Author: Abe Berglas

Abe Berglas

Our ATI Workshop in Brief

On Wednesday September 25, the University Affairs Secretary General and I held a ‘access to information request workshop’. To those who couldn’t make it to our workshop on Wednesday, don’t worry! The highlights are reported on here and immortalized for as long as this site (or the Internet archive) is up.

Those requesting access to documents from McGill invoke the Act respecting Access to documents held by public bodies and the Protection of personal information (capitalized according to LégisQuébec, which is not at all the same as my anglophone instincts). Important sections are sprinkled throughout, perhaps to make sure you read it all. But we’ll cheat and let you know which sections are most used.

Section 9 is the relevant section for accessing documents. It says, “Every person has a right of access, on request, to the documents held by a public body.” What is a public body? You can find a list of public bodies on the Commission d’accèss a l’information website.

Other sections you’ll become acquainted with are the many limitations. Section 9 itself includes a limitation that lets the University withhold draft documents. Recently, we’ve been requesting information pertaining to security and the encampment dismantlement, and sections 28, 29, and 37 were invoked. Many limitations give permission for a public body to withhold documents – Sections 28 and 29 require that the public body withholds documents. Section 28 says “a public body must refuse to release or to confirm the existence of information contained in a document that it keeps in the exercise of a duty provided for by law involving the prevention, detection or repression of crime or statutory offences”. Section 29 is similar, and relates to information disclosure that is “likely to be used to commit a crime or a statutory offence”. It then elaborates that the public body must withhold information that impairs any systems designed to protect persons or property.

Another section that McGill has used in a broad range of requests is that they can refuse to give a written opinion from a member “in the discharge of his duties” less than 10 years ago. Consider that this means we can now get more information about opinions presented during the 2012 student strikes.
Finally, McGill has used section 53 which concerns personal information. This doesn’t hold if you’re the person in question. It can be valuable to ask for records of yourself, especially if you suspect that administrators or professors are talking about you behind your back.

McGill has an antagonistic past with access to information requests. McGill University has actually brought students to the Commission d’access à l’information before. In 2012, a website called McGilliLeaked was created to publish ATI requests submitted by anyone to the university. It was based on McGillileaks the year prior, which was shut down because that website collected confidential leaks.

McGill asked permission of the Commission to refuse all future ATI requests from 14 students that they deemed connected to McGilliLeaked. McGill argued that the requests were abusive and were vengeful after the 2012 student movement. One reporter from the Link, a Concordia newspaper, said that he was named in the request but submitted only two ATI requests to McGill, and passed them on to McGilliLeaked given that they were public documents. A spokesperson from McGill said ATI requests jumped from 37 in 2011 to 170 in 2012. McGill lost this request. The Commission determined that McGill was asking to impose restrictions that changed the Act.

If you are unsatisfied with the documents, you have 30 days to appeal to the commission. This is where the process becomes quite drawn out. Once taking on the complaint, the Commission assigns a mediator. Mediation doesn’t delay the hearing date, and is free and voluntary. If the conflict isn’t resolved, then a decision is made via hearing. This becomes public except under exceptional circumstances, but it’s worth noting that ‘it’s weird for everyone to know my name over an ATI request’ is not typically considered an exceptional circumstance. A hearing never gives out damages to a person, so don’t expect any money, but it can impose fines onto the public body, both for refusing to give documents that they should, or giving documents that they shouldn’t. After the hearing, a decision is transmitted to both practices within 3 months of hearings. From my brief perusal of previous decisions (found on the fabulous website canlii.org) previous decisions have compelled McGill to hand over documents it was previously refusing to disclose.

No matter where you are in the ATI-process, the office of the UA is here to help! We’re willing to guide you through crafting a request, and we’re also collecting responses from McGill to post to our website (if you’re comfortable). Finally, we are especially interests in folks that pursue a request with the Commission. Send us an email anytime at ua@ssmu.ca.

Abe Berglas

The State of Deadnaming

Originally written at the end of summer. Some things may have changed.

Deadnaming at McGill is an issue floating around all trans people. We accidentally out ourselves while using the printer or logging into MyCourses, we have the wrong name read out on attendance sheets, and we are baffled by the randomness of our deadnames haunting various McGill platforms.

Many before us have tried to solve the problem, only to be discouraged by its scope, contradictions, and stagnant progress. McGill’s equity equity committee has claimed to be working on it almost every year since at least 2005, but their members have no idea what the status is. And most of McGill is entirely uninterested.

The deadnaming campaign is a small number of trans students who decided we would fix automated deadnaming. When we started talking about it in October, the task before us seemed impossible.

We started with a lot of cold emails and meeting requests. One of the first people we met was from Enrollment Services. She had been working on implementing preferred names as part of her job in EDI for three years. She welcomed our advice eliminating what she thought were those final edge cases. We had to break the news to her that the problems were still systemic. To fix some instances of deadnaming, students were being directed to email back-and-forth with her boss, a process she was unfamiliar with. I don’t think this is her fault.I imagine it’s the consequence of hiring token EDI employees but never giving them power, information, or the ability to connect with the community.

We started compiling a list of issues, and sent her an email every time a new one popped up. But we didn’t want to put all our hopes there. So we emailed SAA, the Wellness Hub, and departments where we saw problems.. And an email to the Wellness Hub made it to Fabrice Labeau, the Deputy-Provost of Student Life and Learning.

We congratulated ourselves on creating enough noise to reach upper admin, then prepared for a meeting of platitudes. But the meeting proved more productive than we expected. He promised us a committee to gather all McGill employees necessary to solve the problem. And so the Ad-Hoc Committee on Preferred Names – or as, we call it, the Deadnaming Committee – was made. It includes employees from HR, central IT, the Wellness Hub, and Enrollment Services, among others. I get a lot of pleasure listening to eight McGill employees, including the Deputy-Provost ( what an expensive meeting!) grapple with how best to deal with trans people.

In an early meeting, the Deputy-Provost suggested a problem-tracker, which he guessed would take his office a month to compile. We made one overnight and published it to the Queer McGill website. The Deputy-Provost got wind of our homemade problem-tracker and it was an agenda item for our next meeting. But if he was annoyed at us for overstepping, he couldn’t say so. And so he based his problem-tracker around ours.

Throughout the process we found unexpected enemies and unexpected allies. The Wellness Hub gestured at unspecified legal requirements for why they couldn’t issue doctor notes with a preferred name, and student residences were nothing short of a disaster. When I ran into an employee from Student Housing at a Meet McGill fair, and told him I heard from trans residents that they were getting deadnamed, he said, “no they’re not”. Although that attitude has shifted slightly with time, we didn’t trust that housing employees knew or cared about how their systems failed. So we went around to the front desks of all the residences. We got inconsistent and confused answers. One person refused to tell us whether they were ever shown multiple names for students.

The next natural step, if SHHS employees wouldn’t talk to us, was to put up our posters in residences. They read: “Are you being deadnamed by McGill? We want to hear from you”. When we went to get them approved by SHHS, their employee told us the posters were “political” and required a special process. I emailed the posters to her boss, who asked us to change the wording so that it didn’t mention McGill. We refused. We were sent to the Dean of Students Office, where we met with the Assistant Dean, Cindy Mancuso. She agreed that our posters were political, and reprimanded us for using a rude tone and being too demanding. Finally, we met with Daniel Fournier, Associate Director of Residence Life. He told us that there were guidelines for posters put up in residences. We asked to see it. He said no. After going back and forth for 15 minutes, he kicked us out of his office. We did get a small revenge though. A legal access to information request got us the internal guidelines shortly afterwards. Email us and we’ll send it to you!

Sometimes I worry I have a certain kind of entitlement. Trans people are often so stoic about deadnaming. They shrug it off dozens of times a day. They shield their laptop screens with paper. They avoid some systems altogether. And even the memories of discrimination only surface with some prodding. Sometimes it feels like the campaign asks too much.

But I also want to push back against this guilt which seems like residual shame from the Daniel Fourniers and Cindy Mancusos of the world. It’s important to the campaign that its members are righteously angry. It fuels us. I stand by my belief that Daniel Fournier and Cindy Mancuso are transphobic, no matter how many times they tell us ‘we have no problem with the content of your poster’ ’ before calling our existence “political” and belittling us for wanting to put it up.

The entitlement that got us insulted by McGill staff, but the entitlement is also why we win. We refuse to accept a transphobic answer as anything short of transphobic. And although we’ve had dozens of interactions that try to cast doubt on this, we know it is true.

Silhouette of the Arts Building.
Abe Berglas

The Official Record of Senate

The philosophy of Robert’s Rules of Order, Newly Revised (RONR) is that “the minutes should contain mainly a record of what was done at the meeting, not what was said by the members. The minutes must never reflect the secretary’s opinion, favorable or otherwise, on anything said or done”.

I would argue that there are only two records of meetings that won’t reflect the secretary’s opinion: minutes as described in RONR, or a transcript. It is impossible to summarize – essentially, to make a series of interpretations of speech and decisions about what can be discarded – without imposing some subjectivity onto the text.

RONR-style minutes are safe because they avoid, for the most part, this injection of the personal into official records. But they’re also not particularly well-suited for the structure of Senate, much of which is presentations. And much of Senate is symbolic.  Some people speak so that their point makes it into the written history of Senate, to presumably be perused by future Senators, decision-makers, or, if we’re feeling especially self-important, historians. McGill offers few interfaculty channels to bring attention to issues facing the University. It’s natural to want interventions reflected in public-facing summaries of what happened.

At the first Senate Steering meeting I attended, I took issue with how one intervention was summarised because I thought it failed to mention the crux of the Senator’s argument. I was told that minutes aren’t meant to be a word-for-word transcript.

Since Senate minutes are an awkward in-between of RONR minutes and transcripts, they aren’t governed by any rules. The secretariat could vary their level of detail at will throughout the meeting, and there is no recourse.

I propose that archived recordings of Senate should be its new official record. Live-video recording of Senate began in March 2014. An Ad Hoc Committee on the Recording and Transmission of Senate Meetings was created in 2012 following a question from a Senator. The Committee found that recording was important, especially given the limited number of seats available in the room. The Committee mentioned that viewers should be able to see the livestream only during the meeting, but also made reference to an archiving process. They also recommended that the minutes stay the “official record of Senate”.

A survey that received 220 responses was also conducted in between 2012 and 2014. The report says “an overwhelming majority of the respondents favoured the continuation of livestreaming of Senate meetings, and also indicated that archiving of the live transmissions would enable more viewers.” So it was against the “overwhelming majority” of 220 respondents that recordings weren’t archived.

Revised terms of reference for Senate were passed in 2020. Someone asked why recordings weren’t archived and the 2014 report was invoked. I presume no one bothered to read the 2014 report. Now, ten years have passed. It seems like a relevant issue.

Abe Berglas

A Disquieting Trend for Student Input at McGill

The SSMU VP University Affairs  supplies McGill committees with student members. I take this as a serious responsibility. Students have a stake in where our tuition goes, our education, and the services offered to us. Often we can offer personal experience and we can advocate for improvements without having alternative interests. Student participation is even vested in the McGill Charter of Student Rights and Responsibilities. It says “all University bodies constituted to make decisions of policy in matters pertaining directly to students must provide for student membership”.

From the Senate website, committee allocation doesn’t seem like too much work. There are 14 committees that have student representation, with a total of 33 seats for students to fill. But many more bodies at McGill solicit students for their committees. When I began recruiting committee members at the start of my term, I referred to a list compiled in 2022. This list had 46 committees. Many of these groups have no public digital footprint. It makes it hard for non-members to bring questions and concerns to the committee. On my end, it’s hard to solicit future members to a committee they’ve never heard of before. Committees with this issue are largely advisory boards:  the Wellness Hub Advisory Board, International Student Services Advisory Board, Scholarship and Student Aid Office (SSAO) Advisory Board, and Office of Religious and Spiritual Life (MORSL) Multi-Faith Network. Because of the Charter, these offices maintain a mechanism for student membership, but they aren’t promoting it.

Then there are the committees that were abolished. When I reached out to the secretary or chair of all 46  committees,  I learned that the Skills 21 Steering Committee, Skills 21 Program Committee, Universal Access Capital Projects Working Group, Course Evaluation Advisory Group, and Sustainable Labs Working Group are not  meeting this fall. It is impossible to contact the EDIC Subcommittee on Persons with Disabilities, the Subcommittee on Family Care, and the Subcommittee on Racialized and Ethnic Persons since their websites are either outdated or don’t exist. The University Teaching Labs Working Group has been absorbed by the Teaching and Learning Spaces Working Group, halving the number of SSMU representatives in the process. The Student Achievement and Accessibility Advisory Board is currently re-evaluating its existence.

For a committee to dissolve isn’t inherently a bad thing, but it’s certainly a trend worth taking note of, especially when it’s not replaced with other ways to garner student input.  It’s disheartening to win a seat at a table only to have the table replaced by employees that are impossible to contact. One day I hope we can achieve a culture of pride in university committees that involve students. I hope that they publish reports for the community to read, that they consult with my office when making governance changes, and that decision-making power rests in part with students even as situations evolve.

Those wishing to talk more about McGill committees – especially those interested in sitting on some – should email ua@ssmu.ca.