THE VARSITY Vol. CXXXIII, No. 16
University of Toronto’s Student Newspaper Since 1880
11 February, 2013
pg 6
Students charged “illegal” fees
Trinity, SMC, Engineers announce UTSU secession plans
Admission prompted by student union-led investigation
Zane Schwartz
Vipasha Shaikh & Sheena Singh VARSITY STAFF
In response to an initial investigation by U of T student unions, senior university administrators released a report last Tuesday that found at least seven ancillary fees charged to students were in violation of guidelines set out by the Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities (mtcu), as well the University of Toronto’s Policy on Ancillary Fees. The report downplayed the number of fees in violation, saying that while “a few instances of fees may be interpreted as non-compliant,” the “vast majority” were in line with university policy. mtcu guidelines state that if a university levies a fee later found to be illegal, and no resolution can be achieved, “the university’s operating grant will be reduced by an amount which corresponds to the revenue raised by the fee increase,” meaning that the university would receive less funding from the province. U of T’s vice-president, university operations Scott Mabury said there would be no refunds of the fees that had been found in violation of Ministry policy. Instead, they will cease to be charged to students in the future. Upon finding that “embedded in the university’s list of ancillary fees are many user-fee items that should be covered under tuition fees,” the
University of Toronto Students’ Union (utsu), Scarborough Campus Students’ Union (scsu), and Graduate Students’ Union (gsu) began a lengthy process: scrutinizing thousands of fees, levied upon students in dozens of faculties and departments across U of T’s three campuses. The results of those investigations, which began last year, were shared with The Varsity by representatives of the student unions. “It is obvious that the university needs to seriously reconsider the mtcu’s policy on compulsory fees,” finds the utsu’s report. “Many of the fees currently being charged to students do not fall within the guidelines, and many more of these fees are simply unjustified or illegal.” The utsu’s submission condemns the university, claiming that it should be “ashamed” for “exploiting what it considers to be loopholes in the policy as a means of generating revenue.” The unions and the administration remain divided over the question of at least eight other fees, ranging from copyright access to co-op fees, to system access fees for rosi. “It is becoming more of a trend for universities to go to student councils to raise fees,” said Munib Sajjad, vice-president, university affairs for the utsu. “We have to look into things like infrastructure fees and computer fees, and why we should be paying this.”
The administration’s fee review was conducted by the Office of the ViceProvost, Students, and the Planning and Budget Office. Its findings were presented to the Business Board in late-January 2013, several months later than the university had promised. At the Business Board meeting, Mabury stated that the crux of the university’s findings were that “most fees in Category 5/6 were found to be [in] compliance” with a limited number of fees that were not compliant. The administration’s report commits to discontinuing the fees found in violation by 2013–2014. The university has also ruled that iClickers and other additional online materials for courses are no longer required to be purchased by students in order to complete a mandatory credit course — instead, the university is to provide other methods of evaluation to its students that do not require these materials. The report also commits to updating departmental websites, and revising the next ancillary fee schedule to “unbundle” certain fees that are currently a black box, levied under vaguely-worded descriptions, such as the laboratory supply fee that charges for multiple items, such as course manuals, lab coats, and equipment. The university will also clear up another vague fee that is charged to students
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ASSOCIATE NEWS EDITOR
Student heads from Trinity College, St. Michael’s College (smc), and the Engineering Society announced Sunday that they plan to seek “defederation” from the University of Toronto Students’ Union (utsu), a potentially drastic measure if approved. The surprise announcement came as the union prepares to host executive elections this year that will not feature some of the key reforms demanded by the college leaders. All three college leaders seeking defederation cited the minutes of the Elections and Referenda Committee (erc), which met on Thursday and Saturday last week, as clear indications that their reform recommendations were not going to be implemented in time. The minutes of the erc meeting strongly suggest that this year’s election will not utilize online voting, a key plank in the college-backed NonPartisan Declaration on utsu Electoral Reform. The student body is slated to vote on the Non-Partisan Declaration at a special meeting on Tuesday night (for more, see “Cliffhanger” pg 6). The union reacted to calls for electoral reform by hiring a law firm to conduct a review of its current electoral policies. The review considered submissions from a number of sources, including the Non-Partisan Declaration. The results of the firm’s
review were released late last week, and did not include the proposals listed in the Declaration, focusing instead on clarifying rules, appeals processes, and election timelines. Rishi Maharaj from the Engineering faculty, Mike Cowan from St. Michael’s, and Sam Greene from Trinity have been quietly preparing over several months for the possibility of defederation referenda. The Engineering Society has earmarked $100,000 for legal fees and hired the law firm Heenan Blaikie on retainer. Heenan Blaikie has previously represented students’ unions attempting to defederate from the Canadian Federation of Students — a national organization of which the utsu is a member — most recently at Guelph. Attempts to part ways with the cfs have resulted in lengthy and expensive legal battles. “From the beginning of this discussion everyone must have been thinking about legal representation,” said Maharaj. The Engineering Society executive will meet Monday to discuss next steps, and will likely ask their Board of Directors to discuss approving in principle the concept of a referendum on defederation, with specific text to be finalized at a later date. Trinity will follow a similar process, with the meeting to approve the holding of a referendum set for this Thursday. “It’s clear that the Union is ignoring the will of its members in order to maintain the system that keeps incum-
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VARSITY NEWS
Vol. CXXXIII, No. 16
news@thevarsity.ca
WHAT’S GOING ON
THE VARSITY
SNOWDAY EDITION
THIS WEEK
VOL. CXXXIII No. 16
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the week in tweets
ON CAMPUS
Editorial Board Editor-in-Chief Murad Hemmadi
editor@thevarsity.ca
Design Editors Suzy Nevins Dan Seljak
suzy@thevarsity.ca dan@thevarsity.ca
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KEVIN TANG @KVNN_T Took #uoft half a day to realize theres a lot of snow outside.#uoftproblems #snowday
Production Editor Alex Ross
production@thevarsity.ca Managing Online Editor Patrick Love online@thevarsity.ca Senior Copy Editor Catherine Kabasele
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Science Editor Dennis Dobrovolsky
MAGED S. ABDELMALEK @MAGMASIDE Free-for-all SNOW-BALL FIGHT AT 3PM Front Campus! #UofT#Snowday #Toronto #TOstorm retweet!
XAO SPEAKER SERIES: WINONA LADUKE eXpression Against Oppression Week Hart House Theatre Monday, February 11, 7–10 pm 7 Hart House Circle
— February 8, 2013
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Video Editor Wyatt Clough
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Associate Design Editor Nathan Watson Associate Photo Editor Vacant Associate Online Editor Sofia Luu Associate Copy Editor Vacant Associate News Editors Zane Schwartz Irina Vukosavic Associate Comment Editor Vacant Associate Features Editor Damanjit Lamba Associate A&C Editors Danielle Klein Ishita Petkar Associate Science Editors Roxanne Leung Katrina Vogan Associate Sports Editors Elizabeth Benn William Deck
SAVE UOFT RUGBY FUNDRAISER Friday, February 15, 10 pm–2 am The Brunswick House 481 Bloor St.
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The Varsity is the University of Toronto's largest student newspaper, publishing since 1880. The Varsity has a circulation of 20,000, and is published by Varsity Publications Inc. It is printed by Master Web Inc. on recycled newsprint stock. Content © 2012 by The Varsity. All rights reserved. Any editorial inquiries and/or letters should be directed to the sections associated with them; emails listed above. The Varsity reserves the right to edit all submissions. Inquiries regarding ad sales can be made to ads@thevarsity.ca. ISSN: 0042-2789 Please recycle this issue after you are finished with it.
#university of #toronto #uoft still open. Stairs closed. Makes sense.#downtown #snow #storm #iphone
SEMI-FORMAL “BOLLYWOOD BEATS” Hindu Students Council at UTM Friday, February 15, 7 pm Blind Duck Pub 3359 Mississauga Road
— February 8, 2013
TOWNHALL ON THE FUTURE OF THE TRANSITIONAL YEAR PROGRAM University of Toronto Students Union Wednesday, February 13, 6.30–8.30 pm Mechanical Engineering Building 5 King’s College Road
Crime Stats
1
Theft
Harassment
11
1
Trespassing
Dispute
4 1
1 1
Mischief
Noise
Robbery
Elevator Entrapment
3
14
Medical Call
Dear #UofT, canceling classes at 2:15, hours after EVERY other school had made that decision, tends to annoy your students! — February 8, 2013
Only at #UofT is the campus closed but the library is still open till 11 on a Friday. — February 8, 2013
Online voting
February 1-7
10
BEN BAIN @BIGBENBAIN
TRACY MCKINNER @TRACYMCKK
BITE ME: RUDE FOOD AND THE ANGLO-SAXON RIDDLE TRADITION Jackman Humanities Institute Thursday, February 14, 4–6 pm Jackman Humanities Building|Room 100 170 St. George St.
Writers Rida Ali, Zainab Asadullah, Zoë Bedard, Elizabeth Benn, Aberdeen Berry, Dan Berube, Simon Bredin, Amanda Coletta, Wes Dutcher-Walls, Joshua Fumo, David Gelles, Lucy Genua, Nick Gergesha, Susan Gordon, Elena Gritzan, Trevor Janes, Danielle Klein, James Maiangowi, Nicholas Pcholkin, Helen Picard, Sneha Raju, Jordan Rivera, Denys Robinson, Anne Rucchetto, Zane Schwartz, Vipasha Shaikh, Sheena Singh, Catherine Virelli, Irina Vukosavic Dwayne G. White
JENNIFER CHONG @CHONSKI
Security Alarm
Turnout (percentage)
Sports Editor Zoë Bedard Illustrations Editor Minhee Bae
— February 8, 2013
35
Toronto
30
Manitoba
25
Western
20
Ottawa McGill
15
UBC
10
Online
5
2009
2010
2011
2012
Year
Paper Ballot Source: MacleanS
Major online voting incidents UBC (2010)
Queen’s (2011)
Western (2012)
731 votes from a single IP address
Alumni received web ballots, eligible students not on voters list
Student hacked into election, changed one candidate’s name to ‘Justin Bieber’s haircut’ and title of page to ‘University Erection’
VARSITY NEWS
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MONDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2013
3
Election underway for university’s highest office Several incumbents, but still no international students, running for election to Governing Council Aberdeen Berry
VARSITY CONTRIBUTOR
Students will have the opportunity to vote on rosi starting February 11 for student representatives to Governing Council, the university’s most senior decision-making body, for one-year terms. There are eight student positions available across five constituencies. This year, 38 students are running, up from 23 last year. There will be only one acclamation this year, compared to three last year. Several incumbents, including Aidan Fishman and Chirag Variawa, are seeking reelection. Despite a motion this week that called for international students to be eligible to run for Governing Council, the University of Toronto Act still expressly forbids such candidates. Disparaged by students as a largely symbolic position for those hoping to pad their résumés, the importance of the Governing Council has inspired neither ambitious campaigns nor widespread voter interest. Incumbent graduate candidate, Chirag Variawa, argues, “the problem is that discourse is all one sided.”
“ILLEGAL FEES” CONTINUED FROM COVER in the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering (ibbme) for unspecified course materials by elaborating on what it covers on the ibbme website and in the 2013–2014 fees schedule. “It is important to the university to ensure that students have full information on the fees that they pay,” said Mabury. The report contains a host of other measures intended to address the obscure nature of some fees, including a new “best practices” website and more extensive consultations with students, staff, and faculty. NARROW SCOPE The university and ministry divide compulsory ancillary fees into eight distinct categories. The university’s investigation was limited to just two of these, Categories 5 and 6. Category 5 fees cover the cost of select learning materials and services, and Category 6 is for administrative fees charged only to students who use the services covered by the fee. According to the university’s Policy on Ancillary Fees, the sole approval required for such fees rests with the Mabury. For all other fees, which fall under Categories 2 through 4 and include student services, organizations, levies for specific projects, and “extraordinary” academic surcharges, students must be consulted or otherwise engaged through such means as a referendum. Although changes to ancillary fees must be reported annually to the Business Board of Governing Council, neither university protocol nor ministry policy limit how much they can be increased. In some cases, U of T faculties have increased these fees astronomically: a 43 per cent increase for medical student registration, a 67 per cent increase for applicants to the commerce program, and between 400 and 2,000 per cent for nursing clinical placement fees. “Many fees outlined in the ancil-
Students tend to learn about candidates through candidates’ own promotional material, rather than debates. “There are false claims being made, but these are hard to parse,” Variawa noted. Perhaps familiar with these problems, candidate Reema Gowani explicitly included a rejoinder in her platform: “I refuse to make outrageous promises to the student body in order to get votes — I have realistic goals that are achievable.” While there was a single debate held for graduate student candidates, information about it was almost entirely unavailable. There were three participants, one of whom joined over Skype. Similarly, no information was to be found online about several undergraduate candidates, aside from a brief statement of intent on the Governing Council’s website. This lack of awareness might also contribute to an expectation of donothing student governors. Variawa complains, “There is one person who has never shown up to a council meeting … and they are not held accountable, either.” Especially at the undergraduate level, however, students appear to be trying to do things differently this year. For instance, Daniel DiCenzo
(Scarborough) and Adrian De Leon (Mississauga) are running as a slate. “When candidates have the same goals and purpose I believe it helps create a greater impact,” said DiCenzo. He added that he hopes to work with other students, regardless of whether or not he and De Leon are both elected. “I still plan to complete the tasks I have set out as a potential governor. I will also work with other student governors and collaborate with them. Students are always stronger together.” DiCenzo and De Leon have been endorsed via Twitter by Munib Sajjad, Univeristy of Toronto Students’ Union vice-president, university affairs. Despite the challenges of pushing forward substantive policy at Governing Council, student plans have focused on a few main issues. Among these are improving often demoralizing teaching and course experiences for students. Candidate Ashley Racine writes, “many students … have been tricked into taking courses which sound great, but are taught in a disorganized and disinterested fashion,” because “professors may opt out of the publishing of student evaluations of courses.” She hopes to either pursue a policy of mandatory publication
lary fee schedule … increased at rates of above 10 per cent to over 4,000 per cent,” finds the utsu’s report. “It is highly unlikely that increases at this rate are for the purpose of cost recovery.” The investigation began when students at ibbme complained to the gsu about certain ancillary fees they were charged, totaling over $1,500. “ibbme students were shocked. The university seemed to be ignoring ministry policy, which says you have to provide students with information on what the fees are for and submit proposals to Governing Council before making changes,” said Jason Dumelie, gsu academic and funding commissioner. Concerns over those specific fees were raised with both the administration and the ministry, and were partially resolved in March 2012. The episode prompted the university to undertake its review beginning in July 2012, giving other student unions the opportunity to file reports in the process. The utsu submitted their own review of contentious fees applicable to undergraduate students, including building access fees, laboratory supply fees and work placement fees. Union concerns range from clear violations of policy, to vague descriptions given for fees that made it difficult to ascertain whether the fee was legal or not. Sajjad, who led the utsu investigation, said that some fees “are very unclear” and that there have been “misinterpretations of mtcu policy.” In their filing, the scsu raised concerns about “unfairly high” coop term fees that can run as high as $583 per academic session for international development studies, economic policy, physical sciences, and computer science. Guled Arale, vice-president, external, at scsu believes some of these fees should be covered by the university’s central operating budget, and states that U of T’s ancillary fees are among the highest collected by any institution in the country — an issue that the
university’s report declined to investigate. Many of Scarborough’s co-op programs in the humanities, social sciences, management, teaching, and science programs have work placement requirements in order to graduate. Both the gsu and utsu contested the Access Copyright fee (also called the cancopy fee), which charges students for the photocopying and distribution of published copyrighted works. The utsu alleges that this is “an illegal fee that serves to benefit the university” as many non-students (including faculty) also use the service. The university’s response is that its agreement with Access Copyright is a short-term contract that can be reconsidered in December 2013. Some fees that existed before ministry guidelines were issued continue to fall outside of its jurisdiction, and will not be repealed. These fees include the $45 student system access fee, charged to access rosi. In general, union leaders have expressed concern over slow response times from both the university and the ministry. Dumelie stated, “The ministry has been slow in responding to us… We have received a little guidance from them, but over the course of a year, it’s not a ton.” Many of those involved with the union’s investigation had hoped to procure refunds for the repealed fees in the new year, a prospect that now appears unlikely. At the Governing Council’s Business Board meeting in January 2013, many administrators said they were glad the fee review was conducted, calling it a muchneeded clarification. Sally Garner, of the Planning and Budget Office, said that the university’s biggest step moving forward will be its best practices website, which will be launched over the next six to eight months, and will ensure faculties and departments have the resources needed to set appropriate fees for their students.
or “putting these evaluations to work in determining faculty positions.” Fishman takes a different approach, arguing that grade deflation is the chief difficulty, and one that the administration is already aware of. “I plan to put further pressure on U of T officials to increase the pace of mark-raising, and specifically to make our incoming president aware of how much harm our current grading policies do to this university.” Fees are another major problem pointed out by prospective governors. DiCenzo explains that many students are concerned with “ever increasing ancillary fees.” Gowani similarly notes that her goal is to “make the opt-out process easier than it currently is for students.” Candidate Areesha Jacob emphasizes, bluntly, that the problem is “tuition fees,” providing no further detail. Apathy towards the Governing Council has itself become a concern for several candidates. Fishman noted that during his tenure, “I did my best to keep in touch with students via my Governing Council Facebook page.” He hopes to expand his program of informing students, stating, “I’m considering hosting an informal ‘office hour’ once a week.” Gowani also
cited Internet presence as important, saying, “Social media is a strong way of reaching people in our day and age. Because of this, I will keep an active Facebook page where I will update all followers.” Jacob hoped similarly to improve student involvement: “I plan to create an online survey or questionnaire for my fellow students to fill out.” Racine said of her plans to improve engagement, “It could be as simple as going door to door in the clubhouse building, speaking to students in different fields of study from my own.” If engaging with students is one problem candidates face, having an impact as one of only eight students of the 50 members on the Governing Council is another. “The most important role of a student governor is to be a skilled negotiator, since making progress on any of the issues relevant to students rests largely on convincing other figures that a certain policy is beneficial for U of T and can practically be implemented,” says Fishman. Most candidates agree with a strategy of persistent engagement with other members of the council. Racine notes that from her time on the Arts & Science Council, she learned that “students’ issues can be put on the agenda, it just takes a persistent person.”
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Vol. CXXXIII, No. 16
VARSITY NEWS
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Food services task force at UTM expands across province Disagreement over full release of Chartwells contract slows progress
Above left, Grace Guo, the utmsu executive leading the food services task force. Right, cafeteria at utm. JUNAID IMRAN/THe MeDIUM
Irina Vukosavic
ASSOCIATE NEWS EDITOR
A task force initially established to investigate the quality of food services at the University of Toronto Mississauga (utm) has now expanded province-wide, after the idea was adopted by the Canadian Federation of Students-Ontario (cfs-o). The task force is mandated to investigate food options on campuses, examining issues including price, quality, and availability. “Why are meal plans increasing in price? Why are costs going up and food quality is going down? Students aren’t happy, and this task force is about investigating food services across campus,” said Munib Sajjad, vice-president, university affairs for the University of Toronto Students’ Union (utsu) and a utm student. The investigation is expected to explore ways of promoting more diverse food options on campus. According to Grace Guo, vice-president, external affairs at University of Toronto Mississauga Students’ Union (utmsu), the goal is to better accommodate students’ needs and diversity by ensuring clearly-identified options like Halal, Kosher, vegetarian, and vegan. “Our main goal is to be an active actor around the food services on campus, from hosting
town halls to consult students, to distributing surveys to collect feedback,” says Guo. While the task force based at utm has been steadily progressing, the process has been slowed by corporate and administrative reticence to release information. The task force at utm will continue with its work while the cfs-o convenes a larger body to conduct a province-wide inquiry. One of the biggest delays, says Sajjad, is the fact that the contract between Chartwells, the food service provider at utm, and the university is not fully available to the public. Under the food service contract signed in 2004, Chartwells is responsible for most of the operational tasks for food services at utm. These include operating the food service outlets, managing staff, providing recipes and nutritional analysis, marketing the facilities, and providing catering and cleaning. According to Paul Donoghue, chief administrative officer at utm, the financial terms of the contract are considered to be proprietary commercial information, and are therefore confidential. Although the non-confidential elements of the contract have been shared — specifically, the key operating context and the nature of exclusivity — Sajjad says that isn’t enough. He says the union was only able to see the summary, which didn’t indicate price, inflation, quality, or diversity of food on campus.
“I thoroughly believe companies like Chartwells are witholding information from students on the way things run. We need to see the financial aspects of the report in order to make changes that benefit students and allow them to be part of the decision making structure,” he says. Guo adds that not being able to see the contract is problematic because the union does not have all of the nessary information. Donoghue points to several channels where student involvement in the decisionmaking process is encouraged: the utm Residence Student Dining Committee, the Food Advisory Committee, customer comment boards, the Chartwells online Dine on Campus comment page, utm community food service surveys, and open dialogue with the Hospitality and Retail Operations. “We welcome any opportunity for input from the utm community and look forward to continuing to be guided by that input and advice. With that guidance, over the past five years utm has made significant improvements and changes in our food services,” says Donoghue. Since the task force began, both the utsu and utmsu have been gathering student feedback and opinions through food surveys distributed in hard copy or found online on the unions’ websites. Students’ opinions are then processed and delivered to the Hospitality and Retail Services department.
“We want to bring everything we heard from students to Hospitality Services, along with Faculty and staff of utm to make utm student food experiences a great one,” says Guo. Following a decision by the cfs-o, the utm task force on food services is now part of a wider initiative stretching across Ontario. Ten campuses, including Ryerson, York, and Lakehead, have been actively involved, and since the campaign kicked off last summer, 5,000 paper copies of surveys have been collected, with 3,000 responses online. “Food services on campus really is an important issue to students in Ontario and it has definitely been something people prioritize. We’ve been seeing some great results,” says Sarah Jayne-King, cfs-o chair. The cfs-o has been helping to provide participating universities material province-wide, including surveys for individual campus groups and student unions. After the February 15 deadline to submit surveys, the cfs will put together a final report that will summarize the findings and provide recommendations to improve food services across the province. The report is set to be prepared over the summer, and will be used as a resource for students and unions to engage campuses about ways to improve campus food facilities.
U of T to further expand open access projects James Maiangowi VARSITY STAFF
The University of Toronto’s open access initiatives have proven successful enough to merit further expansion, vice-president and provost Cheryl Misak announced at a Governing Council meeting last Thursday. The university’s recent efforts include Open UToronto, an online portal for the university’s freely available content and resources, and a partnership with Coursera to offer massive open online courses (moocs). “You cannot open a newspaper these days without hearing about moocs and open publishing,” Misak said of the university’s efforts to position itself in the new educational landscape. “In this kind of potentially revolutionary new technology it is better to be ahead of the curve than behind, and as you’ll see with Open UToronto, we’ve been required to stay ahead of it.”
Open UToronto provides a central location for university research collections, which range from early nineteenth century-Mexican political pamphlets to a history of the early development of insulin, as well as links to open scholarly journals and course materials. Further expansions are forthcoming. While it may be too early to judge Open UToronto’s success in opening pathways often closed to non-university students, the university has made progress in diversifying its approach to online learning, from the Coursera moocs to this year’s new, entirely-online courses. Misak said the university also plans to record more lectures to free up class time. “We’re using these online lectures in what’s called a ‘classroom way,’” she said. “Students can listen to the lectures at home and in-class time can be used for discussions.
“We’ve also found it’s especially useful for students whose first language isn’t English — they can watch the lecture twice if they need to.” Of all the university’s open access initiatives, none has attracted more attention than its partnership with Coursera, an educational technology company. Over 200,000 students have registered for one of U of T’s five available courses, though the number of students completing the courses is considerably lower. For Charmaine Williams, a professor at the Faculty of Social Work, online courses offered a chance to reach a far wider audience than she would have been able to otherwise. “I decided to do it because I thought I wasn’t going to get the opportunity again to do public education about mental illness,” Williams said of her decision to offer ‘The Social Context of Mental Health and
Illness’ online this winter. “A lot of students in my class are in fact affected by mental illness, or their family members or friends are, and they’ve said they just really want to learn more about it and create discussions amongst themselves.” Near the end of her presentation Misak briefly discussed the fiscal implications of open access. While stressing that online courses are “no attempt to teach our students in a less expensive, less personal way,” Misak noted there were several revenue possibilities open to discussion. “There will always be a completely open way of taking the exams,” she said. “But if you want a certificate of mastery or achievement, there would be some charge for that, and the university would get some of it.” Misak also briefly discussed the option of licensing some of the University of Toronto’s courses to two-year colleges in the United States.
VARSITY NEWS
var.st/news
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2013
5
Governing Council briefed on ROSI substitute New website has plenty of virtual bells and whistles — but will still have “hours of operation” Rida Ali
VARSITY STAFF
The university’s central hub for tuition payments and course registration, rosi, is expected to be phased out and replaced by the Next Generation Student Information System (ngsis) in the coming years, according to new information revealed in a presentation to the Governing Council’s University Affairs Board (uab). The purpose of ngsis is to improve service and enhance the experience of students, staff and faculty through the implementation of a renewed and expanded suite of student information services. “ngsis is about creating new ways to improve the access and interface to university services and transactions for students, across an almost unlimited set of domains, that is, it’s not only about course identification, registration, grades, and fees. We want to include as much as possible through a common interface,” said Marden Paul, director of planning, governance, assessment and communications. He added, “The focus is on services, not systems. This is a very important point to the program.” Vice-Dean Suzanne Stevenson explained the system and the research that went into creating it at a uab meeting last week.
“At each kind of functionality, we researched what would best meet the needs of the U of T community, and also what are the resource issues, and what are the timing issues, and then we make a decision about how to deploy these very high-level approaches,” said Stevenson. “We had to allocate significant attention to things that could have an immediate effect on students, on staff, and really let people know that we are listening to the needs of the organization and responding to those. And that they can see this kind of multi-year process that we would break things into and make positive changes as we could over time.” Besides the long-term project of a replacement to rosi, over 20 shorterterm goals have been identified by the administration in areas such as student life, registration, degree planning, curricular activities, student financial services, strategic planning, and divisional partnerships. In response, plans are underway for a host of new services for students, such as a “one stop” registration page, electronic uhip cards, a residence choice gateway, an online course-finder and degree explorer, a rosi bookstore service, and improved Varsity Blues team registration services. Some of these services have already begun implementation. Administrators hope to reduce phone calls to the Student Accounts
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office and line-ups for uhip, and enable the creation of a central database that can predict future residence needs. “One of the things that some students find annoying as they’re burning the midnight oil with rosi is that it actually doesn’t function for a lot of the night,” said Aidan Fishman, a student governor currently seeking reelection. “Does the new system plan to be 24/7 functional?” asked Fishman during the briefing. “That is a very difficult question because any system has to have periodic times when it has to have system work of some kind. To not have that is very complex and to make that work right is very expensive,” said Stevenson. Dr. Gary Mooney, another governor, said that having a system that worked 24/7 is becoming increasingly important. “In a typical business, the day of the system being down is becoming less and less acceptable,” he said. “What was at one time tolerable — system maintenance and all that stuff — in the business world (and we are a large business) that is no longer tolerable and so we should try and work to have a portal that is open on a 24/7 basis.” Fishman also enquired whether the administration was looking into cre-
“One of the things that some students find annoying as they’re burning the midnight oil with ROSI is that it actually doesn’t function for a lot of the night.” — Aidan Fishman, Student Governor ating an official timetable generator to help students prepare their course choices prior to registration. “That was something we wanted to do this past year but the resources did not allow that,” was Stevenson’s response. She explained that there were off-the-shelf products that provided services like this, but that they did not work well for U of T because of its size and the number of courses offered. “We did some practice runs where it would come back to us with 400 different possible schedules for the courses you had put in.” Another suggestion brought up at the uab meeting was a “push to iCal” option for course schedules. Chirag Variawa, a graduate student governor, explained that as a ta he
had seen students at the beginning of the term trying to input things from rosi to iCal on their phones. Stevenson said that it was a good suggestion and worth looking into, adding that the faculty registrar was investigating ways to push an exam calendar to student phones. Stevenson said that in addition to the current projects, they “are currently selecting other shortterm projects. “We want to continue this kind of ‘what can we look at for the next year’ — things that can have a high impact while we still make a lot of progress on those longer-term planning and implementation-type projects. So we’re in the process of doing that over the next month or so.”
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Vol. CXXXIII, No. 16
VARSITY NEWS
Special meeting adjourned on cliffhanger Prolonged, productive meeting addresses 15 new items before dissolving on brink of electoral reform vote, to resume Tuesday
Top, students gather for the special general meeting. Left, speakers wait in line at the mic. Above, meeting chair Ashkon Hashemi and utsu executive director Sandra Hudson. Bernarda Gospic/THe VarsiTy
Zane Schwartz
ASSOCIATE NEWS EDITOR
The utsu’s special general meeting was adjourned late Tuesday night without a clear resolution on five agenda items, including the closely watched question of whether to implement a proposal for electoral reform. Following a motion introduced originally by Engineering Society president Rishi Maharaj, the Special General Meeting will resume on Tuesday. The meeting, which stretched to nearly four and a half hours, managed to churn through nearly three-quarters of a lengthy agenda, stopping moments before a climactic vote on the Non-Partisan Declaration on utsu Electoral Reform. Members voted to oppose unpaid internships, remove Styrofoam food containers from campus, establish an anti-war coalition, condemn the website “A Voice For Men,” endorse the Idle No More movement, reduce the required nominations for utsu executive candidacy, and lobby for changes to student representation on newly-formed campus councils. “At the end of the day, no one can say their concerns weren’t heard,” said utsu president Shaun Shepherd. “We had a respectful debate on the issues and that’s good for everyone.” One motion, to reduce the number of proxies permitted per person at general meetingsfrom 10 to five, failed. Quorum, the minimum number of voters required to proceed with the meeting, was lost just before a final vote on electoral reform. Attempts to regain quorum during a recess were unsuccessful, after a large contingent of voters from the University of Toronto Mississauga campus left for the final bus home.
“No one expected the meeting to go on this long,” said Munib Sajjad, utsu vice-president, university affairs and a former utmsu executive. A specially chartered bus to Mississauga was scheduled to leave at 9.30 pm, and members were still debating electoral reforms as the meeting entered its fourth hour at 10.00 pm. The bus left at 10.02 pm. Instead, the remaining students voted to re-convene in one week’s time. The motion requiring the union to re-convene the meeting was originally introduced by Maharaj, and then re-introduced by University College Literary and Athletic Society (UCLit) president Benjamin Dionne after a second count of those inside and outside the room showed the meeting had not re-acquired quorum. The motion to adjourn to Tuesday was approved by the remaining students despite scheduling concerns expressed by some utsu executives. The meeting will resume Tuesday at 6.00 pm in the Earth Sciences building, at the exact point it left off: with an immediate up-or-down vote on whether to implement online voting and consider a host of other changes, barring a motion to extend debate, according to meeting chair Ashkon Hashemi. “I want to be clear: this is a continuation of tonight’s meeting. There will be no additional proxy collection. There will be no additional [agenda] items,” said Hashemi at the meeting. It was not clear whether those students who proxied their votes to individuals who would be unable to attend Tuesday’s meeting could reclaim their votes. The meeting’s conclusion, without a vote on electoral reform, frustrated college leaders who have authored and backed the proposal since this fall. “We had a clear majority in favour of electoral reform in the room, and we were sec-
onds away from achieving the vote,” said Sam Greene, head of college at Trinity. Greene suggested that, while “some people legitimately needed to leave,” others “left out of a desire to shut down debate and that is unacceptable.” Dionne said the proposal had been “filibustered.” Both college heads agreed the discussion of electoral reform should have occurred far earlier in the night. A number of motions were far less controversial, and passed early in the night with broad support and minimal discussion. These included all of the items from the November agm, including the passage of the audited financial statements for 2011–2012, as well as motions to examine winter residence fees, create a clubs box office, extend agm notice and deadline requirements, and lobby for international student representation on Governing Council. Even with electoral reform at the top of the agenda this week, it was unlikely that reforms could be approved and implemented before elections begin. Minutes from this weekend’s Elections & Referenda Committee hinted strongly that no major changes would be implemented for this year’s election. Shepherd confirmed that amendments to the electoral rules could take place up until Thursday, February 14, when the nomination period opens. “In order to host a fair election, changes would have to occur before the start time of the election,” he said. That would leave slightly more than 24 hours between the end of the continued meeting to be held on the evening of February 12 and the opening of the nomination period on the morning of February 14. Asked about his previous commitment to ensure that electoral reform happens in time for elections this year, Shepherd was unequivocal: “That commitment still stands.”
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“Take shelter” in Robarts as blizzard strikes, students told Simon Bredin NEWS EDITOR
A record-breaking 30-centimetre snowfall prompted a tri-campus shutdown at U of T on Friday. Campuses at Scarborough and Mississauga declared a snow day early Friday morning, but student leaders harshly criticized Simcoe Hall for stalling on the decision to close St. George campus until nearly 3.00 pm. “There are grave safety and equity concerns that lay within the non-closure of the university in such extreme weather conditions,” said Munib Sajjad, University of Toronto Students’ Union vice-president, university affairs. “I personally saw pictures of wheelchair ramps un-shovelled, professors cancelling classes without an email or message at 9 am and a number of commuting students finding out in surprise and dismay.” Within hours, a Facebook group had been created called “Snow Day for Student Safety.” Members posted photos of unsafe ramps, walkways, and roads, and shared stories about personal injuries or falls. The group, along with Sajjad, urged students to email Provost Cheryl Misak and vice-president, human resources and equity Angela Hildyard, with whom the final decision to close St. George campus rests. “Unfortunately, when we have a storm forecast followed by inclement weather, any decision, whatever it may be, about when to stay open and when to close the campuses will most certainly cause inconvenience and distress for many in our community,” said Misak through a university spokesperson. “We were on the one hand sensitive to safety and commuter issues ... [but] we also had to be sensitive to the fact that many students wanted the St. George campus to stay open, in order to attend things that were important to them, from exams (both undergraduate and PhD), classes, swim meets, and special academic events. “The decision about when to close a campus is always very difficult. We do our best to weigh all of the factors and we trust that our students, faculty and staff will know that they are not taken lightly.” After the St. George campus closed at 3.00 pm Friday afternoon, students were advised that it would be possible to “take shelter” in Robarts Library, which remained open until 11.00 pm that evening. There were unconfirmed reports of a car accident on campus. Drivers said cars were stuck in snowbanks or otherwise blocked, and that the university’s department of Transportation Services was backlogged with requests for assistance. The department did not return calls made by The Varsity, and a university spokesperson said staff had been working hard throughout the day to assist stranded drivers. There have been three reported deaths in Canada from the storm, and clean-up from Friday’s blizzard is estimated to cost the City of Toronto up to $4 million.
VARSITY NEWS
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MONDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2013
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University heeds calls for more prayer space First Muslim space opens at Emmanuel College, with plans underway for a multi-faith space at Robarts Zainab Asadullah
VARSITY CONTRIBUTOR
Just days after students endorsed a motion calling for expanded prayer space on campus, two new spaces at Emmanuel College and Robarts Library have won praise from student groups and administrators. The new prayer space and ablutions facility in Emmanuel College were officially opened on January 22. The Canadian Jaffari Muslim Foundation, the Islamic Foundation of Toronto, the Islamic Institute of Toronto, the Muslim Chaplaincy, and the Muslim Students Association at U of T all helped cover the $25,000 cost of the prayer space, while the cost of the $75,000 ablutions facility was shared by Emmanuel College and Victoria College. “It’s beautiful,� says Hasna Egal, a fourth-year neuroscience student, “the Muslim prayer space is welcoming, clean and very quiet.� It’s not an uncommon sentiment, in the newly renovated Muslim prayer space at Emmanuel — from the sweeping rugs, to the sunken shoe racks and the Islamic art work that decorates the well-lit walls. The decision to add a Muslim-only prayer space to Emmanuel College, a Christian theological school, may have privately caused a few raised eye-
“UTSU� CONTINUED FROM COVER bents in power,� said Greene, head of college at Trinity, adding that “the failure to implement reform is inexcusable and deeply unethical.� As utsu vice-president, internal & services Corey Scott pointed out in the union’s initial statement on the matter, the union is not, strictly speaking, a federation from which members can secede. Although most parties involved are using the terms “defederation� or “secession� to describe the process, a more accurate description of the arrangement sought by the three colleges’ leaders is a re-routing of student fees currently paid to the utsu to college student governments instead. Sunday marked the beginning of what could become a protracted fight over whether the colleges should seek to sever financial ties with the central student union. “It is unfortunate that this has happened, despite the best intentions of the students’ union to accommodate voices,� said Scott. “The utsu funds numerous clubs based and run by Engineering, smc and Trinity students. The utsu will continue to represent our members, despite the numerous intentional and malicious blockades that we have seen this year.� As of The Varsity’s press time, significant questions remain unanswered as to the feasibility of colleges independently providing services currently delivered by the utsu. All three college heads were exploring ways of providing health and dental plans to their students. It was not clear whether students whose divisions or colleges defederated would be able to participate in utsu clubs and events or have access to utsu scholarships. Maharaj has called for an “impartial and fair referendum� on the question of defederation, administered by the university. University administrators were unavailable for comment.
brows. But it’s a decision that makes sense, according to Emmanuel College principal, Mark Toulouse. “There’s a history of Emmanuel College and the Muslim community that has been standing for about four years now,� said Toulouse. “In February 2010, we started the Muslim studies program, as well as the Canadian Muslim continuing education certificate program. We also have a master’s program — the Muslim Studies track, for students interested in becoming Muslim chaplains. “So, we’ve looked at this question of increasing Muslim studies on campus, and recognize there’s a need to pay attention to the lived experience of what it means to be a person of faith as a Muslim.� The decision to construct the new prayer space has been welcomed by the Muslim community on campus and by U of T’s first Muslim chaplain, Amjad Tarsin. The programs focusing on Islam and new spaces for Muslim students are all an expansion of Emmanuel’s efforts to enrich multifaith dialogue both on and off campus. “I think it’s going really well — the space is very beautiful. The whole space fills up every prayer time, but what’s also really cool is that you can find people studying there and using it as a hangout space,� said Tarsin.
Asked whether a Muslim prayer space can be inclusive to all students, Tarsin said: “It’s definitely inclusive and I wouldn’t see why not. Students are welcome to observe prayers. I don’t think it hurts to have a few places around campus for prayer and worship. It’s what students need.� Plans for a multi-faith prayer space on Robarts Library’s eighth floor are also well underway. The push for more prayer space has been led by University of Toronto Students’ Union vice-president, equity, Noor Baig, as well as the newly-formed Student Committee for Appropriate Accommodation and the Office of Student Life. “We’ve officially confirmed the plan to make the prayer space this summer with the Robarts staff,� says Baig. “We haven’t advertised it yet, as we didn’t want students waiting too long in case of any delays. There’s always a need for more prayer areas on campus. Designating a space in Robarts makes sense — it’s a high traffic area in a central location.� The newly-renovated space will be an inclusive area for students of all faiths to pray, no matter what religion or practice they adhere to. A draft of guidelines is being formulated in collaboration with the Multi-Faith Centre for different groups to be able to use the space at
Emmanuel College opened the first Muslim prayer space. Bernarda Gospic/THe VarsiTy
the same time. The new prayer room will be open in the next few weeks, though no firm date has been set. “We’ll definitely be spreading the word about it through all our different channels, and there will be a launch event,� says Baig. But word has already gotten out, and the prospect is getting students talking. “It would be really convenient,� says Egal. “Some of the other prayer areas around campus are tiny and cramped. It would be great to have a large space that’s central.� It’s all part of the bigger plan for inclusivity that Toulouse highlighted. “It’s our responsibility to provide the space that will enable people to join our community and
to live out what is important to them in terms of their faith.� Although there are no statistics available on the frequency of prayer space usage, the Ontario Human Rights Code requires the university to make reasonable religious accommodations for all students, staff, and faculty. There are over 75 faith-based student groups at the University of Toronto, and more than 150 formal worship services held every week. The university has a long tradition of Christian theological education, with more than 10 such programs and nearly 2,000 students studying for a degree in theology, and there are fledgling programs in Jewish and Muslim theology at Victoria and St. Michael’s Colleges respectively.
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8
VARSITY NEWS
Vol. CXXXIII, No. 16
news@thevarsity.ca
News in brief Privacy breach debacle worsens as printing error misdirects letters to victims Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (hrsdc) has sent out letters to 583,000 former student loan borrowers whose information was lost when the federal government misplaced a hard drive containing their personal information — with one small problem. Multiple recipients have reported receiving letters addressed to other people in the same envelope as their own letter. These double letters, which contain names and mailing addresses, but not social insurance numbers, have been attributed to a printing error. According to an hrsdc spokesperson, 100 letters may have been mailed incorrectly. The privacy breach has prompted harsh criticism of the federal agency that lost the hard drive, and prompted a class action lawsuit. Led by former loan recipient Mark Fillier, a group of those affected plans to send letters to all members of Parliament, urging them to take the breach seriously and fund credit monitoring for those affected. For now, hrsdc is leading an investigation into the privacy breach.
Stolen sculpture still at large
U of T students protest environmental inaction
Police are searching for the whereabouts of a bronze statue stolen from University of Toronto’s Odette Hall between 9 am and 12 pm Wednesday morning. The missing statue, whose value is estimated between $10,000 and $20,000, has prompted police to ask for the public’s assistance in tracking it down. The statue is a 1991 sculpture called “The Door,” by renowned Canadian artist Tony Urquhart, a member of the Order of Canada and recipient of the 2009 Governor General’s Award for Visual Arts and Media. Further details provided by Toronto Police Staff Sgt. Deb Abbott say the sculpture is part of a “vast art collection” and is approximately 50 cm high, 25 cm deep, and 25 cm wide. As yet, police have not identified any suspects. This is the second theft of bronze artwork on campus this year. In October, 30 copper plates created by George Hawken were stolen from 1 Spadina Crescent.
On Friday, students and community members gathered at Convocation Hall to protest government inaction on climate change. Over 60 people then marched to the Ontario legislature to deliver an open letter to the new premier of Ontario and leader of the Liberal Party, Kathleen Wynne. Identical letters were sent to premiers across Canada, as well as to the prime minister. Both the letter and the march were designed to call attention to the ineffective climate change policies of the federal, provincial, and territorial governments. The activists cited ignorance about and disbelief in climate change within the government, and called for greater involvement of those who will have to deal with the impact of climate change down the road: minorities and students. Tom McCarthy, a member of the University of Toronto Environmental Action (utea) group who helped organize the march said, “Young people are not going to quietly accept an out-of-control environment and a broken environmental inheritance from our parents’ generation.”
— Catherine Virelli With files from the Toronto Star
— Lucy Genua With files from the CBC.
—Helen Picard
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VALENTINE'S DAY SPECIAL
VAR.ST/COMMENT
U of T students share their thoughts on the value of apologies
11 FEBRUARY 2013
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Small step forward Peculiarities of campus politics Wes Dutcher-Walls VARSITY CONTRIBUTOR
Though politicians are never all things to all people, the political process almost always is. In other words, everyone could take something positive, however meager, from last Tuesday’s Special General Meeting (sgm) of the University of Toronto Students' Union (utsu). For those yearning for action, the meeting was, in many ways, a productive step forward. It considered 15 motions, each diverse in significance, subject, and scope — exactly 15 more than November’s ill-fated Annual General Meeting succeeded in addressing. For those lamenting the increasing acrimony of campus politics, the meeting was refreshingly civil, and chair Ashkon Hashemi is to be commended for presiding fairly and maintaining order. That’s not to say there was no discontent, but rather that it was expressed more through seething than shouting. For the utsu executive committee and their supporters among the membership, the meeting could only have brought a sigh of relief, as they were able to once again neutralize the threat of even talking substantively about electoral reform. At the same time, for those who support such reform, the meeting must have been largely anticlimactic and deeply frustrating. For me, the sgm clearly showed some of the peculiarities of campus politics. First, what seems to be procedural is also partisan and political. A call to move a motion forward on the agenda is not simply that if the motion concerns electoral reform, and a motion to limit debate to two minutes per speaker is not simply that, if its proponent seems like a partisan of the utsu leadership. Second, the student unions are both the supposed representatives of general student
BERNARdA GOSpiC/THE VARSiTY
opinion — if consensus is ever achieved — and advocates for particular political agendas. It goes without saying that there is a disparity between what all students could agree upon and what a majority of voting members presently agree upon, and this affects the discussion. In fact, on the most divisive contemporary issues — misogyny, Aboriginal treaty rights, Canadian military spending, environmentalism — the sgm saw more debate about how much to say rather than
what to say. Civil debate of this nature is student politics at its best: members expressing and discussing what they want their own union to do, to be, and to represent. However, even an agenda containing motions on such contentious issues as condemning AVoiceforMen.com and endorsing the Idle No More movement, electoral reform still managed to appear as the prize-fight. This is partly due to the effective and commendable efforts of Ben
Dionne, Sam Greene, Paulina Bogdanova, Rishi Maharaj, and other ‘reformists’ to publicize and promote the issue. However, the utsu executive must realize that their intractability on the issue is another major reason why electoral reform threatens to become the issue that may swallow an entire year — or more — of union business. It has already scuttled one general meeting, and ended this one prematurely. The utsu leadership has sidestepped both debate and an up-or-down vote on the question of electoral reform and online voting, whether by procedural calculation or serendipity. It is unclear which was at play last Tuesday when a lastminute loss of quorum halted the proceedings, but the outcome will only stoke resentment and suspicion. More positively, it will also heighten anticipation for the sgm’s continuation this week, and proponents of electoral reform would be wise to harness this excitement to ensure an ample turnout. Personally, I am a strong supporter of online voting. I’m inclined to question the sincerity of the utsu leadership’s ostensible concerns over the potential for hacking and fraud, though I share their doubts that online voting can be effectively implemented within as tight a time frame as is demanded by the ‘reform’ movement. I don’t necessarily see their stubbornness on online voting as a conspiracy to maintain their dynasty of perfect incumbency, though I am eager to see open, extended debate and an eventual vote on the issue, even if it results in a fair defeat. So, if last Tuesday’s sgm was an infuriating letdown for the proponents of electoral reform, the positive they can take from it is the assurance that, at this week’s meeting, their motion will finally be at the top of the agenda. Wes Dutcher-Walls is a fourth-year student of political theory.
Delays soured an otherwise productive meeting Denys Robinson VARSITY CONTRIBUTOR
Many were shocked and some disappointed Wednesday morning that the utsu Special General Meeting (sgm) lost quorum just as a motion on electoral reform was going to a vote. I was concerned from the start of the meeting that we would fail to get through the agenda. On several occasions, I personally called the question — moved to force a vote — on uncontroversial motions. My efforts sped up some motions, but were ultimately unsuccessful. I called for quorum at around 10 pm, when the Mississauga students left to catch their bus. Critics accuse utsu execs and their allies of filibustering the meeting in order to avoid discussing electoral reform — the sixteenth motion on the agenda. These accusations are not accurate. In reality, the meeting failed to get through its agenda due to a confluence of obstacles. Last Tuesday's meeting was not all bad. Our exercise in direct democracy saw 15 motions debated and voted on. Looking forward, we need to ham-
mer out a compromise on electoral reform at this week's meeting and build on last Tuesday night’s successes in future meetings. With 20 motions plus old business to get through in just three hours, the sgm was on shaky ground from the start. Starting 30 minutes late because we could not achieve quorum until 6.30 pm did not help matters. Two motions were proposed to fix this problem: one to limit speakers and speaking time, the other to move electoral reform to the beginning of the meeting. Both motions were voted down, by different segments of the room. Unnecessary vote counts and procedural arguments further delayed the meeting. Procedurally, members raise their voting cards to signal their preference during a vote, and the chair can decide to call the result without counting in cases where the result seems clear. If anyone challenges the chair’s decision, a count is held, which is a lengthy process in a meeting of this size. Several times during the meeting, counts were called for when the result was clear. At no point did the chair’s judgment prove to be incorrect. Furthermore, at more than one point in the
evening, members got into procedural quibbles with the chair. On one occasion the chair was forced to produce Robert’s Rules of Order and ended up quoting from it extensively. The late start, combined with a variety of delays and an ambitiously large agenda prevented the sgm from attending to all of its business. These factors were not the product of one individual or group’s efforts. If there had been a serious effort to filibuster electoral reform, those opposed to it would have walked out at 9 pm — the scheduled end of the meeting. Instead they stayed until 10 pm when the Mississauga students had to leave to catch their bus. Electoral reform would have reached a vote if people had been less quarrelsome over vote counts, procedure, and the exact method to expedite the meeting. On a more positive note, a wide array of students — not just utsu execs and college council leaders — tabled a swath of interesting and productive motions. Some were voted down, but many passed and deservedly so. Some of the motions could have been more clearly worded and more carefully constructed. A longer prepa-
ration period will hopefully address this in the future, perhaps with an online forum to share and offer advice on draft motions. Discussion was limited by time constraints, but was insightful and informative at points. In order to keep future meetings productive, all those in attendance will have to keep in mind the importance of a well-paced meeting when making procedural motions or calling for vote counts. To build on the sgm’s successes, next year utsu could host one or more General Members Meetings (gmm) in addition to the Annual General Meeting. The gmm(s) would focus on providing a forum to propose and debate member-driven initiatives. Electoral reform could have been dealt with. We have another shot at this on Tuesday. Both sides of the debate have to understand that the resolution will not be ideal from each of their perspectives. I urge people to compromise on a motion that is satisfactory to both sides. Despite its problems, the sgm accomplished a lot of good things. It was a messy but invigorating exercise in direct democracy. Denys Robinson studies philosophy.
Members vote at the Special General Meeting. BERNARdA GOSpiC/THE VARSiTY
VARSITY COMMENT
10 Vol. CXXXIII, No. 16
U of T's petty cash grab EDITORIAL Was U of T trying to pass an unfair financial burden off to students through ancillary fees? Ancillary fees are imposed by each of U of T’s many departments, who seem to have been ignorant of the Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities’ (mctu) regulations. Yet, the central U of T administration has an obligation to ensure compliance across the whole university. The vastness and complexity of the organization is not a valid excuse for their obvious failure. Based on the available evidence, we can come to one of three conclusions: the university was either ignorant of, willfully blind to, or deliberately allowed departments to continue violating the mctu’s rules on ancillary fees. In any case, students have good reason for serious concern and harsh criticism. If U of T’s administration were ignorant of the rules on ancillary fees, or failed to ensure compliance, it points to a shocking level of ineptitude on its part. It is inconceivable that administrators simply missed the memo on ancillary fees. It seems more likely that the university simply allowed its departments to exploit a loophole and shift costs onto already cash-strapped students.
The university has already admitted that some fees violated the mctu's regulations, and that others were wrongly categorized or poorly explained. U of T has acted appropriately in admitting and remedying some of its faults in this area. There are, however, unresolved disputes over many fees, and even where the university acknowledges its mistake, its attempts at a remedy do not go far enough. When a student is caught cheating on an exam, they cannot simply promise not to cheat again and by so doing, retain the grades they have unfairly earned. Instead, unfair gains are stripped away and punishments imposed. U of T admits that it cheated on ancillary fees, but claims the right to keep thousands of dollars it collected from students through these unfair fees. So far, U of T has promised to stop cheating in the future, but not to rectify past abuses. U of T rightly holds its students to a high standard of academic honesty — why does it hold itself to a different standard in legal and financial matters? If a department had no right to impose the fee in the first place then it has no right to keep the money earned from that fee.
The utsu, gsu, scsu, and other student unions involved in the Ancillary Fee Review process deserve the sincere thanks of every student for highlighting this abuse of the fees system and for fighting to get a fair deal for their members. This is an example of one of the best roles students’ unions can play: an astute watchdog, carefully ensuring that the university, armed as it is with significant resources and staff, does not infringe on the rights of students. In this instance, student leaders met the university on its own turf and proved more effective at, or more willing to, ensure compliance than U of T’s central administration — an achievement that cannot be ignored. Yet, reading the university’s fee review, there are a striking number of cases in which the university and the utsu have different interpretations of how the regulations apply to particular fees. The utsu claims that a number of fees are tuition-related and therefore unjust, while the university claims that the services named are optional and that the fee is therefore justified. Combined, these fees add up to a significant amount of money. Clearly, further action is needed to resolve this dispute and this is an opportunity
for the mctu and provincial government to intervene. The mctu shares responsibility for these unfair fees, since it has obviously failed to enforce its own regulations. Like the university, the ministry was either complicit or incompetent in this failure. Ontario now has a new premier, and Kathleen Wynne and John Milloy, her Minister of Training, Colleges, and Universities, could not make a better first move than to intervene on ancillary fees on the side of fairness and on the side of students. Action by the mctu to clarify that any service or resource necessary for a complete educational experience must be covered under tuition, not squeezed out of students through extra fees, would help compensate for past failings. It would also be a gesture of good faith and set the tone for a more productive dialogue between student leaders and the government. U of T’s administration should be ashamed of its serious failure of oversight. Meanwhile, U of T’s students should be proud of the dedicated student leaders who succeeded in protecting the current and future student body from exploitation. The controversy over ancillary fees demonstrates that we have the power to hold U of T’s administration to account and to effect change at our university.
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VARSITY COMMENT
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2013
11
Are students prepared for a new economy? The influence of Canada’s static economy on graduates’ financial outlook Dwayne G. White VARSITY CONTRIBUTOR
On January 28, Moody’s Investors Service, a credit rating agency, "downgraded the long-time ratings of six Canadian banks." The agency cites “concerns that Canadian banks’ exposure to the increasingly indebted Canadian consumer and elevated housing prices leaves them more vulnerable to unpredictable downside risks facing the Canadian economy than in the past,” said David Beattie, a Moody’s executive. The downgrade sheds light on the long-term financial outlook for many post-secondary students. As students remain in school longer, their student debt will continue to rise. The credit downgrade of Canadian banks is a reflection of the broader outlook of the Canadian economy. Although Canadian banks remain the soundest in the world — Moody’s ratings of Canadian banks remain the highest globally — the downgrade reflects Canada’s slow economic growth. In a nutshell, many economic factors are at play that are not readily apparent in day-to-day life. According to Jeff Rubin, author of The End of Growth, “Moody’s downgrade reflects broadly the slowing of the Canadian economy, which is not growing like it used to.” According to Rubin, the triple-digit price of Brent Crude oil, the world oil benchmark, is causing slow growth. When the country's major source of energy is trading at such levels, it hinders sustainable economic recovery. In essence, slow growth leads to a weak job market, especially for the entry-level jobs many students and recent graduates will be seeking. Economics may not be the most interesting topic to many students, but these economic woes have a direct impact
on today’s youth. The slow growth is contributing to the increase the joblessness among those aged 15-24. It is no surprise that when the youth unemployment rate rises, students stay in school longer, creating a Catch-22 for many students: remaining in school longer because so few jobs are available, resulting in increased debt and contributing to the credit downgrade of Canadian banks. It is here that the downgrade of Canadian banks hits home for students. The opportunity cost — the cost of an alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a certain action — of pursing one’s education is high. Furthermore, staying with one’s parents seems to be an attractive alternative to moving out, resulting in many parents remaining in the workforce longer, contributing to the graying of the labour force, with many individuals working past retirement age. Despite the slow Canadian economy, new opportunities are emerging. In today’s world of triple-digit oil prices, the cost of transporting goods around the world is soaring. In short, we could see a return of jobs to Canadian shores. The shift in the Canada’s economy requires a new perspective. There are growth opportunities, but they are unlike double-digit oil prices of the past. Rubin believes that going forward, “it will be a local economy, not a global economy with a specialized niche. We will reconnect to our local market, since distance costs money we’ll see a return of manufacturing jobs come back to Canada. With today’s youth staying in school longer over time, it will result in a better-educated labour force.” While the future for many students is uncertain, the change in the economy opens up a new set of doors for students and recent graduates to explore new skills and experiences.
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The training received during one’s post-secondary career provides them with a strong competitive advantage in today’s economy. Dwayne G. White earned his BA in Political Science from U of T in 2012. He is currently a student member of the Canadian Population Society and is working on a paper exploring social mobility in large firms.
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About Jeff Rubin: BA (Toronto) MA (McGill) Former Chief Economist and Managing Director of CIBC World Markets Author: “Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization” and “The End of Growth” Website: www.jeffrubinssmallerworld.com
A wolf in sheep’s clothing Devyn Noonan Women’s Issues Director for the U of T Liberals
PHOTO COUrTesY www.markwarawa.com
Kathleen Wynne’s recent victory of the Ontario premiership has been rightly hailed as a triumph for women in politics. Considering that women now lead half of Canada’s provinces, it is tempting to imagine that gender parity has finally been achieved. However, Conservative backbenchers continue to wage a subtle war against women that threatens to devastate their hardfought gains. Conservative mp Mark Warawa’s upcoming motion to condemn sexselective abortion is the cleverest of recent Tory attempts to slowly erode the right to choose. The proponents of the legislation argue that some men are pressuring their wives into aborting female fetuses. If women are being forced into such abortions, the argument runs, should the state not afford them protection? After all, how can we pretend to have achieved gender equality while women are being forced into aborting female fetuses? Warawa has stated that he fully expects the opposition to back his motion. “Who,” he asks, “could not condemn discrimination
against women and girls?” That question is devastatingly effective, and Warawa knows it. Ingeniously, he has somehow managed to position his anti-abortion motion as pro-women. However, close scrutiny reveals that Warawa’s motion is not nearly as benign as its proponents would have the public believe. It is sadly true that some men force their wives into seeking sexselective abortions. However, it would be naïve to assume that there are no other circumstances in which a man might pressure a woman to terminate her pregnancy. Young fathers or men with financial concerns might also try to convince their pregnant partners to visit the abortion clinic. While this reality is unfortunate, the fact remains that we cannot legislate against women seeking abortions under male pressure. If we did, we’d have to take abortion off the table altogether — which, I suspect, is Mr. Warawa’s end goal. Many will be convinced by the argument that it is wrong to abort a fetus purely on the basis of its gender. This reasoning is indeed compelling, but comes with its own problems. To attribute “womanhood” to a fetus comes dangerously close to
granting it “personhood.” If the motion stands, the anti-abortion community will certainly claim that if we can protect some fetuses because they are female, we should protect all of them because they are all human. To that argument, there is no easy answer. Warawa’s motion is clearly a wolf in sheep’s clothing. If it is allowed to pass, its implications will allow the pro-life community to threaten the right to choice. The issue of sex-selective abortion is undeniably complex. All women, feminists included, are justifiably uncomfortable with the notion that a woman might seek to abort a fetus purely on the basis of its gender. However it may pain us, we must swallow that discomfort. The right to choose is so absolutely fundamental to women’s self-autonomy, gender parity, and quality of life that we must accept it fully in spite of its complexities. If women hope to continue their recent string of successes, they must stand up for their rights yet again. In the words of Nellie McClung, “Never retreat, never explain, never apologize — get the thing done and let them howl.” Devyn Noonan is Women’s Issues Director for the U of T Liberals.
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VARSITY COMMENT
Vol. CXXXIII, No. 16
comment@thevarsity.ca
LETTERS TO
Vol CXXXIII, No. 15, February 04, 2013 Architecture faculty finds new studios for “homeless” students Please do not use the word “homeless” to describe the loss of highly prized studio space. I understand that it might seem like trivial semantics to some, but it is in reality a serious misnomer. When I first saw the headline, I thought “great! finally an article about homelessness (i.e. not having adequate safe steady shelter) in the student body.” Not only is the use of “homeless” offensive in its misuse of a loaded term, it is also just straight up confusing. I don't understand how anyone can associate “homeless” with the renovation of studios. It's not the same thing. — Jen (from web) While it is great to see that the undergrads now have access to studio space, I'd like to point out that this victory is certainly a privilege and not a right. Despite the complaints of these current students and their sense of entitlement during the renovation of 1 Spadina, it seems quite a stretch to demand something that (to quote Dean Sommer) "has never been promised or guaranteed." Studio culture is indeed imperative to architecture school, but keep in mind that this is merely an under-
THE EDITOR
graduate program that serves as an introduction to what lies ahead. Schools such as the Architectural Association have never granted their students ample studio space, so I daresay that it is entirely reasonable to expect students to complete studio work elsewhere. Certain areas of Robarts appropriate to collaborative work are open 24 hours, and has it not occurred to students that meeting at someone's home would be even more comfortable? The tone adopted by students appears to be one of deprivation and mistreatment by the faculty, but realistically no such thing has occurred they are simply asking for more. They should be grateful that their request has been granted, even after demanding something that isn't entirely necessary to their success. — Rem (from web) There’s smoke, but is there fire? Denys Robinson writes, “Removing proxies at board and committee meetings is ridiculous.” [His] statement to this effect is ridiculous. I would point out that it is unclear that the current practice of proxy votes at the utsu is legitimate. I would direct the author's attention to the Industry Canada publication: “A Primer
for Directors of Not-For-Profit Corporations," which states, "In most provinces and under the Canada Corporations Act, directors cannot vote or participate in meetings by proxy... his or her responsibilities cannot be fulfilled merely through a proxy." (BurkeRobertson, 18). I would further point out that it is perfectly clear that under the Canada Not-for-profit Corporations Act (the piece of legislation which is being phased in to replace Part II of the Canada Corporations Act) proxy voting is not permitted. Section 126(3) of the Act states, “no person shall act for an absent director at a meeting of directors.” I would humbly suggest that Denys Robinson should check [his] facts before making such ridiculous statements. — Michael (from web) This practice of proxy voting at utsu Board meetings is certainly novel. In the 1980s and early 1990s it was not allowed at utsu 's predecessor, sac. sac was incorporated under the same basic laws as utsu. sac Board Directors who did not attend a certain number of meetings were removed from the Board and replaced through by-election. The rule was three missed meetings and you were gone. 100% attendance was not expected, but
80% attendance was. Why run for the Board if you don't intend to attend the meetings? — Charles (from web) Meeting the people behind the disease Life history project? Sounds like highschool, not a fourth year science course. I am all for this volunteer placement learning, but at least make the experience academic. — herpderp (from web) Be your own boss With all due respect, it does honestly seem that none of the “entrepreneurs” discussed here are going anywhere. None of the appear to have that “royal jelly.” What a waste of a few years of their lives thinking they are Mark Zuckerberg. How sad! — Jhuffman (from web) Students gather again, seeking resolution on broad agenda It's too that bad my motion to force “Hardy Weinberg” to abandon his (or her) annoying pseudonym and limit his (or her) online Varsity comments to three per month wasn't included on the agenda. Alas! — Pseudonymous Bosch (from web)
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VARSITY COMMENT
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MONDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2013
13
Bikechain blues Why a great, student run service has struggled to stay afloat David Gelles VARSITY CONTRIBUTOR
Going to a university as big as U of T means that sometimes, information about helpful on-campus resources passes under the radar, or gets lost in the barrage of knowledge that its tens of thousands of students must absorb daily. Consequently, there are a few little-known gems on campus that can prove very useful to any student who learns about them. One of these is the small studentrun organization called Bikechain. Bikechain is not only an organization that students can join as volunteers, it is also a do-it-yourself bike repair and rental shop that, almost always, provides services for free. The exception is when a person may need to buy a part that is necessary for a repair and, even in that case, parts are sold for less than other shops. On top of that, when you take your bike in for maintenance, you will walk out with it the same day. The neat thing about Bikechain is that it teaches people how to make the necessary repairs for themselves. This is not to say that someone who has never held a wrench before will be expected to simply follow instructions; rather it means that Bikechain staff will work with you to help you fix your bike while at the same time teaching you how to do it, and giving tips on how to keep your bike in good shape.
Although the thought of biking in this weather may seem odd to some, many students get around campus on two wheels and the number skyrockets when the weather is more favourable. However, not many people are aware that such a convenient stop is available to them free of charge almost every day of the week. Bikechain is even useful for those who do not have a bike, as it also provides free bike rentals — along with a lock — for a week or longer to any U of T student. This is great for anyone who may be interested in biking but may not be completely sure about it, and thus may want to try it or even just borrow a bike for a short period of time before buying a bicycle. While Bikechain is a great student service, the organization has struggled in the past to remain open. Although it often flies under the radar, its small location creates waiting times during busy periods, and it has long fought to get a larger space, a fight which it has recently won. Bikechain is currently located in the basement of 33 St. George St. but will be moving to a more spacious location in the near future. In the meantime, students can take advantage of this resource — one of Toronto’s best diy shops — by simply walking down to their current location and ringing the doorbell. David Gelles is a political science student at St. Michael’s College.
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Love is a drag, except when it’s not. In anticipation of Valentine’s Day, students shared the highs and lows of their university love lives. Illustrations by Janice Liu
Three’s a Crowd
Love Tutorial
I became fast friends with a peppy girl who sat five seats away from me during the first few weeks of my Film History course at Innis Town Hall. We had a good system going, sharing notes and making jokes. Then one day, a tall, painfully shy boy who sat a row above us interjected when I asked her a question, and soon after, he began to sit with us. Through lectures and film screenings, we stayed loyal to our little seating arrangement. I don’t really know when it happened, maybe when I discovered the mysterious boy had great taste in music, but I developed a crush on him. But no matter how eager and hopeful I was, there was always a distance between us. When our mutual friend would skip class, which was surprisingly often, the boy would leave an empty seat between us, or awkwardly fill it with his backpack during darkened film screenings. I finally understood where the boy’s intentions lay when my friend and I got out of our tutorial on the third floor of Innis College one day to find him waiting for her by the single row of desks, killing time with assigned readings. His advances were timid, but he never failed to wait for her every week. I tried to remain content playing the friend, but luckily I could stop when our union didn’t endure past the school year. —Anonymous
The last place one might expect to fall in love would be a Political Theory class located in the bleak, poorly-lit lecture hall of New College (what up, Wilson Hall 1016). This unfortunate setting, however, did not obscure my ability to truly fall for the ethnically-ambiguous, beauteous young man in my class. While our noticeably aged professor spoke of Marx’s theory of class struggle and the welfare state, I shifted my head slightly and fixed my attention on the boyfriend of my dreams (this prediction was based purely on appearance and course choice). The best part? We shared a tutorial session. Our chance of interaction increased tenfold. He walked in one cold January wearing an Urban Outfitters cardigan with two red stripes on the arm. I owned the exact same cardigan, and took it as a green light from the universe. We were meant to be. Taste in clothing must translate to fruitful compatibility, right? I played the self-assured young female thing and found him on Facebook, added him and sent him a quick “I think we’re in the same polisci tutorial?” The subtext read, “I know you are, let’s hang out and DO IT.” We ended up dating briefly after. It didn’t work out, but I will always have a place in my heart for that purely authentic university style interaction. I can’t think of a better setting than U of T’s dim, fluorescent lecture halls. —Navi Lamba
First Steps I was nervous about coming out, but I finally told a guy whose attention I had been trying to get for ages, since we met at the dining hall. It was only after that moment that he started to notice me, tried to get to know me, and invited me to sleep over. As my first real intimate “relationship” continued, I still felt really distant from him. After asking what he considered us, and getting “I’d rather not put a label on it” as a response, I figured it was just fun for him and he didn’t actually care. A long-time friend came to visit me at residence a few weeks after this had started, and came out to me. He slept over and … well … things happened. After he went back home, I told my “friend-with-benefits” what had happened. He seemed distraught, and disappointed I would do such a thing. Sorry, for ruining what I didn’t know we had. And sorry, for trying to apologize to you for the rest of the year. Thanks though, for giving me a try. —Anonymous
14
Artsy Encounter I would always notice this guy in my art history course at Sidney Smith. He would often wear a black vest over a light blue dress shirt and had several interlocking bracelets on his left arm. I would peer at him from across the lecture hall. The next semester we were in a smaller classroom and I decided to get a bit closer to him, so I started sitting right behind him. I enjoyed seeing him cross his legs, playing with his curly hair and ever so elegantly typing on his laptop. At first, his physical appearance attracted me to him, but then I started to notice him browsing fashion and art blogs, and suddenly my urge to be in his life grew more intense. I wanted to talk to him about everything. I wanted to do things with him, like get drunk off free wine at gallery openings or down 40s of Olde English on hot summer days at Trinity Bellwoods. I had a great desire to hug him every time I saw him. I’m a male, I’m straight, and I had a girlfriend at the time. I wasn’t sexually attracted to him, I just wanted to be a part of his life. —Michel Herzog
Lunch Date
Heart House
Lost Chances
In my first week of classes, I went to a five-buck lunch event at Hart House. The meal was chicken and odd pea-looking things; the room was a beautiful banquet hall; I was alone and didn’t know anyone there. It was in this frame of mind that I came upon a second-year music student with yellow hair and giant headphones. He was alone too. We became fast friends in a matter of minutes. We exchanged details — names, what faculty we were in, our intended majors. He was from a small town in Alberta, and had just transferred to U of T. I came to learn other things — jazz musicians that he was really into, how he rejected an engineering scholarship for music a couple of years ago, and his love for European history. I was as enamoured as you could get for being naïve and 17. A week later, a botched first date followed in which he told me about getting drunk at 13 and shooting signs and animals with rifles in Northern Alberta. I come from a conservative Muslim background, so I was kind of petrified. Guns? Alcohol? WHAT? Needless to say, we broke it off. —Anonymous
When we met in the Music Room at Hart House two years ago, I barely noticed him. But he persisted, and we started dating. Soon, perhaps too soon, we were sharing secrets, and sorrows, and promises of forever. On a Saturday evening this past December, he told me he wanted to take a walk. As we wandered past Trinity College, he looked at me and remarked that much of our relationship has been tied to this campus. “Sure,” I said, not understanding. When we approached Hart House, icy drops of rain began to fall, and he steered me inside. In a quiet corner of the building, he held my face in his hands, kissed my forehead, and got down on one knee. He said wonderful things that I could not hear because my heart was pounding, and I was shocked and scared and so very, very happy. —Anonymous
Since coming to U of T, I’ve found that a repeated theme in my ‘romantic’ interactions on campus has been missed connections. I’ll see someone who I find attractive, but the situation won’t be right for me to approach them, or the timing will be off. There was once a guy in one of my tutorials who I thought was really cute. He made cheesy jokes, had a funny haircut, and possessed a sexily extensive understanding of history (only at U of T, I know). At the end of the last class, I finally approached him, and he told me all about his excitement over his impending move to a new country. Great. This theme of poor timing has been mirrored during my time here by the popularity of the short-lived website LikeALittle and its predecessors, the Facebook pages “UMentioned UToronto” and “UTSG Compliments.” One day, I was tabling for a club at Gerstein. A lot of guys passed by my table on their way to the library, and I mostly just sat and read, smiling at people as they passed, and offering to tell them about the group. My friend later pointed out to me that I had been mentioned on one of these pages by someone who had passed me by. He went slightly overboard describing my eyes, but it was a relief to realize that for all the guys I’ve noticed at U of T who will never know, there may be some who have noticed me too. —Danielle Klein
Lucky Fool Last year, I was in a class I absolutely hated. But I was taking it with an acquaintance from home, K. I didn’t know K very well, but I’d thought she was cute since seventh grade. But for two months, I said almost nothing. Then, more than halfway through the course, I finally gathered my courage and went over to her post-lecture. And I said: “So, uh, if you, uh, ever wanted to. Go to the library. Or something. I’d be okay with that.” This, apparently, was my idea of courage — inviting a cute girl to study in the most passive way possible. Now, while I had convinced K to do something with me, the day we went to the library I was late, I was in a foul mood and I was followed there by a very ill friend. I barely spoke to her. And after that disaster I didn’t speak to her for months. Cut to summer. I contacted K over Facebook. Just some casual conversation. Then I guess she got impatient. She invited me over to watch Buffy. We watched a while, we drank wine, we kissed a bit. And then I tried once more: “So. Tonight — this was really fun. And I. I was wondering. If you might, maybe, want. To do it again. But ... with dinner?” It wasn’t eloquent. It was, however, an actual question that she could answer. Her answer — though God knows why — was yes. And somehow, we’ve been dating ever since. —D
Robarts Romance We met on my first day of university. He was my frosh leader and I was a shy first-year, intimidated by my new surroundings. We both lived in residence and hung around similar people, but never really spoke to one another, later each admitting that we were too shy. A year and a half went by. He was no longer in residence and the only contact we had were brief moments passing each other on campus, each of us too busy, or too timid to share more than a “hey.” Annoyed by our lameness, fate intervened, and one cold January day I met him on the steps of UC; we were in the same class. In that big lecture hall, we connected. I nervously laughed at his jokes and our elbows touched in those cramped chairs. That same semester Robarts was transformed into a club; the event was called Party in the Peacock. I hosted a pre-drink and invited him. Later that night, we kissed for the first time! Yes, our first kiss was in the cafeteria space in Robarts. Perhaps not the most romantic place on campus, but, hey, at least there was a disco ball. It’s two years later and we are still going strong! —Anonymous
15
Arts & Culture
ONLINE EXCLUSIVE
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11 FEBrUarY 2013 arts@thevarsity.ca
Review of the musical Hair by the UC Follies var.st/arts
Hot date, hot spots FOOD FINDS: VALENTINE'S EDITION ARTICLE & PHOTOS BY JOSHUA FUMO
Ahh, Valentine's Day. The one day of the year where overpriced boxes of chocolate and ruby red roses get tossed around faster than a plastic bag in a hurricane. Perhaps most importantly, it's a day for you and that cute guy or girl in your 2 pm tutorial to enjoy a night out on the town. With that in mind, we've compiled a list of goto date restaurants that, if you play your cards right, guarantee a night of fun and excitement for you and that special someone.
VARSITY COLUMNIST
2 Hawker Bar — 164 Ossington Ave. An unassuming and humble restaurant inside and out, Hawker Bar serves up Vietnamesestyle street dishes with refinement and class. The menu, written on squares of cardboard that once housed 24-packs of beer, is focused yet adventurous. The drink options are plentiful — draughts, bottles, and wines are all available, but the real thrill is found in their list of $9
3 Sidecar Restaurant — 577 College St.
1 Guu Sakabar — 559 Bloor St. W. The newest addition to the Guu Izakaya family of restaurants in Toronto, Guu Sakabar is one of those restaurants that is an experience for both your palette and your soul. Based on the idea that dining is about self-enjoyment and happiness, this Japanese landmark restaurant has already seen massive success in its barely two years of business. Diners are greeted as they enter by screaming and applause from both the servers and chefs. A word of warning to those of you hoping to go out for a nice, quiet date night: go somewhere else. If you're not one for loud and energetic environments, this place is going to feel a lot like dining at the stock market. The menu features a variety of beers and sake, alongside a selection of Japanese and Asian-themed dishes. The sashimi salad ($7.80) features a variety of fresh fish, thinly sliced and tossed with greens in an Asian style dressing. The restaurant’s takoyaki ($5) is an adventurous assortment of fried octopus balls served with tonkatsu sauce (similar to Worcestershire in flavour), and karashi mayo (similar to mustard). Less adventurous eaters can still enjoy a variety of simpler vegetarian options. Reservations needed? The restaurant only takes reservations Sunday to Thursday, 5–10 pm. Weekends require a bit of waiting for a seat, but it's worth it. Can't get a seat? Go enjoy a heaping plate of buttermilk-fried chicken at The White Brick Kitchen (641 Bloor St. W.), which serves up classic American comfort food.
Sidecar's elegant dining space and perfectlygroomed servers and bartenders may leave you screaming “GOOD GOD, MY WALLET!” But fear not, date-master: this fresh-to-order, feel-good dinner spot is surprisingly forgiving on your bank account. Nestled in the heart of Little Italy, Sidecar's premise is simple: use only the freshest ingredients, in simple yet flavourful dishes. The dining area is sophisticated yet welcoming, complete with dim lighting, exposed-brick walls and an impressively stocked bar. cocktails that embrace the flavours of Vietnam. One of the house specialties, a crowd-pleaser known as “Evan's Revenge,” combines bourbon with flavours of ginger, orange, and palm sugar, along with thin slices of red chilies. Each dish on Hawker’s menu pays tribute to the exotic and formidable flavours of Vietnam, The Son in Law Eggs ($7) offers up two softboiled, deep-fried eggs on top of prik nam pla (a tangy combination of hand-pureed chilies and a variety of special ingredients), crowned with Thai basil and cilantro. The restaurant’s one-pound serving of sweet-chili chicken wings ($10) is simply addictive. Reservations needed? It couldn't hurt to call ahead, just to be sure. Thanks to its size, the dining area can fill up in the blink of an eye during dinner. Can't get a seat? Head across the street and split a pizza at Pizzeria Libretto (221 Ossington Ave.). While it's a bit of a departure from Asian cuisine, who’s to say you can't embrace some wood fired, Neapolitan-style goodness every once in a while? All of the dishes on the menu feature components made in-house — Sidecar even bakes its own bread and churns its own butter. The menu features dishes inspired by simplicity, from the house-cut sea salted frites ($4), to the fresh tagliatelle noodles tossed in sheep's milk feta and house-pickled banana peppers ($16), to the intimidatingly dark, flourless chocolate cake served with salted caramel sauce and brandied cherries ($7). They also offer a prix fixe menu Sunday to Wednesday, allowing diners to choose from a selection of an appetizer, a main course, and dessert for $25. Reservations needed? Definitely. Sidecar is becoming widely known for its alluring ambiance and exciting menu, which means date night will usually be pretty packed. And don't forget to dress nicely! Can't get a seat? Hey Meatball (719 College St.) always guarantees a wonderful dining experience. Be sure to try one of their homemade soda flavours while you're there.
4 7 West — 7 Charles St. W. It's 2.30 in the morning — you and your lovely date are full of drinks and tired out from a long night of dancing. You would love to plop into your bed, yet deep in the back of your mind, all you want to do is go sit down and enjoy a damn good piece of cake. That's where 7 West has got you covered. Nestled between a handful of shops just off Yonge Street, this multi-storied all-night hotspot serves up some of the best dishes you could hope to eat at such an ungodly hour. The decor is eclectic yet soothing, and provides a calm and relaxing ambiance where a couple can sit and unwind. Perhaps the most satisfying dishes can be found in 7 West’s selection of tantalizing desserts, shipped in from a top-secret bakery (seriously, I was given the whole, “If I tell you, I have to kill you” speech when I asked). From the decadent Double Chocolate Fudge Cake ($6.50), to the tangy Red Velvet ($6.50), there is no way that your sweet tooth will go unsatisfied. If you're looking for something more substantial to soak up those Whiskey Sours, try one of the hearty Pita Pizzas ($9–10.95), or a plate of nachos with mouth-watering pulled pork ($15.95/$12.95 vegetarian). Reservations needed? Absolutely not. For the record, though, 7 West is committed to refusing service to diners that are too intoxicated or unruly. Can't get a seat? If you seriously couldn't find a table at a place that's always open, there's a Fran's Restaurant (College and Yonge), where you can find all the classic diner dishes you know and love.
Photos clockwise from top left: Guu Sakabar Dessert from 7 West Dish from Guu Sakabar 7 West Photos inset clockwise from top left: Shrimp dish from Hawker Bar Menu from Hawker Bar Dessert from Sidecar Restaurant Sidecar restaurant
VARSITY ARTS & CULTURE
var.st/arts
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2013
17
A different kind of punk
Matt Hitch, lead singer of The Valley Boys, chats about his band’s unique style Anne Rucchetto VARSITY CONTRIBUTOR
The Valley Boys is a relatively new addition to Toronto’s roster of punk bands, but within the past four months alone, they have played shows at the Silver Dollar, The Rivoli, and the Grunge Pit. Bursting onto the scene with a tight, wellproduced collection of songs and a west-coast sound reminiscent of The Adolescents, The Valley Boys’ music is appealing to garage, hardcore, and experimental fans alike. “I try not to pigeon-hole myself into certain musical styles,” explains Matthew Hitch, The Valley Boys’ lead vocalist and principle songwriter. His approach seems to be working. The cassettes of The Valley Boys’ self-titled 10-song album are sold out, and the band’s 12” EP is forthcoming this week from German record label, Cut the Cord That…Records. Despite the band’s small Internet presence — they use only a bandcamp page — The Valley Boys are quickly accumulating a fan base. “People used to find out about music through trading tapes and giving out fliers,” Hitch says. “It’s definitely handy [to use the Internet] but I don’t find it necessary to do what I want to do. Through word of mouth, trading tapes, and using bandcamp, we’re out there.” Made up of former and current members of groups like School Jerks, Brutal Knights, Career Suicide, Hassler, and Chattering Class, The Valley Boys offers up an example of far-reaching punk explorations and numerous reformations. “The last band I was in before The Valley Boys was the School Jerks,” Matt reflects. “That was a straight hardcore punk band. I find that a lot of the bands that I liked in Toronto seemed to be mostly hardcore or garage. There didn’t seem
to be much in between. I wanted to simply do a ‘punk’ band and be between genres. I just wanted to play regular punk music. “My band before the School Jerks was kind of an ‘Oi’ band, so this is about as far as you can get from that.” The music of The Valley Boys differs from other punk bands thanks to its wry lyrics, which range from scathing to irreverent. The album combines political observations with, according to Hitch, some “immaturity and goofiness.” “I try not to be too political, but when you’re not writing about beer, partying, or love songs, it sort of narrows things down,” he says. “I don’t aim to be a political band; I want to have fun.” Each song on The Valley Boys’ album is unique, but all of them feature a fast-paced barrage of raw vocals and frantic drums, made fuller by the hard-driving baseline and dual guitars. In spite of this unified sound, Valley Boys’ musical influences are wide ranging. “I like the smart-ass attitude of the Gizmos but I also like bands like GBH and the Dead Kennedys who are a little more into having things to say,” Hitch explains. “I listen to soul and reggae, and I know we don’t sound like that, but I like to keep things more open.” A Lafayette, Indiana native, Hitch lived in other punk-loving locales such as Chicago, Blooomington, and Lexington before moving to Toronto six years ago. As a former member of several other bands, settling into the music scene here came fairly easily to him. The overlap of music in the United States and Canada provided a solid foundation for the partnerships that would eventually lead to the development of The Valley Boys. Currently, The Valley Boys have been touring in and around Toronto, playing in destinations such as Hamilton, Ottawa, and Montreal. As far
Matt Hitch, lead singer of The Valley Boys. Bernarda Gospic/THe VarsiTy
as Toronto goes, the opportunity to play often and with a variety of groups is fairly consistent. And when it comes to Toronto’s selection of venues, the ideology of the band is “the more intimate, the better.” “I only really go to bars to see bands anyway, and I’m not much of a bar person,” Hitch remarks. “I really like the intimacy of house shows. Siesta Nouveaux was a great place, and its shutting down was a great loss for the musical community. An inclusive environment where people of all ages can come to, without a stage not only makes for a better atmosphere, but a better sound. The closeness generates a better
sound, which creates more energy. More people can get it into it. Everybody is in a better mood, everybody is more excited.” When he’s not playing shows with his band, Hitch collects records, which in turn keeps his musical influences varied and provides inspiration for exploring different styles of expression. Punk music, though, works particularly well for The Valley Boys’ creative and experimental endeavours. “Punk bands all sound so different from each other,” Hitch explains. “Misfits, The Clash, Talking Heads, Devo — they all sound different. In my opinion, ‘punk’ is doing whatever you want to do.”
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Girl Talk Kate Nash Kate Nash surprised her fans in the summer of 2012 by trading in her commercially successful confessional piano pop for grungy guitar rock on the single “Under-Estimate the Girl.” Girl Talk, Nash’s third album since being discovered on MySpace in 2006, continues with the shriek-singing and guitar-addled melodies, but nevertheless, it seems that this is a new musical stage for the British artist; Kate Nash is going blues rock. Her risktaking is admirable, creating a scat-
-tered album that has her screaming about sexism, detailing heartaches with monotone blasé, and finishing with an a cappella ballad that leads into an overwrought, soundtrack-like instrumental section. Underneath the abrasive vocals, Nash’s sound is more calculated and polished than ever, but the polish goes too far. The fragile emotion and anecdotal lyrics that made her resonate with fans when she first burst onto the music scene have been wiped away. In its place is an album that cannot seem to decide what di-
mbv My Bloody Valentine
ist/vocalist Kevin Shields has been hinting at a new record for at least 15 years. Side by side comparisons with Loveless are unavoidable, but the questions persist: How does mbv compare to their already iconic repertoire? Does it bring anything new to the table? While mbv neither reproduces nor veers too far from the sounds that made the band stars, Shields, guitarist/vocalist Bilinda Butcher, bassist Debbie Googe, and drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig display a keener sense of structure to house their texturally rich walls of sound. mbv's icy blue cover offsets Loveless' warm pink, a mark of the coolness and cohesion that contrasts with the latter disc's sound. Repetitious and tightly constructed passages split the first eight songs into two halves: "Is This and Yes" uses synth samples, found sounds, and the emulation of brass instruments to carry Butcher's
Two decades after the release of Loveless (1991), an influential and frequently–imitated milestone in early 1990s shoegaze, My Bloody Valentine has finally released a proper follow-up to what is generally considered to be the band’s masterpiece. mbv's release came as a surprise to many, since guitar-
Choose from approximately 70 online degree credit courses this summer. rection it wants to go in, resulting in a wholly forgettable experience. —Elena Gritzan characteristically angelic delivery, while "Nothing Is" typifies the heavier second half with its polyrhythmic instrumental cycle. Though Shields and Butcher's signature guitar haze is still prevalent, the mutilated leads pair of “Only Tomorrow” pair up against the key changes of “Who Sees You” and the psych-rock influences of “In Another Way” to create a more precise amalgamation of the group's influences. Aided by Shields' obsessive analogue mastering, by the time the song "Wonder 2" roars like a jet engine into your headphones, mbv has already succeeded in transporting you into another world. This is a distinctively different My Bloody Valentine, one that distances itself from past classics and reinvents itself for a new generation. Very rarely does a band of such stature return with such rewarding material. — Nick Gergesha
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MONDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2013
VARSITY ARTS & CULTURE
arts@thevarsity.ca
Divas and drifters TIFF’s Japanese film lineup offers an enticing intersection of high and low culture Daniel Berube VARSITY CONTRIBUTOR
Cinematheque, the subsidiary of tiff that programs classic and rare art cinema out of the Bell Lightbox, has completely outdone itself this season. Between A Man and a Woman, a screening series that pays tribute to Amour co-stars Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, and L.A. Rebellion, a survey of neo-realist African American independent cinema, the Toronto institution is more than fulfilling its mandate to both entertain and educate the city’s devoted filmgoers. Cinematheque’s most comprehensive offering in the coming months is a selection of Japanese films, which are divided across three screening series that showcase highlights of Japanese cinema. Cinematheque’s latest program is perhaps the most exciting portion of the citywide Spotlight Japan festival, which includes contributions from Canstage, the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre, and Soundstreams. Two of the three Cinematheque series, Japanese Divas and Tokyo Drifters, offer an enticing cross-section of high and low culture from Japan’s classical and New Wave periods, focusing on stately canonical art house fare and low-budget genre films, respectively. Japanese Divas and Tokyo Drifters strike a compromise between auteurdriven modernist filmmaking and popular entertainment, providing a significant perspective on Japan’s internationally dominant national cinema in its fledgling stages. Framed as a celebration of iconic female leads, Japanese Divas encompasses much of Japan’s cinematic Golden Age, including beloved and oft-referenced classics like Rashomon and Tokyo Story. But the series also showcases heady entries from the New Wave of the 1960s. Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes and The Face of Another are stark existentialist parables that came out alongside the early works of Nagisa Oshima, and cover some of the same bleak terrain. The reason these wildly stylized, subversive films can play next to, say, the gen-
WENDY GU/THE VArsiTY
tle melancholy and humanism of Ozu, or the elegant, folkloric horror of Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu, is that they share the (perhaps idealist) notion of the auteur. Auteur, or authorship theory, is a belief in the unitary artistic vision of the director as the central driving force behind a given film’s form and meaning. The theory is bound up in romantic and modernist ideas of artistic process, and was vital to the assertion of cinema as an art and the classification of “national cinemas.” The Japanese Divas series could just as easily be called "Master Filmmakers of the Japanese Golden Age," which is why it’s novel and interesting that tiff has taken the feminist-revisionist route, and why these are largely the same films the average student would see in a course on canonical East Asian art cinema. They’re essential viewing,
but they offer largely the same picture of Japanese national identity that the West has received through other cultural channels. Tokyo Drifters, on the other hand, takes a pop culture-centered approach, supplementing the film festival-bate of Ozu and Teshigahara with the sort of pulpy genre filmmaking that played to a broader audience domestically. The series focuses on the exploitation output of Nikkatsu, Japan’s oldest major film studio, and a prolific producer of comedies, urban youth dramas, and crime thrillers. Cinematheque is screening a selection of rediscovered genre classics, including A Colt is My Passport, Branded to Kill, and, of course, Tokyo Drifter. But the program also includes titles that are not as widely available, and do not appear in the Nikkatsu Noir box set issued a few years ago by the Criterion Collection. To single out
one film over a host of possibilities, the promisingly titled Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter is a screening experience that is probably not replicable at the Robarts Media Commons. The exciting thing about this mix of international art cinema classics and locally-sold low-budget entertainment is that some fascinating points of intersection are bound to reveal themselves. Recent initiates to the realm of world cinema can look to these series for a well-rounded crash course in Japan’s cultural legacy, while cinephiles can revel in the obscure pockets of film history unearthed by this two-pronged approach to programming. For example, Nikkatsu and other studios’ rapid output of low-budget noir tragedies and pink films (read: softcore pornographies)
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Signed, sealed, delivered Lindsay Zier-Vogel opens up about The Love Lettering Project Danielle Klein ASSOCIATE A&C EDITOR
Lindsay Zier-Vogel, creator of The Love Lettering Project. BErNArDA Gospic/THE VArsiTY
Lindsay Zier-Vogel has written over 3,000 love letters. “[It’s] a strange meditation to write the word ‘love’ thousands of times,” she says. “Sort of wonderful, sort of bizarre.” Zier-Vogel is a Toronto-based writer and artist. She’s written a novel, The Opposite of Drowning, for which she is seeking a publisher, and has been published in several literary magazines. Zier-Vogel also founded Puddle Press, a book-art publishing house. Her art books are displayed at the National Library and Archives Canada. Zier-Vogel created The Love Lettering Project in 2004, while studying English at U of T. Like many students, she was blissfully unaware of breadth requirements and program restrictions. “I was taking the most inspiring courses,” she says. “I didn’t know that you were supposed to take certain requirements, so I was just taking Canadian poetry and Canadian fiction… It was so fulfilling. I studied with Lynn Crosbie, a journalist at the Globe and poet extraordinaire. She taught modern Canadian poetry, and every week she would invite in one of her poet friends… It made writing and that world so alive.” While Zier-Vogel doesn’t connect her inspiration for the project directly to her background in English, she notes that Crosbie
had a significant influence on what would one day become The Love Lettering Project. “For Valentine’s Day week, [students of Crosbie’s class] were encouraged to write some sort of love poetry, and think about what it is to write love poetry.” The Love Lettering Project began rather spontaneously, while Zier-Vogel was engaging in another project that she started during her undergraduate degree. “I was sitting in the park with a friend of mine,” she says. “We started this weekly writing group and our task that week was to write love poems, and so we were exchanging what we worked on… We thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if we just left them in the park for people to find?’ So we just whipped them into these little art pieces and we left them. It wasn’t planned, it wasn’t organized, it was just this thing that we did one afternoon. “The next time that I did it was in grad school... It felt very dismal to be spending a lot of time at Robarts. Every time I was in the stacks, I was not feeling inspired. I thought ‘the last time I did this project, it was so much fun, maybe I’ll just do that here since I’m spending so much time here anyways.’ “I got people to send me books that they loved, or books that they thought needed love... I put love letters in all these books and some still might be there.” Zier-Vogel never envisioned that the letters would grow into a wide-scale community
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VARSITY ARTS & CULTURE
var.st/arts "DIVAS" CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE provided resources to some of the novice directors that later made up the New Wave, similar to the way that Roger Corman’s International Pictures imprint churned out such New Hollywood luminaries as Francis Ford Coppola and Dennis Hopper. A prime example is Shohei Imamura, who made a series of films at Nikkatsu, ranging from schlocky comedies to politically radical, formally innovative works like The Insect Woman. Another such case is Seijun Suzuki, the mastermind behind Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill’s wild pacing and flashy, hipster aesthetic. Though not recognized as a major artistic figure in his time, his tendency toward
"SIGNED" CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE engagement project. She continued to carry out the project by herself while working on an ma in Creative Writing under the auspices of author Anne Michaels. Zier-Vogel’s thesis on Dora Mavor Moore — a renowned pioneer of Canadian theatre — inspired her to cover a tree in Trinity Bellwoods Park in letters. In 2008, she tied letters to bikes, and another year she took them to places where people had their first kisses. Then, in 2011, the project began to grow momentously, when, during an interview with Taddle Creek Magazine, Zier-Vogel spontaneously pledged to increase her annual output of 100 letters to 500. She asked people to send her messages about what they love about the city and enlisted the help of friends to distribute the Torontothemed letters. “I would always have a bunch in my bag, and wherever I was with friends, I would have them help me out,” she explains. “I realized [that] people had so much fun taking them out into the world. The possibility or potential of leaving this little note for someone and not knowing what’s going to happen — that’s quite thrilling.” Her friends’ reaction to distributing the letters inspired Zier-Vogel to expand her project by collaborating with the Awesome Foundation, an organization that gives $1,000 grants to urban community engagement projects. “I decided that I wanted to give people the experience of that hiding component and connecting to their community. I partnered with 14 different events and I outsourced
postmodern genre deconstruction has been a big influence on Japanese and American cinephile directors like Takeshi Kitano and Jim Jarmusch. Dragnet Girl, a 1930s gangster film directed by Ozu, is another perfect example of this blurring of high and low forms, and a salient reminder that this type of hierarchical thinking belongs more to critics and programmers than the filmmakers themselves. It’s screening as a part of the Japanese Divas series, which kind of dismantles my attempt at categorization, but I think it really speaks to the mobility between genre entertainment and modernist artistic experimentation. Japanese Divas runs until March 31, while Tokyo Drifters runs until April 6. the entire project. I got people to write their own letters… They would tuck them into envelopes, and they would take them out into the world.” The Love Lettering Project has now become community engagement-focused. Zier-Vogel admits that her love letters are often addressed to objects, places, or abstract ideas. For those writing love letters to a special someone this Valentine’s Day, however, Zier-Vogel offers this advice: “It’s easy to feel shy and it’s easy to feel like it's not necessary, but it’s really special… Gifts are wonderful, but a handwritten letter is amazing. It doesn’t have to be on beautiful crafted paper. It can be on a page from your notebook or a receipt. That part isn’t as important as just sitting down and doing it.” That said, Zier-Vogel is not a fan of Valentine’s Day. “[It’s] this … constructed day where we have to confess our love with teddy bears and chocolate,” she says. “It just seems contrived. I think that being able to communicate about love is important on any day… I think that [Valentine’s Day] can feel really lonely if you’re not in a partnership, which is ridiculous because it’s a day that’s full of awkward dinners and holding weird flowers. I think it’s so easy to romanticize it as a single person.” Zier-Vogel believes that being single shouldn’t stop you from writing a love letter on February 14. Sending letters to objects or friends, Zier-Vogel suggests, is “a way of engaging with this day of love without it having to be this romantic, exclusive way of loving. Every Valentine’s day, I send Valentines to all my friends because I think that it doesn’t have to be this couples’ day. “Reflecting on love is something I think we can always do more of.”
Writing the perfect love letter: a step-by-step guide 1) Choose your subject: It’s best to begin by deciding who the lucky target of your handwritten affections will be: that sexy classmate you’ve been pining after since lecture one, or a tree in the park that’s made you feel particularly poetic? You can write to anyone, any place, or anything. 2) Choose your look: You might choose to compose your confession on thick, expensive stationary using a quill and ink for a romantic, antique appearance. Alternatively, you may find that an old copy of The Varsity and a sharpie prove a better medium for your message. 3) Write Think about love, and try to list the reasons why you love the person,
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2013
place or object you are writing to. Without censoring yourself, put those thoughts on paper, whether you end up writing a haiku or an illustrated novel. Be sure to handwrite it. Unlike typed text, handwriting is intimate and thoroughly your own.
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4) Fold, seal, address: Relish the rewarding physicality of the process, just as the eventual recipient of your letter will take pleasure in the simple, yet exciting actions of opening and unfolding.
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5) Deliver: Whether it’s leaving your letter somewhere for a stranger to find, or the nerve-wracking task of passing it on to a certain someone, it’s a wonderful rush to put a little piece of yourself out there in the world.
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2013 GOVERNING COUNCIL ELECTIONS: Student Candidates Statements Please visit http://www.governingcouncil.utoronto.ca/elections.htm
Voting Period: Monday, February 11, 2013 at 9:00 a.m. to Friday, February 22, 2013 at 5:00 p.m. Online voting will take place on ROSI (www.rosi.utoronto.ca), and paper ballots will be mailed to post-graduate medical trainees.
Full-Time Undergraduate Students, Constituency I (Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Toronto Mississauga, University of Toronto at Scarborough) Yifan (Ellen) Chen Hi there, My name is Ellen, just like the talk show “Ellen”! I major in Commerce at Victoria College. I currently represent you on the GOVERNING COUNCIL’s Academic Board and Planning & Budgeting Committee. Also, I am on the SENATE and the operational COUNCIL of my college. Governing Council is a forum for representatives to question proposals that will impact your future: like curriculum changes and expansion projects. I know how things work because I’m currently on it! Believe me, these governing bodies need someone who will tell them what students really think! POINTING UOFT IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION . Adrian De Leon I am a third-year UTSC student working towards a double major in English Literature and Biology. I would like to ask for your vote to elect me as a Full-Time Student Governor for the University of Toronto With my experience as the Vice-President of Academics at Scarborough Campus Students’ Union, as well as having been extensively involved with campus and student life, I have seen the implementation of tangible change ( e.g. improved library, student space, ect.) If elected, I would like to bring real change as your Student Governor—let the student voice be heard. Daniel Di Cenzo My name is Dan DiCenzo. I am a fourth year UTM student. Being a member of the U of T community has given me a great deal of pride and respect for our university. However, no matter how great this university is, there are still a large number of issues our students face. Having been an active student leader for three years, I have worked with many students and heard their concerns. So far, I have been adamant to fight to ensure their concerns are raised. If elected I will continue to represent students’ issues to bring about positive change at UofT Aidan Fishman Between work, fun and maintaining your GPA, do you ever feel like a fish out of water? If so, Aidan Fishman is your candidate! I’m running for re-election to Governing Council because I believe that undergraduates need a strong, experienced representative looking out for our interests. As one of just six undergraduates among sixty Governors, I fought successfully against grade deflation, expanded wi-fi access, and sparked a review of breadth requirements. We can’t stop now – please send me back to push for a better university. Every school (of fish) needs its leader – vote the Fish for Governing Council! http://www.facebook.com/fishmanforuoft Ariane Ganji I am student active in both academic and extracurricular activities at the University of Toronto giving me a solid background for this position. I will make sure that full time undergraduate student’s needs are represented accurately and solved efficiently. Reema Gowani Vote Reema GOWANI! My goal is to bring forward the student voice at U of T. I will put forth my time and absolute effort, going above and beyond to represent the Arts/Science students. Knowing that U of T is a large institution, my plan is to bring a fresh, innovative perspective to help govern our school. Everyone should have an unbiased, accurate understanding of any issues that arise at their university, and most importantly someone who can help voice their opinions of those issues. Let me represent you, and I will make your voice heard! Your opinion matters! www.ReemaGowani.com
Leena Halees Hello. My name is Leena Halees and I’m running for student representative on the governing council. I’m a first year student studying Peace, Justice, & Conflict studies. I have had several experiences working with diverse clubs and committees ranging from the athletics, the arts, and the academics. My passion is to volunteer in hopes to make a positive difference. My goal is to bring a voice reflective of the student body, ensuring only the best for the U of T community. With your support, I will do whatever it takes to make it happen. Thank you for your consideration. Annie Hsu Like you, I am a student still trying to figure out my academic passions and career goals. Like many of you, I am not the most academically successful student or the most outspoken activist. But I am a good listener. I want to listen to you and figure out what needs to be changed to improve students’ university experiences, both academically and socially. I hope to connect with you and represent your needs and concerns as a member of the Governing Council. Areesha Jacob Areesha Jacob is a second year student of Political Science and French at the University of Toronto, St. George. She has a distinct love for the campus and wishes to be a vital part of such a marvelous institution. Vote for her, she can truly represent you as a student. With great time management skills and strong support for advancement of the university, she only favors the best decisions for the students. She hopes you make the right choice, she believes in you, rather. Your one vote truly matters. Masud Khalif N/A. Shannon Knox Shannon Knox is currently Treasurer of the Canadian Studies Student Union and wants to get more involved in the politics and procedures that make the University of Toronto the great institution that it is. Governance is an area where Shannon is experienced, working as a Building Manager for a non-profit housing co-operative where the Board of Directors constantly strive to improve their own governance practices. Participating on the Governing Committee will give Shannon a change to engage in matters of governance from a new perspective other than that of staff facilitator Aida Liman-Tinguiri When it comes time to elect a representative, you want someone that is dedicated and eloquent. As an experienced and accomplished public speaker, I’ll have the audacity to make your voice heard loud and clear. Rest assured that Ontario’s top three bilingual debater will be able to advocate for your rights in the governing council. A vote for me, is really a vote for yourself. John Nguyen My name is John Nguyen, an undergraduate in second year. I’ve never stood at the forefront of student governance because of one problem, its relevance to the average student. I want to make sure that everyone stays acquainted with how they could contribute their ideas, which could result in faster phases of progression in our political, social, and academic systems that will affect individual students on a personal level. I’m an average undergrad that understands the importance of the Governing Council and am running with the vision to demonstrate student governance is both applicable and relevant to the average student.
Elicia Pavan If elected for the Undergraduate Constituency of Arts & Science, I intend to help voice the student opinion in regards to the guidance and strategic direction in The University’s future, ensuring the best possible experience and long-term interests for undergraduate students. Majoring in both Human Biology and Drama, I have the ability to reach students over multiple disciplines ensuring the attention of diverse student experiences across campus are addressed. With an extensive volunteer history within the surrounding community and within U of T, I am able to articulate issues and provide creative solutions with the collective in mind.
Tannishtha Pramanick Hi! As an Arts and Science student at the University of Toronto, I am very much looking forward to being your student representative on the governing council. You can count on me to keep your best interests in mind and uphold your views. I am currently floor president and on the council at my residence. My previous employment and political experiences include working in clinical research at Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical school and participating in a government and leadership program at Yale University. If you would like to know more or have any questions, visit my website at http://2013tanni.webs.com/.
Tannishtha Pramanick Hi! As an Arts and Science student at the University of Toronto, I am very much looking forward to being your student representative on the governing council. You can count on me to keep your best interests in mind and uphold your views. I am currently floor president and on the council at my residence. My previous employment and political experiences include working in clinical research at Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical school and participating in a government and leadership program at Yale University. If you would like to know more or have any questions, visit my website at http://2013tanni.webs.com/.
Ashley Racine The University of Toronto has a unique commitment to treating its students as future leaders. We, as a student body, make this university what it is through a keen dedication to improving ourselves and the world around us. I, Ashley Racine, would enjoy the privilege of sitting as a representative of this great student body on the Governing Council. I served on the Arts and Science Council and learned that we have the power to shape our education if we can only be inclined to ask the hard questions and demand the results. That is what I plan to do.
Ashley Racine The University of Toronto has a unique commitment to treating its students as future leaders. We, as a student body, make this university what it is through a keen dedication to improving ourselves and the world around us. I, Ashley Racine, would enjoy the privilege of sitting as a representative of this great student body on the Governing Council. I served on the Arts and Science Council and learned that we have the power to shape our education if we can only be inclined to ask the hard questions and demand the results. That is what I plan to do.
Rodney Rousseau Rodney Rousseau is a 3rd year student in Biochemistry and Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. If elected, Rodney intends to represent students from all three campuses using an equity-focused lens. Among other concerns, Rodney wishes to address issues of secondary school transition, support for graduate school transition, employability of graduates, and sustainable diverse access to academia. As the University of Toronto continues to grow, it is integral to student success that effective representation support the interests of U of T’s diverse student body, which is what Rodney plans to do.
Aida Liman-Tinguiri When it comes time to elect a representative, you want someone that is dedicated and eloquent. As an experienced and accomplished public speaker, I’ll have the audacity to make your voice heard loud and clear. Rest assured that Ontario’s top three bilingual debater will be able to advocate for your rights in the governing council. A vote for me, is really a vote for yourself. John Nguyen My name is John Nguyen, an undergraduate in second year. I’ve never stood at the forefront of student governance because of one problem, its relevance to the average student. I want to make sure that everyone stays acquainted with how they could contribute their ideas, which could result in faster phases of progression in our political, social, and academic systems that will affect individual students on a personal level. I’m an average undergrad that understands the importance of the Governing Council and am running with the vision to demonstrate student governance is both applicable and relevant to the average student. Elicia Pavan If elected for the Undergraduate Constituency of Arts & Science, I intend to help voice the student opinion in regards to the guidance and strategic direction in The University’s future, ensuring the best possible experience and long-term interests for undergraduate students. Majoring in both Human Biology and Drama, I have the ability to reach students over multiple disciplines ensuring the attention of diverse student experiences across campus are addressed. With an extensive volunteer history within the surrounding community and within U of T, I am able to articulate issues and provide creative solutions with the collective in mind.
Roghieh Shariari Get YOUR voice heard! Are you worried about tuition fee hikes? New academic policies? Graduate school? Your future profession? It’s time to take a stance on your education. You, the student body, have the biggest impact on our university’s future. I strongly believe that the Governing Council needs a hardworking and motivated member who understands these issues, and who will be there to make sure your concerns are addressed. Together we can make a difference – to make our academic and student life even better. A vote for me is a step in the right direction! Daniel Szulc Hey there UofT’ers. My name is Daniel Szulc, and it would be an honour to be elected as your voice for the Governing Council. Your undergraduate experience should be some of the best, most creative and most inspiring years of your life, and I plan to ensure that every student has that opportunity. I’m constantly involved in my community from fundraisers to organized sports, so I hear and see all of your problems. School’s hard enough and as your representative I’ll do all that I can to ensure that what you want and what you need is what you’ll get.
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2013 GOVERNING COUNCIL ELECTIONS: Student Candidates Statements(continued) Please visit http://www.governingcouncil.utoronto.ca/elections.htm
Voting Period: Monday, February 11, 2013 at 9:00 a.m. to Friday, February 22, 2013 at 5:00 p.m. Online voting will take place on ROSI (www.rosi.utoronto.ca), and paper ballots will be mailed to post-graduate medical trainees.
Full-Time Undergraduate Students, Constituency II (Professional Faculties) Yuan Chung YUAN CHUNG is a first-year medical student at the University of Toronto. Winner of numerous prestigious national and international scholarships, Yuan graduated with the University Gold Medal from University of Ottawa with a degree in Biomedical Sciences. During his undergraduate studies, Yuan founded an organization supporting charitable efforts in Cameroon and started a program facilitating student transition to post-secondary studies. Now, Yuan is a member of the class council and is involved with multiple volunteering and leadership endeavors through the Faculty of Medicine. Yuan hopes to bring forth YOUR perspectives and represent YOU in the Governing Council. VOTE YUAN CHUNG! Andrew Girgis Re-elect Andrew Girgis and have your interests voiced to those that make decisions on your behalf on matters relating to tuition, academic standards, and student life! Beware of empty promises! Student governors cannot make sweeping changes! However, with the right person and the right experience, you can count on the professional student perspective to be voiced when decisions on governance are made. Now serving my first term, vote of the person who has gone through the heavy learning curve and knows what is expected of a student governor and what is not and who wants to continue to serve YOU! Ryan Gomes My name is Ryan Gomes, and I’m a full time undergraduate student currently enrolled in Engineering Science. I am running to be a student representative on the Governing Council because I think it’s important for there to be a strong, independent student voice speaking up about student concerns. I’m not shy about expressing my opinions and I am always ready to listen and talk about the issues that matter most to students in how the university is being run. I hope I will have the honour of representing you this upcoming year on the Governing Council. Igor Mihajlovic You’re an ambitious student with big dreams. You’ve been involved in countless clubs, spent summers researching, working, and volunteering. You’re ready to change the world! But now you face a five-figure tuition and mountains of textbooks. Not quite the dream? We professional students are a gem in this city. I will strive to integrate existing city resources to your benefit and bring your unique concerns to light. It’s time for Toronto’s epicentre of innovation to work creatively and interprofessionally. I’ll use my economics background to ensure resource efficiency in Governing Council and support professional students like you.
Part-Time Undergraduate Students One of the two seats reserved for Part-Time Undergraduate Students has been filled by acclamation. Laura Amodio Living in a society that promotes and values life-long learning, part-time students are clearly a vital component of the University of Toronto student body. As a fellow part-time student who has many responsibilities outside of studies, I can relate to those of us who are trying to find balance in it all. As Governor, I will represent you and be your student voice! I will listen to you to determine what your key issues/concerns are, come up with an action plan on how to address and advocate for the key issues, and follow through on the action plan
Asad “A.J.” Jamal As a mature student in Arts and Science, and graduate of the Academic Bridging program, I know the challenges faced by part-time students. Access to education, bursaries, childcare, more evening courses, university services, housing, equity and representation are issues I’ve advocated for as current President of the Association of Part-Time Undergraduate Students. As a member of the Mature Students’ Association, South Asian Alliance, and Debates Team, I’ve helped to build community on campus. As Governor, I will use my experiences and drive to be a strong voice for part-time students. On February 11-22, vote ASAD “AJ” JAMAL for Part-Time Governor. facebook.com/asadjamal Martin Zhang Part time students often experience difficulty in their lives. This difficulty can be financial, where a lack of funds prevents full time studies. It can also be emotional, where family or social issues overwhelm their ability to study properly. Many part time students are at a crossroads in their lives where they seek a higher education to supplement their careers. Others are overcoming past trauma. I have lived and overcame all of those issues first hand. I can advocate for these issues in the Governing Council, ensuring that our voice is heard in the administration. Graduate Students, Constituency I (Humanities and Social Sciences) Victorina Baxan I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education at OISE. As a Graduate Student representative on the Governing Council of the University of Toronto, I will be working towards improving academic, cultural and communication supports needed for student success. I have gained a good understanding of the needs of graduate students through my work as academic advisor with the OISE Student Success Center. My work is informed by my experiences as an immigrant to Canada, being an international student outside of Canada and my current research that focuses on diversity in Education. Rastko Cvekic I am an upper year PhD student in the Department of Anthropology. During my seven years at UofT I have held numerous positions on the Anthropology Graduate Student Union, departmental committees, the GSU and CUPE 3902. If elected, I will provide a strong voice for all graduate students in Divisions I and II, and especially international students who cannot sit on Governing Council. Two of my top priorities are the replacement of full tuition with lower post-residency fees and the recruitment of more Aboriginal students at the graduate level. Adanya Dunn My education includes: B.Mus with Honours (2008-2012), U of T and M.Mus in Operatic Performance (2012-2014), U of T. I have additional experience in languages, physics, chemistry, and history courses, and have lived both off- and on-campus (go Vic!). I have been a consistent and active member within and beyond the University community, in positions such as president, treasurer, event planner, and coordinator of various organizations and committees. Further to this, I offer a holistic approach to all I do, drawing on creative as well as logistical problem solving and solutions, in order to create an effective and welcoming university environment!
Darryl King I am currently a Master’s student at the Rotman School of Management, and have a Bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Queen’s University. I am passionate about the role that the University of Toronto plays within our city and the broader global community. In order to nurture and strengthen this role I believe that three key values must be upheld throughout all of the University’s affairs: integrity, freedom of expression, and a commitment to excellence. I am eager to represent the interests of Graduate students on the council while working together to ensure that the University flourishes in the years ahead. Kate Partridge As an M.Ed student in Sociology and Equity at OISE/UT and undergraduate in International Relations and Latin American studies, I’ve been deeply invested in the impact of policy and governance on marginalized communities, including students. During my five years at UofT, I have been involved as a researcher, tutor, and club executive addressing access to schooling, student housing, food security, discrimination and academic practices. As Governor, I will be a strong advocate for graduate students on post-residency fees, funding, academic freedom, student rights and other issues affecting the graduate student experience. On February 11-22, vote KATE PARTRIDGE for Governing Council.
Graduate Students, Constituency I I (Humanities and Social Sciences) Alexandra Harris My name’s Alexandra Harris and I recently completed a combined Master of Nursing (MN)/ Master of Health Administration (MHSc). I’m now a first year doctoral student in the Faculty of Nursing, as well as a Junior Fellow at Massey College. I have experience in health governance and want to extend this knowledge to the University, thereby providing an informed perspective on the strategic, financial and academic directions of the institution. I believe that I would be an effective steward for the University because I’m a trustworthy, committed and diligent person. I would be honored to act as your graduate representative. www.alexharrisrn.ca
Luka Srejic Luka Srejic is a Ph.D. student in the Institute of Medical Science studying the neuroscience of depression. He obtained his B.Sc. (2006) in Psychology/Physiology and his M.Sc. (2009) in Physiology, both from University of Toronto. He has been involved in student leadership in the Graduate Association of Students in Physiology. He is currently on the graduate executive committee of the Collaborative Program in Neuroscience, playing an instrumental role in organizing the first collective body of neuroscience graduate students at UofT. Luka’s broad perspective and 10-year experience makes him the ideal candidate to represent the interests of physical and life science grad students. Yinming Sun My name is Yinming and I am a biomedical PhD student. As one who has been here since frosh, I have experienced much that the university had to offer, from the academic rigors of engineering science, to the joys of extracurriculars, to the passions of student clubs. University of Toronto is a home I am proud of and would like to make even better, which is why I seek your support in becoming a student representative on its governing council. My understanding of the university and its student body will allow me to optimally voice the needs of our constituency. Chirag Variawa RE-ELECT Chirag Variawa for Governing Council. He has repeatedly demonstrated a passion to bring ALL graduate issues to the forefront of UofT governance. The doctoral completion award and many other critical issues need continued focus, as they form the basis for graduate student financial requirements. Working with the GSU, CUPE, GC, and others, Chirag can leverage his existing network in Simcoe Hall to ensure that grad student concerns are always up-front and centre. Chirag has a LONG list of daily activities as current governor, and all are documented on his website at www.ChiragVariawa.com PLEASE VOTE FOR CHIRAG VARIAWA, thank you!
Farhang Jalilian Farhang Jalilian is an MSc candidate in the Department of Medical Biophysics and a research assistant at Sunnybrook Health Sciences. He completed his Hon. BSc in Physics from the University of Western Ontario. Active in the student community at Western, Farhang was the vicepresident of Physics and Astronomy Students’ Association and has been involved in a variety of outreach activities within the Faculty of Science. Since June 2010, Farhang is a volunteer Medical First Responder with St. John’s Ambulance. Here at UofT, he is a member of the Medical Biophysics Graduate Student Association. Ayesha Rashid Having an appreciation for the unique needs of graduate students, I am highly motivated to serve as a liaison between graduate students and the university. Good university governance is a shared responsibility, achieved through the sharing of voices and perspectives at all levels. As a graduate student, and with prior experience in graduate student and university governance, I have the skill and motivation to engage in effective dialogues and representation. I would like to have the opportunity to continue in my efforts in voicing the interests of graduate students to impact decisions to help foster excellence at our university.
Students registered at UTM and UTSC are also encouraged to vote in the elections for the Campus Councils and their Standing Committees. Questions about the Governing Council elections process may be directed to the Chief Returning Officer, Mr. Anwar Kazimi (416-9788427; anwar.kazimi@utoronto.ca), or the Deputy Returning Officer, Ms Mae-Yu Tan (416-978-8794; maeyu.tan@utoronto.ca).
Science
FROM THE ARCHIVES
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Youth avoid marriage because of fear of divorce
11 FEBrUarY 2013
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science@thevarsity.ca
BErNarda GospIC/tHE varsItY
The science of love Taking a closer look at the brain chemistry of arousal Jordan Rivera
VARSITY CONTRIBUTOR
Writers, poets, musicians, and filmmakers have long claimed that love is inexplicable. It defies explanation and can emerge almost spontaneously between two people. The Romans explained love’s occurrence through the god Cupid, who would strike unknowing victims with his arrow, causing them to fall in love. Romantic love, the love most celebrated on Valentine’s Day, is a passionate and emotional love between people. What explains these feelings, how do they emerge, and who triggers them? What happens when Cupid’s arrow strikes? The first step in “falling” is lust and attraction, driven by the sex hormones estrogen and testosterone. These hormones motivate you to look for a mate. When an attractive target is found and an interaction is initiated, the monoamine neurotransmitters take effect. Dopamine, the pleasure molecule and the neurotransmitter that is increased by drugs and sex, makes being with and pursuing the target rewarding. Norepinephrine is also raised, and puts the love-struck in a state of enhanced vigilance to pursue. Lastly, serotonin is also implicated in this process. Known as the policeman of the brain, it regulates cortical function; those deeply in love have been found to resemble individuals with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (ocd). Romantic love is often associated with long-term commitment, one of the most important predictors of relationship stability that is contingent upon the process of attachment. Attachment is regulated by two
hormones: oxytocin and vasopressin. Oxytocin is released by the hypothalamus during childbirth and breast-feeding, and is implicated in the bond formed between mother and child. It is also released during orgasm and is believed to cement the formation of the intimate bond between two partners. Vasopressin has also been found to be involved in the bonding process. It was first examined in pair-bonding between voles, one of very few (less than three per cent) mammals that form monogamous relationships. Voles were also found to have receptors for both oxytocin and vasopressin in brain regions associated with pleasure and reward. Genes and transcriptional regulators determine the level of translation and abundance of these neurotransmitters, hormones, and their receptors, and raise interesting questions about whether individuals with certain genetic variations are more or less susceptible to forming attachments and falling in love. If so, some predict that accepting marriage proposals may one day involve consideration of the proposer’s genomic makeup. So what happens when attachment has formed and a couple has made the decision to remain committed? Certain cognitive processes have also been observed in couples that show higher relationship commitment and stability. Greater self-other overlap is positively correlated with relationship stability. This involves the merging of your and your partner’s identity and a cognitive entanglement that makes it difficult to differentiate who you are from who your partner is. Studies have found that couples that take longer to differentiate words descriptive of themselves
Dopamine, the pleasure molecule and the neurotransmitter that is increased by drugs and sex, makes being with and pursuing the target rewarding. versus their partner are more likely to remain together than couples who responded faster. The process of self-other overlap occurs early in a relationship when there is plenty of initial self-expansion. This describes the expansion of one’s self-constructed identity to include the aspects of your partner’s. Early in the relationship there is an abundance of new facets for self-expansion made available to you by your partner’s presence in your life — new friends, new experiences, new interests, and new resources, such as cars, apartments, and other objects. This period eventually slows down as you come to know your partner better and relationship satisfaction plateaus as the serious integration of your partner into your life occurs. Couples who make it past this phase will eventually experience continued self-expansion and increased satisfaction but at a slower rate. This latter phase characterizes the more stable satisfaction found in older couples who have formed a solid basis of companionship. Couples who are more stable also demonstrate cognitive superiority. They believe their relationship to be better and happier than the relation-
ships of their friends. They also see their partner as better than attractive alternatives. Studies have found that men will denigrate more attractive alternatives more than less attractive alternatives, as very attractive alternatives pose more of a threat to the relationship. So for those of you lucky enough to be in a loving relationship, or for those who hope to one day be in one, here’s some advice to keep in mind this Valentine’s Day. First, do something new and exciting. Novel activities have been found to be quite effective at increasing relationship satisfaction and buffering against habitual activities and the mundane. Second, do something your partner will really enjoy, and try to enjoy it just as much as they do. One crucial factor found to be important for marital stability and satisfaction is the ability for individuals in a relationship to become genuinely excited and happy for the things that make their partner excited and happy. Lastly, be physically affectionate. Although frequency of sex is positively associated with relationship satisfaction, it is not as strongly correlated as physical affection in general.
VARSITY SCIENCE
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MONDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2013
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A Bright Idea World’s most energy-efficient bulb invented by U of T grads Trevor Janes
VARSITY CONTRIBUTOR
Graduates of the University of Toronto have designed what they claim is “the world’s most efficient light bulb.” Gimmy Chu, Christian Yan, and Tom Rodinger met while working on U of T’s solar car team, and have reunited to develop the NanoLight, a new led light bulb which they launched on January 7. A traditional incandescent light bulb that gives off 1600 lumens (the unit used to measure the amount of visible light emitted) requires 100 w of power, but these incandescents are currently being phased out in favour of the more efficient compact fluorescent (cfl) light bulbs, which require only 24 w to give off the same amount of light. Newer to the lighting scene are led lightbulbs, which need only 20 w, but none of these existing options can hold a candle to the NanoLight, which uses only 12 w to produce the standard measure of 1600 Lumens. The NanoLight led light bulb also lasts four times longer than its cfl counterpart. The longevity and efficiency of the NanoLight will make it extremely attractive to consumers, and the bulb has aesthetic merits too: its unique multifaceted design has been likened by cnet to “an origami bulb of leds.” The unique design allows light to be broadcast in all directions, a feat that has
traditionally been a challenge for led lightbulbs. The NanoLight uses printed circuit board technology to give the bulb its structure, and to provide the necessary internal circuitry. This engineering innovation, combined with the most energy-efficient leds currently available and a special heat-dissipating outer coating, allowed the inventors to omit the heat sink normally required in led bulbs. The NanoLight runs at a lower temperature than other light bulbs, so it can be used safely in enclosed fixtures and, unlike some cfl bulbs, it becomes fully bright as soon as it is turned on. The NanoLight is not without its flaws, however. It suffers from a low Colour Rendering Index (cri) — a measure of how closely the emitted light can reproduce colours of objects compared to a natural light source. One practical challenge listed on the company’s Kickstarter page is the mass production of NanoLight bulbs: the complex shape of the printed circuit board and the atypical mounting of the leds will make assembly by machine difficult, but the bulb’s inventors remain optimistic that they will overcome this challenge. Kickstarter is a for-profit website that facilitates funding for creative projects like the NanoLight. The funding comes not from investors, but rather through “backers” who receive no equity or ownership of the projects they back. As the
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Kickstarter website puts it, “Backing a project is more than just giving someone money, it’s supporting their dream to create something that they want to see exist in the world.” The backers pledge towards the goal set by the project creators. The creators only receive money if they achieve their funding goal for the project within the time allotted. So far the NanoLight has received over $160,000 in pledges, greatly exceeding the goal of $20,000, with weeks left until the March 8 deadline. To encourage pledges, the creators offer incentives including a 10 w NanoLight (75 w equivalent) in return for a $30 pledge, and a 12 w NanoLight (100 w equivalent) for a $45 pledge. As well as overwhelming support on Kickstarter, the NanoLight has also enjoyed substantial media attention; it has been featured on CTV News, tech website cnet, and the business section of the Toronto Star. In a recent CTV News interview, company strategist Chu indicated that the U of T alumni inventors have big plans. “Our focus isn’t just going to be on led lighting but it’s also on solar technologies; we have some other products in the works and we’re hoping to be able to release it to you guys soon.” In these energy-conscious times, any innovation that increases the efficiency with which people use energy is welcome, and potentially profitable.
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Nanolight by the numbers
The Nanolight bulb produces 133 lumen per watt
A 100-watt equivalent CFL produces 66 lumen per watt
A 100-watt incandescent bulb produces 16 lumen per watt Based on 30,000 hours of usage at $0.14/kWhr it would cost: Incandescent
CFL
Nanolight
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VARSITY SCIENCE
24 Vol. CXXXIII, No. 16
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New diabetes treatment enters clinical trials
Join The Varsity’s Science team!
Canadian scientists poised to test the efficacy of early insulin treatment lin for our body’s needs,” says Retnakaran. Once a person is diagnosed, patients are advised to try to improve their lifestyles. As their β-cells deteriorate over time, patients are given anti-diabetics to be taken daily. Finally, when the β-cells completely deteriorate, insulin therapy is needed. Retnakaran and his colleagues want to change this standard timeline for the disease. Their recent paper in the Lancet, “Short-term intensive insulin therapy in type 2 diabetes mellitus: a systemic review and meta-analysis,” establishes enough evidence to warrant novel clinical trials. The results show that in patients with newly diagnosed T2DM, shortterm intensive insulin therapy is correlated with improvement in β-cell function and insulin resistance. Post-study, around half the recipients were able to maintain normal glycemic levels for up to 12 months without any anti-diabetic medication. Retnakaran and his colleagues at Mount Sinai are applying these findings to their new clinical trial, named RESET IT (Remission Studies Evaluating Type 2 Diabetes – Intermittent Insulin Therapy). “We want to give insulin to patients for two to three weeks early in their course of diabetes. This improves the body’s ability to produce and use its own insulin, a period of remission. But, as β-cell function wanes over time, we will administer another bout of insulin leading to another remission period.” Essentially, the trials begin with three weeks of intensive insulin therapy, followed by insulin therapy every three months for a week’s
Sneha Raju
VARSITY CONTRIBUTOR
When it comes to designing innovative and effective therapies for diabetes, Toronto scientists have often led the charge. The advances began with Frederick Banting and Charles Best, who purified insulin to treat diabetics in the 1920s, and the tradition is being kept alive at the Mount Sinai’s Center for Diabetes. Recently, Dr. Ravi Retnakaran and colleagues completed a meta-analysis of seven studies, and showed that shortterm intensive insulin doses have the potential to prevent the pathology associated with Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). T2DM is a metabolic disorder characterized by insulin resistance, which renders cells unresponsive to the hormone and decreases insulin secretion by pancreatic β-cell, leading to β-cell deterioration. T2DM is of crucial importance due to the ever-increasing numbers of Canadians being diagnosed with it. According to Retnakaran, “one out of every eight Canadians will be at risk of developing diabetes by 2020, and the ratio will increase to one in three by 2050.” This means every single Canadian family will be dealing with diabetes in one way or another. While several therapies are currently available for T2DM, they are all essentially supportive. “Unfortunately, none of the existing therapies have been shown to change the natural history of diabetes, which is the inability of β-cells to make enough insu-
Students’ Union University of Toronto n of Students Federatio
It’s not rocket science! (except for when it is)
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G IN R P S 2013
e c i t o N s n o i t c e l E Local 98 • Canadian
duration. Trials will take place in Toronto, London and Hamilton, and will involve 150 patients over two years. So why does this therapy work? The deterioration of β-cell function that patients with diabetes experience is due to an irreversible loss of β-cells and a reversible effect of hyperglycemia due to decreased insulin on β-cell secretory ability. The latter effect, termed “glucotoxicity,” occurs when excess glucose in the blood of a diabetic is toxic to the β-cells that secrete insulin. Earlier findings suggest that the effect of glucotoxicity is higher earlier on in diabetes, when the β-cell numbers are relatively high. Giving a patient intensive insulin therapy early on in diabetes eliminates the glucotoxitiy, thereby preventing massive β-cell death. “If the trial is successful, it [will] introduce a different way to treat diabetes,” says Retnakaran. “Firstly, it lets us treat diabetes in a cheap way. If it is able to stop the progressive deterioration of β-cells, people will not develop the complications associated with diabetes such as heart attacks, strokes, and problems with small blood vessels. “Secondly, the therapy will improve people’s lifestyle as they will not be required to take medication or monitor blood glucose levels daily. Thus, our potential success has huge implications for society, in terms of reduction of costs and improvement in lifestyle.” For more information on Retnakaran’s study, or to take part in the clinical trials, contact the Diabetes Center at Mount Sinai at 416-586-8775.
rgraduates at St. resents all full-time unde ortant services such rep ion Un ’ nts de Stu T imp vides The U of ted TTC ga campuses. UTSU pro George and Mississau ns, book bursaries, clubs funding and discouncentral U of the Pla l to nts de stu s ent as Health & Denta res connects dents’ Union also rep Metropasses. Your Stu vernment, advocates for students’ rights, and social and s go ign pa and n cam , atio als istr T admin work on common go to ses pu cam all oss students acr programming.
The University of Toronto Students’ Union is holding its Spring 2013 Elections to fill the following positions: Position
Seat(s)
Division I Victoria College University College Innis College St. Michael’s College New College Trinity College Woodsworth College At-Large Arts & Science
2 2 1 3 3 1 3 2
Toronto School of Theology
1
Faculty of Music Faculty of Dentistry Faculty of Nursing Faculty of Medicine Faculty of Pharmacy Faculty of Law Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering Faculty of Architecture, Landscape & Design (pending approval at General Meeting) Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) At-Large Professional Faculty
1 1 1 1 1 1 3 1 1 1 2
Division II
Executive President
1
Vice President Internal & Services
1
Vice President Equity Vice President External
1 1 1
Vice President University Affairs
Election Nominations (All Positions) Election Campaign Period Election Voting Period Unofficial Election Results
Important 2013 Dates:
Thursday, February 14, 2013 at 10:00 to Thursday, February 28, 2013 at 16:00 Monday, March 4, 2013 to Thursday, March 14, 2013 March 12, 13, 14, 2013 Times TBA Monday, March 18, 2013
Nomination Pick-up and Drop-off Locations: St. George campus: UTSU Office 12 Hart House Circle Hours: Monday - Friday, 09:00 to 18:00
Mississauga campus: UTMSU Office UTM Student Centre, Room 100 Hours: Monday - Friday 09:00 to 12:30, 13:30 to 17:00
To run for a position, pick up a nomination package during the nomination period at the UTSU or UTMSU office. Please keep in mind the dates and deadlines. For more information, visit our Students’ Union website at www.utsu.ca or contact cro@utsu.ca Please note that, at the time of this publication, “University of Toronto Students’ Union” and/or “UTSU” refers to the Students’ Administrative Council of the University of Toronto, Inc. (“SAC”).
Sports
ONLINE EXCLUSIVE
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Full day-by-day recaps of the OUA championships
11 FEBrUarY 2013 sports@thevarsity.ca
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U of T’s 2011 male athlete of the year Zack Chetrat (Left) and IM Award winner Vanessa Treasure competed this past weekend. lindsaY nEmEth/varsitY BlUEs
Varsity Blues swim teams achieve OUA domination Men’s team secures gold, women end with silver in U of T hosted meet The Varsity Blues men’s team took the oua team championship title for the tenth year in a row with a series of victories at the Varsity Pool this weekend, as the women’s team finished second in home waters. “It’s always great to win,” admitted men’s head coach and oua coach of the year, Byron MacDonald. “[And the women’s team] swum above and beyond what they were [expected to].” DAY ONE The 2013 Championships kicked off in stunning fashion with impressive performances that shattered eight records, three alone by the Blues’ own Zack Chetrat. Following the preliminary heats, the Varsity Blues started off the first day’s finals with 20 swimmers looking to make a big splash.
And they did. By the time the first day of competition wrapped up, the Varsity Blues men’s and women’s swimming teams had broken five oua records, earned eight gold medals, three second–place finishes, and two bronze medals between them. The night ultimately belonged to fifth-year swimmer Chetrat. Named the 2011 Male Athlete of the Year after winning gold in the 100-metre butterfly, 200-metre butterfly, 1500-metre free, and 4×200-metre freestyle, Chetrat was returning to the pool after a one-year hiatus from competition. The time off hasn’t slowed him down: Chetrat broke teammate Frank Despond’s record of 3:48.63 with a 3:47.87 finish in the 400-metre freestyle, before smashing his own record of 1:59.25 in the 200-metre butterfly by clocking in at 1:56.34.
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A series of fantastic performances on the women’s side capped off a wonderful night for the Varsity Blues swimming teams. Vanessa Treasure, the 2012 oua Female Swimmer of the Year, swam a record 2:29.18 in the 200-metre breaststroke to break her 2011 time of 2:29.90. Andrea Jurenovskis, who is swimming for the last time as a Varsity Blue, captured the Grand Slam Award for her fourth oua 100-metre backstroke gold with a time of 1:01.16. Having won eight oua individual titles over the past four years, Jurenovskis added to her collection with a bronze in the 50-metre freestyle, clocking in at 26.24. At the end of the opening day, the Blues men were in the lead and on track to capturing their tenth straight Dougall Trophy with 308 points, while their female counterparts sat in second place with 250
points — only 50 points behind the fourtime champion Western Mustangs. —Amanda Coletta DAY TWO On the second day of this weekend’s oua championships, swimmers arrived at the pool early to prepare for the 10 am preliminaries, while the rest of U of T’s students hoped for a snow day. Friday’s events included the 200-metre individual medley (IM), 100-metre freestyle, 200-metre backstroke, 100-metre breaststroke, 50-metre butterfly, the women’s 800-metre freestyle, the men’s 1500-metre freestyle, and the 400-metre medley relay. By the end of the day, six more oua records had been broken, two by U of T.
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VARSITY SPORTS
26 Vol. CXXXIII No. 16 CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE The women’s 100-metre freestyle preliminaries were dominated by McMaster, Western, and U of T, with the Blues’ Jurenovskis finishing in second place. Jurenovskis managed to hold that spot in the finals, earning the silver medal. The U of T men took seven of the top 13 positions in the 100-metre freestyle preliminaries, with Edward Liu finishing second behind Evan Van Moerkerke of Guelph. In the finals, Mike Smerek took the bronze medal, with U of T’s Liu, Taylor Bond, and Luke Hall finishing in fourth, sixth, and seventh respectively. In the women’s 100-metre breaststroke, the Blues’ Treasure, who has been one of U of T’s strongest swimmers and has dominated the event in past oua and cis championships, led after the preliminaries but slipped 0.69 seconds behind McMaster’s Alexandra Vanommen to claim silver. In the 50-metre butterfly, the U of T men dominated in the preliminaries, to give fans hope of winning multiple medals in the final. They were not disappointed; Smerek placed first, Liu second, and Brian Lee third. Smerek’s performance broke the oua record for
the event set in 2004 by 0.97 seconds. It was his fifth consecutive win in the event, earning him the OUA Major Grand Slam award. In the women’s 800-metre freestyle, U of T’s younger swimmers took two of the three top spots, with second-year Bridget Coley emerging victorious; Blues’ first-year student Esther Haines placed third. By the end of the day, U of T’s women were trailing Western by 620.5 points to 503, but still strongly ahead of McMaster in third (455.5). Meanwhile, the men finished strongly in first place with 585 points above McMaster in second with 475, with Western trailing at 430 points. — Elizabeth Benn DAY THREE Having won multiple medals in the first two days of the meet, the Blues were looking to continue their success on the final day of the oua competition. Toronto’s athletes took gold in their first events of the final day of the championship. Both the men and women won their respective 200-metre medley relays, with the men’s team setting a new oua record. The Blues continued to perform at a high level, winning at least one medal in nine out of 10 individual events.
Treasure and Jeremie Holdom took home first place in their respective 400-metre im races. The two would later be given 2013 Dr. Jeno Tihanyi Awards for Individual Medley Excellence. “It was actually such a big shock,” said Treasure, “I thought that you had to win both the ims, and last night I got just outtouched in the 200 [but I won] because I scored the highest points. It feels good.” The oua meet ended with a bang for Toronto, as the men’s team, made up of swimmers Liu, Brian Lee, Matthew Myers, and Cameron Bailey, won the 4x100 metre freestyle. “My favorite moment of the day was the 4×100 freestyle relay,” said men’s head coach Byron MacDonald. “It’s always an incredibly exciting relay, it finishes the meet always with a burst of energy, and we won it very convincingly and handily.” Blues’ swimmers took home several honours: Chetrat was named men’s swimmer of the year, and Jurenovskis and Smerek took home Graduating Athlete Awards of Distinction. For Jurenovskis the moment was bittersweet. “We haven’t won a championship in my five years, although we’ve always been very close. Ending with the men’s relay winning by a huge margin, their victories
sports@thevarsity.ca are ours, so it was really special to end on that kind of note. To have a couple more golds under my belt was definitely icing on the cake. “I’ve got to say that just being part of the women’s team has been my favorite memory of my university career.” — Susan Gordon CIS CHAMPIONSHIPS The many Blues swimmers — including the entire men’s team — continuing to the cis championship are working to stay focused as they continue with their season. “The difficulty of this Ontario championship is that while it’s a very important meet for us, and we’re glad to win it, our goal is always to win the national championship,” explained MacDonald. “What we can’t do is pat ourselves on the back too hard and relax too much after this meet, because we, in 10 days, have to try to go out and win the national championship.” The Blues men’s team, who finished second at the cis last year, has high expectations for the competition. “The team championship I think is very doable,” noted swimmer Matthew Meyers. “It’s taper time, so lots of rest, eating well. This is my favourite part of the year, I’m excited.”
Fifth-year Andrea Jurenovskis won four individual and two relay medals. lindsay nemeth/Varsity blues
Home pool bodes well for Blues champion swim teams Nicholas Pcholkin
VARSITY CONTRIBUTOR
The University of Toronto was a successful host of the Ontario University Athletics (oua) swimming championships this past weekend. The men’s team essentially wrapped up its first-place finish on the second day, while the women’s finished second overall. Toronto’s men dominated the three-day meet from start to finish and ended with a combined team score of 891 points, a 169-point advantage over the McMaster Marauders (722).
The Western Mustangs’ women led the team standings for three straight days, finishing with 876.5 points. The silver-medalist Varsity Blues finished with 762 points, with the Marauders at a close third with 682.5 points. Toronto’s Zach Chetrat and Guelph’s Alisha Harricharan were crowned the 2013 male and female swimmers of the year respectively. Chetrat broke two oua records in the men’s 400-metre freestyle and 200-metre butterfly on Day 1 and was honoured with the Grand Slam award, claiming the fourth oua 200-metre butterfly title of his university career.
The Athletic Centre was abuzz with excitement as supporters for all teams brought an aura of enthusiasm and competitiveness. The Toronto supporters were the loudest and, in combination with the chants from the swim team, electrified the event and the individual and team races scattered through the three nights. Eric Vanderbeek, a third-year Blues swimmer, lauded the staff. “[They] did a really good job getting all of the supporters out; it makes it most exciting.” The Varsity Blues support, hand in hand with the extensive Toronto decorations, created a supportive environment for U of T’s swimmers.
“Hosting your own meet is the best,” admitted fourth-year swimmer Alexandra Augello. At the other end of the experience spectrum, first-year swimmer Zoe Rivard-Aslin used the word “comfortable” to describe her first tournament as a Varsity Blues swimmer. Luke Hall, an Olympic swimmer from Swaziland, put on another great performance at the oua championships. Hall said the victory “bodes well for us going into the main competition” — the cis championship, hosted in Calgary in a couple of weeks. Not having to travel for this tournament with the cis rapidly
approaching proved a great asset for Toronto’s swimmers. Hall commented saying that while “other teams rest up, we train through it with our main sights on the cis.” The Blues met the high expectations that had been set for the meet. The men’s team has continually dominated the oua, with this victory being their tenth straight firstplace finish. A total of 19 records were broken during the three-day meet, including five on Day Three to cap off the exciting tournament. Varsity Blues swimmer Augello summed it up best: “We know the pool well.”
VARSITY SPORTS
var.st/sports
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2013
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Blues lineman James Bodanis will play in the Big Ten for Michigan State next year. Hai bao/Varsity blues
From the Blue and White to the Green and White Blues defensive lineman James Bodanis set to play for NCAA team Michigan State Zoë Bedard
SPORTS EDITOR
The Varsity Blues football team ended their 2012 campaign with a lackluster 2–6 record. It’s difficult to take any positives from such a season; however, one bright star has emerged in recent weeks. Blues defensive lineman James Bodanis, who was featured on the nfl Canada portion of the nfl website this past week, has drawn the eyes of ncaa team Michigan State. “I made a highlight video at the end of 2012 and decided to put it up on YouTube, and was put in contact with a man in Toronto named Justin Dillon,” explained Bodanis. “He started putting my name out there, and eventually teams came calling and Michigan State was one of them. They actually contacted me first.” Although his transfer has not been entirely finalized, Bodanis will be donning the green and
Bodanis on the field
white of the Spartans next season. “The staff at Michigan State are still going through all the rules and procedures to figure out how much eligibility I will have. [But] whatever the situation is, I still will be playing for them.” Bodanis has played for the Blues for two seasons under head coach Greg Gary. Any transition between coaches, let alone entire teams, is a challenge, but Bodanis is anticipating a smooth transfer. “I have met with the majority of the coaching staff and some of the players on the team and from what I have seen so far I’m very happy with everyone there and I think its very comparable to the kind of atmosphere that U of T has, and that can only be a positive,” Bodanis asserted. “I think that as long as I work as hard as I can and do my best then I should be fine no matter where I play. “The biggest obstacle is probably going to be learning a new system.” The Blues and their cis competitors play by the rules of the Canadi-
Total Tackles 2011: 12 2012: 20.5
an Football League (cfl), whereas ncaa teams such as Michigan State adhere to the structure of the nfl. The main changes that Bodanis will have to confront include where players line up at the snap, the size of the field, and the amount of motion allowed before a play. “I feel like the transition won’t be as difficult as it seems,” Bodanis confidently explained. “I feel as though the rules in the American game are more suited to my attributes, as I can start closer to the ball and have a smaller area to run towards each sideline. And I have played American rules when I played for the Etobicoke Eagles of the ovfl.” Bodanis admits that the transfer will help him get closer to realizing his dream of playing in the nfl. “My decision to leave U of T was a personal choice that I made and had nothing to do with our record and lack of recognition,” asserted Bodanis. “It was a decision I made that was solely based on me achieving my goal of playing in the
Solo Tackles 2011: 8 2012: 18
nfl and I felt that seeking out interest from ncaa schools was my best shot.” If he is to realize that dream, Bodanis will have to prove that he is capable of performing as well under the American rules as he has with the Blues. In his two seasons at U of T, the defensive lineman recorded 32.5 tackles and five sacks. The Michigan State Spartans are a member of the Big Ten Conference in the ncaa Division One Football Bowl Subdivision. The Spartans have won six national championships, and 10 Big Ten championships, with the last conference victory coming in 2010. The team is perhaps most remembered for their participation in “The Game of the Century.” In 1966 the Spartans hosted the Notre Dame Fighting Irish in what has since been remembered as one of the greatest, and most controversial, games in college football history. Michigan State entered the game with a 9–0 record and ranked second nationally, while the first-
Assisted Tackles 2011: 4 2012: 5
ranked Fighting Irish came in with an 8–0 record. On the final series of the game, tied at 10–10, Notre Dame chose not to try to score in the end zone and the game ended in a tie, with both schools claiming the championship. The Spartans have 24 graduates currently active in the nfl, including Super Bowl winner Plaxico Burress and Dallas Cowboys offensive lineman Flozell Adams. In Bodanis’ quest to “make it to the nfl draft and to try to get more exposure and experience,” a school with such highly recognized athletes is a definite advantage. With his final snap for the Blues completed and his departure fast approaching. Bodanis has only thoughts for those he leaves behind. “I’d like to say thank you to everyone at U of T — coach Gary, coach Carter, coach Scott, the training staff, and all the players. Good luck next season and I appreciate everything that you guys have helped me with over these last few years.”
Sacks 2011: 1 2012: 4
28 MONDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2013
Varsity Valentine’s Day Personals To connect, email love@thevarsity.ca
DIVERSIONS
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Masturbation Because love and sex aren’t always available, The Varsity presents the six places to eat pizza and cry on campus.
SUCCESSFUL LIFE LIVER, lover of churros and Sátan. Ideal partner must love Danzig. Seeking a gal to hit the snooze button and exchange belly rubs with.
UTSU’s Special General Meeting: There’s a two minute speaking limit, so stroke your egos (and whatever else you need to) quickly.
IT’S TIME TO DREAM AGAIN! Life changing, enigmatic, future-building professional seeks passionate stud to perform menial labour and dust my collection of ballerina figurines.
Rotman Commerce: Enjoy the full benefits of the invisible hand.
FANCY DANCER, feline fancier, and hearty giggler. Romantically committed gentlemen seeking friend to enjoy the odd free moment with. You: must be comfortable with the unshowered and frantic.
Room F6, University College: Misery loves company.
MY KIND HEART CANNOT LIE! Tragically glamorous woman inclined to nudity and Vietnemese water puppets, seeking passionate companion for the long winter days and even longer nights.
Episkopon Reading: Remember, you can do whatever you want because the meeting doesn’t exist. Notandi sunt tibi mores.
AGELESS BEING SEEKS HOTTT FOLLOWER! Loves excellent Woody Allen impressions, pour-over coffee, and minimal synth. Must be willing to go whole hog.
AST201: Get really excited about the Milky Way.
Fill out our survey about the upcoming UTSU elections before Thursday, February 21, for a chance to win a $50 giftcard from the U of T Bookstore.
Go to:
var.st/electionsurvey