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The McGill Daily | Thursday, November 4, 2010 | mcgilldaily.com
Arch Café books released
Part one of a two-part series
Niko Block
and Michael Lee-Murphy
The McGill Daily
D
eputy Provost Morton
Mendelson has disclosed
a series of hitherto-confi-
dential documents relating to the
Architecture Café, showing that the
cafe posted a small deficit in fiscal
year (FY) 2009-2010. The develop-
ment follows a motion proposed by
SSMU President Zach Newburgh at
the September meeting of McGill’s
Board of Governors demanding the
publication of the numbers.
The documents, prepared by
Mendelson’s office at the request
of the Board of Governors and pre-
sented to the Board on October
22, reveal that before McGill Food
and Dining Services (MFDS) was
compensated for its services, the
cafe ran a $171 deficit in the 2009-
10 school year. Its gross profit was
$33,186, though after the payment
of student employees and man-
agers, repairs and maintenance,
and overhead costs, the numbers
dipped slightly into the red.
Questions remain about the
specifics of the MFDS’s role in the
management of the Arch Café, as
MFDS director Mathieu Laperle
was out of town and unavailable for
comment. The document states,
for instance, that the Arch Café was
costing the MFDS an additional
$15,000 in salary and benefits and
“other expenses.”
“The Architecture Café did have
problems while it ran under the
SSMU investments bounce back
Relying on ethics committee to review portfolio
Henry Gass
The McGill Daily
W
ith the help of a rebound-
ing world economy, SSMU
has begun to generate
more and more revenue through its
investments in corporations.
SSMU’s investment portfolio –
ranging from investments in banks
like RBC and BMO, to telecommu-
nications companies like Telus and
Bell, and energy companies like
the Power Corporation of Canada
and the TransCanada Corporation
– is managed by Ken Lester, CEO
of Lester Asset Management and
a professor in McGill’s Faculty of
Management. The portfolio is reg-
ulated by SSMU’s Financial Ethics
Review Committee (FERC).
“Our mission is [for investments]
to generate $100,000 of revenue per
year,” said Nick Drew, VP Finance
and Operations.
Drew said that the value of an
investment “usually fluctuates
radar,” wrote former Café man-
ager Carly Roualt in an email to
The Daily. “But it never lost money
until 2007. And it appear[s] to be
the managerial apparatus that was
forced upon it in 2007 that ran it,
technically, into the red.”
The café was put under a “mixed
management model” involving the
Architecture Students Association
(ASA) and McGill three years ago,
after the administration threatened
to shut it down. The responsibilities
were shared between students and
MFDS (and its precursor, Ancillary
Services) with students managing
“purchasing” and MFDS taking con-
trol of “food costs and labour costs.”
The nature of these costs remains
unclear.
After reviewing the released
documents, SSMU President Zach
Newburgh said that “there was
an opportunity for the University
administration to assure the finan-
cial stability of this café by working
with students but it did not do so.”
The document, however, main-
tains that MFDS officials met with
students from the ASA throughout
2009 and 2010 “on the need gen-
erally to be environmentally and
financially sustainable, and more
specifically on matters related to
managerial sustainability.”
Mendelson stressed that the café
“was not being run professionally
and could not be run professionally
because students are not profes-
sionals in this industry.”
The report’s projected expenses
for the 2011-2012 school year show
that the Arch Café would have lost
$73,211 in FY2011-12. The lion’s
depending on the success of a busi-
ness,” and therefore attributed the
growth in SSMU’s investment rev-
enue to the general recovery of the
economy. Drew said the value of
SSMU’s investments had dropped
down to $1.5 million last year, but
bounced back to around two mil-
lion dollars over the summer.
“SSMU has investments in a
number of different portfolios. It
really is a diverse investment portfo-
lio,” said President Zach Newburgh.
SSMU’s investment portfolio was
started in 2008, from the $1.8 mil-
lion the Society received after being
bought out of their share in Haven
Books, the former SSMU-operated
off-campus bookstore.
“We thought it was the best way
to put our money away,” said Drew.
“It’s one of the lowest-risk portfo-
lios [you can have].”
Drew said that SSMU rarely
changes its investment portfolio,
but that when there are changes,
they are usually based on recom-
mendations from Lester.
The former Architecture Café is now a study space.
share of this expense stems from an
apparent decision that a full-time
manager with a salary of $49,200
would have been hired if the cafe’s
operation had continued. The doc-
ument also projected an increase
in the cost of casual labour from
about $30,000 to roughly $39,000.
There is no projection for the cur-
rent school year.
The cafe’s financial statement
attributes the salary increases
and the new management posi-
tion to “the unionization of casual
staff.” Mendelson confirmed that
this is a reference to the last year’s
“Sometimes we’ll drop a com-
pany, and buy a new one. It’s gen-
erally based on what Ken [Lester]
believes,” said Drew. “He usually
contacts us and asks us for permis-
sion first.”
SSMU monitors the ethical stan-
dards of the companies they invest
in through FERC. A SSMU by-law
mandates the Society to “avoid”
investing in companies with mate-
rial interests in “socially harm-
ful areas” like guns and tobacco,
human rights abuses like child and
sweatshop labour, and environmen-
tal harm like pollution and habitat
destruction.
SSMU also prioritizes investment
in companies with “a proven track
record of” positive contributions to
the environment, the promotion of
sound employment practices, and
high standards of corporate gover-
nance and transparency.
“We are in the process of cur-
rently investigating ethical invest-
ments – determining which com-
panies we should be investing in
union certification campaign of the
Association of McGill University
Support Employees (AMUSE).
AMUSE officials have said that the
figures are “hypothetical,” as the
union has not yet entered collec-
tive bargaining with the admin-
istration. Dan Ahmad, AMUSE’s
Communications Officer, wrote in
an email to The Daily that the “sal-
ary of managers has nothing to do
with any union at McGill and is dic-
tated by the University.”
Former SSMU councillor Alex
Shee also examined the docu-
ment, part of which reads, “At the
and which we should not, and we
are weeding out those which we
shouldn’t, to ensure that our invest-
ments are at the standards set by
our constitution and at the stan-
dard that is expected by the student
body,” said Newburgh.
Any member of SSMU can ask
FERC to investigate a company in
which SSMU invests over $10,000.
In past years, FERC had met on
an ad hoc, case-by-case basis, but
Drew is requiring them to meet at
least once a year for 2010-11.
Drew identified environmen-
tally harmful areas as “a very grey
area” and “something FERC needs
to look into.”
Last year, FERC investigated
RBC’s involvement in tar sands cor-
porations, but this year Drew con-
cluded that the bank’s activities did
not warrant divestment. Drew also
said that the FERC report was “a
bit biased” against RBC, as it only
referenced one source, instead of
a variety of sources that would cor-
roborate the information.
News 3
Victor Tangermann | The McGill Daily
end 2009-10, we were forced to
conclude that the [mixed manage-
ment] model was not financially or
managerially sustainable, and there
did not appear to be a viable alter-
native.”
“What I would ask is this,” said
Shee, “If you really, really, really
looked at the alternatives, did you
look at funding through SSMU? Did
you look at the possibility of an opt-
outable fee? … If their response
is ‘We looked at it from a finan-
cial point of view and it just didn’t
seem right,’ then how come it made
money in the past?”
According to an email from
RBC’s Client Care Specialist Paula
LeBlanc to Drew, RBC was “active-
ly working toward support for a
number of water-related projects
in Northern Alberta, where the oil
sands are located.”
“Banks do not control the
pace and nature of energy sector
growth, and we do not believe it
is responsible or reasonable to
eliminate potential funding for
entire sectors of the economy.
RBC subjects our lending and
investment banking activities
to a suitable level of social and
environmental due diligence. …
We check that our clients in the
energy sector (and other sectors)
are appropriately managing and
reducing their impacts, and we
support them in those efforts,”
LeBlanc wrote.
“RBC is the worst bank we’re
involved in. … [But] it’s not a com-
pany you want to divest [from],”
said Drew. “We have to invest in
banks.”
 4 News The McGill Daily | Thursday, November 4, 2010 | mcgilldaily.com

Universities using teaching funds for infrastructure

Report by Quebec profs argues instruction is suffering to pay for maintenance and new buildings

Lola Duffort from $1,935 to $1,535 per student, total growth in the student popu- intended for operational budgets. infrastructure, between what type
The McGill Daily which amounts to a roughly twen- lation can be compared to a uni- The report, which was sent to edu- of maintenance…while the govern-
ty per cent reduction. For its part, versity about twice the size of the cation minister Line Beauchamp, ment has made a conscious political
McGill is plagued by $650 million in Université de Montréal appearing recommended that the province choice to decrease taxation on the

A
ccording to a report
released last week by the
Fédération québécoise
des professeures et professeurs
d’université (FQPPU), Quebec’s
universities are funneling increas-
ingly large amounts of money – ini-
tially earmarked for teaching and
research – into the maintenance of
infrastructure, most notably in the
form of building acquisitions and
renovations.
The report addresses the financ-
ing of Quebec universities’ infra-
structure projects, and found that
the government subsidy per stu-
dent earmarked for capital funds
– the budget sections dedicated to
infrastructure – was getting smaller
every year. In ten years, it has gone
deferred maintenance costs.
Meanwhile, funding cuts to
infrastructure have been com-
pounded by a spike in university
enrollment, putting pressure on
schools to improve their infra-
structure to accommodate more
students. Contrary to predictions
made by the Ministry of Education
in 2000, Quebec universities have
seen a sharp rise in enrollment over
the past decade. There are about
23.4 per cent more full-time stu-
dents enrolled in Quebec univer-
sities now then there were twelve
years ago. At McGill alone, there
were over four thousand more stu-
dents attending full-time in 2009
than in 2002.
“Over the past 12 years, the
in the system,” said Martin Maltais,
a professor at Télé-université,
UQAM’s correspondance school,
and one of the report’s researchers.
To offset the costs of new stu-
dents, universities have had to dip
into their operational budgets.
Diverting money away from
teaching and research has been
a standard practice for univer-
sity administrations for the past
twenty years, according to Michel
Umbriaco, the lead researcher
on the report, in an article for Le
Devoir. However, the extent of
this practice has reached a critical
point in the past four or five years,
with universities paying for nearly
fifty per cent of their infrastruc-
ture costs with money originally
place restrictions how much money
universities siphon off from their
operational budgets.
Diverted funds have eroded the
quality of instruction in Quebec,
according the report’s authors.
“Now, we have universities where
people are completing entire bach-
elor degrees without ever actually
seeing a professor,” said Maltais.
Joël Pedneault, a McGill under-
grad and Vice-Secretary General of
the Quebec Students Roundtable
(QSR), a provincial student lobbying
group of which SSMU is a member,
believes that governments should
step in to fill funding gaps.
“The main problem is that
schools have to make these deci-
sions – between instruction and
private sector, which could provide
some of the necessary revenue,”
he said. “Obviously the problem is
multi-faceted, but the bottom line
is that schools are under-financed.”
The FQPPU’s report is the sec-
ond in a three part series they are
producing in an effort to explain
why, despite the Ministry of
Education’s increased investment
in sectors of post-secondary educa-
tion, universities have seemed to
suffer from chronic underfunding.
The first report addressed the
financing of the universities’ opera-
tional budgets. It found that the
ministry had nearly doubled its
investment in the operational bud-
gets of universities in Quebec over
the past ten years.

Khadr sentenced
First child soldier tried since Nuremberg
Humera Jabir the number of witnesses Khadr’s
News Writer defense could call to four individu-
als, while the prosecution was able
to call ten witnesses to the stand.

O
mar Khadr was sentenced
to a symbolic forty years
in Guantánamo Bay prison
on Sunday, although the 24-year-
old Canadian will only serve eight
years, as per the terms of a plea bar-
gain negotiated last week.
The conviction concludes the
first ever trial of a child soldier
accused of war crimes since the
Nuremberg hearings after the
Second World War, and the first
trial of a terrorism suspect by the
Obama-led military commissions.
Khadr pled guilty last Monday to
the murder of Sergeant Christopher
Speer, an American medic killed in
a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002. In
exchange for his guilty plea, Khadr
was offered a sentence of eight years
in prison, and permission to apply
for transfer to Canada after one year.
In a statement released to 28
journalists, The Daily among them,
Khadr’s lawyer Dennis Edney said
that justice had not been served.
“The fact that the trial of a child
soldier, Omar Khadr, has ended
with a guilty plea in exchange for
his eventual release to Canada does
not change the fact that fundamen-
tal principles of law and due pro-
cess were long since abandoned in
Omar’s case,” Edney wrote.
“We may choose to believe that
through his plea Omar finally came
clean and accepted his involve-
ment in a firefight when he was 15
years of age, or that this was one
final coerced confession from a
victimized young man who was
in the wrong place at the wrong
time because his father placed him
there,” said Edney.
The plea agreement limited
Moreover, the commission judge
refused to recognize Khadr’s status
as a child soldier, although he was
only 15 at the time of arrest.
Finally, the commission did not
permit evidence that Khadr had
been threatened with murder and
rape while being interrogated by
U.S. officials, although the incrimi-
nating statements elicited from
Khadr while “under duress,” and
without the presence of a lawyer,
were accepted.
Nathan Whitling, another law-
yer for Khadr, called the forty-year
sentence “astonishing,” particularly
because the prosecution had only
asked for Khadr to be sentenced to
25 years.
“To hear the [military jury] come
down to that forty number was quite
shocking. We knew that number
didn’t mean anything, because there
is a deal in place that will ensure Omar
will serve only eight,” said Whitling.
Campus Eye
“These people on the panel were
all soldiers, and Sergeant Speer was
one of their own. … In that sense, it is
no surprise at all that there was such SPHR protests Israeli soldiers on campus
a harsh sentence,” added Whitling. Photo by Victor Tangermann
Though the Canadian government
has stated that it was not involved A small contingent representing the McGill chapter of Solidarity for Palestinian
in negotiating the plea agreement, Human Rights (SPHR) demonstrated outside the Jewish Studies building yesterday
Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence afternoon against the visit of three Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers. The three
Cannon confirmed on Monday that soldiers were guests at a free pizza lunch hosted by the Jewish Studies Students
Khadr would be permitted to apply Association (JSSA) and the Birthright Alumni program. According to an email sent
for transfer in one years’ time. over the JSSA listserv, the lunch was meant to “introduce these soldiers to students
According to Whitling, Khadr’s in Montreal and spend some time on the McGill campus.” The SPHR contingent was
defense team will seek his release as protesting what they consider a long series of human rights abuses inflicted by the
soon as possible following Khadr’s IDF against Palestinians. SPHR was also protesting the presence of military person-
return to Canada. Khadr’s lawyers will nel on campus, and the perceived recruitment of McGill students to the IDF.
focus on the parole process since the
International Transfer of Offenders —Henry Gass
Act does not permit Khadr to chal-
lenge his foreign conviction.
The McGill Daily | Thursday, November 4, 2010 | mcgilldaily.com
Concordia student prepared to sue administration
McGill’s new senior administator target of possible suit
Anna Norris
The McGill Daily
C
oncordia student Laura
Beach has issued a mise en
demeure – a notice of poten-
tial legal challenge – to three mem-
bers of Concordia’s administration,
including one who will take up a
post at McGill later this month.
The mise en demeure is
the latest in a series of stu-
dent reactions to the renewal of
Concordia’s exclusive beverage
contract with Pepsico last Friday.
The university’s current con-
tract expires on December 10.
Several student groups, includ-
ing Sustainable Concordia and
TAPThirst (Tap Drinkers Against
Privatization), which Beach co-
founded, opposed the renewal
of the contract. They pointed out
that renewing the exclusive con-
tract would contradict the advice
of Concordia’s own environmen-
tal advisory committee.
The discovery by Concordia
students that a new contract
NEWS
BULLETIN
Sustainability initiatives
in store for SSMU
Fourth year Management stu-
dent Ari Jaffe has big plans for sus-
tainability at McGill, and thanks to
a diverse group of allies, it looks
like something is actually going
to happen. Last Wednesday, Jaffe
presented recommendations about
Council’s Green Projects to SSMU
Council based on research con-
ducted over the summer as the
Society’s Green Building and Food
researcher.
“There should be an integration
of sustainability into student life,”
said Jaffe.
Among the most pressing rec-
ommendations are renovations for
the Shatner building, and an energy
audit examining aspects like venti-
lation and lighting. SSMU wants to
implement the Ledership in Energy
and Environmental Design (LEED)
Certification standard. LEED would
work within existing infrastructure
and implement sustainable ele-
ments, instead of calling for new
construction.
SSMU Council is pursuing mul-
tiple sources of funding, including
grants, to finance these projects.
Jaffe’s research took a holistic
approach to sustainability, focusing
on how to connect to the needs of
the average student.
In addition to a Green Service
Point, which would inform students
about SSMU projects and about
how students can contribute to sus-
Pick up Monday’s Daily for more Arch Café coverage.
was being signed on October
29 prompted a rally and sit-in to
oppose both the contract and the
secrecy with which it was negoti-
ated. Beach was among the speak-
ers at the rally, which took place
on October 27 in Norman Bethune
Square at Guy and Maisonneuve.
The mise en demeure, how-
ever, does not address the con-
tract itself, but rather the lack of
student consultation about the
renewal of the contract. Beach
claims that the university acted in
bad faith by signing the contract
while claiming that negotiations
were not taking place.
Beach, also the Sustainable
Ambassadors Coordinator for
Sustainable Concordia, wrote in
an email to The Daily, “The mem-
bers of admin (Marc Gauthier
and Johanne De Cubellis) made
a verbal agreement with myself
and Faisal Shennib that no nego-
tiations/decisions regarding the
beverage contract would be made
prior to a meeting with myself,
Faisal, Johanne, Marc and a rep-
resentative from Pepsico. This
tainability, SSMU hopes to make
Shatner room 302 a sustainable hub
for students, centred around the
Midnight Kitchen, which already
use the space for its daily by-dona-
tion vegan lunches.
Jaffe notes that McGill Food
and Dining Services have proved
a surprising ally in this effort,
including the implementation
of “Meat-Free Mondays” and ten
Local Food Days a year in resi-
dences, as part of the McGill Food
Systems Project.
“It was a really nice side of them
to see,” said Jaffe.
Most important for students are
the possible job opportunities with-
in these projects. As a Management
student, Jaffe understands the
importance of selling sustainability
to apathetic students.
“If you can put value in terms of
sustainability, it’s appealing,” she
explained. “Green has become logi-
cal and inclusive.”
—Alexander Weisler
Homecoming in the red
SSMU’s Homecoming event is
projected to lose $16,000, accord-
ing to SSMU VP Finance and
Operations Nick Drew.
Homekoming Bash 2010, an all-
day event held Saturday, October
2, during McGill Homecoming, was
expected to run a deficit. Drew said
that SSMU had budgeted for that
kind of loss, and that they would be
able to cover whatever the deficit
ends up being.
“[Homekoming] was projected
to lose $16,000,” said Drew. “Funds
came out of the operating budget.
We had the money to cover it.”
verbal agreement was made in a
meeting on May 12.”
“This promise was reiterated
in an email from Johanne De
Cubellis a month later,” she con-
“I would be happy with
a formal apology from
the administration”
tinued. “In September I received
another email from Johanne, stat-
ing that there had been ‘no move-
ment on the Pepsi file’ – however,
by all administrative accounts
an agreement in principle had
already been signed with Pepsi at
that time.”
The administrators to whom
the mise en demeure was given are
Marc Gauthier (Executive Director,
Finance and Business Operations)
and Johanne De Cubellis (Associate
Director, Hospitality Concordia),
According to an audit of last
year’s SSMU financial statements,
SSMU entered this year with a sur-
plus of almost $600,000. SSMU, as
a not-for-profit organization, is not
meant to run a surplus, and Drew
said the excess money would be put
toward new events.
“[Events are] the best way to
tie the community together. It had
very good benefit versus cost,”
said Drew. “We’re really happy
[with the event] despite the finan-
cial loss.”
Drew said that since this was
the Homekoming Bash’s first year,
some financial losses were to be
expected, but that spending for the
event would be tightened up in the
future as SSMU gets more experi-
ence in organizing it.
“It was a learning process,” said
Drew. “It was something [SSMU
President] Zach [Newburgh] really
wanted to do. He really believed
in it, I really believed in it. …
[Homecoming] is a really great
thing to have.”
Drew explained that some of the
leftover supplies from the event,
including food and drinks, would be
reallocated to other SSMU events.
Drew cited Four Floors, SSMU’s
October 28 Halloween party, as one
recipient of leftover Homekoming
supplies.
Drew also argued that the
University should have assisted
SSMU in financing the event. McGill
organizes its own Homecoming
event every year, which is usually a
major source of alumni donations
for the University.
“McGill should also help us out
a little bit,” said Drew. “The whole
thing is meant to get alumni to
spend money.”
with whom Beach claims to have
made an agreement, as well as
Michael Di Grappa.
For Di Grappa, the mise en
demeure came during his last days
Laura Beach Co-founder of TAPThirst
as an administrator at Concordia.
Di Grappa, who served as Vice-
President (Services) at Concordia,
is starting as McGill’s Vice-Principal
(Administration and Finances)
on November 15. He could not be
reached for comment.
The mise en demeure is not a
notification of a lawsuit, but instead
the notification of the potential for
one. “It pre-empts the legal proce-
dure. It requires someone to address
the situation or to admit wrongdo-
ing,” explained Pawel Porowski,
While SSMU is still waiting on
some bills for the event – including
one from McGill – and therefore
does not know the actual deficit,
Drew was confident that the event
would not go over budget.
“We tend not to overspend. We
budget to have a little bit of space”
to account for losses, said Drew.
“We always plan for the worst-case
scenario, and the budget is always
conservative for that reason.”
—Henry Gass
Victims seek reparations
from Oratory
On October 30, Montreal’s
Olympic Stadium hosted a cel-
ebratory mass in honour of André
Bessette, the eleventh Canadian
saint. Known as Brother André,
he was the porter for St. Joseph’s
Oratory and member of the
Congregation of the Holy Cross,
and died in 1937. Pope Benedict
XVI declared Brother André a saint
in Vatican City on October 17.
The celebration of Brother
André’s canonization has been
dampened by a storm of legal
action by victims of alleged sexual
abuse perpetrated by brothers from
Collège Notre-Dame, a formerly all-
boys school that is owned by the
Congregation of the Holy Cross.
According to Robert Cornellier,
a founder of the Committee of
Pedophile Victims at Collège Notre-
Dame, fifty men have come forward
with their stories of abuse at the
College. Cornellier’s late brother
René was a victim of abuse.
Last week Cornellier sent a letter
to Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte,
News 5
External Communications Officer
at Sustainable Concordia.
Thus far, however, none of the
Concordia administrators have
moved away from their position on
the contract, maintaining that the
university is not guilty of breach of
trust. Chris Mota, the university’s
Director of Communications, told
Concordia’s The Link that, “the uni-
versity is confident that we handled
everything according to the best
practices.”
“The admin have responded by
denying having acted in bad faith,
denying having ever made a ver-
bal agreement, despite the email
evidence I have provided,” Beach
responded. She has not yet decid-
ed whether she will go ahead with
legal action.
“I would be happy with a formal
apology from the administration,
a formal commitment to the cre-
ation of an institutionalized frame-
work for student consultation on
future contract negotiations, and
a formal commitment to the cre-
ation of an enforceable ethical pur-
chasing policy.”
who presided over the ceremony,
asking him for a portion of the
money generated by Saturday’s
mass to be given to the victims
of abuse at Collège Notre-Dame.
Cornellier said that he did not
receive any response; instead he
said he received a letter asking him
to stop speaking to media.
Cornellier identified the
Committee’s intention of “investi-
gating” Cardinal Turcotte’s claims
that Saturday’s events honouring
Brother André did not turn a profit.
Of the 50,000 people projected to
attend the event, the final atten-
dance was 30,000, with tickets five
dollars each.
“We don’t want to hurt the col-
lege…but we want to denounce our
abusers,” said Cornellier, conveying
the general message of the men he
has spoken with.
Cornellier explained the will of
his late father, asking for an apol-
ogy and a refund of tuition money
for René’s schooling at Notre Dame,
as reparation for his son’s sexual
abuse. Cornellier mentioned his
family’s initial desire to not go pub-
lic with their case, but after the
treatment they received from the
Congregation in response to their
request, they decided to “push the
story forward.”
“[Their] only reply is to send
their lawyers, the most expensive
and biggest [lawyers] in Montreal.
… [That is the] way they reply to
victims, [the] way the Church in
Quebec replies to victims of cases
of sex assault,” Cornellier said.
St. Joseph’s Oratory had not
responded to a request for com-
ment when The Daily when to
press.
—Erin Hudson
 Commentary
Debt = Delirium
The gadfly
Shaina Agbayani
shaina.agbayani@mcgilldaily.com
D
ebt. A humble $40,000 quan-
tifies my undergraduate edu-
cation by its dusk. Economists
prognosticate that by 2012, U.S. debt
will eclipse its GDP. $3 trillion rep-
resents the appraisal of the Third
World’s indebtedness to the West.
Deleterious spending patterns
Irreverent to student debt, I
relapsed into hyper-consumerist
product dependency last week, pur-
chasing septic fluid while I could
have simply persisted in plunging.
Mired deep in a heap of defi-
cit, Obama’s administration exac-
erbates the land-of-the-free(-of-
prudence)’s, home-of-the-(fiscally)-
audacious’s debt crisis by gratu-
itously increasing investment in
the military-industrial complex.
The U.S. spends 53 cents of every
tax dollar on the military. Less
than a fourth of this is earmarked
for Afghanistan and Iraq, rousing
us to posit that this expenditure
is paranoid, pre-emptive, and pro-
vocative. America’s soaring defence
expenditures – exemplified in the
unprecedented $708 billion that the
administration has requested from
Congress for 2011 military spending
– is symptomatic of a global arms
addiction.
African debt to industrialized
economies now exceeds threefold
what was initially borrowed. This
continent, where easily prevent-
able and treatable condition such
as diarrhea are the second-lead-
ing killer of children under five,
expends four times more on debt
repayments than on health.
Corporate hegemony debtifies us
Corporate philosophies regiment
planned obsolescence. My Liquid
Plumr Pro is a corporate-invented
“necessity” that derides my clog-
clearing capabilities as outmoded by
providing me with a convenient alter-
native. Appeals to convenience often
euphemize excuses for indolence
and irresponsibility. For convenience,
we treat Third World countries as
depositories for our toxic waste.
The military’s economic strangle-
hold on the deficit-ravaged American
economy is forged by a dynamic of
supply and demand. The former is
propositioned by avaricious weap-
ons-manufacturing giants. They form
the expansive nexus of corporate
interest that undergirds excessive
militarization by strategically ubiq-
uitizing themselves. Weapon manu-
facturers are implanted numerously
in all states, possessing tremendous
leverage in lobbying Congress to
increase defence budgets that chan-
nel multi-million-dollar weapons con-
tracts toward them.
The most significant variables in
the decline of Third World countries
into debt crises played themselves
out in the seventies and eighties,
when developed countries rose inter-
est rates starkly and oil prices quadru-
pled, increasing all costs. Both result-
ed from the cowrporate monopoly
on determining interest rates and
oil prices. To rectify the debt quag-
mire, Third World countries entered
into Structural Adjustment Programs
with the World Bank and the IMF
that purported to assist borrowers
pursuing debt relief through more
money-lending or lowering interest
Olivia Messer | The McGill Daily
rates. In exchange, borrowers had to
comply with a neoliberal agenda that
privatized industries and decreased
spending on the health and educa-
tional institutions most beneficial to
civilians.
Rectification: de-dependence
We gotta take the red pill and,
like Neo, recognize the debt matrix
– an excessive, irrational industri-
alization that has dismantled our
mental mechanisms for apprehend-
ing how impotent, paranoid, and
narrow-minded the interdependen-
cy on which capitalist globalization
is predicated renders us.
Convenience-on-steroids – fro-
zen mini-bagels with cream cheese,
payforessay.com – typifies our zeit-
geist (read: we have normalized
a culture of incompetency). We
breathe in the midst of a $1.5-tril-
lion arms addiction (read: we are
becoming more paranoid). Our
freedom to cheaply buy whatever
we want from wherever we want
whenever we want is borne at the
expense of the bleeding and dis-
ease of the earth and the Third
World peoples who participate the
least in this earth-tainting (read:
our scope is insidiously narrow).
We must revise our conceptions
of development and freedom – not in
terms of military capacity, or of our
freedom to buy avocados in January
or to subject developing nations to
usury. Amping up capital-obsessed
globalization is unsustainable.
Rather, we must reclaim compe-
tency and stability by seeking alter-
natives (see Anqi Zhang’s Culture
article on Ecovillages, November 1)
to the global over-dependency most
patent in our transnational, corpo-
rate-sponsored debt crises. !
The McGill Daily | Thursday, November 4, 2010 | mcgilldaily.com
Why I’m supporting
the UDrive
And why you should too
Jamie Burnett
Hyde Park
I
’m writing this in part because
of actions by the McGill admin-
istration attempting to pre-
vent efforts by the Association
of Graduate Students Employed
at McGill (AGSEM) to organize
a union for course lecturers. We
should know about this – univer-
sity administrations have learned to
mobilize students against campus
workers, a trap we can’t afford to
fall into.
I’ve also been motivated by
recent statements by principal
Heather Munroe-Blum. These state-
ments suggest that she and her
administration are not primarily
concerned with our education, par-
ticularly undergraduates’. Munroe-
Blum has been quite public with
two arguments: First, she has called
on Quebec to dramatically raise
undergraduate tuition, occasion-
ally employing the world-class aca-
demic logic that Harvard is unusu-
ally accessible to working-class stu-
dents. Second, she is calling for the
transition of schools with a lot of
resources (like McGill) away from
undergraduate education, becom-
ing instead elaborate advanced
research centres, publicly funded
but servicing big business.
It’s important to contradict
this narrative, ever more popular
in these days of austerity, that the
workers who provide public ser-
vices have interests contradictory
to those they provide services to
(including students). I think it’s
quite the opposite. We see this
both on campus – where university
administrations often manage to
cut costs by turning students and
workers against each other, to the
detriment of our education – and
off, where more generally the nar-
rative of the public-sector-worker-
as-enemy is used to attack labour
rights for (almost) all of us, and to
attack our public services.
Collective bargaining agree-
ments (CBAs) determine the rela-
tionship between the employer
(here, the university adminis-
tration) and employees (in this
instance, course lecturers). The
bargaining process also provides a
great opportunity to see what both
sides really want. Let’s look at some
examples of common things stu-
dent-worker unions fight for (both
Erratum
In the article (“Academic fraud in the spotlight,” News, November
1), the Council of Canadian Academies was incorrectly identified as the
Canadian Council of Academies.
The Daily regrets the error.
6
within and outside CBAs).
Class sizes. Course lectur-
ers benefit from smaller classes
because they’re easier to teach, and
both teachers and students benefit
from more engaging discussion.
Wages, work hours, and leave.
Instructors who are overworked,
underpaid, or both, can’t teach as
well as those who aren’t totally pre-
occupied by how to pay the bills.
Instructors with good medical leave
have a better chance to resolve
health problems early, before they
have the chance to become major
disruptions.
Fair hiring and firing policies.
Most CBAs attempt to provide fair,
transparent mechanisms for hiring
and firing. This helps prevent work-
place discrimination, both in terms
of race and gender, for example,
and on the basis of the employ-
ers’ personal or political beliefs. It
means getting the right candidate
for the job – on the basis of their
actual qualifications.
Professional development.
Another staple in academic CBAs
is the provision for various forms of
professional development. Course
lecturers have a direct interest in
developing their knowledge of their
field and developing as teachers –
unions help get them the resourc-
es to do so. Unions can also help
them obtain things like technol-
ogy grants and office space, helping
their members – your instructors
– be better organized and more
accessible.
Giving workers a say. Decisions
in universities are increasingly
made by individuals more con-
cerned about their outside busi-
ness interests, or their reactionary
politics, than those of students
and education. Course lecturers
are well-placed to see what works
and what doesn’t in the university.
A union would give them a much
stronger voice in how the university
is run.
There’s a theme here: Your
instructors’ working conditions are
your learning conditions.
When they win rights at work,
they’re winning a better education
for us. If we can be turned against
that, we all lose.
Jamie Burnett is a U1 Economics
student and a UDrive volunteer.
The views expressed here are his
own. Write him at james.burnett@
mail.mcgill.ca.
The McGill Daily | Thursday, November 4, 2010 | mcgilldaily.com
I confess: I bought my degree
Even if you don’t pay tuition, you should stand in solidarity with those who do
Courtney Graham
Comment
W
e are all a part of a flawed
education system, one
that turns education into
a commodity that must be bought
and traded on a market. We con-
done current policy by our very
presence here – even if we are
doing so now in order to change
the system later.
Sentiments like Matthew
Kassel’s (“My Café, my memories,”
Commentary, October 14) are
a perfect example of the way in
which most of us are blindly com-
plicit in perpetuating inequality in
university education as a whole,
and at McGill more specifically.
This is true whether you pay your
own tuition or your parents pay it,
whether you are from a working-
class family or your parents make
over six figures.
We tell ourselves: it’s not my
hardship, it’s not my problem, it’s
not my reality – quod erat demon-
strandum, I don’t have to care
about it.
By perpetuating our own
deliberate ignorance, we are not
absolved of our role in a system that
consistently disadvantages peo-
Health Services does good work
Human error is real, but our practitioners are not incompetent
Pierre-Paul Tellier
Hyde Park
I
am responding to Aaron
Vansintjan’s allegation that
McGill Student Health Services
“almost killed” him (“McGill
Health Services almost killed me,”
Commentary, October 28).
It is always distressing to hear
that any student has suffered as a
result of illness, but I feel it is nec-
essary to respond to the criticisms
raised about the service we provide.
First, McGill Student Health
Services does provide same-day
appointments for students who
are not feeling well. A student who
comes in will be seen by a triage
nurse, and, depending on the prob-
lem, will either be given an appoint-
ment later that day to see a nurse or
a physician, or be sent home with
the proper advice. The system was
implemented as a result of student
feedback. Prior to this, students
who came in essentially had to wait
at Student Health – often for hours
– to be seen. Now, students can
leave the clinic and attend classes,
otherwise do their work, or go
home to rest.
Second, students come early to
the same-day appointment clinic
because there are only a limited
number of appointments available.
During the academic year, we try to
have the equivalent of 1.5 doctors
seeing drop-in patients every day.
ple who will never enjoy as much
privilege as we do. Continuing to
be blithely unaware of our role in
the system can only make us look
foolish.
Self-awareness is one of the
most important lessons we take
away from our university educa-
tion. Ignorance regarding our
place in the broader system is
complicity.
And apathy is collusion. If we
enjoy a privilege, we have an obli-
gation to serve others in the pur-
suit of the same opportunities
– whether they choose to do so
through “appropriate” channels
(education) or not. Ultimately, we
have a responsibility to put for-
ward the idea that self-worth is not
and should not be contingent upon
a university education – even if we
have one.
By simply choosing to partici-
pate in our education as bystand-
ers, rather than taking a more active
role (by engaging in debates such
as this one, or by participating in
student politics) we are disadvan-
taging ourselves, and those outside
of the system.
Failing to recognize that the
broader systemic issues facing our
university are part and parcel of our
education is failing to become truly
We would like to have more, but
we are unable to recruit other phy-
sicians, simply because there are
not enough physicians working in
Montreal – a shortage beyond our
control. Recognizing that, we have
trained our nurses to do gyneco-
logical exams, prescribe contracep-
tives, and screen men and women
for sexually transmitted infections,
which frees time for some of our
physicians to see other patients.
Third, our nurses follow strict
protocols consistent with the
current medical literature when
screening and evaluating students.
Students are either referred to a
physician for assessment or sent
home with advice, including the
advice to return to clinic if symp-
toms worsen. But nurses always err
on the side of safety.
Fourth, medical conditions are
dynamic, not static. In this case, the
initial assessment was most probably
the proper diagnosis of what was
then a simple viral infection – a cold,
not pneumonia. At this point, most
students get better, but a small num-
ber don’t. Vansintjan reported that he
returned another day for a medical
note, but a second nurse determined
that he should be seen by a physician,
and the physician diagnosed pneu-
monia and treated him. I am sure
the proper, broad-spectrum antibi-
otic that would treat the “atypical
pneumonia” most common in young
people was prescribed. But, even
despite proper treatment, a medical
Commentary 7
Olivia Messer | The McGill Daily
educated. We should stop pretending. We a whole, and agree on a strategy to
Education is more than the should care and we should fight. begin dismantling it, one issue at a
name “McGill” on our degrees, When tuition goes up for our fellow time.
which are ultimately just pieces of students, for example, we should all
paper that signal potential employ- be up in arms, because education Courtney Graham is U3 Political
ers to the fact that we played the should be regarded as a right, and Science and International
education game and won. It is the not as a commodity. Our collective Development student ( Joint
development of self-awareness and voice cannot be ignored. But before Honours) and The Daily’s copy
civic responsibility – of collective we can speak collectively, we need editor. Write her at courtney.gra-
consciousness. to realize our role in the system as ham@mail.mcgill.ca.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“”
!∀#∃%&%∋(∃∀%(&%∋)∗+∃(,−(./(
condition may sometimes worsen for 0∋%1∗)%−+/2(34.(+,.5,∋∃#67%(
a number of possible reasons – e.g.,
because of another medical prob- 8∗∃∀(∃∀%(5#+∃(∃∀#∃(3(8,−4∃(
lem or more commonly because the
6%(#∋,9−)(∃,(∀%#∋(∗∃:
organism is not sensitive to the pre-
scribed antibiotic.
Fifth, routine use of chest
X-rays in these situations is not
recommended. Guidelines from
the Canadian Infectious Disease !∀#∃%&∃∋()∗)∋+∃&,−.&/0∋;%,∋<%(!:(=91∀1∋−/∋2−,∋,##/3
Society recommend chest X-rays
0#34&3∃&5&6,&.∋670#4−#8∃6+29∋>%+∗1∗,−(?,∗−∃1
only if the diagnosis is clinically
obscure or uncertain – apparently
not the case here.
Finally, there is no easy way,
such as testing a sample of blood or
sputum, to determine what bacteria
are growing in the lungs, so antibi-
otics can only be prescribed based
on criteria such as age, severity of
illness, and the region where the
Your letters –
person lives. The only way to deter-
mine if the proper antibiotics are
being used is to monitor a patient’s
progress and response to the drugs.
we want ’em.
Send them now:
The service that my staff offers
is excellent and the service stu-
dents get at Student Health is better
than what most Quebec residents
letters@
receive. Nonetheless, I invite all
students to get in touch with me if
they have any concerns or sugges-
tions as we feel feedback allows us
mcgilldaily.com
to improve our service.
Pierre-Paul Tellier is a professor of
Medicine and director of the McGill
Student Health Service. You can
write to him at pierre-paul.tellier@
mcgill.ca.
8 Features
Brain chips, battle suits, and cochlear implants
Rebecca Falvey examines the benefits and pitfalls of brain-computer interface technology
A
n interface system that allows an owl monkey
on a treadmill to control the movement of a
200-pound humanoid robot is on its way to
allowing people who have lost the ability to
communicate to do so again.
This is the result of two decades of research into
brain-computer interfaces (BCI): invasive neural pros-
thetics that harness brain signals accompanying move-
ment and translate them into the movement of a cur-
sor on a computer, a keyboard, a prosthetic limb, or a
separate machine, like a robot.
These interfaces may someday bring immense inde-
pendence to people confined to a wheelchair, bed, or
their own brain – for instance,those paralyzed with Lou
Gehrig’s disease (or ALS), stroke, or cerebral palsy.
A company called BrainGate is currently conducting
research into mind-controlled wheelchairs and pros-
thetic limbs. This emerging technology will not only
benefit the disabled and disadvantaged but also the
performance of the military and youth entertainment.
The U.S. Army has invested at least $4 million in
the development of “thought helmets,” which would
enable soldiers to communicate without speaking – not
with sentences and words, but intentions and appre-
hensions.
The Canadian military has also sponsored a signifi-
cant amount of research in this field over the past two
decades, with the intention of restoring limb function
after injury, in addition to its long-term objective of
“performance enhancement.”
Top-of-the-line toy and video game companies,
such as Mattel, Nokia, Sega Toys and Uncle Milton
are working with the company NeuroSky. NeuroSky’s
“ThinkGear” technology is a non-invasive brain-com-
puter interface using electroencephalography (EEG),
which records the electrical activity along the scalp,
produced by firing neurons within the brain.
Invasive BCI, on the other hand, are implanted into
the grey matter of the brain during neurosurgery.
In 2004, the first clinical trial of invasive BCI was con-
ducted on a 25-year-old Massachusetts native named
Matthew Nagle, who was paralyzed from the neck
down. A 96-electrode implant was placed over the
motor cortex controlling his dominant left arm and
hand. The implant was linked to the outside of his skull,
which could then be connected to a computer. The
computer was trained to discern his thought patterns
and associate them with the movements he chose.
On account of this device, Nagle was able to do
everything that most people can do on the computer
and internet by pressing a button or moving a cursor.
He could also open and close his prosthetic left hand.
The device had to be removed within a year based on
FDA regulations, as the immune system of the brain at
this point in the technology’s development will gener-
ally reject the foreign device within the two-year mark.
Independence for those with active brains but inac-
tive bodies is one of the main goals of this research. In
this respect, according to Nagle’s own accounts, the
procedure was successful.
“I can’t put it into words,” Religion & Ethics
Newsweekly quoted him as saying. “It’s just – I use my
brain. I just thought it. I said, ‘Cursor go up to the top
right,’ and it did.”
 the
literary
supplement
 The McGill Daily 2 Literary Supplement

Stuart Wright

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

Let eagles scrape the firmament and fall

like hammers to anvils,
To nightingales yield their Attic-tongued dignity Tiana Reid
and to jays their brassy indignation,
But let us not neglect to make our offerings
to domestic genii
Nor to be stopped, on a blear-skied mild November day,
Little
At the sudden flash-winged ecstasy of pigeons
tremoring an unaccustomed pool.
Krista
With all of the force in her fifty-
pound body, she swung the rope into
a gratifying criss-cross. The rhythm
of her feet pounding on the sizzling
pavement was all that she could hear.
Left foot. Right foot. Swoosh. Just
when her curious neighbours thought
they could predict her agile sounds
to a T, Krista switched it up with a
double-under. As the rope swung
twice under her bare feet, her braids
jumped around on her head, the
beads fastened to each plait bounc-
ing up and down. For fear of failure,
she had been wary of the triple-under
that only one sixth-grader could do.
But now, it was the sweltering hot
summer before grade three and she
had never felt so in her body. She
closed her eyes, held her breath and
jumped as high as she possibly could.
The only sound the whole block
could hear was the rope swinging
three times under little Krista’s feet.

Max Karpinski

Oka
We went to Oka beach today, from the sandwall and charged the
where the red has long washed out, forest,

and we wrote with our feet warriors,

as cold tide rolled in and turned a black bandanna hiding

our toes blue. the red inside

The wall of sand stood of a howling throat

guard between the grey Ottawa announcing its presence

River and the trees, into this land

leaves already burned orange. which washes shrieks over

A message erased for centuries and which shows

stories forgotten, how easy it is to bury seventy-

ghosts turned eight days away in the dirt.
 The McGill Daily 3 Literary Supplement

Francesca Bianco

Sketch of a boy
in a small town
The girl you love still lives at home. I should probably note here this
home is a trailer, not a house, burrowed beneath the mountain by the lake.
There is one window, but no father. He is mining, or dead, she does not know.
You stay up late, touching each other under the headlights of your pickup
truck, sighing catechisms into sweet hay air. The mosquitoes like flames
bouncing against the candles of your wrists.
At home, her mother barely sleeps. She is pregnant. They both are.
You didn’t find out until you could feel the spasm of feet against your hand,
assumed it was yours. In the summer you refurbish tables at the mill. Break the
legs off.
Refinish and hammer them on again. You wait all week for Sunday
mass, ask the Lord to forgive you, thrust your fingers against the wall of the
confessional as if someone will push back. You daydream a cathedral of cloud.
The kitchen in the trailer has no dishwasher. Last week’s macaroni
stirs heavy with locusts. The girl’s younger sister is thirteen and wears black
eyeliner thick as leeches found in the lake. She is racooned in that trailer; you
watch her steal out into the rustling darkness as you slip in.
The neighbourhood (if you can call it that) is forsaken. There is an
old logger paused on his living room couch watching porn, the small breasts of
Mary casting a purple glow onto his front porch. Two driveways down, a herd
of farmers outside prophesize the weather. They stretch upturned arm to pool
Francesca Bianco
all the world’s sins in palms, dispute yesterday’s bar fight troubling the pure

Soul hunting harvest of their talk.

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

“What he fishes for changes
as light changes on water.” She smells of soap and incense. You walk to the pharmacy and buy
-Lorna Crozier her artificial nails, the ones that score prayers down your arms. In their sink
the plates grow forests. The backyard copulates with weeds foaming over old
What he hunts for changes toys, empty beer cans. The dog sleeps there. You think about what you might
as leaves change upon the branch. do after graduation. The high school advisor suggests fire fighting, travelling
Grouse, Pheasant, Fox. to Europe. The girl’s mother told you that Jesus walked on water, that his dis-
There is a precipice in his mind ciples mistook him for a ghost. But you feel nailed to this town, kneeled to the
where they die, ditch dirtied altar of this girl. To this boy who could have been.
blood pooled, fur feathered
Where their eyes turn to bullets.

His rifle is invisible.

He has forgotten what calibre
speeds like a bee to a hive through cloud.
There is no need for specifics.

If he could fire his eye out on a try

he would.
Return it to his face
when he had heaved the beast.
If he could use his heart as a decoy,
then return it after he won.

There is something he has never hunted.

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

Every time he hunts he is different.

The hill is different,
the light that pulls through the trees,
the animal that is there
or isn’t. What he kills now is a swallow
and it’s by accident.
Frail and black,
twitching to fill an emptiness in a forest
he has never seen before
no trail in, or out.
home, they tell you, we are all being herded over some ancient and imminent cliff.
The McGill Daily 4 Literary Supplement

Binoy Zuzarte

Growing Pains
I am waiting for a train to Land’s End. Behind me is a boy
who sees the world in puddles—

lucky rustpenny sun

white button cloud with loose thread
cigarette seagulls and their cinders
wax crayon trees violet-red in a row

Brat! don’t play with cigarettes. Puddles stretch horizontal

then Land’s End, Land’s End station revert.
I pull him aside when doors open
(waterbug creates a ripple)
and I make him look upstream—

pink grey pregnant sky:

dead salmon birthing rainbow roe

Laurin Liu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My mother sighed. Then she said with a mischievous smile, How typical of him.
 The McGill Daily 5 Literary Supplement

Whitney Mallett

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

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

The universe gave Sandy a get-out-of-jail-free card. She’s super hot and super rich
in Conakry
and has all the best shoes. Rows and rows of them. She has ostrich cowboys boots On the cover of a daily spread
that she doesn’t even wear. I want to borrow all of them but my feet are too big. The caption
beneath a picture reads:
Once I borrowed a t-shirt. I pretended I didn’t have an extra one in my bag just “a fisherman
so I could open up her dresser and look at all the things I wished were mine. I working on his nets
remember inside the drawer it smelled like wood and laundry. I picked out an in Conakry”
over-sized white T. Sandy had snipped the arm holes extra big so it’d show off He kneels in a nylon cloud, Untangling cords
her side-boobs. Across the front, bold black letters spelled out Shut The Fuck With a tiny fishbone knife.
Up. I put it on without a bra, and looked at myself in the mirror, my nipples pok- Around him,
ing out underneath the letters. It was see-through enough you didn’t just see the The slippery ghosts of mackerels
shape of the nipple, but a hint of the areola too. Sandy never wore a bra. Still struggle in the snares.
He sings them lullabies;
On my way home I stopped at the Pharmaprix to buy a straight razor to layer Imitating the sound of the sea
my hair the way Sandy told me. When the 16-year old cashier with bubble- Crashing on the shore,
gum pink eyeshadow handed me my change, I dropped a penny. the deep murmurings
of currents
One hand on her hip and one hand on her baby’s stroller, the woman meandering through trenches of the Pacific.
in line behind me, summoned up her bitchiest voice, “Excuse me.” He slips the knife
She pointed at the penny on the floor in front of her. Between the rope
and each fish’s invisible scales.
“Uh thanks. It’s just a penny — I thought a kid would find it.” I saw The mackerel
her glance down at my areolae and felt my cheeks turn pink. Sensing freedom
tests his fins
“Someone could slip,” she enunciated every syllable very slowly. On air
then urges his tiny body
When I told Sandy the story, she laughed, “You should’ve Toward the shore.
told her and her saggy tits to suck it.” The fisherman whistling
A hymn for calm seas
I didn’t tell her that I’d picked up the penny. as he stitches his nets back together.
 The McGill Daily 6 Literary Supplement

Grace Flahive

Bixby
It hadn’t always been like this. In his younger days, before the Unfortunate Happenstance Laura Freitag
of 2093, and 2100’s uproarious Change of Plans, Bixby awoke each morning with a small
mug of pekoe. “The world’s a nice place,” he would say, pulling on each glove with a taut
snap of rubber. The morning light made parallelograms on his bedroom carpet, but the
city it warmed wasn’t one to cause trouble. The cordial people of Vesper yielded to
Almost
pedestrians, smiled at strangers, and always changed the empty bag of milk. They meant
no harm. In those days, Bixby would drive the streets, alert for kerfuffle, alert for fuss.
But he never found it. As the city’s protector, clothed in kevlar, Bixby never once shot his
plasma gun, never found a single crime to fight. Until suddenly, everything changed.
particle
The Caped Commotion took the city in the summer of 2104, wearing masks of
gold and masks of paper. Duct and scotch and masking tape masks, masks of wool and
wood and fruit and Kleenex, and masks with blinking lights. They arrived over the hill
physics
from nearby Penelope and soared through the streets of Vesper. Riding vibrant bicycles, along the powerlined skies form rhombuses
the Caped Commotion tossed shredded paper to the ground, tampered with labels in the but only at certain angles when passed in a
produce section, and entered intersections on yellow lights. A gang of six dozen, perhaps, highway-bound car going approx. 65m/hr we
they spoke in outdoor voices inside of doors. One particularly unruly participant was were supposed to meet in the middle ETA
spotted lazily shelving a library book – a 714 for water features in landscape art under 715 4:39 a.m., but I’d forgotten it along with radio
for woody plants. Disrupted were tennis matches and phone calls, and disturbed was the and top fifty of the fifties (and looping ‘you
peace. Twelve minutes into their stint of chaos, the upheaval of the city met Bixby’s keen ain’t nothin’ but a hounddog’ only that part
ears, and his gloves have never snapped faster. but not the rest) I’d remember later we
shouldn’t have ended up as far as San Vincente
“Please, stop!” he cried, stumbling to the street, blinded by sunlight reflected off each and carried one over in a way that was
glassy downtown building. “Vesper doesn’t want you here! We want stillness, we want altogether wrong and say hey there Danny,
kind smiles!” A troop of the offenders gaped back at him, forgetting for a moment their that’s your daddy’s song, and that’s the
littering, their loitering, their posting of bills where none were to be posted. They stared only thing he’d ever know for sure between
back at Bixby, who wielded his plasma gun, uncertain which trigger to pull in case of polyester sheets and this desert, and yes, I
attack. His helmet-top GPS wobbled precariously on his head, three sizes too large and decided—
never worn before. The protective plastic of his haphazard hazard mask had never been
peeled off, and he squinted behind its glare. Bixby struggled to summon a single brazen
shred in the face of such discourteous opposition. Feeble words escaped his mouth, “I
need you to stop. Please, I-”

It was then that a single scoundrel stepped toward him. The smirking boy, ten or twelve,
chucked a pilfered tangerine in the cowering cop’s direction. Flustered, Bixby didn’t see
it coming, and the fruit hit the edge of his left eyebrow. He staggered, the force of the
projectile having unlatched the hinges he’d never wanted anyone to find.

“You can’t do this!” he cried. And Bixby’s own mask clattered to the ground.
 The McGill Daily 7 Literary Supplement

Dylan Boyko

The from

Oil Barons
Highway 63 is one of the most
dangerous roads in the country. It serves as Nicholas Dillon
the major artery to one of the worst places
in Canada and, effectively, should be paved
in gold. It leads to a nexus of wealth, a place
where the land is combed for the dirtiest kind
of exploitation, the kind that shouldn’t really
Untitled
be worth anything, and through some sort of it was totally insignificant and nobody cared or noticed or even thought to look; and the
voodoo magic is transformed into molten boy lay, silently carving angels from the snow—intense, directed carving, as if it were some almost-
money. It leads to a place where the last people built monolith that took god knows how many years to construct by some ancient race of long dead
you would ever want to get rich get really and forgotten nobodies whose words we don’t get and whose thoughts barely mattered much any-
fucking rich. It is a source of hidden pride, a way. and the people chatted and chatted about the news and the war and the unexpected heaps of
source of common shame. It is ‘Fort Mac’, oil late-fall snow, and how the house painters were too slow and should just be done, and how it’d be
sands, Wood Buffalo. It isn’t even a city, only such great news to hear if the war or the painters were finished, and how we could once again get
a regional municipality, whatever that means. new fur coats if it weren't for the market’s recent plummet, and how political optimism might make
But, it is where my father does his work. I it all better, despite the never-ending rhetoric never coming face to face with the dismal reality that
don’t quite get it. nothing’s getting better or worse, just ideologically garbled, obfuscated, stagnant, or broken. all, and
I’ll never understand that road; worse, perhaps. but the boy kept on swarming it—his eyes becoming nearly entirely crystalline—and
never understand where it really leads, just like he kept thinking of why only children noticed him, and even so few at that. it was cold as a cold, and
I’llnever understand my father being there. november was near done.
The road is erratic, spacey and never seems to
be going the right way. The traffic speeds both
ways, but I’ve always had a feeling it must
go faster in whatever the opposite direction
you’re going is. Kept awake by eight-balls
chased with energy drinks – a million other
things must keep them going, keep them
desiring, pushed down that road – the worst
people you can imagine, and even some you
can’t, pursue some redundant dream. This
really isn’t, but sort of is, my father – I just
don’t understand him. He’s chasing some-
thing, but I doubt it’s there.
My father never drove himself down
that highway; too much disorder, too much
to piss him off. Instead he took the camp bus
with, as he put it, the degenerates, OCD
cases, and idiots who DUI’ed their way into
the backseats. I imagined my father judging
these people, them wearing black sunglasses,
hooded sweat shirts drawn up tight to the
sides of their faces, him in company-provided
work polo, pressed and folded jeans
looking hardened but strangely clever. He just
sits there, criticism wanting to free itself
from his mind, staring out the window of the
bus. He can’t sleep on the ride up, he thinks
he’ll get robbed.
 The McGill Daily 8 Literary Supplement

Jade Hurter

Sunshine
that day the
sky was so blue
a sunflower
spoke through its petals
to your upturned face.

you ran to your mother

small brown fingers
overflowing with a
bouquet of buttercups
and violets.

all you remember

is the sound of the faucet
spilling into a sea green vase
and the smell of soil
on her dress.
Ariel Yeshoshua

The Ballerina
It was 11:30 on a Sunday morning and terribly bright. They hadn’t had time for cof-
fee. Caroline was late for a flight and still somewhat drunk. She was also barefoot,
having forgotten her sandals in the bar the night before. She shifted her weight lightly
from one foot to the other to avoid being burned by the pavement. She coughed a
thick, full cough into her arm and spit brown; cleared her throat once more, wetly, and
spit again, a long glob of yellow. The mucus sizzled like chicken fat on the concrete.
“At least things will be easier for you now,” she said. “Anyway,
I won’t be around to drive you so nutso anymore.”
A bead of sweat dripped down his forehead into the corner of his
eye. He wiped it with the back of his hand, but it didn’t help.
“Is your mother picking you up at JFK?” he said.
“No, she’ll still be at the ballet school when I get in.
She teaches on Sundays until late. I’ll take a cab.”
“And when did you say the dress rehearsals start?”
She didn’t say anything so he said:
“Do you want some money for the cab?”
She laughed hoarsely, an ugly laugh.
“I should go now,” she said. “Goodbye Pete. Maybe
I’ll write to you when I’m feeling better again.”
He reached out to hug her but she didn’t move. He tried to kiss her
cheek but only got her thin black hair. She stood stiffly, avoiding his eyes.
“Good luck,” he said. “I really do wish I could be there for the perfor-
mance. I’m sure you’ll be a hit though. You really are so gorgeous babe.”
Caroline laughed again and patted his shoulder. She could feel the
point of his bone through the shirt fabric. She had never realized before,
how thin he was. She climbed over the passenger’s seat into the driver’s
seat and slammed the door behind her. Pete bent his head sideways and
looked into the car. He waved with his fingers and tried to smile.
Then she was gone and he was on the street corner alone, wondering if this was really
how relief was meant to feel. He walked down a block and called the house from a
payphone. He could hear Lisa’s Alvin and the Chipmunks cassette-tape playing in
the background when Trish picked up. He’d be home within the hour, he told her.
Caroline drove fast, zigzagging through the San Francisco traffic. When she was on
the freeway toward Daly City she lit a cigarette with the lighter receptacle. She kept
the windows rolled up, and fumbled through the glove for a CD. It was the one they
had listened to so many early mornings after the bar, sitting in her Jetta, parked around
the corner from his house. They always parked around the corner, never in front.
The first track of the disk exploded through the speakers. It was a tune by
the band Cobra Sex. The singer’s voice was high pitched and piercing.
Done done done it before,
Did every damn thing I pleased
Before you called me darling!
Caroline pulled off to the shoulder and sat smoking. Cars honked, passing close-
ly to the side. A man in a white pickup yelled, “crazy bitch!” and flashed his
middle finger, but she just turned up the music and put her feet up on the dash.
They were knobby and covered in little pink-purple scabs. She closed her eyes
and tried to imagine what it would be like to sing instead of dance. She opened
her mouth, but did not make a sound. She was not going to make her plane.

I ’ve grown up with a deaf mother and a father
who works as an interpreter with the deaf
community, generally comprised of students
in school. I learned American Sign Language at
the same time I learned English.
Since the 1980s, increasing numbers of deaf
people have been implanted with cochlear
implants – minimally invasive electronic prosthet-
ics that can be surgically implanted within the
inner ear of those who are deaf or hard of hear-
ing. Though their ethical quandaries are different
from those of brain-computer interfaces, they
have created a lot of controversy. There is no real
fear of computerization resulting from cochlear
implants, but rather a familiar feeling of oppres-
sion in the deaf community.
It’s been reported that the implants have the
potential to improve the hearing of those born
hard of hearing or those who have gone deaf later
in life, but do not have a very strong impact on
those who are born completely or almost com-
pletely deaf. It’s now commonly decided in the
medical field that cochlear implants have a better
chance of working the earlier they are implanted
– as early as twelve months old. If a baby is given a
cochlear implant and decides to take it out later in
life, perhaps because they were already too deaf
for it to work and would rather live their life as a
decidedly deaf person with a chosen language,
any residual hearing is likely to be diminished.
The controversy in the deaf community arises
from a feeling of a dismissal of their culture.
Emlyn Murray and Erin Beaver are both young
women I know in my hometown of Halifax. Both
were implanted with cochlear implants – Erin
under her parents’ discretion when she was
three, and Emlyn decided to receive one with her
parents’ encouragement when she was fourteen.
Erin is planning on having her implants removed
as they had no effect on her and caused her pain.
Emlyn felt a discomfort and a terrible, robotic
noise in her head in the beginning, but she has
noticed a gradual improvement in hearing over
the past five years. She once used a hearing aid in
the other ear and favoured that side, the hearing
in the implant has improved to the extent that she
no longer uses the hearing aid.
Though Erin is generally opposed to putting
cochlear implants in babies and Emlyn is an
advocate of it, they both have concerns that “sign
language and other distinctions will be lost in the
rapidly growing technology,” as Emlyn wrote in
an email. Emlyn was born with some hearing, and
worked hard at learning how to improve her com-
munication with the implant.
My mother has always taken very strong
offense to being called “disabled,” and as she has
successfully run her own teaching and consulting
business for around thirty years and has lived self-
sufficiently her entire life, it’s not hard to see why.
While the implants do help some who were born
with an ability to hear that could be salvaged, they
do not help everyone.
The major fear, which has proven true in many
families, is that a baby will be given an implant as
a child, and raised as an entirely hearing child. Yet
they may not develop a good sense of hearing and
be left with a loss of language and culture, strain-
ing to hear and having no real way to express
themselves and communicate, or identify with the
culture they’ve been thrown into.
There’s a strong connection between this fear
and the reality that my mother’s deaf generation
grew up with. From age five to eighteen she lived
at a boarding school for the hearing impaired, a
fairly abusive place that forced the students to
lip-read and wouldn’t let them sign. They gener-
The McGill Daily | Thursday, November 4, 2010 | mcgilldaily.com
ally left these children in the dark, giving them a
sense of shame.
Though the cochlear implants do not carry
the same form of abusive oppression, the same
feeling of loss is prevalent in the children who
can neither hear correctly know how to sign. My
father, who works with deaf children, almost all of
whom have cochlear implants, notices that all of
his students are supposedly on the way to hear-
ing, yet still need him to interpret for them.
T he main purpose of the medical research
into neural prosthetics is to help those
who have lost their independence and
ability to communicate. “In a study of several
hundred quadriplegics,” explained Sam Musallam,
an assistant professor in McGill’s department of
Electrical and Computer Engineering. “Most of
them said they wish they could at least have their
hand movement back.”
Musallem’s research has contributed tremen-
dously to BCI’s ability to identify how the brain
commands physical motion and endpoints –
research that can be applied both to physical
prosthetics as well as computer use. Victims of
ALS in particular require some form of BCI in
order to continue engaging with the outside
world.
“They degenerate and become locked in,” said
Musallam. “These are people who for a long time
were thought to be in a coma or a vegetative state
where they can’t move at all, but they’re con-
scious inside. So nothing happens to the brain,
but the ability to move diminishes. I think the
potential is just huge to allow them to communi-
cate instead of think that they’re in a coma.” What
is mistaken for a coma is just the lack of ability to
respond to stimuli. “But there is nothing wrong
with their brain.”
In regards to the individual, this progress
also highlights the emphasis society puts on the
importance of the individual and independence,
and the choice of self-sufficiency and technology
over community dependence. Brain-computer
interfaces are an ironic development for the
wishes of the individual, as this technology will
simultaneously give movement to those who have
lost the ability to move, and take away the need
for it from those who have the ability but choose
not to exercise it.
“O ne of the groups of people who
often ask me about this and won-
ders when we’re going to be ready
to implant humans are gamers,” said Stephen
Helms Tillery, an assistant professor in the School
of Biological and Health Systems Engineering at
Arizona State University. “So those guys I think
are real keen to deal with an interface directly to
a computer.”
A progressing technology such as this opens a
Pandora’s box of ethical questions. Where do we
as a society want to draw the line with regards to
enhancing the human brain and body with neuro-
electronic devices? When weighing the risks and
benefits of the growing technology, do the bene-
fits of helping the disabled outweigh the possible
negative effects on society and the individual?
One concern with the growing research is
the prioritization of who the technology would
benefit first. This is basically the“disparity of
distribution of wealth,” Tillery explained. “So if
you have a development that gives people an
advantage, often it’s the people who already have
advantages who can afford it and get access to the
technology.”
It is easy to take this topic and spiral into theo-
9
ries of mind control, questions of personhood,
and reruns of The Six Million Dollar Man. The
military has put a lot of money into this research
over the past two decades, some of it being
inspired by brain injuries of Canadian soldiers. Yet
the military’s concerns are not exclusively recu-
perative. As documented in the book Mind Wars,
by Jonathan Moreno, the American government
aims to enhance the military with neural prosthet-
ics and interfaces, creating “network-centric war-
fare.” These goals may also be met by the mind
reading caps the military’s $4-million research
hopes for. This neurologically controlled future
of the military would involve interfaces that would
gather information from surroundings and trans-
mit them to a central command post. There is also
the idea of battle suits that would contain sensors
able to detect injuries and administer drugs.
D ystopian as these prospects are, the
“computerization of humans” fear goes
both ways – the fear of altering the
human body with technology, and the fear of
the human consciousness being stored in a com-
puter. In regards to the fear of computerization,
the technology right now is still “infantile”, said
Musallam. He added, however, that while people
like himself have little control of the final uses
of their research, their medical potential makes
them worthwhile.
“Most, if not all of the military funding, from
DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency], that has gone to prosthetics, has gone
with the goal of developing prosthetics for
paralyzed patients. Now, first of all, knowledge
is independent of good or bad application.
Knowledge is knowledge. … So the military will
use what it wants to use, as it has in the past.
Whether I produce research that is funded by
government agencies, or military agencies, or
by private donation, those results are public
knowledge, they can be used by the military,”
explained Musallam. The intention of the money
spent may not be at the top of the list of public
interest or health, but the knowledge will even-
tually be publicly accessible.
“The internet started as a DARPA project. ...
I don’t think the fears should be with the fund-
ing, but I think the fears should be redirected
toward open discussion and ethical constraint
on the application of the technology,” Musallam
continued.
With a heavy balance of both risks and ben-
efits, the general consensus of researchers in this
field, including Musallam and Tillery, is that there
is not a strong reason to oppose the research at
this time, but that BCI is a technology that should
be kept in responsible hands. Though with no
concept of the future there is no surefire way to
do this, making it a technology or danger no dif-
ferent than any other. The idea is not, as Tillery
put it, to “try to prevent these technologies or try
and keep them down, because I don’t think you
can, but the trick is to be aware and think ahead
about them, to see the potentialities coming
and be prepared to deal with them somehow.”
Musallam has a similar opinion: “Progress is going
to happen, knowledge is going to come out, peo-
ple are going to make use of that knowledge and
I think the most important thing is to make sure
from very early the opinion of people is heard.
We don’t want to have this technology mature
and then all of a sudden have a group come out
and say, ‘No wait this is a problem.’ I think opin-
ion should accompany the development of this
technology because it could impact us with what
it’s used for.”
 Letters
It’s prob the full course load...
Re: “Hunting new blood” |
Sports | November 1
It’s bad enough that I only ever
pick up your newspaper on Mondays
to do the crossword. It’s worse when
I go through your paper with a high-
lighter to find all the errors (of which
there are usually many) only to get
so bored by the articles that I give up
in frustration. Where do I draw the
line? That would be when obvious
mistakes like “axiety – but also lonli-
ness” appear in your headlines. Even
Firefox knows those aren’t words.
If this is how Montreal’s young
English-language journalists write,
it’s no wonder the Gazette is such a
rag. At least they have the excuse of
actually being a daily. What’s yours?
Sincerely,
Jessica Patterson
U4 Education
P.S.: Your drawing of a hunter looks
suspiciously like a hipster with a
gun. I really doubt Canada’s youth
are wandering around the woods
shooting deer while wearing skinny
jeans. It would be highly impractical.
Praise Jesus, pot is sanctified
Re: “Proposition 19: Just say now to
marijuana” | Commentary | October 28
It’s interesting Jerry Brown, the
Democratic candidate for governor
of California, said, “We’ve got to com-
pete with China. And if everybody’s
stoned, how the hell are we going
to make it?” Chinese farmers grow
hemp but free American farmers
are prohibited from doing so. That
makes it unfair for American farmers
who must compete in the free world
market. Does Jerry Brown support
allowing U.S. farmers to grow hemp
the same way the Canadians and
Chinese do? Another reason to stop
caging responsible adults for using
the relatively safe plant cannabis that
doesn’t get mentioned is because it
is biblically correct since Christ, God
Our Father, the Ecologician indicates
He created all the seed-bearing
plants saying they are all good, on lit-
erally the very first page (see Genesis
1:11-12 and 29-30). The only biblical
restriction placed on cannabis is that
it be accepted with thankfulness
(see 1 Timothy 4:1-5). What kind of
government cages its own citizens
for using what God says is good?
Truthfully,
Stan White
Dillon, Colorado
Bolshevism! Bolshevism!
Re: “Their democracy and ours” |
Commentary | November 1
Upon flipping to the Commentary
page this afternoon, I was appalled
by Ted Sprague’s article. It was rife
with overgeneralizations and bla-
tant assertions such as “Canadian
democracy is a sham,” which were
rooted in nothing more than a left-
ist dream of the world looking like
that Coca-Cola commercial where
people of various ethnicities all over
the world join hands and sing “Love
Train” by the O’Jays. To begin with,
the assertion that the removal of
AGSEM’s posters is anything like
the clandestine PROFUNC or the
padlock laws of Maurice Duplessis is
ridiculous. Yes, it is disgraceful, the
amount of resistance from the admin-
istration and various other actors to
the unionization of lecturers; but to
compare it to being unreasonably
detained without trial or unfounded
infringement on economic freedoms
is a horrendous overstatement that
changes this article from an honest
plea for the rights of workers to a neo-
Bolshevik conspiracy theory that is
seemingly bent on world revolution.
Myles Anevich
U2 Political Science and History
You’re at uni, use your noggin
Re: “Revisionism hurts” |
Commentary | October 7
I’m disappointed in Russell Sitrit-
Leibovich for publishing so much
misinformation. The first line of
his diatribe – “A consistent theme
in Palestinian society is a rewrit-
ing of Jews out of the history of the
region” – is misleading. It seems
Sitrit-Leibovich doesn’t know much
about Palestinian society – save what
he gleans from the highly biased Fox
News channel. The irony in his piece
is that it’s actually Israel that system-
atically seeks to erase Arab roots in
Israel and the Occupied Territories.
Arabic names of street signs are
erased, the Palestinian narrative is
not taught in schools, and illegal
settlements continue to eat into the
West Bank – forcing Palestinians
from their ancestral land.
Sitrit-Leibovich, you are a univer-
sity student. Please do your research
and use credible sources next time.
Katia Dmitrieva
Third-year journalism student
Ryerson
I would like to respond to your recent
editorial from the perspective of a
SSTEIRBBPPUSAMC (NOT SSMU) councillor.
Eli Freedman U1 Economics and Finance, MUS Representative to SSTEIRBBPPUSAMC
A note from a councillor
from the organization for-
merly known as SSMU
Re: “Direct democracy needs direct
involvement” | Editorial | October 28
I would like to respond to your
recent editorial from the perspec-
tive of a SSTEIRBBPPUSAMC (NOT
SSMU) councillor. First of all, it is
very insular of you to claim “tepid
leadership from our student govern-
ment,” while praising “admirable stu-
dent mobilization on campus.” While
the work of SSTEIRBBPPUSAMC
executives may not be as visible
to the student body as a rally, it is
the execs who consistently butt
heads with the administration on
a daily basis, and whose contribu-
tions can be easily overlooked, but
are crucially important. Take the
Architecture Café – while the two
rallies were passionate and inspir-
ing in combatting the conception of
student apathy, they were ineffective
in reversing the University practices
that led to the Café’s closure in the
first place, and thus not sustain-
able for dealing with future issues.
While students were understand-
ably upset, and reacted accordingly,
SSTEIRBBPPUSAMC execs have (for
months) been fighting the deeper
problem underlying student issues
with the University on campus,
which is a lack of consultation. The
first step toward the goal of having
admin listen to students on all the
issues that affect us is the creation
of a consultation committee involv-
ing students with Deputy Provost
(Student Life and Learning) Morton
Mendelson. This achievement,
which was accomplished with hard
work, persistence, and discipline (as
opposed to impulsive, rash respons-
es) from our SSTEIRBBPPUSAMC
execs deserves recognition from
all students, and is hardly the sort
of leadership I would call “tepid.”
Furthermore, the general assem-
bly is far from the only chance for
direct democracy as student feed-
back/representation is well inte-
grated into the legislative process.
Any student can attend Council
meetings, ask questions, or raise
resolutions to their respective rep-
resentatives – we are there for (and
elected by) you. Bottom line: many
people criticize council, yet don’t
learn and take advantage of it.
Thanks,
Eli Freedman
U1 Economics and Finance
MUS Representative to SSTEIRBBPPUSAMC
The McGill Daily | Thursday, November 4, 2010 | mcgilldaily.com
Re: “Direct democracy needs direct involvement” | Editorial | October 28
Stonehouse’s spleen-
venting outrageous
Re: “AUS VP Events elected amidst
controversy” | News | October 28
It discourages me to see that Joe
Stonehouse has found a medium in
The McGill Daily through which to
take out his personal frustrations
with his AUS election disqualifica-
tion without complete disclosure
of his own actions. While accus-
ing AUS Chief Returning Officer
Sophie Goss of acting unprofes-
sionally, he has resorted, by way of
Facebook, to childish and profane
personal attacks on her, demon-
strating completely unacceptable
behaviour for someone who was
even considered for an executive
position in a student society.
Perhaps more outrageous than
Stonehouse’s personal attacks are
his accusations of electoral bias
in Goss’s conduct: accusing her of
disqualifying him based on her per-
sonal connections to Patricia Tao is
ridiculous. In the time that I have
known Goss, she has only demon-
strated to me a sense of morality and
an ability to make unbiased deci-
sions paralleled by few; I could never
imagine her consciously making the
decision Stonehouse is accusing her
of, or letting personal feelings cloud
her judgment. Goss’s clear head and
commitment to objectivity made
her more than qualified to run the
elections; she was forced to make a
difficult decision, and it is clear to
me that she made the right choice.
Goss demonstrated incredible
integrity in running an election
while Stonehouse repeatedly dis-
respected her authority and the
by-laws of the election process; she
was well within her rights and acted
as stipulated in her contract in dis-
qualifying Stonehouse. His actions
after his disqualification amount to
nothing more than a need for petty
revenge, which has done nothing
but cloud Tao’s election. There is
no doubt that she will fulfill and
surpass the requirements of her
position and move past the death-
throes of a defeated opponent.
Ben Landon
U2 Math and Physics (Joint Honours)
The Daily loves to publish letters from our readers, but only ones that aren’t
racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, homophobic, et cetera. Send your
missives, 300 words or less, from your McGill email account, to letters@
mcgilldaily.com.
10
Comma infestation in
Mob McGill article
Re: “Students haven’t forgotten
Arch Café” | News | October 21
Hello McGill Daily,
I just read the issue about the
food boycott. Incidentally, a kind of
synchronicity occurred for the sec-
ond time in relation to this boycott,
though it’s now technically over
(?), I believe. I smiled as I ate a BLT
from the Oasis sandwich counter
and noted The Daily’s documented
outrage against the very institution I
had just patronized. Sometimes one
realizes that food hasn’t touched
the lips in 36 hours, and conse-
quently one morphs into some evil
capitalist; or if you’re me, this really
isn’t a great departure from your
regular persona. In any case, I am
your worst nightmare: some kinda
freaky libertarian. Anyway, I’m not
looking to be THAT much of a shit
disturber; I just don’t think I can
write to The Daily in my right mind
without a couple of snide remark
about politics. But I respect; keep
doin’ you, as they say...I have friends
on your editorial staff (hey)!
The real purpose of this letter is
to say that the article on the boycott,
the McGill working group on stu-
dent consultation, and Mobilization
McGill was cool. Certainly, the idea
of transparency is important, and I
respect the push to keep the admin-
istration more accountable. BUT the
article contained absolutely rampant
comma mistakes! Time after time,
when “Mobilization McGill” was
printed, there was a comma after
it – written as “Mobilization McGill,”
– which was consistently off with
the rest of the sentence. Very irritat-
ing! What is this? I began to think
that it was part of the group’s name.
Seriously, is it? Maybe you guys
should hire me as a copy editor.
Take care,
Michelle MacKinnon
U3 English and Canadian
Studies/Victory Lap
 Health&Education
Displaying what ailed it
L’Hôtel-Dieu and its Musée des Hospitalières trace Montreal’s medical record
Peter Shyba
Health&Education Writer
I
n a city like Montreal, where each
street name is more obscure
than the next, it’s easy to forget
that every name has some histori-
cal significance. The relationship
between each name holds a bit of
forgotten history: take De Bullion,
rue Le Royer, and Jeanne Mance
for example. Angelique Debullion
provided Jeanne Mance and Jérôme
le Royer with money to “evangelize
the natives” and set up a hospital on
the island of Montreal. Over the 350
years since its founding, the hospital
has become known as l’Hôtel-Dieu
and now specializes in cardiology
and burn treatments as well as hav-
ing an emergency room. To archive
the interesting history of this muse-
um, the Musée des Hospitalières de
L’Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal opened in
1992 and now houses artifacts from
Montreal’s nascency.
With the museum set up in chron-
ological order, the history of health-
care in Montreal begins in the 17th
century with the arrival of Catholic
missionaries in Montreal to evange-
lize and treat the sick and impover-
ished living in what is now primarily
the Old Port. In those times, the hos-
pital was reserved for the poor, as
the wealthy would be treated within
Indulgent neccesities
Buttery béchamel is essential for your more decadent meals
Dine with Dash
Thomas Dashwood
dinewithdash@mcgilldaily.com
B
échamel is my indulgence.
It makes my knees weak.
I could, without trace of
a second thought, eat a bowl of
it. Considered one of the “moth-
er sauces” but more commonly
known as white sauce, béchamel is
vital to a number of recipes: as a
base for cheese sauces, as a com-
ponent of lasagnas, the sauce for
gratins, or as a basis for many pasta
dishes. But please, proceed to the
recipes lest I admit to any more
embarrassing vices.
Variations:
Cheese sauce: Béchamel is the
base for mac and cheese. Use three
cups of milk, and add at least one
cup grated cheese once the sauce
is removed from the heat (moz-
zarella, cheddar, goat, Swiss and
even blue cheese will work well).
Mix with almost-cooked pasta and
bake with whatever toppings please
their own homes away from what
they believed to be the dangerous,
germ-rich hospital. This segregation
of medical care was seen again after
the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s
and 1850s brought typhus-infected
Irish immigrants to Montreal. The
museum describes them being quar-
antined in “sheds” in Griffintown to
protect the French Canadian popu-
lation from contracting the deadly
disease. These attempts failed,
however, when young boys escaped
detainment and began begging on
the streets.
From an era when McGill was
still an all-male institution, Musée
des Hospitalières displays a large
picture of a smog covered Lachine
Canal in the heyday of Montreal’s
industrial revolution, describing the
time as an era of increased “illegiti-
mate births, improper funerals, low
church attendance, and high mor-
tality rates.” Montreal was known
for having the highest mortality rate
of any city in North America at that
period. Reminders of this period
are now hard to find among all the
billboards for industrial lofts in the
newly gentrified neighbourhood of
Griffintown.
In concurrence with the Board
of Montreal Museum Directors’ cul-
tural initiative “Montréal Ville de
Verre (City of Glass),” a year-long
event emphasizing “all facets of
you (bread crumbs might tug your
childhood heartstrings).
Vegetable Gratin: Mix the
sauce with sliced potatoes and
onions, florets of broccoli or cau-
liflower, or thin slices of eggplant,
zucchini, or squash (fry all of these
for ten minutes in a little oil before-
hand). Place in a baking dish, top
with cheese if desired, and bake for
about 30 minutes (check that the
vegetables are soft). You can broil it
for a few minutes at the end for a
crunchy top.
Pasta: Before adding the flour,
add a small, diced onion and cook
with butter for about three min-
utes. A bay leaf can be added, and
a couple of cloves of sliced garlic.
Proceed normally and then use as
a sauce for pasta (goes well with
chicken, sausage, shellfish and pep-
pers, spinach, artichokes or toma-
toes). Can also be mixed half and
half with tomato sauce.
The McGill Daily | Thursday, November 4, 2010 | mcgilldaily.com
11
glass,” the Musée des Hospitalières
is also currently displaying glass
artifacts from the 19th and 20th
centuries in its temporary exhibits
section. The items on display range
from glass bedpans to containers
for liquid remedies, to syringes and
ophthalmological lenses. The piec-
es on display show both the dra-
matic changes that have occurred
in medicine as well as the technolo-
gies (like vials and beakers for labo-
ratory work) which have remained
the same.
The range of uses for the glass-
ware also varied. One syringe
relied on asbestos rather than a
rubber plunger to deliver medi-
cine, while various bottles held
liquid medicine ranging from
insulin (likely an earlier form of
Sir Frederick Banting’s discovery,
taken from the pancreas of cows)
to Peter Fahrney’s panacea, which
promised to “nettoyer le sang.”
L’Hôtel-Dieu has recently war-
ranted the attention of Quebec
film director Phillipe Lesage, who Victor Tangermann | The McGill Daily
will present his documentary Ce
L’Hôtel-Dieu functions as hospital, museum, and religious space.
coeur qui bat (The Heart that
Beats) at this year’s Recontres tude, psychological distress, social sions of a compassionate medical
Internationales du Documentaire conflict, run-down bodies and minds tradition that still exists today.
de Montréal (International Montreal that have reached their wits’ end.”
Documentary Fesival). The film fol- Health care in Montreal has cer- L’Hôtel-Dieu and the Musée des
lows patients around l’Hôtel-Dieu, tainly come a long way. Although at Hospitalières are at 201 des Pins O.,
and sets out to explore “some of soci- times treatments may have been less open Wednesday through Sunday
ety’s most devastating ailments: soli- than fair or ideal, they were expres- from 1 to 5 p.m.
Béchamel Sauce
Ingredients:
t
4 tablespoons butter (can be replaced with oil in dire circumstances)
t
4 tablespoons flour (not whole wheat)
t

Vegetables (see each variation at left)
t
Approximately 2 cups milk (a thinner sauce will require more milk)
t
Salt, pepper, and nutmeg (optional, but for me, vital)
Makes:
Enough for most recipes
Method:
Melt the butter in a small saucepan. Add the flour and cook for about 3 minutes, stirring, until it becomes
a paste and begins to bubble slightly.
Add the milk, half at a time, stirring constantly between additions. Continue to stir vigorously until the
sauce thickens visibly (takes just a few minutes).
Once thick and bubbling, remove it from the heat, add at least one teaspoon of salt, some pepper and a
quarter teaspoon of nutmeg (if desired).
 C ulture
Succession to the throne
Stalwart diner Nouveau Palais faces challenges of new ownership and interference from the city
Oliver Lurz
Culture Writer
N
ouveau Palais – the iconic
Mile End diner on the cor-
ner of Parc and Bernard
– has been bought by the people
behind the Dépanneur Le Pick Up,
which you may know for its ‘famous’
vegetarian pork sandwiches. So one
historic-cum-hipster diner is taken
over by another and the world con-
tinues as per usual... or not. From
regulars I’ve spoken to, it seems
this is actually causing a quite a stir.
When you eat at a place so unique
as this for a long time you feel a
certain protective sense of owner-
ship. Now, I’m as scared of change
as the next person, but some are
downright furious about what they
perceive as the massive transfor-
mations being enacted upon their
beloved Nouveau Palais.
The menu is a little different for
one thing. “Cheese fries but no pou-
tine?!” one disgruntled customer asks.
Shock. Horror. I tried the cheese fries
quite recently and happened to think
they were really excellent, by far nicer
than any poutine. The fries were crispy
and the cheese sauce very creamy and
tangy with a sort of cheddary flavour.
To me, cheese curds aren’t much of
a comparison. Let’s face it, they don’t
really taste of much, except possibly
rubber and disappointment.
BEGGAR’S BANQUET
“Binevenue” à la Binerie
Traditional Québécois fare hits the spot at seventy year-old Plateau landmark
Laura Pellicer
The McGill Daily
I
consider myself somewhat of a
bean aficionado. My pantry is
always stocked with an ample
supply of baked beans in molasses,
maple syrup, and traditional style
fèves au lard (literally translated to
beans in fat). You could almost say
I’ve bean around the block. Last bad
bean pun, I swear. I recently discov-
ered, however, a more authentic
Québécois alternative to satisfy my
cravings. La Binerie, located at the
So far so good, but by far peo-
ple’s biggest gripe is the end to 24/7
opening hours. Me, I am completely
seduced by all-hours joints, diners in
particular. It might seem trite, but the
idea of sitting at a counter at 4 a.m.
drinking a coffee and watching the
city go by is something that’s really
appealing to me. Realistically though,
it’s hardly a viable business model. In
fact, paying for staff and electricity
all through the night just to indulge
my Edward Hopper-style fantasy is a
good way to go out of business.
So now it shuts at 3 a.m. What
else? Well, the absence of poutine
isn’t the only change to the menu.
The new owner, Bernie, had this to
say via email: “We’re starting with
a small menu and adding more
things all the time. It is true – no
more steamies, no more pizza, and
no more poutine. But we’re going
to have lots of diner classics and
other yummy options. We’ll have a
hot dog, but a good all-beef one.” As
for the interior, “We won’t touch the
decor much, except to try and bring
it back about 25 years. We got some
photos from Mina and Kelly [the old
owners] from when they bought it
and they are pretty awesome.”
Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite a
smooth transition: “One thing that
sucked a lot on our first week is that
the city told us we have ten days to
take down the sign. We’re going to
fight it for sure, but it made me sad to
corner of Mont-Royal and St-Denis,
is the Plateau’s answer to a student’s
need for all-day breakfast and it’s
served up with trademark French-
Canadian flair. So on Sunday eve-
ning, armed with a handful of
toonies, I embarked on my quest
for a second breakfast at this his-
toric restaurant.
Although the restaurant has
changed hands over the years, little
else about this Plateau landmark
has altered since its establishment
in 1938. The menu and decor of the
restaurant are evocative of a differ-
ent era when working class families
Lorraine Chuen for The McGill Daily
hear that,” said Bernie. This really
would be a loss, as the retro-looking
red and yellow sign is something to
behold. The city cited light pollu-
tion as the problem, but this is com-
pletely absurd given that Bernard,
you know, has streetlights.
One would hope though, given
the iconic status of Nouveau Palais’s
exterior, that there will be oth-
ers to support them in their fight.
There are numerous organizations
populated the neighbourhood and
the pace of life was slower. “It’s the
original decor,” explained Jocelyne
Brunet in French, who currently
owns La Binerie with her husband
Philippe Brunet. Except for paint
touch-ups and new countertops,
the Binerie looks much like it did 72
years ago. The diner plays a promi-
nent role in Yves Beauchemin’s
novel Le Matou which was adapted
for film in 1985. The story is about
a young man, Florent, who dreams
of owning his own restaurant, La
Binerie Mont Royal. The movie was
filmed on location at the restaurant.
Along with the Le Matou poster
that adorns the wall, Jocelyne told
the stories behind other black and
white photos and yellowed news-
paper clippings hung throughout
the restaurant. Pointing out a fam-
ily portrait, Jocelyne explained that
the original owner established La
Binerie in 1938 and passed away
recently, in 2005. La Binerie was
the setting for a fictional love story
in Le Matou, but a true love story
also took place when the owner’s
daughter fell in love with one of the
waiters working at the restaurant.
The McGill Daily | Thursday, November 4, 2010 | mcgilldaily.com
around town, such as the not-for-
profit Héritage Montréal, which
exist explicitly to prevent this kind
of cultural vandalism. On various
Montreal online food forums, peo-
ple have begun voicing their out-
rage at the possible loss of the sign.
The new owners see the impor-
tance of this, too. Clearly they’re
not messing around; taking over
Nouveau Palais is not just some
arbitrary profit venture – Bernie
Jocelyne said that in the 1940s
and 1950s, La Binerie was a popu-
lar hangout for men only. The cli-
entele, if not the restaurant, has
changed with the times and today
La Binerie is becoming more popu-
lar with young Montrealers seeking
a cozy spot for comfort food on a
budget. The restaurant packs up on
weekends and its all day breakfast is
the star attraction. About 150 break-
fasts are served up each Saturday
and Sunday.
“It is traditional Québécois cui-
sine,” Jocelyne said. “Everything is
made by hand, nothing is frozen.”
Tourtières, shepherd’s pie, and tra-
ditional-style meatloaf are some of
the popular items on the menu, but
the main attraction is of course the
restaurant’s namesake, beans. “We
make a lot of fèves aux lard,” said
Jocelyne, “it is the house specialty.
We were known from our fèves au
lard right from the start. We make
34 tons of fèves au lard each year.”
I ordered a heaping plate of bacon,
ham, creton, beans, one egg, toast
and coffee for only $6.90. As it was
after 11 a.m. an extra dollar was
tacked on to the breakfast menu
12
Ali MacKellar | The McGill Daily
and co. are committed to keeping
the diner, sign and all, a prominent
part of Mile End culture. The fight
to retain the sign is emblematic
of the broader struggle to retain
some semblance of individuality
and taste in the face of the seem-
ingly endless spread of banal and
ghastly places to buy food.
The nouveau Nouveau Palais is still
located at 281 Bernard O.
price, but even at $7.90 before tax
I definitely got my money’s worth.
I brought along my friend whose
family hails from the Quebec town
of Rouyn-Noranda for her expertise
on local fare. We both agreed that
this spot is definitely a valuable, and
affordable, find. The flavours were
all on point and the maple syrup
was deceptively delicious, even
though Jocelyne admitted it was of
the table more than maple variety.
If, like me, you relish smother-
ing your entire breakfast in maple
syrup and sigh with dismay when
you’ve run out of bacon, then this
is the place for you. The beans
were veritably swimming in the fat
that gives them their name, the
toast was generously buttered and
the cretons…well I’ve never really
wanted to know what’s in cretons to
make them so delectable. My break-
fast came in at just under $10 tax
and tip included, and I walked out
satisfied. I even left behind a lonely
strip of bacon lingering on my plate.
La Binerie is located at 367 Mont-
Royal E. Find out more about its
history at labineriemontroyal.com.
 !∀#∃%&∋()#∗
Lies, half-truths, and Métromètre is taking a break this week
The McGill Daily | Thursday, November 4, 2010 | mcgilldaily.com 14
READING THE STARS WITH MISS TICKLE

Fall foretokens
Aries the Ram // March 21—April 20
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Taurus the Bull // April 21—May 21
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%))?Β∃ .∀#/∃ +)0;=(∃ 2∀∗∃ &2∃ ∗+)∃ /&5+∗∃ ≅∋09)3∃ Χ&,)∃
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Gemini the Twins // May 22—June 21
ϑ+∀∃∗∀∋;∃.∀#∃&∗∃%0(∃0∃5∀∀;∃&;)0∃∗∀∃≅#∗∃90(+>)/)∃
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Leo the Lion // July 23—August 23
4∀>)∗+&25∃/)0∋∋.Β∃/)0∋∋.Β∃/)0∋∋.Β∃/)0∋∋.∃5∀∀;∃&(∃0∆∀#∗∃
∗∀∃+0≅≅)2∃∗∀∃.∀#∃Θ∃∆#∗∃.∀#∃+0,)∃∗∀∃≅/∀>&()∃∗∀∃(+0/)∃
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Virgo the Virgin // August 24—September 23
Φ+&(∃&(∃0∃()2(&∗&,)∃∗&>)3∃!∀#∃2));∃0∃+#53∃Μ2∃∀/;)/∃
∗∀∃∆)∃+0≅≅.Β∃0∋∋∃≅)∀≅∋)∃2));∃∗+/))∃+#5(∃),)/.∃;0.∃
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Libra the Scales // September 24—October 23
ϑ+)2∃ .∀#∃ ∀≅)2∃ ∗+)∃ ;∀∀/∃ ∗∀∃ .∀#/∃ ∆);/∀∀>Β∃ ;∀∃ .∀#∃
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!∀#∃%&∋(∋)∋&∗+∃7&∆/0
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Sagittarius the Archer // November 23—December 21
Ξ∀/5)∗∃ 0∆∀#∗∃ &∗∃ Θ∃ .∀#/∃ 9+029)(∃ 0/)∃ 2&∋3∃ !∀#∃ ?2∀%∃
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Capricorn the Goat // December 22—January 20
8∗∃ ∗+&(∃ /0∗)Β∃ .∀#=/)∃ 2),)/∃ 5∀220∃ 5)∗∃ .∀#/∃ %∀/?∃
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Aquarius the Water-Carrier // January 21—February 19
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Pisces the Fishes // February 20—March 20
!∀#∃0/)∃%0.∃9#∗)/∃∗+02∃.∀#∃∗+&2?3
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Scorpio the Scorpion // October 24—November 22 Check this page at the end of November
Cancer the Crab // June 22—July 22 Φ+)/)∃0/)∃0∃>&∋∋&∀2∃02;∃∀2)∃%0.(∃.∀#∃>&5+∗∃(#99));∃ for winter break prognostications
!∀#/∃;0.(∃%&∋∋∃∋∀∀?∃∋&?)∃.∀#∃;∀3∃89∗∃099∀/;&25∋.3 ∗∀;0.3∃:)∃∀≅∗&>&(∗&93
from our own Sibyll, Miss Tickle! Send
!∀#∃%&∋(∋)∋&∗+/Γ&/5∀∃6∃49∀/≅&∀ !∀#∃%&∋(∋)∋&∗+∃Ν&(9)(∃6∃Η029)/
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Fuck this. No really, right now. Please.

President promises
to revisit Arch
F UCK THIS STUPID CITY WHERE I CAN’T GET ANY BECAUSE DOING IT
with your friends is complicated, open relationships are
messy, my vibrator is out of batteries, and because I don’t
Café closure
know how to find an expert who will exchange their services
Photo by Alejandra Ximénez
for my money (read: sex worker) because we live in a society
where consenting adults exchanging sex for payment is ille-
gal. I just want to get laid! I can’t focus and I can’t stop think-
ing about it and the next couple that I see making out on the
street corner is going to get a round kick to the face if I can’t
satisfy my urges.

Fuck this! is an occasional anonymous therapeutic non-hate-

ful rant column. Send your tirades (and raves) to fuckthis@
mcgilldaily.com.

Following a massive protest on

the Mall in Washington, D.C., last
weekend, which wound its way
toward the Capitol building, U.S.
President Barack Obama promised
McGill students he would “revisit
the Art [sic] Café” issue as soon as
politically feasible.
The President promised to com-
promise with Republicans like
Meather Bunroe-Hlum to find a way
out of the current impasse.
Protesters, having traveled from
Montreal to the capital of Empire,
were disappointed at Obama’s mod-
erate stance.
—Télésphore Sansouci

Off-Campus Eye
Mark Heinrichs | The McGill Daily