vol100iss17

Teach English Abroad

Great Food, Live Music, Art Shows Weekend Brunch - WiFi - Special Event Booking Breakfast - Lunch - Dinner - 7days - 8am Open 1832 rue St.Catherine O. 2

," ,* !& #% (& 2 /// ," ,* #1

TESOL/TESL Teacher Training Certification Courses Intensive 60-Hour Program Classroom Management Techniques Detailed Lesson Planning ESL Skills Development Comprehensive Teaching Materials Interactive Teaching Practicum Internationally Recognized Certificate Teacher Placement Service Money-Back Guarantee Included Thousands of Satisfied Students

Classifieds To ($ & , via email: ads@dailypublications (*# F )$('" 6 58 7 8 F B E 6 58 5

in person: 3480 McTavish St., Suite B-26, Montreal QC H3A 1X9 Cost: McGill Students & Staff: $6,70/day; $6.20/day for 3 or more days.

General public: $8.10/day; $6.95/day for 3 or more days.

150 character limit. There will be a $6.00 charge per contract for any characters over the limit. Prices include taxes. MINIMUM ORDER $40.50/ 5 ads. Lost & Found ads are free. Other categories include: Movers/Storage, Employment, Word Processing/Typing, Services Offered, For Sale, To Give Away, Wanted to Buy, Rides/Tickets, Lost & Found, Personal, Lessons/Courses, Notices, Volunteers, Musicians, etc.

OXFORD SEMINARS 1-800-269-6719/416-924-3240

www.oxfordseminars.ca

Housing

Student Journalism Week

Downtown, next to McGill University.

Available apartments all included, 1, 2 or 3 bedrooms. Close to groceries, drugstores and subway stations.

Indoor swimming pool available.

There is no journalism school at McGill. To try to make up for this, the Daily Publications Society, with help from The McGill Daily, le DĂŠlit, Journalists for Human Rights, Media@ McGill, and CAPS, has invited journalists, professors, and experts so students can finally get an idea about the ins and outs of journalism.

Check out www.mcgilldaily. com/journalismweek for updates and more information.

For more information please call:

514-708-7971 www.cogir.net ć—ĽćœŹčŞžă‚’ĺ‹‰ĺźˇă —ă Śă „ă‚‹ă€ č‹ąčŞžăƒťăƒ•ăƒŠăƒłă‚ščŞž ă Žăƒ?ă‚¤ăƒŞăƒłă‚ŹăƒŤă Şă‚ŤăƒŠăƒ‡ă‚Łă‚˘ăƒłďź’äşşă Œć—Ľ ćœŹäşşç•™ĺ­Śç”&#x;ă Žďź“äşşç›Žă Žă‚ˇă‚§ă‚˘ăƒĄă‚¤ăƒˆă‚’ćŽ˘ ă —ă Śă „ă žă ™ă€‚ă‚˘ăƒ‘ăƒźăƒˆă Żă Šć´’č?˝ă Şăƒ—ăƒŠăƒˆ ăƒźĺœ°ĺŒşă Žăƒ­ăƒźăƒŞă‚¨é§…ă ‹ă‚‰1ĺˆ†ă §äžżĺˆŠă€‚ă Š éƒ¨ĺą‹ă Ż12ćœˆďź‘ć—Ľă ‹ă‚‰ĺ…Ľĺą…ĺ?Żčƒ˝ă€‚ĺŽśčłƒă Ż ďź„495ďź?ćœˆ ďźˆćš–ćˆżăƒťé›ťć°—ăƒťă‚¤ăƒłă‚żăƒźăƒ?ăƒƒăƒˆăƒť 雝芹䝣螟㠿 kodamastore@gmail.com

1100 Dr. Penfield 3 ½, 4 ½ renovated apartments, all included Indoor pool & 24h doorman Interior & exterior parking available.

Close to everywhere!

Call (514) 286-9191 www.cogir.net

Fr "',*#&! classifi * Email us with your name, McGill ID number and classified text at addesign@dailypublications.org mcgilldaily.com/classifi eds

“LAZY 2

since childhood? McGill Vision Research is looking for study participants. Please call Dr. Simon Clavagnier at 514-934-1934 ext.

35307 or email mcgillvisionresearch@gmail. com for further information.

Radical Journalism On the Air 2:30 p.m.-4 p.m.

Brown 5001

Lessons/Courses CANADA COLLEGE www.collegecanada.com Any Language Course: 7.00$/hour TESOL Certification Recognized by TESL Canada.

TOEFL iBT, GMAT, MCAT, TEFaQ, TEF preparation.

Student’s visa, Visa renewal.

514-868-6262 info@collegecanada.com 1118 Sainte-Catherine West, #404, Montreal, QC

Employment Have you had a

Thursday, Nov. 4

MASTER SCHOOL OF BARTENDING Bartending and table service courses Student rebate Job reference service 1 514-849-2828 www.Bartend.ca (onlin registration possible)

More at www.mcgilldaily.com/classifi eds

Ever just want to talk? coordinating@mcgilldaily.com

Call for Candidates The Daily Publications Society, publisher of The McGill Daily and Le DĂŠlit, is seeking candidates for

Percer dans le journalisme 2.0 6 p.m.-7 p.m.

Chancellor Day Hall 101 Introduction to Video Editing 6 p.m.-7 p.m.

TVMcGill, Shatner B-23 Designing for print media 7 p.m.-8 p.m.

Chancellor Day Hall 102

two student positions on its Board of Directors.

Caught in the Middle: Writing an Opinion in Today’s Partisan Climate 6 p.m.-7 p.m.

Chancellor Day Hall 102

The position must be ďŹ lled by McGill students belonging to any faculty other than the Faculty of Arts, duly registered during the upcoming Winter term, and able to sit until April 30, 2011. Board members gather at least once a month to discuss the management of the newspapers, and make important administrative decisions.

Interning in Style 6 p.m.-7 p.m.

Chancellor Day Hall 202

Candidates should send a 500-word letter of intention to chair@dailypublications.org by November 8th.

Contact us for more information.

Making a Sale: Culture Journalism in a Contracting Market 7 p.m.-8 p.m.

Chancellor Day Hall 202

Friday, Nov. 5 Citizen Media: Part II 6 p.m.-7 p.m.

Leacock 219 Social Justice Journalism 7 p.m.-8 p.m.

Leacock 219

News

The McGill Daily | Thursday, November 4, 2010 | mcgilldaily.com

3

Arch Café books released Part one of a two-part series Niko Block and Michael Lee-Murphy The McGill Daily

D

eputy Provost Morton Mendelson has disclosed a series of hitherto-confidential documents relating to the Architecture Café, showing that the cafe posted a small deficit in fiscal year (FY) 2009-2010. The development follows a motion proposed by SSMU President Zach Newburgh at the September meeting of McGill’s Board of Governors demanding the publication of the numbers.

The documents, prepared by Mendelson’s office at the request of the Board of Governors and presented to the Board on October 22, reveal that before McGill Food and Dining Services (MFDS) was compensated for its services, the cafe ran a $171 deficit in the 200910 school year. Its gross profit was $33,186, though after the payment of student employees and managers, repairs and maintenance, and overhead costs, the numbers dipped slightly into the red.

Questions remain about the specifics of the MFDS’s role in the management of the Arch Café, as MFDS director Mathieu Laperle was out of town and unavailable for comment. The document states, for instance, that the Arch Café was costing the MFDS an additional $15,000 in salary and benefits and “other expenses.”

“The Architecture Café did have problems while it ran under the

radar,” wrote former Café manager Carly Roualt in an email to The Daily. “But it never lost money until 2007. And it appear[s] to be the managerial apparatus that was forced upon it in 2007 that ran it, technically, into the red.”

The café was put under a “mixed management model” involving the Architecture Students Association (ASA) and McGill three years ago, after the administration threatened to shut it down. The responsibilities were shared between students and MFDS (and its precursor, Ancillary Services) with students managing “purchasing” and MFDS taking control of “food costs and labour costs.”

The nature of these costs remains unclear.

After reviewing the released documents, SSMU President Zach Newburgh said that “there was an opportunity for the University administration to assure the financial stability of this café by working with students but it did not do so.”

The document, however, maintains that MFDS officials met with students from the ASA throughout 2009 and 2010 “on the need generally to be environmentally and financially sustainable, and more specifically on matters related to managerial sustainability.”

Mendelson stressed that the café “was not being run professionally and could not be run professionally because students are not professionals in this industry.”

The report’s projected expenses for the 2011-2012 school year show that the Arch Café would have lost $73,211 in FY2011-12. The lion’s

The former Architecture Café is now a study space. share of this expense stems from an apparent decision that a full-time manager with a salary of $49,200 would have been hired if the cafe’s operation had continued. The document also projected an increase in the cost of casual labour from about $30,000 to roughly $39,000.

There is no projection for the current school year.

The cafe’s financial statement attributes the salary increases and the new management position to “the unionization of casual staff.” Mendelson confirmed that this is a reference to the last year’s

union certification campaign of the Association of McGill University Support Employees (AMUSE).

AMUSE officials have said that the figures are “hypothetical,” as the union has not yet entered collective bargaining with the administration. Dan Ahmad, AMUSE’s Communications Officer, wrote in an email to The Daily that the “salary of managers has nothing to do with any union at McGill and is dictated by the University.”

Former SSMU councillor Alex Shee also examined the document, part of which reads, “At the

Victor Tangermann | The McGill Daily

end 2009-10, we were forced to conclude that the [mixed management] model was not financially or managerially sustainable, and there did not appear to be a viable alternative.”

“What I would ask is this,” said Shee, “If you really, really, really looked at the alternatives, did you look at funding through SSMU? Did you look at the possibility of an optoutable fee? … If their response is ‘We looked at it from a financial point of view and it just didn’t seem right,’ then how come it made money in the past?”

SSMU investments bounce back Relying on ethics committee to review portfolio Henry Gass The McGill Daily

W

ith the help of a rebounding world economy, SSMU has begun to generate more and more revenue through its investments in corporations.

SSMU’s investment portfolio – ranging from investments in banks like RBC and BMO, to telecommunications companies like Telus and Bell, and energy companies like the Power Corporation of Canada and the TransCanada Corporation – is managed by Ken Lester, CEO of Lester Asset Management and a professor in McGill’s Faculty of Management. The portfolio is regulated by SSMU’s Financial Ethics Review Committee (FERC).

“Our mission is [for investments] to generate $100,000 of revenue per year,” said Nick Drew, VP Finance and Operations.

Drew said that the value of an investment “usually fluctuates

depending on the success of a business,” and therefore attributed the growth in SSMU’s investment revenue to the general recovery of the economy. Drew said the value of SSMU’s investments had dropped down to $1.5 million last year, but bounced back to around two million dollars over the summer.

“SSMU has investments in a number of different portfolios. It really is a diverse investment portfolio,” said President Zach Newburgh.

SSMU’s investment portfolio was started in 2008, from the $1.8 million the Society received after being bought out of their share in Haven Books, the former SSMU-operated off-campus bookstore.

“We thought it was the best way to put our money away,” said Drew.

“It’s one of the lowest-risk portfolios [you can have].”

Drew said that SSMU rarely changes its investment portfolio, but that when there are changes, they are usually based on recommendations from Lester.

“Sometimes we’ll drop a company, and buy a new one. It’s generally based on what Ken [Lester] believes,” said Drew. “He usually contacts us and asks us for permission first.”

SSMU monitors the ethical standards of the companies they invest in through FERC. A SSMU by-law mandates the Society to “avoid” investing in companies with material interests in “socially harmful areas” like guns and tobacco, human rights abuses like child and sweatshop labour, and environmental harm like pollution and habitat destruction.

SSMU also prioritizes investment in companies with “a proven track record of” positive contributions to the environment, the promotion of sound employment practices, and high standards of corporate governance and transparency.

“We are in the process of currently investigating ethical investments – determining which companies we should be investing in

and which we should not, and we are weeding out those which we shouldn’t, to ensure that our investments are at the standards set by our constitution and at the standard that is expected by the student body,” said Newburgh.

Any member of SSMU can ask FERC to investigate a company in which SSMU invests over $10,000.

In past years, FERC had met on an ad hoc, case-by-case basis, but Drew is requiring them to meet at least once a year for 2010-11.

Drew identified environmentally harmful areas as “a very grey area” and “something FERC needs to look into.”

Last year, FERC investigated RBC’s involvement in tar sands corporations, but this year Drew concluded that the bank’s activities did not warrant divestment. Drew also said that the FERC report was “a bit biased” against RBC, as it only referenced one source, instead of a variety of sources that would corroborate the information.

According to an email from RBC’s Client Care Specialist Paula LeBlanc to Drew, RBC was “actively working toward support for a number of water-related projects in Northern Alberta, where the oil sands are located.”

“Banks do not control the pace and nature of energy sector growth, and we do not believe it is responsible or reasonable to eliminate potential funding for entire sectors of the economy.

RBC subjects our lending and investment banking activities to a suitable level of social and environmental due diligence. …

We check that our clients in the energy sector (and other sectors) are appropriately managing and reducing their impacts, and we support them in those efforts,” LeBlanc wrote.

“RBC is the worst bank we’re involved in. … [But] it’s not a company you want to divest [from],” said Drew. “We have to invest in banks.”

4 News

The McGill Daily | Thursday, November 4, 2010 | mcgilldaily.com

Universities using teaching funds for infrastructure Report by Quebec profs argues instruction is suffering to pay for maintenance and new buildings Lola Duffort The McGill Daily

A

ccording to a report released last week by the Fédération québécoise des professeures et professeurs d’université (FQPPU), Quebec’s universities are funneling increasingly large amounts of money – initially earmarked for teaching and research – into the maintenance of infrastructure, most notably in the form of building acquisitions and renovations.

The report addresses the financing of Quebec universities’ infrastructure projects, and found that the government subsidy per student earmarked for capital funds – the budget sections dedicated to infrastructure – was getting smaller every year. In ten years, it has gone

from $1,935 to $1,535 per student, which amounts to a roughly twenty per cent reduction. For its part, McGill is plagued by $650 million in deferred maintenance costs.

Meanwhile, funding cuts to infrastructure have been compounded by a spike in university enrollment, putting pressure on schools to improve their infrastructure to accommodate more students. Contrary to predictions made by the Ministry of Education in 2000, Quebec universities have seen a sharp rise in enrollment over the past decade. There are about 23.4 per cent more full-time students enrolled in Quebec universities now then there were twelve years ago. At McGill alone, there were over four thousand more students attending full-time in 2009 than in 2002.

“Over the past 12 years, the

total growth in the student population can be compared to a university about twice the size of the Université de Montréal appearing in the system,” said Martin Maltais, a professor at Télé-université, UQAM’s correspondance school, and one of the report’s researchers.

To offset the costs of new students, universities have had to dip into their operational budgets.

Diverting money away from teaching and research has been a standard practice for university administrations for the past twenty years, according to Michel Umbriaco, the lead researcher on the report, in an article for Le Devoir. However, the extent of this practice has reached a critical point in the past four or five years, with universities paying for nearly fifty per cent of their infrastructure costs with money originally

intended for operational budgets.

The report, which was sent to education minister Line Beauchamp, recommended that the province place restrictions how much money universities siphon off from their operational budgets.

Diverted funds have eroded the quality of instruction in Quebec, according the report’s authors.

“Now, we have universities where people are completing entire bachelor degrees without ever actually seeing a professor,” said Maltais.

Joël Pedneault, a McGill undergrad and Vice-Secretary General of the Quebec Students Roundtable (QSR), a provincial student lobbying group of which SSMU is a member, believes that governments should step in to fill funding gaps.

“The main problem is that schools have to make these decisions – between instruction and

infrastructure, between what type of maintenance…while the government has made a conscious political choice to decrease taxation on the private sector, which could provide some of the necessary revenue,” he said. “Obviously the problem is multi-faceted, but the bottom line is that schools are under-financed.”

The FQPPU’s report is the second in a three part series they are producing in an effort to explain why, despite the Ministry of Education’s increased investment in sectors of post-secondary education, universities have seemed to suffer from chronic underfunding.

The first report addressed the financing of the universities’ operational budgets. It found that the ministry had nearly doubled its investment in the operational budgets of universities in Quebec over the past ten years.

Khadr sentenced

First child soldier tried since Nuremberg Humera Jabir News Writer

O

mar Khadr was sentenced to a symbolic forty years in Guantánamo Bay prison on Sunday, although the 24-yearold Canadian will only serve eight years, as per the terms of a plea bargain negotiated last week.

The conviction concludes the first ever trial of a child soldier accused of war crimes since the Nuremberg hearings after the Second World War, and the first trial of a terrorism suspect by the Obama-led military commissions.

Khadr pled guilty last Monday to the murder of Sergeant Christopher Speer, an American medic killed in a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002. In exchange for his guilty plea, Khadr was offered a sentence of eight years in prison, and permission to apply for transfer to Canada after one year.

In a statement released to 28 journalists, The Daily among them, Khadr’s lawyer Dennis Edney said that justice had not been served.

“The fact that the trial of a child soldier, Omar Khadr, has ended with a guilty plea in exchange for his eventual release to Canada does not change the fact that fundamental principles of law and due process were long since abandoned in Omar’s case,” Edney wrote.

“We may choose to believe that through his plea Omar finally came clean and accepted his involvement in a firefight when he was 15 years of age, or that this was one final coerced confession from a victimized young man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time because his father placed him there,” said Edney.

The plea agreement limited

the number of witnesses Khadr’s defense could call to four individuals, while the prosecution was able to call ten witnesses to the stand.

Moreover, the commission judge refused to recognize Khadr’s status as a child soldier, although he was only 15 at the time of arrest.

Finally, the commission did not permit evidence that Khadr had been threatened with murder and rape while being interrogated by U.S. officials, although the incriminating statements elicited from Khadr while “under duress,” and without the presence of a lawyer, were accepted.

Nathan Whitling, another lawyer for Khadr, called the forty-year sentence “astonishing,” particularly because the prosecution had only asked for Khadr to be sentenced to 25 years.

“To hear the [military jury] come down to that forty number was quite shocking. We knew that number didn’t mean anything, because there is a deal in place that will ensure Omar will serve only eight,” said Whitling.

“These people on the panel were all soldiers, and Sergeant Speer was one of their own. … In that sense, it is no surprise at all that there was such a harsh sentence,” added Whitling.

Though the Canadian government has stated that it was not involved in negotiating the plea agreement, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon confirmed on Monday that Khadr would be permitted to apply for transfer in one years’ time.

According to Whitling, Khadr’s defense team will seek his release as soon as possible following Khadr’s return to Canada. Khadr’s lawyers will focus on the parole process since the International Transfer of Offenders Act does not permit Khadr to challenge his foreign conviction.

Campus Eye

SPHR protests Israeli soldiers on campus Photo by Victor Tangermann A small contingent representing the McGill chapter of Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) demonstrated outside the Jewish Studies building yesterday afternoon against the visit of three Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers. The three soldiers were guests at a free pizza lunch hosted by the Jewish Studies Students Association (JSSA) and the Birthright Alumni program. According to an email sent over the JSSA listserv, the lunch was meant to “introduce these soldiers to students in Montreal and spend some time on the McGill campus.” The SPHR contingent was protesting what they consider a long series of human rights abuses inflicted by the IDF against Palestinians. SPHR was also protesting the presence of military personnel on campus, and the perceived recruitment of McGill students to the IDF. —Henry Gass

News

The McGill Daily | Thursday, November 4, 2010 | mcgilldaily.com

5

Concordia student prepared to sue administration McGill’s new senior administator target of possible suit Anna Norris The McGill Daily

C

oncordia student Laura Beach has issued a mise en demeure – a notice of potential legal challenge – to three members of Concordia’s administration, including one who will take up a post at McGill later this month.

The mise en demeure is the latest in a series of student reactions to the renewal of Concordia’s exclusive beverage contract with Pepsico last Friday.

The university’s current contract expires on December 10.

Several student groups, including Sustainable Concordia and TAPThirst (Tap Drinkers Against Privatization), which Beach cofounded, opposed the renewal of the contract. They pointed out that renewing the exclusive contract would contradict the advice of Concordia’s own environmental advisory committee.

The discovery by Concordia students that a new contract

NEWS BULLETIN Sustainability initiatives in store for SSMU Fourth year Management student Ari Jaffe has big plans for sustainability at McGill, and thanks to a diverse group of allies, it looks like something is actually going to happen. Last Wednesday, Jaffe presented recommendations about Council’s Green Projects to SSMU Council based on research conducted over the summer as the Society’s Green Building and Food researcher.

“There should be an integration of sustainability into student life,” said Jaffe.

Among the most pressing recommendations are renovations for the Shatner building, and an energy audit examining aspects like ventilation and lighting. SSMU wants to implement the Ledership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Certification standard. LEED would work within existing infrastructure and implement sustainable elements, instead of calling for new construction.

SSMU Council is pursuing multiple sources of funding, including grants, to finance these projects.

Jaffe’s research took a holistic approach to sustainability, focusing on how to connect to the needs of the average student.

In addition to a Green Service Point, which would inform students about SSMU projects and about how students can contribute to sus-

with whom Beach claims to have made an agreement, as well as Michael Di Grappa.

For Di Grappa, the mise en demeure came during his last days

was being signed on October 29 prompted a rally and sit-in to oppose both the contract and the secrecy with which it was negotiated. Beach was among the speakers at the rally, which took place on October 27 in Norman Bethune Square at Guy and Maisonneuve.

The mise en demeure, however, does not address the contract itself, but rather the lack of student consultation about the renewal of the contract. Beach claims that the university acted in bad faith by signing the contract while claiming that negotiations were not taking place.

Beach, also the Sustainable Ambassadors Coordinator for Sustainable Concordia, wrote in an email to The Daily, “The members of admin (Marc Gauthier and Johanne De Cubellis) made a verbal agreement with myself and Faisal Shennib that no negotiations/decisions regarding the beverage contract would be made prior to a meeting with myself, Faisal, Johanne, Marc and a representative from Pepsico. This

verbal agreement was made in a meeting on May 12.”

“This promise was reiterated in an email from Johanne De Cubellis a month later,” she con-

tinued. “In September I received another email from Johanne, stating that there had been ‘no movement on the Pepsi file’ – however, by all administrative accounts an agreement in principle had already been signed with Pepsi at that time.”

The administrators to whom the mise en demeure was given are Marc Gauthier (Executive Director, Finance and Business Operations) and Johanne De Cubellis (Associate Director, Hospitality Concordia),

as an administrator at Concordia.

Di Grappa, who served as VicePresident (Services) at Concordia, is starting as McGill’s Vice-Principal (Administration and Finances) on November 15. He could not be reached for comment.

The mise en demeure is not a notification of a lawsuit, but instead the notification of the potential for one. “It pre-empts the legal procedure. It requires someone to address the situation or to admit wrongdoing,” explained Pawel Porowski,

tainability, SSMU hopes to make Shatner room 302 a sustainable hub for students, centred around the Midnight Kitchen, which already use the space for its daily by-donation vegan lunches.

Jaffe notes that McGill Food and Dining Services have proved a surprising ally in this effort, including the implementation of “Meat-Free Mondays” and ten Local Food Days a year in residences, as part of the McGill Food Systems Project.

“It was a really nice side of them to see,” said Jaffe.

Most important for students are the possible job opportunities within these projects. As a Management student, Jaffe understands the importance of selling sustainability to apathetic students.

“If you can put value in terms of sustainability, it’s appealing,” she explained. “Green has become logical and inclusive.”

According to an audit of last year’s SSMU financial statements, SSMU entered this year with a surplus of almost $600,000. SSMU, as a not-for-profit organization, is not meant to run a surplus, and Drew said the excess money would be put toward new events. “[Events are] the best way to tie the community together. It had very good benefit versus cost,” said Drew. “We’re really happy [with the event] despite the financial loss.”

Drew said that since this was the Homekoming Bash’s first year, some financial losses were to be expected, but that spending for the event would be tightened up in the future as SSMU gets more experience in organizing it.

“It was a learning process,” said Drew. “It was something [SSMU President] Zach [Newburgh] really wanted to do. He really believed in it, I really believed in it. …

[Homecoming] is a really great thing to have.”

Drew explained that some of the leftover supplies from the event, including food and drinks, would be reallocated to other SSMU events.

Drew cited Four Floors, SSMU’s October 28 Halloween party, as one recipient of leftover Homekoming supplies.

Drew also argued that the University should have assisted SSMU in financing the event. McGill organizes its own Homecoming event every year, which is usually a major source of alumni donations for the University.

“McGill should also help us out a little bit,” said Drew. “The whole thing is meant to get alumni to spend money.”

While SSMU is still waiting on some bills for the event – including one from McGill – and therefore does not know the actual deficit, Drew was confident that the event would not go over budget.

“We tend not to overspend. We budget to have a little bit of space” to account for losses, said Drew.

“We always plan for the worst-case scenario, and the budget is always conservative for that reason.”

—Alexander Weisler

Homecoming in the red SSMU’s Homecoming event is projected to lose $16,000, according to SSMU VP Finance and Operations Nick Drew.

Homekoming Bash 2010, an allday event held Saturday, October 2, during McGill Homecoming, was expected to run a deficit. Drew said that SSMU had budgeted for that kind of loss, and that they would be able to cover whatever the deficit ends up being. “[Homekoming] was projected to lose $16,000,” said Drew. “Funds came out of the operating budget.

We had the money to cover it.”

“I would be happy with a formal apology from the administration” Laura Beach Co-founder of TAPThirst

—Henry Gass

Victims seek reparations from Oratory On October 30, Montreal’s Olympic Stadium hosted a celebratory mass in honour of André Bessette, the eleventh Canadian saint. Known as Brother André, he was the porter for St. Joseph’s Oratory and member of the Congregation of the Holy Cross, and died in 1937. Pope Benedict XVI declared Brother André a saint in Vatican City on October 17.

The celebration of Brother André’s canonization has been dampened by a storm of legal action by victims of alleged sexual abuse perpetrated by brothers from Collège Notre-Dame, a formerly allboys school that is owned by the Congregation of the Holy Cross.

According to Robert Cornellier, a founder of the Committee of Pedophile Victims at Collège NotreDame, fifty men have come forward with their stories of abuse at the College. Cornellier’s late brother René was a victim of abuse.

Last week Cornellier sent a letter to Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte,

External Communications Officer at Sustainable Concordia.

Thus far, however, none of the Concordia administrators have moved away from their position on the contract, maintaining that the university is not guilty of breach of trust. Chris Mota, the university’s Director of Communications, told Concordia’s The Link that, “the university is confident that we handled everything according to the best practices.”

“The admin have responded by denying having acted in bad faith, denying having ever made a verbal agreement, despite the email evidence I have provided,” Beach responded. She has not yet decided whether she will go ahead with legal action.

“I would be happy with a formal apology from the administration, a formal commitment to the creation of an institutionalized framework for student consultation on future contract negotiations, and a formal commitment to the creation of an enforceable ethical purchasing policy.”

who presided over the ceremony, asking him for a portion of the money generated by Saturday’s mass to be given to the victims of abuse at Collège Notre-Dame.

Cornellier said that he did not receive any response; instead he said he received a letter asking him to stop speaking to media.

Cornellier identified the Committee’s intention of “investigating” Cardinal Turcotte’s claims that Saturday’s events honouring Brother André did not turn a profit.

Of the 50,000 people projected to attend the event, the final attendance was 30,000, with tickets five dollars each.

“We don’t want to hurt the college…but we want to denounce our abusers,” said Cornellier, conveying the general message of the men he has spoken with.

Cornellier explained the will of his late father, asking for an apology and a refund of tuition money for René’s schooling at Notre Dame, as reparation for his son’s sexual abuse. Cornellier mentioned his family’s initial desire to not go public with their case, but after the treatment they received from the Congregation in response to their request, they decided to “push the story forward.” “[Their] only reply is to send their lawyers, the most expensive and biggest [lawyers] in Montreal. … [That is the] way they reply to victims, [the] way the Church in Quebec replies to victims of cases of sex assault,” Cornellier said.

St. Joseph’s Oratory had not responded to a request for comment when The Daily when to press.

—Erin Hudson

Pick up Monday’s Daily for more Arch Café coverage.

Commentary

The McGill Daily | Thursday, November 4, 2010 | mcgilldaily.com

6

Why I’m supporting the UDrive And why you should too Jamie Burnett Hyde Park

I

Olivia Messer | The McGill Daily

Debt = Delirium The gadfly Shaina Agbayani shaina.agbayani@mcgilldaily.com

D

ebt. A humble $40,000 quantifies my undergraduate education by its dusk. Economists prognosticate that by 2012, U.S. debt will eclipse its GDP. $3 trillion represents the appraisal of the Third World’s indebtedness to the West.

Deleterious spending patterns Irreverent to student debt, I relapsed into hyper-consumerist product dependency last week, purchasing septic fluid while I could have simply persisted in plunging.

Mired deep in a heap of deficit, Obama’s administration exacerbates the land-of-the-free(-ofprudence)’s, home-of-the-(fiscally)audacious’s debt crisis by gratuitously increasing investment in the military-industrial complex.

The U.S. spends 53 cents of every tax dollar on the military. Less than a fourth of this is earmarked for Afghanistan and Iraq, rousing us to posit that this expenditure is paranoid, pre-emptive, and provocative. America’s soaring defence expenditures – exemplified in the unprecedented $708 billion that the administration has requested from Congress for 2011 military spending – is symptomatic of a global arms addiction.

African debt to industrialized economies now exceeds threefold what was initially borrowed. This continent, where easily preventable and treatable condition such as diarrhea are the second-leading killer of children under five,

expends four times more on debt repayments than on health.

Corporate hegemony debtifies us Corporate philosophies regiment planned obsolescence. My Liquid Plumr Pro is a corporate-invented “necessity” that derides my clogclearing capabilities as outmoded by providing me with a convenient alternative. Appeals to convenience often euphemize excuses for indolence and irresponsibility. For convenience, we treat Third World countries as depositories for our toxic waste.

The military’s economic stranglehold on the deficit-ravaged American economy is forged by a dynamic of supply and demand. The former is propositioned by avaricious weapons-manufacturing giants. They form the expansive nexus of corporate interest that undergirds excessive militarization by strategically ubiquitizing themselves. Weapon manufacturers are implanted numerously in all states, possessing tremendous leverage in lobbying Congress to increase defence budgets that channel multi-million-dollar weapons contracts toward them.

The most significant variables in the decline of Third World countries into debt crises played themselves out in the seventies and eighties, when developed countries rose interest rates starkly and oil prices quadrupled, increasing all costs. Both resulted from the cowrporate monopoly on determining interest rates and oil prices. To rectify the debt quagmire, Third World countries entered into Structural Adjustment Programs with the World Bank and the IMF that purported to assist borrowers pursuing debt relief through more money-lending or lowering interest

rates. In exchange, borrowers had to comply with a neoliberal agenda that privatized industries and decreased spending on the health and educational institutions most beneficial to civilians.

Rectification: de-dependence We gotta take the red pill and, like Neo, recognize the debt matrix – an excessive, irrational industrialization that has dismantled our mental mechanisms for apprehending how impotent, paranoid, and narrow-minded the interdependency on which capitalist globalization is predicated renders us.

Convenience-on-steroids – frozen mini-bagels with cream cheese, payforessay.com – typifies our zeitgeist (read: we have normalized a culture of incompetency). We breathe in the midst of a $1.5-trillion arms addiction (read: we are becoming more paranoid). Our freedom to cheaply buy whatever we want from wherever we want whenever we want is borne at the expense of the bleeding and disease of the earth and the Third World peoples who participate the least in this earth-tainting (read: our scope is insidiously narrow).

We must revise our conceptions of development and freedom – not in terms of military capacity, or of our freedom to buy avocados in January or to subject developing nations to usury. Amping up capital-obsessed globalization is unsustainable.

Rather, we must reclaim competency and stability by seeking alternatives (see Anqi Zhang’s Culture article on Ecovillages, November 1) to the global over-dependency most patent in our transnational, corporate-sponsored debt crises. !

’m writing this in part because of actions by the McGill administration attempting to prevent efforts by the Association of Graduate Students Employed at McGill (AGSEM) to organize a union for course lecturers. We should know about this – university administrations have learned to mobilize students against campus workers, a trap we can’t afford to fall into.

I’ve also been motivated by recent statements by principal Heather Munroe-Blum. These statements suggest that she and her administration are not primarily concerned with our education, particularly undergraduates’. MunroeBlum has been quite public with two arguments: First, she has called on Quebec to dramatically raise undergraduate tuition, occasionally employing the world-class academic logic that Harvard is unusually accessible to working-class students. Second, she is calling for the transition of schools with a lot of resources (like McGill) away from undergraduate education, becoming instead elaborate advanced research centres, publicly funded but servicing big business.

It’s important to contradict this narrative, ever more popular in these days of austerity, that the workers who provide public services have interests contradictory to those they provide services to (including students). I think it’s quite the opposite. We see this both on campus – where university administrations often manage to cut costs by turning students and workers against each other, to the detriment of our education – and off, where more generally the narrative of the public-sector-workeras-enemy is used to attack labour rights for (almost) all of us, and to attack our public services.

Collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) determine the relationship between the employer (here, the university administration) and employees (in this instance, course lecturers). The bargaining process also provides a great opportunity to see what both sides really want. Let’s look at some examples of common things student-worker unions fight for (both

within and outside CBAs).

Class sizes. Course lecturers benefit from smaller classes because they’re easier to teach, and both teachers and students benefit from more engaging discussion.

Wages, work hours, and leave.

Instructors who are overworked, underpaid, or both, can’t teach as well as those who aren’t totally preoccupied by how to pay the bills.

Instructors with good medical leave have a better chance to resolve health problems early, before they have the chance to become major disruptions.

Fair hiring and firing policies.

Most CBAs attempt to provide fair, transparent mechanisms for hiring and firing. This helps prevent workplace discrimination, both in terms of race and gender, for example, and on the basis of the employers’ personal or political beliefs. It means getting the right candidate for the job – on the basis of their actual qualifications.

Professional development.

Another staple in academic CBAs is the provision for various forms of professional development. Course lecturers have a direct interest in developing their knowledge of their field and developing as teachers – unions help get them the resources to do so. Unions can also help them obtain things like technology grants and office space, helping their members – your instructors – be better organized and more accessible.

Giving workers a say. Decisions in universities are increasingly made by individuals more concerned about their outside business interests, or their reactionary politics, than those of students and education. Course lecturers are well-placed to see what works and what doesn’t in the university.

A union would give them a much stronger voice in how the university is run.

There’s a theme here: Your instructors’ working conditions are your learning conditions.

When they win rights at work, they’re winning a better education for us. If we can be turned against that, we all lose.

Jamie Burnett is a U1 Economics student and a UDrive volunteer.

The views expressed here are his own. Write him at james.burnett@ mail.mcgill.ca.

Erratum In the article (“Academic fraud in the spotlight,” News, November 1), the Council of Canadian Academies was incorrectly identified as the Canadian Council of Academies.

The Daily regrets the error.

Commentary

The McGill Daily | Thursday, November 4, 2010 | mcgilldaily.com

7

I confess: I bought my degree Even if you don’t pay tuition, you should stand in solidarity with those who do Courtney Graham Comment

W

e are all a part of a flawed education system, one that turns education into a commodity that must be bought and traded on a market. We condone current policy by our very presence here – even if we are doing so now in order to change the system later.

Sentiments like Matthew Kassel’s (“My Café, my memories,” Commentary, October 14) are a perfect example of the way in which most of us are blindly complicit in perpetuating inequality in university education as a whole, and at McGill more specifically.

This is true whether you pay your own tuition or your parents pay it, whether you are from a workingclass family or your parents make over six figures.

We tell ourselves: it’s not my hardship, it’s not my problem, it’s not my reality – quod erat demonstrandum, I don’t have to care about it.

By perpetuating our own deliberate ignorance, we are not absolved of our role in a system that consistently disadvantages peo-

ple who will never enjoy as much privilege as we do. Continuing to be blithely unaware of our role in the system can only make us look foolish.

Self-awareness is one of the most important lessons we take away from our university education. Ignorance regarding our place in the broader system is complicity.

And apathy is collusion. If we enjoy a privilege, we have an obligation to serve others in the pursuit of the same opportunities – whether they choose to do so through “appropriate” channels (education) or not. Ultimately, we have a responsibility to put forward the idea that self-worth is not and should not be contingent upon a university education – even if we have one.

By simply choosing to participate in our education as bystanders, rather than taking a more active role (by engaging in debates such as this one, or by participating in student politics) we are disadvantaging ourselves, and those outside of the system.

Failing to recognize that the broader systemic issues facing our university are part and parcel of our education is failing to become truly

Olivia Messer | The McGill Daily

educated.

Education is more than the name “McGill” on our degrees, which are ultimately just pieces of paper that signal potential employers to the fact that we played the education game and won. It is the development of self-awareness and civic responsibility – of collective consciousness.

Health Services does good work Human error is real, but our practitioners are not incompetent Pierre-Paul Tellier Hyde Park

I

am responding to Aaron Vansintjan’s allegation that McGill Student Health Services “almost killed” him (“McGill Health Services almost killed me,” Commentary, October 28).

It is always distressing to hear that any student has suffered as a result of illness, but I feel it is necessary to respond to the criticisms raised about the service we provide.

First, McGill Student Health Services does provide same-day appointments for students who are not feeling well. A student who comes in will be seen by a triage nurse, and, depending on the problem, will either be given an appointment later that day to see a nurse or a physician, or be sent home with the proper advice. The system was implemented as a result of student feedback. Prior to this, students who came in essentially had to wait at Student Health – often for hours – to be seen. Now, students can leave the clinic and attend classes, otherwise do their work, or go home to rest.

Second, students come early to the same-day appointment clinic because there are only a limited number of appointments available.

During the academic year, we try to have the equivalent of 1.5 doctors seeing drop-in patients every day.

We would like to have more, but we are unable to recruit other physicians, simply because there are not enough physicians working in Montreal – a shortage beyond our control. Recognizing that, we have trained our nurses to do gynecological exams, prescribe contraceptives, and screen men and women for sexually transmitted infections, which frees time for some of our physicians to see other patients.

Third, our nurses follow strict protocols consistent with the current medical literature when screening and evaluating students.

Students are either referred to a physician for assessment or sent home with advice, including the advice to return to clinic if symptoms worsen. But nurses always err on the side of safety.

Fourth, medical conditions are dynamic, not static. In this case, the initial assessment was most probably the proper diagnosis of what was then a simple viral infection – a cold, not pneumonia. At this point, most students get better, but a small number don’t. Vansintjan reported that he returned another day for a medical note, but a second nurse determined that he should be seen by a physician, and the physician diagnosed pneumonia and treated him. I am sure the proper, broad-spectrum antibiotic that would treat the “atypical pneumonia” most common in young people was prescribed. But, even despite proper treatment, a medical

We should stop pretending. We should care and we should fight.

When tuition goes up for our fellow students, for example, we should all be up in arms, because education should be regarded as a right, and not as a commodity. Our collective voice cannot be ignored. But before we can speak collectively, we need to realize our role in the system as

a whole, and agree on a strategy to begin dismantling it, one issue at a time.

Courtney Graham is U3 Political Science and International Development student ( Joint Honours) and The Daily’s copy editor. Write her at courtney.graham@mail.mcgill.ca.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“”

condition may sometimes worsen for a number of possible reasons – e.g., because of another medical problem or more commonly because the organism is not sensitive to the prescribed antibiotic.

Fifth, routine use of chest X-rays in these situations is not recommended. Guidelines from the Canadian Infectious Disease Society recommend chest X-rays only if the diagnosis is clinically obscure or uncertain – apparently not the case here.

Finally, there is no easy way, such as testing a sample of blood or sputum, to determine what bacteria are growing in the lungs, so antibiotics can only be prescribed based on criteria such as age, severity of illness, and the region where the person lives. The only way to determine if the proper antibiotics are being used is to monitor a patient’s progress and response to the drugs.

The service that my staff offers is excellent and the service students get at Student Health is better than what most Quebec residents receive. Nonetheless, I invite all students to get in touch with me if they have any concerns or suggestions as we feel feedback allows us to improve our service.

Pierre-Paul Tellier is a professor of Medicine and director of the McGill Student Health Service. You can write to him at pierre-paul.tellier@ mcgill.ca.

!∀#∃%&%∋(∃∀%(&%∋)∗+∃(,−(./( 0∋%1∗)%−+/2(34.(+,.5,∋∃#67%( 8∗∃∀(∃∀%(5#+∃(∃∀#∃(3(8,−4∃( 6%(#∋,9−)(∃,(∀%#∋(∗∃:

!∀#∃%&∃∋()∗)∋+∃&,−.&/0∋;%,∋<%(!:(=91∀1∋−/∋2−,∋,##/3 0#34&3∃&5&6,&.∋670#4−#8∃6+29∋>%+∗1∗,−(?,∗−∃1

Your letters – we want ’em.

Send them now: letters@ mcgilldaily.com

8 Features

Brain chips, battle suits, and cochlear implants Rebecca Falvey examines the benefits and pitfalls of brain-computer interface technology

A

n interface system that allows an owl monkey on a treadmill to control the movement of a 200-pound humanoid robot is on its way to allowing people who have lost the ability to communicate to do so again.

This is the result of two decades of research into brain-computer interfaces (BCI): invasive neural prosthetics that harness brain signals accompanying movement and translate them into the movement of a cursor on a computer, a keyboard, a prosthetic limb, or a separate machine, like a robot.

These interfaces may someday bring immense independence to people confined to a wheelchair, bed, or their own brain – for instance,those paralyzed with Lou Gehrig’s disease (or ALS), stroke, or cerebral palsy.

A company called BrainGate is currently conducting research into mind-controlled wheelchairs and prosthetic limbs. This emerging technology will not only benefit the disabled and disadvantaged but also the performance of the military and youth entertainment.

The U.S. Army has invested at least $4 million in the development of “thought helmets,” which would enable soldiers to communicate without speaking – not with sentences and words, but intentions and apprehensions.

The Canadian military has also sponsored a significant amount of research in this field over the past two decades, with the intention of restoring limb function after injury, in addition to its long-term objective of “performance enhancement.”

Top-of-the-line toy and video game companies, such as Mattel, Nokia, Sega Toys and Uncle Milton

are working with the company NeuroSky. NeuroSky’s “ThinkGear” technology is a non-invasive brain-computer interface using electroencephalography (EEG), which records the electrical activity along the scalp, produced by firing neurons within the brain.

Invasive BCI, on the other hand, are implanted into the grey matter of the brain during neurosurgery.

In 2004, the first clinical trial of invasive BCI was conducted on a 25-year-old Massachusetts native named Matthew Nagle, who was paralyzed from the neck down. A 96-electrode implant was placed over the motor cortex controlling his dominant left arm and hand. The implant was linked to the outside of his skull, which could then be connected to a computer. The computer was trained to discern his thought patterns and associate them with the movements he chose.

On account of this device, Nagle was able to do everything that most people can do on the computer and internet by pressing a button or moving a cursor.

He could also open and close his prosthetic left hand.

The device had to be removed within a year based on FDA regulations, as the immune system of the brain at this point in the technology’s development will generally reject the foreign device within the two-year mark.

Independence for those with active brains but inactive bodies is one of the main goals of this research. In this respect, according to Nagle’s own accounts, the procedure was successful.

“I can’t put it into words,” Religion & Ethics Newsweekly quoted him as saying. “It’s just – I use my brain. I just thought it. I said, ‘Cursor go up to the top right,’ and it did.”

the literary supplement

The McGill Daily

2

Literary Supplement

Stuart Wright

Sonnet To me nothing of the pigeon is alien: Not the dowdy-frocked provisioning of crumbs from squabbles of anywhere-asphalt, Nor the grate-huddled pub-going with its warm updraft and the disappearance of wings, Nor the chimerical walk, at once cocky and sheepish, Of one not sure whether to wait at tables or to play basketball; And least of all the dirty-dappled span of many-coat splendour, Of churchmouse grey and sewer-habit brown, of city-choked dove-black And, rarely, a throat-catching white that dumbly sounds of bells, and patriarchs, and a world apart.

Let eagles scrape the firmament and fall like hammers to anvils, To nightingales yield their Attic-tongued dignity and to jays their brassy indignation, But let us not neglect to make our offerings to domestic genii Nor to be stopped, on a blear-skied mild November day, At the sudden flash-winged ecstasy of pigeons tremoring an unaccustomed pool.

Tiana Reid

Little Krista With all of the force in her fiftypound body, she swung the rope into a gratifying criss-cross. The rhythm of her feet pounding on the sizzling pavement was all that she could hear.

Left foot. Right foot. Swoosh. Just when her curious neighbours thought they could predict her agile sounds to a T, Krista switched it up with a double-under. As the rope swung twice under her bare feet, her braids jumped around on her head, the beads fastened to each plait bouncing up and down. For fear of failure, she had been wary of the triple-under that only one sixth-grader could do.

But now, it was the sweltering hot summer before grade three and she had never felt so in her body. She closed her eyes, held her breath and jumped as high as she possibly could.

The only sound the whole block could hear was the rope swinging three times under little Kristaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s feet.

Max Karpinski

Oka We went to Oka beach today, where the red has long washed out, and we wrote with our feet as cold tide rolled in and turned our toes blue.

The wall of sand stood guard between the grey Ottawa River and the trees,

from the sandwall and charged the forest, warriors, a black bandanna hiding the red inside of a howling throat announcing its presence into this land

leaves already burned orange.

A message erased

which washes shrieks over for centuries and which shows

stories forgotten, ghosts turned

how easy it is to bury seventyeight days away in the dirt.

The McGill Daily

3

Literary Supplement

Francesca Bianco

Sketch of a boy in a small town

Francesca Bianco

Soul hunting “What he fishes for changes as light changes on water.”

-Lorna Crozier What he hunts for changes as leaves change upon the branch.

Grouse, Pheasant, Fox. There is a precipice in his mind where they die, ditch dirtied blood pooled, fur feathered Where their eyes turn to bullets.

His rifle is invisible.

He has forgotten what calibre speeds like a bee to a hive through cloud.

There is no need for specifics.

If he could fire his eye out on a try he would.

Return it to his face when he had heaved the beast.

If he could use his heart as a decoy, then return it after he won.

There is something he has never hunted.

Something that keeps him standing there every weekend aiming and following.

Every time he hunts he is different.

The hill is different, the light that pulls through the trees, the animal that is there or isn’t. What he kills now is a swallow and it’s by accident.

Frail and black, twitching to fill an emptiness in a forest he has never seen before no trail in, or out. home, they tell you, we are all being herded over some ancient and imminent cliff.

The girl you love still lives at home. I should probably note here this home is a trailer, not a house, burrowed beneath the mountain by the lake.

There is one window, but no father. He is mining, or dead, she does not know.

You stay up late, touching each other under the headlights of your pickup truck, sighing catechisms into sweet hay air. The mosquitoes like flames bouncing against the candles of your wrists.

At home, her mother barely sleeps. She is pregnant. They both are.

You didn’t find out until you could feel the spasm of feet against your hand, assumed it was yours. In the summer you refurbish tables at the mill. Break the legs off.

Refinish and hammer them on again. You wait all week for Sunday mass, ask the Lord to forgive you, thrust your fingers against the wall of the confessional as if someone will push back. You daydream a cathedral of cloud.

The kitchen in the trailer has no dishwasher. Last week’s macaroni stirs heavy with locusts. The girl’s younger sister is thirteen and wears black eyeliner thick as leeches found in the lake. She is racooned in that trailer; you watch her steal out into the rustling darkness as you slip in.

The neighbourhood (if you can call it that) is forsaken. There is an old logger paused on his living room couch watching porn, the small breasts of Mary casting a purple glow onto his front porch. Two driveways down, a herd of farmers outside prophesize the weather. They stretch upturned arm to pool all the world’s sins in palms, dispute yesterday’s bar fight troubling the pure harvest of their talk.

O, the girl’s hair is so pale it could be a halo.

She smells of soap and incense. You walk to the pharmacy and buy her artificial nails, the ones that score prayers down your arms. In their sink the plates grow forests. The backyard copulates with weeds foaming over old toys, empty beer cans. The dog sleeps there. You think about what you might do after graduation. The high school advisor suggests fire fighting, travelling to Europe. The girl’s mother told you that Jesus walked on water, that his disciples mistook him for a ghost. But you feel nailed to this town, kneeled to the altar of this girl. To this boy who could have been.

4

The McGill Daily

Literary Supplement

Binoy Zuzarte

Growing Pains I am waiting for a train to Land’s End. Behind me is a boy who sees the world in puddles— lucky rustpenny sun white button cloud with loose thread cigarette seagulls and their cinders wax crayon trees violet-red in a row Brat! don’t play with cigarettes. Puddles stretch horizontal then Land’s End, Land’s End station revert.

I pull him aside when doors open (waterbug creates a ripple) and I make him look upstream— pink grey pregnant sky: dead salmon birthing rainbow roe

Laurin Liu

Untitled It was rarely taken out – the bottle-green photo album, its photos flaking off the page like scales.

My mother would tell me stories about day trips and her dorm mates. She described with amusement the maneuvers of a persistent suitor and the ways in which her girlfriends teased for it, and recounted afternoons spent with her brothers’ friends and visits to the botanical gardens. She liked to talk about the time her brother’s girlfriend, who happened upon family photos, mistook her for her brother’s secret lover.

It would amaze me that after all this time, my mother could still point to a dim photo of her schoolmate and say, I didn’t like her – she was a mean gossip – as if, after all that had happened, it remained a relevant detail.

And when she turned the page and pointed to a boy, who could not have been more than fifteen in the photo, she said, He was the foolhardy one. We used to be schoolchildren together. One day, when we were at the pool, the schoolteachers told us not to dive into the water from the diving board. Any other child would have checked to see how shallow the water was first. But, of course, he didn’t. He dove off of the diving board headfirst. He smashed his forehead onto the bottom of the pool, and our teachers were scared to death, because there was so much blood. He was probably trying to impress girls. His parents were country people, and they were scared to death. They slapped him – hard – for doing that.

Years later, he tried to escape China by swimming to Hong Kong. It must have been… the early 1970s. It would have taken hours to swim that distance. No less than five hours, probably. He found a secret spot on the coast to slip into the water, and then swam for the entire night. Imagine the exhaustion. All that time, with nothing to eat….

Why didn’t he bring something with him? I asked.

He didn’t bring anything with him. He was probably butt naked!

But then again, maybe he did bring food. Maybe he ate it halfway.

But by the time he got to Hong Kong, he was so tired and hungry that he couldn’t move his joints. He nearly fainted. He found a kid who promised him food if he hid in some tall reeds. Instead of bringing him food, though, the kid turned him over to coast guards.

Imagine! And she shook her head. After all those hours. All that exhaustion. And nothing to eat for all that time… all that for nothing.

My mother sighed. Then she said with a mischievous smile, How typical of him.

The McGill Daily

5

Literary Supplement

Whitney Mallett

Sandy The thing I liked best about going over to Sandy’s is the picture of her dead brother’s high school swim team. It’s hung over the light switch in her bedroom. She never told me which one her brother was and I never asked. He could have been any one of them. They all had identical speedos and pinky-white bodies like raw chicken, same as hers. Secretly, I hope her brother was the one with the crooked smile and the teenstache, crouched in the front row, third from the right.

Sandy talks in a rude way. Like when I asked her why she had that photo, she said, “It’s my brother’s swim team.” When I asked her how old he was, she said “he’s dead,” like I should have known that already. Or the time I helped her move out of her apartment. The landlord came to pick up the key and told her the floors were still dirty. She told him, “What, you want me to do lick them clean?”

The universe gave Sandy a get-out-of-jail-free card. She’s super hot and super rich and has all the best shoes. Rows and rows of them. She has ostrich cowboys boots that she doesn’t even wear. I want to borrow all of them but my feet are too big.

Once I borrowed a t-shirt. I pretended I didn’t have an extra one in my bag just so I could open up her dresser and look at all the things I wished were mine. I remember inside the drawer it smelled like wood and laundry. I picked out an over-sized white T. Sandy had snipped the arm holes extra big so it’d show off her side-boobs. Across the front, bold black letters spelled out Shut The Fuck Up. I put it on without a bra, and looked at myself in the mirror, my nipples poking out underneath the letters. It was see-through enough you didn’t just see the shape of the nipple, but a hint of the areola too. Sandy never wore a bra.

On my way home I stopped at the Pharmaprix to buy a straight razor to layer my hair the way Sandy told me. When the 16-year old cashier with bubblegum pink eyeshadow handed me my change, I dropped a penny.

One hand on her hip and one hand on her baby’s stroller, the woman in line behind me, summoned up her bitchiest voice, “Excuse me.”

She pointed at the penny on the floor in front of her.

“Uh thanks. It’s just a penny — I thought a kid would find it.” I saw her glance down at my areolae and felt my cheeks turn pink.

“Someone could slip,” she enunciated every syllable very slowly.

When I told Sandy the story, she laughed, “You should’ve told her and her saggy tits to suck it.”

I didn’t tell her that I’d picked up the penny.

Gillian Massel

A fisherman in Conakry On the cover of a daily spread The caption beneath a picture reads: “a fisherman working on his nets in Conakry” He kneels in a nylon cloud, Untangling cords With a tiny fishbone knife.

Around him, The slippery ghosts of mackerels Still struggle in the snares.

He sings them lullabies; Imitating the sound of the sea Crashing on the shore, the deep murmurings of currents meandering through trenches of the Pacific.

He slips the knife Between the rope and each fish’s invisible scales.

The mackerel Sensing freedom tests his fins On air then urges his tiny body Toward the shore.

The fisherman whistling A hymn for calm seas as he stitches his nets back together.

The McGill Daily

6

Literary Supplement

Grace Flahive

Bixby It hadn’t always been like this. In his younger days, before the Unfortunate Happenstance of 2093, and 2100’s uproarious Change of Plans, Bixby awoke each morning with a small mug of pekoe. “The world’s a nice place,” he would say, pulling on each glove with a taut snap of rubber. The morning light made parallelograms on his bedroom carpet, but the city it warmed wasn’t one to cause trouble. The cordial people of Vesper yielded to pedestrians, smiled at strangers, and always changed the empty bag of milk. They meant no harm. In those days, Bixby would drive the streets, alert for kerfuffle, alert for fuss.

But he never found it. As the city’s protector, clothed in kevlar, Bixby never once shot his plasma gun, never found a single crime to fight. Until suddenly, everything changed.

The Caped Commotion took the city in the summer of 2104, wearing masks of gold and masks of paper. Duct and scotch and masking tape masks, masks of wool and wood and fruit and Kleenex, and masks with blinking lights. They arrived over the hill from nearby Penelope and soared through the streets of Vesper. Riding vibrant bicycles, the Caped Commotion tossed shredded paper to the ground, tampered with labels in the produce section, and entered intersections on yellow lights. A gang of six dozen, perhaps, they spoke in outdoor voices inside of doors. One particularly unruly participant was spotted lazily shelving a library book – a 714 for water features in landscape art under 715 for woody plants. Disrupted were tennis matches and phone calls, and disturbed was the peace. Twelve minutes into their stint of chaos, the upheaval of the city met Bixby’s keen ears, and his gloves have never snapped faster.

“Please, stop!” he cried, stumbling to the street, blinded by sunlight reflected off each glassy downtown building. “Vesper doesn’t want you here! We want stillness, we want kind smiles!” A troop of the offenders gaped back at him, forgetting for a moment their littering, their loitering, their posting of bills where none were to be posted. They stared back at Bixby, who wielded his plasma gun, uncertain which trigger to pull in case of attack. His helmet-top GPS wobbled precariously on his head, three sizes too large and never worn before. The protective plastic of his haphazard hazard mask had never been peeled off, and he squinted behind its glare. Bixby struggled to summon a single brazen shred in the face of such discourteous opposition. Feeble words escaped his mouth, “I need you to stop. Please, I-” It was then that a single scoundrel stepped toward him. The smirking boy, ten or twelve, chucked a pilfered tangerine in the cowering cop’s direction. Flustered, Bixby didn’t see it coming, and the fruit hit the edge of his left eyebrow. He staggered, the force of the projectile having unlatched the hinges he’d never wanted anyone to find.

“You can’t do this!” he cried. And Bixby’s own mask clattered to the ground.

Laura Freitag

Almost particle physics along the powerlined skies form rhombuses but only at certain angles when passed in a highway-bound car going approx. 65m/hr we were supposed to meet in the middle ETA 4:39 a.m., but I’d forgotten it along with radio and top fifty of the fifties (and looping ‘you ain’t nothin’ but a hounddog’ only that part but not the rest) I’d remember later we shouldn’t have ended up as far as San Vincente and carried one over in a way that was altogether wrong and say hey there Danny, that’s your daddy’s song, and that’s the only thing he’d ever know for sure between polyester sheets and this desert, and yes, I decided—

The McGill Daily

7

Literary Supplement

Dylan Boyko

The Oil Barons from

Highway 63 is one of the most dangerous roads in the country. It serves as the major artery to one of the worst places in Canada and, effectively, should be paved in gold. It leads to a nexus of wealth, a place where the land is combed for the dirtiest kind of exploitation, the kind that shouldn’t really be worth anything, and through some sort of voodoo magic is transformed into molten money. It leads to a place where the last people you would ever want to get rich get really fucking rich. It is a source of hidden pride, a source of common shame. It is ‘Fort Mac’, oil sands, Wood Buffalo. It isn’t even a city, only a regional municipality, whatever that means.

But, it is where my father does his work. I don’t quite get it.

I’ll never understand that road; never understand where it really leads, just like I’llnever understand my father being there.

The road is erratic, spacey and never seems to be going the right way. The traffic speeds both ways, but I’ve always had a feeling it must go faster in whatever the opposite direction you’re going is. Kept awake by eight-balls chased with energy drinks – a million other things must keep them going, keep them desiring, pushed down that road – the worst people you can imagine, and even some you can’t, pursue some redundant dream. This really isn’t, but sort of is, my father – I just don’t understand him. He’s chasing something, but I doubt it’s there.

My father never drove himself down that highway; too much disorder, too much to piss him off. Instead he took the camp bus with, as he put it, the degenerates, OCD cases, and idiots who DUI’ed their way into the backseats. I imagined my father judging these people, them wearing black sunglasses, hooded sweat shirts drawn up tight to the sides of their faces, him in company-provided work polo, pressed and folded jeans looking hardened but strangely clever. He just sits there, criticism wanting to free itself from his mind, staring out the window of the bus. He can’t sleep on the ride up, he thinks he’ll get robbed.

Nicholas Dillon

Untitled it was totally insignificant and nobody cared or noticed or even thought to look; and the boy lay, silently carving angels from the snow—intense, directed carving, as if it were some almostbuilt monolith that took god knows how many years to construct by some ancient race of long dead and forgotten nobodies whose words we don’t get and whose thoughts barely mattered much anyway. and the people chatted and chatted about the news and the war and the unexpected heaps of late-fall snow, and how the house painters were too slow and should just be done, and how it’d be such great news to hear if the war or the painters were finished, and how we could once again get new fur coats if it weren't for the market’s recent plummet, and how political optimism might make it all better, despite the never-ending rhetoric never coming face to face with the dismal reality that nothing’s getting better or worse, just ideologically garbled, obfuscated, stagnant, or broken. all, and worse, perhaps. but the boy kept on swarming it—his eyes becoming nearly entirely crystalline—and he kept thinking of why only children noticed him, and even so few at that. it was cold as a cold, and november was near done.

The McGill Daily

8

Literary Supplement

Jade Hurter

Sunshine that day the sky was so blue a sunflower spoke through its petals to your upturned face. you ran to your mother small brown fingers overflowing with a bouquet of buttercups and violets. all you remember is the sound of the faucet spilling into a sea green vase and the smell of soil on her dress.

Ariel Yeshoshua

The Ballerina It was 11:30 on a Sunday morning and terribly bright. They hadn’t had time for coffee. Caroline was late for a flight and still somewhat drunk. She was also barefoot, having forgotten her sandals in the bar the night before. She shifted her weight lightly from one foot to the other to avoid being burned by the pavement. She coughed a thick, full cough into her arm and spit brown; cleared her throat once more, wetly, and spit again, a long glob of yellow. The mucus sizzled like chicken fat on the concrete.

“At least things will be easier for you now,” she said. “Anyway, I won’t be around to drive you so nutso anymore.”

A bead of sweat dripped down his forehead into the corner of his eye. He wiped it with the back of his hand, but it didn’t help.

“Is your mother picking you up at JFK?” he said.

“No, she’ll still be at the ballet school when I get in.

She teaches on Sundays until late. I’ll take a cab.”

“And when did you say the dress rehearsals start?”

She didn’t say anything so he said: “Do you want some money for the cab?”

She laughed hoarsely, an ugly laugh.

“I should go now,” she said. “Goodbye Pete. Maybe I’ll write to you when I’m feeling better again.”

He reached out to hug her but she didn’t move. He tried to kiss her cheek but only got her thin black hair. She stood stiffly, avoiding his eyes.

“Good luck,” he said. “I really do wish I could be there for the performance. I’m sure you’ll be a hit though. You really are so gorgeous babe.”

Caroline laughed again and patted his shoulder. She could feel the point of his bone through the shirt fabric. She had never realized before, how thin he was. She climbed over the passenger’s seat into the driver’s seat and slammed the door behind her. Pete bent his head sideways and looked into the car. He waved with his fingers and tried to smile.

Then she was gone and he was on the street corner alone, wondering if this was really how relief was meant to feel. He walked down a block and called the house from a payphone. He could hear Lisa’s Alvin and the Chipmunks cassette-tape playing in the background when Trish picked up. He’d be home within the hour, he told her.

Caroline drove fast, zigzagging through the San Francisco traffic. When she was on the freeway toward Daly City she lit a cigarette with the lighter receptacle. She kept the windows rolled up, and fumbled through the glove for a CD. It was the one they had listened to so many early mornings after the bar, sitting in her Jetta, parked around the corner from his house. They always parked around the corner, never in front.

The first track of the disk exploded through the speakers. It was a tune by the band Cobra Sex. The singer’s voice was high pitched and piercing.

Done done done it before, Did every damn thing I pleased Before you called me darling!

Caroline pulled off to the shoulder and sat smoking. Cars honked, passing closely to the side. A man in a white pickup yelled, “crazy bitch!” and flashed his middle finger, but she just turned up the music and put her feet up on the dash.

They were knobby and covered in little pink-purple scabs. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine what it would be like to sing instead of dance. She opened her mouth, but did not make a sound. She was not going to make her plane.

The McGill Daily | Thursday, November 4, 2010 | mcgilldaily.com

I

’ve grown up with a deaf mother and a father who works as an interpreter with the deaf community, generally comprised of students in school. I learned American Sign Language at the same time I learned English.

Since the 1980s, increasing numbers of deaf people have been implanted with cochlear implants – minimally invasive electronic prosthetics that can be surgically implanted within the inner ear of those who are deaf or hard of hearing. Though their ethical quandaries are different from those of brain-computer interfaces, they have created a lot of controversy. There is no real fear of computerization resulting from cochlear implants, but rather a familiar feeling of oppression in the deaf community.

It’s been reported that the implants have the potential to improve the hearing of those born hard of hearing or those who have gone deaf later in life, but do not have a very strong impact on those who are born completely or almost completely deaf. It’s now commonly decided in the medical field that cochlear implants have a better chance of working the earlier they are implanted – as early as twelve months old. If a baby is given a cochlear implant and decides to take it out later in life, perhaps because they were already too deaf for it to work and would rather live their life as a decidedly deaf person with a chosen language, any residual hearing is likely to be diminished.

The controversy in the deaf community arises from a feeling of a dismissal of their culture.

Emlyn Murray and Erin Beaver are both young women I know in my hometown of Halifax. Both were implanted with cochlear implants – Erin under her parents’ discretion when she was three, and Emlyn decided to receive one with her parents’ encouragement when she was fourteen.

Erin is planning on having her implants removed as they had no effect on her and caused her pain.

Emlyn felt a discomfort and a terrible, robotic noise in her head in the beginning, but she has noticed a gradual improvement in hearing over the past five years. She once used a hearing aid in the other ear and favoured that side, the hearing in the implant has improved to the extent that she no longer uses the hearing aid.

Though Erin is generally opposed to putting cochlear implants in babies and Emlyn is an advocate of it, they both have concerns that “sign language and other distinctions will be lost in the rapidly growing technology,” as Emlyn wrote in an email. Emlyn was born with some hearing, and worked hard at learning how to improve her communication with the implant.

My mother has always taken very strong offense to being called “disabled,” and as she has successfully run her own teaching and consulting business for around thirty years and has lived selfsufficiently her entire life, it’s not hard to see why.

While the implants do help some who were born with an ability to hear that could be salvaged, they do not help everyone.

The major fear, which has proven true in many families, is that a baby will be given an implant as a child, and raised as an entirely hearing child. Yet they may not develop a good sense of hearing and be left with a loss of language and culture, straining to hear and having no real way to express themselves and communicate, or identify with the culture they’ve been thrown into.

There’s a strong connection between this fear and the reality that my mother’s deaf generation grew up with. From age five to eighteen she lived at a boarding school for the hearing impaired, a fairly abusive place that forced the students to lip-read and wouldn’t let them sign. They gener-

ally left these children in the dark, giving them a sense of shame.

Though the cochlear implants do not carry the same form of abusive oppression, the same feeling of loss is prevalent in the children who can neither hear correctly know how to sign. My father, who works with deaf children, almost all of whom have cochlear implants, notices that all of his students are supposedly on the way to hearing, yet still need him to interpret for them.

T

he main purpose of the medical research into neural prosthetics is to help those who have lost their independence and ability to communicate. “In a study of several hundred quadriplegics,” explained Sam Musallam, an assistant professor in McGill’s department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “Most of them said they wish they could at least have their hand movement back.”

Musallem’s research has contributed tremendously to BCI’s ability to identify how the brain commands physical motion and endpoints – research that can be applied both to physical prosthetics as well as computer use. Victims of ALS in particular require some form of BCI in order to continue engaging with the outside world.

“They degenerate and become locked in,” said Musallam. “These are people who for a long time were thought to be in a coma or a vegetative state where they can’t move at all, but they’re conscious inside. So nothing happens to the brain, but the ability to move diminishes. I think the potential is just huge to allow them to communicate instead of think that they’re in a coma.” What is mistaken for a coma is just the lack of ability to respond to stimuli. “But there is nothing wrong with their brain.”

In regards to the individual, this progress also highlights the emphasis society puts on the importance of the individual and independence, and the choice of self-sufficiency and technology over community dependence. Brain-computer interfaces are an ironic development for the wishes of the individual, as this technology will simultaneously give movement to those who have lost the ability to move, and take away the need for it from those who have the ability but choose not to exercise it.

“O

ne of the groups of people who often ask me about this and wonders when we’re going to be ready to implant humans are gamers,” said Stephen Helms Tillery, an assistant professor in the School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering at Arizona State University. “So those guys I think are real keen to deal with an interface directly to a computer.”

A progressing technology such as this opens a Pandora’s box of ethical questions. Where do we as a society want to draw the line with regards to enhancing the human brain and body with neuroelectronic devices? When weighing the risks and benefits of the growing technology, do the benefits of helping the disabled outweigh the possible negative effects on society and the individual?

One concern with the growing research is the prioritization of who the technology would benefit first. This is basically the“disparity of distribution of wealth,” Tillery explained. “So if you have a development that gives people an advantage, often it’s the people who already have advantages who can afford it and get access to the technology.”

It is easy to take this topic and spiral into theo-

ries of mind control, questions of personhood, and reruns of The Six Million Dollar Man. The military has put a lot of money into this research over the past two decades, some of it being inspired by brain injuries of Canadian soldiers. Yet the military’s concerns are not exclusively recuperative. As documented in the book Mind Wars,

by Jonathan Moreno, the American government aims to enhance the military with neural prosthetics and interfaces, creating “network-centric warfare.” These goals may also be met by the mind reading caps the military’s $4-million research hopes for. This neurologically controlled future of the military would involve interfaces that would gather information from surroundings and transmit them to a central command post. There is also the idea of battle suits that would contain sensors able to detect injuries and administer drugs.

D

ystopian as these prospects are, the “computerization of humans” fear goes both ways – the fear of altering the human body with technology, and the fear of the human consciousness being stored in a computer. In regards to the fear of computerization, the technology right now is still “infantile”, said Musallam. He added, however, that while people like himself have little control of the final uses of their research, their medical potential makes them worthwhile.

“Most, if not all of the military funding, from DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency], that has gone to prosthetics, has gone with the goal of developing prosthetics for paralyzed patients. Now, first of all, knowledge is independent of good or bad application.

Knowledge is knowledge. … So the military will use what it wants to use, as it has in the past.

Whether I produce research that is funded by government agencies, or military agencies, or by private donation, those results are public knowledge, they can be used by the military,” explained Musallam. The intention of the money spent may not be at the top of the list of public interest or health, but the knowledge will eventually be publicly accessible.

“The internet started as a DARPA project. ...

I don’t think the fears should be with the funding, but I think the fears should be redirected toward open discussion and ethical constraint on the application of the technology,” Musallam continued.

With a heavy balance of both risks and benefits, the general consensus of researchers in this field, including Musallam and Tillery, is that there is not a strong reason to oppose the research at this time, but that BCI is a technology that should be kept in responsible hands. Though with no concept of the future there is no surefire way to do this, making it a technology or danger no different than any other. The idea is not, as Tillery put it, to “try to prevent these technologies or try and keep them down, because I don’t think you can, but the trick is to be aware and think ahead about them, to see the potentialities coming and be prepared to deal with them somehow.”

Musallam has a similar opinion: “Progress is going to happen, knowledge is going to come out, people are going to make use of that knowledge and I think the most important thing is to make sure from very early the opinion of people is heard.

We don’t want to have this technology mature and then all of a sudden have a group come out and say, ‘No wait this is a problem.’ I think opinion should accompany the development of this technology because it could impact us with what it’s used for.”

9

Letters

The McGill Daily | Thursday, November 4, 2010 | mcgilldaily.com

10

Re: “Direct democracy needs direct involvement” | Editorial | October 28

I would like to respond to your recent editorial from the perspective of a SSTEIRBBPPUSAMC (NOT SSMU) councillor.

Eli Freedman U1 Economics and Finance, MUS Representative to SSTEIRBBPPUSAMC

It’s prob the full course load...

Bolshevism! Bolshevism!

Re: “Hunting new blood” | Sports | November 1

Re: “Their democracy and ours” | Commentary | November 1

It’s bad enough that I only ever pick up your newspaper on Mondays to do the crossword. It’s worse when I go through your paper with a highlighter to find all the errors (of which there are usually many) only to get so bored by the articles that I give up in frustration. Where do I draw the line? That would be when obvious mistakes like “axiety – but also lonliness” appear in your headlines. Even Firefox knows those aren’t words.

If this is how Montreal’s young English-language journalists write, it’s no wonder the Gazette is such a rag. At least they have the excuse of actually being a daily. What’s yours?

Sincerely,

P.S.: Your drawing of a hunter looks suspiciously like a hipster with a gun. I really doubt Canada’s youth are wandering around the woods shooting deer while wearing skinny jeans. It would be highly impractical.

Upon flipping to the Commentary page this afternoon, I was appalled

by Ted Sprague’s article. It was rife with overgeneralizations and blatant assertions such as “Canadian democracy is a sham,” which were rooted in nothing more than a leftist dream of the world looking like that Coca-Cola commercial where people of various ethnicities all over the world join hands and sing “Love Train” by the O’Jays. To begin with, the assertion that the removal of AGSEM’s posters is anything like the clandestine PROFUNC or the padlock laws of Maurice Duplessis is ridiculous. Yes, it is disgraceful, the amount of resistance from the administration and various other actors to the unionization of lecturers; but to compare it to being unreasonably detained without trial or unfounded infringement on economic freedoms is a horrendous overstatement that changes this article from an honest plea for the rights of workers to a neoBolshevik conspiracy theory that is seemingly bent on world revolution.

Praise Jesus, pot is sanctified

Myles Anevich U2 Political Science and History

Jessica Patterson U4 Education

Stan White Dillon, Colorado

Re: “Direct democracy needs direct involvement” | Editorial | October 28

I’m disappointed in Russell SitritLeibovich for publishing so much misinformation. The first line of his diatribe – “A consistent theme in Palestinian society is a rewriting of Jews out of the history of the region” – is misleading. It seems Sitrit-Leibovich doesn’t know much about Palestinian society – save what he gleans from the highly biased Fox News channel. The irony in his piece is that it’s actually Israel that systematically seeks to erase Arab roots in Israel and the Occupied Territories.

Arabic names of street signs are erased, the Palestinian narrative is not taught in schools, and illegal settlements continue to eat into the West Bank – forcing Palestinians from their ancestral land.

Sitrit-Leibovich, you are a university student. Please do your research and use credible sources next time.

I would like to respond to your recent editorial from the perspective of a SSTEIRBBPPUSAMC (NOT SSMU) councillor. First of all, it is very insular of you to claim “tepid leadership from our student government,” while praising “admirable student mobilization on campus.” While the work of SSTEIRBBPPUSAMC executives may not be as visible to the student body as a rally, it is the execs who consistently butt heads with the administration on a daily basis, and whose contributions can be easily overlooked, but are crucially important. Take the Architecture Café – while the two rallies were passionate and inspiring in combatting the conception of student apathy, they were ineffective in reversing the University practices that led to the Café’s closure in the first place, and thus not sustainable for dealing with future issues.

While students were understandably upset, and reacted accordingly, SSTEIRBBPPUSAMC execs have (for months) been fighting the deeper problem underlying student issues with the University on campus, which is a lack of consultation. The first step toward the goal of having admin listen to students on all the issues that affect us is the creation of a consultation committee involving students with Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning) Morton Mendelson. This achievement, which was accomplished with hard work, persistence, and discipline (as opposed to impulsive, rash responses) from our SSTEIRBBPPUSAMC execs deserves recognition from all students, and is hardly the sort of leadership I would call “tepid.”

Furthermore, the general assembly is far from the only chance for direct democracy as student feedback/representation is well integrated into the legislative process.

Any student can attend Council meetings, ask questions, or raise resolutions to their respective representatives – we are there for (and elected by) you. Bottom line: many people criticize council, yet don’t learn and take advantage of it.

Thanks,

Katia Dmitrieva Third-year journalism student Ryerson

Eli Freedman U1 Economics and Finance MUS Representative to SSTEIRBBPPUSAMC

Re: “Proposition 19: Just say now to marijuana” | Commentary | October 28 It’s interesting Jerry Brown, the Democratic candidate for governor of California, said, “We’ve got to compete with China. And if everybody’s stoned, how the hell are we going to make it?” Chinese farmers grow hemp but free American farmers are prohibited from doing so. That makes it unfair for American farmers who must compete in the free world market. Does Jerry Brown support allowing U.S. farmers to grow hemp the same way the Canadians and Chinese do? Another reason to stop caging responsible adults for using the relatively safe plant cannabis that doesn’t get mentioned is because it is biblically correct since Christ, God Our Father, the Ecologician indicates He created all the seed-bearing plants saying they are all good, on literally the very first page (see Genesis 1:11-12 and 29-30). The only biblical restriction placed on cannabis is that it be accepted with thankfulness (see 1 Timothy 4:1-5). What kind of government cages its own citizens for using what God says is good?

Truthfully,

A note from a councillor from the organization formerly known as SSMU

You’re at uni, use your noggin Re: “Revisionism hurts” | Commentary | October 7

Stonehouse’s spleenventing outrageous

Comma infestation in Mob McGill article

Re: “AUS VP Events elected amidst controversy” | News | October 28

Re: “Students haven’t forgotten Arch Café” | News | October 21 Hello McGill Daily, I just read the issue about the food boycott. Incidentally, a kind of synchronicity occurred for the second time in relation to this boycott, though it’s now technically over (?), I believe. I smiled as I ate a BLT from the Oasis sandwich counter and noted The Daily’s documented outrage against the very institution I had just patronized. Sometimes one realizes that food hasn’t touched the lips in 36 hours, and consequently one morphs into some evil capitalist; or if you’re me, this really isn’t a great departure from your regular persona. In any case, I am your worst nightmare: some kinda freaky libertarian. Anyway, I’m not looking to be THAT much of a shit disturber; I just don’t think I can write to The Daily in my right mind without a couple of snide remark about politics. But I respect; keep doin’ you, as they say...I have friends on your editorial staff (hey)!

The real purpose of this letter is to say that the article on the boycott, the McGill working group on student consultation, and Mobilization McGill was cool. Certainly, the idea of transparency is important, and I respect the push to keep the administration more accountable. BUT the article contained absolutely rampant comma mistakes! Time after time, when “Mobilization McGill” was printed, there was a comma after it – written as “Mobilization McGill,” – which was consistently off with the rest of the sentence. Very irritating! What is this? I began to think that it was part of the group’s name.

Seriously, is it? Maybe you guys should hire me as a copy editor.

Take care,

It discourages me to see that Joe Stonehouse has found a medium in The McGill Daily through which to take out his personal frustrations with his AUS election disqualification without complete disclosure of his own actions. While accusing AUS Chief Returning Officer Sophie Goss of acting unprofessionally, he has resorted, by way of Facebook, to childish and profane personal attacks on her, demonstrating completely unacceptable behaviour for someone who was even considered for an executive position in a student society.

Perhaps more outrageous than Stonehouse’s personal attacks are his accusations of electoral bias in Goss’s conduct: accusing her of disqualifying him based on her personal connections to Patricia Tao is ridiculous. In the time that I have known Goss, she has only demonstrated to me a sense of morality and an ability to make unbiased decisions paralleled by few; I could never imagine her consciously making the decision Stonehouse is accusing her of, or letting personal feelings cloud her judgment. Goss’s clear head and commitment to objectivity made her more than qualified to run the elections; she was forced to make a difficult decision, and it is clear to me that she made the right choice.

Goss demonstrated incredible integrity in running an election while Stonehouse repeatedly disrespected her authority and the by-laws of the election process; she was well within her rights and acted as stipulated in her contract in disqualifying Stonehouse. His actions after his disqualification amount to nothing more than a need for petty revenge, which has done nothing but cloud Tao’s election. There is no doubt that she will fulfill and surpass the requirements of her position and move past the deaththroes of a defeated opponent.

Michelle MacKinnon U3 English and Canadian Studies/Victory Lap

Ben Landon U2 Math and Physics (Joint Honours)

The Daily loves to publish letters from our readers, but only ones that aren’t racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, homophobic, et cetera. Send your missives, 300 words or less, from your McGill email account, to letters@ mcgilldaily.com.

Health&Education

The McGill Daily | Thursday, November 4, 2010 | mcgilldaily.com

11

Displaying what ailed it L’Hôtel-Dieu and its Musée des Hospitalières trace Montreal’s medical record Peter Shyba Health&Education Writer

I

n a city like Montreal, where each street name is more obscure than the next, it’s easy to forget that every name has some historical significance. The relationship between each name holds a bit of forgotten history: take De Bullion, rue Le Royer, and Jeanne Mance for example. Angelique Debullion provided Jeanne Mance and Jérôme le Royer with money to “evangelize the natives” and set up a hospital on the island of Montreal. Over the 350 years since its founding, the hospital has become known as l’Hôtel-Dieu and now specializes in cardiology and burn treatments as well as having an emergency room. To archive the interesting history of this museum, the Musée des Hospitalières de L’Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal opened in 1992 and now houses artifacts from Montreal’s nascency.

With the museum set up in chronological order, the history of healthcare in Montreal begins in the 17th century with the arrival of Catholic missionaries in Montreal to evangelize and treat the sick and impoverished living in what is now primarily the Old Port. In those times, the hospital was reserved for the poor, as the wealthy would be treated within

their own homes away from what they believed to be the dangerous, germ-rich hospital. This segregation of medical care was seen again after the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s and 1850s brought typhus-infected Irish immigrants to Montreal. The museum describes them being quarantined in “sheds” in Griffintown to protect the French Canadian population from contracting the deadly disease. These attempts failed, however, when young boys escaped detainment and began begging on the streets.

From an era when McGill was still an all-male institution, Musée des Hospitalières displays a large picture of a smog covered Lachine Canal in the heyday of Montreal’s industrial revolution, describing the time as an era of increased “illegitimate births, improper funerals, low church attendance, and high mortality rates.” Montreal was known for having the highest mortality rate of any city in North America at that period. Reminders of this period are now hard to find among all the billboards for industrial lofts in the newly gentrified neighbourhood of Griffintown.

In concurrence with the Board of Montreal Museum Directors’ cultural initiative “Montréal Ville de Verre (City of Glass),” a year-long event emphasizing “all facets of

glass,” the Musée des Hospitalières is also currently displaying glass artifacts from the 19th and 20th centuries in its temporary exhibits section. The items on display range from glass bedpans to containers for liquid remedies, to syringes and ophthalmological lenses. The pieces on display show both the dramatic changes that have occurred in medicine as well as the technologies (like vials and beakers for laboratory work) which have remained the same.

The range of uses for the glassware also varied. One syringe relied on asbestos rather than a rubber plunger to deliver medicine, while various bottles held liquid medicine ranging from insulin (likely an earlier form of Sir Frederick Banting’s discovery, taken from the pancreas of cows) to Peter Fahrney’s panacea, which promised to “nettoyer le sang.”

L’Hôtel-Dieu has recently warranted the attention of Quebec film director Phillipe Lesage, who will present his documentary Ce coeur qui bat (The Heart that Beats) at this year’s Recontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal (International Montreal Documentary Fesival). The film follows patients around l’Hôtel-Dieu, and sets out to explore “some of society’s most devastating ailments: soli-

Victor Tangermann | The McGill Daily

L’Hôtel-Dieu functions as hospital, museum, and religious space. tude, psychological distress, social conflict, run-down bodies and minds that have reached their wits’ end.”

Health care in Montreal has certainly come a long way. Although at times treatments may have been less than fair or ideal, they were expres-

sions of a compassionate medical tradition that still exists today.

L’Hôtel-Dieu and the Musée des Hospitalières are at 201 des Pins O., open Wednesday through Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m.

Indulgent neccesities Buttery béchamel is essential for your more decadent meals Dine with Dash Thomas Dashwood dinewithdash@mcgilldaily.com

B

échamel is my indulgence.

It makes my knees weak.

I could, without trace of a second thought, eat a bowl of it. Considered one of the “mother sauces” but more commonly known as white sauce, béchamel is vital to a number of recipes: as a base for cheese sauces, as a component of lasagnas, the sauce for gratins, or as a basis for many pasta dishes. But please, proceed to the recipes lest I admit to any more embarrassing vices.

Variations: Cheese sauce: Béchamel is the base for mac and cheese. Use three cups of milk, and add at least one cup grated cheese once the sauce is removed from the heat (mozzarella, cheddar, goat, Swiss and even blue cheese will work well).

Mix with almost-cooked pasta and bake with whatever toppings please

you (bread crumbs might tug your childhood heartstrings).

Vegetable Gratin: Mix the sauce with sliced potatoes and onions, florets of broccoli or cauliflower, or thin slices of eggplant, zucchini, or squash (fry all of these for ten minutes in a little oil beforehand). Place in a baking dish, top with cheese if desired, and bake for about 30 minutes (check that the vegetables are soft). You can broil it for a few minutes at the end for a crunchy top.

Pasta: Before adding the flour, add a small, diced onion and cook with butter for about three minutes. A bay leaf can be added, and a couple of cloves of sliced garlic.

Proceed normally and then use as a sauce for pasta (goes well with chicken, sausage, shellfish and peppers, spinach, artichokes or tomatoes). Can also be mixed half and half with tomato sauce.

Béchamel Sauce Ingredients: t t t t t

4 tablespoons butter (can be replaced with oil in dire circumstances) 4 tablespoons flour (not whole wheat) Vegetables (see each variation at left) Approximately 2 cups milk (a thinner sauce will require more milk) Salt, pepper, and nutmeg (optional, but for me, vital)

Makes: Enough for most recipes Method: Melt the butter in a small saucepan. Add the flour and cook for about 3 minutes, stirring, until it becomes a paste and begins to bubble slightly.

Add the milk, half at a time, stirring constantly between additions. Continue to stir vigorously until the sauce thickens visibly (takes just a few minutes).

Once thick and bubbling, remove it from the heat, add at least one teaspoon of salt, some pepper and a quarter teaspoon of nutmeg (if desired).

C ulture

The McGill Daily | Thursday, November 4, 2010 | mcgilldaily.com

12

Succession to the throne Stalwart diner Nouveau Palais faces challenges of new ownership and interference from the city Oliver Lurz Culture Writer

N

ouveau Palais – the iconic Mile End diner on the corner of Parc and Bernard – has been bought by the people behind the Dépanneur Le Pick Up, which you may know for its ‘famous’ vegetarian pork sandwiches. So one historic-cum-hipster diner is taken over by another and the world continues as per usual... or not. From regulars I’ve spoken to, it seems this is actually causing a quite a stir.

When you eat at a place so unique as this for a long time you feel a certain protective sense of ownership. Now, I’m as scared of change as the next person, but some are downright furious about what they perceive as the massive transformations being enacted upon their beloved Nouveau Palais.

The menu is a little different for one thing. “Cheese fries but no poutine?!” one disgruntled customer asks.

Shock. Horror. I tried the cheese fries quite recently and happened to think they were really excellent, by far nicer than any poutine. The fries were crispy and the cheese sauce very creamy and tangy with a sort of cheddary flavour.

To me, cheese curds aren’t much of a comparison. Let’s face it, they don’t really taste of much, except possibly rubber and disappointment.

So far so good, but by far people’s biggest gripe is the end to 24/7 opening hours. Me, I am completely seduced by all-hours joints, diners in particular. It might seem trite, but the idea of sitting at a counter at 4 a.m. drinking a coffee and watching the city go by is something that’s really appealing to me. Realistically though, it’s hardly a viable business model. In fact, paying for staff and electricity all through the night just to indulge my Edward Hopper-style fantasy is a good way to go out of business.

So now it shuts at 3 a.m. What else? Well, the absence of poutine isn’t the only change to the menu.

The new owner, Bernie, had this to say via email: “We’re starting with a small menu and adding more things all the time. It is true – no more steamies, no more pizza, and no more poutine. But we’re going to have lots of diner classics and other yummy options. We’ll have a hot dog, but a good all-beef one.” As for the interior, “We won’t touch the decor much, except to try and bring it back about 25 years. We got some photos from Mina and Kelly [the old owners] from when they bought it and they are pretty awesome.”

Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite a smooth transition: “One thing that sucked a lot on our first week is that the city told us we have ten days to take down the sign. We’re going to fight it for sure, but it made me sad to

Ali MacKellar | The McGill Daily

hear that,” said Bernie. This really would be a loss, as the retro-looking red and yellow sign is something to behold. The city cited light pollution as the problem, but this is completely absurd given that Bernard, you know, has streetlights.

One would hope though, given the iconic status of Nouveau Palais’s exterior, that there will be others to support them in their fight.

There are numerous organizations

around town, such as the not-forprofit Héritage Montréal, which exist explicitly to prevent this kind of cultural vandalism. On various Montreal online food forums, people have begun voicing their outrage at the possible loss of the sign.

The new owners see the importance of this, too. Clearly they’re not messing around; taking over Nouveau Palais is not just some arbitrary profit venture – Bernie

and co. are committed to keeping the diner, sign and all, a prominent part of Mile End culture. The fight to retain the sign is emblematic of the broader struggle to retain some semblance of individuality and taste in the face of the seemingly endless spread of banal and ghastly places to buy food.

The nouveau Nouveau Palais is still located at 281 Bernard O.

BEGGAR’S BANQUET

“Binevenue” à la Binerie Traditional Québécois fare hits the spot at seventy year-old Plateau landmark Laura Pellicer The McGill Daily

I

consider myself somewhat of a bean aficionado. My pantry is always stocked with an ample supply of baked beans in molasses, maple syrup, and traditional style fèves au lard (literally translated to beans in fat). You could almost say I’ve bean around the block. Last bad bean pun, I swear. I recently discovered, however, a more authentic Québécois alternative to satisfy my cravings. La Binerie, located at the

corner of Mont-Royal and St-Denis, is the Plateau’s answer to a student’s need for all-day breakfast and it’s served up with trademark FrenchCanadian flair. So on Sunday evening, armed with a handful of toonies, I embarked on my quest for a second breakfast at this historic restaurant.

Although the restaurant has changed hands over the years, little else about this Plateau landmark has altered since its establishment in 1938. The menu and decor of the restaurant are evocative of a different era when working class families

Lorraine Chuen for The McGill Daily

populated the neighbourhood and the pace of life was slower. “It’s the original decor,” explained Jocelyne Brunet in French, who currently owns La Binerie with her husband Philippe Brunet. Except for paint touch-ups and new countertops, the Binerie looks much like it did 72 years ago. The diner plays a prominent role in Yves Beauchemin’s novel Le Matou which was adapted for film in 1985. The story is about a young man, Florent, who dreams of owning his own restaurant, La Binerie Mont Royal. The movie was filmed on location at the restaurant.

Along with the Le Matou poster that adorns the wall, Jocelyne told the stories behind other black and white photos and yellowed newspaper clippings hung throughout the restaurant. Pointing out a family portrait, Jocelyne explained that the original owner established La Binerie in 1938 and passed away recently, in 2005. La Binerie was the setting for a fictional love story in Le Matou, but a true love story also took place when the owner’s daughter fell in love with one of the waiters working at the restaurant.

Jocelyne said that in the 1940s and 1950s, La Binerie was a popular hangout for men only. The clientele, if not the restaurant, has changed with the times and today La Binerie is becoming more popular with young Montrealers seeking a cozy spot for comfort food on a budget. The restaurant packs up on weekends and its all day breakfast is the star attraction. About 150 breakfasts are served up each Saturday and Sunday.

“It is traditional Québécois cuisine,” Jocelyne said. “Everything is made by hand, nothing is frozen.”

Tourtières, shepherd’s pie, and traditional-style meatloaf are some of the popular items on the menu, but the main attraction is of course the restaurant’s namesake, beans. “We make a lot of fèves aux lard,” said Jocelyne, “it is the house specialty.

We were known from our fèves au lard right from the start. We make 34 tons of fèves au lard each year.”

I ordered a heaping plate of bacon, ham, creton, beans, one egg, toast and coffee for only $6.90. As it was after 11 a.m. an extra dollar was tacked on to the breakfast menu

price, but even at $7.90 before tax I definitely got my money’s worth.

I brought along my friend whose family hails from the Quebec town of Rouyn-Noranda for her expertise on local fare. We both agreed that this spot is definitely a valuable, and affordable, find. The flavours were all on point and the maple syrup was deceptively delicious, even though Jocelyne admitted it was of the table more than maple variety.

If, like me, you relish smothering your entire breakfast in maple syrup and sigh with dismay when you’ve run out of bacon, then this is the place for you. The beans were veritably swimming in the fat that gives them their name, the toast was generously buttered and the cretons…well I’ve never really wanted to know what’s in cretons to make them so delectable. My breakfast came in at just under $10 tax and tip included, and I walked out satisfied. I even left behind a lonely strip of bacon lingering on my plate.

La Binerie is located at 367 MontRoyal E. Find out more about its history at labineriemontroyal.com.

!∀#∃%&∋()#∗

The McGill Daily | Thursday, November 4, 2010 | mcgilldaily.com

14

Lies, half-truths, and Métromètre is taking a break this week READING THE STARS WITH MISS TICKLE

Fall foretokens Aries the Ram // March 21—April 20 !∀#∃%&∋∋∃())∃∗+)∃∋∀,)∃∀−∃∗+)∃∋∀,)∃∀−∃∗+)∃∋∀,)∃ ∀−∃.∀#/∃∋&−)∃0∗∃1)02(∃1)02(∃1)02(3 !∀#∃%&∋(∋)∋&∗+∃405&∗∗0/&#(∃6∃7)∀ ,%#∀−./01∋2.+/8∋)9∃:0∋;%&2

Taurus the Bull // April 21—May 21 <∀2=∗∃>0?)∃02.∃&>≅∀/∗02∗∃;)9&(&∀2(∃&2∃∗+)∃2)Α∗∃ %))?Β∃ .∀#/∃ +)0;=(∃ 2∀∗∃ &2∃ ∗+)∃ /&5+∗∃ ≅∋09)3∃ Χ&,)∃ .∀#/()∋−∃ (∀>)∃ ∗&>)∃ &2∃ ∗+)∃ (0#20Β∃ >0.∆)∃ ∗0?)∃ 0∃ ∋&5+∗∃ Ε∀53∃ Φ+&25(∃ %&∋∋∃ (∗0/∗∃ >0?&25∃ ()2()∃ (∀∀2∃ )2∀#5+3 !∀#∃%&∋(∋)∋&∗+∃Γ&/5∀Β∃Η0≅/&9∀/2Β∃6∃49∀/≅&∀ ,%#∀−./3%−1−.+∃109?∃Ι&9+∀∋(∀2

Leo the Lion // July 23—August 23 4∀>)∗+&25∃/)0∋∋.Β∃/)0∋∋.Β∃/)0∋∋.Β∃/)0∋∋.∃5∀∀;∃&(∃0∆∀#∗∃ ∗∀∃+0≅≅)2∃∗∀∃.∀#∃Θ∃∆#∗∃.∀#∃+0,)∃∗∀∃≅/∀>&()∃∗∀∃(+0/)∃ &∗∃%&∗+∃.∀#/∃−/&)2;(3∃Μ∗∃>&5+∗∃∆)∃0∃≅&ΡΡ0∃≅0/∗.∃∀/∃02∃ 0∋∋Σ)Α≅)2()(∃≅0&;∃∗/&≅∃∗∀∃0∃+∀∗∃(≅/&25(∃/)(∀/∗Τ∃∀/∃&∗∃ >&5+∗∃ Ε#(∗∃ ∆)∃ 0∃ +02;−#∋∃ ∀−∃ ∋∀∋∋&≅∀≅(3∃ Υ)50/;∋)((Β∃ &∗∃ ≅0.(∃∗∀∃∆)∃5)2)/∀#(3∃ !∀#∃%&∋(∋)∋&∗+/405&∗∗0/&#(∃6∃8Ο#0/&#( ,%#∀−./72∀+∃8∋−/);∃ς&∗9+9∀9?

Virgo the Virgin // August 24—September 23 Φ+&(∃&(∃0∃()2(&∗&,)∃∗&>)3∃!∀#∃2));∃0∃+#53∃Μ2∃∀/;)/∃ ∗∀∃∆)∃+0≅≅.Β∃0∋∋∃≅)∀≅∋)∃2));∃∗+/))∃+#5(∃),)/.∃;0.∃ −/∀>∃∗+/))∃;&−−)/)2∗∃≅)∀≅∋)3∃ς∀%∃>02.∃+#5(∃+0,)∃ .∀#∃+0;∃∗∀;0.Κ !∀#∃%&∋(∋)∋&∗+/Η029)/∃6∃Ν&(9)( ,%#∀−./8∋19∀+/1∀+2∃Η05)

Gemini the Twins // May 22—June 21 ϑ+∀∃∗∀∋;∃.∀#∃&∗∃%0(∃0∃5∀∀;∃&;)0∃∗∀∃≅#∗∃90(+>)/)∃ 02;∃%∀∀∋∃&2∃∗+)∃;/.)/ΚΚΚΚΚΚΚ∃Χ)∗∃∗+))∃∗∀∃0∃;/.∃ 9∋)02)/Λ∃Μ>>);&0∗)∋.Λ∃ !∀#∃%&∋(∋)∋&∗+/Ν&(9)(∃6∃8Ο#0/&#( ,%#∀−./42#∋5∋+/:/∀∀?)∃4+&)∋;(

Libra the Scales // September 24—October 23 ϑ+)2∃ .∀#∃ ∀≅)2∃ ∗+)∃ ;∀∀/∃ ∗∀∃ .∀#/∃ ∆);/∀∀>Β∃ ;∀∃ .∀#∃ ())∃0∃>&//∀/Κ∃Μ−∃.)(Β∃?))≅∃&∗∃∗+)/)3∃Μ−∃2∀Β∃5)∗∃∀2)3∃ !∀#∃%&∋(∋)∋&∗+∃7&∆/0 ,%#∀−./7∋(1%+∃Ω>&2)>

Cancer the Crab // June 22—July 22 !∀#/∃;0.(∃%&∋∋∃∋∀∀?∃∋&?)∃.∀#∃;∀3∃89∗∃099∀/;&25∋.3 !∀#∃%&∋(∋)∋&∗+/Γ&/5∀∃6∃49∀/≅&∀ ,%#∀−./!%5621+/Π)/.∋∃4∗/))≅

Scorpio the Scorpion // October 24—November 22 Φ+)/)∃0/)∃0∃>&∋∋&∀2∃02;∃∀2)∃%0.(∃.∀#∃>&5+∗∃(#99));∃ ∗∀;0.3∃:)∃∀≅∗&>&(∗&93 !∀#∃%&∋(∋)∋&∗+∃Ν&(9)(∃6∃Η029)/ ,%#∀−./:6∀1∃∋∀+/4.∋,&0∃Ν∋0∗+

Fuck this. No really, right now. Please.

F

I CAN’T GET ANY BECAUSE DOING IT with your friends is complicated, open relationships are messy, my vibrator is out of batteries, and because I don’t know how to find an expert who will exchange their services for my money (read: sex worker) because we live in a society where consenting adults exchanging sex for payment is illegal. I just want to get laid! I can’t focus and I can’t stop thinking about it and the next couple that I see making out on the street corner is going to get a round kick to the face if I can’t satisfy my urges.

UCK THIS STUPID CITY WHERE

Sagittarius the Archer // November 23—December 21 Ξ∀/5)∗∃ 0∆∀#∗∃ &∗∃ Θ∃ .∀#/∃ 9+029)(∃ 0/)∃ 2&∋3∃ !∀#∃ ?2∀%∃ %+0∗∃Μ=>∃∗0∋?&25∃0∆∀#∗3 !∀#∃%&∋(∋)∋&∗+∃8/&)(∃6∃Χ)>&2& ,%#∀−./:%9∋&&%1∋−.+/Ω>&∋.∃<&9?&2(∀2 Capricorn the Goat // December 22—January 20 8∗∃ ∗+&(∃ /0∗)Β∃ .∀#=/)∃ 2),)/∃ 5∀220∃ 5)∗∃ .∀#/∃ %∀/?∃ ;∀2)Λ∃Μ∗=(∃∗&>)∃∗∀∃≅#∋∋∃02∃0∋∋∃2&5+∗)/3 !∀#∃%&∋(∋)∋&∗+∃Φ0#/#(∃6∃8Ο#0/&#( ,%#∀−./!%∃1∋6∀15+∃<∀∋∋.∃Ν0/∗∀2 Aquarius the Water-Carrier // January 21—February 19 ΨΖ[∃ [[∴∃ ]ΖΨ⊥3∃ Φ+)∃ >02∃ ∀−∃ .∀#/∃ ;/)0>(∃ &(∃ %0&∗&25∃ −∀/∃.∀#3 !∀#∃%&∋(∋)∋&∗+/Η0≅/&9∀/2∃6∃Γ&/5∀ ,%#∀−./0;−%1∋−.+∃10>)(∃<)02 Pisces the Fishes // February 20—March 20 !∀#∃0/)∃%0.∃9#∗)/∃∗+02∃.∀#∃∗+&2?3 !∀#∃%&∋(∋)∋&∗+∃49∀/≅&∀∃6∃Η029)/ ,%#∀−./<∋.62.+∃Ι&9+∀∋0(∃Η∀≅)/2&9#(

Check this page at the end of November for winter break prognostications from our own Sibyll, Miss Tickle! Send correspondence to compendium@mcgilldaily.com.

President promises to revisit Arch Café closure Photo by Alejandra Ximénez

Fuck this! is an occasional anonymous therapeutic non-hateful rant column. Send your tirades (and raves) to fuckthis@ mcgilldaily.com.

Following a massive protest on the Mall in Washington, D.C., last weekend, which wound its way toward the Capitol building, U.S. President Barack Obama promised McGill students he would “revisit the Art [sic] Café” issue as soon as politically feasible.

The President promised to compromise with Republicans like Meather Bunroe-Hlum to find a way out of the current impasse.

Protesters, having traveled from Montreal to the capital of Empire, were disappointed at Obama’s moderate stance.

—Télésphore Sansouci

Off-Campus Eye Mark Heinrichs | The McGill Daily