The Judicial Board has accepted jurisdiction to hear an appeal submitted by Tariq Khan regarding the invalidation of his election as President. The appeal will be heard at the end of April and we are extending an invitation to anyone wishing to intervene in the dispute to duly complete a Judicial Board FORM I-1 “Application for intervention” (found on the Judicial Board website) and submitting an electronic copy to the Chief Justice. You will have until noon on Tuesday, April 29th to submit an application. Please be advised that the J-Board recognizes intervening parties only where those parties are necessary for a complete solution to the questions in issue. Intervenors will be notified by the Chief Justice whether they have been accepted within a reasonable time.
The implementation of a University Centre Building Fee will be the subject of a referendum question in Fall 2014, following approval of the referendum question at the April 10 meeting of the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) Legislative Council.
“They could mandate a special [referendum] earlier in the semester,” she said. “They will have options, which we will be passing onto the new executive.”
Clubs and Services representative Zachary Rosentzveig spoke against the motion.
“I think it’s problematic that this Council wants to vote on a referendum question that next year’s council will be tasked with defending and presenting,” he said.
Vice-President Finance Tyler Hofmeister defended the motion, noting that without the fee, access to the SSMU Building would be limited next year.
“All-hours building access has been cut for the building, given the current amount that we can afford,” he said. “In that case, it’s very likely that the future Council would want to pass a referendum early in the year, so as to keep the building open for all-hours access.”
Council also approved the 2014-2015 budget, which reflects the changes SSMU would make to its operations should the building fee fail to pass once again. Besides the removal of after-hours access to the SSMU Building, other changes include an increase to the price of mini-courses to run a $10,000 profit, as well as an increase in prices at Gerts to run a roughly $17,000 profit.
Library Improvement Fund Committee Report
Erin Sobat, a representative of the Library Improvement Fund (LIF) Committee, presented a plan to allocate approximately $756,000 worth of funds to various library projects this year.
The LIF is funded by student fees which are matched by the university.
These projects include the renovation of the Redpath washrooms, an expansion of the Redpath group study zone with new seating areas and computers, an increase in seating options at the Schulich library, and the purchase of group study room presentation equipment for McLennan Library. Other allocations include an increase in student employment at the library through work-study programs.
Each winter, influenza viruses sweep across the globe, causing an estimated three to five million severe cases worldwide and 250,000 to 500,000 deaths, according to the World Health Organization (WHO)—and this is only one type of infectious disease. Faced with a spectrum of chronic illnesses, viral infections, and microbial pathogenesis, today’s healthcare infrastructure faces an overwhelming societal and economic challenge. To address this issue, many countries around the world have put an emphasis on innovating unique public health measures to focus on preventative care.
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom has chosen to approach one health issue, obesity, in a colour-coded fashion. Their traffic-light food labeling system aims to improve consumer awareness of nutritional information simplistically. Prepackaged food products are labeled red, yellow, or green based on the ratio of fats, sugar, and salt relative to each other that they contain. With this program, the United Kingdom Standard Food Agency hopes to encourage individuals to think before buying a product labelled red. It also allows consumers to quickly pick out unhealthy products from the grocery aisles.
India
Given the technological boom we have seen in the past decade and its ability to reach even the most rural areas, India is considering affordable mobile technology to promote preventative care. Rural populations affected by chronic diseases lack access to the resources necessary to manage these illnesses and prevent them from worsening. The government hopes that with cell phones—whose usage has increased in rural populations—health institutes could provide geographically distant or isolated patients with information on products and services through texts and apps, such as by texting appointment reminders. Automated texts could also serve as reminders to chronically ill patients to take their medications or get immunized. In the future, mobile health care could prove a powerful prevention tool in many countries.
Brazil
Brazil harnessed its creativity and effectiveness in promoting preventative measures through tapping into the country’s love for soap operas. In 1991, the government launched an anti-AIDS campaign that not only distributed condoms and needles, but also used TV soap operas to educate their audience about the health risk of HIV/AIDS.
Canada
There are dozens of preventative measures taking place in Quebec, but one of the most interesting ones is the smoking cessation program. The provincial government established the Plan québécois d’abandon du tabagisme (PQAT) was created in 2002, focusing on stop-smoking campaigns and support for those wishing to quit through measures like quit smoking centres and a smoker’s help line. Interestingly, the Régie de l’assurance maladie du Québec (RAMQ) has decided to allow the public drug insurance plan to cover some pharmaceutical products that assist in quitting smoking.
It isn’t often that a museum exhibit gets to stare back at its visitors. But for the past year, those who have climbed to the third floor of the Redpath Museum have been able to lock eyes with three unexpectedly youthful new faces—model reconstructions of what the museum’s 2000-year-old Egyptian mummies might have looked like centuries ago.
These facial reconstructions, which were added to the museum’s display in 2013, were constructed by a forensic artist based on the data collected from computed tomography (CT) scans performed on the mummies at the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) in 2011. Since the exhibit opened, it has been featured on Le Devoir, the Globe and Mail, and the Smithsonian, and has become a staple of guided tours at the Redpath Museum.
What few of these public-interest displays touch on is that the facial reconstructions are simply the “flashy part” of an international scientific study led by the University of Western Ontario (UWO), according to Barbara Lawson, curator of the museum’s World Cultures section.
“[The reconstructions] weren’t driven by [a need for] an exhibit, but [were] simply a way of elaborating on the data the researchers [had access to],” said Lawson.
The UWO’s IMPACT Radiological Mummy Database is a project that collects information about mummification practices and ancient life from mummies worldwide without damage to the wrappings. The Redpath mummies were among the first to be scanned for the database.
Lawson explained that she created an exhibit to make the research accessible to the public and help them understand museums as living institutions that continue to work with its exhibits. Though it barely skims the surface of how such an institution operates, it is certainly a start.
More than just a museum
Like the double life led by the Redpath mummies both as subjects of research and objects of exhibition, the Redpath Museum holds a complex relationship with McGill’s academic community and the public. Administratively, the museum is a department within the Faculty of Science, hosting faculty members, graduate students, and courses in paleontology, geology, and natural history. Geographically, the museum sits next to the Y-intersection at the centre of campus, its stoic masonry and crown mouldings blending seamlessly with those of the Arts Building and Redpath Hall.
The Redpath Museum is one of the few departments at McGill that allows the public to roam its facilities and watch students at work maintaining the collections. On Nuit Blanche, when visitors of all ages come from across Montreal and line up to the Roddick Gates for the chance to go on the famous “flashlight tours,” the museum seems to belong more to the entire city than simply the university.
The museum has not always operated this way. Peter Redpath, whose family made its fortune through the Redpath Sugar Refinery, built the museum in 1881 to house the natural sciences collection of McGill’s fifth principal, Sir William Dawson. Dawson had been offered a position at Princeton, but what he truly wanted was a state-of-the-art research institute where he could complete his work.
“For scientists like Dawson, at his time, [such an institute] would have been a museum,” said David Green, the Redpath Museum’s current director. In the 19th century, natural history—a discipline with origins tracing back to Aristotle—was experiencing a renaissance as the works of naturalists like Charles Darwin began to push the study of organisms away from descriptive taxonomy and into the realm of scientific theory.
Consequently—and driven by the era’s colonialism—scientists became interested in collecting specimens from around the world to catalogue and study at home. The first natural history museums were built to facilitate the research and teaching surrounding these specimens.
The Redpath Museum was this kind of an institution from the start.
“The different floors were crowded with stuff [from Dawson’s collections],” said Green. “He had his office in the museum, could do his [scientific] studies here, and did his classes in the auditorium at the back of the museum.”
In the 1950s, the museum began to reinvent itself as a public institution by renovating exhibits and encouraging school groups to visit, in addition to keeping up with its scientific research. However, from 1971 to 1985, financial pressures caused McGill to close off public access in order to focus on teaching and research.
“[This meant that] if the museum goes too far in [the] direction [of being a public institution], we could be accused of being not central to the mission of the university, which is research and teaching [….] There’s a balance that has to be struck between these things,” said Green.
Far from fostering exclusion, the museum’s outreach office feels that the university affiliation actually enhanced its public appeal.
“[Visitors] feel quite privileged,” said Ingrid Birker, the museum’s science education and public outreach coordinator. “The texts [on display] are written by content experts who happen to be professors who are teaching the material, and [they] don’t shy away from the scientific terminology.”
According to Natalia Toronchuk, a public education curriculum developer and former student volunteer at the museum, the exhibits’ minimal design elements exude the feel of a workplace.
“You have a sense of [being able to] trust what’s said, because you know there are experts working right behind the door,” she said.
Student and public participation
Today, visitors from the public seem at times to have a much bigger presence than casual student visitors from within McGill.
On Sunday afternoons, the museum hosts film screenings and family workshops.
“We serve easily 300 people [on Sundays], and they’re the public, not McGill students,” said Birker. “[On weekdays,] we get students sent by their CEGEPs to do projects—high school students, […] not always students from McGill necessarily.”
On the students’ side, past and current members of the Redpath Museum Club (RMC)—a student group that volunteers to lead tours at the museum and act as liaisons for the student community—have noted a lack of awareness of the museum’s resources in the wider student body.
“[There’s] a history of Montreal book [Montreal: Seaport and City] by Stephen Leacock where he mentions [that] people ‘have lived and died’ without ever walking into the [Redpath] Museum,” said Isabel Luce, a former president of the RMC. “That’s very much true. I meet fourth-year [students] who [have] walked by the museum and don’t even realize what’s inside.”
It was partly the student community’s lack of engagement with the museum that motivated Donald Fowler, now a PhD student researching evolutionary science at the museum, to start the RMC as an undergraduate student in 2005. Apart from students’ lack of knowledge of what was on display, Fowler was concerned that students were unaware of the ways that the museum could be used as a resource for their academic or professional interests.
“There wasn’t a way for students to get involved at the museum,” said Fowler. “[The RMC] was [made] to create a place for people to figure out what their interest is, [and] how to get involved in it—be it public education, guiding, or [the museum’s] research.”
During Luce’s time as president of the RMC in 2010, the club launched a student version of the Redpath Museum’s popular Nuit Blanche flashlight tours in collaboration with the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU). The tours are attended every Fall by more than 100 students.
“[The student flashlight tours] are meant to appeal to the people who walk by every day,” said Luce. “There’s a lot of different outreach programs at the museum that target a wider group of [the public], but there’s a need to [add] variety to that.”
Improving accessibility
Part of students’ frustration with the Redpath Museum’s uneven appeal—successfully bridging its academic research with public interest, but skipping over the McGill student community in between—is simply a problem due to a lack of resources. There is insufficient space, funding, and staff at the museum to provide equipment or assistance to every student who wishes to work with the objects. The RMC does not provide students with access to the labs and the collections at the museum. Students intending to use the collections must first submit a research proposal and a statement outlining the specimens required.
According to Green, another reason for these restrictions is the need to fulfill the mandate of the museum as a reputed academic institution.
In the Mummies and World Cultures collections, Lawson is the only staff member able to assist students who wish to use collections for independent research. Priority is given to doctoral or masters’ students, then to undergraduates who are writing honours theses or researching topics that specifically target objects which Lawson herself is currently working on.
Students will also occasionally access the collection through museum visits that they go on as part of their courses. In professor Michael Fronda’s HIST 450 course Ancient Historical Methods, students are given the chance to work with the museum’s Roman coin collection under Lawson’s supervision. Students have gone on to make independent discoveries about items in the collection and pursue similar research at the graduate level.
“I had one student [who] tried to catalogue all the unpublished coins [at the museum] that [were] not on display, including […] a mystery coin [that] I assumed was just a forgery,” said Fronda. “But he figured out it was an early modern reckoning token [that] was used in banking houses […] as a placeholder for counting [accounts].”
Katrina Van Amsterdam, a graduate student in classical studies who took Fronda’s course as an undergraduate, said that she has used coins in many other papers since that class.
“The visit to the Redpath Museum [was] instrumental for [giving] me a better grasp of what to look for and how to interpret these objects,” said Van Amsterdam. “It was wonderful to be allowed to look at the evidence […] in a personal manner.”
Other students like Toronchuk and Jacqueline Riddle—another former president of the RMC—have volunteered to lead public tours and leveraged the experience into outreach or curatorial opportunities at Redpath and other museums. For now, however, the only way that the majority of students are able to discover the academic resources available at the museum is by participating in certain courses, such as the one taught by Fronda, the anthropology department’s Human Evolution, or the Faculty of Religious Studies’ Religions of the Ancient Near East.
In these cases, when the arrangement works, it does so extremely well. For Toronchuk, the museum’s greatest strength for both the student and the public is in inspiring curiosity.
“[It’s the] kind of Aristotelian wonder that [an educational] institution is supposed to be about,” she said. “It’s not just learning […] and it’s in some ways even more valuable [than learning].”
This is not a far cry from what Fronda has observed in his students’ reactions to their opportunity to interact with the collections.
“There’s a certain kind of wow factor, […] a kind of visceral, emotional attachment to the material that I hope carries on and [will] encourage them to do more with antiquities,” Fronda said.
For Lawson, it is also this sense of continuity with a century’s worth of notable research and learning that, combined with the cutting edge research taking place at the museum currently, makes the museum an important resource for both the McGill community and the public. This consideration underpinned how she chose to present the mummies’ new faces to the public.
“[The museum has] a symbiotic relationship with research interests at McGill and [other] researchers around the world,” said Lawson. “We also display what the public is interested in […] in a way that illustrates the complicated things in an accessible way […] One way of serving [all of these people’s] needs and interests is to have exhibits that connect to the sorts of question that they are asking.”
Never in my wildest dreams did I ever expect my first real political campaign to make such a big splash. When I first contacted the Parti Vert du Quebec, I offered to volunteer in the campaign and perhaps even run; but I never expected that I actually would get a chance to stand for election. However, when I met with the party leader, Alex Tyrrell, I found that my ideals and beliefs did identify very closely with the new Parti Vert du Quebec.
As a student who works part time (and with two summer jobs) more affordable education and free public transportation are very salient issues for me. There was the appalling notion of drilling for the hard-to-reach oil that might be under Anticosti Island—a large part of which is a nature reserve or park. Such a disregard for the environment reflects disgracefully on any party that supports it. I also saw the need to put aside the sovereignty debate to focus on other issues, though I myself am a federalist. Most importantly, I feel that Quebec needs a change in government. Not just in governing party, but in the very makeup of the National Assembly.
As a young, 21-year-old candidate for a party without seats in the National Assembly running in a Liberal stronghold riding my chances of making much impact were not high. However, I did make an effort to publicize the fact that there were youth active in the political spectrum. The apathy of which the young are generally accused is not all-encompassing. I wanted to show the province, the older politicians, and my fellow youth that students could have a reasoned, active voice in the democratic discourse. I hoped to encourage more students to get involved in the future and in getting out to vote. At least that’s how my campaign went for the first week. While I got some youth interested, the media was focused elsewhere. That all changed when I was denied the right to vote by the reviewers at the Mercier revisions board. To them, I was not a Quebecer.
I had brought the necessary documentation to register as a voter in the election, as well as proof of my candidacy. Not only was I denied by the revisions board, but the board tried to convince me that I wasn’t even a candidate! Suddenly, my effort to enact change was brought into question, and my right to have a say in what happens in my province was contested. The Parti Vert du Quebec believe that this action of turning me and countless other students away is blatant discrimination on the part of the Directeur général des élections du Québec (DGEQ), inspired by the accusations made by the Parti Québécois.
As I was fighting for the right to vote and run in the election, I was effectively trying to prove my own legal personhood. Thankfully, the judge who heard my case acknowledged the absurdity of the notion that I would have the documentation to make me eligible to run as a candidate but not as a voter. Clearly by running, I demonstrate a vested interest in the province and it is my “domicile.” Sadly, my case was the only one of the five McGill students who sued for their right to vote that was granted an injunction. My four co-plaintiffs and countless other students were denied the right to vote as their domicile was still in question. While we at the Parti Vert du Quebec respect the judge’s ruling, we do believe that this is discriminatory meddling on the part of the DGEQ against anglophone students, as inspired by statements made by the Parti Québécois. It really is a sad day when, in a Western democracy, eligible voters have their voices silenced. This should never happen, and shouldn’t have happened here.
To my fellow students, don’t let your voices be silenced—I certainly will not; but remember that you have a voice too. Speak up.
Brendan Edge is a U2 Canadian Studies and History student who was the Parti Vert du Quebec candidate in the Chomedy riding.
The invalidation of Tariq Khan’s victory in the SSMU elections, and the subsequent outcry, have perhaps served as the perfect summation of the crisis of credibility that has characterized student government. Throughout this year, the councillors and executives of the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) have been far more reactive than proactive in response to the numerous situations which occurred under their management. While in some cases this has been effective, in most it had led to costly, embarrassing foul-ups for the executive.
The most prominent example of SSMU failing to take proactive action in the first half of this year is one that has already been discussed in this space; the inability of the Fall General Assembly (GA) to meet quorum due to lack of advertising, thus preventing the official appointment of a board of directors and threatening various entities managed under SSMU. It was not until another GA was held, costing time, money and effort, that these issues were rectified. The outcome of the still-reverberating building fee rejection—with no “Yes” committee or any other such outreach to students on a fee execs said was critical to continued functioning—only serves to show that SSMU did not take a proactive approach to learning from its mistakes.
Another example of SSMU finding itself on the back foot was the “Farnan-gate” fiasco. This incident, which featured SSMU pelted by campus-wide, then national and international criticism, was at first prompted by a lack of foresight and perhaps a complete disregard for the likely student reaction. It was also compounded by a fumbling response to the reaction that almost missed the underlying motivation of the reaction. The official resolution—SSMU rescinding the official apology—still left SSMU with a self-inflicted hit to its reputation while failing to turn much of the student backlash into any real institutional change.
Even so, there have also been unforeseen situations SSMU was forced to encounter this year that were reacted to adequately. The controversy that most typifies the positive aspects of a reactive approach is that of the sexual assault case against several players on McGill’s Redmen football team. Charges in the 2011 case, which resurfaced in news reports last November, caused a firestorm and spurred SSMU and other entities on campus to make new progress on dealing with McGill’s institutional framework on sexual assault. Here, the sudden immediacy of the issue left SSMU well-placed to throw its weight behind an issue that already had some momentum, which has so far resulted in some positive tangible change for students.
What do these contrasting cases say about how SSMU has responded to crises this year? In the first two, SSMU’s reactive responses to incidents of its own creation have weakened student trust in the organization and cost it valuable time that could have been spent on other more worthwhile tasks. In the third, SSMU used its advocacy platform as a way to turn the pre-existing reaction on campus towards concrete policy reforms. In all three situations, SSMU executives failed to anticipate the worst-case scenarios and plan for them. In the cases of the failed fee, GA, and apology, something close to the worst case not only ended up happening, but could have been easily foreseen. Next year, it would behoove SSMU—executives and councillors—to better assess situations and potential effects before intervening, if possible, study closely the specifics of similar past situations that were successfully managed, and, in the event of particularly heavy student criticism, find a way to channel that reaction into positive change.
Even better, a more proactive approach from the SSMU executive would be ideal. Meanwhile, students should take the time to be engaged with campus issues even when there isn’t a massive, attention-grabbing controversy—a better understanding of the mundane aspects of student politics might leave students better equipped to respond to the big crises.
Still, as with any organization, the buck stops with the leadership. Before we talk about changing student attitudes, SSMU should change theirs.
If anybody came out to GZA’s lecture on “Consciousness, Creativity, Music, & the Origin of the Universe” that packed Leacock 132 last Saturday eagerly awaiting the Wu-Tang Clan founding member to explain advanced scientific principles to the audience, then they may have gone home feeling disappointed and unfulfilled. This, however, would be a shame, because in spite of the esoteric knowledge he lacked, GZA still managed to justify to McGill why fellow musicians and fans have affectionately referred to him as “the Genius” throughout his career.
GZA isn’t a scientist—it would be pretty remarkable if he had amassed a significant amount of academic knowledge while making music in one of the greatest rap groups of all time—and he wasn’t trying to be one when he spoke to the crowded lecture hall. Rather, his scientific genius comes from an acute awareness of the role that science plays in our everyday lives, and an appreciation for the discipline as something that can and should be accessible to people from all walks of life.
“Music has always had a direct influence over my life,” GZA explained. “Stevie Wonder once said, ‘Music is a world in itself and a [universal] language we understand.’”
Much of the lecture—which integrated various short rap verses intermittently—and the ensuing question period centred around the role of science on GZA’s personal and musical journeys, and his feeling that music can be an incredibly useful tool for relating and communicating scientific thought. In fact, GZA is currently in the process of working on a concept album called Dark Matter that will tell the story of a journey through time and space and represent the way in which dark matter affects the motion of the universe gravitationally by applying it to the lyrical motion of his music.
One of GZA’s first encounters with science took the form of a game of chess with his cousin when he was nine years old. While he would not touch the game for over another 10 years, GZA never forgot the rules.
“When I began playing seriously as an adult, I learned the tactics and principles,” GZA explained. “[These included] the time, force, and space of chess. Time, as the amount of moves; space, as the squares you control; and force, your military—your army.”
Through employing these strategies, GZA became more intrigued with the science behind the game of chess. Playing in East New York, Brooklyn, and Washington Square Park—where he reached as many as 78 games per Sunday—GZA began to consider mathematical principles like algorithms and probability while strategizing his play.
Discovering the nuances of the game, however, did not just improve GZA’s performance. The artist began to apply the same strategies he used in chess to situations in his life. His thinking shifted to a more scientific perspective, where he tried to approach scenarios from all angles and question the status quo—similar to how scientists interrogate their own experimental problems.
“The active thinking and philosophy stimulated my creative mind to consider all the possibilities and search for more,” GZA said.
This open and creative mindset helped spark the program Science Genius, which is an urban science initiative developed by the Genius himself and Christopher Emdin from Columbia University’s Teachers College.
GZA developed Science Genius to get more students interested and comfortable with scientific topics. While he knew he was not a science teacher, GZA also recognized that as a musician, he could walk into a classroom and provide students with a model to learn. Seizing the opportunity to spread his passion to an impressionable audience, GZA travelled with Emdin to 10 New York high schools to run the program. With GZA, students developed scientific raps about different topics, acquiring an acute understanding through music and lyricism.
“As we read citations and rhymes, one of the things that I try to [impart] to the classrooms is that the rhyme must be clear, eloquent, and clever,” GZA said. “I challenge students to make sense of complex information by maintaining high standards of serious lyricism.”
Even though it was clear by the time the question period came around that GZA wasn’t qualified to answer technical scientific questions, he had a strong answer when asked to tackle the most important question that the universe has for us: “What is the meaning of life to you?”
“Life is being relevant, it’s living, [and] breathing,” began GZA. “[The point of] life is to evolve, develop, grow, and raise yourself.”
Perhaps Darwin wouldn’t have equated evolution to “being relevant,” but then again, GZA didn’t come to quote famous scientists—he came to promote the value of basic scientific awareness and literacy even if one is doing something on the opposite end of the occupational spectrum—like making music. That being said, GZA still offered some parting words of wisdom that anyone looking to survive with the fittest in today’s world should take to heart.
“Don’t be the other 99 and imitate, be the one that originates.”
It doesn’t take a genius to understand these words, but when they come from a successful, intelligent, and inquisitive individual like the Genius, they truly resonate.
After two-and-a-half years of image-macro-based mockery and outrage—some genuine, some feigned—Daniel Braden, the man behind the “McGill Memes” Facebook page and Tumblr microblog, is graduating from McGill and moving to Boston to work on a congressional campaign. This week, the Tribune sat down with Braden to take stock of the satire of the years since the site’s launch in November 2011.
McGill Tribune: What prompted you to start the site?
Daniel Braden: Honestly, looking back on it, it was really just me realizing the funny contradictions that make up McGill. I was living with a writer for the McGill Daily at the time; she was lovely, but a lot of her friends I found very intriguing and very representative of McGill—people who would go on to do the Nov. 10 occupation, #6party, etc. I started it as an inside joke, really.
MT: Could you elaborate on these contradictions?
DB: I think one of the things I noticed were the number of people who seemed to be very wealthy. Many of them would be protesting the tuition hikes and the horrors of capitalism, but would wear expensive clothes and have expensive electronics. While that doesn’t mean you can’t have principles, these people didn’t seem to align with what you would think they would believe in.
MT: What have you found most interesting in your time running “McGill Memes”?
DB: There were times I posted things I thought would absolutely cause an uproar, and they never did. For example, riffing off the stereotype that the Cybertheque library is frequented by East Asians. Those memes were racially insensitive, what you would call a “microaggression,” and I was pretty surprised no one really complained.
MT: Do you think you’ve managed to say anything meaningful about the university and/or its students through your satire?
DB: I actually do. I don’t want to say I’m the one true voice of McGill, because that’s not true at all. But I think I did point out things that no one discussed openly. Chief among those is the lack of service in French at McGill and the lack of full translation, outside of official McGill communications, which is notable considering there are many translation students who would be able to perform such services. English is something McGill’s anglophone students really take for granted.
MT: How hard was it to come up with material?
DB: When I first started with the strikes, the Nov. 10 occupations, #6party, and the AUS GA, it literally wrote itself. Last year was a bit hard, and it has gotten progressively harder. “McGill Memes” would probably not have gotten started were it not for the provincial and student politics in late 2011-2012.
MT: Characterize your political views in a campus context.
DB: A constantly surprised and exasperated observer. One thing that McGill politics has taught me is that nothing is too petty or too small to be taken seriously. That said, this tendency is also a great source of comedic material.
MT: Give an example of particularly petty politics.
DB: We all had to live through ‘Farnangate,’ and we’re still living through the hangover of that. While I’m not a person of color and there could be legitimate reasons for the complaint, at surface value, it was one of the pettiest things I’ve seen in my time at McGill. You would have had to have gone so far out of your way to be offended to that point.
MT: Do you think students should care more about student politics?
DB: Yeah, I think that you can care about student politics without necessarily being angry and needlessly indignant, but I think McGill is too apathetic about these things. There’s a way to be involved in student politics without being overly tiresome.
MT: What did you think of the SSMU elections saga?
DB: What I will say about the election is that as a voter, I am angry; but as a comedian, I am delighted. There couldn’t be a better way for SSMU to end the year and for me to end my four years. On top of everything, even back to the bike gates, I am so happy that my last few weeks here will be spent hashing these failed lease negotiations and then this electoral curveball.
MT: Do you feel a sense of responsibility knowing that your more political posts are the only source of information many students get about campus news, perhaps even provincial politics?
DB: Absolutely not. If you are using my page as your only source of provincial and campus political news, you need to wake up. Additionally, while I’ve had people ask me to put up posts about their pet issues/campaigns, I really don’t think this page has that much of an impact. I don’t feel terribly responsible for it on that front.
MT: What do you hope students took out of the page?
DB: A sense of humour. McGill doesn’t really have one. It’s not a funny school. The funniest thing I’ve seen is “Lot’s wife, McGill”—and that is funny—but that’s it. They call the University of Chicago the place where fun goes to die; this is where your sense of humor just goes to wither.
MT: Do you have any plans for the “McGill Memes” page after you finish?
DB: I did originally want to try to find someone to pass it on to. As it stands, I have plans for a grand finale, but I don’t think it’s going to keep on going.
This interview was edited and condensed by Abraham Moussako.
