From subMedia
After the school decided to erase graffiti, local writers and students took action. They tagged lockers, wrote messages, and sprayed cameras until the security arrived.
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
Guillaume Beauchamp and Maxime Morin (aka “DMS”) publicly declared war on antifascists in Quebec, and in Montreal.
These far-right fanboys have threatened to find us and destroy us. Big mistake.
On December 5th, we had a friendly run-in with you in the streets. Judging by how fast you ran away from us, we thought you had understood our warning the first time.
On the night of December 8th we paid you a visit at your home, 2440 Chambly street, apartment #1, in Hochelaga. We had the pleasure of putting up a few posters around your place, just to let your neighbours know that they live next to some neo-fascist rats.
This was your second and last warning. If you don’t learn to shut up and behave yourself, it’s going to cost you. Feel free to spread the word to your fashy chums: y’all are never, ever safe in this city.
AFC (Antifa af Collective)
From Réseau Résistance Anti-G7
Saturday, January 20, 2018 – 13:00 to 17:00
Centre social Centre-Sud
The Réseau Résistance Anti-G7 (RRAG7) invites you to an organization assembly against the G7! The annual G7 meeting will take place on Friday, June 8th and Saturday, June 9th at La Malbaie, at the Richelieu manor, near the casino. Is there a better place to receive the corruption and collusion from the richest and most powerful of the world than a gambling den? The G7 meetings are critical for splitting the world between these seven presidents and prime ministers, and for the protests which follow them everywhere! We will not leave these servants of the capital machine alone!
The next organization assembly will be on Saturday, January 20th, 2018, from 1PM to 5PM at the Comité Social Centre-Sud, 1710 Beaudry (Beaudry metro station). The assembly room is wheelchair accessible.
This January organization assembly takes place after the November assembly, where committees were formed:
The January assembly will be an occasion to see what each committee did so far and to plan the next steps of the resistance. Note that each committee is open to more members who would like to give a helping hand.
The January assembly will also be an occasion to share how the mobilization is going outside Montreal and to bring practical proposals.
Note however that the assembly is public. Be sure that what you propose can be debated in public instead of within an affinity group.
The complete agenda of the assembly will be sent in January.
Everywhere where the G7 meets, local population get mobilized, protest and resist! Like Italy and Germany last summer, let’s ensure that we take the relay and show our solidarity with all the peoples of the world. Share this call to everyone and every collective who resists to the capitalist hydra!
Informations: info@antig7.org
Fichier public:
PDF icon tract-beige-joined.pdf
As we reported previously, following a dubious December 12th story on TVA news about women being removed from a work site in Côte des Neiges allegedly due to requests from a nearby mosque, the Islamophobic far right in Quebec mobilized. Just as quickly as the wave of racism crested, however, the initial story collapsed, as it became clear that either the journalist had made the whole thing up, or she had been duped by Islamophobes without doing any factchecking herself. In an anemic and half-assed statement made during the 10pm news on December 14th, the TVA reporter blamed the confusion on an « imbroglio between the people concerned », neither apologizing nor taking any responsibility at all for this epic fiasco. It was only at the noontime news on December 15th – that is to say, three days after the initial news report – that TVA finally retracted the story and apologized, all the while still not acknowledging the extremenly toxic effect that this massive howler had had on the social climate.
Initially, far right women, with the backing of La Meute and Storm Alliance, had called for a demonstration in front of the Ahl-Ill Bait mosque, with the avowed goal of disturbing the Friday prayers, as others on facebook spread memes calling for mosques to be firebombed, and far rightists like Isabelle Lavigne made threatening videos explaining how one could get the home addresses of the mosque’s executive. Outside of the right, the ASTRQ union, which represents the workers who were allegedly reassigned to other areas, clumsily called for a demonstration on twitter, a call they canceled within 24 hours as it became clear that things were not as TVA had presented them. Whether taken aback by the speed of events, or perhaps due to their own preconceptions, even “progressive” political figures were caught flatfooted. Montreal’s new mayor Valérie Plante issued a noncommittal call for “calm”, while Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, Québec Solidaire’s slick posterboy, clearly bought the story, joining the far right chorus in condemning the supposed exclusion of the workers (which had not happened):
At the same time, Catherine Fournier of the PQ not only shared the news on social media, but also expounded on the subject at length in an interview with Mario Dumont.
Despite TVA having retracted the story by that morning, roughly 20 people showed up to demonstrate outside of the Ahl-Ill Bait mosque Friday afternoon – a far cry from the hundreds who had signaled they would attend on social media. This was not only a measure of how unreliable intentions to attend a facebook event can be; La Meute had issued a statement on the Thursday pulling out of the mobilization, noting that the initial TVA story did not seem to be holding up (even though Sylvain Brouillette still insisted having « the deep belief that it is true. »). The group – often referred to as Quebec’s largest Islamophobic far right organization – would on Friday issue a statement clearly admitting that the according to its own “investigation” the TVA story was untrue. (You know mainstream media’s racism is trash when even far right groups that march alongside outright neonazis say their concocted anti-Muslim stories are not credible.)
The official retraction by La Meute did not stop some of its members from participating in the rally, including one Michel Meunier from Clan 06 (aka Mickey Mike; also associated with Storm Alliance, and a good friend with neonazi René Blaireau, who has previously been discussed here), who published on his facebook account one of the most disgusting statuses we have had the misfortune to come across in 2017. In a clear reference to the massacre at the Sainte-Foy mosque last January 29th, Meunier stated that he hoped « with all his heart that [Muslims] will start the New Year the same way that you did last year! » This status has since been removed.
Dave Tregget of Storm Alliance took a much more opportunist, and wishy washy, position, claiming on Thursday that the initial TVA story was true, yet asking Storm Alliance members not to show up wearing any identifying insignia, as the demonstration was a “trap” to make Quebecois look racist.
As such, the only self-avowed organization (if one wants to call it that) to show up was Georges Hallak, representing his (one-person) Canadian Coalition of Concerned Citizens, although members of other groups, including the Northern Guard and Soldiers of Odin and Storm Alliance, were also identified.
Like most things, this sad incident of vicious Islamophobia can be viewed both in concrete terms (which raises some interesting questions) and in as part of a broader context including other social factors and forces.
On the concrete level, we still want to know what was behind this story. We are encouraged by news that there may be a lawsuit against TVA, not only because it’s about time the Quebecor media conglomerate (one of the principal sources of racism in Canada) was taken to task for its poisonous propaganda, but also because it might shed some light on how this came about. So far all evidence seems to point to Mark-Alexandre Perreault of MAP-Signalisation (which actually employs the women in question) being at the origin of the story; furthermore, screenshots show that Perreault was not some disinterested party, but was already racist towards Muslims and apt to frame this in terms all too familiar to us:
While the evidence currently points towards Perreault, it may also be worth mentioning a claim by Stéphane Gagné, a white supremacist and self-styled “Quebec Confederate” from Trois Rivières. Gagné, who is close to both Storm Alliance and the small Quebec Threeper milieu, is well-known for his online videos, many of which overflow with racism. At the same time, he is clearly not the sharpest tool in the shed. In a video produced on December 14, Gagné accuses La Meute of being full of traitors who have sold out to Muslims. The reason for this accusation? That apparently two people from G-Tek are known to be in or close to La Meute, and according to Gagné, this means La Meute members were involved in having women excluded from a work site on behalf of Muslims. (We warned you he was not the sharpest tool in the shed.) Given that everyone now knows that the story of Muslims having women excluded from the work site was untrue, the actual significance of La Meute members at G-Tek becomes all the more interesting.
Then again, this all could just be another example of Gagné rambling – he is far from a credible source… However this would reinforce the possibility put forth on the website on jase – which publishes des contributions from citizens who want to promote openness and diversity in Quebec, and who are concerned about the rise of intolerance and the far right – which concludes its own investgation based on internal communications of the La Meute secret facebook group, that there are grounds to wonder whether or not this whole story might not be a setup by a member of La Meute or somebody close to the organization, in order to promote the political agenda of stigmatizing of Muslims.
On the larger scale, the how and why of this story becomes less important. Because, after all, we’re not dealing with just one story. TVA and various similar media, not to mention politicians and other public figures, have spent years building up Islamophobia in Quebec, and stories like this are actually a dime a dozen. This has been a dynamic fed from both above and below – but mainly, we have to say, from above.
This racist spiral reached a horrific waystation almost one year ago, when Alexandre Bissonnette entered the Islamic Cultural Centre in Ste-Foy and opened fire, injuring nineteen people and killing six. Rather than retreat in shame, the grassroots Islamophobic right viewed the mosque massacre as a challenge, and promptly set about mobilizing more aggressively. In 2017, for the first time in decades, the far right repeatedly took to the streets, sometimes even outnumbering antifascist forces. The very mosque where Bissonnette had carried out his murders was once again targeted with hate literature and violence. Politicians in Quebec repeatedly echoed Donald Trump’s claim that antifascists are as bad (or worse!) than fascists, only without the liberal backlash that followed the American president’s statements. In October, the governing Liberals offered a clear olive branch to the far right, when in the same week they canceled a planned Public Commission Against Systemic Racism and passed a new Islamophobic law, Bill 62, which would ban people wearing any kind of face covering from receiving or offering public services.
The fight against Islamophobia in Quebec has become a cornerstone of the broader fight against racism and the far right. Muslims have been designated the number one scapegoat by important sections of the establishment, just as they have been designated the number one target by almost all grassroots racist forces.
As such, we are calling on everyone who opposes racism, scapegoating, and the rise of the right, to join us in a demonstration against TVA, clearly the main culprit in this latest Islamophobic outrage.
Wednesday, December 20th, we will be meeting at 6pm at Parc Émilie-Gamelin
Now is the time!
Tuesday, December 12, TVA Nouvelles reported that female construction workers doing roadwork outside a the Ahl-Ill Bait mosque in Côte-des-Neiges had been reassigned to work in other areas, following a request to this effect from the mosque’s directors. TVA initially claimed to have a copy of a work contract to this effect. If true, this would have been both sexist and illegal.
Within hours of this news report, there was a wave of outrage on social media. In no time at all, well-known far right and Islamophobic personalities were denouncing not only the Ahl-Ill Bait mosque, but Muslims in general, as well as various politicians who were apparently failing to take a stand quickly enough, not to mention the Fédération des Femmes du Québec, which was accused of remaining silent due to the fact that its recently elected president, Gabrielle Bouchard, is a trans woman (and as such, apparently, indifferent to sexism).
Before the end of the day, facts contradicting this narrative were beginning to emerge. The executive of the mosque explained that they had never made any request to remove women from the site. “We did ask for access to the parking lot, at noon on Friday, but we never asked that anyone be excluded. This request, if it was made, did not come from our organization,”stated Moayed Altalibi, the mosque’s spokesperson,in a press release. This was confirmed by Serge Boileau, president of the Commission des services électriques de Montréal (CSEM), which is in charge of the work site, who pointed out that the person who oversees the work site for the CSEM is a woman. “She has been there for three or four weeks, and was never made aware of any request at all, not was she ever bothered by anyone.”
Despite these facts clearly contradicting TVA’s lies, social media networks connected to the far right continued to spread the claim that women had been removed from a work site due to Muslims. Indeed, the very fact that a spokesperson for the mosque was insisting that they had no problem with women’s presence, was cited as proof that Muslims were liars who could not be trusted.
Not for the first time, a dishonest news report about Muslims in Quebec went viral. Not for the first time, the far right is mobilizing as a result. Not for the first time, it looks like the news story itself may be the result of far right disinformation, as screenshots from Mark-Alexandre Perreault (who seems to have been the initial source of this story) shows that he is not exactly a disinterested or unbiased commentator:
Following the TVA report, far right social media icon Josée Rivard was quick to put out a video, in which she first lambasted FFQ head Gabrielle Bouchard with transphobic invective, before turning her sites of Muslims who were apparently responsible for making a female construction worker lose a day’s pay. Putting forward a false view of ethnic relations in Quebec, she shouted about how, “We always welcomed everyone and we never had any problems and now suddenly a bunch of morons are coming here who are messing everything up.”
In short order two women close to La Meute – “Sue Elle” (aka Sue Charbonneau) and “Kat Baws” (aka “Kat Akaia”)–called for a demonstration outside of the Ahl-Ill Bait mosque, with the express intention of disrupting the Friday prayers on December 15. Sue Elle has been involved in numerous racist mobilizations in 2017, attending demonstrations called by the Canadian Coalition of Concerned Citizens, the Front Patriotique du Québec, Storm Alliance and La Meute. Working with neonazi boneheads close to Soldiers of Odin and Atalante, she also attempted to organize a demonstration against Haitian refugees outside the Olympic Stadium on August 6 – an event that she was forced to cancel due to a large antiracist countermobilization.
Kat Baws is close to both La Meute (her partner “Pat Wolf” holds an official position in the group’s Monteregie Clan 16) and Storm Alliance, and was one of the organizers of Touts Unis Pour Les Démunis, a (failed) far right PR operation on December 9.
Besides La Meute and Storm Alliance, Baws also sympathizes with Atalante, the Quebec City-based neofascist organization, and various pages that specialize in identifying and attacking antifascists:
Both Storm Alliance and La Meute quickly moved to back the call for a demonstration outside the mosque on December 15. Meanwhile on the event’s facebook page, it was quickly boosted by Isabelle Roy (aka Seana Lee Roy), former head of Storm Alliance Montreal and co-organizer of the TUPLD flop, and numerous others, as suggestions to sing Christmas carols to disrupt the mosque’s Friday prayers, to hand out bacon or ham sandwiches, etc. began to come in.
At the same time, in parallel, the Association des Travailleurs en Signalisation Routière du Québec announced that it too would be demonstrating on Friday in front of the Ahl-Ill Bait mosque. Organizing via twitter, the ATSRQ warned its members to leave prior to the 1:30pm demonstration (which it said might get out of hand), and then as more and more news reports came out on Wednesday casting doubt on TVA’s Islamophobic claims, finally canceled its plans on Thursday morning.That said –insisting she is acting on her own and now as a member of any group –Marie-Josée Chevrier had already made a public call for people to support the union demonstration, a call that was backed by individuals from various networks, including people close to the Front Patriotique du Québec. As of this writing it is apparent people may still be showing up Friday morning before the larger afternoon racist rally. It is worth noting that Chevrier, despite her disavowal, is a member of some interesting facebook groups:
Storm Alliance, La Meute, and the Front Patriotique du Quebec are said to be organizing security for the Friday afternoon demonstration:
At the same time numerous calls have been made on facebook for more ominous action. Isabelle Lavigne (a member of the Storm Alliance facebook group) posted a video in which, while insisting she was not calling for violence, she warned members of the Ahl-Ill Bait mosque’s executive that she had gotten their home addresses via a government website. Sébastien Cormier – whose family’s immigration problems were exploited by Storm Alliance in their November 25 demonstration – put out his own video, bemoaning the fact that Québécois had been indoctrinated into Islamophobia by the government, yet at the same time warning Muslims that if they keep on making “unreasonable demands” that things would explode. (We have the impression that “Seb” really doesn’t know what he’s gotten himself into, accepting support from people who he himself seems to realize are racists.) La Meute member Patricia Celtique Gagnon put out a video calling for demonstrations in front of mosques across Quebec on Friday, a sentiment that was echoed by other social media denizens.
There have been numerous calls for mosques to be vandalized and attacked, amidst a swamp of racist memes and comments:
And this is of course just the tip of the iceberg.
The far right mobilization around this story – even though it is based on misinformation – is not surprising. In Quebec, a key element of racist organizing for the past ten years has been framed in terms of women’s rights. This can take a racist but anti-sexist form, or it can take the form of straight out paternalism about “protecting our women” and “women are sacred in Quebec”. This is part of a broader phenomenon in which, after years of racist rabble rousing from media and politicians alike, popular discontent here – even around actual issues – is increasingly frequently expressed by white people through Islamophobia.
Regarding these instant feminists of the far right, we also can’t help but notice how selective their outrage is. For one woman to have lost one day’s pay due to sexist constraints is indeed something that should never happen. But for a mass mobilization against this, in a society where on average every woman earns 88 cents to the male dollar (which translates into 28 days’ unpaid work every year), is clearly about a lot more than gender equality.
If women are being excluded from any domain, that is oppressive, sexist, and something we oppose without hesitation. However, we are now all-too-familiar with the way in which these stories are made up by media outlets like TVA, quickly becoming something “everyone knows”, never mind that the story is contradicted by facts. In this case as in so many others, lies have fed an anti-Muslim feeding frenzy.
This is a story we will be following up on in the days to come.
From sub.Media
Join us this New Year’s Eve to send loud messages of solidarity to those spending the holidays behind bars, as we celebrate ongoing prisoner resistance, and renew our commitment to fighting for a world without prisons!
From sub.Media
Grassroots Mi’kmaq people in the unceded territory of so-called Nova Scotia have been resisting the Alton Gas project, which aims to build salt caverns for natural gas storage. The project could have devastating repercussions for the Shubenacadie river and its unique ecosystem. Water protectors have decided to directly block the project by setting up a truckhouse and a camp citing the 1752 Peace and Friendship treaty.
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
Exclusive insight into the modus operandi of the “far-left”, liberal use of simplistic grammar, words pulled directly from dictionaries: recent months have seen a recent upsurge in the number of articles signed by Philippe Teisceira-Lessard in La Presse.
As recently as November 23rd, 2017, Philippe Teisceira-Lessard allegedly published an article describing the alleged actions of the “far-left” in alleged ‘Quebec’. Through exclusive interviews with admitted ex-nazis (Maxime Fiset) and CSIS investigators, he delves deep into the dark underground of the ‘anarchists’, and surfaces with a profound analysis of the ideas and actions motivating the criminally-minded left.
We asked how Teisceira-Lessard has such detailed analysis and information about the motivations of the various actors who post anonymously on Montreal Counter-Info. When we reached out to a source who requested anonymity, we were informed that “he has insider knowledge… how else could he provide details of their intentions and tactics? How would he know that they draw inspiration from djihadist websites?”
There has been a recent upsurge in Teisceira-Lessard’s journalistic contributions. In 2017 alone, he published 54 articles, compared to only 13 in 2015. While reading through his articles from 2016-2017, we became increasingly aware of the glaring similarities between Teisceira-Lessard’s writing and the communiques that anonymously appear on Montreal Counter-Info.
As part of our investigation, we consulted technological experts who ran several algorithms to compare sentence structures and phrasing patterns from Teisceira-Lessard’s articles to those from various posts on Montreal Counter-Info. The results were, to say the least, disturbing.
In 99.2% of the comparisons, both Teisceira-Lessard and the anonymous contributors made liberal use of the following sentence structures: simple, compound, and complex. Both used subjects that employed verbs, at times linked by the conjunctions ‘and’, as well as ‘or’. What is most shocking, is that occasionally an independent clause was linked with a dependent clause through the use of the conjunction ‘because’.
After repeated linguistic triangulations between Teisceira-Lessard’s La Presse contributions and communiques posted on Montreal Counter-Info, Ian Lafreniere, the leading researcher in far-left symbology, stated with concern that “his articles are remarkably similar to anarchist blog posts”. Below we have highlighted several examples of similarities between Teisceira-Lessard’s writing and these anonymous communiques:
“A website called Montreal Counter-Info has become the hub of the movement, and releases communiques that claim responsibility for several attacks on people and property.”
“A video released on the website shows two individuals approaching a railroad and activating paint-filled extinguishers.”
“Many yuppies decide to show their wealth in ways other than by BMWs and Mercedes.”
Editor’s note: The websites actually made more frequent use of the compound-complex format than Teisceira-Lessard, who appears to not want to cloud his writing or confuse his readership with more than two clauses.
Lapresse.com, mtlcounter-info.org, ISIS.net/recruitment. All three are websites. They publish and distribute articles and editorial opinions to a wide audience, who access this information via the internet.
By its own admission, La Presse has been using the internet to disseminate its propaganda since 1999, and as recently as 2015, converted almost entirely to an internet-based distribution model. In what we can hardly view as mere coincidence, Montreal Counter-Info also uses this platform of primarily disseminating information via the “web”, while maintaining a small distribution base in print.
The manager(s) of the La Presse website did not respond to our email inquiries. Their host, the Canadian company Namespro Solutions, refused to reveal their identity to our computer science expert Daniel Lecavalier.
Teisceira-Lessard is no stranger to the violent actions of the far-left. In April 2012, he was arrested and charged with breaking and entering and mischief for his “essential role” in the occupation and destruction of Minister Line Beauchamp’s office in Montreal.
In an interview following the events, Teisceira-Lessard admitted his involvement. “When the police talked to me about mischief, theft, and break and enter, I was in shock—these are strong words. These aren’t petty accusations!” he said with a hint of pride. Since then, Teisceira-Lessard has maintained a low profile and retreated to the seedy underground of the extremist blogosphere.
Though it is technically correct that far-right ideology has directly lead to the murder of eight muslim men, consistent racist attacks at a mosque, and an increase in violent assaults on people of colour, we cannot ignore the impact of the far-left’s actions. “We find ourselves in a situation where the far-left is as much of a problem as the far right,” says Michel Juneau-Katsuya, national security expert and ex-CSIS agent.
We approached several front-end loaders and security cameras, who would only speak to us under the veil of anonymity. In one touching testimony, a storefront window had this to say:
“These violent actions are completely unacceptable and have no place in a lawful society…in no way will I accept attacks on my family, their security, and their peace-of-mind.”
Our investigation and thorough analysis lead us to the following conclusion: if we disregard both ideology and content, there are far too many similarities between articles written by Teisceira-Lessard and those that appear on Montreal Counter-Info for them to be penned by different authors. We contacted the SPVM to request additional support of $524,937.50 to continue with our investigative operations, but their petty cash fund had recently been depleted.
We attempted to contact Teisceira-Lessard to shed some light on these new concerning allegations, but he replied only with “no comment”, a phrase he no doubt learned during his time in jail.
The joint La Meute/Storm Alliance demonstration of November 25, 2017 promised to be the largest far-right mobilization in Québec since the 1930s. The organizers anticipated a thousand people turning out to denounce the Commission publique contre le racisme systémique, which, ironically, the Liberal government cancelled on October 18.[1] At the end of the day, even the two groups and their allies from the nationalist groupuscules, the Three Percenters, the Northern Guard, and the boneheads from the Soldiers of Odin and Atalante only collectively reached half that number (300 to 400 max). Nonetheless, this mobilization could still mark a qualitative and symbolic watershed for the fascist drift in the province—a drift that police forces are more openly supporting, and in which many “mainstream” political actors are complicit.
While, in Montréal this year, we got used to the SPVM acting as a security force for La Meute and the other identitarian groupuscules, never was the collusion between the police and the far-right organizations as flagrant as it was in Quebec City on November 25. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Service de police de la Ville de Québec (SPVQ) brutally repressed antifascists, beating us with batons and shields, pepper spraying us, and making “preventive” arrests, with the clear goal of permitting the identitarians and fascists (some of whom were openly carrying batons and mace) to spread their hatred and racism unopposed in the province’s capital city. Additionally, the multiple approaches used by the media to demonize antifascist counterdemonstrators, both before and after the demonstration, contributed to normalizing the identitarian groups’ toxic discourse.
That said, we have to face the fact that we in the antifascist and antiracist movement have an enormous amount of work to do to make clear the urgent danger posed by the increasing shift to the far right. The various militant groups involved were only able to mobilize around 250 people to face off with the fascists at the Assemblée nationale.
To begin with, the Rassemblement populaire contre la manif de La Meute et Storm Alliance à Québec!, which the Quebec City ad hoc antiracist collective “CO25” put a lot of energy and thought into organizing, only drew a few hundred people, including those who made the trip from Montréal, who made up almost half of the assembled group, which was also augmented by small groups of comrades from Saguenay, Estrie, and elsewhere in the province.
Although a variety of objective factors undermined the mobilization (the time of year, the cold shitty weather, the early morning bus departure from Montréal, etc.), we also need to consider a certain number of complementary factors.
It was no coincidence that the major media published a series of articles demonizing the “far left” in the days leading up to the demonstration. The negative presentation of antifascists, treated as interchangeable with the far left, is an established approach that has only gotten worse since last August 20 in Quebec City. The negative image of antifascists that has been publicly fostered rests in no small part on a biased perception of violence and a dishonest portrayal of the far left and the far right as equivalent.
There’s simply no denying that the events of last August 20, some incidents in particular, seriously undermined the credibility of the antifascist movement, even in some circles that are would normally be sympathetic to us. Not everything, however, can be explained away by the media coverage. It’s pretty obvious that we are collectively having an enormous problem breaking through the hegemony of a particular legalist, pacifist, and pronouncedly nonviolent discourse, which could be described as “extreme centrism.” This sort of ideological monopoly, characterized by a rigid pseudo-ethic wrapped around a woolly ideological core, primarily serves the interest of the far right, which in its quest for legitimacy is making sure to cooperate with the police and to project a law and order image that belies the much greater and much worse violence at the heart of its programme.
To put it another way, given that the state, the far right, the media, and even certain progressive personalities have banded together to demonize the antiracist and antifascist movements, our movements face an uphill battle of popular education and the deconstruction of centrist myths.
We also have to recognize that racism is greeted with a high degree of tolerance in Québec, particularly outside of Montréal. Recall that the famous Commission publique contre le racisme systémique—which certainly didn’t pose a radical threat of any sort—was harshly criticized by the two main opposition parties, before being cancelled by the Liberal Party, which for abject electoral reasons replaced it with the a meaningless “Forum sur la valorisation de la diversité et la lutte contre la discrimination.” That very same week the Liberal Party passed the Islamophobic Bill 62, which is now facing constitutional court challenges. Without fail, surveys conducted in Québec confirm a strong popular sympathy for anti-immigrant and Islamophobic ideas, particularly in communities with few (or no) Muslims or immigrants, but which are inundated by trash media and the fear it whips up against the “other.” It’s a context where hostility toward antifascists is fed by both anti-left conservatism and a xenophobia that rejects and disdains anything that is not “de souche.”
On the other hand, the very structure of the social media that we are overly dependent on in our organizing favours echo chambers where users inevitably end up interacting almost exclusively with people who share their ideas and values. This plays no small part in the isolation of the far left and its views. The identitarian echo chamber actually seems to be a lot bigger and substantially more influential than the antiracist echo chamber, reaching more people every day. It’s obvious we have to find new ways to organize, and to do so we HAVE TO get off of the social media platforms and go into communities, or we risk radical antifascism being permanently marginalized. That means organizing and acting in the cities, neighbourhoods, and communities where the far right are intent upon recruiting.
On a much more positive note, we must note the excellent work done by our CO25 comrades. The popular gathering, even if it only brought out a small crowd, was a clear organizational success. Everyone appreciated the meal collectively prepared by members of the IWW, the Collectif de minuit, and Food Against Fascism, the speeches were clear and on topic, security was well organized, and the piñata was a nice way to end it. Overall, better communication vastly improved coordination between the cities. But it’s still clear that things are far from ideal . . . it was fine for a pleasant picnic to denounce racism, but it wasn’t enough when the pepper spray came! So, while the popular gathering was a success, the same can’t be said for the subsequent events.
The parameters established by the “popular” gathering were clear; people planning to physically block the far-right march were to wait until after noon to move into position.
Following improvised leadership, a small group of about 200 demonstrators easily skirted a handful of disorganized cops to take to the street and move in the direction of René-Lévesque. The SPVQ riot squad got their shit together just enough to throw up a haphazard cordon at the intersection of René-Lévesque and Honoré-Mercier. Showing little taste for the fight (perhaps a prudent assessment of the objective conditions . . .), the antifascist forces didn’t try to break through the police line, instead choosing to occupy the intersection for a long as possible. At this point, the La Meute and Storm Alliance march was 150 meters away, in front of the Centre des congrès.
It wasn’t long before the cops received the order to put on their gas masks, a sure sign that chemical irritants would soon be coming into play. After about ten minutes the riot squad moved against the antiracists, more and more violently pushing them in the direction of the Fontaine de Tourny, generously dousing the front row in pepper spray, and they quite literally did this to clear the way so the racists could march on the Assemblée nationale as planned. The cops’ commitment to defending the racists’ right to demonstrate was almost touching.
Comrades resisted courageously for as long as they could, but eventually they were pushed back to the fountain. Metal barricades were dragged into the street to block the cops and snowballs rained down on the cops and the identitarians. However, by this point the resistance was pointless; most of the counterdemonstrators were dispersing, as rumours of an imminent kettle created confusion in our ranks. We withdrew to the Plains of Abraham, where there was an impromptu caucus, after which a hard core took off in the opposite direction, hoping to skirt the police and confront La Meute and Storm Alliance further on. A commendable effort, but unfortunately unsuccessful. At about the same time, the police arrested twenty-three comrades.
In the end, the far-right march was able to return to its starting point unopposed, yet still under a heavy police escort.
The police later reported an additional twenty-one “preventive” arrests shortly after noon in the area of the demonstration. The arrestees in these cases were charged with conspiracy to illegally assemble and being disguised with the intention of committing a crime. The police themselves admit that no crimes were committed by any of these people. Minority Report much? There are also some comrades who face additional charges.
From our point of view, what was historic about the November 25 mobilization was the open unabashed coming together of almost all of Québec’s far-right forces. Until now, concerns about how they are perceived have caused La Meute, and to a lesser degree Storm Alliance, to keep openly fascist and white supremacist groups like Atalante and the la Fédération des Québécois de souche at arm’s length. This time they did not hesitate to cheerfully invite them to join their little party in the province’s capital. And in the aftermath of the demonstration Atalante Québec’s Facebook page included comments replete with praise from dozens of members of La Meute, Storm Alliance, the Soldiers of Odin, etc.[2] Which says it all.
Let’s be perfectly clear: Atalante members are white supremacists and unequivocal neo-fascists. There’s no room for doubt. The group was founded in 2016 by boneheads from the “Quebec Stompers” scene, part of the milieu surrounding Légitime Violence, a band with edifying lyrics such as: “Ces petits gauchistes efféminés qui se permettent de nous critiquer n’oseront jamais nous affronter. On va tous les poignarder” [The little leftist sissies who dare to criticize us would never risk confronting us. We will knife them one and all]. And perhaps even more to the point: “Déroulons les barbelés, préparons le Zyklon B!” [Roll out the barbed wire, Get the Zyklon B!], referring to the gas used in the Nazi concentration camps. Atalante has close ties to the fascist “Rock Against Communism” music scene, with the Italian neo-fascist group CasaPound, and here in Québec with the Fédération des Québécois de souche and the traditionalist Catholic Society of St-Pius X.
We also noted the presence of the Three Percenters (III%), a pseudo-militia whose members arrived at the demonstration decked out with reinforced security gloves and carrying telescopic batons, what appeared to be pepper spray, and other concealed weapons. This group, which has only recently established itself in Québec, includes conspiracy theorists and survivalists bound together by anti-Muslim and “anti-globalist” paranoia. The organization is primarily based in the U.S., but it has some chapters in English Canada as well. A few days after announcing themselves on November 25 in Quebec City, a number of “threepers” were part of the hodgepodge of dickheads who announced a pro-gun rally at the Polytechnique at the Université de Montréal, on December 2, 2017, four days before the annual commemoration of the 1989 shooting of fourteen women there by the anti-feminist Marc Lépine.
We are within our rights to ask why the Threepers weren’t arrested in Quebec City (or, at a minimum, why their weapons weren’t confiscated), while the police arrested twenty-one antifascists purely preventatively, pointing out in the media that weapons were found in the possession of some arrested militants. . . . And why were the Atalante and Soldiers of Odin boneheads permitted a lengthy gathering on the esplanade ramparts, from where they could fly their colours without the slightest interference from the police . . . while a few meters away the riot squad was mercilessly assaulting the antifascists.
The way the police were deployed in the contested space goes a long way toward suggesting complicity and a comfortable symbiosis with our adversaries. The police were in front of the far-right march with their backs to the identitarian protestors, focusing their attention on the antiracist militants. The SPVQ played a similar role on August 20, providing La Meute organizers with privileged information about the Montréal militants, extracted in a questionable way from a bus driver, thereby helping them to go ahead with their demonstration. But, frankly, this time not the slightest effort was put into hiding the complicity!
No big surprise that the identitarians applauded the police at the end of their demonstration . . .
As expected, media coverage once again left a lot to be desired, typically portraying the antifascists as shit disturbers, when in reality we were on the receiving end of all of the violence! Most of the media repeated the SPVQ press statements without asking a single question, focusing primarily on the seizure of arms and throwing around the word “conspiracy.” We noticed a substantial difference between the coverage in the anglophone press and that in the francophone press. Significantly, the former doesn’t shy away from referring to La Meute and Storm Alliance as far-right, while the francophone press defaults to euphemisms and beating around the bush . . . when they don’t completely confuse the various groups and their respective positions (one TVA journalist went as far as to claim that Atalante were the antifa who had come to demonstrate against La Meute!). Xavier Camus has produced an excellent piece on the bizarre media coverage of the November 25 events.
Only the CBC thought it worth mentioning that the police had done the far right’s dirty work. To the best of our knowledge, in his piece appropriately entitled À bas le fascisme!, Houssein Ben-Ameur was the only columnist to set the record straight without feeling he had to tar the racists and the antiracists with the same brush.
Once again, it is the independent media that provided a perspective closer to what the antiracist and antifascist militants there that day actually experienced. The MADOC video is a great example.
In the final analysis, it’s hard to see this as a success for antifascists and antiracists. Obviously a modest mobilization was better than no mobilization at all, and we were frustrated by all of the adversity we faced trying to clearly express our opposition to these racist groups gathering in Quebec City. Even if November 25 wasn’t a victory for us, it would have been worse still had there been no opposition. It is also a fact that without the help of the police, even our modest mobilization would clearly have disrupted our adversaries’ plans in no small way. But that just isn’t good enough. To halt the fascist advance, we need to pick up our game, both at the level of mobilization and in terms of information and education. Furthermore, we need to find new ways to intervene, new approaches to mobilizing that allow us to break out of the ranks of the established left-wing scene and begin to meet and discuss with new comrades.
The best thing to come out of this mobilization was the improved ties between antiracist and antifascist militants in Montréal and Quebec City, as well as elsewhere in the province. Obviously we have our work cut out for us if we are to use this beginning to build ever stronger and more effective networks.
[1] There was also the fig leaf of support for “Seb,” a Québécois man whose wife (a “potentially legitimate immigrant”) is having trouble immigrating to Canada.
[2] It’s worth noting that Dave Tregget, the leader of Storm Alliance, was himself the president of the Soldiers of Odin about a year ago and did not hide the fact that he was on good terms with Stompers and Atalante. Tregget has spent the recent months denying that he is a racist at every opportunity, but how can you doubt his racism when he and his buddies jump into bed with Atalante at the first opportunity? Tregget lies and manipulates, and it’s time the media recognized that.
The following is the complete text from a flier antifascists were planning to distribute at a counterdemonstration against a group that had planned to hold a pro-gun rally at the Place du 6 décembre (the memorial to victims of the 1989 antifeminist Polytechnique massacre, in which 14 women were killed) on Saturday, December 2nd. This rally has now been moved outside of Montreal, and as a result the planned counterdemonstrations have been canceled. We still feel it is worthwhile to share this text, which explains the connections between this rally – and the « gunnies » — with the Quebec far right. A more in-depth text on this subject will be coming soon.
Today some self-styled “gunnies” were planning to hold a rally at the memorial for the victims of the Polytechnique massacre, in which 14 women were killed in 1989 by antifeminist gunman Marc Lépine.
We are here to share our solidarity and outrage over this misogynist provocation.
Over the past year we have witnessed a sickening increase in hate crimes, and far-right organizing, across Quebec. This was sparked by a mass shooting at the Islamic Cultural Center in Quebec City, on January 29. The current far-right wave, while focused on Muslims, is hostile to anything that threatens their imaginary “traditional” Quebec society, made up of white, francophone, heterosexual Catholics, with men “protecting” women and laying down the law.
The so-called “gunnies” protest was organized by the collectif Tous contre un registre québécois des armes à feu, and specifically by Conservative Party officials Guy Morin and Jessie McNicoll. It is no surprise that both McNicoll and Morin, along with several people who indicated they would attend the event, are also supporters of various far right groups, such as Storm Alliance, La Meute, and the Three Percenters.
The Three Percenters is a group that many who planned to attend this event, including Guy Morin himself, are also associated with. “Threepers,” as they are called, are a paramilitary group that was started in the United States in 2008, pledging armed resistance against attempts to restrict private gun ownership. However, their political agenda goes far beyond simply supporting gun rights. In the United States, Three Percenters have been actively involved in vigilante patrols along the Mexican border, blocking buses of immigrants who have already been detained, and holding anti-refugee rallies. Threepers have held protests outside mosques, and have been involved in a number of cases of violence, including in November 2015 when one of their supporters shot five people at a Black Lives Matter protest in Minneapolis. In Canada, Threepers have “staked out” mosques and tried to intimidate counterprotesters at anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant demonstrations.
There is clear overlap between Tous contre un registre québécois des armes à feu, the Threepers, and other far-right groups, including the Storm Alliance and La Meute. Several Threepers armed with clubs and wearing the group’s insignia were identified providing security at the recent racist demonstration organized by those two groups on November 25 in Quebec City, and before the facebook event for the December 2 “gunny” rally was taken down, a number of Storm Alliance and La Meute members as well as Threepers had indicated they would attend. At the same time, one of the “gunnies” who made an insulting video accusing the victims of Lepine’s massacre of being “polypleurniches” (“polycrybabies”), Martin Leger, is a former member of the neo-nazi Quebec Stomper scene from which the group Atalante (who were also present on November 25) emerged.
The plan to hold a “gunny” rally at the memorial to the Polytechnique victims is a clear antifeminist provocation. While groups like Storm Alliance and La Meute claim to favor equality between men and women, they routinely deride feminism for having “ruined” women in Quebec, or for being part of a leftist conspiracy to weaken the Quebec nation. These racist groups are mainly interested in positioning white francophone Québécois men as protectors of white women against the threat they feel “other” men pose. And yet, since December 6, 1989, over 1500 women and girls have been murdered in Quebec, generally by white men, often by men they knew. The racism of Storm Alliance, La Meute, and the Threepers will do nothing to protect anyone, but on the contrary will simply lead to heightened violence against women, including and especially women in the communities they target.
We are determined to resist by any means necessary the rise of the extreme right and its racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic agenda.
Montréal Antifasciste: United against racism, patriarchy and colonialism
