Results  from  the  

2015  SFSS  election

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C A N A D I A NCOMMUNITYNEWSPAPERAWARD 2013

There was a time when, upon real-izing that my degree would remain incomplete after four years of study, I felt inadequate.

I had set a goal to complete my undergraduate degree within four years. Under the best circum-stances, I would have had another two years — more likely three — before I could convocate. Right now, I am in my third year.

The reason for this feeling of inadequacy stemmed from a personal preoccupation with the four-year degree; since high school, I have considered the four-year degree to be standard, ordi-nary. To devote any more time to a degree is less than ordinary would be a mediocre undertaking.

Granted, I have switched pro-grams twice, and am doing so a third time — going from a BFA to a BBA, then to a BA. I am now con-sidering abandoning this in favour of completing an unrelated degree.

But with each change in pro-gram came an exhaustion, a sense of academic failure.

This sense was compounded when I observed my colleagues nearing completion of their degrees, some already prepar-ing to convocate after a little over three years. I felt like I was dragging my heels.

However, I’ve come to several realizations that have enabled me to — quite frankly — grow up and see that simply powering through my first degree choice would have been an adolescent decision.

Through my repeated failed excursions into other fields, I have begun to recognize the value of a missed experience.

University — and your twen-ties in general — provides you with one of the very few oppor-tunities in life to try new things and screw up. You’re intelligent enough to fail at something and really take away from the ex-perience, all while being young enough to get away with it rela-tively unscathed.

Thus, if the consequences are so light, take a chance to discover your interests. It is easy to be comfort-able with what we perceive to be our preferences. But in reality, our

interests are so foreign even to our-selves. You might be able to maxi-mize your interests within a partic-ular framework, but you’ll remain unaware of the existence of a larger, more accommodating one.

I recognize that some people truly do find a very particular af-finity with the course of study that they had originally embarked upon. If you get away with finish-ing your degree in a timely man-ner, without ever craving more or falling to second thoughts, I ap-plaud and envy you.

But recognize that it was as much a matter of chance as of any-

thing else, and, provided with a different set of cards, you would have only limited yourself by sticking to what you originally chose to do.

If all you have to lose is a bit of time,

to feel a little behind based on the expectation of completing 120 credits in four years — a de-gree being something which is ultimately arbitrarily quantified anyways — you might as well take the time to extract real, per-sonal value from it, and to dis-cover the framework that might shape the rest of your life.

Don’t take your original course of study for granted. Remove yourself from what is comfortable and take a chance on something different; you have time.

FIRST PEEK

4 news editor Leah Bjornson associate news editor Melissa Roachemail news@the-peak.ca NEWS March 30, 2015

Please  visit  the  website  for  more  information:  www.talk.go.krContact  information:  Consulate  General  of  the  Republic  of  Korea604-­681-­9581vanedu@mofa.go.kr

The results are in, amigos: Enoch Weng has been elected as the SFSS president for the 2015/2016 year.

“I don’t even know how to feel. Just so loved,” Weng told The Peak after his fellow can-didates had let him down from their shoulders amid chants of “Enoch, Enoch!” He immedi-ately excused himself, rushing off to shake the hands of the other presidential candidates.

The only independent presi-dential candidate, Weng received 858 votes, winning by a margin of 220 votes over second-place finisher Zied Masmoudi, who received 638. The two were

followed by Erik Hadekaer (605), Kayode Fatoba (500), and Johnny Aether (125).

Masmoudi embraced Weng after hearing the results, telling him, “I know it’s in good hands.”

The elections saw 12.08 per cent voter turnout — the highest per-centage since the 2009 elections,

excluding years which asked stu-dents to vote on referendum ques-tions related to the U-Pass.

The REAL slate were the big winners of the night, with 10 of their 16 candidates elected.

Four executive positions were won by significant mar-gins. Brady Wallace was elected

the new VP University Rela-tions with a total of 1,356 votes, just over three times as many as runner-up Ally Van Poa. Bar-bara Szymczyk claimed the VP Finance position with 1,550 votes, doubling opponent Karan Thakur’s 742.

The new VP Student Life is Deepak Sharma, who triumphed over opponent Hassan Liaquat with a total of 1,470 votes to 809.

Darwin Binesh will take over the VP Student Services position with a similar margin of 1,481 votes to opponent Shery Alam’s 828.

Described by Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Oscar Sanchez as the “quadrangle of love,” the four candidates for the VP Exter-nal Relations position fought a close race. Ultimately, Kathleen Yang emerged victorious with 804 votes, 152 past runner up Blossom Malhan.

All three referendum ques-tions passed, resulting in the establishment of Health Science Undergraduate Student Union (HSUSU) as the official Faculty Student Union (FSU) by a 96 per cent approval rating. Students also voted in favour of reallo-cating portions of the Space Ex-pansion Fund Levy to the Mem-bership Fee Levy as well as for

targeted funding for the SFSS Emergency Food Bank Program, passing by 59 per cent and 76 per cent respectively.

Weng’s fellow presidential candidates had nothing but kind words for the president-elect. “I just remember sitting in the debates and getting constant high fives and fist bumps from Enoch, and the whole time he’s been so supportive and happy,”

Aether noted.Hadekaer reiter-

ated that this just felt like an average Thurs-day night for him, and was excited for what the new board has in store for the summer: “As a solid team, they’re going

to take this board and move it to-wards where it should be going. And I’m thrilled about that.”

When asked how he felt, Mas-moudi told The Peak, “Feeling good, actually. Almost my whole team won, so REAL represents.”

He continued, “I’m sure that [the board is] going to accom-plish great things.”

The Peak caught up with Weng, who, teary-eyed, was making the rounds and thank-ing his fellow candidates and supporters. “I’m feeling very overwhelmed. I’m so thankful for everybody,” he said.

Weng surely has big dreams for the year ahead, but for now, his plans are simple: “Tonight, we’re going to go to my house and just watch Disney movies all night. And that’s how we’re going to celebrate.”

5NEWS March 30, 2015

After almost a year of negotia-tions with SFU, the university’s Teaching Support Staff Union (TSSU) has voted overwhelm-ingly in favour of the option to take job action this summer.

In a vote held between March 24 and 26, 92 per cent of TSSU voting members voted against the current offer from the university. Their previous collective agreement expired on April 30, 2014.

As a result, the university’s teaching assistants, tutor mark-ers, sessionals, and English lan-guage and culture interpreters will now decide whether to en-gage the strike vote to commence job action, or choose to wait.

Should the union choose to engage in job action, they would be putting pressure on the administration without withdrawing their services,

therefore retaining their wages. However, they must hold an ad-ditional vote should they wish to initiate a picket line and withhold all services.

Since February of this year, there have been 15 bargaining sessions between the two sides, with neither reaching an agree-ment. “Without some addi-tional pressure, it is the opinion of the contract committee that no progress can be made and we will be forced to accept the employer’s concessions,” stated the TSSU website.

“Our members have spoken with a unified voice, and they are demanding that SFU’s ad-ministration engage in seri-ous, good faith bargaining to address their concerns,” said Derek Sahota, spokesperson for the TSSU, in a press release. Sahota referred to the current agreement as “a broken system,” which he believes SFU could easily repair at no extra cost.

The TSSU’s Chief Steward, Reagan Belan, outlined what she felt were the key issues facing the union: job security for sessional instructors; benefits and equity for continuing language instruc-tors at Harbour Centre; priority

access to teaching assistant work for graduate students; and equal pay for equal work for all teach-ing assistants.

“Most teaching assistants balance the responsibilities of their jobs with full-time work as graduate students, while many sessional instructors maintain several jobs to earn a living,” said Belan in the release.

The TSSU held a Special General Meeting (SGM) on March 27 to ratify the vote and elect members to a strike com-mittee, who will decide the union’s course of action in the upcoming weeks.

Although the university was unable to give an updated com-ment before press time, their “La-bour Issue” web page published the following statement early March 27: “We understand that TSSU members have voted in fa-vour of a strike. The University remains committed to a negoti-ated settlement that can only take place with both sides at the bar-gaining table, striving to achieve a new collective agreement.”

The statement continued to note, “Even with a strike vote in hand, the union can elect to re-turn to the bargaining table and resume negotiations.”

Guest speaker Gwynne Dyer engaged an SFU Woodward’s audience in a difficult discus-sion on March 25, titled “The New World Disorder?”

Following instances of war in Libya, Iraq, and the re-cent conflict in Ukraine, is the world getting out of control and heading towards violence, chaos and another cold war? Dyer gave a more positive spin to the issue, emphasizing it is “not as bad as it seems.”

Beedie School of Business held the fifth annual Opportunity Fest at SFU Surrey campus on March 26.

The festival gave students a chance to display their innova-tive projects and ideas, and be recognized for their work. The judges also selected several winners who received prizes for their efforts.

Students were offered a two-day NVivo for Windows in-tensive training program over March 27 and 28. The work-shop was created and facili-tated to build students’ knowl-edge of NVivo qualitative data analysis software.

It thoroughly explained the use of NVivio from the set-up step to the final report and presentation step, and gave aspiring researchers a chance to practice using the analysis software.

A week of events related to green issues, called Reinvest in Our Future Week, was held by the Simon Fraser Student Society (SFSS) last week to generate conversation about envi-ronmental issues on SFU campuses.

The events were held in con-junction with SFU 350, Sustain-able SFU, SFPIRG, and the Wil-derness Committee.

For SFSS VP Finance Adam Pot-vin, the week was an opportunity to bridge the gap between proponents and opponents of fossil fuel infra-structural expansion. He hoped that with a deeper understanding of the issues, the community could en-gage in more productive dialogue.

“I’ve always been frustrated at the lack of understanding between the two sides,” explained Potvin.

“I felt like there was no real middle ground, and I thought that both sides [the right and the left] were kind of talking past each other.”

He continued, “What I want to see is a more nuanced approach that seeks to combine realising that oil is a necessity [. . .] but at the same time there needs to be an effort to steer our community towards re-newable energy.”

The week kicked off with an event titled Visioning our Future on March 23. Students and com-munity members discussed what they wanted to see in our commu-nity’s future, both economically and environmentally.

Tessica Truong, environment rep for the SFSS, was particularly impressed by the dialogue at this event. “At first the tone of the con-versation was a bit pessimistic [. . .] but soon it moved to [defining] what SFU’s role could be, not just as a research institution but a hub of innovation,” she explained.

Later in the week, community members and SFU students gath-ered in the Maggie Benston Cen-tre to discuss issues related to the proposed Kinder Morgan Pipeline

expansion through Burnaby Mountain. For Potvin, this event was what he had been looking for-ward to most.

“The Kinder Morgan dialogue is probably the marquee event in my mind,” he said. “I think just because it’s so applicable to SFU and the SFSS.”

Some of the topics on the table included how to engage SFU stu-dents in the SFSS submission to the National Energy Board (NEB), environmental concerns, and the NEB consultation process. Terry Waterhouse, SFU’s chief safety of-ficer, was also present to discuss concerns around the tanker farm at the bottom of Burnaby Moun-tain, among other things.

The week of events culminated in a panel discussion on Thursday afternoon where students and staff

discussed The Role of the Univer-sity in Society: Divestment as a Case Study, and a talk on Friday called “How does climate change impact my health?”

Students in the Divest SFU movement have been pushing the university over the past several years to shift its investments from

fossil fuel compa-nies to other, more sustainable sectors.

To keep an open dialogue on these issues, Potvin ex-plained that orga-nizers wanted to brand the event as a

“Reinvest” rather than “Divest” con-versation: “We’ve kind of wanted to focus more on the proactive side of things. Rather than the whole, ‘Rah rah down with oil,’ it’s more ‘Rah rah let’s look at renewable energy.’”

Truong commented on the overall intent of the events: “I think what will emerge from the con-versations is what students want. What are they concerned about. And I think those will definitely be included within our submission [to the NEB this September].”

6 NEWS March 30, 2015

In cooperation with the Graduate Student Society (GSS), the board moved to hire a Research Assistant to assist the societies in researching and prepar-ing their submission to the National Energy Board regarding the proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline.

Both groups applied for and received intervenor status in the last year, and will work with the Research Assistant to formulate their submission, due by Sep-tember 1, 2015.

The SFSS voted once again to increase the number of hours available to the chief electoral officer (CEO), Oscar Sanchez, so that he can finish the 2015 SFSS elections.

On March 11, the board voted to increase Sanchez’s billable hours from 150 to 200, since he had already worked 143 of the 150 al-lotted to him.

Sanchez asked for another 100 hours to be added “to be safe.” “We’re still dealing with out-standing infractions, we’re backed up on paperwork, we’ll have to do all the budgeting for next year,” he said. “There’s still a sub-stantial amount of things that need to be done.”

Board approved the in-crease in the CEO’s hours from 200 to 300.

Last week was ME Week at SFU, bringing free food, puppy time, and wellness workshops to stu-dents on the university’s differ-ent campuses.

The initiative was held from March 23 to 26 and aimed to promote mental health aware-ness. SFU’s Hi F.I.V.E. club col-laborated with the Simon Fra-ser Student Society (SFSS) and Health and Counselling Services to bring a variety of mental health-oriented activities to the SFU community.

Hi F.I.V.E. is a movement that originated at SFU and has since spread to campuses across North America, which “aims to eliminate stigma towards those who are experiencing mental health distress or illness.”

Erika Horwitz, Associate Di-rector of Counselling, summa-rized the goal of Hi F.I.V.E.: “We want people to stop thinking of ‘them’ and ‘us;’ the ‘mentally ill’ and ‘us.’ To really understand that just like you have physical health and you may get sick with the flu or a virus, it’s the same with mental health.

“You can be doing great at one point and not so great at another.”

Jennifer Hoffmeister, a Hi F.I.V.E. organizer, spoke to The Peak about how she hopes the week’s events can help to reduce stigma around mental health is-sues. “A lot of it is awareness,” she said. “We kind of don’t per-ceive mental health as some-thing we need to talk about.”

Hoffmeister hoped that events during the week might help spread the word about

mental health issues on cam-pus, as well as the resources available to students.

However, she pointed out that stigma is a barrier to receiv-ing care. “People shouldn’t be afraid to talk about it,” she said. “You can’t get help if you’re not going to talk about it.”

On Monday, Hi F.I.V.E. set up tables in the Southeast AQ to promote the event and distrib-ute information about the vari-ous services offered by Health and Counselling, the Canadian Mental Health Association, and the BC Psychological Associa-tion. Tuesday saw a pancake breakfast that had a turnout of over 1000 students.

Hoffmeister said with a chuckle, “I think we spent al-most [one and a half ] to two hours flipping pancakes and serving pancakes.”

On Wednesday, professionals gave massages to stressed-out stu-dents and a drop-in yoga session

was offered. In Saywell Hall on Thursday, students played with puppies brought in by Health and Counselling Services staff.

A highlight of the week was Thursday’s Careers Night in Mental Health event. The event gathered six professionals work-ing in mental health fields to speak about their own careers as well as respond to students’ questions and concerns about mental health on campus.

The organizers for ME Week were enthusiastic about how the event was received by the student community. “It kind of opens up the opportunity to talk

to students about [Hi F.I.V.E. and Mental Health],” said Hoff-meister. “We actually have the opportunity to speak with them about something that, if we just walked up, they might not be normally as receptive to.”

They also noted that turn-out for careers night was triple what they had last year for the same event.

Friday was proclaimed a “Day of Kindness” at SFU, cul-minating in a Kindness Party in Convocation Mall. Horwitz noted, “There is very good re-search that has found that kind-ness and compassion is very good for mental health, for the person giving and the person re-ceiving.” Hi F.I.V.E. handed out coffee and cookies, inviting stu-dents to “pay it forward.”

Horwitz summed up the day’s intent: “If you want others to be happy, practice compas-sion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”

7NEWS March 30, 2015

When asked how their event was going, organizers from Free the Children SFU replied: “Quiet, but good.” Unlike most events, quiet was a sign of suc-cess for the team, considering they were leading students in a vow of silence on SFU’s Burn-aby campus last week.

Participants pledged to re-frain from speaking for 24 hours “in solidarity with children whose voices are not heard and rights are not upheld around the world or those here at home

who are bullied,” according to the Free the Children website.

Event organizer Selena Van Aert told The Peak that the point of the vow was “taking a silent stand so other people don’t [have to].”

She explained the meaning behind refraining from speak-ing for the 24-hour period. “It kind of is symbolizing how these girls who don’t have the right to education, how they aren’t able to speak out about it, they just have to go along with what their life is about [as de-cided by others],” Van Aert said.

Thousands of students at high school and university campuses around the world take the pledge every year to go silent for 24 hours, as a show of support for the rights of girls living in poverty.

SFU’s Burnaby campus is no exception. Van Aert brought attention to why SFU students should be concerned about events such as the Vow of Si-lence. “I think it’s important for SFU to know about it because we are so privileged to be here and have education and have everything that we have here,” she continued. “Having the awareness shows everyone how lucky they really are and how there are so many who aren’t.”

Members of the club col-lected pledges during the week of March 23, inviting students

to take the vow on March 26 in West Mall. Organizers also sold boxes of Dunkin’ Donuts and took photos of participants with their hands placed over their mouths with the word ‘si-lent’ written on them.

Free the Children SFU has been raising funds over the past two years to build a school in Haiti. So far, they have raised

approximately $5,000. “We’re hoping to be able to raise, and we will, that $10,000 to build that school,” Van Aert commented.

When asked how she felt about having to stay silent for 24 hours, Van Aert replied, “I think it will be really hard. [. . .] Com-munication is what we’re doing throughout most of the day.

“But at the same time I’m excited because I’m able to let people know about this issue that’s going on around us in the world,” she concluded.

Louis Riel House residents lobby governors

Shortly after the meeting began, students from Louis Riel House (LRH) arrived to advocate for affordable hous-ing on campus. The students have been mobilizing since the university announced it would officially close the residence in August due to issues with maintenance and the presence of mould in the residence.

Teresa Dettling, a student and single mother living in LRH, shared her concerns that this closure would leave her un-able to afford to live on campus. Board chair Bill Cunningham

thanked the students for at-tending, and mentioned that the Board would be discussing the issue later in their session.

Undergraduate representa-tive on the board Deven Azevedo brought up the issue in the open discussion, asking the board what “additional support” mentioned in their official statements the university is providing residents.

Associate vice president stu-dents Tim Rahilly replied that they are meeting individually with students. Rahilly added that the building is being closed due to health concerns, not plans to gentrify the site.

Annual Operating Budget approved

The Board of Governors ap-proved SFU’s budget and financial

plan for the 2015/2016 year at their meeting last Thursday, for a total budget of $482.1 million.

In his President’s Letter, An-drew Petter wrote, “The oper-ating budget is balanced and seeks to protect program quality, maintain research support and ensure access for qualified stu-dents in the face of funding cuts and other fiscal challenges.”

However, the university does anticipate a $2.9 million reduction to the government grant as a result of reductions at the provincial level.

Board members discussed the impact that increased tuition fees have made towards a bal-anced budget, but representative June Francis cautioned the board against depending on these stu-dents beyond their means: “We

do not want to be an institution that is elitist and exclusionary.”

Consultation with students policy revised

Azevedo brought several re-visions forward regarding Bylaw 10.15 concerning Consultation with Students on Tuition and Fees Policy after “a number of opportunities for improvement were identified by students and their elected leadership.”

Chardaye Bueckert, SFSS pres-ident, Abhishek Nanjundappa, GSS university relations officer, and Azevedo worked with vice-president academic Jon Driver and vice-president finance and administration Pat Hibbitts.

The revised policy stated that the university will invite students

to budget consultations, as well as establish a website to dis-seminate information about pro-posed tuition fee increases.

Responsible Investment Committee offers inaugural report

The newly formed Respon-sible Investment Committee re-ported on the university’s com-mitment to the United Nations Principles for Responsible In-vestment and to incorporate en-vironmental, social, and corpo-rate governance considerations into its investment decisions.

Committee chair Julia H. Kim stated, “This issue is one that tends to elicit a lot of strong opinion and emotions, and this committee will provide a forum for that discussion.”

8 NEWS March 30, 2015

Joe Fresh contributes $1 million to Ryerson’s fashion centre

Fashion students at Ryerson University rejoiced as the Canadian brand, Joe Fresh, announced its donation to and collaboration with the univer-sity’s fashion program to “create a new fashion innovation centre: The Joe Fresh Centre.”

The centre will provide students with access to workspaces, mentorship programs, and seed funding, which will “[put] Toronto on the fash-ion map may happen a lot sooner than later.”

Third-year fashion communications student Katy Sun noted, “We’ve got some really talented people here that are passionate about what they do. As students, most of us probably don’t have the funds to start our own business, so it’s a great opportunity.”

With files from The Ryersonian

UQAM threatens striking students with suspension and expulsion

Administration at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) have announced intentions to take an assertive approach against students who took to the streets of downtown Montreal last week to protest increasing tuition fees.

Nine students were informed that they could potentially “face either one-year suspensions or [. . .] outright expulsion as a result of actions com-mitted during protests on campus over the past two years.”

Although UQAM has a history of political ac-tivism, one of the students threatened with ex-pulsion, Justine Boulanger, explained that such a threat is unprecedented. “It’s the first time the university has issued notice of disciplinary action for political activities,” she said.

With files from The National Post

Rotten food served at Memorial University triggers social media outcry

Pictures of mouldy lemons, undercooked pork chops, and dead flies in tacos served at Memorial University’s dining hall are among the images that students have been posting on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Imgur.

Dining hall meal plans are mandatory for students living in residence, and cost over $2,000 each semester.

MUN dining services claim that the so-cial media posts may not accurately reflect the issues that should be brought directly to their attention. However, students claim they “regularly bring issues to staff’s attention — and the list of sub-par food experiences can’t be brushed off as social media hype.”

With files from CBC

SFU students brewed up some healthy competition last Friday in a craft beer marketing contest held by SFU and Central City Brewing and Distilling.

As part of its plan to launch the Simon Fraser Brewing and Distilling Corporation this spring, the two or-ganizations launched a competition to design the first brand of beer sold by Fraser Brewing.

The competition asked en-trants to design “light lager that is easy-drinking, ‘gateway’ beer” meant to guide customers who tend to drink “mainstream” beer into the craft beer market. The beer also had to cost less than $10 per six pack of cans.

Tim Barnes, VP of Marketing and Sales for Central City and one of the judges, said that the

goal of the night was “to engage with the student population, to get an idea and a plan together for the new beer.” He contin-ued, “We wanted to integrate with students and have students give us their ideas on what they thought would be great beer.”

Barnes was joined on the judging panel by Steve Dooley, executive director of SFU Surrey, Mike Volker, executive director of SFU’s Innovation Office, Dar-ryl Frost, the founder and CEO of Central City, and Gary Lohen, the Central City Brew Master.

The contest’s conclusion was held at the SFU Surrey Campus Mezzanine on last Friday, fol-lowing a week of presentations by the competitors. The week highlighted the work partici-pants had done over the past

months, and they were evalu-ated based on four criteria.

First, a business plan submis-sion that detailed product cat-egory, the target consumer, and recommendations on the prod-uct’s price, promotion, place-ment and packaging.

Second, a 10 to 15 minute pre-sentation for the judges’ panel. Third, a creative concept — a “brand idea and story behind the beer” — to give the product a unique flavour. And fourth, a creative brand name for the beer.

Four groups presented in the finals on March 27: Bea-ver Lager, Semester Ale, The Explorer, and one team that presented two beers, Slackline Lager and Frisbee Ale. Overall, Barnes said that The Explorer team stood out for their com-prehensive business package.

The Explorer team was com-prised of students Carmen Ja-vier, Tiana Lo, Jagroop Gossal, and Muhammad Atif Saad, all of whom are students in event or-ganizer and SFU professor Sarah Lubnik’s BUS 338 Foundations of Innovation course. According to Lubnik, the team “played on

Simon Fraser’s importance in BC history at the same time as refer-encing SFU’s image as a campus of explorers and adventurers.”

“We still may not use the exact name of the beer, but we liked their plan. Their plan was really good,” commented Barnes. “The competition was less about the beer name and more about build-ing a really strong business plan.”

The Explorer was not the only winner, as Barnes stated that the runner-up presented a “great beer label design, which we may actually use.”

The Simon Fraser Brew-ing and Distilling Corporation will now move into production of its first beer, and is already planning to release a second beer in 2016.

9opinions editor Adam Van der Zwanemail opinions@the-peak.ca OPINIONS March 30, 2015

British Columbia has the high-est cost of living of any province in the entire country and the second highest rate of poverty, yet the provincial government remains complacent about pov-erty reduction.

Recently, BC Jobs Minister Shirley Bond announced that after being stagnant for several years, the minimum wage would be raised by 20 cents to a measly $10.45 per hour. For the sake of comparison, once these changes go through in September, BC will have the lowest minimum wage in all Canada except for Sas-katchewan and Alberta.

Even with the new increase, an individual with a full time job being paid the minimum wage and with no dependents will be $5,000 short of the poverty line if living in Metro Vancouver. We must ask our-selves: In what world does a “minimum wage” not provide for the most basic and “mini-mum” standard of living?

The minimum wage is an integral part of any poverty reduction plan. It is meant to help the commonly-termed ‘working poor’ — individuals who may work tirelessly at one, two, or even three jobs and yet barely manage to scrape by the poverty line, especially if

responsible for multiple depen-dents. These individuals are not impoverished because they do not work hard, but rather be-cause the wage floor has been set disproportionately low in comparison to the poverty line.

A robust minimum wage is not meant to replace govern-ment welfare programs targeted towards the unemployed, dis-abled, or elderly. Nor is it meant to replace socialized medicine and subsidized transportation. Rather, its purpose is to provide a predictable basic income for workers who are less in demand. It is a bastion of a healthy econ-omy; the minimum wage gives consumers income to spend and contribute to the economy, rather than making them rely on assistance programs.

There are multiple progres-sive minimum wage systems worth considering in creating a policy that works for BC. For instance, in Australia, a coun-try with lower than six per cent unemployment, the minimum wage is set at $16.87 (Australian dollars). The Australian system is flexible and progressive in that the high minimum wage is only for workers above the age of 20.

Those who are younger face a progressively lower wage, a policy which is quite rational. There is no justification for a 15-year-old to make the same wage as someone 10 years older with far more financial burdens.

Another possible approach would be a separate minimum wage for municipalities with higher costs of living. This is already in place in prosper-ous US cities such as Seattle and San Francisco, who have pledged to implement mu-nicipal minimum wages set at around $15. The status quo in which the province imposes a “one-size-fits-all” solution does not consider discrepan-cies in costs of living. Allowing municipalities to set their own minimum wage would allow

each city a wage that corresponds to its own unique living expenses.

I can recall with a heavy dose of nostalgia the days when I earned minimum wage hang-ing clothes in a dusty old thrift store. While $10.25 was plenty for myself, I remember one co-worker

in particular who worked a day shift at the store and a night shift in the fast food industry just to scrape by a living for her and her two sons.

For too many people, the current minimum wage is a sore excuse for actual poverty reduc-tion. It is time the provincial gov-ernment takes concrete steps to ensure that all BC residents can put food on the table.

DEAR   PROFESSOR   PEAK: Since moving away from my parents’ house, I’ve noticed many problems in life that I feel have stemmed from my relationship with my mother: self-image, jealousy of others with power, and the like. I’ve improved my ability to talk to friends and other family mem-bers about issues that I have with them, but when it comes to talking to my mom, I just can’t do it, especially consider-ing she lives across the country now. I want to be open to her, but I can’t just bring it up on a phone call out of nowhere! How do I resolve these feel-ings? ––– SINCERELY,   ROCKY  RELATIONSHIP

DEAR   ROCKY: I actually had a similar experience around the time that I left home. It was difficult to discuss any problems I had with both of my parents after I left — a problem that has resonated with me for almost my entire adolescent and adult life. It’s definitely not a great feeling to feel barricaded from this kind of relationship with a loved one due to hard feel-ings, past negative experi-ences, or just a prolonged lack of contact.

A couple of things have helped me mend my relation-ship with my loved ones, and hopefully they will help you too. The first is to realize that your mom loves you — you are her kid, and while there may be difficulties, there are also feelings love and support, even if you two don’t outwardly ex-press them to one another.

Also, some time away from your mother may be key! You mention that she now lives across the country, and this distance may actually benefit you. After having lived away from home for a few years, I was able to experience the world for myself, to formulate my own perspectives, and to develop a certain maturity that I was bereft of when living with my parents. This gave me the confidence to overcome some of my hard feelings and talk with my parents.

If you’re still anxious to talk with your mom, remem-ber that inaction feeds anxiety. Give yourself some distance, then step out of your comfort zone and make an effort to connect. She may just recip-rocate the response and sur-prise you! Relationships with loved ones can be tough, but if you’ve recognized the divide and are open to mending it, I have confidence that you and your mom will be happy in the end. ––– PROFESSOR  PEAK

Are   you   an   SFU   student   or   faculty   member   who   needs   some   relationship,  student,  or  SFU-related  advice?   In   150  words  or   less,   send  your   issues  anon-ymously   by   visiting   the-peak.ca/professorpeak.   Your   entry   could   be   pub-lished  in  our  next  issue,  along  with  some  helpful  advice  from  Professor  Peak!

THE LEFT SUMMIT

10 OPINIONS March 30, 2015

great TV, no one will trust you with a big budget.

It’s time to take risks, shell out some cash, and join the move-ment, Canada.

We are the HBO generation. We grew up watching dark, sexual, nu-anced, creative television that ex-plore themes that resonated with the human condition. To engage us, you’ll need to start taking risks. Less of the traditional ‘you can watch it with your grandma’ programming, like Murdoch Mysteries, and more “stylized, smart and sexy,” like BBC’s Sherlock.

Moreover, if you want to docu-ment our history and culture as the CBC does, you need to do so in a compelling manner. Boardwalk Empire, with its story about Prohi-bition-era America and the crimi-nals and politicians that ruled it, will be talked about for years to come. If Canadians are to watch program-ming that tells our story, we need to create honest, thought-provoking drama, no matter how risky and ex-pensive it may be.

Finally, it’s about national pride. We have our authors, our comedians, and our pro

athletes. It’s about time we have our TV, too.

The sense of pride we feel when our writers produce great work and the rest of the world watches may just do more for Canadian soli-darity than another period drama based in 1900s Toronto can.

There’s a generation of Cana-dian actors, directors, storytellers ready to tell stories more passion-ate and challenging than we’re used to, and it’s about time we fully support them. After all, it’d be a damn shame if their homegrown talent is never put to use.

TV’s golden age is upon us. The small screen has become a more incisive storytelling medium than ever before. Just ask Walter White, Don Draper, or Frank Underwood.

Finally, creators are using the multiple-episode structure to their advantage, delving deeper into character arcs, constructing complex story lines, and provid-ing a highly satisfying and dis-tinct viewing experience from that of the silver screen.

But where’s the hit homegrown Canadian programming in all of this? I can’t remember the last time a friend recommended that I watch the latest show the CBC picked up, and whenever I do happen to catch an episode of Murdoch Mysteries, the camera-work, lighting, dia-logue — well, all of it seems just a bit

tackier and less professional than what I’ve grown accustomed to.

Canadian TV has failed to truly resonate with audiences and churn out highly entertaining content over the years. Of course there are the rare exceptions, such as Trailer Park Boys, but if there is a Renaissance happening, I think we ought to be a part of it.

Canadian programming has been lacking in part because one of the CBC’s mandates is to “re-flect Canada and its regions to national and regional audiences.” That sounds great, but there are only so many Alberta references I’ll get when I watch Little Mosque on the Prairie because well, I’m not from Alberta. The mandate places predetermined constraints on TV writers, limiting how inventive

they can get with their stories.

To create com-pelling program-ming also means likely offending viewers. A good

portion of our original program-ming funnels through the CBC, and as a public broadcaster, they’re not really in the business of pissing people off. Finally, you often need money to make good television, but when you and the rest of your Canadian brethren haven’t proven you can make

March, April, May: the spring se-mester is coming to a rapid end and the time for course registra-tion is upon us. Another term where we must face the chal-lenges of schedule accommo-dation for our institution as we attempt to meet their demand-ing prerequisite requirements. These prerequisites are often topics that are not of interest to us and are typically seen as a means to an end.

As irrelevant as these courses may be, they are highly publicized

and promoted by the university. Everyone is familiar with classes that meet our WQB require-ments, regardless of their mini-mal appeal. What is not adver-tised, though, are directed study course opportunities.

As students who are suppos-edly “engaging the world,” we need to be aware of opportunities that encourage us to take educa-tion into our own hands and be given the opportunity to resist the conformity of a conventional uni-versity classroom.

Directed studies are available in every department that I have researched. English, education, business, sciences, and math-ematics all allow for these op-portunities. They are typically accessible for third- and fourth-year undergraduate students.

Yet when students register for their courses, directed studies have a minimal course description that make them seem confusing and unappealing. SFU describes these courses as “independent reading or research in topics se-lected in consultation with the su-pervising instructor.” Snooze.

Perhaps this ambiguity is due to the university’s concerns with the quick success of too many students. While SFU encourages academic success, it also encour-ages students ‘take time’ to com-plete their education. Under the regular class-structured system,

students are more likely to expe-rience less success, which in turn may set back the amount of time it takes to complete their edu-cation and allow the institution financial gain.

Directed studies, on the other hand, are geared toward what the student is interested in learning.

They leave room for cre-ativity and in-dependence, and with this added moti-

vation, a student can succeed in all of his or her directed studies courses.

This semester I had the privi-lege to partake in an empowering directed study within the Faculty of Education. I have been able to take control of my own education by

reading articles that are important to me. My particular directed study meets once a week in the Highland Pub, where we discuss social issues in education. We also have the op-portunity to mentor students dur-ing office hours, a deeply engaging educational experience.

I have the freedom to choose what I study and eventually com-pile a final project that is useful and relevant, rather than an aca-demic paper that will only see the recycling bin.

I have never been so impas-sioned by a course in the five years that I have been a student at this institution. Directed studies provide a much-needed escape from the monotony and stress of regular coursework. I recommend them to all stu-dents at SFU.

11OPINIONS March 30, 2015

health benefits for newborns, yet too many women are ogled at and receive rude comments.

Every day we see sex on TV and underdressed models on the covers of magazines. If the society we live in has no issue advertising the human body, why do so many people feel un-comfortable with mothers who breastfeed? The short answer is that, when the female body presents itself in any sort of non-

sexual way, the gen-eral public doesn’t seem to know how to react.

A c c o r d i n g to Léger, mothers

have to overcome “humility hur-dles” when it comes to nursing. If that’s the case, then the last thing we should do is go out of our way to shame them. The idea that breastfeeding is in some way a personal offence is ridiculous.

It’s high time we start re-specting them and their bod-ies, instead of accusing them of indecency.

The truth is that breasts are not objects to be romanticized and sexualized; they are a part

of the body that serves an im-portant role in terms of child up-bringing. A woman should never feel ashamed for using them for this purpose.

Breastfeeding in public is not the problem; how we think of the

female body is. It’s their choice where to breastfeed, and it’s up to them to decide what their child needs. I sure wouldn’t want to eat my lunch in the bathroom, and I doubt mothers want their babies to either.

Let’s talk about breasts. Earlier this month, a Vancou-

ver woman, Kristen Hilderman, was shamed by a flight attendant for breastfeeding on the plane without a cover. A similar event took place in a Manitoban mall only days before. While feeding her child, Tara Léger was asked to move into a washroom, despite the fact that she was discreetly nursing where she was.

Both women reported feeling attacked and humiliated by those who called their breastfeeding to the attention of those around them, suggesting that what they were doing was “offensive.”

Cue the eyerolls from the large community of people who

think that public breastfeeding is either a non-issue, or that ask-ing women to “cover up” and “take it elsewhere” is an appro-priate response.

But the truth is that standing up for public breastfeeding is in-credibly important in the struggle for gender equality. To shame a woman for breastfeeding pub-licly sends the message that they should self-consciously hide what they are doing.

To nurse a child is not about publicly displaying your breasts. It’s about nourishment. Mothers aren’t looking to make a statement or expose themselves — they sim-ply want to feed their children. Breastfeeding is completely natu-ral, and is proven to have many

I’ve been drinking my coffee black since the beginning of last sum-mer. It was a tough habit to get into! Straight, black coffee can be painfully bitter, though once I ac-quired a taste for the drink, I’ll say that waking up to a fresh-pressed pot of black-gold is absolutely ter-rific. I’ve decreased the intensity of my heartburn problems, and have contributed to the less rapid deterioration of my health — all while loading myself up with the wonder drug, caffeine.

But, I’ll admit, there is the odd time that I decide to add a bit of sugar in my morning cup o’ java, and when I do, it’s ecstasy. A mouth-gasm of enhanced, sweetened flavour that sends my brain into a buzzing overdrive. Sometimes I’ll order that double-double, just to give myself an extra kick. Adding sugar once in a while, and in small doses, ain’t no biggie, and it gives me a sim-ple something to indulge in from time to time.

My grandma used to spoon four heaping teaspoons of sugar into her coffee cup. She’d also have two cups per day. For those like me who have trouble with math, that’s eight heaping teaspoons of sugar in the morning!

My grandma obviously had blood sugar levels of steel, and I’ve never been able to under-stand how people can consume so much sucrose without keeling over from cardiac arrest.

So, if you’re one to add coffee to your sugar, here are some facts

you learned in your high school biology class: sugar contains fruc-tose, and too much of this can destroy your liver, which means you could die. Overloading your liver can lead to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which means you could die. Sugar also causes insulin resistance, which leads to type II diabetes, which means you could die. Sugar also leads to can-cer, which means . . . wait a sec, did you just read my mind?

In short, don’t die. Keep away from all that sugar!

12 OPINIONS March 30, 2015

The U-Pass program has been extremely beneficial for students all over the Lower Mainland, but with the ongoing transit referen-dum, the future of the program may be at risk.

According to the U-Pass web-site, and from an SFU City Con-versations event I was part of with the chief negotiator for the pro-gram, the current contract with TransLink for our U-Pass prices ends next March and will need to be re-negotiated. However, if the referendum does not result in a ‘yes’ vote, the U-Pass program may likely cease to exist.

As students, it is crucial that we become involved in our com-munity by voting in this referen-dum. The Metro Vancouver region is our home and many of us will continue to live here beyond grad-uation, and we have a responsibil-ity to the place we live. We pay thousands of dollars at university to invest in our future careers; it only takes minutes to register on-line, and mail in our ballots to in-vest in the future of our home.

In order for the U-Pass pro-gram to continue, students must come together and vote ‘yes’ for better transit. At the City Con-versations event, Jonathan Cote, the Mayor of New Westminster, stated that this vote seems to be a method the Mayors’ Council is using to see if the public is in-vested in transit improvements for the region.

This would be so that munici-palities and the province will be even more invested in transpor-tation needs. According to Cote, the tax increase is not a major funder of the projects, but rather an indicator of our commitment to transportation — a necessity we must be willing to invest in for the future.

Unfortunately, this measure of community commitment would backfire if the referendum results in a ‘no’ vote. Discussion at the event surrounded how the Mayor’s Council will take this as a message from the region that we do not care enough about a healthy, sustainable, and congestion-free region to in-vest in transportation.

This message could also undermine future U-Pass ne-gotiations, since current fund-ing has fuel tax for our transit system’s services maxed out. Past incidents, such as a U-Pass price hike a few years ago, have shown how TransLink, under higher political authority, may not maintain subsidized fares for students if they need more money to increase services. From a business point of view, it makes sense to charge stu-dents more for the services they are using if we take no ac-tion to try and make our ser-vices better.

However, we can avoid an-other U-Pass price hike — or even losing the pass altogether

— by voting ‘yes,’ the tax money from everyone in the Lower M a i n l a n d will go to-

wards actually increasing services throughout the entire region, so there will be even more accessibil-ity, hours, and places to go with our shiny blue U-Pass.

We shouldn’t take what we have for granted. We have U-Passes thanks to the hard work and ad-vocacy from students like us. Let’s be the next group to do something beneficial for all students.

Monica Lewinsky returned to the public stage to speak about her very public scan-dal at the TED Conference Truth and Dare on March 19.

“At 22, I fell in love with my boss. At [. . .] 24, I learned the devastating consequences.” It’s no se-cret that Lewinsky was pub-licly and globally humili-ated by Internet users due to her sexual relationship with then-president Bill Clinton. “I was branded as a tramp, tart, slut, whore, bimbo, and, of course, ‘that woman,’” she recalled from the comments posted online.

Lewinsky’s ‘slut-sham-ing’ experience was one of the first of many experiences women have had online since 1998. But this type of web-shaming is only one of the forms of a bigger, more prevalent issue: cyberbully-ing. This issue is responsible for similar recent events, including the leaked nude photos of female celebrities such as Jennifer Lawrence and Kaley Cuoco.

Cyberbullying is a prob-lem that needs to be ad-dressed due to the exponen-tial damage it has caused, not only to women, but to all genders. However, we can counteract this issue through simple online compassion.

One mustn’t forget the other notable and devastat-ing occurrences of women’s privacies being infringed upon online, due to desen-sitized online hatred. Look no further than British Co-lumbian Amanda Todd’s suicide, provoked by the online abuse she received from posting a topless photo — a tragedy that could have been prevented if more online users had actively

recognized the sensitive sit-uation, and stood up against this harassment.

Unfortunately, cyberbul-lying has become incredibly prevalent in our society. Ac-cording to a study by Inter-net security firm MacAfee, at least one in three teenag-ers are now bullied online in America. Moreover, online anonymity allows for hatred that often targets women, minorities, and LGBTQ in-dividuals. Because of this, Lewinsky is now calling for a revolution, and I stand be-hind her.

Comment sections, forum posts, and personal profiles have become the public bat-tleground for what seems like a neverending spread of hate. With social media plat-forms failing to offer protec-tion, cyberbullying also stole away lives like that of Nova Scotian Rehtaeh Parsons.

While our g o v e r n m e n t needs to cre-ate laws that make this a crime, the reality is that

changes must be made di-rectly through web users.

We have the power to af-fect real change on the web, and to fight the disassociation between the real person and the virtual profile that cyber-bullying causes. The Internet has become a bystander so-ciety that continues to permit this behaviour — since the consequences that occur from such behaviour in the real world often do not apply, this online culture has projected a deafening silence that blocks the pleas of real person’s pleas behind the screen.

Though, it is easy for us to become upstanders within our bystander society: we just have to counteract the nega-tivity by making the personal choice to empathize with our friendly comments, rather than remain desensitized.

“Empathy from one per-son can make a difference,” Lewinsky advised. “Compas-sionate comments help abate the negativity.”

With so many suicides and so much harm caused by cyberbullying, the least you can do is to click with compassion.

13March 30, 2015COMMUNITY PHOTOSMarch 30, 2015

photo editor Brandon Hillier email photos@the-peak.ca

ast Thursday night, candidates and friends gathered in the Maggie Benston Centre at

midnight to hear the results of the 2015 SFSS election. Emotions ran high and the room filled with tears and cheers as a new board of directors emerged.

The big winner of the night was president-elect Enoch Wong, whose celebration plans fell in line with his entire campaign: heading home to watch Disney movies.

A  look  at  some  of  SFU’s  most  notable  Honorary  Degree  recipients  

   

HONOURS  BY  THE  NUMBERSHONOURS  BY  THE  NUMBERS

A  look  at  some  of  SFU’s  most  notable  Honorary  Degree  recipients  

 

 

HONOURS  BY  THE  NUMBERSHONOURS  BY  THE  NUMBERS

16 ARTS March 30, 2015

Provocative and dramatic, British playwright Sarah Kane’s Blasted was met with hostility and outrage upon its 1995 debut. The play was origi-nally condemned for its use of ab-surd brutality (in one scene, for ex-ample, one of the characters sucks out another’s eyes). But it quickly became a historic piece of theatre.

In commemoration of its 20th anniversary, Pi Theatre is present-ing the second-ever professional staging of Blasted in Canada. De-spite its legacy, the play has only been staged a handful of times in all of North America. North Amer-ican producers have been largely unwilling to confront the ambi-tious theatricality and courageous acting that the play demands.

Artist Director Richard Wolfe and the Pi Theatre have endeav-oured to bring the conversation sur-rounding Blasted to Western Can-ada. The play continues to generate controversy due to its intense vio-lence, but it is also demanding and highly theatrical on an artistic level.

“The play is about the link between intimate violence and the institutionalized violence of war,” explained Wolfe. “The vio-lence is not a glorification of vio-lence, it is not for entertainment, but [Sarah Kane] was showing that all war is a nightmare.”

The play opens with a dis-turbed man’s brutal seduction of a young woman in his hotel room. The wrenching domestic scene is interrupted by the ar-rival of a war-hardened soldier — an event that blasts open “the metaphorical door that stands between us and institutional vio-lence,” Wolfe explained.

Still, the play portrays the profoundly sensitive side of hu-manity. “It is a love story, too,” Wolfe described. “There is a real sense of need [for] compassion and human contact.” The play is the convergence of the most horrific, malicious acts with the desire to be loved.

Written when Sarah Kane was only 23 years old, Blasted was the first of five plays she wrote before the her suicide in 1999 at the age of 28. Her in-fluential work deals with love, desire, pain, torture, and death.

Wolfe’s production features daring and brilliant actors Cher-ise Clarke, Raresh DiMofte, and Michael Kopsa. Acclaimed set

designer Drew Facey confronts the challenge of creating a set capable of exploding each show, while Simon Fraser University alumnus Remy Siu will provide sound design.

After the performance, au-dience members are invited to mingle in Pi Theatre’s adjoin-ing lounge. “The play doesn’t give answers, it just makes you think and makes you feel,” ex-plained Wolfe. “We want people to come down after the show and have a couple drinks and talk about the experience.”

People who are interested in dangerous art and polished aes-thetics will enjoy this non-tradi-tional performance. “There is high theatricality, there is fantastic acting — the play is electric,” de-scribed Wolfe. “If you like theatre [that] you will be engaged in, then you’d enjoy [Blasted].”

Ferenc FehérThe Vancouver International

Dance Festival presented a diverse line up of artists this year, and of-fered many free shows as well as ticketed events. Hungarian chore-ographer and performer Ferenc Fehér’s work, Tao Te, was one of the free shows at the Roundhouse Community Centre.

Along with Balázs Szitás, Fehér’s choreography was full of deliberate movements that had the two danc-ers running and tumbling around the stage, throwing and pushing themselves off of each other with-out losing momentum. It was strik-ing to see how well his performance conveyed the speed of traveling through life on our chosen path.

The structural device of Fehér’s dance theatre piece is represented

in the program by a quote from Martin Heidegger: “The lasting el-ement in thinking is the way. And ways of thinking hold within them that mysterious quality that we can walk them forward and backward, and that indeed only the way back will lead us forward.”

Philosophically and physically complex, Tao Te was both a beau-tiful study of Heidegger’s concepts and an impressive piece of choreog-raphy. With limp limbs, the dancers’ vigilant, stilted movements were intriguing and thought-provoking as they moved through various se-quences, including an aggressive wrestling bout.

Fehér says that, to him, “think-ing and choreographing are mirror-images of each other since they refer to the same secret.” His unique combination of freestyle dance and martial arts, coupled with his inter-est in philosophy, made for a multi-faceted work of art.

Out Innerspace and 605 Collective

Another double bill show fea-tured two local dance companies who have grown together over the years, Out Innerspace and the 605 Collective. They both presented works-in-progress that highlighted their strengths.

Out Innerspace’s style is cin-ematic, dark, and full of complex facial expressions. The seven danc-ers in this piece stayed in a tight group and moved as one being dur-ing most of the piece. The work was choreographed and performed by company founders David Raymond and Tiffany Tregarthen, in collabo-ration with Laura Avery, Ralph Esca-millan, Elissa Hanson, Arash Khak-pour, and Renée Sigouin.

With animalistic intensity, they slinked around the stage in aggres-sive, complex formations. What I love about this company is their ability to create complex characters

and narratives through their unique movement. One particularly inno-vative moment was when a few of the dancers formed a large talking mouth from a combination of dif-ferent body parts.

The group of dancers seems to be fighting and avoiding some outside force during the piece, while also dealing with some parallel internal conflict. The work is a comment on the over-simplification of good and evil, and begins with a short mono-logue which says “you are good” and “we could not do this good without you.”

The 605 Collective has long been one of my favourite dance companies, and I am looking forward to seeing the full length version of Vital Few next year. Choreographed by Lisa Gelley and Josh Martin and performed along with Hayden Fong, Jane Os-borne, Odile-Amélie Peters, Jes-sica Wilkie, and Sophia Wolfe, this work-in-progress explores the theory that it only takes a small number of people in any group to effect change.

Playing on the constant code-pendence and interrelationship be-tween the dancers, this work was a fascinating study of how one small change has a much larger ripple effect. They dance as a collective while also allowing each dancer’s distinct style to shine through, and there is no leader as they all lead the group at some point.

The dancers are highly aware of each other throughout the piece, knowing exactly when to pick up where another left off with impeccably smooth tran-sitions. They were autonomous from the group while also being highly dependent on them. The 605 Collective has always created movement in a collaborative way, and this work explores this concept beautifully.

17ARTS March 30, 2015

Tim Johnson’s Home is a computer animated science fiction-comedy film about an alien invasion with an inter-esting twist. Themes such as friendship, accepting differ-ences, and finding a place of belonging are blended with a good dose of humour in this fun-filled kids’ movie.

Home begins when an alien race, the Boov, uses an anti-gravity special power to capti-vate and transport humans to a distant desert planet in order to take over Earth. Unlike most members of his alien race, Oh (Jim Parsons) is an overly en-thusiastic and lovable Boov who naively believes that ev-eryone is his friend.

In reality, Oh is strongly disliked by fellow Boov, a feel-ing that is only augmented by his serious blunder: Oh ac-cidentally invites the entire galaxy, including the Boov’s enemy alien race, to his housewarming party.

Banished from the Boov and attempting to run away to a Boovless spot on Earth, Oh runs into a feisty human girl named Tip (Rihanna) who escaped captivity and now longs to reunite with her mother. Although Tip is

initially repelled by and dis-trustful of Oh, both eventu-ally develop a friendship and unite to find Tip’s mother — and save the planet while they are at it.

The hero of the movie is Oh. His use of incorrect Eng-lish (possibly correct in Boov language) in statements such as “can I come into the out now?” or “my warming-of-house party” are sure to draw laughs and ‘awws’ from the audience. Jim Parsons’ voic-ing of Oh further adds to the character’s likeability.

One of the most amus-ing scenes in the film comes when Oh is unable to stop his body parts from bursting into dance when he is first intro-duced to human music.

Although the storyline is fairly simplistic and mostly geared towards young chil-dren, the film provides deeper messages that adults will surely pick up on. In one scene, Oh tells Tip that the Boov were informed that the human race was backwards and needed the Boov to lib-erate them, an obvious refer-ence to colonialist ideologies.

In Home, acts of friend-ship and understanding are what lead to viable solutions to the world’s problems. Tip and Oh team up to find Tip’s mother and fix Oh’s mistakes, suggesting that this may be the only way to build a sus-tainable home.

All in all, Home is an ad-venturous ride, with an im-portant lesson on friendship to teach its young and mature audiences alike.

Walk the Moon from Ohio brought their energetic, danceable music to the Commodore Ballroom on March 22 as part of their Talking is Hard tour, and showed us all why it’s sometimes important to just shut up and dance.

With colourful neon lights, red-streaked hair, and plenty of synth, the show felt like an ’80s throwback — in a good way. I also really enjoyed lead singer Nicholas Petricca’s relaxed per-formance style. Their entrance song as they took the stage was The Lion King’s “The Circle of Life,” and it set a peaceful mood that remained throughout their set. Their stage presence and Petricca’s carefree dancing also exuded positive energy that crossed over to the crowd.

Petricca must be into yoga or some other relaxing hobby. At one point, he asked the crowd to take a few deep breaths with him, and also did a group activ-ity where he had us pull in all the “bullshit” and things that make us angry, tired, or sad, and pull all that stuff up and out through our fingertips to let it go.

Honestly, I think more bands should employ yoga techniques in their stage show. It focused the audience and loosened us up to dance without a care in the world.

On “Different Colors,” the band showed off some great electric guitar riffs, and reverbed

into the very catchy “Tightrope.” The ’80s synth vibe continued for their fist-pumping, anthemic “Down in the Dumps.”

The band also showed their range with higher-pitched, echoing voices paired with chilling synth, while “Up 2 U” had a much heavier sound with hard rock influences.

Petricca described the song “Avalanche” as “a song about taking life by the balls.” This track is incredibly catchy, and reminds me a lot of Athlete’s “Superhuman Touch,” perhaps because it evokes the same inex-plicably cosmic, uplifting feeling.

The empowerment contin-ued as Petricca got the crowd

to jump in unison with “Jenny” and put our hands up to “I Can Lift a Car.”

They saved “Shut Up and Dance” as their last song be-fore the encore, and came back to do a surprisingly great cover of The Killers’ “All These Things that I’ve Done.” It was a treat to sing “I’ve got soul, but I’m not a soldier” with the enthusiastic crowd.

I think “Anna Sun” is still their best-known song, so it makes sense that it was their final song of the night, allowing some of their bright, energetic attitude to stay with us long after the show was over.

18 ARTS March 30, 2015

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! Registered to vote in B.C.

! Living in Metro Vancouver

You can ask for a voting package to be mailed to you by calling 1-800-661-8683 or online at elections.bc.ca /ovr. You can ask for a voting package until midnight on Friday, May 15, 2015.

Elections BC must receive your completed ballot package before 8 p.m. on Friday, May 29, 2015.

Visit elections.bc.ca or call 1-800-661-8683 for more information.

elec tions .bc.ca 1-800- 661-8683

Last Wednesday, I had the plea-sure of visiting the Vancouver Art Gallery and seeing its three stun-ning exhibitions: Cézanne and the Modern, The Poetics of Space, and Unscrolled.

On the first floor of the gallery until the May 18, you can find im-pressionist paintings collected be-tween the 1940s and ’50s by Henry and Rose Pearlman.

As indicated by its name, this exhibition is focused largely on works done by painter Paul Cé-zanne. Working with materials such as watercolours, Cézanne pushed his bright colours outside of his sketched lines as a reaction

to the complexities of real life — he was building his works out of pure colour.

All of the pieces on display in this collection showcase artists who were reacting to the invention of the photograph — once real life could be captured in that form, painters

and sculptors began to challenge themselves to create their own viv-idly colourful and often over-exag-gerated impressions of life.

The Cézanne exhibition features works that cannot be found any-where other than this tour collec-tion — they are usually housed at

Princeton University. I would rec-ommend checking this exhibition out for the rare opportunity to see this stunning collection.

Until April 6 on the second floor of the gallery you will find Unscrolled, which includes a collection of works by 10 cur-rently active post-modern Chi-nese artists who are both chal-lenging and working within confines of traditional Chinese art and history. I found this ex-hibit extremely stunning; all the works pushed boundaries in their own way to create memo-rable pieces addressing Chinese culture and heritage.

In one room, you can find an interactive piece entitled Bang by famous Chinese activist and artist Ai Weiwei. This piece is made up of almost 900 antique chairs that were traditionally found in Chi-nese homes due to their resilient structure and ease of creation. Needless to say, Bang is com-pletely breathtaking. Visitors are free to walk through the art and interact with it as it tells a story of Chinese culture now lost.

On the third and final floor, until May 24, you can find The Poetics of Space, an exhibition curated around the investi-gation of space and our place within it. The artists featured in this collection range from his-torical to current. Because of this, each piece or set of pieces is unique. The viewer is given a wide range of styles, mediums, and outlooks via the varying perspectives of each artist.

It is clear that while each of the current exhibits at the Vancou-ver Art Gallery are able to stand alone, they all benefit from one another’s themes and reception.

A walk through the gallery starts with some of the early be-ginnings of the rejection of stan-dards and practices in art and the world. You are then led into a new age of self-reflection that looks back while striving forward, and you end with varying perceptions on the world around us and the ways in which artists throughout history have challenged our per-spectives. What a wonderful way to spend a day.

19ARTS March 30, 2015

Having dropped his debut album last October and opened for major hip-hop talents in-cluding MGK, YG, and Hop-sin since, Dkay is a rapper to watch out for in Vancouver’s local hip-hop scene. His fun and energetic music, along with his promotion of the city, have given his name a lot of buzz within Vancouver, and he’ll be opening for big-name Atlanta rapper Waka Flocka Flame on April 9 at Venue.The Peak: How excited are you to perform with Waka Flocka Flame?

Dkay: I am pretty excited mov-ing forward with this show; there is going to be a lot of high energy and I like that. Waka Flocka is for sure one of the bigger artists I’ve opened for and that’s [. . .] got good energy because the crowd’s really excited.P: When you are on stage per-forming, what type of vibe do you like to give off?

D: I’ve been MCing and host-ing parties for a really long time,

so I have a good ability of read-ing the crowd and trying to keep the energy high and keep them interested. I like to bring my audience through a story, and I give a little introduction before each song so that they know what they’re expecting and they can feel a vibe off the song be-fore it starts. P: Who are your biggest influ-ences as an artist?

D: I would say there’s a mix-ture of 50 Cent and Nelly. Those dudes made me really want to start rapping. Since I’ve been rapping I’ve been influenced by Drake, YG, Ty Dolla Sign, and Lil Wayne. You know, it kind of changes as the music changes.P: Do you feel you fit into a sub-genre within hip-hop?

D: I would definitely say that my sector is not defined yet. Every region has their own style: East Coast, West Coast, the Bay Area — even Toronto has a de-veloping sound. I’m trying to do the same thing and put Vancou-ver on the map, and come out with something that’s unique.P: Being from Canada, have you found it tougher to sell yourself as a rapper and artist?

D: To be honest, I actu-ally find that Canada is the least receptive to my music. In the United States and dif-ferent countries they are used

to having different outlets for music, so they are less picky. In Vancouver they support their local artists, but they also want to hear music from major artists that don’t come from the city. P: Where do you see yourself within the Vancouver hip-hop scene right now and in five years?

D: I am about to put out an-other EP in a year. In five years, I hope to be an established main-stream hip-hop artist in Cana-dian and American markets, hopefully overseas as well, and I’m trying to set up my own re-cord label called Leftside Music Group, but I’m the only artist on there right now. I’ve got a couple different producers and song-writers working for me right now, but I’m hoping to sign other art-ists once I blow up.P: Referring to your song “Friend Zone,” what advice can you offer to the fellas struggling with the friend zone?

D: The reason it comes up is because guys are a little bit shy and nervous, and don’t re-ally know how to put their true feelings on the table. And that’s when guys get put in the friend zone. If guys put their genuine sides forward, a decent girl’s not gonna shut that down. I think we gotta stop worrying about being embarrassed and just go for it.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s ad-aptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Inherent Vice is a laby-rinth with no way out; the more you think about its plot and try to piece together all of its clues, the more the solu-tion eludes you.

The point is to become immersed in its conventional setup and the lunacy of its journey through a mad and corrupt world. The film un-folds like a ’70s conspiracy thriller where everything leads “straight to the top” (think

Chinatown), except that In-herent Vice offers no solution to the mystery or reprieve from the paranoia.

Doc ( Joaquin Phoenix), a private investigator, is look-ing into the disappearance of his ex-girlfriend’s mil-lionaire boyfriend, who has a girlfriend, who also has a boyfriend. The story has even more friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, non-friends, and people who are just down-right unfriendly. Oh, and things get much more convo-luted than that.

The film also jumps from one moment to the next with-out disclosing how we got from point A to point B. An-derson’s movie seems to be about as stoned as its char-acters and as hungover as the time period it depicts. This is deliberate: regardless of whether or not you agree with Anderson’s unconventional vision, you have to marvel at

the uncompromising nature of his intent.

What were we talking about? I don’t know. Forget it.

Inherent Vice features an enormous ensemble cast who play exaggerated caricatures of 1970s archetypes in a dense plot with hippies, prostitutes, drug dealers, dirty cops, and rich men gone crazy, creating a hallucinatory world full of dis-tinct individuals (and memora-bly over-the-top performances from Josh Brolin, Benicio Del Toro, and Martin Short).

In order to enjoy the film you have to get lost in each in-dividual moment and not worry about where the plot is heading.

The viewer is never given a gateway into any of the char-acters’ experiences through stylistic flamboyance, as in other films about druggies. An-derson avoids point-of-view shots or any subjective visu-

als but rather plants his cam-era down and simply observes these whack-jobs. He’s creat-ing a sense of time and place where the char-

acters are trying to hold onto a lifestyle that is fleeting.

If taken as a plot-driven procedural, Inherent Vice would be a frustrating mess with one-dimensional char-acters and underdeveloped plotting. Taken as a period piece, it fascinates in almost every moment.

The film initially immerses you with its genre conven-tions, which recall the para-noid thrillers of the ’70s, be-fore it subverts their formulae and leaves you lost in its in-sane world without any coher-ent resolution.

By the time the credits came, when I was airlifted out from the labyrinth, I found myself eager to return. There has to be an answer to the mystery. There has to be someone at the top pulling all the strings — right? Or has the movie just made me as para-noid and stoned as hippies losing touch in the ’70s?

20 sports editor Austin Cozicaremail sports@the-peak.ca SPORTS

March 30, 2015

The move from Barrie, ON was tough on the business stu-dent. Though he joined three “best friends” from Barrie who were al-ready at SFU, he admits the first few weeks were a real challenge.

“I’m really close to my family — three brothers, two wonderful par-ents — it’s tough. I [saw] them day-in and day-out, my mom cooks my meals, my dad talks to me everyday, and we just hang out because my dad works from home. We’re just a really close family.

“All of a sudden, just not see-ing them at all, it was really tough,” Adrian continues.

“In October I had kind of a breakdown, I had a week where I was like, ‘I want to go home, this is not for me,’ [. . .] I almost failed my first math midterm, that was the big thing, ‘What am I doing here? I don’t belong here,’” he notes.

Adrian VanderHelm is the first member of SFU’s men’s swim team to qualify for the NCAA Div II Na-tional Championship — a feat he topped by also becoming the first male All-American swimmer at SFU. All in his freshman year.

“It didn’t really sink in until I got there and I started to see the level of competition,” reflects Adrian on his experience at the national championship. “Coach Liam [Don-nelly] is not really one to congratu-late, or be very buddy-buddy with you, but he gave me, we call it ‘the Liam Donnelly side hug,’ he gives you a pat on the back. It’s a big deal, if he does that, it’s like, ‘Woah, he gave you a hug.’”

Despite his early success at SFU, Adrian was a late bloomer to the sport of swimming.

“It’s my sixth year. I haven’t been swimming that long — most people start when they’re a lot younger, I only started [competitive swim-ming] in grade nine.”

In high school, Adrian struggled with his body weight. “When I was in grade eight, I was 5’7” and 220 lbs, I was a really big kid,” he remem-bers. “I was always pretty good at swimming, so my mom heard how

swimmers were super ripped, and she was like, ‘maybe he could try that and see if he liked it, and maybe it would help with his weight.’ [. . .] So I tried it and I was very good at it.

“The biggest struggle I still have is nutrition,” he notes. “I log my food every single day, I count calo-ries, I count certain nutrients I take in — and I still have trouble keeping my weight down.”

While Adrian notes that there is a history of weight issues in his family, he was reluctant to attri-bute it to ‘bad genes.’

“Some people say it’s in the genes, but I don’t like to look at it like that, because then it’s like, ‘Oh, I’m just going to be fat,’ and I’m like you might as well try [to lose weight],” he explains.

With swimming, Adrian has found an avenue to get in shape, noting that he is now at a “comfort-able” 187 lbs.

“You always hear people say, ‘swimming is the best exercise, it’s a full-body thing,’ but it really is true,” he says. “Not only is it a full body workout, it burns a lot of calories fast, and it’s fun for me — I don’t know if other people find

it fun. It also is very calming — if I’m ever stressed for school I’ll go for a swim, even if I already swam twice that day.”

Exercise, however, wasn’t the only thing Adrian found in swim-ming. He also attributes a new-found confidence to his sport.

“I was shy, I had trouble with I guess you could say bullying — I don’t like that word — but peo-

ple picking on you and people call-ing you fat or ‘fattie.’ It hurts and it sucks, but

in the end it makes you who you are,” Adrian says.

“That’s the best, being able to come from people making fun of you and letting that drive you [. . .] You can’t let it push you down. I kind of rose above it and showed them what I was made of.”

When the time came to decide on where to go for university, Adrian narrowed it down to three choices: University of Victoria, University of Toronto, and SFU. Ultimately, the American collegiate atmosphere drew him to SFU.

“The people in the States just race like crazy. It’s nuts; you go to a swim meet and there’s more people watching than a Canadian hockey game — and it’s swimming, nobody even watches swimming,” he says.

But things quickly got better.“After I had an interview with

SFU SportsDesk [an SFU Athletics-produced web series], and having them want to interview me, talk-ing to people, and being part of the leadership in the school in my first year, all that stuff [came] together to show me that people wanted me to be here and I wasn’t just here be-cause I wanted to be here,” he says.

“Then having those three friends from Barrie back from my home-town rooted me, and I was able to feel like I was kind of like at home.”

Now, he finds a sense of com-fort at SFU, with a family of sorts in his team, and a new place he can call home.

“When I went home for Christmas, I went home [to Bar-rie], but I started to think to my-self I want to go home — back to BC. And it’s weird, I’ve only been here for six months.”

21SPORTS March 30, 2015

Men’s golf achieved their sec-ond NCAA tournament vic-tory last Monday and Tuesday at the California Baptist Invi-tational in Corona, CA. John Mlikotic led the team with a total score of 214 (-2) in four rounds of golf, despite open-ing the tournament with the highest Clan score in the first round. He shot 70 (-2) and 68 (-4) in the final two rounds, and placed second individually at the tournament. Mlikotic’s ef-fort won him the GNAC Golfer of the Week award. “We are not firing on all cylinders right now so to come away with a win in this tournament against many of our rivals tells me the team is starting to believe in itself,” head coach John Buchanan told SFU Athletics.

Track and field were honoured with Great Northwest Athletic Conference (GNAC) awards on Tuesday. Senior Lindsey Butterworth, who achieved the women’s 800-metre title at the national championship, was named the GNAC Indoor Track and Field Athlete of the Year. Freshman Paige Nock was voted the conference’s top female freshman, while graduate student Jennifer Johnson was named the GNAC Female Newcomer of the Year.

Jovan Blagojevic and Alan Koch returned to Terry Fox Field for one last preseason game for the Whitecaps FC2 on Saturday, March 21. De-spite Oregon notching the first goal, the former SFU men’s soccer midfielder and coach guided the FC2 to a 3–2 victory over Oregon State University. Blagojevic scored the game-winner in the 84th minute. The FC2 began their regu-lar season against the Seattle Sounders FC2 on Sunday.

Last Monday, Clan basketball star Erin Chambers was named an honourable mention for both the 2015 Daktronics/Di-vision II Conference Commis-sioners Association Women’s Basketball All-American team and the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association (WBCA) All-America Team. This marks Chambers’ second straight ap-pearance as an honourable mention on the WBCA All-America Team.

Last Wednesday, SFU Athletics an-nounced Joe Paopao as the newly hired offensive coordinator of the SFU football team.

Paopao, a native of Honolulu, HI, is no stranger to the BC football scene, having spent seven of his 11 seasons playing in the CFL with the BC Lions before multiple stints on the BC Lions coaching staff, including one season as head coach in 1996. He has held coaching jobs on various CFL teams, serving as the head coach for the previous Ottawa franchise, the Ottawa Renegades, for all four seasons of its existence from 2002–2005.

Nicknamed the “Throwin’ Samoan” for his ability as a quarterback, Paopao has also coached at the university level, serving as the offensive coordinator for the Waterloo Warriors from 2007–2011 before being named the university’s head coach, a position he held for two seasons before returning to the Lions as a receivers coach in 2014.

SFU head coach Kelly Bates had first-hand experience working with

Paopao on the 2014 Lions coaching staff, where Bates was the running backs coach and draft coordinator.

“I know what Joe’s about,” he said. “Joe has many accolades, many accomplishments, he’s got a wealth of football knowledge, but the thing that drew me to Joe, and the thing that makes him the perfect hire, is that he cares about people. His actions prove that day in and day out.

“He will have a positive impact on everyone that he runs into and he works with in this program,” Bates added. “I felt like it was a steal to get him, and I think this place is fortunate we have him.”

Paopao hopes to bring sta-bility to an institution that has lacked a consistent coaching staff for the last few years, with three different head coaches in three years and a different of-fensive coordinator each year since 2011.

“I’m their fourth different of-fensive coordinator in four years, [the team is] getting four different messages, four different philoso-phies offensively, and it can’t be easy,” Paopao noted. “I’m sensitive to that. They’re tremendous young men, but they’re still human be-ings. When you’re 18, 19, 20, 21 — it’s not easy when there is constant turnover.”

Both Paopao and Bates em-phasize the importance of developing the student ath-letes as human beings.

“I’ve been coaching a long time, been in the pros for 30 years, it’s like my ninth year in univer-

sity, so I understand what it takes,” Paopao said. “It takes patience, it takes being consistent with the message to student athletes — and I enjoy the process, having sent four of our children to university. I get it.”

Part of Paopao’s plan is to make sure that the student athletes are excelling academically. He notes his belief that this will also help the team on the field.

“We’re going to have to trust in the things that Bates is trying to implement, which is you’ve got

to go to class, we’ve got to make sure they get the tutorial help they need,” he continued. “That’s a big investment in them by the univer-sity throwing a scholarship, and their parents who are investing in their future. We also believe that next four to five years are going to influence the next 40, 50 years of their life.

“In our game, each play lasts anywhere from three to five sec-onds, that’s all,” Paopao continued. “So before that and after the ball is snapped, that’s where being a good student and being disciplined mentally [comes in].”

The goal of the SFU coaching staff is to get the team to being a competitive force in the Great Northwest Athletic Conference, as SFU has not achieved a win-ning record since joining the NCAA. In 2014, SFU actually had less wins than the season be-fore, going from a relatively low three wins to just two. Paopao acknowledges that it’s not going to be an easy task, and it won’t happen right away.

“It’s like building a house, I mean it doesn’t happen in 10 minutes or 10 days,” he said. “It’s no different than starting university. In your first year, nobody graduates, there’s a process to it — you have to see how things work in it, but you have to keep working at it.”

22 SPORTS March 30, 2015

Last Monday, six Clan football graduates headed to Edmonton to participate in the CFL regional com-bine. The players hoped to receive an invitation to the national com-bine the following weekend, where two SFU football players — wide receiver Lemar Durant and defen-sive back Matt Isherwood — were directly invited.

Unlike last year, where both players invited from SFU received an invite to the national combine, none of the six — running back/defensive back Chris Tolbert, wide receiver Bobby Pospischil, wide receiver Kyle Kawamoto, defensive lineman Kristian Law-rence, running back Cole Tudor, and wide receiver Bibake Uppal — received an invitation.

The six players were tested with six drills: bench press, vertical jump, broad jump, short shuttle, 40-yard dash, and the three-cone drill.

The Clan alumni did particularly well at the three-cone drill, with Pospischil and Uppal claiming first and second overall times respec-tively. Five of the six players finished in under eight seconds.

“I felt I performed well at the vertical jump; my broad wasn’t as

good as I would’ve liked it to have been, but I still performed decent at that, my three-cone drill was sec-ond best at the combine so I felt pretty confident about that, espe-cially at my height,” Uppal told The Peak in a phone interview.

However, the 40-yard dash was a point of struggle for much of the Clan delegation, accord-ing to Uppal.

“I think everyone was in the same boat as me, they felt like they should have performed better for the most part,” he said. “[It] seemed like most of the people at the com-bine were pretty disappointed at what they ran. [. . .] There were a couple of guys who ran pretty fast, but for the most part, it seemed like everyone ran a little slower than they would have liked to.”

Kawamoto also achieved the second overall score for the short shuttle drill.

TSN’s Duane Forde, who had listed Pospischil and Uppal as ath-letes to watch, wrote, “[Pospischil] tested well and got open during one-on-ones, but had a rare bad

day catching the football. With his smaller stature already working against him in the scouts’ eyes, he needed to be almost perfect.”

For the athletes, not being invited to the national com-bine is certainly disappointing, and makes the path to being drafted in the CFL tougher. But Uppal is still op-timistic about his future.

“A couple of coaches spoke to me after the com-bine, and said they were looking at me, so I’ve got to just stay at it, keep training, work on the things I feel I didn’t perform well in; and the ones

I did perform well in, I need to work on those as well,” he said.

He noted that the event gave him a glimpse of what he needed to do to be drafted by a CFL team.

“Being in that atmosphere test-ing is not the same as when you’re at home working on those num-bers, [when] you’re more comfort-able. [It’s] a little bit more pressure, you don’t get very many attempts at certain things, so you’ve got to make sure you’re consistently doing well,” he said.

“They say this is one of the deepest drafts in years, so it’s helpful to see the guys I’m going to be going up against in the draft, and certain things they’re good at that I need to improve at. It’s always good to learn off other people’s games.”

The Champions League quar-ter-final participants were de-termined March 19, and the an-nouncement provided us with a slate of quality matchups, in-cluding a rematch of last year’s final and yet another match between players Zlatan Ibrahi-movic and Lionel Messi.

Reaching this round is a very big deal for these clubs — only five more weeks of games remain in the 21-week

tournament to crown the champion. The first matches will start Tuesday, April 14 after the international break ends. Here are my predic-tions for the round of eight:

These two teams always seem to face each other; they met in the round of eight in 2013 and were in the same group in this year’s tourna-ment. Despite pulling off a thrilling last-minute upset against Chelsea in the round of 16, PSG are the clear under-dogs against Barcelona. Both teams won at home during the group stage, and PSG will also be without Ibrahimovic for the first leg, as he got a controver-sial red card in their last match. But after Messi’s performance

against Manchester City at the Camp Nou, how could you go against him?

Porto are heavy underdogs against a very strong Bayern side — one that demolished Shaktar Donetsk 7–0 at home. Bayern also have an 11-point lead in the Bundesliga, which means they can afford to rest some key players and put all of their effort into the match. But Porto are in good form, having won or tied every game so far in the competition, something that neither Bayern nor Real Madrid can say. Porto striker Jackson Martinez will be back after missing the last leg with an injury, but it won’t be enough against a fantastic Bayern side

with too much depth to go out in the quarter-finals.

Juventus vs. MonacoJuventus fans will like this

draw, as they are facing the low-est-ranked team left in the com-petition. Monaco fans will also like this draw, as they avoid the four heavy favourites in Barce-lona, Bayern Munich, Real Ma-drid, and Atletico Madrid. Juven-tus will be the odds-on favourites in this matchup, but will be with-out influential midfielder Paul Pogba, as he is out seven weeks after being injured in their last match against Borussia Dort-mund. Juventus are stronger de-fensively than Arsenal, but should be cautious not to underestimate Monaco like Arsenal did at home.

Probably the biggest matchup of the quarter-finals sees a rematch of last year’s final between two bitter rivals. Although on paper Atletico Ma-drid is the lesser team, Atletico seem to have had Real Madrid’s number since the final, hav-ing won four games and drawn two against them since, includ-ing a 4–0 thrashing in Febru-ary. Real’s recent form has not been very good, and it will be interesting to see what manager Carlo Ancelotti does to try to repair the situation. Atletico barely got through to this stage, having to win on penalties. It will be a very even matchup, but I think Atletico can pull off an upset here and advance.

SFU wrestler Oscar Balaqui was crowned the 50 kg Canadian National Junior champion for the second year in a row. Balaqui has spent the season as a redshirt, having won last year in his senior year of high school. 2015 Clan signee Nolan Badovinac achieved second place in the 84 kg category. At the senior nationals, sophomore Josh Kim placed fifth. On the women’s side at the juniors, freshmen Tiffany Hibbert and Payten Smith earned silver medals, and Ashley Osachuk and Abby Lloyd earned bronze.

Clan softball went one for four in Montana, playing the Montana State University-Billings (MSUB) Yellowjackets in two doubleheaders over Saturday, March 21 and Sunday, March 22. The Yellowjackets outscored SFU 32–13 over the four games, with the only victory coming in the second game on Saturday in a 10–9 result — the other games the Clan were held to two or fewer runs in the rest of the games. “[MSUB] came out with energy, scored runs early and shut down our offence. The games were all but done early from an emotional point for us,” head coach Mike Renney told SFU Athletics.

23DIVERSIONS / ETC March 30, 2015

Across1- Protracted 5- Clublike weapon 9- Related to the kidneys 14- Bacchanalian cry15- ___ about (approximately) 16- Actress Verdugo 17- Infringement 19- Spoil 20- Historian 21- Holmes’s creator 22- Restless 23- Maize 24- “___ had it!” 25- Tank 28- California border lake 31- Loses color 32- Conger 34- ___ all-time high 35- Feels for 36- Gather, harvest 37- ___ Moines 38- Chest or closet material 39- Vends 40- Ornamental shoulder piece 42- Eureka! 43- Grating

44- Least fresh 48- Perfect Sleeper maker 50- Star-shaped 51- Sleep disorder 52- Essays 53- Doctrine 54- French summers 55- Noteworthy achievement 56- Poke fun at 57- Hamlet, for one 58- Building additions Down1- Burton of “Roots” 2- Sheeplike 3- High times? 4- Freezing 5- Accompanier of means and opportunity 6- Licorice-like flavoring

7- Codger 8- East ender? 9- Snappy comebacks 10- Comic Boosler 11- Singer Sedaka12- Actress Heche 13- Back muscle, briefly 18- In play 21- Prescribed amounts 23- Apple juice 25- Unit of weight in gemstones 26- Lively dance 27- Oscar winner Patricia 28- Wee bit 29- To ___ (perfectly) 30- Clasp for a door 31- Like old jeans 33- CD forerunners 35- Salsa singer Cruz 36- Reality

38- Shortened 39- Biblical verb 41- Concurs42- Comfortable 44- Dutch painter Jan 45- Stand used by painters 46- Pilfer 47- Trials 48- Graf ___ 49- Sicilian resort 50- Mex. miss 51- ABA member 52- A Kennedy

SFU Public Square presents Catri-ona Strang and Michael Turner at Lunch Poems at SFU on April 15,

Teck Gallery (515 W Hastings St.). Free admission, no registra-tion required. For more informa-tion visit www.sfu.ca/publicsquare/lunchpoemsAd text: MATH GOT YOU SCARED? WORRIED ABOUT THAT UPCOMING FINAL? Con-tact Scott Cowan for all your Math/MACM tutoring needs. Competi-tive rates, extensive experience and great past reviews! scottc@alumni.sfu.ca f13Are you Gay, Bi-sexual or just not

sure? Need a safe place to talk? HOMINUM Fraser Valley is an informal discussion and support group to help gay, bi-sexual and questioning men with the chal-lenges of being married, sepa-rated or single. Our next meeting is 7:30 pm on Friday, February 27th. For information and meeting location, call Art 604-462-9813 or Don 604-329-9760.The Peak puts on super fun trivia at the Highland Pub on the last Monday of every month and the March edition has a theme: Sein-

probably too young to have seen when it aired live. But no matter, you and your pals should come down and drink some beers while you answer fun questions. Plus, there are prizes for everyone!

LAST WEEK’S SOLUTION

EVENT LISTINGS ARE FREE FOR SFU STUDENTS AND

STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS. SEND THE DATE, TIME, LOCATION,

NAME, AND A 15 WORD DESCRIPTION TO

CLASSIFIEDS@THE-PEAK.CA

24 humour editor Jacey Gibbemail humour@the-peak.ca HUMOUR March 30, 2015

SFU’s student paper is facing criti-cism for publishing an opinions-related election article in the news-paper’s opinions section.

The article, which appeared in the March 23 issue of The Peak, was titled “The Peak picks their 2015 SFSS candidates” and included en-dorsements for six candidates run-ning in the then upcoming Simon Fraser Student Society (SFSS) elec-

tions. However, when posted on-line, the piece received several ac-cusations that the opinions article

was biased and didn’t belong in a publication meant to incite fur-ther dialogue.

“I can’t believe how clearly bi-ased this article is,” one online commenter posted via Facebook.

“The newspaper’s staff have no right to make educated endorsements based on previous professional

experiences with candidates run-ning in the election. Who the hell do they think they are? I might not have any experience with running a newspaper, but I think I know how a newspaper should be run.”

The piece in question was a col-laborative effort between 12 of the newspaper’s staff members; infor-mal votes were anonymously cast, compiled, and then elaborated on to create digestible information for interested readers. According to sources, the staff’s intention had been to mimic what most major

newspapers already do and use its extensive prior knowledge of the candidates to vocalize who they thought would perform best as part of the SFSS board.

“I bet The Peak are just endors-ing whoever they’re all friends with,” said another online com-menter. “It’s very unreasonable that they didn’t endorse my friend, who’s also running. If they can’t endorse both their friends and my friends, then they shouldn’t be en-dorsing anyone at all. How is that reporting objectively?!”

Concerns were also raised about whether a newspaper should be allowed to print the article and file it online under the opinions section, since it’s clearly just an opinion and some people might somehow mistake it for news.

“What if someone reads this, doesn’t realize that it’s an opin-ions article [. . .] and blindly fol-lows the endorsements?” An-other commenter said, as part of a 859-word post. “People are totally unable to develop an opinion without having it spoonfed to them, so this puts the non-endorsed candidates at a huge disadvantage.

“It’s not about the exten-sive objective reporting they’ve done in previous issues, like their election special. This one article has made me lose total respect for the whole publica-tion. Forever!”

Aside from a short, supple-mentary post the aforementioned Facebook update, The Peak has yet to officially comment on the negative feedback, but sources say the staff hopes people can learn to think for themselves and not blindly follow what they read, regardless of how it’s being pre-sented to them.

Overdramatic newspaper head-lines and misleading presentation of information to the public could lead to the eradication of multiple species on Earth, according to a local expert.

The warning comes from Chan-dler Finks, a tenured professor of so-ciology at Simon Fraser University. Finks, 55, claims that the kind of sensationalizing and “quote cherry-picking” that more and more media outlets are practicing can often “distort” the bigger picture and “could lead to problems” down the “line” — including the end of all life on this planet, assumedly.

“I think it’s interesting how some newspapers present the facts,” Finks wrote in an email re-sponse to The Peak’s inquires. “You never know when someone’s going to blow things out of proportion.”

While Finks failed to elaborate on what these aforementioned “things” are, we can assume that they will have an overwhelming impact on every one of Earth’s liv-ing organisms, including all plant life, animals, bacteria, and even humans. Elaborating further, if this trend of deliberately present-ing “the facts” in a misleading way continues, Finks believes this will cause all of these entities to “blow” up and leave our planet devoid of life.

These and several other shocking words are just part of Finks’ 200-word email, which was leaked by The Peak last Thursday.

In the email, Finks’ main criti-cism of the media was focused on

whether “newspapers” are doing enough to ensure that incorrect data doesn’t lead to mass panic or to the general realization that ev-eryone one day will die, no matter how much you might try to deny or avoid any mention of it. Finks goes on to say that death is “inescapable” for humans, which is just stating the reality — but isn’t reality scary when you start actually thinking about it? The answer is yes.

For mankind, it would appear the writing’s already been on the wall for quite some time. In 2014, the Madagascan dwarf hippo-potamus was declared officially extinct by International Union for Conservation of Nature. Back in 2011, the western black rhinoc-eros was also declared extinct, though no individual of the spe-cies had actually been recorded for five years.

While Finks does not spe-cifically mention either of these

animals in his email, they can be seen as prime examples of what is to come for the rest of Earth’s inhabitants if proper “proportion” is not maintained by media outlets.

As for when this seemingly unavoidable fate is likely to

manifest, Finks is reluctant to say, but suggests that we might “never know.” In the meantime, the best humans can hope for is accurate reporting in the news and an end to media over-em-bellishing every single unim-portant detail.

Jacey GibbHumour Editor

25March 30, 2015HUMOUR

Good work, team! That’s an of-ficial wrap on another Burnaby Heights Neighbourhood Easter Egg Scavenger Hunt. This event wouldn’t have been nearly as successful without all of our volunteers. Every one of you really gave it 110 per cent this year, the kids all seemed to re-ally enjoy themselves, and I’ve already had some good feed-back from a few of the parents.

Also, it’s probably unre-lated, but I thought I’d men-tion it anyways: I noticed that my stockpile of precious ve-lociraptor eggs seems to have misplaced itself sometime in the last few hours. Has anyone seen my dinosaur eggs? They’re large, sort of an off-eggshell white, and whenever you hold one, you get the overwhelming feeling like you’re playing god.

The last place I remember seeing them was in the rec cen-tre supply closet. I was busy counting them, as someone with two dozen velociraptor eggs often does, when Francine

asked to help with a particu-larly nasty streamer entangle-ment outside. When I came back, my pile of eggs was miss-ing. Does anyone remember moving them?

Perhaps you saw them on the floor and moved them onto a shelf so they weren’t a tripping hazard? Or maybe someone shuffled my dinosaur eggs out of the way so he or she could have easier access to the beautifully watercoloured eggs I prepared for the Easter egg hunt? Nope? You sure you didn’t accidentally move them, Carol? Just checking.

I also hate to bring it up, but I wish that you guys had followed my instructions and hid all of the Easter eggs instead of just some of them. There’s no point in us having leftovers because it’s not like we can save them for next year’s hunt. Judging by how many Easter eggs are left in the supply closet, I’d say you guys hid less than half of them.

Like, a lot less than half. Not even a dozen, or maybe even fewer?

Try to remember, folks: this hol-iday isn’t about us, it’s about mak-ing the kids happy. And you know what makes kids happy? Finding watercoloured eggs on the ground and putting them in a little pastoral pink or yellow basket. If that’s not Easter, I don’t know what is.

After talking to you all here, I think it’s pretty clear what hap-pened here. We have to acknowl-edge the reality that someone, Carol, likely mistook the geneti-cally modified raptor eggs I’ve been working on for the last 10 years for the $5 chicken variety that I spent an hour decorating with stripes

and polka dots. We don’t have

to panic, though. Not yet. The eggs aren’t set to hatch for a few more days, so that should be enough time to find

out who took them home, trade the raptor eggs for the decorated ones, and verify that it was klutzy Carol who accidentally used the wrong eggs. Sorry, I mean figure out who moved them.

Well this whole event went from fun to none fairly quickly here. Ev-erything should work out okay though. The only real threat is Carol’s incompetence.

Sorry, Carol. We were all thinking it.

Non-humans of SFU

26 HUMOUR March 30, 2015

27March 30, 2015HUMOUR

Start things off with what’s known as the “rescue pro-cess.” First, assess the scene and check that there are no immediate threats that could put you at risk of being totally over this party. Once it has been determined that the party is salvageable, you should focus on the “pri-mary emergencies”; if some-one looks near the breaking point or like they’re about to start a fight out of sheer boredom, they are a primary

emergency and should be assisted first. After that, you can take care of “second-ary emergencies,” or people who are clearly not enjoying themselves but are still man-aging to force a smile.

Note: Assessing the situation is the first and most important step. If a party is clearly beyond saving, there’s no sense in endangering your own social life by also becom-ing a victim.

The more people there are in a room together, the higher the risk of one or more of those people hav-ing pungent body odour. When left untreated, an in-dividual’s stank can severely bring down the mood of a party and may even lead to some attendees saying they

have to work in the morn-ing and leaving early. Help the affected smelly person to the nearest sink and run warm, soapy water over the stink-infected areas. If the odour persists even after being washed, call emer-gency party services and in-form them of the situation.

One of the most im-portant things to know about Standard Party First Aid is the “recovery position.” After check-ing for primary and sec-ondary emergencies, do a visual assessment of which attendees are the least attractive. (Any-one below a five on the hotness scale should be noted but this can be a sliding scale, depending on the number of people at the party.) Approach

the >5s one by one and inform them that you know Standard Party First Aid and you’re here to help the party. After they’ve given their con-sent, gently help the person to the floor and roll him/her onto their side so they are facing away from the rest of the party. Once they’re in the recovery position, ensure they are comfort-able and move onto the next person.

In severely boring cases, a person can actually fall asleep while standing up and injure themselves by toppling over. If you see someone continuously yawning and with their eyes less than 10 cm open, they could be at risk of passing out. Quickly recite them a joke you read on the Inter-net or talk about how your friend’s friend once hooked up with Quentin Taran-tino and it was apparently

as weird as you’d think it would be. Your main goal is to keep the person awake until a Flip Cup tournament can be organized or some-one suggests ordering pizza.

Note: If you’re too late and the person has already collapsed from boredom, help move them to another room and inform the host. They’ll regain conscious-ness later on when the party is either picking up or offi-cially winding down.

If you spot someone openly trying to flirt with another person but they keep chok-ing up and making things awkward for everyone, you may have to intervene. Encourage the bumbling individual to bend slightly at the waist and repeat-edly hit his or her upper back, flat palmed, until all of the dumb anecdotes and cheesy pickup lines have been successfully forced from the person’s airway.

Note: To verify that a person is completely out of boring things to say, have them say a few sen-tences and listen for any references to their new addiction to juice bars or cliche jokes from early ‘90s SNL skits. If present, it’s possible you will have to reapply another cycle of open-palm hits in their back. Repeat until signs of a personality begin to emerge.

If you notice a person has been constantly checking his or her phone all night, they might be suffering from broken social skills and will require your immediate at-tention. Using a piece of fabric, wrap the person’s dominant hand and tie the ends into a knot behind his or her neck. Ensure the fabric is tight and the hand

cannot escape. While this won’t prevent someone from checking their phone entirely, it will at least slow the process until they finally leave or their phone dies.

Note: An arm sling may also be necessary if the per-son is always showing other attendees pictures of his or her kids, even without prompting.

28 LAST WORD features editor Brad McLeodemail features@the-peak.ca March 30, 2015

Sorry if my title tricked you into thinking this was yet an-

other narrow-minded jab at the liberal arts. But I think there is a very good reason to distinguish between the piece of paper you receive from a man in a silly hat at the end of your long four (or five or six) years at university and what you actually get out of it.

It didn’t used to be that way, of course — a bachelor’s degree used to be like the golden ticket into Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, except instead of a lifetime supply of choc-olate and a psychedelic factory tour, you got to reproduce a comfortable middle-class existence in a sterile, white-collar office job. But those days are over.

As I near the end of my un-dergraduate career here at SFU, the frequency of belligerent ques-tioning I receive has increased proportionally. In different forms, they invariably ask, “What the hell kind of job are you going to get with a sociology degree!?”

It didn’t start out this way. These same people were perfectly happy when I was a bright-eyed UVic engineering freshman with a clearly-defined path to a well-paying job. But that discourse shifted significantly when I de-cided to walk my own path into the SFU sociology department.

I get similar responses when I tell other arts students I’m a so-ciology major, but an arts degree isn’t about the grades you get,

it’s about how you develop as a person. It’s about the things you learn, and the people who help you learn them. This all sounds cheesy, but bear with me.

The things I’ve gained aren’t ex-clusively job skills. They are life skills that produce better, more critical citizens who engage with society in both the public sphere and in their everyday life.

I hear people enjoy lists, so let’s give that a try. Here are the top four things I’ve gained from my liberal arts education:

There’s an often-quoted saying that anthropology is about “mak-ing the strange familiar and the fa-miliar strange” — but I want to ex-tend that to the arts as a whole. An arts education pushes the bound-aries of possibility. Instead of stop-ping at questions of “what?” and “how much?,” I’ve learned to ask the big question: “why?”

The academic questions I explore everyday tend not to be instrumental. They aren’t aimed at market-rationalized goals of profit, or even to accomplish a specific, defined outcome.

Of course, society needs peo-ple like that. We need scientists to discover the empirical nature of existence, engineers to build things based on those discover-ies, and environmental scientists to study the effects. But we also

need people to question what’s behind those innovations.

The only way I actually got better at thinking critically was by being critiqued myself. In fact, I hope you use our Facebook com-ments section after you finish reading to do the same.

Arts students have their own comments section: each other. Upper-level arts courses tend to be small and discussion-based. This has been ripe terrain for engage-ment with wildly different perspec-tives than my own.

The only way I’ve developed critical thought has been through the ruthless critique from my fel-low classmates. These are people who grapple with the same ques-tions I do, yet produce radically different conclusions. Simply put, my peer groups have made me a better thinker than I ever could have been alone.

Most arts courses I’ve taken overlap. A communications

course might discuss Marx, while a history class might invoke he-gemony. Instead of staying iso-lated within our respective dis-ciplines, arts has allowed me to draw upon multiple perspectives to understand the world.

Arts are the venn diagram of university studies. In my degree I’ve been able to explore the in-tersections of history, the human mind, rhetoric, society, culture, and ethics. Only by bringing these all together have I been able better understand the world around me.

I read a lot. Pages and pages every day. Some of it’s fun, some not so much. But it’s al-most always challenging, and that’s fantastic. Being able to read a vast amount of text, un-derstand it fully, pick out the important concepts, and write something actually worthwhile about is something I do almost every day.

Being able to articulate my thoughts, feelings, and desires fully has been the most liberating experi-ence of my life. And I wouldn’t give that up for anything.

I’m aware that this is an in-credibly privileged position to take on higher education. Most people I know are buried under mountains of student loan debt, and don’t have the luxury to pay $7,000+ a year in tuition to

simply become better thinkers — myself included.

While most arts degrees do not have specific, defined career paths built into them, that’s not really the point. Rather, they create a founda-tion to build their lives upon. And in the age of precarious neoliberal ‘flexible’ labour, maybe this is a good thing.

Labour market demands change constantly, and many technical skills become obsolete overnight with parallel technical advancements. Instead of special-ized vocational training good for working one specific job in one specific industry, an arts educa-tion has allowed me to develop an adaptable skill-base of writing, re-searching, communications, and analytic skills that can applied to a plethora of contexts. So far, I’ve ap-plied them to education and digital communications analysis, benefit-ing enormously from these skills.

And while I may not graduate to a six-figure salary immediately, I know I’ll be okay in the long run.

But even beyond that, my ed-ucation has allowed me to inter-rogate the market logic ideology that pervades our culture — in-stead of asking “how much can I make?,” I instead ask “how can I make a difference in society?” Ul-timately, the track laid out by my arts education is not clear-cut. It’s a twisted path of curiosity, ques-tioning, and exploration. But I’ve learned that that’s the best way for me to develop as a person. I have embraced the chaos. I rec-ommend you do the same.