Land Defense

The morning of September 27th, the streets of Montreal and Quebec City were taken by storm by a historic human tide. Hundreds of thousands, young and old, hit the street in response to the international call for a Global Climate Strike. This call for a planetary strike arrived in Quebec in the spring, when student associations and teachers’ unions began voting to walk out on September 27. In the summer, cégep administrations, threatened by the prospect of illegal strikes by teachers, decided to make the day of September 27 an “institutional day” and arrange the calendar accordingly. Institutional days, as a mechanism for capturing and absorbing strikes, gradually spread throughout the entire Quebec education system, from elementary schools to universities. If, at first, one could be satisfied that more than 600,000 people would be “freed” by the authorities to participate in the demonstration of September 27, doubts arise with respect to the future of the movement and its autonomy. The strike as a voluntary and collective interruption of daily routine has been diverted by school administrations, which used institutional days to ensure that they would maintain control of the agenda and temporality of the struggle. ...

On September 27th, we were more than 3000 students, retirees, children, and workers marching in the streets of downtown Chicoutimi to denounce government inaction on the environment and the destructive GNL Québec project (Énergie Saguenay). The latter consists of the construction of a natural gas liquifaction complex in Grande-Anse and a 750km-long gas pipeline (gazoduc). In parallel, in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region, 3000 people took part in the demonstration in Alma and hundreds of individuals marched in Saint-Félicien as well as in the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie neighborhood of Alma. In Quebec City, 25,000 people took the streets and in Montreal, a historic mobilization brought together almost half a million people. ...

Alma, September 26th, 2019. Two banners were dropped this morning in downtown Alma near the offices of Economic Development Canada. They read: “Industrial development is killing us! We don’t want a job, we want a life!”. The government body that recently gave out $2 million in funding to the metallurgy sector was symbolically targeted. The action, signed by the living waters committee, takes place in the context of the climate strike movement and aims to denounce industrial and extractive projects in the region. ...

“The struggle against climate change can’t exist in a vacuum. It must also be a fight against the border system that values some lives over others. It must overthrow capitalism which always strives to produce more.” – Call for the anti-racist and anti-capitalist contingent “L’air, la terre et les rivières Ont besoin de révolutionnaires” (“The air, the land, and the rivers need revolutionaries”) – Chant heard in the streets ...

The following text was written by the CLAC, the IWW and Montréal Antifasciste and was distributed at the Montreal climate demonstration on September 27, 2019. It can also be downloaded to print here . 1. GOVERNMENTS WON’T SAVE US Those who benefit from poisoning the land and exploiting people you care about won’t be reformed. They’ll make it seem like they hear your voices and occasionally put on grand spectacles to temporarily appease your anger. They’ll encourage you to channel your anxiety into pointless practices that only reinforce individualism. So while some of us compete to take shorter showers or to reduce our trash output, government officials, universities, and corporations shamelessly invest in more pipelines, host uncritical academic conferences, or fly jets to fancy meetings where empty promises are made. ...

(see video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odLUEQsqJqI ) Do you want to do your part to defend Mother Earth from the ravages of the oil and gas industry? Do you want to support the indigenous people who have been on the front lines of the fight against pipelines for the past decade? Do you want to learn about decolonization, the sovereignty movement, and the campaign to prevent the Coastal GasLink (CG)L) pipeline from being built? ...

NO GOVERNMENT WILL SAVE THE PLANET FOR US - WE HAVE TO SAVE THE PLANET FROM THE GOVERNMENT! WHEN THE POLICE ATTACK AN ANARCHIST RESPONSE TO CLIMATE CHANGE OUR MASKS PROTECT US HISTORY SAYS IT CLEARLY: THE INSURRECTION FOR THE CLIMATE MUST KNOW HOW TO DEFEND ITSELF RECUPERATION AND ITS MULTIPLE FORMS THE VULTURES ARE ALREADY CIRCLING OVERHEAD Read it . Print it .

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Respectful greetings. Construction work is ongoing to strengthen the various Wet’suwet’en front lines. Meanwhile Coastal GasLink continues to push ahead with its fracked gas pipeline. The following are various opportunities for people with construction and other skills to stand with the Wet’suwet’en: ...

Many of us in the environmental movement share a dream of a free society, in which people live together, caring for the land they inhabit. We imagine such a community as an autonomous zone, existing independently of the colonial, capitalist system we oppose. I am pleased to report that I now write these words from exactly such a place. I now find myself by the shore of Parrott Lake, on a territory belonging to the Sun House of the Likhts’amisyu Clan of the Wet’suwet’en Nation. The exact place where we now camp was a Wet’suwet’en village site for many generations. In subsequent waves of colonial violence, the Wet’suwet’en were driven from this ancestral home. Now they have reclaimed it and are building a new village, which is be a place of cultural revitalization, of learning, of healing, and of stewardship of the land. ...

A warm greeting to our companions, It seems our meetings get warmer every year. We write to you as our planet reaches record breaking degradation and heads of industry make further plans still. We write to you as the canadian government engages in low-intensity warfare on Wet’suwet’en communities from the raid on Gidumt’en, the invasion of Unist’ot’en, surveillance, police checkpoints, armed patrols, to the perpetuation of murdered and missing indigenous women. Slow genocide without a name. ...

Dear Friends, Allies, Comrades, and Supporters, We are pleased to announce that preliminary work has begun on the Likhts’amisyu Spring Construction Camp. This project is an initiative being led by two hereditary chiefs of the Likhts’amisyu Clan of the Wet’suwet’en Nation. For the past ten years, the Wet’suwet’en have been fiercely resisting pipeline development on their territories. Things came to a head back in January, when the RCMP raided a resistance camp on the territory of the Gidimt’en, another Wet’suwet’en clan. ...