Analysis

Abstentionist Posters and Anarcho-syndicalist Perspectives on Elections

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Sep 042018

The electoral circus has begun in Quebec.

As anarcho-syndicalists, we believe necessary to promote a systematic abstaining stance. This is why we share here two posters as an answer to statist propaganda and electoralist brainwashing.

The fact that we don’t vote is the logical result of our revolutionary project.

It’s delusional to think that our emancipation will come from parliament. We’ll only be able to realize anarchist communism (only economical and political system that insures our individual and collective emancipation) by organising our struggles in a horizontal, egalitarian fashion… and far away from political parties.

For us, « leftist » parties place social movement’s and well intentioned activists’ energy in an electoralist dead end that offers only disappointment, treason, instrumentalisation, manipulation, lies, illusions, etc. While the electoral machine of the « leftist » parties are being built, minds and thoughts of social movement activist are pushed toward statist alienation and electoral wait-and-see attitude. If there is no capitalism with a human face and if the state is the wheel of our exploitation, then we’ll have to abolish both to be free.

In the end, we stay convinced that we have nothing to expect from the state, it doesn’t matter who’s in power. Both « right » and « left » parties reproduce and support state and capitalism that lean on oppressions and systematic exploitation. Elections contribute to the alienation of our lives.

Download the posters by clicking the links below

Elections everywhere – Text

Elections everywhere – plain poster

Resisting Slavery: From Marie-Joseph Angélique 1734 to Prison Strike 2018

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Aug 272018

From It’s Going Down

Some anarchists came together on the night of August 23rd to cover Montréal’s Vieux Port (Old Port) in posters that read in both French and English:

Resisting Slavery: From Marie-Joseph Angélique 1734 to Prison Strike 2018

August 21 – September 9th

More Info: twitter.com/JailLawSpeak

We postered along the same streets that Angélique was paraded down moments before she was hung, and then burned. Angélique, we remember. Slavery, stolen land, and attempted genocide define the contours of the ever-forming settler states of Turtle Island (North America). In solidarity with prisoners currently fighting slavery inside all US prisons, we wanted to (re)tell the story of Marie-Joseph Angélique. Angélique was a Black woman enslaved in Montréal during the 18th Century who was sentenced to torture and death for allegedly setting fire to her slave owner’s domicile, which resulted in the majority of the city of Montréal burning. We offer Angélique’s story as a reminder that Québec and Canada were engaged in the practice of slavery for over 200 years. We chose Angélique’s story because it connects the city we live in to the ongoing story of resistance to slavery on this continent.

US prisoners have used this strike to reference a long history of resistance to slavery. August 21, 1831 marked the start of Nat Turner’s Rebellion, a significant moment of resistance by enslaved people. August 21, 1971 also marks the day the state killed George Jackson, a Black revolutionary prisoner deeply involved in struggles for the liberation of Black peoples. Jackson’s death ignited an intense period of prison organizing. September 9, 1971 marks the start of the Attica Uprising, one of the most significant moments of resistance inside US prisons. Prisoners at Attica released a list of comprehensive demands to improve their living conditions. Those demands were never met but have clearly influenced the prisoners on strike today.

Resistance to slavery is an ongoing struggle for those facing incarceration in the United States. The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution states:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Slavery actively continues within US prisons. The 13th Amendment legally justifies the violent, brutal conditions that define this carceral system. These conditions are what prisoners across the States will be striking against over the next two weeks. And while Canada does not have a similar constitutional amendment, we view prisons not only as an apparatus of domination, but also as an extension of Canada’s settler colonial project. The primary aim for the settler colonial project is to control land for settlement and for the extraction of “natural resources”. It is through these capitalist relationships to land that the colonial system secures its wealth and future existence. However, First Nations, Inuit and Métis Nations are viewed by the political and economic elite as an obstacle to this settler future. The settler state and society have employed tactics and strategies such as: racialized and class-motivated surveillance, policing, military repression, and incarceration. Containment and control are not only central to the settler colonial project, but prisons and incarceration are a strategic part of keeping Indigenous people off the land, and thus less able to challenge state power.

Slavery, stolen land, and attempted genocide are the founding stories of the settler states occupying this continent, and they are the foundations of the systems we seek to abolish. We weave together these aforementioned moments in history to illustrate how they belong to a longer, more global context of colonial expansion, exploitation for profit, and great wealth for some humans at the expense of the objectification of so many forms of life.

Solidarity with the prisoners on strike, in memory of Angélique.

Against prisons, against slavery, against colonialism!

URL link to poster pdf files: https://archive.org/details/PrisonStrike2018posters

Bill 25 on Welfare: a War on the Poor

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Aug 102018

From the SITT-IWW

On April 1 came into force the law 25 – “An Act to provide a better match between training and employment and to promote employment integration” – which was integrated with the current law on social assistance. We believe it is the early termination of welfare because the founding principles behind it, the right to live decently and access to income regardless of the cause of need, no longer considered. Its implementation will jeopardize people’s lives by imposing attempt to survive them with crumbs, and taking in the great objective employment project, whose purpose is to provide a cheap labor business.

With the law 25, anyone who came to welfare after April 1 2018 must now must enter the Target employment program. This is also the case for those already on welfare before that date but which are part of a family where one member of the couple is now first-time applicant or first-time applicant *.

The law 25 implies that, when you find yourself in these categories, if one misses a meeting with our officer or social welfare officer, she or he can retain completely our check. Furthermore, in case of breach of any of our obligations without cause “valid” (according to the plan set by the welfare officer-e corresponding to our situation : making employment initiatives, to training or to “develop social skills”), Agent-e will have the right to cut our check in the following month or the following month.

56 $ for the first breach ;
112 $ for the 2nd violation ;
224 $ for the 3rd failure.

Basically, if we refuse to comply with employment integration program, we are forced to live with a check 409$ per month. It is therefore clear that the objective of the law 25 is to require persons found no compulsion to work to find one, according to the priorities of private enterprise and according to labor market needs (and conditions established by the welfare officer-e). But we know that the work is not the only way to achieve in life ! And we claim the right to live decently no matter how it is done. In the facts, this law reinforces the notion of “good and bad poor” and prejudice against people who do not have jobs. The government amplifies voluntarily. It is to his advantage to do so, breaking the solidarity among the population, sparking discontent against welfare recipients who have “easy”, that are “hard fat, parasites, fraudsters, profiteers “who deserve to live in misery.

The irony is that even the Employers Council has expressed reservations about the punitive measures Objective employment program. By parliamentary committee, M. Yves-Thomas Dorval, CEO of the Quebec Employers Council, said : « […] That said, I’ll be honest with you, M. The Minister : The amount of social assistance, was, it’s not much either, […]. That’s why I was very happy to see that enhances Russia welfare for those who want to participate. And with that I can assure you of our full support in that direction. Now, it is difficult for a government to make measurements without consideration. And that, I do not know if this is the best, we are not experts in it, but I can just tell you : For sure this is already not high, was, the level of social assistance.» (27 January 2016).

The government’s goal is clear : He wishes discipline the poor world to make it a slave labor and captive, no alternative but to actively participate in programs imposed by the Ministry not to starve. What is announced, this is not a fight against poverty, it is a war to the poor! Keeping us in abject conditions, stirring a core in the form of possible adjustments on their check and a stick in the form of large denomination check or file closure, the Liberal party is a cheap labor, Gift for the company, and long-term, the end of welfare.

Au SITT-IWW, we will continue to oppose any project that creates a class of workers and precarious-e-s workers and that is why we are in solidarity with the struggle against Lens employment project!

* A first-time applicant or a primary applicant is a person who makes an application for social assistance for the first time.

From Embers: Anti-Fascism in Quebec

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Jul 262018

From From Embers

An interview with an anti-fascist based in Montreal. We discuss the history of the Quebec far right dating back to the 1930s, anti-fascist resistance in 1990s Montreal, and the contemporary context, including an important victory against La Meute on July 1, 2018.

July 1: Antifascist Victory

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Jul 252018

From Montréal-Antifasciste

On July 1st, La Meute, Storm Alliance, and a new group called “Independence Day” planned to converge in downtown Montreal and march against “illegal” immigration, in what La Meute promised would be a demonstration of “historic” proportions. Thanks to a coordinated response from local antifascists, antiracists, anarchists, communists, Indigenous and anticolonial activists, migrant justice groups, and concerned citizens, what it ended up being was a historically colossal failure. This was La Meute’s first attempt at a demonstration in Montreal since March 4, 2017 – and this time, they weren’t able to parade their vicious, hateful rhetoric through the streets.

Antifascists faced a number of logistical challenges. The racists had stated on social media that they would be meeting in “the east of Montreal” and leaving from there to their march, but that they would only announce the precise details the morning of their march. The antiracist demonstration was called at Place Simon Valois not far from Joliette metro, an area considered “home turf” for the radical left, and which it was hoped could be used as a staging area to head further east if necessary (the assumption was that the far rightists would be meeting at Radisson). It looks like the whole thing about “east of Montreal” was likely disinformation on their part, as they in fact met at Bonaventure metro in the west of downtown. On very short notice, the antiracist forces arranged to have metro tickets on hand, and after a quick rally at Place Valois with speeches from Montreal Wolf Pack (an Indigenous street patrol) and local antifascist organizers, headed to Joliette to take the metro west.

Between 200 and 300 hundred people had turned up at Place Simon Valois, and roughly 200 made their way to where the far rightists were meeting. There was some confusion – which was the fault of the organizers – about the nature of the antiracist rally. On social media it had been announced that this was not going to be a counterdemonstration, however those who showed up to organize the event and most of those at the rally wanted to confront the far right head on. That’s why people decided to move to Bonaventure. To anyone who showed up expecting a separate demonstration against racism, and who was disappointed when it became a counterdemonstration downtown, we offer our apologies. We will attempt to do better at communicating in a consistent and accurate way in future.

It is also important to note that we suffered from very limited human resources when organizing on our own side. July 1 is a horrible day to organize a demonstration in Montreal, as so many people are moving that day. The left also relies heavily on student forces and networks which are absent during the summer. And finally, antiracists were already mobilizing that week (and that day) to go to communities close to the border in a “Refugees Welcome Caravan.” While we did the best we could given a very small number of organizers, certain tasks fell by the wayside. One result of this was that, despite our victory on the streets, we were unable to properly put forth our own politics in the media reports that followed. Next time we must do better.
Despite these challenges, on the day itself, once we arrived downtown, it became clear that we significantly outnumbered our opponents. Somewhat spontaneously, our forces split in two, boxing the racists in behind the lines of police protecting them. What followed were several hours of sweltering heat (the hottest July 1 on record in Montreal) as we kept the far rightists immobilized. Big props to those who held their ground in the hot sun, to those who took the initiative to go get water for the crowd once the water the organizers had brought ran out, and to those who took the lead in chanting antiracist, antifascist, and anti-colonialist slogans to keep the crowd’s spirits up.

La Meute would later try to claim that their march was a success, despite only 100 or so people having showed up from across Quebec, because they managed to walk a half a block to their first target before we showed up (the offices of Immigration Canada, which were closed that day). A look at their comments in their private groups, however, shows the truth of the matter, that they had intended to march and had been blocked by our forces, as they had been relying on the police to contain or attack antifascists (as they had done in April in Montreal and in November in Quebec City). When this didn’t happen, they had no plan B, and in what is becoming a La Meute tradition, spent most of the afternoon seeking escape from the heat in a nearby parking garage.

As for Storm Alliance, so few people showed up that leader Eric Trudel ended up berating his own people in a post-march facebook video for being all talk and no action. We don’t know what Trudel was on at the time (though note the constant sniffing of his nose during the video), but this rambling attack on his own people just made him, and Storm Alliance as a whole, look all the more like clowns. The group has certainly not recovered since its founder Dave Tregget quit last winter.

Many factors contributed to our success in blocking this attempted racist march. First and foremost, the success was not strictly ours, but was in fact the success of the Montreal radical left, which contains many divergent tendencies, and which has many serious disagreements, but which came together for this and cooperated in exemplary fashion. Antifascists are part of a broader movement with a deep and rich history in this city; we can only win when we remember this fact and draw upon these forces. Secondly, our antifascist movement itself has now had over a year since La Meute’s first public outing in Montreal to learn from its past mistakes – where our movement was once a loose, disorganized network of groups who had little to no communication with each other, we are now much more effective in our ability to coordinate actions. Thirdly, it needs to be mentioned that La Meute’s own forces were incredibly poorly organized that day, even without consideration of the intense heat – they forgot their water and signs in the car, seemed to be relying on the police to practically conduct their demo for them, and one member even lost a list of all of their Clan’s attendees and then failed to even warn their members about this slip-up until antifascists found the documents and uploaded them for all to see.

Another important factor in our favor, recent interventions by local Montreal activists had brought media attention to the fact that police have openly sided with the far right at numerous demonstrations over the past year; this in turn created a situation where the police were under pressure to not embarrass their bosses by too openly siding with La Meute this time around.

Finally, it must also be noted that far right forces were divided on July 1. While Storm Alliance and Independence Day joined La Meute’s march, another small far right demonstration was making its way unimpeded through the streets of Montreal. The Front Patriotique du Quebec – a small star in a larger constellation of racist forces for whom Quebec independence is of primary importance – has held a “Rally for a Republic of Quebec” every July 1st for several years now. The FPQ did not take kindly to La Meute calling an anti-immigrant rally at the same time as their annual march. While there have been calls for “unity” on the right, these have been surpassed by the attacks on La Meute for being a “federalist” group. In short, many nationalists, including racists and far rightists in the nationalist camp, increasingly see La Meute as an unreliable and arrogant group built up by the media but unable to mobilize any substantial numbers on the ground.

Indeed, giving credit where credit is due, the “La Merde” image antiracists used on social media and posters for July 1 was in fact borrowed from Sylvain Lacroix, the former FPQ member close to the Three Percenters, who is himself now trying to set up a far right militia in Quebec. Those who whined online that this image was “anti-Quebec” should get a grip: the image came from your own side, and from the nationalist section of your side at that! Hatred of La Meute can be pretty intense in some other far right corners, including even threats of violence (the screenshots of which we can’t show right now, for reasons people should be able to surmise).

More marginally, members of the Alt Right scene in Montreal (which contains many actual neo-nazis) similarly view La Meute as a bunch of losers.

We may have won this battle, but the war of combating the rise of the far-right – here and elsewhere – continues. Make no mistake – their movement is absolutely still growing, their anti-immigrant, racist, islamophobic, and misogynist ideas are still taken seriously, and their rhetoric is still peddled by mainstream political parties, one of which – the CAQ – stands a very good chance of winning the upcoming Quebec provincial election in October.

It’s important to celebrate our successes – but it’s even more important, now more than ever, to let them motivate us for the long fight ahead!

Conversation with an anarchist person of colour from Montreal

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Jul 232018

From From Embers

I talk to Rosa, a friend and anarchist person of colour living in Montreal, about racism, identity politics, identity-based organizing and projects she’s involved with. Thanks to Rosa for the music selections!

Far Right Troll Spreads Fake News about Antifascist Attack (which never happened)

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Jul 042018

From Montréal-Antifasciste

A particularly disgusting piece of “fake news” was being shared on social media following to two far-right rallies that occurred in Montreal on July 1st.

While La Meute and Storm Alliance were immobilized by antifascists, a smaller march called by the Front Patriotique du Québec marched from Carré St-Louis to the Jacques Cartier Bridge.
Within hours of the FPQ march ending, a story began to be shared in their networks – and also by members of La Meute, Storm Alliance, and other such groups – about a brutal attack on three Indigenous people who had been trying to join the FPQ march. According to this story, antifascists spotted these would-be Patriots at an unnamed metro station and beat them so badly they had to be hospitalized:

In another post, this same “Calinda Nath Grondin Cado” claimed specifically that it was Jaggi Singh who led this violent attack:

As the story was repeated on twitter by La Meute member Sébastien Chabot (alias World Truth), it became a matter of “the troops of Eve Tores” (sic) who had sent three people to hospital:

The spin people were giving this on social media was that “antifa” had attacked Indigenous people hoping to attend the FPQ march. This plays into the increasingly prominent narrative within the national-populist right, that Québécois were never colonizers but were the historic allies of Indigenous people, who are now called upon to stand with Quebec against the “invasion” of “illegal immigrants” and a corrupt (English) Canadian federal government.

The problem with the story of this attack, of course, is that it is not true. Not even a little bit. As became clear quickly enough.

Thanks to work by comrades at LetroupeauQC, it quickly became clear that the people shown in the photos were in fact victims of violence … just not in Montreal, not in 2018, and not from antifascists.

Mathieu Grégoire was the victim of a homophobic assault in Beauce in 2016:

Stephanie Littlewood was the victim of a brutal assault from her ex-partner in Leeds, England, 2016:

Nagieb Khaja is a journalist who was beaten by border guards at the Turkey/Syria border in 2015:

Yet again, the far right has been caught peddling lies. What makes this case special is how brazen the lie was and how quickly it was debunked by people on our side. Indeed, within 24 hours, members of La Meute were being warned not to share the story, that doing so would simply discredit their side:

While it is good to see that even our opponents have now conceded that this story is untrue, it would be a mistake for us to simply move on without highlighting some important dynamics in play.

First, we must note that two people were accused publicly on social media of being behind a violent assault. Eve Torres is a candidate for Québec Solidaire in the Outremont-Mont Royal riding, who has garnered media attention due to the fact that she wears a hijab. Jaggi Singh is a Montreal-based anarchist and antifascist who both the far right and “mainstream” political and media figures have tried to paint as the “leader of the antifas”. Both Torres and Singh spent the day at the anti-La Meute demonstration and so couldn’t have been involved in any assault some place else, even if it had occurred, but this didn’t stop members of the far right from accusing them. This was both slander, and incitement to violence – more than one person commented on social media how there would be reprisals for this non-attack. It is no coincidence that these two were singled out in this way: hijab-wearing and racialized activists in Quebec are prime targets of the far right here, and always end up topping their “enemies” list. A situation which the mainstream media and political figures are complicit in creating and maintaining, due to its own racism, sexism, and Islamophobia.

Second, this serves as a reminder that the far right is built on lies and misconceptions about the world. Not a surprise, something we all know. Nonetheless, we assume that most of our opponents are at least sincere – i.e. they may be repeating lies, but we assume they believe them. Yet it is important to keep in mind that there are operators who understand the situation, who realize how credulous their fellow far-rightists are, and who take advantage by consciously fabricating lies in order to advance their agenda. (We saw this in December in the case of “fake news” targeting mosques in Cote-des-Neiges, and more recently when a far-right troll tried to fabricate evidence of sexual assault by a medic at the G7 protests.) Whether these people are police operatives attempting to manipulate the overall political situation, pathological individuals seeking attention, or unscrupulous political agents who don’t mind lying to their own side is often difficult to tell.

Dirty politics of this sort are referred to by police and military as “psychological operations.” Progressive movements need to understand that we are now operating in a situation where such psychological operations are increasingly common, and we need to take precautions to reduce their impact. This is not a problem that will go away, and we are horribly mistaken (and naive) if we believe that all cases will be this easy to spot. We have to be careful.

A Criminal’s Guide to Bill C-75: Understanding the Liberals’ Crime Bill (Part 2 of 2)

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Jun 272018

From North Shore Counter-Info

Submitted anonymously to North Shore Counter-Info

This is the second part of a two part series. Start at the beginning here.

In part 1 of this series, we saw briefly what the Liberals’ crime bill C-75 intends to accomplish and looked at one of the big tasks it set for itself: creating a legislative response to some recent Supreme Court decisions. Although those are perhaps the most important aspects of the bill, the remaining sections will also have major impacts on the lives of those who have to deal with the legal system. So here, we’ll look at how Bill C-75 gives more power to prosecutors to decide how to go after people, how it changes the treatment of youth, and finally how it is reacting to social movements, namely those around the death of Colton Boushie and #MeToo.

Probably the most controversial aspect of the bill is the discretion it proposes to give the crown about how to prosectute cases. Bill C-75 will turn a large number of indictable offenses into hybrid offenses, giving more power to prosecutors to decide how to pursue cases.

Crimes in Canada fall into two categories: Indictable offenses are the more serious and summary offenses are the less serious. Certain crimes are considered hybrid offenses and leave the crown attorney the discretion to decide whether to pursue it as indictable or summary depending on the context, and even to change their mind to secure plea deals.

Under this bill, most indictable offenses that carry a maximum penalty of under 10 years will become hybrid offenses, meaning the crown could choose to pursue them summarily. However, it also increases the maximum sentence for a summary offense from six months to two years (the maximum stay in a provincial jail). This has the strange effect of meaning serious crimes could be turned into less serious ones, but that less serious crimes can now be punished more seriously.

Similar to what we saw in the part 1 about trying to take breaches of conditions out of the courts, this seems to be a measure designed to free the crown’s hand to secure plea deals by offering to change the offense to summary. The courts are basically guilty plea machines and this hopes to put even more pressure on people to plead out.

Typically, people fight harder against indictable offenses: the consequences of having one on your record are way worse, regardless of what the charge is. Poor people with indictable charges are more likely to get Legal Aid and be given more assistance to deal with what are considered to be more complex cases. However, this measure also means that maximum penalties for minor crimes can increase fourfold. By having the option to seek an 18 month sentence through a summary charge rather than needing to use a more serious indictable one, the crown can reduce the resources available to defendants and also make it more likely that they won’t fight, even though the sentence and the facts are the same. For all the Conservatives’ claim this measure is about dealing with delays by being soft on crime, to me it looks more like a way to railroad more defendants into convictions more quickly.

As well, being able to proceed summarily makes it more likely that prosecutors and police will use certain unusual charges to target social movements. One current example, and one that the Conservative party keeps bringing up, is Unlawful Assembly while Masked (UAWM), a charge invented in 2014 that has recently been laid for the first time, targeting anarchists in Hamilton and other cities. Until now, police and crowns have chosen to use more conventional charges against masked demonstrators, ones related to specific actions they carry out, because the constitutionality of UAWM is far from certain, criminalizing as it does participating in a demonstration without yourself committing any other crime.

It seems likely that UAVM violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms by making it illegal to simply be present at a demonstration. Since it is a serious indictable charge that carries a possible ten year sentence, it is very likely that those charged under it would fight it and it is very likely that the crown and police would have a hard time overcoming Charter objections. But if they can lower the sentence and make the charge less serious by pursuing it summarily, then the risk of Charter challenges becomes much less and therefore the law is more likely to be used. Since UAVM essentially makes mass arrests legal in a way they have usually not been in Canada, making this law easier to apply is actually hugely dangerous.

The Liberal government draws its legitimacy from being seen as responsible to progressive social movements; this allows them to de-activate those movements, keeping them in the realm of protest rather than having them become forces that can actually impose their will on the state. One of the biggest surges of popular anger in the last year followed the not-guilty verdict handed down to the man who killed indigenous youth Colton Boushie.

Although racism pervades every aspect of the justice system, anger here latched on to the fact that the killer was a white man and was tried by an all-white jury. This is not a new problem: for instance the Iacobucci commission was launched in 2011 to investigate the absence of native people on juries in Ontario. But the Liberals didn’t take an honest look at how the Indian Act excluded indigenous people from basic things like voting until two generations ago, or how residency on reserves often means you aren’t on jury lists, or how much of a financial burden it is to end up on a jury. No, the Liberals chose the bluntest instrument. The defense lawyer in the Colton Boushie case used a tool called peremptory challenges to exclude all jurors who looked native, people were mad about that, so they’re just getting rid of peremptory challenges.

The problem is this tool has many other uses, as it is basically just a way to exclude a potential juror without relying on one of the established reasons for doing so. It could, for example, be used to exclude a white supremacist from a jury, or someone like me who would never find anyone guilty. It might mean that lawyers will have a harder time excluding specific jurors on the basis of race (on the grounds that they’d be “sympathetic” one way or the other), but it does nothing to reflect the structural inequalities in Canadian society that become visible on juries. But if the goal is just to throw a bone to anti-racist protestors to stop the growth of a movement against the courts, then maybe it will be enough.

Many measures in Bill C-75 make things tougher for people accused of sexual assault and domestic violence. This is specifically a response to the #MeToo campaign but is more generally aimed at feminist movements to end sexual violence. Notable measures include: increased penalties upon conviction; and reverse onus bail hearings for repeat offenders (meaning the defendant has to argue why they should be released instead of the crown having to argue why they shouldn’t). These measures go against the direction of other aspects of C-75 (easing bail, giving options to reduce sentences) and clearly are meant to show that the state considers there has been too much leniency for these crimes relative to others. It’s “tough on crime” politics for leftists who don’t mind prison.

As well, the need to protect survivors was often invoked as another reason to do away with preliminary inquiries (as we discussed in part 1), since having to testify twice is very retraumatizing. Like with jury selection above, the abysmal failure of the legal system to take sexual and intimate partner violence seriously for so many decades meant that frequently movements against patriarchy could not encourage survivors to use these system (like how their racism meant indigenous people and people of colour often feel the need to stay away). This is a theat to the courts’ legitimacy, and so the government moves to address the issue as narrowly as possible.

It should come as no surprise that politicians, as people who love power, would choose to listen to those feminists who believe that prisons and courts will somehow help get rid of patriarchy. To individualize these problems and believe that putting this or that asshole away for longer will in any way address the issue of violence against women is a tragic over-simplification. The courts become no more legitimate or feminist as a result of this bill. As well, to use the way courts retraumatize survivors in order to take away rights from all defendants is really sneaky and should be opposed.

With all the talk about children separated from their parents and jailed in the US, it’s worth mentioning the ways the Liberals intend to change how young people are locked up here in Canada. A big chunk of Bill C-75 deals with changes to the youth criminal justice act. On an average day in Canada, about 900 youth are in jail in Canada, with between 6000 and 7000 more in some sort of program that falls short of prison. About half of these youth are indigenous. Kids who are locked up or placed in a facility under restrictive conditions are way more likely to continue going to jail as adults than are other youth, so how the court system treats its youngest victims has a huge impact on the future of both those individuals and their communities.

The main thrust of the Bill C-75 reform is to reduce the number of youths in prison by increasing the number in restrictive programs that are technically not prison. Moreso even than adults, youth spend a lot of time in the justice system for breaches of court ordered conditions and like with adults Bill C-75 will seek to reduce this by lessening the number of conditions and dealing with them outside of court.

Although I’m extremely skeptical of the current that seeks to extend the control and violence of prison out into the rest of society by way of conditions, supervised release, social worker supervised facilities (like halfway houses), and the like, these are still way better than being in jail. However, these reforms will only apply if youth are sentenced as youth, but Bill C-75 also makes it easier for courts to sentence them as adults. At the moment, before a crown can seek to sentence a youth as an adult, they need permission from the attorney general, which offers some oversight and makes it harder to do. In the future, the local crown’s office can make the decision, meaning more youth will not have access to the protections that the Youth Criminal Justice Act and the changes in Bill C-75 provide.

This text has been very long, but I’m glad you stuck with it. Bill C-75, like the Conservative Crime Omnibus bill before it, is deliberately long and convoluted as a way of keeping us from understanding what’s happening. It’s hard to get an overall picture of what a bill like this is doing, and so most commentary has focused on particular aspects. But having opinions about whether eliminating prelims or trying kids as adults or making certain offenses hybrid misses the point – the overall vision contained in a bill like this one. It’s a progressive bill, but in a limited sense: it addresses specific areas of the criminal code and related legislations that have been identified as problems and addresses them narrowly. The concern for efficiency in the system masks overrides big questions like people being pressured into pleading guilty and certain important measures, like bail reform, are unlikely to be implemented in practice, as they remain within the arbitrary purview of JPs and judges who can really do whatever they want.

There is still a lot more stuff in this bill (we didn’t even get into all the weird laws they’re deleting: anal sex and “inducing miscarriage” will no longer technically be crimes), but I hope this summary gives a good sense of what C-75 is trying to do and that it can be the beginning of a conversation. This is one of the biggest changes to the justice system in recent decades, and although Canadian politics aren’t as dramatic as the permanent spectacle south of the border, it’s worth taking a little time to build up an analysis of this, as we will have to deal with these changes in every moment of struggle in years to come.

A Criminal’s Guide to Bill C-75: Understanding the Liberals’ Crime Bill (Part 1 of 2)

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Jun 272018

From North Shore Counter-Info

Submitted anonymously to North Shore Counter-Info.

This is the first in a two-part series. The second part is available here.

It’s the Colton Boushie bill and the #MeToo bill. It’s the bill that wants to speed trials up and change how people are impacted by bail while waiting. It’s a bill that frees the state’s hand to treat minor crimes more seriously or to use serious crimes more lightly. It’s a bill that talks about having fewer youth in the system but makes it easier to charge them as adults. It’s the bill that lets cops avoid cross-examination, sends you to court by video, and formally decriminalizes anal sex. It’s a 300 page omnibus bill from the party that spent years promising to never use omnibus bills.

Bill C-75 is currently in committee federally and it aims to make major changes to the justice system across Canada. For a bill of such sweeping scope though, it hasn’t been much discussed outside of political and legal spheres. However, the legal system, and the cops and prisons that come with it, are the backdrop of so many choices we make every day, structuring what we think possible in both big ways and small. It affects all of us. And if you’re like me and you sometimes find yourself getting dragged through the courts and maybe ending up in jail, there’s tons of stuff in here that is immediately and materially relevant to you.

This bill is too vast to properly discuss in a text short enough for people to actually read. I hope this text will be a starting point for more critical conversation about this bill, getting beyond the cherry-picked provisions held up by the Liberals to appeal to certain groups. The cynical garbage from the government (“It has more protections for victims of domestic violence! It’s a feminist bill!”) shouldn’t be where our analysis stops. And full disclosure, I’m an anarchist and don’t consider the justice system legitimate, no matter what laws they pass, and I think a judge is a disgraceful thing to be. But I also think a broad critique like that doesn’t exempt us from actually understanding changes like those in Bill C-75, forming an opinion on them, and preparing ourselves to resist them or to endure them.

Broadly, there are three categories of Bill C-75’s measures that I want to discuss. I’ll get into more detail on each below, trying to highlight distinct ideas with bold type so you can just skip to parts you care about if you want. I’m dividing the categories by what motivates these measures rather than by their content, since it’s interesting what government thinks its job is:

Respond to supreme court rulings that restrict how long cases can take to get to trial and that seek to reform the bail system to reduce pretrial detention and the use of harsh bail conditions; these rulings are considered progressive by those who follow such things, but how specifically the House of Commons is taking them up raises big questions.
Respond to social movements, notably those around the trial for Colton Boushie’s murder and those calling for an end to sexual violence; these parts of the bill are particularly shallow and pandering, limited to jury selection for the former and harsher treatment of the accused for the latter.
Give the prosecution more flexibility in determining the seriousness of crimes, which gives them more power to secure deals, makes certain laws easier to apply, and allows them to punish minor crimes more severely.

First of all, Bill c-75 is responding to a couple of Supreme Court rulings, most importantly ones known as Jordan and Antic. The House of Commons has a responsibility to ensure that the criminal code and related legislation (Bill C-75 changes a whopping 12 acts) fit with rulings by Canada’s courts. However, the political nature of their response is important, since the Liberals try to present themselves as at once humane reformers and also close to the mainstream consensus on crime (that people accused of crimes deserve anything that happens to them).

The Jordan ruling deals with how long it takes for trials to happen. The Supreme Court ruled inadequate the existing provisions for deciding when delays in getting to trial had violated a defendant’s rights. The judges imposed a solid deadline where none existed before: 18 months for cases being tried in provincial court and 30 months if it went to superior court with a preliminary inquiry.

This led to a bunch of cases being thrown out across the country because of delays. Typically, it’s in the crown’s favour to drag things out as much as possible: because of how many people wait for trial in prison and because of the restrictive bails that are the default in most of Canada (more on that later), the process is the punishment. More time waiting for trial means more people plead guilty.

Addressing the challenge of Jordan appears to be the main goal of C-75, and much of the bill tries to eliminate steps and speed things up to meet the deadlines. I’m not going to list every way, but here are a few important ones and briefly why I care.

Bill C-75 will get rid of preliminary inquiries. Prelims are trials-before-the-trial, where the crown has to actually argue their case and deal with push-back for the first time. It’s also where the defense can feel out what arguments the crown will make in order to prepare for trial or decide if it’s worthwhile. Prelims make up about 3% of all trials.

Those opposed to prelims say that since 1991 the crown has been required to disclose their case before trial anyway; those in favour say the prelim allows courts to focus on the issues and leads to speedier trials. Brilliant time savings or false economy? Depends who you ask.

Land defenders and all who resist take note: the charges against the person accused in the Junex anti-fracking occupation in Quebec were dropped following a prelim because the inflated, political charges didn’t hold up. This saved the accused land defender another year and a half of uncertainty and life under shitty bail conditions. In the G20 Main Conspiracy case, the pressure the prelim put on the crown and the police made it possible for the defendants to strike a deal they could live with rather than spend additional years awaiting trial.

Bill C-75 seeks to save time by allowing police to avoid cross-examination by giving their evidence in writing instead of appearing in court. This means it will no longer be assumed that the defense will question police on their evidence, so if a cop is saying some shit about you, your lawyer doesn’t automatically have the chance to challenge what was said. You’re going to have to ask the judge to order the cop to appear and the whole thing will get put over to a different day, probably weeks away. If you’re in custody, showing up to court means missing meals, multiple violating “searches”, and spending the day in leg shackles, in addition to how each delay keeps you in prison longer; and since the court always believes cops anyway, it’s that much easier to just say why bother.

Though it’s not yet clear exactly how, Bill C-75 will expand the use of video court for people in jail, possibly by making it mandatory in some situation. When I’m in for pretrial, I always try to go to my court dates in person, even though it’s a horrible experience. Being able to actually provide direction to your lawyer or intervene directly if you have to is a key piece of not getting railroaded by the system, even though the experience of attending court as a prisoner is so awful.

Lots of other pieces of this bill are also being sold as helping to deal with Jordan and delays, but these are three measures geared entirely towards that and they will make a big difference to those going through the system.

The second supreme court case, Antic, deals with a problem that is obvious to anyone who has seen themselves or anyone close to them charged with a crime: the way the bail system works. The second you are charged with an offense in Canada, you risk immediately going to jail for months or years, and if you are lucky enough to get out while waiting for trial, it will be with very strict conditions that are often hard to follow, and that trap people in the system.

At any given time, about 60% of everyone locked up in Canada is waiting for trial (the figure in provincial jails is much higher). There is a lot worth saying about this and how it happens: like how bail is decided by Justices of the Peace (JP) [Ed. note: in Quebec, this role is played by a regular judge] who have no accountability and don’t need to know the laws in question; how appealing a bail decision costs thousands of dollars and takes months; how most harm caused by incarceration happens in the first few days, as you lose your job and housing and experience trauma in prison. But I’ll swallow how angry bail court makes me and focus on the bill.

Bill C-75 aims at encoding in the criminal code some of the principles from Antic that would in theory restrain the ability of JPs to fill all the jail cells that they do. These are the ladder principle and the principle of restraint. To quote Bill Blair, a sadistic former police chief turned politician: “The principle of restraint’s starting point is that accused persons will be released at the earliest reasonable opportunity on the least onerous conditions appropriate in the circumstances.” If anything, it’s shocking that wasn’t already the case. The ladder principle provides a tool for meeting the principle of restraint: If the crown is asking for a more restrictive condition (for instance, house arrest), they must demonstrate why less restrictive conditions (a curfew or ‘reside at’ condition) wouldn’t meet the purpose of bail, namely ensuring that the accused shows up for trial and guaranteeing public safety.

A further element is to instruct JPs and judges overseeing bails to consider whether the defendant is from a marginalized group and specifically extends Gladue hearings for indigenous people to the bail stage. This is in recognition of the fact that indigenous people are 4% of the total population but make up a quarter of people in jail, and that other groups are similarly disproportionately locked up.

The most common reason for people being denied bail is that they don’t have a surety [Ed. note: the requirement of a surety is less common in Quebec]. Sureties are like co-signers for a loan but who agree to supervise you and who pledge a significant portion of their savings to the court should you breach your conditions. Generations of oppression manifest themselves today (among other ways) as indigenous and black people being significantly poorer than other groups, especially white people. Add in how the long-term criminalization of those communities means more people have records, routinely insisting on suretiesfor almost everyone is one big way that the over-incarceration of these groups happen.

Something like 1/5th at least of all court cases are dealing with breaches of conditions. C-75, in the interest of clearing cases out of the court, invents a judicial review process as an alternative to criminal charges should a person be caught breaching a court-ordered condition. Breaches are a whole separate criminal charge that stay even if you’re found innocent of the original charge, and since JPs can assign whatever they want as a conditions, breaching is very common. This traps people in cycles of re-offense and nominally Bill C-75 wants to make that a bit less common by reducing criminal convictions for them.

Generally, anything that results in fewer people in jail is a good thing in my eyes. Not because I don’t think we need ways of dealing with unacceptable behaviour, but because locking people up solves nothing. That said, with these reforms the power stays in the hands of JPs who, in Ontario, have so far mostly ignored the Antic ruling and continue to hand out among the harshest bails in the country. Anyone who has ever watched one of those robe-wearing assholes pass judgement on someone they love without even pausing to reflect can’t have much faith that new rules will make much difference. Further, cops love bail conditions, they love having that additional power over people beyond what the law usually provides: sure, they may use their new found discretion not to charge in some cases, but the power is still theirs.

So far we’ve seen the broad strokes of what bill C-75 intends to accomplish and dug in more detail into how it will deal with two major legislative challenges, addressing the Supreme Court rulings in Jordan and Antic. In both these situations, the state is less concerned with limiting harm done to people charged with crimes than with keeping things moving as quickly as possible and protecting the legitimacy of the system. In part 2, we’ll look at how the Liberals are moving to appear responsive to the demands of feminist and anti-racist social movements without meaningfully changing anything at all and how what some call being “soft on crime” may actually lead to more people being convicted and given longer sentences.

Continue to Part 2

Report-back on the Demo Against the “March for Life”

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May 282018

Anonymous Submission to MTL Counter-info

Each May, thousands of people meet in Ottawa for the “March for Life,” an initiative of organisations opposed to free choice and free information concerning the voluntary termination of pregnancy. This year, it was on May 10th that the anti-choice demonstrators took the streets of the capital city to demonstrate against the rights of women (and every person with a uterus) to control their own body, to have the right to an abortion. The Riposte Feministe organised a Montreal contingent to join the counter demonstration with feminist groups from Outaouais and Ottawa. We were about 50 people leaving from Berri-UQAM station that morning, caffeinated with indignation.

The demo departed from Confederation Park, downtown, where there were already activists distributing pamphlets to passers by. For about an hour, women and those of diverse sexual and gender identities spoke about the common themes of defense of bodily autonomy in all its expressions, colonial and imperial state institutions who silence the voices of gender oppressed people, and the right to safe, accessible, and legal abortions.

At 1:30pm, we left the park, strong and in solidarity, to block the departure of the “Pro-Life” demonstration, a hypocritical name that distracts from the real meanings of this conservative position: the desire to control women and their bodies, the discrimination against LGBTQIA+ people, and racism. Despite our smaller numbers, we formed a solid and vocal opposition that effectively prevented the anti-choice demonstration from advancing. After almost an hour of resistance, the antifeminist camp gave up and moved back. This was the most significant symbolic moment of the day.

The counter-demonstration split in two to attempt to again block the demonstration, who had continued their march on another parallel street. We took another smaller perpendicular street to reach them. The police passed us in order to create an impenetrable wall out of their bicycles to prevent us from crossing the intersection. This enclosure was a police repression tactic: one consisting of making a revolutionary radical subject exist; us, a dangerous and violent counter gang. The cops weren’t looking to destroy us, but rather to produce us as a political subject. As the Invisible Committee explained it in To Our Friends: “When repression strikes us, let’s begin by not taking ourselves for ourselves. Let’s dissolve the fantastical terrorist subject which the counterinsurgency theorists take such pains to impersonate, a subject the representation of which serves mainly to produce the “population” as a foil—the population as an apathetic and apolitical heap, an immature mass just good enough for being governed, for having its hunger pangs and consumer dreams satisfied.”

Our non-violent intentions were clear from the beginning of the counter-demo. We expressed our anger peacefully. The police repression that we experienced was therefore unjustifiable through excuses of safety. It is evident that the force they used served to legitimize the “Pro-Life” position. It was an undeniable demonstration of support for anti-feminist arguments, camouflaged under a supposed responsibility to protect the uncontestable freedom of expression in a neoliberal society.

The repression also served to reduce our positions to unfounded and violent postures. The cops succeeded in inverting the backlash, transferring the violence of the anti-choice position onto us, who were only affirming our rights to our own bodies. This allowed them to open the path for a openly violent masculinist and anti-feminist demonstration to turn toward our immobilized and thus vulnerable contingent.

The “peace line,” formed by cops, reinforced the old dualist paradigm, creating an opposition: on one side, the good citizens defending the right to life, and on the other, the gang of violent insurgents. But we must not forget that the real violence is found on the protected side. This demonstration reflects the rise of the far right and of fascism in North America. We could read slogans such as “All Lives Matter”, “Make Canada Great Again,” and “Not Your Body Not Your Choice”. The majority of these posters were held by cisgender white men. What’s more, there were many high school students, mostly coming from catholic schools, who came with their pro-life signs made in class, which reflects state and systemic indoctrination imposed from a very young age.

Let’s continue to denounce neo-nazi and fascist movements so we don’t normalize violence like this. Let’s be in solidarity with Indigenous peoples, racialized people, women, and people of diverse genders and sexualities! Despite the emotional, psychological, and physical difficulties, this counter demo brought forward activist voices past and present and served to remind us that we still need to fight. Thanks to the Montreal Riposte Feministe for reminding us of the living force of our community.

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