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.”

Holly Stewart

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.

Alice Walker

Alice Walker

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.

Columbia University’s Jon Elster, a renowned scholar in rational choice theory, delivered the René Cassin Lecture in the Faculty of Law on Thursday entitled “Justice, Truth, and Peace.” In a discussion attended mainly by Law professors and students, Elster argued that most of the time, justice, truth, and peace don’t go together.

Elster is the latest in a line of respected scholars to give the lecture. Named after the 1968 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, the lecture series hopes to attract renowned speakers to discuss a growing need for human rights education and engagement beyond the university.

As Dean of Law Daniel Jutras noted, Elster’s “research includes a range of political philosophy, including the rational choice theory, the theory of distributive justice, and history of social thought.”

In his lecture, Elster pointed out that two good things might not always work well together. For example, profits and community benefits are both good things individually, but they can clash in certain situations.

Even in profit-sharing schemes, such a system is inefficient. “When transferring wealth from a rich person to a poor person, some wealth is often destroyed or not created,” Elster said.

Elster argued that the same principles can be applied to truth, justice, and peace, even if this seems somewhat counterintuitive. Conflict resolution, he says. comes in three steps. First, there must be justice in the forms of punishment for the wrongdoers and reparation for victims. Second, truth commissions are set up to uncover and document the wrongdoings that took place. Finally, the establishment of a durable peace is of overwhelming importance.

In his lecture, Elster discussed the link between justice and truth. For example, the justice system may serve the goal of truth “when truth is produced as a byproduct of the ordinary workings of the justice system,” he said.  

“The Nuremberg trials served this function as the public trial exposed the wrongdoing of the wrongdoers,” he added.

Truth may also serve the goal of justice, such as when publication of the names of wrongdoers exposes them to public contempt. Additionally, truth may also provide justice to victims by laying down the factual groundwork for reparations.

“There is also a link between truth and peace,” Elster said. “Truth commissions, for example, can help preserve the peace.

“Truth commissions prevent resurgence of armed conflict, by making it impossible to deny the massive wrongdoings that took place,” Elster said.

The framework breaks down however, when the three things are brought together, like in the case of public apologies. Official apologies occur when regimes acknowledge their past wrongdoings. Often, these apologies do not go hand in hand with compensation.

The dangers of apologies come at a time when politicians around the world have expressed regret and remorse for what their predecessors did at various times in the past.

Elster argued that often these public apologies become meaningless.  

“Sometimes they have used moral impersonal language, as when deploring these past actions or acknowledging that they were wrong,” he said. “The moral status of these statements is highly ambiguous. Often, they are nothing short of meaningless. To apologize for what dead individuals did to other dead individuals is absurd on metaphysical grounds.”

Some, though, have questioned his controversial opinion.

“I found the concept that public apologies have no real meaning is interesting if debatable,” said Siddharth Mishra, U1 economics. “On a rational standpoint, his arguments make sense in terms of pure utility. But there is a lot of criticism of that particular framework is too narrow, and too encapsulate political actions.”

Regardless, the scholarly lecture presented and shared new ideas.

“It was interesting; it brought a whole new perspective,” Mishra said. “And that is what it is all about, sharing ideas.”