Paris has loomed large in my mind the past few months. In Paris, on Nov. 30, the COP21 climate talks will convene. These talks must succeed. If they do not then we do not have a snowball’s hope in hell of avoiding the worst, most catastrophic effects of climate change.
I would like to respond to the article “Closing the STEM gender gap” by Chantelle Dubois, published in the Nov. 4 issue of the Manitoban. Dubois provides her opinion on the broadly studied STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) gender gap, and closes her article with the incredible sentence “The gender gap will fix itself with time.”
There’s been discussion recently about imposing additional mandatory courses on students at the University of Manitoba. In the University of Manitoba Students’ Union (UMSU) Annual Survey, students were asked if they support an Indigenous Studies course requirement.
The University of Manitoba Graduate Students’ Association has had a rocky organizational history.
Blue, white, and red. Over the last week my Facebook feed has been filled with profile pictures tinted in those colours. It’s not only the images, though; everyone seems to have something they want to say to address the tragedy in Paris in which roughly 130 people were killed by ISIS terrorists.
Watching Justin Trudeau and his 30-member cabinet being sworn in earlier this month, something struck me as extremely off-putting about the whole affair: the oath Trudeau and his ministers made to our head of state, the monarch of Canada, Queen Elizabeth II.
“In Flanders fields the poppies blow…” A hundred years ago, these familiar lines by John McCrae first showed the connection between our fallen soldiers and…
In a full-page trumpeting of the University of Manitoba Students’ Union (UMSU) executive’s accomplishments, UMSU president Jeremiah Kopp refers to the renovations begun and planned to the hallway on the third floor of University Centre as a “marquee, $1.4-million, world-class capital project.”
That’s the kind of hyperbole (some might call it bullshit) that makes me blush, and then write an article about it.
I fully support an UMSU campaign on mental health. Public health insurance does not fund most mental health services, particularly preventive ones. The university offers limited student counselling, but it’s not the university’s role to operate as a pseudo-healthcare system. As such, students may be unable to access the care they need when they need it.
You may have noticed that, for some time, there’s been a food truck parked on campus. A welcome relief from the unrelenting mediocrity of campus food services (though I’ve yet to actually see anyone buying poutine there), the Poutine King is inarguably an asset to life on campus.
The whole point of a food truck, however, is that you can park it anywhere; the specific spot the truck currently occupies is not only inappropriate, it is offensive. The truck should be moved – perhaps more importantly, whoever told it to park there should have known better in the first place.