Mcgill Daily Vol 107 Issue 4

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Volume 107, Issue 04 | Monday, September 25, 2017 | mcgilldaily.com Nothing funny has happened since 1911

Ethnic cleansing in Myanmar PAGE 5

Contents

September 25, 2017 mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

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LE PETERSON IS READY TO WELCOME YOU

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EDITORIAL

Continuing the tour of Olympic venues

Ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims

MODEL LOFT AVAILABLE TO VISIT

Indigenous Awareness Week at McGill

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New diagnosis for Alzheimer’s

International News

Brain area associations

COMMENTARY

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Culture

Seeing Mount Eerie in concert

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Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions on campus

Hurricane Irma and the western response $

Sports

What Gary Bettman did to hockey

NEWS

IN THE HEART OF THE QUARTIER DES SPECTACLES

9

Album review: CCLX by Lunice

Art essay

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The last days of summer

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Feature

In memory of Jane

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EDITORIAL

Volume 107 Issue 4

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Canadian education needs better Black and Indigenous representation

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ast week, a book that included slurs against Black and Indigenous people was used to teach a grade nine humanities class in Vancouver. The book, Susanna Moodie: Roughing it in the Bush, was taught alongside a classroom activity that asked children to match the “politically incorrect” slurs with the “appropriate definitions,” in order to reflect the “racial, ethnic, and social prejudices of the time.” While the intention of the lesson was to condemn this language while giving it historical context, it failed to consider the consequences of exposing Black and Indigenous students in the classroom to such derogatory and potentially harmful content. Framing such degrading language as simply “politically incorrect” not only undermines the gravity of the issue, but also refutes the existence of Canadian settler-colonialism and anti-Black racism as ongoing injustices.

This failed attempt to properly address Black and Indigenous histories should not be regarded as one teacher’s personal failure, but as a systemic problem.

Although Canada is nominally committed to including more Black and Indigenous history in public school curriculums, provinces are not legally obliged to do so, and thus there is no standardized way to teach this material. In 2015, only two provinces offered mandatory training for educators to improve awareness on Indigenous cultures, while five provinces do not even offer Indigenous history as optional material. Meanwhile, multiple studies have confirmed that anti-Blackness is prevalent at all levels of education in Canada. In a 2009 report by the Quebec Board of Black Educators, many Black students and educators emphasized the personal value of seeing fair representation of Black histories and cultures in the curriculum, describing the experience as a “restoration of individual dignity and pride.”

To address these problems, the federal government must provide resources for Black and Indigenous peoples to be able to educate children and young people for themselves, instead of expecting individual teachers to facilitate educational reforms. This can be done, for instance, by providing more funding to Indigenous schools and programs, which are currently neglected by federal funding models. The Trudeau government is backlogged on their promise to spend $2.6 billion on Indigenous primary and secondary education, and government-funded reserve schools receive 25-30 per cent less funding than provincially run, non-reserve schools.

While the Canadian government has promised no funding to initiatives specifically directed at Black educators, provincial and school-district level efforts have been made to increase representation and provide more employment opportunities to Black educators. In Ontario, where only 10 per cent of teachers are racialized despite a rising racialized population, many are calling for workplace anti-discrimination and harassment policies that target racial biases in employment. Additionally, the last Quebec report on the issue outlined similar recommendations for more positive images and role modeling of Black people in education.

McGill students must interrogate the ways in which Black and Indigenous histories are taught throughout the education system, including in the McGill context. We should aim to talk to our professors and department heads, and advocate for an emphasis on Black and Indigenous narratives and more equitable hiring practices. Students should refer to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 calls to action, and the Ontario Alliance of Black School Educators’ “The Voices of Ontario Black Educators” report, as starting points in holding the government and educational institutions accountable for their promises.

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“The unstable (adult) brain,” September 11, SciTech, p. 16: The title and subtitle were misprinted. In fact, the title should have read, “Progress in cancer research,” and the subtitle, “A perspective from the case of medulloblastoma.” The Daily regrets the error.

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Roundtable discusses ethnic cleansing in Myanmar

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Rohingya face “truly brutal” violence amidst delicate political situation Gabrielle Demis News Writer Content warning: descriptions of violence, sexual assault mention

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n Wednesday September 20, a roundtable discussion was held by the Southeast Asia Lectures Series and the Institute for the Study of International Development (ISID) on the systematic ethnic cleansing currently underway in Myanmar.

The violence has forced hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims out of the country, causing a refugee crisis in neighbouring nations like Bangladesh. Professors Megan Bradley, Erik M. Kuhonta, Kazue Takamura, and Alexandre Pelletier considered multiple aspects of the humanitarian crisis, the relationship between violence and democratization in authoritarian contexts, the implications of statelessness, and the role of international actors in the crisis.

The violence has forced thousands of Rohingya Muslims out of the country, causing a refugee crisis in neighbouring nations like Bangladesh.

Textbook example of ethnic cleansing The Rohingya people of Myanmar’s Rakhine state have been subject to harsh collective punishment measures in recent weeks. The violence, carried out by government forces, has ostensibly constituted reprisals for the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army’s (ARSA) attack on a military outpost on August 25, which killed 12 soldiers.

These reprisals have been “truly brutal,” said Kuhonta, with “attacks by helicopters, rapes against women, killings with guns as well as machetes.”

“By any criteria, this is the worst humanitarian disaster in the

past several decades,” Kuhonta continued. In total, it is estimated that over 210 villages have been destroyed by fire, resulting in over 1000 deaths in less than four weeks.

The systematic persecution of the Rohingya in northern Rakhine has also triggered a forced exodus – over 421,000 people have crossed the Myanmar-Bangladesh border, both by land and sea; UNICEF estimates half of the refugees to be children.

The United Nations has declared the crisis “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing,” though certain academic communities were categorizing the situation as an ongoing genocide as early as 2015.

However, Myanmar’s de facto ruler and 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has repeatedly denied the state’s involvement in the continued persecution of the Rohingya. In fact, her office has claimed the Rohingya have been setting fire to their own properties and blaming the security forces, though no evidence was provided to support the allegations.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s silence Aung San Suu Kyi’s 25-day-long silence on the crisis was sharply criticized by the international community. Many predicted the fall of an icon, and questioned her standing as a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Some considered revoking awards, including her honorary Canadian citizenship. Suu Kyi addressed the issue Tuesday in an address to the Myanmar parliament in Naypyidaw.

The panel’s speakers explained that although one cannot morally justify Aung San Suu Kyi’s relative silence, it is important to note the precariousness of the political context. The National League for Democracy (NLD) has been in power in Myanmar since 2015, with Aung San Suu Kyi as de facto leader. However, the military retains significant control over the country’s institutions with a fixed quarter of parliamentary seats, exclusive authority over crucial posts in the executive, and veto power for constitutional amendment.

From a political standpoint, to publicly denounce the army’s persecution of the Rohingya jeopardizes the stability of Suu Kyi’s government. Be that as it may, said Kuhonta, echoing Desmond Tutu’s words to Aung San Suu Kyi, “If the political price of the liberalization

Nelly Wat | The McGill Daily and potential democratization in Myanmar is the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, then the price is surely too steep.”

“By any criteria, this is the worst humanitarian disaster in the past several decades” —Erik M. Kuhonta Professor at the department of Political Science From marginalization and persecution, towards ethnic cleansing According to Alexandre Pelletier, a political science Ph.D candidate at the University of Toronto, the marginalization of the Muslim-majority Rohingya in Buddhist-majority Myanmar is rooted in a variety of shortand long-term factors. These include ethnic grievances rooted in critical disagreement on and suspicions around whether the Rohingya truly belong in Rakhine state. The widespread and long-standing prejudices against Indians and South Asians in Myanmar is a consequence of British colonial rule.

Takamura, a professor of International Development Studies, highlighted the state’s strained majority-minority ethnic relations, referring to the government’s continued reliance on arbitrary racial classifications, which has worsened the tensions in Myanmar.

“The issue of the term ‘Rohingya’ is very contentious in Myanmar,” agreed Kuhonta, noting that the Rohingya are excluded from the government’s list of 135 officially recognized ethnicities.

“If the political price of the liberalization and potential democratization in Myanmar is the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, then the price is surely too steep.”

—Erik M. Kuhonta Professor at the department of Polifical Science

A vast and lasting crisis Bradley, a Political Science professor at McGill, told the panel that the humanitarian crisis is a reallife illustration of power imbalances and pathologies in the international refugee regime. Bangladesh has accepted over 421,000 Rohingya refugees crossing over its borders in less than a month. This number is 70 times higher than the number of asylum-seekers who crossed the U.S.-Canada border in August.

Bradley pointed to the discrepancy between the availability of resources in Canada and number of refugees this country has taken in.

In response to the crisis in Myanmar, the Bangladeshi government’s announcement of new refugee camp construction points to a future of protracted displacement and encampment for the Rohingya refugees.

“Encampment [in temporary accommodations]” as opposed to local integration is “the worst possible option […] for refugees in terms of their individual human rights, well-being, and livelihoods,” said Professor Bradley.

Myanmar currently has the largest stateless population in the region, well ahead of Brunei, Malaysia, and Thailand, with over 440,000 stateless individuals. Takamura reflected on the devastating implications of Rohingya statelessness, and the inherent “precariousness and vulnerability” it produces.

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News

September 25, 2017 mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

Erica Violet Lee on Indigenous feminism Resistance through mourning, love, and reclaiming space in academia

Claire Grenier The McGill Daily

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n September 20, the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies hosted a talk by Indigenous activist Erica Violet Lee. The event, titled “For NDN Girls at the End of the World,” was part of McGill’s seventh annual Indigenous Awareness Week. Lee, a nêhiyaw community organizer from inner-city Saskatoon, and author of the blog Moontime Warrior, discussed different forms of resistance to colonialism through an Indigenous feminist lens. Lee is currently pursuing a graduate degree in Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto.

Lee started the event with a land acknowledgement and dedicated her presentation to Sisi Thibert, a trans sex worker from Montreal who was murdered on September 18.

“My talk today is going to be dedicated to Sisi Thibert,” she said, “another sister murdered here in Montréal at the hands of transmisogyny and the violent colonial criminalization of sex workers.”

Decolonizing academia Lee stressed the importance of education and recalled her experience witnessing peers being forced out of classrooms because of their Indigenous identity, “I don’t buy the argument that if Indigenous

folks want to decolonize, we have to stay out of universities. […] I don’t think that school is a colonizer’s concept; intellectual learning and intellectual reflection have always existed in our community. […] Our intellectual lives were, and always have been, more complex than they’re portrayed.”

Lee later explained that she follows a “take-what-they-giveyou” policy, stating that you can take the academic tools given to you by institutions like universities and actively use those tools to dismantle the unnecessary and harmful structures in our society.

Lee also spoke about how she is hesitant to draw attention to her identity as an Indigenous person in academia.

“I always wonder if at the beginning of academic lectures, I should introduce myself this way, because it positions me as a young person - a young, brown, Indigenous person who needs to prove my intelligence and worthiness to speak in a room; to take up space in the academy. But I’m going to keep doing it because Indigenous women, youth, [...] have much more knowledge than is ever honoured.”

She then elaborated on her graduate work, telling the audience that her supervisor, Dr. Eve Tuck, had asked her class, “What is the story you have to tell the world before you can do anything else?”

Lee’s response, she explained, will

be a master’s thesis dedicated to the inner city of Saskatoon: “A project just for the freedom and love of one little west-side native neighbourhood in Saskatoon.”

Emotional resistance Lee related the story of Colten Boushie, a 22-year-old member of Saskatchewan’s Red Pheasant Nation. Boushie was shot dead for “trespassing” in the summer of 2016 by Gerald Stanley, a Saskatchewan farmer. Lee recalled being in a Saskatoon courtroom during Stanley’s preliminary trial.

She sat on a small uncomfortable chair in the chamber, the size and structure of which made it difficult for people in the courtroom to physically comfort one another.

The court proceeding took place under a looming portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, whose royal officers were positioned outside the courtroom, monitoring the crowd outside who had come to grieve the loss of Boushie, a young victim of racialized violence.

“In this setting,” she said, “it feels as though Boushie is on trial, and that we are the silent witnesses. […] The reality is that Gerald Stanley left that farm alive, and Colten Boushie did not.”

“Mourning is important,” continued Lee, “because Indigenous death is not named genocide. [Indigenous] deaths are not considered a loss worth

mourning, nor an illegal act, but rather our deaths become a state sanctioned event, and control of that death becomes a form of power. […] Dead bodies don’t move or migrate or transgress or trespass. […] The best way to control our existence is the destruction of our bodies.”

One year after Boushie’s death, the Red Pheasant community held a memorial feast. Everyone gathered, and grieved with each other as a picture of Boushie was passed around. Lee declared the importance of this experience, saying, “In a world where Indigenous death is constant to the point of normalcy; feasting is a rebellious act. […] Mourning is a communal activity; no one should have to do it alone.”

Lee spoke not only of physical resistance, but also of emotional resistance: “I think that native women writing, or saying anything about our feelings, is revolutionary fucking scholarship.”

“From restrictions on hunting, fishing, and trapping; to residential schooling; missing and murdered women, girls, and two-spirit people,” she continued, “and overwhelmingly disproportionate rates of incarceration, the explicit and implicit policies of Canada’s settler state are the regulations of Indigenous movement. These regulations are a gendered project, and so [their] interruption is

inherently feminist. To reclaim our agency in a space that has continuously denied our feeling, the essential distinction between a living body and a dead one, is radical resistance.”

Elaborating on emotional resistance, Lee transitioned to the topic of love. She explained that her existence is resistance in and of itself, but reminded the audience that she is still complex.

The question she ponders is how she (and other Indigenous people) might move past resistance and let go. For Lee, the epitome of letting go is falling in love. “[Decolonial love is] a love that cares for us, for our bodies and minds; a love that helps us do the work as Indigenous women, queer folks, trans folks, of anticolonialism and anti-racism; the work of feminism. [...] A love that centres on our freedom and liberation, not our trauma.

“Being in love is not a distraction from our revolution, but a constant pulsing reminder that if we truly love, love deeply enough and honestly enough, we put ourselves on the line to take down the greedy few who want to steal the places, things, and people we love.”

She finished with a call to action: “The maintenance of colonial hetero-patriarchal systems is unnatural, fragile, and on the verge of collapse. All we need to do now is light a fire to help the forest along.”

Board of Directors ratifies BDS reference Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions members question the validity of decision

Xavi Richer Vis The McGill Daily

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ast Sunday, September 17, the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) Board of Directors (BoD) voted to ratify the Judicial Board’s reference on the legality of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) motion brought to the General Assembly (GA) last winter. The reference, issued in May 2016, ruled that BDS was discriminatory in nature and violated SSMU’s Constitution and Equity Policy.

The reference was the result of tensions on campus following the Winter 2016 GA voting in favor of ratifying a motion in support of BDS. The BDS movement advocates for economic pressure against the state of Israel, in order to bring about a nonviolent end to the illegal occupation of Palestine and the oppression of Israel’s Palestinian citizens.

While the GA vote was overturned, the BDS motion failed the school-wide online ratification process.

A dangerous precedent According to SSMU President Muna Tojiboeva, the BoD’s ratification vote was not facilitated in a confidential session.

Eleven out of twelve Directors voted in favor of ratification, with only one abstention.

While the decision was nearly unanimous in procedure, many on campus remain

unconvinced of the reference’s validity.

The JBoard reference concluded that “SSMU’s commitment against discrimination in favour of creating ‘safer spaces’ renders motions similar to the BDS Motion, which specifically compel SSMU to adopt a platform against a particular nation, unconstitutional.”

However, Sydney Lang, a member of RadLaw, a social justice-oriented group of law students at McGill, has specific objections to section 33 of the reference.

“Their end reasoning,” Lang explained to The Daily, “is that yes, SSMU can take positions against nations but under certain circumstances, if it’s phrased in certain ways, and only in extreme cases. [...] What I’m most concerned with is that they’re giving the Judicial Board in the future the ability to determine what’s an extreme case. They’re technically saying that we could hypothetically do this if it was a really extreme case and we would do it in a certain way. That’s not based in the Constitution. The Constitution doesn’t set that out. They’re creating this idea that they’re the ones who get to gauge the extremity of an issue before SSMU can take a stance on it.”

“They’re making decisions about what’s an extreme international conflict,” continued Lang, “or what’s extreme for the lives of Palestinians or other people around the world who are facing occupation, but how are they the ones to determine what’s extreme?”

Conflating the state and its citizens “By adopting official positions against certain nations,” reads part of section 33, “as the BDS Motion aims to do with Israel, SSMU would be placing Members from those nations at a structural disadvantage within McGill’s community [...] In essence, SSMU signals to those Members from the very beginning that it is hostile towards their country thus, indirectly, them. Motions which compel SSMU to do so threaten the fragile bonds which hold McGill’s international community together.”

“They’re conflating the political state of Israel with individual Israelis citizens,” said Lang in response. “They’re making this connection between the two that isn’t factually grounded. Look at any other [case] in history; McGill took a stand against South African apartheid, but weren’t against South Africans. Similar examples are when students in HK protested against the Chinese government or Indigenous peoples challenge the state of Canada. You are critiquing a system of governance, oppression, or occupation, not individual citizens” BDS has yet to put out a statement following the Board’s ratification vote, but in an interview with The Daily, BDS member Maia Salameh gave some insight into how members of McGill’s BDS Action Network are feeling.

“We’re gonna fight it, but it is a huge blow obviously and a disappointment,”

said Salameh. “That doesn’t mean it’s over. [...] the whole problem stems from the structural nature of SSMU,” said Salameh.

“To fight this, we need to [...] reform [the structure] because right now there are unelected members that are making these huge decisions without any accountability or transparency.”

Currently, the JBoard, a body of the BoD, is composed of seven SSMU members appointed by the Nominating Committee.

JBoard decisions are then ratified or rejected by the BoD, with decisions never being reviewed by an elected SSMU body.

“We are forming a new campaign called Democratize SSMU,” explained Salameh. “It’s going to be a coalition not just of BDS members because we don’t think this decision just affects BDS. We want to mobilize student groups and student activists in general because we want institutional change. We’re going to go through Equity complaints because [we] think there’s been a gross injustice here and we will be staging protests just to make people aware of this decision and why it affects them.”

Many questions left unanswered The minutes from the September 17 BoD meeting have yet to be released. As of publication, none of the BoD’s members-atlarge have responded to comment regarding the ratification vote.

News

September 25, 2017 mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

On Canada’s treatment of Indigenous Rights

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Professors discuss limitations of UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

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n Thursday September 21, the Indigenous Law Association and the Faculty of Law held a discussion concerning Canada’s implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). The event featured guest speakers Dr. Hayden King, an Anishinaabe scholar from the Beausoleil First Nation of Gchi’mnissing, Huronia and Dr. John Burrows, the Research Chair in Indigenous Law at the University of Victoria Law School in British Columbia. The discussion began with a land acknowledgment, then a panel on Indigenous rights and self governance, followed by a question period.

What UNDRIP means for Indigenous Peoples in Canada The United Nations describes UNDRIP as “a universal framework of minimum standards for the survival, dignity and well-being of the Indigenous peoples of the world and it elaborates on existing human rights standards and fundamental freedoms as they apply to the specific situation of Indigenous peoples.”

The UN General Assembly passed UNDRIP in 2007. Though Canada initially voted against it, the federal government decided to remove Canada’s objector status in 2016.

Borrows noted that the current Liberal government has made a promise to implement the UNDRIP while in power.

The implementation of UNDRIP concerns Section 35 of Canada’s Constitution, a framework which recognizes and affirms the legal rights of Aboriginal people in Canada, “I would like this to mean a repudiation of the way the Supreme Court of Canada approaches Aboriginal treaty rights under section 35.1 of the Constitution,” Borrows said.

He explained the importance of a broader interpretation of Section 35, reminding the audience that the infringement of Section 35 constitutes a violation of Aboriginal rights.

Borrows mentioned that the understanding of the rights of Indigenous peoples needs to come from a dialogue between Indigenous communities that takes into consideration varying schools of thought. “We’d be looking at the treaties that we have with the plants, and the rocks, and the water. Understanding our relationships with the plants, and the animals, and the insects […] and really seeing UNDRIP in that light,” he said.

Borrows pointed to R. v. Van der Peet, a Supreme Court case which determined that any Aboriginal person claiming the right to participate in an activity protected by Section 35 of the Constitution must prove that the activity was practiced in pre-colonial Aboriginal society. This would greatly restrict the ability of Indigenous peoples to have their rights respected if their actions cannot be traced to cultural practices that took place before first contact with European colonists.

“What UNDRIP does is set [rights] in place without having to prove them.

There’s a recognition that Indigenous peoples have a right to self-determination, have a right to land, languages, media, family relations without having to go through an expansive process of having to justify that to anyone else in the world,” Borrows said.

Article 46 and limitations of UNDRIP King told the audience that UNDRIP’s strong language concerning the assertion and protection of Indigenous rights was significantly diluted with Article 46. Article 46 allows states subject to UNDRIP to place certain limitations on the “the exercise of the rights set forth in this Declaration.” The addition of Article 46 allow states to disregard their obligations to their Indigenous populations on the basis of territorial integrity and defense of sovereignty. “[Article 46] is effectively a backdoor out of the declaration of the rights of Indigenous peoples […] The declaration allows states to evacuate the previous fortyfive articles if they so choose,” said King.

“From 2010 to present we’ve had minister after minister of Indian affairs, when asked for comment on the declaration, say that it is aspirational. [They say] we’ll work toward implementing [it], but in a Canadian version, through the Canadian constitutional framework.”

Indigenous peoples have a right to selfdetermination, have a right to land, languages, media, family relations without having to go through an expansive process of having to justify that to anyone else in the world.

–John Borrows Research Chair at University of Victoria Law School Several states objected to the vast majority of the articles that were contained within the draft resolution, resulting in their revision. The final resolution also included a rewritten version of article 46, which prohibits any action which, according to the declaration, would “dismember or impair, totally or in part, the territorial integrity or political unity of sovereign and independent States.

Claire Grenier| The McGill Daily Moving toward a new relationship This July, the federal government announced ten principles by which it will abide in the aim of working on a stronger nation-to-nations relationship with Indigenous communities. The federal government states that the principles are an attempt to move toward reconciliation with Indigenous communities, by respecting Indigenous rights and focusing on the importance of cooperation and partnership.

He told the audience that certain principles within the document allow for nothing more than a strict and narrow interpretation of the Canada’s obligation to Aboriginal rights under Section 35. Principle number seven states that any infringement of Section 35 must be justified with a consultation and accommodation of Aboriginal communities. King noted the loose requirements to justify the infringement. “Now, the community doesn’t have a right to say no. They’re just consulted. And Canada or Ontario or Quebec can infringe [on their rights] anyway,” King said. “If we say no to a development that affects us, that should mean no.”

King concluded that if the federal government is serious about respecting Indigenous rights and committing itself to the implementation of justice, it should move to open the Constitution in order to include all articles of UNDRIP, including article 46.

“The things that’s been missing from our conversation right now is that massive transfer of resources, of land,” King said. “If we have that transfer of lands and resources, then we’d see First Nations do a lot better, more substantive progress toward trans-

forming Indigenous nations into what we want to see them become.”

Moving away from symbolic gestures King discussed how recognition of Indigenous rights need to move beyond symbolic gestures such as like territorial acknowledgement. “There’s a difference between symbolic recognition–which will get us positive recognition and a decline in racism, which is a good thing–and material recognition,” King told the audience.

“What is [the government] actually doing in a material sense? There’s all this great talk about [symbolic reconciliation]— an inukshuk here, a teepee there […] but what are we actually doing?”

Even with the symbolic implementation or commitment to UNDRIP, King says the material needs of Indigenous peoples must be met. He states that so long as Indigenous communities own such little land and face harsh socioeconomic realities, true progress will be a struggle.

For Aboriginal treaties to be respected, Borrows noted, the reciprocal relationship between communities, governments, and their environments must be honored. Borrows noted communities like the Ahousaht First Nation, are protesting the anchoring of an open-net salmon farm near Tofino, B.C. by using fishing boats to set up a blockade.

“As long as we keep damaging our rivers,” Borrows said, “as long as we keep preventing things from growing, as long as we’re blocking out or changing the sun in a way that then impacts our climate, then we are not living by our treaties.”

International News

September 25, 2017 mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

8

Second earthquake in two weeks devastates Mexico Nora McCready The McGill Daily

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n Tuesday, September 19, a 7.1 magnitude earthquake hit South Central Mexico. The epicenter of the quake was in the state of Puebla, located approximately 120 km from Mexico City. As of Friday, September 22, death tolls stood at 282, 137 of whom died in the capital. This number is expected to rise as efforts to clear rubble continue and more bodies are found.

Victims of the earthquake also face the threat of aftershocks, which could be acutely harmful given the structural instability caused by the initial strike.

The quake also devastated infrastructure, leaving whole communities homeless.

The Puebla area is facing the most damage with 1,700 homes declared inhospitable and in need of demolishing in the coming months. Desperate families affected by the housing emergency are making pleas on social media for humanitarian aid. The government is struggling to deal with the widespread destruction.

Destruction within Mexico City is widespread, and at least 44 buildings were levelled by the quake. The damage in the capital is partly due to the high population density, but the impact of the earthquake was magnified by its geography.

Mexico City is built on an ancient lakebed

made of clay, which amplify seismic waves.

As a result, tremors reverberate through the area with a devastating effect. The Mexican army and navy entered the city in the aftermath of the quake to participate in the relief effort. People still need to be rescued from collapsed buildings, and unstable structures need to be demolished.

According to some, the army has caused added turmoil in the city by prematurely demolishing certain buildings, without adequately attempting to rescue people who may have been trapped.

The most recent quake occurred less than two weeks after the 8.1 magnitude quake, which was the most powerful earthquake in the country in over a centu-

ry to reach the Southern coast of Mexico.

While the timing of these events are very close, most experts claim that the timing is coincidence. Both quakes were caused by shifts in the Cocos plate, located just off the coast of the continent. The Cocos plate is gradually pushing underneath the North American plate, causing a massive pressure increase which is sporadically released in these destructive tremors. Shifts in these tectonic plates are a constant reality for Mexico, and while the cause of these two recent quakes are the same, their timing is coincidental.

With material from The Guardian, NPR, ABC, and Al Jazeera.

Tensions rise ahead of Catalan independence referendum Rayleigh Lee The McGill Daily

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atalonia’s government is scheduled to hold an independence referendum on October 1 which will determine whether Catalonia can leave Spain.

Spain has attempted to block the referendum by ordering suspension, arresting 14 senior officials from three government buildings, and raiding print shops to confiscate referendum ballots. Legal measures were taken to prevent advertisements from being released to media sources, and prevent delivery companies from distributing pamphlets. Madrid has declared the referendum unconstitutional, and warned that

anyone who participates in the voting will be indicted.

In response to the crackdown, thousands of protesters gathered in the streets of Barcelona, followed by a solidarity rally in Madrid. The Spanish government and prime minister Mariano Rajoy have been criticized for being anti-democratic. Rajoy argues that the Spanish Constitution of 1978 makes the country is indivisible, and therefore, has no provision for a self-determination vote. This did not stop Catalonia from taking legislative steps to develop its own law on self-governance.

Recent tensions between Madrid and Barcelona have consolidated an image of unified pro-independence sentiment.

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However, unlike desire for the referendum, the separatist cause is fragmented among voters. In a public survey commissioned by the Catalan government in 2015, 41 per cent of Catalans were in favour of independence. During the 2014 referendum, the low turnout of 2.2 million out of 5.4 million voters showed that the ‘No’ voters boycotted the poll.

Support for an independent Catalonia began after 1939, when the dictatorship of Francisco Franco restricted the Catalan language. Separatist sentiment abated temporarily after Franco’s death, with the return of democracy, only to rise again in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

Separatists believe that Spain’s central gov-

ernment allocates less to Catalonia than the province contributes financially to the rest of the country; while Catalonia makes up 16 per cent of Spain’s population, it accounts for 19 per cent of the national GDP. Catalonia is proceeding with the referendum as planned, and will legally declare independence from Spain within 48 hours if the vote is won. It is unclear whether the Spanish government will eventually resort to article 155 of the constitution, an unprecedented move which would allow Spain to directly intervene with Catalonia by deploying national police.

With material from The Guardian, NPR, and The Financial Times.

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ART Essay

‘Last Days of Summer,’ Laura Brennan

September 25, 2017 mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

9

Commentary

September 25, 2017 mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

Hurricane Irma and the Western media

10

Why the disproportionate coverage of Irma is a problem

rently homeless. Due in part to proximity to coastal areas, it seems likely that the global south will be the first to receive the most adverse ramifications of a changing global climate. It is evident that nations such as Saint Martin will continue to be impacted by the adverse effects of climate change in following years. However, we also know that with a gross domestic product of about 19 trillion dollars, the U.S. has the funds and resources to combat the ever growing negative effects of a warming climate.

Island nations with GDPs as low as $45 million do not have such resources. If the US’s major role in the rise of climate change is to be factored in, we must consider holding it responsible for the damages caused by disasters like Irma, and that can occur through more balanced media coverage as well as direct aid provision.

tuviere okome Commentary Writer

H

urricane Irma was a category five tropical storm that formed on August 30 and quickly turned into a hurricane, eventually coming to an end on September 12. It originated in the eastern Atlantic, near the island nation of Cape Verde and traveled through a series of countries in the Caribbean, leaving a huge trail of devastation through the islands and into Florida.

Unbalanced coverage Due to irresponsible reporting by the western media, there seemed to be an outright obsession with the destruction caused

by Hurricane Irma in the United States. There was little to no serious and sustained mention of the devastation that the hurricane wrecked on Caribbean island nations like Cuba, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Martin, and Barbuda. In these media reports, Florida was at the heart of the analysis of the damage resulting from this storm. Those reporting demanded sympathy for the people of Florida, yet did not call for the same reaction for residents of Saint Martin, or any of the other island nations for that matter.

In searching through reports on hurricane Irma by CNN, I found a total of 11 articles specifically about Irma, only five of which mentioned the island nations impacted by the storm.

Unlike the U.S., these island nations do not have the economic resources to withstand the damages caused by Irma. In Saint Martin for example, residents do not have access to food or clean water. In contrast, to this, Florida has opened 42 shelters to accommodate the 25,000 people who would be without shelter after Irma. It was obvious that countries such as Barbuda needed more than just a casual mention to garner the sympathy of western audiences. Barbuda is a country with a $1 billion economy, and by assessing the damages caused

by Irma it is predicted to have a $250 million problem in rebuilding their nation. Since the hurricane, there has been no one living on the island, for the first time in 300 years. Without the help of the international economy and international media coverage, Barbuda will not be able to recover.

Yet, while powerful media outlets like CNN continue to shower praise on the network’s role in providing help to the victims of the disaster in the U.S.,

laura brennan | The McGill Daily there was no parallel action for the people of these Caribbean nations. Couldn’t the western media have done more to ensure the prospective security of Caribbean island citizens?

This should have been through adequate and real-time coverage of the hurricane, as was done for the U.S. territories impacted.

Unlike the U.S., these island nations do not have the economic resources to withstand the damages caused

by Irma.

Why was there less focus on Caribbean countries? The media in the west has an ethical responsibility toward the people of Saint Barthélemy, Barbuda, and Saint Martins during natural disasters like Irma. The neglect of these countries at a time of crisis displays a lack of concern for those who live outside the United States and the prioritization of white lives over the lives of people of colour during devastating crises.

Climate racism To be able to address these issues in the context of the disaster, we must first understand the science of hurricane formation and thus why this hurricane season seems to be the most extreme in recent memory. There are three main components to the formation of any hurricane; water measured at a temperature that exceeds 75 degrees Fahrenheit, a sustained gust of wind, and moist air. Since warmer air retains more water vapor, it leads to extreme precipitation and possible flooding in the wake of a hurricane.

It can be hard to determine the degree to which climate change plays a role in an active hurricane season, but this hurricane season has certainly been characterized as anomalistic compared to previous years. One indication of this is the development of seven hurricanes from the 13 Atlantic storms named so far this year.

Since climate researchers began to collect climate data in 1851, only an eighth of all recorded years produced more than seven Atlantic hurricanes. While climate change may not be entirely responsible for the formation of hurricane Irma, warmer ocean temperatures can be linked to increased hurricane strength as there is more sustained energy to fuel it.

Looking at the phenomenon of climate change in the recent

past, we must note that the United States accounts for well over 15 per cent of the globe’s total input of carbon dioxide. An argument can be made that China accounts for 30 per cent, which is double that produced by the U.S., but this has been accounted for given the higher population ratio in China relative to the U.S..

Thus, to a significant extent, the U.S. is implicated in the progression of climate change, prompting the magnification of hurricanes like Irma.

Couldn’t the western media have done more to ensure the prospective security of Caribbean island citizens?

Nevertheless, the impact of hurricane disasters extends to all people, and that includes the smaller island countries that release a miniscule amount of carbon into the atmosphere in comparison. 95 per cent of Barbuda’s structures were demolished by Irma, and 60 per cent of its population are cur-

The neglect of these countries at a time of crisis displays a lack of concern for those who live outside the U.S. The international media’s lack of interest in the destruction of these island nations points to a lack of sympathy, and consequently, this attitude is adopted by the audiences they cater to. This is especially concerning when one thinks that CNN has an avid international audience which is dependent on their news coverage. As part of a shift in western media to maintain their security, outlets like CNN continue to focus solely on what happens in the U.S., thus emphasizing the notion that issues concerning the U.S should be exclusively addressed.

In doing so, the western media contributes to the formation of a society that does not accept any moral responsibility towards global citizens. Secondly, it further perpetuates the idea that the west lives at the global forefront and trivializes those who do not fall under this umbrella.

Popular media has continued to fail in its duty to provide news about marginalized people, leading to an inability to provide aid to people who do not look or exist like the western majority.

FEATURES

September 25, 2017 mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

Grief, my grandmother and me

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An ode to Jane

Claire Grenier The McGill Daily Content warning: death, descriptions of self-harm, suicide

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t wasn’t the heart attack that killed her; it was the stress put on her already fragile aorta that caused her to slip away. Her heart had ripped, and it was far too damaged to be put back together. The stitches wouldn’t even hold. The doctors assured us that they had done everything they possibly could, but everything still wasn’t enough.

She died.

She dies all over again in my mind whenever I think back on this time. All those feelings and memories are still sharp and vivid like stained glass shrapnel. In the first week after her death everything happened at breakneck speed. After the initial scramble of a changed life subsided, grief became more methodical. Grief chose when to attack rather than being a constant companion to everyday actions.

I just can’t wrap my head around her being gone. I thought I understood death. I thought I would handle my first family death well. I was wrong.

November 13, 2015: We let the phone ring. And ring.

It was family movie night: a rare luxury in our family. There was no issue, at least no one expected one.

Jurassic World played on.

When the movie was over, we turned on CBC news, like the standup informed Canadian citizens that we are. Paris, the city my uncle and his wife were staying in, had been victim to a terrorist attack.

We checked the phone messages, my uncle had called to say that he was alright, and my grandfather Skipper had called to tell us that Grandma Jane had had a heart attack. She was scheduled for surgery later that night, with a full recovery predicted. I was terrified, extremely terrified. I went to sleep scared, and despite the circumstances, optimistic. I would go with my mom to Ottawa the next day to help my grandmother in her recovery. She was going to survive.

She was going to survive; she had to. I wasn’t ready for her not to.

I understand that she died, but I don’t yet understand that I will never see her again, hear her again, hug her again. To me - that seems impossible, but I need to get used to it because it’s the reality of the situation.

November 14, 2015: In the morning, I woke up with my lights still on. In my haste to forget the previous evening, turning them off had slipped my mind.

No one told me that she had died: I knew. I knew because I heard my mom making plans for someone to take care of our cats for awhile. That meant that the whole family was going away, which meant...

Tentatively, I entered my mom’s room. I saw her face, and then I knew for sure. No words needed to be spoken. She was visibly broken, and that said it all. Her mom was gone. I didn’t have any words either. I crawled into her bed like a kid escaping a nightmare, because that’s exactly what I was.

I emailed my teachers, I called my work, I made every pain polished and formal. This only alienated my reality more; it was all so official. and that denied the rawness of my pain.

My mom, my dad, my brother, and I climbed into our last-minute rental to make our way to Ottawa.

It was time to pick up the pieces of our family.

After the initial scramble of a changed life subsided, grief became more methodical. Grief chose when to attack rather than being a constant companion to every day

actions.

My dad drove, my brother slept, I wrote, and my mother made the calls. My grandmother’s best friend, and my mom’s godmother, screamed when we called her.

Loud, deafening and filled with anguish; it was unforgettable. She threw the phone away from herself too, but we could still hear her weeping through the speakers.

“Hi, it’s Wendy, Jane’s daughter…no everything is not alright; my mother had a heart attack… they tried everything, but it wasn’t enough to save her.”

It would never be enough.

Over and over again these calls were made. Same tone, same cold prickly sensation dripping in every

somber syllable, same ending to the same story. Our story, our reality, no matter how desperately I wished it wasn’t.

I wrote a poem in that car ride which I later read at her funeral. I needed to constantly remind myself of reality, if not, I feared that I’d slip away. Writing was an effective and calming way to reassure myself of these events, another way was to take pictures. It sounds horribly narcissistic, but I took selfies on that car ride, and yes, they did help.

I cannot stress enough how nothing felt real. With a selfie, you can easily identify your own face, it grounds you. I know the angles of my eyebrows, the bump of my nose, the slope of my eyelids, the dimple in my left cheek that is so much like the one my grandmother had. In that moment I knew what my face looked like, even if my emotional context was scary and surreal. Seeing my very recognizable face in a very unrecognizable situation helped me process the heart-breaking reality of it all. Those selfies let me realize where I was, and what had happened; they facilitated a (still) continuous and completely shattering realization. So, I kept one as a reminder and as a relic.

We got to Ottawa around 6pm that night. My grandfather was absolutely broken. Skipper had always managed to put up a front of a picture-perfect, manly man who drank whisky, hunted, had fought in wars, etc. Now, he sat crumpled in the centre of the house that he and his dearly loved wife raised their kids in. Both he and the house looked so ghoulish and empty without Grandma Jane. He couldn’t stop crying.

The memories of the days between her death and her funeral are a bit blurred around the edges.

Everyone was doing their own thing, just going through the motions, or drinking, or cleaning. We all explored the house in an effort to try and get used to it without the warmth of Grandma Jane filling each room, even though it all still smelled like her. Individually, memories of our lives with Grandma Jane flooded over us with each aimless wander.

Some discoveries from that time: her prayer book, every day for close to 20 years there was an entry; a notebook detailing the lives of every person she called regularly, so she would always know what to talk about.

Small ironies. The only car we could rent was black. The closer we got to the house the more it rained.

The sunset made everything rose

gold. The day after her funeral it rained all day, almost as if the city was washing our grief away.

November 18, 2015: 300 people showed up. My grandmother was a music teacher, and was beloved by all whom she taught and touched. Her true impact on people had never been made clearer.

I don’t ever want to go to church again after that funeral. Partly because it was my grandmotherís funeral, but mainly because the funeral was so surreal and is so cemented in my memory that no future venture into a church would feel right.

It was surreal for a few reasons.

Firstly, 300 people, most of whom I had never met before, were in attendance. They were all there to celebrate the life of my grandma.

All these strangers understood how special she was.

Secondly, seeing as my cousin and I are more like siblings, the two of us developed a wildly inappropriate sense of humour that can only be birthed from a shared tragedy. Whispered jokes about using the ashes as ‘sad confetti’ for the celebration abounded. My mom had to shush our giggles during the sermon, but she did it with a smile, just like her mom would have.

Thirdly, there were puppets.

The church’s pastor typically used puppets in his regular services and my grandmother loved them; she often counted the puppets as the highlight of her Sundays. So, there

were puppets at her funeral. The story of a caterpillar (life on earth) who enters its cocoon (death), then becomes a flourishing butterfly (life in heaven) was recounted to the guests in oddly cutesy, comforting language. At the end, the beautiful butterfly puppet was gifted to my

In that moment I knew what my face looked like, even if my emotional context was scary and surreal.

Seeing my very recognisable face in a very unrecognisable situation helped me process the heart-breaking reality. grandfather. I think he still has it.

Fourthly, someone thought it was a good idea to let my oldest uncle speak without him writing anything down first. There is no official time count, but I would guess that he spoke for around half an hour. In those odd 30 minutes he

12

FEATURES

September 25, 2017 mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

included many touching stories about his mom, but those were mainly drowned out by his shameless self-promotion. Most notably for his book on tantric Indian sex practices (if you truly want to honour my grandmother’s memory, never read chapter four).

Finally, I read too. That poem I wrote in the car, I read it for everyone as part of the service. I let my broken heart seep into everyone’s bones.

I remember my reading from an outsider’s point of view. I was deeply affected by this action, yet it doesn’t feel like something I’ve done. I don’t remember walking up to the stand, or my awkward introduction for the piece, but I do remember my walk back. I collapsed into my dad and he wrapped his arms tight around me as the whole church rose to sing hymns.

I know that hymns are supposed to be beautiful, but I had never heard a harsher chorus.

When I was ten, my dad took me to see the musical Les Misérables at the local high school. It’s his favourite musical. He knows all the lyrics, and was not afraid to use them. Half-way through the show, I leaned over to him and huffed a now infamous quote among my family: “You know that you’re supposed to sing the words in your head, right?”

So as my dad held me, with tears and sobs completely raking my body, I felt even more desolated and broken and small. Yet, he made me laugh. He stopped singing, leaned down and whispered to me: “I’m sorry. I know I should be singing the words in my head.”

I can accept that my grandmother is dead; I can’t accept that Grandma Jane is.

November 20, 2015: We left. By then I was left dull and completely wrought by the week. Every action was an echo of myself, prickly numbing attempts at normalcy. We were leaving our bubble of sorrow, where tragedy was allowed to envelop us, for our everyday lives where we were expected to act like we had before. I had to return to a life I was already struggling so deeply to live.

When my grandmother died, I was in the middle of a horrendous and all encroaching depressive episode. My then precarious mental health became intrinsically linked with my narrative of her death - I can’t separate them.

For most of 2015, my grade 11 year, I wanted to die. Since I was 12 I’d been having brushes with suicidal thoughts. I was usually able to chase them away with small motivators, like a list of things I would miss and a short list of the people who would miss me. This worked swimmingly until October of 2015.

I tried all my usual ways to pull myself out of it, but it wasn’t working this time; it was continuous, and it only got worse. I had an isolating job, a new and demanding course load, and was in the middle of realizing that I had no healthy relationships I could rely on. Everything made me tired. I was motivated, but had lost the physical capability to act on it. I spiralled and was too embarrassed to ask for help. I was the one that helped people; I didn’t want to need someone to help me.

My 16th birthday, October 29, 2015. My friends forgot it was my birthday. I left the school dance early in the taxi my mom had called for me. The person who I’d gone with had ditched me. I was just wandering around the school alone, waiting for the hurt of being ditched to pass so I could try and have some fun on my birthday. It didn’t. Instead, I started to realize that I only had one friend and she didn’t see me as a person, but rather as an asset. I was gentle and caring, and the person who I had assumed was my best friend for the past decade was content to take advantage of that.

When I got home, I went straight upstairs and took a long shower. I washed my makeup off with vigour, and scrubbed out the red hairspray I had used as part of my costume until my scalp bled. Then I took the first mildly sharp thing I could find, a comb, and attacked my wrists.

Time doesn’t stop when you die; other people are left with the mess. After being exposed to said mess, I lost the desire to leave one.

I made a counselling appointment through a suicide hotline within a few days of that low point.

At the appointment, I rolled out my problems on the bright red carpet of the office until I lost the energy to speak. The counsellor told me to get more vitamin D and sent me on my way. I felt pathetic, and a little ripped off, but also relieved. Talking felt so good. That appointment taught me the magic of talking: how it makes everything real and thus easier to deal with. I had no one to talk to, so I bought a notebook.

I couldn’t continue bottling everything up until my inevitable burst; that way of living was not healthy.

Grandma Jane died just over a week after my appointment.

Time doesn’t stop when you die; other people are left with the mess.

After being exposed to said mess, I lost the desire to leave one. I didn’t want to die anymore because that would be too painful of an event for my family, but I didn’t want to be alive because it was proving too painful for me. During the last half of 2015, I was simply lost.

Slowly I bounced back, from everything. I found friends, and a way to be alone without hating myself for it. I discovered how to enjoy the shimmering of the present, instead of wishing for grotesque escapes.

I walked out of my abusive friendship with living scars, but still intact. And finally, I fell in with people who I enjoyed listening to and who let me talk.

Even though I still have those days where my bones fill with lead, and a foggy despair washes over my body, I can, and do, enjoy life now.

Finding “joie de vivre” meant I had to reconcile the fact that someone I loved dearly no longer had that pleasure. I couldn’t get caught

up in these crushing realizations; life was moving on and I had to follow it. No matter how ugly some of those changes were.

I know that she wouldn’t like the fact that I don’t go to church, that I swear like a sailor, that I hold grudges, or that my mom never made me play piano, and most of all she wouldn’t like that her loss still hurts me. I also know that she didn’t care that much about making sure that I was the perfect granddaughter. She was content to let me explore my capabilities.

She loved that I wore lipstick, that I sang the lullabies she taught me, that I treasured the knickknacks she gave me and the stories she told, and that, to my mother’s dismay, I fold napkins like she taught me. That woman was so full of love and pride; she had infinite admiration for the small things.

She would be so proud of me.

I spoke to her almost every day.

She listened, and in turn I learned

how to listen to others. She was never aware of the fact that she taught me how to laugh raucously as well. When we talked I was energetic, and her voice was honey, golden and soft. That absence stings the most. I’m romanticizing her, I know that. She deserves it.

She helped me grow into who I am today, both pre and post mortem.

I’ll have to keep growing up without her, and that’s okay. She’ll never be gone from me completely, and that’s okay too (I never want her to leave). A year and a half later I’m still healing.

And I still miss her.

I remember your face the first time you tried a pumpkin spice latte.

Some of my lipstick transferred from the cup to you and it matched the one you were already wearing. I felt like I was supposed to be your granddaughter.

SPORTS

September 25, 2017 mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

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Montreal’s sporting geography Examining the legacy of Montreal’s 1976 Summer Olympics

Rosalind Sweeney-McCabe & Louis Sanger The McGill Daily

T

he Daily’s journey through the 1976 Olympic Park continues. After heading to the Big-O and the Olympic Village, our photographer then visited The Pierre-Charbonneau Centre.

The goal of this photo series is to examine sports’ impact on the geography of Montreal, and in turn, the lives of its people.

The Pierre-Charbonneau Centre was originally built in the 1950s as a police training centre.

It was outfitted with a gymnasium, a pool, and other athletic zones. When the 1976 Olympics approached, the arena hosted wrestling competitions and was also established as headquarters for the organizing committee of the Olympic Games.

Since the Olympics, the centre has been home to several Canadian league basketball teams, including the Montreal Jazz, the Montreal Royals, and the Montreal Sasquatch. Now, the various spaces and utilities are open to the community, including a gym, an elevated running track, a gymnastics gym, and several martial arts areas.

The Centre Pierre-Charbonneau is located at 3000 Rue Viau.

The most striking section of the building is its circular facade, which faces the Olympic Stadium. A tall wall of red brick encircles the front of the building.

A mosaic depicting athletes competing in Olympic sports lines the long foyer of the building. In this section the Olympic rings are depicted above the Olympic flame as two wrestlers spar beside.

The gym features several volleyball courts. When the Daily visited, only one court was being used by two people practising volleyball.

SPORTS

September 25, 2017 mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

14

Why we boo Gary Bettman

A brief summary of the NHL commissioner’s 24-year career Emre Benoit-Savci Sports Writer

Y

es, he can hardly skate, but there is a lot more to hate about the National Hockey League commissioner of 24 years.

As the final seconds of regulation time during game six of the 2017 Stanley Cup Playoffs came to a close, the media could be seen rinkside getting ready to storm the ice. When the buzzer rang, it became official: the Pittsburgh Penguins had won their second Stanley Cup in a row. Out came the celebrations, the laughs, and the tears. Then came Gary Bettman to deliver the Stanley Cup to the victors. Cue the boos…

Why this incessant booing occurs every time Bettman appears is of little mystery to the world of hockey. Gary Bettman often seems like the worst person in the sport—if not on earth. The man is so universally hated that even a city like Nashville, whose hockey team would not exist were it not for him, can still find cause to boo him. So this begs the question, why do we boo Gary Bettman? One can point to the new hockey team in Las Vegas, a city whose temperature can reach above forty degrees Celsius on a normal summer day. This team is just the latest manifestation of Bettman’s obsession with expanding into non-traditional southern markets at the expense of more passionate Canadian and Northeastern U.S. markets.

In 1993, Bettman was appointed as the commissioner of the National Hockey League (NHL) by the owners of the league based on a mandate of expansion. Ever since the beginning of his tenure he has pursued an aggressive (often misguided) expansion into non-traditional hockey markets. While this has been great for the league with regard to television packages and the “selling of the game,” teams in Nashville, Arizona, and Atlanta have been largely financially unstable. Gary Bettman has been deliberately trying to “Americanize” the game and sell it to a demographic that is clearly not interested.

These aggressive moves also come at the expense of the traditional, loyal Canadian

markets. The latest expansion to Las Vegas is another example of his stubborn refusal to give the majority of fans what they want. In 2007, he refused to allow a sale that would have moved the Nashville Team to Hamilton. He also refused to look for a seller for Phoenix that wouldn’t keep the team in Arizona, despite costing the league millions annually due to lack of support there. The aggressive expansion into the sunbelt affects not only the Canadian cities without teams but also the seven Canadian teams currently in the NHL. Ever since the nineties, the pursuit of southern American markets by Bettman has caused a drain in Canadian talent’s willingness to sign with Canadian teams.

This means that Canadian teams are often unable to compete with the higher salaries and bigger TV audiences of their American counterparts.

If Bettman’s blatant disregard for smaller, more passionate Canadian markets is not frustrating enough to the league’s fans, his mismanagement of labour relations issues should be. While Bettman was primarily brought on to expand the game to US markets, he was also given the mandate of ending labour unrest within the league, something he has failed miserably to accomplish. The NHL and the NHL Players’ Association (NHLPA) have remained at odds over pensions, player safety measures, and Olympic participation. Since his tenure, the league has had three labour stoppages, one causing the entire season to be cancelled. The NHL under Bettman has pursued an agenda with complete disregard for the players, the fans, and the overall game in favour of satisfying the team owners. With each collective agreement’s termination, the league has pursued agendas to further lower salaries in order to expand the owners’ revenues.

Furthermore, as more research is conducted into the long-term effects of concussions on mental health, Bettman has made only the most token efforts to address the problem even as former enforcers like Derek Boogaard, Wade Belak, and Bob Probert

are dying from problems that are clearly hockey-related. Bettman shows a dangerous disregard for both players’ labour rights and their personal safety.

The current dispute between the NHLPA and the NHL concerns Olympic participation, as Bettman has forbidden NHL players to compete in the 2018 Winter Olympics. While the NHLPA attempted in vain to overturn this decision, Bettman insisted that the players not compete, as the Olympics interrupt the NHL season (and his paycheck, of course). The NHL now considers the matter closed, although the NHLPA insists that this decision will further sour relations between the two organizations.

Bettman’s priorities.

While Bettman can continue to point to the continuing growth of the NHL as it pursues larger markets, his indifference to the demands of the players has arguably created a more volatile league than the one he inherited, as each termination of the collective agreement results in another labor stoppage. This has hurt nobody more than the average hockey fan, which is perhaps the sole unifying point for fans from Miami to Edmonton.

And if that isn’t enough for you, the last Canadian team to win the Stanley cup were the 1993 Montreal Canadiens—the same year that Gary Bettman became the commissioner.

Louis Sanger | The McGill Daily

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SCI+TECH

15

September 25, 2017 mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

Zooming in on Alzheimer’s disease A new blood-based method developed to detect dementia

Tai (Ritchie) Vinh Truong Sci+Tech Writer

A

n aging population has become an unavoidable trend amongst developed countries. For the first time ever, in 2016, seniors made up a higher percentage of the Canadian population than children. Advances in healthcare have significantly improved quality of life and lengthened lifespan. However, with this improvement comes the increasing prevalence of neurodegenerative diseases. More and more people experience impaired movement and loss of mental functioning (dementia) as they approach old age. Neurodegenerative diseases all share a common root in protein misfolding. As a result, aggregation accumulates and leads to loss of neuronal functioning.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia.

While the causes of AD have not been determined, its pathology is believed to be driven by the excessive accumulation of proteins that are found naturally in our body such as amyloid plaques and tau tangles. Outside the cells, amyloid bunches disrupt signaling between neurons and trigger inflammation, which can damage surrounding neurons. As opposed to amyloid plaques, tau tangles are found inside the cells. Modified tau proteins form neurofibrillary tangles, damaging neuronal cytoskeleton, and eventually leads to programmed cell death.

The majority of brain processes such as memory and learning depend on communications between neurons. In AD patients, neurons lose the capacity to relay information and decay over time. At early stages, complications such as wandering, getting lost, difficulty understanding questions, and slight behavioral and personality changes drastically affect quality of life. As

the disease progresses, patients gradually have problems recognizing friends and family members, lose the ability to multi-task, and often experience hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia.

Current treatments aim at maintaining mental function, managing behavioral symptoms, and impeding the disease’s progression. While AD’s progression cannot be stopped or cured, early diagnosis allows patients and their families to seek professional help when the disease is at pre-clinical stage before the symptoms are evident. They can start coping and planning for the future by learning about the disease and developing support groups. In some cases, early intervention may potentially reverse some of the impairments. Unfortunately, most patients are not diagnosed until signs of cognitive deficits become apparent and irreversible. Furthermore, current diagnosis tests are often either invasive or expensive and time consuming. Due to the inconveniences, susceptible patients may be discouraged from taking the assessments. These problems call for a new diagnostic test that is less expensive, and minimally invasive, but that remains as accurate as the established ones.

Researchers from Lancaster University addressed these concerns in the recent edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. In this study, blood plasma from 549 individuals with various neurodegenerative diseases as well as age-matched healthy individuals were collected and analyzed with Fourier-transformed infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). FTIR is an

analytical technique that measures the radiations absorbed by different chemical structures. It provides information about the unique molecular composition, and structures within each sample. “Interrogation of these samples with spectroscopic techniques allows for the generation of a spectral fingerprint, which subsequently facilitates the discrimination of the different populations and identification of potential biomarkers,” remarked Maria Paraskevaidi, the study’s lead author. Using classification algorithms, the researchers were able to differentiate between AD and healthy individuals with the accuracy reaching 86 percent. This is as accurate as current diagnostic tests in the clinics but costs less money. In addition, differentiation of AD from other neurodegenerative diseases was achieved with satisfactory segregation and classification results. Notably, dementia caused by AD was distinguished from dementia linked to Lewy bodies (DLB), the second most common cause of dementia, with an accuracy of 90 percent. Despite

Claire Grenier | The McGill Daily their similarities in symptoms, AD and DLB have been shown to respond distinctively to different medication. Correctly identifying AD and DLB can help a doctor devise appropriate clinical management, which will in turn improve the patient’s quality of life.

This study introduces a new, convenient, and highly accurate test for diagnosing AD. Current tests involve the laborious process of collecting cerebrospinal fluid or the expensive and timeconsuming brain imaging. Other blood-based techniques focusing on measuring levels of amyloid beta and tau proteins have yielded contentious results; the plasma level of amyloid beta was reported to increase in some studies and decrease in others. In fact, a recent meta-analysis of 231 studies has come to the conclusion that level of plasma amyloid beta is not strongly correlated with AD, and should not be used in clinical

practice for diagnosis. Similarly, the level of plasma tau has been investigated as biomarker for AD. While the level of plasma tau is increased in AD patients compared to healthy controls was a consensus view among researchers, the finding needs further verifications in larger cohorts. At the present, “there is no single definitive medical test for diagnosing AD,” said Paraskevaidi. However, with incredible efforts like the one in this study, we are getting closer to a test that would allow for early and accurate diagnosis of AD. I feel more hopeful as I reflect upon Alois Alzheimer’s saying “Excessive reservations and paralyzing despondency have not helped the sciences to advance nor are they helping them to advance, but a healthy optimism that cheerfully searches for new ways to understand, as it is convinced that it will be possible to find them.”

The Daily’s Sci+Tech section wants you!

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SCI+TECH

September 25, 2017 mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

New treatments for schizophrenia Discovery of brain area associated with auditory hallucinations

Claire Grenier | The McGill Daily Naz Sutcuoglu Sci+Tech Writer Content warning: mental illness

O

ver the past ten years, the public has become increasingly aware of mental illness and its impact on people’s lives.

Scientific research has brought a new understanding of disorders that were a mystery to many. Mental disorders are very real and their effects on one’s life are tremendous.

Although the punch cannot be seen, the impact is there.

One type of mental illness is schizophrenia, a biochemical brain disorder confuses a person’s reality with a fake one. The manifestation of schizophrenia can greatly differ among individuals: some will only experience one episode in their life, while others will experience many more. There are also different kinds of schizophrenia ranging from acute to chronic. Auditory hallucinations are one symptom that affect more than 70 per cent of people with schizophrenia.

Other symptoms include delusions, distorted thinking, and social withdrawal.

There is no definite cure that will work for every patient because of the lack of knowledge concerning this disorder.

Schizophrenia affects men and women of various ages. A specific gender or age

is not affected more than others. In the United States, there are around 3.5 million people who suffer from schizophrenia, around 20, 000 of whom are homeless, and don’t have access to medical aid.

In the United States, there are around 3.5 million people who suffer from schizophrenia, around 20,000 of whom are homeless, and don’t have access to medical aid.

People with schizophrenia require lifelong treatments with a choice of various antipsychotics, counseling, or support groups and homes. All antipsychotics available come with a long list of side effects, making patients reluctant to take them. Schizophrenia was

discovered in the late 1800s but was not named until 1910, and was not taken seriously until quite some time following that. Only recently has research for different treatments of schizophrenia started. Recently, a French research group presented a new finding on schizophrenia to the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP) Congress. Not only did they find the exact brain area responsible for auditory hallucination in schizophrenic patients, they also figured out how to improve this condition in most affected patients.

Sonja Dollfus, a professor of the University of Caen, and her colleagues made their discovery by bringing a previously proven method into their hypothesis for schizophrenia treatment. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has been thought of before as a treatment for psychiatric conditions and has been successful in other cases. However, a lack of controlled trials of TMS were applied to a part of the brain to aid in schizophrenic hallucinations. Dollfus and others used this to create their hypothesis that applying TMS to the temporal lobe would trigger hallucinations and would improve a patient’s conditions. In their clinical trial, 26 patients received TMS treatment while 33 received a placebo treatment.

Two weeks after the trial, the patients of

both the control and placebo group were examined. The research group found that 34.6 per cent of the control group showed a significant response whereas only 9.1 per cent of the placebo group responded.

According to ECNP, a significant response is anything above 30 per cent, making this finding even more impressive.

At the ECNP Congress, Dollfus stated, “It seems that we now can say with some certainty that we have found a specific anatomical area of the brain associated with auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia . . . We have shown that treatment with high frequency TMS makes a difference to at least some sufferers, although there is a long way to go before we will know if TMS is the best route to treat these patients in the long-term.”

For future treatments, researchers should fully understand what the brain disorder entails. Something of this significance will have a great impact on the types of research that will follow and influence their hypotheses. Knowing the specific part of the brain that’s associated with hallucinations can bring researchers closer to understanding and developing precise treatments for hallucinations, and perhaps also other symptoms affecting millions of schizophrenic patients today.

culture

September 25, 2017 mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

17

The 21st century Prometheus Let There Be Light looks at fusion amidst the energy crisis

Laura Brennan | The McGill Daily Maria Atallah Culture Writer

W

hat if you tried to bottle the sun? What if you tried to build a star on Earth?

Canadian filmmakers Mila Aung-Thwin and Van Royko’s documentary Let There Be Light follows several teams of scientists around the globe attempting to channel the sun’s energy to solve the global energy crisis. In the French countryside, they are building the world’s most complex machine: an artificial star that will provide perpetual, cheap, and clean energy for all mankind.

This Herculean task is aggravated by political misunderstandings, and funding issues which have significantly delayed its construction. The film explores the rise of the project in the mid-20th century and the subsequent decades of disappointment and disillusion, due to the failure of the first experiments and the ever-growing cost of construction. However, fusion, which seeks to extract energy from a magnetically charged cloud of hydrogen gas, has seen a resurgence in the 21st century, with a hopeful outlook in the decades to come.

Let There Be Light certainly isn’t a boring scientific documenta-

ry: it’s a touching portrayal of hundreds of people working to bring an almost impossible concept to life. Beautifully animated sequences introduce several long-dead thinkers and eccentric visionaries who birthed the project, allowing us to delve into its fascinating history. It’s also an incredibly personal work of art, as it depicts scientists in a realistic, faithful manner, instead of their usually detached portrayal in the media. All these elements allow us to empathize with the people working tirelessly to stop us from destroying our planet… and ourselves.

Fusion has seen a resurgence in the 21st century, with a hopeful outlook in the decades to come.

Alternating between aerial shots of breathtaking natural landscapes and sterile concrete buildings, of lush forests and suffocating factories, Let There Be Light compels us to meditate

upon our impact on the environment. In our struggle for survival, we’ve been bleeding the Earth dry of fossil fuels for decades. In a world rapidly running out of energy, fusion research could be our last chance of salvation. The documentary perfectly illustrates this race against the clock. From recognized scientists to eccentric inventors building monstrous machines in their garage, all agree that fusion represents humanity’s last hope. However, the experiment has drawn numerous critiques from the general public and the scientific community, who judge fusion to be unattainable.

The sheer scale of the project can certainly seem daunting, but is fusion really a waste of time?

Let There Be Light premiered in Montreal on September 15th.

Co-director Van Royko then sat down to answer some of the audience’s questions.

The McGill Daily: Did the documentary attract any new investors in fusion research?

Van Royko: I don’t think new investors joined specifically because of the film, but it’s doing a great job bringing awareness to fusion, which is still a relatively unknown alternative energy source. I’ve also heard Google is

using its computers to help solve algorithms and apparently they’re really interested in the project. A lot of new countries are also interested in joining, like Kazakhstan and Iran.

In a world raidly running out of energy, fusion research, which seeks to extract energy froma magnetically charged cloud of hydrogen gas, could be our last salvation.

MD: What is Canada’s part in fusion?

VR: Making this documentary? [laughs.] Canada actually wanted to be involved in the beginning; they wanted the machine to be built on Canadian soil because of the absence of seismic activity, which makes it an ideal place for it to be built. But in the end it was between France and Japan, and they ended up choosing the South of

France because it’s wine country I guess? But Japan got to appoint the first two directors of the project, who have incidentally been blamed for the significant delays.

So yeah, I don’t know if Canada was insulted not to be chosen or something, but at least we made this documentary.

MD: Do you believe in fusion?

VR: Absolutely. I definitely believe in fusion and like, in the film they’re talking about using sea water to produce energy with fusion, and I don’t want you to think they’re just gonna empty the ocean. They just take a few isotopes, then dump the water back into the ocean. It’s clean and cheap and lasting, and I think that with definitive funding it could absolutely work.

MD: What can you tell us about filming?

VR: We worked with a very small crew, most of the time it was just Mila and me, and I think there’s a lot of things we couldn’t have done with a bigger crew. We just talked to all the scientists extensively, we were able to capture some small funny moments, some touching moments. By the way, this whole thing is completely Mila’s brainchild. He wrote, directed, and edited everything. I was there for most of the filming, but it’s really all his.

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September 25, 2017 mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

culture

Processing grief through music Mount Eerie shares harrowing portrait of life after death

Victor Redko Culture Writer Content warning: mention of death, drugs, and description of grief

G

eneviève Castrée was a cartoonist and poet who worked primarily with the Montreal-based L’Oie de Cravan and Drawn & Quarterly publishers. She was also a talented musician in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, where she moved after marrying Phil Elverum of The Microphones and Mount Eerie fame. It is also where she recorded under the name Woelv and then Ô PAON. After a fifteen-year career, and not long after the birth of her and Elverum’s only child, Geneviève Castrée was diagnosed with cancer. She passed away in July 2016, and eight and a half months later, Elverum released A Crow Looked At Me. All eleven tracks on Crow are about Castrée, and the lyrics make quite clear the intensity and depth of his grief. Listening to the album is extremely difficult. It is full of the painful surprises that Elverum himself encountered (“A week after you died a package with your

name on it came. / And inside was a gift for our daughter you had ordered in secret. / And collapsed there on the front steps I wailed”), and it paints an honest and, to anyone who has experienced the death of someone close, relatable picture of tragedy.

Listening to the album is extremely difficult.

It is full of painful surprises.

Normally when you go to a show, you expect to be entertained and to leave feeling blown away and happy. Given the context of the album and tour, I had no expectations of the sort. I was ready for an emotionally devastating night. Not only that, but the mere fact that Elverum was playing in Montreal mattered, given his marriage to Castrée and her connections with Montreal, so I imagined that this show in particular would be rather hard for him.

Combine this with the fact that the

venue, the Ukrainian Federation Hall in the Mile End, was stuffy and poorly ventilated and thus hot and muggy, I felt rather uncomfortable in the leadup to Elverum beginning his set.

When Elverum walked on, he briefly spoke about his connection to Montreal (confirming that this would be a difficult show for him), then about Castrée and the songs he was going to play.

Nobody made a noise as he spoke, nor as he began playing. After the first song (an unreleased one which left me wondering if he had made up any lyrics on the spot), he launched into playing the entirety of A Crow Looked At Me. Listening to the album is one thing. Seeing it performed is an entirely different one. Instead of just hearing Elverum’s anecdotes, you see him relive the entire experience. Watching the grimaces on his face as he sang about Castrée was heartbreaking.

It almost made me wish that he wasn’t performing, that he wasn’t rewinding the tape to watch the mental image of his wife dying over and over again, but this was part of his healing process. He writes songs about Castrée and

sings them in order to solidify his sorrow externally.

He writes songs about Castrée and sings them in order to solidify his sorrow externally.

Despite the heaviness of the occasion, there were brief moments of levity. During one song, he recounted the time he had partied with Skrillex and Father John Misty during a music festival in Arizona full of “young kids on drugs,” and at one point he stopped to talk about how many sweaters he packed for Montreal’s supposedly cooler climate. And it truly was incredible to see an artist that I deeply respect and love, someone who has become a fixture in the indie scene after putting out more than two decades worth of fantastic material, perform. What’s more, the Ukrainian Federation Hall was actually an ideal venue for the occa-

Of language and song

sion. Having seen Stars of the Lid there, I had a feeling that the location was well-suited for intimate shows, and this reinforced that fact, with the small space and creakiness of the seats adding to the confessional air of Elverum’s songs. Every member of the audience was transfixed by Elverum. Many people were in tears, and many struggled to figure out exactly what to do after each song: do they clap enthusiastically to show their appreciation or do they clap reservedly to show respect to the dead?

After the last song ended, everyone gave him a standing ovation.

As I filed out of the venue, feeling depressed and yet oddly satisfied, I realized that I had witnessed a truly special event. Before the last song, Elverum had said that he would probably never play those songs here in Montreal again. It was too painful for him. And, honestly, who can blame him? Montreal is a personal place to him because of Geneviève Castrée. To hope that he does this kind of show again is offensive. This show only happened because of tragedy. It happened because, as Elverum sings on the opening line of A Crow Looked At Me, death is real.

A young Indigenous artist combines the traditional and the personal Kayla Holmes Culture Writer

O

n Saturday, September 16, Montreal’s Rialto Theatre hosted a moving performance by an emerging Wolastoqey artist. Jeremy Dutcher’s work brings to life traditional Maliseet songs, incorporating his own flavour and talents into a final product that is hard to label but undeniably captivating and emotional.

Dutcher is one of only 500 or so remaining speakers of the Wolastoqey (or Maliseet) language, and his work is heavily directed towards the revitalization of both the music and the language of his people. The Wolastoqiyik (“people of the beautiful river”) First Nation inhabit territory primarily in New Brunswick, but also in parts of Maine and Quebec, and has at its heart the Wolastoq River. By performing almost exclusively Wolastoqey songs, Dutcher hopes to

The incredible operatic power of his voice makes listening to his work an emotional experience.

inspire others to keep these alive. “When you lose a language,” he tells the audience, “you don’t just lose the language.

You lose a whole way of looking at the world.”

The show took place on the second floor of the historic Montreal theatre, in a long, dark hall with the dull thump of other performances in the lively building reverberating through the floor. Dutcher’s chatty banter with the audience, as they left the bar and came to sit on the wooden floor in front of the stage, was indicative of the tone of the evening—warm, casual, and enchanting.

Dutcher drew the audience in from the moment he set hands on the creaky grand piano (which he patted affectionately halfway through his performance: “it needs love”) until the last echo of his operatic voice faded away.

Most of the songs performed were part of Dutcher’s first album, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, which is recorded and will be released soon. His project is ambitious. Though not easily accessible to the community due to their poor quality, there exist a number of recordings on phonograph cylinders (the earliest commercial form of recordings) of Wolastoqey songs recorded by an ethnographer in the early 1900s. Through a tedious and time-consuming process described on his website, Dutcher has been transcribing these songs and adapting them for his own performance. The combination of

the traditional songs played, Dutcher’s talent on the piano (on which the influence of classical and jazz music are felt, while remaining completely unique), and the incredible operatic power of his voice makes listening to his work an emotional experience.

Dutcher is one of only 500 or so remaining speakers of the Wolastoqey language, and his work is heavily directed towards the revitalization of both the music and the language of his people.

Throughout his performance, Dutcher played the recordings that he has been transcribing, the original ones from the early 1900s, either before or simultaneous with his own interpretations. Listening to

the scratchy but beautiful wax recordings fading into Dutcher’s powerful voice was profoundly moving.

Between songs, Dutcher talked of the history of his people and of their music, and shared his own experiences working on this project. All but two of the songs performed were in the Maliseet language, with Dutcher providing a translation of the title and of the broad meaning of each.

He noted, for example, the tumultuous nature of the Trade Song (Esuwonike), or how many of the Wolastoqey songs reflect an intimate tie with the water (Song for the Canoe —Lintuwakon ciw oqiton, Fisher and the Waterspirit — Pomok naka Poktoinskwes).

After performing the Song for the Shaker, (Lintuwakon ciw ultestakon,) a lullaby, Dutcher told a particularly moving story about the importance of his project. Both the Wolastoqey language and songs are becoming increasingly hard to come by. Now based in Toronto, Dutcher travelled home to perform the pieces he had been working on for his people. After his performance, an older woman came to speak to him. She told him that, as a child, her grandmother had sung her the Lintuwakon ciw ultestakon, and that she had not heard it since. And she thanked him. Dutcher’s goal is to do just this, and he explains: “I see this project as a way not just to reclaim these songs as Maliseet, but also to give them back to my people.”

culture

September 25, 2017 mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

Blending opera, film score, and rap

19

Montreal artist Lunice releases cinematic debut

Mariam Salaymeh Culture Writer

L

unice Fermin Pierre II has progressed from 19-year-old bboy to versatile artist. Lunice, a child of Filipino and Haitian immigrants, is based in Montreal and draws heavy influences from African-American artists, saying, “I grew up around hip hop culture, I keep it as basic as that … but that influence is undercut with electronic undertones.” He originally pursued DJing as a teenager, which kickstarted his desire to create his own music.

Across 11 tracks on CCLX (360), Lunice unravels a “stoner opera that blends new rap production, film scores, and modern club music.” He combines rap, hip hop and electronic to offer listeners an enticing listening experience.

Across 11 tracks, Lunice unravels a ‘stoner opera that bleeds new rap production, film scores, and modern club music.’

The album is layered and intense; one song is instrumental bliss, the next is provocative verse.

It’s theatrical. The album’s first half showcases traditional old-school rhythm and blues, while “Freeman” features poetry and ushers in the album’s midway point, “CCLX III (Intermission).” “Drop Down” has a heavy downbeat fit for a club, and features Le1f rapping. “CCLX III (Costume)” has spiritual undertones as the final notes are elevated and synthesized, almost optimistic. When The Daily asked Lunice about the meaning behind some of his songs, he responded, “How I react to my music could be completely different to the next person, which is great because [art] is so subjective.”

According to Lunice, there’s a new wave of experimentation both within the hip-hop/rap genre and between several genres. He claims, “[the genre] can’t only be straight rap.” From this mindset comes his fierce support for and involvement in impromptu jam sessions in electronic and rap music taking place

across his hometown of Montreal.

Explaining the legacy of collaboration and its positive contributions, he says, “There were sessions where you could bring whatever instrument you need to play music out, to come up with new sound and new music every weekend, it was the perfect setting to push our boundary and experiment. That was a thing from when Kaytranada and his crew were bubbling up, or even when we look at the history of Jazz.”

His general narrative is stylistic, four songs hold an eponymous title, and foreshadow the different “acts,” while other numbers work independently. We start off the album with “CCLX (curtain)” wherein the listener is told to “save your better change for the road” and is consistently reminded of the artist’s musical background, with an electronic downbeat which lasts throughout the whole opening feature. The tonal changes are often defined by the reprisal of sullen rap from a moment of silence during the song. It concludes. Since the release the audience feedback has been positive and perhaps more importantly, critics have also embraced his creativity.

“[Jam sessions were] the perfect setting to push our boundary and experiment... from when Kaytranada and his crew were bubbling up, or even when we look at the history of Jazz.”

Image Courtesy of Motormouth Media The video is immaculate and abstract. Lunice’s cinematographic mode of processing becomes apparent as the song combines club, trap, and a hypnotic depth found within the slower beat, all coalescing behind the music video’s abstract choreography. When Lunice was asked about this, he rehashed his passion for film and the creative potential in combining the audio and visual, explaining, “What’s interesting is that I’ve come to realize that I really do enjoy shooting, almost as much as I like music, which

is funny because for some people it just comes to making the music.”

He studied editing and film in CEGEP and at Concordia, saying he’s always loved the “hard work that comes with taking creative risks,” both in performing and in audiovisual media.

In the last few seconds of the record’s final track, “CCLX IV (Black Out),” we manage to hear a snippet of Lunice’s unrestrained laugh. When asked about ending the album on this note, he stated: “The whole record’s pretty dark

so I wanted to just lighten it up and even to give an impression of ‘to be continued’ into something a little more light-hearted to follow.” He’s very excited about the immediate future, citing that he already has notes and blueprints for the next album. He recognized that for his debut, though, the dark musical undertones, conceptual textures, and hints of optimism make the album a layered, complex piece. Lunice’s final laugh offers a layer of hope amongst the abstractions and swells of CCLX’s tonal darkness.

—Lunice

Although the album is dark in sound and tone, many lyrics are optimistic and uplifting. The music video for CCLX’s lead single, “Tha Doorz,” mirrors the album’s format. Conceived in Montreal five years ago, the song features a swelling, ominous synth; Lunice actually only used one main synth melody throughout, crediting Kanye West as an inspiration for that creative decision.

Lunice in “Tha Doorz.”

Image Courtesy of Motormouth Media

compendium!

September 18, 2017 mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily

20

Lies, half-truths, the joke’s over.

The Hipster taxonomy

Resin. What is it? A protective coating for a piece of wood?

Some kind of tree sap? An ingredient in candlemaking?

Whatever it is, it is natural and it is authentic; so too is the resin hipster. Commonly found pouring over Hemingway and sipping six dollar lattes served by a barista with an attitude.

Commonly found getting a spruce tree tattoo because they just feel connected to nature and really love Atlantic Canada.

Commonly found brewing their own chamomile honey rosewater beer and hanging up framed posters of heritage equipment. These individuals have carefully curated instagrams showcases only their most authentic selves. “A picture of me in front of a sunset holding my 35mm nikon”; “Me and my friends enjoying a quirky picnic in a cornfield”; “An angry barista made me this beautiful latte.” It is important to note that these are not the captions that the resin hipster would choose - their instagram would obviously be peppered with Bon Iver lyrics.

Crossword

The minimalist hipster can be spotted walking through the mile end wearing cuffed black jeans, a comme des garcons t-shirt, and a plain baseball hat with a curved bill. How much did this immaculate uniform cost? Only the minimalist hipster knows. These hipsters love sparse rooms and satisfying containers.

They are the most likely to go clubbing and develop a cocaine habit, partly because clean white lines are congruent with their esthetic, and partly because their affluence allows them to flirt with an edgy dangerous life without having to deal with the consequences.

Their instagrams seem so lacking in curatorial decision that the absence actually becomes the esthetic.

An unfiltered poorly lit photo of an equally minimalist friend looking apathetic? The minimalist hipster will post it because they just. don’t. care.

The co-op hipster abounds in Montreal. These individuals often wear only other people’s discarded clothing but somehow still look spontaneously hip. These hipsters care. A lot. But not about their instagram esthetic, they care about issues. They are most likely to be chastised for being an angry vegan, or for making a friend feel guilty for not recycling. They love markets and food co-ops and free community workshops because they are so collective. These hipsters’ free-spirited excitement, while often admirable, can sometimes tip into the realm of manic-pixie-dreamgirl. They’re here selling homemade kombucha at the market collective today, but where will they be tomorrow? Sleeping in a friend’s backyard treehouse? Performing at a music festival?

Halfway across the country in a rideshare with three people who are opposed to showering? Who knows?

Jay Van Put Official Crossword Wizard of robitussin) 18. Company that made Pong 19. South Park character 20. Spanish tusked whales?

23. Technology obsessed youth in Japan 24. Caspian or Aral, for one 25. Jordanian jumper?

33. etc. for Caesar 37. Baseball plate 38. Neeson of The Grey 39. ____ D’Ivoire 40. Excited 42. Teammate 43. Alien spaceships 44. Prefix: Middle 45. Coldplay’s “___ for the weekend” 46. Dominican coal mine bird?

50. Protein synthesis 51. Swiss ski resort 56. Fish’s relatives from Turkey?

63. In the near future 64. Pop fly 65. Not strong 66. Respiratory system organ 67. Hole __ __ 68. Not punctual 69. Fencing sword 70. Mitigated 71. Killed a dragon

Across 1. Chemicals that hurt the ozone layer 5. Minor celebrities (i.e Kathy Griffin) 10. Worshipped figure

14. Heaps 15. Jewish circle dance 16. Back of the neck 17. ____-tripping (getting high off

Down 1. Loading that an athlete might do 2. Avoid sinking 3. Poisonous snake 4. Broth 5. Indian lentil soup

6. ___-Quebec 7. Afghanistan’s neighbor 8. Singer Bareilles 9. Want a drink 10. “God willing” to an arab 11. Input 12. Gemstone 13. Part of a camera 21. USA in France 22. Tiny bit 26. Degree in Desautel’s 27. ___ Mia 28. Birch-like tree 29. Slang, Must have 30. Fatty 31. Type of tree or reading 32. ___ Muil from Lord of the Rings 33. Size above 34. Meat alternative 35. 14 across, exaggerated 36. Bellatrix from Harry Potter 41. Directory (abbr.)

47. ___ Taylor (clothing company) 48. Taxi driver 49. Half of God? 52. Author of A Theory of Justice John 53. L’_____ shampoo company 54. Type of board or shop 55. Crooked 56. Land surrounded by water 57. Dish with a spoon 58. Musical pitch 59. Radius neighbor 60. Bathrooms in Britain 61. ___ Ranger 62. Raced

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