Ryerson Free Press April 2010

APR

2010

“THERE IS A DELIBERATE INTENTION TO DESTROY THE DEMOCRACY AT EVERY LEVEL: GLOBAL, NATIONAL AND LOCAL. WE MUST DEFEND THIS.” Dr. Vandana Shiva takes on capitalism at Ryerson.

NEWS “we have SOCialiSm FOr the riCh and CapitaliSm FOr the pOOr” Vandana Shiva came to Ryerson to close off RSU and CESAR’s Global Awareness Week

By Nora Loreto, Editor-in-Chief “every cheMical useD in agriculture was used in war,” said vandana shiva, the internationally-recognized seed activist and physicist, to a jam-packed liB 72 on Friday, march 26.

Part of the continuing education students’ association at Ryerson (cesaR) and the Ryerson students’ union (Rsu)’s global awareness week, shiva was the most popular speaker and closed the week of events. shiva is well known for a number of initiatives. her work against monsanto and other pharmaceutical companies patenting and creating genetically modified seeds is famous, and those in attendance were outwardly excited to have her present. despite a line-up that was ultimately turned away because of a lack of capacity, approximately 400 people were present to hear shiva’s speech. her first standing ovation was given before she even said a word.

From Boom to Bust: how capitalism is equity’s burden touched on a broad number of topics, from the demise of independent indian farmers, to the rush to purchase land in the global south by transnational corporations and foreign countries, and from the ability of small groups of people to successfully fight back against a corporation to the need for all people who care about the earth to take action. “a system which must consume more and more of the planet’s resources must, by necessity, take them from someone else,” she said, framing the speech that was to be delivered. shiva spoke on stage of liB 72 in front of the massive pledge that had just been signed by sheldon levy, Ryerson President, to phase out the sales of bottled water by the year 2013. shiva talked about global food production and said that only 12 per cent of the food that is grown on earth, is consumed by people. despite this, nearly $400 billion is collectively spent

2

RyeRsonFReePRess.ca

by oecd nations to subsidize agriculture. “we have socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor,” she said.

The massive amount of money spent subsidizing food compared to how many billions of people are starving, is proof that the system is unsustainable and inefficient, and that the resources currently exist to solve global hunger. “half of humanity isn’t getting enough food in their bodies,” she said. canada is implicated in the degradation of global resources and is mimicking its attitude toward First nations people in canada to its interaction with other indigenous people around the world. “land has become the most important investment,” said shiva, and canadian companies are part of the push to purchase land from tribal communities in india. despite their constitutional right to refuse access to their land, canadian steel and aluminum companies along with other international companies are pushing to purchase land to make money. shiva said that when these tribal groups deny access to their land, militia forces are brought in and force them to relinquish their land.

“The u.s. is selling drones to india to kill Tribal and peasant people,” she said. shiva received two more standing ovations and the people who asked questions almost all started with words of disbelief to be in her presence.

“There is a deliberate intention to destroy the democracy at every level: global, national and local,” said shiva. “we must defend this,” she added.

The crowd responded in rousing applause.

PhoTos: RuTh claiRe cagaRa

Ryerson Free Press The monthly newspaper for continuing education, distance education and part-time students at Ryerson Address Suite SCC-301 Ryerson Student Centre 55 Gould Street Toronto, ON CANADA M5B 1E9

Phone (416) 979.5000 x7715

Fax (416) 979.5223

Email ryersonfreepress@gmail.com

Website WWW.ryersonfreepress.ca

Editor-In-Chief Nora Loreto

News Editor James burrows

Features and Opinions Editor James Clark

Layout Editor Andrea Yeomans

Culture Editor amanda connon-unda

Photo Editor Dan Rios

Cover Photo Courtesy Of the Ryerson Students’ Union

Holocaust Pull-out Cover Photo thaths/Flickr

Contributors astrid arijanto john baglow tracy chen elizabeth chiang chanel Christophe jessica finch amy goodman Natalie Guttormsson MICHAEL HISCOCK PRIYANKA JAIN GRAEME Z. JOHNSON michael macleod henry maitles dave markland lian novak ADRIANA ROLSTON john rose sachin seth melissa shaw kate spencer BRETT THROOP sara torvik suzanne weiss bradley whitehouse Publisher CESAR The opinions expressed in the Ryerson Free Press are not necessarily those of the editors or publisher.

Advertising Ryerson Free Press’ advertising rates are as follows. All prices are for single insertions.

Discounts apply for Ryerson groups and departments.

Full page—$750 Half page—$375 Quarter page—$195 Eighth page—$95

Ryerson Free Press April 2010 3

CFS-Ontario Releases Final Report on Campus Racism

By Graeme Z. Johnson

On March 23, the Ontario branch of the Canadian Federation of Students released the findings of its Task Force on Campus Racism. The report and the recommendations made by the Task Force are the result of hearings conducted on 17 Ontario campuses from February to October 2009.

The report details the testimonies of many racialized students who have encountered racist remarks, graffiti, and even violence.

Administrators at many universities seem reluctant to acknowledge racist incidents, with one Algoma University student telling the Task Force that “the university tries to sweep everything under the rug, claiming that they are isolated incidences committed by off campus visitors.”

The report cautions that racism within university campuses can be especially damaging to students because many are unable to escape the toxic environment it creates.

“Students tackle racism on campus on a daily basis, however, it is one thing to tackle racism in school and then go home at the end of the day,” a Ryerson student told the Task Force, “but for those who live on residence, campus is their home and they can’t escape racism. You find that there are students who come from across the world from various backgrounds and cultures and then there are students who come from across Canada from areas where racism is acceptable.”

The Task Force also found that incidents of blackface – the practice in which white people paint their faces and act out racist stereotypes – have increased at campus events in recent years. The most famous of these is the case of a group of University of Toronto students dressing as the Jamaican Bobsled Team for a college-organized Hallowe’en party in 2009.

Unfortunately, the report found that incidents of blackface were not merely isolated to student-run events or parties.

One University of Windsor student detailed a highly offensive presentation made by a white student on the subject of deportation. “He came in with black paint on his face, an outfit, and spoke with a fake Jamaican accent and he kept saying ‘yo yo yo’ during his presentation. The course instructor thought it

was great, the person got a good mark, there were no issues.”

Regrettably, many racialized students do not feel comfortable speaking out when incidents of racism occur in the classroom. “Even if they feel that they are discriminated against, they feel like they have to respect the authoritative power and feel like they can’t really stand up to it,” said one George Brown College student. Students who did confront professors reported that some professors would refuse to listen to concerns or would silence them.

Discriminatory institutional cultures are harmful not only to racialized students, however. “The university as a whole needs to take seriously the large gap between where we should be in terms of percentage of racialized faculty (ten per cent) and where we actually are (four per cent),” said an unnamed Trent professor. Of those who are able to find employment in a university, racialized faculty are far less likely to hold senior positions within academic departments and make less money than their white colleagues. They also “make up a disproportionate number of part-time and contract faculty, which limits their research and publication capacity, while increasing their teaching and mentorship workload. However, their teaching and mentorship roles are not as seriously considered, while their research and publication records are often deemed to be insufficient when analysed during promotion and tenure reviews. In addition, racialized faculty often lack support from colleagues, departmental chairs and deans.”

Often, curriculum reflects this lack of diversity, with many students reporting that course materials rarely included the perspectives or work of racialized people. Many felt that “their history was erased, under-represented, or obscured by curriculum.”

“In some areas, curriculum or course content may need to be reviewed for Eurocentrism and strategies for ‘de– Eurocentrising’ courses,” said one Trent professor. “There is a great need for wider education at all levels on how whiteness reproduces itself in a myriad of subtle and systemic ways.

Basic information about white privilege should be taught in

first year courses.”

Those who have attempted to address these problems have often been met with resistance, some reporting that they have felt intimidated by defensive white people.

“There are those classes when I actually feel unsafe standing in front of 120 students and talking about things I feel people are resentful of,” said a University of Windsor professor. “That means you are naming the responsibility on the whole system and putting the responsibility back to everybody else. It is very easy to say yes [racism] exists and we should address it but when you have to give up power, that’s when difficulties arise.”

The Task Force also found that academic programs that attempt to promote equity or fill the gaps left in Eurocentric curricula were often the hardest hit when universities were forced to make budget cutbacks. According to the report, “these programs have been shrinking or disappearing as a result of programme cuts and under funding. Recent cuts to the Women’s Studies programme at Guelph University, and East Asian Studies and Caribbean Studies at the University of Toronto, have caused alarm for students and faculty at these schools. Students at the University of Toronto have been fighting cuts to the Equity Studies programs.”

“If [the university] needs to cut back, why are all those cuts targeted and focused on specific areas of study that are affirming for many students here on campus?” asked one student, who feels such policies show a lack of support for critical theory and equity studies.

The report found that one of the most staggering issues of systematic racism faced by racialized students is the continually rising cost of post-secondary education.

According to the Task Force, high tuition fees have “impacted racialized people disproportionately because on average, the poverty rate for racialized families and individuals is higher, while racialized people earn lower incomes compared to non-racialized people. Between 1980 and 2000, while the poverty rate for the non-racialized population fell by 28 per cent, it rose for racialized families by 361 per cent.”

Ontario budget: $310 million a year for universities AND colleges

By Brett Throop A $310 million increase in annual provincial funding for post-secondary education this year will help add 20,000 new spaces to Ontario’s universities and colleges.

Funding will also extend a restriction on tuition fee increases above 5 per cent for another two years. Weekly loan limits will increase from $140 to $150, and students will now be able to earn $103 a week working part time without it penalizing their loan (up from $50). Part time students in financial need will get a $500 grant, 1,000 additional students will be eligible for the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, and interest charges on student loans will not be charged until six months after graduation.

The maximum amount expected to be paid back on student loans per year also increases from $7,000 to $7,300, although that’s the first such increase in 12 years.

Ontario universities’ $1.6 billion deferred maintenance costs received no mention in

4 ryersonfreepress.ca

the budget and it is not clear if new funding will help address Ontario’s growing studentfaculty ratio. That ratio, 27:1, is the highest in Canada. The Canadian Federation of Students says that 5,000 new full-time professors need to be hired to fix this gap.

According to a report released last week by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA), Ontario university students today are paying more money for a lower quality education than their parents did. The report also says that in the 1960s, students paid low tuition fees and studied in newer buildings.

“This new research shows that students are learning in ever-larger classes and ageing infrastructure,” OCUFA president Mark Langer said in a press release. “When you consider the tuition fees these students must pay, it’s clear they are not getting the same value their parents did.”

PHOTO: DUCKIEMONSTER/FLICKR

Liberal government cuts special diet Health professionals and anti-poverty groups outraged

By James Burrows, News Editor Over the last five years, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) has been fighting to let those on social assistance know that they are eligible to receive a special dietary allowance of $250 a month. This allowance can only be accessed after a doctor’s note and paperwork has been submitted. When the provincial budget was released March 25, many were outraged to discover that this allowance had been entirely cut.

The response has been swift. Michael Hurley, President of the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions (OCHU) stated on Saturday that this “offends Ontario’s humanity.”

The OCHU believes that the cuts will actually result in higher health care costs for the province, as those without the supplement may end up needing hospital care more often.

“Every person who is acutely ill and hospitalized will cost the system $1,000 or more a day,” noted Hurley.

“The fact that doctors have prescribed the special dietary supplement for 124,000 households should flag that many people on social assistance have medical conditions

and these are exacerbated by inadequate diet, housing and clothing. If five per cent of these citizens become acutely ill as a result of their malnutrition, every penny the province is saving here will be paid out in hospitalization costs.”

OCAP has also reacted quickly, even storming the set of the The Agenda with Steve Paikin, while Ontario’s Finance Minister Dwight Duncan was being interviewed. OCAP believes that “this is the most devastating social cutback since Mike Harris slashed welfare rates in 1995.”

John Clark and Liisa Schofield describe the current situation as follows: “A single person who was receiving the maximum for basic needs and shelter would get only $585 a month without the Special Diet. Add $250 for the Special Diet and he or she has some chance of paying the rent and eating rather than making a choice between eviction or starvation.”

During the Harris years, social assistance was cut by 22 per cent. At one point, the Conservative government even believed that the poor should be able to live on only $100 worth of food a month.

OCAP has been saying for some time now that the McGuinty government has been making the situation for the poor much worse noting that the Ontario Liberals have not put money back into social assistance that Harris cut and only promised to raise welfare rates in the 2010 budget by one per cent later this year, a number less than the projected inflation rate of over two per cent. Since being elected in 2003, the Liberal government has only raised rates by six per cent – well below the rate of inflation during this period. When cost of living is taken into account, rates have decreased by about 40 per cent.

Currently, roughly 440,700 Ontario residents receive Social Assistance, which is just over half of those who received assistance before Mike Harris took office in 1995.

Average income has not increased, after inflation is taken into consideration, since the early 1980s.

OCAP is planning more events in April including a Public Meeting, where those on social assistance can come and give testimony, on Friday, April 9 and a Raise the Rates rally and march, Thursday, April 15.

Report finds that students of colour pay more for higher ed

By Priyanka Jain

Research has been conducted by the Canadian Federation of Students regarding postsecondary education, and the expensive investment that comes with having a degree in your hand. Statistics have shown that, on average, visible-minority students pay more for their tuition compared to non-visible minorities.

Statistically, immigrants have a higher education level than those who are not immigrants, but somehow Canada’s labour force does not recognize this. Immigrants find themselves in lower-income jobs, when they are fully capable of more challenging, higher-paying jobs.

For these immigrants, including the vast majority who are racialised, having lowerincome jobs now affects their ability to pay for post-secondary education. On average, in less than 20 years, undergraduate fees have more than tripled and tuition fees in Ontario are also the highest in the country. This puts a huge burden on racialized people.

The Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) is money that the government loans to students, to pay for their tuition fees each year. Students have 14.5 years to pay off their accumulated student loan from a four-year degree, which can be up to or more than $28,000. For racialised students, post secondary tuition becomes a huge burden, especially when students come from families who are unable to contribute to their post secondary fund.

Not only is the burden of paying back OSAP a contributing factor to the stress racialised PHOTO: MaSAHIRO IHARA/FLICKR

students have to go through, but the consequences that students have to face if they do not pay off their debt are also severe. If students are unable to pay back their OSAP money, they will build a bad credit history, which will limit their ability to take out loans or access credit in the future.

It is far from a win-win situation for racialized students when it comes to the high cost of post secondary education. They are already under represented in the workforce with their wages being statistically lower than non-racialised people, and the fact that immigrants have been proven to have a higher level education when arriving to Canada only brings more frustration. With all these limitations, and the additional burden of having a $28,000 student loan to pay off, it really isn’t fair for visible minorities in Canada.

For today’s generation, having a post-secondary education is mandatory in order to qualify for any kind of reputable job. Having a lower income job, with higher expenses does not do justice for those who have come to Canada in hopes for a better future. Having high tuition fees only puts students in a crisis situation, mostly racialised students, who are statistically less privileged than everyone else. For the majority of post secondary students, getting their degree is not only a necessity, but also an accomplishment. They should be rewarded for their determination to do well, and shouldn’t feel as if they are financially incapable of funding their education.

Ryerson Free Press April 2010 5

Canada-U.S. Gang summit meets in toronto

By Michael Hiscock All speakers at the 2010 Canada-U.S. Gang Summit have been to a lot of funerals.

The summit took place at the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts on Front Street. Its goal is to bring the expertise of America’s five decades of gang-related experience to help Canada’s relatively newer gang problem -- highlighted in Toronto by the Boxing Day shooting that took the life of Jane Creba in 2005.

In this city, there are 131 street and prison gangs, and one-million gang members across North America.

The presenters were made up of those who have lead street gangs, who have been in street gangs, or just people who have dedicated their lives to making a difference within them.

Their stories made the sold-out crowd both laugh and cry, but they could all tell stories of death.

“I buried my first in 1988,” said Father Gregory Boyle, Executive Director of Homeboy Industries. “I buried my 168th about three months ago.”

Homeboy Industries is the largest and most successful gang intervention program in the world.

Bringing in $10-million a year, this program currently employs 350 former gang members in several non-profit industries like Homeboy Bakery, or Homegirl Café.

Since 1988 when Boyle established the industry, he has worked with thousands of gang members and has become just as attached to them as they are to him. When he was diagnosed with Leukemia several years ago, a large gang member called “Grumpy” came into his office, opened his arms out and desperately asked: “What do I have that you need?” referring to his organs. He also received crying phone calls from his homegirls, and consoling collectcalls from jail.

“Gang violence has never been a problem, it is an indicator. It is a symptom of poverty and despair,” Boyle said from behind a podium.

“Hopeful kids don’t join gangs.”

Boyle, 56, lives in an area of Los Angeles deemed a “hot zone,“ or more simply, a really dangerous area.

He puts himself in the same environment as the people he tries to help.

Los Angeles alone has 1,100 gangs with 86,000 members.

He says that gang members have trouble adjusting to society because of flaws within the legal system, policy, and a general impoverished upbringing. The speakers unanimously brought up criminal records being a barrier from meaningful employment after incarceration.

Some of Boyle’s homeboys, who acquired criminal records two years ago, were supposed to speak at the summit but could not get across the border because of their past deeds.

Boyle realized that these were people who really couldn’t get jobs.

“So we went around to factories around social housing and asked if

6 ryersonfreepress.ca

they had any felony-friendly employment policies,” he said.

Needless to say, they didn’t. The result was Homeboy Industries, and it has revealed almost every possible barrier to employment these people could throw at Boyle.

One man who he dealt with had “Fuck the World” written in big, bold letters across his forehead. He complained he was having trouble finding work.

But that doesn’t stop Boyle.

He boasts he will do “anything” he can to help and also offers tattoo removal, counseling, and job opportunities.

“The only thing that will stop a bullet is a job,” he said.

Gangsters also have a hard time coming to terms with what is making them act the way they do in the first place. Their stories are generally humiliating, examples from Boyle include parents flushing their child’s head in a toilet or putting out cigarettes on their face.

These troubled youth generally have a lack of family support, making peer pressure the sole influence of their upbringing. This often leads to early encounters with drugs. The speakers said they tried marijuana for the first time around 11, but the average gang member would at 14, an extreme low being four. It doesn’t take long for them to realize they can make good money through the drug trade.

Andrew Bacchus, former leader of the Vice Lords gang in the Jane and Finch area, said it all started with a brown envelope when he was 10. A man in his area approached him with it and said that if he took it to another person, he would be paid ten dollars. That is a lot of money for a kid, so he did.

At 11, he asked what was in the envelope. The answer was marijuana and, after trying it, he went straight up the chain.

“My uncle showed me how to make crack-cocaine,” he said. “When you sell crack, it is to desperate people -- you need a weapon.”

Bacchus described how they would buy starter pistols and, back when you could purchase .22 calibre rounds from Canadian Tire, he would purchase ammunition for them. Using a drill, he would make the barrels large enough to hold the rounds and voila, a gun.

As an entrepreneur, he made $10,000 a month selling cocaine. He would sit outside of the washroom at the nightclub “Fluid” and make a large majority of his deals there.

He was called The Chef, because he cooked it in his kitchen at home.

Bacchus spent two and a half years in jail for attempted murder.

The gang life is not always a conscious decision though. Rick Osborne, who served a full life sentence in prison, came from a relatively stable and wealthy family.

“By 20, I was a monster,” he said.

A teenager in Niagara Falls, he got involved with the wrong crowd

but never mimicked their behaviour.

One day when he was invited out by a friend, they took him into a room where he was injected, against his will, with a “speedball.” A speedball contains both methamphetamine and heroin.

“I can still feel the biker’s thumb on my bicep and the blood swirling in the syringe,” he said.

By 20, there was a Canada-wide warrant for his arrest. He became a full-patch member of the Hell’s Angels biker gang. By 21, he was locked away in Milhaven penitentiary. He served a life sentence across 33 different institutions. He managed to turn his life around and became the seventeenth person in Canadian history to earn a university degree while within a federal institution.

“The Toronto police message was: once a gangbanger always a gangbanger,” said John Sawdon, the leading Canadian expert on street gangs.

The speakers called for the need of a better legal definition of a “gang” as well as “organized crime.”

In Canada, a gang can constitute two university students selling drugs together from their residence or a full-fledged gang like the Crips or Bloods. Tough on Crime measures were criticized, saying minimum sentences take the individuality away from the sentencing process. Some deserve a second chance, while some may not.

In any case, the men and women who spoke at the conferences were mainly comprised of people who are currently living their second chance. Osborne now works with youth and teaches them to build motorcycles in a program he co-founded called “Ozzy’s Garage.”

All reformed gang-members who spoke at the conference now work with youth.

The world’s leading gangresearcher, Irving Spergel, calls for an approach that encompasses law enforcement, schools, social service agencies, and so forth, to work together. According to him, police and youth need to interact more and police should approach them without a uniform.

In Toronto, the average youth worker makes about $37,000 a year, while, according to David Soknacki, a former budget chief, the six figure club at the Toronto Police force is growing. For advocates of a community approach to rehabilitation, this is a problem. If there are children out there who are able to open a business of any kind at age 11, legal or illegal, and provide a living for themselves, than isn‘t some real potential being thrown away every time one is sent to jail? What if someone tried to guide them on a better path instead? Maybe the strongest citizens are found in the least expected areas. Summed up, that is what the conference was trying to get across.

“I don’t think we can eliminate gangs,” said Spergel. “We don’t really know what works. We don’t have any systematic data.”

Young Social Entrepreneurs of Canada want to change the world

By Amanda Connon-Unda, Culture Editor It’s Saturday March 27 and a large group of young people are gathered at MaRS to celebrate Earth Hour. Ilse Treurnicht, the CEO of the MaRS Discovery District welcomes the group of youths who have been attending the Re:Vision conference. Before she recedes toward the back of the crowd she reminds them of the lessons that she thinks were learned during the financial meltdown of 2009. “We have to go beyond science and technology and the next great idea,” she said. “We have to integrate new and better ways of doing valued things… and it’s going to take a new model of collaboration, and we’re going to really need young people.”

Treurnicht should be happy because the young people at The Young Social Entrepreneurs of Canada (YSEC) want to be part of that very process they collectively envision rebuilding sustainable business models and changing the world.

At 24 years old and with a small stature, Nagah Kornberg is already quite the accomplished spokesperson for YSEC. When she reveals over breakfast one morning prior to the Re:Vision conference that she was a teacher for almost a year before she became the Director of Program Development for YSEC it’s surprising. How does she have the chutzpah at 24 to accomplish so much?

When you listen to her story, the answer becomes clear. Promoting social entrepreneurialism seems to have come naturally. In highschool she worked with the children’s rights group Free the Children founded by the Kielburger brothers, and then immediately out of Trent University

she worked as an elementary school teacher.

Kornberg said she asked her students in the career studies class she taught, “If you could create your dream job, what would it look like?” Today with YSEC she asks her peers similar questions. She explained “the goal is to ignite a national movement of young social entrepreneurs in Canada.” She said that YSEC provides a front door to social entrepreneurialism by holding monthly social networking events and workshops and by being a bridge of access to established social entrepreneurs.

It was around the fall of 2009 when YSEC, with its group of 10 core team members, decided to plan its first ever Re:Vision conference. Their vision was big and the undertaking was equally massive. Kornberg explained that after talking to their community and seeing what people needed, the YSEC team realized that bringing together the top 100 young leaders in Ontario would be a way for young social entrepreneurs to empower themselves. “We wanted to create a space to dialogue, share, to learn from and to teach each other,” said Kornberg. “Its success is almost entirely dependent on our participants engaging in it. It’s exciting and petrifying,” she said, a few days prior to the conference.

Well, she may have had questions then about how the conference would go, but as things got underway at the conference it was clear that there was lots of dynamic programming for participants to enjoy.

Lulwa Saffarini, a project coordinator for the Change Maker Stories, screened a film she directed with other volunteers called Change Together/Change to Get

Here. The film featured six stories about youth involved in social change projects in Toronto. Saffarini said in making the film, “We looked for people solving old problems in new ways; people who saw the potential of what this world could be and people who had a clear vision.” She said, “We saw them addressing many systemic root problems and we found people trying to wrap their heads around those and … create something that holistically works.”

In response to the community’s request to hear the stories of experienced social entrepreneurs YSEC hosted a keynote speaker event. The Earth Hour occasion featured author David Bornstein, the editor at change.org Nathaniel Whittemore and Tonya Surman, the Co-Founder of the Centre for Social Innovation, who shared some of her own hard-earned lessons with the crowd.

“Do your homework and learn business skills,” she said. “Learn how to do cash flows and budgets. Know your topic and research it.” She continued, “An organization lives and dies on its money,” so make sure you have a business model and a model for your governance. “In-fighting kills organizations,” she said. “Talk about power dynamics in groups,” she advised, speaking from her own experience in business, the not-forprofit sector and her personal relationships.

“Don’t negate the strength of leadership. I think we all have equal value, but there are spheres of influence.”

“This is all I am, pure passion,” she said.

“Behind that passion is a little bit of rage. I am pissed off about many things,” exclaimed Surman, an authoritative, energetic, friend-

ly blonde haired Executive Director.

“I worked with hundreds of organizations who all wanted the same things and they were all reinventing the wheel, and that’s why we dreamt up the Centre for Social Innovation,” in order to help organizations be sustainable, she said.

Toward the end of her talk she said, “We are at a pinnacle of transformation in our world... We understand the opportunities in the economy are about solving our environmental problems… In addition to thinking local, we do also have to think globally.” As the old slogan came out of her mouth, it sounded truer than ever before.

In the closing exercise that Re:Vision offered, Dev Aujla, the Founder of DreamNow and Sean MacDonell, the Founder of Creativision, posed personal questions to the conference participants. “Who would you want to be if you were a mash-up of different successful people?” asked Aujla.

“Why can’t you be that person? What holds you back?... What do you need to erase those feelings?” He asked. “Now vanquish those feelings,” he said, before inviting the participants to mingle.

After the social networking exercise was over, the participants reflected on the exercise. One person said “It clicked. I generated ideas for my business.” “It felt empowering because I was able to make it all work,” said another. One participant said, “I was able to form my own story. It came together in a way I didn’t expect.” The last one said, “It was great to connect with someone based on who they are and not what they do, because that’s where all of the passion comes from.”

Lessons from Carlos Andrés Gómez Gómez impresses Ryerson students with his spoken word

By Adriana Rolston This past December Carlos Andrés Gómez was in a New York jail performing his spoken word poem How to fight, about the absurdity of physical violence. He stood before 200 young men and described an incident in a club, when he responded to an invitation to fight by shedding four tears.

It tripped the guy up, says Gómez. “I just got so sad for all of us. It’s like I pulled out a scud missile in the middle of the club.

It throws people’s shit off, to see a man cry, not out of fear.

His performance ended with, “I’m your brother. You’re my brother. Let’s start something,” and he extended his hand to the first young man in the prison’s audience.

He grabbed Gómez’ hand, stood up, and embraced him.

Everyone in the room applauded. It was a very powerful and emotional moment for Gómez, who challenges notions of masculinity, sexism, racism and homophobia in his poetry, which erupts in fitful cadences.

The poet, actor and playwright from New York City and Los Angeles has graced hundreds of universities, colleges, festivals and

workshops worldwide. On Thursday March 11 he shared his thought provoking poetry at Ryerson’s White Ribbon Campaign event, addressing themes of racism, colonialism and violence.

Gómez is a two-time National Poetry Slam finalist and was named Artist of the Year at the 2009 Promoting Outstanding Writers Awards. In 2006 his first fulllength CD “Carlos Andres Gomez: Live from New York,” won Spoken Word Album of the year at the L.A. Music Awards. He also founded The Excelano Project in 2003, a University of Pennsylvania spoken word group that has reached the national championship final stage in each of its six years competing.

Although Gómez’s rhythmic prose leave pulses in his wake, sitting in a Ryerson lecture hall before his performance, he explains why he isn’t a fan of some of the superlatives critics have plastered him with, like: radical, incendiary or liberal. He would rather think of himself as a person who woke up one day and had some ideas affect his life.

“I don’t read poems to make

a difference; I’m not a service announcement,” he says. “I don’t feel like a prophet. People are complex.

People are fucked up. I’m fucked up too,” he admits. He says he recognizes that he has privileges and prejudices like everyone but tries to hold himself accountable and measure the repercussions of his actions. “Even if this doesn’t affect someone in a detrimental way, how does this affect the world?” he asks himself.

He grew up in Harlem, then later taught in public schools and was a social worker, much of which he describes in first album. For instance, his well-known poem, What’s Genocide, named after the question that Gómez asked his then class of students and received blank, curious stares.

Although his work challenges the status quo he doesn’t identify with a political party or as an activist. Gómez knows that if he does, audiences will judge him by the nametag he wears, and won’t listen long enough to hear his words. “If people know what drawer to just jam you into they can easily dismiss you,” he says.

Plus, he likes to throw people off balance by messing with their presupposed definitions. “I feel like all life time learning happens when we’re off balance or uncomfortable.”

Much of Gómez’s art achieves this, like his piece, Butterfly, inspired by the 2005 tsunami in New Orleans, addressing the displacement of native land owners under the guise of reconstruction.

“Real estate developers are to natural disasters what defence contractors are to terrorist attacks. Both like it quiet and wellplanned...practice erasing families like pencil markings,” he says as Ryerson students nod in agreement.

His poetry is a history lesson with a heartbeat. On stage his body is a live wire that cradles, grasps and surges forth words that implode and shiver.

Last spring Gómez finished his sold out solo play called MAN UP in New York City, which won Best Short Play at the 2009 Downtown Urban Theater Festival. His next solo play in the works, A World Without Fathers, explores the disappearing father figure pandemic and its influences on how boys

become men. He interviewed over 100 men from diverse experiences of masculinity to find resonating stories.

Another one of Gómez’s pieces that resonates at Ryerson is, Tipping Point, where he describes the contractions and expansions of life.

“My mother taught me to expand, pull my shoulders back in proud defiance at a room full of expanded pupils collapsing on my back,” he says, his shoulders and palms pulled back, then suddenly snapping forward.

“My sister’s shoulders learned to contract in the Sixth grade.

Locked and bound…her jaw and muscles contracting, forgetting that all we ever were built to be was enough, as if enough is less than we need,” he utters, quietly and urgently, to a hushed room that reverberates in the aftershock.

His explosive poetry explores diverse identities and Gómez ends the night with an echoing message of acceptance: “Be proud of who you are. The revolution is within.

Because this world tries to break us down and tell us we’re not enough.”

“All we are is enough.”

Ryerson Free Press April 2010 7

Canada Complicit in Colombian Human Rights Violations

By Natalie Guttormsson When it comes to Canada’s relationship with Colombia, what is a higher priority for Canada: the defense of human rights or the interests of mining companies?

Canadian mining companies are sneaky. They often change names or create subsidiary branches that operate either through the United States or within the resource countries themselves. Even these subsidiary companies can change names, making it difficult to track who is who and what company is responsible for what and where. Canada alone has hundreds of junior mining companies involved in projects all over the world.

Medoro Resources, with its head office in Toronto, recently made headlines in Colombia and in the mining news circles due to a press release describing a new acquisition near the city of Segovia, Colombia. According to Colombian law, the mine and reserves in question are the property of the former employees and shareholders who say that no such agreement or sale has been negotiated.

Canada’s interests in Colombia are questionable at

minimum. The economic downturn in Canada had pushed Harper’s free trade deal with Colombia to the back-burner, but now that parliament has resumed session the bill is back on the table.

Eight years before FTA-Colombia, or more officially, bill C-2, became a part of the Canadian political agenda, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) had a very different opportunity to help formulate Colombian policy.

In 1999, Colombia saw a year of massive economic downturn, forcing the country to accept a bailout loan from the IMF. The next year, Plan Colombia arrived, courtesy of Clinton, to enforce the structural reforms the IMF demanded.

In 2001, Canada had its turn. CIDA helped the Colombian government re-write their national mining code, which relaxed environmental regulations on mining operations, extended concession lengths for foreign companies, and reduced royalties the companies had to pay to the Colombian government for the resources they were to extract. Canada’s direct involvement in Colombia’s political affairs begs the question of

where, amongst our humanitarian agencies, does industry take precedence over human rights?

When Álvaro Uribe took office in 2002, the percentage of human rights violations committed by the state was at 17 per cent, but by the end of his first term in 2006, that number had risen to 56 per cent. Yet Uribe is credited by some with bringing political stability and social security to Colombia. All he really did was create an environment friendly to foreign investment and investors and fail to improve security for the Colombian people.

The statistics alone should be enough to deter Canadian MPs from supporting the FTA with Colombia, but there seems very little concern about them. Canada may soon follow in the tracks of the E.U. in sentencing Colombians to another FTA. The only possible consolation is that Uribe’s time in power is limited and a new president will soon be elected, though to inherit the governance of a place like Colombia would amount to, as José Mujica, the newly elected president of Uruguay, stated after taking office, “serving in purgatory.”

Peace talks stall: Canada delivers unconvincing criticism of Israeli settlements Bill seeks to put limits on John McKay talks to Ryerson business students about Bill C-300.

Canada’s mining empire

By Natalie Guttormsson The list of conflicts between Canadian mining companies and communities living in prospective mining areas seems infinite, but there is some desire in Ottawa to change this reputation. Liberal MP John McKay, of the Scarborough-Guildwood riding, introduced the private members Bill C-300 on February 9, 2009.

Bill C-300 is called: “An Act Respecting Corporate Accountability for the Activities of Mining, Oil or Gas in Developing Countries.” This act would legislate new law to hold mining companies responsible for their actions outside of Canada. Upon any credible accusation of human rights abuses or violation of environmental standards, Canadian companies that receive government funding or political endorsement could be suspended from business until an investigation is completed on the matter. There would also be a series of regulations put in place for companies to meet on a yearly basis in order to receive government funding.

This bill has raised strong opposition within the mining community, which was evident at the annual convention of the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) earlier this month. PDAC’s opposition is founded on a few misinterpretations of the bill. While tabling at the convention and handing out “No-Bill C-300” pins, promoters could be heard saying that the bill would call for an investigation for every little complaint that would arise. They claimed this would lead to a huge waste of time and tax dollars as well as deeply hurt the companies every time they would have to suspend exploration or production for investigations to be completed.

In actual fact, the bill states that only credible, serious complaints will be investigated. PDAC’s own set of regulations and standards for member companies allegedly holds

8 ryersonfreepress.ca

in respect human rights and environmental protection above profits. The standards outlined on PDAC’s website reflect many of the same expressed in Bill C-300. The complaints of the PDAC opposition reveal that they can tolerate their own organization investigating member companies but not the Minister of International Development or the Minister of Foreign Affairs. This state interference in the private sector does not sit well with them.

There are Canadian companies who do conduct business in a respectable and responsible manner but there are many more who do not. Canadian companies make up 60 per cent of the world’s extractive industry and have faced charges of environmental degradation, forest displacement and community displacement, as well as complacency in incidents of rape and murder. This bill is intended to create a mechanism to hold these companies accountable for such actions and is endorsed by several MPs from the Liberal Party, NDP, and Bloc Québécois, as well as organizations such as Mining Watch, the Halifax Initiative and Canadian Council for International Cooperation.

The bill is currently in its second reading and, if passed, will hopefully be able to prevent incidents like the “Ramirez versus Copper Mesa and the TSX” trial that is currently going through the Ontario courts. Although Copper Mesa was finally de-listed from the TSX on January 19 of this year for “failing to meet the continued listing requirements,” neither the TSX nor Copper Mesa press releases reveal which requirements were not met. McKay’s bill would provide grounds to legally punish companies like Copper Mesa rather than leaving it up to members of remote communities who neither have the funds nor the resources to do so and should never be required to either.

By Graeme Z. Johnson

Israel announced Tuesday that it would be moving forward with plans to build 1,600 new homes in an East Jerusalem suburb, expanding settlements further into occupied Palestinian territory.

The announcement comes just as Palestinian leaders reluctantly agreed to resume U.S.-led peace talks after a 14 month deadlock. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the project, threatening to withdraw from negotiations as long as Israel continues the settlements’ encroachment into Palestine.

“I call on the Israeli government not to lose a chance to make peace. I call on them to halt settlement building and to stop imposing facts on the ground,” Abbas said Wednesday, after meeting with U.S. Vice President Joe Biden. In the 1970s Israel developed a policy of creating ‘facts on the ground’ in the occupied territories that would see a wave of Israeli settlements in the hope that a full Palestinian state would be more difficult if not impossible to create.

Biden, who is in the region heading negotiations, initially condemned the construction project, saying it would undermine peace efforts, but reversed his position Thursday, stating that the United States has “no better friend” than Israel.

Canada also weighed in on the decision – in what could be the Conservative government’s strongest criticism of Israel to date – stating that Canada “regrets” Israel’s decision to expand the settlement according to a statement released by the office of Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon.

Israel stands by its decision to continue construction, expressing regret only that their continued colonization of Palestine has put Vice President Biden in an awkward position.

Israel’s Interior Minister, Eli Yishai, whose office announced the new building project, apologized for the inconvenience, but also confirmed that Israel had no plans to stop the illegal settlements’ expansion, stating, “I am very sorry for the embarrassment ... Next time we need to take timing into account.”

PHOTO: www.johnmckaymp.on.ca

Battle in the Antarctic

By Natalie Guttormsson

Sea Shepherd crew members are hosed by water cannons from Japanese harpoon whaling ship, the Yushin Maru No. 1.

The Sea Shepherd Campaign to protect whales in the Southern Ocean Sanctuary, Antarctica, came to an early close at the end of this year after mechanical problems with the vessel Bob Barker and the destruction and sinking of another boat, the Ady Gil. Peter Bethune of New Zealand, record holder for the fastest naval circumnavigation of the world, was working with the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society as captain of a small crew on board his personal speedboat, the Ady Gil, when the Japanese whaling ship, the Shonan Maru 2, rammed into it.

Every winter, Captain Paul Watson, head of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, travels to the ice cold waters of Antarctica with a crew made up of members from around the world in order to protect whales, in what is internationally recognized as the Southern Ocean Sanctuary.

Every year in the Sanctuary, a Japanese fleet of whalers enters to hunt whales, claiming to kill within the allotted quota for scientific research. Captain Watson and his crew have witnessed first hand that this is not true.

The Sea Shepherds have been criticized for their aggressive tactics against the Japanese because their strategies include physically blocking off certain passes with their boats, operating water cannon (which the Japanese also possess), and launching home-made, non-toxic stink bombs onto the Japanese boats in attempts to spoil any meat that is being handled on board.

During a skirmish with the Shonan Maru 2, the Ady Gil was doused with freezing water from the Japanese cannon, as the their ship collided with Bethune’s speedboat, sawing off a large

portion of the front of the vessel. The Steve Irwin, another, larger Sea Shepherd boat, quickly rescued the six-member crew with only one injury received to the members that were on board.

Soon after the collision, on the morning of Monday, February 15, Bethune boarded the Shonan Maru 2 with a letter demanding $3 million to pay for his boat and to order a citizen’s arrest of the Japanese Captain on the charge of attempted murder of the six sailors on the Ady Gil. The murder charge is based on the sinking of their boat in Antarctic waters without attempting to offer rescue to the surviving crew. According to marine law, Bethune was within his rights in his actions, but the Japanese assert that he boarded their vessel illegally. Bethune is currently being held in custody on the Shonan Maru 2, which is on its way back to Japan, where he will be put on trial.

Captain Watson has said that the Sea Shepherd society has a team of lawyers waiting to defend Bethune upon his arrival in Japan. The government of New Zealand has said it will keep up diplomatic talks with Japan to deter whale poaching and to attempt to ease the situation surrounding Bethune. The Sea Shepherd campaign came to an early close on February 25 due to risks brought on by a faulty fuel gauge on their other ship, the Bob Barker. The campaign ended after three straight weeks of preventing whale slaughter by the Japanese fleet, and although a few more weeks remain in the hunting season, the Sea Shepherds deem this year to have been a success. The fate of Peter Bethune will become apparent soon, as a court date in Japan in midMarch left him facing five charges in Japanese court.

Drought Continues in Caribbean

By Chanel Christophe

Imagine households going days and sometimes weeks without pipe-borne water. That is the dire situation now facing many Caribbean communities as severe drought conditions persist. The unseasonably low levels of rainfall have resulted in the drying up of water sources stretching from Jamaica all the way to Guyana. Some meteorological experts have chalked up this particular dry spell to the El Nino cycle and have dismissed suggestions that it is attributed to the global warming phenomenon.

Whatever its cause, the rainy season, normally experienced in the region from June to November, has not yielded the usual quantities that would allow these countries to weather the dry period from December to May. Many of these countries are now implementing stringent conservation measures to stave off impending social and economic disaster.

For the majority of them, tourism is the mainstay of their economies, and as the drought drags on, that vital industry comes under increasing pressure.

Guyana’s agricultural sector has been under siege from the drought and the government has recently had to invest approximately two million dollars to irrigate crops and install water pumps in certain areas. The drought has also hurt the country’s mining sector, as boats cannot navigate the dry riverbeds to transport supplies, fuel, and workers to the mines PHOTO: GUANO/FLICKR

further inland.

Residents in the parish of St. Andrew in Jamaica now have to trek miles to carry water for simple household chores including bathing, cooking, washing clothes, and other domestic uses. In Antigua and Barbuda meanwhile, the staterun utility company responsible for water distribution has implemented a water rationing system. Rationing involves supplying water only to certain sections of the country at a time while taps elsewhere are shut off. That particular measure has also been introduced in a number of other countries as well.

In Trinidad and Tobago, the Water and Sewerage Authority has implemented its own water conservation programme and has stepped up efforts to repair leaky pipes. It has also deployed a number of ‘water police’ over the country with the authority to stop and charge citizens for the improper use of water and watering equipment. Even Trinidad and Tobago’s Prime Minister could not escape the hands of the law, when water at his official residence was turned off after it was discovered that his sprinklers were being used to water the residence lawns. The Prime Minister subsequently fired the firm contracted to provide the lawn maintenance services.

In St. Lucia, the government has officially declared a state of emergency. The country’s legislation gives the relevant

minister, in this case the Agriculture minister, the discretion to declare such an emergency if he is satisfied that “by reason of an exceptional shortage of rain, or contamination of water, a serious deficiency of supplies of water exists or is threatened.”

Under threat of being fined or imprisoned up to six months, government and water authorities have released a list of restrictions and prohibitions on how water supplied by the island’s lone distributor can be used. The law forbids the use of state-supplied water for watering lawns, grounds or farms, nor can it be used for supplying ponds or swimming pools.

In addition, persons are prohibited from using water to wash vehicles or for construction purposes.

Health authorities in the region are growing increasingly concerned about possible health risks from a protracted drought period. The fear is that with a prolonged drought, persons will resort to unsafe sources of water, which will increase the chances of disease.

The current drought was one of the several issues down for discussion when CARICOM (Caribbean Community) leaders convened last week in Roseau Dominica for the twenty-first intersessional heads of government meeting. While the Caribbean heads talked water, the Caribbean people were praying for rain.

Ryerson Free Press April 2010 9

OPINION Free speech includes the right to protest U of O students versus Ann Coulter

By James Clark, Features and Opinions Editor Conservative U.S. pundit Ann Coulter was scheduled to speak at the University of Ottawa on March 23, but the event was cancelled before she even showed up. Organizers have tried to blame hundreds of student protesters, saying they infringed on her free speech rights.

But it wasn’t students, the University of Ottawa or Ottawa police who cancelled Coulter’s speech, as some reports claim.

The event was cancelled by Ezra Levant, a self-styled “free speech” martyr who helped organize Coulter’s three-city speaking tour in Canada.

Levant has tried to paint students as a violent mob that planned to assault Coulter. But there were no arrests at the protest and no reports of violence. Protesters may have expressed anger and outrage, but they remained peaceful, and never posed a threat to Coulter.

More importantly, students have every right to protest Coulter – and were right to do so. Free speech includes the right to protest, especially on a university campus. By exercising their free speech rights, students do not undermine Coulter’s.

There are lots of reasons to protest Coulter, whose

the left is attacking free speech, and that conservatives are being persecuted for their ideas. But there is no evidence to back these claims.

Coulter writes a syndicated column that runs in newspapers all over the US. She frequently appears on radio and TV talk shows, and has published a number of books, all widely available. The students who protested Coulter’s gig don’t have a fraction of that kind of media access.

In fact, Coulter dominated the airwaves in the days after her speech was cancelled, and it was her interpretation that has largely become the official version of events – even though much of it has been refuted. Students, on the other hand, have had to struggle to tell their side of the story, at the same time as fending off vicious attacks from Coulter and her backers, who have tried to characterize them as “thugs,” “fascists,” and “terrorists.”

Unfortunately, some progressives have accepted Coulter’s side of the story, and are portraying her as a “victim.” One highprofile example is a public letter issued by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) to Dr. François Houle, Vice-President Academic and Provost at the University of Ottawa. Houle had sent a private letter to Coulter in advance of her visit, explaining the difference between speech laws in Canada and the US. In light of Coulter’s record attacking oppressed groups, Houle’s concerns are legitimate, and his letter is hardly a threat.

Coulter claims that the letter was intended to incite a left-wing mob against her. But Houle’s letter was private; it was Coulter who leaked it to the media and whipped her followers into a frenzy about it. Sadly, CAUT has bought the line that Coulter’s free speech was undermined. Despite how much she acts like one, Coulter is not a victim.

Most real attacks on free speech in Canada have been largely ignored, mainly because they have been led by the Conservatives and their allies. The most obvious example at the moment is the Conservatives’ refusal to obey Parliament’s request for the release of all files relating to Canadian involvement in the torture of Afghan detainees.

Other examples include the Conservatives’ attack on anti-war and Palestine solidarity activists. Instead of engaging in a serious debate about the war in Afghanistan, or considering alternative points-of-view, the government has repeatedly attacked its opponents, smearing them in the media and undermining their credibility.

Richard Colvin, the career diplomat who raised objections about the treatment of Afghan detainees, was vilified by the Conservatives, and called a “traitor.” New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton was dismissed as “Taliban Jack” for suggesting that all groups in Afghanistan should be involved in peace negotiations.

In February 2009, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Jason Kenney unilaterally cut all funding to the Canadian Arab Federation (CAF) in response to its criticism of the government’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza. Kenney later cut all funding to KAIROS – a human rights organization representing 11 of Canada’s largest Christian churches – because of its criticism of the Israeli occupation. Kenney’s decision ended a 35-year relationship between KAIROS and the federal government, and has forced the group to cancel many of its humanitarian projects.

Shortly thereafter, the government cut all international aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which administers health and social programs for Palestinians

“When Arab passengers were denied air travel because of racial profiling, Coulter told them to use flying carpets instead.” speeches and columns attack Muslims, Arabs, immigrants, women, gays and other oppressed groups. Here’s what she said about Muslims and Arabs in the wake of 9/11: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.

She later wrote: “I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East and sending liberals to Guantánamo.”

When Arab passengers were denied air travel because of racial profiling, Coulter told them to use “flying carpets” instead. During Coulter’s appearance at the University of Western Ontario, Fatima Al-Dhaher, a 17-year old Muslim student in political science, challenged Coulter’s racism, asking how Muslims like her should travel.

Coulter replied: “Take a camel.”

Since her Ottawa gig was cancelled, Coulter claims that she is the victim of censorship. But Coulter doesn’t defend the free speech of those whose views she opposes. On the Democrats, she has said: “They’re always accusing us of repressing their speech. I say let’s do it. Let’s repress them. Frankly, I’m not a big fan of the First Amendment.”

Like Coulter, many of her backers are “free speech” hypocrites. Levant was among the first commentators to back the Conservative government’s ban on British MP George Galloway, and has remained silent on attempts to shut down Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW), a series of educational events that take place annually on university campuses all over the world.

Coulter, Levant and other right-wing pundits argue that

10 ryersonfreepress.ca

in nine refugee camps – suggesting that the organization is connected to terror groups.

In March 2009, Kenney banned British MP George Galloway from Canada, claiming that his humanitarian aid convoy to Gaza was evidence of his support for terrorism. A Kenney spokesperson defended the ban by saying that Galloway’s opposition to the war in Afghanistan equalled support for the Taliban.

Kenney has also initiated what is called the “Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism” – an unofficial inquiry into anti-Semitism in Canada. So far, the committee has resisted calling witnesses who are critical of Canadian foreign policy. On March 9, the Bloc Québécois quit the coalition in protest.

More recently, the government delayed issuing a visa to independent Palestinian MP Dr. Mustafa Barghouti who, like Coulter, was slated to speak in three cities in Canada. The delay forced the cancellation of Barghouti’s tour.

On campus, students involved in IAW have also faced serious attacks of free speech. In late February, Progressive Conservative MPP Peter Shurman (Thornhill) passed a motion in the Ontario Legislature condemning IAW, with the support of 30 MPPs. A similar motion was introduced by Conservative MP Tim Uppal (Edmonton – Sherwood Park) in the House of Commons, but failed to win unanimous consent. Either way, federal cabinet ministers and Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff issued their own statements condemning IAW. In 2009, students involved in IAW faced poster bans – which were enacted on three separate campuses – and attempts by university administrators to manipulate room-booking rules to prevent Palestine solidarity clubs from meeting on campus.

Taken together, these cases show that the most sustained and serious attacks on free speech are coming from the Conservative government and its backers, not a few hundred students at the University of Ottawa.

The consequences of these attacks have been severe. But this should come as no surprise since government-led censorship relies on the full weight of the state and its access to mass media. The Conservatives have prevented their critics from entering Canada, denied funds to critical organizations, demonized individuals and organizations with whom they disagree and created a McCarthyite atmosphere that discourages free and open discourse – especially on issues related to Afghanistan or Palestine and Israel.

Ironically, Levant claims that protesters have created a chilly climate at the University of Ottawa. But where was Levant in all these other cases? If anyone has created a chilly climate, it’s the Conservatives.

The free speech debate in Canada will continue for some time, especially as the Conservatives ramp up their attacks on all those who oppose their agenda. But the best way to challenge these attacks is to mobilize against them.

It’s also the best way to challenge hateful bigots like Coulter. Calling for a ban only plays into their hands, allowing them to portray themselves as “free speech” martyrs. It also creates a dangerous precedent since administrators and the state are all too ready to use bans against students or the left, as the above examples show.

Instead, activists should follow the lead of students at the University of Ottawa who exercised their free speech rights to counter Coulter’s hateful message. This kind of response reaches far more people, and gives confidence to all those who feel isolated or threatened by Coulter’s attacks.

Protesting bigotry is not a threat to free speech. It was – and is – the right thing to do.

Take Back Your School is an extreme right-wing blog that purports to rid campuses of progressive students, and doesn’t usually merit space in this publication.

‘Uppity’ Black woman targeted by bloggers Is a ‘high-tech lynching’ in progress?

By John Baglow The identity and occupation of a student demonstrator outside the ill-fated Ann Coulter event at the University of Ottawa are now public property. Ellen Ocran has become the newest chew-toy of the rabid Right.

And this sort of thing is all-too-typical on the rightwing blogs: “The uppity bitch was so incredibly annoying, rude, and waved her hands in anyones [sic] face who disagreed with her. I’m glad my mother raised me properly because if not, I would have bitch-slapped her myself!

“I hope she gets what is coming to her. The idea that my tax money goes to pay her salary is appalling” [emphases added].

Read the full comment here: http://takebackyourschool.wordpress.com/2010/04/01/ellen-ocranbusted/#comment-828.

Note also the subtle slavery meme, widespread among the mob: if this person works for an NDP MP, then her time is owned by the taxpayer 24/7. Unless Ocran was supposed to be in the office earning her salary at the time of the protest, however – unlikely, because it was deep in the evening – she wasn’t being paid by anyone.

But the bottom line is: she should be punished. For expressing an opinion, non-violently, on her own time.

Don’t be distracted by the continuing Speechy propaganda that Coulter was shut down by (as she herself ludicrously put it) “thousands of rioting liberals.” As I noted then, and there has been no refutation since: “For all the talk of students ‘shutting down’ Coulter’s talk, there was not one mention of physical violence against anyone. There was not one reported arrest, although two dozen tactical squadders from the Ottawa Police were on hand. No weapons of any description were in evidence – just voices, sometimes angry, uncivil ones to be sure, but so what?

(Read Dr. Dawg’s account here: http://drdawgsblawg.blogspot.com/2010/03/ann-coulterin-ottawa-shrinking-violet.html) Anyone else find it funny – or perhaps “disgusting” is a better word – how the Speech Warriors™ seem so prone to obsessively tracking down and trashing opponents exercising their own freedom of speech? Particularly “uppity” ones who apparently ought to know their place?

Having initially named the wrong person, (and therefore having to deep-six inflammatory

posts and apologize), the mob is now on the move. And all that seems to be missing is the white sheets.

John Baglow–a.k.a. Dr. Dawg–is a progressive Ottawa-based blogger who contributes to Dawg’s Blawg: drdawgsblawg.blogspot.com. This article originally appeared on Dawg’s Blawg on April 2, 2010.

Take Back Your School is an extreme right-wing blog that purports to rid campuses of progressive students, and doesn’t usually merit space in this publication.

The obscenity of war Obama inherits Afghanistan disaster

By Amy Goodman US President Barack Obama has just returned from his first trip as Commander-inChief to Afghanistan. The U.S.-led invasion and occupation of that country are now in its ninth year, amid increasing comparisons to Vietnam.

Daniel Ellsberg, whom Henry Kissinger once called “the most dangerous man in America,” leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Ellsberg, who was a top Pentagon analyst, photocopied this secret, 7,000-page history of the US role in Vietnam and released it to the press, helping to end the Vietnam War. “President Obama is taking every symbolic step he can to nominate this as Obama’s war,” Ellsberg told me recently. He cites the “Eikenberry memos,” written by U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, which were leaked, then printed last January by The New York Times.

Ellsberg said: “Eikenberry’s cables read like a summary of the Pentagon Papers of Afghanistan.... Just change the place names from ‘Saigon’ to ‘Kabul’... and they read almost exactly the same.”

The Eikenberry memos recommend policies opposite those of Gens. David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, who advocated for the surge and a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. Eikenberry wrote that President Hamid Karzai is “not an adequate strategic partner,” and that “sending additional forces will delay the day when Afghans will take over, and make it difficult, if not impossible, to bring our people home on a reasonable timetable.”

Petraeus and McChrystal prevailed. The military will launch a major campaign in June in Afghanistan’s second-largest city, Kandahar. Meanwhile, with shocking candor, McChrystal said in a video conference this week, regarding the number of civilians killed by the U.S. military, “We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.” US troop fatalities, meanwhile, are occurring now at twice the rate of one year ago.

Tavis Smiley has a PBS special this week on one of the most powerful, and overlooked, speeches given by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The address was made on April 4, 1967, exactly one year to the day before King was assassinated. The civil rights leader titled his speech “Beyond Vietnam,” and controversially called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

The press vilified King. Time magazine called the speech “demagogic slander that sounded

like a script for Radio Hanoi.” Smiley told me: “Most Americans, I think, know the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. Some Americans know the ‘Mountaintop’ speech given the night before he was assassinated in Memphis. But most Americans do not know this ‘Beyond Vietnam’ speech.”

Smiley added, “If you replace the words Iraq for Vietnam, Afghanistan for Vietnam, Pakistan for Vietnam, this speech is so relevant today.”

Like King, Obama is a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. In his acceptance speech, Obama mentioned King six times, yet defended his war in Afghanistan. Princeton University professor Cornel West, interviewed by Smiley, said of Obama’s Nobel speech, “It upset me when I heard my dear brother Barack Obama criticize Martin on the global stage, saying that Martin Luther King Jr.’s insights were not useful for a Commander-in-Chief, because evil exists, as if Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t know about evil.”

In early March, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, offered a resolution to end the war in Afghanistan, saying: “We now have about 1,000 U.S. troops who have perished in the conflict. We have many innocent civilians who have lost their lives. We have a corrupt central government in Afghanistan that is basically stealing U.S. tax dollars.” The resolution was defeated by a vote of 356-65. A Washington Post poll of 1,000 people released this week found that President Obama enjoys a 53 per cent approval rating on his handling of the war in Afghanistan.

The public is unlikely to oppose something that gets less and less coverage. While the press is focused on the salacious details of Republican National Committee spending on lavish trips, especially one outing to a Los Angeles strip club, the cost to the U.S. taxpayer for the war in Afghanistan is estimated now to be more than $260 billion. The cost in lives lost, in people maimed, is incalculable. The real obscenity is war. Ellsberg hopes that the Eikenberry memos will be just the first of many leaks, and that a new wave of Pentagon Papers will educate the public about the urgent need to end Obama’s war.

This article appeared on rabble.ca on April 2, 2009.

Amy Goodman is the co-founder, executive producer and host of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on more than 450 public broadcast stations in North America. Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Ryerson Free Press April 2010 11

Ignatieff, the leadership thing Dr. Dawg explains why the Liberals’ ‘Thinkers’ Conference’ left him cold

By John Baglow

I should have been overjoyed by Michael Ignatieff ’s performance at the Canada at 150 “Thinkers’ Conference” in Montreal this past weekend. To a large extent leadership is a media construct (http:// drdawgsblawg.blogspot.com/2007/10/stphanedion-construction.html), and the received view of it is, I believe, fundamentally anti-democratic (http:// drdawgsblawg.blogspot.com/2008/01/on-leadershipand-character-in-politics.html). I have long argued for a new conception of leadership, a cooperative approach, and one where a leader feels safe to speak of complexity and difficulty rather than offering the false security of sound-bites and press releases.

And here was Ignatieff, pushing for a “party of the network,” asking for help, inviting widespread participation, and bringing together thinkers, even dissident ones like Robert Fowler, in his refurbished big tent. That style contrasts vividly – and it was meant to – with the rigid, micro-managing Stephen Harper, his sense of perfect rightness, his utter unwillingness (or inability) to admit doubt or nuance into his pronouncements.

Yet it left me cold.

In his closing remarks, Ignatieff talked about a new way of leading – in his usual passionless, tepid, professorial manner. When he did try to inject his own words with enthusiasm, it sounded as though he was trying. That’s a matter of style, but style is a necessary element of communication, surely the single most important aspect of leadership. A great communicator can viscerally transmit his or her confidence and passion directly to the listener. But there is something bloodless about Ignatieff.

In fairness, had anything substantive come out of

12 ryersonfreepress.ca

the think-meet, he might well have shaken off some of his stiffness. But the Liberal Party seems stubbornly resistant to anything rising above the cliché. Ignatieff ’s wrap-up lacked life, at least in part, because nothing new came out of this conference at all, other than the remarkably forthright views on foreign policy delivered by Robert Fowler – who was almost immediately patronizingly dismissed (“He has earned the right to say what he wants, ” said Ignatieff.) Unlike Conservatives, Liberals do allow dissent – but they are prone to stifle it with soft pillows.

What leadership is Ignatieff actually offering?

He was absent when Parliament recently resumed, off gallivanting in the hinterland to prove his democratic credentials. Now he’s back, but rather than reaching out to Canadians as a whole, he headed almost immediately into a Thinkers’ Conference stuffed with intellectuals, who were supposed to generate coherent collective vision and policy.

And what did we get? Judging from Ignatieff ’s closing, no bedrock of principle to which specific policies can be anchored; no coherent new vision or striking new departure to galvanize Canadians or even (judging from the lukewarm applause he received) his own party faithful.

It was just one boosterist platitude after another: “We started as a conference and became a community.” “We changed Canadian politics this weekend and it will never be the same.” It was “Team Canada” this and “Own the Podium” that. I suspect most Canadians went about their business utterly unaware that the world had changed beneath their feet.

What were these changes? Well, there is now a “national strategy” supporting “knowledge and

innovation.” Something has to be done about Aboriginal educational outcomes. Illiteracy is a “national priority.” Immigrants need more access to language programs, and those who qualify for post-secondary education should be able to go. And we could export our educational capacity to benefit a mysterious “five million people in Asia.” (That last one still has me scratching my head.)

Then there was a healthy dose of Facebook politics: network, network, network. But the “party of the network” now believes in a “responsibility network” instead of those nasty old Trudopian big federal programs. How reassuring that the with-it Liberals are really committed to Conservative values after all.

And so the mountains laboured, and brought forth a freeze on corporate taxes, and a set of priorities so vague that any party would have been comfortable advancing them, in almost exactly the same words.

Something happened this past weekend, but, pace Ignatieff, it’s not likely to be “forever etched in the memory of our Party and our country.” The memories are probably already fading for those involved, and most Canadians didn’t even know it took place. “We have changed ourselves,” said the leader, but there is no outward sign of it. The Liberals remain adrift on a sea of bromides, safe harbour well out of reach – and the man at the wheel is, by all appearances, as lost as his crew.

John Baglow – a.k.a. Dr. Dawg – is a progressive Ottawa-based blogger who contributes to Dawg’s Blawg: drdawgsblawg.blogspot.com/. This article originally appeared on Dawg’s Blawg on March 31, 2010.

PHOTO: SHORTFIN/FLICKR

FEATURES what tOrOntO Can learn FrOm the vanCOuver OlympiCS The Pan Am Games come to town in 2015.

Does Vancouver have any advice for us?

By Melissa Shaw tOrOntO Will hOst the Pan american games in 2015. Before then, it could learn a lot from the experience of the 2010 vancouver olympics. what are some of the effects that hosting a large sports event like the olympics can have on the host city and country? in vancouver, there were 900 surveillance cameras installed at venue sites and on major downtown streets prior to the games.

They were monitored by the RcmP’s integrated security unit, and the plan was to remove them after the Paralympic games. similarly, surveillance cameras were supposed to be removed after the 2004 summer olympics in athens, greece, but they remain in place, and continue to be monitored by the police. in the lead-up to the vancouver olympics, police monitored and questioned high-profile anti-olympics activists, including university of British columbia professor chris shaw, who wrote a book criticizing the 2010 games. shaw was approached by police in a café, and was detained for an hour at london’s heathrow airport on his way to speak at a conference.

Freelance journalist martin macias was also questioned in transit, at the vancouver airport before the games began. macias was covering the effects of the olympics on local communities and the olympics Resistance network conference. he was eventually sent back to seattle. when he asked why he was refused entry to canada, border officials cited his involvement in anti-olympics protests.

The government of British columbia passed Bill 13 which empowers authorities in vancouver, Richmond and whistler to enter residences or private property with only 24 hours notice to remove olympics signs. violators could be fined $10,000 a day and illusTRaTions: asTRid aRiJanTo

face up to six months imprisonment. antiolympics signs were banned in designated olympics zones. The law was amended only after protesters filed a lawsuit against the city, which they have since withdrawn. The use of megaphones and other sound amplification devices remains restricted. debates about spending priorities persist. many critics continue to argue that the money spent on the games should have been spent on reducing homelessness, a major issue in vancouver. critics also point out how infrastructure expansion further displaced homeless people. The closure of the georgia viaduct as part of the 2010 games transportation plan forced homeless people who lived near it to leave. venues that hosted games events erected security barriers which prevented homeless people from entering these zones. in some cases, city workers and police offered to help them find alternate shelter, but they faced arrest if they refused to relocate.

There were also severe environmental consequences. The construction of the fourlane highway through the eagleridge Bluffs, part of the upgrade to the sea to sky highway, displaced local wildlife. Protesters wanted the Province to consider a tunnel to avoid destroying the wetland habitat of the rare red-legged frog, a species that is supposed to be protected by environmental legislation.

First nations communities also expressed opposition to the olympics games, and how they were conducted. The cowichan Tribe First nation accused the hudson’s Bay company (hBc) of stealing its design for a traditional sweater after offering to produce

them for the company’s line. hBc rebuffed the offer, saying the cowichan Tribe did not meet the company’s efficiency standards. hernan humana, a professor at york university’s school of kinesiology and health sciences, spoke to the Ryerson Free Press about both the positive and negative impact of the games on vancouver: “There is no doubt that in vancouver it has been very difficult for its citizens to function in the middle of the games. it is also unacceptable, the removal of citizens who do not portray the ‘right image’ – i.e. prostitutes, homeless people, drug addicts, etc.

“The positives are connected to improving infrastructure and facilities. For the duration of the games, local restaurants and bars were very busy, but those benefits are very short-lived.” most people following the media coverage of the olympics may not be aware of these issues. when asked whether anti-olympics protesters received adequate media coverage, hernan said: “of course not. image is everything and mainstream media is ‘embedded’ in this idea. To cover protesters is not ‘what the games are all about,’ as the mantra is repeated.” when protesters gathered outside Bc Place during the opening ceremonies, they were given little coverage, and their reasons for protesting were not explained. and while most protests were peaceful, the media focused on a few isolated incidents where property was vandalized.

The olympics typically attract lots of attention from the media and the public

because they are a worldwide event. But the Pan am games, which usually attract less attention because of their regional focus, are actually a larger event, with 8,000 athletes from 42 countries competing in 36 events. By contrast, vancouver hosted 5,500 athletes and officials.

The athlete village for the Pan am games will be built in the west don lands area, which is on the waterfront near the st. lawrence market. it is not clear how lowerincome housing will be incorporated into the west don lands development; critics point out that any acceleration of a development plan that was originally supposed to take 10-12 years to complete may compromise the quality of construction.

The affordable housing that was promised in construction plans for the vancouver olympics could soon become condos, sold off to the highest bidders in order to reduce the heavy debt left by the games. The $1 billion price tag for the development of the west don lands and the $1.4 billion operating costs for the games are just estimates. according to no games activist murphy Browne, the cost of the vancouver olympics was originally pegged at $1.6 billion, but ended up costing over $5 billion. These costs are paid by taxpayer dollars, while corporate sponsors reap huge profits through merchandising. it may be too early to tell exactly what issues Toronto will face when it hosts the Pan am games in 2015, but the experience of the vancouver olympics should serve as a warning to city residents of the far-reaching consequences could face in the years ahead.

Check out the No Games – Toronto blog at nogamestoronto.blogspot.com

RyeRson FRee PRess

April 2010

13

Karzai’s justice Afghan children brutalized in jail

By Dave Markland For anyone who follows events in Afghanistan even casually, it is not news that children there are suffering tremendously. Most obviously, there has been an horrific toll of children killed directly by the war. According to one tally, last year U.S./NATO airstrikes alone killed more children than the Taliban and other insurgents did in all their attacks (131 vs. 128).

But the challenges for children go beyond the direct horrors of war. “The world is ignoring the daily deaths of more than 850 Afghan children from treatable diseases like diarrhoea and pneumonia, focusing on fighting the insurgency,” according to British charity Save the Children. Afghan children have the world’s worst chance of seeing their fifth birthday and yet Canada, along with other belligerent countries, is spending a mere pittance on aid for that country while the military sucks in billions of dollars.

And who can forget the scandalous 2008 accusation by Canadian Forces Padre Jean Johns who revealed that Canadian soldiers were ordered by commanding officers to look the other way as allied Afghan soldiers engaged in “bacha bazi” (“boy play”). Her accusations were later echoed by other soldiers. The Canadian Forces National Investigation Service is likely still investigating the allegations.

Interpress Service’s Gareth Porter has more on the hazards facing Afghan children: “Two-Thirds of Boys in Afghan Jails Are Brutalized, Study Finds “WASHINGTON, Mar 30 (IPS) – Nearly two of every three male juveniles arrested in Afghanistan are physically abused, according to a study based on interviews with 40 per cent of all those now incarcerated in the country’s juvenile justice system.

“The study [was] carried out by US defence attorney Kimberly Motley for the international children’s rights organization Terre des Hommes...

“Those statistics parallel the findings of a study published by the UN Children’s Fund and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission in 2008, which found that 55 per cent of boys and 11 per cent of girls reported having been beaten upon their arrest.

“Virtually all the male juveniles said the police beatings were aimed at forcing them to

sign a confession. They said they had signed either while being beaten or threatened with being beaten, and that the confessions were then used to convict them.

“The testimony of the juveniles themselves on brutalization by police was consistent with Motley’s interviews with juvenile court judges. Forty-four per cent of the judges interviewed indicated that juveniles complained routinely about torture and physical abuse by police officers. Another 33 per cent refused to answer when asked whether they had heard such complaints...

“Almost half the children brought before a court in Afghanistan are also denied the right to speak in their defence, according to Motley’s study...

“One of the male juveniles denied the right to testify in court was a boy charged with pederasty, or sexual relations between an adult male and a child. As is often the case, he was the victim of rape, after having been kidnapped by three adults, all of whom were released and never charged...” (Read the full article here: http://www.ipsnews.net/news. asp?idnews=50843).

It is worth noting that officers from the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) have been in Afghanistan for several years instructing their Afghan cohorts as well as inspecting correctional facilities there. Of course, we don’t know if CSC ever found evidence of the crimes which both Motley and Porter rather easily discovered. While it might at first seem difficult to believe that Canadian officials would be hypocritical on issues of sexual morality, cynical readers might simply interject that recent Ministers of Public Safety (responsible for CSC) have included the morally challenged Stockwell Day and Vic Toews.

Dave Markland is a blogger and anti-war activist based in Vancouver. He posts regularly on the StopWar.ca blog, where this article originally appeared on April 2, 2010: http://stopwarblog.blogspot.com/. StopWar.ca is Vancouver’s labour and community coalition of organizations united for justice and peace, and a member of the Canadian Peace Alliance.

What happens if a country goes bankrupt?

And what if its neighbours refuse to bail it out?

By Sachin Seth When Greece’s Panhellenic Socialist Movement took the reins of government in November of 2009, its leaders promised to save the country’s economy as it teetered on the edge of bankruptcy.

In March, five months later, the country was still being crushed by an Olympus-sized mountain of debt. Greece was running a deficit nearly five per cent higher than the average European Union (EU) nation, and its debt was close to 121 per cent of its GDP – that’s a lot.

As member of the EU, Greece couldn’t follow Argentina’s 2001 example of devaluing its currency to save itself from economic implosion. Instead, Prime Minister George Papandreou employed a series of cost-cutting measures, hoping that his government would cut the deficit and stabilize the country.

Papandreou pledged a 10 per cent cut in Social Security spending, a 90 per cent tax on private bankers’ bonuses and $6.5 billion USD in pay cuts and tax hikes. He also abolished state bank bonuses, and plans to implement a new tax system that will see wealthier Greeks carry more of the country’s financial burden.

Despite Papandreou’s efforts, the country remained in dire need of assistance. For a while, rumours of a new currency, solely for internal use, were sweeping Athens: something of a cross between a Euro and a Drachma, which analysts and critics alike affectionately referred to as the “Gyro.”

14 ryersonfreepress.ca

Papandreou probably could have persuaded the EU to agree on terms for a bailout simply by handing out Gyros to each minister. Instead, he went knocking on the doors of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, rulers of the most powerful economies in Europe.

But, as Jeffrey Kopstein, director of European Studies at the University of Toronto, pointed out to the Toronto Star, a bailout from one of these two powerhouses could inspire other troubled European economies, like Portugal, to ask for help.

Luckily for Greece (at least for now), at the Euro Summit in late March, the two nations swallowed their reservations and agreed, along with 14 other EU members, to pledge $44 billion USD to help save the Greek economy – but only if the country is unable to raise the necessary funds from international financial markets.

The deal emerged after a one-on-one discussion between Merkel and Sarkozy at an emergency meeting in Brussels during the summit. Its conditions stipulate that, if Greece defaults on its loans and is unable to borrow additional money at a reasonable rate, the IMF would play a substantial role in aiding the country, while most of the funds would come from 16 EU countries (to spare Greece the embarrassment of being bailed out by an organization whose focus is mainly developing nations).

Contrary to the opinions of analysts, however, the European Commission says Greece is “on track” to deliver on its debt promises, as long as it keeps a tight grip around its budget. That means Greece would not have to tap into that $44 billion safety net, and it would not need the help of the IMF. EU ministers back the Commission’s findings, an endorsement that carries the whiff of fairytale optimism. Although the deal isn’t a full bailout, the EU did, after much deliberation, recognize that it had to aid Greece to save it from running to the IMF. Papandreou is no Apollo – he can’t heal his country’s economic misfortune on his own.

Merkel and Sarkozy tossed Papandreou and the Greek nation an olive branch. But Merkel will have a tough time selling the deal to the citizens of her country; they very much oppose government involvement in Greece’s economic affairs. If Greece does indeed default, Germany would contribute the largest amount of money of the 16 nations, likely leading to widespread opposition among the German public.

Of course, the EU’s generous (albeit largely hypothetical offer) is not completely selfless. The main goal is to ensure the Greek economy doesn’t implode, for fear the blast would smash the Euro to bits. But after the aid agreement was announced, the Euro went up.

Analysts recognize that the EU’s inability to agree on a full bailout that doesn’t involve the IMF is a shortcoming, and something that could continue to affect negatively the Euro in coming weeks.

“We wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the Euro coming under renewed pressure as the package is only designed to be used only in the most extreme circumstance, which we clearly haven’t reached yet,” Adam Cole, chief currency strategist at RBC Capital Markets in London, told the Wall Street Journal.

Papandreou is making strides in the battle to save his country’s economy, but what the deal brokered at the summit will do for the EU currency remains to be seen.

PHOTO: Eusebius@Commons/Flickr

NEVER AGAIN. A special feature in honour of Holocaust Remembrance Day

Remembering the Holocaust

T

his year marks the sixty-fifth anniversary of the end of World War II, a global conflict that claimed the lives of nearly 60 million people over six years of total war.

It also marks the 65th anniversary of the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp, where over a million people were systematically murdered, 90 per cent of them Jews.

The systematic persecution and attempted extermination of Europe’s Jewish population over the years of the Third Reich in Germany are known today as the Holocaust, what many historians call the “greatest crime of the twentieth century.” The Holocaust refers to the six million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators from the rise of fascism in Germany in the 1930s to the end of World War II in 1945.

The Nazis also systematically targeted and murdered millions of other people during the Third Reich: Romani, Poles, Soviets, communists and socialists, trade union-

16 ryersonfreepress.ca

ists, political and religious dissidents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gays, people with disabilities and prisoners of war.

The total number of people killed in Nazi concentration camps – whether by gassing, firing squads, slave labour, disease or malnutrition – ranges from 10 to 17 million.

Scholars continue to debate whether the term Holocaust should include non-Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, although most acknowledge the disproportionate suffering of Jewish victims, in terms of the large percentage of Europe’s Jewish population that was killed. In 1933, European Jews numbered over nine million. Almost two thirds of them were killed in the Holocaust, a fact that compels most historians to describe the event as a genocide.

The Holocaust is unique in that it marks the first time in history that the full machinery of the modern industrial state was comprehensively and systematically organized to achieve the extermination of a particular group of people, based on their religion. At every level – economic, political, legal and social – the Nazi state attempted to target, isolate and murder Jewish people, cultivating anti-Semitism to achieve its ends. Nazi tactics ranged from the slow and gradual exclusion of Jews

from public life, and their isolation in disease-ridden ghettos, to their mass transfer to death camps all over Europe where they were killed in gas chambers or by slave labour.

The term “Holocaust” comes from the Greek for “sacrifice by fire” and is called the “Shoah” in Hebrew. Today the Holocaust is commemorated all over the world, and is marked by numerous days of remembrance and mourning.

January 27 is now marked as the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the date in 1945 when Soviet troops liberated AuschwitzBirkenau, just months before the German surrender that ended the war in Europe. In 2005, the United Nations designated January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, although it is also observed on other dates around the world by Jews and non-Jews alike.

In Canada, many Jewish Canadians refer to Holocaust Remembrance Day as Yom HaShoah, held annually on the twenty-seventh day of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, which usually falls sometime between March and April. The full name is Yom HaShoah Ve-Hagevurah, which means “Day of (remembrance of ) the Holocaust and Heroism.” This year Yom HaShoah is on April 11. Although there is no federal legislation recognizing

a Holocaust Memorial Day in Canada, it is widely observed by Jewish Canadians.

Manitoba is the only province that officially recognizes a Holocaust Memorial Day, following legislation passed in 2000.

In Israel, Yom HaShoah is an official state holiday, and will also be marked on April 11. Memorial services are generally held the day before, as the official holiday begins at sunset.

The Ryerson Free Press will mark Yom HaShoah this year by publishing a special feature about the Holocaust, one that retells both the traumatic experience of Jewish suffering during the rise of fascism in Europe, and the heroic and inspiring resistance of European Jews and their allies who fought back against Nazi persecution.

We hope that it will serve as a valuable resource for our readers who share our commitment to anti-oppression and anti-racism, and as a reminder that, in the darkest moments of our history, there will always be resistance to injustice.

That resistance, more than anything else, should be the lesson we draw from the experience of the Holocaust, a lesson that affirms our common humanity and the real potential for human liberation. —Nora Loreto, Editor-in-Chief

I

t’s impossible to talk about fascism without looking at the economic and social struggles that were underway in the first half of the twentieth century.

The outbreak of World War I ushered in a period of war and revolution on a global scale. Ordinary people rose up all over Europe—trying to end not only the war, but also the conditions that gave rise to it.

Revolutions including millions of workers took place in Russia, Germany, Italy and elsewhere in Europe, while general strikes and uprisings spread across the globe—including the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919.

Most of the revolutions were unsuccessful, except in Russia where workers briefly established the first genuine workers’ state in world history.

Elsewhere in Europe, although capitalism had been restored to power, the contradictions in the world economy that contributed to the outbreak of World War I remained, and contributed to the economic and social struggles that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s.

In 1929, the US stock market collapsed, creating a global economic meltdown. In places like Germany, already suffering from the terms of settlement of the Versailles Treaty and paying massive reparations to the victors of World War I, economic crisis affected the whole country. The world was in an economic depression with no obvious way out.

In response, two movements emerged that attempted to solve the crisis.

The first was the Communist movement. Inspired by the initial success of the Russian Revolution, millions of people around the world turned to communism as an alternative to the capitalist economic system that had created so much inequality and that had led to World War I. Despite the defeats of revolution immediately after the war, Communist Parties around the world continued to grow and wield more influence, playing a decisive role in the struggles of the 1920s and 1930s.

Related to the Communist

movement and influenced by Marxist ideas, social democracy—what is called “reformism” today—was another response to the economic crisis, but one whose objective was to work within the existing system (not to replace it) and to follow constitutional laws.

The second movement was fascism, a movement based on the petit bourgeoisie—what today is called the middle classes (small business owners, shop-keepers, nonunionized professionals, bureaucrats, etc.)—that sought to restore capitalism’s health by physically defeating the working-class movement. Fascism came to power in Italy in the early 1920s under Benito Mussolini, and in Germany a decade later under Adolph Hitler.

Today, fascism is a term that many people use casually to describe racists, anti-Semites, authoritarians or even just the right-wing. Some people describe the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as “fascist.” The US-based “Tea Party” movement uses the terms “fascist,” “communist,” and “socialist” interchangeably, although there are dramatic differences among these terms.

By contrast, historians and political scientists attempt to define fascism scientifically – usually in class terms, and in the context of a critique of the capitalist system. Leon Trotsky – a leader of the Russian Revolution who had been exiled from the Soviet Union by Joseph Stalin in 1929 – wrote extensively about the nature of fascism and the threat it posed to human civilization. He also wrote extensively about the best way to resist the rise of fascism, harshly criticizing the response of the Communist Parties that failed to stop it.

Despite the fact that Trotsky wrote in exile—observing events in Europe through news reports and letters—anti-fascist activists and scholars continue to draw on his works today. Trotsky describes fascism as follows: “The historic function of fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organizations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery.”

Describing the rise of Nazism in Europe, Trotsky says: “German fascism… raised

itself to power on the backs of the petit bourgeoisie, which it turned into a battering ram against the organizations of the working class and the institutions of democracy.”

During periods of prolonged economic crisis, the struggle between the working class (anyone who has to work to make a living) and the ruling class (those who own or control what society produces and how it gets distributed) intensifies, often bringing the two groups into sharp conflict with one another.

The struggle between those two groups has become more obvious today, following the collapse of global financial markets. Workers all over the world have been under pressure to accept lower wages, give up their pensions or face lay-offs. Unemployment has reached its highest levels in years. While workers make concessions, the corporations and the banks seek government hand-outs to increase profit margins.

Sometimes this struggle intensifies to the point that massive social upheaval is the result. This was the case in the early decades of the twentieth century when millions of people around the world were attracted to the ideas of communism and socialism as a means to end war and economic crisis. Communists helped organize mass strikes that allowed workers to express their collective potential strength, shutting down their workplaces— even if only temporarily—and stopping capitalist production and the creation of profit.

But the working class and the ruling class are not the only groups affected by global economic crisis. Within that framework, there are other classes that exist in between.

Trotsky uses the term “petit bourgeoisie” to describe what some identify as the middle classes today: small business owners, shop-keepers, non-unionized professionals, bureaucrats, etc. This group of people—while often connected to the working class, and sometimes rising from it—does not have the same collective power as workers do because they cannot be organized along the same lines. They are atomized and isolated from one another.

Trotsky argues that this class can become the vehicle for fascism. He says that fas-

cism elevates “those classes that are immediately above the working class and that are ever in dread of being forced down into its ranks; it organizes and militarizes them… and it directs them to the extirpation of proletarian organizations, from the most revolutionary to the most conservative.”

This contradictory position means that the middle class can be pulled in one of two directions, depending on the strength of class forces.

When the working class is strong and winning victories, the middle class is pulled in their direction—in a supportive way. But in periods of economic crisis, the middle class can come to see the working class as a threat to their own prosperity and the health of the economic system. As a result, it can be drawn to fascist parties that aim to defeat the working class.

But because the middle class doesn’t have the same potential collective strength of the working class, fascists need the political and economic backing of big business and the corporations – often called the ruling class—in order to mobilize middle class support as an effective force against workers and their organizations.

This is what happened in Italy and Germany in the early twentieth century. The terrible economic crisis that swept the world in the wake of the Wall Street crash in 1929 threatened the livelihood and position of Europe’s middle classes, especially in Germany where people lost all their savings, inflation went through the roof and millions became unemployed. The corporations and the banks could no longer produce profit competitively.

The survival of the capitalist system was in doubt.

Big business in Germany was more frightened of the threat of Communism and the influence of the Russian Revolution than it was of fascism.

As a result, fascism became the saviour of capitalism, by defeating the working class

and all forms of mass organization that could mount any effective resistance.

The Nazis built fascism on two fronts: in parliament where they contested elections, and in the streets where fascist thugs inflicted physical violence and intimidation on workers, socialists, communists, Jews and other oppressed groups. The strategies worked hand-in-hand to consolidate the Nazis’ power.

Fascism relies on racist ideology, including anti-Semitism, to bind its supporters together, and to find a scapegoat for the growing anger over the effects of an economic crisis.

In the case of German fascism, the Nazis exploited anger about the global depression, mass unemployment, hyperinflation, Germany’s defeat in World War I, the reparations the German government was forced to pay, and the impoverishment of Germany’s middle class—and made Jews the scapegoat.

But the principal objective of fascism is not necessarily to exterminate a particular racial, ethnic or religious group from society – although this was certainly a means to an end for the Nazis. German fascism was mainly concerned with the restoration of German capitalism as the most powerful force in Europe (and eventually the world), and later believed that the “Final Solution”—the organized and state-led genocide of Jews— would help them achieve their goal.

This is why communists, socialists and trade unionists were among the first groups targeted, arrested and sent to concentration camps immediately after the Nazis seized power. Germany’s mass working-class organizations had the potential to stop the Nazis – both in the streets and in parliament—and Hitler knew it.

Once the leadership of the largest opposition forces to fascism had been eliminated, the Nazis were able to consolidate their power, and expand their terror against all those who opposed their agenda. The defeat of the German working class paved the way for the Holocaust, removing the last line of defence of German workers against the horrors of Nazi tyranny. —James Clark, Features and Opinions Editor

What is fascism?

Ryerson Free Press April 2010 17

Could Hitler have been

stopped?

How German fascism came to power

M

any historians discuss the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1920s and 30s as if nothing could have stopped it. This is not true. Fascism’s rise to power encountered obstacles and opposition all along the way, and could only stay in power by terrorizing its opposition.

Adolph Hitler initially attempted to seize power in Germany by force alone, but his “Beer Hall Putsch” in 1923 was a complete disaster. Following this defeat, Hitler began to seek power through elections, by trying to establish the Nazis as a legitimate right-wing party within the German parliament.

This is typical of fascist organizations, which fight for power both by standing in elections and by organizing street gangs that physically attack and terrorize their opponents.

In parliament, however, the Nazis never won an outright majority, and only came to power because the two largest opposition forces that far outnumbered them – the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the German Communist Party (KPD) – failed to form a united front against fascism. The SPD and the KPD spent more time attacking each other than they did the Nazis.

It is a common misconception that Germans voted for Hitler. In fact, when Hitler became chancellor, he was not elected. He was appointed by President Hindenburg on January 30, 1933. Unfortunately, the SPD refused to oppose his appointment on the grounds that it was “constitutional,” and out of fear of provoking the Nazis. In February, the Nazis organized the Reichstag fire, blaming the Communists.

President Hindenburg suspended the constitution, eliminating all civil liberties. The SPD and KPD leadership were arrested.

When new elections took place on March 5, 1933, despite the crackdown on all opposition forces, the Nazis still failed to win a majority.

The KPD called a strike – finally seeking support from the SPD – but because it had spent so much time discrediting the SPD among huge sections of workers – the strike failed.

By the end of March, Hitler forced a vote in the Reichstag to award him dictatorial powers, which needed a two-thirds vote. Only with most opposition leaders and members of parliament in jail, did Hitler succeed in seizing power. Within days, the Nazis formally took over the German trade union leadership and began sending labour leaders to concentration camps.

Just months earlier, during November elections in 1932, and before Hitler was appointed chancellor, the SPD and the KPD won a combined vote that won a majority over the Nazis. In the last free election of the Weimar republic, the two largest parties in the German parliament failed to form a united bloc against fascism that could have stopped Hitler.

In the 1920s, Benito Mussolini led the fascists to power in Italy using similar means: by organizing right-wing gangs of street thugs, also known as Blackshirts, to attack communists, socialists and trade unionists. Mussolini also tried to build a nationalist political organization that sought power from Italy’s ruling class. Initially, Italy’s rulers distrusted Mussolini, but their fear of Italy’s increasingly powerful workers’ movement eventually led them to back the fascists.

These events show that the rise of fascism was far from inevitable. Hitler could never win a majority, and had to arrest the opposition leadership before he could take over parliament. If the two largest opposition groups in Germany had formed a united bloc against Hitler – both in parliament and in the streets (through demonstrations and strikes) – they could have stopped fascism in Germany.

Even as fascism spread across Europe, workers continued to resist – sometimes by leading illegal strikes and protests, or by supporting underground resistance movements. These events run counter to some views of history that suggest that ordinary people in Europe fully embraced fascism, and were inherently anti-Semitic. Fascism took power by force, and could only hold power by destroying all democratic institutions, and by physically eliminating any opposition.

Today, the threat of fascism has re-appeared in Europe (although not on the scale of the 1930s) where neo-Nazi organizations have attempted to establish themselves as “respectable” political parties. Some of them, like the British National Party, have won election to office, while organizing gangs of street thugs to intimidate immigrants, refugees, Muslims, Jews, gays and racialized communities.

Activists have attempted to learn the lessons of the movements against fascism in the 1930s, recognizing that building maximum unity among all anti-fascists is key, and that fascists must be confronted in mass mobilizations in the streets, and denied a platform in elections. Unite Against Fascism, a mass anti-racist and anti-fascist organization in Britain, is currently involved in these kinds of movements against British fascists who are attempting to exploit the effects of the ongoing global economic crisis.

Perhaps the most important lesson about the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s is that it could have been stopped. Likewise, the greatest tribute to be paid to all those who died in the Holocaust, or who were killed by Nazi terror, is to ensure that today’s political and economic uncertainty do not give rise to contemporary fascist movements.

“Never again!” must be more than just a slogan; it should be a guiding principal that motivates us to oppose oppression and injustice everywhere we see it. —James Clark, Features and Opinions Editor Check out the website of Unite Against Fascism, the largest anti-fascist organization in Britain: http://www.uaf.org.uk/.

18 ryersonfreepress.ca

Marek EdelmaN:

“

Now the SS men were ready to attack. In closed formations, stepping haughtily and loudly, they marched into the seemingly dead streets of the Central Ghetto. Their triumph appeared to be complete.

“It looked as if this superbly equipped modern army had scared off the handful of bravado-drunk men, as if those few immature boys had at last realized that there was no point in attempting the unfeasible.

“But no, they did not scare us and we were not taken by surprise. We were only waiting an opportune moment.

“Battle groups barricaded at the four corners of the street opened concentric fire on them.

“Strange projectiles began exploding everywhere, the hand grenades of our own make, the lone machine pistol sent shots through the air now and then – ammunition had to be conserved carefully.

“They attempted a retreat but their path was cut. Their dead soon littered the street.”

Thus Marek Edelman describes the first major battle for the Warsaw Jewish Ghetto in his stunning memoir The Ghetto Fights.

Edelman, who died at the age of 90 on October 2, 2009 in his native Poland, was the last survivor of the five-person command group which led the Ghetto uprising. The above passage describes the beginning of the 1943 uprising against the Nazi Holocaust in Poland.

By the time of the uprising, two thirds of the 400,000 Jewish men, women and children sealed in the ghetto had already been deported to the death camps. The uprising was triggered by the Jewish Fighting Organization – in Polish, Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or “Zob.” It was formed from three political parties – the Anti-Zionist Jewish Socialist Bund, the Socialist Zionists and the Communists.

Two days fighting resulted in “something unprecedented”, he continues. “Three officers with lowered machine pistols appeared. They wore white rosettes in their buttonholes: emissaries.

“They desired to negotiate with the Area Command. They proposed a fifteen minute truce to remove the dead and wounded.

“Firing was our answer. Every

house remained a hostile fortress. From every storey, from every window, bullets sought hated German helmets, hated German hearts.”

The end came only when the Nazis set the Ghetto ablaze. Edelman was one of the lucky few to escape by crawling through underground sewers. The fire was the only way the Nazis could “save their military honour.” Heinrich Himmler, Nazi chief military thug, had panicked. He ordered the total destruction of the Ghetto.

“Otherwise,” he said, “we shall never pacify Warsaw, which continues to be a dangerous centre of disintegration and diversion.”

Himmler was right about that.

A year later, the Polish Underground, inspired by the Jewish ghetto fighters despite their defeat, led the city-wide uprising against the Nazi occupation.

Remarkably, Edelman took part in that uprising too.

Edelman’s remarks about “hand grenades of our own make” and the “lone machine pistol” firing only occasionally to conserve ammunition – comments echoed in other memoirs – have been seized upon by some historians. Don’t they prove the deep-rooted, endemic anti-Semitism, the anti-Jewish hatred, of wider Polish society? Why, even the anti-Nazi Polish Underground was unable or unwilling to arm the Ghetto properly.

Marek Edelman always dismissed these accusations. In 1989, I visited him at his home in Lodz, Poland, to seek his agreement to produce a first British edition of The Ghetto Fights.

He told me then that nearly 50 years of reflection had not changed his mind about the basic decency of the Polish people. His humanist Judaism and trenchant political beliefs forged in the struggles of his teenage years as a cadre of the Bund had instilled in him an unshakeable belief that racism could be overcome, and in the potential enormous power of solidarity.

Yes, there was a weakness of solidarity from the Polish Underground in 1943, but it reflected their own weakness, lack of arms and terrible sense of their own political isolation.

The Red Army might have helped deliver the knock-out blow against Hitler in the end, but the 1944 Polish uprising was defeated because Stalin ordered them to halt outside Warsaw.

Some Israeli ideologues and politicians have bitterly resented Edelman’s decision to live in Poland, and to ignore or

criticize Israel.

Some have even criticized his positive attitude to Polish solidarity. But “Antek” Zukerman agreed with Edelman. Antek was Zob’s liaison with the Polish Underground, Edelman’s comrade in the Zob leadership – and a staunch Zionist who ended his days on the Ghetto Fighters Kibbutz in Israel.

Antek watched the Ghetto burn from the outside. In his own astonishing memoir, A Surplus of Memory, he writes, “With my own eyes I saw Poles crying, just standing and crying.

“One day the ghetto was shrouded in smoke and I saw masses of Poles, without a trace of spiteful malice.”

Antek even called it a “sin” to condemn the Polish people. He also knew all about Polish solidarity. Here he is describing rank-and-file Polish Communists: “Until they were corrupted by authority and even more so by Stalin, those people demonstrated exceptional personal and movement integrity.”

The basic conviction of the Ghetto fighters was that the struggle of fellow Poles suffering at the hands of the Nazis was the same struggle as their own. This led to the publication, as the Ghetto was on the brink of collapse, of a “Manifesto to the Poles,” which must rank as one of the last century’s greatest appeals to liberty, equality and fraternity.

“Poles, citizens, soldiers of Freedom!” it begins. “Through the din of German cannon, destroying the homes of our mothers, wives and children; through the noise of their machine guns, seized by us in the fight against the cowardly German police and SS men... Through the smoke of the Ghetto that was set on fire, and the blood of its mercilessly killed defenders, we, the slaves of the Ghetto, convey heartfelt greetings to you.

“We are well aware that you have been witnessing breathlessly, with broken hearts, with tears of compassion, with horror and enthusiasm, the war that we have been waging against every brutal occupier these past few days.

“Every doorstep in the Ghetto has become a stronghold and shall remain a fortress until the end! All of us will probably perish in the fight, but we shall never surrender!

“We, as well as you, are burning with the desire to punish the enemy for his crimes.

“It is a fight for our freedom as well as yours! We shall avenge the gory deeds at Oswiecim, Treblinka, Belzec and Majdanek!

“Long live freedom! Death to the hangmen and the killer! We must continue our mutual struggle against the occupier until the very end!

“Signed, the Jewish Armed Resistance Organization.”

Marek’s fight for freedom did not end in the Warsaw Ghetto. After the war ended, Edelman became a heart surgeon in his native Poland – continuing the task of saving lives, as he saw it. And he remained politically active all his life, supporting the independent Solidarity trade union movement that would remove the Stalinist regime in Poland in the 1980s.

At Solidarity’s congress in 1981, in the shipbuilding city of Gdansk, where the union was founded, a veteran of the Polish Underground that led the 1944 uprising against the Nazis, one year after the Ghetto uprising, halted the applause for himself. He pointed to a hero “of considerably greater stature” in the hall – Dr. Marek Edelman.

The Communist authorities, fearful that Edelman would emerge as an iconic figure for Solidarity, offered him belated Polish military honours, which he refused.

In the summer of 2002, Edelman, still going strong, intervened in Israel’s show trial of the now jailed Palestinian resistance leader, Marwan Barghouti.

He wrote a letter of solidarity to the Palestinian movement, and, though he criticized the suicide bombers, its tone infuriated the Israeli government and its press.

Edelman had always resented Israel’s claim on the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as a symbol of Jewish liberation.

Now he said this belonged to the Palestinians. He addressed his letter to the Palestinian “Zob:” the “commanders of the Palestinian military, paramilitary and partisan operations” and “all the soldiers of the Palestinian fighting organizations”.

The old Jewish anti-Nazi Ghetto fighter had placed his immense moral authority at the disposal of the only side he deemed worthy of it. —John Rose This article originally appeared in Socialist Worker (UK), issue 2173, October 17, 2009: http://www.socialistworker. co.uk/art.php?id=19233.

John Rose is a British Marxist of Jewish descent who teaches sociology at Southwark College and London Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom. He is the author of The Myths of Zionism.

the ghetto fighter Ryerson Free Press April 2010 19

Murder by assembly line How the capitalist crisis in Germany unleashed the forces that produced the Holocaust

20   ryersonfreepress.ca

Auschwitz gas chamber.

T

he last century was the bloodiest in history. The Holocaust, the Nazis’ attempted annihilation of Jews and other “sub-humans,” claimed over 12 million victims and was its most brutal act. It was not the only genocide. There was the attempt by the fledgling Turkish state to wipe out the Armenians from within its borders in the second decade of the twentieth century. In the last decade there was the slaughter in Rwanda.

There were other atrocities too – the use of atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, imperialist wars such as in Vietnam, and appalling conflicts such as in the Congo.

Yet the Holocaust rightly evokes for most people the ultimate in inhumanity. Hence the outrage and revulsion when Ernst Zündel, David Irving and other Holocaust deniers claim that it was “a detail in history.” However, it was not just the scale and savagery of the slaughter, but the thoroughly capitalist nature of the Holocaust – both in its planning and implementation – that makes it unique.

In a BBC documentary on Auschwitz a few years ago, one Nazi officer described it as “murder by assembly line,” as the most advanced industrial methods were turned to killing.

In essence, it was an attempt to strip humans of their humanity, to justify the idea that they are subhuman as a prelude to their extermination.

As Primo Levi, the Italian Auschwitz survivor put it: “Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself.

“He will be a man whose life and death can be lightly decided with no sense of hu-

PHOTO: NIKONMANIA/FLICKR

man affinity, in the most fortunate of cases, on the basis of a pure judgment of utility.

It is in this way that one can understand the double sense of the term ‘extermination camp,’ and it is now clear what we seek to express by the phrase ‘to lie on the bottom.’”

The capitalist nature of the Holocaust ran through from the conference that planned the slaughter at Wannsee in January 1942 through to the role of industrialists and the civil servants. Jews were not only exterminated immediately, but could, particularly in times of labour shortage, be worked to death as slave labour.

Yet unlike previous barbarities, such as the slave trade, there was no overriding economic logic to the death camps and the mass murder.

It often appeared irrational – industrial managers using slave labour complained of how wasteful it was to constantly have to train up new workers as the SS ensured that Jewish slave labour did not live too long. On occasion, the transport of Jews ran counter to the war effort. On D-Day itself, in June 1944, the main worry of the German High Command, faced with the Allied invasion of Europe, was the transport of a few hundred Greek Jews to Auschwitz.

Yet as the German army was thrown back on the Eastern and Western Fronts, the Nazis’ commitment to wiping out the Jews of Europe remained. The one thing holding the Nazi cadre together was the belief that as they went down they would take millions of Jews and other “subhumans” with them.

This has encouraged some to argue that the Holocaust was some inexplicable outburst of “evil” with no connection to the capitalist system.

The connection is there. Germany’s leading engineering firms competed for the contract to build the most efficient crematoria. However, the link is not primarily through the complicity of firms such as IG Farben or IBM in the execution of the Holocaust, but in the way the Nazis came to power and maintained their rule in alliance with big business.

Historian Ian Kershaw, who was adviser to the BBC series on Auschwitz, has described how Germany’s elites hoisted the Nazis into power in January 1933.

Hitler did not win a majority of seats in the German parliament. For all the Nazis’ rhetoric of standing up for the “little man” on the street, Hitler required the support of the representatives of the capitalist class to seize power.

They saw in him a force that could destroy working-class resistance. His program of military expansion, particularly into Eastern Europe, chimed with the historic aims of German imperialism.

The Nazis were the barbaric product of the crisis of capitalism in Germany between the wars, and the Holocaust was a product of their twisted world outlook which had at its heart the notion that the Jews were a sub-human enemy. The Holocaust became central to the Nazis, while the Nazis and the successful outcome of the war were central to the interests of German capital.

The German invasion of the USSR in 1941 unleashed murder on a vast scale. The Nazis found they now controlled areas with many millions of Jews – there were less than half a million within the borders of Germany itself. Forced Jewish emigration from the lands the Nazis controlled was no longer an issue. The “solution to the Jewish problem” was to murder them.

In the first week of the invasion, more Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen (the SS killing squads) than in the previous eight years of Nazi rule in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and half of Poland.

Indeed, until mid-1941, there were more communists and socialists in Nazi concentration camps than Jews.

The Einsatzgruppen moved in behind the German army. One historian summed up what happened in the city of Bialystok, which had some 50,000 Jews, when the Nazis entered on 27 June 1941: “Dante-esque scenes took place in these streets. Jews were taken out of the houses, put against the walls and shot... At least 800 Jews had been locked in the Great Synagogue before it had

been set on fire... the soldiers were throwing hand grenades into the houses.”

The Einsatzgruppen also attempted to involve indigenous populations in doing their killing. Often they were successful and many of those accused of war crimes were Latvian, Lithuanian or Ukranian.

In other places, though, the Nazis couldn’t make the locals into murderers.

For example, a report prepared in October 1941 complained that Einsatzgruppen A operating in Estonia could not “provoke spontaneous anti-Jewish demonstrations with ensuing pogroms” because the population in their area lacked “sufficient enlightenment” to murder the Jews.

The need to kill Jews more efficiently and quickly, and the effects of face-to-face slaughter on the German soldiers, persuaded the Nazi leadership that a more impersonal method of slaughter was preferable.

The Nazis went to great lengths to keep the extermination camps secret from both the Jews and the German population. The Allies did get to know about the death camps. But Allied leaders told delegations asking them to bomb the railway into Auschwitz and the crematoria blocks that they had no proof of mass murder. Saving the Jews of Europe was not an Allied war aim.

We should remember all this as we commemorate the Holocaust. Keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive will not by itself stop the rise of fascism in the twentyfirst century. But it does make the Nazis’ job harder, which is why today’s neo-fascists and their ilk go to such lengths to deny it. The Holocaust also stands as a terrible warning of the barbaric forces capitalism can unleash when it goes into a deep crisis and its existence is at stake. —Henry Maitles Henry Maitles has written extensively on the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of members of his family in Lithuania and Poland. This article originally appeared in Socialist Worker (UK), issue 1936, January 29, 2005: http://www.socialistworker. co.uk/art.php?id=5685.

Ryerson Free Press April 2010 21

S

Hope from Holocaust resistance My family and their community in Piotrkow, Poland, suffered a hard fate under Hitler. The Nazis forced the city’s 25,000 Jews into the first ghetto in occupied Poland. The resistance movement in the ghetto was unable to link up with resistance outside. Only a couple of hundred Piotrkow Jews escaped death.

But my mother and father then lived in Paris. They were active in the ‘Union des Juifs,’ a Jewish resistance organization closely linked to socialist parties and other anti-Nazi groups. When the Nazis started rounding up Jews in France, the Union des Juifs hid thousands of Jewish children among anti-Nazis across the country. My parents were killed. But a brave peasant family in Auvergne, at great risk, took me in and hid me. And that is

22 ryersonfreepress.ca

why I am here today.

The Nazis were defeated, and the resistance dealt blows to racism that are felt in France even to this day.

There is a lesson here for us today.

Hitler seemed all-powerful at the time.

But he could not crush the resistance, a broad people’s alliance embracing many religions and many political viewpoints.

We need that kind of alliance in resisting oppression today – including the oppression of the Palestinians.

What makes Israel An apartheid state?

The United Nations has defined apartheid as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.”

The apartheid concept was instituted in North America when indigenous peoples were restricted to reservations in remote corners of the lands stolen from them. The South African Dutch settlers and Israeli government further developed the concept.

Eliminating Israeli apartheid involves three simple measures: 1) The right of exiled Palestinians to return to their country; 2) An end to Israeli occupation of Palestinian land; 3) The right of Palestinians within Israel to full equality.

On July 9, 2005, 170 Palestinian civil society organizations called for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against the institutions of Israeli apartheid. The BDS movement helped to end the crime of South African apartheid. Since 2005, the BDS movement against Israeli apartheid movement has won wide support around the world.

Nelson Mandela, the great leader of BDS against South African Apartheid, said, that justice for the Palestinians is “the greatest moral issue of the age.”

Support from Jewish community

Holocaust survivor speaks out

tudents in more than sixty cities took part this year in educational meetings on conditions in Palestine as part of Israeli Apartheid Week, held from March 1 to 7. It’s a controversial event for some, and not popular in Canadian government circles. Some criticize it for supposedly dishonouring the victims of Hitler’s Holocaust.

I am a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust, the Nazis’ mass murder of Europe’s Jews. The tragic experience of my family and community under Hitler makes me alert to the suffering of other peoples denied their human rights today – including the Palestinians.

True, Hitler’s Holocaust was unique.

The Palestinians are victims of ethnic cleansing and apartheid. Hitler started with that, but went on to extermination.

In my family’s city in Poland, Piotrkow, 99 per cent of the Jews perished.

Yet for me, the Israeli government’s actions toward the Palestinians awaken horrific memories of my family’s experiences under Hitlerism: the inhuman walls, the check points, the daily humiliations, the systematic deprivation, diseases and killings. There’s no escaping the fact that Israel has occupied the entire country of Palestine, and taken most of the land, while the Palestinians have been expelled, walled off, and deprived of civil and human rights.

Many levels of the Canadian government have recently been attacking the movement against Israeli apartheid, saying that it is anti-Jewish in character.

This is bizarre. When Nelson Mandela opposed South African apartheid, was this anti-White? No, Mandela proposed that all South Africans, Whites included, join on a basis of democracy and equality in freeing the country from racial oppression. And that is precisely the proposal that the movement against Israeli apartheid makes to all inhabitants of Israel/ Palestine.

We are told that Israeli Jews will never accept such a democratic solution.

Why? Is there something wrong with their genes or their culture? The very notion is absurd – in fact, its logic is anti-Jewish.

Opposition to Israeli apartheid is based on hope – a hope founded on the common humanity of the region’s Jewish and Palestinian inhabitants.

I recently discovered that my name is included in a website list of “7,000 self-hating Jews.” They need to add a couple of zeros to that total. In my experience, support of Palestine is stronger in the Jewish population than in society as a whole. And Jewish people work alongside their Palestinian brothers and sisters as a strong component of the Palestine solidarity movement.

Why do they call us “self-hating?” Because they define Judaism as support for the present policies of the Israeli government. They see Judaism as nothing more than a rationale for oppressing Palestinians. What an insult to Jewish religion and culture!

We, as Jewish supporters of the Palestinian resistance, stand on the finest traditions of Judaism, and its great contributions to human religion, philosophy, science, and solidarity through the ages. For us, Judaism is universal. The rights we expect for the Jewish people, we demand for all humanity – above all, for the Palestinians that the Israeli government oppresses in our name. —Suzanne Weiss Suzanne Weiss is a Holocaust survivor and member of Not In Our Name: Jewish Voices Against Zionism (www.nion.org) and of the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid (www.caiaweb.org).

Who’s getting screwed the most?

Take the 2010 Budget Quiz, and find out Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives 1. The number of unemployed grew from 1.1 million to 1.6 million Canadians during this recession. Before the recession, 43 per cent of unemployed Canadians got jobless benefits. The government loosened some Employment Insurance (EI) rules for some people but those improvements aren’t permanent. Some are scheduled to end in May 2010, some in spring 2011, and others not till the fall 2011. What proportion of the jobless get benefits today? a. 83 % b. 67 % c. 48 % d. 59 %

6. With the current deficit, we’re told that we don’t have the “fiscal room” to build a better Canada. However, today’s federal government revenue has dropped precipitously due to corporate tax cuts and cuts to the GST. When was the last time that federal government revenues were this low (as a portion of the Canadian economy)? a. 1998 b. 1988 c. 1978 d. 1968 e. 1958

2. During the last recession (1990-91), the number of unemployed rose to 1.7 million Canadians.

What proportion of them got jobless benefits?

7. Largely unmentioned in this year’s budget is the fact that significant corporate tax cuts have been introduced. By 2013, how much of the projected federal deficit will be the result of corporate tax cuts introduced this year?

a. 65 % b. 83 % c. 49 % d. 75 %

a. 25 % b. 45 % c. 55 % d. 75 %

3. The government said the purpose of stimulus was to get people back to work. Its Action Plan promised to create or maintain 220,000 jobs.

How many jobs did it create or maintain thus far?

8. One of the areas to see significant cuts in Budget 2010 is Foreign Aid, which was cut by $4.5 billion (over five years). Lester B. Pearson’s goal was to have all developed countries devote 0.7 % of their GDP to Foreign Aid. Canada currently contributes 0.30 %. What will Canada’s contribution (as a proportion of GDP) be in five years?

a. 190,000 b. 50,000 c. 135,000 d. Not clear 4. Inadequate pension and retirement income is a huge concern for aging and elderly Canadians in the wake of the financial meltdown. The government has addressed this issue by: a. Increasing seniors’ income supplements b. Introducing pension insurance c. Enhancing the Canada Pension Plan d. Doing nothing 5. More students are investing in post-secondary education today than ever before, but with rising tuition fees and work that’s both hard-to-find and low-paid, most are entering their careers buried under a mountain of debt. In 1990, the average debt level for a bachelor’s degree was $10,500.

Today’s average student debt in Ontario is: a. $24,500 b. $12,000 c. $22,000 d. $31,000

a. 0.45 % b. 0.35 % c. 0.25 % d. 0.15 % 9. The 2010 Budget did not introduce many surprises. Of all the spending in the budget, what percentage had already been announced? a. 94 % b. 84 % c. 74 % d. 64 % 10. Although many commentators mentioned that the Defence budget had been cut, it received a much lighter treatment than any other federal department. The capping of all other departments will save $7 billion over five years. If the Department of National Defence had also been capped, what would have been saved over five years? a. $3 billion b. $4 billion c. $5 billion d. $6 billion

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives is Canada’s progressive policy research institute. Check out its quiz online at www.policyalternatives.ca/multimedia/test-quiz.

1. (c) Only 48 % of Canada’s jobless get benefits.

2. (b) In the last recession, 83 % of the unemployed got jobless benefits.

3. (d) It’s not clear. The Budget states up to 135,000 jobs have been created or maintained, but this number comes from a macro-economic model. The government cannot tell us which stimulus initiative created these jobs, where they have been created, or what kinds of jobs they are because it decided not to systematically track the number of direct jobs created, from the ground up.

4. (d) Doing nothing: In the Budget 2008, the government provided tax breaks for couples with one person brining in high pensions (income splitting) and introduced a new tax-free savings vehicle (TSFA) for all those who are able to save. In the latest budget, they announced a new national holiday – a Senior’s Day – and have promised to chat about pensions with the provinces.

5. (c) Today’s average student debt is $22,000.

6. (e) 1958.

7. (d) Corporate tax rates ate continuing to decline even in this time of fiscal restraint. They are going down so much over the coming years that by 2013-14, corporate tax cuts implemented this year will be running at $6.3 billion a year.

8. (c) Canada’s contribution (as a proportion of GDP) will dip down to 0.25 %.

9. (a) 94 % of the spending of this budget had already been announced.

10. (d) $6 billion: The Department of National Defence makes up approximately 1/5th of all program spending and is one of the primary drivers of the expansion in program spending.

Answers:

PHOTO: aaron_anderer/FLICKR

Ryerson Free Press April 2010 23

CULTURE Journalists covering Haiti asked to consider cultural blinders

By Amanda Connon-Unda, Culture Editor On Tuesday March 16, the Canadian Journalism Foundation presented “Stories from Haiti.” The discussion with reporters who were there was moderated by journalist Sally Armstrong, and featured Maclean’s foreign correspondent Michael Petrou, Toronto Star reporter and columnist Catherine Porter, the Globe and Mail’s reporter Anna Mehler Paperny and photographer Fernando Morales. Following the journalists’ reflections on covering the massive earthquake in Haiti an audience Q&A prompted a discussion about the racialized patterns of aid and the cultural blinders that journalists need to consider when working abroad.

“In whatever we do, journalists have dilemas on their hands,” said Armstrong that night. “It’s easy to accuse people from the bleechers about media coverage,” she explained.

“But, what’s the journalists’ role in a disaster area?” she asked. “Some people call us vultures of sorrow.”

Fernando Morales showed his slideshow of photos taken in Haiti. In one picture the justice palace is damaged and a long line of people are waiting at the UN station for food. In another, people rescue things from the rubble. As another slide went up the audience starred at a displaced persons camp where clean sheets were hung as people were “trying to live like normal,” said Morales. But living like ‘normal’ is hard, as another photo that followed revealed. In it, photos of now dead children were placed amidst the rubble outside a school.

In several of Morales’ portraits there was a look of sadness and desperation on many men’s faces as they waited for aid. Morales said he had witnessed the police and UN using pepper spray to control the growing crowds of people.

Michael Petrou too recalled the fear of personal violence that Haitians experienced, in addion to the devestation of the quake. Petrou’s return to Haiti was a follow up to his 2005 visit when he covered the over-crowded penitentiaries in Port-au-Prince. He said on this visit he reported that after the earth quake the prisoners had escaped from the same prison he’d visited in 2005.

Unlike the other journalists at the event, at age 23 Anna Mehler Paperny was completely green to foreign assignments. She spent two weeks in Haiti and when she arrived she asked herself amongst the rubble, “What’s the story I’m

telling here?” She answered her own question by saying, “The journalism doesn’t actually change. You’re still telling the same story despite being foreign. You still need to talk to local people like you would in Toronto.” The smell of dead bodies was pervasive, she said, but “What’s scarier is being face to face with people alive now, who might not be in a week.” She said, “You’re inability to help is unpalatable.”

Catherine Porter described a journalistic dilemma she encountered. She said, “You don’t have access to intellectual academic sources.”

“It’s raw journalism. You start reporting what you see, without having experts to bounce your opinions off of.” Porter noted it was hard to find professors of development and nursing but she also said, “It’s a question of who speaks,” it’s important to give regular people a voice. At the time, the voices of the NGOs were prominent and easy for her to find.

“It was weird to be a white woman reporting,” she said.

“When I got my notebook out people would think that I was an aid worker…People wanted to tell me their stories,” she said.

From the audience microphone Tim Knight, an acclaimed documentary filmmaker who has worked in the African continent, asked the journalists, “How did your white skin affect the stories you got back from people?”

While the reporters acknowledged that their white skin often got them mistaken as aid workers, they did not articulate how their cultural outsider status may have changed how local Haitians interacted with them on the basis of race.

Porter said, “I went to people’s homes. I didn’t feel like it was obvious that I wasn’t a local. You just have to ask many questions and not take things for granted.”

Porter said, “You’re relating to people. You’re talking about an individual, someone whose house has collapsed.”

“Disaster porn?” she asked, “It should be covered big,” said Porter, “I think it’s a jaded public that use that term.”

One woman in the audience from the Toronto Haiti

Action Committee, a group committed to raising awareness about Canada’s role in the 2004 overthrow of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, complained about the deluge of recent calls by journalists trying to find contacts for stories. She said journalists had shown very little interest in important issues prior to the quake. “When it comes to looking at Canada’s role in Haiti, why is that left out in coverage?” she said. Someone else said, “I think you need a bigger picture,” and another said, “I’m surprised you are neophytes.

Please get the background and read one of the books about the history of Haiti. Bone up on the history and on Canada’s involvement.”

Porter responded in a somewhat exasperated voice, “I don’t think there’s a right or left wing of a tragedy. Where is there a political angle on a tragedy? It’s universal. That’s how I approached it.”

Perhaps now that the reporting about the devastation has been done big picture stories can be written. Porter exchanged information with an activist and said she’d like to hear more about their initiatives and research. It looked like a promising start.

Following the event, Mehler Paperny said “Any debate is good for journalism… I don’t think we question international intervention. Those are questions that are important to ask.”

@MargaretAtwood at the Toronto Public Library

By Elizabeth Chiang Margaret Atwood spoke to a packed crowd at the Toronto Reference Library as part of its annual Writer’s Room lecture on March 25, hosted by Ian Brown. The two traded witticisms about politics, literature, feminism and even Swedish humour.

Atwood is a celebrated figure in Canada’s literary scene. Her accolades are numerous, including the 1995 Swedish Humour Association’s International Humorous Writer Award. She was recently awarded the $1-million Dan David Tel Aviv University international prize for her contributions to modern literature. This is a prize she shares with Indian-American novelist Amitav Ghosh. As an author of over 40 volumes, including poetry, children’s fiction, fiction and non-fiction, at seventy-one years old Atwood continues to produce profound and intellectually stimulating works.

Her most recent novel The Year of the Flood examines themes of spirituality, humanity, sexuality and life after experiencing a disaster. While it is not a sequel to her previous novel Oryx and Crake, many of the same char-

24 ryersonfreepress.ca

acters return. When asked whether it was a “nervy” thing for her to “rewrite” the story, she answered a firm yes: from her view, it was a nervy move. However, it is not a rewrite, but she compared her retelling of the story to the Victorian novel, in which there is always a “meanwhile...” chapter that presents a different perspective of the events, happening simultaneously, and leading readers to the eventual merging of multiple plotlines.

In response to whether she feared that the threats of genetic engineering in her novels, such as Oryx and Crake, would come true in the future, Atwood replied drily, “I make things up.” She used Dante Alighieri as an example of the writing tradition wherein he himself had not visited Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, but made things up for the sake of his story. She continues with aplomb, “What I write does not necessarily come true.”

But what she writes makes an indelible impact on the Canadian arts scene. She joked that even having been a writer for so long, she remains “pathologically stingy” and the ever looming worries of making a living are genuine. Her writing style is open-ended; she is prolific but does not make extensive outlines and prefers to start in the Homeric way with the action, followed by the past, and then moving to the future.

Atwood is sharp, eloquent, and, to some audience members’ surprise, extremely tech savvy. She is on Twitter and playfully joked with Brown about her “T of the D – which (you may not know this) means tweet of the day.” Atwood also blogs extensively and firmly believes that digital reading devices will play an increasingly large role in the future of reading, especially for baby boomers in their golden years. She embraces change and reaches out to her online audience as much as those she meets in person.

When asked whether there were situations where she would avoid writing something for fear of the cause and reaction in people, Atwood answered, “[Writing is] one of those art forms where the consumption is performed separate from the creation. You never know who reads your book and you don’t know how they’ll react and you can’t control that... the best you can do is to put it out there and hope that somewhere out there … readers find your book.”

ATWOOD PHOTO: ELIZABETH CHIANG; HAITI Photo: Fernando Morales/Globe and Mail

Felix Hoffman visits Ryerson, highlights new German photography

By Elizabeth Chiang School, some photographers Ryerson Universiwho invented a way of seeing ty’s annual Contact are not recognized anymore,” Lecture Series began said Hoffman. with a spirited talk by “The new tendencies Felix Hoffmann, chief from Leipzig” – a term coined curator at C/O Berlin.

by Hoffman – includes Oscar Hoffmann is an art Schmidt, Sebastian Stumpf historian, art theorist, and Tobias Zielony. Hoffman’s and the initiator of C/O lecture was accompanied by Berlin’s Talents program a slide show of works from for young photographers these up-and-coming artists, and art critics. The showcasing their talents lecture was co-presented and comparing their styles by the Ryerson Gallery with the established Becher and Research Centre, the School.

Goethe-Institut Toronto, Tobias Zielony’s depicthe Contact Photography tion of suburbs and gas Festival and the Ryerson stations speak to the new School of Image Arts. generation of youth coming During his visit from Leipzig, where there is a at Ryerson, Hoffman burgeoning arts scene. There visited the historical libraries, schools, health Black Star Collection clubs, bakeries and corner which was gifted to the stores are closing down at an university in 2005. It incredible rate. Young people examines the personalihave no places left to socialties, events and conflicts ize. “The deindustrialization, of the twentieth century. economic decline and the Hoffman said Ryerson Felix Hoffman, chief curator at C/O Berlin, presents at Ryerson as part of the Contact Lecture series. market not needing their has a “unique, historic, labour causes young people to experience a loss of their immediate environment. At these gas and fantastic opportunity,” and hinted that Ryerson might also be able to feature some of C/O stations, young people are acting out their own peripherality,” explained Hoffman.

Berlin’s work.

Sebastian Stumpf ’s work is disconcerting, especially when we see a person in the picture Doina Popescu, director of the Director of the Ryerson Photography Gallery and Repretending to walk standing on his head in the middle of a street. The staged situations are search Centre confirmed that “Felix Hoffmann and I have certainly embarked on a path of entirely disconnected from everyday life and reality. A surrealism exists in his performance mutual discussion and exchange. Only time will tell where this will lead.” work that unsettles his viewers.

In his talk Between the Arts: What and Where Is German Photography Now? Hoffman When asked about the role of film and video in the gallery, Hoffman stated that it has provided a sneak peak at several of the new shows he has curated for C/O Berlin. He also gave been two years since they started including video installations, and they have not started agan educational overview of the new schools of art in Germany and discussed the artistic and gressively pursuing new media yet. structural changes they have experienced since the 1990s.

Much like the majority of art institutions in Canada, Hoffman said that C/O Berlin is “The problem in Germany is that the Becher School (the world famous Düsseldorf privately funded through the entrance fees, charity funds, and sponsors. “It is not easy to keep Becher School of Andreas Gursky) is so prominent. It is an art market that is overwhelming culture alive,” said Hoffman. other views. From the outside, you can only see the Becher School. Even within the Becher

After their first bucky, said the whale heads on the road

By Bradley Whitehouse

Tyler Bancroft’s fingers aren’t just good for strumming chords. The singer-guitarist for Said the Whale is often gets his hands dirty tinkering with the unreliable tour van.

“It’s just a frickin’ nightmare,” says Bancroft.

The 25-year-old singer-guitarist for the Vancouverbased indie rock band has been busy tuning up the van for the band’s upcoming cross-country tour for their new EP Bear Bones. Since the five-piece group started touring in 2007 with their debut album Taking Abalonia, the acoustic band has had some serious car trouble and breakdowns while on the road.

“I’m currently in the tour van with my head in all sorts of crazy places. I just installed a new heater. As we speak right now, I’m putting the glovebox back together,” said the musician over the phone.

But if the past year is any indication, things should continue to go smoothly for this tour’s lineup of cross-country performances. In 2009, Said the Whale won the CBC Radio HOFFMAN PHOTO: ELIZABETH CHIANG

3 Bucky award for most Canadian song for “Emerald Lake, AB,” which Said the Whale played at Parliament Hill on Canada Day and recently performed in their hometown during the Olympics.

“The vibe in Vancouver - I’ve never seen it like that in my entire life ... we were really happy to have been a part of Vancouver’s history like that.”

With two albums under their belt, the group revisits their roots with their latest recordings. The EP includes a stripped down version of some of their signature tracks like “Emerald Lake, AB.” Recorded in band member Ben Worcester’s bedroom, it has a raw, unfinished sound that’s honest and intimate.

“We certainly aren’t sitting down ever to write songs to be like, ‘Okay, we need a radio song, we need a mellow song which is going to make the girls cry, a weird song that’s got math and stuff.’ There’s never any intention to it. We’ll write what comes natural to us. It’s kind of more sincere that way.”

Bancroft first picked up the guitar in sixth grade because he wanted to learn how to play Nirvana songs. He met Worcester in high school where the pair played in a couple of bands together. As they got older, the two decided to make a serious go of it with their music.

They teamed up with Tom Dobrzanski, who has worked with artists like Tegan and Sara and the New Pornographers.

Dobrzanski hooked the duo up with a few local musicians to do a recording. The bassist on the first tracks joined the project last-minute when Bancroft met him by chance at a music store.

“We were going to play it ourselves and I walked in to rent a bass and he said, ‘Well, do you need someone to play bass on your record?’, and I said, ‘Yes, we do!’ He got off

work and came out and did it for a six-pack.”

After recording their first album, Said the Whale figured the next thing to do was to hitch a band together and hit the road.

“It’s been a pretty quick ascent to happiness.”

That said, life isn’t just one big jam session - they all have day jobs. Bancroft works on his dad’s tug-boat, and during the Vancouver Winter Olympics he chauffeured NBC staff up to the mountains.

“It was pretty cool - I drove Jimmy Fallon to Whistler.”

A job at the wheel makes sense for a guy who is used to doing the long haul across Canada.

After making the trip so many times, the band has come to know their way around even the most forlorn areas of the country. For Said the Whale, a successful cross-country tour just isn’t complete without a pit-stop for Canada’s best bacon.

“A huge part of touring is the food, and for us the number one place would be this random little place called Jaycie’s in Herbert, Saskatchewan. They have the absolute best bacon that you’ll ever eat in your entire life. I know, it sounds so random. Herbert, Saskatchewan is just the tiniest little place. I don’t even know if you could ever find it on a map. We stopped there once by accident and we’ve never forgotten it since.”

Their next album hasn’t been written yet, but the westcoast band is making an Atlantic pit-stop during the tour, where they hope to find some inspiration.

“We have a week off in the middle of the tour so we’ve rented a house in PEI. We’re all going to set up our gear and do some writing together, stuff like that. So we’ll see what comes out of that.”

Ryerson Free Press April 2010 25

in Full blOOm

26

RyeRsonFReePRess.ca

The canadian cancer society presented a garden titled “yellow Beacon” that featured a wall of daffodils and a message wall, where words of hope and remembrance were written on stone.

The ontario college of art and design (ocad) collaborated with the canadian Physicians for aid and Relief (cPaR) to create the “Foodprints” exhibit. it was built with sustainability in mind, constructed from non-toxic, recycled or salvaged materials. locally-sourced plants, like the bell pepper pictured, were provided by the sToP community Food centre “green Barn.” cPaR is a non-profit organization that strives to ensure healthy communities in places such as ethiopia, Tanzania, malawi and uganda.

not everything at the festival was rooted in soil. several prize winning floral arrangements were on display, and these masks adorned the outside of a cave made entirely of a clay and straw mixture.

PhoTos (Pages 26 & 27): michael macleod

RyeRson FRee PRess

April 2010

27

anOther SwediSh band impreSSeS tOrOntOnianS

By Sara Torvik

March MarkeD the twenty-eighth successful year of canadian music week, a four day festival in which bands from all over canada and abroad came to Toronto to play in 45 different venues. one of the highlights of the week was the gothenburg trio hellsongs, who recently signed with canadian label aporia Records. hellsongs managed to create quite a buzz with their unique twist on familiar songs. hellsongs played live at the horseshoe Tavern, and proved they have an energetic stage presence to match their strong cover album. Their live show contrasted well with the soft mellow feel of their lP, and they had a great sense of humour. lead singer siri Bergnéhr donned a pair of black studded gloves and guitarist kalle karlsson shredded his acoustic guitar as if he were in an actual metal band. The crowd ate it up.

“The audiences here have been extremely ecstatic,” said karlsson after the show.

“They seem to be genuinely interested when we are playing, not talking at all, which some (people) have warned us about. and everyone is very talkative afterwards. canadians in general seem to be more easygoing than swedes when it comes to addressing someone for

28

RyeRsonFReePRess.ca

a short chit-chat,” he said. as for what they have in store for us in the future? “There is an eP already recorded and released in europe that would be new to you guys,” karlsson said. “we’re going to try to have it released here, but we’re not sure if that will happen. some songs are already up on myspace.” on their debut album, Hymns in the Key of 666, the band takes a collection of well-known heavy metal classics, such as we’re not gonna Take it by Twisted sister and Paranoid by Black sabbath, and gives them an indie-pop make-over. The result brings a fresh and unexpected flavour to the idea of heavy metal covers. what really stands out about hellsongs’ take is the emphasis on the lyrics. Their arrangements make you think about what is being said in those lyrics. The vocals that are adapted in hellsongs’ music really create an awareness for the listener that there is a deeper message there. a new hellsongs album is currently in the works, but if you’re too impatient to wait you can listen to Hymns in the Key of 666.

PhoTo: Jon liinason. couRTesy oF www.hellsongs.com

AGO’s Sculpture as Time exhibit invites playful curiosity

By Kate Spencer Around a corner, tucked in its own small alcove, sits a Pepto-Bismol pink stucco blob.

High on a shelf, with its back to a thick piece of wood, it looks like a creature out of Star Trek. On the other side of the board is a photograph of a buck-toothed nun grinning at a clay statue. Passersby stop and stare at the blob, then swing around to the front to stare at the nun. And back and forth and repeat. A small child stares up at the nun’s face and wails to its mother, “I don’t get it.”

This is Kelly Richardson’s Twilight Avenger, one of many contemporary sculpture pieces on display at the Art Gallery of Ontario, as part of the Sculpture as Time: Major Works. New Acquisitions exhibit, running from March 4 to August 1. The exhibit explores how artists from the 1960s have radically shifted traditional definitions and boundaries of the sculpture medium. The common thread of the exhibit is the interaction between the creative process and time. As says a plaque at the entrance to the exhibit, our ability to perceive time and our desire to define it shapes our awareness and understanding of the world.

The artists involved in this exhibit have all explored an interest in a sculpture that demands time, and an interest in time.

It may be difficult for some patrons more accustomed to classical sculpture to enjoy the exhibit.

Certainly, there are many people who would not consider a stack of dinner plates in a sink high art.

It is important to remember that what makes modern sculpture so interesting and so fun for a

viewer is the interactivity. This is a sculpture process that invites questions, creates excitement, and makes you long to take the whole thing apart and understand how it works. The viewer is as much a part of the creative process as the artist is—and can decide their own meaning, rather than having it imposed on them.

A beautiful example of work that invites this artist-viewer connection is Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Homographies, Subsculpture 7. This mixed media display involves fluorescent light tubes, computers and motors.

And in a stark white room, people’s eyes are immediately drawn to the ceiling.

It is an installation that causes the most serious of admirers to dance and spin and dash across the room, then stop suddenly and peer above their heads. They behave so strangely because the viewers’ movements control the lights. The light tubes are attached to robotic fixtures hung from the ceiling and linked to a monitoring device.

As a person walks underneath them, they respond to their presence, position and motion and slowly rotate to look into the eye of their beholders.

David Moos, the AGO’s curator of contemporary art, feels very

strongly about all the recent acquisitions that are being displayed as part of the exhibit, which mixes the work of established artists with leading young creators. “They are indicative of my curiosities as a curator,” Moos said in a telephone interview. He noted the common thread that ran through the exhibit—their relationship to time, framed in relation to what is historical and spiritual.

The installations are also connected by dint of being what is considered contemporary art.

the artist finds inspiration from.

Another significant trend is the move toward ‘land art,’ which uses natural materials, and in which the landscape and the work of art are fused to become one thing. In this trend, as Moos said, “the idea of showing an object in a gallery is thrown out” and the idea of a gallery being the sole container of art was thrown out with it. “Those works are about nature, about us beholding natural phenomena as recorded by the artist,” said Moos.

This land art style is shown in the

For those patrons who are set adrift by the installations, there is hope. If you were to find yourself staring at Nathan Carter’s Blue and Cream Travelling Language Machine—a Doctor Seuss-like creation of wire and coloured blocks—and not quite seeing how it connects to the theme of “time,” Moos recommends making use of the AGO’s resources. There is extensive textual information on each work, and often the artists themselves have included dynamic informational tools, up to and

Moos explained that the definition of sculpture has changed since the 1960s, when it was considered an immobile form in concrete space. Now, there are new materials, not just wood or stone or clay, but really anything that

works of Kelly Richardson and Anri Sala, whose video pieces are displayed together because both films feature animals as avatars of time. Both artists invite viewers to consider humanity’s relation to its environment.

including instructional videos on how to view their art. For the completely lost, there are also the gallery guides, identifiable by their orange lanyards. “Don’t be timid,” advised Moos. “If you ask, you find answers.”

Rocky Horror and Repo shadow casts celebrate sexual diversity

By Tracy Chen Just past midnight several hundred people cluster together into a sea of red seats at the Bloor Cinema. A teenage girl with pink dreadlocks sits in the centre. There’s a middleaged man with a moustache and bald spot wearing a sweater.

A young man who has come for the past nine years sits in the section on the right. He yells, “You’re a slut,” toward the stage in front of the movie theatre. The rest of the regulars join him, yelling.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Rocky Horror), a 1970s musical about a ‘sweet transvestite,’ is called a cult classic for a reason.

The Time Warp song starts to play. On cue, the audience members abandon their seats and gravitate toward the stage.

“Let’s jump to the left,” plays the music. The crowd jumps in unison.

In the 1970s, although Rocky Horror was relegated to a timeslot called Midnight Madness, it quickly found a following. Today, Rocky Horror has the longest continuous run of any motion picture in history and has grossed more than $135 million in its lifetime.

At the Bloor Cinema, Rocky Horror regularly screens on

the last Friday of every month with a live shadow cast, a group of actors and dancers on stage who imitate the onscreen action. Occasionally it is screened with another musical called Repo: the Genetic Opera (Repo).

Sam Abel, a Rocky Horror cast member and Ryerson University student, usually wears dark-framed glasses and no makeup. On-stage her character wears the opposite style— layers of white makeup, and a maid costume that can barely hold in her cleavage. She says most people don’t recognize her outside of the show. Yet, once she was at the World’s Biggest Bookstore and noticed a man looking at her. “Excuse me, are you in Rocky Horror?” he said. He then realized that he’s seen her in a totally different context without pants on and she imagined he felt really embarrassed.

Rocky Horror is the kind of place where cast members reveal their bodies and cross-dress in a playful non-threatening atmosphere. You can find an awkward, confused, chubby teenager who likes women’s clothing at the show. “A guy can come to the show, put on his dress and sparkly high heels and tons of eyeliner. Not only are you accepted, but you are celebrated,” said Rena Ashton, another cast member.

IMAGE Courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario. ©2002 Rachel Harrison

First time cast members are aptly called ‘virgins,’ since they are asked to strip down to their underwear. There have been instances of accidental female and male exposure.

Despite its edgier side, the shadow cast has a wider appeal on Halloween night, when Rocky Horror regularly sells out to an audience of 600 people.

Audiences will regularly throw witty lines and character references toward the stage. “If you know all the shut-out lines, you’re a hero,” says Ashton. They dress up as their favourite characters, a Catholic high school teacher, a librarian, a lightening technician, a children’s musician and a tour guide. They come wearing corsets, fishnets and five-inch heels.

Ashton said being a cast member is an outlet from her everyday life. “Once in a while, you just need to put on some orange sequin heels, put on the most outrageous dress you have, and say fuck three hundred times in four minutes,” said Ashton.

In both shows, bodily curves are welcome. Once, a girl asked Abel if she could join the cast even if she was chubby.

Abel told her it would be ‘fantastic’. “I have hips as wide as a yardstick and that’s fine,” said Abel.

Ryerson Free Press April 2010 29

Reviews

MADE FOR TV

FILM Mai Iskander talks about Garbage Dreams

Abroad: a predictable homegrown romantic comedy about a young journalist in London

A new made for TV movie called Abroad debuted last month on CBC Television. Lian Novak reviews the film which was based on a novel

by Globe and Mail journalist, Leah McLaren. Like McLaren in her 20s, the main character of this film also finds herself London working at a London newspaper, writing about her romantic misadventures.

E

lizabeth Bennett meet Bridget Jones meet Amy Pearce. If either of those first two names rings a bell you already have a pretty good idea of what Abroad is all about.

Canadian expat journalist Amy Pearce, played by the delightfully quirky 29-year-old Torontonian actress Liane Balaban, arrives in London flustered and jet-lagged.

All the while an upbeat Feist track is playing in the background, which helps set the tone. Amy goes straight from the airport to her new job at the London Daily Post without even dropping off her suitcases!

This made me roll my eyes. She is that committed. But at The Post she is met with resentment and patronization by her colleagues and boss. While a ‘serious’ journalist back home, here she is relegated to pushing the tea cart and writing for the ‘fluff ’ section called Post Fem (with a pink font of course) where, if she’s lucky, she’ll get to write about bikini waxes and 10 ways to snog a bloke.

It soon becomes apparent that she only got the job through her connection with the Post’s patron, Lord Oldenberg, which suggests a thinly disguised version of Lord Conrad Black. They also reference how Amy came from writing at a conservative Toronto paper that Oldenberg also owns (cough, cough, National Post). While Oldenberg seems warm and fatherly toward Amy, we soon find out that he’s not as virtuous as he seems.

On Amy’s first day, she comes across a whole host of colorful characters that one only meets in romantic comedies: her meanspirited, vapid boss, the handsome and charming English cad who has her smitten faster than he can say ‘cheerio,’ the other handsome, yet gruff, English man who

seems proud and prejudiced (hello Mr. Darcy!) against Amy and her two flamboyant flat mates that at once welcome her as one of their own. The large, brightly kitschy decorated house that she shares with her equally brightly kitschy and permanently unemployed flat mates is another moment when the audience is required to suspend their disbelief (and collectively eye roll). How they can afford to live in a house like that in one of the most expensive cities in the world is another magic movie moment that only further distances me from getting involved in any of these characters. Is it just me, or is there anyone else out there who would like to see characters in romantic comedies living in drab, tiny square footage apartments like the rest of us? If that were the case, maybe, just maybe I’d feel a pang of sympathy when the English cad in this film turns out to be a cad.

Abroad, a CBC made-for-TV movie, filmed by director, Philip John, is shot with what looks like a decent-sized budget. The scenes are well-lit, with lovely English-rose saturated colors. In keeping with the rest of the movie, the clichéd tourist backdrops run rampant: shots of the Tate Modern, the River Thames, pubs filled with drunk, rowdy ‘football’ obsessed men, the lush green English countryside and a final lovey-dovey scene in the rain (I roll my eyes again, but by this time I’ve lost count).

Though this movie follows the romantic comedy formula (naïve young woman goes through ups and downs, falling for Mr. Wrong before eventually falling for Mr. Right) there are still a few laughs to be had, mostly from Balaban’s comical facial expressions (she does disbelief and exasperation really well).

If you’re already a fan of Pride and Prejudice and the Bridget Jones movies, but were always hoping for a more homegrown connection, then Abroad should be your cup of tea! —Lian Novak

To watch the trailer, visit www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y2P2UKAPWA

30 ryersonfreepress.ca

D

ocumentary filmmaker Mai Iskander is a persistent and brilliant storyteller. Her latest film, Garbage Dreams, is a testament to her energy and dedication to film. In Garbage Dreams Iskander focuses on the Zabelleen, known as ‘garbage people,’ living in Mokattam, one of Egypt’s worst slums. The Zabelleen have formed a community waste removal and recycling service for nearby Cairo, as they pick up the city’s trash, then separate, recycle and sell all re-usable materials. At first glance, Mokattam is a sad site, as giant garbage bags line the streets and children play amongst mounds of refuse, but for the Zabelleen sorting trash is a way of life.

Iskander follows three Zabelleen youths as they come of age in the village. Adham, Osama and Nabil are best friends with starkly different personalities.

Adham is the dreamer, Osama is apathetic, and Nabil is the oldest and most grounded of the three. The boys have been recycling since they were young, and although they have high hopes, their poverty prevents them from pursuing a life beyond recycling. They, along with other Zabelleen youth, attend the local Recycling School, a community institution that teaches recycling methods to kids and teens. The Recycling School is where Iskander (who is herself half Egyptian) first met the boys.

In 2005, she travelled to Egypt to learn more about her roots, but when she began volunteering at the school, her motives for staying changed. Iskander recalls her volunteering experience, “I met the kids and was impressed at how much they were like regular teens; interested in their hair and their muscles.”

Understanding how these teens could remain strong in such an environment was part of Iskander’s mission with the film she has created.

The boys’ story takes a turn, when corporate waste removal services begin infiltrating Egypt and cornering the market. Mokattam must face the consequences of modernization in the garbage industry, as big business begins to squeeze the life blood out of the community. With less garbage for the Zabelleen, the future of the village hangs in the balance, and the boys must make some crucial decisions. Adham and Nabil

are funded to go to Wales on behalf of the Recycling School. While there, the boys work and learn at a local recycling plant, and upon returning home deliver their findings at a village meeting.

The principal difference in European and Egyptian methods of waste disposal is source separation.

This refers to the home owner separating their garbage from recyclables and putting two bins out for collection. This has never been done in Cairo, and several Zabelleen decide to start a campaign to get city dwellers interested in source separation. The campaign falls flat due to a lack of support from the corporate entities and a shortage of resources.

While the struggle between big corporate and small community interests is a large part of the narrative, Iskander insists that she made a conscious effort not to make a political film. She explained, “[I] really wanted to focus on the Zabelleen.” Her documentation of the hardships faced by the village, and the boys in particular, is really well done, and she is able to adequately capture the underdog spirit of Mokattam.

Iskander returned to Mokattam two years after the corporate invasion, to check up on the village and the boys. The village survived, but is not the bustling work environment it once was, while the boys do their best the stay friends despite following different paths.

Iskander notes that, “The film has brought a lot of attention to the Zabelleen, and [although] the usual portrayal of them is as victims, no one had seen their contributions to society [before].” Many in Egypt taunt the Zabelleen for their status, but this documentary shows them in a different light; they are a strong, hard working community.

Garbage Dreams premiered at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival last year, and Adham was given the opportunity to attend. Since going to Wales during filming, Adham has developed an interest in world travel, and he given the star treatment at the Texas premiere. Iskander’s film was shortlisted for best documentary feature at the 2009 Academy Awards, and continues to play at Festivals and venues around the world. For more information find Mai Iskander at www.documentary.org. —Jessica Finch

ABROAD STILL COURTESY OF CBC; GARBAGE DREAMS STILL COURTESY WWW.GARBAGEDREAMS.COM

4

NEWS/ARTS

The DeVryersonian

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Vampire Weekend Maple Leaf Gardens Vampire Weekend yesterday, the gay village tomorrow Vampire Weekend Somehow reviewers just can’t get enough Vampire Weekend. To satiate your appetite, we’ve pulled together three separate reviews of the most amazing band ever.

Vampire Weekend Reviewed by Jimmy Streak (a hopeful for an Exclaim! internship) In the wake of post-modernism, post-postmodernism, pre-post-modernism, postglobalization and the post-digital era, Vampire Weekend - whose pre-Vampire Weekend demo is still their best work, in our opinion - holds a special place in our hearts. Unlike the myriad bands we’ve screwed over by giving their debut a stellar rating and then unmercifully shredding their next album, we decided to stick by Vampire Weekend. Why, you ask?

Because Vampire Weekend is the kind of band that’s perched perfectly between the snobby music world of critics and the music audience that disdains that kind of cultural elitism. By attaching ourselves to the band’s music, we can stay in touch with the general public, further establish ourselves as populists and grow ever more monolithic. [Why do you think we gave Justin Timberlake such a good review?]

Furthermore, because we helped break Vampire Weekend to the world, we can now pretend that we like them more than other publications based on the fact that we heard them first. Then, when we very suddenly decide we no longer like them, we can appear ahead of the curve beside publications who like Vampire Weekend for their music and not just their cultural sway! See? It’s perfect - Wait, what? My word count is up? But I’ve only had enough space to demonstrate my superior intelligence and cultural hubris! I haven’t even begun to make a critical judgement based solely on the band’s mu Rating: 10.0 Vampire Weekend Reviewed by Sarah Jane Osborne (a hopeful for Rolling Stone magazine internship)

We love Vampire Weekend, modern music, and the “indie” scene. You know “indie”? It’s this new kind of music that the kids like, and we here at Rolling Stone are really digging it - people still say they “dig” things, right?

In fact, we liked the band’s debut so much that we named it the f i f ty - s i x t h best album of the decade, meaning that it’s better than U2’s How to Dismantle an Atom Bomb (68) but not as good as All That You Can’t Leave Behind (13) or No Line on the Horizon (36). Vampire Weekend’s Contra doesn’t sound much like U2, or like any album from before 1980, so we don’t really have any points of reference here. I guess Contra is a pretty good album, with simple, clean guitar and upbeat rhythms.

It’s definitely not bad, but I don’t want to say it’s amazing, either. Rolling Stone can’t make bold judgments like that...

Have other publications written reviews of Contra yet? ‘Cause that would really give me a clue as to how to rate this album. Ah, well - I’ll just give it three stars out of five for now and then Rolling Stone can change the rating in a half a decade when the album starts being considered a classic. Hell, we did it for Kid A. Rating: ***

Vampire Weekend Reviewed by first-year RTA student Kimmy Rodgers Who the hell is Vampire Weekend?

I mean, I know music inside and out, but for the life of me, this just isn’t ringing a bell.

Aren’t there any celebrities in this band? Then I could at least just talk about how goodlooking they are. If I had to give this music a genre classification, it would definitely be “weirdo-rock,” music for people who don’t like good music like the Black Eyed Peas and Lady Gaga. God, I knew we shouldn’t have started doing album reviews!

Rating: ?

By Francine Collavecchio

Move over Maple Leaf Gardens, Sheldon has made his next move.

Not content with owning the historical arena only, Sheldon signed a deal with the City of Toronto to purchase the entire gay village.

“Ryerson will finally be the gayest school in Canada” said an elated Levy to a press conference held at Zelda’s today.

“We’re very proud of our school and it was this pride that lead us to procure the village.”

Ryerson’s purchase has secured Church Street from College Street to Isabella Street.

Work is ongoing to finish the details for Ryerson to purchase the final, less gay blocks. The details of cost were kept confidential, but a rumour over heard in a bathroom stall during the press conference leads The DeVryersonian to believe that the costs are somewhere close to $200 million.

Belinda Grayson, the university’s vicepresident of women’s issues, said “Sheldon is an amazing visionary. He imagines what’s possible and goes out and buys it. He’s a capitalist’s dream and the gay town’s saviour.”

Sheldon outlined the cancerous university’s plan to develop the village with a very nice PowerPoint presentation. He indicated that Ryerson will be moving the School of Engineering to new booths that will line the street. As the Faculty that already has the most frontage on Church Street, moving Engineering there made sense to Levy and his people.

“We plan to replace all the rainbow flags with the colour of our Engineering Faculty.

Purple flags will be much less gay,” said Levy.

Skip Judsen, president of the Ryerson Engineering Student Society (RESS) was cau-

tiously optimistic of his faculty’s move to the village. “I’m afraid that engineers wont realize that we moved the faculty and will still show up to the engineering building for class,” he said.

“However, the stigma that comes with the village–partying, drinking and awesome parties–is an image we encourage and promote with in the Faculty. Once we figure out how to reduce the traffic at the village coffee shops, this new location will be perfect,” added Judsen.

Councilor Kyle Rae was kind of pissed that Ryerson bought the street.

“Why would he buy the entire street?” said Rae. “That’s insane.”

Toby Whitfield was seen grinning about the purchase at the back of the room at the media conference.

“OMG,” said Whitfield, “now that we’ve closed Gould Street, our campaign naturally extends to closing other streets. The Close Church Street campaign is going to be bigger than the Gould Street campaign ever was.”

Chris Drew, self acclaimed lover of street closures in and around Ryerson and former RSU vice president could not be reached at the Liberal party’s secret headquarters for comment.

The Ryerson purchase was the first case in Canada of a university actually purchasing a street from a city. When the University of Toronto heard that Ryerson won this honour, a statement was issued by president David Naylor.

“The University of Toronto plans to buy Spadina and become the first university in Canada to purchase a street. Ryerson is not a university,” read the statement.

2

The DeVryersonian

NEWS

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Toby caught vacationing

BY Shandon Cunningham

Toby Whitfield has been seen on a ski hill in Quebec, says a report from the student newspaper from McGill University. While there has been no word on whether or not his work is related to the Ryerson Students’ Union or the Canadian Federation of Students, he suspiciously covered his face with a balaclava and ski goggles, and purposely took a double-black-diamond run to escape a photographer.

“This is inexcusable,” said Jesse Troutman, a former

Ryerson student, a former employee of the RSU and the guy who holds the most public beef with Whitfield. “Toby was elected to work at RSU, not be in Quebec. Plain and simple.”

When contacted for comment, Whitfield said that he was using two vacation days and met his family in Quebec for a ski getaway. “Sometimes I need a break, you know. I thought reading week was a good time for me to see my family.”

Whitfield is entitled to two weeks of vacation as an executive member of the RSU. But vacation is not an excuse for Troutman. “He is paid barely enough to meet minimum wage to take shit from people every day. How dare he vacate his post. Where will people go now if they’re looking to launch an attack on someone at RSU? Definitely not Liana, that would just look bad,” he said.

Jessica Henry, a first year RTA student agreed with

what we told her Troutman said. “Liana is a hard person to attack in the newspaper, it’s true. Toby’s the easiest for students to take our aggression out on and because of that he should be in his office all the time, waiting for students to come and yell at him.”

At the same time, Whitfield was also spotted running for a student union position at the St. Mary’s Student Union in Halifax. Troutman argued that this is gross incompe-

tence and Whitfield has no right to seek executive offices elsewhere in Canada. “This is another example of the control the CFS has in trying to infiltrate student unions,” he said.

When confronted about this, Whitfield said that he has a twin brother who lives there. That answer was not good enough for some of Whitfield’s critics.

“Seriously, a twin? That’s basically impossible,” said an anonymous Internet com-

menter.

Whitfield has been the target of many scandals this past year. While he’s managed to reduce the cost of students’ health and dental benefits, reduced the lines at the Member Services Office, produce a budget that balances, provides regular financial reports, secured a promise to close Gould Street and somehow was elected to be president of RSU next year, he has been dangerously negligent in his duties, say some students.

We finally get to say ‘blowjob’ in a headline

By Balloonda Mithchel

With the closure of the Carlton Cinemas, Ryerson has signed an agreement with another local theatre to address its classroom space crunch.

Starting fall 2010, students in large liberal arts classes will have their classes at the Loft 18-plus Cinemas on Yonge Street.

“People talking about stuff that isn’t sex is not too common at our pleasure theatre,” said Boss Singleton. “I think these lectures are going to help raise the level of discourse around here.”

On the first day of class there, students were mostly content with the new theatres for classes, but some were unhappy that they were expected to pay 25 cents to get into the theatre.

“The 18-plus theatres is a nice place to kill time between classes,” said Henry Langford, a second-year student in business management.

“I never in my wildest dreams thought that I’d find myself here learning about geography. In fact, on Thursdays I don’t even leave here until its time to go home,” he said.

The Ryerson Faculty Association launched a complaint claiming that the 18-plus Loft Theatre is not a safe working environment for professors.

They lodged a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

When asked about whether or not he thought it was appropriate to hold classes in a pornography theatre, Sheldon dismissed all criticisms.

“First of all, students love pornography. That’s a fact,” said Sheldon. He added that students have emailed him many times saying that they thought the new classroom space was great.

“We finally have our spot on Yonge Street which is historic. Nowhere else in Canada can students take class in a pornography theatre, except maybe at Concordia,” he said.

The president of the Ryerson Faculty Association thinks that the space is inappropriate to hold classes. John Matjke told The DeVryersonian that he hopes their challenge to the Hu-

man Rights Commission will be successful.

“How are students supposed to pay attention to lectures when there’s someone getting a blowjob on the screen behind me? There’s like only two profs at Ryerson who can compete with that action.”

Some students agreed with the Faculty Association, and thought that holding classes at the 18-plus Lofts was inappropriate.

“Ryerson cannot expect students to be okay with having classes in such an oppressive environment,” said Liana Salvador the vice-president of education for the Ryerson Students’ Union.

“How does Ryerson expect us to be respected once we become Ryerson grads when people know that some of our degrees were earned in a porn theatre? We’ll be protesting this decision by covering the screens with the massive banner we had Sheldon sign that promised to ban bottled water at Ryerson. That way, students wont have to watch women being oppressed and objectified and they’ll stop using bottled water.”

When asked about the move, Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities John Milloy said that he approved of the decision made by Ryerson.

“We applaud Ryerson’s visionary leader and personal hero of mine Sheldon Levy for coming up with such a clever way to save us money. We refuse to properly fund this system and this decision will rely on creative work arounds such as this one.”

Milloy was given a tour of the theatre by Levy in a private meeting the week before the announcement was made.

“I tested those seats and they were very nice. Students here are very lucky, and my ministry will be suggesting to other schools to make similar partnerships with pornography theaters in their areas,” Milloy said.

“I have a feeling that this partnership will be best exported to the University of Windsor,” he concluded.

Ryerson scores Yonge Street location. Classes will be held at Loft 18 + Cinemas starting fall 2010.

NEWS

Thursday, April 8, 2010

The DeVryersonian

3

Canada to have tallest tower once again

BY Jimmy Jo-Jo Junior Shabadu

A treaty signed today by Prime Minister Stephen Harper has traded Canada’s Aboriginal population for the largest tower in Dubai. In anticipation of deep hostility toward this move, Harper made the announcement quietly while on vacation.

“We respect Canada’s treaty obligations that have recently been signed with the president of Dubai’s development organization, Ali Muh…[in audible],” Harper told reporters yesterday, while bathing in a tar pond.

“Canada’s great Aboriginal population is our donation toward the great kindom’s workforce shortage. We wish these men and women well in their voyage to their new homeland.

The 1.5 million people who identified as Aboriginal in the 2006 Census will receive their one-way tickets to Dubai by barge in the mail. Local band councils will be forced into ensuring that every single Aboriginal person they’re aware of are on the boat.

Chuck Strahl, minister of Indian and Northern Affairs, was elated with the announcement.

“We solved Dubai’s labour deficit and Canada’s Aboriginal unemployment problem with the stroke of a pen.

This is the greatest trade since Wayne Gretzky went from the Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles Kings,” said Strahl.

Harper and Strahl were both quiet about where the tall tower would be located. Strahl was overheard the night of the announcement while very drunk saying, “there’s no fuckin’ way that the tower will end up in Toronto.”

The move has been highly criticized

by Aboriginal groups and construction companies.

“We have a damn labour shortage in this country, and we’d be happy to underpay Aboriginal people the way we underpay temporary foreign workers,” said Hamish McDonnald the president of the federation of home construction corporations. “A stupid tall building isn’t going to do any work. Give us more tax breaks and we can afford to hire these people.”

The National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations was so angry that he released only a statement to the press.

“We’ve always known that Haper and Strahl were racist and heartless but

this decision is a low that we haven’t encountered in a century,” said Shawn Atleo. “We weren’t even consulted on this decision.”

Harper’s press secretary and only other person allowed to comment on the trade other than Strahl, thought the decision was an innovative way to improve the lives of Aboriginal people.

“I’ve heard excellent things about Dubai. They will have an amazing opportunity to make themselves new lives. Plus the desert is going to be a hundred times better than our awful winters,” said Dmitri Soudas.

Michael Ignatieff was highly critical of the decision, calling Harper’s “flipflopping” negligent, abhorrent and disgusting.

“Stephen Harper apologized only a while ago to Canada’s first peoples for their treatment, then he cut funding to programs like the National Healing Fund, then he said he’d never deport Aboriginal people, and now he’s shipping them off to Dubai. This flip-flopping is not a leadership quality like my qualities,” said Ignatieff.

Haper’s phallic desire to have the tallest tower has been clear to his inner circle for years. Skip Hardeman, Harper’s former spiritual advisor when he was the leader of a fringe, rightwing melitia of wieners, said that he was actually obsessed with having the tallest tower in the world.

“Steve’s only fond memory of living in Toronto is his love of the CN Tower,” said Hardeman.”

“When he was approached to make this sale, he couldn’t give up his boyhood love of the CN Tower, and so he creatively used his hatred of Aboriginal people to craft a deal that is winwin.”

Hardeman added that Harper confessed that he is sure that God’s will is flowing through his hands.

“This truly is God’s will. God bless these troubled people, and God bless the charity that the good, albeit godless, people of Dubai have displayed.”

First Nations people are planning massive protests that may shut down Canada’s economic activities entirely through protest activities. These actions will coincide with the Victoria long weekend.

Stephen Harper and Chuck Strahl ink deal to restore Canada’s ‘tallest tower in the world’ title and solve Dubai’s work shortage all at once.

WE LOVE SHELDON LEVY!

the

DEVRYERSONIAN

Volume 2, Issue 1 • thedevryersonian.com — Ryerson’s Independent Student Newspaper since 1067 • Thursday, April 8, 2010

WE’RE NOT CLEVER ENOUGH TO SHOCK

YOU ANY OTHER WAY