Chloe Wilde, BSc’11, won a reality show competition to become MuchMusic’s newest on-air personality

Chloe Wilde, BSc’11, recently triumphed in what was, arguably, the most public job application process in the country. And the job itself – becoming a MuchMusic VJ – certainly wasn’t one that the McGill nursing student envisioned for herself. “Never in a million years,” she declares.

Wilde became MuchMusic’s newest on-air personality after winning its VJ Search. The contest began when 500 contestants submitted themselves for voting on a MuchMusic webpage. The top 20 entrants then advanced to the final stage of competition, which played out on—what else?—a reality show.

Wilde found herself touring the country with her rivals, competing in challenges, weathering eliminations and having every trial and tribulation documented for viewers across Canada.

“I had to remind myself I was there to win,” says Wilde, a self-described “mama bear” who was attracted to nursing because of its emphasis on patient care. “The most difficult part [of the competition] was putting myself first.”

The VJ hopefuls had to demonstrate their pop-culture savvy, on-screen charm and quick thinking through such un-straightforward challenges as creating a 30-second viral video, introducing a music video while tubing down a mountain and—Wilde’s least favourite—performing improv live and in character (in her case, as Kim Kardashian).

Most people would buckle under that kind of pressure (and many contestants did), but Wilde had a few things going for her. For one thing, her naturally sunny personality translates well to TV. For another, she wasn’t a complete neophyte. Wilde already had some experience in front of the cameras as a host on AskMen.com’s video channel.

Wilde thinks the psychology degree she earned at McGill came in handy too.

“For sure, I think my experience at McGill has helped me,” she says. “We learned so much about human interaction and why people act the way they do. We [the VJ Search contestants] were essentially 20 Canadians with very Type A personalities. So that can really lead to a lot of drama and tension.”

For Wilde, who says she had always approached life with a kind of “tunnel vision,” the contest—and her subsequent win—forced a change of tack. “VJ Search taught me that it’s okay to relinquish control and go with the flow. Take it day by day.” Her new motto, she says, is “the show must go on.”

In that spirit, the Quebec-born, Saint-Lazare-raised VJ is packing up her things, saying goodbye to Montreal and moving to Toronto. She’ll soon begin her full-time duties at MuchMusic, taking on guest-hosting duties on a variety of shows.

Though she’s put nursing on hold for now, she’d like to revisit what she calls the “beautiful profession” one day, and, ultimately, hopes to host a show that combines her lifelong passion for science with her natural aptitude for entertainment.

“If I could be the female version of Bill Nye [the Science Guy], I think I would be the happiest girl on the planet.”

TV host and photographer Heidi Hollinger

Four years ago, a TV producer appeared at Heidi Hollinger’s photography studio in Montreal with an intriguing offer. How about hosting a TV series about port cities, produced in two languages? And so Ports d’attache for TV5 and Waterfront Cities of the World for Discovery World prepared for takeoff. “I couldn’t say no, it was an incredible opportunity,” says Hollinger, BA’90.

Each year, she and her crew travel to 13 cities, spending a week in each. They shoot English and French episodes at the same time.

So far, the shows have provided Hollinger with the opportunity to experience, among other things, Melbourne’s footy craze, Copenhagen cycle tracks teeming with bike riders, Helsinki’s ubiquitous and rejuvenating saunas and the orderly chaos of crossing Tokyo’s Shibuya intersection with thousands of other pedestrians.

But Reykjavik holds a special place in Hollinger’s heart, with its otherworldly landscape of green moss and lava fields. “It’s like walking on the moon.”

Hollinger has travelled from a young age, flying solo to Florida since she was six to visit her grandmother, and spending summers on a family farm in Finland (her mother’s native country).

The former McGill Daily photo editor once lived in Moscow for 10 years. Her daring shots of politicos juggling apples, sporting roller blades, and, in the case of controversial nationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, stripped down to his skivvies, catapulted her photography career. Since returning to Montreal, she has photographed Gilles Duceppe, Pauline Marois and Jean Charest (the Quebec politicians tend to be much more conservatively attired). Hollinger makes a point of photographing people during her Ports d’Attache interviews and the images are incorporated into a montage at each episode’s conclusion.

After four seasons and 39 cities, Hollinger says she is ready to deplane and spend more time with her family. Her next project involves opening eyes to Cuban cuisine. “I would seriously consider living in Havana,” she says, “but my true port of call will always be Montreal.”

Jack Gelineau tending net for the Boston Bruins in 1950

It was the autumn of 1951 when I entered the Faculty of Engineering. An item on the notice board motivated me to show up for a tryout with the Redmen at the old Montreal Forum at St. Catherine and Atwater, hockey’s shrine. I found myself amongst players who were handling the puck with ease, especially a Redmen alum and goaltender whose name was Jack Gelineau. No wonder I couldn’t put anything by him. After all, he had been awarded the Calder Trophy as the NHL’s Rookie of the Year the year before.

The coach of the Redmen was Rocky Robillard and Gelineau, BCom’49, was on the ice solely for old time’s sake having backstopped the Redmen to a championship in 1946. But I knew nothing of this. And I knew nothing of Gelineau the man who, as an air gunner with the RCAF and not yet 20, survived a plane crash and rescued  an injured crewman from the burning plane. He was awarded the British Empire Medal for gallantry.

Despite his early NHL success, he left professional hockey after only a few seasons, evidently in search of fulfillment elsewhere.

Forty-four years later, I was visiting my mother at the Manoir Westmount, founded in 1979 by its Rotary Club. She entered this residence for seniors in late 1993. I stopped by on a monthly basis, becoming a dining room regular. I routinely chatted with the Manoir’s affable manager, who I simply knew as Mr. Gelineau. This went on, month after month, until one day in the spring of ’95, I noticed a memorandum circulating,  advising that “Mr. Jack Gelineau” was about to retire. How very familiar his name looked when spelled out in front of me. Naturally, I wondered if he could possibly be the goalie I faced when I was a teenager and blurted out to Manoir’s head nurse, “Is it really him?” “Yes”, she said. “I didn’t know!” Well I hadn’t, not for a moment.

Jack Gelineau with J. Peter Roberts's mother

Mr. Gelineau was installed as the Manoir’s manager in 1982. Modesty was his long suit and helping others his forte. He had found a vocation suiting his temperament. This illustrious McGill athlete of the forties naturally sought to put those around him at ease, especially seniors like my mum. The photo depicts him gifting her a birthday rose. It is hard to believe this quiet spoken man challenged the likes of Maurice Richard and a young Gordie Howe!

J. Peter Roberts played for the McGill Redmen in 1951-52. Jack Gelineau was inducted into the McGill Sports Hall of Fame in 1997. He led the Redmen to a national championship in 1946 and was the first recipient of the Forbes Trophy as McGill’s male athlete of the year in 1948. Gelineau  played 143 regular season games in the NHL, mostly for the Boston Bruins. He made his NHL debut before graduating from McGill and won the Calder Trophy as the NHL’s top rookie in 1950. He died in 1998.

Members of the Campus Swaps team (l to r): Christian D'Andrea, Shira Abramowitz and Danny Witters

When Shira Abramowitz, BCom’12, was graduating from McGill, she was struck by the realization that she would have many things – everything from almost-new binders and functioning calculators to toaster ovens and printers – that she didn’t know what to do with. It’s a dilemma that many graduating students face: after three or four years of apartment shuffles, they’ve accumulated a lot of stuff they no longer need.

The result: the streets of the McGill Ghetto are piled high each spring with garbage bags, couches and old TVs. And, eventually, it all ends up in landfills.

Abramowitz decided to create a more sustainable system, so that graduating students wouldn’t throw away perfectly good items, and new incoming students could purchase these things at extremely low prices. She called it “Campus Swaps” and recruited Christian D’Andrea, BSc’12, to help launch the idea.

During their first year, they worked 14 to16 hour days, driving around a SUV with a trailer attached, collecting non-furniture items that graduating students no longer wanted. They ended up with more than 4,000 pounds of stuff. In their second year, that grew to 7,000 pounds.

“People were pretty surprised that [something like this] didn’t exist already and loved the idea of their things going somewhere other than in the trash,” says D’Andrea. “We actually had professors call us too, to pick up old things from their office.”

In September, they hosted a big sale for new McGill students. The first year, about 300 people showed up. The second: more than 500.

The items range from household goods, to school supplies and even brand name clothing. “True Religion jeans are worth, I’ve been told, a couple hundred dollars and we might only sell them for 10 dollars,” D’Andrea says.

The Campus Swaps founders are happy with what they’ve achieved so far, but their ambitions extend further still. The goal is to transform their small one-campus operation into a sustainable international initiative.

To help foster that ambition, Abramowitz recently sailed across the world with Unreasonable at Sea, a 100-day trip across 13 countries, where 11 entrepreneurs dealing with social and environmental challenges, were selected to learn from mentors in the field.

At every stop on the world-tour, they had the opportunity to pitch their ideas to world leaders.

“In each port we hosted a mix of pitch events, receptions and design-thinking workshops led by [people like] George Kembel from Stanford’s design school, Tom Chi, the guy behind Google glasses and the self-operating car, and Daniel Epstein, founder of the Unreasonable Institute,” says Abramowitz.

The plan now is to expand Campus Swaps to university and college campuses across North America. It’s already in place at San Jose State University in California, where Abramowitz is originally from.

“University is such a temporary existence and lifestyle, and these goods tend to be purchased with that in mind,” says D’Andrea. “But there needs to be a way to keep those goods cycling through that same system.”

Author Sally Armstrong at the Nyanzale refugee camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Photo: Avril Benoit)

When I bring up a recent description of Sally Armstrong’s career — “war correspondent for the world’s women” — she laughs. “I want that on my tombstone.” Gallows humour is to be expected from a journalist who has spent 20 years writing about the atrocities women have suffered in danger zones across the world. But this is about as dark as Armstrong gets during a recent chat in Montreal.

Her new book, The Ascent of Women, is optimistic about the future of women around the world, and argues that the fight for their status in the developed and developing world has reached a tipping point. “The earth is shifting,” she writes, “a new age is dawning. From Kabul and Cairo to Cape Town and New York, women are claiming their space at home, at work and in the public square. They are propelling changes so immense they’re likely to affect intractable issues such as poverty, interstate conflict, culture and religion, and the power brokers are finally listening.”

When I ask her about these changes, Armstrong, BEd’66, DLitt’02, is quick to offer examples of recent activism in places like Afghanistan and India. “In Kenya, 160 little girls between the ages of three and seventeen are suing the Kenyan government for failing to protect them from being raped. That would never have happened before, because people would have said, oh it’s girls, it doesn’t matter. And we would have dismissed it on this side of the water as ‘that’s the way they treat their girls.’” Armstrong dedicated the book to Malaha Yousafzai, the 15-year-old education rights activist who the Taliban attempted to assassinate last year. “She is the epitome of what this book is about. She went to school despite what the Taliban said and the whole world is listening instead of ignoring her.”

But this shift in the world’s attention has been a long time coming. In 1992, Armstrong was in Sarajevo, covering the effect of the Baltic War on children, and putting her McGill degree in phys-ed to good use. “I loved being a gym teacher. It’s the kind of job that’s like putting tools in your kit bag. You use them all the rest of your life. I’m in zones of conflict all the time, and there is invariably a bunch of terrified children hiding during some bombing. And I know 300 games.”

A day before she was set to leave, she started hearing the rumours of rape camps. At the time, Armstrong was still editor-in-chief of Homemakers. But this was breaking news, not the sort of stuff  a magazine, with its usual months-long lead time, published. “I brought that story back and gave it to a major news agency. I said, give it to one of your reporters. They didn’t do it.  Seven weeks later I phoned the editor I’d given it to.” He’d been too busy he told her. “Twenty thousand women were gang raped. Some of them eight years old, some of them 80. What? ‘Oh, Sally’, he said, ‘don’t be so hard on me.’ So I decided then that if nobody else is going to tell these stories, I was.”

This was how the brutal story of Eva Penavic, a camp survivor, came to be published alongside the seasonal recipes the digest style magazine was better known for.

It won a National Magazine award, and successive stories like this one helped make Homemakers one of the most widely circulated and commercially successful magazines in Canada.

Still, “I had to fight like a cat to have those stories published,”she recalls. “The 11 years I was at was at Homemakers, I fought for every one of those stories. My publisher would say to me, no advertiser wants to be on the same page as a story of a woman who’s been raped in the Balkans. And I used to say, an advertiser wants to be on the same page that’s the best read page in the magazine. I still believe women want more meat on the bones of their stories. But that’s a very hard dragon to fight. When I left Homemakers, they hired a new editor and asked her to turn it into a health and wellness magazine. They lost 350,000 readers in the first five months.” Armstrong’s daring reporting had given Homemakers an edge that differentiated it from similar magazines aimed at women. Once that was gone, the magazine lost much of its personality. Homemakers ceased publication in 2011. “They didn’t get it then and they don’t get it today.”

Fortunately, there are an increasing number of influential people who do. From the economist Jeffrey Sachs, who has spearheaded the UN’s Millennium Development Project, to Isabel Coleman, a fellow for the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, who writes: “countries that oppress their women are doomed to be failed states.” These, Armstrong argues, are important, influential voices joining the rising number of women across the world who are now standing up to repressive states and religions despite the often horrific consequences.

“These are very scarring stories. They play on the back of my eyelids and I had not had good news to tell. I was in Afghanistan during the Taliban. It was barbaric, those thugs reigned with terror and the world was looking away. But the women were incredible.” She pauses to savour what seems a sudden profound sense of the passage of time. “I’m so proud of them.”

Illustration by Ethan Rilly

Translating the work of a gifted writer from one language to another is a tricky business. No less an authority than Umberto Eco once summed it up by saying that “translation is the art of a failure.” In a country like Canada, with its much-touted two solitudes, one could argue that failure is not an option. The stakes are too high. We need to understand one another and making sure that the works of some of our greatest authors are available in both official languages is as good a place to start as any.

Thankfully, Canada is home to a talented corps of gifted literary translators. Many of the country’s most celebrated translators are McGill graduates. Their ranks include Jane Brierley, MA’82 (a two-time Governor General’s Literary Award winner for her translations), Dominique Fortier, PhD’03 (an award-winning author and a GG finalist in translation in 2012), Linda Gaboriau, BA’72 (a two-time GG winner) and Alain Roy, BA’88, MA’90, PhD’96 (the 2012 GG winner for French translation for his work on Mark Kingwell’s Glenn Gould).

McGill graduates have translated some of the country’s foremost authors, bridging cultures and opening up literary horizons for avid readers across the country. But translation is a solitary, behind-the-scenes pursuit, one that we rarely get a glimpse of. We approached some of the country’s leading literary translators to get their perspective on the work that they do.

Patricia Claxton BA’51: The invisible woman

Patricia Claxton

A doyenne of the Canadian literary translation scene, Patricia Claxton has such an impressive track record that it’s hard to know where to begin. The self-taught translator started out using translation as a means to learn French. “I found an article in Cité Libre that I thought was extremely well written, and it expressed views that agreed with mine. So I translated it and took it to someone who was very bilingual, and he said I was pretty good. But he also said ‘If you’re going to translate this fellow’s writing, you’re going to have to write what he said and not what you think he should have said.’”

The fellow Claxton had been taking linguistic liberties with was Pierre Trudeau. “That was the best lesson I ever had. Never extrapolate. If you want to write something that expresses your own opinions, then write your own stuff. Don’t translate somebody else’s. The translator’s job is to be invisible.”

That lesson was learned in the early sixties, and Claxton has been invisible ever since. Although not in her own mind. In describing the practice of literary translation, she squares her shoulders and says, “I’m performing it. Most people think you’ve got the words and you just put them in English. But I think of myself as an actor on stage. The French use the word ‘interpretation’ in the sense of acting on stage and interpreting a role, so I think of myself as interpreting a role in English.”

Claxton’s career as a literary translator has been long and illustrious. She has translated such Quebec icons as Nicole Brossard and Jacques Godbout. And she has won two Governor General’s Awards, both for work related to Gabrielle Roy, the most recent one in 1999 for her translation Gabrielle Roy: A Life.

Indeed, her career has been punctuated by encounters with Roy, having translated a selection of the celebrated French Canadian author’s autobiography, letters in Letters to Bernadette and children’s literature with The Tortoiseshell and the Pekinese (“That’s pie,” she says of translating children’s literature). She is also well-known for translating Gil Courtemanche’s A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali, a love story set against the backdrop of genocide. “Recreating something that powerful is a challenge,” she says. “But I’m not afraid of horror. Anything that’s a challenge can be fun as far as I’m concerned.” 

Rachel Martinez BA’82, GradDipTranslation’07: The wistful ambassador

Rachel Martinez’s literary translation career started with a bang, in the form of a Governor General’s Literary Award. While trying to find her niche as a freelancer, she wrote to Éditions du Boréal offering her services. They declined, citing her lack of experience. A contract for an art catalogue for Les Presses de l’Université Laval helped her get her sea legs, and soon Boréal was knocking on her door asking whether she could translate Kevin Bazzana’s Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould. They didn’t need to knock twice.

“I was so happy,” she says. “I worked so hard on it. I had experience in translation, but this was my first literary work. I got completely immersed in it. I used to work a lot at night when my kids were asleep, and I would listen to his music. I watched TV shows about him, listened to recordings and looked at pictures. It was a wonderful experience. It’s not always like that, but this particular time it was.”

Rachel Martinez (Photo: Eve Leclerc)

Whenever the project lends itself to this sort of immersion, it’s how Martinez prefers to work. For a recent translation of Susin Nielsen’s Word Nerd, the story of a young boy with a penchant for Scrabble, Martinez hauled out the board. “I read about Scrabble; I played Scrabble. I had to translate word play, so I worked with the Scrabble board at my side. It’s so much fun when you can get into a subject that way.”

Martinez also translated Douglas Coupland’s Player One: What Is to Become of Us for Quebec’s Les Éditions Hurtubise, which was later published in France, a rarer occurrence than one would think. French publishers prefer to have books translated by French translators, sometimes with questionable results for Canadian works of literature ― translating winter can be tough if you haven’t experienced it firsthand. So Martinez was particularly proud of this coup. And she is equally proud of her versatility. “I don’t want to be confined to a single genre. I love doing biographies. I love doing children’s literature. I love doing novels,” she says.

Martinez sees her role on Canada’s literary landscape as bridging two cultures, a sort of ambassador, albeit a wistful one. “I find it sad that if you go to French university and you’re not studying literature, or maybe even if you are, there’s a good chance that won’t find out about English Canadian literature. You can do your master’s in literature and not know about Margaret Atwood or Alice Munro. And I imagine the same is true for English universities. So we’re hoping to make French readers aware of what’s happening on the other side of Ottawa River. That’s the mission. We’re trying to get the two solitudes communicating.”

Nigel Spencer, BA’66: The word player

Nigel Spencer receives the 2012 Governor General's Literary Award for French to English translation from Governor General David Johnston at Rideau Hall (Photo: Fred Chartrand/Canadian Press)

Nigel Spencer may have been born to translate. “I used to translate in my head for fun,” he says. “I like word games. When I get tired, I pun. It’s excruciating.” But it was a first contact with author and playwright Marie-Claire Blais, with whom he is now closely associated professionally, that got the ball rolling. He sent her an excerpt of one of her plays he had translated. She liked his work and started putting his talents to use.

Spencer has translated four of Blais’s novels, winning a Governor General’s Literary Award for three of them – including the 2012 prize for his efforts on Mai at the Predators’ Ball. Not bad as batting averages go. And it’s a pretty good indication that Blais and Spencer are simpatico. “She’s fearless, she’s direct; she reaches out in several different directions without ever quite losing her grip. It pulls you in. It’s like a whirlpool. And I love it. It’s a challenge and I love that too.”

For Spencer, literary translation is best described as “creative interpretation,” a term he borrows from Edith Grossman, the American translator of the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and others. Spencer’s background in drama has given him the tools to interpret creatively. “I think that’s the best description I’ve ever heard,” he says. “Maybe it appeals to the actor in me, that whole multidimensional approach. When I’m working, I talk to myself, I walk back and forth and I try things out.”

Spencer is aware of his role as a conduit for cultures coming closer together. “When you translate, you sort of bring the audience along with you, so you’re kind of a mediator. You take account of the audience’s context, along with the author’s, and you have to make them interpenetrable. You have to discretely editorialize occasionally, to choose a word in a sort of didactic way to allow people to see the background, which is not their background. So I think the word “ambassador” in its best sense applies in that you’re introducing context, cultures, languages and mindsets and allowing them to interpenetrate.”

Spencer has also translated several books and songs for the former Poet Laureate Pauline Michel, translated articles for Time magazine and created film subtitles for Bravo!, all of which has helped him stretch and develop his ability to express himself, making his prose “flesh-and-blood language,” to use his words. The way he sees it, experience and confidence are liberating, because you can start to play around with things. “First, it’s setting yourself free, and then you get back to how the author got from point A to point Z. And you ask, ‘how am I going to get there’? Well, I’ll do it my way.”

Rhonda Mullins is a Montreal writer and translator. She was a finalist for the 2007 Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation for The Decline of the Hollywood Empire by Hervé Fischer. She studied translation at McGill’s School of Continuing Studies.

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Power & Politics host Evan Solomon (Photo: CBC)

“This is Power & Politics, and you are where you need to be,” intones Evan Solomon, BA’90, MA’92, each weekday as he welcomes TV viewers to CBC News Network’s two-hour political talkfest from the nation’s capital. As it happens, this is also where Solomon needs to be – at least for now.

The McGill alumnus, now a youthful-looking 45, has always flourished as a marketer of ideas, whether he was founding a magazine on Internet culture, writing a best-selling novel, co-editing non-fiction anthologies or hosting high-brow cultural programs. Yet he seems right at home with the argie-bargie of Canadian politics. “I don’t dismiss it all as silly talking points,” he says cheerfully.

Since debuting Power & Politics in 2009, Solomon has become the CBC’s go-to broadcaster for political discourse. As if preparing for his daily TV role weren’t workload enough, he has also anchored The House, CBC Radio’s Saturday morning serving of Canadian politics, since September 2011.

“What’s refreshing about Ottawa,” he says, “is that you can talk about ideas without feeling embarrassed.  Moving to Ottawa has given me a real understanding of the depth of policy work that’s done here.  It’s not just about my having a front-row seat; there’s a real responsibility to ask questions that matter to citizens.”

Indeed, CBC ads promoting Power & Politics emphasize that Solomon “holds politicians’ feet to the fire.” So is it frustrating when some politicians answer him with evasions? “I don’t begrudge them that,” says Solomon. “The sailor doesn’t get mad at the direction of the wind.”

With his edgy interviewing style, Solomon has repeatedly challenged the Harper government’s plan to buy the F-35 fighter aircraft. “I’m not taking sole credit [for the government’s climb-down from the decision], but I’m proud of the detailed work we did. I’m agnostic about the choice of plane, but religious about the process, which wasn’t transparent.”

The Toronto-born Solomon certainly wasn’t agnostic about his choice of university.  He earned a BA and an MA from McGill jointly in English literature and religious studies. “I went to McGill because it was open to a multi-disciplinary approach,” he recalls. “I was interested in the interplay between cultural narratives and religious and political ideas.” It was there that he and fellow student Andrew Heintzman, BA’89, MA’92, formed a friendship that led to future collaborations.

“We had three ideas of what we wanted to do,” says Solomon.  “We wanted to get into politics; to develop a business idea for green products; and to start a magazine.” First came the magazine, when the pair founded Shift in 1992. Originally an arts and literary publication, it evolved to encompass technology and Internet culture. Shift was the first magazine on the web, says Solomon, and the first to attract Internet advertising. It earned him a reputation as a savant of the Digital Age.

But in 1999, he left his post as editor-in-chief to write full-time. “I didn’t want to sort of have my cultural perch and just grow old at Shift,” he told an interviewer. “I wanted to tell different stories…” So he wrote Crossing the Distance, a novel about two brothers, both fleeing police investigations of separate murders, who meet up at a Georgian Bay cottage. The novel sold 10,000 copies and went into paperback. (Two works of fiction he has written since have languished, which he calls a “sore point.”)

Solomon also developed his broadcasting persona in the nineties. He and Heintzman hosted Shift Television on a community cable channel. CBC Newsworld producers spotted Solomon and auditioned him for the host’s role on Futureworld, a show about technology and ideas that ran 48 episodes and won a Gemini. He then hosted Newsworld’s Hot Type, a show about print culture.

Solomon teamed with Heintzman again to co-edit two non-fiction anthologies. The first was Fueling the Future: How the Battle Over Energy is Changing Everything (2004), followed by Feeding the Future: From Fat to Famine, How to Solve the World’s Food Crisis. (2005).

For the rest of the decade, Solomon co-anchored CBC-TV’s Sunday night national newscast.  Reporting from across the country and abroad, he covered the Asian tsunami, piracy in the Persian Gulf and a succession of federal elections.

These days, Solomon focuses on his role as a “tough, but fair” interrogator of politicians. “My job is accountability,” he says. “My job is to get unvarnished answers, to counter spin, and to ask the questions at the heart of the political debates affecting us all. Our goal is to be the arena where decision makers come to explain their choices, ideas and actions.”

He is already looking forward to the next federal election in 2015 – especially to the role that Quebec will play in determining its outcome. Will NDP leader Tom Mulcair, BCL’76, LLB’77,  be able to build on the party’s amazing breakthrough in the last election? Will the Bloc Québécois reemerge? How will Justin Trudeau, BA’94, fare as Liberal leader? Can Stephen Harper reinvigorate a government that will have been in power for nine years?

Solomon clearly enjoys his work. “My political itch is getting scratched pretty profoundly in Ottawa.” But when reminded of his McGill-era aspiration to enter politics himself, he replies, “I wouldn’t rule anything out in the future.  I’m open.”

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by Sylvain Comeau

When Hurricane Sandy battered the U.S. east coast last fall, many environmentalists were quick to point to the disaster as evidence of global warming. Famed activist David Suzuki called it “a glimpse into our future.”

Chris Green: “My personal focus is that climate change is essentially an energy/technology problem, and a very difficult one to solve.” (Photo: Owen Egan)

Most scientists tend to be more circumspect, even as they issue warnings about the global climate change phenomenon.

“When it comes to individual events like [Hurricane Sandy], it’s impossible to ascribe them, scientifically speaking, to climate change,” says emeritus professor of oceanic and atmospheric sciences Jacques Derome, BSc’63, MSc’64.

Scientists try to keep their focus on the big picture, Derome adds. “[The research on] climate change tells us something about the statistics of how things might change in the future. Those statistics may tell us that events like this might occur more often. As the climate and the oceans get warmer, storms become more likely. Climate change research is all about probabilities and statistics – it’s not about specific events.”

However, researchers readily acknowledge that extreme weather garners headlines, and brings the reality of climate change home to the average person in a forceful way.

“Events like Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, and the European heat waves, show us just how vulnerable we can be,” says James Ford, the head of McGill’s Climate Change Adaptation Research Group. “In developed nations, we have had a belief that we are somehow insulated from the climate, but these events show us that assumption is false.”

Ford and his team examine the effects of climate change on Canadian northern communities. “What is happening in the Arctic is definitely an early warning,” he says.

“If global warming goes over two degrees Celsius, we say that will be indicative of dangerous climate change. Where I work in the Arctic, temperatures have already increased by about five degrees Celsius in the past 30 years. We are talking about very visible impacts; climate change in the Arctic is a reality, it is happening now.”

The warming trend endangers the food security of Inuit and other communities, and it is not difficult to project similar long term effects on much larger populations.

“In the Arctic, we are talking about 55,000 people, and the stresses are already quite significant,” says Ford. “When you take a global view and make projections, we can see likely impacts in hot spots like Asia, for example, where billions of people are dependent on local agriculture. These people will be vulnerable to droughts.”

The most pressing danger is not rising temperatures, but the speed at which it is occurring.

“Islands or parts of continents may be flooded,” says Derome. “We are likely to see whole populations being displaced.”

Derome says there is little serious debate at this point over the existence of climate change. “Today there is a very wide consensus among scientists. There are still a few doubters here and there, but it’s a very small minority. At this point, it’s not a theory anymore – no more than evolution. Both have basically become accepted facts.”

But while global warming trends are becoming increasingly urgent, many scientists express frustration at the glacial pace at which their research results are being translated into public policy. Government action remains the persistently missing piece to the puzzle.

“Climate change may be at the top of some politicians’ agendas, but certainly not in Canada – far from it,” says Derome.

Elena Bennett: “I hope to teach students how to tell good information from bad." (Photo: Owen Egan)

“We have essentially reneged on the Kyoto Protocol. The Harper government also cut funding for the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, which funded climate change research for 10 years.”

Those funding cuts spelled the end for the Climate Variability Network, once led by Derome.

“It is quite frustrating for scientists,” he says. “We are preaching in the desert.”

So, what is a scientist to do?

If you’re Lawrence Mysak, an emeritus professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, you seize every opportunity that comes your way. Spotting federal Liberal MP Marc Garneau on a train last year, Mysak approached him to come to McGill to talk about the role of science in society.

“I have taken to giving more and more public lectures on climate change – these have generally been very successful and engaging, and from them I hope the general public can put pressure on their MPs and MNAs,” says Mysak, the former president of the Royal Society of Canada’s Academy of Science. “We can also write op-ed letters. I have done this in the past and now my former students and their students are doing this very successfully.”

Mysak was recently involved in research that garnered plenty of media attention. The study noted that warmer temperatures in Canada were resulting in a shortened season for outdoor hockey rinks in many parts of the country. It pointed to the effects of global warming in a manner that couldn’t help but draw attention in a hockey-mad country.

Mysak says the study was “fun and worth doing” and he references it in the public talks he presents on climate change. “But we still need to [focus on] basic research, to keep our field moving forward.”

Elena Bennett, an assistant professor of natural resources sciences, believes scientists have a responsibility “to translate their research for use by politicians and other stakeholders,” adding, “there are lots of people making decisions that affect the world and the environment who aren’t politicians.

“To my mind, this means trying to understand the perspective of those stakeholders and how to make the message meaningful for them while accurately reflecting science.”

One of the best ways that university researchers can affect change is in the classroom, she says. “I hope to teach students how to tell good information from bad, how to tell when science is respectable [and] how to interpret the spin in a newspaper story.”

Researchers insist that governments can’t ignore climate change for long because it will have an impact on every aspect of our lives. For example, the issue can’t be uncoupled from the number one concern of most politicians: the economy.

“Economists started to get interested in climate change at the very end of the eighties,” says Chris Green, an economics professor affiliated with the McGill School of Environment. “My personal focus is that climate change is essentially an energy/technology problem, and a very difficult one to solve.”

In fact, Green doesn’t view a lack of political will as the principal stumbling block to tackling climate change.

“The notion that we can just do away with coal, oil and gas is preposterous,” he argues. “Barring a future technological revolution, we are not close to doing so.” Green says, “fossil fuels dominate for a reason,” and that heavily touted environmentally sound alternatives aren’t yet capable of meeting our energy needs. “For example, we have no way of storing solar and wind power on a mass scale,” he stresses.

“If you end up constricting the use of fossil fuels without having good substitutes, then the economy will suffer. What we need are ways of financing the technological race, and that part would not be difficult. You could start very low; a five dollar carbon tax, for example. It would raise enormous amounts of money for research – roughly $30 billion per year in the U.S., and $3 billion in Canada. The solution is not political will, or who is in power at the moment. We need heavy investment in long term research and development.”

If there is one bright spot when it comes to government action, it is in the area of adaptation, says James Ford. An increasing cadre of researchers have been directing their efforts toward the human side of the equation; specifically, what strategies human communities, large and small, can take to adapt to the effects of climate change.

Federal departments such as Natural Resources Canada, Health Canada, and Aboriginal and Northern Affairs, have adaptation programs in place, but most of the real progress is at the provincial and municipal level.

“Canada has lagged behind on mitigation, but was an early leader when it comes to the adaptation side of the equation,” Ford says.

Still, many of the McGill scientists working in the area wish that climate change and its related environmental challenges occupied a much higher position on policymakers’ to-do lists.

“I think that people simply don’t know what to do about it,” says Nigel Roulet, director of McGill’s Global, Environmental and Climate Change Centre. “I think people throw up their hands because the problem is too big to deal with. And it’s certainly not amenable to being solved within four-year election cycles. With our political structures, we are not very good at long-term planning, which is really what is required.”

Still, Roulet offers proof that research can have an impact. He was one of the scientists who contributed to the much-cited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an effort that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

“Environmental problems often seem to happen slowly – at least at first,” says Bennett, “so perhaps we are like the proverbial frog in the pot, not realizing that the water is heating around us.”

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CRTC chair Jean-Pierre Blais (Photo: Ryan Remiorz/Canadian Press)

The average Canadian family spends more than $2,000 on communication services (phones, Internet, TV) each year – it’s the sixth biggest expense in most household budgets.  That alone gives consumers a big stake in who heads the country’s broadcast and telecom regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).

Last June, McGill-trained lawyer and veteran cultural bureaucrat Jean-Pierre Blais, BCL’84, LLB’84, was named as the CRTC’s 10th chair.  Blais’s first moves were designed to “lay down a marker” as a consumer-friendly regulator.  He immediately created a new position — chief consumer officer – at the commission’s headquarters in Gatineau, Quebec. The post answers what he saw as a need for increased integration of consumer issues in all aspects of the CRTC’s work.

The commission then made national headlines with its surprise decision last October to block BCE Inc.’s planned $3.4-billion acquisition of Astral Media Inc. BCE CEO George Cope made no secret of his anger over the decision, calling it “absurd.” For his part, Blais said that the deal would have given BCE too much control over Canadian broadcasting, imperiling any hope for “robust” competition among different players in the sector.

“We’re not in the business of favoring one group over another,” says Blais. “But applicants have been put on notice that they have to do their homework and meet the burden of proof that their proposal serves the ‘public interest’ and puts Canadians at the centre.” BCE and Astral are now restructuring their deal, still hoping to earn approval.

Blais is currently working on establishing a mandatory code of conduct for wireless providers. “Once the code is in place,” he says, “service providers will have to clarify the contractual terms they are offering their customers, who will then be in a better position to make informed choices.” Following an initial online consultation, the CRTC posted a draft version of the code in late January.

Blais and the CRTC have even scolded Oprah Winfrey – well, not Oprah directly, but Corus Entertainment, which owns the Canadian rights to the Oprah Winfrey Channel. Corus was reprimanded for falling short in fulfilling its broadcasting license obligations by not airing enough educational programming on the channel.

“The issues surrounding OWN have been held up as an example of how the CRTC has become less of a rubber-stamping agency under new chair Jean-Pierre Blais,” noted Marc Weisblott, a Canada.com news editor who covers media.

In past years, Blais concedes, the CRTC “appeared very distant, not welcoming to consumers who wanted to make their views known.  We want to rebuild the confidence of Canadians in the institution.” One way to do that, he says, is to make the CRTC’s hearings more accessible by holding evening sessions, when more working people can attend.

The grey-haired, but youthful-looking regulator has been a fan of television since he spent his childhood watching cop shows, movies and documentaries in his Pointe-Claire home.  Today, he watches about 24 hours a week of TV, close to the national average of 28.6 hours.  “I multi-task while I watch, but I like news, edgy crime dramas and [Radio-Canada’s] Tout le monde en parle,” he says, drawing on his bicultural identity to watch shows in both official languages.

While the 49-year-old Blais and his generational peers might still watch a fair bit of TV, many younger adults bypass their television sets in favour of downloading programs online. The implications for Canadian content are uncertain. Blais says it’s too soon to say whether conventional TV watching is on its last legs.

“We don’t know whether that will be [young people’s] future pattern of consumption, once they’re married with kids.”  He notes that the advent of TV was forecast to be the death of radio, but that didn’t happen. “I see people wanting to buy [broadcasting] assets and pay a lot for them.  That doesn’t suggest to me that the business model for commercial television is broken.”

The future regulator got his legal training at McGill.  He recalls attending one of his first-year law classes as a callow 19-year old, barely out of CEGEP, looking to his left at a student with a PhD,  and to his right at another with two university degrees, and feeling slightly intimidated.  But the Faculty of Law, he says, proved to be a formative experience for him.

From 1985 to 1991, Blais practiced intellectual property, entertainment and administrative law at the Montreal law firm Martineau Walker (today Fasken Martineau).  Law firms, he says, are stocked with “finders, minders and grinders.  I was a grinder.” In his early thirties, looking for an international experience, he left to do an LL.M. at the University of Melbourne.  When he returned to Montreal, the Bar wasn’t hiring.

So he reluctantly moved to Ottawa in 1994 to join the CRTC’s legal team, which was hiring following the Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling that the commission had sole authority to regulate telecommunications.  Blais rose to general counsel, broadcasting, and discovered “that the CRTC, and the public sector in general, practice better law than the private sector, with its emphasis on billable hours.”

As the CRTC’s executive director of broadcasting from 1999 to 2002, he oversaw development of a licensing framework for new digital pay-TV and specialty services.  He also led reviews of major acquisitions, including BCE’s (of CTV) and Quebecor Media Inc.’s (of TVA). Blais then moved to the Department of Canadian Heritage as assistant deputy minister, international and intergovernmental affairs—“the best government job I’ve had.”

In that post, he helped shape UNESCO’s Cultural Diversity Convention, which supports “countries making special rules for the promotion of their cultural industries.” He also enlisted multinational adherence to the World Anti-Doping Agency’s anti-doping code.  As the federal rep on the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games bid consortium, he helped lobby the IOC in Prague in July 2003, and celebrated its selection of Vancouver.

After a lateral move within the department to assistant deputy minister, cultural affairs, Blais created the Task Force on New Technologies to examine the effect of the Internet and digital technologies on federal cultural policies.  He also co-chaired a government-broadcaster committee which eased the way for digital television.

Steeped in Ottawa’s laws and policies on the broadcast and telecom industries, Blais is well equipped for his five-term as chair of the CRTC.  He’s hit the ground running.

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Suuns members (l to r) Ben Shemie, Liam O’Neill, Joseph Yarmush and Max Henry

by Ryan McNutt

Ask Max Henry, BMus’08, to draw connections between his time studying jazz at McGill and the music he makes with his band Suuns (pronounced “soons”), and the talk quickly turns to geometry.

“The building blocks only do you a service when they eventually disappear,” he says of his musical education. “The classical world might be square building blocks, and the jazz world might be rectangular building blocks, but the shapes that we’re getting at aren’t pixelated, they’re not built out of squares or rectangles. They’re continuous.”

Suuns’ second album, Images du Futur (Secretly Canadian), is certainly hard to box in. The record borrows its name from Ginette Major and Hervé Fischer’s series of imaginative, multimedia art exhibitions that ran between 1986 and 1996 in Montreal’s Old Port. Like the exhibitions’ now-retro futurism, the album meshes the tools of the past and present — indie jangle, prog structures and post-rock drone — to create something that’s familiar yet otherworldly. Throw in an attuned sense of groove and you end up with one of the year’s most acclaimed Canadian records thus far. The British music magazine Q, for instance, describes the album as “an eerie, engaging adrenalin rush.”

The Montreal-based foursome features three former McGill jazz students: keyboardist Henry, guitarist/vocalist Ben Shemie, BMus’04, and drummer Liam O’Neill. They didn’t all study at the same time, though, and didn’t know each until a variety of connections brought them and guitarist/bassist Joseph Yarmush together to form a band at first called Zeroes. They changed that to Suuns shortly thereafter, paying tribute to their original moniker by naming their 2010 debut album Zeroes QC.

Like that record, Images du Futur is produced by Jace Lasek of Montreal’s Besnard Lakes. The album shows a growing confidence with melody, but its musical constructions are still complicated by the band’s penchant for tightly wound tension.

“That’s our biggest consideration,” says Henry, when asked about the band’s slow-building minimalism. “We try and avoid decadence and indulgence.”

That may seem like a strange statement coming from a jazz-trained musician, but Henry shrugs off the idea that jazz training inevitably leads to showy jazz composition. He likens it to a degree in journalism or political science: a foundation in a form, but not one that defines how you’ll end up using it.

One benefit to the band’s education, Henry says, is not needing to rely on so-called “happy accidents” in their songwriting.

“If you come up with something you like, you can do it again, you can change keys, you can move to another instrument,” he explains. “The more closely you look at these things, the less kind of ethereal it becomes — less special, perhaps — but it’s a lot easier to manipulate.”

Having just played SXSW in Austin, the band will be touring for most of the next three months across Europe and North America. But Montreal remains home: Harvey says affordable rent and a strong musical community makes the Mile End neighbourhood an ideal base of operations for Suuns.

“You end up with this really great, small, tight-knit community but with the resources and reputation of a large city,” he says. “I don’t know how we could do this in a city other than Montreal.”

Two videos for songs from Images du Futur are online: “2020” and “Edie’s Dream“