Last Thursday, McGill’s Aboriginal Sustainability Program and the Sauvé Scholars Program hosted a talk by Louellyn White, who discussed her time studying the Akwesasne Freedom School as part of her PhD dissertation.

White, who is part Mohawk, is an assistant professor in First People’s studies at Concordia University. In the talk, she shared her experiences visiting the school and suggested that other schools could learn from its example of holistic cultural education. 

White first came to do research at the freedom school because of her interest in its Mohawk language immersion program. Soon, however, she became fascinated by the school’s unique approach to education. 

“The school itself is about so much more than language immersion,” White said. “It’s about cultural identity, self determination.”

The school is located on the Akwesasne reserve, which straddles New York State, Quebec, and Ontario. Akwesasne, which literally means “land where the partridge drums,” underwent a period of extreme unrest in the 1980s when a group of Mohawks set up a two-year barricade to protest the arrest of their people following protests against an imposed system of governance. 

During these two years, a group of parents decided to start their own school rather than send their children across the barricades to school. 

“They did it in the most grassroots of ways,” White said. “They used living rooms. They used garages. They used toolsheds.”

Today, 30 years later, the school still exists and has managed to stay true to its mission of providing an authentic Mohawk education.  

“The most unique thing about this school is that it’s self-sufficient,” White said.  “They’ve stuck with those original goals of self-determination and self-education.”

The school receives the majority of its money through fundraising. One of their biggest fundraisers is a quilt auction that can bring in as much as $20,000. The school owes much of its success to the dedication of parents and other members of the community. 

“There are parent committees for everything,” White said. “Parents have to be very, very committed … This is how it’s really sustained itself over the years … because it’s driven by this organic place. People are very immersed in it.”

The school itself is very small, with only 60-65 students at a given time, and goes from pre-kindergarten until grade eight. From Pre-K to grade six, all the students are in complete Mohawk immersion.  

During her time at the Akwesasne Freedom School, White learned that language is not the only way the school helps students regain their Mohawk identity.  

“When I talked to these students I said … ‘does language make you Mohawk?’ and the majority of them said ‘no,’ it’s ‘do I know my songs? Do I know my dances? Do I know my history?'” White said. “The language is important but it’s just one part of identity.”

White explained how the school cultivates values such as respect, responsibility, co-operation, leadership, and stewardship through this type of cultural education.

“I think other communities, non-native communities, can look at situations like this, at schools like this and see [a] culturally appropriate curriculum, grassroots experiential forms of education, [and] value systems,” White said. 

White spoke about the importance of self-governed Aboriginal education, especially in light of the fact that many Aboriginal people are still suffering from their experiences at residential schools. 

“Education is very important within the Aboriginal community,” Allan Vicaire, project co-ordinator on the Aboriginal Sustainability Project, said. “It is a topic that we continue to address to our youth, to educate oneself. I think that there is such a strong stance on education because of the realities that we live in.”

While the transition from Akwesasne to high school can be rough at first, White said that the freedom school students have better values and a stronger sense of their own identity than many students from other schools.  

David Searle, a McGill graduate in history and political science, in attendance enjoyed the talk, as did many others.  

“It’s really wonderful how they’ve integrated their local culture [and] their history into their education,” Searle said.

Alexandra Allaire / McGill Tribune

Last Thursday, McGill’s Office of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) held an event for staff to introduce the new MyCourses software, which will replace the current system on May 1, 2012. The old software, WebCT Vista, was implemented in 2005, but its vendor will no longer be supporting the outdated program as of Jan. 2013. 

Ghiliane Roquet, McGill’s Chief Information Officer, explained that this need for new software also presented opportunities to upgrade its features. A majority of the upgrades are intended to make it easier for instructors to disseminate information, from course-related materials to announcements.  

“We want to be able to provide [staff and students] with a stable environment … with at least a parity of what you have now—and hopefully a lot more,” Roquet said.  

The software selection process included software demonstrations on campus and opportunities for staff and student feedback. Finally, Desire2Learn (D2L), a Canadian e-learning company located in Waterloo, Ontario, was signed to a 3-year renewable license to supply McGill with a new version of the MyCourses software. 

Some new features of the software include a completely new look, the introduction of widgets, and a revised discussion board that can link up to specific content on MyCourses. The discussion board is the most used feature on MyCourses by students, tallying nearly 33 million hits per semester. There is also a new option for staff and students to have a display picture that will then show up on discussion boards and class listings. 

Elan Weinstock, a U3 student in the faculty of management and part-time employee with McGill’s IT services, described the two features that he is most looking forward to using: its central calendar and the mobile platform. The mobile platform, he argued, will ensure that students will be overall better informed. 

“When an announcement comes out … it will be sent to me [in] real time to my cell phone,” Weinstock said.  

He added that students will be able to opt into that feature. 

Additionally, the software’s calendar application will now make note of students’ assignments, exams, and quizzes. Students will then be able to “subscribe” to their MyCourses calendars and import them into their personal calendar applications, such as iCal or Google Calendars.  

Staff are working hard to ensure that the software is operational on schedule. The 4,000 courses that take place during the typical school year—fall and spring semesters—are currently undergoing migration to the new interface, at an average pace of two and a half hours of labour per course. 

“There has been a lot of work involved with converting everything from the old system to the new system,” Roquet said. “All courses for the summer have already been migrated.”

The outlook for the software’s use is positive. The staff and few students who attended the event were generally very receptive of the presentation. 

“It’s a time saver,” Carolyn Samuel, a professor in the faculty of education and the McGill Writing Centre, said. 

Provost Anthony Masi, who Roquet referred to as “the sponsor of the project,” emphasized the impact that the new software could make on the McGill community. The switch, he emphasized, is first and foremost in the interest of students. 

“We want to put an effort on the ‘student-centeredness’ of this institution,” Masi said. “We produce new knowledge, and we disseminate it, and that requires that we stay at the front of technological innovation.”

“It should enhance the learning experience of students in all faculties,” he added. 

Students like Weinstock are optimistic about the software. 

“In the test environment, it worked fine,” Weinstock said. “I am expecting it to work really well.”

On Feb. 22, McGill University and the Association of McGill University Support Employees (AMUSE) announced that they had come to a tentative agreement on both the economic and non-economic issues affecting casual workers at the university. The proposed agreement, which needs to be approved by a ratification vote at AMUSE’s next major meeting, includes provisions for wage increases, paid overtime, and sick leave, as well as modifications to the existing hiring and firing process for casual labourers on campus.

According to a press release by McGill University, this will be the first collective agreement for AMUSE, which represents roughly 1,500 casual labourers on campus. These negotiations took a year to complete.

“Something that we keep in mind is that a lot of the advantage to holding a casual position is that it can be a short-term thing … and you’re looking for flexibility in that job a lot of the time,” Jaime Maclean, current president of AMUSE, said.  “But there’s also a lot of inequality between positions on campus, and without a labour union to police the working conditions of their members, an employer can easily take advantage of their employees.”

Maclean, however, was quick to state that while McGill hadn’t been taking advantage of their casual employees, there were still problems in wage equality and job demands that emerged some years ago, leading directly to the creation of AMUSE and the beginning of collective bargaining.

“While there are obviously people who just work once a week and don’t mind that, there are a large number of people who work full-time at McGill in the same jobs as MUNACA workers,” Farid Attar, former president of AMUSE, noted. Attar is also a member of the bargaining team that negotiated the agreement with McGill.

Attar added that AMUSE aims to maintain this flexibility for the employees who benefit from it, while also increasing job security, benefits, and general working conditions for employees who have put four years of their life into their work.

AMUSE’s bargaining committee was elected at their first general assembly in Nov. 2010, whereupon they attempted to draft the terms of the initial agreement. It wasn’t until March 2011 that serious back-and-forth negotiation began. Bargaining on the non-economic issues continued throughout the year until they were finally resolved in Dec. 2011. On economic issues, however, bargaining quickly reached a stalemate, requiring both parties to call for conciliation.

Altar explained that conciliation brings in the government as a neutral third party, in order to introduce a fresh perspective and restart negotiations. 

In this agreement, some of the benefits gained in the non-economic sphere included written contracts, paid sick days for full-time workers with six-month contracts, priority for AMUSE members for contract renewals and promotions, and paid overtime.

More thought was put into considering wage increases, with the membership of AMUSE categorized into three main groups, each of whom are going to see minimum wage increases under this agreement, as well as minimum yearly increases, with the first increase scheduled for the signing of the agreement. For those workers who are already paid above the minimums mandated by the agreement, there is no danger of losing wages.

“People have to come to the ratification vote,” Attar stressed. “Ultimately it’s not the bargaining team who decides, it’s the membership that gave us the mandate to bargain with McGill­—if you want those wage increases, if you want those job securities, you’ll have to come to the ratification vote … during that time, we’ll answer all the questions they have.”

The ratification vote for AMUSE’s collective bargaining agreement is tentatively scheduled for mid-March, with one session to take place in the afternoon and one at night.

On Feb. 29, SSMU hosted an open forum for students to discuss the Quebec student movement mobilizing against proposed provincial tuition increases. The event offered students a venue to ask questions and gain some clarity on the issues, such as the driving forces behind the movement.   

“I feel like often people think that the only issue is the rise in tuition fees, but don’t understand the full impacts and the ideological problems behind that—the real reason why people are actually fighting for this,” Joëlle Shaw, an honours art history student, said.  

With a 20 person turnout, the forum had a range of students in attendance from the faculties of science, arts, and education, and included international, in-province, and out-of-province students.  The discussion aimed to be a safe space for people to offer perspectives and share opinions on what students felt were some of the core issues at hand. Joël Pedneault, SSMU VP External Affairs, led the discussion.   

“We need to talk about how us going on strike will strategically make the student movement support us more,” Pedneault said. “The question is, how we can put these discussions into practice and actually begin to mobilize and get involved with the student movement?”   

From accessibility of education and government subsidies, to the distribution of loans and bursaries, students tried to understand the sources of the call to action.    

“I think that there is certainly a division between people who support the strike and those who want free education, and those who [simply] want accessible education … I think that’s a distinction that is not made enough,” Shaw said. “I want to pay for tuition and I don’t think education is a right, however I think that as a society it is our duty to ensure that the privilege of education extends to as many people as possible.”  

What came to the forefront of the debate was the number of discrepancies and differing perspectives surrounding the student movement. From numerous sources of information, stories were varied and student concerns were many. However, one thing that remained evident was an invested interest and desire on the part of students to learn more about the present issues affecting the community.     

Although several faculty student society constitutions do not specify the quorum needed for strike votes, some students argued that the typical quorum of 150 students would not be representative of the student body. 

“We aim to have many times [that number] in attendance, as many students as possible, to make the GA as representative of the AUS membership as possible,” Kevin Paul, U3 arts, said. 

The forum then moved to discuss the position the McGill student body holds within the provincial, national, and international context, and the university’s contribution to the discussion of provincial tuition increases.  

“Because we are the university with the most non-Quebec Canadian students in the province … it puts us in a dangerous situation where we may start pitting Quebec students against non-Quebec students, exacerbating existing tensions in the Quebec student movement,” SSMU president Maggie Knight said. “We should be thinking to build bridges instead of divide students.”   

“These issues need to be discussed and I think if we refuse to discuss those properly then we’re doing ourselves a disservice and provid[ing] unnecessary polarization,” she said.

Victor Temprano / McGill Tribune

On Feb. 16, McGill’s Office of Sustainability held the third of four Sustainability XChange sessions, discussing the McGill community’s impact on climate change and ways to reduce its overall carbon emissions.

Jerome Conraud, an Energy Manager at McGill, opened the session with a presentation on McGill University’s level of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for the year 2010.

Currently, definitions of the scope of emissions are not finalized, and many categories of emissions are loosely defined, leaving room for interpretation. Conraud emphasized that his office is examining the process.

Conraud stressed that McGill’s greatest burdens on the community-at-large are “scope one” emissions  which include emissions from heating, ventillation and air-conditioning systems (HVAC), refrigerants, McGill-owned vehicles, and livestock. These emissions cause over three fourths of McGill’s total emissions making them the most environmentally damaging.

“If [emissions are] “scope one,” then we are directly responsible, and we should report on that,” Conraud said. “The goal is to show that we are a good part of the community.”

Emmanuelle Lapointe, a visiting faculty member with McGill’s faculty of engineering’s school of architecture, explained that McGill requires distributors of construction materials to make information about their impact available to McGill via the Internet. This measure increases accountability when planning campus-wide renovations or construction projects.

“All distributors of construction materials who provide to McGill … can go on that website and input their products,” she said. “It gives us their environmental and health [risks].” 

Lapointe added that McGill reuses as many materials as possible.

While various federal, provincial, and municipal governments require in-depth reviews of McGill’s GHG emissions, the university has also cultivated ties with other schools in reporting to various environmental NGOs. Conraud added that he hopes to present a review— one more thorough and accessible than all others—for the McGill community.

Kathleen Ng, McGill’s Environmental Officer, argued that the provincial government, which provides McGill with the majority of its funding, increasingly makes the job of the Office of Sustainability more difficult as McGill’s environmental performance consistently exceeds provincial expectations.

“Because our operating budgets for electricity are given by the Ministry of Education, and we do not use all the money allocated, they cut our budgets,” Ng said.

In addition, while the university continually decreases its ecological footprint at a minimal cost, McGill has had to search for cheaper energy. A number of attendees raised concerns after viewing Conraud’s presentation over the sources of energy used by the university.

“Approximately 50 per cent of all the energy we consume [comes from] fossil fuels, and the answer [to why that is the case] is that it is cheaper … Some students were promoting carbon neutrality, but that would be expensive,” Conraud said. “McGill as an institution and a community needs to define what our goals are.”

Ng underlined the need for student intervention. McGill staff seek change in the McGill community, but students, she said, who carry the most weight, rarely participate in discussions.

“We used to have a committee on the environment with students, staff, and faculty to brainstorm ways to keep the lines of communication open,” Ng said. “What we are interested in seeing is getting students engaged … towards finding alternatives to what we already have.”

As the university’s clients, she continued, students’ suggestions and concerns often carry more weight on campus than those from staff and faculty.

“Sustainability is everyone’s job,” Ng said.

On the morning of Feb. 16, students and other activists gathered outside the Montreal Stock Exchange to protest the privatization of public services in Quebec, including issues such as rising Hydro Québec prices, healthcare costs, and tuition fees. The protest culminated with police pepper spraying some of the the activists.

The activists united as one group under the title “The Coalition Against User Fees and Privatization of Public Services.” According to their website, the coalition is composed of 156 community organizations, unions, and student and feminist groups.

The group hoped to raise awareness for its causes by preventing employees of the stock exchange from arriving to work for the day. The protest began at approximately 8:00 a.m. and quickly spread from the front of the Montreal Exchange to the adjacent Delta Centre-Ville Hotel.

In front of the Exchange, a crowd of a few hundred students and other social activists held up banners and signs while chanting slogans, placing themselves in front of all entrances and denying entry to the building.

“We’re here to contest the raise in tuition,” a protestor from the Université du Québec à Montreal’s (UQAM) student union AFESH (L’Association Facultaire Étudiante Des Sciences Humaines) who requested to remain anonymous, said. “It’s about accessibility—we have a lot of parents at UQAM, and we’re fighting strongly for them so they can support their kids and have an education also.” 

The group was carrying a banner and had positioned themselves to block the entrance of the underground parking area connected to the Exchange.

“We want education to be accessible for everyone and that’s our main goal,” Anne Sarah Brian, a student from Collège de Maisonneuve, said. “We want the government to return to the fees of 2007.”

“We want the government to tax the natural resources of this country … it’s not a lack of funds. It’s the fact that the funds are not put in the right places,” Corinne Trubiano, another protestor, said. 

Around the back of the building, the situation was less peaceful. Many employees of the Exchange had been using the attached Delta Centre-Ville Hotel to reach their workplace, so protesters had blocked it as well. By 11:00 a.m. there was a tense standoff between police and protesters, with police cordoning off the hotel entrance from two groups of protestors who had gathered in the driveway.

“This is really where the main confrontation is,” McGill student Becca Yu said. “We’re hoping that by shutting down this building for the day, it’ll put pressure on the government to reverse these policies … without actually directly blocking the building, it’s so easy to just ignore a big crowd of people.”

By 11:30 a.m. the Montreal police decided to extend the cordon around the hotel in order to allow hotel guests to enter and leave. Starting on the right side of the entrance, they pushed protestors back out of the driveway so that guests, including a children’s hockey team, could leave the hotel.

At roughly 11:45 a.m. this tactic was repeated on the other side of the hotel entrance, but police met greater resistance and were actually pushed back by the crowd of protestors for some time. After addressing them through a megaphone, police used pepper spray to clear the protesters.

“They pushed us further and further away,” Dan Parker, coordinator of 99%, the official publication of Occupy Montreal, said. “Some of the more militant activists started pushing back and of course that’s when the pepper spray came out and people started running for it. Fortunately, there [are] medics here and they’re taking care of people with Malox.”

By 12:15 p.m., the protestors from the front of the Montreal Exchange joined those who had been blockading the entrance to the Delta Centre-Ville, and proceeded to march around the area, stalling traffic for a while.

“University is a good time [for students] to get involved, and especially to fight the tuition costs being raised,” Parker said. “I would invite all students to find out from their local organizations who are mobilizing around the tuition fees to find out how it relates to the privatization of our services … Education is a right, and we shouldn’t watch more people get more in debt and lose their access to education.”

Sam Reynolds / McGill Tribune

On Feb. 15, a group of Montreal activists called the Raging Grannies staged a singing protest at the Roddick Gates to condemn the asbestos industry’s influence at McGill. The Grannies sang about the harmful effects of asbestos and criticized the use of Canadian taxes to support projects like the planned reopening of the Jeffrey Asbestos Mine in Asbestos Quebec, which would facilitate the export of asbestos to countries where its use is not regulated.

“Fee, fie, fiddlie-i-o, our taxes have better places to go,” the women chanted.

They also condemned the asbestos industry with chants like “stop exporting death from Quebec!”

The protest follows anti-asbestos activists’  call for the removal of asbestos exporter Roshi Chadha from the McGill Board of Governors. Chadha took a leave of absence from the board in early February, following two letters to McGill calling for her removal—one from medical doctors and health care researchers and one from individuals who have lost family members from asbestos-related diseases. Chadha is the director of Seja Trade Ltd., a company that exported asbestos from the Jeffrey Mine in Asbestos, Quebec, until the mine’s operations were suspended last fall. Her public relations agent has stated that the company is not responsible for what happens as a result of the asbestos once it is overseas.

Elizabeth Vezina, one of the Raging Grannies, said that she was very concerned about what effect asbestos has outside the McGill and Montreal communities. Companies like Chadha’s export asbestos to developing countries like India, where the material is used for purposes such as cement roofing in schools. While the use of asbestos is outlawed in Quebec, there are no regulations stopping mining companies from exporting it elsewhere.

“There’s no such thing as safe handling of [asbestos],” Vezina said. “We’re sending it to countries that don’t have the same regulations as we do here. We’re spreading misery.”

The protest comes following demands for an independent investigation into McGill’s ties with the asbestos industry. In 1965, the Quebec Asbestos Mining Association (QAMA) partly funded the research of McGill Professor of Epidemiology J.C. McDonald on chrysotile asbestos, which makes up 95 per cent of asbestos sold in the world and 100 per cent of the trade in the past two decades. 

This research has been criticized for minimizing the negative health effects of asbestos, and for its continued use by lobbying groups to defend mining and exporting asbestos. Dr. David Eidelman, Vice-Principal (Health Affairs) and dean of medicine issued a statement about the controversy. 

“It is true that Prof. McDonald drew different conclusions about the possible safe use of asbestos than most authorities do today,” Eidelman wrote. “Holding scientific views that are different from those of the majority does not constitute research misconduct.”

Eidelman recently announced an internal investigation of the research, to be led by Prof. Rebecca Fuhrer, chair of the department of epidemiology. 

As an asbestos exporter, Chadha is seeking to reopen the Jeffrey mine, which provided more than half of the funds for QAMA before its activities were suspended last fall. However, there is strong opposition to the project. The Quebec Medical Association has stated that this project goes against public interest and will lead to asbestos-related deaths, and all of Quebec’s Directors of Public Health agree that the project will increase asbestos-related diseases.

Although plans to reopen the Jeffrey mine continue, Vezina feels encouraged by growing opposition to asbestos use in India.

“There are many groups in India working very hard to get the import banned, so once they get the mine up and running, hopefully they won’t be able to export [the asbestos] anyway,” she said.

While asbestos might not be a daily concern for McGill students, Vezina feels that it is nonetheless important for them to know what is going on at their university.

“Students have all kinds of things they should be standing up to; we really hope that your generation will start to make some differences. The corporations’ control over finances of the university and over the government is too much; we need to start saying no,” she said.

Lotfi Gouigah, a second-year graduate student in communication studies who observed the protest, agreed with the Grannies.

“I think it’s important to be graduating from a university that is not linked to big lobbies that influence its research findings,” Gouigah said. “We should make sure that research is independent. Students should take a stand.”

On Thursday, Feb. 16, the ‘Mod Squad’ formally convened for its first meeting to discuss the need for moderation in the face of rising campus radicalism. A movement initiated through Facebook by Beni Fisch, McKenzie Kibler, Harmon Moon, and Brendan Steven, the Mod Squad aims to work towards the restoration of a non-confrontational, peaceable atmosphere on campus and in the student body.

“After the ‘We Are McGill’ event, we realised that these radical students were more organised and more willing to be more spectacular in what they were doing, and the people who disagreed with them weren’t organised enough. And that’s when we started planning,” Moon said. “The James Building occupation sparked … massive support that we tapped into … This is the moment for the majority to stand up, and we’re riding the tiger on that and just not letting go.”

Many students voiced disagreement with the tactics of the recent occupation of the James Administration Building, which lasted from Feb. 7 until Feb. 11, and the ‘Mod Squad’ intends to lend a voice to what they call the “silent majority.” A diverse number of students attended the meeting, including elected Arts Representative Isabelle Bi and former SSMU President Zach Newburgh.

“I think it’s quite disrespectful that some people are hijacking the institution that I am proud of,” Jesse Kuri, a U3 political science and economics student who attended the meeting, said.

Introductory in nature, the meeting focused on defining in more explicit terms the direction of the organisation. Hoping to fundamentally differentiate themselves from the ‘Mob Squad,’ a student-run mobilization committee, the meeting discussed changing the organisation’s name to one that is more collaborative in nature than antagonising. It was continually stressed that it is not the motivation behind the ‘Mob Squad’ that’s considered misguided, but the tactics. 

The ‘Mod Squad’ discussed a more long-term goal of establishing a platform for open and reasoned discussion in lieu of confrontational tactics.

“We have to focus on bringing back a sense of calm. A lot of what has been going on in February, especially what happened in November too, [has generated] a sense of hysteria … that this is Egypt, that this is the Arab Spring … that we have to bring down the administration. This [organisation] is acting as a counterforce to that,” Moon said.

After raising concerns about the way a “vocal minority” monopolises debate at General Assemblies, the meeting also focused on a more representative and less “co-optable” SSMU.

“We want a more collaborative relationship with the administration … many people wouldn’t like occupiers to be on the SSMU council … Matthew Crawford [an occupier] is a senator on the front-line, representing the arts faculty, negotiating with the administration. Obviously this compromises his representative position,” Steven said.

Afterwards, the organisers expressed satisfaction with the meeting.

“I’m very happy with how this went. It was really good to get everyone in a room,” Moon said.

Attendees also expressed hope for what the movement could accomplish for the student body. 

“I just hope that once we have this dialogue going, we can let the student body know what we stand for, and offer an aspect of truth, a perspective amidst everything that’s happened,” a student who wished to remain anonymous said.