By: Sophie Hunt
On Oct. 7, the warm fall air was filled with the scent of fresh produce as McMaster students filled Mills Plaza for the first ever Local Food Fest.
The event was hosted by Mac Farmstand, an MSU service that sells locally-grown fruits and vegetables on campus from June to October. The Local Food Fest brought together McMaster food initiatives such as MACgreen, Mac Bread Bin, and Mac Veggie Club, as well as numerous local food producers and distributors.
“Farmstand’s goal is to encourage students to have more local eating habits,” said Jonathon Patterson, Mac Farmstand’s director. “A lot of people enter university after living with their parents and being used to having meals with family. University is when we start to develop our food habits, and local food is so important.”
This year, Mac Farmstand has served an averaged of 200 people per day, almost double the number of clients it has seen in previous years. The Local Food Fest was created as a result of the increased interest in local food that Farmstand has seen.
One of the local vendors represented at the event was The Mustard Seed, a cooperative grocery store that sells food grown and produced in the Hamilton area. The store is located at the intersection of Locke Street North and York Boulevard in downtown Hamilton.
“Anything that can be local is local at our grocery store,” said Meg Makins, a representative from The Mustard Seed. “This festival is all about local food, so it was a perfect fit . . . I think [the event] raises awareness about the importance of local food, and it helps students realize that they can access local food in a simple way.”
The Farmstand closes on Oct. 31, so the service is brainstorming ways to continue to promote local food sources for students that have come to rely on local produce. “We’re looking at continuing past Oct. 31,” said Patterson. “The stand would be closed, but we’d be having local farmers come in for an interactive panel discussion.”
“We’re partnering with the residences to offer smaller cooking classes within residence for students to learn how to cook things that they can cook when living on campus,” added Patterson. “We’re also working on partnering with the Student Health Education Centre for having a dietician who would be at Farmstand just for one day, so if people have questions they can have those questions answered.”
This is the first year that Mac Farmstand has hosted the event on campus, but the service hopes to make the Local Food Fest an annual event.
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By: Steven Chen
In ancient myth, even the brave felt the empty silence of the beast’s cavern. Clearly the times have changed, as more than 500 attendees packed Carmen’s Banquet Centre on Wednesday, Sept. 30, while they awaited the winners of the annual LiON’s LAIR entrepreneurship competition.
Presented by the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce and Innovation Factory, this year marked the fifth annual LiON’s LAIR awards gala. Similar to the widely-popularized television series Dragon’s Den, the event features ten finalists who offer business pitches with ambitions of competing for over $100,000 worth of cash and professional services.
The pitches are assessed by a panel of five “Lions” – comprised of some of Hamilton’s most distinguished business experts. It is the Lions who ultimately make the grand decision of which companies stand out on top.
Mario Paron, a Lion, McMaster alumni and Canadian Managing Partner of the KPMG Enterprise, is thrilled to have been involved with the competition in many ways. “[KPMG] has been a sponsor since the very beginning and in the last two years, I have actually been directly involved as one of the judges,” said Paron.
When considering the growth of the LiON’s LAIR over the past five years, there is a noticeable increase in the number of contestants, media attention, gala attendees and prize value. Likewise, Paron notices that the level competition is also rising.
“People are more prepared and the ideas have more business merit,” mentions Paron. “If you look at it as a basket of entrepreneurs, every year the bar seems to go up in terms of the quality of the presentation and the underlying concepts that they are bringing forward.”
This year’s group of finalists brought out an array of innovative and canny start-up businesses. Companies ranged from Chipsetter, an economical pick-and-place machine for printing circuit boards, to xocial, a social platform inspiring “do-gooders” to motivate each other through healthy competition.
The first-place winner of $77,000 prize package was Sniper Skin, a start-up company that designed a revolutionary alternative to hockey tape. Lee Wright, a committed parent and mechanical engineer, used his own frustration with fabric tape and applied it towards creating a new marketable product.
Looking back on his journey in developing this company, Wright appreciated the support he received from the Innovation Factory in preparation for the presentation pitches. “They warned us upfront that there was going to be a lot of effort on our part,” noted Wright, “but every week we learned something new, for example how to speak to the media and how to talk on camera. And just meeting the other companies that we were competing against was a fantastic experience.”
McMaster was well represented at the awards gala, with several of the finalists being alumni from the university. In fact, Brandon Aubie, founder of QReserve (LiON’s LAIR finalist), expresses inspiration for the start-up stemmed from the challenges that arose while studying at the university.
“While working at McMaster University’s Biointerfaces Institute, we faced the problem of having a lot of research tools and resources, but not enough people using them. Tracking these [research tools] down, even within your own university, can be tedious and result in endless email chains,” said Aubie.
“[QReserve’s solution] is to build a national database of research equipment, services and facilities for anybody to access and utilize,” he added.
The role of formal education in boosting these entrepreneurial efforts is often overlooked. “If I look at Hamilton right now and the momentum that it is building, some of it has to do with the fact that our educational institutions are really contributing. I really think that we need higher education, which can be a bit of a breeding ground,” noted Paron.
The annual LiON’s LAIR is once again helping to spur the entrepreneurial spirit in the Hamilton area. With the event increasing in scope year after year, it serves a tremendous role in profiling local success stories and start-ups.
Photo Credit: Banko Media
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Special thanks to Michael Beattie, Bianca Caramento and Christine Yachouh for helping us acquire these letters.
From Vincent Samuel, Conservative candidate Hamilton West-Ancaster-Dundas
From Elizabeth May, federal leader of the Green Party
From Filomena Tassi, Liberal candidate in Hamilton West-Ancaster-Dundas
From Thomas Mulcair, federal leader of the New Democratic Party
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Porch Stories
Saturday, Oct. 17 at 9 p.m. @ Mills Hardware - Runtime: 73 min. - Rating: 14A | Drama
From the director of acclaimed 2004 Hot Docs prizewinning documentary Army of One, Toronto filmmaker Sarah Goodman displays a sure hand with her first narrative feature. Porch Stories captures the intersecting lives of three people. With a strolling camera and beautiful black-and-white cinematography, Goodman perfectly portrays the web of events and overheard conversations that make up the city’s soundscape.
Court
Monday, Oct. 19 at 1 p.m. @ Ancaster SilverCity Cinemas - Runtime: 116 min. - Rating: PG | Drama
Winner of top prizes at the Venice and Mumbai film festivals, Court is a quietly devastating, absurdist portrait of injustice, caste prejudice, and venal politics in contemporary India. An elderly folk singer and grassroots organizer, dubbed the “people’s poet,” is arrested on a trumped-up charge of inciting a sewage worker to commit suicide. What truly distinguishes Court is the brilliant cast of professional and nonprofessional actors; an affecting mixture of comedy and tragedy; and the naturalist approach to the characters and to Indian society as a whole, rich with complexity and contradiction.
Al Purdy Was Here
Saturday, Oct. 24 at 1 p.m. @ Mills Hardware - Runtime: 95 min. - Rating: PG | Documentary
The story of Al Purdy, Canada’s leading poet, and the A-frame cabin that he built, now being restored as a writers’ retreat. Featuring interviews and performances by artists including Leonard Cohen, Bruce Cockburn, Gord Downie, Gordon Pinsent, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Sarah Harmer, Tanya Tagaq and Joseph Boyden, the film moves between Purdy’s story and the compelling characters bound up in his legacy. Purdy has been called the last, best and most Canadian poet.
Amy
Sunday, Oct. 18 at 7 p.m. @ Landmark Cinemas 6 Jackson Square - Runtime: 90 min. - Rating: 14A | Documentary / Biography
With a voice oft-described as a combination of Billy Holiday, Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan, Amy Winehouse was a pop star with soul, a once in two generational musical talent whose appeal crossed cultural and demographic boundaries. As riveting as it is sad, Amy is a powerfully honest look at the twisted relationship between art and celebrity — and the lethal spiral of addiction.
When I first met Jazz “Jacuzzi La Fleur” Cartier in 2014, he was still relatively unknown to those not tapped into the Toronto rap scene. In the crowd waiting to get into the A$AP Ferg show, my eyes would have been drawn to Cartier even if a mutual friend hadn’t quickly introduced us. The rapper was sporting a murdered-out fishing vest with what I think were Gucci loafers, and naturally stood out from the masses.
At age 22, Cartier comes off as a man beyond his years both in his lyrics, and in casual conversation. The son of two parents whose nomadic careers led them across the world, Cartier moved around a lot in his youth. By the time he was 16 Cartier was living on his own in his native Toronto, and dealing drugs to get by. A club connoisseur, Cartier could be regularly seen enjoying the nightlife downtown.
His first album, Marauding In Paradise, is an expression of these dark influences. The cover artwork references the Adam and Eve creation story, and in many ways the album’s release saw Cartier reinvent himself from a guy people knew for his drug-induced debauchery to a promising musician. It was a difficult path, with the album taking many different shapes since work began on it in 2011, but one that saw Cartier come into his own as an artist. Cartier wasn’t alone in his development, as his long-time friend and executive producer of MIP, Lantz, has been working with him since they were teenagers.
While I wanted to profile him before the album dropped, things never seemed to pan out. When I finally get the chance to reconnect with him, it’s through a FaceTime call he takes from a studio in Toronto. While Cartier is polite throughout and eloquent in his responses, he shows little interest in reflecting on past achievements for too long and seems to be itching to finish up press and start recording.
Aware of the platform Marauding In Paradise has given him, Cartier exudes a businesslike urgency about what needs to be done to take his career to the next level. The discipline he’s shown in this past year is something he sees as a product of the maturity that he picked up living alone and continually working towards something that he takes seriously, unlike some people who take up rapping as a hobby after they’re done school and stuck in their parent’s basements.
“A lot of people still live at home with their moms. Not to discredit them, but you can’t really flaunt independence or exude some kind of character when your whole support system is based on the fact that you have stable living conditions at home. I think living on my own since I was young has given me a bigger perspective on life. I see things a lot differently now,” said Cartier.
Much has been made of Drake, who lived with his own mom in Toronto’s opulent Forest Hill neighbourhood during his early days as an artist, so one can understand why Cartier would seek to subconsciously distance himself from the so-called “6 God”. While Toronto is now a household name thanks to Drizzy’s exploits, the picture many have of the city is at odds with the grittier version Jazz has been living, far from the reaches of the city’s north end.
One similarity that Cartier has with Drake is a close relationship with his favourite producer. Where Drake had 40, Cartier has Lantz. The latter duo can be assumed to be on much more personal terms as they’ve been working together since they were 15, and it shows. With MIP coming off as a polished debut, Cartier is eager to see where their professional relationship takes them.
“If something were to ever happen to Lantz, it wouldn’t be the same. As long as he’s breathing and I’m breathing, I think we’re gonna be working together. It’s even hard for me to work with other people now because I’m just so used to our relationship and how fluently we work… He’s the furthest thing from a yes-man and I’m the furthest thing from a yes-man, so we get at each other a lot. He’s the kind of guy I can text at 5 a.m. with a random idea.”
Keeping things in-house is the utmost priority for Cartier at the moment. In an era where rapper’s personalities are normally diffused throughout a massive homogenous crew, Cartier’s brashness and single-handed commitment to his own vision is refreshing. You know that when he tweets something, it hasn’t been watered down and you can appreciate him for his willingness to stick his own neck out.
Given the nature of his songs, where crazy parties and ensuing late-night trysts figure prominently, one could wonder what his recording process is like. Cartier is quick to denounce the idea that he indulges in any drugs while behind the mic or on stage.
“Everything I talk about is usually just from going out at night. In the studio, and when I perform, I keep things one hundred percent professional. I don’t drink before I get up on stage so I can keep a clear mind. Now, I’m in the studio every day, so I don’t have time for parties. I’m like full straight-edge,” said Cartier.
The music industry is fickle in its propensity for casting aside artists as quickly as it hypes them up, but Cartier doesn’t appear to be putting himself under pressure to release a quick follow-up only to sacrifice losing the fans he gained from his intense first-person narratives.
“This year I was just starting out, but next year I’m gonna snap and I’m gonna make sure the wave is felt, because I’m not content with staying where I’m at right now.”
Unwilling to speak on a solid release date, Cartier simply smiled and said his sophomore record would come out “when it’s ready and the time’s right.”
Cartier often calls his own number on tracks and says his own name in the midst of spitting bars like he does on MIP-standout, “Switch.” If he continues to thrive at the same quick pace, he’ll soon have arenas full of people shouting along with him.
It’s always a pleasure to hear the passion in a person’s voice when describing something they love. It’s even better when a group expresses that same passion. This is exactly the case with Goodnight Sunrise, a Toronto band currently on a tour of Eastern Canada to promote their new record, Deal With It.
I got to catch up with the members of GNSR recently during the drive between two of their shows. Their enthusiasm for music was infectious even when running on little sleep and not nearly enough coffee.
Interestingly, neither David Kochberg nor Vanessa Vakharia, the band’s guitarist/vocalist and keytarist/vocalist, respectively, came to music at a young age. “My parents made me take piano lessons against my will,” Kochberg explained.
Paul Weaver, the band’s drummer, however, got an earlier start. “I got into rock and roll because of my mom. My mom was super badass and she used to buy me cool records. And my parents used to truck me around to like, Pearl Jam concerts,” he said.
Vakharia had a similar experience to Kochberg growing up. “But when I was in high school I got really into becoming Britney Spears and I tried out for Canadian Idol three times in a row, stood in line for 10 hours and got rejected after the first note… I really wanted to be a pop star,” she explained.
She added that one night she confronted a band playing at a bar. “I was like, you guys would be so much better with female harmonies…and then they asked me to come jam with them the next day.” That became the first band Vakharia was part of. “We found David on Craigslist and we were in this other band for a few years and then we started Goodnight Sunrise.”
The creation of the band’s songs is a group effort. “Usually what happens is either David or I will come up with a chunk of a song, like a riff or a melody…and we’ll bring it to the other person,” Vakharia explained. “Then we’ll bring it to our bassist or [Paul] and they’ll really put the meat of the song together… but it’s mostly me and David writing the lyrics.”
Goodnight Sunrise’s genre is difficult to pin down as it combines its members’ varied musical interests. Kochberg is a fan of classic rock, while Weaver has been influenced by Alice in Chains and 90s grunge, along with his classical jazz training. “I love rock, but really I grew up listening to pop and house music,” Vakharia said.
Despite their differences in musical inspiration and preference, Kochberg, Vakharia and Weaver all agree on their favourite performance as a band. They played the first day of Turtle Music Fest in Parry Sound this summer, and while their performance went well, Vakharia explained that things took an unexpected turn.
“After we played, everything went to shit. The festival got cancelled,” including the sets of the two headlining bands, I Mother Earth and Our Lady Peace.
“So on Sunday at 3 p.m., we were still in town [with] all these people in Parry Sound who wanted to party…We ended up providing the gear for I Mother Earth so they could play a show at the local bar and the agreement was that since we brought all the gear, we would get to open for them.”
The crowd was appreciative and enthusiastic.
“No one was too cool to dance that night,” she said.
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By: Emile Shen
Gwendolyn Eadie once toured with Disney on Ice across North and South Americas as an ice dancer. These days, she still laces up her skates for the McMaster Varsity Women’s Figure Skating Team, but you can also find her in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, where she is a PhD candidate.
Eadie began her undergraduate career at Simon Fraser University as an English major. Her interest in math and science was present throughout her childhood, but it was not until she took a first-year astronomy class that her interest developed into an academic pursuit.
Eadie credits this development to her astronomy professor. “When you have a teacher that is really inspiring and can convey the material really well… if you have an innate interest, then when you have a prof that can bring that out of you, that’s when you hope you can go into that field.”
“The turning point was when I wrote an English paper about the Hubble Space Telescope. Maybe English wasn’t the right thing for me,” she reminisced.
Now in the third year of her doctoral studies, her work focuses on calculating the mass of the Milky Way Galaxy.
To many of us, conquering the weight of our day-to-day responsibilities is enough, never mind the mass of a galaxy. But Eadie, who has developed her own statistical model for calculating the weight of the Milky Way Galaxy, finds reassurance from studying the ever-expanding universe as it reminds her of the relativity of our issues in the grand scheme of the solar system, and beyond.
Even with all of this, competitive figure skating is still part of her life.
“It’s something I love and it’s completely different from work—it gets me out of the office and it gets me socializing with a whole different set of people, so it just keeps me really happy to keep doing it.”
The figure skating team consists mostly of undergraduate students so Eadie is also seen as a role model within the team. Sometimes, she offers her teammates free physics tutoring in her downtime. Eadie wants women to break down barriers in academia and beyond, believing in the importance of role models. When asked to name her role models, she lists her mom first and foremost.
“I think seeing [my mom] growing up really broke down those walls. Why can’t I go into science and do astronomy? There’s no reason why I can’t.”
Motivation can be hard to tap into when stress kicks in, but Eadie believes it is important to keep devoting time to our passions.
“Don’t stop the things you love doing… It’s a part of who you are and it’s good for you.”
Photo Credit: Aaron Springford
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Q & A with Hamilton’s new mayor, Fred Eisenberger
The Silhouette sat down with Hamilton’s new mayor-elect, Fred Eisenberger, to discuss his time away from politics, the low voter turnout in Hamilton, and his short and long term goals to improve Hamilton. Eisenberger won the mayoral race on Oct. 27 with 49,020 votes, claiming 39.9 percent of the total vote.
After serving as mayor from 2006 to 2010, what have you learned that will influence your role as mayor this time around?
I had the unique and distinct opportunity to be the President and CEO of the Canadian Urban Institute, a research organization that works in countries and municipalities around the world. We had offices in the Ukraine, the Philippines, Jamaica and Ethiopia. I certainly got a strong sense of the challenges that other cities were going through and how they were dealing with them, and some practical applications in terms of what most cities need to do to improve their mobility and communities, and also how they use data.
Going forward with the huge volume of data that we are currently collecting, the Urban Institute was actually leading the way in how to mine that, analyze it, evaluate it, clean it, scrub it, and then make it useful for future decision making. That experience has certainly given me a lot of additional insight into what cities could, should, and need to do in the future.
Do you have any plans to address the low voter turnout (34 percent) in Hamilton?
Yes, during the course of the campaign I said I would like to have the online network voting instituted by the next election. This has been used, online, phone-in, dial-in or mail-in, or all of the above, so that accessibility to voting is vastly increased. It also requires a discussion with the school board in terms of educating kids from grade 1 right through grade 12 on every election, on the candidates and get them to vote through every election between grades one and grade 12. I think voting is a learned behaviour, and either you learn it at school or you learn to take that responsibility from your parents, and maybe people do, but obviously 60 percent or more of the population does not. So it’s something that we have to teach…and I think it has to happen in the schools and I want to have a discussion with the school board in terms of making that a required part of the curriculum.
What are your main priorities for the next few months?
Obviously staffing up for the mayor’s office, sitting down with Council and looking at our strategic direction and getting a clear buy-in in terms of either affirming or adjusting the strategic direction depending on what Council wants to do, including staff. Having a process developed for public transportation, through the course of the campaign I talked about a citizen’s jury process to look at all the evidence around public transit, BRT, LRT, just adding more busses, and make a recommendation through Council what they believe is the best course of action is for the city.
I did talk about starting or restarting the Vision 2020 exercise that was done about 25 years ago. It really talks about a community strategic and buy-in and I want to get that started sooner than later. If you look up Vision 2020, which is kind of the model we’ve been working from for the last 25 years, it’s clearly time to re-do that process. It brings in all people from all sectors and it breaks down the entire community in terms of different sectors and different priorities. I think the community at large needs to provide direction to the city for the next 20 or 30 years in terms of what they would like Hamilton to be.
What do you hope to accomplish by the end of your four-year term?
A lot. I mean, clearly public transportation is a big issue. I’m confident that we are going to have this sorted out and with any luck, a clear direction and maybe some shovels in the ground as a result of whatever transit proposal we pick.
Economic development continues to be the biggest issue for the city, the loss of commercial industrial tax space over the last 30 to 50 years has really put the pressure on the residential tax space and we need to turn that around. We need more job opportunities in our city. I would like to think that at the end of the four-year term we have made a significant dent in growing our commercial industrial tax space, filling up our industrial parks, and hopefully starting to work on the airport growth district as an opportunity for additional growth, as well as the brown fields.
Lastly I would say that I would like a pretty clear direction in a waterfront development corporation put in place for the CN lands and the steward street lands along the west harbourfront.
I’m looking forward to getting started December 1st, and I think it’s an exciting time. We’re going to have the PanAm games happening next year and Hamilton is certainly on the up swing and we just need to keep the momentum going.
