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TD bank redecorated in solidarity with Standing Rock

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Mar 062017

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Some swell friends visited the TD Bank on Chabanel during the night of March 3rd.

The TD has funds in the North Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). We found it useful to remind them of their reponsability in the eviction of the Standing Rock camp which happened this week in Sioux’ territory. Banks, through their funding of resource extraction projects, participate in colonialist devastation of lands and violence against Indigenous people.

Solidarity from Tio’tia:ke
No borders!
Their pipelines won’t pass!

Several unclaimed attacks on bougie businesses in Hochelaga

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Mar 042017

Le Lapin blanc

A restaurant on Sainte-Catherine street in Hochelega-Maisonneuve, the Lapin blanc, was the target of vandalism on Thursday night, between 26 and 27 January.

A few minutes after the business closed, a surveillance camera captured a masked individual writing some hardly flattering graffiti.

For the owner, Stéphane Allard, there is no doubt that it was a planned, anti-gentrification action.

“You see four individuals pass by with a backpack. Then you see a masked person write hateful graffiti”, explains Mr. Allard, who estimates he lost an entire day of work.

– Radio-Canada

Anticafé

Another business was targeted by vandals in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve who smashed the window of a café during the night of Saturday to Sunday, between 11 and 12 February.

In a video published on the Facebook page of the Anticafé Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, people from the café explain that the damage was discovered around 6 o’clock in the morning.

“These events are hard to control. We don’t really understand why. I don’t think the Anticafé is a business that can be described as gentrifying”, they say.

“We don’t know if these events are tied to a kind of anarchist action or if it’s simply an accident. Regardless, it costs the businesspeople money”, they add in the video.

At least 25 businesses were vandalized in nine months last year in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve by people aiming to denounce the gentrification of the neighborhood.

–TVA Nouvelles

Mon Gym Privé

The owner of a Hochelaga gym refuses to be intimidated after 4 acts of vandalism targeting him in only 5 months.

“They could very well break my window eight times, I won’t leave here”, says Michaël Couture, owner of the business Mon Gym Privé. “I’ll put up a wall of bricks if I need to in place of the window, but I won’t leave. It’s the neighborhood I chose, I’m staying.”

Thursday night, February 23rd around midnight, the police received a call about a broken window, at the corner of Sainte-Catherine and Cuvillier streets. Arriving on site, Mr. Couture realized without much surprise that it was the window of his business. The reality repeats itself for this entrepreneur operating in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve since the summer and who has already experienced 4 acts of vandalism since the fall.

In October, a poster for the “Assembly of struggle against the gentrification of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve” was even glued to his brick wall, beside a tagged window.

– Journal de Montreal

On the night of Thursday to Friday (23 February), three businesses were vandalized. The next day, around thirty snow structures at the Winter Carnival were destroyed. By Monday morning, at least four more businesses on Sainte-Catherine Est had been tagged.

A few steps from Elektrik Kids, targeted last week, one could read “Asshole” on Showroom Montréal, “Death to cows” [anti-police slogan] on the front door of the MyRoom Gestion real estate agency, and a symbol of anarchism on the storefront of LavoieLuminaires.

– Journal de Montreal

How To: Wheatpaste

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Feb 162017

Wheatpasting is a simple, dirt-cheap way of spreading ideas, news, analyses, and creative expression outside of (and against) the pacified modes made available by the institutions that control and mangle our lives. Let’s reclaim, together, the means of expression from the media, Facebook, Twitter, smartphones, and everything else that reduces us to mere observers of life. Poetry is in the streets!

WHAT YOU NEED
•1 cup of flour
•2 cups of water
•Stove or hotplate
•A pot or pan
•A large paintbrush
•A bucket or container
•Flyers that you want to put up
•Latex gloves (if you don’t wanna walk around with drippy hands)

(OR, you can use a gallon of pre-made “wallpaper paste,” which can be bought cheaply at hardware stores. If you do this, you can skip these first three directions.)

DIRECTIONS
•Mix the 1 cup of flour with 2 cups of water together in a pan and stir until there are no lumps.
•Heat the mixture by boiling it until it thickens.
•Cook for about half an hour, and then let it cool.
•Put the wheatpaste solution into a container, grab a paintbrush, some flyers, and head out into the night. Keep in mind that wheatpasting is not “legal” and therefore, it is best to go late at night and avoid being seen by cops.
•When you locate a visible, non-porous surface like metal or glass, use the paintbrush to apply the wheatpaste to either the back of the flyer or the surface itself and smooth the flyer down so there are little or no air bubbles. Put some more wheatpaste on the front of the flyer (especially the edges) to secure it to the surface.

Print PDF here, for making two-sided posters that have this short instructional guide on the back.

Source: Plain Words

Still Cameras, Still Targets

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Feb 142017

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Anarchists hate cameras. We love games. That’s why some friends in the Sud-West took up the call to play CAMOVER. Masked up in black (obvi), we bagged a bunch of nosey CCTVs and painted over many others. No Face No Case! Shouts out to hommies in Hochelaga throwing down. Keep the good work up and the snitch cameras down.

From one participant:

CamOVER!? No Question. We hit the street four deep, two on the lookout, real casual, walkies and cigarettes, and got to bagging. Rope lines snaking through the air, cracks off streetlights as cams tumble down, we caught a side-eye from a citizen passerby and got back at it, like, FUCK YOU&YOUR CAMERAS. We dipped when the cops rolled up, stashed the cams alley-side, and swooped em up the next day.”

Montreal Banner Drop Opposes Trudeau Visit to Washington

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Feb 132017

From Resist Trump Montreal

On Monday, February 13th, activists calling for open borders dropped a banner over a busy Montreal highway reading “Trump fasciste, Trudeau complice” (Trump is fascist, Trudeau is complicit). The action, across from Justin Trudeau’s constituency office, comes as Trudeau visits Trump in Washington, D.C.

Read the full press release here, or see more photos and statements from the Open Borders Collective on facebook.

A grassroots movement that combines anti-colonial, anti-capitalist opposition to neoliberalism, while also supporting Indigenous sovereignty and migrant justice, is necessary to defeat Trump and the Far-Right, and the people who normalize him,” stated Grewal.

Both Arseneault and Grewal add together: “Today we drop a banner off a highway, a symbolic gesture of disobedience; but in the coming weeks and months, we need to engage in protracted civil disobedience and direct action to open the borders and ultimately defeat the rise of the far-right.”

Sabotage in Lanaudière

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Feb 102017

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Rumors are circulating in the region of Lanaudière that a hydraulic excavator and a tractor were heavily sabotaged on the construction site of the new high-tension line at Ste-Émelie-de-l’Énergie. It seems that the sub-contractor of Hydro-Quebec will not be able to take his retirement as expected this year due to the costly damages to his machines. The site in this area is at the stage of preparing for the imminent deforestation of the corridor.

Also, at the beginning of the winter, a snow cannon at the ski resort Val Val St-Côme was sabotaged. It was cut into pieces and made useless.

It seems that the destroyers of the environment have no respite.

Beyond symbolism … for a Solidarity City!

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Feb 092017

From Solidarity Across Borders

This morning, the City of Montreal Executive Committee is expected to take the first steps to declare Montreal a “Sanctuary City”, similar to the hundreds of Sanctuary Cities that already exist in the United States, and more recently in Toronto, Hamilton and Vancouver.

Declaring Montreal a “Sanctuary City” is not sufficient on its own.

“The City of Montreal needs to get beyond easy symbolism, and undertake tangible measures to ensure non-cooperation with the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) to end deportations and ensure access without fear by undocumented migrants to all essential services, including health care, education, and housing,” says Stacey Gomez, a community organizer with Solidarity Across Borders, a migrant justice organization in Montreal active since 2004.

Inspired in part by Sanctuary Cities in the USA, but crucially motivated by the autonomous organizing of undocumented migrants who resist deportations and detentions and create and sustain networks of mutual aid and support, Solidarity Across Borders has actively campaigned since 2009 to make Montreal a “Solidarity City”.

More than sixty community organizations have signed the “Solidarity City”; they collectively agree to:
– never ask for information regarding immigration status;
– treat all information regarding other people’s immigration status as strictly confidential, and never share it with government agencies;
– not charge fees based on immigration status;
– implement a policy of non-cooperation with the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), including barring them from their premises;
– work to make sure that labour and other human rights standards are applied equally to all, regardless of immigration status, in our organizations, workplaces, and communities.

For Solidarity Across Borders, the Solidarity City Declaration is the basic template for the City of Montreal’s own possible Sanctuary City. This includes non-collaboration by the Montreal police (SPVM) with the CBSA. The City of Montreal has direct authority over the SPVM, who every day arrest and hand over undocumented migrants over to the CBSA, in flagrant violation of what minimally a Sanctuary City is supposed to be.

“If more than sixty Montreal community organizations have already agreed to not cooperate with the CBSA, then a genuine Sanctuary or Solidarity City in Montreal must do the same, including barring border agents from all City premises,” says Jaggi Singh, also a community organizer with Solidarity Across Borders.

As part of its Solidarity City campaign, Solidarity Across Borders has demanded free access to primary and secondary schools, as well as hospitals, clinics, and other services for undocumented migrants. By way of example, undocumented kids are still unable to access free primary and secondary education, while undocumented migrants are fearful to access health services, or cannot afford to pay.

There are at least 50,000 undocumented migrants in Montreal, if not many more.

Beyond ensuring total and complete non-cooperation with the CBSA, Solidarity Across Borders highlights that undocumented migrants are created by exploitive and unjust economic and social policies. In particular, they re-iterate their main demands for an end to deportations, detentions and double punishment, and the implementation of an inclusive, comprehensive and ongoing regularization program for the more than 500,000 undocumented migrants living in Canada.

“Ultimately, we need to draw on the tradition of struggle and resistance from diverse working class, immigrant, and oppressed communities in Montreal and become a Rebel City that demands open borders and status for all, ” says Singh.

“Without grassroots pressure, opportunistic politicians will be content with empty symbols, gestures and photo-ops,” adds Gomez.

Background Information
– Solidarity City Declaration
– Solidarity City Declaration Demands
– Education Without Borders Collective
– Public Statement: No Border Agents in our Hospitals and Clinics / Heath Care For All! (2013)
– Past Support Work Campaigns

Cabaret and open-mic night against gentrification

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Feb 092017

Most humble greetings, Princesses and Princes of the so-called city of Montreal. It is time to brighten up our long, cold nights with a luxurious and decadent celebration in honor of gentrification! In Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, dangerous anarchists are trying to slow progress. But, gentrification is an inevitability of unfettered capitalism, a most desirable process and, of course, our highest ambition. Join us as we feast on salmon and caviar, martini in hand. Let us witness magnificent concrete condos rise! Let us toast to new security cameras and police presence! Only they will protect our modest businesses, our honorable citizens, and maintain order in our streets.

On the menu: circus performances, music, drag, and amusements of all kinds! As generous hosts, we are pleased to offer you the opportunity to participate as well. This is an ***OPEN MIC NIGHT***, and we welcome contributions of any kind: zine readings, personal texts or poems, songs, break-dance, pirouettes, puns, etc. Please contact the organizers or come at 8pm on the eve of the cabaret to sign up.

No sexist/racist/homophobic/transphobic/abelist/classist behaviors or comments will be tolerated.

PWYC, with suggested contribution between $5 and $10. Funds will be used to assure the survival of L’Achoppe

Disclaimer: you may suspect that this event is, in fact, about fighting gentrification in our neighborhoods. The first in a series of cabarets, you may think that we want to give different voices to a place to be heard, to overthrow the dominant discourses, and to subvert the status quo. Perhaps you believe this cabaret is created for and by people involved in this struggle. Or that our intention is to create a cathartic space where we can be vulnerable, we can take risks together and we can express our joy, our anger, our bewilderment, our euphoria…

Everybody hates racists!

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Feb 042017

Graffiti in Pointe-St-Charles, Montreal

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Translation: the title is a play on the chant “Tout le monde déteste la police!” (Everybody hates the police) that was popularized in the rebellion in Paris last summer.

Last Sunday night, six people from the Muslim community in Quebec city were assassinated at their mosque. This shows that racist extreme-right ideology is very much alive in supposedly egalitarian and tolerant Quebec society, which currently participates in fostering an islamophobic climate in which racists are increasingly feeling emboldened to act. This time it’s not an act that can be ignored, unlike the pigs heads left on the steps of the same mosque several months ago and which interested practically nobody, or the daily verbal and physical aggressions in the street of racialized people.

On the day of the funeral for those killed in the shooting, a mosque in the Montreal neighbourhood of Pointe-St-Charles had it’s windows broken. In response, a solidarity rally drew a hundred supporters in front of the mosque, anarchist graffiti expressing solidarity went up on advertisement paneling across the street, and anti-fascist posters were taped on the broken windows titled “Against racism, islamophobia and anti-semitism. Let’s be on the offensive”.

Many are asking themselves how is it possible that this could happen here. However, racism and hatred for the ‘other’ outside of Christianity is not something new in Canada. This country is founded on the genocide of indigenous people, and their ghettoization into reservations. Contrary to what we learn in school, the colonizers of so-called Quebec also participated in this mass genocide. Quebec society has its share of racism through the ages, whether it be with the new form of slavery of the mass incarceration of black and indigenous people, the residential schools, the exploitation of migrant works without papers, or the islamophobic Charter of Values. Of course, the rise in right-wing nationalist ideology in the last years has had a large impact on the murders that happened in Quebec, but we can’t forgot that this way of thinking existed even before someone like Trump took power in the US, or a politician like Marine Le Pen is polled to win 30% of the vote in the coming elections in France.

It’s not surprising that the xenophobic act that took place last Sunday happened in the capital of Quebec. Several racist groups have been diffusing their despicable ideology in broad-daylight for several years, with impunity. Groups like Atalante Québec or Soldats d’Odins (Soldiers of Odin) and several others can try to hide behind their false banner of “only denouncing radical Islam”, but we’re not falling for this manipulation. We know very well that these are people who act according to a racist logic. How can a group like Atalante say that it’s not racist while they organize a conference with neo-fascist Italian groups like Casapound who claim the legacy of Mussolini. Quebec City also has its share of “radio poubelles” (a term used for right-wing populist radio stations) listened to each day by thousands. The hosts of these shows can always wash their hands by saying that they don’t call for murder, but they contribute in a large way to the normalization of racism and islamophobia. Let’s be clear: these people also have blood on their hands and their discourses of hate must absolutely be confronted with all means necessary. Whether it be the pieing of people like Mathieu Bock-Côté, disrupting all their conferences, or by never allowing a racist demonstration to take the streets in peace.

The response to the extreme right must be determined and relentless, this people must be afraid to publicly poster their discourses of hate. We must not wait for any change coming from the political class that also contributes to the atmosphere of racism: through the normalization of hate towards muslims, the maintenance of inherently racist borders and policing , and the ongoing colonial violence that Canada is founded on. The struggle against the rise of fascism and the world that needs it will only come from ourselves and without the intermediary of any representatives – to fight organized fascists out of the streets at every opportunity and to attack everything that gives them legitimacy. We must make our anti-fascism radical by continuing to fight against the racist foundations of our society – colonial government and industrial civilization, nationalism, police, prisons, and borders.

US Consulate Shut Down, Call for Continued Direct Action to End Canadian Complicity in Racist Violence

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Feb 032017

No wall, no hate! Fuck racism (and white supremacy!) Open the borders

On Monday in Tiohtia:ke (aka Montreal in occupied Kanien’kehá:ka territory), hundreds of people outraged and sorrowed by the horrifying intensification of Islamophobic violence on both sides of the border shut down the US consulate.

Standing front of the consulate doors with banners and signs, first in silent sorrow and anger, protesters then began spontaneously chanting together- not only against Trump’s Muslim ban, but also against the racism that runs rampant across the Quebec political spectrum, against Canada’s exclusionary immigration policies, and against white supremacy. The ad-hoc group demanded the immediate opening of the US-Canadian border, an end to the safe the safe third country agreement and designated country of origin list, and an ongoing, comprehensive regularization program for undocumented people already in Canada (for more information on these demands see www.solidarityacrossborders.org).

The consulate doors were locked from the inside, and for the duration of the demonstration no one was able to enter or leave, effectively shutting down business as usual.

This action was not difficult to organize, and did not require a huge crowd to be successful. We believe it offers hope that, from our different starting points, in our different ways and capacities, many of us may be able to find ways of working with other community members to defend ourselves against and disrupt the institutions furthering racist and Islamophobic violence. We hope that such actions can be undertaken in a spirit of pushing the borders out of our city and transforming our communities into spaces of mutual aid and support- our vision of a Solidarity City. Not only is it possible, the current situation is forcing it on us.

While Canadian politicians contort themselves to avoid denouncing Trump, while the media, caught in the racist stereotypes it helps perpetuate, fumbles with the difference between a shooter and a witness, and while the same public figures who yesterday insisted that Muslims do not belong in our communities, today express disbelief at the tragedy, we should not expect and cannot wait for these same accomplices to protect out communities. This is a threat we must face head on. Many among us have no choice but to face it – having already been harmed by its violence. Those who do have a choice, have all the more responsibility to stand in solidarity and fight back, according to our different capacities and means, and in our different contexts.

After the success of today’s action, we encourage everyone to join together, be creative, try new things, and above all to take concrete action to disrupt racist violence!

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