CFS AVOIDS REFORM AT AGM Motions limit defederation movement

A defederation movement has been gradually growing, particularly in the months leading up to the 28th Annual National General Meeting (AGM) of the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS). Thirteen of the CFS’s eighty member associations have expressed the desire to leave the union. In the second week of October, dissatisfied members of the CFS released a reform package detailing forty-three motions.

The motions were moved by the Post-Graduate Students’ Society (PGSS) of McGill University, and seconded by the Kwantlen Student Association, the Alberta College of Art and Design Students’ Association, University of Calgary, University of Regina Students’ Union, Concordia Student Union, and Concordia University Graduate Students’ Association. The reform package states that it aims to “apply basic democratic tenets and organizing principles to the CFS.”

“The tension was definitely there, just going in [to the AGM],” says Gurpreet Kambo, Cap’s Students of Colour Liaison who traveled to the Gatineau-Ottawa area, to be the Capilano Students’ Union representative at the meeting. “People knew that something was going to be done.”

The thirteen schools who are part of the defederation movement include: McGill’s Post Graduate Society, the University of Cape Breton, Simon Fraser University, Kwantlen Student Association, Guelph University, Concordia Student Union, Graduate Student Association of Concordia, Dawson Student Union, Society of Graduate Students at Western Ontario University, Univeristy of Windsor Students’ Alliance, Carleton University Students’ Association, The Central Student Association at Guelph University, Trent Central Student Association, University of Victoria’s Student Society, Graduate Students’ Association of the Univeristy of Calgary, and University of Regina Students’ Union.

MOTION 6

“There’s been tension for a long time, going back years and years,” says Kambo of the CFS. Another delegate at the meeting told him it was the “most conflict-ridden AGM since the mid-90s”.

“The infamous Motion 6, which was the one about raising the … percentage to defederate. That was by far the most controversial one [motion],” says Kambo.

Prior to Motion 6, if a school wanted to defederate there were two main steps they had to follow. They had to give the CFS a petition signed by ten percent of the school's population, and that petition would then allow them to hold a referendum asking their student body if they wanted to leave the CFS. In order to defederate, the referendum must have 50% of the votes in favour of disassociating their student association from the CFS.

Motion 6 states that the requirement of 10 percent for the petition, while “aimed at greater grassroots democracy within our Federation, seems to be open to abuse.”

The motion accuses the defederation movement of being a “coordinated plan to destabilize our Federation by a small group of individuals, including some non-members.”

It goes on to say that evidence indicates, as part of this destabilization plan, “the organizers of the petitions intend to submit them all on the same day in an effort to force the various referendums to be held within the same, small window of time.”

The motion, proposed by the Carleton University Graduate Students’ Association (GSA), calls this “anti-democratic, because the Federation and its members would have no reasonable opportunity to present a case for continued membership in the Federation.” The motion proposes that the initial 10 percent for the petition be increased to 20 percent of the student population.

“We did it because we realized that the recent defederation attempts really weakened our movement in regards to the time we could allot to other campaigns, especially our Drop Fees rally,” Kimalee Phillip, president of the Carleton GSA, told the Canadian University Press (CUP).

The motion also places a limit of two defederation referenda able to be held across Canada in a three-month period. A student association would be allowed to attempt defederation through holding a referendum once every five years instead of every two.

“The spirit of the motion was to ensure stability within our movement and to ensure that our bylaws had no loopholes that could be abused in the future,” says Phillip.

“People were discussing that one [Motion 6] all week,” says Kambo. “For Motion 6 to pass, they required a super majority.” This requires that 66% of the delegates vote in favour of the motion.

Nineteen delegations voted against Motion 6, and forty-four voted in favour. Six delegations abstained. “That’s really borderline close,” says Kambo.

The motion passed, adding to the controversy.

A point was raised in the meeting, “that the bylaw regarding this says two-thirds of voting members present have to be voting in favour,” say Kambo, “and the word present kind of changes the whole meaning … because if you count the abstentions then two thirds of the voting members did not vote in favour of it.”

The CFS Chair, however, said that according to her experience, abstentions didn’t count as voting members. The plenary chair overruled the objection , stating that in her experience abstentions didn't count as voting members. Multiple delegations left the meeting in protest. There is still some debate over whether or not the motion passed.

Kambo also reported that someone pulled the fire alarm during the debate of Motion 6.

The passing of Motion 6 will make it more difficult for student associations to defederate.

THE FORGOTTEN MOTIONS

Due to the high level of attention that Motion 6 received, many other motions in the AGM did not receive much publicity.

Motion 20 was proposed by the Kwantlen Student Association and requested that the Canadian Federation of Students-British Columbia “support campus media’s right to report on student issues without the fear of legal and political reprisal.” It also requested that all meetings of the CFS be open to campus media and CUP representatives.

Motion 31 demanded that a campaign take place nationally to raise awareness about the possibility of student funds being diverted into supporting the Pan American games. The University of Toronto is currently part of a bid group to bring the Pan Am Games to Toronto in 2015.

This motion was of particular interest to member locals in BC. “We moved an amendment saying … the BC component, because of our experience in the matter with the Olympics, that we are also condemning the diverting of student funds toward institutional international gaming sports events,” says Kambo.

Motion 18 called on the CFS and the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations (CASA) to work together on certain issues and to collaborate on lobbying goals and strategies. At CASA’s AGM, members said in a unanimous motion that they wanted to work with the CFS. Motion 18, however, did not pass.

THE RECEPTION

With the defederation movement gaining such publicity in campus papers prior to the AGM, controversy and retribution were unavoidable, particularly with the presence of Motion 6.

“It was obviously two different sides there [at the AGM], and I think that some of the motions were good … and some of them were terrible,” says Kambo of the reform package proposed by the PGSS of McGill prior to the AGM. “But I wasn’t about to outright dismiss their concerns. That’s not democratic. I don’t think this organization [the CFS] is above criticism or anything like that.”

The reform package was put out fundamentally with the aim to reform the CFS and resolve some of the current discontent with the Federation. It calls on the CFS to increase the transparency of their procedures, including disclosing the salaries of its employees and opening Federation meetings to the press. As it was reported, there was only one journalist in attendance at the event, Emma Godmere, Editor of the Fulcrum newspaper and Ottawa Bureau Chief for CUP.

Motions also requested that limitations be placed on the length of time a person can work for the CFS, and to end all the current lawsuits against member student unions looking to defederate, like SFU and at the University of Prince Edward Island.

“Students have no idea that [the CFS] exists, and there is no indication that they’re an effective organization,” Lex Gill, a student and petition organizer from Concordia, told The McGill Tribune.

“What have they accomplished? What are we getting? Free International Student Identity Cards, and people interfering in our elections.”

Rick Telfer, president of the Society of Graduate Students at the University of Western Ontario, told The Tribune that the student opposition to the CFS was unsurprising.

“Can you imagine particular groups or individuals who might oppose the kinds of things that the CFS advocates? The Federation has advocated over the years to advance the rights of people who identify as gay or lesbian, they have advocated for Aboriginal rights, and they have played a significant role in advocating for women's equality," said Telfer. "There are many [people] within Canadian society who oppose these efforts. So when you wonder why people are petitioning against the CFS, the answer is self-evident. It's because they disagree with the objectives and aims of the CFS."

While some student unions have endorsed the reform package, other groups like the Canadian Association of University Teachers soundly rejected it.

James Turk, the executive director for the Association, did not support the reform. He told The Martlet at the University of Victoria that the Post-Graduate Students’ Society of McGill was trying to “cripple” the CFS.

“Should your motions be successful, it would be a tragic loss for students across Canada,” he said. “We hope the membership of the CFS soundly rejects each of your destructive motions.”

THE CFS AND YOU

The Canadian Federation of Students describe themselves as a means to “provide students with an effective and united voice, provincially and nationally,” according to their website. Eighty different post-secondary institutions across the country retain membership, which totals a representation of over half a million students.

Capilano University is member local 5 of the CFS, one of the first members since the CFS’s conception in 1981.

There are several services provided to members of the CFS. The CFS supplys students with a free International Student Identity Card, a Studentsaver Discount Card, free tax filing services, and potential benefits through the National Health Network. The CFS lobbies for “halting tuition fee increases” and generally reducing tuition fees. Tuition fees were frozen in BC from 1996 until 2002. Their platform also looks at problems with Canada’s Student Loan Program, under the slogan “Education shouldn’t be a debt sentence!”

With all the controversy surrounding the CFS and its AGM, The Courier decided to look into members’ understanding of the CFS and the services it provides to students. Around forty students responded to our survey. While most were primarily from Capilano, a significant number of students were from Langara, SFU, UBC, and multiple post-secondary institutions in Ontario. 42% of students had been attending their college/university for less than one year, and 30% for 3-4 years.

We asked questions about their knowledge of the CFS and the benefits they received as members.  However, 31.6% of those surveyed were unsure if they were members of the CFS, and 73% were unaware of the benefits they received as a member.

When asked what they liked about the CFS, responses were varied. One reply read that they liked “its awareness campaigns and human rights activism”, and another person thought it was “a good concept to have a uniting organization for Canadian students.”

One question asked if the CFS had any notable flaws. Respondents said, “they [the CFS] don’t do their job,” that they should “try to benefit more students,” and there was a call for “more openness and transparency”.

40% of those surveyed said they didn’t like the CFS or felt that it had too many flaws and was ineffective. 46% said that it has potential, but it needs a lot of reform. And 12.5% said they like most things about the CFS.

When asked if they felt they had a voice, and are represented well by the CFS, 39.3% said ‘never’, 21.4% said ‘rarely’, 10.7% said ‘sometimes’, 3.6% said ‘usually’, and 0% said ‘always’.

60.7% of respondents felt that they did not have a place in the CFS, and did not have a role as a student in the organization.

76.3% of those surveyed said they knew little to nothing about the CFS and what it stood for.

THE GREY AREA

Much controversy surrounded the AGM, but it certainly made for an interesting meeting. The reform package put forth by McGill played a key role.

“They propose this huge package of motions for reform and other people within the organization took it as an attack,” says Gurpreet Kambo. “I tried not to think in those black and white terms, [instead to] listen to everyone for what they were saying, and what the motion was, rather than who it was coming from.”

“I think that organizations like the CFS need to evolve, and they’re definitely not above criticism,” says Kambo.

Regardless of what other schools are doing, Capilano currently has no plans to change its present relationship with the CFS.

//Samantha Thompson

Assistant News Editor

FROM THE EDITOR: DIE, DARK DECADE, AND BE REBORN

The dizzying edifice of ideas is above us, a turning gyre of pure data, collapsing on the old world. It’s 2010, and we are reeling with vertigo. This past year brought us recession, a malicious 82% cut to the overall Arts and Culture funding in BC, increased military buildup in the Middle East, and draconian challenges to our Charter rights over the Olympic leviathan, that great shambling mound of overspending and ambition.

As we danced, drank, toasted and toked our New Year’s ambrosia, squinting our bleary eyes against the uncertainty of a new decade, we avoided thoughts of Copenhagen, Darfur, and the Downtown Eastside, dancing a dubstep shuffle over last year’s stinking corpse. We just wanted a little escape, a sweet relief in the hot flush of impending hangover as we staggered out of our pasts into a diaphanous future, to be reminded. Maybe we heard someone crying from an alley. Stumbling into the dawn of 2010, a Somali man with an axe was planning his attack on a 75-year old cartoonist in Denmark, blood and revenge for black marker mutterings about Muhammad and his exploding head.

This decade needs a new metaphor.

The media has broke trust with the masses and information is now infected, like a dirty syringe. We are forced into fear by the gravity of the news while the sinister headlines spar like soldiers for our lace tokens of attention. Pinned to a paradigm, wriggling, we are collapsing on cue, overloaded with eco-oblivion and apocalypse, a marketing initiative that took off a decade ago with Y2K, culminating in the cryptic prophecies of the Mayan long-count calendar (this mystical message brought to you by Disney, there for you even if the world won’t be). Our media reality is created by the formation of a false antagonist, and the form that sells copy is also the one that pushes the same old stale fruitcake plots. Jesus had Pontius Pilate, Bush had Saddam Hussein, Harry Potter had Voldemort. And so it goes.

This decade needs a new plot.

If you had stopped on your way home New Years day to look at the headlines in the news stands, you would have seen the old one. You would have beheld the sparkling artifacts of history carefully polished and preserved for your consumption... chosen for you because they sell, statistically, and because humans are predictable in their tastes. Habitual.

It is the main address of the New Year. Habit. The behavioural circuit. It is the organ grinder of our lives. We submit to the same old sterile story, repackaged endlessly, validating the old adage that only an adversary can unify a cause.

These decade needs a new habit.

New Years is not a doing, but rather it is a promise to do or not to do, an asseveration of intent. As old institutions fall from the sky like flares from Roman Candle casings we are left with the certainty of something, a fugacious moment of pure potential, rising like an airplane with an underwear bomb, set to explode. As our fragile dreams of entitlement and eros become last year's toilet paper on a pant leg, we are screaming over the stall walls for a fresh roll and a Sharpie marker.

//Kevin Murray

Editor

Letterbox Featured comments from our website

Re: Stealing Is Okay

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campus love me, Aramark is a serial rapist and should be bent
over and dealt the hand it deals to its clientele.”
-Rogue


Re: Scoop Scoopers III

“That guy really looks like Matt Damon. Freaky!”

-Haxxor


Re: Talkin’ Taxes: Grad Students Question CFS Tax Plan

“This McGill graduate student cannot disagree more with
the current position of the PGSS President. Simeone’s
statements, both in this article and others, demonstrate
that he didn’t bother to investigate the CFS policy, internal
PGSS policy, and how these policies were developed before
publicly taking a regressive position. As a Canada Gradu-
ate Scholarship (CGS) recipient, I feel I should have paid
taxes on my award. Those taxes would not have materially
impacted my ability to pay my bills. Upfront grants would,
however, help my colleagues who aren’t lucky enough to
hold a CGS pay their rent. If the end goal is to ensure more
graduate students receive adequate funding, it is far prefer-
able for us to stand in solidarity as a student movement than
for a thoughtless few to undermine the good work that is
being done.”

-Melane Thompson


Re: Voicebox comment on tipping bartenders

“The only reason I tip the bartender more than the barista is
because the bartender has managed to make society ‘believe’
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Re: Letterbox Issue 11

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Re: Voicebox comment on Ska

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couldn’t handle being in a circle pit of fist pumps and love.”

-Girl


“Ska sucks wrinkly wannabe British testies.”

-Krock


Re: All Aboard the Steam Train

“Vancouver is chock full of delicious sub/counter-culture/s
(some on the forefront, some not), you just need to look and
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world of unheard of today, 1,000,000 hits tomorow.

-Morgan


Re: Local Wrestler’s MemorialMatch

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me now this is a laugh, but at the time I was so committed to
this idea). I ended up meeting him and interviewing him for
my high school newspaper, and when my class came down
to Vancouver on a school trip, he met with me for lunch and
told me that no matter what I did in my life, I would make an
impression. you can imagine the impact that this older, cool
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-JJ Brewis


Re: Alternative Exercise

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hoop jam? The Saturday Circus meets from 2-4pm most Sat-
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-Christa Giles

CHALLENGING THE INTERNATIONAL COVENANT UBC students not first to lodge UN complaint

VANCOUVER (CUP) – The complaint filed with the United Nations by the University of British Columbia’s student society accused the provincial and federal governments of not providing affordable post-secondary education.

The complaint, filed Nov. 25, was not approved or discussed by the UBC Alma Mater Society (AMS) council prior to being filed, but was sent on behalf of the society by its president, Blake Frederick, and Vice-President External Tim Chu.

At a three-hour emergency meeting on Nov. 28, the council voted in favour of withdrawing the UN complaint and asking the two executives to resign.

Pivot Legal Society issued the complaint on behalf of the AMS and Tristan Markle, a former AMS vice-president administration.

The complaint states that the provincial and federal governments are violating an the international covenant that states post-secondary education should be “accessible to all” and that countries should move toward “free education.” The International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights was signed by Canada, along with over 144 countries, in 1976.

The AMS has spent $3000 for an initial retainer to pay Pivot Legal Society lawyer Katrina Pacey, but they have yet to receive a final invoice. The money was taken out of the council’s legal fund, which has an annual budget of $25,000.

Tom Dvorak, vice-president finance for the AMS, and Johannes Rebane, vice-president academic, were also signatories on the contract with Pivot. Both Dvorak and Rebane have claimed that they overlooked the contract and went ahead on the faith of their fellow executives.

Other individuals involved were AMS Policy Analyst Adrienne Smith and Communications Manager Kelli Seepaul. Chu said at a Nov. 26 Executive Committee meeting that former vice-president Markle was chosen as a co-complainant by Pivot from a list of concerned students submitted by Frederick and Chu for his emotionally-charged appeal.

This is not the first time a Canadian student society has tried to challenge the international covenant. The Simon Fraser Student Society filed a similar complaint with the UN in 2005 that stated, “We, the Simon Fraser Student Society . . . argue that the actions of both the Federal Government of Canada and the Provincial Government of British Columbia over the last decade have constituted an egregious violation of international law.”

According to UBC Insiders, a former Simon Fraser University internal relations officer said the UN responded to their complaint, saying that “considerations” may be taken at the time of the general review of Canada, which happens every ten years.

//Sarah Chung

The Ubyssey (University of British Columbia)

CSU SHOPS FOR TEETH Dentists are expensive, I just found out

Capilano University could soon be playing a very active role in its students’ smiles.

The Capilano Students’ Union (CSU) is looking to implement a dental plan, which will offset the cost of dental work for students who attend Capilano University. Currently, Capilano is one of the few universities in BC not offering dental coverage to its students.

“We’ve just be been looking at different programs and different companies that offer it [a student dental plan],” says Gurpreet Kambo, who is part of the CSU’s executive. He added that it that it will probably be taken up with more priority soon than it has in recent months.

Richard McCrae, Chair of the Services Committee for the CSU, says, “I’d like to see the groundwork put in place for this coming semester, but I don’t expect anything concrete to happen until next fall.”

There are quite a few different plans available, but presently many post-secondary institutions offer student dental plans through the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS).  The CFS offers health, dental, and vision insurance via the National Students’ Health Network, an organization the CFS founded in 1985. This Network works with Greenshield, a Canadian non-profit insurance provider. UVIC uses Greenshield to provide a dental plan option to their students.

Going through Greenshield is not the only option, however. UBC and SFU, for example, offer a dental plan to their students through Sun Life Assurance. BCIT and Kwantlen use Great-West Life Assurance.

“We’ve been looking at what other campuses offer recently and exploring our options, cost-wise,” says McCrae.

According to the Alma Mater Society of UBC Vancouver, it costs students $216.31 annually for UBC’s health, dental, and vision plan. Under Greenshield, it costs students at the University of Victoria $285.60. At Kwantlen, students are paying $179.00 annually towards their health and dental plans cumulatively.

The Services Committee has been in touch with a representative from Ontario and are planning on meeting in the next month to go over various plans, and give themselves the opportunity to ask questions.

“That won’t necessarily be our final choice,” says McCrae.

As it would increase student fees, the implementation of a student dental plan at Cap would “have to be passed as a referendum,” says Kambo.

“The difference between a health plan and something like the U-Pass,” says McCrae, “is that students would have the opportunity to opt-out if they already had coverage.”

There is, however, some question about whether the implementation of a dental plan would be passed as a motion.

“It depends on the demographics of the school,” says Kambo, “Some people think a lot of people already have coverage.”

Brad Bereziak, a student at Capilano University, is one such an example.  “I’m still covered under my mom’s dental plan through her work while I’m in school,” he says.  When asked if he would go under a potential dental plan at Capilano he replied, “Probably not.”

“It will take a while to make sure we’re getting the best plan for our students, and the more help we can get from the student body, the better,” says McCrae.

Russ Miller, a first-year student, says he would use the dental plan “because I don’t have a dental plan outside of Capilano.”

It is up to the CSU to determine what the viable options are for a dental plan service, but in the end it comes down to student vote.

“When we’ve picked the plan we feel will work best, a referendum will be held to ensure this is something the students want to go for,” explained McCrae.

“We should have a dental plan,” says Miller, “We’re a university.”

//Samantha Thompson

Assistant News Editor

UNIVERSITU PARKING TICKETS: UPHELD Appeals court decision follows retroactive legislation preventing refunds

Decision comes after retroactive legislation preventing refunds


KELOWNA, B.C. (CUP) – British Columbia students might want to pick up a parking pass soon, as the provincial Court of Appeal has granted UBC Vancouver’s appeal to a Supreme Court decision that challenged universities’ ability to give out parking tickets.

The decision comes after the provincial legislature passed Bill 13, the Miscellaneous Statutes Amendment Act, in October, retroactively legalizing UBC's parking regulations.

Camp Fiorante Matthews, who have represented plaintiff Dan Barbour since he initiated a class action lawsuit against UBC in 2005, announced the appeal result on their website. The statement says that on Nov. 25 the B.C. Court of Appeal allowed the school’s appeal of the trial judgment “because of the effect Bill 13 has on the legal issues in the case.”

"The amendments to the legislation affirm that institutions do have the authority to regulate vehicle traffic and parking on their property," wrote Moira Stillwell, the B.C. minister for advanced education, in a statement. "Government’s view was that public post-secondary institutions always had authority over these matters."

In March, the B.C. Supreme Court ruled in regards to a class action lawsuit brought about by Barbour, a Vancouver accountant, who had his vehicle towed for accumulated parking tickets while going to his dentist at UBC Vancouver. The Supreme Court ruled that UBC had been going above and beyond the powers allocated to it in the University Act.

According to Barbour, the Oct. 29th legislation and subsequent Nov. 25th ruling were disappointing, but not surprising.

"It wasn't unanticipated, [but] what I had hoped for was that the provincial government would do would be to modify the regulations so that it gave natural justice to the process," Barbour told the Canadian University Press. " They just virtually said 'whatever you've been doing in the past is alright now'. That, I found, was extremely disappointing."

Barbour raised a number of concerns with the current state of parking at UBC Vancouver – citing the lack of a traffic court similar to municipal structure and a system, he says, which puts the onus on him to contact the university to see if he has been assessed a ticket.

“That's always been my intention of what this behaviour is all about, trying to modify the university's behaviour."

Stilwell noted that universities are autonomous, and can set their own regulations.

Barbour questioned the logic of covering the actions of universities, as autonomous bodies via retroactive legislation. "Traditionally . . . retroactive legislation was there to allow the government to protect itself, not other parties. Where does it stop?" he asked. "Do logging companies, or the mining companies, or anybody who's influential enough with the provincial government, do they now get an opportunity to go to the government and say 'look, we've been doing this wrong all this time, but we'd like some retroactive legislation that says it’s OK?’"

Minister Stillwell defended the government's decision to make the bill retroactive.

"[It] will ensure that current and future users will not be negatively impacted by institutions having to pay back fines that were collected in the past," she said, noting that UBC might have had to pay up to $4 million in refunds.

"If the amendments are not made retroactive, it is estimated this would cost our institutions millions in refunds – money that would have to come from other important programs and services provided to students."

The legislation and decision spells the end for a number of parallel class-action lawsuits that had begun around the province against different universities. The Court of Appeal has not yet issued written reasons for its decision, and Barbour noted that depending on what the reasons say, there might be grounds for an appeal.

"I'm waiting to see what the words say in the judgment, whether they have completely cut this thing off at the knees or not," he said. "My suspicion is they have, that the panel of the Court of Appeal wasn't particularly sympathetic to the entire lawsuit, so I just have to wait and see."

Scott McCrae, director of public affairs at UBC, requested to have interview questions sent to him by email correspondence but did not respond to emailed questions or phone calls before the time of publication.



//Andrew Bates

CUP Western Bureau Chief

NEWS BRIEFS: SECOND-HAND NEWS

Presidential Search

Greg Lee’s last days as Capilano’s head honcho grow ever closer. The presidential search committee is charged with the task of selecting the final candidates for presidency, one of whom will be approved by the Senate. Since the application deadline was November 16, consulting firm Pinton Forrest & Madden has been screening candidates, and will continue this process through January. Due to the Olympics in February, interviews will not be conducted until March. PSC member Ghazal Tohidi noted that so far, most of the selected candidates are from out of town.

Dr. Lee’s term officially ends on August 31, 2010. Although there has been no word yet on his plans for life after Capilano, he revealed in a popular Internet video that he believes he bears a striking resemblance to the mayor of North Vancouver, which may offer telling insight into his future plans.

Hunger Relay for Homelessness

Capilano students went hungry to raise awareness about homelessness this November. Cap’s Social Justice Committee joined the 2010 Homelessness Hunger Strike Relay, which recently marked its one year anniversary on December 29. Capilano’s participation was only one part of the ongoing relay, in which a wooden spoon is passed on after each one-week leg of the national campaign. The hunger strike will continue to June 2010, at which time supporters will travel to Ottawa, demanding affordable housing and better social programs.

CSU elections surpassed (low) expectations, change election bylaws

The CSU held its most successful elections in recent memory this past fall, with 15% of the student population casting their ballots. CSU staff estimated that a high number in the past has been about 200 votes, though 471 students voted this year. The success of this election has partly been attributed to the unusually high number of contested positions.

There will be 2010 elections held for several positions which have terms ending in the spring. These elections will be run under the newly amended election bylaws, which were passed at the CSU’s Fall Annual General Meeting. The changes mainly deal with procedural guidelines for disqualifying candidates, but another notable change is a drastic decrease in the amount of signatures a candidate needs for nomination. Previously, 15 were required but under the new policy, only five are necessary.

Swine Flu infects Cap, vaccinations delayed

In late October, the Courier received word that several students at Capilano had been diagnosed with H1N1. Students were not notified by the school, but schools are not obligated to inform students if other students are infected, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada. Shortly after, the school posted vaccination dates for November, which were cancelled, and postponed until December. According to Capilano’s website, students who missed the December 3 vaccination date are able to schedule an appointment by contacting Mary Ciccone in Health Services, at 604-984-4964.

Compostable cutlery

As part of Capilano’s mission to become a “greener” campus, plastic cutlery was abolished over the summer of 2009 and replaced with compostable cutlery. However, shortly into the fall term, students discovered that the cutlery is only useful for cold meals – the cutlery melts under heat, making it useless for basically anything besides salad. Aramark is currently looking for an alternative, though Dan Traviss of Aramark noted that this is both a difficult and costly endeavor.

//Natalie Corbo

News Editor

AMBUSH MARKETING Cartoon boobs make Vancouver sad

The sticker reads “all selfish guys” and depicts a man’s penis dangling between the blades of a pair of scissors. This sticker, thrown onto his billboard by a lesbian couple, represents the only complaint West Coast Tattoo owner Thomas Lockhart has received in the “ten or fifteen years” he has used his storefront billboard, a wooden sign that features the painted upper body of a naked woman.

Despite not receiving any complaints in the decade-plus he has used the sign, both at his previous Davie street location and now at his East Hastings shop, Lockhart was visited this November by two men who he described as “dressed up in little blue outfits and shit.”

“Two of them came in,” said Lockhart, describing the visit, “at first I thought they were cops.” In fact, the men worked for the city, and had come to inform Lockhart that they had received a complaint about his sign, which he now must remove from the sidewalk. Failing to do so would result in fines Lockhart says are “now up to 250, possibly up to 10, 000 [dollars],” something he doesn’t seem to worry about, laughing as he says “as soon as they left, I put [the sign] right back out.”

Lockhart believes that his sign was targeted because of his store’s location on a major Olympic route. “We knew over a year ago where the main streets were for the venues. They’re using facilities up here like the PNE grounds, so I personally think it was more of an anti-Olympic cleanup thing.”

Theresa Beer, a City spokeswoman, disagrees, saying that the complaint was simply about “the content of the sign from a woman with young children” and that it was evaluated “in the context of the neighbourhood.” Despite her denial, the city’s actions raise the question “why now?” and the stew of vague government officials, threats of repercussions, and a sludgy layer of bureaucracy paints Lockhart as a Kafkaesque character, as if Josef K. had appeared in Vancouver with shoulder length hair and a body covered in tattoos.

Another criticism of Lockhart was recently painted on the CBC evening news, where West Coast Tattoo and Lululemon were accused of “ambush marketing” by VANOC and supported reporter Chris Brown, who condescendingly decried businesses like Lockhart’s, who he said unfairly use the Olympics to their advantage without paying for sponsorship.

The accusations of “ambush marketing” stem from a promotion that offers a free Olympic themed tattoo for Canadian medal winners. Personally, I think our medal winners should be treated as heroes for the incredible sacrifices they make and should be lauded with gifts of beer, fame, and free product. Lockhart is willing to step up and give his product away for free, and the publicity he gains from that is well deserved.

Luckily for Lockhart, it’s something he’s shrewdly managed to capitalize on. Basically, what he has done with both complaints is use a minor issue to generate major publicity for his shop, something he freely admits to, sagely stroking his beard as he told me how he responded to the city’s visit: “Well, I don’t have a huge advertising budget, and I can sniff publicity. So I said, ‘gimme your card!’”

Although some don’t feel this type of advertising is morally right, it seems completely justified until VANOC and the IOC clean up their own act. Until then, it remains a battle of hypocritical money-governed corporations refusing the locals the same liberties and advantages they use to further their own products (did James Cameron use this for the plot of Avatar?), and I will continue to wish happy hunting to people like Thomas Lockhart, who gamely take on these massive organizations with nothing more than a well-drawn pair of tits.

//Mac Fairbairn

Writer

ADVOCACY FILM PUSHES PEOPLE Uwe Boll makes a film worth noting

“If you start crying, or you think, I cannot watch it anymore … you have to think [I] can sit through [this film], because they are living through it. This is happening to these people right now.”

With these words, Uwe Boll launches his newest film, Darfur.

Boll, known for his adaptations of video games into full length films, has taken a step in a significantly different direction. He describes the film, shot in Cape Town, South Africa, as following six journalists as they embark on a trip to document the massacre occurring in Darfur, Sudan.

Darfur spans a period of three days, in which six journalists convince their African Union guide to take them to a village in Janjaweed territory. Once they get there, the journalists see how deeply in fear, of the government and the Janjaweed (a rebel militia), the Sudanese live. While they are interviewing Sudanese men and women for accounts to take back home and prove to the UN that a genocide has occurred, the Janjaweed show up at the village, and threaten to kill the journalists if they do not leave. Four of the six journalists choose to leave the camp, but two remain behind.

“We had... well, basically the idea was that the actors took care of themselves. They were supposed to be journalists, and they would act and ask the Sudanese what they experienced. The Sudanese were not given lines... where the one woman, who broke down because her whole family had been killed. That had actually happened to her,” Boll elaborates.

In fact, when filming Darfur, the only real actors were those portraying the journalists (including actor Billy Zane), members of the African Union and those playing the Janjaweed.

While there are moments in the film that could be criticized for using too many hand held shots, the focus of Darfur should remain on what is important - the message that Boll is trying to spread.

Don Wright, Regional Coordinator for Amnesty International, agreed with Boll, “as gruesome and emotional as this film is, it’s still important that this is the message we are spreading … something needs to be done to stop this.”

In fact, Wright explained just how honest Darfur is compared to the current situation occurring in Sudan: “Everything we saw in the film was very realistic – the rape, murders of the children. All of that was authentic because we have heard the same things from the survivors we have interviewed.”

“Village after village [is] being attacked and burnt to the ground, and so when the Janjaweed in the film say that they were clearing Darfur of Africans, it was very realistic in terms of what has been happening in Darfur. Even the final shot of the village being bombed and burnt to the ground was realistic. Amnesty had an agreement with a satellite company a couple of years ago, who would supply us with images of villages. You would see the village the day before it was attacked, it was lively, and the next day after the Janjaweed attacked, you would see the burned out shell of the village.”

While Boll’s Darfur may be very effective in creating the shock factor sometimes required to get people to do something about a situation that often seems worlds away, Wright explained how Amnesty International looks at reaching people.

“There are different ways to reach people – Amnesty does a lot of on the ground documentaries and reports, that include interviews with survivors, and if you were to use your imagination you could certainly arrive at the same picture. Or you’ve got the film that is meant for broad release, and it gives you those images.”

“I make the movie, because we push the information away from ourselves every day we are alive. And in that, we fail.” Boll explained that to him it was more important than just spreading the information, but in creating a group of people who actively start advocating for the Sudanese. “We watch this stuff, and [often] we do nothing. I want [people] to watch this film and want to do something.”

“Darfur” was screened by Amnesty International and Canadian Students for Darfur. Another screening will be put on in early February at Silver City in Metropolis, though the publicist at the time was unsure of the specific date. For more information on how to help pressure the international community to bring a stop to the massacre that is happening in Sudan, visit www.amnesty.ca or www.csfdarfur.net.

//Nicole Mucci

A COW GOES MOO-MUU-BLOORPDWEEEP Circuit bending at VIVO

VIVO began life in 1973 as the Satellite Video Exchange Society (SVES). A small group of avante garde video artists gathered together their young families to live together in a collective where they could make unique art on their own terms. Almost forty years later, their vision of an experimental art society persists, and “has grown into a vibrant artist-run centre with state of the art facilities and educational workshops,” as stated on their website. The centre now provides a means of experimentation, expression and distribution to a new vanguard exploring new media.

An important aspect of VIVO, or Video In Video Out, is their Work Exchange Program, which credits volunteers with 14 “video bucks” good for the rental of equipment and payment of workshop fees. This system allows anyone with enough curiosity to get a lot accomplished just by paying a $50 (associate) or $100 (producer) membership fee and working to help the centre. Cooperating in this way gives all of the members a sense of community that is, according to Operations and Education Coordinator Dinka Pignon, equally important to the technical means VIVO provides.

In an interview with The Courier, Dinka points out that when you "give people open hands and encourage an open minded approach ... people will do magic. Lots of good art has emerged from here coming from young people who haven't had much experience with art." The art to which she refers came out of SLAB (short for Studio Lab). This is a set of workshops and ongoing projects teaching “visual multimedia programming, real-time media manipulation, circuit bending, physical computing, and all you need to know to get your art to move.”

Votes for Sleepwalkers was a SLAB project which was displayed from October 2 to 11, 2008. It featured seven interactive pieces from seven different artists, all with varying themes and employing different techniques. Analogue Detour to Electronic Sound & Video, which ran from May 29 to June 7 in 2009, was the product of a ten-day residency of Swedish sound artists Kent and Wenche Tankred, and featured an immersive light and sound display. Performance artist Emilio Rojas stated in summary of the second project, “I would recommend the SLAB workshops for anyone who wants to mature as an artist, and learn different skills to enhance their media practice.”

The emphasis of this lab is on providing a place to experiment without boundaries and challenge social and artistic convention. "Not that I'm saying that conventions are not to be respected, but they are also there to be broken and stepped over," Dinka says with a smile during our interview.

One of the more impressive rooms in the building is a video archive stretching back to the ‘60s, when video tape was played on reel-to-reel machines just like the ones used for old audio recordings. Christa Dahl, Senior Advisor to the Board of Directors and Archivist at VIVO, gave me a tour of the archives.

“We actually have one of the most important collections of historic video art,” she said, pulling a ½” reel of Nam June Paik’s from the shelf. Paik was an important cultural figure and electronic artist who rubbed elbows with the likes of experimental composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, and the archives are replete with his work. Moving through the shelves of reels, primitive cassettes and beta, we made it past the players for each of these old formats to the artist documentation. This section contains gobs of information on every artist in the archive, and is definitely the place to go if you ever have the passion to write a unique paper for Art History.

From January onward, the archives will be opened to the public, and people will be able to walk in, select a piece of video art, sit down and watch it. If you ask me, that’s just downright nifty. Recently, Willy LeMaitre presented a 3D stereographic video exhibition that was really enjoyable and a lot better than Final Destination. Opening the archives will let more people receive a unique experience of the screen, which, as Martha would say, is a good thing.

Circuit Bending

Myself and three others lean back in our seats around the workshop table now crowded with tools, wire and soldering irons only just switched off. It is time. Time to marvel at our twisted creations. I press the demo button on my two dollar toy piano to run through the songs. “Mary Had a Little Lamb” begins to play, and I look up at my comrades in anticipation. Do I dare? I slowly twist the newly installed knob, not knowing what exactly to expect.

The tune slows and the pitch drops, and suddenly Mary doesn’t have a little lamb anymore – she’s riding some kind of starship made of unicorns through hell! The others power on their bent circuits, and for the next few minutes, the sounds of electronic chaos can be heard bleep-blooping and hissing and doing other unspeakable things while our instructor David Leith looks on in satisfaction. Every few seconds, I catch a snippet of another song from my childhood rise above the din. No, kids, we’re not on acid, we’re just at a VIVO workshop.

Circuit bending is the somewhat esoteric process of manipulating electronic things to get them to do things they were never meant to do. To bend a circuit is similar to breaking one, only you don’t go all the way. The typical subjects are toys that make noise, and the typical end results can be broken down into three categories. A broken toy is the most common and least satisfying eventuality, but getting it to the breaking point can be fun. Most toys are transformed into pretty noisemakers, which are very fun. With a bit of luck and ingenuity, though, a two dollar toy from Value Village can become a sonic portal to another dimension. This is the most fun of the three categories, but it can be unnerving to hear the voice of the beast growling from the two inch speaker on your sky-blue toy piano.

The basic process of bending a circuit is actually fairly simple. First, you pry open the case to expose the vulnerable innards of your device. A pen and paper are needed to create a map for future voyages into the realm. After these preparations, and using whichever finger you wish, you poke at the circuit board (best to do this while the thing is operating, but avoid high voltage). The object is to locate areas and components of the device that cause some strange effect, like altering pitch, making noise or generating a loop – a series of sounds or device functions that repeats itself, sometimes changing with repetitions.

But circuit bending extends far beyond poking at the guts of old toys. In fact, its only limitations are the imagination and expertise of the bender. Slightly altering the design of an old Speak & Spell can cause the speaking portion to glitch and spout off a bunch of alien gibberish. Actually, the Speak & Spell line of toys from Texas Instruments are some of the most popular toys to bend, since the speech synthesizer and low computing power offer up lots of bizarre behaviour with the right treatment. David Leith explains this and Benoit, a sound designer for Ubisoft, says, “I used to have one of those, but in French,” to which David replied “it wouldn’t be after you got done with it!”

Unfortunately, none of us found anything that could speak or spell, but we were all able to make some amazing bends. Among these were an evil laughing keychain that became much more evil after modification, something with a sheep on it that definitely didn’t sound like a sheep, a flashing toy microphone that sang an inter-dimensional version of “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo,” and that sky-blue toy piano mentioned earlier (you may have seen that one around Cap in early December).

It was all very experimental and risky, which is true of many things that happen at VIVO. This is not the place for people who are in love with the status quo, nor is it right for people who don’t enjoy being horrifically confused every now and then. But for those brave boys and girls who aren’t afraid to leave the safety of predictable art, the risk and confusion pay off handsomely with some unforgettable experiences. With the right combination of set, scene and audience, this new media can be as transformative as a master painting or film. VIVO is a unique place, and it deserves your attention if you’ve ever wanted to see what life is like at the forefront of artistic innovation.

To learn more about VIVO, go to www.videoinstudios.com. If you’d like to participate in a circuit bending club, email sky_hester@hotmail.com.

//Sky Hester

Writer

BOOK REVIEW Margaret Atwood's Year of the Flood

Margaret Atwood, known for her sarcasm, described her book Year of the Flood by saying, “this is the most cheerful book about the near annihilation of the human race that you will ever read. Sometimes when I say the near annihilation of the human race, people say ‘yay’. Please don’t say that.” Atwood and her partner Graeme Gibson visited Cap on December 1, and she also took the opportunity to clear up some fine points about genre.

“Picture, in your mind, a great big banner over the top [of the stage] and what it says is quite a lot of things. It says, we are going to put all books that are not realistic [topics/themes of] fiction novels ... and under a second banner we are going to put all of the other books. What would be left would be two families of books. One of them would be descendants of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” by Jules Verne. He thought he was writing about things that could potentially happen on this planet. The other family would be started by HG Wells, with “War of the Worlds” and the “Time Machine”. This is science fiction ... it deals with space travel, and what we now think of as Martians ... Those are the two families; things that could potentially happen and things that would be extremely unlikely to happen anywhere. My books are part of the first family.” Year of the Flood would fit into the first family of books, firmly entrenching her work in speculative, rather than science, fiction.

Year of the Flood is about a disaster that has “obliterate[ed] most of human life” according to the book itself. Atwood’s book begins in the 25th year of an unknown era. The book jumps back and forth between this year 25 and the preceeding years leading up to the flood, in an attempt to explain why the world ended up the way it did. When Atwood uses the term flood, she uses it in the annihilationist sense, not simply a wet one. The flood Atwood refers to is the pandemic that would appear to only leave two survivors.

Toby, the first character introduced, is a former God’s Gardener and has only survived because she was locked into a spa. Atwood describes the spa as a marvellous place to be “trapped, as many of the masks were edible and [nearly] everything is pink.” Ren, the second character that the book follows, was a worker at a high end sex club called Scales. She was locked away when the flood hit because she was “waiting for [her] test results,” as a client had bit her. The understated feminist critique these characters express is a hallmark of Atwood’s writing.

In the world that Ren and Toby had lived in prior to the flood, the CorpSeCorps and God’s Gardeners essentially ran the world. The CorpSeCorps was the government body, which had become integrated with all of the major corporations in the world, and had in a sense become corrupt. God’s Gardeners were a group of people who believed that science and Christianity should be mixed, that the world was in deep peril because of the way people were treating nature, and because of this they had predicted the waterless flood countless times before. Atwood, after quickly explaining the main players in the book, reminded the audience that it was important to “keep what happens in the book within the pages of the book.”

Despite her warning, she anticipates a world that anxious readers might already find eerily familiar and has gone to great lengths herself to make sure that what happens in the book is manifested in real time. This is best exemplified through the actual music of the God’s Gardeners, available as a companion CD. After the Gardeners' sermons and hymns were written for Year of the Flood, they were put to music by singer/songwriter Orville Stoeber (www.orvillestoeber.com). On yearoftheflood.com, Stoeber explains how the hymns were written, and for what purpose. Essentially, the recorded hymns sound the way Atwood and Stoeber thought God’s Gardeners would write them. However, on the website it is left open to fans to also record their own versions of what the hymns would sound like.

During the reading, Atwood chose to read a hymn called April Fish Day  that she felt was “very fitting for Vancouver in the year 2009, a year in which 9 million salmon simply disappeared.” Confirmed by the Federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans, BC found that only 1.1 million sockeye salmon had entered the Fraser River-ways this past year - there should have been about 10 million. 

And while the audience giggled during her entire reading because of the satirical language she used, there was a feeling of nervousness throughout the crowd, as if they believed that she was not reading a book, but predicting the future. The Copenhagen Conferences were about to commence and the world had just been shaken by the H1N1 outbreak and a global vaccination campaign.

Atwood’s book, while not specifically pointed at any environmental issue in particular, does warn of what our world could look like if trends continue. Atwood touched on the impending during the Q&A period. She jokingly stated, “Our government is standing up for our right to choke to death,”  but was quick to say that it was time for Canadians to “stop sit[ting] still.. and allow[ing] for the selfish and greedy behaviour that we have seen during [past] Copenhagen [events].”

Speculative fiction or not, Atwood’s tale of the almost annihilation of the world touched many people sitting within the theatre that evening. “Things that could potentially happen” were happening as Atwood wrote the book, and still are. H1N1 may not have succeeded in killing the world, but there has been much speculation about what this small scale pandemic could foreshadow. Paranoia points to a superbug, similar to the one responsible for Atwood’s pandemic in “The Year of the Flood.” The same  unfortunately goes for her environmental concerns and the similarity between her speculative world and our real one.

//Nicole Mucci

Writer

COOK AND WALKER The top five films of 2009

1. The White Ribbon

Austrian auteur Michael Haneke’s examination of a village in pre-WWI Germany is a devastating masterpiece that stands as one of the best films of the decade. Haneke is known for his ability to explore the psychology of his characters, and he is up to the same tricks here, albeit in a different and subtler way. The White Ribbon contains a sense of horror unprecedented in cinema.

2. Extraordinary Stories

The first of two four-hour features on our top five, Extraordinary Stories is an awesome explosion of momentous narrative, exploring the nature of storytelling itself. At once both deconstructive and illustrative, it stands as one of the most impressive frenzied films, putting pop culture favourites, like Pulp Fiction, to shame.

3. Phantoms of Nabua

Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's (nicknamed “Joe” in America, for obvious reasons) ten-minute short film is a portrait of home through a collision of lights and sounds. In short, the film documents several shadowy figures as they kick a burning soccer ball around, while a fluorescent light flickers in the background. Their game comes to an end once the flaming ball burns a screen canvas to the ground. In ten minutes “Joe” finds a way to extract an emotional reaction and relation from the viewer that many feature films can't match.

4. Love Exposure
 

The second four-hour film on our list is Japanese director Sion Sono's magnum opus on genitalia and religion. Basically, Sono takes Japanese stars with fame equivalent to Zac Efron and Miley Cyrus and casts them in his epic that infiltrates and destroys all popular notions of organized religion. Sono maintains a rare sense of humour throughout, and by the fourth hour, the reoccurring visual motif of the main character's boner becomes a serious dramatic device; no joke. Sono, often likened to Tarantino in his pop film-making style, beats Tarantino at his own game by showing his responsibility as a humanitarian and filmmaker in his thematic battle for upheaval against religious institutions.

5. Up
 

While not perfect, the latest Pixar classic is a true gem that continues an insane 14-year streak of quality that has been peaking since Ratatouille. Sincere and heartfelt, the story of an old widower trying to honour the memory of his wife by flying to South America in a house lifted by balloons is genuinely moving. The first 20 minutes or so, which beautifully summarize the protagonist’s life, are as good as anything in American animation.

//Adam Cook and Curt Walker

Writers

HITZ FROM THE BONG History of a head shop

A head shop is named after the client base, not the wares. It's a store that functions to serve pot heads (hence the name) with a place to pick up their nefarious accessories. I work at Puff on Robson street. It's the store upstairs, down the grey encrusted hallway next to a buzzing tattoo shop, the one carrying pipes and bongs equipped with the newest advancements in water cooling technology – thousand dollar pieces infused with diffuser stems inside external horizontal water chambers, and glass-on-glass multi-chamber bongs with internal tree perculators and an ice pinch, all blown on glass lathes from chemically hardened Pyrex. Maybe you asked the clerk where to find some “herb” because your dealer downtown moved away. Perhaps you went in with your giggly friends and commented that the store always smells like “pot”. Nope, that's incense, poser.

Not that I don't sympathize with posers. Actually, I'm the biggest poser ever. Never a fan of the 'stoner' image one might accrue by working at a head shop, I, the store clerk at Puff, gave up smoking marijuana years ago. I wanted to pursue athletics and better grades (or something) but I ended up with a cigarette addiction and the same lousy marks. Draw whatever conclusions you like.

During high school, I smoked marijuana regularly. Don't act like you never tried it during lunch break. However, the weed itself was never a huge point of interest for me. I never had a subscription to High Times or an article of clothing adorned with pot leaves. The point I'm trying to illustrate is that I never actively sought out a place at Puff for its association with marijuana. Four years ago I moved to Vancouver looking for a job, and was thrown haphazardly into stoner culture. I happened to know the owner of the Puff franchise; he needed another employee at the distribution warehouse and offered me a job. I eventually settled into my current retail position, selling smokers the wide variety of tools they need to get the job done.

One of the things I love about working at Puff, though, is how the stoner connotation is constantly being turned on its head. Professionals, academics and other hard working people come in to the store to buy smoking accessories all the time. I am often reminded that the dirty, unemployable, stoner is nothing more than a stereotype. Users are just as often clean, friendly and articulate. Marijuana isn't a problem for everyone, and 'functional smokers' make up a considerable portion of the client base.

If you are a regular customer, you may notice some not-so-subtle changes, not only at Puff but at other head shops as well. Since last summer, legislative changes have deemed it necessary to hide all tobacco products from sight. In the near future, 'blunt' wraps and flavoured rolling papers will be phased out altogether, as they have been deemed to encourage children to experiment with smoking. Although head shops and smoke shops now hide their papers and blunts from the customer, Puff still proudly displays their pipes and bongs. Rather than marketing smoking accessories for tobacco or illicit substances, head shops work around these restrictions by advertising the gear toward the smoking of herbal shisha.

Such lenience, however, is not afforded in the USA. In its infancy, the Puff franchise also dealt in the States. That is, until the Feds let the founders know they were under investigation for dealing paraphernalia. The shareholders became anxious to jump ship, and the sole remaining owner decided it prudent to deal exclusively in Canada. Vancouver's very own Tommy Chong illustrates the repercussions of selling pipes in the US. Chong Glass, which was started in Paris of all places, dealt pipes and bongs online. Life imitates art, as Tommy Chong was fined $20,000 and sentenced to nine months in a sweaty Californian prison.

These forced adaptations provide a lens into an important but understated issue. The reality of BC's smoker culture is not some kind of Cheech and Chong cliché – it’s a 7 billion dollar industry that services all segments of society, and let’s face it, Canada's 'war on drugs' is ramping up. Politically driven legislation, increasing penalties and the imposition of 'mandatory minimum' sentences for drug possession, is currently being pursued by the Conservative government. How will this affect marijuana in Vancouver, known to be the new Amsterdam of permissive puffing? Find out next time, you stoned bastards.

//Marco Ferreira

Columnist

THE WORD JERK Defending the universe from literary tyranny

A word jerk is, as amateur slang historian Lauren McCoy once put it, “a person who presumably takes some form of pleasure in using rare and complicated words when ordinary ones will suffice … there is nothing practical about this way of speaking.” Impractical perhaps, but I’ve always had a penchant for loquaciousness, even when it comes at the expense of understanding. I do this not because of some sadistic tendency towards social confusion, nor for lack of the ability to express myself, but chiefly in order to illustrate a simple point: Words are meaningless.

Words do, of course, seem meaningful. When you hear a word, your brain interprets its various sonic components into a complete idea, and from this idea you glean meaning. However, this appearance of meaningfulness is just that – appearance. The real meaning of the word is intangible and mental, transmitted from one person’s mouth to another’s ear inside a word. Speech is the only obvious physical link between minds, but it is also a considerable obstacle to overcome.

Consider for a moment that in a dictionary, it takes words to define words, and the most profound barrier to understanding a word is the language employed in its explanation. Have you ever taken a calculus class? In those first few classes, most students just sit there reeling in horror at the bizarre application of various words that were either previously assumed to be understood, or had no concrete definition. To gain a better conception of whence this tumultuous perplexity emanates, it would be advantageous to address the principle tenets of structural linguistics. Let’s talk about language.

Ferdinand de Saussure, a turn of the century Swiss linguist, examined the structure of language very deeply. His most influential currents of thought flowed from an idea of language being composed of identifiable elements, like signs and references. A sign is sub composed of a signifier (a word or any other symbol) and the signified (the idea represented by the word or symbol). He famously stated that “the connection between the signified and the signifier is arbitrary.”

This insight can help to explain the confusion encountered when addressing the language of something unfamiliar, like higher mathematics; without some acquaintance with the signified, the signifier has little hint of meaning. The symbols of the Calculus are nothing more than chalk on a blackboard to the uninitiated. Though Newton and his contemporaries conceived the system to reveal the hidden clockwork of the universe, it is little more another layer of obstruction to the understanding of those unwilling to learn the symbolism.

Even with a profound understanding of the signified, however, the signifier is only a hint of meaning, not meaning itself. So, words – the speech-signifiers of mental, intangible things – though they have definitions, do not have meaning, but only indicate meaning. They are therefore meaningless, which was to be demonstrated.

Yet, though our means of expression is objective and without meaning, the same isn't necessarily so for expression itself. If we know that our words are just the signifiers of what we want to say, we can get to the point without lots of superfluous jargon. Ludwig Wittgenstein, a philosopher of both language and mathematics, stated in his Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus that “what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.”

I have intentionally written all of the above using overly complex words to illustrate the point. It’s amazing how meaningless symbols and words can be, and even more amazing that some people are capable of expressing beautifully illuminating sentiments with minimal language. Again referring to mathematics, beauty is in simplicity of expression. Once you work through the ugly words and equations to get to the realm of pure thought, everything becomes clear, even obvious.

This is the purpose of language: Not to throw around symbols and work with structure, but to bushwhack through the jungle of false expression into the true mind of another person. We are constantly communicating meaning through meaningless things. Apply this principle and you will become a master of linguistic expressivity, as I, the word jerk, humbly hope to be.

//Sky Hester

Columnist