Mcgill student files grievance against protest protocol
McGill University’s provisional protocol on demonstrations, protests and occupations has sparked a protest from a student who has filed a grievance against the pending code of conduct, saying the university is trying to control and intimidate potential protesters and is violating human rights in the process.
Philosophy student Eli Freedman has filed a grievance just as the protocol, which is already controversial on campus, where several student and labour groups are firmly opposed to it, is about to go to senate for approval at the end of this month. Freedman demands the protocol be nullified and a formal apology be issued by the university administration for “possible violations of students’ human rights covered under international and provincial law.”
Freedman doesn’t just have chutzpah and an axe to grind — he also has civil rights lawyer Julius Grey agreeing McGill today “is not liberal enough” in its handling of campus protests.
Grey said when he was presidentof thestudentunion at McGill in the 1960s, the administration was much more lenient about protesting students and tried to ensure students wouldn’t be penalized.
“I deeply regret that I don’t see that attitude today,” Grey said. “It’s part of the new corporate university that it’s no longer with those who protest, but moving toward the side of the establishment.”
In general, he said, the protocol and the whole McGill attitude aren’t right. “It is the nature of students that they protest and this should be understood and accepted.”
Freedman called the protocol “a most egregious breach of human rights and a grotesque abuse of power” on the part of the university. “It is understood in a democracy that people will protest and it won’t always be pretty. Trying to stomp it out is a draconian way of dealing with it.”
The protocol has been in effect since February, when McGill implemented it after students occupied an office in the James administration building for five days.
Although the protocol was revised at the end of November and was the subject of consultation, many campus groups have rejected it, with unions saying it will be used to criminalize labour protests and students saying it violates their legal right to nonviolent protest.
“There has been a lot of controversy around the need to have it at all,” said Josh Redel, president of the Student Society of McGill University. “A lot of people are displeased with what is expected to become the protocol.”
He said part of the problem with the protocol is its attempt to define peaceful protest — something Redel believes is almost impossible to do as it is a very subjective thing.
“The law is there for people’s safety, to ensure entrances aren’t blocked, so the protocol is just reiterating the law,” Redel said.
But Freedman, who filed the grievance because he believes he can win, argues there is something far more sinister behind the protocol.
“It is a very threatening protocol that creates a framework for criminal procedures and shows the university’s fuse will be very short,” he said. “When you see it in writing, it has a very chilling effect.”
He said he was asked to provide more detail after filing the grievance, and is now just waiting to hear from the senate committee on student grievances. McGill wouldn’t comment on it.
Coming after a year in which radical student activism disrupted the McGill campus, the protocol was intended to set parameters for acceptable and unacceptable militancy. A draft form of the protocol talks about “more intense” levels of noise, inconvenience to campus life, tone of discourse and level of anger expressed provoking a greater likelihood that the protest would not be deemed peaceful.
In reaction, McGill’s nonacademic workers’ union (MUNACA), its teaching union (AGSEM) and its support employees ( AMUSE) published a statement in the McGill Daily saying “the protocol conflates mere inconvenience with violent disruption and therefore tramples on the rights of the McGill community members to express all but the weakest forms of political dissent.”