Author: Gregory Todaro

Mediation leads to undisclosed financial settlement and task force

Eight months after a local human rights organization filed a complaint with the Quebec Human Rights and Youth Rights Commission on her behalf, Concordia student and former Arts and Science Faculty Association executive Mei Ling—a pseudonym used to protect her identity— reached a settlement with ASFA on Thursday.

The Center for Research-Action on Race Relations (CRARR), which has represented Mei Ling since the complaint of discrimination and harassment based on her race and gender was filed in March of this year, agreed to enter mediation with ASFA.

“The reason that mediation was chosen between ASFA … and myself is because ASFA is a nonprofit organization, a student organization with changing leadership,” said Mei Ling at a press conference on Monday. “That means that there’s a very high turnover rate and new people, ideas and values come into ASFA every single academic year. We felt that there was a lot of potential there in order to really create these institutionalized changes and prevent future harm.”

During her mandate as an ASFA vice president, Mei Ling discovered a Facebook conversation between two male executives which used offensive, racist, misogynistic and sexually graphic and degrading language directed at her.

In the original complaint, CRARR was asking for $30,000 in moral and punitive damages. The settlement included an undisclosed amount of monetary compensation and an official apology from ASFA, but also required the establishment of a task force to review violence and discrimination against women and minorities in student associations and university bodies and the ways complaints on this topic are dealt with in the future.

While ASFA President Jenna Cocullo didn’t disclose the amount of monetary compensation for Mei Ling, she said that the amount wouldn’t cause any major financial problems for the organization.

“Even if [money] was a concern, our priority is getting justice for Mei Ling,” she said. “Also, since there was not that many executives this past semester, a lot of our budgets for the fall haven’t been spent so there’s going to be leftover money.”

Members of CRARR who worked on the case spoke about the importance of the outcomes of Mei Ling’s complaint.

“[We] believe that the outcome of our case will help change public debates and actions regarding sexual violence on campus in Quebec,” said CRARR community organizer Brandy deGaia.

“As a law student at McGill University, I hope this case affects the revision and finalization of McGill’s impending sexual assault policy and I know that it’ll possibly affect my school community as well,” said Yuan Stevens, who also worked on the complaint.

ASFA was given six months to create the task force. The mandate is to “address issues raised by this complaint,” and “develop and implement measures to ensure that members of the ASFA and Concordia community, and women in particular, can learn, work and be involved in campus life free of civil rights violations and violence in all its forms,” according to a statement from CRARR released Monday.

CRARR and Mei Ling said they want the task force to be made up of both members of the Concordia community and outside experts who represent Concordia’s diverse population.

“It’s not about me,” she said. “It’s about supporting an idea and a solution for this kind of problem.”

Since she launched the complaint earlier this year, Mei Ling told The Concordian that she hadn’t been contacted by anyone from the university since she filed her complaint. “The fact that Concordia hasn’t reached out to me to this day means they don’t really care,” she said.

While Concordia spokesperson Chris Mota couldn’t confirm if anyone from the university had reached out to Mei Ling, Mota said, “If we can, in any way, shape or form be involved [with the task force], it’s something we would consider.”

While this complaint against ASFA has been resolved with this settlement, the complaints against the two former executives is still under investigation by the Quebec human rights commission.

Three different events outside French consulate in Downtown Montreal

Thousands of people flooded McGill College Avenue over the weekend in response to the attacks that killed 129 people in Paris on Friday.

Over three days, vigils and marches were based around the French consulate in Downtown Montreal. Candles were lit in memory of the victims and attendees carried signs, French flags and sang the French national anthem. The attack in Paris was the second terrorist attack in two days, following Thursday’s attack in Beirut, Lebanon that killed 44 people.

The first gathering took place Friday night. The first of seven attacks in Paris happened at around 4 p.m. EST—9 p.m. local time in France—and by 10 p.m., around 200 people were outside the consulate in Montreal for the first of three events.

An even larger vigil with more than 1,000 people took place Saturday afternoon.

On Sunday, Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre led a march of more than 1,000 people from Place des festivals to McGill College Avenue. He walked arm-in-arm with French Consul General to Montreal Catherine Feuillet, Quebec Minister of International Relations and La Francophonie Christine St-Pierre, federal Minister of Canadian Heritage Mélanie Joly, Coalition Avenir Québec leader François Legault and other political representatives.

After a minute of silence for the victims, Coderre spoke in French to the crowd. He spoke briefly, highlighting the importance of everyone standing together against acts of violence—including the Daesh attack which killed 40 people in Beirut on Thursday.

“At this rally today, Montrealers of all origins and religions are expressing their deepest sympathy and solidarity to those closest to the victims and everyone affected by violent acts,” he said.

“I spoke with my good friend and colleague [Mayor of Paris] Anne Hidalgo yesterday,” Coderre added. “I also spoke to my friend Bilal [Hamad], who is mayor of Beirut. I told them that Montreal stands in solidarity with them … and that together we will work to ensure a high quality of life.”

Feuillet spoke after the mayor.

“Since Friday, French people all over the world are standing united,” she said. “Here, Montrealers have been with us since the first second. We are deeply touched by the solidarity given.”

Thinking Out Loud series looks at journalism and human rights

“Turkey is a graveyard for journalists,” said veteran Turkish journalist Amberin Zaman, speaking to the crowd at a lecture in Concordia’s D.B. Clarke Theatre Monday night.

She described the influence the government of Turkey has over the firing of journalists, where hundreds of journalists across the country have lost their jobs because they’re either seen as critical of the government or aligned with a group the government finds threatening.

This is what Turkish media is coping with said Zaman during the Thinking Out Loud lecture.

Zaman, along with Kyle Matthews, senior deputy director of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia were guest speakers at the A Conversation About Journalism and Human Rights talk. The lecture was moderated by foreign editor for The Globe and Mail Susan Sachs. The talk, which was also co-presented by the Austrian-based International Press Institute, focused on what Zaman calls “unremitting and sustained” suppression by the government on Turkish media.

Zaman herself was fired from the Turkish newspaper HaberTurk after publishing articles against the government.

“[The Turkish public] are no longer privy to critical views of the government, so all you have is propaganda,” she said. “What’s also troubling is that now the government is also targeting the Western press … now foreign journalists who write stories that make the government uncomfortable can face expulsion—as did Fréderike Geerdink, a Dutch journalist recently who was prosecuted in fact prior to her expulsion on terror charges.”

“Every single year while my colleagues in the Western press are getting ready to renew their press accreditation [in Turkey], they really worry, ‘will I be accredited again this year?’” Zaman added. “They feel that pressure very intensely. To what degree will that influence their reporting, I wonder?”

When Sachs asked Zaman if she felt her own reporting was influenced by this, Zaman replied, “I’d like to think no.”

Zaman was personally targeted by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan last year: he called her “A militant in the guise of a journalist,” and told her she needed to “know your place.”

“I think it’s very frightening when you see a state that … has full political power and still feels obliged to actually pressure businesses and private media to toe the line,” said Matthews. “It’s a spiral. How do you get out of that?”

One possible outlet is Twitter; Zaman said that the social media platform is especially popular with younger Turks. In 2013 during massive protests in Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park, the hashtag #direngezi was trending.

While social media has allowed people to get and share information Matthews said the Turkish government is trying to exert it’s influence online as well.

“In Turkey, we have seen that social media platforms have been shut down numerous times,” he said. “It turns out that 60 per cent of requests to Twitter to shut down accounts or posts … came from the Turkish government.”

However, Matthews also said that social media can greatly empower individuals.
“I think for authoritarian governments [social media is] the one thing that drives them nuts,” he said. “They try to shut down Twitter, they try and shut down Facebook but they can’t control it … I don’t think the 21st Century is going to be very kind to control freaks because you can’t control the flow of information. They can shut down cell phone access, they can shut down the internet, but there are so many new technologies being introduced to allow individuals to bypass that.”

Activists say mining companies are using “divide and conquer” tactics

Guatemalan investigative journalist Luis Solano gave a presentation at McGill University on Thursday concerning the ways mining companies use militarized security strategies to silence resistance. At the talk, organized by the McGill Research Group Investigating Canadian Mining in Latin America, Solano spoke about Tahoe Resources, a Canadian-based mining company, and how their tactics have caused violence and conflict.

Solano, whose words were translated into English, said mining in Guatemala began to take off in the mid-1990s after the end of the country’s civil war. He said that in order to create incentives for companies to develop in Guatemala, the government—along with mining companies looking to operate in Guatemala—reformed the country’s mining act and reduced royalties from six per cent to one per cent. Canadian companies were quick to apply for mining licenses from the government and then find companies who could carry out the work on the ground.

“In 2007 it all moved into the hands of Goldcorp … it is one of the companies that is most implicated in human rights violations in our country,” said Solano. “2010 saw the founding of a company called Tahoe Resources with shareholders and capital from Goldcorp.”

Tahoe Resources’ Escobal Mine project in southeastern Guatemala is around 1,300 sq. km—twice as big as Toronto—making it the third-largest silver mine in the world. In 2013, Solano said the communities within the boundaries of the concessions handed out to companies decided to start holding community consultations.

“About 90 to 95 per cent of the population … has said no, we don’t want these projects,” he said. “But the government and the mining company were never willing to accept these results.”

He said there is fear in the communities that the land and water will be contaminated through the mining process. The area around the Escobal Mine uses farming and dairy production as its largest forms of economic activity so contamination could destroy their only way of making a living.

Solano said despite the peaceful nature of resistance to these mining projects, the government and the mining company started to consider it dangerous resistance.

“Because it’s resistance that could actually put a stop to the mining project, there have been moves made to characterize it as terrorist resistance,” he said.

The government and the company have responded with both public and private security agencies, Solano said. “This has led to a series of military operations that is designed to put an end to this peaceful resistance. What they want to do is infiltrate the resistance movement, charge certain people with crimes, kidnap people, slandering leaders, illegal detention and also attempting to divide the communities to better divide them and do away with this resistance.”

Solano said these tactics were designed by International Security and Defense Management (ISDN), a U.S. Army defense contractor with a track record in intelligence and counterinsurgency.

Solando said there is a co-responsibility between governments, armed forces and transnational companies in the repression of human rights in Guatemala.

“All of these actors are also responsible for the divisions created among the people, and what’s happening with Tahoe Resources is a pattern you see worldwide,” Solando said.

Community-University Research Exchange is hosting Radical Research Week

A week-long event looking to highlight the importance of work done by community grassroots movements kicked off at Concordia Monday.

Radical Research Week is hosted by Community-University Research Exchange (CURE), part of Quebec Public Interest Research Group (QPIRG) at Concordia, a group which works to connect students to community-driven social justice research through grassroots organizations in Montreal.

“It grew out of this undergraduate community-driven research conference that QPIRG puts on every year called Study in Action,” said CURE coordinator Cassie Smith.

CURE works to pair students with research projects organized by community grassroots organizations.

The first-ever Radical Research Week consists of workshops, panels, art exhibits and film screenings to show how students and community members contribute to knowledge production—even if it isn’t recognized by academic institutions.

On Monday, Radical Research week kicked off with a free lunch with the People’s Potato. Later that day was an exhibit showing art related to social and environmental justice and a collective piñata making workshop where participants create a piñata based on something that bothers them as a group. That piñata will be destroyed later during the week as a cathartic group experience.

Other events include a community roundtable with representatives from 10 different community groups, a panel discussion on technology on feminist technologies and a Radical Campus Tour to learn more about radical activism projects around Concordia, both past and present.

On Thursday, the keynote panel discussion about grassroots knowledge, hosted on the seventh floor of the Hall building, will feature Indigenous activist and artist Ellen Gabriel, Black feminist Robyn Maynard and co-founder of Montreal-based FemHack Anne Goldenberg.

“[The keynote] really draws in the idea of community-based social justice research from a variety of perspectives,” said Smith.

CURE will be requesting to become its own fee-levy group at the Concordia Student Union byelections later this month. Smith said allowing the group to become independent from QPIRG would allow CURE to hire coordinators and increase the number of events they hold.

“We don’t have the budget to have a stable coordinator, they’re always hired through … some sort of short term grant,” said Smith. “Some semesters we don’t even have a coordinator.”

Smith also said the fee levy would allow CURE to triple or quadruple the number of students working with grassroots groups each year. Currently, around six students take part in a CURE project each year.

“As an undergraduate student, I think it’s really easy to be on auto pilot or feel like what you do is just for some degree requirement but doesn’t really go beyond that,” Smith said. “I think [CURE projects] are really important for students because it validates that work you do as useful.”

“You don’t have to have a PhD to do amazing research,” she added. “Instead of writing papers that get read by your professors then shoved into a drawer someplace, you can do work that actually goes outside the walls of the university and benefits whole communities.”

To learn more about CURE and Radical Research Week, visit curemontreal.org.

Concordia student part of 2015 Arctic Youth Ambassador Caucus

Concordia anthropology student Andrew Fitzsimmons left Ottawa on Oct. 29 for a five-day trip along with 30 other members of the 2015 Arctic Youth Ambassador Caucus.

“Early in the morning, we got up, grabbed our bags, and flew up to Iqaluit,” he said.

The caucus was organized by the Canadian non-profit organization Global Vision. Fitzsimmons and other ambassadors from Southern parts of the country met with leaders and youth ambassadors from the North to discuss problems the North is facing such as food security and climate change and come up with potential solutions for those issues. This caucus also hoped to bridge the gap between the two communities.

After landing in the capital of Nunavut, the caucus met with the territory’s legislative assembly.

“They were in session,” said Fitzsimmons. “We were actually recognized by the assembly, as well as the education minister [Paul Quassa] … and the Premier [Peter Taptuna].”

From there, the group went to Inuksuk High School to visit with government leaders on food security.

“One of the typical issues you hear often about in the North is food prices,” Fitzsimmons said. Other than increasing the subsidization of food, one potential solution could be to find a way to increase traditional hunting practices.

“More and more youth live a life just like ours,” he said. “It’s hard to schedule hunting with things like school when you have a five-day-a-week school schedule.”

“Hunting is also very expensive,” Fitzsimmons added. “There’s costs of traveling … bullets, time to practice, and then you need to know how to process the food.”

The group also discussed the possibility of creating a “family partnership” where a family in the South would send food up to a family in the North in exchange for traditional knowledge, stories and any goods they wished to send.

Later during the trip, the caucus met with the territory’s education minister, Paul Quassa. Fitzsimmons said Nunavut is currently considering building a university. Canada is currently the only northern country without a university in the arctic, Fitzsimmons said. He also said the territory is still working on improving its education program.

“They’re using the Alberta curriculum in Nunavut right now,” he said. “They have some mandatory, Nunavut-only requirements … but one of the goals maybe one day would be to have their own curriculum.”

Fitzsimmons also said other education issues include high school graduates’ lack of college preparedness and the territory’s relatively low graduation rate.

During their time in Nunavut, Fitzsimmons and the Southern ambassadors also spoke to their Northern counterparts about issues like the territory’s suicide crisis and issues exacerbated from climate change.

Fitzsimmons, who is in his fourth year studying anthropology, said this experience and his time as a co-op intern for Parks Canada has inspired him to continue learning and working with Canada’s North.

Thousands were on strike across the province on Thursday

Thousands of students assembled at Lineaire De La Commune Park in Old Montreal on Thursday to protest provincial austerity measures.

The march was organized by L’Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (ASSÉ) to coincide with strikes by the public sector, including teachers who are still negotiating their contracts with the province. Around 50,000 students across Quebec were on strike.

At Concordia, two undergraduate programs were on strike: the Liberal Arts Society (LAS) and the School of Community and Public Affairs Student Association (SCPASA). The Sociology and Anthropology Graduate Student Association (SAGSA) and the Graduate Philosophy Students Association (GPSA) were also on strike.

This protest is in the wake of the Oct. 29 announcement that the Quebec Government would be investing over $1 billion into Bombardier, who that same day announced a $4.9 billion third-quarter loss.

Students started gathering at the park at 1 p.m., then marched up St. Laurent Boulevard, working their way downtown and eventually stopping at the intersection of Ste. Catherine Street and Berri Street. Police in riot gear walked alongside the protesters for the duration of the march, which remained peaceful.

Event marks one-year anniversary of the BDS petition circulated at Concordia

The 2015 BDS Week started on Monday with its first lecture at the Hall building seventh-floor lounge. BDS, which stands for Boycott, Divest and Sanction, is a global movement to put pressure on Israel until it complies with international law and respects Palestinian rights.

BDS Week was organized by Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights Concordia (SPHR) and co-sponsored by the CSU and SPHR McGill to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the first petition about BDS passed around at Concordia. The week features daily events including presentations from lawyers, journalists and photographers.

Rami Yahia, BDS Week organizer with SPHR Concordia, said the event aims to promote the use of BDS as a nonviolent way to speak out against the occupation and settlement of Palestine.

“We also want to emphasize the international laws that are being broken by Israel,” he said.

While there are critics of the BDS movement, Yahia said the movement and SPHR Concordia have received a lot of support.

“We have a collaboration with the People’s Potato, we have Amnesty International collaborating with us,” Yahia said. “It’s just amazing.”

The BDS movement has also received support from the CSU as well as student unions, trade unions and NGOs across the country.

Indigenous and Palestinian struggles

BDS Week’s first event was a presentation by Clifton Nicholas, a documentary filmmaker and member of the Kanehsatake Kanien’kehá:ka Community. His presentation, called “Indigenous struggle in Canada and Palestine,” focused on the similarities between the indigenous struggle in Canada and problems currently facing Palestinians.

“The whole notion of an empty land open for exploitation is very familiar,” he said. “You hear the zionists notions of going to the desert and ‘making it bloom.’ It’s the same ideology that’s used here … these are the same arguments being used up to this day in particular with the tar sands.”

He also discussed how there are Palestinians who know Hebrew better than their own native language, similar to the way aboriginal children lost their language and culture through Canada’s residential school programs.

BDS Week continues until Nov. 30. To see a full list of events, visit facebook.com/sphr.official