Sam Reynolds

Montreal may seem worlds away from Libya and Muamar Gaddafi, but McGill professor Rex Brynen would argue otherwise. Having spent the summer in Benghazi as a consultant to the rebel leadership, Brynen is all too connected to the Libyan situation.

Brynen took part in a roundtable presented by the Atlantic Council of Canada on ‘Life After Gaddafi: Prospects for Post-War Libya’ on Oct. 13 at McGill.  The roundtable consisted of five guest speakers debating issues pertaining to the future of Libya.

“The real challenge in constructing and rebuilding Libya will not be physical reconstruction, but institutional,” Brynen said. He explained the need for widespread, functional changes in response to factionalism and cronyism currently present in the Libyan system of government.

“I’m absolutely gobsmacked by how many people have turned up for the event,” Dr. Bernd Goetze, one of the event hosts and director of the Atlantic Council’s Quebec division, said.

The Atlantic Council works to build public knowledge of international peace, security, and NATO through the publication of articles, roundtable and youth events, and competitions.

At this particular event, speakers discussed a range of issues, from personal accounts of Libya’s history under Gaddafi to the much more optimistic current situation from Salhin Gheriani, who concluded that “Libya is full of activity, and you have to prepare to be amazed.”

Dr. Miloud Chennoufi of the Canadian Forces College explained the role of the rebel leadership in the National Transitional Council, cautioning against too much optimism for the country’s future.

“The West is not interested in democracy in the Arab world. It has never been interested in democracy in the Arab world,” he said.

Dr. Imad Mansour, a faculty lecturer at McGill, took a more removed view in questioning Libya’s prospects for peace or violence.

“We are seeing more continuities than ruptures, but the problems will continue,” he concluded.

The final panelist was former diplomat Mr. Paul Chapin.  He took a positive stance, asserting that the revolution will provide peace and prosperity for the Libyans, but emphasized the importance of nuanced foreign involvement.

“We’re not going to make the mistake of coming in and telling them how to run their country,” he said.

After the presentations, the speakers discussed the results of the roundtable.

“I thought it was an excellent discussion,” Brynen said. “There were a broad range of perspectives offered by the panellists, and the large student audience seemed informed and engaged.”

Tom Aagaard, a research analyst from the Atlantic Council, agreed.

“There’s so much momentum behind this issue,” Aagaard said. It was surprisingly easy to get people involved because it’s such a hot topic right now. Although the tone was a little cynical tonight, the council does go for honest and critical discussion with a variety of perspectives.”

Michal Khan, U3 Middle East studies and political science, found the talk especially relevant in its discussion of the impact of policy on the Libyan community.

“Often in university events on politics like these, academics like professors are the only ones involved. So we get the analytic academic side of the story. The strength of the panel in my opinion is that we not only got different academic perspectives but also how the events in Libya impact governments and their officials and the Libyan community,” Khan said.

Sam Reynolds

On Oct. 1, the Bachelors of Arts and Science Integrative Council (BaSIC) asked its students what stance they wanted to take on the MUNACA strike.

When the results came in, the favoured response, with 44 per cent of the vote, was to maintain neutrality. Supporting the strike was selected by 37 per cent. The remainder, 19 per cent, were against the the strike.

As a result, BaSIC decided to remain neutral on the strike.

“We didn’t even discuss it in the executive. At AUS council, our VP external abstained. We would just go with whatever the surveys said,” Hubie Yu, BaSIC’s president, said.

In addition, the survey had an optional and anonymous comments section in which students could post their thoughts about the issue. Some questioned the validity of having a stance on this issue as a student group, while others criticized the lack of a fourth option condemning the strike. One commenter simply said they would rather see the money MUNACA might eventually get put towards more valuable uses like keeping tuition fees down.

Some students were pleased that BaSIC conducted the survey and consulted students before taking a stance.

“It’s just amazing that BaSIC, as an organisation, is willing to engage its membership and find out their views on a controversial topic such as this; it would have been unfair of them to assume their constituents are for the strike,” Brendan Stevens, a U2 political science student  and member of Conservative McGill, said.

Other students wondered why more organisations did not conduct similar surveys.

“Student groups should consult their constituent members, which SSMU did at the General Assembly, but there were only 100 people out of the huge amount that represents SSMU at that and they tend to be the ones who are more politically engaged anyway and more likely to support the strike so it really depends on the organisation,” Grace Khare, a student at McGill, said.

AUS and SUS have not taken positions on the strike due to opposition.

“We haven’t taken a position: there was a motion put forward two councils ago saying that we take a position on the strike, which did not go through,” Jade Calver, President of the AUS, said.

SUS President Akshay Rajaram noted that while the society has not taken a stance, this is as a result of a lack of information on how the strike affects their students.

“We discussed the issues affecting students in general council and with our dean but we haven’t formally taken a stance,” he said. “Depending on the year [at McGill], students are being affected differently in regards to the strike.”

Lindsay Cameron

Lindsay Cameron

To many, the clerical abuse scandal in the Catholic clergy was something that happened in 2002 when media reports were first released, and has only appeared in the public consciousness sporadically since then. This is certainly not the case within the Catholic Church. On Oct. 14 and 15, McGill hosted “Trauma and Transformation: the Catholic Church and the Sexual Abuse Crisis,” a conference which drew together seven bishops, 50 nuns and priests, dozens of academics, and around 20 students to talk about clergy abuse, and how to resolve and prevent it.

“It is significant that this is the first time there has been a major academic conference that is at a secular university,” Dan Cere, a McGill Religious Studies professor and conference co-host, said.

“Most of the conversations that have gone to date [within the Catholic Church] have tended to focus on …  ‘what are the codes, what are the protocols that we need to put in place to stop this?’ They haven’t really looked at what the systemic issues are.”

A study released in May 2011 by the John Jay School of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York looked at statistics of sexual abuse of minors within the Catholic Church from 1950 to 2010 in America. Principal investigator Karen Terry found that incidents of abuse had peaked in the 1970s and 1980s, implying that abuse may not, as previously thought, be endemic within the Catholic Church, but could be linked with particular phenomena of that era.

“We found that the rise in abusive behavior within the Church was consistent with rises in other types of behavior in society,” Terry said.

These included rises in crime, drug usage, divorce, and premarital sex. While Terry emphasized that these behaviors did not cause abuse, the social factors that caused these behaviors to increase may also have contributed towards the increase in abuse in the Catholic Church.

“The dioceses at this point need to continue to provide safe environment programs … but they still need to be held accountable, and they need to increase their transparency in responses to abuse,” Terry said, recommending changes for the church based on the study.

Archbishop Mancini of Halifax suggested that reforms need to be made within the church, including the church’s age-old teachings on sexuality.

“The fact is that sexuality is part of the human condition, and when it is ignored, minimized, or inadequately understood, the result is devastation in people’s lives.”

Instead of ignoring sexuality the way the church has in the past, Mancini urged more discussion on the subject, specifically to allow priests to understand themselves and develop.

Another conference participant, Fr. George Wilson, indicated that the Catholic Church should allow parishoners more power in matters of faith than had been previously granted.

“We should have laymen and laywomen on the board [to ordain priests] making that decision [of who becomes a priest and who does not],” Wilson said.

McGill Student Ombudsperson Spencer Boudreau felt that the abuse that occurred within the Catholic Church could be examined as a case study for other large institutions.

“I think the conference has a message to students that it’s important to speak about any kind of abuse,” Boudreau said.

“I’m in education. A big issue now for example is bullying that goes on in schools and on the Internet … that’s a form of abuse that maybe all of us have to be more sensitive about … I think that we always have to be sensitive to abuse.”

Students felt that the experience was unique and contradicted the views long thought to be true about the Catholic Church’s attitudes towards sexual abuse.

“I think the image from this conference is one that sharply contrasts the one that the mass media has been portraying since this issue erupted … that the church is complacent, that it’s not interested in improvement … but the sense that you get from a conference like this … is that they do care and that they are being proactive…. ” Julian Paparella, a U0 science student volunteering at the event, said.

“As the younger generation, we’re not necessarily directly affected as individuals by this particular issue, but it’s one about which we need to be knowledgable in order that in the future, we may not experience what we did in the past.”

Each year, the CBC, in conjunction with the House of Anansi Press, and Massey College in the University of Toronto, hosts the Massey Lecture, a series of lectures given by an expert guest speaker on their original research. In honour of the 50th anniversary of the lecture, CBC invited Montreal native—and staff writer for the New Yorker—Adam Gopnik to speak on a subject that is inherently Canadian: winter.

The Montreal portion of the lecture was co-hosted by McGill and introduced by Provost Anthony Masi. He spoke of the compatibility between the series and McGill’s goals of pedagogy and community service.

“For half a century, the Massey Lectures have advanced these goals by serving as a forum to engage Candians that stimulates reflection, discussion, and debate,” Masi said. “I would call [the series] a Canadian icon, but that might not be appropriate, since its lecturers are so often iconoclasts.”

Presented in a series of lectures that will eventually become a radio series, Gopnik’s treatise on winter is also available in book form. Winter: Five Windows on the Season offers a vista into the season’s historical and cultural relevance. As its name suggests, Gopnik has broken up the lecture and his treatise on winter into five sections, and will be traveling across Canada to deliver his discussion on each in a different city. The first section, on romantic winter, was delivered last Wednesday at the Telus theater. Romantic winter looks at the season’s transformation in European and Canadian cultural discourse.

Gopnik appreciated that the lecture took place in Montreal, the city where he spent his formative years after moving from Philadelphia. It was here that he experienced his first Canadian snowstorm in 1968.

“In the course of a lifetime, we get to live in a lot of places, if we’re very lucky, as I have been … but there’s only one place in life that we live that we can never get over … and Montreal is the place that I can never get over. I walk the streets and I remember,” he said. “But I remember everything, somehow, that happened: when you’re small and young in a place you’re remembering you; as you get older … the you and the place mix together; and I remember even my first snowstorm as if it were yesterday, although it was in fact Nov. 12, 1968.”

Gopnik’s lectured on the transformation of the conception of winter in European culture, then Canadian culture, to the modern understanding of winter that Canadians now hold.  He noted that we encounter a lot of natural metaphors, and that it makes a lot of sense that winter and loss are equated. His lecture then followed the evolution of winter from something awful, bleak, and grey, to something beautiful—almost mystical—and the role that the progression of time has played in the season’s conception. The romance of winter is now possible, as it was for him the morning of the snowstorm: technology and the modern era allow us to appreciate winter from behind one of our five windows.

The lecture was well-received by the audience, and many lined up afterwards for a chance to speak with Mr. Gopnik and have him sign their copies of the book.

“He really engaged my sense of romanticism,” Genvieve Aboud, a teacher at the Champlain College Cégép in Montreal, said. “Then he countered that with the realism, with what we live every year: walking through the slush …  I think it was really neat the way he balanced the two ideas.”

“I wouldn’t have immediately thought of Adam Gopnik for the 50th anniversary lecture,” Bethany Or, another teacher at the Cégép, said. “He writes for the New Yorker, and I know that he lived in Paris … but it was perfect and he obviously put a lot of thought into it.”

The lecture will air on CBC Radio 1 Ideas at 9 p.m. on the week of Nov. 7. Gopnik will speak next in Edmonton on Friday Oct. 21.