In the past week, there has been considerable debate on campus about the role that Remembrance Day should play in Canadian life. Some have questioned whether the annual event transcends remembrance, and instead, glorifies war and idolizes a willingness to die for one’s country. Here, a key question emerges: is it possible to separate political motivations from the act of remembering and respecting those who went to war?

Remembrance Day is, at its core, an observance rooted in personal reflection. For that reason, it has different significance for different people. For some, it is a day to honour loved ones lost in war, and to pay respect to those who continue to serve. For others, it is a time to acknowledge the fact that war is a part of Canada’s history that must never  be forgotten.

Although Remembrance Day presents a possible opportunity to question and critique how our society views war, there are other occasions both more pertinent and appropriate for such scrutiny.

Canada’s new $20 bill, released into circulation last Wednesday, features the Vimy Ridge monument as its key image. Undoubtedly, it is important to honour the sacrifice of Canadian troops in the First World War, but we must also question if we are prioritizing a romanticization of war at the expense of, for example, the promotion of peacekeeping efforts.  Notably, the current Canadian $10 note depicts a female peacekeeper atop the banner “Au service de la paix/In the service of peace.” A new $10 note will be unveiled in 2013.

In the same vein, the federal government’s $60 million advertising campaign for the 100th anniversary of the War of 1812 calls the government’s priorities into question.  Was the War of 1812 as important a ‘turning point’ in our country as the signing of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms? Remembrance is crucial, but we must consider what these signal about what we collectively value as a nation, and what impact it may have on future generations of Canadians.

Canadian history lessons are a fundamental fixture in primary and secondary education. Which stories we choose to tell—and which we choose to withhold—need to be thoughtfully and critically considered. Glossing over unjust relations with Indigenous peoples—as often happens when the ‘discovery’ of this continent is first presented in school—is an egregious failure to educate about wrongdoing.  So, too, is the selective, one-sided presentation of war. There is a pressing need to critique the way we teach history to children.

Remembrance Day is a day to remember those who died in the service of our country. That is not to say that the event—and the way we observe and remember past instances of war—is above criticism. But the focus of the day should remain on veterans and their individual sacrifice. At the same time, we should continue to question the extent to which our society glorifies war, and the level to which our government weaves narratives of war into national sentiment.

Since leaving Canadian politics, Michael Ignatieff has been forceful, intelligent, charismatic, and well-spoken. In other words, he has become the diametric opposite of the Michael Ignatieff who led the Liberal party to its worst parliamentary showing in recent memory. Speaking at the BBC’s annual Free Thinking Festival, Ignatieff decried the rapid centralization of power in the Prime Minister’s Office and called for party leaders to allow individual Members of Parliament (MPs) more freedom in voting and legislative tasks.

Without this decentralizing step, Ignatieff believes that the Parliament will fall further into dysfunction, as the needs of individual ridings are increasingly delegated to the margins. The tightening of party control has also led to increased antipathy between the parties, with squabbling and catcalls replacing civil relationships on the floor of the House of Commons.

It’s not hard to see where Ignatieff is coming from. The Harper government—like its predecessors—has been characterized by the fostering of animosity among parties, and MPs under his banner are hardly, if ever, permitted a free vote. To be fair, all parties have fallen prey to the temptation of mindless opposition instead of providing constructive solutions. Ignatieff himself famously whipped the Liberal Party during the vote to eliminate the gun registry, against the wishes of some of his rural MPs.

The continued rise of hyper-partisanship are not unique to Canada. The Obama administration faced four years of obstinate opposition from the Senate and House Republicans, which made it incredibly difficult to pass legislation. And while effective opposition is one thing, setting a record for the most filibusters in one session of Congress—as the Republicans have, from 2009 to 2011—is nothing to be proud of.

So what does this mindless, party-line voting and hyper-partisanship get us? Does the 40 per cent of Canadians represented by the Conservative party have the monopoly on all good ideas? Has the impenetrable Democratic state assembly in California produced good policy without Republican input? The answer to all three of the above questions is a resounding ‘No.’ In the absence of bipartisan policy-making, effective policy becomes much more difficult, and at times impossible.

The Affordable Care Act’s passage is instructive. The votes required to get the bill through Congress were 99 per cent Democratic, with no Republican participation in its passage. The bill, while improving the health care status quo, is riddled with compromises made to industrial lobbyists because of this narrow support. Imagine if half of the Republican caucus had been on board with providing a solution to America’s health care problem. Not only would they have been able to have a say in the bill’s final shape, but the integrity of the bill could have been much stronger. Their mindless opposition failed completely.

What can be done to solve this problem? How do we allow individual members of a legislature more freedom? Political scientists have identified that longer-tenured parliamentarians and an increase in the number of parliamentarians overall usually lead to more independent thinking. To that end, some theorists have advocated paying individual MPs more money, to make the job seem more desirable, and thus a potentially long-term career.  Increasing parliamentarians’ salaries would also make the job more appealing to well-qualified candidates, who may otherwise have ignored a career in politics. In Canada, we are also seeing a new influx of MPs thanks to Canada’s growing population. Hopefully larger caucuses will be harder for party leaders to control.

Ultimately, the power to end irresponsible partisanship lies in the hands of the individual voter. As evidenced this past week, voters can penalize obstructionist parties, and usher in a group of representatives determined to reach across party lines, compromise, and get things done.  At the polls, Canadians should prioritize qualities like responsibility and bipartisanship in candidates.  By doing so, Parliament can change for the better.

Is there free speech on our campus? That depends on who’s talking. According to the libertarian Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), when it comes to protecting controversial speech, McGill University—like most Canadian universities—fails miserably. In the wake of these accusations, we must rethink the boundaries we set between offensive speech and simply controversial speech.

It’s worth noting that the report has received sparse coverage in campus media. Aside from an editorial the Tribune ran last week (“Safe Spaces on campus do not repress free speech”), there has been no mention from the other two main English campus outlets—the McGill Daily and the Bull and Bear. Nor did the news sections of any of the major campus papers reach out to either the Students Society of McGill University (SSMU) or the McGill administration for comment.

While the JCCF report devotes a significant portion of the report to discussing onerous protest regulations imposed by the administration, it reserves particularly pointed criticism for SSMU.

Upon looking at SSMU’s Equity Policy, we are confronted with the clash of good intentions and good policy. Intended to create a safe and accepting campus environment for historically disadvantaged groups, the policy is criticized by the report for employing an overly broad definition of “oppression”—allegedly broad enough for the speech of students and clubs to be chilled because of nebulous conceptions of ‘offence.’

On its face, the Equity Policy, and the broader concept of a speech code, is incongruous with our conceptions of free speech.  In the ‘real world,’ while there are sanctions for libelous speech and active incitements to violence against groups, we generally see speech as something that can and should be equally accessible to everyone regardless of one’s political views.

However, one of the major differences between the university and the outside world is the fact that a person can walk away from hateful, prejudiced, or simply hurtful speech, in a way that one can’t meaningfully do on a university campus. On the university campus, one can’t meaningfully feel whole or accepted if there are not norms of tolerance.

This is why there was a justified uproar about some costumes worn at SSMU’s Four Floors Halloween party several weeks ago. The focus of the controversy was the appearance of costumes depicting blackface. This particular costume is uniquely problematic because of its origins in minstrel shows—plays shown in the Jim Crow South that depicted blacks as generally inferior. This is a case in which it is fair to declare something ‘out of bounds,’ not simply because it references such hurtful history, but also because it does not provide any redeeming intellectual value.

On the other hand, the party also featured costumes invoking Mexican stereotypes. When the Latin American students’ organization on campus was asked to comment on these costumes for a piece in the McGill Daily, they responded that while the stereotypes were bad, they did not constitute an offence because the mockery was “not intentional.” This response was not printed in the paper, but it reveals the dilemma in trying to make campus a safe space for the marginalized; offence and oppression are all in the eyes of those who feel offended or oppressed.

This is the crux of the question. As the Equity Policy stands, any perceived slight upon one’s identity can become grounds for sanction—as we saw in several incidents last year, such as with respect to a pro-Israel event where organizers were sanctioned as “oppressive” because of the title of their event, “Israel A-Party.” The challenge is to create a policy that limits discriminatory speech in circumstances when there is clear intent to harm—or actual harm—and to err on the side of free speech in cases in which the offence is less clear.

To this effect, the least disruptive solution might lie in simply interpreting the policy correctly and as written. There are two key questions on SSMU’s page for potential complainants: first, “Is the issue an interpersonal or political one that may not require SSMU involvement?”; second,  “Is there an imbalance of power involved?” Several of the more controversial applications of the Equity Policy, from the earlier-mentioned sanction against the pro-Israel event, to intra-executive disputes inside student organizations, would not have merited serious consideration under a more literal interpretation of those sections. SSMU, for example, was under no ‘requirement’ to involve itself in the complaint over the Israel event, as the dispute was not even that the event’s content was discriminatory, but rather that its original title, “Israel A-Party”—which intended to counter-message Israeli Apartheid Week—did not sufficiently adhere to the political views of the complainant.

The pursuit of free speech and the pursuit of a tolerant campus are not inherently conflictual ideals.  What the JCCF report reminds us is that, while our campus is generally well-intentioned when it comes to student expression, it is too willing to craft vague, nebulous regulations that are used by some to stifle the speech of others. Solving this issue could come in the form of a rewritten Equity Policy, but the most immediate solution is to simply interpret the policy more strictly than it has been.