Demos

I want to remember how it felt to be shook by the beauty of the crowd. Fear and anxiety dissipate as a hundred-strong black bloc takes the street, realizing its collective power that compels police units to maintain a safe distance. It’s happening. We can do this. Attacking luxury cars, hotels, and banks when the police have been made unable to defend them is an attack on the police, which depends on the perception that it can maintain law and order to be respected by good citizens and feared by the excluded. A call-and-response of shattering glass echoes down Peel Street, as projectiles fly at bank windows in quick succession. Not to worry, several rocks, flares, and at least one decent firework are reserved for the SPVM. ...

Because a less brutal police isn’t the point whatsoever, here’s a poster that better reflects the intentions of many among us. To print (French only) | PDF 11 x 17

We’re asking ourselves if we want to go to the March 15th climate demo. We tried to go to a reformist demo for the planet a couple months ago. It felt like crap. We’ve been in demos before where we weren’t feeling it, where we didn’t feel in our place (like in a union demo). But there it was really of an entirely different order. Like total incommunicability between our bodies and theirs (or something like that). Like, we didn’t even feel like we were on the same side of the barricade. ...

Much of the ground may be covered in a thick sheet of ice right now, and piles of snow have been growing around the construction site for the new migrant prison in Laval for weeks, but that doesn’t mean the Canadian government isn’t hard at work preparing the next stages of construction for this monstrosity, nor that we should turn our attention away until after the spring thaw. ...

On New Years Eve 2018, a crowd of around 150 people gathered near Henri Bourassa Metro on the island of Montreal to take three school busses out to Laval, Quebec. Every year since 2014, and intermittently in the years prior to 2014, people gather outside prisons in the Montreal area to set off fireworks, wish people in prison a Happy New Year, and show our opposition to prisons, borders, and the industries and governments that sustain them. ...

June 7th, 2018, 6 P.M. at Parc des Braves (750 ch. Sainte-Foy, Qc City) Mass demonstration against the G7 and to open the borders! Down with capitalist exploitation, colonialism, and racist and sexist politics! The heads of state of the seven most powerful imperialist and colonialist countries will gather on June 8th and 9th as part of the G7 Summit that will take place at the Manoir Richelieu in La Malbaie. It’s a special occasion for the global elite to celebrate their dominance of the capitalist economy in style. While they claim to be discussing economic growth, job creation, gender equality, and climate change, in reality G7 meetings are key to the process of organizing the global economy in favour of banks and the oil, agricultural, pharmaceutical, tech, and weapons industries. ...

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. ...

As workers, unemployed, students and tenants, our best defense against those who exploit and abuse us is solidarity. That is why the Industrial Workers of the World (SITT-IWW Montreal) invites you to gather and fight together in Parc-Extension on May 1st. ...

As part of the week against police brutality, the Outaouais region mobilized like every year to create a series of events denouncing the violence of the Gatineau police and the SQ. This year, community organizations from the region and activists also decided to rent a bus to go to Maniwaki in support of two families that have faced the violence of SQ officers. In 2015, Brandon Maurice was killed, shot by an SQ cop, and in 2018, a friend of the Maurice family, Steven Bertrand, was shot in the dead by a courthouse guard who refused to let him leave to smoke a cigarette. ...

The TVA building was the target of an act of vandalism over the night of Thursday to Friday [March 16th]. A window facing De Maisonneuve Boulevard was shattered. A good reminder that possibilities of attack don’t exist only in demos, during which it is not always easy to act due to the large numbers of cops. Just before 3:30am, three masked individuals walking on the boulevard broke the window using blunt objects, then rapidly left the scene. ...

Anti-Racist, Family-Friendly Demonstration in Quebec City! Sunday, March 25, 2018 Get on the Bus From Montreal! Buses leave at 9am and return in the evening. Community groups in Quebec City are organizing a family-friendly Demonstration Against Racism this coming March 25, part of a Festival Against Racism. Quebec City has been a center of activity by anti-immigrant, racist, far-right groups and protests, but local community groups continue to take to the streets to denounce racism, hatred and intolerance. Let’s join them in solidarity and support, as part of a Quebec-wide movement. ...