Demos

Anarchists clashed with cops during the march against police brutality. This was the 22nd installment of the march — and along with MayDay, it’s consistently one of the most militant demonstrations that takes place in the Canadian city each year. People attacked the cops with flag poles and fire extinguishers filled with paint. Corporate stores and banks had their windows smashed, but the police managed to protect the studios of TVA – a right-wing TV network that published a fake news story that stoked anti-Muslim sentiments in Quebec City. The police violently charged at the crowd, seriously injuring one person and arresting three. Three cops were also injured.

The C.O.B.P. has been inviting all citizens to participate in demonstrations aiming to express anger towards the fact that the Quebec Police corps feeds off of repression, profiling and brutality. Each year, we issue several claims pertaining to the police’s intervention methods, their abuse and the impunity that is of second nature to their profession. This year is no exception : the Collectif Opposé à la Brutalité Policière invites you to take to the streets on March 15, 2018, in order to express by all means necessary our refusal to bow down to the colonial and capitalist authority that is the police. It is of utmost importance to highlight the fact that this demonstration will take place on unceded indigenous territory which the Quebec political class continues to think is an area that it governs. ...

Gathering at Place Émilie-Gamelin, tonight (February 1) at 19h With every bullet, we are reminded that the police are murderers. Yesterday, they once again opened fire on someone – an 18 year old who remain anonymous – who was acting with hostility at the courthouse in Maniwaki. Last summer Pierre Coriolan was gunned down by the police while he was having a mental health crisis. In the winter of 2016, Bony Jean-Pierre was murdered by police. As long as this deadly order is imposed on us, we will not forget, and we will not forgive. ...

On New Year’s Eve, for the sixth year in a row, a noise demonstration was held in front of the Laval prisons. Despite the freezing cold, this year was marked by the greatest participation since the beginning of this tradition. More than a hundred people walked chanting “Everybody hates the police!” and “For a world without prisons or detention centers!”, the whole thing accompanied by percussion, banners, whistles and fireworks in large quantities. ...

Join us this New Year’s Eve to send loud messages of solidarity to those spending the holidays behind bars, as we celebrate ongoing prisoner resistance, and renew our commitment to fighting for a world without prisons!

The joint La Meute/Storm Alliance demonstration of November 25, 2017 promised to be the largest far-right mobilization in Québec since the 1930s. The organizers anticipated a thousand people turning out to denounce the Commission publique contre le racisme systémique, which, ironically, the Liberal government cancelled on October 18. [1] At the end of the day, even the two groups and their allies from the nationalist groupuscules, the Three Percenters, the Northern Guard, and the boneheads from the Soldiers of Odin and Atalante only collectively reached half that number (300 to 400 max). Nonetheless, this mobilization could still mark a qualitative and symbolic watershed for the fascist drift in the province—a drift that police forces are more openly supporting, and in which many “mainstream” political actors are complicit. ...

Anti-racists in Montreal have built a coalition of over 150 groups in the struggle against fascism, and on Sunday they staged their first demonstration—a massive, festive “fuck you” to nazis. The night before the demo, some people redecorated a statue of John A. MacDonald, Canada’s first Prime Minister and an architect of indigenous genocide. For more info go to Montreal Antifasciste’s website.

For several years we’ve seen the rise of racist hate speech in Quebec. The Parti Québecois’ “Charter of Values” in 2013, the election of Donald Trump in the USA, and the rise of populist, xenophobic political parties in Europe have galvanized the development of the far-right here. These forces have made a splash with their racist polemics. Far from cooling down this process, the Quebec City mosque massacre seems to have propelled this hateful discourse, normalizing it in the public imagination. These small racist and xenophobic groups have since organized multiple demonstrations, mobilized against a Muslim cemetery in Saint-Apollinaire, spread xenophobic messages against Haitian asylum seekers, and generally succeeded in normalizing public fear and intolerance, while at the same time legitimizing their hate-based organizations. Politicians and sensationalistic columnists are not innocent in perpetuating this toxic atmosphere. These opportunistic pyromaniacs are fanning the flames of intolerance, while at the same time ignoring the growing violence of the far-right in Quebec. ...

Legal defense funds are urgently needed for Freddy Stoneypoint, an Anishinaabe man who was arrested Monday night in a police raid of the anti-fracking blockade on Mi’gmaq territory in so-called “Québec”. People had erected barricades and blockaded the site for over a week before a Sûreté Québec (SQ) tactical unit assaulted the camp. Protectors of the land and water are always confronted by the machinery of the police, in service of the oil companies. Solidarity and support for the defenders will be necessary for the struggle to be able to stop the destruction of territories. ...

Despite a sizable turnout on a rainy day, May Day in Montreal left many feeling like the police succeeded in keeping our celebrations tame and orderly. The anti-capitalist demonstration started in two locations: a downtown contingent organized by CLAC (Convergence of Anti-Capitalist Struggles), and an anti-fascist, anti-borders contingent which would join the downtown one from the east. This was organized in part to avoid demonstrating alongside the PCR, authoritarian communists that CLAC persists in organizing with. ...

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 ...

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