Brian Platt
Dec 12, 2012
The Winnipeg Free Press
SELKIRK — A 51-year-old woman died in a house fire here Monday and a few hours later, her nephew drove his truck into the frigid Red River at Lockport but survived the crash.
RCMP did not release the name of the victim of the blaze, but neighbours and relatives identified the woman as Gloria Sanderson. The fire, which engulfed the house’s front porch around 10:30 p.m., also took the life of her black Labrador dog.
May 28, 2012
The Canadian Press
When a six-year tuition freeze was lifted in British Columbia in 2002, causing tuition at most universities to double over the next three years, a group of 50 students spent a night camping in the University of British Columbia administration offices while a few hundred protested outside.
Then the group stormed the student union’s executive offices to demand the resignation of the union’s president, Kristen Harvey.
May 3, 2012
The Canadian Press
A catastrophic hard drive failure has led a pair of film school students on an epic odyssey to convince Hollywood icon Morgan Freeman to narrate their project.
Just a week before his graduation project deadline, Ian MacDougall knew he had to do something drastic.
His hard drive had crashed, taking seven months of work on his short film with it. It would be impossible to do over that work in seven days.
MacDougall remembered an idea that Mackenzie Warner, his classmate at Simon Fraser University, had told him about last year: Wouldn’t it be great to make a documentary about getting Morgan Freeman to narrate a documentary?
May 2012
The United Church Observer
By all accounts, Bountiful is a beautiful place. Nestled in the Creston Valley of southeast British Columbia, just north of the Idaho border, it is home to about 1,000 people. Aside from the nearby town of Creston, Bountiful is isolated — and that’s how the residents prefer it. It may be the most controversial community in Canada.
Bountiful’s inhabitants belong to two feuding Mormon fundamentalist sects, both of which practise polygamy. In 1990, the RCMP began to investigate allegations from former residents of incest, sexual abuse and trafficking of teenage brides.
March 1, 2012
The Ubyssey
UBC is a month away from opening a $27 million biomass power plant with Nexterra Systems Corp., a local green-tech company. Two of Nexterra’s American projects have ended in failure. Is UBC headed down the same path?
ON OCTOBER 9, 2011, South Carolina’s largest newspaper published a lengthy exposé on an alternative energy power plant at the University of South Carolina (USC).
The plant, which used biomass gasification technology, had been racked by explosions and malfunctions. In March 2011, only four years after opening, it had to be closed down completely. USC is now waiting to recoup its $20 million investment.
UBC is about to open a $27 million biomass power plant in partnership with Nexterra Systems Corp., the same company that supplied the technology to the USC power plant.
February 16, 2012
The Ubyssey
The AMS has made national headlines over the past couple of weeks, including stories in The Toronto Star, The Huffington Post and The Province. Considering the AMS’s recent history, this would normally mean I’d be writing a column that starts with a recap of a hilarious and embarrassing scandal that has swamped our student union.
But this time the buzz is good: the AMS is planning a microbrewery for the new SUB. According to President Jeremy McElroy and VP Finance Elin Tayyar, it would be the first brewery operated by a student union anywhere in the world.
February 1, 2012
The Ubyssey
All student unions have scandals. It’s what happens when politically inexperienced young people gain power over millions of dollars. Few elections occur without squabbles, and personal attacks are common at student council meetings.
But when it comes to scandals, no student union in the country holds a candle to the Kwantlen Student Association.
The KSA has seen a gauntlet of court cases, boycotts, firings and security incidents in the past decade, but 2011 brought an almost unfathomable level of dysfunction and deceit.
January 22, 2012
The Ubyssey
On January 25, there will be a birthday party at the Centre for Student Involvement (CSI).
The party is for the CSI itself. That day will mark the two-year anniversary of the university’s signature project under the realm of “student development.”
The definition of student development depends on who you ask. Most faculties have their own student development officers, each of whom has slightly different priorities. On the whole, though, it involves providing students with opportunities and resources to make them feel supported and encouraged during their time at UBC.
Today the CSI has grown into the staging grounds for most of the major events you see at UBC throughout year, including the Imagine Day orientations, Terry Talks and the Student Leadership Conference (SLC). It also hosts a steady flow of meetings, workshops and minglers for smaller student groups.
January 18, 2012
The Ubyssey
Whenever a student union election is underway, the question arises of how serious we should treat it.
The reason that question arises is because there are always a few stern-faced observers wagging their fingers at everyone else, saying things like “the candidates are behaving shamefully!” and “why can’t we focus on policy?” and “this is why turnout is so low!”
The high-minded scolders say these things because student union elections are always filled with joke candidates, pranks, personal attacks and anonymous slander (this year we already have an anonymous blog devoted to mocking Sean Cregten’s Kiwi heritage through poorly-doctored photos.) In turn, the student media eggs this on by paying so much attention to it.
Thus, the scolders say, student politics is a joke to most students and that’s why turnout and engagement is so low.
December 5, 2011
The Ubyssey
As the terminus of two transcontinental railroads and a major seaport, Vancouver was a clear target for any Japanese attack on coastal North American cities.
When Pearl Harbour was bombed on December 7, 1941, an attack on the harbours in BC became a frighteningly real possibility.
The main base for Vancouver’s defence was located at UBC—right in the spot where the Museum of Anthropology now stands. It was called Point Grey Fort.
November 28, 2011
The Ubyssey Roundtable, Episode 4
November 27, 2011
The Ubyssey
If the Engineering Undergraduate Society (EUS) screws up, you can’t sue them.
Well, you sort of could, in a roundabout way. But you’d have to sue the AMS, because the EUS isn’t a legal entity. As with the undergraduate societies of Arts, Commerce, Science and so on, the EUS is essentially just a branch of the AMS, the student union that all UBC students are automatic members of.
November 26, 2011
The Ubyssey
“I’ll tell you a funny story. I think I can tell you this story.”
So begins Andrew Coyne, the national editor of Maclean’s magazine, when asked about being threatened with a lawsuit by the Prime Minister’s chief of staff in 2005.
“The first I heard about it was on the front page of The Globe and Mail,” says Coyne. According to the story, Tim Murphy was going to sue him and the National Post.
November 20, 2011
The Ubyssey
Last Wednesday, the UBC Senate voted to give special degrees to Japanese-Canadian students who, during World War II, were kicked out of university due to the forced internment of all Japanese-Canadians. Yet we can’t tell you what the deliberations were like, or whether there was any significant dissent, or even the details of the vote. That’s because all of the proceedings on this matter were done behind closed doors.
November 16, 2011
The Ubyssey Roundtable, Episode 3
November 6, 2011
The Ubyssey
Wesbrook residents voiced strong opposition to additional residential development in south campus last week, as UBC held their last open house for the South Campus Neighbourhood Plan.
On November 1, Joe Stott, director for Campus and Community Planning (CCP), stood at the front of the commons room in MBA House for 90 minutes while campus residents lambasted him.
October 31, 2011
The Ubyssey
It has been four months since Adbusters first advocated an “occupation” of Wall Street, six weeks since the tents went up at Zuccotti Park, four weeks since the media started paying attention and two weeks since a Canadian version of Occupy Together began.
But as the novelty of the movement wears off and the occupiers don’t get into the media anymore just for being there, where is all this heading? It’s increasingly looking like that will depend on who screws up first: the occupiers, or the police.
October 27, 2011
The Ubyssey
What does a university bookstore do when falling book sales threaten its business model? At UBC, one tactic has been to use its buying power to cut smaller competitors out of the market.
All large retail outlets, such as the UBC Bookstore, have staff called “buyers,” who have the job of negotiating supply contracts with product distributors. The buyers negotiate with either vendors who work directly for the distributors, or sales representatives who work for many different distributors.
At least one clothing and giftware buyer working for the UBC Bookstore has, in the past, told vendors to stop supplying their product to the AMS Outpost, the much smaller campus store run by the student union. The Ubyssey has acquired emails showing that when one vendor refused to cut the Outpost off, the Bookstore buyer canceled their orders and told the vendor that “future business is now compromised.”
October 15, 2011
The Ubyssey
There’s a lot to like about the Occupy Together movement that’s taking root in cities across the continent, and I say that as someone who normally rolls his eyes whenever professional protesters get all worked up over something.
This protest feels different than the demonstrations against the G20, the Olympics, the World Trade Organization or any other occasion where men wearing suits are gathering to talk about stuff. The focus is more broad-based, windows aren’t being smashed and it’s an overdue expression of real anger at how Wall Street banks have operated in recent years. It’s also—and we’ll get to this in a bit—a welcome pushback against the Tea Party.
October 17, 2011
The Ubyssey (Transit Supplement)
Planning out a bus network in a metropolitan region is a rather complicated task.
Katherine McCune, the manager of service planning for Coast Mountain Bus Company (CMBC), paused when asked what people should know about her job. “Well… it’s a lot of fun,” she said with good-natured sarcasm. “It’s so many elements, and we try to design service for the broadest range of customers.”
Metro Vancouver is the largest single service transit area in Canada, and CMBC is responsible for managing over 200 bus routes operated by more than 3300 drivers. At the company’s headquarters in Surrey next to the Gateway SkyTrain station, a small section of staff work in cubicles on the fifth floor to design and optimize the entire bus network across the region.
October 8, 2011
The Ubyssey Roundtable, Episode 1
October 6, 2011
The Ubyssey
“Are you serious?”
That was my reaction late Wednesday afternoon when editors in the office started buzzing about how we had to make a last-minute change to the paper to pay tribute to Steve Jobs, the just-deceased multi-billionaire former CEO of one of the most profitable corporations in the world. Apple’s only current competitors on the stock market are oil companies like Exxon Mobil.
We put it to a vote, and my side lost.
“You’re just being a contrarian!” one of our editors literally yelled at me. He then went on to check Twitter on his iPhone, surf the web on one of the ten Apple computers in the Ubyssey offices, and later watch a movie on the personal Mac he has in his bedroom. He’d shit in an iToilet, if it existed.
October 2, 2011
The Ubyssey
Last July, a Canadian-owned boat that planned to run the Israeli naval blockade around Gaza was blocked from leaving a Greek port. This week, The Ubyssey discovered that the $700 transfer from the Social Justice Centre (SJC) to the Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights club (SPHR) for the purposes of donating to that boat was never actually processed, despite being approved by AMS Council.
So if you’re keeping score at home: last year, the AMS was swamped by months of annoying and polarizing arguments—and even conducted a preposterous terrorism “investigation”—over a small amount of resource group money that was never actually donated to a ship that never actually sailed to the blockade. Good grief.
September 11, 2011
The Ubyssey (10 Years Later Special)
The moment the second plane hit the World Trade Centre, 9/11 became political. This was no horrible coincidence; this was an attack.
Going back and reading the columns written right after 9/11, I’ve never been very impressed with those who were more concerned about the United States’ reaction than with the fact that a clearly well-financed organization had just executed the most spectacular terrorist attack in history. I noticed with some regret, but not much surprise, that The Ubyssey’s first editorial comic after the attack depicted soldiers shooting a dove flying out of the World Trade Centre wreckage. I guess this was meant to symbolize the American military murdering the peace and harmony symbolized by 9/11, or something.
September 11, 2011
The Ubyssey (10 Years Later Special)
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Dr Allen Sens was awoken by his radio alarm clock. As usual, it was set to CBC. “The first thing I started to hear was the reports coming in from New York, and so I bolted upright and turned on my television. And I watched the towers collapse.”
In the first issue of The Ubyssey published after the attack, Sens, a senior lecturer in the political science department who has worked with the United Nations, shared some of his thoughts and predictions. We caught up with Sens this week and asked him to reflect on the comments he made back in 2001.
September 11, 2011
The Ubyssey, 10 Years Later Special
Shortly after the second plane hit the World Trade Centre, Douglas Quan received a call from The Ottawa Citizen telling him to get to the site as quick as possible.
Quan, a former UBC student and Ubyssey news editor, was enrolled in the journalism program at Columbia University in September 2001. He had previously worked as an intern at the Citizen, which is why they put him to work that day.
September 11, 2011
The Ubyssey (10 Years Later Special)
Michael Warner’s first day on the job was September 9, 2001. His office was in the World Financial Centre, directly across the street from the World Trade Centre.
In 2000, Warner had worked at UBC as the AMS VP Finance. When he graduated from UBC in 2001, he accepted a job offer from Merrill Lynch and left for New York City. He has lived there ever since, and The Ubyssey reached him by phone last week.
Hello, new students. Welcome to UBC.
You now belong to a student union, the Alma Mater Society (AMS). The AMS takes a fairly small amount of money from you in the form of a student fee, but when all these fees are added together, it makes up a budget of millions of dollars. So you should pay attention to what your student union is doing.
August 2, 2011
The Ubyssey
University students like to drink alcohol. Some drink very little and some drink a ridiculously large amount, while most of us fall somewhere in between. But this is something that no law in a free country will ever change: we want to drink, we want to enjoy ourselves and we are going to do it whether the various authorities like it or not.
Naturally, alcohol-related incidents on university campuses only get publicity on tragic occasions, like when two Queen’s University students fell to their deaths last year after drinking. Queen’s responded by banning alcohol in residences during Frosh Week—a week-long party for which many Ontario universities are infamous. While the ban is designed to mitigate harm, it actually achieves the opposite effect.
July 6, 2011
The Ubyssey
In general, humanity can be trusted to make simple things much more complicated than necessary. A straightforward rule or principle will inevitably become bogged down in countless caveats and exceptions. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to fight against this tendency. The stronger among us must stand for clarity and steadfastness.
The issue of whether a comma should be placed before the final item in a list exemplifies this battle.
May 3, 2011
The Ubyssey
It is not yet clear whether Osama bin Laden actually picked up a gun to defend himself when American Special Forces assaulted a mansion in Pakistan, shot him in the head and carried off his body. It wouldn’t be a surprise if he didn’t; bin Laden rarely did any fighting of his own. On the few occasions when he was actually in Afghanistan to fight with the mujahidin during the Soviet occupation, he was bedridden with sickness whenever a firefight broke out. Bin Laden was primarily a financier and organizer of a vicious brand of Islamist terrorism and it hardly needs to be said that the world is truly better off with him dead.
Unfortunately, but inevitably, it took mere minutes after the news broke for right-wingers to start gloating with jingoistic rhetoric and left-wingers to start sneering with snarky sarcasm. I travelled to Afghanistan in October and have been talking to Afghans for years about terrorism, Al Qaeda and the war against the Taliban in their country, so this issue is close to my heart. It’s important now to filter out the chronic political point-makers on both sides, and consider what it means for Afghanistan now that bin Laden has drawn his last breath.
Iran’s main opposition group laid down its arms a decade ago. But as far as Canada is concerned, it’s still a terrorist organization. What does it take to lose the label?
May 2011
The United Church Observer
Last June, Rev. Rob Oliphant and four other Liberal members of Parliament went to Paris for a huge rally in support of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). It was the second year in a row that Oliphant, a United Church minister and the MP for the Don Valley West riding in Toronto, had been invited by the NCRI to its annual show of solidarity for democracy in Iran.
As far as the Canadian government was concerned, Oliphant and the thousands of other politicians and activists from around the world who attended the rally are consorting with terrorists.
April 7, 2011
The Ubyssey
Afghanistan wrested the world’s attention back from Libya and Japan this week with a series of violent protests over a Koran-burning stunt in the United States. The stunt was performed by a pathetic old man named Terry Jones, a villainous right-wing pastor with a Yosemite Sam moustache and a tiny religious following. His fringe actions were properly ignored by all major media outlets until the Iranian and Afghan governments issued simultaneous condemnations of it. Hamid Karzai’s role in inflating an otherwise irrelevant incident is deplorable, and reinforces my sinking feeling that Afghanistan has no chance for a peaceful future until a new president is elected.
It is wrong to assume, as some people have, that these are grassroots protests organized by concerned Afghan citizens. Much like the Danish cartoon protests from a few years ago, the Koran-burning protests are the result of a concerted effort by reactionary Islamic clerics to foment anger through misinformation.The first protests last week were organized by the forces of Sheikh Asif Mohseni, the same practitioner of Shia teachings who launched his angry mob against the progressive curriculum of Marefat High School.
March 31, 2011
The Ubyssey
Kabul is a much safer city than most Canadians think, though one can never be complacent about the danger that still exists. I noticed that a supermarket which I visited on my trip in October was blown apart by a bomb on January 28; it was a senseless attack that mostly killed Afghan civilians, as most Taliban attacks do. But the vast majority of Kabul’s four million residents, including many foreigners, carry out their work unharmed.
Kandahar, on the other hand, is more dangerous than most Canadians know, and there is no one in more danger there than an Afghan student going to a secular school. I spent one day in Kandahar visiting some of these students at the Afghan Canadian Community Centre (ACCC).
Cover story, March 2011
The United Church Observer
A slightly beat-up red Toyota Corolla pulled up outside our hotel in Kabul. Walid, our driver, smiled as I took a seat next to him in the front. Lauryn climbed into the back seat, a black and grey head scarf over her blond hair. Men in the front, women — with heads covered — in the back. This was only my second morning in Afghanistan, and already I was following the local custom assigned to my gender.
Lauryn Oates is the projects director for the Calgary-based development charity Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan (CW4WA). I have known Lauryn for three years; we met in Vancouver through our shared work with the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee, a group of activists committed to building democracy in Afghanistan. She has made over 20 trips to Afghanistan since 2003. On this day, we were going to a village school to see a ceremony for teachers graduating from a CW4WA training program.
February 11, 2011
The Ubyssey
This is a story about two buildings run by two men who could not be more different. One is a hero, the other is a villain. The villain is wealthy; the hero has to constantly scramble to get by. There is a climactic clash between the two sides. We do not know how this battle will end yet—but more about that later.
On the side of the just and the good is Marefat School and its principal, Aziz Royesh. Marefat is located in one of the sprawling slums on the outskirts of Kabul, Daste Bachi. It took me an hour in a local taxi to get there. The lanes are narrow, full of ruts and rubble. When I stood on the roof of the school, there were small one-level huts for as far as the eye could see.
January 30, 2011
The Ubyssey
One of the most enduring clichés about Afghanistan is that of the relatively cosmopolitan city dwellers waging battle against the illiterate, impoverished and violent rural Afghans. Like all clichés, it contains a germ of truth wrapped in layers of false and offensive stereotypes. But on my second day in Afghanistan, I took a trip to a village school which ensured that I would never subscribe to the false dichotomy of backward rural Afghans rebelling against the urban elites.
The truth is that Afghan villagers are among the most vulnerable and hardest-hit of the Taliban’s victims. Yes, there are definitely some villages where secular education is shunned and the culture dictates that women are to remain uneducated and hidden from public view. But you will find many more where schools closed down under Taliban rule have been reopened since 2001, and there is an insatiable demand for teachers and resources to educate the boys and girls who live in the area.
January 10, 2011
The Ubyssey
Few things are as depressing as looking at statistics on children in Afghanistan. UNICEF estimates that one of every five children born will die before their fifth birthday. They also place the number of orphans at two million.
Although one should always be skeptical about population numbers in Afghanistan—Kabul has anywhere between two and five million people, depending on who you ask—if it’s true, there are as many street kids in Afghanistan as there are people in the Lower Mainland.
