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Law faculty union suspends its strike on Friday, resumes on Monday

by Ghazal Azizi on

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The Association of McGill Professors of Law (AMPL) has been periodically on strike since April 24, 2024. The union, which represents tenured and tenure-track professors at the Faculty of Law, received its certification in November 2022, after a year-long legal battle with McGill at Quebec’s Tribunal administratif du travail (TAT). After more than a year at the bargaining table, McGill and AMPL have yet to arrive at a collective agreement (CA) and the university continues to challenge the union’s certification with an appeal case at the TAT. 

On Sept. 12, AMPL announced that it had suspended its strike to extend “an olive branch” to the university and would return to work on the condition that McGill drop its judicial review of AMPL’s certification by Sunday, Sept. 15. Since the university has decided to maintain its case against the union, AMPL has resumed its strike, effective Sept. 16. 

In August, the university filed a request for arbitration, which Minister of Labour Jean Boulet granted, appointing Maître Jean Allard. After the appointment of an arbitrator, each side must choose an assessor—an advisor who works with the arbitrator—and have a pre-meeting with Allard. If the arbitrator concludes that there is no possibility of a resolution, then Allard would order interest arbitration—a formal court process at which point any ongoing strike must end. However, the union believes that McGill’s request for arbitration is driven by an intent to de-accredit the union. 

“The wheels of justice turn very slowly,” AMPL Vice President Kirsten Anker said in an interview with The Tribune. “If McGill was hoping to use arbitration as a shortcut to ending the strike without making any concessions to us, that plan is not going to happen […], which, of course, means that the semester will be at risk by that stage.”

According to Anker, when the university failed to attend a scheduled negotiation meeting during the summer, AMPL offered to forego a strike and accept arbitration on the CA’s monetary issues if McGill ended its judicial review case. AMPL believes the university’s ongoing challenge to its certification is an attempt to drain the union’s funds and morale rather than overturning the TAT’s decision, given they find McGill’s chances of winning the appeal to be low.  

“There are different ways to win in a legal battle and this is what we think the judicial review campaign is about, to either win outright on the law or continue with appeals and challenges […] that would exhaust us,” Anker said.

In solidarity with AMPL, representatives from the Canadian Association of University Teachers, the Association of Graduate Students Employed at McGill, and Concordia University Professional Employees Union attended and spoke at the union’s rally on Sept. 11 in front of the James Administration Building. At the rally, AMPL Secretary Richard Janda reissued the union’s offer from the summer. 

“We accept arbitration on all monetary matters so [they] are off the table if you accept our existence. Accept our existence, stop this proceeding before the courts and let’s put into a collective agreement all the non-monetary matters we’ve agreed upon,” Janda said in his speech. “This isn’t about money, folks [….] This is about governance. This is about trying to make the university again a collegial institution.” 

The union says “the humanitarian suspension” of its strike, which they announced the day after the rally, arose as a goodwill gesture that the union is open to returning to work and as an attempt to draw attention to its offer.

“We reissued the offer on the understanding that if it’s not accepted by noon on Sunday, then we’ll go back on strike,” Anker said. “So it’s partly […] adjusted towards the administration. It’s also adjusted towards students because in particular, there are some time-sensitive processes [such as] getting forms in for graduate students, contracts for research assistants and setting them up with work.”

Shortly after the clock struck noon, on Sunday, Sept.15, AMPL announced through their social media channels that its strike’s hiatus had expired, given the university had disregarded the union’s offer. 

“The things that we cared about were refused,” Anker said. “So they did not agree to abandon their judicial review. The only thing that they did offer was to have an expedited […] schedule with the arbitrator.”

In an earlier statement to The Tribune on Sept.13, the McGill Media Relations Office (MRO) expressed content with AMPL’s decision to suspend its strike and said the university is eager to discuss the union’s concerns in the presence of the arbitrator. However, in response to The Tribune’s request for an explanation on why the university had yet to drop its judicial review case against AMPL, the MRO restated the university’s ongoing stance that a single-faculty union is too small of a bargaining unit. 

“McGill counts more than 1,700 professors whose appointment, tenure, salary, sabbatical leaves, and retirement are subject to the same regulations. If subsets as small as 42 or so professors, as in AMPL’s case, unionize and negotiate collective agreements, we could see over a dozen new unions join McGill’s current 16,” the MRO wrote in an email. 

“Labour relations at McGill would become unmanageably complex, cumbersome, and costly. […] Challenging the description of AMPL’s bargaining unit is not about opposing the unionization of professors. It is about protecting the future of McGill as an equitable and unionized employer,” the MRO continued.

The MRO also stressed McGill’s efforts to mitigate the strike’s effects on the student body and named some of its measures to ensure law students can complete their fall semesters. 

“The Dean of Law […] has been holding weekly Zoom sessions so that he and the Associate Dean (Academic) can take live questions from students and receive their concerns,” the MRO wrote. “Public information and measures we’ve taken are also posted on a dedicated webpage. Other measures taken included working with the Registrar’s office on ways to extend the add/drop period, allowing for late payment of fees without penalty, and providing optional sessions offered by the Dean and alumni.”

Anker told The Tribune that Provost and Executive Vice-President (Academic), Christopher Manfredi is now the negotiation lead on McGill’s end. To Anker, this is a hopeful sign that a resolution may be on the horizon.

She also reiterated that in any strike or labour dispute, third parties are the most affected. 

“Strikes are inconvenient,” Anker said. “That is the only power lever that unions have against their employers, and there are always third parties who are affected. And we feel that, and we know that it’s just [about] the minimization.” 

Anker touched on the community’s concerns that the union’s strike has had impacts on incoming and returning law students. She stressed that AMPL’s negotiations with McGill will pave the way for other faculty unions.. 

“Students don’t necessarily understand the full picture of this yet, if they’re just focusing on the narrow […] legal arguments,” Anker said. “You can lose a litigation, but win in a broader strategic sense, and getting parties to spend money and time and energy on something is part of the strategy.”

“If [students think] that it’s going to stop at the lower level court, perhaps they’ve misunderstood what the project is here, because it’s not going to stop there on the McGill side. [….] And if, by any chance, we fall on a judge who doesn’t understand labour law, or [one who] sympathizes with McGill, then that’s the end of our union movement,” Anker continued. “Framing [the strike] as […] inconveniencing students […] as if it’s some minor thing […] misrepresents what’s at stake here.”

A previous version of this article mis-attributed a quote about the union’s reissued offer to McGill to AMPL Secretary Richard Janda. In fact, the speaker was AMPL Vice President Kirsten Anker. The Tribune regrets this error.

Science & Technology

Empowering perfectionist students with personalized support

by Lana Liquard on

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Perfectionism in students has become an epidemic. In today’s high-pressure society, younger generations are increasingly striving for unattainable standards, often at the expense of their mental health. Anxiety and depression are rising among students, especially in competitive academic environments like McGill University. 

David Dunkley, Associate Professor in McGill’s Department of Psychiatry and Department of Psychology and Senior Researcher at the Lady Davis Institute, recently published a paper in the American Psychological Association that sheds light on how targeted interventions may provide a lifeline for perfectionistic students. 

At the core of this study is the Perfectionism Coping Processes Model (PCPM), developed by Dunkley and his team to help participants better understand their daily emotional experiences. The novel intervention is the explanatory feedback intervention (EFI), which is a therapy session in which students receive personalized feedback based on their daily emotional experience. This intervention aims to support students with higher self-critical perfectionism. 

The goal is to increase self-awareness surrounding daily mood fluctuations and provide students with the best targets to handle high-stress situations. The structured feedback process helps individuals identify emotional patterns that lead to distress, empowering them to shift from avoidance strategies to more constructive coping mechanisms. 

Empowerment was one of the study’s key outcomes, with participants reporting feeling more informed, optimistic, and in control. Beyond feeling empowered, the intervention additionally improved participants’ coping skills. Specifically, it increased coping self-efficacy and encouraged problem-focused coping by actively addressing problems rather than avoiding them. A significant reduction in depressive and anxious symptoms was also observed, particularly because the intervention helped participants engage with their mental health more proactively. 

“[EFI] is an individualized intervention,” Dunkley said in an interview with The Tribune. “Often, interventions are one-size-fits-all. Self-help books [are] just giving people modules, things to work on, lots of which doesn’t apply to them.” 

The study highlights how tailored interventions, like the EFI, offer a more effective solution for perfectionistic individuals who might not benefit from generic approaches. 

“Streamlining interventions is critical, [as] perfectionistic people have negative help-seeking attitudes and don’t tolerate interventions they don’t need,” Dunkley said. 

The power of this research lies in its advocacy for individuals to become their own agents in addressing their mental health support. 

“Let’s try to see how the person can help themselves, because they need to do that anyway,” Dunkley emphasized. 

This approach differs from more traditional treatments like medication, by focusing on teaching patients how to navigate their daily lives and improve their mood gradually.

In addition, the study has significant clinical implications. EFI provides students with individualized feedback, helping them gain a deeper understanding of themselves, demystifying their mental health needs. 

As one of the study’s key strengths, EFI “fast-tracks” treatment. Therapists often need several sessions to begin understanding a patient’s needs, especially if that patient is introverted. With the EFI, therapists can cover in one session what would normally be covered in multiple. 

“If [the patient] already has something that shows them what they need to work on and explains it in a way that’s more constructive and destigmatizing, then hopefully they will be more open to and better informed to seek treatment,” Dunkley said. 

Looking ahead, Dunkley and his team hope this type of intervention will become available to McGill students through the Student Wellness Hub. 

Dunkley is launching a follow-up study in September, incorporating a new model, the Perfectionism and Emotion Regulation Processes Model (PERPM) with the PCPM framework, focusing on emotional regulation in perfectionism.

Ultimately, this study shows how a single-session intervention like EFI can significantly impact  students struggling with perfectionism. This intervention is broadly applicable and has the potential to benefit anyone facing similar challenges. 

By helping individuals understand their mental health in a personalized and empowering way, this research opens the door to more effective, streamlined mental health treatments that could transform how we approach perfectionism and other mental health challenges students face.

Science & Technology

Telemedicine: A path to modernize healthcare for seniors

by K. Coco Zhang on

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The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the economy, society, and healthcare system. While this crisis has presented the healthcare delivery system with unprecedented challenges, it has catalyzed the rapid adoption of telemedicine—remote clinical services. 

Telemedicine allows patients to chat with healthcare professionals about their physical and mental health or receive a diagnosis via video or phone consultations. Although it has the potential to improve healthcare access and quality, its use may present unique challenges for older adults. 

In a recently published paper, Dr. Vladimir Khanassov, assistant professor in McGill’s Department of Family Medicine and Director of the Care of the Elderly Training Program, and his team investigated potential advantages and barriers to telemedicine use in primary care for older adults. They also proposed recommendations to improve older adults’ experiences with telemedicine.

“Unlike younger generations, it is often difficult for older adults to use technology, so my objective was to identify the barriers for the elderly patients to access telemedicine for issues that would sometimes require hours of wait in the emergency room, but when they have access to telemedicine, their problems should be solved in five to ten minutes,” Khanassov said in an interview with The Tribune.

Khanassov’s team found that most older adults preferred phone calls over video sessions for ease of use. Nonetheless, telephone consultations have several disadvantages.

Telephone consultations are restricted to verbal communication, meaning the physicians cannot observe the patient’s body language, facial expressions, and environment. This lack of visual contact can cause essential details to be overlooked and potentially result in diagnostic errors. 

However, telemedicine has certain limitations regardless of whether it is conducted over the phone or video.

“For example, it is difficult to treat abdominal pain in telemedicine because you have to touch the belly,” Khanassov said.

The study also highlighted miscommunication-related concerns due to language or hearing barriers.

“Language barrier is a significant challenge to telephone consultations because healthcare professionals cannot explain everything over the phone,” Khanassov said. “Elderly patients often have hearing problems, which make telephone consultations difficult. When they cannot fully understand questions, they cannot see the body language of the healthcare professional or make any visual contact.”

Furthermore, telephone consultations may be inconvenient for older adults with limited literacy or cognitive impairment, as they may struggle to effectively express their medical condition over the phone. 

Older adults also often encounter technical challenges associated with video consultations, such as internet connection problems, difficulties in handling video devices, and video quality issues.

“When you do a video call, there is usually a privacy statement that patients need to accept. The elderly patients sometimes do not see the button that they have to click to accept, so they cannot access video consultations, and that would create an obstacle,” Khanassov said.

Despite these disadvantages, patients interviewed in the study expressed several advantages associated with telemedicine, including maintaining continuity of care, saving time, reducing exposure to potential high-risk environments, and improving the patient-physician relationship. 

Not only does telemedicine benefit older patients, but it also helps improve the work efficiency of healthcare professionals.

“For nurses, telemedicine helps them to complete tasks more quickly. For example, they can assess the blood pressure over the phone because patients will take the blood pressure, write it down, and report it to the nurses who will then assess the numbers. This process would be more time-consuming if the consultation was in-person,” Khanassov said.

Khanassov also emphasized the importance of supporting older adults in navigating telemedicine platforms and highlighted future directions for telemedicine research.

“This study allows us to see that elderly patients appreciate telemedicine and would like to have access to telemedicine, so we just need to adjust the technology for them,” Khanassov said. “Based on the study, we most likely need to do more randomized, controlled trials to look at the difference in clinical outcomes of certain conditions for telemedicine versus in-person visits, such as the number of emergency visits and admissions.”

Student Life

Balancing your health and studies

by Yasmine Mkaddam on

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With the countless deadlines and exams progressively piling on your responsibilities, it can be difficult to maintain a healthy mind and body. These tricks and habits can help you balance your time and take on this new semester with confidence.

Taking care of your body

For your own success and comfort, it is crucial to maintain a healthy routine. It’s easy to lose track of eating, exercising, and sleeping during the semester, but trying to persevere through your studies while being malnourished, dehydrated, and sleep-deprived can make it even harder to succeed in your studies. 

It can be hard to stay on top of grocery shopping and cooking when the semester gets busy, but eating well brings up your energy levels and helps you feel your best. While access to healthy food is a luxury for many, the IRCGM offers services to find food banks close to you and groups like Food not Bombs offer balanced meals for anyone who needs them. On campus, Midnight Kitchen provides weekly vegan and nut-free meals to students in need each week. Also take a moment to check out The Cheap Sheet, a booklet created yearly by McGill Student Services, which lists affordable, reduced-price, and sometimes free options for goods like groceries, textbooks, and clothes. 

Keeping an eye on high-sugar drinks and caffeine intake is also important for your body’s well-being. These drinks are dehydrating and a large consumption can eventually create health issues such as diabetes, heart disease, and more. Opting for hydrating beverages with vitamins and electrolytes will give you more energy and help you carry yourself through the day. 

Giving your body rest by sleeping six to nine hours a night enhances your energy, mood, concentration, and your long-term memory. Taking a power nap of 20 to 30 minutes per day can also help you recover your energy during the day without the grogginess that can come with a longer midday nap.

Managing your mental health 

With summer giving way to the long Canadian winter, it can be hard to keep up your energy levels and positivity. To help maintain your spirits during the cold winter months, try to spend your personal time engaged in activities you enjoy. If you’re looking for new ways to get out of your home, McGill has countless social clubs and Montréal offers plenty of fun activities that can boost your serotonin. That said, accepting the low-motivation and low-energy days as well as acknowledging that your body and mind deserve care is a step that must not be overlooked. 

For students with mental illnesses or declining mental health, seeking support through therapy and healthy coping mechanisms is critical. The McGill Student Wellness Hub offers one-on-one appointments or online counsellors. 

Keeping track of your commitments

As lectures, labs, and assignments start to pile up, it’s easy to get lost in a sea of deadlines. Monitoring your responsibilities with a calendar and using a reminders app can help you be more productive and up-to-date. To-do lists can also help, although it’s worth spending some time to determine what method of keeping track of tasks best suits your personality and needs. 

Setting yourself attainable and realistic goals will help you maintain consistency in your projects and create a routine you can keep up with. It’s also important to keep an eye on what activities are making it more difficult to meet your goals. For instance, social media can suck up hours of your time without you realizing it: Tracking your screen time can help you learn how much time you’re spending on these platforms and how it’s impacting your life. Multitasking is a better option—like using your screen time or putting your music on blast while working out.

Commentary, Opinion

To fly or not to fly: Soaring into Canada’s Uncompetitive Skies

by Samathar Senso on

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With midterms approaching at a rapid pace, McGill’s reading break is an alluring opportunity for well-deserved rest, gruelling last-minute study sessions, or maybe even a quick trip back home. Given that 50 per cent of McGill’s incoming students come from out-of-province or abroad, the Montréal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport can expect an influx of McGill students in the coming weeks.  

As students look forward to a much-needed break, the reality of air travel costs remains a persistent challenge. For many, getting home has become an increasingly unattainable expense. Here in Canada, our air travel choices are scarce and often lead us toward Air Canada. With consistently high airfares, declining customer service, and questionable competition practices, we can’t help but want better for our skyways—and our wallets. 

In 2022, Air Canada accounted for 51 per cent of available domestic flights across Canada— a significant figure in any industry, particularly within the national airline market—and this dominance was not achieved naturally. The Greater Saskatoon Chamber of Commerce raised concerns that Air Canada and WestJet—Canada’s second-largest airline—were possibly colluding by dividing flight maps amongst themselves in order to quash further competition and raise prices. This year, the airlines collectively made up 82 per cent of domestic flights compared to 74 per cent in April 2023. Similarly, the Minister of Transport raised concerns over Air Canada’s proposed acquisition of Air Transat, one of its only competitors on over 83 flight routes, as it potentially represents an anti-competitive practice. This proposal was almost given a pass until the European Commission barred the transaction, citing the desire to maintain a competitive market as a primary reason. 

The current aviation landscape in Canada isn’t surprising given the circumstances under which Air Canada was created in 1937. The company was founded as a crown corporation, meaning it was operated as a private entity but owned by the federal government, which gave the airline a complete monopoly on domestic air travel until 1959. Given this history, the federal government has a responsibility to address the current monopolistic landscape and ensure that competition in the airline industry serves the public interest. 

The scarce presence of budget airlines in Canada, such as Spirit Airlines or Ryanair in the U.S., also means consumers don’t have a choice but to reach deep inside their pockets and pay inflated ticket costs. While ticket prices are steadily declining after a surge during the pandemic, prices remain 10 per cent above what they were in 2019. Post-pandemic, two of Canada’s few budget airlines—Lynx Airlines and Sunwing—both ceased operations with Lynx Airlines shutting down and Sunwing being absorbed by WestJet. Swoop, another low-cost Canadian airline, had a similar fate and was absorbed by WestJet a few days after Sunwing. 

With the time constraints associated with long-haul intercity bus services and our rail system’s continuous shortcomings, flying has become the only viable option for many travellers to reach their destinations. As of recently, Air Canada has plans to take over the Canadian rail network by joining forces with the French rail company SNCF to build a long-awaited high-speed electric train corridor between Windsor, Ontario and Québec City. Instead of seeking new business ventures as an attempt to expand its monopoly, Air Canada should focus on improving client experience. This is especially true after the airline ranked at the bottom in a recent survey on customer satisfaction, with Spirit and Frontier, two budget airlines, being the only carriers ranking lower for economy class. 
To break free from this monopolistic hold, the federal government must take swift and decisive action to encourage competition in the Canadian airline industry. Interventions like blocking anticompetitive mergers and promoting the growth of budget airlines could provide travellers, including McGill students, with more affordable and diverse travel opportunities. As McGill’s student body increasingly looks toward travel for respite or reconnection, it’s time for Canada to open its skies to better options.

Commentary, Opinion

Good enough: CoComelon and our toxic quest for self-improvement 

by Luken Castaneda Garces on

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I, like many others, feel a constant need to improve myself. When many kids hit puberty, they hear a voice in the back of their minds telling them they can be smarter, funnier, cooler, more cultured, and more attractive. This voice says there are endless possibilities regarding what they can achieve. One must only set their mind to it, and it can be theirs. For the past 10 years of my life, I and some of my friends have lived this way. We find something we don’t like about ourselves and work obsessively hard to change it, and then the cycle repeats itself. What’s more, this obsession has infiltrated our leisure time. We’ve been living as machines, by treating ourselves as some kind of software that we can endlessly update—but that is not a sustainable or enjoyable way of living. True growth and self-love arise when people embrace their limitations as human beings and accept that they are good enough as they are. 

Living in a cycle of self-improvement makes people unhappy because they always feel like they’re falling short. Many over-achievers and academically curious people on university campuses such as McGill have a drive to acquire enormous amounts of knowledge. However, these endeavours often stem from a place of insecurity of not being “intellectual” or not sounding “smart enough,” rather than a genuine pursuit of truth. Compulsively listening to audiobooks while cooking and podcasts while working out for the sake of being productive evoke a sheer sense of shame regarding the pursuit of guilt-free pleasure. People watch classic movies and read classic books because they find them beautiful, but also because they know they’re acquiring cultural capital while doing so. This mindset diminishes the simple pleasures of daily life and fosters a sense of constant inadequacy, making it difficult to truly relax and savour life, generating a deep-rooted feeling of dissatisfaction. 

However, this dissatisfaction evaporates once people come to accept their own limitations and allow themselves genuine pleasure without the constraints of self-optimization. On a recent podcast episode of The Ezra Klein Show, the host grapples with the idea of pleasurable entertainment and educational value. In the episode, Klein and author Jia Tolentino discuss the kids’ show CoComelon. CoComelon gets a lot of scrutiny from parents because the show essentially does not provide any educational value to its viewers—mostly kids ages 0 to 4. Tolentino suggests that while parents’ concerns might be well-intentioned, they externalize their obsession with self-improvement onto their children. Consequently, kids grow up believing they must optimize their free time, which leaves no room for simple pleasures such as CoComelon. Demanding this sort of productive leisure from children leads them to grow up thinking they will never be good enough, and therefore, must keep improving themselves even in their spare time.

McGill students can reap enormous benefits from adopting a healthier relationship with pleasurable leisure time. Full-time students have always been at a high risk of burnout, but those risks have skyrocketed ever since the COVID-19 pandemic. Juggling five classes, a part-time job, working out, and a social life is no easy task; so, adding a self-imposed pressure to remain productive during our spare time is a refusal to attend to our human needs. If you feel like binge-watching Bridgerton instead of reading Dante’s Inferno because you are too mentally tired, your body’s signaling to you that it needs that. It is not an act of laziness to occasionally succumb to pure pleasure and self-enjoyment. In fact, it is a political act by refusing to equate an individual’s self-worth with how productive they can be. 
Self-improvement is not a bad thing. There is value in growing and bettering oneself, and having this collective growth as students benefits our community. Nonetheless, this behaviour becomes destructive when it becomes so pervasive that it dominates every aspect of our lives. Let’s embrace a kind of fun that is unconstrained from 21st-century capitalist pressures, and accept that we are good enough as we are.

McGill, News

Professor Johnathan Flowers discusses ableist algorithms in virtual lecture

by Russel Ismael on

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Professor Johnathan Flowers of California State University, Northridge gave a virtual talk entitled “Ableist Algorithms and Digital Disability” as part of the “Disrupting Disruptions: Feminist Publishing, Communications and Technologies” speaker series on Sept. 11. Organized by professor Alex Ketchum of the McGill Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (IGSF), the series explores the intersection of feminist studies, technology, and history.

Flowers’ talk centred around the ableist connotations of discussions around AI. He began by discussing the recent controversy surrounding National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a non-profit that connects writers with each other for support in crafting a novel. The organization was criticized by the public after it encouraged writers with physical or cognitive disabilities that impair their writing to use AI if they need it. Flowers argued that this upholds ableist structures through what is called a “technocapitalist disability rhetoric,” where disabilities are seen as problems to be solved through technology, which undermines the personhood of disabled people.

Despite the world becoming more AI-driven, Flowers continues to caution against the extensive use of this technology, arguing that it perpetuates oppressive practices. He argued that AI is a product of “technoableism,” the idea of technology as a means of eliminating disability, instead of addressing the systemic issues disabled individuals experience.

“The increasing integration of algorithmic technologies into our daily lives not only relies on structures of ableism in society, but imposes new ableist social and political structures through their everyday applications,” Flowers explained.

Flowers described AI as a ‘political technology’ in the same sense that Langdon Winner, a political theorist, describes all technologies. Winner’s work states that technologies are inherently political, as they can create or reinforce existing social orders. Drawing from Winner, Flowers emphasized that AI is mired in ableist and colonialist roots, and that referring to it as an ‘algorithmic platform’ is more appropriate since ‘AI’ conceals the power dynamics at play.

“The term ‘artificial intelligence’ implicitly enables the ableist, eugenicist, and racist purposes to which these technologies are routinely put—to be perceived as unmitigated goods and advancements in society,” Flowers explained. 

Additionally, Flowers stated that since the discourse surrounding AI is often centred on the technology itself, it often ignores the benefits it has for people. He used the example of Phonak, a hearing aid company, and explained that the company stated their latest hearing aids were the first of its kind to adopt AI technology.

“The [Phonak] advertisement positions the advances in technology as the primary focus of the description, rather than the material benefits it may bring to disabled persons,” Flowers said. “This reframing relies on a milder form of technoableism that positions algorithmic technologies as the future solution to ‘problems’ of disability.”

Computer algorithms perpetuating ableist structures is a familiar concept to Ketchum, whose research focuses on how marginalized groups respond to digital technologies. She noted that algorithmic ‘gatekeeping’ can affect academics who produce and disseminate feminist scholarship in digital spaces.

“[O]ne issue is that some major academic journal publishers announced that they are selling their database of articles to train AI—a labour issue, an environmental issue, and also (though legally contested) a copyright issue,” Ketchum wrote to The Tribune. 

Ketchum proposed that feminist publishing and communications can resist ableist algorithms by opting out and not using generative AI. 

Jeremy Frandon, a PhD student in Information Systems Engineering at Concordia University, noted that “AI objectivity” is shaped by the datasets it uses, potentially embedding systemic biases.

“Research groups try to gather data that represents the real world and that is free of sampling bias, but creating a quality dataset is such a challenge that some papers are published just to present a new dataset,” Frandon wrote to The Tribune.

For Flowers, it is crucial to pay attention to the motivations of those who created AI technologies, as well as the biases within the technologies themselves.

“We must attend to the political and social purposes that motivate the introduction of these technologies, rather than simply try to understand the technologies themselves.”

Off the Board, Opinion

The revolution will not be memeified

by Dana Prather on

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Memes make the world go round. Well, not exactly, but they certainly helped me get through my summer internship. Between the stress of research projects and meetings, I found respite in scrolling through my Instagram Explore page and grinning at jokes that the pilgrims would have found incomprehensible (if not explicitly blasphemous). 

 During one of these breaks, I stumbled upon a post from @OfficialMcGillMemes that had gone viral. Without getting into the nitty-gritty, the meme used a format from the animated film Inside Out that likened developing class consciousness in response to seeing the McGill senior administration’s ballooning paycheques to the characters discovering a new emotion. I stopped to read the post. I chuckled. I heaved a frustrated sigh at the situation. Then I moved on, not thinking twice about the meme or its McGill-related subject matter.

It’s safe to say that much of the McGill student body is familiar with memes about the university—how else would we preserve crucial institutional memory if not through videos of Flood Girl, photos of the Lettuce Club, or screenshots of our esteemed administration’s online blunders? But this particular post seemed to have popped the McGill bubble and spread to far-reaching corners of the internet; rather than garnering the account’s average of 300 or so likes, or even their previous personal best of nearly 1,400, this post boasts over 15,000 likes as of this article’s publication.  

Using humour to cope with difficult situations is nothing new, particularly for Gen Z. As the first generation to grow up with phones at our fingertips, many of us are accustomed to getting some or even all of our news from social media platforms. When you consider that we are bearing witness to countless atrocities and abuses of power through our phones in real-time, every day, it seems like the only option is to resort to humour or risk losing all hope. 

Still, seeing how the niche account’s Pixar-inspired meme had gone semi-viral gave me pause. Why did this post in particular resonate with people? Not everyone who liked the post currently goes to or has ever attended McGill, but surely many have. If even a third of those people were students who organized a protest or circulated a petition against McGill’s decision to raise senior administrators’ salaries while neglecting AGSEM members’ right to a living wage, the potential for shifting the status quo would be enormous.

Social media has given us the freedom to engage by reposting an aesthetic infographic or commenting under a topical meme, then letting these movements go out of sight, out of mind when we put our phones down. The actions suggested above are undeniably more strenuous and emotionally-taxing pursuits than engaging in online activism, but they are well worth it. The remedy for despair is direct action and community-building, not memes.   

It should be stated that this is as much a critique of my own hypocrisy for engaging with more political memes than tangible activism as anyone else’s. If I had gone to half as many rallies as I had scrolled through satirical Onion articles about the ongoing siege on Gaza or chuckled at a post calling out McGill’s overreliance on the police, I probably wouldn’t be writing this. However, as I was reminded by a chant at a recent student rally, “We keep us safe.” The only way we effect change is by showing up for each other offline and fighting for it.  

Silly as it may sound, coming across this post was the reminder I needed that sitting on the sidelines never leads to progress. Attend a rally. Sign a petition. Stand up against injustice in the ways you know how. Memes can be an effective way to start a conversation, but they can’t be the end of the discussion. Sure, you can argue that it isn’t that serious. But unless our memes are accompanied by concrete action, the joke will still be on us, whether we’re in on it or not. 

McGill, News

QPIRG launches paid membership program for non-McGill students

by Mairin Burke on

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The Quebec Public Interest Research Group at McGill (QPIRG) is rolling out a Community Membership program this fall. Although only McGill students were previously eligible for membership at QPIRG—a grassroots collective concerned with anti-oppressive social and environmental justice—this new program will allow those in the greater Montreal community the opportunity to connect more deeply with the organization.

QPIRG offers a variety of services such as Rad Frosh, event series such as Culture Shock and Spring Into Action, and access to an Alternative Library and a free textbook loan program. Any McGill student who has paid their student fees for the semester, including the $5 CAD opt-outable QPIRG fee, is automatically a member of QPIRG. Although membership was previously reserved for McGill students, QPIRG’s programming has always been open to the general public. 

The new Community Membership program has introduced two tiers of non-student enrollment: A basic annual membership option, which is equivalent to a student membership, and a “Friend of QPIRG” option. 

The basic membership, which operates on a pay-what-you-can model with a suggested fee of $10 CAD, entitles the holder to printer access for 500 political posters and 100 personal prints annually, a reserved copy of the planner and resource guide that QPIRG publishes every year, and a membership card. The “Friend of QPIRG” option, priced at $15 CAD, further entitles purchasers to a QPIRG tote bag, a personal thank you postcard, and “bonus surprises throughout the year.”

Nelly Wat, QPIRG’s full-time Outreach and Promotions Coordinator, explained that the organization began to consider implementing a non-student membership system as early as February 2024 to address their increasingly limited finances. Citing a rise in the cost of resources, Wat stated that QPIRG has had to cut the budgets of their Working Group, which are collectives that undertake research and action through organizing around a specific social justice issue. Current working groups include The Black Healing Centre, Solidarity for Palestine’s Honour and Resistance (formerly Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights) at McGill, and The Trans Patient Union. QPIRG has also had to indefinitely suspend discretionary funding opportunities for small-scale projects to keep their external services available. 

“As long as we’re able to address this budget crisis we’re in, [our] events will remain free,” Wat said.

Nhuan Dong, a non-student member of QPIRG who also sits on the organization’s board, told The Tribune that the new membership program also seeks to increase QPIRG’s connection with the community. 

“We have been having financial issues with operational costs […] and also were trying to find a way to re-engage with non-student community members in a more meaningful way so that people feel they are really a part of [QPIRG] instead of loosely connected.”

As a McGill alumnus (BA ‘24) who was employed by the QPIRG Alternative Library during his time as a student, Dong expressed how meaningful QPIRG continues to be in allowing him to maintain connections and seek personal development opportunities. Dong noted that the organization was especially important in supporting him in transitioning from the university to the workforce.

Wat echoed this sentiment, explaining that the membership model will only provide a small supplement to revenue and is more about heightening McGill students’ awareness of what the QPIRG entries on their Minerva statements contribute to.

 “Community members access our services for free. They don’t pay a fee levy to QPIRG, but students do. So [this] would level the playing field […] and help students realize they get a lot for their dollar.”

In an email to The Tribune, Carl Bystram, another representative from QPIRG, added that the fee increase would draw students’ attention to the financial contributions they provide to the organization through student fees while promoting their services.

“We hope that the membership campaign will encourage them to learn about our events, campaigns, programs and services, and to hopefully directly benefit from the organization that they have helped to build,” Bystram wrote.

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Suppart Collective hosts art showcase in support of the Mohawk Mothers

by Fabienne de Cartier on

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Singers, poets, visual artists, and members of the broader Montreal community gathered at Bar Milton Parc on Sept. 12 for a fundraising art showcase in support of the Kanien’kehá:ka Kahnistensera (Mohawk Mothers), who are currently involved in an ongoing lawsuit with McGill and investigation into possible unmarked graves on the site of McGill’s New Vic Project. The event was hosted by Suppart, a collective of eight organizers who host weekly showcases with local artists to fundraise for various causes.

Suppart is a non-hierarchical, consensus-based organization, whose mission is to champion young artists and promote social change. In addition to the Mohawk Mothers, the group is fundraising for the International Solidarity Movement, the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, and Comm-Un. Suppart founder Maddy Hay told The Tribune that she sees community-building as the key to fostering social change. 

“The dream was to create a consistent safe space where young artists and friends could come together to support each other and the causes,” Hay said.

Suppart began fundraising for the Mohawk Mothers this summer. Since 2015, the Mohawk Mothers have been working to prevent construction at the former site of the Royal Victoria Hospital (RVH), where McGill seeks to build their New Vic Project. On the site, the CIA and Canadian government ran the MK-ULTRA mind control and chemical interrogation experiments from the 1950s to the 1960s, which allegedly disproportionately targeted Indigenous youth. The Mothers believe there may be unmarked graves at the site and have been advocating for a comprehensive investigation. 

In April 2023, the Mohawk Mothers reached a settlement agreement with McGill, the Société québécoise des infrastructures, the RVH, the City of Montreal, and the Attorney General of Canada, which mandated that a panel of archaeologists appointed by all parties support archival, testimonial investigations, and archeological work at the site. However, after the panel disbanded in August 2023, various hearings have ultimately left the panel dissolved. In the latest decision on Aug. 17, the Court of Appeal of Quebec ruled that the panel would not be re-established as the Superior Court of Quebec had ruled in November 2023. 

In a written statement to The Tribune, the McGill Media Relations Office (MRO) highlighted that, although the panel would not be re-established to direct excavation work on the site, the recommendations the panel made in their July 2023 final report remain in force. Moreover, the MRO noted that, as per the panel’s recommendation, an archaeologist will monitor excavation on McGill’s section of the site in the fall of 2025, when excavation work is scheduled to begin.

Karonhia’no:ron, who performed poetry at the event, is a McGill graduate student who joined Suppart through their work with the Mohawk Mothers. Karonhia’no:ron explained that the latest ruling represents a loss for the Mothers and spoke to the importance of fundraising for them in the wake of the decision.

“The funds are important […] because the Mothers are not represented by lawyers. So whenever there is a decision in favour of McGill or Quebec, it’s at the cost of the Mothers,” Karonhia’no:ron said. 

Karonhia’no:ron also noted that, in addition to raising money, the showcases they host aim to promote social change and awareness through community building. 

“It’s a great way to not just have more people know about the Mothers, but have more people that know each other and support each other,” Karonhia’no:ron said.

Poet Robin Warren—who goes by the stage name Rusty—performed at the event and echoed Karonhia’no:ron’s sentiment, stressing the sociopolitical power of art. 

“One of the things that interests me about Suppart is that they blend art and activism together,” Warren said. “Art has always been at the forefront of political action [.…] [When you] start listening to other people that write, you can feel their hurt, you can know what they’re hurting about, and you can better understand [their] issues.”

A previous version of this article stated that the CIA and Canadian government ran MK-ULTRA experiments on the site of the former Royal Victoria Hospital from the 1950s to the 1970s. In fact, the experiments ran between the 1950s and the 1960s. The Tribune regrets this error.

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