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Behind the Bench, Sports

Maternity in sports must be brought into modernity

by Zoé Mineret on

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The past decade has seen remarkable progress in protections for pregnant athletes. In 2020, FIFA and the Women’s National Basketball League (WNBA) introduced mandatory paid maternity leave. The Premier Hockey Federation (PHF) also has paid maternity leave and maintains that no player can be released from their team due to pregnancy. 

These protections, however, are not enough. Many players who get pregnant see their lives and careers permanently altered by mistreatment from both teams and sponsors alike. 

Sara Björk Gunnarsdóttir, a former midfielder on the Olympique Lyonnais’s women’s team (Lyon), wrote a piece for The Players’ Tribune outlining the mistreatment she faced from the French club throughout her pregnancy. The club purposely withheld her salary and did not provide her with any form of support. 

Gunnarsdóttir sued Lyon through the Fédération Internationale des Associations des Footballeurs Professionnels . Despite winning the lawsuit and having the club pay her lost salary in full, the move illustrated that even when the necessary rules and regulations are in place, players are still forced to fight for financial security. 

Gunnarsdótir’s mistreatment is, unfortunately, not an isolated incident. Athletes who become pregnant are regularly cast aside and treated like pariahs by their clubs and sponsors, who act as though pregnancy marks the end of an athlete’s career. 

Track athletes Allyson Felix and Alysia Montaño both wrote essays for The New York Times exploring the mistreatment they dealt with at the hands of one of their sponsors, Nike, when the company learned of their respective pregnancies. For Felix, they proposed a 70 per cent pay cut when renegotiating her contract, while Nike elected to put Montaño’s contract on hold entirely. 

With salaries for women athletes often being unsustainable, sponsorships are vital to their ability to compete at the professional level. The treatment Felix and Montaño endured at the hands of Nike reflects the sports world’s hypocrisy towards pregnant women. Pregnant athletes are celebrated in public as superheroes by clubs and sponsors but treated as disposable behind the scenes. 

In 2021, Nike released an advertisement celebrating the toughest athletes of all: Mothers. The ad depicted various pregnant people doing physical activity and branding them as the epitome of athleticism. The company gets to directly profit off the promotion of pregnant athletes while simultaneously offering dehumanizing pay cuts to the pregnant athletes they sponsor. 

The insincerity of clubs and sponsors directly impairs the physical and mental health of athletes who are expecting. Often, a sponsorship renewal is dangled in front of pregnant athletes on the condition that they get back to their pre-pregnancy fitness level as soon as possible.

The precarity brought about by the stigmatization of pregnancy within sports is not only career-threatening—it can be life-threatening as well. Kara Goucher, an American long-distance runner and Olympic silver-medallist, exposed herself to severe health risks due to over-exercising after her high-risk pregnancy because Nike told her they could renew her contract if they saw satisfactory results from her during races. 

As seen in the case of Gunnarsdótir, even when regulations exist to protect athletes, clubs will still try to take advantage of them. Pregnant athletes cannot risk exposing themselves to long-term physical or mental health problems for the sake of abusive clubs and sponsors. Not only does this affect the trajectory and health of their pregnancy, but it can also create long-lasting problems for their future athletic careers. 

If clubs and sponsors want to see athletes in their greatest physical shape after pregnancy, they need to start taking care of them during those nine months. Rather than piling on undue emotional stress, athletes should be provided with a variety of resources and support by their clubs and sponsors, who have a duty of care toward them. Athletes are human beings who deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, not simply toys that can be thrown away if they are not deemed bankable.

Ask a Scientist, Private, Science & Technology

Flying cars must make way for the real future of transportation

by Ella Paulin on

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Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley–style futurists would like you to believe that the future of transportation holds flying cars, conveyor-belt tunnels for high-speed vehicles, and completely self-driving cars. All of these innovations are designed to free drivers from driving and the annoyance of getting stuck in traffic.

While those innovations may sound appealing, McGill researchers argued a few months ago in a paper published in Futures that this approach fundamentally distorts the problem of congestion and traffic safety. Instead of imagining a future with more advanced cars, they argue that we need to imagine a future with no cars at all, or at least one where reliance on cars is dramatically reduced.


Paris Marx, the paper’s first author, earned his master’s in urban geography from McGill and has gone on to host the popular podcast Tech Won’t Save Us. Their first book, Road to Nowhere, came out in July 2022 and expands on ideas of a car-free future. Kevin Manaugh, professor of geography at McGill, advised Marx and co-authored the Futures article. 

During an interview with The McGill Tribune, Manaugh explained how the ‘flying cars’ approach, which treats urban infrastructure improvement as a purely technological issue, fails to consider the full scope and complexities of modern cities. 

“We’ve defined transport as a technical problem. And then these technical solutions seemed like the only way to solve them,” Manaugh said. 

The technical solutions that Silicon Valley CEOs come up with may be exciting, especially in the case of flying cars or Elon Musk’s Boring Company, which promises to drill below-ground tunnels that could shoot cars forward at speeds of up to 240 kilometres per hour. 

“I think people are inspired or intrigued by these kinds of futuristic types of things, and I think we, as a culture or society, are impressed by these flashy new things,” Manaugh said. 

But getting caught up in an extravagant idea can lead entrepreneurs to solve problems in ways that don’t address underlying causes like faulty urban planning, inequitable zoning laws, and an over-reliance on cars instead of more ecological modes of transportation such as walking or biking. 

“You’re not taking into account how this thing scales, you’re not taking into account the number of people who can be served by this, and you’re not really reducing congestion because you’re just making another thing that people can use—but it doesn’t deal with the space issue at all,” Manaugh explained. 

In order to enact real change, the authors argue, society has to fundamentally reevaluate the role of cars in cities. 

“When you’re walking around, or even in your car for that matter—if you’re experiencing the city, imagine just how many decisions have been made to prioritize this mode of transport,” Manaugh said. “Our campus is an exception, but as soon as you cross over into Sherbrooke, you’ve got multiple lanes of traffic, there’s all this space for cars, there’s parking garages. And that’s space that can be doing something much more important or productive.”

Cars are so ubiquitous that it’s difficult to imagine a world without them. But as history shows, it’s more than possible to build cities around different modes of transportation. 

“For literally thousands and thousands of years, humans built really beautiful civilizations and cities where the only way of getting around was by human or animal power,” Manaugh said. 

One way to work towards a world where the car’s role is reduced in cities is to imagine transportation as more than a technical pursuit. 

“I think there’s other ways to think about it—as a social issue, or as an equity issue,” Manaugh said. “If you define the problem as not everyone can access what they need, you might not start thinking about how we need new vehicles. You might start thinking about it as we need to redesign how we allow land uses to be put next to each other, or we might realize it’s actually a housing affordability question more so than a fancy new vehicle question.”

Re-envisioning transportation as a social, health, or justice issue allows researchers, entrepreneurs, and governments to prioritize genuinely innovative approaches, instead of just updating our existing cars with each new Silicon Valley fad. 

Ask a Scientist, Private, Science & Technology

Copy–pasted nucleotides found to cause neurodegenerative disease

by Ali Baghirov on

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Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and ataxia are caused—as their categorization would suggest—by the degradation of nervous system cells. One to three individuals per 100,000 are affected by late-onset cerebellar ataxias (LOCA), a disease characterized by impaired muscle control that worsens over time. While most types of ataxia set in during childhood, LOCA is exhibited by patients older than 30. Other, more common types of ataxia are well-studied, but the causes of LOCA were unclear until Dr. Bernard Brais and his team made a breakthrough.

Brais, a researcher at the Montreal Neurological Institute (The Neuro) and McGill professor of genetics, identified a genetic mechanism highly correlated with the onset of LOCA in a recent article published in The New England Journal of Medicine. The researchers found that the accumulation of long strings of repeating GAA segments—a specific sequence of three DNA nucleotides—causes underexpression of vital proteins responsible for nerve impulses and impairs the expression of a vital gene called fibroblast growth factor (FGF14). Nucleotides, which are the building blocks of genetic information, form a code that tells the cell how to produce proteins.

Brais explained that LOCA is characterized by deteriorated movement coordination: Patients experience difficulty walking and speaking, are easily exhausted by physical exercise, and manifest a high intolerance to alcohol. 

At the cellular level, LOCA is caused by a reduced number of ion channels in nerve cells called Purkinje neurons in the cerebellum—the bulbous region on top of the brainstem—that are responsible for movement control. Ion channels are proteins embedded in the membranes of neurons that allow certain ions, which are charged atoms, to pass through. These channels regulate the number of ions travelling in and out of cells and establish a voltage difference across the membrane, which is crucial for sending signals down the neuron. Without these signals, the nervous system couldn’t perform important functions like muscle contractions, reflex responses, and sensory processing.

The FGF14 gene carries instructions for how cells should make proteins to help organize ion channels in DNA sequences. Brais’ investigation revealed that LOCA is caused by a mutation that creates more GAA repeats in the FGF14 gene: A kind of copying and pasting is happening, where three nucleotides reappear hundreds of times in the middle of a sequence. Such a mutation prevents cellular machinery from ‘reading’ the gene properly and ultimately producing the right number of ion channels. According to Brais, GAA repeats are responsible for 61 per cent of LOCA cases in French-Canadian patients.

“We think [that] from the DNA on FGF14, there is no [protein] produced. It creates a region that prevents this copy of the gene from being expressed,” Brais said in an interview with The McGill Tribune. “If [the repeated region] is large enough, it will decrease the expression of one copy to the extent that, with time, those cells will find [it] more difficult to organize their channels that are so important for their electrophysiological activity.”

This discovery also explains why patients with fewer GAA repeats in the FGF14 gene have mild or no symptoms of ataxia, as the disease’s severity depends on the GAA region’s size. Brais explained that unaffected people have eight to 35 GAA copies—as numbers approach 250, there is an increased risk of developing LOCA, and 300 repeats are sufficient to cause ataxia.

Finally understanding LOCA’s cause brings researchers closer to developing a cure. In fact, a drug developed to target GAA repeats in Friedreich’s ataxia is a promising treatment for LOCA. 

“There’s a lot known about Friedreich’s because it was cloned many years ago, […] that’s why we know so much about the GAA repeats,” Brais explained. “[The] GAA repeat in [another] gene has been studied extensively and it does the same thing as in FGF14.” 

Is there a way to remove GAA repeats from FGF14 once and for all? Yes and no. There is a powerful technology called CRISPR which, in theory, can delete any sequence in the genome. Removing over 300 repeats in LOCA patients, however, is not a straightforward task. 

“I don’t think we’re close to a therapeutic trial, at least with those long repeats for sure,” Brais said. “Delivering [CRISPR agents] to the brain is still a major challenge. But yes, at least in theory, you can […] remove that expansion.”

Out on the Town, Student Life

There’s no coffee at this café

by Sophia Micomonaco on

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Most incoming McGill students know about the rites of passage that they’ll experience, like living alone for the first time or a late night at McLennan cramming for an exam. What these students don’t know is that, at this university, there is another experience considered equally formative: Their first trip to Café Campus.  

The 56-year-old club, known to most as ‘Café,’ is one of the most popular dance venues for McGill students. As a stop on Frosh bar crawls, students are introduced to Café Campus before they meet their professors—and the visits only go up from there. Its proximity to campus and themed music nights, like ‘Retro Tuesdays,’ have proven to be big draws for McGillians. Café isn’t just a freshman spot, either—it also hosts a number of McGill-affiliated events, like the Management Undergraduate Society’s Winter Carnival or the Engineering Undergraduate Society’s E-Week.  

Sofia Gobin, U0 Arts, was one of many McGill students who visited the club during Frosh week. Her introduction to the club as a McGill venue has kept her coming back so many times that she’s lost count.

“I’ve been to Café countless times,” Gobin said. When pressed on why, she responded: “Just because it has the reputation of being a student club and a lot of first-years, in particular, go there on nights out […] [it] was definitely a bit different because we were just playing games in the main area, but I think the fact that it was introduced so early on made it seem like it was a ‘McGill club.’”  

So the club is considered a quintessential part of the McGill experience. Andrea Goldstein, U0 Arts, thinks the music nights and its prime location are the main reasons. 

“It’s so close to all of us, which makes it such an easy walk,” she explained. “I [also] think Café is so popular among students because everyone is looking to go where their friends are going, so it gets really busy on certain nights, like [2000s] nights on Thursday.”  

Since so many McGill students visit the club, club-goers will often be among friends, creating a unique sense of community. Harry Brar, U0 Management, remembers that other McGill students helped him out during his first visit to the club. 

“During my first time at Café, I lost my phone there,” Brar said. “But everyone helped me find it, which was awesome.” 

The McGill community gathers at Café in the same way as they gather in McLennan during exam season, making the club a hotspot for students.  

Although many students seem to agree that Café is not a main component of McGill life, its wide variety of drink options, proximity to campus, and multiple dance floors make it a must-visit.

“It’s not essential to a student’s life at McGill in general, but you need to go at least once for the experience,” Goldstein said. “I’m not sure how many times I’ve been, maybe four-ish?”

Gobin agrees, saying that McGillians “must go at least a couple of times. At least to give it a try.” 

It seems that what makes Café so quintessential to McGill’s student life is its consistency. 

“I don’t think that it’s a vital component of McGill student life, but with that said, Café is always a good time,” Brar said. 

According to Gobin, along with many other students, there is no doubt that the club is a sort of McGill trademark. 

“It’s just kind of iconic, it’s exactly what you expect,” she said. “It’s never going to be horrible; it’s never going to be especially incredible or amazing […] it’s reliable.”  

McGill, News

McGill announces creation of postvention framework during Quebec Suicide Prevention Week

by Madison Edward-Wright on

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Content warning: Mention of suicide

On Feb. 7, McGill will hold its first community consultation regarding a suicide postvention plan that has been in the works since a need was first identified in 2019. The postvention plan is one third of a larger project designed to address suicide on campus. McGill is updating the community on the status of the framework during Suicide Prevention Week in Quebec—the week of Feb. 5 to 11. The Association québécoise de prévention du suicide first launched the awareness week 33 years ago and has held it every year since. 

The postvention component, which details the procedures McGill will follow after the death of a student by suicide, will eventually be accompanied by prevention and intervention frameworks. According to Melissa Lutchman, McGill’s crisis intervention and suicide prevention specialist, the postvention plan was developed first because it was identified as the largest gap in suicide-related services at the university. 

“It’s also the largest gap for many universities across Canada,” Lutchman said in an interview with The McGill Tribune. “With student consultations, and faculty, and staff, [we learned] what the needs were around postvention, [like] knowing how to talk about suicide, knowing what to do when a student returns from a suicide attempt. What do you say? What do you not say when a student dies by suicide? What does McGill do?”

Currently, McGill is not equipped to help students experiencing a mental health crisis. McGill recommends that students go to a hospital or call Suicide Action Montreal in case of emergencies. For students not in a crisis but still experiencing difficulty, ODoS provides case managers who are trained to guide students and facilitate access to care, whether that is at the Wellness Hub or an external clinic. 

The postvention framework will not be immediately accessible to the student population, says Maya Willard-Stepan, the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) mental health commissioner. She told the Tribune that the plan’s delayed public release is because the Students’ Suicide Prevention Framework Committee will be holding community consultations to ensure the document can properly serve students. 

“The other really important part [is] making it readable [and] ultimately smooth on the other side of things, [and] transparency around these protocols is going to be very important,” Willard-Stepan said. “We want to produce something that is safe to put out and accurate and true and that the community can take comfortably”

Lutchman was recently hired by McGill to work full-time in order to complete the three-pronged framework in a timely manner—she was initially hired on contract. Before coming to McGill, Lutchman spent 18 years working at Suicide Action Montreal and Talk Suicide Canada, formerly known as Crisis Services Canada. Her expertise in the field and deep knowledge of crisis care have allowed her to ensure the larger framework project focuses on suicide rather than general mental health care.

“There is a lot to say about not confounding mental health with suicide,” Lutchman explained. “Although there [are] a lot of people with mental health diagnoses who die by suicide, there are a lot who don’t. When you confound the two, you contribute to stigma and labelling.”

Stigma surrounding suicide is something first-year nursing student Madeline Dumouchel has come across in her time both in John Abbott College’s nursing program and at McGill. Dumouchel believes that destigmatizing suicide is crucial and something McGill should continue working toward.


“Having [an] open discussion can save [the] lives of others who are afraid to speak up and feel lost or alone,” Dumouchel wrote in a statement to the Tribune. “The university should be very involved in times of crisis, as many students rely on their school for support and access to resources [because] crises can impact students’ academic performance, their life at school and at home [….] Some individuals […] may feel like school is their safe place and comfort zone.”

Ask a Scientist, Private, Science & Technology

Should AI chatbots display emotions?

by Ann Derham on

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If you’ve visited an online retail store, you’ve likely encountered a chatbot before. It’s the small message that pops up in your screen’s bottom corner, saying something along the lines of, “Hi there! Thanks for visiting our site. Can we help you look for something?” 

Elizabeth Han, a Desautels Information Systems professor, investigates these AI chatbots and their use in the modern world. She recently published an article in //Information Systems Research// looking into whether it is beneficial for AI chatbots working in customer service to express, or display, positive emotions.

Existing research suggests that when human customer service representatives express positive emotions, customers feel like the quality of service is higher. Psychologists theorize this to be a result of “emotional contagion”—when a person sees someone else feeling an emotion and they begin to feel it as well. 

The question Han and her team set out to answer is if this effect translates to exchanges with chatbots. They hypothesized that while emotional contagion may still have an effect, it could be negated by customers’ feelings of discomfort toward a machine expressing human emotions. 

To answer this question, Han and her colleagues asked participants to complete online tasks using virtual chatbots, like requesting an exchange for a textbook they had previously ordered. Some participants interacted with chatbots that were programmed to express positive emotions, while others interacted with ones that were more robotic.

The emotion-expressing chatbots used lines like “I can help you with that, and I am excited to do so!” while the straightforward chatbots kept it to a simple “I can help you with that.”

After participants completed these interactions, they rated the quality of the customer service experience. Han and her colleagues found that customers who interacted with positive-emotion chatbots did not experience the increase in perceived service quality that you would have expected had they been interacting with human agents. 


This new information presents businesses with a tricky question: Save money by replacing customer service employees with chatbots, or provide a better customer experience by continuing to use human agents? 

In an interview with The McGill Tribune, Han explained how the switch to chatbots increases company efficiency. 

“Essentially, these service employees are doing emotional labour by interacting with perhaps annoying customers, but chatbots are not really affected by that,” Han said. “The chatbot doesn’t feel anything, and they can just make whatever appropriate response.”

Given how much more efficient chatbots are, some companies may be tempted to simply not tell customers that they are interacting with a chatbot instead of a human.

“There is research that has been done that has looked into the effects of disclosing the chatbot’s identity, and it actually reduces those business outcomes. There is a tradeoff between better business outcomes versus keeping the line of ethical and legal codes,” Han explained.

This then becomes an ethical and legal question: Do customers have a right to know when they are speaking to a computer? And would companies honour this right if it meant a loss in profits?

“I think there are many regulations coming up regarding disclosure so eventually companies will move more and more towards disclosing the identities of those chatbots,” Han said. 

The field of AI is rapidly developing, and thinking about how these AI chatbots have been created and will continue to evolve raises many difficult questions. It might even make you wonder the next time you’re browsing an online store and get the pop-up notification to chat: Are you talking to a human or a machine?

McGill, News

Reports of alleged predatory behaviour at Redpath raise security concerns

by Oscar Macquet on

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Content Warning: Description of sexual harassment

Since late December, multiple posts have circulated on social media reporting that a man has been preying on women at McGill’s McLennan-Redpath Complex. Posts on r/McGill, a student-run Reddit subpage for the university, have denounced the man for soliciting multiple women students in Redpath. Various sources confirmed being approached by a man with a similar description in Redpath at different dates. 

Teddy Laughton, U2 Nursing, was having lunch in the Redpath cafeteria when she was approached by a man in his late 20s who was “standing around in the cafeteria.” According to her, the man did not appear to be a McGill student.

“After making it clear that I didn’t want him to keep talking to me, a few minutes later I saw that he was talking to another group of girls, shaking their hands and I could tell that they were all uncomfortable,” Laughton told The McGill Tribune. 

Laughton notified the employees of Redpath Café and was assured that staff would “keep an eye on him and call security if necessary.” Yet, she recalls seeing the man in the cafeteria some 20 minutes later, and believes that he should have been removed from the premises.

Anne-Émilie Demaison, U1 Arts, also had an encounter with the man in early January, this time on the second floor of Redpath.  

“I felt an insistent gaze, and whenever I would look up from my computer he would be staring at me,” Demaison said in an interview with the Tribune. “He was sitting one table across from me and had one hand constantly on his [crotch]. There were few people on the floor and I began to panic and called as many of my friends as I could for them to come and help me. I left to go to the bathroom, and when I came back to my seat I saw that he had moved to my table. I quickly gathered all my stuff and got out of there.” 

Demaison says that her first reflex was to seek assistance from her friends instead of searching for security guards who roam the floors of the Redpath and McLennan but are otherwise difficult to locate.

Demaison feels that the security presence in the library is lacking considering the entire complex has nine floors. 

“It was late and there weren’t many people on the floor, so I didn’t have many options to turn to,” Demaison said. “Maybe security at the entrance of the libraries, or even signs to indicate how to contact security services in the case of an emergency could help students feel safer.”

An increased security presence would not necessarily guarantee the safety of all students. Many studies show that increased surveillance, even by campus security guards or police officers, lead to a disproportionate number of negative encounters for racialized students. 

The Tribune reached out to librarians at the McLennan-Redpath Complex to inquire about the university’s student safety measures. The staff present at the time declined to comment, and referred the Tribune to the university’s communications team instead. 

Fréderique Mazerolle, a McGill media relations officer, explained that the Campus Public Safety Department strives to promote a safe environment for students, faculty, and staff to work in. 

“Our agents patrol the campus, manage access, transport students and staff with disabilities as well as respond to incidents and emergencies on a 24-hour basis,” Mazerolle wrote in an email to the Tribune. “Ensuring the safety of the McGill community is our ultimate and continuous goal.”

The Tribune was unable to get a statement from the library’s security guards, whose contracts are outsourced to Garda Security Group and cannot comment on security protocols. The Campus Public Safety Department also declined to comment. 

If you are concerned for your safety on campus, McGill’s security services can be reached at 514-398-3000. The Campus Public Safety department’s Night Route Maps also outline recommended routes for navigating the campus in the dark and locate emergency phones for contacting additional security.

McGill, Montreal, News

MISC panel tackles anti-Black racism in academia and beyond

by Madison McLauchlan on

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Content Warning: Mention of racist violence

The McGill Institute for the Study of Canada (MISC) brought three McGill academics together for the “Anti-Black Racism in Canada and Beyond” panel at Centre Mont-Royal on the evening of Feb. 2. The event delved into entrenched systems of power and oppression that limit Black participation in academia and in everyday life across the country. 

Hosted by Holly Cabrera, CBC journalist, BA ‘19, MIst ‘22, and former editor at The McGill Tribune, the panel featured David Austin, a course lecturer at MISC and professor at John Abbott College; Terri E. Givens, professor of political science at McGill and the Provost’s Academic Lead and Advisor on McGill’s Action Plan to Address Anti-Black Racism; and Tari Ajadi, an assistant professor of Black politics at McGill. 

The sold-out hybrid event began a few minutes after 5 p.m. with an introduction and land acknowledgment by MISC director and professor of political science Daniel Béland. 

Cabrera opened the panel by addressing recent examples of police brutality: The murders of Nicous D’Andre Spring, a 21-year-old Montreal man who was killed by correctional officers while illegally detained at Bordeaux Prison in Montreal, and Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old man who was killed by five Black police officers in Memphis, Tennessee. 

“You’ll recall that many have referred to 2020 as a moment of racial reckoning—and since police murdered George Floyd, we’ve seen more beatings, more book clubs, and more backlash,” Cabrera said. “So it bears repeating: Anti-Black racism has existed for centuries, and Black people continue to resist it.”

Austin added that defining the capitalist roots of anti-Black racism is crucial if we are to dismantle it. All panellists were clear on the historical connection between capitalism and the subjugation of Black people—from the transatlantic slave trade to mass incarceration. 

“I really believe change cannot come about until we all are willing to have that vulnerability and say, I am a part of this system,” Givens said. “Nobody wants to admit that they are part of a racist system, but we are […], and that it’s […] part of the structures of white supremacy that are built into the system of capitalism that we live in today.”

Next, Cabrera broached the question of performativity in institutional equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) initiatives. Though EDI initiatives seek to increase the representation of people of colour within organizations, Ajadi explained, they cannot change what an organization was originally conceived to do. 

“EDI is a tool of management, it helps you to make your organizations better. That’s not liberation,” Ajadi said. “Right? That’s not what structural change looks like. To me, it looks like changing the organization so that the organization achieves its goals in a more efficient or effective way.” 

When Cabrera asked whether the institution of policing is salvageable, the panellists agreed that reform efforts have not gone nearly far enough. 

“As the author of a report on defunding the police, you can imagine what my response is,” Ajadi quipped. “But I’d rather flip the question—what does policing do well?”

Austin pointed to policing as a prime example of how large-scale structural change is needed to address institutionalized racism.

“That’s the only way we can actually understand what happened in Memphis,” Austin said. “We’re talking about structural power, and how even with the representation of more Black faces in high places, the structures of power are not transformed.”

At McGill, there were 14 Black tenure or tenure-track faculty members out of approximately 1,800 in 2021. McGill pledged to increase this number to 40 by 2025, and 85 by 2032. Over the past two years, 28 Black tenured or tenure-track professors were appointed. Black students make up 4.6 per cent of the student body according to the Student Demographic Survey. 

“I think people want to say, ‘Oh, we’ve made progress [….] We’ve done enough for Black students at McGill,’” Givens said. “The point is: Have we created an environment where students want to come to McGill, where Black faculty feel like they belong and can thrive and flourish? Have we created an environment that makes McGill look like a place people want to be, period?”

SSMU

SSMU BoD debates motions about campus safety app and trans students’ rights on campus

by Adeline Fisher on

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The Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU)’s Board of Directors (BoD) met via Zoom on Feb. 2 to vote on four motions, including two awaiting ratification that had previously been approved by SSMU’s Legislative Council.

Kerry Yang, SSMU vice-president (VP) University Affairs, presented the BoD with a motion regarding the creation of a  Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) with HAVEN—a campus safety app—for a trial period until April 2023. In instances of sexual harassment or assault, the app provides users with a quick and accessible way to call for help. Pushing the emergency button once sends a customized text message to the user’s designated contacts, pressing it twice sends the same message as a voicemail, and pressing it three times calls either campus police or 911, depending on whether the user is located on or off campus. 

Some BoD members are concerned about the potential legal risks of HAVEN, specifically a breach of privacy laws, that SSMU could incur as a result of the app’s geo-tracking capabilities. Benson Wan, a Legislative Council Representative on the BoD, is apprehensive of the security and privacy risks students may face if they use the service.

“On the one hand, I think that this is conceptually a good application to offer to students for them to opt into,” Wan said. “However, I think there are some concerns with regard to the logistics of how this would be rolled out. I think there might be some security concerns, data concerns, et cetera. They are not very strong concerns, but I think they do exist.”

Other board members echoed Wan’s worries, including SSMU VP Student Life Hassanatou Koulibaly. She pointed out that SSMU may face legal repercussions should the Society choose to sign the MoA, which was also referred to as a “memorandum of understanding,” with HAVEN.

“I think that in introducing something to our student body we are inherently endorsing it, whether it is free or not,” Koulibaly said. “So there would be some liability that would come to [SSMU] from that.”

The motion was ultimately tabled until the next BoD meeting. 

The following item on the agenda was a motion to have McGill divest from companies complicit in the ongoing Uyghur genocide, which was adopted at the Jan. 19 Legislative Council meeting. After a brief discussion, the motion was unanimously ratified and adopted by the BoD. 

The final item on the agenda was a motion to support trans students’ rights on campus, in response to the controversial event titled “Sex vs. Gender (Identity) Debate” hosted by McGill’s Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism (CHRLP) on Jan. 10. The motion noted the transphobic nature of the debate and asserted that such an event endangers McGill’s transgender community by setting a precedent for the platforming of transphobic rhetoric at the university. 

SSMU VP External Val Masny explained what SSMU hopes to accomplish should the motion pass, noting that they “put forward this motion so that SSMU can adopt a future policy that will be comprehensive of the students’ needs and rights in terms of advocacy.”

The motion faced opposition from board members who expressed concern that SSMU could face accusations of defamation as a result of directly naming the event’s key speaker, a professor of human rights law at King’s College London. 

The motion was ratified, with five votes in favour and two votes against. 

Moment of the Meeting:

Legislative Council Representative Benson Wan, along with SSMU President Risann Wright and others, raised concern about supporting the motion on the rights of trans students, remarking that SSMU may not properly understand the potential legal ramifications of naming the debate’s speaker. Wan suggested that SSMU seek professional legal advice before adopting the motion.

Soundbite:

“If we do implement HAVEN as an app, and students do like it […] but we decide it won’t be particularly useful for students and thus decide not to move forward with having HAVEN be part of campus, there might be some backlash [….] We need to make it very clear to students that it is a trial run and not something that is permanent.”

— SSMU VP University Affairs Kerry Yang on the HAVEN free trial

A previous version of this article stated that SSMU President Risann Wright was opposed to the motion in support of trans rights. In fact, Wright asked a question as to whether SSMU could face defamation for using someone’s name in the motion and, upon receiving an answer of no, proceeded to vote in favour of the motion. The Tribune regrets the error

McGill, News, The Tribune Explains

Tribune Explains: McGill’s whistleblowing policy

by Oscar Johnson on

More in McGill:

McGill’s Policy on Safe Disclosure allows individuals to confidentially report misconduct or abuse of power at the university without fear of reprisal—a practice generally known as whistleblowing. The policy was created in 2007 and is a last resort for students when other university mechanisms have failed or are unable to address “improper activity.” The McGill Tribune looked into the whistleblowing policy, how it works, and how to use it. 

How does someone use the Policy on Safe Disclosure and what is “improper activity”?

Any member of the McGill community can submit a report if they suspect “improper activity” on campus. The person reporting improper activity is called the “discloser” and the person being accused is called the“respondent.” The policy identifies three types of improper activity: Academic misconduct, which is the “failure to perform academic duties, improper use of confidential academic material,” or “misrepresentation of material facts”; financial misconduct, or the “misappropriation or misuse of funds or property that belong the university”; and research misconduct, or “fabrication, falsification, plagiarism,” and other serious breaches of protocol specific to research being conducted. Reports through the policy are submitted to the secretary-general of McGill.

Reports should include as much information as possible about the respondent’s alleged improper activity. Only university employees, appointees, and volunteers or those serving in positions on boards of affiliated organizations, or bodies created by such a board, are subject to the policy. A student cannot be the target of a report unless they are also part of an aforementioned university body. After a report is submitted to the secretary-general, an investigation is opened.

How is an investigation conducted?

The secretary-general will send the report to an officer that specializes in incidents similar to the one reported. For academic misconduct, the provost oversees investigations; for financial misconduct, it is the executive director of internal audit at McGill; and for research misconduct, it is the research integrity officer. The appropriate officer has 15 working days to determine if the case was reported in good faith, falls within the scope of the policy, and necessitates further investigation. 

When appropriate, an investigator will evaluate the allegations and deliver conclusions within 30 days. Before a final decision is reached, the respondent will be informed of the allegations against them and have 10 working days to respond. None of the information collected is revealed to the general public; however, the involvement of the police or a granting agency can break this high level of confidentiality. 

During an investigation, a respondent has the right to an unpaid advisor to help them navigate the situation. An advisor is an unpaid member of the university who has agreed to help out the respondent. 

When should one submit a report?

A person should only whistleblow after having tried to report an incident through other means or if these other means are not suitable under the circumstances. 

When submitting a report through the policy, one should have reasonable grounds to believe that abuse has occurred. When a report is deemed as not being “in good faith” by the responsible officer, the person filing the report can be subject to disciplinary repercussions. If the respondent is found innocent, they will face no consequences, although the university will take measures to protect the respondent’s privacy and reputation. If the respondent is found guilty, they will be subject to disciplinary action “in accordance with the relevant regulations, policies, or collective agreements.”

How frequently is the policy used?

According to McGill’s most recent report on their safe disclosure policy, it is not widely used. Since 2019, there have been three total reports, one each year. Two of the reports have found the respondent guilty. No one filed a report through the policy for the first five years of its existence. 

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