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Art, Arts & Entertainment

‘Kanga I, II, III’ brings Projections: SANKOFA’s afrofuturist vision to Trottier

by Ellen Lurie on

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Tanzanian-American-Canadian artist Shanna Strauss’s screenprint triad Kanga I, II, III joined the student-led digital art exhibition Projections: SANKOFA on Feb. 23. Displayed in the Lorne M. Trottier Building mezzanine, the Kanga series combines negative space with vibrant colour to assert the unifying power of shared cultural identity. 

Projections: SANKOFA is a subsection of McGill’s Projections Art Series, an initiative under which students and staff jointly curate digital art exhibits aiming to increase the inclusion of underrepresented groups in the Faculty of Engineering. SANKOFA emerged as a collaboration between the McGill Visual Arts Collection, the Office of Engineering Inclusivity, Diversity, and Equity Advancement, and a curatorial team of five Black students at McGill: Dami Bali, Sarah Al Ghassani, Gloria Muco, Yvehenry Samee Julsain, and Fedgi Dony Gaspard. 

Largely recruited from McGill’s chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers, SANKOFA’s student coordinators began the curatorial process with minimal formal experience in the arts. While they initially aimed for the exhibit to represent life in the global Black diaspora in its entirety, the curatorial team progressively narrowed their focus to emphasize reflection as a means of community building. 

In an interview with The Tribune, Bali, B.Sc. ‘26, described how adjusting the exhibition’s scope offered opportunities for community building among Black Engineering students at McGill.

“We stepped away from trying to represent all of Africa and the Caribbean and […] the global diaspora, and focused more on encouraging people to look within themselves [and] learn about art [from] different areas of the world,” he said. “We [wanted] Black students, coming from all walks of life, to have a physical space at McGill University where they can feel […] seen and represented, […] share knowledge, share experiences, and form friendships.”

The SANKOFA curatorial team pursued this vision through an afrofuturist analytical lens, tackling questions of temporality within post-colonial Africa and the global diaspora. In an interview with The Tribune, Al Ghassani, U4 Arts, described how categorizing Black cultural practices in terms of ‘past,’ ‘present,’ and ‘future’ can risk erasing their continuity in the diaspora. 

“We found at many points during the curation process how problematic [it can be to] classify culture as ‘past.’ What does it mean to say that we are ‘looking back’ to our traditional practices? Why isn’t it a current practice?” she said. “So, from there we shifted into not seeing [culture] as past versus future, but instead looking at things more fluidly.”

Through this exploration of nonlinear time, the curators landed on the series’ theme: SANKOFA, a term derived from the Akan people of Ghana which encourages reflection on the past to inform the future. The Kanga installation, the exhibition’s sole physical work, embodies this message. Strauss’s portrait series depicts three women in negative space, their kanga headscarves the only component of the pieces created via the addition of ink. This visual anonymization of the women’s features in favour of symbols of their shared cultural identity asserts the ability of a textile like the kanga to transcend space and time. 

As noted by Al Ghassani, Swahili proverbs line the borders of Strauss’s kangas, reflecting the textile’s longstanding role as a communicative tool.

“Beyond its aesthetic function and utility as an everyday piece of clothing, [the kanga is] a very critical tool in Zanzibari and East African culture for sending messages [and] is still being functionally used as an everyday piece, as a form of resistance,” she stated. “To consider kanga as something that’s ‘past’ or ‘tradition’ [is] a completely false thing [….] People still utilize their tradition today and beyond.”

Beyond Projections: SANKOFA’s extensive digital art profile, the curatorial team also pursued its goal of community building through interactive events. With the assistance of Destiny Kirumira, a PhD student at McGill’s Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture who helped design the events’ spatial layouts, the team brought the exhibition beyond passive viewing by incorporating art stations, short films, and live radio broadcasts of African and Caribbean music. 

For Bali, events like SANKOFA’s launch are crucial in offering Black students a space at McGill for reflection and connection, particularly as Black representation among McGill faculty remains low, with only 39 Black tenure-track or tenured professors employed across the university.

“Throughout my entire time at McGill, I don’t think I’ve had a Black professor, and that was […] jarring,” Bali said. “So, the [Projections: SANKOFA] events that we host to engage the community really do mean a lot for people [….] When people feel they’re cared for, catered to, respected, welcomed, a lot of beautiful things can blossom from that.”

Opinion

AI’s use in legal decisions poses major risks to the Canadian judicial system’s integrity and neutrality

by Nello Giuliani on

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On April 22, the Superior Court of Quebec annulled the August 2025 arbitration Association des Ressources Intermédiaires D’Hébergement du Québec (ARIHQ) v. Santé Québec, as the ruling was based on nonexistent, likely artificial intelligence (AI)-generated legal doctrine and jurisprudence. Each citation of a legal precedent linked in the award led to completely different judgments; the precedents did not actually exist.

Quebec Judge Martin F. Sheehan ruled that arbitrator Michel A. Jeanniot could not delegate his decision-making authority to a third party, much less to an AI large language model (LLM). Since nonexistent references constituted the entirety of Jeanniot’s legal argument, this undermined confidence in his ruling, as an accurate, human-led review on Jeanniot’s part could have prompted an alternative sentence. Sheehan established that adjudicators who outsource their reasoning to an LLM are abandoning the deliberative function they are appointed to perform and are therefore liable for the model’s mistakes.

The ruling marks an important precedent for the role of AI in law, highlighting both the danger of granting decisional power to generative AI, and the pernicious integration of AI into legal systems and research. Legal professionals are increasingly using LLMs for the purposes of summarizing texts, scraping big data for relevant documents, cross-referencing precedents, and conducting legal research. AI is also being embedded into legal platforms, such as search engines, browsers, and databases, raising concerns about the supposed objectivity of legal tech, and creating a crisis of accountability for errors when humans are not deliberately prompting models.

Growing adoption of AI systems, which frequently hallucinate and possess ingrained biases against racialized groups, both negatively impacts litigants, and violates the Canadian justice system’s tenets of fairness and impartiality. Thus, AI safety—the outlining of AI risks and formation of computational and governance frameworks to address these risks—is a legal necessity.

Researchers at Mila, a Quebec AI institute, have found that transformers, the neural network architecture for LLMs, often misstate facts, generate invented content, and incorrectly fill in gaps in reasoning, all of which can interfere with the validity of legal work. AI systems are also unable to fully grasp the complexity of context-dependent human values and fail to handle shifting circumstances. This issue, commonly known as value-lock, makes LLMs ill-equipped to handle complex normative questions, which can lead them to reinforce outdated, exclusive social norms. For example, media outlets tend to ignore peaceful protest, instead covering extreme or violent events to attract viewership. LLMs trained on this data may then reinforce this view of social movements and, in doing so, maintain current regimes of power.

Further, the data used in transformer pre-training, which is gathered through web scraping, is often unrepresentative, holding a Western hegemonic bias and perpetuating discriminatory views and social stereotypes. This means that marginalized communities are at a higher risk of being victimized in legal decisions. For example, AI predictive policing systems, which use historical crime data to decide where to deploy officers and to identify individuals “most likely” to commit violent crimes, can absorb biases from past criminal data and replicate them in their recommendations for punitive outcomes. Since Black communities have historically faced overpolicing and overincarceration in Canada, such systems risk further entrapping Black Canadians in the country’s criminal justice system.

While AI tools can offer meaningful research potential, these nontransparent, inaccuracy-prone, and inherently biased models must be heavily regulated. At the baseline level, AI should be banned from direct legal decision-making, prohibited from generating text that could directly influence legal outcomes, and thoroughly audited for any purposes ranging from legal drafting to research. In increasingly complex and covert circumstances, the deep integration of LLMs into legal systems will necessarily demand both self-regulation from within legal bodies, and external public governance over which AI systems are allowed to be deployed in the legal field, and for which cases.

Art, Arts & Entertainment

Know Your Artist: Theodore A. Harris

by Ellen Lurie on

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American artist and poet Theodore A. Harris is a genius of the political collage. Born in Manhattan, New York and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Harris brings an autobiographical focus to the subversive, polysemous medium of the collage, one shaped by his upbringing, mentors, and personal experiences with anti-Black discrimination and American capitalism’s exploitative nature. 

In an interview with The Tribune, Harris described his medium as uniquely capable of placing disparate images in dialogue with one another, so that these images transgress time and space in an instantaneous, profoundly political manner. 

“Collage is like a novel that can go back and forth in time, just by the very fact that [it uses] existing images which you can appropriate,” Harris said. “Because those images are each from a different time period, you can talk about the past and the present at the same time […] [and] get multiple meanings.”

Yet for Harris, meaning does not just emerge from the clippings themselves and the way they interact; rather, the viewer’s own experiences mediate their individual interpretation of the work. Harris draws on James Baldwin’s concept of the “most disagreeable mirror” to explain this phenomenon: A theory where Baldwin argues that Black bodies reflect back to white Americans their unacknowledged histories of colonialism, racial prejudice, and complicity in oppressive economic systems. As such, viewers encountering Harris’s collages are forced to confront their own place within the political realities his work depicts.

“Collage is a great vehicle for […] dealing with the personal as political,” Harris said. “When the viewer is looking at the work, the experience that [they] bring to that artwork determines how [they] feel about it, what [they] think about it, how [they] see [themselves] in that artwork.”

Harris’s 1995 piece, The Long Dream, After Richard Wright, is on display in the McGill Visual Arts Collection (VAC)’s Visible Storage Gallery, located on the fourth floor of McLennan Library. One of the VAC’s more than 3,500 works, the collage measures only 12 by 15.5 inches and is shown among dozens of far larger pieces. Yet, you can’t miss it. The collage is almost deceptively simple, combining only two images: One of a young boy looking through a fence, clipped from an advertisement for the 1994 film Fresh, and a photograph of a wall destroyed by an Israeli missile strike in Palestine. By layering the demolished wall over the movie poster, Harris creates a trompe l’oeil effect, making the boy appear trapped behind both the fence and the rubble.

“You get this mixture of push and pull of the form and content [in the collage],” Harris explained. “[It] is a reflection of a dystopian dream that is reality. That reality, for that [boy’s] innocent face, is […] trying to dodge the bullets of race, class, capitalism, and a country that is doing everything it can to stifle your growth.”

The collage’s title The Long Dream, After Richard Wright pays homage to American novelist Richard Wright’s 1958 novel The Long Dream, set in Jim Crow-era Mississippi. In the novel, Wright highlights how systemic racism perpetually defers the American Dream for Black individuals, turning it into a prolonged, agonizing fantasy that is never fully realized due to anti-Black discrimination. Harris reinterprets Wright’s thesis in a contemporary context through this collage, illustrating how systemic racism still renders the American Dream elusive.

The collage was anonymously donated to McGill by a friend of Harris’s in honour of Charmaine A. Nelson, provost professor of Art History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, founding director of the Slavery North initiative, founder of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design’s Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery, and former professor of Art History at McGill. Nelson became the first Black person appointed as a tenure-track professor of Art History in Canada in 2001, and went on to teach at McGill for 17 years before leaving the university in 2020; she resigned after the Art History department refused to consider her for the department chair role and discriminatorily denied her full professorship. At the time of her departure, only 10 of McGill’s 1,700+ faculty members were Black. 

By dedicating his piece to Nelson, Harris transforms McGill’s own gallery space into a platform through which to recognize the significance of Nelson’s scholarship, advocacy, and impact on the field of art history, something the university failed to do while she was working there. For Harris, the presence of this work is itself political, serving to facilitate discourse on anti-Black racism, capitalist exploitation, and American colonialist projects abroad.

 “A lot of institutions do use art as a cover for their dirty deeds,” Harris stated. “It’s been going on forever. Politics have always been in art, and art has always been in politics. All I can do is make work that I hope will be in a conversation down through history. Just by that artwork being [displayed at McGill], it has a function of being in that space to raise consciousness.”

Institutions also possess a responsibility to go beyond merely showcasing conscious-raising works. In an interview with The Tribune, Assistant Curator of the VAC Michelle Macleod described how McGill’s Action Plan to Address Anti-Black Racism 2020-2025, introduced a few months after Nelson resigned in 2020, entails a responsibility that the VAC actively seek to acquire and curate a collection that is “as diverse as the McGill community.” According to Macleod, identifying and filling these gaps must be substantiated by active reflection.

“It’s tricky in the art world [….] [Inclusion] can quickly become tokenism. You can’t just install one artwork and be done,” she said. “The work is baked into everything you do, everything you put out there, and how you put it out there as well.”

Harris himself has worked to create institutional pathways for active, structural inclusion, most notably as the founding Artistic Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Black Aesthetics—an educational project designed to spotlight the Black Arts Movement’s approach to art and aesthetics through events, written works, and exhibitions. The Movement was founded by poet and Harris’s close collaborator Amiri Baraka as a cultural counterpart to the Black Power Movement, emphasizing the need to create a Black cultural identity independent from Eurocentric artistic standards: A project Harris continues through the Institute. 

Beyond The Long Dream, After Richard Wright, in the exhibitions he presently curates, Harris continues to foster unlikely conversations between disparate art forms, techniques, and genres, making each exhibition a collage in itself.“I [want] to see abstraction exhibited with figurative work, blatantly political artwork juxtaposed to more subtly political or minimalist work next to abstraction, all mixed up,” he said. “The only thing that’s important to me is the truth. It’s what makes [art] beautiful.”

Montreal, News

Montreal protestors commemorate the 78th anniversary of the Nakba

by Ellen Lurie on

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On May 16, hundreds of protestors gathered in front of the Consulate General of Israel in Montreal to commemorate the 78th anniversary of the Nakba (Nakba Day). Demonstrators waved Palestinian, Rotisken’rakéhte (Mohawk Warrior Society), and post-1979 revolution Iranian flags amidst the music of live drummers. 

Nakba, which translates to ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic, describes the Israeli army’s mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians following the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. During the Nakba, Zionist militias and Israeli forces expelled over 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland, or approximately 75 per cent of the Palestinian population, and destroyed approximately 400 Palestinian towns and villages in an explicit effort to prevent Palestinians’ future return. Attacks such as the Deir Yassin Massacre, during which Israeli paramilitaries killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians, accelerated this expulsion. 

The Nakba resulted in a refugee crisis that still exists today; Palestinians displaced by the Nakba and their descendants number over seven million people, many of whom currently live in stateless limbo in temporary camps administered under Israeli military rule.

Ali Salman, an affiliate with Students for Palestine’s Honour and Resistance Concordia, opened the commemorative event by recalling this history, and asserting the continued importance of advocating for the Palestinian people’s right of return.

“The grandparents, who to this day, still hold the keys to the houses that they left 78 years ago, are a reminder that 78 years of occupation breeds 78 years of resistance and liberation,” he said. “The hearts of those who had to witness [the Nakba] were broken, but their spirit of return has and never will be.”

Counter-protestors stood opposite the demonstration on av. Wood, waving flags representing Israel, the United States, Quebec, and pre-1979 revolution Iran. The opposition held signs declaring, “Pas de Charia dans nos rues”* (“No Sharia on our streets”). 

After Salman’s speech, Indigenous human rights activist Ellen Gabriel, a Kanien’kéha:ka (Mohawk) woman from the Kanehsatà:ke First Nation, began addressing the crowd in her native tongue, explaining that doing so is a symbolic act of resistance given Canada’s historical residential school system, under which Indigenous Peoples were systematically denied acts of linguistic or cultural expression.

“Children [in residential schools] were punished, needles put in their tongues, so they would not speak their language,” Gabriel said. “Today, speaking my language is an act of resistance against a colonizer.”

Gabriel then drew connections between the genocide of Indigenous Peoples in Canada and Israel’s genocide in Gaza, emphasizing that they both occurred under the same colonial power: Great Britain.

“All settler-colonial states are founded on racist doctrines like the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius, a land without a people,” she said. “But we are a people, and this is our land, just as Palestine belongs to the Palestinians.” 

At the end of Gabriel’s speech, demonstrators chanted, “Land back for all Indigenous people, from Turtle Island to Palestine.” 

Following Gabriel, Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF) Canada spokesperson Colombe Dimet described the GSF’s most recent flotilla mission, which set sail toward Gaza on May 14, carrying aid and over 400 activists. While in international waters, the Israel Defense Forces raided and intercepted the GSF’s vessels on May 18. Among the activists detained were 12 Canadians, including McGill University IT and Technical Services manager Ehab Lotayef. 

Dimet emphasized that Israel’s disregard for international maritime law reflects its broader commitment to maintaining its settler-colonialism in Gaza.

“The Mediterranean [Sea], a space of international solidarity, has become a militarized zone controlled by Israeli forces and their allies where civilians from around the world can be attacked or kidnapped while attempting to open a humanitarian corridor by sea,” Dimet stated. “With every attack, [Israel] shows it is ready to go to any lengths to maintain the siege imposed on the Palestinian people.”*

The event’s next speaker, Secretary General of the Conseil central du Montréal métropolitain (CCMM-CSN) Chantal Ide, described the importance of global class solidarity in advocacy efforts for Palestinian liberation. She stated that global capitalists are complicit in Israel’s genocide, with their fortune deriving from investments in or the production of weapons technology.

Palestinian Youth Movement Montreal representative Rama Al Malah then spoke, asserting that despite Israel’s continued attempts to suppress Palestinian uprisings throughout history, the future bears promise.

“The future does not belong to empire. The future belongs to our prisoners, who have taught us that even when you have nothing, you fight with your stomachs and your bodies,” Al Malah stated. “The future belongs to the children in the West Bank, who face tanks with nothing but rocks [….] The future belongs to the Arab and Palestinian people who have reclaimed their struggle from the far diaspora. And the future belongs to all of you […] who have committed yourselves to […] the Palestinian struggle for national liberation.”

After the speeches concluded, protesters began marching down rue Sainte-Catherine, chanting, “Nous sommes tous des enfants de Gaza.” They then turned left on rue Chomedey, where residents cheered from their balconies and waved flags. The protest next turned right onto boulevard De Maisonneuve, where chalk artists sketched visual representations of the protest’s chants. 

At around 4:00 p.m., the protest paused briefly on rue Saint-Mathieu, where Salman delivered a second speech reminding marchers and passersby of the purpose of the Nakba Day protest.

“Our responsibility is to ensure that the sacrifice of these martyrs is not forgotten, and that Zionism’s global image never recovers,” he said. “Netanyahu has said himself in a recent interview that [Israel is] now fighting on multiple fronts. Well, we are one of those fronts.”

Marchers replied by chanting, “Say it loud and say it more, not a conflict, not a war,” and, “Mark Carney, pick a side. Justice or genocide?” The group continued down boulevard De Maisonneuve until they reached rue Peel. They then turned left on rue Sainte-Catherine, with the protest concluded at Square Phillips. Salman offered closing remarks, expressing his hope that this year will be the last Nakba anniversary with Palestine still under Israeli occupation.

“We hope that the next time we take the streets for this occasion, for Nakba 79, it will be because Palestine is liberated,” he said.

*These quotes were translated from French.

Off the Board, Opinion

A final note from the Editor-in-Chief of Volume 45, for the record

by Yusur Al-Sharqi on

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One week before The Tribune’s first production night, I found myself in Toronto in a black dress, black shoes, and sparkles on my eyelids. I was at the funeral of Fabienne de Cartier, a former News Editor. 

We dedicated Volume 45 to Fabienne, an unforgettable force of nature who shaped our paper in countless ways, so it is only fitting that our final special issue return to the theme of memory.

Journalism, at its core, is an act of remembering. On a team with constant turnover, what we publish becomes the only thing that tangibly endures. The archive outlives us and holds what might otherwise be forgotten. It is a great privilege to preserve memory in this way. 

But memory is imperfect. In our newsroom, we try to document events faithfully, but the paper you hold will always be an incomplete record. There is never enough space for everything that we know matters. Stories are constantly pushed online, paragraphs cut, and photos sacrificed so more words can fit. But however incomplete it may be, the act of preserving something is always tremendously important, because when the future comes, and someone inevitably asks what students saw and what they stood for, they will find the answers in our pages. 

My favourite, most terrible memory is of our first production night. I didn’t remember that we needed permission to stay in our office past midnight, so after getting kicked out with several more pages to complete, we snuck into the Ferrier computer lab to finish the issue. I asked Zoe, one of our design editors, to redraw Fabienne’s portrait about ten times until it was finally perfect—at 5:00 a.m. That’s when I realized that we had taken so long, our paper would be distributed a day late. I felt like I had disappointed everyone.

But the next day, I saw Fabienne’s face across campus, on every stand, and it didn’t feel like disappointment anymore. It was the most rewarding moment of my four years at McGill, and that sense of pride and care carried me through the 26 issues that followed. 

Even if “nobody reads student papers” (which, of course, isn’t true, because I read them), I am overwhelmed with pride at Volume 45, because while I cannot promise perfection in our pages, I can promise honesty, thought, and real, genuine care. 

I leave with a sense of comfort that this promise will be kept in the future. I am certain that Mairin, our incoming Editor-in-Chief, will transform the paper in ways I cannot imagine. I am so grateful to be leaving it in the most competent and gentle hands. 

To the unforgettable Tribune community: each of you has shaped me in ways I will carry long after our final publication. My years of writing fail me when I try to put my gratitude into words, but I hope you can feel it. I am truly in awe of all of you.

Thank you for letting me be part of your memory, and for being a beautiful part of mine.

— Yusur Al-Sharqi, Editor-in-Chief

McGill, Montreal, News

SPHR remembers Gaza Solidarity Encampment ahead of Nakba Anniversary Protest

by Ellen Lurie on

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On May 9, Students for Palestine’s Honour and Resistance (SPHR) at McGill hosted a gathering to commemorate the two-year anniversary of Montreal community members establishing the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on McGill’s Lower Field. 743 days later, community members of all ages met for a potluck, arts-and-crafts, and a letter-writing campaign for Palestinian political prisoners, intended to raise awareness of, and inspire solidarity against, Israel’s prison conditions. 

SPHR organizers set up picnic blankets with canvases, paints, and bags of red, black, white, and green beads for jewelry-making, offering homemade hummus and pita to anyone stopping by the event. Event-goers danced to the music of live drummers.

In an interview with The Tribune, two members of SPHR, Alex* and Moon,* explained how the day’s anniversary gathering symbolically returned members of the movement for Palestine to the site of the encampment, which was a space chosen to subvert administration-imposed restrictions on pro-Palestine organizing at McGill. 

“With McGill censuring and censoring SPHR, we were not able to book spaces on campus [….] The encampment was a really rare opportunity for people to actually be together organizing in the same physical space,” Alex said. “It was also an occupation of this already stolen land.” 

Alex and Moon expressed that the day’s event also demonstrated the persistent nature of student activism against Israel’s genocide in Gaza at McGill, which they stated will continue to exist until the McGill administration’s stance regarding the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement changes.

“Universities see [student activism] as having a four-year shelf life,” Alex said. 

“But SPHR has been an organization for over 20 years, and despite students coming and going, the movement has never died down,” Moon added. “As long as McGill is still invested in those companies that kill our people, we will be here to demand divestment.”

At around 4 p.m., a McGill security officer arrived at the field and questioned attendees about the event. The officer asked about the purpose of the gathering and the music playing over the speakers. Alex emphasized the discrepancy in McGill security’s treatment of SPHR’s event compared to other community gatherings taking place concurrently on the Lower Field.

“I see people sitting on campus getting some sun, I see people throwing Frisbees around, [and] nobody’s harassing them,” they said. “But when we come and sit just to have some music, have our flags up, display our identity proudly, all of a sudden, that raises questions from security.”

Alongside the encampment anniversary gathering, Montrealers gathered on rue Sherbrooke to protest Quebec’s Bill 21, Bill 94, and Bill 9: The three closely related provincial laws restrict public servants from wearing religious symbols at their workplaces. McGill security officers stood stationed in front of the Roddick Gates, facing the protest.

“When we look at McGill’s security posture, we see the same thing as always. All their security guards posted on the perimeter looking outwards,” Alex stated. “My question is, what are [they] defending?”

Alex added that although intense scrutiny by security officers is an ongoing issue in organizing contexts, it will not deter the movement for Palestine.

“We’re no strangers to checkpoints. We’re no strangers to stops and searches,” Alex said. “Our countries have been securitized, have been colonized, [and] have been dominated by Western imperial powers. We’re familiar with all this, and it doesn’t scare us.”

The event also incorporated a letter-writing session for Freedom for Palestinian Political Prisoners, a campaign sponsored by the Palestinian Youth Movement. The initiative seeks to send 10,000 letters to the 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners currently detained in Israel under isolated and dangerous conditions. As representatives of SPHR noted, these prisoners are being tried under discriminatory Israeli laws, making campaigns that raise awareness of these legal contexts and demonstrate solidarity with detainees crucial.

“Just recently, [Israel] passed the [Death Penalty for Terrorists Law] with a 99 per cent conviction rate, which ultimately sentences Palestinian prisoners to death by hanging,” Moon said. 

“So, it’s important not to neglect our prisoners […] [so] that they know we’re here for them, that the world hasn’t forgotten them,” Alex added. 

On the nearby Y-intersection, Ned,** a musician, photographer, and painter who regularly attends advocacy events in Montreal calling for Palestinian liberation, stood drumming on his darbuka. In an interview with The Tribune, he described how live music plays a role in cultivating a social movement’s momentum.

“When there’s music playing [on a speaker], it’s nice, but when somebody’s playing live music, it’s another level of attention that you can bring to the cause,” Ned said.

Ned also incorporates painting and photography into his art-based advocacy. For the past few years, he has painted illustrations on the stone columns of the Roddick Gates every day to commemorate Palestinians killed by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, only to return to campus to find his paintings washed away. Ned emphasized that regardless of such setbacks, Montreal community members remain committed to organizing against Israel’s colonial project in Palestine. 

“Despite all of the censorship [by removing these pieces] and despite the illegal dismantlement of the [Gaza Solidarity Encampment at McGill], we’re still moving forward,” he said. “Today is very special [….] Everybody here is incredibly talented and is putting their bodies on the line to stand for humanity, to speak against the genocide [for] our people that are unable to speak about their own cause.” 

Alex explained how local artists like Ned’s participation in SPHR-led and Montreal-wide organizing for Palestine reflects the movement’s importance and resonance beyond only the McGill student body.

“We’re not all students here, and that’s a talking point that the university has used to discredit people who took part in the encampment,” Alex said. “But this campus does not exist in a McGill bubble [….] We’re here to say that we’re part of Montreal [….] We’re here to pop that bubble.”

SPHR organizers further discussed ongoing attempts by McGill to disincentivize on-campus organizing for Palestine: the university’s 2024 uprooting of the white pine sapling planted by Kanien’kehá:ka women to commemorate the encampment; the McGill Senate’s implementation of a new Student Code of Conduct in November 2025 expanding McGill’s disciplinary response capabilities; McGill’s imposition of legal and disciplinary charges against students involved in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment; and, most recently, the McGill Board of Governors’ approval of the Identification Policy for Access to Properties Owned, Occupied, or Used by the University on April 23, allowing McGill security officers to request that anyone on campus present them with valid government identification, or remove their face covering. 

Alex and Moon described how these attempts reflect McGill administrators’ frequent portrayals of pro-Palestine advocacy at McGill as representing only a minor fraction of the student body, despite also arguing the movement is of a threatening size and physically acting against it.

“This is a desperate attempt to simultaneously portray us as a small, fringe, and irrelevant group of students, but also as this larger than life, well-funded, externally-motivated entity,” Alex said. “How can we both be a small minority who the right thing to do is ignore, while also being a large existential threat to the university?”

Looking forward, SPHR highlighted the upcoming Nakba 78th Anniversary Protest they are helping to organize a student contingent for. The protest will take place on May 16, beginning at 2 p.m. in front of the Consulate General of Israel in Montreal. 

For Moon, true engagement in pro-Palestine advocacy goes beyond demonstrating allegiance from afar, and must instead involve an active effort toward progress.

“We are a part of the fight for liberation on the outside,” Moon said. “I don’t want to go to an institution that is marked by the blood of my people.”

*Alex’s and Moon’s names have been changed to preserve their privacy.

**Ned preferred to be referred to solely by his first name.

McGill, Montreal, News

McGill community members express concerns about McGill Athletics’ former partnership with InterRent REIT

by Rebecca Hamilton on

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Across the 18 months she has lived in her Plateau apartment, Alice Lee, U3 Arts & Science, has had her water shut off 13 times. Most recently—in February 2026—she turned on her tap to find the water running yellow, as she recounted in an interview with The Tribune. Lee explained that her building’s maintenance worker was unequipped to deal with the problem.

“He came into our apartment and didn’t have any tools, he just had a can of WD-40,” Lee said. “It was the same when we had problems with our electricity.”

Lee lives in a building owned and managed by InterRent, which is a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT)—a type of company that owns and operates for-profit real estate. For the past three years, McGill Athletics has partnered with InterRent’s property at 625 rue Milton, an agreement set to end in May 2026. Throughout the agreement, InterRent served as McGill Athletics’ official private student housing partner, and funded renovations to the Athletics student lounge in Tomlinson Hall. 

REITs such as InterRent have been rapidly expanding their share of Canada’s rental housing market, growing from owning zero rental units in 1996 to roughly 200,000 by 2021. Over the same period, their total assets ballooned from $80 million CAD in 1993 to $76 billion CAD in 2021. REITs raise capital from investors to purchase rental buildings, and distribute rental profits as dividends to investors. Unlike most investment trusts, they benefit from a tax structure that allows them to avoid paying taxes on the income they distribute, which makes them appealing investment vehicles.

Critics argue that the REIT model worsens a societal housing system that treats housing as a vehicle of wealth accumulation for landlords, rather than a universal need. REITs are a driving force behind the ‘financialization’ of housing, which tenant unions, academics, and the Canadian Human Rights Commission have identified as a threat to the human right to housing.

The Hamilton Tenants Solidarity Network (HTSN) explains that InterRent uses the term ‘repositioning’ to describe their practice of replacing lower-paying, often lower-income tenants with higher-paying, higher-income ones. In InterRent’s 2024 annual report, President and CEO Brad Cutsey stated that 90 per cent of the company’s portfolio has been repositioned, enabling the company to “attract stronger residents.”

A survey conducted by community union ACORN Canada found that up to 80 per cent of tenants with financialized or corporate landlords—such as InterRent—experience urgent repair needs. The HTSN claims that some landlords avoid addressing these repairs on purpose, in order to displace long-term tenants by making their living conditions “unbearable.”

In a written statement to The Tribune, Anna Kramer, assistant professor at McGill’s School of Urban Planning with a research focus on housing, similarly described strategies of displacement. 

“The financialization of housing is exacerbating the precarity of tenants,” Kramer wrote. “By buying up apartment buildings and using strategies such as neglect, superficial renovations and above guideline rent increases to push out long-term tenants, [REITs] are raising rents rapidly and setting precedents for other landlords to follow.”

Tenants have pushed back against these strategies. In 2018, long-time residents of InterRent-owned buildings in Hamilton went on a seven-month rent strike, in response to rising rents and poor conditions. The action resulted in InterRent making some repairs to the disputed rental units.

Kramer described InterRent’s specific role in Montreal’s current housing crisis. 

“Although Montreal has some of the highest tenant protections and rent control de jure, de facto rents are rising much faster than inflation and the set guidelines for increases,” Kramer wrote. “Rents in Montreal have increased by 70 [per cent] between 2019 and 2025, and […] over 41,000 eviction cases [were] filed in 2024 in Quebec. Given these trends, McGill’s partnership with [InterRent] REIT is a slap in the face to students and tenant solidarity in general.”

In a written statement to The Tribune, McGill’s Media Relations Office (MRO) stated that the university will provide more details to the McGill community regarding their InterRent partnership at a later date.

“As [the three-year] agreement [between McGill Athletics and InterRent] has now expired, the University will have more to say in due course,” the MRO wrote.

Lee explained that she initially believed renting in a large apartment building would provide her with more reliable services as a tenant. While her building management has attributed the water disruptions she has experienced to problems with Montreal’s city system, she has never been able to find any record online of issues in her area. She suggests that students considering renting from a corporate landlord proceed with caution.

“Be careful,” Lee said. “You think, because you’re signing up for an apartment building with utilities, […] that you’ll have everything provided for you, and then you overlook some of the details [….] And they’re probably, definitely, overcharging you for what you’re going to get.”

A previous, incomplete version of this article was unintentionally published online on April 18, 2026, and removed on April 20, 2026 until wholly ready for publication. The Tribune regrets this error.

Student Life

‘Journalism After Gaza’ panel discusses media bias and the future of reporting in Palestine

by Ellen Lurie on

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On April 9, the McGill Institute of Islamic Studies hosted a panel event titled “Journalism After Gaza: A Roundtable Discussion on the Present & Future of the Media,” featuring Saman Malik, Sana Saeed, and Kareem Shaheen. The panel was led by Pasha M. Khan, associate professor at the Institute of Islamic Studies and its Chair of Urdu Language and Culture, and moderated by Julnar Aizouki, U2 Arts. The event was hosted in partnership with the McGill Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Policy and Research Association (MPRA), a student-led think tank offering opportunities for research and debate regarding politics in the MENA region. The panelists discussed how the language Western media institutions employ, and the misinformation they promote, delegitimize Palestinian identity and struggle.

The event began with MPRA Editor-in-Chief Christy Khairallah, U2 Arts, spotlighting a card-writing initiative the MPRA is leading in tandem with Palestinian Students and Scholars at Risk: A Canadian nonprofit providing support to Palestinian students who have been admitted to Canadian universities, but are currently stuck in Gaza in administrative limbo.

Saeed, DC-based writer and critic, host and senior producer of Al Jazeera’s AJ+, and creator of the award-winning series The Occupation Style Guide, opened the discussion by describing ongoing hypocrisies in reporting on the genocide in Gaza.

“The last three years of the genocide in Gaza were […] the worst in terms of what we’ve ever seen in terms of news coverage,” Saeed said. “[Reporting was used] to manufacture justification of not just the bombing of a population, but the extermination of an entire nation.”

Shaheen, editor at New Lines Magazine and former Middle East correspondent for The Guardian, followed up by drawing comparisons between coverage of Gaza and propaganda published by major news outlets during the Iraq War, situating current media complicity in the genocide in Palestine within a broader history of distorted coverage in the Middle East.

“During the Iraq war, [journalists] would write these front page articles [with] all this fake information that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction […] and [The New York Times] would publish it uncritically,” Shaheen stated. “The same malpractice is occurring [now] in the way the media is covering these stories [concerning Palestine].”

The panelists next reflected on how, in the past decade, journalists across Canada have repeatedly communicated their discontent with mainstream media’s vague coverage of Palestine through open letters. However, as Malik—director, writer, and former CBC producer for the fifth estate, Big News, and For the Culture—noted, these letters were often met with minimal institutional accountability—if not backlash and aggression.

“Some of the journalists [who signed these letters] were literally taken off of stories. They were blacklisted,” Malik said.

Recounting her experience working with Al Jazeera in the United States, Saeed highlighted how Arab and Muslim journalists who speak out against improper coverage of Gaza are disproportionately persecuted.

“[My coworkers and I at Al Jazeera] started getting emails from [Arab and Muslim] journalists who [asked], ‘Can you remove my name from [coverage discussing Palestine]? I’m being threatened with a dismissal,’” Saeed recounted. “There is activism allowed in journalism, but it’s always one way.”

According to Malik, this practice of targeting journalists on the basis of their ethnic and cultural backgrounds reflects deeper assumptions within the field of media regarding who is allowed to speak with authority.

“This idea of objectivity as it relates to journalism [claims] you can only be objective if you are a straight, white man,” Malik said. “Everything else is considered […] biased.” 

However, as Saeed explained, while mainstream outlets suppress Arab and Muslim reporters for speaking out about gaps in coverage on Gaza, reporters with ties to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) or Israel’s broader colonial project continue to publish misinformation without being penalized.

“In 2024, [The Wall Street Journal published an] accusation that [United Nations Relief and Works Agency] workers were involved in the October 7 attacks [….] One of the byline [writers] for that article was someone who was not only a former IDF soldier, but someone specifically doing pro-Israel propaganda just a year prior and [who] went through training on how to construct popular narratives from blogging and writing,” Saeed recounted.

The implications of this double standard, Saeed argued, go further than editorial negligence, carrying not just moral but legal weight.

“Under the Geneva Conventions, […] media complicity in a genocide […] is absolutely a war crime,” Saeed stated. “In order for mass violence to be legitimized, it starts with language, even language that we think might be innocuous [….] The words you use to describe the conditions of a human being determine whether they are given the right to live or if they are given the right to be killed.”

The panelists moved to discuss the implications of this surge in unchecked propagandistic reporting by mainstream outlets for the future of journalism more broadly. Shaheen commented that, moving forward, journalists must remain cognizant of the limitations of a single exposé or breaking news headline.

“People think that the way journalism works is that there’s this great investigation, you land on it, you publish it, and then the world changes,” Shaheen said. “But the way most journalism changes people’s minds is [through] repetition [….] That’s why it’s really important to talk about language, […] because [language] cements a vision or a viewpoint or a reaction in the public mind about [Gaza].” 

Malik argued that media literacy and discernment is one of the most critical tools through which to combat disinformation surrounding Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

“With the misinformation of how polarized everything is, knowing and understanding the difference between a journalist versus [any]one with a camera […] is very important,” Malik stated.

Saeed emphasized the importance not only of reforming Western news agencies’ and the public’s attitudes towards Palestinians, but also of consistently uplifting Palestinian voices.

“The thing that does give me hope are Palestinian journalists [continuing their work] in Gaza. Over 200 have been killed, […] they continue to be targeted and killed, and no international journalists are allowed into Gaza, so we’re losing those stories more and more and more every day,” Saeed stated. “Then, all we’re left with are extremely biased outside perspectives on Palestinians [….] Anyone who’s interested in journalism should look at Palestinian journalists […] and what they were able to do for a world and industry that has let them be annihilated.”

Behind the Bench, Sports

Sad endings do not ruin a great story: Haliburton, Vanmoen, and Carlyle

by Will Kennedy on

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Sad endings are unfortunately part of life, but they do not have to ruin our greatest stories. The most popular romance movie on Letterboxd is La La Land, a movie with a horribly unsatisfying ending to an otherwise lovely story. That summary is one so often befitting in sports. Not everyone gets a walkoff hit in their final game like Derek Jeter, or a buzzer-beating game winner to cap off an MVP season like Russell Westbrook; more often than not, things do not go as planned.

Throughout the 2025 National Basketball Association (NBA) Playoffs, Tyrese Haliburton played a crucial role in producing one of the most exciting tournaments in years. Haliburton hit four game-winning or -tying shots in the final five seconds of a fourth quarter or overtime, giving him five for his career. Only LeBron James has more, with eight. Haliburton created iconic moments that will forever be in the hearts and minds of Indiana Pacers fans, or really anyone who got to experience what he had to offer up until Game 7 of the NBA Finals. 

Game 7’s are a lot like heavy romance. Sometimes they end with the ultimate celebration, or, in Haliburton’s case, it can end with tears streaming down your face while you lay in agony. The image of Haliburton pounding his fist into the floor while screaming in pain after he tore his Achilles tendon in the final game of the 2025 NBA Playoffs will forever be etched into the brains of fans, but more importantly, it ought to remind them of how special Haliburton truly was throughout those four playoff rounds.

Towards the end of March, we saw another sports love affair end in tears. McGill swimmer Romain Vanmoen found himself competing at the U SPORTS National Championships in Markham, Ontario for the final meet of his career. Vanmoen qualified for the 200-metre backstroke final, where he had an underwhelming performance and the slowest time. However, his performance was secondary, as after the race something far more important happened. Vanmoen—who had just swam in lane five—turned to the competitor in lane six, Cameron Carlyle of the Dalhousie University Tigers. 

The two hugged and shed tears after the final race of their respective careers. These were not just two athletes drawn in the lanes next to each other; for Vanmoen, the guy in lane six is his best friend. Carlyle spent the first four seasons of his U SPORTS swimming career at McGill where he swam next to Vanmoen in practice everyday. Not only were they teammates for five seasons, but the pair spent four of those seasons living together before Carlyle graduated and moved on to Dalhousie. The race represented the final time two best friends got the opportunity to share the pool together. The tears seen streaming down Vanmoen’s face were not of disappointment because he had a bad race. In an interview with The Tribune, Vanmoen emphasized that he was not held up on the outcome of the race, but on the emotions he felt. 

“Even if the performance wasn’t great I didn’t care at all,” he wrote. “[I am] grateful for everything the sport gave [me], all the way to allowing me to race next to [my] best friend.” 

Some would consider a last-place finish in the final a bad ending for Vanmoen, but to him it did not matter because the best friend he ever made in swimming was right next to him until the very end of his career.
La La Land teaches us that we do not always get the storybook ending we want, but for Haliburton, Vanmoen, and Carlyle alike, that does not ruin a great story. Haliburton endeared himself to millions around the world and created so many new fans eagerly awaiting his return. For Carlyle and Vanmoen, as their swimming careers come to a close they can say goodbye to a sport they love with the comfort of having gained a lifelong friend with whom they share countless memories with and someone who will be there for many more. The storybook ending did not happen for any of the three, but maybe one day they can all walk into Seb’s and share a smile knowing they won in life.

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