Under his umbrella, ella, ella. Kingsman: The Secret Service shows off cool gadgets in James Bond homage. >> Pg. 4
thegazette Naming our daughters after prize winning cows since 1906
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2015
WESTERN UNIVERSITY • CANADA’S ONLY DAILY STUDENT NEWSPAPER • FOUNDED 1906
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TOMORROW high -12 low -19 VOLUME 108, ISSUE 76
Poloz calls for change to banking Amy O’Kruk NEWS EDITOR @AmyAtGazette
Stephen Poloz, the governor of the Bank of Canada, visited Western yesterday as part of a lecture series hosted by Western Alumni. Poloz, who holds a doctoral degree in economics from Western, gave the first ever address for the President’s Lecture series where he talked about the future of the Canadian economy, in particular the future course of monetary policy that will build on lessons learned from the recent global recession. “At the regulatory level, the G20 countries recognize the need to make the countries and the world financial systems much safer,” Poloz said. Poloz elaborated that the Bank of Canada’s cut of interest rates last month was part of a preventative measure against the risks the drop in the price of oil has exposed to Canada’s economy. “The oil price shock is … a net negative for Canada’s economic growth,” Poloz said. “Lower oil prices mean lower mean Canadian incomes across the board. The shock will worsen the debt to income ratio for Canadian households thereby increasing financial stability risks.” Poloz’s image is currently featured on the Social Science Centre as part of Western’s Be Extraordinary campaign. The campaign celebrates the achievements of notable alumni as part of an effort to generate $750 million in donations for the university to invest in its future enhancement. While Poloz’s visit was celebrated by many, some students have raised questions about the university’s glorification of Poloz
Amy O’Kruk • GAZETTE
and the Be Extraordinary campaign itself. The Society of Graduate Students sent out an email to their member base yesterday morning that questioned the Poloz’s statements made last fall regarding unemployed youth working for free and using the funding campaign’s reliance on alumni giving to “offset stagnant provincial funding for post-secondary education.” Kevin Godbout, SOGS President,
said the email’s message is about holding Poloz accountable for comments he made in the public but moreover it questions Western’s funding model and campaign. “He’s one of the very prominent figures of the Be Extraordinary campaign …we want to shift the narrative away from narratives of exceptionalism … and bring it back to towards actually no, what’s extraordinary is that so
Western email system converges to Office 365 Mohammad Abrar Abdul Hanan GAZETTE STAFF @uwogazette
This Saturday, Information Technology Services will move email service from Convergence to Microsoft Office 365 for all undergraduate students at Western. The switch to the new email service is expected to bring a plethora of
benefits to students. “We found that the existing platform is getting near end of life and the capacity limitations of Convergence limited students significantly in terms of the amount of emails that they could store in the system,” said Dave Ghantous, associate director of Technical Services at Western. “All in all, we thought that the number of features and the capacity that Office 365 gives
will add significant benefit to the students.” Emily Addison, vice-president internal for the University Students’ Council, said developing a new email service has been major priority of the USC for the past few years. “For years the USC has heard complaints about the storage capacity along with other features of Western’s email service. As a result of this, it became an advocacy priority
many students are struggling and Western isn’t willing to acknowledge it and take steps to make these things better.” During the Q and A session following Poloz’s lecture, he responded to a question that brought up his past comments about unemployed youth and was also asked about the future outlook for young, unemployed job seekers.
“Our modeling suggests that in another two years we’ll be home, or back to full capacity,” Poloz said. “Those who are seeking full-time employment and are having to settle for part-time employment will be able to make that transition, and those who are entering the labour market for the first time have a much better chance to engage.”
for the previous executive and we have been lucky enough to see this change come to fruition this year,” she said. ITS started the initiative to migrate the email service in mid2014 with an evaluation of the alternate email platforms. According to Ghantous, Office 365 and Google were the top choices since a majority of higher education institutions in Canada use or in the process of moving their email service to either of the two platforms. “We evaluated both Google and Office 365 as potential target platforms and felt that the features and functionality of Office 365 fit better at Western than Google,” he said.
During the development stage, key problems experienced by ITS were determining a system to transfer students emails over to the new platform and adequately communicating with the students to ensure that they understand and prepare for the process. To deal with these issues, ITS conducted a pilot program from January 8 to 31 with 1,800 undergraduate students. The feedback from the participants gave ITS an opportunity recognize potential problems with the new email service and develop plans for the mass rollout in February. >> see EMAIL pg.3