Hundreds of anti-fascists and anti-racists blocked a planned march by islamophobic and anti-migrant far right group La Meute. People clashed with police, beat up a nazi, and kept the racist marchers trapped in a mutli level parking lot for hours. Once the protesters left, the group exited and marched.
For those that don’t understand French, Mayor Labeaume talked about a “Singh gang”, referred to antifa protesters repeatedly as “cretins”, stated that the protesters that destroy property are “always from Montreal”, and told the protesters to “go somewhere else than Quebec City” and that “Quebec City is not for you”. Lots more too. ...
Inspired by the popular removal of racist monuments across North America in the wake of Charlottesville, and in solidarity with the anti-racists confronting the white supremicist group La Meute in Quebec City today, community members removed and destroyed a Heritage Canada plaque celebrating colonial genocide early this morning in Montreal. They replaced it with a notice commemorating the people killed on the site and honouring resistance to colonialism and to white supremacy. There are many similar monuments in Montreal, just waiting to be taken down … ...
The transphobic, far-right, anti-Muslim Students in Support of Free Speech (SSFS) group from Toronto had a disastrous evening today in Montreal. Their planned recruitment event, a Montreal Pub Night, never happened. Instead, the Toronto SSFS President, Mari Jang, and the wannabe Montreal President, Oliver Marshall, spent several hours in a downtown police station filing a police report regarding their cancelled event. There were no arrests or injuries. Just hours before their scheduled pub night, SSFS had to move their event away from Grumpy’s Bar because the staff and management at Grumpy’s, a Concordia lefty hangout, clearly indicated to SSFS that they were not welcome (instead, Grumpy’s organized their annual fundraiser in support of community group Head and Hands Sex Ed For Youth Project, which is queer and trans inclusive). ...
The media has begun commenting on a short racist youtube video, shot at Parc Safari (a zoo 45 minutes outside of Montreal) on July 2nd [i] . The video, seemingly shot by a woman who just happened to be innocently visiting the zoo that day, is in fact not easy to make out – one sees a crowd of people milling around of the grass, a woman in a headscarf walking by, and one hears something difficult to make out coming through a sound system. Nothing in fact out of the ordinary to anyone who spends any amount of time out in public in most big cities in North America. ...
According to Groupe de recherché sur l’extrême droite et ses allié-e-s (GREDA) , there are currently about 60 active Quebecois far right groups, and if you count those which are connected with the rest of Canada, there are about 100. However, once one starts looking at the activities of the groups, there is a lot of collaboration and cross-membership. Provided below is a list of the larger organizations operating in Quebec. ...
UPDATE : the MRQ conference has been displaced to the Centre équestre l’Intégrité, located at 3987 chemin Sainte-Angélique, in Saint-Lazare. You can call directly the owner, Sophie Robichaud, at 450-510-5354 or 514-992-2141 Saturday June 17, several right-wing and far-right nationalist groups and individuals were supposed to meet at the College de Maisonneuve, for a day-long conference organized by the Mouvement républicain du Québec, in collaboration with La Meute. Following media reports and the announcement that the Mouvement étudiant révolutionnaire would be organizing a demonstration to “block the far right”, the college canceled its contract with Editions Dédicaces (publishing house of Guy Boulianne, leader of the MRQ). ...
Today the far right in Montreal was able to take the streets, with the supposed aim to protest against the Liberal government. They left out their affiliations out of their call-out, and successfully attracted a sizeable crowd, who were none the wiser about the politics of the organizers. #monteeal riot Police form a perimeter around #fascist demo preventing #Antifa from confronting them pic.twitter.com/dvi4ymxznM — submedia (@submedia) April 23, 2017 ...
Red and Anarchist Skinheads (RASH) and Montreal Sisterhood, made a graffiti in solidarity with a comrade in Marseille, France, who was stabbed by two fascists in late March.
On March 25, 2017, approximately 200 people responded to a call to confront far-right groups planning to disrupt a day of anti-racist/anti-fascist workshops in Montreal. The call was made after a Facebook event calling to shut down the “terrorist workshop” surfaced. The event was made by the Canadian Coalition of Concerned Citizens (CCCC), the same group that called for the anti-immigrant March 4th demonstrations which occurred all across Canada. On that day, fascist group La Meute was able to take the streets of Montreal for the first time. ...
On March 4th a series of Islamophobic demonstrations had been called across Canada, by a (probably one-person) group known as the Canadian Coalition of Concerned Citizens. Ostensibly the rallies were against Bill M-103, a parliamentary private member’s motion condemning Islamophobia (in the wake of the massacre at a mosque in Quebec City earlier this year), which the CCCC framed as an attack on free speech[1. M-103 is an unremarkable standard politician’s denunciation of racism. It is a non-binding motion calling for the problem of racism and Islamophobia to be recognized and uprooted, for studies to be done and statistics collected, and for solutions to be found, but does not actually suggest anything concrete beyond this.]. So the March 4th rallies were officially “for free speech, against sharia law and against globalization,” and internal guidelines specifically told people not to bring white power or openly racist signs (which of course didn’t stop them from shouting “race traitor” at us as they arrived, or giving nazi salutes). ...
Unexpectedly and for the first time in many years, far-right groups were able to march in Montreal. We didn’t think fascist groups could mobilize as they did, after the crushing defeats of the Pegida demos in 2015 where 4 or 5 lost aunts and uncles were countered by 500 protestors. The day started around 11am with a gathering of far-right groups at Place Émilie-Gamelin. Defending freedom of expression was their pretext for spewing their hatred of Muslims. The rally consisted of about 150 people, with numerous flags of “La Meute” [“The Pack”, as in “wolfpack”] as well as some Quebec flags. A small group of Maoists tried to block them from the start, but the cops quickly stepped in to push them away and clear the street for the fascists. ...