It is easy for some to give in to a knee-jerk response to the Idle No More movement and regard it as a petty squabble over access to federal funds, or to look at Chief Theresa Spence’s four-week ‘hunger strike’ of water and fish broth, and see no hunger strike at all.

Right or wrong, this focus misses the point. Idle No More has grievances beyond the realms of funding, many of which are reasonable. The movement suffers from a marketing problem, namely a terrible spokesperson in First Nations Chief Theresa Spence. Although charges of corruption and embezzlement in the Attawapiskat First Nations community she leads have not been proven. Nevertheless, Spence’s fiscal management of her community to economic catastrophe, despite annual federal grants of more than $15 million, makes the entire movement vulnerable to ad-hominem attacks.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s omnibus Bill C-45 is the root of these protests. In his typically authoritarian manner, Harper has melded together a number of policy proposals into one behemoth piece of legislation. This has discredited media scrutiny of the unsavory aspects of the bill, and has restrained the ability of Conservative Party backbenchers to vote with their conscience. MPs against policies that would deteriorate environmental protections, for example, may vote for them if they are bundled with legislation that would benefit their own constituencies.

Lorraine Land, partner at OKT Barristers and Solicitors and a specialist in environmental and Aboriginal law, has made a list of the aspects of Bill C-45, along with other current Canadian legislative proposals, which negatively affect Indigenous peoples. While some of these points are tenuous, it is undeniable that Harper’s policies will have a negative effect on the environment.

Bill C-45 itself has scrapped environmental assessments required for the construction of infrastructure projects on bodies of water for the vast majority of Canada’s lakes and rivers, opening them up to potentially harmful practices. Bill C-38, another Harper omnibus bill, proposes a wider range of detrimental changes to environmental policy. These include increasing the ease with which Canadian companies can dump waste into the ocean and decreasing protections for a number of endangered species. An exhaustive list can be found on the website of the Green Party of Canada.

Environmental protection is highly important for most Indigenous peoples, whose histories and cultures tend to emphasize a spiritual connection to nature. Idle No More goes beyond environmental grievances, however, and centers on the sense of being left out by the government from decisions important to those affected. Bill C-428, for example, another recently proposed piece of federal legislation, has made fundamental changes to the Indian Act of 1876 with little to no consultation with the Indigenous peoples. When they speak about feeling overlooked or invisible, they are being absolutely sincere.

Many may argue that Canada’s Indigenous peoples, often seen as government-reliant, do not deserve a bargaining position equal to that of Ottawa. This may be a fair point, but Harper’s actions have a pattern to them. His attempt to run roughshod over Indigenous opinion in matters directly impacting them fits right in with his two prorogations of Parliament, his consistent suppression of scientific research, and his funding cuts to public organizations that dissent from the Conservative Party orthodoxy.

Changes to Canada’s environmental regulations may turn out to be necessary for its economic growth. All members of society tacitly accept the need for some trade-off between preserving the environment and attaining economic growth—even Canada’s Indigenous peoples. There is an increasing number of First Nations who agree to share in the profits of ventures that exploit the natural resources of their reserves, a trend that began with the Fort McMurray First Nation in northern Alberta.

The Idle No More protests, however, will force greater scrutiny in the changes proposed by the Conservative Party of Canada and will spark a public debate on the extent to which we are willing to accept those trade-offs. It is certainly refreshing to see Canada’s Indigenous peoples stand up and provide a roadblock both figuratively and very literally to Harper’s authoritarian style of governance.

Last December, we saw a very different side of the Parti Québecois and the students that helped vote it into office than we came to know in 2012. Elected on the shoulders of the student movement, and a recent advocate of accessible education, the PQ struck a major blow against the same issues it once stood for with its plan to cut $124 million in university funding. The students, meanwhile, have watched this happen with little coherent response. The Tribune decries the government’s evasive and dishonest behaviour, and urges students and administration to come together in opposition.

This move represents a sudden departure from the government’s stated priorities. Its new budget, released on Nov 20, bore no mention of any cuts, only championing the end of the tuition hikes. Two weeks later, the government revealed sizable cuts without any warning to students or schools. This reversal indicates a thorough disrespect for students and student issues, as well as a willingness to use these issues for political gain. In Sept 2012, with the election on the line, and student movements engaging as relevant political actors, the PQ heralded education as a top priority. Now, with a budget blasted by opponents, and a need for fiscal responsibility, education is the first to face cuts.

As for the students, whose response to last year’s planned tuition hikes started out as a rumble and built to a roar as protest after protest took to the streets, this new development has been met with near silence. Some major student groups have spoken out against it, but no cohesive plan of action has emerged.

The student reaction was also hampered by the placement of the announcement late in the year, as most schools were in the midst of exams, or finishing up for the holidays. Especially in light of the ongoing government advocacy for accessibly education right up until the announcement, its timing should be seen as strategic. This has severely limit reaction to and discussion of the issues surrounding these cuts.

Those opposing the tuition increases cited concerns for accessibility of education. While higher tuition does make education available to fewer people, these cuts will, indirectly, have the same adverse effect. When McGill’s budget was passed last spring, under the assumption that the tuition hikes would take effect, a substantial portion of the school’s revenue from the additional tuition was to be put towards student financial aid and emergency assistance. These are the sorts of investments a school can make when it has money. Conversely, when budgets are cut, the first things to go are those which most directly impact students.

One explanation for the lack of outrage now is that the budget cuts don’t take money directly from students’ pockets in the way a tuition hike does. However, it is important to remember that the net outcome is the same. A smaller budget means that a school is able to provide fewer services and a lower calibre of education. While the amount that we are paying may not be higher, the value of what we are paying for is diminishing. Whether the cuts are reflected in student services and resources (such as advisors or Service Point), facilities, libraries, or directly to the classroom, it is once again the student who loses out.

Among the greatest differences between this and the events in the spring of 2012 surrounding the tuition hikes is that students and the administration are now aligned in their interests. These budget cuts are bad for the university community as a whole, and to see them rescinded should be a universal priority. It is the administration that is in the best position to do this. Our Board of Governors includes members who carry enormous influence both within and outside of the university. Although some of these individuals’ presence on the board has been a point of tension between students and administration, they are well-placed to advance the school’s cause. As an institution, we carry political clout. McGill can make a difference, and it is from the top that it can most efficiently effect change.

The Board has already passed a motion denouncing the budget cuts, and Principal Munroe-Blum has been vocal in her opposition to the cuts. These are a good foundation, but we need something more. We need to see a message sent to the government that education must be prioritized, and educational institutions will stand up for themselves, even if it will not. If there has ever been a time for the university to take action and speak on behalf of each and every one of its members, that time is now.

A large part of the difference in the policy prescriptions that we see from the Left and Right can be attributed to the logic they apply to political and policy problems. In terms of social issues, we see that those on the Right tend to frame problems within an absolutist moral framework, and anything that falls short of this standard is vigorously opposed. An obvious example is the insistence of the American religious right on “abstinence only” sex education, on the grounds that teaching contraceptive use would promote immorality. Those on the Left, meanwhile, tend to frame the same social issues in terms of “harm reduction.” That is to say that even if you don’t like teenagers having sex, or people using drugs, these things are happening; therefore we should teach contraception, or have safe injection sites, because the best intervention the state could engage in would be to reduce the harms of the activity, as opposed to vainly trying to eliminate them altogether.

Ironically, when we shift to environmental issues, we can see the more absolute moral framework being applied by left-wing activists.

The recent spate of campaigns by left-wing campus groups to get universities to divest from companies linked to climate change have occurred on campuses across North America, including McGill. On our campus, from General Assembly (GA) resolutions to petitioning university administrators, students have argued that McGill, as an institution that has shown commitment to sustainability, should not invest any of its money in companies or financial institutions involved in natural resource extraction.

The problem with these campaigns is that whether or not divestment will actually produce any changes in the behaviour of these companies is at best, a secondary consideration. The text of the resolution put forth at the Fall GA shows a document rooted mostly in normative argumentation, with many appeals to McGill and SSMU’s (Student Society of McGill University) stated principles on the environment. This is in many ways falling into the trap social conservatives fall into when advocating against harm reduction strategies. They focus on the moral stand their own actions are making against the societal wrong, with little consideration of how this stand affects overall occurrences of the wrong; if company X continues to exploit the environment after divesting, their logic seems to be, ‘at least we removed our money and can clearly say that we aren’t playing a part in it.’

This sort of stance is certainly respectable in the abstract, but is dubious in the real world. If you take a stand against investing in a company, or stock portfolio based on whether or not they derive profits from activities you find socially objectionable, where do you draw the threshold? How do you quantify the level of social harm, and decide who loses money accordingly? It may be easy to say that the oil rig operator is engaged in an unethical activity that should be divested from, but what about the bank that financed the drilling expedition? The company that built the drill? A close reading of the SSMU GA divestment resolution—which passed in the Fall GA as a consultative body—would suggest that there is no threshold. The resolved clauses push for divestment from companies involved in the oil sands, and “other companies that have negative impacts on their social, political, economic and environmental surroundings,” which is an incredibly nebulous standard; any company larger than a ‘mom and pop’ business can be construed to have some “negative” impact on its “surroundings.”

The flip side of the coin, and the real problem with a divestment strategy is that, by removing university stock from any or all of these companies, the university also removes its main means of direct influence over their activities. Publicly traded corporations respond first to their shareholders, and the likelihood that the public attention generated by university divestment will make companies change their behaviour more than any action universities as shareholders could take is dubious at best. Public outcry has limited and brief effectiveness as a tactic against the actions of large corporations.

So when we look at the issue of divestment, we must question the logic behind it. Are we simply trying to register our own opposition to a social harm, or will our action tangibly reduce the social harm? Being able to say that you aren’t a part of a social harm has little real value if your action does little to change the behaviour of the actors that matter.

This Christmas Day, my family found ourselves in the Old City of Jerusalem, the historical intersection of the world’s three great monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Although we are Jewish, we walked to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to see what Christmas was like at one of the religion’s holiest sites. On the way, we ran into a priest from France, who gave us directions to the church. As we parted, he left us with a blessing: “I will see you all again in Heaven. Not just in the real Heaven, but in the heavenly Jerusalem.” The experience that day was indeed close to heavenly, walking from such a holy Christian site, to the Kotel or Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism while hearing the muffled sound of the muezzin—the Muslim call to prayer—emanating from the al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest shrine in Islam.

The peace of that day led me to reflect that despite the friction and constant upheaval in this most coveted of lands, there was a feeling of an unlikely tolerance above it all. Yes, later that day, we read reports of an Ultra-Orthodox Jew fighting with an Armenian priest, and breaking his 16th-century cross; later, stories came out of conflict between Palestinians and soldiers of the Israel Defence Forces in East Jerusalem. From my perspective, however, that day was noticeably calm, and the tolerant words of the priest stuck with me.

One memory from before my trip kept re-entering my mind. It was the story of a fellow McGill student, Alex, who’d had an opposite experience—not in the Middle East, but in McGill’s “safe space.” Sitting in the Redpath cafeteria during the most recent flare-up of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Alex—wearing a kippa, or skullcap—said he was accosted by a group of students wearing black-and-white checkered keffiyehs, the symbol of the Palestinian resistance movement, who he had not provoked. One of the members of the group pointed to Alex’s kippa and then drew his finger across his throat, a universal symbol. Regardless of whether it was serious, Alex saw this as a death threat. According to Canada’s Criminal Code this was a crime, inspired by his religion. It was a hate crime. Like Arab and Muslim students who are unfairly targeted and branded as ‘terrorists’ due to baseless hatred and ignorance, Alex experienced something that we cannot accept.

It is particularly troubling that a hate crime occurred on our campus; and not only did no one do anything about it, no one knows about it. We don’t know about it because Alex did not know where to go, and did not think he could actually achieve a positive resolution or be treated fairly because he was on “the Israeli side.”

We cannot let events like this go unnoticed nor unmentioned. “We” here takes three separate meanings: I personally use the word “we” as a member of the campus media; a member of the Jewish community; and a member of the broader McGill community. When we see hate, we must stop it. When we experience hate, we must report it. And when we believe that something is fundamentally wrong, we must take action against it.

From a media perspective, we need to remember that fair and honest reporting does not involve pretending that all sides are right, and steering away from controversy. This case of anti-Semitism should have been reported, as should other acts of hate be they against women, homosexuals, people of other races, or anyone else. If students are not forthcoming, as in this case, it is our job to find these stories, to write them down, and to make them known. If one student like Alex cannot tell his or her story to every student at McGill, a student journalist can.

From a Jewish perspective, “we” as a community must re-find our voice. For decades, Jewish students were known as activists who took on causes they believed were right and made a difference. The movement to help Soviet Jewry escape from the galvanized Jews on campus was successful. Jewish leaders marched with the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement in the ‘60s. Today, many of us shy away from controversy, and we let things slide, rather than take up a fight that might be difficult. Apathy has never been part of our culture. This includes the fight against anti-Semitism, but our values go beyond our own people. “We” must pursue justice and prevent hate not just against our own people, but wherever it takes place in the world.

Finally, from a campus perspective, “we” not only need to be more tolerant, but we also need to be more accommodating of everyone who experiences hate and discrimination, on all sides of a given issue or conflict, despite what the media decides to report. Alex did not know where to turn to find help, he felt like he was alone. Students should know that there is a welcoming, comforting place to tell their stories regardless of their political views. The equity complaints process and resources such as the McGill Counselling Service and the Legal Information Clinic (just to name a few) need to be better publicized so as to be used by anyone who needs help. Based on the prevailing campus rhetoric on the Arab-Israeli conflict, Alex felt that he would not have received fair  treatment. If we claim that McGill is a safe space where everyone is heard, we cannot apply a double standard. Picking and choosing is not justice.

Regardless of which category you fall into, as you return to class this semester, ask yourself if you are as tolerant as you think you are. Ask what you do to promote and preserve justice. Take up a cause that you believe is right and fight for it. Others may disagree with you, but do not be deterred. When we all do that, our campus will be as peaceful as the visions of the French priest in Jerusalem on Christmas Day. Let’s make that happen in 2013.

Two notable Liberal missteps in the past couple of weeks have enflamed regional tensions in Canada. First, MP David McGuinty apologized and resigned from his post as natural resource critic, after suggesting that Conservative MPs with regionally-based views on energy policy should “go back to Alberta.” Shortly thereafter, Justin Trudeau’s similarly disparaging comments from 2010, which pointed the finger at “Albertans who control our community and socio-democratic agenda,” resurfaced.   Though Trudeau promptly issued an apology, all of the comments in question—and the reactions they elicited—demonstrate a willingness by politicians to play up ‘East-West enmity.’ If continued, this rhetoric will certainly prove harmful to Canada’s national unity and democratic effectiveness.

Party politics in Canada, though not as polarized as in the United States, have long been a vicious game, and parties are relentless in their attacks across the aisle. While the nature of our multi-party system somewhat tempers this, the influence and tactics of American politics continue to bleed into our political culture. We’ve seen this recently in Justin Trudeau’s consultations with Obama advisor Mitch Stewart, and in the increased presence of overtly partisan media outlets, such as those under the Sun Media umbrella, often referred to by critics as ‘Fox North’.

The divide between East and West in Canada is nothing new, either. Its defining moment came with Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s National Energy Program (NEP) in 1980. Intended to help the struggling East by regulating oil prices, the economic meltdown that it caused in the West resulted in immense cross-country hostilities. The West’s subsequent caustic slogan, “Let the Eastern bastards freeze in the dark,” is a telling indicator of attitudes at the time.

If the comments in dispute seem to point to continuing friction today, the Conservatives’ responses to them only affirm this tension. Even the Prime Minster joined the pile-on, declaring it “shameful that 30 years after the National Energy Program, these anti-Alberta attitudes are still close to the surface in the Liberal Party.”

In reality, a certain amount of regional party divide is natural. The purpose of parties is to value the priorities of their constituents, of which will align better with the experiences and interests of certain regions than others. As such, Alberta’s alignment primarily with the federal Conservative party isn’t entirely unfounded nor is it the source of impropriety here. What’s problematic is that members of the Opposition propagate a view of Alberta or ‘the West’ as their adversary. Likewise, responses to this—that paint the entire East as resentful of Alberta’s oil wealth and seeking to disadvantage the West—are both misguided and misleading to voters on both sides.

[pullquote]All of the comments in question—and the reactions they elicited—demonstrate a willingness by politicians to play up ‘East-West enmity.’ If continued, this rhetoric will certainly prove harmful to Canada’s national unity and democratic effectiveness.[/pullquote]

Canada is a federalist nation, whose leaders are elected from provinces each possessing a level of individual autonomy and competing values and interests. This makes it even more imperative for the role of federal representatives to be to unite the country by its common interests, not to divide. This is not just a matter of political principle, but of federal well-being.

At its core, the message propagated here is not just that certain parties only represent the interests of certain regions, but that they actively pursue policy detrimental to other regions. If people were to take this message to heart, and vote solely based on understood regional divides, the issues would no longer matter. Elections would essentially become a foregone conclusion, with the winner being whichever party most successfully instills the electorate’s mistrust in their opponents.

Parties would no longer be held to the same level of accountability by the electorate, nor would they have any real desire to accommodate to the needs of regions that did not elect them. Assessments of regional estrangement would quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. At best, this amounts to a huge obstacle to electoral legitimacy; at worst it, it would amount to a total circumvention of democracy. In any case, it is not an acceptable outcome.

Political leaders of all stripes need to step up, take accountability when they speak rashly on such matters, and behave graciously when their opponents do the same. Most of all, they need to stop pitting Canadians against one another. Partisanship and posturing have their place and time; but these must ultimately take a backseat to the ongoing sustenance of a united, healthy Canada.