Issu38 Vol101

Volume 101, Issue 38

March 19, 2012 mcgilldaily.com

McGill THE

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News

The McGill Daily | Monday, March 19, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

3

226 arrests, 1 flipped police car Anti-police brutality march spreads through downtown area Laurent Bastien Corbeil and Erin Hudson The McGill Daily

T

hursday night’s anti-police brutality protest turned ugly when demonstrators and police clashed in the streets of downtown Montreal. Around 2,000 protesters turned out for the demonstration, gathering at the Berri-UQAM metro station at 5 p.m. before marching through the downtown area.

Some demonstrators wore red squares around their right eyes in solidarity with CEGEP student Francis Grenier, whose right eye was injured last week when hit with a flash grenade thrown by a police officer.

The anti-police brutality demonstration, organized by the Collectif opposé à la brutalité policière, was marred by small groups of protestors who took part in acts of sporadic violence. Projectiles were hurled at store windows and police vehicles along Ste. Catherine, after riot police stopped the march in front of McGill’s Strathcona Music building and demonstrators diverted to Ste. Catherine.

The violence was widely condemned by other demonstrators, however, who responded to most instances of vandalism by booing.

After a masked man unsuccessfully tried to force open an ATM machine with a garbage can, he was surrounded by the crowd.

At 6:30 p.m., riot police scattered the crowd into several smaller groups by detonating flash grenades and repeatedly charging demonstrators. A standoff occurred between a splinter group of demonstrators and police on

the corner of Drummond and Ste. Catherine at 7 p.m.

The group, which consisted mostly of bystanders, was later pushed up Ste. Catherine. A parked police car was smashed and overturned along the way by demonstrators wearing masks.

Shortly after 7 p.m., roughly 200 demonstrators, most of them masked, flooded down the McTavish steps on to McGill’s lower campus. The crowd made its way past the Redpath Museum, while one demonstrator stood atop its steps and led a chant, in French, of “Whose streets? Our streets!”

The crowd passed through the Y-intersection, moving towards Burnside Hall. When the group tried to exit campus onto University, police turned them back.

Riot police appeared next to the eastern wall of Burnside. One protestor threw what appeared to be a rock at the officers, who did not respond.

Blocked from University, the crowd made for the Roddick Gates and exited campus on Sherbrooke.

Around 200 demonstrators regrouped in Place Émilie-Gamelin.

Rows of riot police stood along Ste. Catherine between the metro station and St. Hubert. Police used pepper spray on demonstrators on at least two different occasions in the square to move the crowd away from police lines.

At least four police officers arrested Jake Impellizeri at 7:56 p.m. on Ste. Catherine. As he was handcuffed, Impellizeri claimed that he did “nothing wrong” and was about to head home.

His friend, William Karshaw, stood by and watched the arrest.

“We were just standing, just like everyone else just watching. I guess

Hera Chan | The McGill Daily

Demonstrators against police brutality took to the streets of Montreal. he didn’t get a chance to get out of the way fast enough, and he was thrown to the ground and arrested,” Karshaw said. “We weren’t doing anything wrong…we were moving out of the way.”

At around 8:15 p.m., more demonstrators arrived at the square, bringing the crowd up to 400 people. The centre of the demonstration – and primary site of interactions with riot police – shifted to the intersection of Berri and Maisonneuve in the northwest corner of the square. Seven officers on horseback held the intersection.

Around twenty minutes later, between 100 and 150 people were kettled and arrested outside the

National Archives and Library of Quebec. The demonstrators were encircled after riot police charged the crowd. Lines of police officers, vehicles, and ambulances, blocked off the area so that no one could get in or out.

Riot police charged south down Berri and west on Maisonneuve, further dispersing demonstrators. 100 demonstrators remained in the northwest corner of the square until 9:06 p.m., at which time riot police charged again, pushing demonstrators out of the square. The demonstration dissolved a short time later.

At around 9:30 p.m., the demonstrators arrested outside the

National Archives were read their rights in English and French.

According to a police officer on the scene, a mass arrest could take up to two hours to process.

Each demonstrator was accompanied by two officers to be frisked, their bags searched, and loaded onto STM buses to go to a detention centre.

The officer said that there was no resistance from demonstrators.

One demonstrator was led out of the group to an ambulance by two officers. In total, the police reported that over 226 people were arrested, and seven officers injured.

—with files from Eric Andrew-Gee

Bill to involve civilians in investigations of police Municipal government trying to resolve “lack of trust” between police and public Jordan Venton-Rublee The McGill Daily

C

alls for reform from both the public and the Quebec government have led to a bill amending the Police Act. The bill, which is currenlty being presented to the Quebec National Assembly, would make civilians more involved with holding police accountable.

The proposal, known as Bill 46, was presented to the National Assembly in December by Security Minister Robert Dutil, and is currently being discussed.

The proposed Bill 46 would establish a “Bureau civil de surveillance des enquêtes indépendantes” (civilian oversight bureau), which would oversee independent

investigations in every case “where a person, other than an on-duty police officer, dies, is seriously injured, or is injured by a firearm used by a police officer during a police intervention or while the person is in police custody.”

It is already mandated by Quebec law that an investigation be held if such incidents occur.

However, current investigations are designated to an outside police force – one whose officers were not involved in the incident.

The proposed bureau would work alongside this investigation, and would report back to Dutil with their findings.

Quebec Ombudsperson Raymonde Saint-Germain does not believe these proposals go far enough. In an email to The Daily, Saint-Germain’s Director of

Communications Carol-Ann Huot said that, “For the most part, Bill 46 does not change the procedure in place under the current ministerial policy.”

“The fact is that Bill 46 maintains the system of police investigating police that does not provide a sufficient guarantee of impartiality,” Huot continued.

In a February 2010 report on Quebec’s investigative procedures into incidents involving police officers, Saint-Germain estimated the cost of establishing an independent investigation office at around $3 million, representing about 0.2 per cent of the Quebec police services total annual budget. She believes that this funding “can be made possible by reallocating existing resources.”

Huot spoke to a current attitude

of mistrust between police and the public.

“The public interest requires a serious and credible solution to the fundamental problem of lack of trust regarding police investigations into incidents where a civilian dies, is seriously injured, or is injured by a firearm or conducted energy device used by a police officer during a police intervention or while the civilian is in police custody,” said Huot.

The Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) would not comment on the story, stating that, as the bill is not yet mandated, they cannot issue a comment. Dutil’s office had also not responded to The Daily’s requests for comment at time of press.

Martine Painchaud, press secretary for Mayor Gérald Tremblay’s cabinet, said in an interview with

The Daily, “We believe in the creation of an independent unit, and we believe that the project of the government is the step in the right direction, though it is not exactly what city council asked for.”

During the summer of 2011, the Montreal City Council passed a resolution for the Quebec government to establish an independent investigation committee, following the shootings of two men by police.

“It is important that the population have a lot of confidence in a system of investigations that are impartial and independent,” continued Painchaud.

Huot reiterated that “a credible long-term solution to re-establish public trust in such investigations while respecting police officers and their rights must be put in place.”

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH CREATIVE WRITING PRIZES AND AWARDS The MONA ADILMAN PRIZE IN POETRY, estimated value $500--or estimated value $250 for two students, is open to undergraduate or graduate students registered in the Faculty of Arts for the best poem or group of poems relating to ecological or environmental concerns.

The CLARK LEWIS MEMORIAL PRIZE, estimated value $400, is open to major or honours students in the Department of English. The prize is awarded annually or from time to time for original plays staged in the course of the academic year.

The CHESTER MACNAGHTEN PRIZES IN CREATIVE WRITING (two prizes, one of estimated value $600 and another of estimated value $300) are open to undergraduate students of the University for the best piece of creative writing in English, i.e. a story, a play, a poem, an essay, etc. Printed compositions are ineligible if they have been published before April 16, 2012.

with

the tax experts

I GOT MY MONEY’S WORTH

The PETERSON MEMORIAL PRIZE, estimated value $2,000, is open to undergraduate or graduate students registered in a degree program in the Department of English with distinction in English Literature (CGPA 3.30 or above) who has also shown creative literary ability.

The LIONEL SHAPIRO AWARDS FOR CREATIVE WRITING, three prizes of estimated value $1,300 each, to be distributed if possible among the genres of poetry, fiction, screen writing and playwrighting. Each prize is to be awarded on the recommendation of the Department of English to students in the final year of the B.A. course who have demonstrated outstanding talent. (A note from your academic adviser verifying you will have completed your program requirements and the minimum credits required by the Faculty of Arts MUST accompany your submission.)

These competitions are restricted to students who have not previously won the First Prize.

Forms to be completed are available in the Department of English General Office, Arts 155. Submissions must be IN TRIPLICATE. DEADLINE: Monday, April 16, 2012

ANNUAL

GENERAL MEETING The AGM of the Daily Publications Society (DPS), publisher of The McGill Daily and Le Délit, will take place on

Wednesday, April 4 in Leacock 26 at 6pm

th

Members of the DPS are cordially invited.

The presence of candidates to the Board of Directors is mandatory.

For more information, please contact

chair@dailypublications.org

TEH DAILYNEEDS A CCOPY EDITER!.

IF YOU NOTICED ALL FIVE MISTAKES, YOU SHOULD APPLY! COPY@MCGILLDAILY.COM

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News

The McGill Daily | Monday, March 19, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

5

Case vows “consequences” for CBC McGill professor says network distorted his interview in asbestos documentary Eric Andrew-Gee

The McGill Daily

M

cGill professor Bruce Case has vowed that the CBC will face “consequences” for how he was depicted in a documentary on the University’s ties to the asbestos industry broadcast last month.

Case, a professor in McGill’s Department of Pathology and a leading asbestos researcher, did not say whether he was considering legal action against the CBC. Case was interviewed about his former colleague, J. Corbett McDonald, who received over a million dollars from an asbestos trade group to conduct research in the sixties and seventies. The documentary spurred McGill to launch a preliminary review of McDonald’s research last month.

In an interview with The Daily, Case accused the CBC of “deliberate misrepresentation and bias.”

“And, believe me, there will be consequences,” he said.

In the documentary, titled “Fatal Deception”, Case appears to give evasive answers in defending McDonald’s record, as well as his own.

Terence McKenna, the CBC reporter, asked Case, “Is it true that your studies have been funded

in part by the asbestos industry?”

Case replies, “My personal studies have never been funded by the asbestos industry – not one penny.”

A screen-shot of an academic paper then appears on screen, bearing Case’s name, and a footnote acknowledging funding from the JM Asbestos Company.

Case maintains, however, that the CBC misrepresented his role in the study, saying the paper in question was not one of his “personal studies,” but a student’s work, to which he had contributed research.

In a written response, McKenna and Gil Scochat, the documentary’s producer, said, “There was no bias or misrepresentation…deliberate or otherwise.”

They added that Case claimed the study as his own in a May 2005 court deposition.

In an interview, Case also stated that the CBC had truncated his answer to a request by McKenna to see the raw data from a study Case and McDonald conducted together. The study suggested that certain asbestos mines in the Thetford-Mines area were less contaminated with “tremolite” asbestos, and thus less prone to giving workers mesothelioma, or cancer of the lining of the lung.

In the documentary, McKenna asks of the data, “Will you give it

Courtesy of the CBC

Case did not say whether he was pursuing legal action against the CBC. to us?”

Case replies, “No, I won’t give it to you.”

In an interview with The Daily, Case said his full answer was, “‘I love the CBC – I watch the National every night including Saturday and Sunday, but the CBC is not a scientific agency, and therefore I don’t share scientific data with the CBC.’”

Schochat declined to provide The Daily with an unedited tape of the original interview, citing a CBC policy against doing so.

But in their written statement, Schochat and McKenna wrote, “We did not include that portion of Dr. Case’s answer because his testimonial of love for the CBC was irrelevant to the matter under discussion.”

“They edited and distorted my response,” said Case. “And, again, there will be consequences.”

While he declined to say what kind of consequences, Case’s personal website – which features the tagline: “Nobody knows the trouble I seen…” – linked to a letter by the University of Toronto scientist Murray M. Finkelstein calling the CBC documentary “slanderous.”

MUNACA to file complaint against McGill Labour Board to decide whether the University acted in bad faith Erin Hudson

The McGill Daily

M

UNACA plans to file a complaint before the Quebec Labour Board early next week after failing to come to an understanding with the University regarding the interpretation of an article of the union’s collective agreement.

The parties have been reviewing the wording and interpretation of the union’s collective agreement from December 5, 2011, when it was ratified, to February 17 when the process stalled at Article 23.10.

Under the article any MUNACA employee who is paid over their salary maximum will no longer receive salary increases, but will instead receive lump sum payments amounting to cost of living increases relative to their salary.

These lump sum payments will be payable to the employee’s pension.

MUNACA President Kevin Whittaker said the union was presented with the new interpretation of the article on November 26, 2011.

“We specifically told [McGill] that...the modification to the Article 23.10 would be conditional on the number of people it would impact, and we need a list of who those people are,” he said. The union received a list of eighty employees who were already paid higher than their salary maximum.

“After analyzing that list we realized these people were already at their grandfathered max so there was no detrimental impact on them,” said Whittaker.

Union executive VP Finance David Kalant explained the decision. “We’ve accepted that these people should be red-circled [subject to the new Article 23.10] since it doesn’t make sense that salaries already above the maximum of the job scale should keep going up. They will be held con-

stant until the job scale catches up to them,” he wrote in an email to The Daily.

Once the job scale catches up to the employee they will begin receiving salary increases again.

However, on February 17, McGill told the union that 48 employees would be added to the initial list of those affected by Article 23.10.

When, three weeks later, the union had not yet received the names of those employees, they held a demonstration on campus.

On the following Monday, McGill presented MUNACA with a list of names. Both parties met on March 15 to discuss the list.

Whittaker said that the union’s team “specifically asked” for a rationale as to why the 48 names were excluded from the original list. The University declined to comment on the March 15 meeting to The Daily.

“And we said, ‘Well, the onus was on you to tell us that this was not a complete list, because

we asked for a complete list,’” Whittaker said.

In an interview on March 12, McGill Director of Employee Relations Robert Comeau said that the union and McGill “never agreed on a number.” According to Comeau, the list was “provided, yes. Agreed to, no.”

“We provided the list of employees as an example of that situation,” he continued.

Whittaker said the additional 48 people had been added to the list for a “number of reasons.” He said that “every single one of the new people are problems,” though he noted that all 48 names are also receiving salaries greater than their position’s salary maximum.

“Our problem [is that] had that complete list been submitted we would never have agreed to it,” said Whittaker. “They were misleading us, giving us information that we would see, that would not truly negatively impact

on our members, and withholding that which they knew would have been a deal breaker.”

Whittaker said a common reason for adding some of the 48 names was the abolition of an employee’s position in a higher job class – an occurrence that he stated happens frequently.

When an employee is relocated to a lower job class – if they have job security – they maintain their previous salary, Whittaker explained.

However, with the new interpretation of Article 23.10, Whittaker stated that employees placed in lower job classes would not be able to receive salary increases while occupying the lower position, as their salary would likely exceed the maximum salary for their new position.

Comeau told The Daily on March 12 that the only criteria for adding names to the list is “if they are paid over the maximum of their current salary.”

6 News

The McGill Daily | Monday, March 19, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

QPIRG referendum to take place in April Juan Camilo Velásquez The McGill Daily

T

he Arts Undergraduate Society (AUS) issued a statement seeking an apology from the SSMU Executive during last Thursday’s SSMU Legislative Council, following the open letter that SSMU released regarding last Tuesday’s AUS General Assembly (GA).

In the letter, SSMU executives expressed disappointment concerning the “poor communication, organization and attitude,” of the AUS in their handling of the GA. Isabelle Bi, Arts representative to SSMU, spoke to Council on behalf of AUS President Jade Calver and the other Arts representatives.

“The act of issuing a public letter rather than respectfully meeting in private with the AUS executive is insulting and demonstrates the SSMU executives’ lack of professionalism and sets a dangerous precedent,” said Bi. “I would like to clarify that the AUS has never been and will never be subordinate to the SSMU,” she added.

The statement also accused SSMU VP Clubs and Services Carol Fraser of “hindering the logistics of the event.”

“She failed to provide details beforehand, she failed to reply to

emails, and she worked with third party interest groups instead of the Faculty,” said Bi. Fraser responded to the accusations by stating she had been in contact with members of the AUS Executive Committee about logistic overflow of rooms prior to and on the day of the event.

“I made it very clear that there were other room bookings already made in the building, and there was no other overflow space available in the building,” said Fraser.

Fraser further explained that part of SSMU’s discontent came “from [the AUS] kicking out groups like the [Muslim Student Association] and Mini Courses out of the space they were going to use without consulting me first… that really crossed the line and it had to be addressed.”

Fraser also clarified that AUS’ Nuit Blanche event – scheduled for March 22 – has not been cancelled.

“We’re not cancelling the event, rather, we just want to make sure it goes smoothly, so we requested a plan of the event, which was already in the works with the security supervisor,” said Fraser.

SSMU President Maggie Knight stated that the letter does not “typify” the type of relation that the SSMU wishes to have with any

faculty association, or that it has had this year.

Knight also told Council that the letter seeks to protect the clubs and services that use the building.

“The way TVM was treated was extremely disrespectful, and given that there had been discouragement from TVM livestreaming, and then they were later relied on to provide some sort of connection between the rooms and treated as tech support – it is fundamentally distressing and it is not indicative of the relations students would like to have at all,” said Knight.

Ellie Marshall, president of TVM, told Council that TVM felt “extremely disappointed and taken advantage of” by AUS during the GA. “We were subject to verbal reprimands of our services and at one point I was actually pushed in Leacock 132 for trying to fix the livestream,” said Marshall.

Marshall also expressed gratitude towards SSMU for addressing the issue.

“Our student services were mistreated for the AUS’ benefit,” she said. “I am a member of the AUS. I went there to vote, so were seven other members of TVM who sacrificed their GA experience to make sure everything

worked out.”

Calver also spoke to Council and expressed that AUS and SSMU should continue to have the good relationships they have had this year.

“I wish the SSMU Executive had taken time to reflect before issuing a public statement without consulting the AUS Executive.

However, I do not wish to cause further tensions between these two bodies,” said Calver.

Calver also thanked TVM and apologized to them on behalf of AUS. Following the discussion, a motion was passed to commit the issue to the SSMU Executive Committee, which will meet later next week.

QPIRG Another motion was passed to run an exceptional referendum period from April 10 to April 16,.

This referendum period will be used to put forth a question regarding QPIRG’s opt-out system. QPIRG’s fall referendum question was declared invalid by the administration and a Judicial Board case.

Council also voted to have a referendum question regarding online voting for General Assemblies. This question seeks to implement online ratification of decisions made in SSMU GAs.

CSU strike: day one Many Concordia students still attending class Dan Smith

The McGill Daily

C

oncordia University students officially commenced their strike against the provincial tuition fee increase last Thursday. Although picketers provided information and asked for support, they did not prevent students, staff, or faculty from entering campus, and many students continued attending classes.

The motion to strike was passed by a wide margin at the Concordia Student Union’s (CSU) General Assembly (GA) on March 7, and will end on March 22. According to Lex Gill, CSU President, students may submit a petition to call a second GA and vote to extend the strike.

Some students had begun collecting signatures for a petition to call a second GA days after the March 7 assembly, but withdrew it in order to respect the autonomy of departmental student associations holding separate GAs throughout the week.

According to Anthony

Garoufalis-Auger, a second year Political Science and School of Community and Public Affairs student and member of the CSU’s Strike Committee, another petition to extend the strike is already circulating, and has collected between 250 and 350 signatures.

Garoufalis-Auger stood in a picket line outside the Hall Building, one of Concordia’s major facilities.

“I think the strike is an effective way of making demands of the government,” said Garoufalis-Auger, who acknowledged that many students had continued attending classes. “If we’d get support of those leaving their classes, maybe they can help disrupt other classes.”

Standing nearby was a fourth year Industrial Engineering student named Joe, who asked that his last name not be printed. Joe said he supports the strike and is against the tuition increase, but that he would still attend classes and write his exams in order to graduate this year.

“I really like that some people are doing this to fight for something that is right.” He added that

he has had no problem making it to his classes. “It is very easy to get around. People are smiling.”

Although the CSU, which represents all of Concordia’s approximately 30,000 undergraduate students, is officially on strike, not all of Concordia’s departments have voted to strike. The Commerce and Administration Students’ Association (CASA) voted overwhelmingly against the strike last night. “CASA voted not to strike, and students are respecting that,” Gill said in an interview with The Daily.

Tanya, a third year Dance student, said that she and others had tried to attend their classes, but were obstructed by a picket line on the seventh floor in the John Molson School of Business, where dance and music studios are located. “We think it’s crazy because we’re trying to finish up. We have a big show, and now we’re just paying for losing our class. We’re with the strikers, but we want to go to class.”

On the seventh floor, other Dance students were picketing, sur-

rounded by tables full of snacks and bulletin boards covered in both pro and anti-strike messages. “Our idea is, if people want to pass, they can pass. It’s a choice you make, and we want people to be conscious of it,” said Ariane Dubé-Lavigne, a Dance student in her first year.

Marches, workshops, and teach-ins took place around campus throughout the day. In the basement of the School of Community and Public Affairs, a group of about 15 students choreographed dances and composed versions of recent pop songs with lyrics relevant to the strike. They planned to broadcast their work on CKUT Radio later that day.

Concordia administration released a statement on March 12 announcing their intention to provide normal services for the duration of the strike, and some administrators have warned of possible disciplinary or academic consequences. But another statement concerning the strike on the administration webpage reads, “Professors are encouraged not to penalize students who do not attend classes, sit exams, or submit papers on March 16.”

WHAT’S THE HAPS

AUS seeks apology from SSMU executives

Ampersand Conference Saturday, March 24, 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Leacock 219 Ampersand is an annual student-run conference hosted by the Faculty of Arts & Science aimed at integrating arts and science in a thought-provoking and interactive event. The theme for this year’s conference, MultipliCITY, aims to show us the diversity that accompanies living in a city. Lunch will be provided. Tickets are $15 online (ampersand2012. com) and $20 at the door.

Drop-in Daycare at Westmount Pre-school Daily, 9:15 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

4350 Ste. Catherine West PGSS members now have access to drop-in morning spots at Westmount Preschool at a discounted rate of $10 per morning. Spots are reserved on a first-come, first-served basis. In order to qualify, one parent must be a PGSS member and complete a registration form in advance, available through the Services Office. For more details, procedures, and registration forms, please contact Marilou at info.pgss@mail. mcgill.ca or at 514-398-1862.

Social Entrepreneurship and Philanthropy in Haiti Gala Saturday, March 24, 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.

SSMU Ballroom, 3rd floor Shatner Building This McGill Student and Alumni Benefit Gala will feature Professor Payam Akhavan, who teaches and researches international criminal law; Matt Brightman, a McGill student and founder of the company Moral Fibers; and Pierre Minn, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology and the Social Sciences of Medicine who has been conducting research in Haiti since 1997.

Musical performances include student ensembles from the Schulich School of Music.

How Would the Tuition Hikes Affect Women: Workshop and Discussion Tuesday, March 20, 3:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.

Breakout Room, 2nd floor Shatner Building SSMU and Concordia’s Simone de Beauvoir Institute present a workshop and discussion about how tuition hikes would affect women.

The Simone de Beauvoir Institute recently released a study of the potential impacts of the hikes on women, which argues that policies such as tuition increases serve to marginalize women, especially women of colour and poor women. The workshop will be followed by a discussion on the how the hikes marginalize people on the basis of gender, race, and class.

Commentary

The McGill Daily | Monday, March 19, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

7

Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily

“Is your hair real?”

Don’t fucking ask me if my hair is real Tyrone Speaks Christiana Collison

tyronespeaks@mcgilldaily.com

A

s I entered a sushi restaurant for dinner a few weeks back with a friend of mine, I was met by a hostess who, without a second thought – before the common pleasantries of hellos and seating arrangements – asked me, “Is your hair real?”

Pause. Let’s just pause right here for a moment.

Black women, how many times have you heard that question?

The infamous, “Is your hair real?” or “Can I touch it?” or, the pinnacle of all, “Well, where’s your real hair then?”

The surveillance of black women’s hair in both black and non-black spaces has been a longstanding and terribly unaddressed ritual for quite some time now. The racial specificity behind these questions have a direct link to the social devaluing of black

women’s aesthetic in mainstream society. It also provides another example of the entitlement wider society feels they have over black women – in this case, their aesthetics. An entitlement, I’d like to point out, they don’t have.

Hair, cross-culturally, has been constructed as something very central to the establishment of femininity. To put it bluntly, a woman without hair is not really a woman at all (that is, according to normative claims of femininity, or normative characteristics of what the feminine ought to be). In other words, hair has, for several women, become intrinsic to the construction of their feminine identity.

If we take this centrality of hair to a woman’s (aesthetic, at the very least) identity formation to be true, then I’m quite sure we can see the real problems implicit within those particular questions posed towards black women, and specifically the question, “Is your hair real?”

As I pointed out to my sushi dinner buddy, questions that inquire about the biological validity of

one’s hair are extremely gendered and racialized. That is to say, nonblack women and both black and non-black men are never asked the question, “Is your hair real?” and, thus, are never asked to validate the natural “ownership” of their hair.

The sheer thought of me posing this question to a non-black female or any man, for that matter, had my date in tears of laughter at its supposed absurdity, despite the fact that men and non-black women can and often do wear extensions, hairpieces, toupes, and wigs.

But yet, the ease at which women and men alike, both black and non-black, stop me on the street, in subway cars, and at my job (at almost every shift) to ask if me if my hair is real is quite astounding. It is telling of the many ways black women are constantly asked to account for their aesthetic being.

I say this because those individuals who seek to freely question the “biological” realness of black women’s hair do not know that this questioning has rooted hostile implications. This question, “Is your hair real?” asks no

other women but black women to essentially prove their feminine aesthetic identity – an identity that, as I have stated, becomes devalued every single time surveillance is enacted. Black women are forced to affirm or deny, at least once in their lifetime, the validity of their femininity and of their identity as woman. A problem? I think so.

Now, let’s get back to the incident that occurred at the sushi restaurant.

Unfortunately, I did answer the hostess, unwillingly of course. Will I share what my answer was? No, of course not. I did however tell my friend at dinner that I would no longer answer to the self-righteous inquiries of my identity as a woman.

But, obviously, I still get asked this question. Perhaps it is because of misguided and curious people who act as if they have never seen (black women’s) hair before and problematically feel that they have the right to ask about it (a right, I repeat, that they do not have). Or maybe it’s on account of my periodic

teetering between two seasonal hairstyles throughout the year.

My most beloved afro, which I affectionately call Tyrone (hence, “Tyrone Speaks”), and my dimedout “Poetic Justice” braids. The latter, a hairstyle I admiringly stole from Janet Jackson in the movie Poetic Justice, consisting of super long and thick braids… like real long, like down to my waist, long.

Regardless of the reason, I will no longer be answering this hostile and unlawful question. Misguided and supposedly curious (but, really, more like ignorant) people who feel entitled to inquire have no reason at all to ask me, or any black woman for that matter, about the realness of my hair – ever, period. So stop.

Simply put, perhaps it’s time watchful society focuses their eyes on their own hair and not my own, you know? So I kindly ask, don’t fucking ask me if my hair is real.

Tyrone Speaks is a twice monthly column written by Christiana Collison on the subject of black feminism. You can email her at tyronespeaks@mcgilldaily.com.

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THE VISIONS OF ROBERT LINDBLAD WORDS BY TIMOTHY LEM-SMITH PHOTO BY SAM SLOTNICK

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obert Lindblad is not a conventional career man.

For one thing, he doesn’t carry a business card, despite having worked the same job for over twenty years. He used to busk on Montreal street corners but he gave that up to focus on more lucrative pursuits. Some days, when he needs extra cash to pay his phone bill, he’ll go around knocking on strangers’ doors, trying to sell a five-dollar CD of instrumental music he recorded. (He calls it a mix of New Age and techno and has submitted it to the Junos this year. To me, it sounds like the music that plays in planetariums while solar systems project onto the ceiling, or the soundtrack of a sperm whale’s life played in slow motion.)

It was during one of these entrepreneurial jaunts that I met him. He didn’t have to knock; I was on the way out of my Plateau apartment and

opened the door to find him standing directly in front of me. He was holding the CD out like he knew I was coming, though that might just be retrospective conjecture on my part.

“Jesus!” I exclaimed. After apologizing quickly, Lindblad began his pitch. Looking back, I probably couldn’t have been less prepared for what he was about to say.

Lindblad is not physically imposing: he’s short, probably about fivefoot-four, and smiles at strangers. He has been semi-paralyzed since being hit by a car in 1969, which gives him a limp and curved back. His introduction was so casual that I had to ask him to repeat it. For a second time, he said, “I’m a psychic who finds missing children.”

Later, after having heard him say it ten or so times, I realized that the phrase was an important signifier for Lindblad. It has been his means of

self-identification since he was struck by a strange epiphany more than two decades ago. He repeats it almost compulsively as he tells stories about himself. Those stories are full of holes, elisions, and likely exaggerations – they’re self-mythology. But they have an internal, narrative logic, too. The gospel according to Lindblad.

Linblad says he’s not sure if he was born a psychic. He grew up in Dorval, a small city on the island of Montreal, in the sixties. His childhood was pretty typical – his mother was a hospital receptionist and his father was a computer scientist who worked, he recalls, “on those big, big computers” that looked like HAL’s motherboard in 2001: A Space Odyssey but were cutting edge back then. He also had two siblings.

He claims that in the years before his car accident he was a petulant kid, whose youthful vigour occasionally degenerated into violence. His close friend Gilbert Girio is more blunt: “He told me the kids thought he was an asshole.” Once, when he was in kindergarten, he says he threw a desk at a teacher who had dared to keep him in detention after class.

Then, one day, when Lindblad was seven, two kids beckoned him to cross Cardinal Ave. in Dorval to see a bunch of tadpoles swimming in a ditch. As he ran across the road, he was struck by a speeding car. The car dragged him a dozen feet before launching his small body through the air. He landed in the ditch on the other side of the road, next to the tadpoles.

“I was in a coma for a month and dead for one minute,” Lindblad recalls. He says his mother stayed

AGE

THE MCGILL DAILY

Monday, march 19, 2012

AGE

AGING GRACELESSLY Exploring the business of not getting old in South Beach WORDS and art BY jacqueline brandon

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became an adult too quickly, certainly quicker than most. I spent the first two decades of my life aching to be older. In the tourist utopia of South Florida that I call home, it was all too normal to impersonate an older self with a little plastic card, and heedlessly pursue a freedom that was not yet my own.

Only in retrospect have I been able to feel the stunning irony of such youthful restlessness. After all, it was not only I who embraced this distorted notion of age: while young people conjure up a past that is not yet their own, the aged run from their years with a voracity that I have yet to discover elsewhere in the world.

My experience with the former became far too personal when, while taking a year off before university, I took a job at the front desk of a South Beach salon-spa. Perhaps the experience would have been less poignant had I not taken a nearly two year hiatus from life in Miami to attend boarding school in a small town in the Northeast. During this

period away from home, my distorted perceptions of age, beauty, and superficial upkeep became grounded in a much more wholesome reality. Returning to Miami was a disorienting wake-up call, to say the least.

In many more unfortunate ways than one, Miami Beach has earned its stereotype as a playground for the wealthy and beautiful to flaunt everything from bodies to jewelry to freshly-built mansions. I had always been somewhat conscious of the insincere nature of places like this, where women too-often turn to plastic surgery, and men handle midlife crises by purchasing fancy cars. However, it was not until my time at this beauty and pleasure oriented establishment that I was truly awakened to my city’s sad relationship with aging.

I became complicit in the daily avoidance of age. By working at the spa, I endorsed a lifestyle that required devoting a steady supply of one’s money and time to superficial self-improvement. The strivedfor standard of beauty was, need-

less to say, narrowly defined. It left no room for wrinkles, or graying hair, or ridged fingernails, or any other signs the body exhibits with more years on earth. The rhetoric of rejuvenation was espoused to the point of exhaustion. Even worse, it was encouraged for employees to carry out these standards of youthful attractiveness by wearing makeup and receiving the treatments offered by our employers. The agephobia manifest in these treatments – such as the facial that claimed to “counter first signs of aging and discourage maturing skin” or the chemical peel that is described as “the facial that if you’ve had everything else before a face lift you will see instant results.”

It did not take long for me to cultivate resentment for this emphasis on youth. One shift in particular is isolated in my memory as a breaking point of sorts. A thin woman stumbled up to our reception desk in high heels, her gaudy jewelry hanging unflatteringly off of her withering wrists. I had made the

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apocalyptic error of double-booking her blow-dry and manicure appointments. As she unleashed her wrath at my relatively minor error, I couldn’t help but recoil.

In Immortality, Milan Kundera characterizes his elderly female protagonist as beautiful – possibly even sexual – despite her charmless body. He insists that humans are ageless, existing outside of time with the exception of a few key moments throughout life. In that moment at the salon, I felt the heartbreaking shame of age-denial in such a visceral way that I was disgusted by not only my workplace but by the society that created it.

The establishment where I worked, as well as the much larger system that it is lost in, has effectively turned youth and beauty into an industry. Americans alone spent $10.7 billion dollars on cosmetic procedures in 2010. It’s obvious that issues of class are reflected in the avoidance of age. My experiences with the clientele of my former workplace are certainly not

indicative of the city of Miami at large. The salon was the realm of the privileged, a place for moneyed housewives and their all-too busy husbands. It was where those on the advantageous side of capitalism could empty their swollen pockets.

Perhaps it seems petty – it was just a beauty salon, after all – but I came to see it as merely an element in a much farther-reaching and profound predicament.

Despite festering feelings, I finished out my time at the spa-salon.

My clash with this culture of antiaging, first in my childhood and then somewhat abruptly as an adult, was not without consequence. It remains a central concern of mine to not perpetuate a baseless, negative attitude toward age. I don’t see youth as some unattainable goal for which I should endlessly strive. The ethereal dignity that strikes me as beautiful today is entirely detached from one’s stage of life. Youth – and the supposed beauty that accompanies it – cannot be found in an appointment.

THE MCGILL DAILY

Monday, march 19, 2012

AGE

Russia’s lost generation is being eaten alive The frightening, flesh-eating effects of the opium derivative Krokodil WORDS BY TAMKINAT MIRZA ART BY AMINA BATYREVA

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This article contains potentially triggering content

ollowing the very first injection, skin starts to discolour, turning a scaly gray and green; it becomes scabrous and rots with continued use. Emulating the skin of the reptile the drug is named after – and also the result of its bite – Krokodil leaves its user’s bone and muscle tissue exposed, rotting, and awaiting the onset of gangrene. Pictures of addicts are a vision akin to the body horror found in Cronenberg films.

Russia is home to the world’s highest ratio of heroin users – up to two and a half million, according to unofficial estimates. Krokodil, a synthetic opiate alternative to heroin seems to have first appeared in parts of Russia around 2002. Its rapid spread throughout the country is largely tied to the 2009 crackdown on Afghani heroin. Faced with limited supplies of the opiate and the resulting higher street prices, there has been a mass shift to Krokodil as a heroin-substitute.

The growth of narcotic drug use in Russia has occurred alongside the growth of a demographic known as “the Lost Generation.” This cohort, which faces high levels of unemployment, violence, and drug addition, is made up of those whose developmental years coincided with the fall of the Soviet Union and the ensuing economic turmoil.

A 2010 report by the World Health Organization (WHO) quantifies the challenges faced by this group. “In the Russian Federation, in the period [between] 1985-1994, rates [of youth homicide] in the 10 to 24-year-old age bracket increased by over 150 per

cent.” Contemporary data supports the notion that the lost generation faces increasing strife. In 2010, the Russian International News Agency (RIA Novosti) reported that, of the two and a half million Russian drug addicts, 20 per cent were school-aged children, 60 per cent were young people (aged 16 to 30) and 20 per cent are older people. Ria Novosti also reported that the number of users between the ages of six and 13 were increasing “dramatically.”

Krokodil delivers roughly the same high as heroin, but is three times cheaper: a single dose costs five euros, compared to fifty for heroin. Made from iodine, lighter fluid, gasoline, industrial cleaning oil and codeine, it can be cooked in thirty minutes in a users kitchen.

As simple as its creation process appears, Krokodil addicts spend their lives in a cycle of cooking and injecting, in continued attempts to avoid withdrawal. Compared to the four to eight hour-long high heroin promises, Krokodil delivers only about ninety minutes of euphoria, with intense withdrawal symptoms following soon after.

Another fact distinguishing opiates from synthetic-opiates: a Krokodil user’s death comes maximally two to three years from the first dose, and even a single dose may be lethal.

The chemical associated with Krokodil, desomorphine, was used as a morphine-substitute in the 1930s, and is eight to ten times more potent than morphine. Codeine can be turned into desomorphine in a

series of chemical reactions, which – although easily achieved through a three-step synthesis in a legitimate lab holding all the relevant materials – is often impure when cooked in a dirty, ill-equipped kitchen. The resultant impurity has been determined as the cause of skin decay around injection time.

Why has Krokodil use become so widespread in Russia? The most significant reason seems to be the ease of accessing codeine-based analgesics – they’re sold over the counter nationwide.

According to a report by the Medical University of Silesia in Poland, there are currently an estimated 100 to 250 thousand confirmed Russian Krokodil addicts, and about 30 thousand deaths per year associated with the drug.

Its presence in Germany, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, France, Belgium, Sweden, and Norway was confirmed earlier this year, although an estimate of the numbers of users is not yet available for these regions.

As codeine is not as freely available in some of these countries, such as Germany, it is believed that Krokodil is currently cooked in Russia and transported along drug routes to Germany, often being sold as heroin. Because of the similar euphoria induced, users may often not realize that what they have consumed is anything but the more natural opiate – at least not till discoloration, scabs, and rotting set in.

Until recently, Russian authorities failed to recognize the drug as a majour problem, making no moves

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to increase state-run rehabilitation facilities or limit over-the-counter sales of codeine-based analgesics.

Failure to do the latter can be ascribed to the huge profits pharmaceuticals have been reaping from over-the-counter codeine sales.

“Over the past five years, sales of codeine-based tablets have grown by dozens of times,” Viktor Ivanov, head of Russia’s Drug Control Agency, told UK’s the Independent last year. “It’s pretty obvious that it’s not because everyone has suddenly developed headaches.”

“A year ago we said that we need to introduce prescriptions,” said Ivanov, “These tablets don’t cost much, but the profit margins are high. Some pharmacies make up to 25 per cent of their profits from the sale of these tablets. It’s not in the interests of pharmaceuticals or pharmacies themselves to stop this.”

The country’s authorities have been loosely debating over the need to ban codeine or impose mandatory drug testing in schools, and President Dmitry Medvedev has called for websites detailing the recipe for Krokodil to be shut down. Banning codeine has been a harder measure to introduce, hindered by lobbying pharmaceutical companies in rigid opposition to it. Yet with this downward societal spiral in place, Russian authorities have announced plans to restrict sale of medicines containing codeine starting in June 2012.

The state now also has a working plan to create its first network of rehabilitation clinics over the coming years. Yet, in the short term,

the Health Ministry currently runs only a few live-in rehab centers, with their capacity capped at about 2.5 million drug addicts. To fill this void, the majority of operational rehab clinics in the country at the moment are being run by religionaffiliated groups which border on fundamentalism.

The limited rehab facilities are just that: a void, and a pressing one.

Withdrawal from Krokodil is a harrowing month-long endeavor, far more painful than the week it takes to overcome heroin withdrawal.

Users are aware of this, and are often also aware of the flesh they will lose and the reality of imminent death, yet they return to it for its cheapness and ease of access.

“You can feel how disgusting it is when you’re doing it. You’re dreaming of heroin, of something that feels clean and not like poison,” Zhenzya, a recovered Krokodil addict, told the Independent, “But you can’t afford it, so you keep doing the Krokodil.

Until you die.”

While restricting over-the-counter sales of codeine-based pharmaceuticals is essential in tackling Krokodil use in the region, the need for assisted rehabilitation and more comprehensive social reforms focused on Russian youth is just as pressing. If a heroin habit is thought to be difficult to kick, addiction to and creation and trafficking of “the drug that eats junkies” must be tackled just as firmly in an attempt to combat the self-imposed death sentence Krokodil users in Eastern Europe now face.

THE MCGILL DAILY

Monday, march 19, 2012

AGE

shannon palus

T

wenty-one, surely, was too old to come out, I thought when I turned 21.

At 9, my mom asked me if I had a crush on any of the boys at school. “Or girls,” she added. “Or you can like girls.” That tiny clumsy Boolean statement, that tripwire. That true or false question, so well meant, had managed to gum up the system for so many years.

I did have a crush on someone at the time. His name was Stefan, and our parents took turns picking us up from after-school drama class together.

At thirteen, I swayed awkwardly with boys at middle school dances, bodies carefully arms distance apart.

The point was to gigle about it at the all-girls sleepover afterwards – attention, stories, not pleasure.

At 15, after my first kiss (with a boy), I watched one of the girls on the track team stretching. Why not kiss her? I wondered about which girls I would date if I were a boy. These were thoughts I did not articulate. Crushes

on girls were dismissed as the cutesy phenomenon of “girl crushes” – shorthand for admiration, instead of jealousy. I handed in high school creative writing assignments about hooking up in the back of a boy’s VW-bug. I watched Winona Ryder kiss Jennifer Aniston on Friends, and felt jealous; Zack Braff kissing Sarah Chalke on Scrubs and wanted to be Zack.

At 18, I made out with girls at parties, under the pretense of attention-grabbing. At twenty, I shivered when a sales girl at Lush started touching my arm.

Feelings, like water, don’t just compress or dissolve under pressure. One night last August over two-for-one pints of beer at Gerts, I relayed a story involving breasts to my friend.

“Are you sure you’re straight?”

And there it was: permission. I started crying, in the middle of the campus bar – luckily, you’re never too old to cry.

vidal wu

I

neither chose to come out, nor was I publicly incriminated for my then-deviant sexuality – my mother dragged me out kicking and screaming.

You have to understand my mother in order to understand how this happened. Growing up Chinese, we value integrity and honesty to yourself and to your family. Hiding your identity is seen as both unnecessary and as a blight on the trust that you should have with your kin. My mother was also a nineties club kid, trudging through the slush of downtown Toronto in five-inch stilettos to go to the hottest party she could find. She was besties with gay men before being besties with gay men was a thing.

As a child, it was pretty clear my interests didn’t quite align with the majority of my male peers, unless you count learning the choreography to “I’m A Slave For U” the second it came out as typical little boy

behaviour. She was simply waiting for my inevitable sexual awakening.

I was 13, in grade eight A few months after breaking up with my first girlfriend (over MSN chat, of all things), my mother confronted me about my sexuality.

I don’t remember what inspired it, but soon I was in tears screaming, “I’m bi – dammit!” I was so exasperated by her nagging that I simply admitted to liking guys, and thought that she didn’t know better, that I’d eventually prove her wrong. Within a couple of months, I had come out to all of my friends, developed my first crush on this gorgeous Argentinian soccer player with great cheekbones (the only logical reason to watch the World Cup, of course), and had told my cousins, who I regard as siblings.

All because my mother had the guts to call me on my shit. Thanks Mom.

*liv moser

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n first year, I took all the Women’s Studies classes I could. I rationalized it so easily with curiosity, with my politics. But there was something else – I knew that I would eventually have a revelation. One day, during WMST 303 (my Feminist Theory and Research class) the girl sitting next to me passed me a note. I’d had a “friend crush” on her, and she was adorable. She sparkled, she had a cool haircut, and she wore these cute thick-framed glasses. My God, the world fucking stopped when she smiled.

Even though I haven’t had a real conversation with her in almost three years, I still get sweaty and nervous just thinking about her.

The note was totally platonic – it was about participating in some art show – but her hand brushed my thigh and it lit up as if on fire. I left that class crying and, on the way back to my room in the then all-female RVC, I called my friend. I was absolutely hysterical. It was one small movement after another toward an obvious conclusion. At 19, I was seeing The Vagina Monologues and my thighs were burning at passed notes and my time in my room was spent watching The L Word and research-

ing how to make a girl have an orgasm. I masturbated for the first time that semester. I cried and cried and cried. But, sometimes I came too.

There were so many questions. “But if I like men and I like women, what does that mean?” “How could I have not known?” “Was I always queer or did I become queer?”

“What do I call myself?”

I made cards for the girls on my floor out of acrylic paint that read “I’m queer!” in rainbow colours. I had long phone calls. My brother, my best friend, my future roommate, my ex-boyfriends. Then my best friend told some bro that I was “a lesbian,” and people were facebook chatting me and people who bullied me in high school were posting about it. In the hot suburbs of Atlanta, people were talking.

I deferred my exams. I spent the summer drinking beer and watching Gilmore Girls in my room, and – two years later – I’m still trying to negotiate my sexuality. My parents and I are still trying to figure out what we’re comfortable talking about. I’m still only writing this article because it’s pseudonymous. My extended family still doesn’t know. I’m still coming out.

*Names have been changed.

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THE MCGILL DAILY

Monday, march 19, 2012

AGE

When I knew what to say illustrations by olivia messer

tom acker

Stories from queer students about coming out at different ages

“T

hey know.”

Somewhere in the courtyard of Solin Hall somebody throws a beer bottle and it smashes against the concrete.

“What do you mean?” I ask. My sister has been trying to call me for two days. I’ve been at McGill for four. I’ve missed ten of her calls. In the middle of my first college party, she calls me again.

“Mom and Dad. They found your journal. They know.”

The words slowly sink in. My heart beings to beat, my hands start to tremble, and it’s all I can do not to slump into a pile on the floor.

“What do you want me to do?”

She asks me.

I’m drunk and confused and I can’t process what has just happened.

“I don’t...” I can’t finish my sentence. I don’t know what comes next. My friend comes over to me and mouths “Are you okay?”

“Tom.” My sister is being insistent.

“Tom, what do you want me to do?”

In the fifth grade I tried looking at porn for the first time. I typed “boobs” into google image search, only to find the results less than stimulating. Hesitatingly, I typed in “penis”. If there was ever a moment in which I definitively I knew I was gay that would be it. The time I typed “penis” into google images search with SafeSearch off.

The story is more complicated than that though. For years, I continued attempting to be attracted to women. My first make out session happened in the seventh grade with a girl who was so scared I almost felt bad afterwards. Throughout this, my gayness didn’t feel real, somehow only abstract. “Gay” was just a word I used to find porn.

In the eighth grade, everyone discovered fingering and the jig was up. I had absolutely no desire to stick my hand in a vagina. If google image search made me realize I was gay, it was fingering a girl that had cemented it. For the first time the word “gay” began to take shape as my sexual identity.

In the back of the bus on the way home I remember mouthing to myself “I am gay”– it felt strange

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and horrible and shameful.

I was raised in a strict Evangelical household, with mandatory church group on Sunday and Wednesday nights. I had grew up going on mission trips, singing praise and worship, and taking communion.

In this world, being gay was not acceptable. For a long time my shame was so great that I would pray to God to stop me from feeling the way I did. In the sixth grade I remember singing “How Great Thou Art,” tears streaming down my face, just wanting more than anything to be straight. By the eighth grade, I had started coming to terms with it and my shame turned to anger. At God, the Church, and my parents. I hated them all. I hated them for making me hate myself. I hated them for making me think for so long that who I was was wrong.

The anger and the hate built and contorted until it made me into someone I no longer liked or knew.

I began to live for other people, and my life was a struggle not to seem gay. I was busy convincing everyone that I was fine when I was being slowly eaten from the inside. I had friends, but I didn’t trust them. I had a family, but I thought they would disown me. I laughed, I went out, I pretended to be normal. Each day, got harder to pretend, and what was once the horrifying thought of coming out became the only way to make it all stop.

Somewhere around tenth grade I got tired of hiding, I was exhausted and unhappy and lonely. I told a friend, a friend I thought I trusted, and she told a couple of her friends.

It snowballed, and by my senior year, and entirely without my consent, everyone knew.

I had my first real sexual encounter on a cot at a Model United Nations conference in Philadelphia with a confused boy who had a girlfriend, and then I got home and wrote a journal entry about it.

Four days after arriving at McGill my parents found the journal. My mother had been cleaning my room, found it, and read the

whole thing, including the part about sex with my high school boyfriend. She immediately called my sister, who already knew, and she called me.

I avoided all contact with my family in the weeks that followed.

My parents tried to call twice, but I pushed them both directly to voicemail. They sent emails.

I ignored them. Finally, in early October, one month after they had read about my first time, I called them on Skype.

They appeared on my MacBook looking tired and ragged.

“The first thing we want to tell you is that we love you.”

I wish I could remember more from that conversation. At some point, I released a manifesto to them about who I am, how they couldn’t change me if they wanted to, and how I was completely fine if they didn’t want me to be their son anymore. There was a lot of crying and then I finally hit the red button at the top of my screen, crawled into bed, and didn’t do anything for a long, long time.

That Thanksgiving was marked by more tears, more assertions of my sexuality, and a list of ultimatums. Christmas came and went with little fanfare – with the notable exception of Christmas Eve, which entailed a drunken confrontation and more tears.

That summer, on a balmy evening in July, my mother came into my room as I was surfing the Internet, and asked me to close my laptop and look at her.

“I won’t pretend this isn’t hard for us, but I love you, and I will always love you, but you have to give us time to process this. We didn’t see it coming, and it’s very hard for us.”

“Okay,” I said, “That’s fine.”

This past winter, when Skyping with the boy I had been hooking up with, my mother came into my bedroom to get something.

“Whose that?” she asked. “Dan.” She walked over to my computer, stuck her face in front of my laptop, and said, “Hi, Dan, I’m Tom’s mom. It’s nice to meet you.” On her way out she mouthed two words to me, “He’s cute.”

THE MCGILL DAILY

Monday, march 19, 2012

AGE

Conflations of girlhood and womanhoOD How ageism is not gender neutral WORDS BY mays chami ART BY shinae lee

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geism can be most basically defined as discrimination against one on account of one’s age. However, I would like to suggest a broader definition – that ageism is the inexplicable sense of constraint within the age group that you belong to and all that it entails. The conventional discourse around ageism would require one to gather statistics that indicate reduced opportunities for those of advanced age groups and then compare those between the two genders. But I would like to discuss a different kind of ageism – one that all women (arguably) feel at all stages in their lives. Perhaps the first question you’ll ask at this point is, starting at what age exactly? This question is a direct indicator of the women-specific complexities surrounding age, more specifically, the blurring of the line between girlhood and womanhood.

The most literal proof of this is that women continue to be referred to, and to reference themselves as, girls, well past the onset of adulthood. I’ve even noticed the paradoxical phenomenon where many women, regardless of their age, tend to refer to females older than they are as “women” and females of their own age as “girls”. Even well into their forties and fifties, females feel uneasy referring to themselves

as women due to their association of the word with something unattractive and undesirable. Men avoid it too and opt for words like girls and ladies essentially to flatter women. The same is absolutely not true when the roles are reversed: while boys are referred to using the convenient in-between term “guys” starting from age 14 or 15, their female counterparts remain “girls” until as long as society allows or dictates it, before they’re suddenly demoted to the category of women, usually when they become a mother and a wife, at least so would argue comedian Louis CK. According to him, “you’re not a woman until you’ve had a couple of kids and your life is in the toilet.” Whatever happened to the word woman designating an adult female?

This discrepancy is translated in turn to outward appearance. Taking a look at any publicity shot on an ad or even at Hollywood red carpet events, one aspect is most obvious when comparing the men and the women.

This is that the women’s “imperfections” (invariably those indicative of age such as wrinkles and gray hairs) are concealed, while men’s are quite often proudly displayed, the prevailing notion being that men of advanced age have charming or desirable qualities. The result is that it is usually much more difficult to gauge

a woman’s age than it is to guess a man’s. In this way, women attempt to physically prove, to themselves and to the world, that they can play the part of being thirty forever. While there are sections of both men and women in the middle-aged group that seem not to accept their age, a disproportionate number of women dress in a way that their younger self would.

All this points to the fact that many women feel an enormous amount of pressure to remain youthful.

To drive the point home even further, I would like to bring up one more phenomenon particular to women, and that is regarding the concept of Lolita, the 12-year-old “nymphet” from Vladimir Nabokov’s eponymous novel. Lolita somehow became an icon over the past few decades, where grown women seek out to don attire to resemble the young sexualized female. If the idea of a grown woman trying to look like a young sexualized girl is not an absurd conflation of girlhood and womanhood, I don’t know what is.

While ageism is rampant in many stages of one’s life, the fixation of girlhood haunts all too many females long past childhood.

Mays Chami is a U4 Eectrical Engineering student. She can be reached at mays.chami@mail. mcgill.ca.

Disrespecting our elders How age discrimination occurs in the gay community WORDS BY michael d’alimonte

W

ithin the gay community, are men defined by their age? While many may take the progressive perspective that age doesn’t define a person, it’s hard not to take notice of the link between age and identity in the gay community. Many stereotypes and roles are determined almost entirely by one’s age.

Apart from general stereotypes, age affects sexual attraction, just as in the straight community. Many gay men specifically seek out those older or younger than themselves. While it is normal to have different sexual preferences, is an age gap between two men different than between a man and woman? Traditional gender roles dictate that it is acceptable for

a woman to date an older man and a man to date a younger woman.

However, in the gay context, large age disparties are often socially stigmatized. The classic “sugar daddy” motif comes to mind, and could be the first thing I would think if I saw a gray haired man holding hands with a twenty - year old man.

Such a thought may stem from the stereotypical image of “youthful men” that characterizes the gay community. It would be ridiculous to think that older gay men don’t exist, but the portrayal of gay culture within the media almost always focuses on the younger populace. This interpretation is not without reason, given that younger males dominate gay culture.

Walk into a gay club on a Friday night

and you’ll be hard pressed to find anything other than young and fit men.

Speaking from experience, when one does see an older guy with gray hair they seem out of place. Amidst the young, the physically older don’t seem to belong. To be fair, a club setting is not a wholly accurate example of how older gays are stigmatized, since most clubs cater to young adults. However, gay ageism has been shown to permeate society at large.

Older gay men, specifically seniors, are not recognized within the gay community, nor society as a whole. Patricia Neil Warren, in her article “Elephant Graveyards: Gay Aging and Gay Ageism in the Year 2000”, focuses upon this fact. Until recently, no assisted living centers

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existed that catered to the queer elderly. Such institutions were created due to the maltreatment of gay and lesbian individuals within traditional nursing homes. Unfortunately this is still a problem, as very few queer friendly nursing homes actually exist.

Many elderly gay men are forced into an environment of persecution where they must live amongst an elderly community in a nursing home that doesn’t accept their way of life.

This lack of support sparked the creation of groups like Mature Age Gays (MAG), which is now one of the largest gay groups in Australia. Another example is the L.G.B.T. Aging Project, based in Massachusetts. Despite these beneficial groups, the gay elderly are often dismissed by their

younger counterparts, something that must be remedied. The older generation of queer people fought for some of the rights and equalities we enjoy today in Canada, and now these elderly gay individuals still have to continue to protest against indignities suffered in their old age. While our elder years may seem a long way away, the time will eventually pass. If today’s gay men do not wish to experience the neglect that our elders presently suffer, then perhaps it is time we return the favour and fight for equality amongst the elderly.

Michael D’Alimonte is a U2 English Literature student. He can be reached at Michael.dalimonte@ mail.mcgill.ca

THE MCGILL DAILY

Monday, march 19, 2012

AGE

After the Lights Go Out The plight of pro athletes after retirement WORDS BY COLUMNIST evan dent ART BY amina batyreva

T

he lure of the game is strong.

The money, the fame, the thrill of winning is enough to keep athletes coming back, to keep straining their bodies, to endure the scrapes and injuries inherent in every sport. We see athletes that keep hanging on, keep coming back for just one more year, to taste glory one last time, despite the fact that their injuries are getting worse and worse.

But what happens to these people when their career is over? For the large majority of players who don’t go into broadcasting or other high paying jobs after their careers, the answer is not comforting.

Our heroes do not go gracefully into their twilights. The collection of strains and injuries that one player can acquire over a whole career can grind away at the body and make life after sports physically difficult. There are football players today with mangled fingers from crunching battles in the trenches, or formery able-bodied athletes who now have trouble walking without a limp. Some players regret not retiring earlier because they are unable to play with their children.

Basketball players must deal with their balky knees that are worn from years of jumping The list goes on and on.

For every athlete, there are also the long-term effects of concussions.

Research has shown that even athletes who are never diagnosed with a concussion often suffer from a series of minor bruises to the brain, which can lead to long-term damage. Players that did not compete during our current era of concussion awareness are afflicted with splitting headaches, dementia, or even Alzheimers.

For many athletes, the dream of going pro and playing in the big leagues has gotten in the way of getting an education. Someone whose sports career has been cut short by injury, or by not being quite good enough, is often left without enough money to live on and must scramble to find a new career despite not having many other marketable skills.

Yes, for the superstars – the most talented or famous of the bunch – life is good after retirement. But there are far more players that face a hugely different reality after their sports careers.

It would be nice to think that the leagues – the ones for which these athletes sacrificed everything – would give back to the players in retirement and make sure that their lives are as comfortable as possible, especially for those in dire need. But the leagues have mostly let their athletes down.

The different leagues’ pension plans and post-retirement medical ben-

efits do not match the level of sacrifice that the players have given.

Take the NFL, for instance.

This is the league in which players’ careers are usually the shortest and most filled with injury. The NFL has a pension plan for retired players, but it only begins once they turn 55, many years after most players end their careers. Even then, it is based on years of service and doesn’t amount to much. Darrell Green, who played for the NFL for twenty years, now receives $70,000 per year, or $290 per month per year of service (a total of $5,800 per month). In addition, the NFL often does not hand out disability payments to athletes with medical

problems. This forced one player, Mike Webster, who was overwhelmed with rising medical costs, into homelessness. He was an offensive lineman. Sporting News named him the 75th best player in the NFL of all time in 1999. He suffered from amnesia, dementia, and depression.

In his autopsy, the doctors discovered that he had Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). This condition has gained much media attention in the past few years, bringing about an awareness of the dangers of concussions. For a game that is so inherently violent, this kind of callous disregard for retired players is hard to fathom. The retired players of the NFL have attempted

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a lawsuit against the league, asking for better benefits and pay, but the case is slow moving.

This is the sad plight of most retired athletes: once they have stopped being moneymakers for the league, they are tossed aside. With the increased corporatization of sports, the game has become more and more of a business, and the players have increasingly become commodities. They are a means to an end. Once they stop being useful, the league sees no reason to keep supporting them, and many professional athletes are left out in the cold.

Sure, the teams will bring them back for an alumni day, honor them every once in a while, but this sort of

celebration looks past athletes as humans and once again commodifies them. After that glimpse of support, the retiree will be put back into the dark, forced to struggle alone against their mental, physical, and financial problems.

There are some that make it through and leverage their former careers into a sustainable job elsewhere. Some are able to provide for themselves and their families and to mend their aching bodies.

But there are many others – players we won’t hear about – who struggle. They go through their old age fitfully and in pain, waiting for help that will not come. Was all that strain worth it, then?

IAN MURPHY

The McGill Daily | Monday, March 19, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

by his side throughout that long month, singing to him day and night. The doctors thought he might not make it.

“I woke up to nurses in miniskirts,” he says. “That was so great.

You know you want to live when you wake up to that. Remember, that was the sixties.”

He remembers one of the nurses giving him the Meet the Monkees EP and a Flinstones record. And he remembers a feeling of change coming over him – the crisis fading and the epiphany setting in. He was only a boy, but he had almost died, and he never wanted to hurt anyone again.

Pacifism has no place in an elementary school playground. The fists and insults of the less enlightened kids stung just as much. As he recalls in his online Psychic Autobiography he remained resolute even as several assailants beat him at once. He claims he cried only because the idea of “punching them out” was so upsetting.

This was the first of several crises that threatened to derail Lindblad’s life, which were each followed and redeemed by life-changing epiphanies.

After graduating from St. Thomas High School, Lindblad moved to Pierrefonds, a borough on the northwest tip of the island, where crisis found him again. He says that one afternoon in 1982, almost a decade before he became aware of his psychic power, he was troubled by spontaneous visions of green flames. That night his apartment complex burned to the ground.

As Lindblad recalls, he woke up in the middle of the night to discover that the empty apartment across from his was on fire. He ran through the halls waking people up and getting them out of the building. Later, he stood outside and watched helplessly as flames consumed the complex – the water in the hydrants was frozen solid.

Lindblad told Girio about incidents like these in which he experienced preternatural visions that seemed to foreshadow the future with strange accuracy. Girio, who already had an interest in “that esoteric stuff,” eventually decided that Lindblad would make a good dowser.

Dowsing is a form of divination (from the Latin divinare: “to foresee, to be inspired by god”) that involves the use of a stick or pendulum to read energy or radiation emanating from people, places, and inanimate objects. It’s a particularly popular brand of pseudoscience, or “woowoo,” to use the terminology of prominent skeptic and author James Randi. Randi’s foundation, the JREF, is currently offering US$1 million to anyone who can show “under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event.” So far, no one has walked away with the money.

The history of dowsing and its siblings is full of charismatic cranks.

A practitioner of “radionics” named Dr. Albert Abrams claimed that he could use a machine he invented called The Dynomizer to cure any disease with a drop of a patient’s blood. A British antiquarian named T.C. Lethbridge maintained that he used a pendulum to discover three massive ancient chalk engravings on the side of some hills near Cambridge, England. One of them, a human-looking figure, looks like it’s been defiled by an English schoolboy: the chalk outline depicts a giant curve-tipped erection and two perfectly round chalk testicles.

Girio had been experimenting with these techniques himself with little success. Lindblad, on the other hand, was a natural. The first night he experimented with dowsing, nine years after his apartment had burned to the ground, he says he used a pendulum to find quarters Girio had hidden under books while he was out of the room. They did this over and over again until four or five in the morning. “The chances of him finding something like that was [sic] just astronomical,” Girio reflects. “It started to become pretty obvious that this was something that seemed to transcend space, at least.”

Girio still occasionally calls Lindblad to ask him help find things he’s lost around his house. He says Lindblad isn’t always right about these things, but his opinion is “worthwhile.”

Back in 1991, on that fateful night when Lindblad found coins for hours on end, he had another epiphany. This one would change his life for good.

It would be more useful to him than the Political Science B.A. he earned from Concordia that same year. The thought came to him automatically: “I’ve got to find missing children.”

Lindblad has been running Child Search, his own not-for-profit business, ever since. He says he solved a triple murder in Vancouver on his first day on the job. That, he claims, was the first of over 2000 missing children cases he’s solved, many of which involved kidnapping, torture, sexual assault, and murder. He approaches these abject cases as more than the collection of menial tasks that make up other jobs; they constitute the bulk – even the meaning – of his life.

On a typical day, Lindblad will sit down in front of a computer for ten hours, often more, and often well into the night, googling Amber Alerts for recently abducted children. When he finds a worthwhile case (the criteria are pretty broad – missing child? Check. Somewhere on Earth?

Check.), he says he channels his psychic visions to locate the missing child. The routine is only broken by eating, sleeping, making music, and spending time with his girlfriend. (He used to do karate – he was a black belt.) Occasionally he takes the night off and goes to Foufounes Électrique, which he calls “the Foufe.”

His visions, as he describes them, are not spontaneous – he consciously channels them through feats of concentration, occasionally with the help of a pendulum, map, or a photo of the missing person. When the visions come, he says he has a bird’s eye view of the crime, the scene, and the perpetrator or the victim. (“It’s like you’re on top looking down at a movie.”) Apparently, he can learn various facts about the crime in an instant – from a victim’s location to a killer’s age, eye colour, and weight.

When he’s collected this information, he calls the police. In 1998, he was interviewed on the Québecois news show Journalistes Enquêtères, after he told two parents where to find the body of their son, who had been missing for over a month.

During the case, twenty psychics contacted the parents with information about the boy, Samuel Maynard.

Each of the psychics claimed to have “seen” him, either dead or alive, in a variety of places (in a truck…or an invisible clay house…or somewhere in Ontario). Lindblad was the only one to say the boy had drowned in the Rivière Sauvage in Lambton, QC. An article in the Journal de Montréal the next day reported that Maynard’s body was found three kilometers from the spot Lindblad had described.

Apart from the Maynard case, Lindblad makes it difficult to check many of his stories, most of which lack basic details. He was evasive when I asked him about ongoing cases, citing his desire not to upset the parents of missing children. He didn’t want me to watch him work because, he said, he only gives information to families and the police. He often tells stories of past cases almost verbatim off of his online autobiography. The words sound scripted and have none of the nonchalance that Lindblad exudes when he’s not talking about work.

Generally, when he recalls past cases he doesn’t give specific names of people or places, and his memory is vague. He also says he worries that if he gives information that’s too specific, or divulges the name of a criminal, he might be putting his own safety at risk.

The whole thing just doesn’t pass the most basic smell test. To see if my instincts were right, I called the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM). Sergeant Ian Lafrenière, one of their press flacks, told me that the police don’t elicit help from psychics. If they receive information from a psychic, they’ll look into it, but it’s usually a waste of time. When I asked him if this information ever helped with investigations, he took a contemplative pause. Maybe, for a split-second, he was imagining a world where policing could be that easy -- another pleasant delusion. But then he sighed and said, “Honestly, no.”

It’s hard to deny (no matter how

hard you try – and I have tried, hard) that Lindblad’s self-image is nothing more than the construction of a compulsively self-deluding man.

Of course, there’s another moral dimension to what Lindblad does.

He doesn’t just mislead himself; he misleads others, too. He tells vulnerable parents who have lost children that by some supernatural revelation he knows where their son or daughter is. That he’s convinced it’s true makes it hard to accuse him of bad faith, but the morbid facts stick to your throat if you think about them for too long.

And yet, despite everything, I find it hard to condemn Lindblad.

Maybe it’s how familiar his selfinvention feels. I recently watched a 1973 interview with Marlon Brando on The Dick Cavett Show. There’s a great moment in the interview when Brando, himself an infamous selfdeluder, begins to preach the merits of acting to Cavett: “We wouldn’t survive a second if we weren’t able to act. Acting is a survival mechanism.

It’s a social unguent, a lubricant.

People lie constantly, every day.”

Cavett is perturbed by the conflation of daily performance and acting, but Brando’s point (if we don’t lie, we die) is salient. We all have to tell ourselves little lies in order to deal with the absurdity, monotony, horror, or meaninglessness of life. I’m still not entirely convinced that I won’t grow up to be a professional basketball player and poet who bridges the gap between thug lyricist and literati. Like I said, we all choose our own imaginative ways to be deluded. Sometimes our imaginations need to go a bit further, usually when life’s horror or absurdity is a bit stronger, a bit more relentless.

Sometimes inordinate dedication to a massive delusion – no matter its implications – is the only way to keep going.

In 2005, Lindblad had a curious, brief burst of international celebrity, when he flew to Japan to appear on the television show S.O.S. The episode is blessedly preserved on YouTube. It begins with an excited Japanese voiceover yelling about “Robotu Lindoblatto,” like he’s the latest must-have Japanese superproduct that could be yours for four easy payments. Then a square image of Lindblad floats over a starry outer-space background, before shattering into a dozen fragments as he jams his dowsing staff through it. “In Japan,” he told me, “they said I’m the fastest, best, and coolest psychic on earth.”

Later in the show, Linblad is shown with his back to a table with a map on it, his dowsing staff pointing up to better channel his powers. A dramatic action-movie song reaches its climax, and he whips around and stabs a point on the map. There are supposedly missing people there – they’re pictured in grainy black and white elsewhere on the screen. In the top left corner, there suddenly appears a yellow phone number for viewers to call.

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Sports

The McGill Daily | Monday, March 19, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

10

Lingerie football expands in Canada

Rashad Y usifov for The McG ill Daily

Franchises awarded to Vancouver, Saskatoon, and Regina

Tamkinat Mirza

The McGill Daily

T

he Lingerie Football League (LFL) has recently established franchises in Vancouver, Saskatoon, and Regina, tripling its foothold in Canada.

This Canadian expansion is part of an ongoing effort to develop the LFL, a new sports phenomenon.

The new league is an all women’s football league in which athletes wear lingerie. The first Canadian franchise was awarded to Toronto.

The league started in the United States and gained a significant following, spurring its recent expansion into Canada.

“In the US there are twelve [teams], in Canada right now, there are four,” LFL Chairman Mitchell Mortaza said.

The US franchises in the LFL

are Baltimore Charm, Cleveland Crush, Chicago Bliss, Green Bay Chill, Las Vegas Sin, Los Angeles Temptation, Minnesota Valkyrie, Orlando Fantasy, Tampa Breeze, and Seattle Mist.

“To say that [the LFL is] in its infancy would be putting it lightly,” Mortaza said, adding, “The team in Toronto did incredibly well. It exceeded our expectations, and the media attention and fanfare in advance to actually playing is phenomenal. The Saskatchewan province…and also the Vancouver market [have] reacted very strongly to it. We like our chances and we look forward to introducing more and more franchises.”

The LFL is looking to expand further into Canada, coveting franchises in Montreal, Quebec City, Calgary, and Edmonton. It further hopes to expand into Australia in 2013 and Europe in 2014.

The LFL has made attempts to market itself based on more than its sex appeal and has gained a reputation for intense competition.

“Certainly there is sex appeal, and that’s part of it, but our awareness has always been that the sex appeal will draw in media coverage and fanfare, but unless you have a credible football product, it’s not going to sustain because people can get more sexual content [elsewhere],” said Mortaza.

“It has to have a level of credibility to it, and the women have to be true athletes… We have to take it seriously, and that’s why it’s grown so well in the States. We’re going to follow the exact same recipe in Canada,” he continued Following this mandate has been a challenge for the LFL, as it aims to acquire athletes who are both talented and marketable.

“Initially we were attracting a

lot of models who wanted to be athletes. Now it’s the opposite,” said Mortaza.

Mortaza describes his athletes as “the Gabriel Reese’s of volleyball, or the Danica Patrick’s of racing… Women that are marketable, but also very athletic.”

By amplifying its emphasis on athletics, the LFL seeks to market to a wide range of demographics.

“A lot of folks just assume [our demographic] is just men, young men. But it’s actually not only hardcore and casual football fans, it’s a lot of people who otherwise could care less about football,” said Mortaza.

“We’re finding that a lot of women are coming to the games, and watching the games [on TV].

It’s not strictly football, it’s not so testosterone-driven, so it tends to appeal to the wider audience.”

Yet according to reports by the Toronto Star, the audience for the

Toronto Triumph’s opening game in September last year comprised of “at least four bachelor parties,” with a fan stating that his “favourite part was the tackling.”

Beyond the sex appeal of female athletes in lingerie, their attire is not as practical as it is visually appealing. Liz Gorman of the Tampa Breeze told CBC that she believes the league will eventually evolve to a point that the more revealing outfits will not be worn.

She told the CBC, “I mean I don’t like it… You’d rather wear full clothing. I have a bunch of scrapes on me.”

LFL games are currently broadcast on MTV networks in the U.S., and, according to Mortaza, “there’s two networks – one an entertainment-based network and the other, a national sports network – that are interested in the rights in Canada.”

Next season begins August 25.

Science & Technology

The McGill Daily | Monday, March 19, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

11

Reboot, refurbish, recycle How a McGill student group gives old hardware a second life – and why you should care Jassi Pannu

Science+Technology Writer

I

t could soon be possible to pick up a desktop computer for a mere $30, thanks to a project called Reboot McGill.

Operating out of what once was a storage room in Ferrier Engineering Building, Reboot is a student-led effort to increase sustainability on campus, as well as to improve access to technology.

Reboot works in cooperation with the McGill Office of Sustainability and McGill Waste Management to collect spare and damaged computers from all over campus. Each gadget then undergoes hardware testing and an operating system overhaul, as well as a hard drive wipe.

Missing or damaged parts are replaced, and the final product is a fully refurbished computer.

Anyone who has ever seen the inside of a computer knows that electronics repair can be tricky – so the most surprising aspect of the program may be its integration of inexperienced volunteers.

Students from all faculties drop by to help during Reboot’s office hours, where their shared interest (or just newfound curiosity) in computers is put to use testing mother boards or installing freeware like Linux based Ubuntu.

The group can easily refurbish twenty computers in a week, and high stacks of CPUs take up most of the small Reboot office’s floor space.

The group could turn a profit from selling the desktops, but prefer instead to donate them to various Montreal non-profits (The Yellow Door was a recent recipient). Anyone can request a computer from Reboot, though priority is given to charities, schools, and McGill affiliated groups. Starting next week, they also hope to sell surplus desktops to students for personal use at highly discounted rates.

Where would these computers go if Reboot didn’t exist? Most other cities have similar donations based refurbishment programs that are often run privately. According to Reboot, however, nothing comparable exists in Montreal just yet. The most prob-

able fate for these devices would have been recycling or disposal, or storage in a dark and dusty McGill corner – even if they were in working condition. Reboot provides these computers with new homes, and also mandates that recipients return the hardware to Waste Management when it’s time for their disposal, ensuring the technology is used in full and ultimately recycled correctly.

The cooperation between Reboot and McGill Waste Management may be just what the electronics recycling initiative needs. Working together, they now provide a one-stop shop for all e-recycling. Once handed off to the co-op, individuals can be certain that their electronics will be refurbished or recycled appropriately. It is precisely this sort of unification that promises to solve the current woes of electronics recycling. It is not for lack of options that most electronics are improperly recycled, but, rather, due to the confusion associated with too many choices. Apple and Best Buy are examples of private companies that offer recycling programs, but both have restrictions on what

Midori Nishioka for The McGill Daily they will and will not accept, and both have associated fees. Many smaller companies offer recycling, but only for specific types of electronics. Now, McGill staff and students have a simple and straightforward way to reuse and recycle.

Reboot McGill welcomes all computer enthusiasts. Find them on the second floor (218) of the Ferrier building, or at http://reboot.mcgilleus.ca/. Stop by the Roddick Gates on March 27 to meet Reboot, and to drop off your old or broken technology.

Blender bike Photo by Lindsay Cameron Gabi Goszczynska, a U1 geography major, spent twelve hours one weekend tricking out her bike. As a result of her handiwork (and lots of help from Graham Bradley, a member of Concordia sustainability group Allé-go), there is now a blender attached to her back wheel that can be powered by pedaling the bike. Goszczynska brought her bike to the Sustainability case competition last Wednesday – she was at Growing Grounds, her team’s booth serving up strawberry banana smoothies.

In her team’s plan for a sustainable student-run cafe, a blender bike will be used to grind beans in the morning (which takes about 15 minutes for a day’s worth of coffee). Students who order smoothies would have the option to blend it using the bike instead of electricity, and would receive a small discount.

The wheel spins roller blades, which turns the rod in the middle of the blender that’s connected to the blades.

A similar design was used at Occupy Montreal to power kitchen appliances.

Though the bike won’t necessarily cut down on electric bills – peddling produces a couple watts an hour, while electricity is measured on an entire other order of magnitude – she explains that it’s more of a symbolic measure than a practical solution to saving the world.

—Shannon Palus

Campus Eye

Culture

The McGill Daily | Monday, March 19, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

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So, tell me your story Oral history project listens to Montrealers displaced from their original homes Maija Kappler

Culture Writer

Amina Batyreva | The McGill Daily

“W

hen people ask me where I’m from, I have this pause – I say, this is going to be a long story.”

With these words, Palestinianborn writer and community activist Rania Arabi may as well have been speaking for many of the more than 500 immigrant Montrealers who are part of “We Are Here,” a new multimedia exhibit at the Centre d’Histoire de Montréal.

Using footage of video interviews with over 500 Montrealers who have been displaced from their original homes due to war, genocide, and other human rights violations, the exhibit allows them to tell their life histories in their own voice – shedding a dramatic new light on the city and its residents.

“We Are Here” reminds us that one out of every five Montrealers was born outside of Canada. And yet, despite making up a large portion of the population in an undeniably diverse city, the immigrant perspective is rarely prioritized. News reports notwithstanding, these are stories we almost never hear. As the exhibit’s curator Eve-Lyne Cayouette Ashby describes it, one of the project’s major aims is to diversify common understandings of an immigrant’s experience. “By giving them the mic, we can better understand what it’s like to go through these horrible stories,” she explained in an interview with The Daily. “When someone who actually lived through it tells you their own story, you enter another universe.”

The stories are both heartbreaking and utterly compelling. History is rarely relayed in such a direct, unmediated way, and the resulting exhibit is hard to look away from.

Despite the grim subject matter, the exhibit never makes any situation seem entirely hopeless. André Gauvreau, a coordinator of cultural events at the Centre d’Histoire de Montreal, said he was surprised to find that even though they’re talking about difficult aspects of their lives, “there is a lot of life in these stories.”

Cayouette Ashby echoed this sentiment, and added that “these are incredible stories of resilience.”

The “We Are Here” exhibition is part of the larger Montreal Life Stories Project, which began in 2007 and is co-ordinated by the Community-University Research Alliance and Concordia’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. It originally focused

on genocides in Rwanda and Cambodia, unrest in Haiti, and the Holocaust and other persecutions of European Jews. The team was made up of people from different backgrounds (academics, researchers, businesspeople, artists, filmmakers, volunteers, and activists from French and English Canada, Cambodia, Rwanda, and elsewhere), and their first interviews were with their friends or family members. As the project expanded, it came to include other Montrealers with roots all over the world, spreading almost exclusively through word of mouth.

The exhibit takes a humanistic approach to history, focusing exclusively on oral histories, Ashby said. Gauvreau agreed that the exhibit departs from traditionally understood history, and emphasized the specificity of the exhibit’s methods. Interviewers for the project were given general guidelines, but no set questionnaire, and approached the ensuing conversations as dialogues: they allowed

the interviewees to tell their stories as they saw fit.

Interviews usually began chronologically, not with episodes of violence but with the subject’s early childhood, their families, their experiences in school. After that, they would talk about whatever the interviewee wanted to discuss. “We were there to listen until they decided to stop,” Cayouette Ashby said. Some interviews lasted only about thirty minutes, others were conducted over months and totalled almost 25 hours. There are only about three hours worth of interview footage on display in the exhibit, cut down from what Cayouette Ashby estimates are thousands of hours of recorded interviews. This editing process, she said, was one of the most difficult parts of the exhibit’s preparations.

Considering the limits of its time frame, the exhibit does an impressive job of showcasing many different points of view.

It uses a variety of mediums to tell the survivors’ stories: visual art, photographs, artifacts, chil-

dren’s drawings, and, of course, visual interview footage. Some of these interviews are broadcast on a large screen at the exhibit’s centre, others play on smaller monitors distributed throughout.

There is also a seating section that contains handheld screens, where viewers can sit and listen to individual interviews for as long as they want. The other aspects of the exhibit help to round out a more complete picture, but watching the interviews is by far the most powerful transmission of these stories.

Some people tell stories of adapting to the city right away; others encountered extreme racism and xenophobia. The approach values honesty, making sure to incorporate critical opinions of Montreal along with laudatory ones. The exhibit also makes a point to focus not just on specific events and those directly affected by them, but also on the aftermath. Some of the people interviewed are the Canadian-

born children of refugees, who – while bypassing the struggles of their parents – still find themselves dealing with the burden of family histories and dueling national identities.

Cayouette Ashby wants people who leave the exhibit to look at the city with a new eye. “The Holocaust is not just something confined to Europe in the 1940s, but could relate to your neighbour, or a guy on the bus. Same for Cambodia in the 1970s,” she says. The xenophobia some refugees have experienced in Montreal is further proof that there is, in fact, very little distance between the human rights violations we read about in the news and those in our own city. After seeing this exhibit, she hopes we can look at these neighbours and realize that “maybe, [they have] a wonderful story to tell.”

“We Are Here” run sat the Centre d’histoire de Montréal (335 Place d’Youville) until April 13.

THIS WEEK VOTE

FOR A

NEW S E T O F

S R O EDIT

TUESDAY 20 at 6 p.m.

Candidate rundowns

Thursday 22 at 6 p.m.

Interviews and elections Must be daily staff and attend both days email coordinating@mcgilldaily.com with any questions

RISKY BUSINESS Feminist festival of media arts + digital culture 10-18 November 2012 A Studio XX production www.htmlles.net

Call For Proposals Deadline: April 2, 2012

The HTMlles 10

YOUR ART WE WANT IT

ILLUSTRATIONS@MCGILLDAILY.COM

Compendium!

The McGill Daily | Monday, March 19, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

Lies, half-truths, and Stephen Harper being awkward as usual!!

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VS Welcome to The Daily’s McGill-based pop culture and current-events March Madness bracket. The series will run all month! Email compendium@mcgilldaily.com or tweet at @mcgilldaily with your picks or if you think you have better match-up ideas. All contestants subject to our comedic whims.

Current SSMU Execs

Winner 3

Winner 1

AUS Execs

Environmentalism

FINAL SHOWDOWN

Samosas

Winner 2

Stephen Harper

Winner 4

Schwartz’s

Stephen Harper vs. Environmentalism After helping Canada achieve one of the worst environmental records in the world and reneging on our Kyoto Accord goals, Prime Minister Harper further took out his hatred for the planet on an innocent panda. Harper also stressed that being cute and affectionate towards Pandas is just not his style. The Daily believes the environment won this match because Harper is a fucking jackass. In addition, no pandas had cut taxes to wealthy corporations or slashed funds to valuable social programs when The Daily went to press.

Heather Munroe Blum Bill Gates

C

a ll g n i l l a

Comedia

ns

Send your funny shit to compendium@mcgilldaily.com Blunter S. Propson for The McGill Daily

[InSERT CROSSWORD TITLE HERE] The Crossword Fairies The McGill Daily

Across 1. Large amount of money 4. Put in the hold 8. Hit the road 12. Arias, usually 13. Highway division 14. Ancient alphabetic character 15. Food options 16. Heartburned 18. Online trading 20. Group of eight 21. Gun, as an engine 22. Band aid?

23. Oscillate while rotating 24. Paragons 26. Can of worms?

28. Barbie’s beau 29. Breviloquent 30. Back talk 31. Microscope part 32. Former 35. Urgent request 38. Disney dog 39. Throat dangler 43. PC linkup 44. Like some lips or slippers 45. Blood binder 46. Pantomime 48. Avian or swine, e.g.

49. Singer DiFranco 50. Some Bosnians

51. Descartes divisions 54. Arboreal fort 56. Hipster, twenty years ago 57. Flight data, briefly 58. Dock 59. And others, for short 60. Put on a scale 61. Active 62. Break a commandment

Down 1. Convinced 2. Grad 3. Even more sad 4. Impolite dinner sound 5. After-bath powder 6. ___ bitten, twice shy 7. Diminutive 8. Piece of land 9. Blooper 10. Like leftovers 11. Blushes 12. Break away 15. Excellence 17. Defeat decisively 19. Dash lengths 23. Unless, in Latin 25. Gone fishing, perhaps 26. Ribald 27. Far from ruddy 30. Attempt

31. Impose, as a tax 33. Woman of ill repute 34. Unecessary items 35. ___ of Paris 36. Lizard constellation 37. Beseech 40. From Kampala 41. Popular pulse 42. Biscotti flavouring 44. Hurry 45. Aged 47. Corpulent 48. Crossword maker, alternate spelling 51. Witticism 52. Addict 53. Not pro 55. Saturn’s wife

The McGill Daily | Monday, March 19, 2012 | mcgilldaily.com

volume 101 number 38

editorial 3480 McTavish St., Rm. B-24 Montreal, QC H3A 1X9 phone 514.398.6784 fax 514.398.8318 mcgilldaily.com coordinating editor

Joan Moses

coordinating@mcgilldaily.com coordinating news editor

Henry Gass news editors

Queen Arsem-O’Malley Erin Hudson Jessica Lukawiecki features editor

Eric Andrew-Gee commentary&compendium! editor

Zachary Lewsen culture editors

Christina Colizza Fabien Maltais-Bayda

science+technology editor

Shannon Palus

health&education editor

Peter Shyba sports editor

Andra Cernavskis photo editor

Victor Tangermann illustrations editor

Amina Batyreva production&design editors

Alyssa Favreau Rebecca Katzman copy editor

James Farr web editor

Jane Gatensby le délit

Anabel Cossette Civitella

EDITORIAL

Tuition hikes are sexist This semester, students have left their classrooms and taken to the streets in opposition to the upcoming Quebec tuition hikes. The hikes have been part of our public discourse, but what’s rarely discussed is the the feminist nature of the fight for accessible education, as tuition hikes particularly affect women.

The past few decades have seen women make substantial progress in their university involvement. In 1971, women made up a mere 42 per cent of all university graduates, while, in 2006, 60 per cent of all university graduates were women.

Changes like this could be reversed in Quebec if we allow the proposed tuition hike of $1,625 over five years.

Tuition hikes disproportionately affect women, given that women earn 71 cents of every dollar earned by men. Women who are attempting to pay their own way through university have a more difficult time doing so than men because of their lower average income. According to Concordia’s Simone de Beauvoir Institute, “A woman will earn $863,268 less than a man with the same diploma over the course of her lifetime.”

Therefore, it’s also more difficult for them to pay back student debt post-graduation.

Additionally, this strain hurts single mothers attempting to finance their children’s education. According to a 2011 study, tuition fees made up 18 per cent of a single mother’s salary, whereas it made up 10 per cent of a two parent family’s income.

There is no need to aggravate existing inequalities by raising tuition – the hikes are completely unnecessary. If the Quebec government were to increase the top income bracket’s tax rate by 1.4 per cent and create a corporate capital gains tax of 2.4 per cent, the government could provide free post secondary education to all students.

The first Concordia student association to go on strike was the Women’s Studies Student Association. It is The Daily’s hope that more McGill student associations, including the Gender Sexual Diversity and Feminist Studies Student Association, will join the unlimited general student strike. Currently, the Social Work Student Association is the only McGill student association on unlimited strike.

If student groups do not actively work to prevent tuition hikes, women in Quebec and at McGill will be hit hard. It’s time for students to join the fight for accessible education and stop this sexist hike.

Students can learn about how tuition hikes affect women by attending the workshop, “How would the tuition hikes affect women?” workshop and discussion on Tuesday, March 20 in the SSMU breakout room at 3 p.m. We also encourage students to participate in the provincial Day of Action and march against tuition hikes on March 22. A McGill contingent will leave from the Roddick Gates at noon to go to the march.

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ISSN 1192-4608.

Errata In “PGSS executive candidates” (News, Page 6, March 15) it is stated that Sébastien Forté and Errol Salamon are VP Internal candidates and that Michael M. Krause and Heather Phipps are VP External candidates.

Rather, Sébastien Forté and Errol Salamon are VP External candidates and Michael M. Krause and Heather Phipps are VP Internal Candidates. The Daily regrets the error.

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