Dear editor,
Re: “CSU’s New Food and Clothing Bank” (editorial, Sept. 30). As a concerned member of the Concordia community I think that the comments made by the anonymous editorialist were both arrogant and disturbing.
The Concordia Student Union’s mandate is to protect students’ rights and provide services that make their time at Concordia a little easier, so they can focus on the important things – like studying. In the lead up to last year’s CSU election campaign our executive team perceived the need for a service that provided students with food and clothing to help them through times of financial difficulty, yet which avoided the bureaucracy of Concordia’s financial aid office. We ran on a platform that included the food and clothing bank prominently. We received very positive feedback throughout the campaign and students voted for it. Once in office we conducted thorough research on other successful food banks and came up with a sustainable project that had one goal: to help students in need, now.
For The Concordian’s editorialist to imply that the majority of students have access to funds from their parents, and that these funds are “just a phone call away” displays a serious lack of respect for our student body. Though the editors at The Concordian may have endless funds available via their parents, assuming that nearly 30,000 people are in the same situation shows just how arrogant and out of touch with students they really are.
What is even more disturbing is the claim that Concordia students are part of a very small group of Canada’s “elite.” Perhaps it is too much to ask of the writer to remove the pink lens through which they see our university and recognize that so many of our students have to work long hours at part-time jobs to pay for their education on their own.
If our students are part of Canada’s elite group of wealthy children, then how does one explain the student loans epidemic where students find themselves in more and more debt as they work their way towards completing their degrees. In fact, if the author had bothered to do any research at all they would have found that average student debt in Canada has tripled since 1990 and has risen to $25,000. The most unsettling thing found in this editorial is not that the writer seems to be living in an alternate universe, wherein students are not in debt to the tune of thousands of dollars, as a result of a severe lack of government funding for post secondary education; rather, it is that a service that is meant to make studying at Concordia a little more accessible by offering students a little bit of help is called cynical and unnecessary.
I think it is clear to the students of Concordia that the only thing which is cynical and unnecessary here is the editorial itself.
Elie Chivi
VP Communications
Concordia Student Union
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Dear editor,
Regarding Andrew Haig’s opinion piece, “Portrait of the artist as a welfare bum,” (Sept. 23):
While it may be true that the Conservative government has followed cutting certain Arts & Culture (A&C) programs with more funding to the Canada Council, the National Gallery and the National Arts Centre, this is only half the story.
Heritage Canada is divided into two mandates: A&C, and Participation and Sports. The Conservative party increased funding to the latter mandate, prioritizing programs such as the Olympics and language training, over the former mandate -which has, in fact, been cut by five per cent.
Furthermore, a Canadian Conference for the Arts study has revealed the Conservatives’ underreported figures set aside by the Liberals for A&C. And after Parliament’s dissolution in 2005, they simply attached the difference onto their budget, making it appear as though they were the more generous party (with the federal surplus they inherited).
The recent cuts to acquisitions funding and increased shipping costs to and between museums can only translate into fewer exhibits and privatization. If the public is not concerned about their publicly funded institutions, it will end up with publicly sponsored advertising campaigns, such as the Walt Disney (March-June 2007) and Yves Saint-Laurent (May-Sept. 2008) exhibits at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
A&C injected $46 billion into the economy last year and this cultural scene is as important for the seven per cent of Canada’s workforce engaged in its production, as for the growing and demanding IT and knowledge sector that is seeking a thriving cultural community to adopt. Delivering the beast of A&C under the schooling of government is a recipe for propaganda, historical revisionism and corporate cultural hegemony.
It might have been plausible to argue that Harper’s cutting certain arts programs was pragmatically motivated, if it didn’t happen within a general context of public censorship and cynical political ideology regarding the purpose of culture, freedom of expression and access to information.
Beginning with his stint in the National Citizens Coalition, the ideological pro-Reagan/Thatcher lobby group, Harper supported things like privatizing the CBC and suggested in 2004 that many of Canada’s A&C programs were merely entrenchments of the Liberal party of Canada (according to Howie West, in a chapter titled “Harper’s Museum and Art Gallery Policy” in the book The Harper Record, recently published by the Centre for Policy Alternatives). Harper’s policies, thus far, are still pointing to a particular social agenda that appears to benefit from, if not deliberately intend, a cultural and informational vacuum.
Further evidence that this agenda of morality and public censorship is the goal of Harper’s government lies in the list of other programs cut as soon as the Conservatives received their mandate, such as the Court Challenges Program, Status of Women Canada, Coordination of Access to Information Requests System (CAIRS), as well as suing Elections Canada and pressuring Auditor General Sheila Frasier to submit to PMO approval and veto of her press releases. The end of CAIRS in particular must trouble Mr. Haig, or it should, as the Canadian Association of Journalists seems to think it is bad.
To respond to Mr. Haig’s assertion that the art establishment is no more suited to judge art than a politician: César Sa
