Confronting Paternogate and an institution of complicity

This isn't the first article in which I've confronted the rape culture that permeates collegiate and professional athletics, and sadly, I don't expect it to be my last. With the last rumblings of Paternogate dying down in the media and the riots effectively over in State College, it's time to step back and take a look at this thing.

Attawapiskat and the First Nations infrastructure crisis

Friday night, while perusing my Facebook feed, I clicked on a link a friend posted to an article on the Huffington Post's Canadian news website. There, under the "Politics" web banner and a stylized red maple leaf was the title in stark serif print. It read: "What if They Declared an Emergency and No One Came?" Scrolling down, I saw a black and white image of a friendly-faced man whom the caption identified as Charlie Angus, MP for Timmins-James Bay.

My personal brush with sexual harassment

This past Wednesday morning, still groggy from the forcible readjustment of my sleep schedule (alarm clocks are your friend), I was running to catch the 94 Wellesley bus when a complete stranger decided to humiliate me in public. Picture this, will you? This goon, sausage-like in build, had the leering, ruddy face of an alcoholic or a heavy drinker.

Throughout my time as a news editor at Vic, I've often felt that the Vic administration doesn't look out for our interests in matters of student life. This is why I was particularly surprised to see that the Review of Victoria College was given such positive feedback on the progress that has supposedly been made in this area of our college's functioning.

Last week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper met with aboriginal leaders in Ottawa. It was his first such meeting since becoming prime minister in 2006. The prime minister and the chiefs were able to agree on some policy changes, including increasing financial accountability for First Nations bands, and accelerating the pace of land claims and treaty negotiations.

Hate speech laws are nothing new. For a little more than a generation, Western European countries as well as Canada have enacted well-intentioned laws to combat hatred of minority groups by making it illegal to publicly advocate hatred against oppressed communities.

As I write this, I look out on a gray sky overhanging a green, muddy earth in the cold air on Christmas day. It appears to foster an appropriate sense of pathetic fallacy as tribute to two great writers whom we have lost in recent months. If it were not for the death of Vaclav Havel around the same time, the literary world would have been focusing most of its mourning on the passing of journalist and essayist Christopher Hitchens.

Has anything really changed?

We are constantly told that we live in a ‘postcolonial' world. We study postcolonial countries, we read Things Fall Apart and discuss postcolonial literature, and Stephen Harper tells us, "We have no history of colonialism." We say postcolonial so that we can imagine colonialism as being over, a part of history never to occur again.

I deleted my Facebook page over the holidays. Well, sort of. I deactivated it, meaning I could come back any time and reactivate it. I could sign in and everything would be back to normal, meaning I could sign in and my profile would be restored, my name made searchable, the photos I took during that Grade 11 school trip to Manhattan would be made visible, and my interests and exploits made perusable and scrutinizable again to potential sexual partners and employers.