Analysis

July 1: Antifascist Victory

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Jul 252018

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.

Wheatpasting the Revolution: An Interview with Zola

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May 242018

From It’s Going Down

Few street artists have captured the sights, feels, and emotions of combative social movements as well as Zola, an anarchist based in so-called Montreal. Bringing to the streets high color posters, stickers, and artwork that reflects anarchist, antifascist, and anti-pipeline battles – among others, their work has become a staple in the area as well as synonymous with the growing anarchist movement in the city. Wanting to know more about Zola, their work, and what drives them, we caught up with them to find out more about the artist behind the posters.

IGD: How did you get interested in street art and graffiti? Was it before you became an anarchist?

I was around anarchist circles way before I started to be active in street art, but I had also already been looking into street art websites and owned a few street art books for a long while. It might be lame to say so today, but Banksy was definitely a big inspiration back then. Like many others, he introduced me to all the possibilities street art could offer in terms of anti-capitalist discourse.

For me, the merging of street art and anarchist activism really took off around the Occupy movement. Back then I was interested in the subversiveness of feminist and femme mediums like textile and yarn-bombing clashing with the mostly very masculine world of graffiti and privatized public spaces. With my collective during those 2011-2013 years, we experimented a lot in form while I solidified my radical discourse.

That’s also the period I realized that anarchists and radical politics people could be very easily suspicious or hateful towards experimentation and art, and navigating between different scenes like this could be socially costly on both sides. That period really created the experience and the activist art network to base off the wheatpaste practice I have now.

IGD: What was your process of radicalization?

I think like most, I radicalized the moment I physically realized the system was there to maintain oppression instead of peace. The student movement here has always had it rough with police repression, and being chased off by someone paid by the state with a fucking shield and stick to beat you up has got to radicalize you pretty fast. This gave me the will to reach for anti-oppressive politics in social movements and make friends with folks with very diverse life backgrounds and experience of racial, environmental and other forms of state violence.

IGD: There’s so much talk of graffiti vs street art, and vice versa. What is your take? Why do you choose to work often with posters and wheatpaste?

Wheatpasting really works for me because I can take the time to prepare something I am aesthetically satisfied with in the safety of my home, and then install it outside in an instant. I never had the opportunity or guts to practice and learn can control or draw freehand.

In terms of scenes or cultures, I guess I have a love/hate relationship with both graffiti and street art. I think there’s a lot of idiots and haters out there, but also a lot of good folks doing the good work in both mediums. Obviously what makes it complicated nowadays is the monetization of those cultures and how capitalism slowly creeps into every artist’s mind.

IGD: What motivates you to present the images and characters that you do?

I started illustrating queer and femme black bloc when I felt both the need to address stereotypes of skinny white men as the street fighter figure and the desire to make more visible the presence of radical politics within the city. My experience of bloc is that there are a lot of fucking badass women involved in this tactic but they are often invisibilised by that one louder dude who gets in front of the photojournalist’s shot. I wanted to show a more real and diverse image of bloc peeps and masked protesters.

It was also the year following the 2012 student strike and I felt Montreal needed to normalize the practice of bloc and showing another face of it might remind everyone we out here, we ain’t going anywhere. Since I started this series now 5 years ago, I’ve just pushed the allegory case study as far as I could, questioning the obsession our radical visual culture has with the masked figure.

IGD: So much of the stuff you have put up is so playful and joyful, this seems counter poised to often the more ‘negative’ aspects of anarchist graffiti and street art, even if some of the images you are choosing are clearly “militant.” Is this a conscious choice to present often joyful subjects?

I might have started doing this series with the idea of speaking to the “greater population,” but I feel like with time I felt more comfortable aiming my work to speak to other folk who engage in the struggle. Stumbling upon positive images of resisting figures around the street corner is a boost in morale for my peeps. I don’t know about joyfulness, I still don’t quite get that Spinoza thing. But using bright colors and a tidy illustration style are a conscious choice to divert from the very strict typical anarchist aesthetics. It is a style I naturally tend towards, having read so much manga in my younger years.

IGD: How does street art and graffiti play into the wider anarchist movement in Montreal? Are there lots of anarchist graffiti writers and/or street artists in Montreal and the surrounding area?

Montreal is blessed with a very big bastion of anarchist activism that has influences in many scenes including street art and graffiti. There aren’t really anarchist-identified street artists per se, except me I guess, but radical politics are present in many street artists’ work and a lot of anarchists will go out to put up event posters, stickers, or spend a summer on a street art project.

The city also has its share of anarchist and radical politics related graffiti poetry, slogans and vandalism. You can’t walk two blocks in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve without encountering a sprayed circle A or a “fuck the patriarchy.”

There is also a pretty big graff crew which is/used to be an Antifa gang who did some activism and street fighting. Nowadays they mostly just write NTFA and I would say most of everyone don’t know that their crew name is short for ANTIFA, haha ?

IGD: We know there’s been backlash and heat to anarchists in Ontario as well as MTL Counter-Info, has the spotlight hit your work at all?

To my knowledge, I only get a few lone troll comments once in a while. We do have a small problem with a few active Alt-Right guys in the streets but nothing that worries me. In terms of coppers, well who knows if they are building a file on me?

IGD: Do you feel like images can convey things that words cannot, in terms of political graffiti and art? Seems like an easy thing more anarchists could be experimenting with.

Yes absolutely! I hate how everything is always red and black with a stencil font and has to be so literal. I feel like people are finally getting somewhere creatively with the meme culture and the spread of rad online pages and imagery but anarchism definitely has so much more potential to develop a nuanced visual discourse and different styles.

IGD: We’ve heard in Montreal there is at times a language barrier between Anglophones and Francophones. How do people overcome this?

This is definitely true. I’m francophone, got into rad politics in the francophone student movement. I knew literally not one Anglophone person for years. I was able to break the language barrier by networking with QPPIRG-Concordia groups and make Anglophone friends. Friendship is absolutely the way to go! The city is not that big.

IGD: In terms of large scale struggles or eruptions, such as the student strike in Montreal, how can political graffiti and art play a role?

I see graffiti and illegal street art as direct action. It is a legitimate part of a social movement in itself, disrupting capitalism and taking back public space.

I would even dare say that art and visual culture played a central role in the 2012 Student Strike. I don’t know of an art medium that wasn’t found in the streets in some way or another during that time. One of the main roles of art in social movements is creating an identity people can refer themselves to. There is nothing like a strong sense of belonging to loyalize someone to a cause. It is also a gateway into activism and a real way to play out accessibility within a diversity of tactics strategy. Some might not be able to go to a protest knowing riot cops will be there, but they can come to the stitch and bitch and talk about that last Bell Hooks book they read, or bring their toddler to a live-printing activity in the park before the demo.

More broadly, I think graffiti and street art reflect the people’s ethos, so a revolutionary time will offer opportunity to develop revolutionary street art practices. Mediums are bound to change though, with the evolution of capitalism and the co-option of rebellious cultures. I don’t know which form it will take in the future. We are already seeing a decline in political murals and wheatpaste in the Western World, but people always find a way to be creative in periods of social unrest.

IGD: How can anarchists make better inroads into the broader graffiti culture, which often is very open to the anarchist movement at times?

Art and activism are most difficult to bridge on the cultural level. They are often not the same people: Artists don’t want to go to meetings and anarchists restrain themselves in creative experimentation (they focus on the press release). I’ve experienced this many times when I was the only street artist attending a meeting to plan an activist-led street art outing, or the only activist trying to organize a meeting to plan a street related project with artists. It might seem silly and superficial but culture really does create barriers.

On one side I want to say that Montreal anarchists are already very active with spraypaint. On another, I feel like the local graff culture that belongs to Hip-hop is not in contact with activism, and that both would benefit from meeting in the middle. There has been initiatives like the call for a memorial mural for young Freddy Villanueva who was murdered by police, or the Montreal Sisterhood who used to bridge punk and hip-hop scenes through feminism but that’s kind of dead right now and we definitely need more tryouts like this. Even myself I’ve tried to get in touch with NTFA but kind of failed ultimately.

On a hopeful note, maybe the efforts to support anti-racism and decolonization in the anarchist circles will help open space to broaden collaboration. I definitely have hope it is possible!

IGD: For anyone that is looking at your work and thinking they could do the same thing, what advice would you give them?

Do it! You are the only one stopping yourself from trying. Things fall into place only a while after you start out. I started with no activist network, no knowledge in graff culture, no ability in drawing. I found a way to make it work with my first strength: staying home on photoshop a lot, and made some good friends along the way.

IGD: Any parting thoughts? How can people view your stuff and support your work?

I hope people find the strength to take it to the streets and log off their social media accounts more and more. Posting critical content online is great, but the revolution will not be on fucking Twitter.

I have a small shop for people who want to get my work for cheap at zolamtl.storenvy.com and encourage everyone to follow campaigns and groups I work with or support such as Unceded Voices, Solidarity Across Borders, and Racines Bookstore.

IGD: Is boxed wheatpaste better than homemade? And if not, what is the BEST homemade wheatpaste recipe out there?

I never bought boxed wheatpaste? There is nothing like the ritual of cooking your dough before an outing, I wouldn’t change it. As for a *best* recipe, when I feel like a rich and famous artist, I add acrylic mat medium to the mix and it does wonders for UV protection.

Anti-construction Crew Releases Thousands of Crickets into Immigration Prison Architecture Headquarters

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May 192018

Lemay’s head office, 3500 rue Saint-Jacques

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

One morning in April 2018, our amateur construction crew released thousands of crickets into the newly built headquarters of the Montreal architecture company Lemay. We pulled a sheet of plywood off the side of the building and funneled the crickets into a recently completed office space. Lemay, along with Quebec-City based company Groupe A, has been awarded a contract to build a new immigration detention centre in Laval, a suburb of Montreal. It is slated to open in 2020. We oppose borders, prisons, and immigration detention centres. We struggle for a world where people are free to stay and free to move; a world without white supremacy, capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy.

We see the release of these crickets as merely the beginning of a concerted effort to stop the new immigration detention centre from being built. Crickets are known to reproduce quickly and are difficult to exterminate. Their constant noise and quick proliferation through any space they have access to makes them much more than a nuisance to have around. The crickets will multiply inside Lemay’s new headquarters in the gentrifying neighbourhood of St. Henri, even after the wall we deconstructed has been replaced. Meanwhile, we will get even more organized in our resistance to this new immigration detention centre and all that it represents.

The new immigration detention centre in Laval has been proposed as part of a Liberal government “overhaul” of the immigration system. The bulk of the overhaul is focused on infrastructural changes: $122 million of the $138 million overhaul project will be spent on building two new immigration detention facilities (in Laval and in Surrey, BC) and upgrading an already existing detention centre in Toronto. The stated reason for this change is that the current detention centres are not up to international standards. The government claims they also want to move away from detention and towards alternatives to detention.

The new facilities are being pitched as “nicer” prisons. They are supposed to be “non-institutional in design,” and have easy access to outdoor spaces and meeting spaces for family and NGO representatives, but still prioritize state security and keeping people locked up inside. The companies who have been awarded the contracts are known for designing LEED certified court houses and prisons as well as libraries and university spaces. So, it’s hard to imagine that this new prison won’t have an “institutional” feel. Much like the overhaul of the federal women’s prison system in Canada in the 90s and the current attempt by the Ontario provincial government to soften their prison system, this “overhaul” of the immigration detention centre aims to put some pretty curtains on a building that people can’t leave and pretend that it’s okay to lock people up.

The new prison in Laval seems like it will have the same or slightly more capacity to imprison people than the current immigration detention centre (current capacity is between 109 and 144 people, while the new centre would supposedly hold 121 people). This is strange in a context where the numbers of immigrants being detained is down in recent years and the government claims to plan to reduce these detentions even further. It wouldn’t surprise us if they’re just talking more bullshit. As someone said, “if you build them, they will fill them.” A reduction in the number of folks detained seems unlikely.

In fact, let’s talk about that a bit more. As part of the overhaul to the immigration system, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale announced the government’s intention to explore “alternatives to incarceration.” In the report that was written about the overhaul, the government said that alternatives to detention included “the ability to report by phone through voice recognition technology to minimize the need to report to the CBSA in person, maximize freedom of movement, facilitate compliance and optimize efficiencies.” Sounds like it’s about making border cops’ jobs easier and saving money.

More commonly known alternatives to immigration detention include electronic bracelets and halfway houses, or a parole-like system run by NGOs willing to act as prison guards. In some ways, these options are better than sitting in a prison. In other ways, these options will act as a carrot, with prison as the stick. In the end, these “alternatives to detention” will reinforce the legitimacy of the detention centre as an option at all (“we gave you a chance to use the phone system and, even though we gave you no option to regularize your status and, in fact, gave you a deportation date instead, you went MIA, so now we have to put you in detention”). Alternatives to detention are more sophisticated forms of controlling migrants that allow the state to seem benevolent, while still deporting and detaining people who don’t submit to the more sophisticated controls.

The strategy of pursuing alternatives to detention would likely lead us further down a road where NGOs collaborate with the government in detaining migrants, in exchange for funding for their staff salaries. In 2017, the government signed a new contract with the Red Cross to monitor conditions in immigration detention centres. However, the Red Cross has technically been monitoring immigration prisons since 1999, this is just the first time they’ve gotten “core funding” for the program from the government. In exchange for $1.14 million over two years, the Red Cross will keep “monitoring” detention centres and telling the government that everything is a-ok; rubber stamping the continued practices of imprisoning migrants. Don’t you just love it when NGOs step in to make government repression look good?

So what do we make of this overhaul in the end? It means more money for more repressive prisons, some money for some slightly less heinous ways of controlling people’s movement, and some money for the Red Cross. In a context where people are walking across the border from the US to flee Trump’s America, a context where most of those people won’t be granted refugee status and they could very well end up in immigration detention, we want to stop this new immigration detention centre from being built. We see this as the perfect time – in fact the only time – to intervene in order to keep this from happening. We mobilize against this new prison, without forgetting that we also want to see the old one closed. We see the prevention of construction on this new prison as just one part of a much larger fight to tear down the others already standing.

In addition to understanding this struggle in the context of a global “migrant crisis,” we understand that this is also happening in a context of a rise of activity in the far right. Storm Alliance, a far right racist anti-immigrant group, has organized a handful of anti-migrant demonstrations at the border, often joined by La Meute, Quebec’s home-grown populist far right group. Influenced by anti-migrant and far-right rhetoric on the internet, Alexandre Bissonnette shot and killed six people in a mosque in Quebec City a year and a half ago. TVA and the Journal de Montreal publish far-right fake news to popularize these sentiments.

With all this in mind, we understand a fight to stop this new detention centre from being built as a fight based in anti-fascism, as part of the fight against white supremacy. We seek to connect our actions to those of other people in our communities, both near and far, who are also fighting white supremacy and the rise of the far right. Even as we fight the liberalism of the current governing party in Canada, we also fight the rise of the far right and their violent visions for the future.

We are inspired, recently, by the campaign to try and stop the deportation of Lucy Granados. We are inspired by the everyday bravery of people living without status and by those who get organized and get together to protect each other and our shared communities. We are inspired by all the people who are standing up against borders, prisons, and other forms of domination. We are inspired to struggle for their freedom to stay and freedom to move, and to call on others to join us.

Lemay is not the only company involved in the design and construction of the prison, and thus not the only possible point of pressure. From the architectural plans of Lemay, to the contributions of Groupe A, to the materials and construction crews, it takes many hands and many parts to build a prison. This is a call for more research, discussion, and action around Lemay’s involvement specifically, but also all the other firms and groups invested in the project. We hope to see other anti-construction crews take action in the future, and we hope that this project can become the target of a sustained campaign, capable of bringing together many people to support an end to prisons and borders.

We hope that the resistance to this prison continues to proliferate, faster and further than thousands of crickets.

Report-back from the 2018 CLAC May Day Demo

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May 092018

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

CLAC organized its annual May Day demonstration on the theme of the G7 this year. The planet’s most powerful will gather June 8th and 9th for a major meeting in the Charlevoix region.

This year, May Day saw the unions agreeing to accommodate the bosses’ calendar by holding a march Saturday April 28th, gathering several thousand people.

On the first of May, three demonstrations were called in Montreal: CLAC’s at Parc Lafontaine, the Revolutionary Communist Party’s in the Golden Square Mile, and the IWW’s in Parc-Extension.

About 200 people gathered towards 6pm at the southwest corner of Parc Lafontaine for the CLAC demo. Lots of police were deployed all around with bike cops as well as numerous buses of riot police. The SPVM had made up its mind to let no one demonstrate on this May Day. The crowd growing gradually, one noticed the presence of about forty individuals putting on black clothing, looking to form a black bloc more consequential than in recent demos in Montreal. The riot cops chose to move in closer to leave the small crowd no room to maneuver.

Just before the departure, some speeches were given on the ravages of capitalism locally and elsewhere. The demo then took the street towards 6:30pm on Sherbrooke, going west. The cops then decided to take the sidewalk on the north side to begin forming a kind of moving kettle around the demo. A small but very determined black bloc did not want to allow them this space prized by the Urban Brigade which gains considerable tactical advantage from it. By taking the sidewalk, the Urban Brigade is able to control the whole of the demo, in that it can decide where to direct the crowd. This greatly limits attacks on symbols of capitalism, such as banks. Taking the sidewalk should be a collective reflex of the demo, because having a demo encircled by the SPVM is a problem for everyone. If removing the cops from the sides remains the work of a small part of the demonstration, it will remain very difficult to hold the street in Montreal in a more combative way.

Protected by banners the black bloc decided to empty a fire extinguisher, throw bricks and rocks, and shoot fireworks at the cops, to force them to make a retreat. While the cops backed up a bit, a number of them choosing to hide behind parked cars in fear, the strategy was not as effective as hoped, as the demo found itself split in two with the arrival of a second Urban Brigade on the other side, which pushed the rear of the demo back east and made one arrest. At this moment the police rapidly regained control of the situation, deploying riot cops on the streets north and south of Sherbrooke. People had no choice but to disperse or return to Parc Lafontaine just five minutes after the start. It wasn’t the clash with the cops that forced the dispersal, but rather the arrival of cops from all sides in large numbers.

The dispersal was also facilitated by the lack of closer links between people in the demo. Being able to keep a much more compact unity could have limited the damage caused by the cops’ intervention. Keeping a slower pace and ensuring that no one is isolated at the front or the back could have possibly allowed the demo to go on for longer. The cops prepare for annual demos like May Day months in advance, and they seek to disperse us as quickly as possible. Finding ways to unite the intentions of every person who shows up is difficult, but it remains the key to continuing to hold the street.

This is a text that calls for others: how did you experience this May Day, and what could be done so that we continue to find each other in the street?

Another Day, Another Broken Door

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Apr 102018

From Northshore Counter-Info

Statement from The Tower, Hamilton’s anarchist social centre

Early Friday morning, Hamilton police raided a home associated with some of those involved with organizing The Hamilton Anarchist Bookfair. The door was kicked in, a flash grenade was thrown into the house, and a full swat team entered. With their assault rifles drawn, the swat team proceeded to pull everyone out of bed some of whom were naked, and with one exception, put everyone in handcuffs. Three people were detained and one person arrested. Cedar, a member of The Tower Collective and our cherished friend, was arrested, taken away, and currently remains in custody.

Those who weren’t arrested were forced to wait outside for close to five hours, while cops “searched” the home. Similar to the fascists who attacked The Tower last month, the police thoroughly trashed the space and even messed with the bookshelves. All three floors of the house were ripped apart and many things were damaged, including a collection of framed feminist postcards that were broken into several pieces and thrown into the bathroom toilet. Police are misogynist pigs, plain and simple, without exception. A long list of items were seized, including all electronics (phones, computers, cameras, external hard-drives etc.), books, posters, zines, and a pretty random assortment of documents (academic journal articles, translated texts from a book project, hand written notes, event programs, pamphlets etc.).

In terms of the arrest, Cedar is facing conspiracy charges in relation to the so-called “Locke St. Riot”. We have no desire to engage with the politics of innocence. The concept of innocence and its flipside criminality obscure more than illuminate – no one is innocent and the most “criminal” amongst us run the economy and government. Beyond that, these notions perpetuate the logic of a colonial legal system rooted in white supremacy. That said, it is worth noting that conspiracy charges are notoriously dubious and flimsy, and have a legacy of being used as a tool of political persecution. They are an act of desperation intended to cast a wide net and scare people. Such charges are *not* a matter of engaging in a particular activity, but rather a matter of possibly encouraging a particular activity.

The Tower is an openly anarchist project that from its inception has promoted ideals of mutual aid and solidarity, equality, and community autonomy, as well as direct action, class war, and fighting back. Our politics have always included *both* gardens and riots. We want to see people building beautiful alternatives of liberation, just as much as we want to see people attacking structures of domination. Nothing about this is going to change, and despite recent challenges, our project will continue to push these ideas. We still have no tears for Locke St. and we remain unapologetically supportive of the activities that took place last month. It’s actions like these that can impel conversations that no one wants to have (in this case, intensifying gentrification throughout the city), and we see this as positive.

As things continue to unfold, it is important for people to remember that it is never okay to cooperate with the police – do not talk to them and do not share any information (however big or small) with them. This isn’t a question of agreeing or disagreeing with particular tactics, but of refusing to take actions that help facilitate state violence and repression. Aside from discussions about Locke St., local media has been dominated by stories of police corruption, misconduct, brutality, and most recently murder. Less than a week ago, the Hamilton police shot and killed Quinn MacDougall, an unarmed nineteen-year-old who had called 911 in distress looking for help. Cops are not and will never be our allies. We gain safety and strength by sticking together and staying silent.

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