I can’t exactly remember the conversation where my mom told me that my dad might have prostate cancer. Ironically enough, it happened on a November evening, but in the long months that ensued, we never said the words out loud again. We’d never been confronted with a something so deadly and so scary. Cancer is a heavy word—ominous, terrifying. It’s a word that makes you re-evaluate any and all of your past decisions, and makes you reconsider all upcoming ones. Talking about cancer is hard. But it’s important.

Enter Movember. This annual campaign began ten years ago and encourages men to grow a moustache in November to raise awareness and research funding for prostate cancer. The movement, which began in Australia, gained significant momentum in the past years, and teams of ‘Mo Bros’ and supportive ‘Mo Sistas’ from all over can now register online and raise large sums for national prostate cancer organizations. Last year, Canadian participants raised over $785,000 for Prostate Cancer Canada, with over $2 million raised overall by teams around the world.

In my years at McGill, I’ve seen Movember gain momentum and visibility on our campus. But like other movements that are based on fashion statements, conversations about Movember often revolve around the moustaches themselves. (Is it bushy enough, or is there scarcely enough fuzz? Is it well-groomed, or unkempt?). It’s rare to hear discussions that transcend the visual portion of the campaign, and instead, focus on the meaning behind the moustache. It is time to take a step away from evaluating people’s moustaches, and rather, to think of the reasons that they’re rocking the ‘mo: to raise awareness for prostate cancer.

Although some people do raise funds with their moustaches, many jump on the bandwagon, sporting a moustache without knowing enough about the cause behind it.  Even if you aren’t raising money this November, remember that you can effect change and reduce the stigma associated with men’s health. If we can talk about embarrassing moustaches, why not also talk about what some view as embarrassing health topics?

Some facts to get you started in discussing men’s health: the prostate is walnut-sized gland in the male reproductive system. According to the Canadian Cancer Society, 26,500 men were diagnosed with prostate cancer in Canada last year, and 15 per cent died because of it.  One in seven men will develop prostate cancer during his lifetime and one in 28 will die of it. Prostate cancer has a high survival rate—at 96 per cent—but only if caught in its early stages. Because early detection can really make a difference, doctors recommend that men have annual check-ups starting at age 40 or 50.

As the daughter of a prostate cancer survivor, I appreciate Movember because it’s a month to ask difficult questions and consider their answers. Do you know if your father, grandfather or other relatives had prostate cancer? This will double a man’s chances of having it later on. Have your loved ones ever had a check-up, and do they understand how important it is to have an annual one? These are questions that often don’t come up in regular household conversations—they never did in mine—but whose answers may surprise you.

This November, I encourage you to make the moustaches you see on campus a chance to start a conversation about the symptoms, risks, and implications of prostate cancer. Regardless of your ability to grow a moustache, these are important questions whose answers might one day affect people you care about. Talking about cancer is always difficult, but it’s important to be comfortable, or at least able, to discuss prostate cancer today, so that if the day ever comes that you need to face it head-on, you’ll know what the discussion entails and you’ll be better prepared to face it.

Last week, the Montreal Gazette reported that McGill is filing a lawsuit against Arthur Porter, former executive director of the McGill University Health Centre, over an unpaid loan (see “News in Brief,” page 2). The unfurling fiasco has brought forward one disconcerting revelation after another.

It’s hard to choose which part of the scandal is most shocking: it could be the additional sum of $92,000 Porter was paid, on top of the publicly disclosed salary of $256,000. It could be the undisclosed amount he was paid as an assistant professor in the faculty of medicine, despite no evidence that he taught in that capacity. Most puzzling of all, though, is the $500,000 loan he received from McGill in 2008, at an annual interest rate of one per cent, for which he is now being sued.

Here, some obvious questions emerge. McGill has, to date, failed to specify exactly what the loan was for, and why such a large figure was offered to an executive director at rates far below prime. The Montreal Gazette found that the loan was part of a “housing loan agreement”—a questionable term. According to the National Post, low interest loans are apparently a standard perk for university administrators on top of their salaries. Porter’s teaching salary—for lecturing he allegedly never did—also has yet to be explained.

[pullquote]“There are some serious matters of contention still on the table, and we ask that McGill come forward with an explanation.”[/pullquote]

As paying students of this university, we feel that we are entitled to hear answers to the simple questions of what the loan was for and what teaching Porter actually did. Either something went very wrong and the university simply does not know how this all fits into a larger tangled web of deceit, or the practice of paying nonteaching executives as professors and supplying them with loans at such low rates is standard. Both are similarly disturbing and require explanation.

What concerns this editorial board most, however, is that it’s entirely likely that none of this would have gone public had it not been for McGill’s lawsuit against Porter. The affair raises a number of bigger questions about how our university manages its finances and discloses the salaries of directors and senior administrators.

Most importantly, we would like to know if other university officials have been receiving personal loans of hundreds of thousands of dollars at negligible interest rates, or been appointed to positions and paid for work they never did. Salaries of top university administrators are made public in Quebec through annual reports submitted to the National Assembly. This public disclosure, unfortunately, means nothing if the figures aren’t correct. (Salaries of directors of publically-funded institutions, like the MUHC, are similarly available via access to information requests).

McGill will do its best to brand Arthur Porter as the guilty party, and that won’t prove to be terribly difficult. Before this incident, there was much controversy around the MUHC project, including several allegations of corruption. In September, a provincial anti-corruption unit raided the offices of the MUHC. Porter left the country in 2011, after abruptly resigning as chairman of Canada’s Security and Intelligence Review committee. His departure came amidst allegations that he sent $200,000 of his own funds to a Montreal businessman, hoping to secure a $120 million infrastructure development project that would have benefitted Porter’s own company in his native Sierra Leone.

However, this affair is indicative of a broader lack of transparency. There are some serious matters of contention still on the table, and we ask that McGill come forward with an explanation. At a time when the administration cries bloody murder about underfunding, this debacle could be highly damaging to McGill’s credibility if it cannot provide answers. At the same time, if it cannot account for such large sums, it is going to have a hard time convincing major players, including the provincial and federal governments, that it deserves the additional funding it claims to need.

As students, we would like to know exactly what the loan was for, and whether offering low-interest loans to senior administrators or directors is standard practice. Similarly, we would like answers as to why there was a discrepancy between Porter’s actual salary and the publically disclosed figure, and whether such divergences are common. Assurances that posted salaries are correct—and more generally that there is transparency in compensation for top university officials—are first steps towards maintaining the trust of tuition-paying students.

Last Wednesday, Parti Québécois (PQ) Environment Minster Daniel Breton raised considerable controversy. When asked about proposals currently being brought forward to start moving crude oil from Alberta’s oil sands to refineries in Montreal and further east in the Maritimes, he rejected the notion outright.

“Albertans want to bring their oil onto our land, without our consent,” he told La Presse.

He also cited environmental risks, stating that “this is a question of protecting the environment that’s on our territory.”

The Alberta oil sands are a hotly-debated topic on the environmental front. For years, critics have targeted the extraction process as excessively harmful, but that’s not the issue brought forward by Mr. Breton. His concern, judging by his quote, is the impact of the project on Quebecois land.

Unlike the hotly disputed Keystone XL and Northern Gateway projects, which would lay down new pipelines in a process both lengthy and harmful to the surrounding areas, these current proposals primarily involve the repurposing of existing infrastructure. Enbridge is seeking to reverse the flow of their pipeline, which currently moves crude oil from Montreal to Sarnia. Similarly, TransCanada wants to convert their Canadian Mainline pipeline, which currently carries natural gas, into an oil line. The work required to make these modifications is minor.

Mr. Breton also cited the 2010 Kalamazoo River oil spill as a reason for Quebec to be wary of the proposals. While the disaster in Michigan certainly serves as a harsh reminder of what can go wrong with pipelines, these are risks that Quebec is already taking with the existing Enbridge line. Reversing the flow of oil will not increase the likelihood of a rupture.

The environmental concerns seem even more dubious when one considers that New Democratic Party leader Thomas Mulcair has come forward in favour of these proposals. Mulcair has vehemently opposed the other aforementioned pipeline initiatives, on the grounds of both environmental and economic concerns. However, provided the project developer pays for any environmental damage caused, he believes that the economic benefits greatly outweigh any drawbacks in this case.

Currently, refineries in Eastern Canada process crude oil shipped in from Saudi Arabia, Africa, and Venezuela. Once refined, the oil is sent inland to Canada, to the eastern United States, or as far south as Texas. Replacing these imports with Albertan oil would keep more profits within Canada.

As Mulcair rightly points out, the alternatives to this proposal involve shipping the bitumen to the U.S. or China, eliminating potential high-paying Canadian jobs. The West-East pipeline would create more jobs in the East, and increase the export capacity for our refined oil.

Ultimately, Mr. Breton’s comments seem to indicate an ideological opposition to the proposal, rather than a stance based on the facts of the issue. Rather than addressing environmental or economic concerns, his comments derive from a purely political stance. The rhetoric used is distinctly nationalist, even employing the Quiet Revolution slogan ‘maître chez nous’ (‘masters of our own home’). While Mr. Breton’s sovereigntist approach is certainly in keeping with the Parti Québécois’ stance, it may be problematic for the province’s future.

This sort of dogmatic unwillingness to even consider proposals such as these could prove seriously harmful to Quebec, deterring job creation and economic growth. The PQ has vowed to get tough on corporations, but a recently filed lawsuit—in which a number of corporations including Wal-mart and the Gap are threatening to pull out of Quebec over increasingly strict language laws—seems to demonstrate that this stance is to the overall detriment of the province thus far. To set a precedent in which opportunities are being struck down on uniquely partisan grounds will only worsen this. While the party did get elected on a platform stemming from a particular set of ideologies, these cannot take precedence over general economic well-being.

The questions of judgement that these issues bring forward could ultimately damage the party itself. As a newly-elected minority government with an upcoming confidence vote, this is not the time for the PQ to be trying to score political points with a separatist base by shunning real issues. If the Party plans to occupy any sort of long-term leadership role, it will have to learn to temper its ideologies and take all aspects of that role seriously.