Montréal Contre-information
Montréal Contre-information
Montréal Contre-information

The Briarthorn OpSec Guide

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Jul 132025
 

From No Trace Project

PDF: read | letter booklet • TXT

Introduction

There’s a lot of work that goes into figuring out how not to get arrested, and how to minimise the damage if you are. To try to make it easier for our comrades, we want to share the techniques we’ve developed while operating an illegal activist organisation. This is a guide for non-experts, but for some procedures it will help to be moderately techy or at least be working with some techy friends.

Caveats

DON’T TRUST US TOO MUCH. We’ve put a lot of thought into this and we haven’t been caught yet, but it’s always possible we’ve just been getting lucky. Where possible, do your own research and think it through for yourself. These procedures are starting points to develop from, provided because they’re a better place to start from than the usual insecure ways of doing things. We’ve tried to make it harder to blindly trust us by explicitly noting when there’s something we don’t know.

THIS INFORMATION WILL GO OUT OF DATE. We’re writing this in 2025. The longer after that you’re reading this, the more likely some details are no longer true.

ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT WHAT THE POLICE CAN OR WILL DO ARE RELEVANT TO THE UNITED KINGDOM (UK), because that’s where we work.

And perhaps most importantly, DON’T LET WORRYING ABOUT SECURITY STOP YOU FROM GETTING SHIT DONE! If you get paranoid and don’t do something because it’s too difficult to do perfectly safely, the surveillance state wins. Do things safely enough for the level of risk they carry, and always take easy opportunities to make things safer, but if you spend days setting things up perfectly safely just to do some graffiti or something then they’ve won by virtue of stopping whatever other thing you could have done with all that effort.

General Principles

There are two fundamental principles to bear in mind across all of this.

Threat Modeling

In order to know what to do to keep yourself safe, you need to know what the realistically likely dangers are. A threat model is an idea of who’s trying to stop you and what they can do, and if you’re doing operational security then you need to have one. The procedures in this document are written on the assumption that you’re mainly up against the UK police, and they’re not willing to invest more resources into stopping you than they are any random low-to-mid-level illegal activist group (i.e. you’re not doing any terrorism or anything). It also assumes that you’re not doing anything very public, that most of your operations will never be reported to the police. If you’re doing headline-grabbing propaganda stuff then you may face a different threat profile, for instance you don’t have to keep the existence of the group secret but you might have to worry more about infiltrators. The reason we’ve chosen this threat model is that it’s the situation we have experience with, and also that we feel more groups could do with focusing on changing the world directly ourselves rather than trying to convince the government to do it for us.

Defense In Depth

There will always be things you overlook, and things you couldn’t have known. When your defenses inevitably fail, you should have other defenses in place so that it’s not a total disaster. This means that even if you trust someone completely, you still don’t tell them incriminating things they don’t need to know. Even if your encrypted drive is secure, you still delete things off it when you don’t need them anymore. Even if you’re using an encrypted messaging app, you still use pseudonyms. When you fuck something up, it shouldn’t be the end of the world.

Procedures

This section is the bulk of the guide. It contains a set of procedures for doing various things more securely. Often they refer to each other, e.g. part of the procedure for securely buying things from the internet is to apply the procedure for securely using the web. Each procedure has three increasingly secure versions: Acceptable, Good and Paranoid. More secure versions include doing all the things mentioned in the less secure versions as well unless otherwise specified. We’ve made this division so that people won’t get bogged down worrying about security that’s way over the top for what they’re doing. As a rough guide, we feel that for crimes that don’t necessarily invite police attention every time as described in the introduction, the Acceptable level is appropriate for when we’re risking up to maybe six months, Good for up to a couple of years, Paranoid for up to maybe five or six years. But that’s just our personal comfort levels at this particular stage in our lives, so don’t take that as gospel. For crimes that do invite police attention, we’d probably move everything down one category — no custodial sentence, six months, a couple of years.

Going Somewhere

Acceptable

Wear a mask and nondescript clothing.

Good

Leave your phone behind — the phone company knows its location at all times and keeps records for years. Pay for public transport in cash if possible. Be aware of CCTV, especially cameras that may be government-operated rather than belonging to private businesses since the police can access them more easily.

Paranoid

Don’t bring anything with your name on it. Possibly arrange for a comrade to alibi you if necessary.[1]

Using The Web

Acceptable

Use Tor Browser. If you’re not familiar with it, Tor Browser is a web browser that routes your connection through a series of other computers before it reaches the website you’re connecting to. This means the website doesn’t know who you are because your connection appears to come from somewhere else, unless of course you tell it who you are yourself (e.g. by signing into an account in your own name). It’s easy to install and use on pretty much any computer, including smartphones. See torproject.org.

Good

Use Tails. If you’re not familiar with it, Tails is a piece of software you put on a USB stick or SD card (see the procedure for storing digital information) that lets you boot the computer you plug it into using a secure operating system. Tails ensures all internet traffic goes through Tor, and leaves no trace on the computer of what you were doing. See tails.net.

Paranoid

Use Tails from a public wifi network, such as in a coffee shop. This will probably involve applying the procedure for going somewhere, unless you live across the road from a coffee shop or something and can connect to the wifi from your house. Be aware of CCTV, but most businesses don’t store CCTV records for too long. If you get a coffee, pay in cash. Don’t make a habit of using the same place every time.

Messaging Someone On The Internet

Acceptable

Use Signal. If you’re not familiar with it, Signal is an encrypted messaging app. It requires a phone number to sign up, but can be used on a computer as long as the account is tied to a phone. Apply the procedure for storing digital information to any device that you install Signal on. If you think you might be arrested, uninstall Signal. When you reinstall it you will have lost all your messages, this is an unavoidable consequence of the security features that prevent the police from recovering your Signal messages from a device you’ve uninstalled it from. Note that the way that your Signal messages with someone are most likely to be leaked is if the police get hold of your or that person’s inadequately-secured device and simply unlock it and read the messages the same way the intended recipient would. However, if that happens they won’t necessarily know who the other person in the conversation is (unless you revealed who you are in one of the messages they read). See signal.org.

Other encryted messaging platforms exist, but Signal is very popular, so firstly it’s less suspicious to be using it and secondly it’s been extensively tested in practice. If Signal isn’t an option, we like the look of Matrix or SimpleX, but we don’t have experience with them.[2]

Good

Use separate Signal accounts for different purposes, so if one of them is identified as you the others may not be. You need a separate phone number for each account, so you’ll need to get a SIM card, they’re sold in many supermarkets (apply the procedure for buying something in person, or just apply the procedure for going somewhere and steal one). You don’t have to activate the SIM card in order to receive the verification text, so don’t — that will connect your bank account to it. You’ll need to keep hold of the SIM card in case you lose access to your account (e.g. by having to uninstall Signal), but you should keep it hidden because if the police search your house and find it they may be able to discover and maybe even impersonate the account it’s associated with. Alternatively, if you set a Signal PIN (see below) you may be able to use that to recover your account without the SIM.

Configure Signal settings to be more secure — set “who can see my number” and “who can find me by number” to nobody, set a default disappearing messages timer, turn off link previews, read receipts and typing indicators, turn on call relaying, turn on screen lock, set a Signal PIN (use a secure alphanumeric PIN) and enable registration lock.

Consider using Molly (molly.im). Molly is an alternative frontend for Signal. It makes it harder for someone who has your phone to get into your account, but it isn’t widely-used enough to be quite sure it’s well-made and safe.

Paranoid

Instead of using a phone, have your sensitive Signal accounts on Tails using signal-cli. We won’t go into detail about signal-cli because if you’re technical enough to use it you’ll be able to figure it out yourself. You can connect signal-desktop to the account for ease of use. Don’t put the SIM in your own phone, use a burner phone (acquired with the procedures for buying something, either online or in person). Never turn the burner on at home or in a location connected to you, or in the presence of your or your comrades’ phones, as the phone company will know where it is and what other phones are nearby and store that information. Once you’ve registered your account, get rid of the burner. Apply the procedure for storing an object for the burner and SIM. They should be stored together, as getting access to either one will reveal all the information that could be acquired from either, unless you decide to just dispose of the phone and get a new one if you need it.

Eventually, the phone company deactivates unregistered or registered but unused SIMs and allows a new one to be made with the same number. When this happens you’ll no longer be able to recover your account using the SIM, and it’s possible that the person who buys the new SIM will use it to register for Signal, kicking you out of your account (note that they won’t gain access to your account, it’ll just be lost). In order to prevent this, note when your SIM will expire and move your account to a new number before it happens. If you’re getting reasonably newly made SIMs this shouldn’t be more than every couple of years. You’ll need to do this even if you haven’t kept the SIM card and you’re just using the PIN to get back in if you lose access.

Using Cryptocurrency

A detailed guide to the non-security aspects of using cryptocurrency is out of scope for this document, so this procedure is written assuming you know how to use cryptocurrency.

Acceptable

Apply the procedure for using the web, and use monero. Monero is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency, which is important, because contrary to popular belief most cryptocurrencies are extremely traceable. For regulatory reasons it’s difficult to buy monero in the UK, but you can buy other currencies and easily exchange them. Apply the procedure for storing digital information to your wallet. You can buy cryptocurrency from an onramp service or an exchange.

If the thing you want to buy can’t be bought with cryptocurrencies, you can buy virtual prepaid debit cards using monero on sites like coinsbee.com (not forgetting to still apply the procedure for using the web) and use those to pay for it.

Since storing information securely leads to an increased risk of losing it, you may want to keep a record of your wallet seed. This should be stored securely itself, either as digital information or written down. Someone who gets access to it gets full access to the wallet.

Good

Make sure you’re using a local wallet rather than an exchange (but it’s unlikely you can get monero on an exchange these days anyway). Access the monero network over Tor, the feather wallet has a facility for this built in (featherwallet.org). Make sure to transfer your monero between two wallets you control, so that more than one transaction has to be compromised to trace what you’re spending it on. If you’re buying cryptocurrency, consider buying it from a peer-to-peer exchange so it’s harder to tie to your bank account.

When storing the seed, consider writing the seed words out of order, as long as you’ll be able to remember how to put them back in order.

Paranoid

When moving money through any kind of series of accounts, always put more in than you take out at the far end, so someone watching both ends can’t guess that it’s the same money because it’s the same amount. Likewise don’t do it all at once, leave delays between transfers.

If you’re keeping the seed words written out of order, recover the wallet corresponding to the order they’re written in and make some small, non-incriminating transaction with it, so if the seed is found you can make a plausible case that this is the real wallet.

Buying Something In Person

Acceptable

Apply the procedure for going somewhere. Pay in cash.

The Good and Paranoid versions of this procedure are just the same using the Good and Paranoid versions of the procedure for going somewhere.

Buying Something On The Internet

Acceptable

If it’s something that’s not illegal in itself, have someone who’s not doing anything else illegal order it and pick it up from them. You can reimburse them in cash. Don’t forget to remove the label with their address on it from the box if you’re keeping it, so if your house is searched the police won’t find out about this person from the label.

Good

Apply the procedure for using the web and order it using the procedure for using cryptocurrency, either still to someone else’s address or poste restante[3] in a name that you have a good fake ID for (if you can’t give a valid ID the post office may refuse to give you the parcel).

There isn’t a Paranoid level for this, because we don’t have the experience with ordering anything that warrants that level of security to be able to speak authoritatively on it. Anything we could say would be speculative.

Laundering Money

Acceptable

Buy things with the money and sell them. Buy and/or sell things in a similar way with your own money to obscure it. This process is okay at a glance but won’t stand up to actual investigation, and isn’t practical for large quantities of money.

Good

Using the procedure for accessing the web, buy monero with the money (see the procedure for using cryptocurrency). At this point the money should be disconnected from its source. Use the monero to buy prepaid virtual debit cards as mentioned in the procedure for using cryptocurrency. Note that although the source of the money is obscured, the fact that it came in the form of monero isn’t, so it may still look suspicious.

Paranoid

Buy monero with the money and move it between two accounts. At this point the money should be disconnected from its source. Trade the monero for cash sent to you by mail on a peer-to-peer exchange such as retoswap (retoswap.com) (using the advice in the procedure for buying something on the internet for receiving it by post securely).

Sending Post

Acceptable

Apply the procedure for going somewhere. Buy postage in cash. Alternate between various post offices. Follow the post office rules (e.g. on the proper way to post liquids) as far as possible to reduce the chances of your packages being opened.

Good

Buy stamps and envelopes in cash, and post at postboxes. Alternate between various postboxes. If you need to send large items, use parcel postboxes, but if you’re not in a city there might not be many to alternate between. Don’t post lots of things all at once in one postbox, as this might raise suspicions and get them opened. With stamps, be aware that the barcodes on them can’t be used to trace where they were bought, but they are scanned by the sorting office so they can be used to trace at least to the sorting office of the place where something was posted from (and that’s one of their purposes).

Paranoid

For occasional posting, use commemorative stamps, as they don’t have the barcodes on them (but posting lots of parcels with commemorative stamps in one place would be suspicious). Buy envelopes from different places so which brands of envelope you use can’t be used to identify where you’re going to buy them (or more likely as circumstantial evidence after the fact based on the fact you frequently went somewhere that sold those envelopes). Pick postboxes in locations such that your house isn’t in the centre of all the locations you use.

Storing An Object

Acceptable

If your address is unlikely to be a target of investigation, just keep it in your house. If you or your housemates are at risk of arrest, or if the address is used to order things to, hide it. Small things like SD cards and SIMs are easy to hide very well, so don’t just stick them behind a picture frame and call it a day, unscrew the back of something that isn’t ever opened up under normal circumstances or something.

Good

Even if your house isn’t likely to be searched, hide it anyway. If it doesn’t need to be regularly accessed, keep it at the house of someone who isn’t doing anything dodgy.

Don’t be tempted to hide things in public places, since a search warrant then isn’t needed to get at them.[4] Storage units are probably a bad idea too, since they’ll be connected to whoever pays for them.

Paranoid

If the item is replaceable, and it’s cheap and/or rarely used, consider not storing it at all and getting a new one whenever you need it. If the item can be split into parts that aren’t (as) incriminating on their own, store it across several people’s houses. We know of no good way to hide a unique, single item to a Paranoid standard of security, so if you find yourself needing to do so all we can recommend is minimising the time you need to do so for.

Storing Digital Information

Acceptable

Store it on a computer with full disk encryption. If you don’t know how to set this up, see VeraCrypt (veracrypt.fr).[5]

If you must store it on a smartphone, e.g. because it’s a messaging app that’s hard to make work on a computer or because you need access to it on the go, then set a strong password on your phone (i.e. NOT just a numeric PIN) and disable fingerprint unlocking. If you think you may be going to be arrested, turn your phone off, as some methods of unlocking it only work if it’s been unlocked previously since it was turned on.

If the police believe that encrypted data they’ve found is relevant to an investigation and that you know the password, they can legally compel you to decrypt it. The penalty for refusing can be up to two years imprisonment, or five if it’s a terrorism investigation. For this reason, don’t assume that even totally secure encryption will keep the police out if the evidence it protects is worth less that two years. There is a defense if you can cast doubt on whether there really is any encrypted data (this requires technical skills to set up) or on whether you really know the password.

Using cryptpad (cryptpad.org) is okay as long as you remember to set a password, and don’t share the password right next to the link as this defeats most of the point of having one.

When you no longer need the information, apply the procedure for destroying digital information.

Good

Store it on an encrypted microSD card and keep it hidden, or store it in a VeraCrypt hidden volume on a traditional hard drive (i.e. not an SSD, and not a USB stick or SD card, as these can’t hide the existence of a hidden volume reliably). If using an SD card or USB stick, note that they can sometimes fail. If the information is important, keep a backup, also encrypted. If you’re using Tails (see the procedure for using the web), you can use the persistent storage to store information in this way, and it’ll sometimes warn you before the device fails.[6]

Paranoid

We don’t have a good strategy for storing digital information with a Paranoid level of security.[7] We can only recommend minimising the amount of time you have to store it for, and making it as hard as possible to prove that any one person knows the password.

Destroying Digital Information

There isn’t an Acceptable level for this procedure, because overwriting is good enough to be Good but just deleting isn’t good enough to be Acceptable.

Good

When a file is deleted it’s not removed from the drive, it’s just marked as deleted until it’s overwritten by something else being stored in the same place. In order to delete it properly, you’ll need to overwrite it with meaningless data first. This can be achieved with tools such as sdelete and secure-delete. However, this only applies if you’re using a traditional hard drive, as opposed to an SSD (almost certainly the case in a laptop), USB stick or SD card. If you’re using an one of these, this approach won’t work for individual files. Instead you’ll need to wipe the whole thing at once, by overwriting the entire drive using a tool like DBAN or dd.

Paranoid

Overwrite the entire drive multiple times (even if it’s a traditional hard drive in case a copy has been stored somewhere for automatic backups or something). Alternatively, and this is probably overkill but quicker if you’re in a hurry, physically destroy the drive it was stored on. You’ll need to make sure you’re actually getting at the part where the data is held. The traditional approach of drilling holes in a hard drive isn’t actually that reliable, ideally you’ll want intense heat or powerful magnetism.

If You Do Get Arrested

(As a reminder, this document is based on UK police practices.)

If, despite your precautions, you do get arrested, there are still things you can do — or mostly, avoid doing — to minimise the damage. What it boils down to is: DO NOT TALK TO THE POLICE FOR ANY REASON. The police are very good at tricking you into saying something incriminating or that they can use as the basis for reasonable suspicion. There are many circumstances under which talking to the police can make your life harder. There are no circumstances under which talking to the police will make your life easier (with maybe two exceptions, discussed later). If they suspect you, nothing you can possibly say will make them suspect you less. It doesn’t matter how you refuse to talk to them — you can say “no comment”, “I’m not going to answer that”, “Am I legally obliged to answer that?”, nothing at all, whatever, just don’t tell them anything. Here is a list of circumstances under which you should not answer police questions:

  • If they tell you they’ll let you go quicker if you talk, or keep you longer if you don’t. This is generally not true, and they can’t keep you for too long without charging you anyway.
  • If they make any kind of offer to reduce your sentence. The police don’t have the authority to reduce your sentence, that’s a matter for the court.
  • If they offer only to charge you for a small offense if you admit to it, and drop a more serious charge. They are lying.
  • If they tell you they have enough evidence already to convict you, or that an accomplice has confessed. They are probably lying, and even if they aren’t, unless a competent lawyer says otherwise you probably still stand a better chance of minimising your sentence by keeping quiet.
  • If they make polite small talk. Once you start talking it’s easier for them to keep you talking. Remember, they’re trained to extract information from people.
  • If they ask questions whose answers are definitely not incriminating. If you answer these questions but then refuse to answer the questions which are incriminating, it looks pretty bad in court.
  • If you have an alibi. Save it for your lawyer and the court. The police don’t need to know your alibi, and they won’t believe it. Anything you say to the police, you’ve effectively committed to saying in court. You don’t have to commit to anything, so don’t.
  • Likewise, if they’re accusing you of something you can easily prove you didn’t do. It’s to your advantage if they try to charge you with something you can easily prove you didn’t do, as it makes the rest of the charges look less credible. Save it for your lawyer and the court.
  • If they’re demonstrating ignorance. It may be genuine, or they may be baiting you into showing knowledge of a topic relevant to the accusations. Either way, making fun of them isn’t worth the risk.
  • ANY OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES AT ALL, apart from the exceptions mentioned below.

The two cases in which it might possibly be to your advantage to tell the police something are these:

  • When you arrive at the station (and not before), you may want to tell them your name and address. This is because if you refuse to provide your name and address and they decide to charge you, they can keep you locked up until the court date regardless of what you’re accused of (because if they let you go they wouldn’t be able to find you again). Giving false details is an offense, and they can usually check pretty easily. Note that if you do you give your address, they may go and search it.
  • Under some rare circumstances, refusing to answer certain questions may be an offense in itself. A specific example of this is mentioned in the section on storing digital information — under some circumstances it may be an offense not to give up the password for encrypted data. This kind of thing doesn’t come up very often, and if it is the case they’ll tell you (or they should, and probably will if they actually intend to charge you with it since the court would likely require them to demonstrate that they did). Conversely though, if they tell you that you’re legally obliged to answer a question, they may be lying — if at all possible verify that with your lawyer.

Last Words

Having read all that, the thing we most want to make sure is that you’re not too intimidated. Like we said at the start, if the attempt to be secure leads to not taking action, the surveillance state wins without having to do anything. If you don’t feel capable of achieving the level of security that you feel you’d need for the actions you want to take, take less dangerous actions in the meantime rather than focusing exclusively on learning everything about security. Real life experience is the best way to learn.

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1. No Trace Project (N.T.P.) note: For this level, you may also want to take precautions to ensure you are not being followed. For more information, see our Threat Library mitigations “Surveillance detection” and “Anti-surveillance”.

2. N.T.P. note: We would recommend SimpleX rather than Matrix, as Matrix does not protect communication metadata as well as SimpleX does. Compared to Signal, SimpleX does not require a phone number to create an account. For more information, see AnarSec’s guide “Encrypted Messaging for Anarchists”.

3. N.T.P. note: Poste restante is a service where the post office holds mail until the recipient calls for it.

4. N.T.P. note: We think storing things in public places can be a viable solution if done properly. For more information, see our Threat Library mitigation “Stash spot or safe house”.

5. N.T.P. note: On computers (i.e. not smartphones) we recommend encrypting all your digital information using the full disk encryption system Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS), which is available by default in most modern Linux systems, and thus does not require installing additional software such as VeraCrypt.

6. N.T.P. note: The Tails persistent storage uses LUKS.

7. N.T.P. note: An additional strategy for this level is to store the devices that contain the digital information in a tamper-evident way. For more information, see our Threat Library mitigation “Tamper-evident preparation”.

Two Years of Constellation and the Sky Hasn’t Fallen Yet

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Jun 202025
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

This reportback was inspired by a Mastodon post by Franklin Lopez, who wrote:

“It’s just so fucking cool to be back at the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair after so many years away. Gotta be real—back in the day, the Fair could feel like a stress factory. Lotta tension, lotta unresolved beefs, and way too many identity politickers turning the place into their personal UFC octagon.

But this time? Chill as fuck. Good vibes all around. People actually talking with each other instead of past each other. It felt like a space that remembered what solidarity actually feels like. Massive thanks to the folks at @constellation for bringing the Bookfair back and making it feel like home again.”

‘Twas the most wonderful time of the year. The Constellation Anarchist Festival wrapped up a second year in the traffic cone capital of North America, taking place from May 15-21 at various locations throughout the city.

Constellation is kinda like the old Montreal Anarchist Bookfair but without the Banhammer of Identity Politics restlessly waiting to come down and split your soul apart from your body at any given moment. While the old bookfair took to banning books, hairstyles, and art forms they deemed to be offensive, Constellation has taken a more laissez-faire approach, which is refreshing.

The main event was, of course, the bookfair, which once again went down in the always hot, always humid CEDA. Sure, we might not be able to be in there for more than 20 minutes at a time before crawling to the nearest exit for some fresh air, but honestly, we love that place. Plus, studies have shown that profuse sweating helps rid the body of harmful toxins, including microplastics.

It was rainy so the spot was even more packed than usual. The usual bevy of acronym orgs, zine peddlers, rad crafters, and publishing conglomerates were all there, eager to hawk their sweet, sweet products. There was at least one tarot deck for sale and nobody seemed to be losing their shit over it, almost as if the old bookfair’s claim of tarot being cultural appropriation was a psy-op to keep us from fighting the real enemy: the mid-ass chana masala.

Seriously, what the fuck? The bookfair usually has some tip-top vegan slop, but this year’s chana was so salty, it doubled the size of our kidney stones. We sincerely hope that the food is better next year.

But we digress. Overall, the vibes were right. Like we said, unlike the old bookfair, Constellation doesn’t seem so caught up in trying to police everyone to maintain some subjective semblance of a “safe space.” And everything turned out completely fine. The only thing we weren’t safe from that weekend were some of the smells y’all were expelling. Guys, not showering isn’t gonna hide your trust fund. Luckily, there were face masks available at the entrance that we doubled-up on to shut out the stench.

We don’t even think our White Dread-o-meter went off during the entire weekend, though we also haven’t changed the batteries in a few years. But, seemingly, it’s a non-issue. All the oogles who had dreads in 2016 have had lice by now anyway and have had to shave them off, so let’s just drop it already.

At this point, we can say it’s proven to be the case that we don’t need a central committee deciding what’s allowed or what’s not at one of the world’s largest anarchist events. The best way of making anarchy inclusive and relevant to lots of different people is not by setting down rules that are incomprehensible to anyone outside a narrow milieu of university-based activists (such as telling a Black bookstore they aren’t allowed to table tarot cards because of “cultural appropriation”). We hope we find ways to show our gratitude and respect for all that the old bookfair did to keep an important tradition alive over the years, while remaining true to our anarchist principles and to the promise of the gathering spaces we share.

A Practical Security Handbook: No Trace Project edition

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Jun 182025
 

From No Trace Project

PDF: read | letter booklet part 1, part 2 | tabloid booklet • TXT

Note from the No Trace Project:

A Practical Security Handbook for Activists and Campaigns was originally published in the United Kingdom in 2004. While part of this handbook is now outdated, we believe some of it is still very relevant.

This document is a partial re-edition of the original handbook. We have freely adapted its contents, leaving out sections that we deemed outdated or irrelevant to this re-edition, improving wording, and changing a few details, while trying to stay as close as possible to the spirit of the original text. We have also added footnotes to point the reader to up-to-date information on DNA, CCTV, and other topics.

This re-edition contains a wealth of information to help anarchists and other rebels analyze their security needs, plan and carry out direct actions, and detect or evade physical surveillance. We hope it will help you defeat the State and achieve your goals. Good luck!

The full original handbook can be found on our website.

Appropriating the Bookfair: A Reportback from Constellation 2025

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Jun 132025
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

We heard you like reportbacks from anarchist festivals; may others from this one follow. May 15th-21st, 2025 in Montreal was the second edition of Constellation. Over seven days, there were book launches, parties, benefit shows, bike rides, a book arpentage, a squatted rave in an abandoned magic store, a barbecue, a barbecue that blocked fascists, a mesh networking day, a radical consent workshop, and more. People attended from across the country, from south of the border, and from overseas, and events consistently saw packed rooms, even when there were five happening at the same time.

May 17th was the anarchist bookfair, a Montreal tradition going back to the year 2000. Over ninety publishers, zine distros, artists, and groups held tables. It rained pretty much all day, and there was only space inside CEDA for about two thirds of the tables, but a barn-sized wedding tent was set up on the baseball diamond outside, plus a second smaller one, and they sure proved themselves. Meanwhile, kilos of shoplifted coffee kept attendees caffeinated, kids hung out in the childcare room or attended workshops that included the reading of an anarchist children’s book by the authors, and a kitchen team prepared to feed hundreds of people for free. Easily over 1000 people passed through, and we can’t remember the last time we’ve seen so many new faces at an anarchist event in the city.

Other workshops discussed histories of revolutionary anarchism in eastern Europe and Latin America, artificial intelligence, an anarchist analysis of cancer, the dangers of the militarization of social struggles, the history of resistance to slavery and colonialism in the southeastern US, tenant organizing around lead exposure, and living rurally as anarchists. Land defenders from the Nehirowisiw (Atikamekw) territory about two hours north of Montreal also traveled down to share the context of their struggle against logging with a packed workshop room. This discussion was particularly well-timed, because logging blockades would begin going up again three days later, calling for supporters in the city to join them. Hopefully, lots of the people who attended this discussion picked up some anarchist reflections on anticolonial solidarity in zine form at the bookfair and prepared to make material contributions to this struggle.

In place of a second day of books and zines, on May 18th, CEDA played host to what was billed as a skillfair. It was awesome. Friends reported needing to see the format first-hand to understand its potential and are excited for where it could go in the future. There were tables where people could practice lockpicking, learn how to buy hormones online with Bitcoin, practice soldering electronics, plot organizing against their landlord, learn about mesh networking, make a Riseup account, make alterations to clothes, learn how to improve the security of computer hardware, and learn some DIY chemistry. Workshops introduced people to basic auto repair, screenprinting, Balkan singing, somatic techniques for collective action, guerrilla grafting, and much more. Fewer tables, more extended face-to-face interactions, and virtually no monetary exchange might be some of the factors that provided a nice contrast with bookfair day. We’re also interested in how the skill tabling format can allow for connections to be made between projects and needed practical knowledge.

It’s no secret that the group organizing Constellation has taken a different approach than that associated with the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair Collective (MABC), different permutations of which organized the bookfair until 2023. When the MABC accused Constellation of “appropriating” the bookfair, we were happy to see that local anarchists were pretty unanimous in replying that the bookfair doesn’t belong to anyone, which is another way of saying that it belongs to all of us. We’ve reflected since the weekend on how this perspective offers a more free, dynamic, and inviting environment, while also asking a bit more of each of us.

One level on which this is true is around conflict. Any event bringing so many anarchists together in the same place is bound to see interpersonal and political tensions. We’re happy that the festival was organized without the intention of sweeping conflict out of view or suppressing it, or along the model of a special committee empowered to decide who is welcome and what is allowed. A consequence of this approach is that people who are parties to conflicts, or who have been hurt or even harmed by others, may take autonomous action in an attempt to assert boundaries, stop patterns of harmful behavior, or get retribution. But with freedom comes responsibility. We badly need a healthier culture around conflict, one that is more capable of de-escalating conflicts that are not with the enemy and of changing the nevertheless harmful patterns that give rise to them. It is in part through our responses to how conflicts are brought into our shared spaces that this culture develops as a form of collective responsibility. This can be uncomfortable, whether it’s challenging the tendencies of our closest friends, identifying the fears underlying one’s own learned responses, figuring out the assumptions that are going unquestioned in our social circle, or simply saying things that feel hard to say. At other times, it may just take some initiative.

In one instance, a poster denouncing a tabler, a local writer and zine publisher, was wheatpasted outside CÉDA the night before the bookfair. We don’t particularly like this writer, who has turned their “cancellation” into somewhat of a grift (anyone with the platform this person has is not “cancelled”). But the poster made a pair of serious claims that aren’t backed up to our knowledge by any credible information, in the context of labeling this person unwelcome at anarchist events. Making serious allegations against someone on spurious or non-existent evidence can be incredibly damaging in so many ways to our relationships of trust and to our struggles. We didn’t mind hearing that most of these posters were destroyed before the bookfair even began.

In general, if you decide to bring your beef to the bookfair, especially in a way that makes demands of other anarchists, you should be ready to hear questions, challenges, and perhaps criticism. We’re wary of any group that seeks to engage in conflict in the most public way available to them while demanding that others not intervene; this feels like the opposite extreme to the invisibilization and avoidance of conflict, making it into a spectacle instead. Both extremes deny collective responsibility for conflict, one by relegating it to the private sphere, the other by turning the rest of us into passive spectators. Neither ought we to falsely frame things in terms that shut down debate or threaten to vilify anyone challenging our claims.

Creating methods for redressing harm without appealing to or re-constituting authority feels like a lifelong project. Besides not delegating this responsibility, we’re not sure anyone got anything right on this level over the course of the weekend.

– some anarchists

A different position

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Jun 112025
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

We are NOT the Association of Nehirowisiw Aski Land Defenders, our position is different: “We do NOT call the police, in this situation”. The supposed colonial justice system is one of the central elements of the systemic racism committed against all indigenous people of turtle island. We are indigenous people that resist the ongoing genocide.

Report-back of Anti-Fascist Action on the 19th of May 2025

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Jun 112025
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

On the morning of “Patriot’s Day”, a day where Nouvelle Alliance (a québécois fascist and nationalist group) usually holds an annual show of force, we proved ourselves able to humiliate and claim victory over them. This group tried to assemble itself in front of a statue of Dollard Des Ormeaux, a figure of nationalist mythology whom Nouvelle Alliance tries to rehabilitate glorify and rehabilitate. Every year, they try to have an aesthetic gathering and bring in new members to rehabilitate their own image, tarnished by their venimous discourse and hideous hatred for others.

The few members of Nouvelle Alliance’s fighting core, numbering at barely twelve, met up early in a corner of Parc Lafontaine in order to march onto the the place where they plan to honor their martyr Dollard Des Ormeaux. However, we were better prepared and ready to face them. Whilst a group held the fort on the grounds the fascists aimed to occupy, a welcoming committee made it’s way to make it known that this was anti-fascist territory.

These neo-nazis, still believing strongly in Might Makes Right, did not hesitate to charge our line of anti-fascists and to start throwing hands and feet aided by reinforced gloves. The lil-leader (truly small of stature) François Gervais enjoyed LARPing as a commander ordering around his little troops and attempting to give us orders.

Nouvelle Alliance, far from the medias and university campuses, showed their true colors: raw hatred and a thirst for violence. Their attemps to denigrate us were of an almost absurd level of machismo: including nice quotes like “they sent a gang of faggots” and “there are so many women with them, [a fight] isn’t their place.” In accordance with these values, the only woman of the group stayed far off behind them in order to film their attack, whilst we sticked together in solidarity.

Our counter-attacks frustrated their advance and angered the side in front of us who expect us to give up and to fold in front of their supposed virile strength. The fear in their eyes were not lost by us, and we recognized the hesitation of many of the members of the group to continue fighting. Despite the adversaries’ determination to crack our skulls in, we were courageous and did not falter in responding in kind with our own fists, hands and sticks. None of us even had the idea to flee and it took police intervention to break up the brawl. Our strikes, rallied together by solidarity for our comrades, allowed us to slow down the fascists during a decent number of time: enough for our comrades holding the fort to come to our aid. Thankfully for Nouvelle Alliance, the polce arrived as our comrades were joining us, and the former did not hesitate to show their preference for their fellow fascists by standing by to defend the fascists whilst we were given no choice but to disperse from the park.

The massive victory of the libertarian left on this day was thanks to the unity within the diversity of tactics put into use. Our spirit of combativity and our physical counter-attacks against the fascists kept them away from the place of the Celebration. The Celebration gave popular support and legitimacy to sideline the fascists. Without the former, Nouvelle Alliance would have trampled over the efforts to set up the Celebration and would have inserted themselves into the public space: endangering the Celebration to the point where it would not have been accessible, familial and safe. Without the latter, we would not have shown the legitimacy that we actually have, and the police would have had every excuse to divy up the space and to falsely equivocate the fascist margins and popular anti-fascist resistance. We could freely fill our reclaimed space with joy and solidarity which sprouts from the diversity of tactics, unity within the struggle and unyieldingness against the fascist destruce forces. Continue to massify the struggle and continue striking fascists in the face.

Love and Fury

A Few Basics About Fascism And How To Deal With It

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Jun 032025
 

From Montréal Antifasciste

Anonymous
May 2025, Bas-du-Fleuve
[Version pdf – French /// Version pdf format livret – French]

We are witnessing the most documented genocide in history in Palestine and the consolidation of a fascist regime in the United States. Many of us are wondering what to do about it. Here’s a conceptual framework for understanding what’s going on and how we can respond. This synthesis draws upon material from Kelly Hayes and her Organizing My Thoughts blog, the thinking of Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie of Interrupting Criminalization, Ejeris Dixon and his podcast Fascism Barometer, Scot Nakagawa’s  The Anti-Authoritarian Playbook blog, Anne Archet’s blog flegmatique, the YouTube channel Thought Slime, and Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, among other sources.

///

Some Basics

Fascist movements, parties, and regimes can be recognized by:

  • an authoritarian trajectory aimed at dismantling democratic structures, eliminating dissent, and maintaining their leader’s power.
  • blatant lies that do not undermine their support.
  • a propensity for instrumentalizing crises or creating them out of thin air to enrich themselves and to restrict civil liberties, including freedom of movement and assembly, the right to demonstrate, freedom of the press, and the right to a fair trial.
  • idealized representations of race and nation, articulated in terms of purity, unity, and loyalty.
  • a desire to dominate and/or eliminate marginalized groups (women, migrants, 2LGBTQIA+ people, Black people, Indigenous people, religious minorities, people with disabilities, the poor, autistic people, etc.) that takes the form of dehumanizing rhetoric and repeated attacks on their fundamental rights.
  • a conviction that inequalities do not stem from social conditions but are natural and biological, and that this hierarchy is entirely legitimate.
  • references to a fictional past where all of the above was allegedly the case.
  • a fetishization of violence as the response to the humiliation of failing to entirely dominate marginalized groups.
  • a dual objective of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Fascism can seize state power through elections, a coup d’état, or a combination of both, as in the case of the Trump administration, which won the election and used its ascension to power to carry out an “administrative coup”—the illegal usurpation of congressional power and various state department powers by Elon Musk and the DOGE.

Once in power, fascism uses a well-known operative approach: criminalization. It passes laws that make certain activities criminal and deploys the police, the justice system, and prisons against the people who engage in them. For example, it criminalizes:

  • giving or receiving certain types of care (abortion, gender-affirming care, and possibly care for people with autism and people with disabilities. . .).
  • providing information (by transforming the definition of pornography so that the laws sanction any book dealing with queerness, by transforming the definition of antisemitism to include any denunciation of the genocide of the Palestinian people, by arresting lawyers who give legal information to migrants. . .).
  • simply existing on its territory (the mass revoking of visas, cancellation of status, criminalization of the homeless. . .).

Beyond laws, criminalization is politicized to designate entire groups of people as threats:

  • trans and intersex women are a threat to cis women in sports and more generally.
  • demonstrators are a threat to the rest of society.
  • migrants undermine job security and the housing market and threaten the working class.
  • Muslims threaten national security.

These threats are nurtured by fascist narratives and presented as existential threats to the nation’s future, thereby:

  • dehumanizing targeted groups.
  • pre-emptively stripping them of their fundamental rights.
  • portraying them as “others” who must be violently controlled, punished, and eliminated.
  • using them as scapegoats for all the evils of capitalism and fascism.

It is through this process of criminalization that fascist regimes create popular consent for the violence deployed against certain groups (physical and psychological violence, disappearances, forced labor, denial of care, murder. . .). People are made to believe that:

  • those target by hatred are not victims but are being punished for their crimes.
  • violence is both justified and completely normal.
  • those targeted would have been left in peace it they hadn’t committed a crime.

However, what is defined as a crime continuously grows.

This process also exists in so-called liberal democracies, which have developed expansive judicial and prison apparatuses. Fascists need the infrastructure and the legitimization that liberal democracies readily provide for the industrial-carceral system to function.

Keep in mind that:

  • police and prisons are a legacy of slavery and colonization.
  • Indigenous peoples in Canada have been the targets of genocidal violence.
  • their dances, rituals, and languages were criminalized.
  • they have suffered mass sterilization, forced displacement, and far-reaching abuse in residential schools.

Fascism is not so much a break with liberal democracies as a form its panic takes. As a result, the fascism currently consolidating in the United States and taking shape in Canada and Québec is characterized by:

  • panic in the face of recent advances in social justice, which they call “wokeness,” and which threaten their domination.
  • panic over the climate crisis and the efforts to mitigate it, both of which threaten access to the resources that underpin their dominance.
  • a tense alliance of Christian fundamentalists, a racist and sexist grassroots movement, a political elite, and ultra-rich big tech oligarchs.

Here are a few other important facts about fascism:

  • The fascists want us to waste our time. They will tell all sorts of lies so that we spend hours trying to prove our point, deconstructing their rhetoric, and clarifying facts. Then the next day they completely change their tune forcing us to do it all over again.
  • For fascists, certain (mythical) truths are more important than reality. If reality doesn’t agree with their truth, reality is wrong. Their relationship to reality is substantially undermined, so reality won’t convince them that they’re wrong. Reality has no bearing on their truth.
  • Above all, fascists want power. That’s what motivates them. They will adjust their rhetoric and values as much as is necessary to acquire and maintain power.
  • Fascists want survival of the fittest, based on a cartoonish Darwinian vision of evolution. They want to dominate. As they see it, anything that keeps them in power is justified. Their domination proves them right, and that’s all they need.
  • Fascism is not the work of a few outsiders hovering above the population. People participate, cooperate, and then become acculturated to fascism. It becomes their reality, their way of understanding the world.

How to Deal with Fascism

Historically, state apparatuses, opposition parties, the justice system, and the mainstream media have all failed to prevent the rise of fascist regimes. The neoliberal elites who run democracies may appear to oppose fascism, but faced with an increasingly unlivable world in which it becomes impossible to sustain both capitalism and liberal democracy, they too will adopt increasingly fascistic policies. For neoliberals, the criminalization and/or abandonment of ever-larger groups of marginalized people will be articulated as a matter of pragmatism and inevitability, while fascists will present it as the desirable return of a violently unequal natural order. In short, don’t expect the support of the neoliberal elites.

Popular organization is the best form of resistance. If the normalization of police, prisons, and mass surveillance has made this effort more difficult, presenting these tools of control as necessary, even natural, there are nonetheless multiple avenues for collective resistance.

Where to start:

  • Openly resist the consolidation of fascism. Clearly identify what is happening in the United States, Palestine, Canada, and elsewhere. Talk about fascism with those closest to you. Don’t let it be surreptitious. Force it out into the open.
  • Act locally against events organized by fascist groups. Attack them in every possible way. Physically prevent them from spreading their hatred.
  • Call bullshit what it is. Don’t get sidetracked by their lies. Don’t waste your time arguing with them. Don’t get caught up in their way of framing the situation. Bring the discussion back to what they do, to the horrors they commit, to the hatred that drives them.
  • Above all, don’t immediately fall into line if fascists come to power. When faced with authoritarian power, people tend to anticipate what a repressive government would want, and immediately cooperate, to make sure they don’t anger those in power and to protect themselves. This anticipatory obedience tells the regime what compromises people are willing to make and enables it to go much further much faster. This way of adapting harms everyone. It’s essential not to reflexively obey.
  • Maintain solidarity. Fascism normalizes human suffering and the jettisoning of groups of people designated as negligible or insignificant. Fascists want us to fall back upon our survival instinct, to get caught up in our personal preoccupations, to be isolated and weak. Solidarity is our strength.

We must build and maintain collective people’s power: the power to keep our communities safe; the power to prevent any of our own from being disappeared; the power to make sure everyone has food. We must begin by exploring all the ways in which we can participate in building this power, for example, by working to:

  • block fascist advances (e.g., by fighting anything that increases the scope, capacity, resources, and power of the prison state and fascist movements, such as building new prisons, militarizing borders, new identification systems targeting certain groups, etc.).
  • break their alliances and links with local groups and organizations (e.g., links between workers’ unions and organizations representing the police, links between the police and far-right militias, links between the mass media and transphobic activists, etc.).
  • minimize the impact of their policies (e.g., build and support a strong community network, self-help groups, secure communications networks, community defense infrastructures, gathering spaces, etc.).
  • build bridges between the communities affected (e.g., trade unions, women’s groups, anarchist gangs, anti-colonial movements, abolitionists, disability rights activists, etc.).
  • develop resources (e.g., organizations dedicated to sharing the history of struggle, transformative justice organizations, as many spaces as possible where we can gather, debate, digest all of the available information, have block parties, organize workshops, conferences, and marches, etc.).

To explore this issue further, I suggest the zine Block and Build: But Make It Abolitionist by the Interrupting Criminalization organization. Then it’s a matter of determining what makes sense for us, what we’re able to do, and how we understand our social context and the overall situation. For this, I recommend the zine Making a Plan, also an Interrupting Criminalization publication.

It could start with a union, a local chapter of Food not Bombs, a group that organizes people’s assemblies, a housing committee, a group of friends who make engaged art, a women’s group, and so on. All of it is relevant. these groups must:

  • develop a common language and an overall assessment of the situation.
  • coordinate in a decentralized way that encourages autonomous action as part of a larger whole.
  • develop a security culture commensurate with the level of risk.
  • prepare for repression by setting up a support system in advance.

Then, when the time comes, it will be possible to fight a fascist regime on a large scale thanks to:

  • a large enough mass of people committed to noncooperation, people who forget to deliver a letter or to forward an e-mail, who slow down some construction project, who don’t remove books from the shelves, who continue teaching history to children, who sabotage bureaucratic processes, who give false information to the police, who continue making music outside and at night, all of it to disrupt the smooth functioning of the regime.
  • diversity of tactics, including mass demonstrations, a general strike, industrial sabotage, alternative health care networks, etc.

If we join forces to fight fascism and the criminalization process that underpins it, anything is in our reach.

The Association of Nehirowisiw Aski Land Defenders Wants Saboteurs Handed Over to Police

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May 262025
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

We’re writing what follows to enable anarchist comrades and anticolonial militants to make informed decisions about where and how to engage in struggle.

In a press release published May 17, 2025, and available on their Facebook page, the Association of Nehirowisiw Aski Land Defenders (MAMO First Nations) condemns acts of vandalism recently committed on forestry machinery apparently belonging to a contractor involved in cuts on their territory.

The press release goes further, claiming that “these acts cannot and must not go unpunished.” It continues: “If you witness an act of vandalism or if you have any information that may assist the investigation, we strongly encourage you to share it without delay with the police authorities.”

We believe that relationships of struggle are strongest when they are nourished by practices of honesty and transparent communication on the motivations and limits of each of us. We hope that these events can be the basis for nuanced and open conversations about solidarity.

Report back on the May 19, 2025, People’s Anti-Fascist Festival

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May 262025
 

From Montréal Antifasciste

A little Context

In the run-up to Journée nationale des Patriotes 2025, celebrated on Monday, May 19, this year, the ethnonationalist organization Nouvelle Alliance (NA) called its second annual commemoration of Nouvelle France settler Adam Dollard des Ormeaux at the monument in his honour in Montreal’s Parc La Fontaine. On May 20, 2024, the far-right group had a similar gathering at Dollard’s monument (the year before that, NA activists had gathered at Pied-du-Courant, in the southeast of the city, to pay tribute to the Lower Canada Patriotes). The folkloric Dollard des Ormeaux is not, it must be stressed, the hero that NA and reactionary nationalists of its ilk insist on glorifying.

One of the posters seen around the Plateau Mont-Royal neighbourhood in May 2024, in the days before the commemoration of the Patriotes.

Did You Know?

Dollard des Ormeaux is not the “saviour of New France”
that nineteenth-century “historians” make him out to be.

He was a young French adventurer who tried to steal furs from the Iroquois.
The idiot ended up trapped in Long-Sault.

He refused to negotiate with his enemies, which led to the revolt of his Huron allies,
and that worked out badly for him and his companions.

Some versions of the story claim that he built an improvised explosive device
that detonated where he was holed up, thereby guaranteeing his defeat.

Rather than being the courageous saviour of the colony that Lionel Groulx portrays him as,
he is more of the OG imbecile of French Canada, a pillar of self-sabotage,
rendered a heroic figure by nationalist scribes in need of foundational yarns.

Also, Fuck Nouvelle Alliance!

Fed up with some fifty identitarian nationalists with stone-age ideas traipsing around Montréal with impunity, concerned citizens and people from the neighbourhood, along with members of community organizations, anti-racist activists, and trade unionists mobilized in recent weeks to organize a “People’s Festival Against Fascism” in protest.

The poster for the People’s Festival Against Fascism that appeared around Montréal in the weeks leading up to the event.

The main goal of this festive gathering was to occupy the area around the Dollard des Ormeaux monument in order to denounce the growing influence of the far right, in general, and the ambitions of Nouvelle Alliance, in particular. The celebration was a great success in its own right, by our count, attracting between three and four hundred people to the park between 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. We salute the tremendous effort made by those involved, and are reassured to see that citizens of Montréal and of Québec generally are ready to mobilize to confront the recent wave of normalization of the far right in public discourse.

A number of articles have been published in the media over the past few days, the majority demonstrating a flagrant lack of understanding of Nouvelle Alliance and its strategy. While we welcome the mainstream media’s growing—albeit belated—interest in Québec’s far right, it is clear that their attention to this area is still leaves something lacking, and that for a variety of structural reasons, they generally ignore the considerable efforts our collective has made over the past few years to shed light on this subject.

Here, then, is a detailed insider’s account of the events of May 19, 2025, that we hope will shed light on elements that have been overlooked or simply glossed over by the media and other key observers.

///

Leading up to the Gathering

On the evening of Sunday, May 18, the day before the commemoration, Nouvelle Alliance posted a series of characteristically austere photos on its social media accounts, saying: “the Patriote song [Tex Lecor, 1968] will be sung at the foot of the Dollard des Ormeaux monument.”

Nouvelle Alliance publication on the evening of May 18, 2025, the day before the Dollard des Ormeaux commemoration.

Given that Nouvelle Alliance was certainly well aware of the popular festival scheduled to take place at the foot of the monument at the same time as their event, this made it clear that they planned to occupy the contested space.

How they planned to do that became clear on Monday morning at around 8:00 a.m., when a contingent of a dozen or so people, made up of part of the NA core and a few goons, who were possibly recruited for the occasion, gathered at the opposite end of Parc La Fontaine. This contingent, dressed in black, moving in military formation, and wearing combat gloves and mouthguards had clearly come looking for a fight.

Eliott Labrie Laplante, a member of Nouvelle Alliance’s core group, has never been able to deal with his manhood being called into question! Here, several hours after the morning’s confrontation, he’s still sporting his reinforced gloves.
This previously unknown individual, identified as Dany Ayotte from Québec City, was particularly active in the morning’s physical confrontation. Here he is still wearing his reinforced gloves not long after.

This small group soon began marching toward the Dollard Des Ormeaux monument, with the clear aim of physically dislodging the popular rally organizers who were setting up and, we presume, taking control of the space “by any means necessary.”

Fortunately, alerted by the previous day’s publication to the possibility of violence, a few autonomous activists mobilized in the early hours of the morning to confront them and prevent a cowardly attack on citizens taking the opportunity to advance a vision of an inclusive and welcoming Québec. There was a physical confrontation in the southeast section of Parc La Fontaine, during which NA members made full use of their combat gear.

It’s clear that the Nouvelle Alliance core group arrived anticipating—and savouring—this sort of confrontation. This new combative approach, which until now we hadn’t associated with this group, stands in stark contrast to the image of clean-cut middle-class hipsters that the group has promoted for several years. It will be interesting to see for how long NA can maintain this ambiguity. Engaging in hand-to-hand combat with left-wing activists will complicate efforts to carve out a place in mainstream politics by infiltrating the Parti Québécois and Bloc Québécois.

Once an SPVM intervention ended the confrontation, the NA members who had taken part in the assault were held by police at a distance from the monument where two rival events were scheduled to take place.

It’s worth noting that the prevention of NA’s plans as a result of the confrontation enabled the organizers of the popular festival to quietly set up their six tents, hang numerous banners around the monument, and go ahead with the convivial, family-friendly event. We salute the courage of those who blocked NA—whose violent impulses are now obvious—to protect their community and, ultimately, guarantee the success of the event.

A Festive gathering in Parc La Fontaine

By 10:00 a.m., it was party time, and antifascist sympathizers began to gather in growing numbers. Litres of coffee were served, there was face painting for children, lively music rang out across the park, and impromptu soccer matches added to the fun. The atmosphere was decidedly festive!

One of the banners surrounding the monument [Neighbours welcome/fascists out].
Hundreds of hot dogs were served.
A number of tables were set up in the tents.

Participants in the popular festival chanted anti-fascist slogans to drown out Nouvelle Alliance’s tedious speeches.

The same cannot be said of the experience of the small band of identitarians gathered around NA, who were unable to get close to the monument and found themselves facing off with the police for quite a while.

Nouvelle Alliance activists slink away from the police cordon.

Unfortunately for Nouvelle Alliance, real life isn’t a school yard and announcing your event first isn’t enough to reserve a space, especially when it’s to spread hatred of others disguised as love of your nation.

The nationalist group’s militants and its sympathizers were forced to set up on the sidewalk about fifty metres from the Dollard des Ormeaux monument, held at bay by a large police presence and the several hundred people who attended the festival against fascism. Disappointed and looking dejected, the Nouvelle Alliance militants and their sympathizers tried, rather feebly, to hold their commemoration in spite of everything, but were drowned out by the popular festival’s music and antifascist chants.

Nouvelle Alliance commemorates its ghosts on the sidewalk.

Speaking of sympathizers, we should mention the notable presence of David Leblanc, a neo-Nazi bonehead well known in antifascist circles, since he likes to take photos of himself giving the Nazi salute (he was notably active with Soldiers of Odin Québec). We also mentioned him almost exactly one year ago, since he was also present at the Nouvelle Alliance commemoration on May 20, 2024.

Bonehead Dave Leblanc has a bad cramp in his arm.
Leblanc (from behind) having a good laugh in May 2024 with NA members, here with Émile Coderre.
Dave Leblanc’s presence went unchallenged at the Nouvelle Alliance event in 2024; seen here holding the Carillon Sacré-Cœur alongside fellow neo-Nazi Shawn Beauvais MacDonald.

At the time, the identity group’s leaders claimed that they couldn’t control who participated in their events, as they were public activities, and that they hadn’t known the ugly truth about David Leblanc. What excuse will the cryptofascists of Nouvelle Alliance come up with this year? Knowingly and without raising an eyebrow, they allowed a loud and proud neo-Nazi to walk alongside them all day, even shaking his hand and chatting with him.

Bonehead Dave Leblanc stands next to Nouvelle Alliance leader François Gervais, giving an interview to Alexandre Cormier-Denis, on May 19, 2025.
Neo-Nazi Dave Leblanc marches with Nouvelle Alliance, May 19, 2025.

It’s hard to imagine that some people still doubt Nouvelle Alliance’s ideological position.

Another sinister character who reappeared for the second year running was Shawn Beauvais MacDonald, the main organizer of the Frontenac Active Club, who was again spotted prowling around the Nouvelle Alliance gathering. After arriving alone this time, he was joined by two others and left shortly afterwards.

Beauvais MacDonald was part of the Nouvelle Alliance commemoration in 2024.
Shawn Beauvais MacDonald returned in 2025, but left shortly after this meeting at some distance from the festival. Were these people acolytes? Cops telling him to piss off? Who knows?

Perhaps the most significant appearance at the NA commemoration, however, was that of Alexandre Cormier-Denis. Cormier-Denis, whom we’ve already talked about (and will have more to say about very soon. . .), had announced the week before that he would be taking part in the NA commemoration and invited his supporters to join him. Cormier-Denis, it should be remembered, is the main host of the far-right “reinformation” project Nomos.TV, which stands out for its ethnic nationalism and its profoundly racist and Islamophobic statements. His extreme positions led to him being disqualified from presenting a brief to a parliamentary commission on immigration in 2023.

To give you an idea, here’s a sample (from dozens of examples) of Cormier-Denis’s positions (on immigration, “rewilding,” the future of patriotism, etc.), which clearly align with those of Nouvelle Alliance, since they appear to constitute a mutual admiration society:

Cormier-Denis’s presence clearly shows that the social project proposed by Nouvelle Alliance resonates with the worst of Québec’s fascist and fascist-adjacent elements. François Gervais, president of Nouvelle Alliance, readily granted him a live interview lasting several minutes, in which we are treated to a confused and subjective description of the current period, in which antifascists, “Bolsheviks,” and progressive independentists are lumped together.

François Gervais en entrevue avec Alexandre Cormier-Denis pour la chaîne Nomos.tv.

Anyone who thought that Nouvelle Alliance was above the racist rhetoric of Cormier-Denis and his acolytes was clearly wrong. Nomos and Nouvelle Alliance are one and the same movement.

Once the dreary NA speeches were over, their “commemoration,” which lasted at most twenty minutes—compared to an hour last year—turned into a sad and solemn little march (not a smile to be seen), at around 12:30.

The Nouvelle Alliance fools on parade.

Surrounded by dozens of cops, around fifty sympathizers of this groupuscule marched along Rachel and Saint-Denis Streets, toward Carré Saint-Louis, the starting point for the annual Grande marche des Patriotes, organized by the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste (SSJB). Along the way, the ethnonationalists, still led by their president, chanted reactionary and exclusionary slogans like “Patrie, Nation, Tradition,” as well as classics like “le Québec aux Québécois” [Québec for Quebeckers]. It’s worth noting that these slogans echo those of the French far right. For example, the neo-Nazis of the Comité du 9 Mai (C9M), who marched with impunity in Paris a few weeks ago, regularly chant, among other things, “Europe, Jeunesse, Révolution” [Europe, Youth, Revolution].

Same cadence, same delivery, same content: it’s clear that that’s no coincidence. In addition to its Québec precursors, NA is inspired by the worst of the European far right (identitarians, royalists, revolutionary nationalists, etc.), and that’s worth noting.

Meanwhile, the People’s Festival Against Fascism was in full swing, and a good time was had by young and old alike. More than five hundred hot dogs were served, and the games and music continued for several hours after Nouvelle Alliance’s departure.

Once again, we applaud the extraordinary effort of the organizers and congratulate everyone who chose to spend part of their Monday promoting and defending inclusive anti-racist values.

There was music.
We danced!
We redecorated the Dollard monument.
Between three and four hundred people came over the course of the day.
Numerous flags, including the Pride flag, waved above the anti-fascist festival.

Many progressive pro-independence activists were also present, including members of the Front pour l’indépendance nationale (FIN) and OUI Québec, who held up a poster produced for the occasion: “L’indépendance du Québec sera antifasciste” [Québec’s independence will be anti-fascist].

The Patriote tricolour was also waving at the anti-fascist festival!

At Carré Saint-Louis

Nouvelle Alliance’s misadventure wasn’t over. The fun continued when they arrived at Carré Saint-Louis at around 1:00 p.m. and attempted, as they have in the past, to parasitically attach themselves to the annual Grande marche des Patriotes organized by the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste. To their dismay, they were not welcome—for the second time that day!

Unlike last year, the SSJB had stopped to consider who it partnered with and made the judicious decision to inform Nouvelle Alliance’s leaders in advance that they would not be welcome this time. However, there’s what you say and there’s what you do, and on the ground, the SSJB leadership’s position did not prevail. Instead, the SSJB tried to negotiate a compromise, allowing Nouvelle Alliance to participate if they agreed to put away their banners and flags. Like last year, however, the NA militants failed to keep their word and did, in fact, display their colors as soon as the march got underway. Luckily, the presence of a small (but solid!) progressive pro-independence contingent put an end to that.

OUI Québec militants and comrades from the Front pour l’indépendance nationale (FIN) joined forces to prevent Nouvelle Alliance from joining the main march, sealing NA off. After a brief hesitation, during which the progressive independentists courageously held the line, despite being outnumbered by NA activists, the police intervened to separate the two sides by, quite literally, pushing the progressives out of the way.

An anti-fascist contingent at prevented the identitarian groupuscule from joining the main body of the Grande marche des Patriotes.

The entire SSJB march took place without the toxic presence of Nouvelle Alliance, the latter marching a hundred metres behind, completely surrounded by the SPVM.

Progressive independentists sealed Nouvelle Alliance off from the Grande marche des Patriotes.

We’d like to congratulate OUI Québec and FIN for having the courage to stand up for their anti-fascist principles despite the pallid support of the march’s organizers. Over the years, we’ve often criticized the contemporary independence movement for its complacency toward the far-right groups that pollute its ranks. Let’s give credit where credit is due: OUI Québec’s recent strong stance offers hope for the future of the sovereigntist movement.

Unfortunately, not all sovereigntist groups are created equal, and the ludicrous presence of the Action socialiste de libération nationale (ASLN) at the Grande marche des Patriotes proves the point. The latter, whose rapprochement with Nouvelle Alliance we recently exposed, joined their new comrades for the duration of the march. Friendly handshakes were exchanged, and a few jarring red flags were seen amid Nouvelle Alliance’s sea of blue. This situation marks a turning point in relations between the ASLN and NA. Until recently, the two groups had kept their rapprochement under wraps, but now their alliance has come out into the light of day. Despite their ideological differences as to the ideal future for Québec, it would seem that their reactionary social positions provide sufficient common ground. The rest of the pro-independence camp be warned: support for either of these two groups is support for their conservative, anti-migrant, anti-diversity, anti-woke, and fundamentally reactionary social project.

An image that sums up the whole sordid affair: Nouvelle Alliance leader François Gervais, flanked by neo-Nazi bonehead David Leblanc, gives an interview to ethnic ultranationalist fanatic Alexandre Cormier-Denis for the far-right reinformation channel Nomos.TV, while Billy Savoie and the Stalinist ASLN bozos cackle in the background.

Conclusion

As we have seen, Nouvelle Alliance has become increasingly visible within a far-right ecosystem, from which it foolishly believed it would gloriously emerge to infect the rest of the sovereigntist movement with its nauseating ideas.

It’s about time the mainstream media got its facts right, rather than buying into the mendacious propaganda being spewed by Québec’s far right. It’s a pity, for example, that newspapers readily publish the whimsical nattering of commentators who are either confused or acting in bad faith, such as secularism activist Nadia El-Mabrouk, who, in a letter published in Le Devoir on May 23, admits that she was unaware of Nouvelle Alliance (and, therefore, couldn’t possibly understand the nature of its project and its discourse) but, nevertheless, defends its presence in the broad sovereigntist family, as well as encouraging us to embrace dialogue and universal love.

Fortunately, the new generation of sovereigntists doesn’t share this blindness, as is evidenced by the position taken by OUI CVM, which loudly and clearly denounces this new reactionary alliance and everything it represents.

The struggle for Québec’s independence is a very complex issue, and anti-fascists of different stripes certainly disagree on the desirable outcome, but whatever happens in Québec in the future, we make this promise today: fascists will NEVER rule here.

Bonus tracks :

Leading Nouvelle Alliance activist Émille Coderre, whose problematic past we’ve discussed in the past, and whose entry in the PQ and the Bloc we’ve noted several times, makes a hand gesture widely seen as code in contemporary white supremacist movements. Way to go, guy!

The many moods of Franky Gervais…

[1]               [Tex Lecor, 1969]

All Eyes On The Nehirowisiw Aski!

 Comments Off on All Eyes On The Nehirowisiw Aski!
May 232025
 

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Blockades are going up on Atikamekw territory (Nehirowisiw Aski) to resist the CAQ’s forestry regime. In solidarity, anti-colonial protestors seized the intersection of Papineau and Ontario during rush hour.

Paralysing southbound traffic to the Jacques-Cartier Bridge for close to 20 minutes before the police could arrive. Protestors used road flares and defended eachother in the face of brazen motorists – police were caught by surprise and were unable to intervene. After leaving the intersection, protestors took the streets, and dispersed with no arrests or police interventions. The success of this action inspires us at an urgent moment demanding solidarity with land defenders refusing the CAQ’s land grab.

The frontlines need urgent support as the logging season begins. Land defenders on the Nehirowisiw Aski are directly resisting colonial extraction and the destruction of their territory. This is frontline resistance to the CAQ’s forestry regime—a regime that hands over vast stretches of so-called Quebec’s forests to industry without consent, without regard. They’re calling for material support along with solidarity—whether you can go to the blockade, send funds, or take action here in Tiohtià:ke—this struggle must be taken up by people in the city. We must disrupt comfort, convenience, and quiet complicity.

Indigenous Land defenders are not solely responsible for resisting the colonial death march of extractive industry—the frontlines are everywhere. Don’t wait for permission. Don’t ask for justice. Fight alongside those creating it. Land defenders need immediate material support and brave anti-colonial accomplices.

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