#arshy mann

Throughout the anglophone Caribbean, Barbados has garnered a long-time reputation of being one of the most Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) friendly territories, with a large visible LGBT population. During the earlier occupation of Barbados through British colonisation, the island witnessed a more permissive atmosphere towards homosexuality. This could be accredited to the fact that single men en masse came from Europe to settle, in addition to the fact that enslaved West African people emerged from cultures that allowed room for homosexual relationships. These were often seen as sacred. Attitudes took a sharp and notable turn during the Victorian Era when moral panic led British Parliament to pass harsh and stringent laws against same-sex intimacy. Today, these laws, the harshest in the Western Hemisphere; a cold reminder of a painful colonial legacy, remain enshrined in the Constitution of Barbados. In a post-colonial Barbados, a duplexity in the attitudes and treatment towards the LGBT community could be witnessed. Many older Barbadians can recall an era where homosexuality and being transgender were celebrated, yet viewed as a spectacle. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, The “Queen of the Bees” drag pageant would be held in public theatres, stadiums and arenas throughout the island; attracting mass heterosexual audiences. Gay and Transgender Barbadians proudly paraded throughout the street during the Kadooment Day celebrations in an uninhibited “gay band”. Identifiable and open community spaces existed and were run by LGBT merchants and business owners. In tandem, secretive spaces existed for “closeted” queer people who were often gender conforming and straight-acting. This all changed and radical levels of homophobia and transphobia became prominent in the wake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic during the mid-1980s due to mass fear-mongering, stigmatisation and the rise of anti-gay rhetoric from Evangelical Christian Churches in addition to the upsurge in violent messaging towards homosexuals in dancehall music. The LGBT community has been attempting to recover ever since.

This all refutes the inflammatory notion that homosexuality is something that is inherently "un-Caribbean". Homophobia isn't ours. It was brought to us through the same system that oppressed black people into believing that that should follow Christianity. The same system that shames my kinky hair, my wide hips, my full lips and my dark skin. Homophobia is of the white supremacist, cissexist, capitalist, heteropatriarchy. But I'll get into that at another time.

This twitter thread from Arshy Mann on the subject of incels, the alt-right, and radicalization is pretty on-the-nose and informative for those who weren’t already aware of the incel movement. In the context of the recent attack by Alek Minassian on women in Toronto, the information is relevant.

You can read the whole thing here.

It’s become political cliché to say that people trust the Conservatives on the economy. But Peggy Nash believes she can convince Canadians that when it comes to their wallets, they should vote NDP.

Running on a message of New Democratic economic stewardship, Nash argues that she has a resume that can back up her words. She’s worked as a labour negotiator, community activist, party president and, until she decided to run for the leadership, the opposition finance critic.

“We’re seeing a dramatic decline in the number of good-quality jobs,” said Nash, arguing that this can’t be fought with Harper’s hands-off approach.

“They leave it to the market and [what] the market decides…and where that has gotten us is the highest level of inequality in Canada since the 1920s.”

If elected NDP leader, Nash argues that she would give Canadians a real choice when it comes to the economy.

“I believe that government has to work with the private sector, with labour, with communities, in order to ensure that we’re creating jobs.”

Nash argues that Canada needs to emulate countries like South Korea, Germany, Brazil and Finland, which she argues have not allowed global corporations to dictate policy.

As a former labour negotiator for the Canadian Auto Workers’ union, Nash emphasized that she’s faced off against top CEOs and wouldn’t have a problem doing it again from the prime minister’s office.

Like most of the other leadership candidates, Nash decries the fact that Canada simply exports raw materials instead of processing them at home.

She also places a strong emphasis on the need to move to a green economy.

“We’re behind many other countries in the world at transforming our infrastructure and transforming our production to renewable energy and better energy efficiency,” she said.

“Nobody’s going to turn off the tap on oil and gas production. They’re going to be part of energy strategy for the foreseeable future, but we can massively reduce our dependence…rather than just digging stuff or pumping stuff as quick as we can, and exporting it anywhere we can, as quickly as we can. It’s not a good strategy.”

Nash argues that the Harper government has a shoddy record when it comes to post-secondary education.

“I think that’s a disgrace in a country that purports to be a modern democracy, that we’re not ensuring that post-secondary education is affordable,” she said. “We need to increase the transfers from the federal government to the provinces with strings attached to ensure that the money is used to lower tuition fees.”

She went on to say that “for somebody to apply to university, and then hope that they’re going to get a loan or grant, and some will and some won’t, I don’t think is right.”

According to Nash, she’s a candidate that truly represents NDP values.

“What they get with me is someone who’s connected with the grassroots of the party,” she said. “If we’re going to grow, if we’re going to build, if we’re going to inspire people to work with us, we’ve got to stay connected with the grassroots.

“Those aren’t just words to me. It’s my life’s work.”

For all of the young NDP MPs that marched into Ottawa last election, Niki Ashton acted as a vanguard.

When she was first elected in 2008, Ashton was the youngest NDP MP and the youngest female member of Parliament, two distinctions she lost after the Orange Wave hit Quebec. Not that she minds.

“I’m very happy to be joined by other young people,” said Ashton.

But even before her 2008 election, Ashton was making splashes amongst the New Democrats. In 2005, she ran against incumbent NDP MP Bev Desjarlais for the party’s nomination in Churchill, the federal riding for all of northern Manitoba.

“[She] was the only NDP MP opposed to same-sex marriage,” said Ashton. “So we decided to get involved and organized and ran in the nomination.”

Ashton won. She was 23 years old, and though she lost in the federal election that year, she came back in two years time to take the northern Manitoba riding.

Ashton maintains that she has always seen her age as an advantage.

“When you have young people’s issues being raised at the top level, that engages our generation.”

During her leadership bid, Ashton has been running on a platform that emphasizes the growing inequality in Canadian society.

As a demonstration of the types of changes she would champion, she points to her desire to create a Minister of Equality that would address issues such as gender and racial discrimination.

“The way to [combat inequality] is to have a real presence in government at the ministerial level,” she said. “That involves looking at legislation, but also, of course, programs that create a level playing field and truly aim to put an end to discrimination.”

Ashton, who served as the NDP’s youth critic, said that reducing tuition fees is an essential plank of her economic plan.

“I know firsthand how much of a challenge and a setback the rise of tuition fees…is to our generation,” she said. “This is not a charitable commitment, this is about making a real difference to young people.”

As a northerner and a former instructor at the University College of the North, Ashton has often advocated for increased commitments to northern and First Nations education.

“That’s the pinnacle of the kind of inequality we see in our country and it’s unacceptable in a country as wealthy as Canada, that First Nations receive a lower level of funding ultimately because they are First Nations.”

She also points to Canada’s foreign policy as a place where young Canadians are being excluded from decision-making, but then forced to live with the consequences.

“It’s our generation that pays the ultimate price when soldiers die,” said Ashton. “If I’m elected leader, my message would be keep the troops home.”

Ashton uses a simple slogan to encapsulate her leadership bid: “new politics.”

“New politics is about engaging young people and engaging the issues that young people are raising,” she said. “Harper’s practicing old politics.”

Part-time students will now be treated like their full-time counterparts when it comes to student loans.

In December, the federal government announced that people with part-time student loans will no longer accrue interest until after their studies have been completed, bringing the program in line with the full-time loan program.

“Economic recovery continues to be our top priority,” said Diane Finley, minister of Human Resources and Skills Development, in a press release. “We’re helping Canadians gain the skills and education required to participate in today’s workforce and contribute to Canada’s overall economic prosperity.”

Active students with part-time loans will still have to pay any interest accumulated before January 1, 2012, but won’t accrue any further interest until they’ve either completed their studies or stopped attending a post-secondary institution.

A spokesperson for Human Resources and Skills Development Canada stated in an email to Canadian University Press that the change was prompted by a desire to achieve parity between the part-time and full-time student loan programs, as well as to help boost the economy.

“The Government of Canada recognizes the vital role that post-secondary graduates play on the road to this country’s economic recovery. That’s why the Government of Canada continues to focus on helping more students reach their education goals.”

The spokesperson went on to write that this change is in line with previous changes to student loans made by the government earlier this year, including increasing earnings exemptions for people with full-time student loans, allowing part-time students with higher family incomes to qualify for loans and forgiving portions of loans for new physicians and nurses who choose to work in rural or remote communities.

The NDP’s critic for post-secondary education, Rathika Sitsabaiesan, isn’t impressed by the announcement.

“There aren’t a lot of actual part-time students, so it’s not actually affecting a lot of students,” said the Scarborough—Rouge River MP.

She went on to say that instead of broadening access to student loans, the government needs to shift towards easing the debt burden on students.

“Instead of burdening students and their families, which are usually working families using all of their life savings towards educating their children, [the government should] provide grants rather than loans,” she said.

Sitsabaiesan pointed to the fact that total Canadian student debt is close to surpassing the $15 billion ceiling set by the Canadian Student Financial Assistance Act.

“In the act, it was set that $15 billion was the ceiling that could ever be reached for amount of [student] debt that…could be outstanding at any given time.”

A government commissioned actuarial report on the Canada Student Loans Program released in July 2010 stated the $15 billion ceiling will likely be breached in early 2013.

If that occurs, the government will have to find ways to reduce student debt, or amend the legislation in order to increase the ceiling. Back in 2000, the Liberal government pushed up the ceiling from $5 billion to $10 billion.

Sitsabaiesan said that the best way for the federal government to ease the debt burden on students would be to create a dedicated post-secondary transfer fund similar to the Canada Health Transfer. Presently, funding for post-secondary education is included in the broader Canada Social Transfer.

Because provincial governments have discretion over how the money from the Canada Social Transfer is spent, the amount that goes to post-secondary education can vary from year to year.

“There’s no stability. So [post-secondary institutions] are turning to create their own sense of stability by continuing to increase tuition fees by the max amount each year,” she said.

Back in June, Sitsabaiesan presented a private member’s bill proposing the creation of a dedicated post-secondary transfer, but it has not passed first reading.

Without structural changes at the federal level for how post-secondary education is financed, Sitsabaiesan believes student debt will continue to grow unabated.

“Having more loans available is not really going to make education more accessible,” she said.

Everyone likes a good ranking list. Baseball fanatics spend hours debating whether Roger Clemens’ fastball had more fire than Nolan Ryan’s. Music aficionados similarly pick and preen over the 19th best Lou Reed track.

In more serious arenas, economists and policymakers compare the GDP, GNP or HDI of developing countries, watching with great interest as they rise and fall relative to one another. In this way, the world of academia is no different.

But university rankings are a relatively new phenomenon. Although the Maclean’s University Rankings have been around since 1990, it was only in the early 2000s that rankings went worldwide and mainstream. Since then, they’ve become an omnipresent (and some might say omnipotent) reality of post-secondary education.

Students vex over them when deciding which university to attend and politicians point to them as either a source of pride or a reason to prod a university to improve. Most dangerously, universities have begun to adjust their behaviour to receive better scores.

Conventional wisdom is that these rankings emphasize excellence in research above other aspects such as teaching or benefiting the local community and a new report by the European University Association confirms that the conventional wisdom is as much for a reason.

“Global university rankings reflect university research performance far more accurately than teaching,” the report declared.

Not only is research most heavily measured, but certain types of research, especially medicine and natural sciences, are held head-and-shoulders above the rest.

Fields where most findings are published in peer-review journals, as opposed to books, get much more weight in these rankings. That means that disciplines in the humanities, social sciences and some applied sciences, get short shrift—which should come as no surprise to Arts student at UBC.

The fact that the rankings are flawed is no big news, but a problem arises when both the public and universities start viewing them as definitive reflections on institution-wide performance.

These rankings create incentives for universities to improve very specific metrics instead of actually improving quality and, in some cases, it also pushes them to actually manipulate statistics and lie.

Don’t think this happens?

Well, in 2004 the National Post obtained internal memos from UBC administrators that showed they “pressured faculty members to manipulate enrollment and in some cases capped class sizes” in order to improve UBC’s rankings in Maclean’s annual supplement.

Fans of The Wire will know this better as ‘juking the stats.’

Rankings are insidious in other ways as well. Employers start to look at them to see how well-educated a student is (which it doesn’t measure). A humanities student from SFU who may have a better education than a UBC student may be less likely to get a job because, essentially, UBC has a higher ranking due to its medical research program. That seems rightfully perverse.

In the wake of a social media outpouring of emotion towards rioters and looters, a UBC student stepped forward and confessed.

“I am not proud of my actions and have made a visit to the Vancouver Police Department over the weekend to turn myself in,” wrote Camille Cacnio in a blog post published on Sunday.

The biology student was caught on video, walking out of Black and Lee Tuxedos with two pairs of size 42 men’s dress pants. She was identified through photos on social media which were displayed on numerous sites set up to shame those who participated in last week’s riots.

Although other UBC students have also been accused online of participating in the riots, as of Monday, Cacnio is the only student who has come forward.

“On any regular day I would not condone looting. However, at the time of the riot everything just seemed so right,” she tried to explain.

Included in her post were apologies to both the UBC Faculty of Science and the UBC Rowing team, which she was a part of until last semester.

However, she argued that her only crime was theft, a minor crime compared to the arson and vandalism that also took place during the riots. In her 3500 word post, which alternated between apologetic and accusatory, Cacnio pointed a finger at her attackers in social media, saying they were part of a ‘mob mentality’ themselves.

“To me this sounds like people are trying to retaliate by yet another form of mobbing. The thing about this form of mob mentality that astounds me is that, this time, they’re doing it sober.”

She also bemoaned the racist and sexist nature of many of the comments that had appeared online, asking people to have sympathy on other young people who became targets on the internet.

Cacnio said she was fired from her part-time job as a receptionist at Burrard Acura, which received numerous complaints regarding her actions.

The university, however, will not be taking any disciplinary action towards Cacnio or any other UBC students who were found to be involved in the post-game chaos.

“We let the police and the courts determine discipline in events like this,” said Scott Macrae, the director of UBC Public Affairs.

“University discipline really refers to the university community, its members and its property, not to something that is outside of that.”

A man who drowned Sunday at Kawkawa Lake near Hope, BC, has been identified as 24 year old UBC student Felix Riaga Odera.

Odera was visiting the lake while on a trip with the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship—an AMS club.

According to the RCMP, Odera was staying at a bible camp on the lake. He jumped in the water on Sunday afternoon from a floating dock that was approximately 70 feet way from the shoreline. Four or five other students were on the dock at the time, and when Odera did not resurface, they called the RCMP.

“The early stages of the investigation point to the young man being unable to swim,” Cst. Tracy Wolbeck told the Hope Golden Star. “It’s a really sad accident and very upsetting for the people who witnessed it.”

The initial search for his body was unsuccessful, but was finally recovered on Monday morning by the RCMP Underwater Recovery Team.

Odera, a Kenyan from Nairobi, began studying at UBC in 2007 and majored in political science. According to his personal blog, which he started a month before his death, he was interested in social justice, entrepreneurship and spiritual understanding. He had a full scholarship to attend UBC and was the VP Finance for the Africa Awareness Initiative.

His final blog post written on April 30 described the month-long missionary trip called the Vancouver Urban Partnership that was to start shortly after. It involved a week of intensive bible study in Sundre, Alberta, followed by three weeks of scripture studies, lectures and internships in the Downtown Eastside.

His body has been sent to Royal Columbian Hospital for an autopsy. The coroner determined that neither foul play nor alcohol were factors in Odera’s death.

A page on Facebook has been set up to memorialize Odera.