September 2008 – Page 2

UBC Student, SDS Activist Banned from Canada

UBC student and activist Brian Gehring has been banned from entering Canada. Brian was one of the 19 people arrested in the Knoll Aid 2.0 protest that happened on campus last spring in response to the widely opposed construction of the underground bus loop and destruction of the Grassy Knoll.

Brian, an American citizen, had been spending the summer in Bellingham and was attempting to return to UBC to inquire about outstanding academic issues and find information on applying to grad school. Canadian immigration officials detained him at the border and interrogated him at length about his involvement with SDS and Knoll Aid. Officials searched his car and confiscated his cell phone and downloaded its contents. Brian does not have a criminal record and has not even gone to trial yet regarding his involvement with Knoll Aid.

The RCMP cited that he had broken the law by trying to enter Canada without a study permit. Brian mentioned that this reason was superficial and contrived as his interrogation focussed solely on his student activism. In addition, American citizens are normally permitted to enter Canada for up to 6 months without a permit. Officials often deny entry to people with criminal records (which Brian does not have), but they went beyond this measure in Brian’s case. They outright banned him from Canada for a year and told him that he would never be eligible to receive a study permit to study in Canada again. He has not yet graduated from UBC.

There was no word on Brian’s plans to appeal this decision.

GSS Handbook Upheld

Nothing like a little controversy to start the fresh school year off! The Graduate Student Society (GSS), like the AMS, releases an agenda and handbook that’s distributed to students for free every year. This year they asked a well-known campus activist, Nathan Crompton, to put it together. Supervising it was the GSS Handbook Committee chaired by GSS VP Student Services, Rodrigo Ferrari-Nunes.

The Handbook has been printed at a cost of at least $20,000. In addition to normal stuff like an intro to student services and an agenda, the handbook features a critical, cynical and satirical history of UBC and numerous assertions about the university’s profit-mongering raison d’etre. The content proved to be too “inappropriate” for GSS President Mona Maghsoodi though. In response, three members of the Executive decided to suspend distribution of the Handbooks and lock them in an unknown location. Although Mona would not return my calls and it has been noted in other publications that she declined to say which elements of the handbook are contentious, but said it’s not necessarily the “activist stuff.”

In response to the nature of the content, Nathan Crompton said that “there’s a certain level of satire. I don’t think it’s over the top.” He also expressed his views on the purpose of the handbook. “A lot of people see the handbook as a way to impress the president. We didn’t make that kind of handbook.”

Some people think the radical political content of the handbook is fine, and withholding it is “censorship”. Others find the content inappropriate for the handbook and objectionable in general. For me, the more interesting question is: How was this thing massively produced before being checked over? Presumably the president of a student society would weigh in on such a massively important publication before sending it to the printers. According to Nate, the editors did their work in the plain view of the GSS Executive. Editors held ‘Open House’ meetings, where executives were invited to review Handbook material, in addition to several Handbook presentations to the GSS Executive in which Executive members were informed that the Handbook would feature the activist history of UBC.

Since the the Handbook is the responsibility of the Handbook Committee and GSS Council, not the Executive, the final decision on whether or not to distribute the handbook lies with GSS Council. See the debate play out at tomorrow’s GSS Council meeting! Free beer!

Happily, we’ve got an electronic copy. You can download and take a look a the contraband handbook itself HERE .

What do you think? Good political critique of the university’s past and present, or overly negative and editorialized introduction for new grad students? What reflection does this fiasco have on the GSS as a whole?