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After four years of wrangling and disputes, McGill University agreed Tuesday to hand over long-sought documents and emails to a former student who believes they will shed light on the university’s links to military research.

The conflict had persisted for so long that former student Cadence O’Neal, who filed her original Access to Information request in 2012, was kind of stunned to have university representatives show up at an ATI hearing at the Montreal courthouse Tuesday and simply say: Here you go.

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“I’m surprised – and pleased,” said O’Neal, a recently-graduated women’s studies student, who was lugging around 600 pages of documentation as she left the courthouse.

She was also somewhat astonished that the university has spent so much time and money opposing the request, only to have complied at the last minute.

“It makes me think they could have done this a lot earlier and saved me four years. I hope in the future they will respond more quickly to students’ requests for information,” O’Neal said.

The documentation now in her hands contains reports and digital slide presentations made by McGill’s CFD Laboratory, which specializes in the development of state-of-the-art methods for Computational Fluid Dynamics. Still to come, by Sept. 2 and after they have been properly redacted, are almost 6,350 emails between CFD and some of the companies Demilitarize McGill believes they have military contracts with, including Bell Helicopter Textron, Lockheed Martin and Bombardier.