Within a week of new banners being installed on Mercier Bridge that celebrate colonial “Canada 150”, several have already been torn to shreds.
Big ups to the vandals!
From Instagram
During the morning of June 21, a police car was attacked with bricks in the neighbourhood of Pointe-Saint-Charles. The circumstances of the attack are unknown, as it hasn’t been reported by the SPVM or the media. This begs the question of how often similar acts occur without anyone hearing about them, because they are invisibilized by the institutions that control the flow of information.
It’s impossible to say what inspired such an action yesterday morning and we want to avoid the trap of imposing a political narrative where there isn’t necessarily one. Nonetheless, hearing of this trashed police car brought us feelings of elation and inspiration. We publish this photo because, no matter the circumstances, it’s encouraging to see people fighting back against such an age-old enemy.
Pointe-Saint-Charles is rapidly undergoing gentrification, which has led to an increased police presence in order to facilitate the social cleansing that gentrification requires. Last year, anarchists put a police car in Pointe-Saint-Charles out of service in broad daylight, with similar tactics to what was seen yesterday.
We hope to see resistance multiply to the daily violence of police. We want fear to change sides.
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
On Friday, June 16, an installation in Montreal promoting Canada’s 150th year of killing people and taking their land (among other shit), was defaced by some anarchists. A large “Canada150” billboard above a Parks Canada information booth was covered with black paint, while anti-colonial posters were wheat pasted on an adjacent placard memorializing Sir Wilfred Laurier.
The location is alongside the Lachine Canal, and across the street from Atwater Market, both major tourist destinations. The action was timed so that summer weekend crowds wouldn’t miss our redecoration. As of Saturday afternoon, the black paint had not been removed.
Inspiring calls to disrupt Canada150, a celebration of Indigenous genocide, have circulated widely in recent months. As people living in Canadian cities who want to sabotage the economic, political, and symbolic machinery of the colonial state, we encourage a multi-pronged attack in engaging with Canada150.
Highly visible subversive engagement with Canada150 installations, as well as with the usual colonial statues and monuments, can disrupt the official narrative of a diverse yet united country with a history meriting celebration. Here in Montreal, where the 375th anniversary of the city is being celebrated in tandem with Canada150, we can look for opportunities to hit two birds with one stone, so to speak.
Targets are everywhere. Colonization enlists every facet of Canadian capital and state power. On Friday, for instance, the property of Parks Canada, a federal agency that may seem innocuous at first glance, was damaged. Most parks in Canada are on traditional indigenous territories. The conversion of this land into federal and provincial parks is an important part of Canada’s genocidal history and present project. These areas were transformed from homes, hunting, and harvesting territories, where people could sustain themselves and their communities, into very specifically state-managed parks. It is no coincidence that the first National parks were established during the construction of the Canadian Pacific railway, and at the tail-end of the Métis Rebellion.
Direct action targeting hard-to-defend infrastructure (even in and around urban areas) like highways, railways and pipelines can directly impact the revenue streams of government and corporate colonial profiteers. Doing so breaks with the social control on which colonial governance depends. These attacks build the skills, confidence, and collective capacity that are invaluable in periods of intensified collective action.
Through action, we build effective networks for material solidarity with Indigenous frontline struggles. Those of us in cities often have access to substantial funding and other material resources that can cover vital supplies, transportation, and legal costs for Indigenous people defending their land. And we can organize to show up when invited to Indigenous land defense actions, in helpful numbers and with relevant contributions. When engaging in such efforts, settlers need to move beyond an allyship framework and understand our own reasons for participating in anticolonial, anticapitalist projects, recognizing that an anticolonial struggle is inseparable from our own.
We are dedicated to projects that will continue into 2018, strengthening resistance to Canada beyond these twelve embarrassing months of heightened colonial smug self-promotion.
Fuck the 150th, fuck Canada!
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
Just over a year ago, a masked crowd looted the yuppie grocery store attached to the “3734” restaurant on Notre-Dame street and redistributed the food to people in the neighborhood, one of dozens of actions against gentrification in recent years. The grocery store shut down several months ago, but we noticed that the 3734 restaurant was still serving business lunches and expensive dinners to local yuppies. So last Wednesday night we paid them a visit, breaking a window and covering the inside of the restaurant with paint, using a fire extinguisher.
“But what does vandalism against businesses accomplish?” When these businesses that enable gentrification have been targeted, the mass-media has emphasized that they are only a small part of a larger process of gentrification, so the vandals are missing the point. Those of us against gentrification can draw the opposite conclusion: this doesn’t mean that these targets aren’t worthwhile, but just that we need to accompany them with more diverse targets and widespread actions! We bet that repeated vandalism and spiking insurance rates can make a difference to whether small trendy businesses are able to stay afloat, and can also deter future investment that would further cement gentrification. Did you hear? St-Henri businesses keep closing following de-gentrifying attacks: Campanelli, Shapiro’s juice bar, and the 3734 boutique grocery make three in the past year and a half.
Gentrification is an operation of displacement, alongside more longstanding processes such as colonialism and mass incarceration, that those in power use against anyone who stands in the way of development, control, and ‘progress’. We wreck gentrifying businesses in our neighborhood(s) for the same reasons others might attack the police, sabotage industrial development, make borders unenforceable, and injure fascists.
We’re told that we just need to vote, write to elected officials, or peacefully protest if we want to change things, but anyone knows better than to trust this tired lie. We want to change infinitely more than what would be possible by performing the role of the good citizen or by getting good media coverage for a list of demands to those in power. The ‘legitimate’ channels that this society gives us for change may bring about reforms to the specific details of oppression, but they do nothing to undo the systems of oppression themselves, and often are designed to make us ever more dependent upon them. That is why we refuse to dialogue with a gentrifying business, and instead break their windows and destroy their commodities; actions that directly impact our environment, unmediated by politicians and their world. In a society that values property over life, we must destroy property in order to live.
Tired of useless meetings or sitting at home alone with your Facebook feed? Try a nighttime stroll with a friend, a mask, and a sledgehammer. Attacking is very possible, no matter who you are, and if you’re careful you can do quite a lot without being caught – check out this recipe for nocturnal actions for some tips. Let’s keep making St-Henri a hostile place for yuppie business, developers, the police, and the rich they serve!
From sub.media
Montreal community groups came together with autonomous radicals last week to demand access to housing, squatting buildings and holding free barbecues in the park.
From subMedia
Montreal radicals began a “week of occupations” by squatting an abandoned hospital that they hope to turn into a housing complex. When the police attacked, they barricaded themselves inside. More actions are planned through the coming week..
From subMedia
This morning, a group of autonomous environmentalists in Montreal occupied the offices of EACOM Timber, in opposition to the company’s plan to log forest in the habitat of endangered caribou in Northern Quebec. In order to facilitate the logging operation, the government of Quebec plans to displace the entire herd of caribou into a zoo, a move which has been opposed by the Assembly of First Nations of Quebec and Labrador. The company is currently constructing a road into the zone that they hope to log, and the activists say the fight is far from over.
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
On the night of May 19, we decided to come together to attack the restaurant and bar Ludger, the offices of Projet Montréal, and the IGA supermarket in Saint-Henri.
If we attacked Ludger, it’s not only to denounce the over-priced meals that they serve, but to attack the way of life of young professional yuppies who invade popular neighbourhoods with their cash, and contribute to the exclusion of the poor in the neighbourhood.
If we attacked the office of Projet Montréal it’s not only for their role in the gentrification of the neighbourhood in advancing the argument of social mixity (mixité) and favoring the establishment of new businesses and condo projects. We attacked the office because it’s the entire political world that we want to attack. We refuse to be represented and directed by someone else, whether a Prime Minister or a borough councillor. We are masters of our own lives.
If we attacked the IGA it’s not only because the food is too expensive, but because we believe that eating well shouldn’t be a luxury, but something that’s free and accessible to everybody. In this neighbourhood, some people are hungry and we don’t want to be sorry observers of the situation.
We’re very aware that the targets that were attacked aren’t large capitalist institutions. However, these businesses are the reflection, at the smallest scale, of a world that always favors the wealthiest over the poorest, who are always subject to further misery. This is why we wanted to reverse the order of things for an instant, and have it understood that though shuffling through each day we can also bite. We want rich lives, not the lives of the rich.
We were happy the morning after to read in the news that other businesses had been attacked the same night in Verdun.
P.S. Hope we didn’t disturb your little Friday night dinner too much.
Des insoumi-ses (ungovernables)
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
Despite a sizable turnout on a rainy day, May Day in Montreal left many feeling like the police succeeded in keeping our celebrations tame and orderly. The anti-capitalist demonstration started in two locations: a downtown contingent organized by CLAC (Convergence of Anti-Capitalist Struggles), and an anti-fascist, anti-borders contingent which would join the downtown one from the east. This was organized in part to avoid demonstrating alongside the PCR, authoritarian communists that CLAC persists in organizing with.
The downtown contingent saw clashes between the PCR and the police after a bank was vandalized with paint bombs, leading to an arrest of one of their militants. The east contingent had at least one hundred anarchists wearing masks, some of whom carried black flags. People seemed to be waiting to join the demonstration downtown before popping shit off, but unfortunately, before this could happen police flanked both sides of the demo. Once the demonstrations merged downtown, this flanking was deployed to a degree not yet seen in Montreal. Nearly 100 cops walked on each side of the crowd, so that along nearly its entire length at least one sidewalk was held by cops.
An atmosphere of vulnerability to these police tactics prevailed until the demonstration fizzled out hours later. It deterred major property destruction and attacks on police, without cops even having to crack down. At any given time, police on either side were ready to intervene, and the demonstration had neither side-banners nor enough density to be able to defend against the police attacks that would likely follow any unlawful action. Apart from a few luxury car windows being smashed, the tension never materialized into collective action.
The police have all year (and large budgets) to prepare for annual rituals of revolt that Montreal anarchists have been cultivating, such as May Day and March 15. The defeat of this year’s May Day reaffirmed that we should be experimenting with demonstrations (spread through word-of-mouth or social media) that don’t give police as much time to prepare. However, we don’t want to abandon these annual rituals either. Like December 6th in Athens, May Day in many cities, and the Day of the Combatant Youth in Chile, annual rituals of anarchist rioting can still serve us. There are many people who will only be in the streets with us on May Day when there’s no major social movement. Interacting with them, and preparing for moments of generalized social rupture when we will have to sometimes engage with a highly prepared and mobilized police force, make these traditions worthwhile.
It’s impressive how many anarchists came out on a rainy May Day, seemingly in affinity groups. Here are two proposals for how this significant potential could adapt to the recent development in policing tactics:
As anarchists donning the black mask, we need to get better at staying together as a bloc. Our default is to be scattered through the crowd in affinity groups, or even alone. Although this is likely due to the social barriers of people not knowing each other, we need to start to overcome these to form effective black blocs rather than sparse clusters throughout the demonstration.
We need our own side-banners to help delineate and defend this bloc. Without side-banners, we have nothing to prevent police from easily cutting into the crowd to make targeted arrests. Side-banners also help to obscure police vision on who is doing what. They are a mobile barricade, and we need to start prioritizing their deployment.
May Day in Berlin this year, where side-banners are used in succession to defend against police flanking.
As for where to position the bloc, we think it makes the most sense to copy the ‘Cortège de tête’ from our comrades in France, who during the Loi Travail revolts always had the combative section of the demonstration at the front. If you’re there to participate in the bloc, you know that you can always find it at the front. Although in the past, hanging back has meant that smaller groups receive less police attention and can more easily act, now that the police are lining the entirety of the demo this just leaves those smaller groups isolated.
Let’s refuse to allow ourselves to be pre-emptively kettled by police flanking us on the sidewalks. This could be accomplished by building a culture of consistently taking the sidewalks whenever we take the streets, before police can fill them. Past attempts to make this happen have always remained small and police have managed to push through. This is where reinforced banners and combative flagpoles could come in handy. If police try to take the sidewalks back from us, a team anchored by a reinforced banner could block their passage and make them vulnerable to projectiles thrown from behind the sidewalk and street banners.
Although many of us who show up for these moments don’t have organizing relationships outside of them, if we make efforts to prepare within our affinity groups in ways that will sync with the efforts of others, our rituals could take on a renewed force.
See you at the (mobile) barricades!
From Sub.media
Today the far right in Montreal was able to take the streets, with the supposed aim to protest against the Liberal government. They left out their affiliations out of their call-out, and successfully attracted a sizeable crowd, who were none the wiser about the politics of the organizers.
#monteeal riot Police form a perimeter around #fascist demo preventing #Antifa from confronting them pic.twitter.com/dvi4ymxznM
— submedia (@submedia) April 23, 2017
They also left their flags and insignias home, and favored Quebec flags, and in a bizarre instance, one person flew the indigenous unity flag, popularly known as the “warrior flag” Taking inspiration from recent events in the US, the proto-fascist elements within the the protests were ready to fight.
Some wore masks, body armor, and helmets and even brandished sticks. Their security marshals wore armbands, and they had scouts through the perimeter of the protest. Anarchist and anti-fascists were blocked by a large presence of riot cops, and comrades were not able to get close enough to the protesters. The police protected the protesters as they freely marched through downtown.
