Tag: canada

Music

Top Ten : Outdoor music festivals

Post author By The Concordian
Post date March 6, 2012

If you’re like me, you’re already dreaming about summertime, and outdoor festivals go hand in hand with my season of preference.

10. Osheaga Music and Arts Festival; Montreal, Quebec, Canada – Of course, this list wouldn’t be complete without the mention of our own Osheaga Festival right here in Montreal. Held every year in Jean Drapeau Park on beautiful Ste-Hélène Island, Osheaga has been bringing together musicians, artists, and music and art lovers since 2006. Although the annual summer festie doesn’t boast on-site camping, festival-goers build a sense of camaraderie through the commute from downtown to the park via shuttle, bicycle or footmobile.

9. Exit Festival; Novi Sad, Serbia – Exit Festival keeps people up all night long with big name acts like Iggy Pop, the Beastie Boys, Snoop Dogg, M.I.A., Deadmau5, Portishead, Wu-Tang Clan, Bad Religion and tons more. What makes Exit different from other festivals? Firstly, it began as a student-initiated project against the Milosevic regime in 2000. Secondly, it has been hosted at the beautiful Petrovaradin fortress since 2001, and finally, the music doesn’t start until late at night, with musicians performing until dawn.

8. Rock al Parque; Bogota, Colombia – As one of the longest established festivals on this side of the Greenwich Meridian, this Colombian festival has been, well, rocking the park for 17 years. With that kind of longevity, you know it’s got to be good. The festival’s international and inter-genre flair sets it apart from other festivals that boast more mainstream or specialized genres. The three-day-long festie has hosted musicians from France, the Netherlands, Germany, Peru, Jamaica, El Salvador, Spain, the U.S. and plenty more.

7. SXSW Music Conference and Festival; Austin, Texas, U.S. – If finding new, emerging and upcoming music is your schtick, then SXSW is, hands down, the festival for you. For five days, over 2,000 musicians take over practically every venue available in Austin to showcase their talents for the festival’s 45,000 patrons, 2,941 media members, as well as an undisclosed number of industry bigwigs. In addition to non-stop live music, SXSW also holds musician workshops and conferences, and features big name speakers like Nas and Bruce Springsteen.

6. Big Day Out; Australia and New Zealand – This multi-city festival goes on tour every January, hitting up Auckland, Gold Coast, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth between the last week of January and the first week of February. Taking place in prime southern hemisphere summertime, the festival secures huge acts like Kanye West and Soundgarden, who, no doubt, are drawn to the festival to escape the cold and soak up some of that warm, golden Australian sun with up to 50,000 festival attendees.

5. Burning Man; Black Rock Desert, Nevada, U.S. – Burning Man is the most elusive festival in North America—maybe even the world. This week-long arid experience is so much more than a music festival, with many attendees left unable to explain their time at Burning Man. It’s more like an experiment that happens to include some amazing music and art. The temporary community is built upon “radical self-expression and radical self-reliance” with each year dedicated to a different theme (2011’s was “Rites of Passage”). There are no rules, and money is of no value. At the end of the festival, a giant effigy of a man is burned to the ground, hence the name of the festival.

4. Sasquatch! Music Festival; George, Washington, U.S. – Held every year in the awe-inspiring Gorge Amphitheatre on the Columbia River, Sasquatch! Music Festival’s four stages are graced by some of the biggest names in music. Foo Fighters, Death From Above 1979, Modest Mouse, the Flaming Lips, Kings of Leon, Nine Inch Nails and countless others have played during the four-day long festival, but tons of indie bands get their beginnings there, too.

3. Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival; Indio, California, U.S.– As one of the largest outdoor music festivals in North America, you’d better believe Coachella is a damn good time. While camping at the festival is the most popular (and arguably the best) way to experience Coachella, those who can’t live without their hair straighteners and who prefer to have daily showers also have the option of shuttling into the festival grounds from nearby Los Angeles. The festival is held over two weekends every April, so if one weekend doesn’t work for you, then you can catch the same acts the next weekend—or why not go to both?

2. Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival; Manchester, Tennessee, U.S. – So, I’m a little biased in placing this festival so high on the list—after all, I did meet my significant other here and if you ask me, I’ll tell you that my time at ‘Roo changed my life. Literally. Located in the heart of Tennessee, a mere 90 minutes from Nashville, Bonnaroo is an epic experience of music, art and community. With 80,000 campers, over 100 acts, including stand-up comedians, on more than 10 stages spread over 700 acres of lush Tennessee farmland, Bonnaroo will soon become your gospel.

1. Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts; Pilton, Somerset, U.K.– Although the beloved Glastonbury is not happening this year, its triumphant return is scheduled for 2013, and rightly so. As the largest outdoor music festival in the world, this festival has been rocking the masses since 1970, the day after Jimi Hendrix died. With over 40 years in the game, dozens of stages and upwards of 140,000 attendees, Glastonbury is the festival of all music festivals.

Tags 2012, Big Day Out, Bonnaroo, Burning Man, canada, Coachella, Exit Festival, Glastonbury, montreal, Music Festivals, Osheaga, Outdoor, Rock al Parque, Sasquatch, Summer, SXSW

Arts

So what’s up, docs?

Post author By The Concordian
Post date February 14, 2012

A scene from Håvard Bustnes’ Health Factory.

The 1980s may be remembered for Madonna, Tom Petty and Phil Collins—or are those the the Superbowl halftime shows of the past decade?—but it was also a turning point for the perception of government in both the United States and Britain. As the great (sarcasm) Ronald Reagan said, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
This ushered in a new paradigm of absolute and obsequious commitment to the market. America was built on competition, it was said, and its improvement was dependent on unfettered capitalism.
The market is a brilliant tool and an important facet of good democracies. But the overzealous commitment to wholesale privatization is deeply flawed. Competition amongst retailers and car makers forces innovation because these industries are based on consumer desires, and providing excellent products is a powerful incentive. These tenets are absent in other fields, the most obvious of which is health care, an industry based on need and trust.
The idea that government-run health care is a bloated bureaucratic mess comes from this era (which also brought us shoulder pads, big hair and Sixteen Candles), and it was the decade in which Britain and Norway partially privatized their health care systems, exemplified by Margaret Thatcher’s famous “hospital of my own choosing” speech.
Håvard Bustnes’ Health Factory documents the effects of this pseudo-privatization,where government funds create a faux market. In Norway, the state pays hospitals by the procedure; birthing a baby, for example, nets a Norwegian hospital 18,000 kroner. But should a slow-paced birth require a vacuum, the hospital pockets an additional 10,000 kroner. Needless to say, the threshold between “normal” and “requiring expedition” starts to wane fairly fast.
According to nurses in Norway, hospitals go as far as to chastise employees for an abundance of “normal births” in a given month.
A prominent Norwegian doctor sums up this state of affairs deftly: paying by the procedure incentivizes quantifiable items, shifting focus away from improving health. A hospital would rather treat 10 easy patients as opposed to five difficult ones, since the former has a better ratio of time to value. It also discourages the human side of health care. What value is there in holding someone’s hand who is in deep crisis, he asks, and how long do you hold on before it becomes unprofitable?
The obvious ethical issue of ranking patients by profitability aside, a hospital market isn’t feasible because healthy markets require informed consumers. Consumers chose VHS over Betamax because they could easily deduce the former’s cost-benefit superiority. This choice eventually drove Betamax out of existence (to the dismay of many picture-quality purists). But making this kind of decision about your health care provider requires knowledge of a much more esoteric nature. And, as is argued in the film, consumers don’t necessarily want choice when it comes to which hospital to go to; they just want good care. Competition, it seems, is not the golden goose the Iron Lady made it out to be.
Obviously, public health care has its own major flaws; Canadians know this well. The Big Wait addresses one of these: the inability of international medical graduates to practice medicine in Canada. IMGs, be they from Kenya or Serbia or India, arrive in Canada hoping to benefit from the country’s need for doctors. Owing to their degree and, for most, their experience, they can skip medical school but must pass the same licensing exams as new Canadian graduates. Then they must go through our residency program before becoming certified doctors, but this step represents a major bottleneck. All Canadian medical school graduates are guaranteed a residency; IMGs must fight for a handful of these positions. If they don’t snag one, they must wait an entire year before reapplying. Many languish in stopgap jobs for years before finally setting foot inside a Canadian hospital.
This logjam is driving many of these would-be doctors southwards, because the American private system is better equipped to offer a wealth of residency positions. For communities like Midland, Ont., where family doctors are rare and the walk-in clinic recently closed, the idea that trained doctors are being turned away is justly frustrating. Wait times are a national problem and more doctors are needed. Turning away potential fast-track doctors seems ludicrous.
The question, however, is whose warts are worse? Is inefficiency a worthy price to pay for a system incapable of prioritizing anything but need? Or is expediency something to covet above the risk of monetizing patients, which in itself may not be endemic to privatization?After these two films, you can at least say you’re informed enough to make an intelligent decision and, hopefully, have a healthy discussion. Just don’t pay by the word.

Health Factory and The Big Wait are showing on Feb. 20 at 7 p.m. in H-110. Visit www.cinemapolitica.org for more details.

Tags canada, cinema politica, Håvard Bustnes, health care, Health Factory, Norway

News

CFS marks 30th anniversary, prepares for new day of action

Post author By The Concordian
Post date November 29, 2011
3 Comments on CFS marks 30th anniversary, prepares for new day of action

Around 250 student delegates met in Gatineau for the four-day conference. Photo by Antoine TrÃ©panier/CUP

OTTAWA (CUP) â€” The Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) celebrated its 30th anniversary last week at its 60th semi-annual national general meeting held just outside of Ottawa. Nearly 250 delegates convened in Gatineau, QC to discuss student issues at the twice-yearly event, this time held from Nov. 22 to 25.

Feb. 1, Ã la rue!
Campaigns, budgets and executive reports were all debated and passed, but the overarching theme of the four-day-long conference was the upcoming national day of action on Feb. 1, 2012.

Keynote speakers Justin Trudeau, Liberal member of Parliament, and Nycole Turmel, NDP interim leader of the Official Opposition, both pledged their support for Feb. 1, much to the appreciation of delegates.

“This year is really defined by the national campaign,” said CFS national chairperson Roxanne Dubois.

According to the CFS, the Feb. 1 protest will be multifaceted, targeting the reduction of tuition fees, reduction of student debt and increased education funding.

For Dubois, two topics stood out at this year’s national general meeting.

“The ‘Education is a Right’ campaign and the day of action obviously are one, because we’ve actually been able to talk about it in various caucuses, and different constituency groups were able to identify some materials that would enable them to connect to the campaign more directly,” she said.

The second was the soon-to-be-launched “No Means No” website and mobilization to prevent violence against women in the lead-up to the Dec. 6 commemorative events in remembrance of the Ã‰cole Polytechnique massacre in Montreal in 1989.

Election of a new national chairperson
During closing plenary, delegates voted for their new national executive for 2012â€“13: the national chairperson, the national deputy chairperson and the national treasurer.

Candidates in each category ran unopposed and all were elected.

Adam Awad, current national deputy chairperson, and originally from the University of Toronto Students’ Union, will take the position of national chairperson. Jessica McCormick of the Memorial University of Newfoundland Students’ Union will become national deputy chairperson and Michael Olson of the Vancouver Island University Students’ Union will become national treasurer. All three will officially assume their new positions next spring.

“I’m actually really excited to have such a diverse [team of] at-large members … I’m really excited to be able to work with three incredibly strong provincial components and to bring the lessons that they’ve learned from the different parts of the country and I think it’s really important to not just have an Ottawa-centric, and Ontario-centric, perspective on how to get the message out,” said Awad on his election.

“I’m really excited to be able to continue working past this year, to continue working for students all across Canada.”

Thoughts from a newcomer

Mark LaRiviere of Trent University had the last words from the floor at closing plenary and though his first experience at a CFS national general meeting left him feeling motivated, he had some reservations about its structure.

“I was told, odds are if you’re a white, male, undergraduate student, [and] heterosexual, then there’s very few constituencies that you can fit in,” said LaRiviere.

Constituency groups are “composed of individual delegates who share a common characteristic as recognized by the federation,” such as students with disabilities, francophone students and international students.

“It’s very established within the structure of the federation to create a space for groups that are traditionally excluded from many decision making processes, and so that’s the recognition of very evidenced social inequalities that we recognize and that we allocate a space for,” said Dubois.

“I feel strongly towards many of the issues … it was a bit of a downer, just because I felt like I could definitely be an advocate for a lot of them,” said LaRiviere, who did not end up participating in any of the constituency groups.

Overall, the meeting was characterized by a strong sense of unity among delegates, and there was very little variance in discourse.

For the next two months, the national office will be concentrating on the planning and roll-out of the upcoming national day of action.

“Over the next two months, the work of the national office … will be to [provide resources to] all of the local communities and campuses that will be organizing for the day of action, with whatever they need,” said Dubois. “And to try and keep a national vision for our goal and for our campaign of putting ‘Education is a Right’ out there â€” and really trying to garner public and media and community support for accessible education in Canada.”

Tags canada, CUP, tuition

News

Dawson Student Union lends voice to movement to save long-gun registry

Post author By The Concordian
Post date November 22, 2011

TORONTO (CUP) â€” Students from Montreal’s Dawson College visited Parliament Hill last week to join the fight against the Conservative government’s plan to scrap the long-gun registry.

Audrey Deveault, chairperson of the Dawson Student Union (DSU), appeared before the Standing Committee on National Security on Nov. 17. She and other attendees spoke out against Bill C-19, which seeks to end existing federal firearms registration requirements and destroy all records that are currently contained in the Canadian Firearms Registry.

“It was more of an emotional presentation, I think â€” mainly, how students feel facing the imminent abolition of the long-gun registry,” Deveault told Canadian University Press. “We wanted them to know about what was going on at Dawson five years later â€¦ [and] how many people were affected, in their everyday lives, after that tragedy.”

This past September marked half a decade since the 2006 shooting tragedy at Dawson, when one student died and 19 were injured after 25-year-old Kimveer Gill opened fire on the campus. One of the three firearms Gill used was a registered rifle.

“We’ve been victims of gun violence â€¦ we are always very involved in that battle to keep gun control very active,” said Deveault.

LÃ©o Fugazza, director of internal affairs and advocacy for the DSU, told Canadian University Press that Dawson students have been actively working since the 2006 shooting to make sure “it doesn’t happen again.”

“When we went to the [parliamentary] presentation, our main message was, ‘Please don’t rush things, please consider all the options,’” he said.

“Before taking a decision, you need to get in touch with experts, but also victims, and people who are directly involved with the registry â€” and then take a decision in regards to those experts and those victims,” Fugazza continued.

Deveault explained that the DSU made an official submission to give a presentation to the parliamentary committee, which was accepted â€” though they still haven’t heard back about a meeting they had recently requested to have with the prime minister.

“Obviously, we’re not expecting necessarily a yes, but we were certainly not expecting to be ignored completely by the prime minister,” she explained.

The Conservatives have stated previously that the gun registry is “ineffective” when it comes to reducing crime, often targeting innocent gun-owning citizens instead of criminals.

“The Harper government has always been clear; by eliminating the wasteful and ineffective long-gun registry, we can instead focus our efforts on measures that actually tackle crime and make our streets and communities safe,” Public Safety Minister Vic Toews said in a statement last month.

While Bill C-19 was officially introduced in Parliament in October, the Conservatives have attempted to end the registry previously but have been unsuccessful due to their minority government status. Now with majorities in both the House of Commons and the Senate, the Conservatives are expected to pass the bill with relative ease.

â€” With files from Sarah Deshaies