The turnout for last week’s Arts Undergraduate Society elections was a relatively healthy 14.4 per cent. What the AUS didn’t have, though, was enough candidates. Five of the 10 elected positions, including the presidency, were acclaimed.

This is an all-too-familiar story in McGill student politics. It’s rare to find a Students’ Society or faculty association executive without at least one acclaimed executive. In the past decade, one in every four SSMU executives have been acclaimed, according to the Tribune’s records. This year, within the four largest faculty associations (AUS, the Science Undergraduate Society, the Engineering Undergraduate Society, and the Management Undergraduate Society), approximately one in three executives were acclaimed.

Management Undergraduate Society President Celine Junke called the problem “huge.”

“Ideally, you want every position to be contested,” said Tais McNeil, the chief electoral officer of Elections McGill.

Acclaimed candidates aren’t always unqualified—they can often be as passionate and committed as those who are elected. But history, at least, shows that acclamation is risky. Last year’s Arts Frosh lost the AUS $30,105 under the management of acclaimed AUS Vice-President Events, Nampande Londe. Faculty associations sit on thousands of student dollars, but there is nothing to stop an unqualified candidate from getting their hands on them.  

“This is the second year I’ve run without an opponent. I was ready for [one],” said Jade Calver, who was acclaimed as next year’s AUS president on Wednesday.

 

The Reasons

Current student executives say that the problem isn’t student apathy, but the nature of the positions.

“It is a very difficult job,” said Dave Marshall, the current AUS president, who was also acclaimed. “It’s a huge time commitment and it’s a lot of time away from your studies. In many cases, it requires you to take a fewer number of courses. Students, particularly international students, will take a look at a role like this and say, ‘If I get involved in a student association, I’ll have to pay another $15,000 to stay an extra semester.'”

Marshall’s year has been particularly stormy. After the AUS’s drastic Frosh losses, the federal and provincial governments seized three years of the organization’s back taxes, the City of Montreal sued the AUS over a misplaced poster, and the university administration withheld the Society’s student fees because of unfiled audits. It is therefore not surprising that students aren’t eager to run for executive positions.

Moreover, some portfolios require serious technical expertise, especially finance and operations and external representation positions.

“[These positions are] very technical, they’re very difficult, and some students are intimidated by them,” McNeill said.

Unsurprisingly, these positions are the most commonly acclaimed.

“A lot of people say that it’s indicative of student apathy, and I don’t think that that’s absolutely correct,” Marshall said. “If you look at the number of people involved at the AUS, if you look at the people who are unpaid and stick around our offices and do great things for our students, that’s not the case. You won’t get any more qualified candidates involved, because the people who really want to be involved are already involved in the AUS in some capacity.”

While apathy isn’t the main reason for the problem, it seems hard to believe that it does not play a role. This year’s paltry 14.4 per cent AUS election turnout was one of the “highest ever,” according to Marshall.

 

The Solutions

There are a number of possible solutions. Marshall said that the university should compensate student executives.

“When I look at my fellow student leaders across McGill, I know that they’re doing amazing things, and it’s sort of a shame that a lot of them won’t get the recognition they deserve,” he said. “There really is an obligation for the university to put their money where their mouth is, when they say that they support student leaders.”

He suggested that they might subsidize the extra semesters that executives often have to stay, as is the case at some other universities in Canada. The student executives of the colleges at the University of Western Ontario, for example, are exempt from tuition during their periods of service.

According to McNeill, some think getting rid of some executive positions and reallocating their responsibilities is a solution. Marshall, however, said that this would overburden the executives who remained.

There is an awareness of the problem in the faculty associations, however, and some signs that change may be coming. Earlier this year, the MUS effected changes in its administrative structure which make most of its executive positions appointed. The students elect a 13-member Board of Directors, including a president, which then appoints six executives.

“We saw the election process as not the most ideal way to select the most qualified candidates,” Junke said. “Appointing is something that we do not regret right now.”

Marshall noted that the acclaimed position that caused the most problems for the AUS last September, VP events, drew three candidates this year. Occasionally, students aren’t as apathetic as they’re made out to be.

Over the last few weeks, a number of Canadian universities have experienced problems with Turnitin, the digital paper-submission system which detects plagiarism by comparing students’ work to that of their peers.

The University of Toronto and Ryerson University both posted university-wide notices regarding the outage, which began on March 9. It appears that students were able to submit their work, but instructors were unable to retrieve results.

“Users trying to access Turnitin.com at this time are not able to access originality reports,” read a public notice on the University of Toronto teacher’s website. “Access has been restored for a few courses but the problem persists.”

Instructors at McGill were also affected by the disruption. Professor Alberto Sanchez-Allred of the anthropology department experienced minor problems last week.

“[I]n the end it wasn’t such a big deal for me,” he said in an email. “I couldn’t access the assignments that students turned in or the reports for a few days, but now everything seems to be back to normal.”

According to iParadigms, the creator of Turnitin, less than one percent of the affected accounts experienced downtime longer than two days, and as of March 22, only 0.4 percent of affected accounts were still without service.

Turnitin operates at 9,500 educational institutions in 126 countries. According to Chris Harrick, vice-president of marketing for iParadigms, the problem has had little impact outside of Canada.

“This outage was confined to the storage nodes that hold data for our Canadian customers,” he said in an email to the Tribune. “It did have a very brief impact on our worldwide user base, but the majority of the impact was only on Canadian customers.”

But to Ryerson’s students, their two-week server disruption felt like an eternity.

In its defence, last year Turnitin was online roughly 99.9 per cent of the time. Nevertheless, Harrick remained apologetic.

“We know how much our instructors and students rely on the service and we’re very sorry about the inconvenience this outage has caused to our customers,” Harrick said. “We take these sorts of disruptions very seriously and are constantly working to improve the reliability of our service.”

The McGill website is being revamped. The university’s website redesign team is gathering feedback in a survey to ensure the new changes are beneficial to the large number of visitors who access the site daily.  

McGill’s team of web editors is redesigning of all the pages that are linked to the homepage and creating a new template.

“We need to make the homepage match with the new design and we need to make it more responsive to people’s needs, basically, and [make it] more usable and modern,” said Susan Murley, director of communication services at McGill’s Office of Public Affairs, and part of the website redesign team. “We need to try to get people what it is that they’re looking for.”

Currently, the team’s focus is on gathering feedback to learn what is being proposed, and what kind of work would be necessary to implement the proposed changes. Murley said the university is looking to implement these changes by the end of the summer.

The McGill website receives a significant amount of traffic on a daily basis, internally from students, faculty, and staff, and externally from alumni, prospective students, and journalists. The site, therefore, cannot afford to be down.

“The biggest challenge with the homepage is that we have so many different types of people that use it,” Murley said. “Each of those groups have different things they’re looking for, so trying to get a homepage that works for all of those groups, that helps them find what they’re looking for, without it being very clustered, is difficult.”

The Liberal Party 2011 election campaign began Sunday night with a rally at Montreal’s performing centre TOHU, where diverse attendees voiced their support for party leader Michael Ignatieff and their local MPs as well as their distrust in Harper’s leadership.

At the rally, a DJ played tracks in the corner, perhaps an attempt to galvanize the notoriously apathetic 18 – 24 year-old demographic. The youth vote was represented by 25 Liberal McGill supporters and a few others. Overall they made up a small percentage of the crowd.

Rushing from a rally in Ottawa on Saturday and leaving for Toronto immediately after stepping offstage, with stops planned in Winnipeg and Vancouver over the next three days, Ignatieff has a busy schedule that reflects the urgency that will define the strenuous 37-day campaign period.

With many voters undecided, every speech and political manoeuvre will count. Ignatieff’s campaign got off to a rough start when rumours of a Liberal-Bloc-NDP coalition were spread by members of the Harper government, but most rally attendees thought he handled the accusations well when he firmly denounced the possibility.

“It was clear yesterday—no coalition,” said Mark Bruneau, a supporter from the Jeanne-Le Ber riding. “It’s the beginning of the campaign so we’re going to move on.”

A wall of Liberal signs obscured the bleachers as an enthusiastic crowd cheered on Ignatieff’s speech, but high spirits were tempered by the knowledge that a Liberal majority government is unlikely.

“It’s not going to happen,” said Zach Paikin, a member of Liberal McGill. “We know it’s the case but if we work really hard, hopefully we’ll get a minority government.”

“A snowball’s chance in hell,” said Steve Tornes, another McGill student.

Ignatieff’s speech, delivered with 70 Liberal MP candidates from around Quebec standing onstage behind him, tried to reach out to the hearts of Canadians with picturesque anecdotes about the citizens who inspired him.

“I think of a young man I met in north Winnipeg about a year ago …  he didn’t know whether he would finish high school,” Ignatieff said at one point.

But Ignatieff also drove home the message that the Liberals were an alternative to the Harper government, which lost the confidence of Canadians when Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s 2011 budget was rejected in the House of Commons on Friday.

“The Quebec people are no longer capable of withstanding the Harper regime,” he said. “With all the respect I have for Gilles Duceppe, he will not get us out of the Harper regime.”

Justin Trudeau, Liberal MP for the Papineau riding, cited Canada’s international reputation and transitioning economy as relevant campaign issues, expressed his beliefs that the Harper government is not trustworthy.

“The message of the campaign is: If you want a government of anyone other than Stephen Harper, you’re going to need to vote Liberal, and that message needs to be heard the strongest in Quebec right now,” Trudeau said.

Though absent from Ignatieff’s speech, education and health care ranked high on some attendees’ priority lists for the campaign. But Kathleen Klein, president of Liberal McGill, pointed to the biggest problem faced by all campaigns.

“The biggest issue is voter turnout,” she said.

Trudeau echoed a similar sentiment.

“Canadians sort of coast on our government,” he said. “During an election, Canadians pay attention. We take a look and realize this is not good enough.”

Whether the Liberal message—that Canadians should choose an alternative to the Harper government—will ring true with enough voters remains to be seen.

Last week, the Omni Hotel on Sherbrooke hosted the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada’s annual conference, this year titled, “Canada and the United States: Conversations and Relations.” The conference brought together high-ranking decision-makers from the U.S. and Canada to engage in conversation with the audience and one another. The conference’s goal was to consider how this close relationship operates at the highest levels of business and government.

The program began with Governor-General David Johnston, a former McGill chancellor who helped found MISC in the 1990s. Returning to the university for the first time since his installation last fall, he announced, “I’m home.” He shared his vision of creating a “smarter, more caring nation,” and emphasized that this can only be done in cooperation with, and not in opposition to, the U.S.

“We have much in common, and much to learn from one another,” he said.”There has been no more beneficial relationship between two nations in history, at least from the Canadian viewpoint.”

The next portion of the program, “Presidents & Prime Ministers,” featured a taped message from former president George H .W. Bush, and a dialogue between former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney—introduced by businessman Charles Bronfman as “one of the most underappreciated and underrated prime ministers of this country’s history” and James A. Baker III, who served in the cabinets of the Reagan and Bush administrations. He appeared from Texas via Skype.

After mostly exchanging compliments and anecdotes related to their work together on NAFTA, the first Gulf War, and the 1991 Canada-U.S. Air Quality Agreement, the guest speakers briefly addressed the nature of the bilateral relationship.

“Through the years the relationship has been extraordinarily strong,” Baker said, adding that the two countries are essentially “joined at the hip.”

Mulroney admitted the partnership between the two countries is not one between equals. “The most important profile any prime minister has or ever will have is our relationship with the United States,” he said. “The president, the Congress, both parties, the interest groups, important members of the media if you don’t have that relationship, nothing happens.”

Throughout the conference, speakers offered various metaphors to characterize the dynamics of the relationship between the countries.

Canadian Senator and former CBC journalist Pamela Wallin compared the relationship to that of a teenage girl who has a crush on a star football player.

“If he walks by and smiles at her, she swoons and says, ‘Oh my God, he’s paying attention to me,’ and is so thankful,” she said. “But if he ignores her, she goes into a fit of depression and tells her girlfriends that she doesn’t really care about him anyway.”

“We live and die by their notice, and it makes us a little vulnerable on some issues,” Wallin added.

Gary Doer, Canadian ambassador to the U.S., disagreed.

“When I go into an office in Washington, I don’t go in as Oliver Twist,” he said in a conversation with David Jacobson, the American ambassador to Canada. “This is not love, trust, and pixie dust when it comes to trading in dollars.”

Quebec Premier Jean Charest and Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin, who spoke about relations between their two governments, agreed in an interview with the Tribune that, at least between Vermont and Quebec, it’s best characterized as a brother-sister relationship.

“It’s very much a relationship of equals—it’s not a question of size,” Charest said. “One can be older or younger, richer or poorer, they’re still brother and sister.”

Most speakers and questioners from the audience seemed to agree that the most pressing issues for discussion were trade and border security. One question to the ambassadors regarding the Omar Khadr case was ignored by both, though Jacobson addressed the general issue of Guantanamo Bay.

Tim Reid, a former U.N. peacekeeper, asked Doer whether Canada ever has foreign interests either opposed or irrelevant to American interests. He objected to Canadian investment in certain African nations with questionable human rights records, like Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

“I think we shouldn’t focus only on [trade],” he said in an interview. “Most Canadians don’t seem to have much of a concept that we have other interests, too.”

Though the conference went smoothly, some attendees were disappointed.

“It hasn’t been factually the most enlightening thing,” said Nicholas Moritsugu, a U2 economics student. “I’d have liked to see some more frank discussion. A lot of the stuff was anecdotal.”

“We didn’t ask people to come to be on the firing line,” added Antonia Maioni, director the Institute for the Study of Canada. “We asked people to come to be in a conversation.”

On March 11, Shaon Basu, like many Japanese students at McGill, panicked as he learned of the tragic events unfolding back home.

“I freaked out, quite honestly,” said Basu, a U2 physiology student. “It was after one of my labs and I came to know about it from a string of text messages from concerned friends.”

Even though Japan is thousands of kilometres away, the recent earthquake and subsequent tsunami have had a significant impact on McGill students and prompted extensive relief efforts.

“I was terrified when I couldn’t contact my parents because all the phone lines were jammed,” Basu said. “Luckily, I was able to get a hold of my cousin on Skype, who told me that my family members were fine. Two of my relatives actually lived in Sendai [a city close to the epicentre] but they’re alive and well. Not their apartment, though.”

The earthquake measured 9.0 on the Richter scale, making it one of the most forceful quakes in modern times.

“I would say that that particular event is generally regarded as the fourth or fifth largest earthquake that we have ever measured,” said Prof. Olivia Jensen, from the McGill earth science program.

However, she pointed out, that the earthquake itself wasn’t the real problem—the epicentre was approximately 130 miles offshore and Japan’s infrastructure was prepared to deal with shaking.

“The real surprise was the tsunami,” she said. “There was no expectation of one on this scale.”

She added that initial estimates of the damages’ costs are comparable to those of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 in the United States.

With such high costs ahead, many McGill students, particularly those with personal connections to Japan, have begun to help.

Monica Östergren, a U3 Faculty of Education student, has been heavily involved with relief efforts at McGill. Östergren, who is also a vice-president of the Japanese Students’ Association (JSA), was raised in Tokyo, where her family still lives.

With the JSA, Östergren has been holding bake sales, fund raising, and distributing donation boxes in Japanese restaurants to collect money for the Japanese Red Cross. She noted that other campus groups have taken active roles as well, and that other solo relief efforts have been undertaken by concerned individuals.

“I think the fact that we are so far away motivated us even more to truly think hard about what we can do from here in Montreal that could help Japan,” Östergren said. “For me personally, being involved in this process of working for this cause has helped me feel part of Japan. Instead of reading the news and watching the footage and becoming depressed, I think we all benefit from having the sense that we are doing something to help.”

For all students wishing to donate, the JSA would be holding bake sales on March 29 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Redpath Library and March 30  from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the McConnell Engineering Building.