Improv Night in Canada

Amanda Cupido

It’s exactly like Hockey Night in Canada. Except there’s laughter instead of chants, a stage rather than ice and comedians in place of hockey players.

Starting in September 2009, Improv Night in Canada was launched by Todd Charron and Paul Shoebridge, two improv instructors at Second City comedy club in Toronto. Currently, the show is held every Tuesday at 8:45 p.m. at the John Candy Box Theatre.

Improv Night has two teams that perform three times (once in each period of the game). At every break throughout the show, there are “injuries” that take place and allow a new comedian to be drafted to the team.

At the end of each period, the point is awarded to the team that the audience cheers the loudest for. Charron was the one who originally came up with the idea for the show to mimic Hockey Night in Canada.

“Way back, Paul and I were…looking for a format where a bunch of people could play in,” he said. “We wanted to get teams of people playing together as a team even if they didn’t know each other.”

It started with only four comedians showing up to play. Now there are about 50 people who come out on a weekly basis.

Shoebridge said that many famous comedic actors such as Tiny Fey and Mike Myers started off as improv students with Second City, just like the comedians that perform each week at Improv Night in Canada. “I think they will be the future stars of this world,” he said.

Ben Ball is a comedy student in Toronto who attends the event almost every week.

“I like performing in front of people and this gives me an opportunity to do that,” he said. “It’s really cool and I like it.”

Ball thinks the format is fun and hopes that the experience will lead to other comedy gigs. “I just want to make people smile,” he said.

John Candy Box Theatre is located at 70 Peter Street and admission is pay-what-you-can at the door. For more information, you can call 416-340-7270.

Social Media and the Egyptian Uprising

Sharanja Devasundar

The Internet today, in the form of social networking sites, does something that was thought to be unheard of a decade ago. It connects youth. It brings people who are miles, or even countries, apart, together. It can help put a single message, may it be about politics or human suffering, within the grasp of people in different parts of the planet. Ten years ago in Egypt, a rebellion may still have been possible without modern day Internet, but it might not have involved a large percentage of Egyptian youth such as the one this past January.

According to research done by CoffeToday, an online news organization, in Egypt alone there are at least five million Facebook users. This number was reported by Andrew Noyes, a spokesperson for Facebook, who added that numbers increased dramatically in the two weeks before the protests in Cairo began. During that period, there were 32,000 groups and 14,000 pages created for the purpose of exchanging information in Egypt.

Last month, Egypt saw a drastic change in government after President Hosni Mubarak, who had been in office for the past 30 years, resigned. His resignation came after 18 days of protesting from thousands of Egyptians since late January. The protestors were dissatisfied with Mubarak’s authoritarian government and demanded a new, more democratic government.

According to a Globe and Mail article by Patrick Martin, Egypt’s underage population was at the “forefront of the movement for power change.” Groups consisting of university students played their own roles in organizing the protests that ultimately led to Mubarak’s resignation.

A catalyst of this unique youth movement was the use of social media. Young Egyptians employed social networking sites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to voice their concerns about Mubarak’s government and help in organizing protestors.

One active leader among these groups is an assembly of youth called “We Are All Khaled Said.” The group is made up of volunteers who came together after the murder and torture of its namesake by two police officers in Alexandria, Egypt, last June. The members’ main goal, boldly stated on its website, is “to end torture in Egypt.” They also want to “show the world that Egyptians are standing up for their rights…”

While working with another youth organization called the April 6 Youth Movement, both groups have created their own Facebook pages. Currently, each group has close to 100,000 online followers.

In addition to organizing protests, Egyptian activists – such as those mentioned above – used Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to share information and videos. As a result of sharing information through the Internet, news of the events in Egypt spread quickly to the global community, and in a form that was uncensored by the government.

An example of this “sharing” is a YouTube clip posted on January 25, the first day of Cairo protests. In the video, a young man is standing in the path of a mounted water cannon. Among YouTube users, the video is revered for its similarity to the lone protestor who stood in front of Chinese tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989.  This video alone has received over 200,000 views on YouTube.

The revolution in Egypt may have come about because Egyptian protestors were passionate to see a change in their homeland. But social media was an important tool in bringing about that change. Put in the hands of Egypt’s youth, sites like Facebook and Twitter helped spread the word about the dates and locations of protests. They also sent information detailing the political chaos occurring in Egypt to the global community in the form of blogs on Tumblr, photos on Facebook and videos on YouTube. In a sense, it helped bring together two entities: It united the people of Egypt as well as the global community through the sharing of important information and ideas.

PSE Stakeholders: their demands in word clouds

This year, the funding framework that sets out how colleges and universities will be funded, is expiring. Student, faculty and administrative groups have all submitted their recommendations for how to move forward. To save you time, we’ve condensed their reports into word clouds, so you can see a snapshot of how these groups advocate for change within the post-secondary sector (in alpha order).

Ryerson’s Highest Rollers

Hadewijch takes FIPRESCI at TIFF

Angela Walcott

The Prize of the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI Prize) for Special Presentations was awarded to Bruno Dumont for Hadewijch (France) at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Described as a hypnotic study of the possibilities and consequences that arise from an absolute belief in God, unusual dynamics begin to emerge. When the film credits were rolling by after and advanced press and industry screening of the film, critics were scratching their heads saying, “Huh?

Set in France, Hadewijch tells the story of a young woman, Céline, who is studying theology. She prays regularly and seems to be an all around good person until her superiors advise her to take a break from her studies, to discover her true self in the world. It is not that she doesn’t have enough faith, it is that she has too much. Religion in film has been explored in many different ways. Some directors choose to handle the topic from a symbolic standpoint while others are blatant. Dumont’s film is the latter.

Religion is a delicate topic. From a historical perspective, it has divided countries and caused nations to wage war. But for all the bad that people do in the name of religion, there are many good deeds as well. Religious organizations have helped the needy. Religious institutions comfort us in our deepest moments of despair, bringing people together through a common belief system.

What Dumont chose to do with this movie is examine the “what if” scenario of the consequences that arise once a young impressionable girl becomes consumed by religion. What separates her from other teens who would typically worry about boys, clothes or makeup is the lengths she will go to for her beliefs. Dumont takes common adolescent themes that have become cliché, such as coming to terms with one’s own identity or romantic feelings for another, and reworks them on a grander scale. This is not just a phase especially when the depth of the main character’s devotion becomes troubling.

Céline sobs uncontrollably and laments about a world that doesn’t understand her. What exactly is wrong with Céline? It is hard to say. She comes from an extremely privileged home, the daughter of a minister in the government, and still there is this steady decline. She is unhappy or as a male friend who is interested in Céline simply puts it, “you are weird”. She is a young woman who believes in something but while something as strong as faith is meant to bring comfort and reassurance, she becomes misguided and it leads her to further despair.

Dumont whose films L’Humanité and Flandres both won Grand Prix awards at the Cannes Film Festival, forces us to ask the question, how do will I know when too much of a good thing has become bad for me? If you even have to ask yourself that question to begin with, then I think you are well on your way to finding the answer.

The Conservative saga continues

The Ryerson Free Press reported in April and May of this year that there was evidence of interference in students’ unions and a coordinated attack against the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) and Ontario Public Interest Research Groups (OPIRGs) by people directly linked to the Ontario Progressive Conservative Campus Association (OPCCA) and the Conservative Party of Canada. After first reporting this in March, the Ryerson Free Press was threatened for misidentifying Richard Ciano as having been at the training session at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. While we altered the story to correct the error, he is pictured here at the Toronto training session.

Ciano is the founder of the Conservative Campaign University, a political training school for conservative activists. He has held various executive positions with the Conservative Party of Canada, including vice-president. He is also an executive director of the ironically-titled Manning Centre for Building Democracy, an organization with such notable patrons as former Ontario and Alberta premiers Mike Harris and Ralph Klein. In 2000, a Richard Ciano unsuccessfully sued York University for $50,000 to compensate lost class time during a sessional instructors strike in 2000.

These photos show Ciano presenting at the Toronto Conservative training workshop earlier this year, in front of power point slides that target CFS and OPIRGs.

Upon publishing the original story, the Ryerson Free Press was also threatened by several people named in the piece and their lawyers. For the potential impact on campus democracy, we believe that exposing these links is critical. Students must fight against such blatant attempts to manipulate and subvert the democratic process, especially if they can be linked to the current governing party of Canada.

Without enough people to hold a legal meeting, RSU directors try to push through health plan contract

Nora Loreto
News Editor

The meetings of the Ryerson Students’ Union have, somehow, continued to degenerate into a chaos that the organisation has never before seen. Last night, certain aggressive board members dropped to a new low where bullying, shouting and inventing rules became the norm.

I half expected to see a pig’s head on a pike à la Lord of the Flies.

The emergency meeting held on Monday, March 30 was called by Osman Hamid and Dana Houssein primarily to consider an emergency motion to sign a health plan contract before March 31. The motion left the appointment blank, to be amended on the floor of the meeting.

Health Plan contracts are high stakes for students’ unions. For-profit brokers can stand to make millions of dollars off a single contract. For example, when RSU signed the last contract with Gallivan and Associates, they were effectively guaranteeing the company over $800,000 in profit. That’s because the firm built commission rates into their five-year contract and, having once successfully sued the RSU for tens of thousands of dollars, there was little chance that the RSU would break the contract again.

At the RSU Semi-Annual General Meeting in the fall, students passed a motion directing the RSU President, Vice-President of Finance and Services and Executive Director of Operations and Services to conduct a tendering to select a health and dental plan broker for next year. The process is still on-going.

Despite this, however, Hamid and Houssein ignored the motion passed by RSU’s members, subverted the process and called Monday night’s meeting. They even brought a lawyer with them. Flora Poon, called to the bar last year, would not disclose by whom she was retained or why she was there.

Toby Whitfield, Vice-President of Finance and Services, chaired the meeting. He ruled the motion to appoint a health and dental insurance broker was out of order because it violated both the motion passed at the SAGM (a higher decision-making body) and because it would put the organisation at risk of litigation as the process hasn’t yet finished.

His ruling was challenged, but upheld. After two and a half hours directors who felt that the motion was inappropriate, left the meeting in disgust.

In the chaos that ensured, the remaining board members demonstrated either a complete lack of knowledge of proper process or a total disregard for any democratic standards.

This was best illustrated by a motion that was served to totally suspend the rules. Not a specific rule, but all the rules. Not surprisingly, such a manoeuvre is not permitted in Robert’s Rules of Order or the bylaws of the RSU.

Despite this, Hamid, supported by Hussein, Snobar and Sharma, argued that they needed to suspend the rules in order to allow them to re-submit the health and dental plan motion that was already determined to be out of order. When Whitfield ruled that there were no provisions to suspend the rules, Hamid and friends none the less declared all rules to be suspended. Whitfield left 9:28 pm in protest and with him, quorum. Without quorum, the meeting could not officially continue.

Quorum is defined in the bylaws of the RSU as being 50 percent plus one of the directors on the board. This is the minimum number of people who must be present in order to hold a meeting.

Hamid declared that, according to the RSU bylaws, Sid Naidu, Vice-President of Student Life and Events, is the next in-line to chair the meeting (they don’t actually say that). After arguing between each other, Naidu assumed the role of chair.

“Really, what are you guys trying to do?” Naidu asked Hamid and Snobar.

“We’re trying to suspend the rules so we can add something onto the agenda ‘cause we want to add another motion to the agenda so we need to suspend the rules,” was Snobar’s response.

Naidu asked if there was any opposition to suspending the rules. With only their allies remaining, no one was left to oppose it. Naidu was reminded that a proper motion should be moved and seconded. Hamid moved to suspend the rules, Snobar seconded, and the motion was passed unanimously.

So, without rules, without quorum, with some directors doing homework away from the table, and without a competent chairperson, the remaining directors forged forward with their agenda.

The discussion may as well have been in Snobar’s basement.

The dismissed motion was re-added to the agenda with a minor amendment to differentiate it from the previous one that had been ruled out of order. Hamid confessed that it was essentially the same motion.

Naidu read the motion out and asked if everyone was in favour. Everyone raised their hands. Hamid moved and Houssein seconded an amendment to re-appoint Gallivan and Associates as RSU’s health and dental plan broker for next year.

When it was asked if they had quorum, Hamid told the secretary to ensure that all references to quorum be removed from the minutes.

Hamid motivated his preference for Gallivan and Associates. No one asked any questions. Hamid didn’t circulate the plan, the cost or the other bids. He didn’t say whether or not Gallivan was the cheapest, most expensive or in the middle of the group of brokers who bid on the plan. He didn’t mention their profit margin, promises of improvements or even the amount that would be charged to every RSU member for their health and dental plan. He didn’t mention that he had no authority to look at the proposals, let alone make a recommendation.

Hamid lost two elections last year and got elected last-minute to represent Student Groups at a vote of close to 60 people. During the recent RSU election, which he ran for vice-president of finance and services he lost by the largest margin, 664 votes. He’s rumoured to be running again in next week’s Student Group election, despite his recent loss.

Had this decision been the purview of twelve board members, in this case Sid Naidu, Femi Lawson, Waseem Bangash, Aisha Nofal, Chandan Sharma, Abdul Snobar, Dana Houssein, Mohammed Malik, George Phu, Ken Chadha, Mohsin Mehboob and Osman Hamid, a $4-million contract of student money would have been unilaterally re-awarded to Gallivan and Associates.

Because of the litany of procedural irregularities, however, this decision will remain a personal one, and not of the RSU.