Archive for Josh Dehaas

Protesters want radio station and QPIRG fees reinstated

It’s day three of an occupation of the sixth floor of the James Administration building at McGill.

It appears protesters didn’t plan for it to last so long. On Wednesday night, occupiers sent down a bucket on a rope to try and haul up food from supporters below. Security guards cut the rope.

Doug Sweet, Director of Media Relations for McGill, told the Montreal Gazette that, “hauling stuff up by rope to the sixth floor is potentially dangerous,” and could potentially “break windows.”

Students took over the building on Tuesday when about 60 showed up to protest the administration’s decision to not honour a referendum over the continuation of funding for two campus groups. Most protesters were in the lobby of the building and have since left.

The Quebec Public Interest Research Group, a social justice organization, and CKUT, a campus radio station, were funded mainly by student fees. Two-thirds of voters appeared to support continued student funding of QPIRG in the Fall 2011 vote, but the university’s deputy provost for student life and learning, Morton Mendelson, invalidated the question due to confusing wording.

In addition to reinstating student funding to both groups, protesters want Mendelson to be fired or to resign. They’re calling their protest Mendelson’s “surprise resignation party.” Twitter is abuzz about the “party” with the hashtag #6party. A blog claims to offer “communiques from the sixth floor.”

McGill Daily published a letter today from QPIRG that thanks protesters and demands that their funding continue. However, they will not run a question about funding in the upcoming referendum.

CKUT, on the other hand, will not only seek affirmation of funding, but will ask students to make their fee mandatory.  If passed, students who don’t support the station will not be able to opt-out.

Public Interest Research Groups have been controversial lately. Conservative students don’t want their student fees funding causes of the left, such as Israel Apartheid Week and anti-capitalism initiatives. Queen’s University students recently voted to stop collecting fees for a PIRG.

But students shouldn’t get too excited yet

Raj Sherman by dave.cournoyer on Flickr

If elected later this year, the Alberta Liberals say they would begin eliminating post-secondary tuition and start forgiving up to a $1,000 per year in student loans for working graduates.

Liberal leader Raj Sherman unveiled the platform on Monday in Edmonton ahead of an election that’s expected to be called this spring.

The Liberals would pay for their tuition elimination, forgiven student loans and other new spending with $1.5-billion in tax hikes on corporations and on the wealthiest 10 per cent of earners.

But students dreaming of free school shouldn’t get excited yet. The Liberals have only eight of the legislature’s 83 seats and are running in fourth place with just 12 per cent support, according to a poll by CBC News. The incumbent Progressive Conservatives, led by Premier Alison Redford, had 46 per cent of decided voters in the poll, followed by the upstart Wildrose Alliance at 24 per cent and the New Democrats at 14 per cent.

Continue reading Alberta Liberals promise free tuition

Officials comb South Saskatchewan River

A jacket that may have belonged to a missing student from Saudi Arabia prompted an unsuccessful search of the South Saskatchewan River on Saturday, reports CKOM radio. Hamza Alsharief, a 23-year-old chemical engineering student at the University of Saskatchewan, went missing in December. Alsharief’s wallet and identification were found in his residence. Investigators believe he may have taken his own life. He’s described as 5’8″ with a slim build, brown hair and brown eyes.

You won’t guess who’s upset

The crest of gay fraternity Delta Lambda Phi

McGill University has a new fraternity and it’s facing criticism from a surprising corner.

On Saturday, Delta Lambda Phi (DLP) became the first Greek society in Canada that markets itself to “gay, bisexual, and progressive men.”

But while the members report no homophobia toward them, they told the Toronto Star that they’ve faced criticism from activist group Queer McGill. Elyse Lewis of Queer McGill says that by reserving itself only for “men and those who identify as men,” the fraternity implies that transgender men aren’t real men.

Continue reading Canada’s first gay fraternity faces critics

Protests underway from coast to coast

Today, students from Memorial University of Newfoundland to the University of British Columbia are participating in the National Day of Action organized by the Canadian Federation of Students.

Through marches and on social media, they’re promoting the idea that Education is a Right.

Their explicit demands are for lower tuition fees, less student debt and more public funding.

The CFS says that the average student with debt owes $25,000 by graduation and that public funding has dropped from 81 per cent of operating costs of universities 20 years ago to 57 per cent today—all while tuition has risen from 14 per cent of operating funding to more than 35 per cent.

In other words, students are paying more of their own costs for university than ever before, which makes it difficult for low and middle-income students to get through school and then pay off debts.

The campaign is being discussed widely on Twitter with the tags #feb1 #cfsfcee or #cdnpse.

Peggy Nash, a candidate for the New Democratic Party’s leadership has already tweeted in solidarity and provided a link to her Plan to make Post-Secondary Education Accessible.

In Newfoundland, which already has among the lowest tuition anywhere, conservative Premier Kathy Dunderdale attended a National Day of Action event this morning and said that, during her lifetime, she’d like to see students’ first degrees paid for by the province, reports VOCM radio.

Research shows links to mental illness, lung capacity

Photo by Yeshe on Flickr

When sociologist and drug-policy expert Andy Hathaway surveyed one of his first-year classes at the University of Guelph last fall, 80 per cent of students reported experience with cannabis.

Hathaway cautions that it was only a small pilot study (around 100 responses), and it took place at Guelph, which is, let’s face it, “a bit granola.”

Still, that 80 per cent figure isn’t surprising.

When twelfth graders are asked if they’ve tried marijuana, roughly half say yes.

Provincial rates of lifetime usage now range from a low of 40 per cent of Albertan twelfth-graders to a high of 63 per cent of those in Nova Scotia, according to the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse. And that’s before university.

Smoking pot can’t be considered deviant anymore, says Hathaway. It’s simply the new normal.

A loosening of cultural attitudes, particularly in the media, helps explains the shift. “We had Cheech and Chong in the 1970s, but that was a very stereotypical portrayal,” says Hathaway. “Now we have shows like Weeds that show use of marijuana by very regular people—soccer moms and dads.”

But as attitudes toward marijuana soften, some campus health experts report that they’re more worried about students using the drug than ever. That’s because research increasingly shows links between marijuana and the number one health problem on Canadian campuses: mental illness.

Dr. Elizabeth Osuch, a psychiatrist who runs the First Episode Mood and Anxiety Program at a hospital in London, Ont., encounters mentally ill students who offer their own evidence of marijuana-related problems. “I hear the story frequently about how ‘I get paranoid when I smoke pot’, ‘I get anxious when I smoke pot’, or ‘I’ve been smoking pot a long time and now I’m depressed’,” she says.

That’s not surprising to Dr. Osuch. What’s surprising to her is how surprising that is to others.

“I’ve given talks across this community and when I talk about the effects of marijuana, it’s news to people,” she says, “unless I’m talking to a group of clinicians who interact with people in a medical or counselling setting. They know, because they’ve been seeing this for years.”

The best-established risk is that marijuana can trigger or exacerbate psychosis in a small number of people who are susceptible, based on their genes. To some, the link is not even debatable. “A number of prospective epidemiological studies put it beyond doubt that cannabis use increases the subsequent risk of schizophrenia,” wrote the authors of a 2007 review in Addictive Disorders.

Devastating as psychosis may be for those who experience it, diseases like schizophrenia only affect a small proportion of the population. But Dr. Osuch warns that marijuana may also be contributing to the most common health problems on Canadian campuses: depression and anxiety.

One study published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence in 2007 followed a group of 14 to 17-year-olds over a decade, checking up on their mental health and drug use along the way. They found that depression, bipolar disorder and, to a lesser extent, anxiety disorders, all coincided with previous cannabis use—and more use predicted more illness.

But that’s only the beginning. “I would predict that there will be more and more information out there in the coming years looking at the problematic effects of what’s no longer a ‘soft drug’,” says Dr. Osuch, who notes that there’s more Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in in marijuana today than ever.

Dr. Osuch is currently the lead researcher on one such study exploring the links to depression. She explains the theory behind that possible link: “Marijuana is very active on the neurocirciutry of reward processing. Anything that you do because you like doing it activates reward processing in the brain,” she says. “And if you slam that neurological system daily with a chemical [like THC], it becomes very difficult for the person to feel reward from doing normal things,” she adds.

Dr. Osuch is quick to point out that not everyone who smokes pot will have a problem. “But a significant percentage of them will,” she says, adding, “as long as you know what those percentages are, or a sense of what the risks are, you can make an intelligent decision.”

Right now, the students she meets when giving talks at the Western University in or London, Ont. high schools haven’t gotten the message. They perceive pot-smoking as low risk.

Part of the confusion is the conflicting messages young people get when they type “marijuana health effects” into Google. “What they’re getting is all kind of sites that say marijuana is great,” says Dr. Osuch, “what they aren’t getting is the scientific research.”

There are, of course, some well-funded and easy-to-find meassages about the risks online—those from the federal government. But Hathaway, the drug policy researcher at Guelph, says the federal government’s anti-drug messages aren’t trusted by youth, because they exaggerate the risk.

In one of the federal ads, called Fast Forward, a blonde boy refuses a puff on a joint after he envisions a life of violence and trouble with the law. In another ad, called Mirror, a girl in her bedroom ends up cutting her arm with a piece of glass after taking some unidentified drugs.

Such scare tactics cause teens to tune out drug messaging entirely, says Hathaway. “If you’re sending inaccurate messages about marijuana when they have enough experience to know this is basically propaganda, they’re going to have doubts about any message of that kind,” he explains.

Although Hathaway doesn’t advocate abstinence like Dr. Osuch, he does believe there’s room for better education about marijuana. “Effective social policy would account for the small minority who may run into trouble with drugs and be candidates for some kind of intervention,” says Hathaway.

The government might do better to educate youth about the dangers of smoking tobacco along with marijuana, for example, says Hathaway. Tobacco is known to reduce lung capacity and increase the risk of cancer. Meanwhile, a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association in January showed that smoking two to three joints actually increases lung capacity.

But because the JAMA article portrays marijuana as less harmful, it’s unlikely to would make it into the government’s messaging. Once again, the science is unlikely to reach young Canadians.

And if there’s one thing Dr. Osuch and Prof. Hathaway agree on, it’s that young people need better access to the facts. That way, they can determine the risks for themselves—whatever they may be.

Strange apology inside

Some of the computer hardware stolen from the University of Victoria earlier this month was found by a postal worker in a letter box in Langford, B.C. Saanich Police say that all of the laptops and flash drives had been rendered inoperable, although a copy of the information was included, along with a note that police are calling “a strange twist.” CBC News reports that the note says the following: “The information in these bags was not copied, distributed or exploited” and “we want no part of everyday people living in fear that their personal information is being used against them to take [their] hard-earned money. Criminals are human before they were criminals.”  The police are scratching their heads. “Whether it is simply altruism or regret on the part of the suspects or whether it is something more sinister, is unclear to investigators,” they wrote. The computer hardware contained the unencrypted banking information and the social insurance numbers of up to 13,000 current and former employees.

Woman flees washroom

Footage of suspect (Toronto Police, Jan. 11)

A third woman has reported an apparent peeping tom lurking in a washroom at York University.

This comes two weeks after two similar incidents. Women reported seeing a man in a washroom stall at Curtis Lecture Hall on Jan. 9 and Jan. 10.

The latest incident occurred on Jan. 24 inside a washroom at the Stacy Lecture Hall. At 8:55 p.m., a woman says she noticed large shoes inside a stall that looked like they belonged to a man. She fled the washroom and activated a security alarm.

The suspect is described as a brown male aged 21 to 23. He’s about six feet tall, weighs about 185 pounds. He has a chinstrap beard and a square jaw. He was last seen wearing dark jeans, brown or dark-green shoes with beige soles, a dark-grey hoodie with a black jacket and was carrying a dark brown or black backpack. Those with any information are encouraged to contact Crime Stoppers.

But women still underrepresented

The new dean of Canada’s largest engineering school, the University of Waterloo, is a woman. Pearl Sullivan will be the first female to take on the top job when she starts on July 1.

Sullivan is originally from Malaysia. She completed her undergraduate degree at the Technical University of Nova Scotia and her PhD at the University of British Columbia. She taught at the University of New Brunswick and then Waterloo where she founded the graduate program in nanotechnology and chairs the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering.

Sullivan isn’t the first female engineering dean in Canada. Elizabeth Cannon was Dean of Engineering at the University of Calgary before she went on to become president in 2010.

But engineering schools are still mostly male. Only 20.6 per cent of undergraduate engineers in 2001 were female. The proportion declined to 17.7 per cent in 2011, reports Engineers Canada.

Nine per cent drop in Ontario

Photo by cdsessums on Flickr

The Ontario College of Teachers sounded the alarm bells in 2011 about the gap between the number of graduating teachers and the shrinking number of  jobs available. Their survey of new graduates showed 24 per cent were unemployed and only one-third were employed full-time.

John Milloy, the minister in charge, reacted by taking the unprecedented step of capping the number of first-year education students at 9,058.

This week, new statistics show that students got the message. The Ontario University Application Centre reports that provincial teacher’s colleges received 8.9 per cent fewer applicants in 2012.

Some schools saw huge declines. Nipissing University in North Bay, Ont. got 15.8 per cent fewer applications. Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ont. got 21.5 per cent fewer applications.

In fact, the total number of applicants—9,311—is only slightly higher than the new cap. But it’s 72 per cent lower than the number of applicants five years ago—in 2007 when there were 16,042.

It’s not just Ontario where jobs are hard to find. The substitute list in Halfiax’s biggest school board had grown to 1,665 teachers in 2011, according to The Chronicle Herald. Last year just 119 teachers retired from the board. Meanwhile, Nova Scotia added 1,000 new teachers.

On the other side of the country, it’s a similar story. The number of applicants to education at the University of British Columbia fell from 688 in 2007 to 543 in 2011—a 21 per cent drop.

And UBC’s teacher’s college has been upfront with their students about the prospects of getting jobs directly out of school. “In 2010, roughly 2,700 new teachers were certified in British Columbia but only about 1,500 new positions were available,” the school admitted in a recent article online.

Still, UBC suggests there are reasons for grads to be hopeful. Certain specialty areas, like music, French, home economics, physics, math, and vocations like technology and cooking are in demand.

There are also plenty of jobs for adventurous graduates in places like Asia and the Middle East.

But most tellingly, UBC will introduce a mandatory non-traditional teaching practicum in 2012, to make their sure students explore other careers that education degrees might lead to.