Published by the SPT, a student society of McGill University
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’[Read More…]
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[Read More…]
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[Read More…]
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[Read More…]
Antoine – BSc, Honours Biology Dear Bio, If you’re into bio, you’d better learn to love DNA. Breathe it. Dream about it. Because everything comes back to DNA. What’s the reason behind ‘phenomenon X?’ A gene. ‘Phenomenon Y?’ Another gene. Are you curious about the composition of a microbial community?[Read More…]
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[Read More…]
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[Read More…]
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.
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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.”
SPHR remembers Gaza Solidarity Encampment ahead of Nakba Anniversary Protest
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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.
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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
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.
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.
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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.”
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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Canada’s prison system is predicated on rehabilitation and reintegration—yet, the country’s own correctional service is defunding the most integral program to realizing that aim.
Correctional Service Canada (CSC) has announced the suspension of its federal prison education program in Quebec correctional facilities, effective June 30, 2026. At present, Quebec offers prison educational programs under Commissioner’s Directive 720 at two federal penitentiaries: The Cowansville men’s and Joliette women’s institutions.
Collèges d’enseignement général et professionnel (CEGEPs) are integral to the delivery of educational programs to incarcerated individuals in Quebec, as CEGEP instructors teach the majority of courses in prisons. They offer upper-level, pre-professional, and field-specific courses that extend past general education objectives, facilitating greater personal and professional development. Crucially, these CSC-CEGEP partnerships allow incarcerated people who have not completed primary and/or secondary education to pursue studies that go beyond CSC’s Adult Basic Education requirements.
Of CEGEPs holding partnerships with CSC, Cégep Marie-Victorin is the primary institution offering pre-university programs in the province, having been involved in education in correctional contexts for approximately 50 years. However, due to financial constraints, CSC has decided not to renew its contract with Marie-Victorin in its current form, emphasizing the need to locate a cost-neutral alternative.
Without these programs, the Canadian justice system’s stated purpose of “assisting inmates to become law-abiding citizens” cannot be realized. For a legal system predicated on rehabilitation, accountability, and a safe return into one’s community, this radical reduction in funding is fundamentally incoherent with the mission of correctional institutions.
//The state’s aim: Reintegration and recidivism//
According to CSC Quebec’s Regional Communications Manager, Jean-François Mathieu, the purpose of educational programming in prisons is primarily centred on post-correctional outcomes with a two-pronged goal: Promoting reintegration and reducing recidivism.
“These programs allow inmates to acquire the basic skills in literacy and personal development that they require in order to succeed in the community [after incarceration],” Mathieu wrote in a statement to //The Tribune//.
Yet, education bears merit beyond reducing criminal activity, with proven positive impacts on the psychological health and livelihoods of incarcerated individuals. Jeffrey Kennedy, Assistant Professor in McGill’s Faculty of Law, elaborated on how education’s rehabilitative value does not—and should not—stand alone as the sole justification for the program’s existence in prisons.
“Education is a social good, period, and we shouldn’t limit its value to ‘rehabilitative’ purposes, even if it also helps prevent future crimes,’” Kennedy stated in a written statement to //The Tribune//. “The same reasons why McGill [community members] are themselves part of this university and see education as valuable—for personal growth, career prospects, relationships, interest, or seeing education as a good in itself—also apply to the people we have imprisoned.”
Samuel Rochette, Professor of Psychology at Cégep Marie-Victorin and now-former instructor at the Cowansville men’s institution, affirmed this sentiment, describing how the time commitment education in prison requires, alongside its ‘opt-in’ nature, encourages incarcerated people to develop positive habits both during and after imprisonment.
“I’ve known for several [incarcerated people] who stopped taking drugs, at least on a regular basis, because they were much more focused on what they were doing [in classes]. And that’s not an exception,” Rochette said in an interview with //The Tribune//.
//Prisoner well-being, desistance, and identity re-formation//
The benefits of educational programming are in no way limited to post-correctional outcomes. While reducing recidivism is a key aim of the state in its carceral project to deter future law-breaking, the more normative, prisoner-centric benefits of these programs remain and are perhaps more profound.
Frédérick Armstrong, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Chair in Applied Research for Education in Prison at Cégep Marie-Victorin, has conducted significant research affirming the benefits of education to the well-being of people in prison. Armstrong’s work, mainly his qualitative analyses, is crucial to the progressive development of UNESCO’s policy agenda, particularly the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
He collaborated with Cégep Marie-Victorin educator Lyne Bisson on a 2024 report, conducting interviews with more than 40 people across five provincial prisons. Participants described how participating in educational programs can build self-esteem, foster a sense of academic competence, and even make the days pass faster.
CEGEP-led educational courses also empower the incarcerated to redefine their identities and self-perceptions in a process known as desistance, or the evolution in identity that occurs when incarcerated individuals undergo effective rehabilitative programs. Drawing from one of the interviews he conducted with Bisson, Armstrong offered an example of how this phenomenon may manifest.
“A young man [in the prison] […] made a big thing of being called a student by the prison guards. So, the prison guard would say, ‘Okay, all students can go to school.’ And he’s like, ‘I’m a student?’ [….] That identity shift is key in the process of desistance,” Armstrong shared in an interview with //The Tribune//.
The ability of CEGEP professionals to support these shifts in the identity and behaviour of incarcerated people is not just important for students’ personal growth; Parole Board members rely on educators to report on prisoner desistance when evaluating whether to offer parole and, if release is granted, what its conditions will be. In an open letter to CSC shared with //The Tribune//, Theodore, a student incarcerated at Cowansville who withheld his last name, described how educators can serve as advocates for imprisoned people.
“The Parole Board doesn’t live here among us, and all they have to go by is our parole officer, [correctional officer], and program officers, in most cases,” Theodore shared in the letter. “CEGEP […] [is] a program in which inmates can accomplish presentable metrics to the Parole Board about what they have done here. ‘How can I show you I’m doing better if there’s nothing good for me to do?’”
//Prison Education as an Opportunity for Socialization//
Educational programming in prisons also fosters another crucial aspect of reintegration: Adopting pro-social behaviours. Relying on his personal experience, Theodore described how the classroom environment—particularly its use of ‘rehearsals’—can support the development of prisoner social skills.
“The specific environment created by [the] CEGEP operating in this penitentiary creates a transitional environment for offenders to ‘rehearse’ living pro-socially. This includes skills, but also social situations: Navigating teacher relationships, submitting to the curriculum, and navigating interactions with peers,” Theodore wrote. “The [institutional program] uses role-play very often to […] make sure we know to apply the skills we are being taught.”
By strengthening these social skills, prison education programs make significant progress toward rehabilitation efforts, addressing the behavioural, cognitive, and emotional roots of criminal activity. Rochette added that without these course offerings, it is difficult for people in prison to find opportunities for socialization.
“I had a student tell me, […] ‘In 18 years, you’re the first real human interaction I’ve been having,’ and I wanted to cry at that moment. I mean, that was really touching.”
//The Psychological and Human Rights Dimensions of Punishment//
The ability of educational programs to offer opportunities for socialization and facilitate desistance is undeniably critical to the psychological health of imprisoned people during and after incarceration. However, such benefits are greatly impaired when the method of punishment is incompatible with these positive outcomes. Drawing from his expertise in psychology, Rochette offered a theory-based explanation of the threats posed by detention as a mechanism of punishment.
Operant conditioning models state that punishment must follow three rules to effectively deter future repetition of the behaviour: Immediacy, consistency, and proportionality. Therefore, a punishment must be intuitively related to the initial wrongdoing for it to result in positive behavioural shifts.
However, these three conditions are rarely met in Canadian prisons. Mandatory minimum sentences and long prison sentences are frequently applied to nonviolent or drug-related offences, amounting to incoherent and disproportionately severe models of punishment.
The ineffectiveness of current models of punishment in the criminal justice system is epitomized by the persistence of administrative segregation, more commonly known as solitary confinement. Administrative segregation is a temporary correctional measure under which certain incarcerated people are isolated from the rest of the prison population to mitigate violence or security risk. Although administrative segregation was officially abolished in 2019, it persists in the form of Structured Intervention Units (SIUs), often described as ‘administrative segregation by another name.’
Educational programming is thus one of the few opportunities to counterbalance the negative elements of punishment. It is the provision of such programs in the face of these unnecessarily punitive measures that is crucial to reducing recidivism, improving prisoner well-being, and achieving the positive identity shifts associated with recognition and socialization. As a result, as Kennedy describes, depriving incarcerated people of these programs proves counterintuitive.
“It seems indefensible to me to justify someone’s imprisonment on the basis of ‘rehabilitation’ […] and then deprive that person of the opportunities they need to realize that,” Kennedy wrote. “There can’t be a disconnect between the reasons we sentence people and the actual realities of imprisonment.”
//Financial constraints and online prison education//
Despite these immeasurable benefits, budget pressure on CSC has forced the end of Cégep Marie-Victorin as it currently stands. However, such austerity calculations entirely neglect that the program, beyond being socially and ethically beneficial, is an economically efficient investment.
“The program [costs] around $400,000 CAD to $450,000 CAD a year [….] Keeping someone in prison in Canada, especially in Quebec, is about $100,000 CAD to $120,000 CAD a year,” Rochette said. “Of our 40 students, we only need one or two of them to not go back to prison for this program to be productive and, in fact, save money [for] the government.”
And such educational programs are in high demand: Many incarcerated people transfer into the Cowansville and Joliette institutions for the sole purpose of attending the Cégep Marie-Victorin program, sometimes leading to waiting lists. In fact, when CSC announced that budget cuts had forced the end of CEGEP education in prisons, Rochette reported that prisoners immediately offered to direct their Inmate Committee’s budget toward funding the program. As a result, when scaled up against the psychological and emotional benefits of these programs, such financial constraints appear increasingly inconsequential.
Although it has not yet been officially announced, CSC has communicated its intention to reformat prison education into an online model, known as the Offender Digital Education (ODE) program, in hopes of continuing the program while cutting costs.
However, the majority of both tangible and intangible benefits of prison education are lost when educational programming shifts online, making these austerity measures lethal to the program rather than simply cost-cutting.
“[Online prison education] has been tried elsewhere. For instance, in France, it was a fiasco, it was horrible. They wasted a lot of money, and people used the computers there to hack, and it didn’t work,” Rochette stated. “And plus, you remove the human connection, the interaction, […] the normalcy, and the alternative to their lifestyle that is very appealing to them.”
//Moving forward: An international human rights standard for prisoner education//
Prison education is not a program unique to Quebec; it is an internationally pursued human rights imperative. Given Armstrong’s work in the UNESCO chair role, prisoner education in Quebec bears implications for policy work far beyond Canada, let alone the province.
However, research on the efficacy of prison education models tends to emphasize the need for randomized controlled trials and qualitative research as more scientifically reputable justifications for implementing such programs. Yet, such empirical justifications are, in many ways, secondary to the pursuit of what is really a human rights goal.
“I’ve had that conversation […] where evidence-based policy is very important. I don’t have any evidence that education is a human right, right? That’s not evidence-based. That’s normative. It’s a political statement to say that people have a right to education,” Armstrong explained. “So, if we show that education does not reduce recidivism, it would still be legitimate to provide education in correctional contexts because it remains a right.”
While empirical studies, educator and prisoner testimonies, and financial calculations all suggest that the prison education model should be preserved in its current form, such evidentiary support is, in many ways, extraneous. Rather, the necessary and sufficient condition that obligates prisons worldwide to provide education to the incarcerated is one simple fact: Education is a human right.
//“I’m a student?”//
50 years of prison education made that question possible, but it took only one budget cycle to force the program’s closure. Reinstate CEGEP education in Quebec prisons—not because it saves money, not because the data demand it, and not because it stands to reduce recidivism, but because human rights should not disappear behind bars.
