McGill Tribune

As many McGill students know, several associations have once again joined together to launch the QPIRG Opt-Out Campaign. Every semester, the campaign aims to inform students about their right to opt-out of the Quebec Public Interest Research Group. We never expected that this year QPIRG would use violence to try and stop us.

QPIRG was founded some 23 years ago as an organization pursuing the interests of students on matters of public concern. In this respect, they have failed atrociously. QPIRG collects $7.50 per year per student of student fees, which it pools to finance the activities of radical fringe groups.

The list is stunning. The Coalition for Justice for Adil Charkaoui seeks the immediate release of all terror suspects currently detained by the Canadian government under security certificates. Students Taking Action in Chiapas stands in solidarity with the Zapatistas of Mexico, a violent rebel movement, and seeks to bring the struggle “back home” to Canada. The Chaotic Insurrection Ensemble actively promotes anarchism, while Tadamon! is an anti-capitalist, anti-corporate organization which lobbied the Canadian government to remove Hezbollah from the terrorist organization list. QPIRG claims that Israel is an apartheid state.

QPIRG also publishes School Schmool, the organizer that once celebrated the creation of the pipe bomb and teaches readers how to vandalize and destroy private property.

The Opt-Out Campaign features a diverse array of organizations. Free the Children McGill, the Italian Student’s Association, and Swiss Club are only a few examples. We want students to know that QPIRG doesn’t have a right to your money: you can take it back, and withdraw your consent from the causes that they support.

QPIRG itself is terrified of students making an informed decision on whether to opt-out. They are so terrified, in fact, that some of their members have actively harassed the Opt-Out Campaign. The removal of flyers and the destruction of posters have antagonized what should be a free and open debate.

These acts of political intimidation culminated on September 23 when QPIRG members discovered that our campaign was tabling in the MacDonald Engineering Building. While at first these individuals engaged in argument, they became more aggressive as tabling continued; this aggression spiraled into the hurling of racial slurs and stereotyping, in addition to the destruction of campaign property.

The crowd of QPIRG members grew, and they began to physically obstruct members of the Opt-Out Campaign from distributing flyers. McGill Security was contacted, and QPIRG was told to maintain a reasonable distance from the Opt-Out Campaign.

While the situation stabilized, it eventually deteriorated when Maddie Ritts (a member of QPIRG’s Board of Directors) stormed up to the Opt-Out table and proceeded to steal and violently rip posters. Security caught several individuals, and a report has been filed with administration.

Campaign members were fortunate to have the presence of McGill Security, who stood firmly for free speech when they told QPIRG that political intimidation was unacceptable in a university atmosphere.

Campaign members did not expect such a violent response to our exercise of free speech and open debate. We thought that we could engage in a sincere disagreement with QPIRG, and have our disagreement aired respectfully.

Clearly, we were terribly wrong. QPIRG is only concerned with its pocketbook, not with the concerns of McGill students.

QPIRG needs to be sent a message: we all have the right to express our thoughts and voice our dissent, and we shouldn’t be bullied for it. Don’t let QPIRG intimidate you, or tell you that they have a right to your money. We urge you to inform yourself further, and if you feel that this group doesn’t deserve your money, don’t give it to them.

The QPIRG Opt-Out Campaign is a coalition of concerned students and associations dedicated to informing students about their right to opt-out and to explaining why we feel they ought to. A complete list of all those involved can be found at qpirgoptout.com.

Nathaniel Elfassy, Marc-Olivier Fortin, Shayna Goldman, Lisa McLennan, Divya Pahwa, Brendan Steven, and Jess Weiser contributed to this article.

McGill Tribune

I recently read that you placed extremely well in various rankings of universities around the world. Congratulations! You must be very proud. I hope you realize, that, as Heather Munroe-Blum herself said, this is in large part due to the students and alumni.

In light of this, my question to you is as follows: As an institution which prides itself on the calibre of its student population, who claims that its graduates are in a league of their own—that they are leaders and innovators in their fields—would you not be proud to see the fruits of your labour right in front of you?

Wouldn’t your eyes swell with tears at the sight of individuals, in whom you have invested so much of your time and energy practicing what you have apparently taught them? Wouldn’t you feel a sense of accomplishment in knowing that students from different faculties, faculties that wouldn’t necessarily have anything to do with each other, are willing to work together for a common goal that does not in any way have a grade or money sign assigned to it? This unifying goal is one that is pure, simple, and good. Aren’t those the values you want to teach?

When your students stood together in front of Leacock before Senate, did you not feel a tugging at your heart strings? How could you not be moved—even if you disagreed with them—by their passion and fervour and dedication?

Life and death do not depend on your decision, but confidence in ourselves and each other does.

This issue of the Architecture Café is greater than brownies and zaatars. It’s about us; it’s about the students—the reason that this university exists in the first place. It’s about us having a voice, and a place to belong to, grow, learn, and share. It’s about sometimes putting the quality of life before the dollars and cents of it all.

We’re not asking you to say yes to the Architecture Café right away, but only to let us try and convince you of what we the students are so convinced ourselves—that the café is integral to the life and history of this esteemed establishment and that we can find a way to make it work. Let us try to devise a sustainable business plan that pleases both you and us. But really, it shouldn’t be you, the university, and us, the students. Shouldn’t it just be an all encompassing us?

We’re asking you to let us put in practice the skills and knowledge you pride yourself in having instilled in us. We understand that you have a contract with Aramark, and in a way, I guess we should feel proud that they truly viewed the Architecture Café as competition. We understand that you’re trying to honour your agreement with them, but wasn’t your first agreement with us, the students?

Katherine Messina is an Architecture Master’s student. Reach her at [email protected].

McGill Tribune

I would like to challenge some of the faulty reasoning expressed in Brendan Steven’s column titled, “Scrap the Quebec Tuition Model” (McGill Tribune, September 20).  In his article, Brendan gauges the value of our entire higher education system through the lens of one university.  He confuses weakness in the government with the inability to equitably fund all tertiary institutions while satisfying the ambitious needs of McGill.  Heather Munroe-Blum would like McGill to rise up in the international rankings. There would be nothing wrong with that if we were a private university. But this action would impoverish our system.  And this is a critical problem, whereby Monroe-Blum may be doing great by McGill’s standards, but her significant lobbying is undermining the advantages of a low tuition rate for the majority of the other students in this province.

Steven states, “There is no solid evidence that the Quebec model improves education. In fact, Quebec lags behind Canada for proportions of young people holding a university degree. Quebec’s graduation rate lies well below the OECD average. Meanwhile, Quebec has had the lowest rate of increase of those holding degrees in the entirety of Canada since 1992.”  He claims that low tuition is not improving our graduation rate, but we must be careful not to look merely at university degree holders, because there are a variety of factors that influence university attendance and completion.  One of the reasons Quebec lags behind in graduation rates is because of the problems in both the primary and secondary levels of the Quebec education system, which contribute to a large dropout rate.

Surprisingly, Steven raises the issue of equalization payments. He states they are despised in the rest of Canada, but that is simply not true.  This issue is recycled across Canada when media outlets would like to sell more product or gather more attention to their product.  They do this by dragging out polarizing issues that perpetuate the “Quebec versus the rest of Canada” hyperbole.  These payments are mathematically calculated and used to pay for healthcare and education—big ticket items that would otherwise burden provincial finances.

Tuition is one way of increasing revenue to universities and I have no doubt the current government will try to increase the tuition rate over the next few years. Clearly, the voice of McGill is being heard in the Charest administration. But all tuition is artificial as most students in the entire country do not pay the “real” cost of a university education.  Tuition, however, like the price for any product, tends to rise until the market will bear no more—when the average investment does not equate to advantage or benefit. In fact this may already be the case for many students in Ontario, the province with some of the highest tuition fees in the country.  Steven advocates scrapping the current tuition model because it would be advantageous for McGill, and I have no doubt that it would. But is it worth destroying our current provincial system so that we can re-create Harvard in the heart of Montreal?

We have to look at other ways of generating revenue. Tuition is one method, but it is not the only way.

The best way to discuss this issue would be in a forum. I challenge the author to present his case at the PGSS/SSMU/AGSEM panel discussion on university financing this upcoming October.

Ryan Hughes is Vice-President External of the Post-Graduate Students’ Society of McGill University, and can be reached at [email protected].

McGill Tribune

Publicly funded social services and organizations exist because we value the role they play in keeping our communities—whether nationally, locally, or campus-based—healthy, supportive, and inclusive. Canadians fund affordable housing, women’s shelters, employment programs and public advocacy groups because we believe that they are a social good. The fact that not everyone uses those services does not make them any less valuable to our community as a whole. This logic also holds true when applied to our university community. As we do in society, we should strive for a university experience that includes a diverse range of services, opinions, experiences, and analyses. This diversity is not only an ideal, but also an expectation.

The Quebec Public Interest Research Group (QPIRG) is one part of creating that diverse, critical university space. It is a publicly funded organization that aims to connect the ivory tower to social and environmental struggles in our communities. This materializes both through events and programming (such as Culture Shock, Social Justice Days, workshops, speakers, and films), as well as through resources and initiatives made available through QPIRG (an alternative library and the Community University Research Exchange project). Crucially, QPIRG also funds working groups who do research, education, and action on a diverse range of social and environmental problems (such as Campus Crops, the Filipino Solidarity Committee, Greening McGill, and many others). It fills a void by supporting underrepresented and important issues on campus that affect many students and community members. By opting in to QPIRG, McGill students make typically scarce funding and resources available to our fellow students and community organizers.

In this context, the strategies that have been used in the last week by the students running the QPIRG Opt-Out Campaign are ones that have been deliberately misleading, inaccurate, and intended to starve access to resources that would allow for a more diverse, inclusive, and critical space on campus. The opt-out group, by framing their campaign in terms of saving money, silences the fact that the goal of the campaign is, in fact, to incapacitate QPIRG and its work. The campaign does not explain to students what QPIRG does or how it functions, and, as a result, discourages students from making their own informed decisions. When the opt-out campaign does address QPIRG’s work, they do little other than insinuate that it funds “fringe” groups from the “radical left,” which apparently includes causes such as locally grown food, the increasing corporatization of campus, a car-free campus, and the struggles of First Nations, immigrant, and LGBTQ communities. Furthermore, it’s worth noting that that many QPIRG working groups have as many active student members as many SSMU clubs, meaning there is no quantifiable argument to be made regarding the “fringe” nature of these groups. Similarly, like SSMU clubs, working groups exist to represent a portion of the student population and their concerns, and, like many campus clubs, QPIRG does have a political mandate—one of social and environmental justice and anti-oppressive work.

The opt-out campaign’s tactics serve only to stifle political expression and organization on campus. As it would be with any other student service, when QPIRG is constantly under attack, it hurts the well-being of students, the diversity on our campus, and the aspirations of our university and our wider community. Fortunately, when we choose to continue to support the work of QPIRG and all other student services, it makes it possible for those same values to flourish.

Kira Page, Sarah Woolf, and Sebastian Ronderos-Morgan contributed to this article.

McGill Tribune

Brendan Steven claimed in his September 21 column that increasing Quebec tuition wouldn’t force low-income students out of university. While I’m not sure I buy that (unsupported) argument, it’s also students from middle-income families who could be shut out by tuition increases. A 2005 Statistics Canada report summary concluded that “Under a deregulated postsecondary education system, all forms of higher education will be available only for those whose families that can afford the costs themselves or for those who qualify for student financial assistance. Many of those in the middle may find themselves in a situation where they can do neither.”

While many lower income students may still attend university, they will likely take on more student debt. Another StatsCan report examining the effects of tuition increases between 1995-2005 concluded that “In 2005, Canada not only had more individuals graduating with student loans, but also an increasing proportion graduating with larger debt loads than in the past.” The proportion of students with debt upon graduation of over $25,000 rose from 17 per cent to 27 per cent. Twenty per cent of students expected to take at least 10 years to repay their loans.

Student debt is a conservatising force; in the face of tens of thousands of dollars of debt, a newly-graduated lawyer is more likely to go into corporate law than work at legal aid. While Steven may not find this objectionable, I’d like to be able to afford to work at a job I find meaningful. For our generation, student debt is additionally dangerous. For middle and low-income families, our generation is likely to feel the pinch of many competing demands on our finances: at 30 we may still be repaying student loans as well as taking on a mortgage, providing for a child or two, paying increasing taxes to keep our (very important) health care system afloat under the demands of the aging baby boomers, and possibly providing financial support to parents. As more parents help their children with the cost of attending university, their own financial reserves to live on in their retirement diminish. If these trends continue, how likely is it that we will be able to help our own children afford university while ensuring our own financial security to the end of our lives? Furthermore, how will the increase affect children of single-parent or single-earner families?

On a side note, I found it hypocritical that, despite Steven’s support for tuition increases, he is promoting opting out of QPIRG’s optional fee with a “get money back on your tuition” angle (additionally ridiculous given that QPIRG’s fee is in no way part of tuition). Please have the decency to stick to your principles regarding your objections to some of QPIRG’s activities instead of promoting students getting back $3.75 on one hand while advocating for tuition increases of thousands of dollars on the other.

Maggie Knight is a U3 Environment & Economics student.

McGill Tribune

Eleven months ago, a 15-year-old girl was gang-raped for two and a half hours outside her high school dance in California. More than 20 people were involved in the incident. At least four of these men ravaged the girl, while several others took out their phones not to call the cops, but to snap some photos.  The rest stood back and cheered them on.

On September 10, a freakishly similar incident took place east of Vancouver. A 16-year-old girl was drugged and gang-raped by partygoers during a weekend rave. This time, one of the cowardly onlookers decided to take his paparazzi instinct a step further and posted the pictures on his Facebook page. By the time his Facebook account was deleted by authorities, the pictures had already reappeared in a dozen other black holes throughout the Internet, and they are still multiplying.  

Even the RCMP admitted defeat. As such, they have now resorted to highly ambitious pleas, urging the online community to stop reposting the pictures and for witnesses to step forward and speak up.

In California and in British Columbia, the ages of majority are 18 and 19, respectively. In the California incident, four arrests were made, and in Vancouver, two. In California, all of the boys—three of them were under 18 years of age, one a 15-year old—were charged with at least one count of sexual assault, and all of them were charged as adults. In Vancouver, one 16-year old may face child pornography charges, while police are “recommending” charges of sexual assault for the other 18-year-old. Both of them have been released until prosecutors “consider” charges.

I am sure — or at least I sincerely hope — that all of the young men deeply regret their heinous crimes. The difference, however, is that the Americans are doing their contemplation behind steel bars and not on plush sofas. The young Canadians deserve jail time, too.

However, to remain faithful to the integrity of this column, I will give the benefit of doubt to the perpetrators and try to understand them as they would hope to be understood. As unpleasant as this will be, let me exchange minds with an adolescent rapist and a voyeur.  

One possibility, as suggested by Louisa Russell of the Canadian Association for Sexual Assault Centres, is that there is “a lot of misunderstanding among young boys on consent.” True, but an 18-year-old male is not a young boy. The actions of these men are certainly not those of young boys either.

Raping someone is a deliberate choice. So is getting drunk at a party, and so is circulating the graphic evidence so that the girl and her family are forced to relive the traumatic nightmare.

Despite lacking scientific evidence, we continue to blindly accept age limits not as useful yardsticks but as legal absolutes. We continue to ignore the painfully obvious fact that people of the same age can behave in very different ways.

There is no evidence or study to show that young people undergo a programmed metamorphosis at precisely midnight on their 18th or 19th or 21st birthdays. And yet, if the federal elections were next week, a young girl who is 17 years and 350 days old will not be allowed to vote even if she was the campaign manager for a Liberal candidate, because she’s not yet 18.

Every recent post-election analysis in Canada has depicted puzzled political scientists trying to understand why voter turnout continues to plummet in general and amongst 18 to 24-year-olds in particular. Here’s an idea: maybe the apathy we observe in young voters is the result of a long and systematic rejection of their voices. Maybe we screwed up the most critical habit-forming years of their lives by neglecting to engage them when it mattered. Now, these 18-year-olds have aged into perfectly conditioned 35-year-olds who seem to robotically not care.

It is time to end our black-and-white attitudes about age and start judging individuals on a case-by-case basis. More importantly, it is time to educate young people better, not only about safe sex and the meaning of “no,” but also on the ethics of dealing with each other with dignity and respect.