercury once asked, hauntingly, “Who wants to live forever?” It seems now that we may not have much choice – forever is only a few years away.

In this monthly segment, Niko Block will be covering global climate change and up-to-date environmental issues.

A

study compiled by the UN Environment Programme found that carbon emissions grew over three times faster between 2002 and 2007 than they had in the nineties. Elephants and buffalo are dying due to drought in Kenya. Scientists estimate that Papua New Guinea’s Carteret Islands will be fully submerged by 2015; the region’s 10,000 residents are currently being relocated to the island of Bougainville. The president of the Maldives held an underwater cabinet meeting calling for the world to reduce its carbon emissions, lest the Pacific archipelago also be submerged. A new report from the Environmental Justice Foundation estimates that climate change will displace 150

million people by 2050. Another report predicted that fish populations in the tropics will decline by 40 per cent in the same time period. On October 24, over 5,200 events and protests were staged worldwide demanding emissions reductions and a comprehensive climate resolution at the upcoming conference in Copenhagen.

Denmark, Luxembourg, and New Zealand consume the greatest quantities of meat on a per capita basis. Australia’s army continues to shoot kangaroos in an attempt to thin their population. Thirsty emus and kangaroos have increasingly forayed into Australian towns in recent weeks due to drought.

—Niko Block

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Car-free campus or bike-free campus?

News Writer

S

haring the road with cars, school buses, ambulances, and construction has made cyclists’ use of the new bike path on University a rather unpleasant experience. When completed, however, the path is expected to reduce car usage around the University and contribute to a greener campus.

The City of Montreal established the bike path in order to connect missing links in the current bicycle network. The new path will allow cyclists to connect directly to the Maisonneuve path, and more easily access downtown Montreal. The extension is part of a wider campaign to expand the bicycle network – with approximately 560 kilometres available to cyclists this fall, and plans to increase the network to 800 kilometres by 2014.

Coupled with the commuter Bixi bike system that was installed over the summer, the bike path extension is part of a larger effort to make the city more livable and defeat the “car is king” attitude, which lowered Montreal’s ranking on Monocle Magazine’s Top 25 most livable cities from 16 to 19.

McGill has also announced plans to make campus car-free by 2010, and is working toward the removal of parking spaces on lower campus, and regulation that

would restrict all vehicular traffic, with the exception of delivery vehicles entering via the Milton Gates.

There has also been talk of increasing bike lock spaces, and promoting bicycle use through groups such as The Flat, a bicycle repair collective in the basement of Shatner, in order to reduce vehicle traffic.

Despite the benefits of a new bike path near campus, there are concerns that the new path will constrict an important, and already narrow, traffic artery. So far it has limited the parking space available on University. Parents shuttling their children to and from the FACE School, an arts academy across from Otto Maass, will also be affected, as will the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, which uses University as its main emergency route.

Moreover, while the new bike path may appear to be part of the effort to build a car-free campus, the University’s reasons for supporting the path have not been entirely bike-friendly. McGill had lobbied for the bike path in hopes that it would divert bicycle traffic away from campus, as McGill’s central position between downtown and eastern Montreal makes it tempting for cyclists going west from Milton or going east from Sherbrooke.

McGill’s policies on bicycle use have long frustrated city cyclists, with security guards insisting that

cyclists take the road up toward Arts, the longer and steeper route through campus, and of late, forcing all cyclists to walk their bikes.

According to François Roy, the Vice-Principal of Administration and Finance, the restriction on bike usage is a safety issue. The heavy foot traffic when students have class and the corresponding bicycle traffic could pose a threat to students, and there have been numerous collisions and close calls between pedestrians, cyclists, and cars. It is hoped that the new bike path will encourage cyclists to take the long way around McGill, via University and Maisonneuve, thus ameliorating these safety concerns.

When compared to the city’s recent bike friendly developments, McGill’s response to cyclists on campus has raised questions as to how bike-friendly the University’s plan for a car-free campus is. While there are plans for new bike parking infrastructure, and other bike friendly measures, the new bike path suggests that McGill does not want non-student cyclists on campus, and thus does not see itself as part of the larger Montreal biking community. Safety for students is certainly a prime concern, but perhaps McGill should attempt to integrate itself better into the larger citywide project to extend bicycle use, while balancing its obligations to student safety with its responsibility to making Montreal more livable.

Dominic Popowich / The McGill Daily

Evan Zatorre

Metro lines to be extended Shirine Aouad News Writer

O

Ethan Landy for The McGill Daily

n September 16, Quebec premier Jean Charest announced a public transportation project to extend metro lines in Montreal’s metropolitan area. The project’s estimated budget of $4 billion will first be reviewed in feasibility studies conducted by a board of Agence métropolitaine de transport and Ministère des transports representatives. The investigation is slated to take up to three years, and cost $12 million dollars.

The proposed plan, which includes connecting orange line termini Côte-Vertu and Henri Bourassa, as well as extending the blue line past Saint-Michel into Anjou and the yellow line into Vieux-Longueuil, has already raised objections. Though the Ministère des transports requested Laval, Longueuil, and Montreal to submit a public tranport proposal, West Island municipalities such as Beaconsfield and Dollarddes-Ormeaux have been left out of the project.

Transport 2000 Quebec, a nonprofit organization and consumer based advocacy group, has criticized the project. It favours investing in already existing rail and bus

17 Urban form

Transit

The McGill Daily, Monday, November 9, 2009

services, or reviving a less costly and labour-intensive form of transit such as the tramway, which was taken off the road in 1959.

McGill graduate student Robyn Penney, who often commutes into the city from her parents’ residence at Pierrefonds in the West Island, felt that the metro is not the most effective means of public transit in her borough.

“Like many West Islanders, I used to think semi-seriously that the refusal to expand the metro to our area was just discrimination against anglos. But…the metros do not move as fast as the train. In only 25 minutes, I’m in the heart of town,” she said.

Penney added, though, that trains can be few and far between, and on weekends they sometimes run no more than three to four times a day.

Raphaël Fischler, an urban planning professor at McGill, felt that while the expansion made sense at first sight, he questioned the wisdom of some of the proposed expansions.

“The original plan for the metro network, drawn up in the sixties and seventies, had the blue line go to Montréal-Nord, an area with a high density of population and with a population that is poorer on average than the population of the city in general and is more dependent on public transit

for its mobility,” Fischler said. “So why the change to Anjou, where the population density is lower on average, where incomes are higher on average, and where use of public transit is weaker on average?

These are important questions.”

Fischler viewed the project, headed by Quebec’s Liberal Party, as a political gesture. “The main reason for this announcement is to send out the signal that the government cares about Montreal, city and region, and its needs; that it cares about sustainable development and public transit; and that it intends to invest in public infrastructure and create jobs in the process at a time of economic slowdown,” Fischler said.

He noted though that the project – which will add 20 kilometres to the metro network – is not expected to be completed for another 15 years, a timeframe which suggests that the political priority given to the public transit plan is, as of yet, mainly nominal.

Recent wheelchair-friendly installation of elevators in metro stations Lionel-Groulx and BerriUQAM has also met with some skepticism. Michel Labrecque, former Société de transport de Montréal Chair, has estimated it will take another 25 years before all stations are accessible to people with disabilities.

Culture

The McGill Daily, Monday, November 9, 2009

18

Dominic Popowich / The McGill Daily

Parc Extension is the 2009 Inter-university Charrette’s intervention site. Participants will look at the neighbourhood’s unique food-related networks.

Food for thought Cross-university student panel discusses using design to feed cities Kira Josefsson The McGill Daily

U

niversities produce dreams.

This means that, as university students, we are allowed, even encouraged, to indulge in fantasies about personal or universal utopias, a fact that makes some people mutter about ivory towers and the like. Others, however, think that dreams are the first step toward real change. Among this latter group are a number of students from McGill, UQÀM, Université Laval, Carleton, and Ryerson, who this Tuesday will showcase their dreams for a better city at the vernissage for this year’s edition of the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s Inter-university Charrette.

Inter-university charrettes have taken place every fall since 1995 in Montreal. Each year, over the course of a couple of days of intense effort, teams of students – usually of design, architecture, or urban planning – work to find solutions

to one specific problem related to the city. By encouraging community participation through ads and a public exhibition, the organizers of the charrette hope to create a dialogue that can inspire city inhabitants to refashion their space to suit their needs.

These are lofty aims, yes. But at the same time, the problems that the charrettes tackle are very real; they are issues that may not be taken on because of the lack of short-term financial incentives, but that must nonetheless be solved.

An illuminating example is this year’s project, titled “Nourishing the City.”

“We’re on the verge of a global food crisis,” says Nik Luka, a professor at McGill’s School of Architecture and the head coordinator of this year’s charrette. Further, he notes that food production is not a part of society’s idea of the city, saying that our current practice of importing our food from the four corners of the earth is one that we must realize is unsustainable. Like every

industry, food production becomes more lucrative when it’s centralized and large enough to reach economies of scale. But this is an untenable situation, and one that puts great strain on the environment, and making healthy whole foods unnecessarily expensive. The Canadian Centre for Architecture’s Charrette advocates that food production be closer to home, and asks its participants to think about solutions that may enable this, and thus improve food security.

While submissions to the charrette have often included plans for projects that are too large to be pragmatic, the main point of the event is to inspire and raise awareness among stakeholders in the issues discussed. Nevertheless, Luka says that this year, the charrette may lead to more direct implementation of ideas, a benefit of larger networks and closer collaboration with the community. The CCA and the universities are working together with the Centre d’écologie urbaine de Montréal and Nourrir Montréal, two

community groups that have a prolonged relationships with the Parc Extension area, this year’s intervention site. Though not wealthy, the neighbourhood has a vibrant community, largely due to its status as a gateway community, and is home to many immigrants, who are active in seeking new networks.

“Public life becomes more important when private housing isn’t great,” explains Luka. Additionally, the neighbourhood is one of those increasingly rare places that has not yet been subjected to gentrification, and this is another challenge for the charrette teams: improving the quality of life without new development on every street corner.

Emily Reinhart, a U2 Architecture student who will participate in the charrette as a part of her studio class, thinks the project is a great opportunity to try out a design competition, which will be an important part of her career as an architect.

Social concerns are often said not to get any room in the commercial world, but Reinhart thinks she will

find a way to integrate them into her future work.

“Because of what our professors have stressed in class, they have made us more socially conscious,” Reinhart comments. “[Professors] have really ingrained [in us] the importance of building a city suitable to human needs.”

Change must and will emanate from dreamy ideas. The ivory tower only becomes a reality if those thoughts stay within the university walls. So long as students maintain two-way communication with communities, we should think up as many great dreams as we can.

It’s a cliché, but true nonetheless: if we wildly aim for the stars, there is always the risk that we end up somewhere in the treetops – and that’s not half bad.

All of the submitted projects will be exhibited at a vernissage at La Société des arts technologiques (1195 St. Laurent) November 11 at 5 p.m.

Culture

19

Miranda Whist / The McGill Daily

Urban form

The McGill Daily, Monday, November 9, 2009

Shedding a red light on history Sarah Mortimer recounts the birth and development of the home of Montreal’s sex industry

T

he history of Montreal’s redlight district betrays its special notoriety. It was bred, after all, by the same mechanisms that brought other commercial sex industries in North America into being. The lack of economic opportunity for working class women, widows, unwed mothers, and “spinsters” forced women to turn away from more “respectable” professions in order to make a living.

Characterized as “fallen” by more politically influential classes, these women were then further marginalized – socially and legally – by society. Throughout the decades, Montreal’s sex industry fell under fluctuating intensities of regulation, but was never fully outlawed.

Throughout the late 19th and early 20th century, municipal authorities dealt with what they saw as the problem of sex work in Montreal largely through symbolic spatial politics. Efforts were made to keep prostitution away from “innocent” middle class women and children by arresting sex workers who strayed outside the accepted limits of Montreal’s so-called “erotic marketplace.”

As a result, brothels and nightclubs became visibly severed from Montreal’s upstanding residential areas, making it possible – as Chez Stella founder and Concordia sex historian Karen Herland points out – for members of the city’s middle class “to pretend that society’s virtue was intact.”

The character of Montreal’s red-light district thus developed in opposition to these exclusive enclaves of “virtue.” Greeted with disgust and suspicion in residential areas of the city, individuals who rejected society’s traditional domestic values may have been attracted to the red-light district for the relative freedom it offered from social and legal persecution.

Whereas female sex workers were rejected for their work and life circumstances in other areas of society, those who worked together in brothels and bars formed close bonds over their similarities, creating what Tamara Myers calls “a distinct female subgroup.” Additionally, during the twenties – when sex workers fell under the ever-expanding scope of strict loitering laws – broth-

els and bars became legally safe, though not ideal, spaces for sex workers. The same institutions that alarmed upper-class mothers and motivated them to form antivice committees throughout the first of half of the century, did, in fact, serve a practical purpose for many people who were already on the outskirts of society.

Of course, welcoming those who existed on society’s margins has always been a key part of the redlight district’s history. In her book, C’etait du spectacle, Vivian Namaste writes that the “spirit of diversity and tolerance” around sex and labour on lower St. Laurent, where controversial renovations are slated to occur this spring, contributed to the vibrant history of Montreal’s transsexual communities.

Likewise, it was not uncommon for non-heteronormative sexual practices to take place at clubs in the area. In his famous book City Unique, author William Weintraub recalls seeing two nude women penetrating each other with dildos at 312 Ontario during the forties. Though taken on its own, this by no means suggests

the existence of a lesbian community in that brothel, it proves the existence of relatively open attitudes in such spaces toward sexual practices that might have been viewed as abnormal by mainstream society.

It was only sporadically that city leaders and police attempted to check the activities in this area.

At the dawn of the 20th century, Montreal’s status as one of the fastest growing cities on the continent – in addition to its port access and European cultural ties – made it a central destination for travellers across the globe. Soldiers, booze-seeking Americans, and curious commuters throughout Canada all flooded the entertainment district’s main arteries in search of that “glittering sinfulness” that had become Montreal’s call to fame.

By 1944, it became evident that the red-light district was generating an important portion of Montreal’s commerce when Mayor Adhémar Raynault – alarmed by an explosion of STI infections among men from nearby military bases – took action, shutting doz-

ens of brothels down. Soon after, Montreal tourism rates plummeted, forcing Renaud to admit the city’s economic dependence on the red-light district.

The incident proved emblematic of a legacy of moments in Montreal’s history where authorities have had to redefine their approach to regulating the red-light district, by taking into account social and economic realities. The economic boost that city-regulated prostitution afforded both the legal system and the tourist industry would ultimately undermine moralizing campaigns by politicians like Jean Drapeau.

Today, arguments over the area’s historic importance are shaping the way in which authorities make decisions about the space.

Looking back at the history of the area, it is most interesting to note the force of attraction it continues to exert on its visitors, developed in spite of initiatives aimed at reducing its visibility.

Perhaps it is this area’s openness that has caused Montreal to figure so favourably in the popular imagination.

20 Culture

The McGill Daily, Monday, November 9, 2009

Documenting the International Criminal Court Pamela Yates’ The Reckoning traces the ICC’s growing pains Zoë Robertson Culture Writer

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merican filmmaker Pamela Yates’ latest production, The Reckoning – The Time for Truth, the Struggle of the International Penal Court, surveys the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the challenges it has faced since its inception in 2003. The film will screen tomorrow as part of the Montreal Human Rights Film Festival’s Human Rights Encounters Series.

The film follows the ICC’s prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, and his office’s activities over a three-year span. Arrest warrants are issued for Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army leaders, warlords of the Congo are put on trial, the Colombian justice system is questioned, and charges are laid for genocide in Darfur.

Prosecutor Moreno Ocampo and his office investigate the crimes, gather the evidence, indict the perpetrators, and finally face them in trial. The Reckoning doesn’t paint a pretty picture, but it offers a promising outlook on the prevention of international crimes.

The opening scene sets the tone of the film, which relies on graphic images and horrific examples to illustrate the magnitude of cases being dealt with. It shows a tearful group approaching a recent murder scene in the bush of Middle-Africa.

Lifting a muddy skull from the ground, a local man explains that without justice, there is no basis for

respect, and communities will continue to attack and kill one another.

In countries where mass murders and gruesome crimes are committed with impunity, citizens hope for representation that will end these acts of cyclical destruction.

The idea of an international court was conceived at the end of the Second World War, when Axis leaders were prosecuted for crimes against humanity at the Nuremburg trials. Only after the Cold War were other international criminal processes, such as the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals, established by the United Nations (UN) Security Council. Aware of the shortcomings of ad hoc tribunals, the UN General Assembly convened in 1998 in Rome, bringing government representatives from around the world to construct the framework of a permanent international criminal court. The court became a reality in 2002, and today the Rome Statute has been ratified by 110 member states.

Philippe Kirsch, a former Canadian diplomat, served as a judge of the ICC from 2003 to 2009, and was also its first president. In a phone interview, Kirsch explained how the ICC differed from earlier conceptions of international justice arrangements like the Nuremburg trials. “All of these [ad hoc international tribunals] returned to the past and returned to specific regions and countries,” he said.

“Eventually states decided that they needed something permanent that would look toward the future.”

Expounding on the difficul-

ties of the ICC’s creation, Kirsch added: “an entirely new court and an entirely new system was created from scratch…it was complex; it had very novel components.”

Indeed, the ICC’s early stages were fraught with numerous practical challenges. Yates’ film addresses these internal issues, beginning with the problem of which human rights violations required investigation. When it comes to issues like rape and murder, or the abduction of child soldiers and sexual slaves, how do you decide which is most pertinent, and which most deserves punishment?

Kirsch points out that in addition to internal challenges, the ICC faces numerous external critiques.

Crucially, the legitimacy of the court has been questioned as many of the world’s most powerful nations have rejected membership. Though the United States, under the Clinton government, initially signed the treaty, it was never sent to Congress for ratification, leaving the opportunity for the Bush administration to withdraw its involvement from – and actively work against – the ICC. While the U.S. is no longer hostile to the ICC, it still has yet to re-enter the organization.

Meanwhile, other states have refrained from signing the treaty, notably China, Russia, India, and most Middle Eastern countries.

“The old tribunals – Nuremburg, the Yugoslav tribunal, the Rwanda tribunal – were criticized for exactly the opposite reason [association with powerful nations],” Kirsch asserted, “because they were creat-

ed – imposed, in fact – by the victor states after World War II and later by the UN Security Council. To avoid that implication, the ICC was the first and only criminal court that was created by global treaty so that it could represent all views.”

Political legitimacy is another great concern of the ICC’s. All cases to come before the court so far are from Africa, raising a question of possible bias of judicial procedures. Kirsch points out, however, that “the ICC has never taken up any situation itself. All the situations that have been referred to the court...the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, and the Central African Republic, have referred their own situations.” As a court of last resort, the ICC can only take a case if a country is unable or unwilling itself to prosecute. He goes on to comment that “the ICC always operates in a political environment, so whatever it does touches always on immense interest, economical and political.... It is often criticized, not for what it does but because it complicates...political situations, and to overcome that...will take some time.”

Regarding future increase of state ratification, perseverance and time will likely prove the court’s credibility to unsigned nations.

Kirsch explains that “the essential condition for the ICC to have legitimacy is to always remain faithful... to a judicial role, not to ever act politically and the ICC system has been designed to avoid that.... That is where legitimacy comes from and that is what, ultimately, will

give confidence to states that have not ratified yet that they should, that...the ICC is a good thing for the world.”

For member states, the court has been beneficial, leading to improvements in the domestic judicial systems, which will, ideally , bring local perpetrators to justice.

In turn, local progress benefits the ICC’s mission, as the ICC’s limited resources restrict its capacity to undertake cases. A joint effort must be made between international and domestic judicial systems.

The Reckoning covers a small, though very important, portion of the tribulations that have surrounded the ICC since its conception. To grasp the extent of the court’s challenges, this riveting documentary shows the external struggles the court has faced, as well as hazards of field work, illustrated by explicit images and testimonials. Yates, who has received recognition for previous films from Sundance and has seen one of her pictures released in over 150 countries, has created a captivating story that vividly exposes not only the difficulties faced by the first independent international criminal court, but also issues that countries affected by war crimes deal with.

The success of the court, postulates Kirsch, lies in public awareness about its functioning. “The worst enemy of the ICC is ignorance, and the states need to be pushed a little bit.... Civil society has an enormous role to play in helping understand... international justice.”

Dominic Popowich The Daily wants to print your art.

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Compendium!

22

The McGill Daily, Monday, November 9, 2009

Lies, half-truths, and decadence

Les blagues du Mal Let’s learn how to be in public Library Etiquette: Oh, I’m heading to the circus to work on my paper, you? I’m sorry, if you have ever done any of these things in the library, I don’t think we can be friends: Skyped – in any language. (You’re right, I don’t understand Turkish.

But I can still hear you.) Explained band theory in metallic bonding to your friend whilst you were both wearing headphones. (Something about energy gaps between the valence and conductor bonds, yes I heard you from 30 feet away.) Hummed the chorus to “Going to the Chapel” on loop. (For the record, “This Land is Your Land” and the Inspector Gadget theme song are equally irritating substitutes.) Set up a buffet of Oreos, salami, and peanuts on a paper towel. (Yes, I personally witnessed this.) Beat-boxed or otherwise pretended your pencil drumming sounded like Louie Bellson. (Especially aggravating when you have overdosed on caffeine.) Trimmed your split ends and dusted them onto the floor. (Not a cool way to leave your mark in university.)

Can I just say, not the time.

Fuck This! is a therapeutic anonymous rant column, not necessarily about the library. Send your 200-word-or-less harangues every week to compendium@mcgilldaily.com. Anonymity guaranteed, but nothing hateful – just frustrated!

Mallory Bey / The McGill Daily

Better living through chemistry Friedrich Nietzsche

Across 1. Productions 9. Ocean menace 13. Squid food 14. Stat 15. Russian mountains 16. Large 17. Total 18. European blackbird 20. Sandwich meat with a lisp 22. Beast of burden 24. Undertake 25. Before noon 26. DJ implement 30. Singer DiFranco 31. kJ, m, eV, s, e.g.

32. Luau accessory 33. __mobile.

34. Ball-point predecessor 35. Metallic rare earth element 37. “Collect $200” 38. Breach 39. Minister: Abbr.

40. Gill substitute 43. ___ fatale 47. Mongrel, archaic 48. Excessively 50. Pan’s pipe 51. Poet ___ Pound 52. Retorted

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54. Tidy 55. Plea

Down

33. Counterpart 35. Tibetan subsistence animal 36. One who cries foul?

38. Catherine the ___ 41. Creole vegetable 42. Seat of physical strength 44. Greek prefix meaning “beyond” 45. Convene 46. Countercurrent 49. Don’t __ out of the Midnight Kitchen fee 53. Marie Antoinette jewellery

1. Lowlife 2. Noxious weed 3. Pertaining to wings 4. Chivalrous 5. ___ Not There, movie 6. Apprehend 7. “Sandwich” consistency 8. Prettier 9. Virile 10. Ulysses, often 11. Capital of Nepal 12. Glass half Solution to “Fall is here, ring the bell” full outlook 19. “C’___ la vie!”

21. Where the Wild Things __ 23. Gunpowder ingredient 26. Filament metal 27. What the States did 28. What Adam lost 29. Gamble 30. Jasmin’s suitor

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