Mtlcounter-Info

Hello friends, We are writing to update you on the 2020 Montreal Anarchist Bookfair. As everyone is more than aware, the global pandemic has resulted in the postponement or cancellation of large gatherings, and many upcoming anarchist bookfairs worldwide (from Europe to Aotearoa and beyond) have been forced to call off their events. Our collective has yet to make a decision. It is clear to us, however, that if we organize a gathering on the weekend of May 16 and 17, it will look significantly different from what the bookfair has been for the past twenty years. ...

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Collective direct actions like rent strikes are a good way to change our power dynamic with the government so that it can intervene to cancel mortgages and rents for everyone. Gathering together as tenants of the same landlord makes organizing a rent strike simpler for us and makes it more complicated for your landlord to use legal remedies (such as eviction). Steps to Follow: ...

Laval, 24 March 2020 Following the petition we wrote [on 19 March, sent to government officials and asking to be released in the context of the pandemic*], which had little impact on our situation of detention, we have decided to move to the second phase of our plan. This is to go on an indefinite hunger strike, starting today. This will be done in the most peaceful way and we are not breaking any detention centre rules. Thank you for your support and all help is welcome. ...

The situation changes quickly. Along with everyone else, I follow it avidly and share updates, watch our lives change from day to day, get bogged down in uncertainty. It can feel like there is only a single crisis whose facts are objective, allowing only one single path, one that involves separation, enclosure, obedience, control. The state and its appendages become the only ones legitimate to act, and the mainstream media narrative with the mass fear it produces swamps our ability for independent action. ...

Approximately 150 people marched today in downtown Montreal as part of the 24th Day Against Police Brutality. In these troubled times, it’s easy to retire within oneself and forget about the rest of the world. We may be in quarantine, but the cops are not, anywhere in the world. Not wanting to reduce the severity of the current health crisis, it must not be used as an excuse to forget and stifle the dissent that is taking place around the world. Whether in Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, France, Hong Kong, or even here in the unceded territories of the Wet’suwet’en, Mohawk or Mi’kmaq. ...

In light of the pandemic of COVID-19, a rapidly spreading flu-like virus affecting the respiratory system, public health officials are increasingly calling for people to work from home, for self-isolation, and for social distancing (maintaining distance both between individuals and collectively, by cancelling large events and closing down busy public places). We felt it important to take this opportunity to speak to our friends, family and neighbours with precarious immigration status: those who can’t stay home from work; those who have no paid sick leave or who work at jobs with no health and safety precautions; those whose immigration status complicates their access to healthcare; those who are often employed in the cleaning and sanitary positions that are so crucial in this moment of crisis; and those locked in the cages of the immigration detention centre. We are also thinking of our Indigenous community members who are similarly facing layers of discrimination both in the healthcare system and everyday life. ...

Talking with a non-native anarchist who spent time at Kanonhstaton in 2006, a land reclamation led by members of Six Nations blocking the development of a private subdivision on their territory. We discuss his experience at Six, dynamics on the ground before and after the police raid, and the possibilities and complexities of anarchist-indigenous solidarity with the current wave of Wet’suwet’en solidarity in mind. With music from Tru Rez Crew and Lee Reed . ...

It seems worth sharing that we have managed to shut down, (if only for a few to several hours), different rail lines in Southern Ontario using the ol’ copper wire technique. We did this three separate times targeting a junction in Milton, on lines that connect Kitchener-Waterloo to Toronto and Burlington. Using paper maps to follow where lines go, we had fun finding places to act with most impact. We learned more about how this was done following some of the other informative and inspiring posts here on North Shore. ...

On Friday, community members entered the offices of Lemay, architects of the new prison for migrants in Laval. Chanting slogans, distributing flyers, and carrying silhouettes of friends and neighbours who had been detained and deported, they disrupted business as usual. The new prison, located at 400 Montée Saint-François in Laval, will replace the current one. Like all prisons in Canada, it will be filled with poor, brown, Black, and Indigenous people colonized by European powers. This prison is an essential part of Canada’s border strategy, keeping poor people from the global south out and wealth in the hands of a few. ...

Sometime on Friday March 6th, 2020 in a secret courtroom on University Ave in Toronto, CP Rail will make a motion to have their interim injunction be extended to an interlocutory one. Didn’t know CP had an injunction just like CN Rail’s? Neither did anyone but CP Rail & Justice Myers – until they decided to serve recent Hamilton arrestees at their homes after 9pm last night. ...

before the sun rose in the early early morning of 02/20/2020 we took direct action against pipeline infrastructure in Acheson AB outraged by the Reactionary Colonial Mounted Pigs invasion of sovereign Wet’suwet’en territory and in solidarity with the Secwepemc we decommissioned a section of pipe that the klanadian state (financers of this project) had left sitting in the open air with little defense solidarity means attack ...