Trouble Is Everywhere

Avec apologies to my french-reading friends

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 03:10:27 GMT

Bon soir, mes amis!

Aujourd'hui, je suis ecouté a un podcast en français. Le podcast a produit par «NKH World Radio Japan», et les nouvelles au sujet du les Chinois et les Australiens. Aussi, le President d'aux Etas-Unis, et le guerre en Iraq. Je ne le comprehend pas, parce que je n'écoute pas les nouvelles en anglais. :(

Je suis mal a la tête. Je voudrais dormir. J'espere que, demain, j'ecrais aussi.

(Oh! Oh! Aujourd'hui, je suis pensé que il fasse froid. Mais, il fait chaud. Ontario. Je suis désolé. :(

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Olivia Chow on the long-gun registry, December 2011.

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 19:01:08 GMT

This is from last year:

Olivia Chow: Today, on December 6, we remember the tragic massacre of 14 young women in Montreal, 22 years ago. One lone gunman with a lethal weapon could not contain his anger against women. Canadians mourned and vowed to work for change.

Jack Layton and others spoke out against men's violence against women, and co-founded the White Ribbon campaign, now supported by millions in 55 countries.

They, and families of the 14 young women fought for gun control. Marc Lepine's weapon is listed on the long gun registry, which the conservatives now tragically aim to destroy.

This government should strengthen gun control rather than eliminating it -- so we can all stand in this House on December 6 and say — Never Again.

Aujourd'hui, six décembre, levons-nous tous debout et disons d'une seule voix : plus jamais!

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Canadian Courts agree: The Government Needs To Make Websites Accessible

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 16:21:05 GMT

Via the CCD:

On 30 May 2012, the court released its decision in the Jodhan case, which seeks to secure access to Government of Canada websites by people with disabilities. CCD applauds Donna Jodhan and AEBC for their hard work on this issue.

I've been following this case for a while. I'm pleased at the court's decision, and still appalled that my government spent so much money fighting this.

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LET'S PLAY A FUN GAME

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 13:58:33 GMT

So this is a thing that happened.

Sign Language Ban Imposed on N.J. Girl

School officials have threatened a hearing-impaired girl with suspension if she uses sign language to talk to her friends on the school bus, the girl's parents say.

Danica Lesko and her parents say sign language is the only way to for the 12-year-old to communicate, especially while riding to school on a noisy bus.

But officials at Stonybrook School — which is not a school for the hearing-impaired — and district officials in Branchburg, N.J., apparently believe signing is a safety hazard. They have sent a letter to the Lesko family ordering Danica to stop using sign language on the school bus or risk a three-day suspension.

...

"The Board is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to all students with disabilities, and is satisfied that there has been no violation of that policy in this case," officials said in the statement. "The Board is also committed to assuring the safety of all students who travel on District buses, and will continue to take appropriate steps to accomplish that goal."

LET'S PLAY A FUN GAME.

How do you think Sign Language is a SAFETY HAZARD?

View Poll: I Am Anna's Sarcasm Voice

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The AODA needs you to support it

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 22:49:09 GMT

As most people who know me already know, Don is a full-time wheelchair user. In addition, he is a regular user of our medical system - he needs to have regular tests to ensure that his heart is still healthy, for example, and he needs to have various levels of things checked regularly in order to ensure that his thyroid replacement drug is working properly and his blood pressure isn't wonky. These are the sorts of tests he needs to keep him alive.

Since moving to Ontario, Don has been referred to two different medical clinics for evaluation of these. He was referred to both of these clinics by doctors who were aware he was a wheelchair user since they physically saw Don in his wheelchair when referring him, and also because they were referring him for things that need to be checked because of his Marfan's Syndrome, which is why he uses said wheelchair.

Don has been to two different medical clinics in Toronto, exactly zero of which have been wheelchair accessible.

A few months ago he needed to get into one clinic for a blood test and urine test. Most people can complete them both in the clinic. Don had to take things home and pee in a cup here because the washroom was completely unsuitable for people with mobility issues or people using wheelchairs, which meant Don had to make two trips - trips that take far more out of him than they would out of a non-disabled person.

The clinic today, which was ultrasound for his aorta, was not only clumsy in dealing with people who have unusual heart conditions (like, say, someone with Marfan's Syndrome), but their washroom was inaccessible to people with mobility-related issues or using wheelchairs, as well as having narrow hallways and doors that made navigating very difficult for someone in an electric chair.

The common response of people who are afraid of the Access for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) and similar legislation in the US is that if there's a need, things will be taken care of. Everyone "knows" that people want to be accessible they just lack the knowledge or ability or something that will make this happen. You just need to ask nicely and it will be provided.

Medical clinics serve people with disabilities on a regular basis and they can't even get it together on accessibility. That's why we need these sorts of laws, because frankly it's too long to wait.

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US: Oppose Industry Attacks on the ADA

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 13:17:49 GMT

Oppose Industry Attacks on the ADA

The ADA has been in effect for 21 years, and all the new ADA rules have undergone extensive review for more than 10 years, with multiple comment periods and many opportunities for hotels to learn about their responsibilities. The new requirements already had a generous phase-in period of 18 months. DOJ should not extend it further. And the Senate should not restrict enforcement of these, or any, ADA requirements.

Providing access to swimming pools is doable, not burdensome. The ADA's accessibility requirements for barrier removal in existing facilities are very reasonable—they only require what is easily accomplishable and able to be carried out without much difficulty or expense. The rules are carefully crafted to take the needs of covered entities like hotels into account. No extension or enforcement ban is needed.

Also, it is not acceptable for the Department of Justice to backtrack on ADA requirements because an industry exerts pressure. To do so is an invitation to other industries to say, "Roll back our requirements, too." Today it's the hotel industry. What weakening changes will come tomorrow?

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International Women's Day and the History of Madness

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 13:46:10 GMT

I went to a talk yesterday about the building of the wall at 99 Queen Street West in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

The wall was built by people incarcerated at the insane asylum there over 100 years ago. They were not paid for their work, unlike people in insane asylums in France, and unlike people in Canadian penitentiaries. In fact, the budget for the asylum depended on unpaid labour from the people incarcerated there: after finding that one of their inmates was an expert seamstress, they fired their two employees who were doing the sewing and gave it all to her. Women worked in the laundry their entire lives without pay, and when an 82 year old woman said she didn't want to do it anymore, it was presented as an oddity in her file, further evidence of her insanity. Another woman, after being incarcerated for over 26 years, kept sending letters back asking to be given backpay for her work.

The wall was backbreaking labour. It was done without pay, and without credit. The directors of the asylum bragged about how they were saving money by having their inmates do this work.

Today is International Women's Day. I don't think we're going to spend a lot of time acknowledging the lives of Canadian women who lived and worked and died behind asylum walls. Madness scares people, after all.

As Geoffrey Reaume pointed out in his talk last night: there's a rhetoric that people who are mad or crazy or insane can't work, that their work is shoddy and poorly done because they're crazy and can't be trusted to do it. And yet that wall on Queen's Street West is over 100 years old, and it is amazing workmanship, and it still stands as the only memorial to the often faceless men who put it up, whose work was valuable enough to save the province literally tens of thousands of dollars, but whose names were never recorded.

Psychiatric Patient Built Wall Tours at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Toronto, 2000 – 2010
Rembrance of Patients Past by Geoffrey Reaume
History of Madness in Canada
Psychiatric Survivors Archives of Toronto

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Thu, 26 Jan 2012 01:17:00 GMT

I'm sorry this image is so small. It's an image from the new Google video that explains their plans for how to change your privacy policies! it's not subtitled, despite Google's recent commitment to totally being accessible to people with disabilities. Thus I turned on YouTube's AutoCaption.

The video says:
With fewer words, simpler explanations, and less legal gloop to wade through.

The captions provide:
With fewer words simpler explanations and leslie copeland tweeter.

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What I Do With My Time When I'm Not Whinging On The Internet, an essay

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:26:52 GMT

I wanted to chat a bit about what it is I do all day as a PhD Year 1 in history. Because, you know, I want to. And I have a journal. And people get curious.

[All images have a description below.]

In my university, I need to do a year of course work, wherein I take weekly classes in my "fields" that would logically prepare me to be able to teach courses in my fields, and also give me what's called a "broad survey of the literature". In practice.... Well, I have a rant about that, but what this means in practice is that for each of the three courses I'm taking, I need to read the equivalent of between three and five books a week. (Sometimes "book" means "four or five journal articles" on the topic.)

I'm conveniently interested in fields that have a number of other people interested in them, so I get classes. One of my fellow PhDs has a directed reading course where it's her and the prof and they talk every week about the reading. At my previous university, the PhD program only accepted one student a year and all of his field readings were like that. I'm very glad I'm not in that because wow is that intimidating.

My fields are Canadian History, Immigration History, and the History of Science, Medicine and the Environment. At the end of this year, I'll start preparing for Comprehensive Exams. That will have both an oral and written component, and I'll have to write on two of my three fields. Then I go in and defend my answers and talk about my understanding of the field and the discussions within it. (Again, these are different depending on what institution you're at.) It's a pretty big deal. But I'm not doing that till October, which is next academic year in Canada, so I'll let that go for now.

[Academic years in Canada go from September till March/April, with semesters typically lasting around four months including the exam period. The Winter Semester typically starts in early January. The Fall semester starts in early September. There are also Spring & Summer semesters which are much shorter and often involve very quick classes that people are taking to meet certain requirements. I took a language course once during the Spring/Summer period. I will never do that again.]

Anyway! So, those classes are each about three hours long, and I take the Canadian & Immigration ones every week, and the Science one every other week. I can't tell you how long I read for, because I don't know. Until the books are finished. I also, of course, have assignments and the like, mostly historiography papers which I am terrible at. Historiography is the study of how history is done and the theories behind it. I like knowing these things, but I hate writing them out, but eh. Life is hard.

In addition, I am a Teaching Assistant. This is a person - often a graduate student but not always - who leads small groups of students in "tutorials" that discuss the readings or lectures. This isn't how TAing is always done. I've previously been a TA that only graded papers and assignments and never met with students. Here, my funding is dependent on my being a TA, because it's a position I'm paid for. As such, there are certain rules about what I'm allowed to do and how many hours I'm allowed to dedicate to TAing. This works out to about 10 hours a week. That includes typically attending the lectures my students attend twice a week, as well as leading the two hour tutorial session once a week. (Although typically my tutorials only last 1 1/2 hours because they're on Thursday evenings and students just peter out of energy after a while.) I also, of course, do all the readings for class, grade all of my students' assignments, lesson plan, meet with the Course Director, etc etc etc. I also hold office hours once a week, answer student emails and inquiries, and angst a lot about whether or not I'm doing a good job. I don't get paid for the last bit though.

In addition to this, I attend a lot of Professional Development-type things. This is not required and in fact it's been suggested that I attend fewer of them because they are eating into my other commitments. These include things like how to be a better TA, research methodology discussions, and (most recently) a talk about various library resources that I could have been taking advantage of all along. (Librarians are awesome, yo.) I've also done some "Time Management for Grad Students" and a class on how to use the library here because it's very different from my previous university. These are occasional things that I don't have to go to, and I don't get "paid" for them; however, for various teaching-related things, I can get "credit" towards a teaching certificate that indicates that I've done this sort of learning. Which may or may not make me more competitive in the job market. I know I mostly just want to feel more confident in front of the classroom, since I'm teaching my students things they need to know.

Of course, all of the above is probably typical of most graduate students, at least in the Arts & Social Sciences. (I assume sciencey people do things involving wearing lab coats and experimenting and study ducks and law students read legal decisions, etc.) What I do that's very Historical is I research in archives. Currently one of my courses has a major research paper due that requires primary source research, and that's what I've been doing when I've been moping on twitter & elsewhere about my woefulness, because my research is about murdered children in 19th century Canada.

But putting that aside, researching in the archives can be a very interesting experience. Right now, most of my research involves dealing with microfilm.

[This is the part that will involve many photos.]

Depending on your experiences, you may consider microfilm readers to look very clunky, and be very difficult to use. Certainly many historians & researchers I know have stories about getting sick (and sometimes even throwing up) from using microfilm because it's so hard on the eyes and causes motion sickness.

This is an older microfilm reader:

It's a big brown box that displays the image on a screen by throwing light at it. I've used these before - they make me quite ill very quickly, and they hurt my eyes. You have to hand-crank them, and they're very difficult to focus. I don't have to use those anymore because my life is awesome.

Here's another microfilm reader, the one I use here. It's on a computer, which means I can use autofocus, I can carefully control how the motion works, I can brighten or darken the image easily, I can increase or decrease the contrast, etc. It's a lot easier to use, although we still use the same sort of microfilm. (You can see the "reader" on the right hand corner of this image - it's still an image created by shining light through the film, but instead that image is displayed on a computer for me to manipulate.)

This one is a terrible blurry close up of the film itself. It's pretty tiny, and carries a lot of information. In particular, I am looking at court transcripts that are contained in a file that was originally created by a government agency in 1895.

This is an image of how I can control the microfilm from the screen. I love this because I don't have to do anything except point & click with a mouse to speed up, slow down, or reverse the microfilm display.

This is just an image of the microfilm reader room. As you can tell, there are lot of machines to use. I took this picture late in the evening, often there are more people here.

Part of the question is always "How do you find the microfilm you need?" Archives use "finding aids" to help with this. These can be online (and many of them are moving online), but the old fashion method was just cleverly sorted binders.

This binder is from when I was looking for newspaper reports on the murders I'm studying. I could look up the town the murder had occurred in and see what newspapers were published at the time and how many of those the archives had. This would often narrow down to a particular roll of microfilm, because the archives I'm looking in don't have a lot of newspaper reports. (They're all kept in a different archive in the city.) Back in Halifax, I could often narrow it down to a six month period but then would have to crawl through the film looking for the dates I was curious about. "Fortunately" this was a very notorious trial so I expect that I'll have several months of scandalized reports to look through.

Of course, I don't only look at microfilm, although that's eating up a lot of my research time right now. I do also get to look at primary source documents in their original form, and handle them. This is when researchers will often get to use sexy sexy gloves like you sometimes see on t.v. or in movies.

This is a large file box that contains many documents that don't want to be folded anymore than they already have been. It's made from a type of material that is acid free, to protect the contents, and I do need to handle the contents with gloves because of their age. These purple gloves are latex free; there are also cotton gloves, but I find they don't fit my fingers very well.

This is just the box opened, so you can see the way the files are kept in acid-free large envelopes. This particular box is sorted chronologically. It's assize court files and each envelope contains one session's documents. In this jurisdiction there were two sessions a year.

Because of the nature of the crimes that are discussed in these documents, there aren't a lot generated per year. Typically these files would just name the people who had been charged with various crimes, list what the jury had decided, and give a small report on the crime rates in the region and the state of the local jail.

This is a close-up of one of the documents itself. It's a bit hard to read because of the handwriting, since of course all of this stuff was hand-written. I think it says:

...apparently is a model gaoler.
We find that there are at present sixteen males and three females confined in the gaol. One is awaiting trial for arson, four are insane, four are vagrants, four are under sentence for theft, three for burglary, two for keeping a house of ill-fame and one for receiving stolen goods. Of the three burlars were sentenced ... during this assize and one...

What I'm attempting to research is several murder cases in late 19th century Canada and their legal repercussions. So I'm doing this primary source research, and supplementing it with some legal research and secondary sources (those are things written about primary sources) on the topic of crime, on immigration, and on the particular victims of these crimes. All of my victims were immigrant children who came over to Canada to work on farms, and there's a lot of research into their experiences. So, of course, I head off to the library and do that stuff, too.

Part of how I organize my research is by using a research journal. Mine is pink!

This page is just lists of microfilm I've already looked at and some notes on them. It's not terribly exciting. But I also keep track of what secondary sources I've checked out, and other archives I need to go to. Sometime this month I need to go to another city and check out their records on the Labour Council because they used these murder cases to argue that workers with disabilities shouldn't be allowed into the country. It's possible that the government documents I'm looking at might have the minutes from that meeting, but I haven't found them yet.

I also get to reference what's call the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. One of the children I'm researching (the one whose corner reports I was looking up last night) is George Everett Green, and his entry makes clear the impact his murder had on Canadian immigration laws.

Publicity surrounding the inquest and the trial influenced both federal and provincial policy on child immigration. The labour movement became involved not only because it was interested in the well-being of the young labourers but also because it was concerned about their effect, as part of an increasing stream of immigration, on Canadian wage rates. In 1897, responding to labour’s requests, the new Liberal government of Wilfrid Laurier* appointed a representative of the labour movement, Alfred F. Jury, as Canadian immigration agent at Liverpool, with special responsibility to scrutinize the actions of the British child emigration homes. In Ontario, John Joseph Kelso, the provincial superintendent of neglected and dependent children, and his supporters in the child-saving movement argued that no youngsters should be as casually placed as Green had been. Their pressure for reform led in 1897 to passage of the Juvenile Immigration Act, which required more careful record-keeping and screening of child immigrants and annual inspections of them in their Canadian situations. This act was subsequently replicated in Manitoba, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, the other provinces in which substantial numbers of British children were placed.

I have over 300 pages scanned and saved on a flash drive about this case, and I'm sure I'll have another 300 before it's all over.

Anyway, that's generally what I do. It's not terribly exciting, except for the bit where it totally is. If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

ETA: It occurred to me that I could have replaced everything above with this:

Buffy: I'm starting to think this working hard is hard work.

Willow: Isn't it crazy like that?

Buffy: I thought it was gonna be like in the movies -- you know, inspirational music, a montage: me sharpening my pencils, me reading, writing, falling asleep on a big pile of books with my glasses all crooked, 'cause in my montage, I have glasses. But real life is slow, and it's starting to hurt my occipital lobe.

Willow: Aw, poor Buffy's brain.

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Friday is fired forever

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 23:23:57 GMT

Supreme Court Affirms Right of Religious Organisations to Foster Bigotry by Andrea at This Ain't Livin'

For SCOTUS to uphold the right of a religious organization to fire someone merely because they have a disability, not because they performed their duties poorly but merely because the non-disabled employers were uncomfortable and scared about that person’s disability is shameful and appalling. Confirming the right of religious organizations to discriminate on grounds that have nothing to do with religion is morally reprehensible. Even more repulsively, every major religion in the US, every major Christian denomination (and quite a few minor) filed amicus briefs in favor of their right to discriminate. Only one Sikh organization filed an amicus brief, along with a stellar line-up of civil rights organizations, humanists, and atheists, arguing that religious organizations do not need a legal right to discriminate against people.

Meanwhile, religious organizations including churches will continue to discriminate. They will continue to refuse to make their houses of worship accessible, and now they can easily refuse to even consider hiring someone who is disabled, and if an employee becomes disabled, they may claim that person is a minister and terminate their employment to avoid paying health insurance or disability insurance costs.

Seriously? SERIOUSLY?

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This is the only thing I want to keep in mind for 2012

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 11:07:24 GMT

"Love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we'll change the world."

-Jack Layton

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Fri, 09 Dec 2011 05:37:24 GMT

I'm doing some circle maintenance and removing access from folks I haven't interacted with in the better part of a year. If this is an oversight on my part (clicky boxes are hard!) please let me know! (Comments are screened)

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Je me souviens

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 09:22:16 GMT

It is December 6th, and I remember.

I was 13 years old when Marc Lépine opened fire and murdered 14 women for being at engineering school when he wasn't. He blamed feminism for the situation he was in, and murdered these women for being in non-traditional jobs, for being there.

Every year, the memorials I go to are different. Some are quiet - I remember several winters in the snow, holding candles and reciting names like a talisman against violence.

Geneviève Bergeron, 21 years old. Hélène Colgan, 24 years old. Nathalie Croteau, 24 years old.

When I was younger, they seemed impossibly mature and sophisticated. I used to imagine them laughing and enjoying university, cut down without warning. Now that I'm 35, they seem so young, and I wonder if they were afraid.

Barbara Daigneault, 23 years old. Anne-Marie Edward, 22 years old. Maud Haviernick, 29 years old.

For the past several years in Halifax I've tried to go to the Not So Silent Night vigil. One year it was held near the cenotaph, another year at the public library. There is less recitation of names, and more screaming. There's less focusing on this incident, this moment, and more discussion of the number of women every year who are murdered, who disappear, who can't get away and now never will.

Maryse Laganière, 29 years old. Maryse Leclair, 24 years old. Anne-Marie Lemay, 23 years old.

Every year, there are people who roll their eyes and tell everyone to get over it. Last year a clever person at Dal compared the yearly observance to people who are still upset about the expulsion of the Acadians in 1758. Back in 1998, Vancouver changed their city ordinances to avoid making memorials that might "purposely create antagonism or cause distress" in direct response to the memorial for this massacre and the campaign to have a memorial to AIDS victims put up in the city.

Sonia Pelletier, 28 years old. Michèle Richard, 22 years old. Annie St-Arneault, 24 years old.

But I can't deny that this memorial always leaves me disquieted. We go silent for a night, or we scream for a night, we rage against the dying of the light. But 582 aboriginal women are missing or murdered, and we don't remember them the way we do these 14. We have a barely-acknowledged Trans Day of Remembrance. We don't talk about sex workers murdered whose deaths are so unimportant that serial killers can operate with impunity until they start on "real" women. If we started naming girls murdered by parents, women with disabilities murdered by caregivers, how long would our yearly remembrance be?

Annie Turcotte, 23 years old. Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz, 31 years old.

I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. We name these 14, silently or quietly or screaming their names to heaven, because we can't name the others. Because there is enough controversy around this day, this naming of 14 women who were undoubtedly killed for being women, and we can't imagine the controversy in naming them all, acknowledging that some women are targeted because they are vulnerable, because they matter less, because they are hated beyond belief, because there will always be someone who tells me that women who don't want to be abused shouldn't be sex workers, shouldn't be "liars", shouldn't be in relationships, should just leave.

I forget this date is coming every year, and suddenly it's here, and I remember, I remember, I remember.

Geneviève Bergeron (b. 1968), civil engineering student.
Hélène Colgan (b. 1966), mechanical engineering student.
Nathalie Croteau (b. 1966), mechanical engineering student.
Barbara Daigneault (b. 1967), mechanical engineering student.
Anne-Marie Edward (b. 1968), chemical engineering student.
Maud Haviernick (b. 1960), materials engineering student.
Maryse Laganière (b. 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique's finance department.
Maryse Leclair (b. 1966), materials engineering student.
Anne-Marie Lemay (b. 1967), mechanical engineering student.
Sonia Pelletier (b. 1961), mechanical engineering student.
Michèle Richard (b. 1968), materials engineering student.
Annie St-Arneault (b. 1966), mechanical engineering student.
Annie Turcotte (b. 1969), materials engineering student.
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (b. 1958), nursing student.

Excerpt: Monuments policy toughened: The park board's new policy could be used to refuse future monuments that might antagonize people.

The Women's Monument, now in Thornton Park on Main Street, offended many people because its plaque specified it was "in memory and grief for all women murdered by men" -- not all murdered women, or all murdered people.

The AIDS Memorial became the subject last year of a Vancouver television station poll, in which the vast majority of viewers objected to it being erected in Stanley Park.

After much public argument, the AIDS Memorial is now set to be located near Sunset Park.

Ron Rothwell, chairman of the Friends of Stanley Park, which opposes all monuments in public parks, said the park board's new policy against controversial monuments is a "small step in the right direction." But Rothwell said placing the word "purposely" before the phrase banning monuments that "create antagonism or distress" watered down the guideline and opened them up too much to commissioners' interpretation. Rothwell also didn't like the fact that the board, in adopting the new guidelines, lifted its temporary moratorium on new memorials.

Nevertheless, Rothwell applauded the board's new stipulation that future monuments must make a park more attractive. He thinks that rule, if enforced, would cancel most proposed memorials.

Simon Fraser University applied ethics professor Mark Wexler said he could see why the board has decided, with this policy, that "it doesn't want to be in the controversy business."

Although Wexler personally doesn't mind contentious monuments because they provoke discussion and education, he said the Women's Monument was a highly unusual memorial because it pointed the finger of blame, in this case at men.

That's in contrast to most memorials in honour of Canada's war dead, Wexler said, which don't cast blame by mentioning that it was the Japanese or Germans who killed Canadian soldiers in the Second World War.

École Polytechnique massacre

Sisters in Spirit

Out of Sight Out of Mind? Transgender People's Experience of Domestic Assault [PDF]

Canadian laws on prostitution shown to increase violence against sex workers

Violence Against Indigenous Canadian Sex Workers

Violence Against Women With Disabilities: Probing the Scope of the Problem

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Don = mal. :(

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 02:58:56 GMT

Moi: Le français est très difficile. .
Don: Oui.
Moi: Je ne pense pas que tu est très compatissant.
Don: D'awwwwww. "There there, there there." (Qu'est q'on dit "there there" en français?)

Don = mal (mais il le dissimules).

Aujourd'hui, j'ai lu un livre qu’étais écrire par une femme qu’étais assassinut. Elle est morte avant le livre était complété. C'est les troisième auteur qu’étais morts avant les livre était complété. :( Je pense que les histoires du Canada est un travail dangereuse. :(

Aussi, j'ai écrit en français pendant deux heurs. Je dois emploi mon dictionnaire tout le temps. :( J’oublie beaucoup de français. *soupir* Je sais que la langue arrive avec le travaille.

Aujourd'hui, j'ai:

- boit thé
- lu 2 livre de histoire
- entendu à un lecteur de 1960s "Rebel Youth" (Jeunesse Rebelle?)
- fait la cuisine.

Je suis très fatigue.

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En français, je m'appelle «soucis»

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 00:20:08 GMT

Aujourd'hui, je me voudrais excercer à le français. Je ne parle pas français très bien, parçe que je ne travaille pas quand j'étais une étudiante. Maintenant, je dois étudier très dure. (J'espere que «dure» est "hard". Je pense que il est "soft". Je ne veux pas que j'étude "soft"!)

Je suis triste que je ne parle pas français. Je suis une Canadienne. J'ai famille qui est francophone. Je suis une historienne du Canada, et beaucoup de histoire est en français.

Je projete d'écris en français chaque jour, et lis un article. Peut-être je vais écrite mes neveu qu'habitont à Québec. (Ils sont les fils de la soeur de Don.)

Aujourd'hui, j'ai

- nettoyé le frigo
- lis deux article d'histoire
- écris mes étudiantes
- nettoyé ma bureau
- bu thé.

Je suis très contente.

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The Montreal Metro System will be fully wheelchair accessible in 2058

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 07:45:30 GMT

I know a lot of people skip titles of posts. Please read the title of this one.

I had an argument with someone at school on Thursday and it's still sitting with me. I think this is because we'd had an earlier argument on a similar subject on Tuesday. As you can probably imagine, it was about disability, or more specifically, about how disabled people have existed and advocated for themselves since long before the mainstream folks started paying attention, and well before I ever started paying attention.

The argument on Thursday was about my colleague's disagreement with the abstract for a master's research paper on disability discrimination in the Montreal Metro System. I'm not from Montreal, so the place this system has in Montreal was a bit much for me to grasp. Apparently it's a big thing, a progress thing. A thing about how Montreal has been advancing into the future. When it was opened in 1966, it was opened to everyone.

Everyone, of course, except people who can't walk up and down stairs.

The presentation and follow-up short video talked explicitly about ableist constructions of public spaces. She called it out very bluntly: this is discriminatory. This has always been discriminatory.

The part that others tend not to get, the part my colleague at the university didn't get, is that the people at the time knew this.

This is one of the things about disability-based discrimination that drives me up the wall. The theory that many people express is that no one in the past could possibly have been expected to think about disability as a category because this whole disability rights thing didn't start until [the speaker learned of it, whatever time period that is] and obviously not a moment before. (See: many feminist responses to disability-based critiques online that ignore even something as simple as the presence of disability activists at the Beijing conference in 1995. I've been told again and again and again that disability only became a "thing" to consider in the past few years and it's mostly "oversensitive" types at that. Arg.)

So, let me lay some facts on you:

The late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Metro was being built to be inaccessible to many people with physical disabilities, was also the time when people with disabilities were getting out of unwanted institutional settings. It's called "The Great Exit," and I'm pretty sure you haven't learned of it. The Great Exit didn't happen spontaneously, and it wasn't an austerity measure. People with disabilities campaigned for it. They fought for it. Just like they fought for employment and education in the 1800s and early 1900s in Nova Scotia.

Once they left institutions, people with disabilities fought for employment rights and to live free from discrimination. To some extent, they won. The Quebec Human Rights Act included disability as a protected class, passed in 1975.

Except for transit users. Explicitly, transit was not included, you could not sue for a human rights violation for not being allowed on a bus if you were disabled.

In 1988, ADAPT (a US-based protest group) came to Montreal to highlight how inaccessible the transit system was. This PDF has some of their information [in English] about the protest. It was all over the news, and people were arrested for crashing through barricades with their wheelchairs.

And still, the Metro remained inaccessible. In fact, it wasn't until 2004 - Sixteen Years Later - that the law saying that you couldn't sue for inaccessible transit was struck down, and it wasn't until 2006 that a Metro station was made wheelchair accessible. And even then, it was a debate, and one that apparently was won because it "looked bad" that the Metro was still inaccessible. Not that it was bad, that it looked bad.

The Metro in Montreal is currently being retrofitted to be accessible. The current rate is less than one transit station becoming accessible per year. Again, The Montreal Metro System will be fully wheelchair accessible in 2058.

My colleague argued that it is wrong ("presentist," the worst thing to accuse an historian of being within the discipline) to chide people in the past for not thinking of people with disabilities when they made the Metro. "They didn't know better then. We know better now."

This is a lie. They knew. Disability-based historians and disability rights activists know how far back the fight for equal access goes. It didn't spring, fully formed from the head of Hephaestus, in 1995 in Beijing. It didn't suddenly arrive the day you first learned of it. It's always been here. In ignoring that, in assuming that his ignorance is in fact the truth, my colleague (and many others like him) are betraying their own attitudes about disability, about history, and about what matters.

Don will be 78 years old when he can physically get into every Metro station in Montreal. The lifespan of people with Don's disability is less than that.

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Another day, another run-in with the TTC

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 22:17:03 GMT

I'm trying to determine if I now have a case of assault-by-TTC-driver. But I'm not sure.

What happened was that the TTC driver, in her effort to inform me that she doesn't actually have to follow TTC's rules if she's running late, closed the bus door in my face fast enough and with no warning that the door hit me. It's been a few hours and the area the door hit me is still sore.

On the one hand: If she had told me she was going to close the door and drive off, I probably would have stepped back and avoided being hit.

On the other hand: I don't think she was trying to hurt me.

Thus, I am unsure.

But yes, it was another TTC driver informing me that she doesn't have to actually follow TTC's rules because... I don't know. She insisted that she would call dispatch and find out when the next bus with a working ramp would come along, but refused to stay long enough to give us that information because she was already late on her route.

What is the purpose of this? I don't even know anymore. We ended up walking home from campus rather than deal with the TTC anymore today.

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VOTE DAY VOTE DAY!

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 14:02:30 GMT

It's Vote Day, Vote Day, Everyone Get Out to Vote Today!
Everybody's looking forward to the results!
It's Vote Day! Vote Day! Get Outside and Vote Today!
Everybody's looking forward to the results!

Parties and parties and parties and yay!
parties and parties and parties and yay!
Looking forward to the election.....

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PhD-related radio silence begins now

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 01:21:30 GMT

After scheduling time for everything I need to get done, including eating, my time has been basically eaten into and there's not much left. I'm going to try and be stingy with it.

So, it's totally not you, it's me. Well, me and York. Which is very very big. (There are twice as many people in the undergraduate history program as there were in my undergraduate university.)

♥

I will probably pop up here and there but otherwise I've got some free time scheduled mid-October, and then again in December.

I do have time scheduled to answer emails (about 4 hours a week) so don't be afraid to say hello. (anna@annaoverseas.com), and I suspect the obligatory "omg life so hard, must place more EBZ" twitters on @annaoverseas will be around too.

I will more than likely be updating the acafilter because it's how I keep track of what things I should be reading, and expect both twitter and journal updates when I'm researching because I might find more cows. In fact, I hope to find more cows! Cows everywhere!

♥

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Further TTC Developments

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 02:46:14 GMT

According to a letter I just received from the TTC, buses are not to be put in service if their ramps aren't working. Drivers are to do an inspection of their buses before their shift, including the ramps, and if the ramps aren't working, they're not supposed to drive them.

Okay then.

Completely non-poll-technology Poll:

Do you believe this?

Yes, of course!
No, of course not!
I'm sure it's the policy, but not put into practice.

So, that's what's going on there.

Things are so busy here I hardly have time to breath.

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Ontario strikes again

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 14:38:19 GMT

We have started the process of attempting to get Don health care.

Logically, this should be simple: Canadian moves from one province to another, Canadian receives health care using Canadian's health care card from previous province until residency requirements are met for the new province's health care to kick in.

In practice, things are very different. Don's spent two days on the phone with various people about getting a doctor in the city. Ha ha, ha ha ha.

First call was to the HealthCareConnect people to find a GP that was taking patients. They will not help him because in order to use HealthCareConnect one needs to have a valid Ontario Health Care Card. Don cannot get a valid Ontario Health Care Card until October. We think. It might be longer.

HealthCareConnect refers Don to a website. The website is woefully out of date. He finally finds a GP that is taking patients and that doctor's office says "Well, awesome, but you have to register with HealthCareConnect before we can take you."

So, Don calls back HealthCareConnect and someone there feels sorry for him and kicks him up a level. That person reveals that she can give him phone numbers for some "community care centers" that are required to take him even if he doesn't have an Ontario health care card, but they're basically like walk-in clinics. There is no regular GP that you'll see (necessary for someone like Don who has a wide variety of health issues, is using a wheelchair full time, and needs careful prescription management) and they don't prescribe the medications he uses to manage pain.

Okay then. I call up our MPP's office. At first I am told that, no no, you can immediately just go into a Service Ontario office and get your health care sorted. The three month waiting period is only for newcomers to Canada. This is fascinating to me as it contradicts absolutely everything else I have ever read and would make Ontario unique amongst Canadian provinces. I ask him to confirm and he spends some time looking at websites and declares that things are "a bit unclear." He tells me that he'll call his contact at the Ministry of Health and get back to me.

So, here we are. Don has enough medication to cover him for a month. With some of his medication, if he can't get a new scrip, he will die. (Slowly, granted, so probably something could be sorted before he slipped into a coma, but who the fuck knows.) Now it's no longer a matter of "medication is expensive", it's a matter of "can we even get it?"

But gosh, if only cripples were more positive thinkers, everything would be easier.

Oh, and by the way: If Don were moving into a long-term care center, then he'd automatically get an Ontario health care card.

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Toronto Transit Authority Believes PWD Shouldn't Ride Buses, Part 2 of an ongoing series

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 01:20:04 GMT

The TTC is putting drivers on wheelchair accessible routes who have never been shown how to use the basic safety equipment provided for people who use wheelchairs.

According to our driver home this evening, he has never been shown how to use any of the equipment required to stabilize a motorized wheelchair on the bus he is driving. He advised us (politely) that our options were getting on the unsafe bus, waiting "maybe all night" while he tried to figure out how to use the safety equipment on the bus, or waiting for the next bus. As you all may recall, our luck with "waiting for buses" has been poor, so we chose the option that was unsafe.

Don's electric wheelchair weights 250 lbs without a person in it. Don, who is 6'10" tall, weighs around the same amount. Can you imagine the injuries that could be sustained by Don, or anyone near him, if his wheelchair tipped over because it was not safely secured? The wheelchair swayed back and forth during the whole trip, and on at least one tight turn I was worried it was going to knock right over into the window. I imagine Don's experience of this was even worse.

Don's disability includes a chronic pain condition that is exacerbated by both movement, and having to brace himself. Right now he's doped up on a full morphine dose just to recover from the bus ride home.

PS: Tried five times today to call Wheel-trans. The line was busy every time.

The TTC is putting untrained drivers on late evening routes. Do you feel safe?

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Toronto Transit Authority Believes PWD Shouldn't Ride Buses, Part 1 of an ongoing series

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 21:49:01 GMT

Over 50% of the buses that Don & I have tried to take in Toronto have refused him service because he is disabled.

Of the five bus drivers who have refused us service, only one has followed the protocol that was outlined to us by TTC Customer Service yesterday. Today, a bus driver threatened to trap Don on the bus and force him to wait for the firetruck to come rescue him if I did not stop insisting that he follow TTC protocol in situations regarding broken ramps on buses. That same bus driver was reprimanded by the bus driver that finally accepted us on his bus because apparently the TTC is deliberately putting buses with broken ramps on wheelchair-accessible routes with wheelchair-accessible stickers on the buses and just telling wheelchair users to wait for the next bus. This will obviously allow them to say they have 100% of wheelchair accessible buses on routes when those buses are not wheelchair accessible.

Two bus drivers have not strapped Don's wheelchair into the bus, as they are required to do, and one driver did this improperly. This puts Don's life at risk. Without training, I cannot strap Don into the bus for them. I am not Don's caregiver, and should not be expected to do this work without pay, and while having to pay to be on the bus. When this sort of work is required of me on airlines or trains, I get a free fare.

The TTC has been taken to court at least twice for failing to obey accessibility requirements. I had been under the mistaken impression that being required to pay a huge fine and still have to follow accessibility guidelines would cause TTC to consider that accessibility is something they are required to do. Apparently this is not the case.

Because we were kept waiting for three buses at the last stop we were at, we are unable to call TTC customer service to complain about this situation. Again, we have been in Toronto for two weeks, and have been taking buses together on two days. I do not have the time and energy to call TTC to complain about this every single day that Don and I want to go out. I do not want to have to call TTC customer service every day. But now I am considering getting a cell phone that much sooner just so we can call TTC customer service when these things happen rather than having to wait till tomorrow morning.

I wish I could say I cannot believe this is happening in the bustling metropolis of Toronto, but frankly, I am not. After years of fighting for basic accessibility requirements in Halifax, and foolishly thinking that things would be easier in a busier city with more resources, and a strong disability rights community, I am really really tired of this shit.

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Thu, 07 Jul 2011 22:00:14 GMT

Google is looking specifically for people who are fluent in Sign to test out some features of their new Google+ social network. If people who are fluent in various types of Sign, they are hope you will help them test a video-chat feature called "Hangouts".

They are definitely looking for ASL users. I know a few BSL users have indicated an interest to Google. I didn't notice anyone with AusLan or any other form of signed language.

Please pass along to your relevant d/Deaf & HoH networks!

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Letter to the Asylum, 1921

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 15:44:50 GMT

Found attached to an application to the Halifax School for the Blind:

Grant Falls, NB
27-October, 1921

Halifax School for the Blind,
C. F. Fraser, Supt.

Hon dear sir:--

The applicant, to my mind, is only short-sighted, is very unruly and is lacking extensively in grey matter (brain cells).

He will never become a poet, an orator, a musician or a signer [sic].

I would advise you to leave him with his father who is not more gifted than the son.

Yours truly,
Rev. T. [Redacted], D. D.

Yes, this was in the pile of rejected applications, but none of the rejected applications have notes indicating why they were rejected.

ETA: The very next application has someone, presumably the applicant's mother, writing across it "Will not leave her her. Go away from me now as she is not in a fit condition." :( It's like she was bullied into filling out the application.

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