Students

After the school decided to erase graffiti, local writers and students took action. They tagged lockers, wrote messages, and sprayed cameras until the security arrived.

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). ...

In the early hours of November 11th, red paint was dumped onto James McGill’s burial monument on McGill University’s downtown campus. In front of his memorial, near a plaque dedicated to Canadian soldiers killed in WWII, “Fin à McGill” was stenciled. James McGill, the founder of McGill University, is widely known to have owned enslaved Black and Indigenous people, and his lucrative earnings in this economy allowed him to finance the establishment of the university. ...

This week we look at the student led mobilizations that have rocked the streets of Montreal and Quebec City. From large scale marches, to occupations of university buildings to direct actions, the spring 2015 coalition has re-energized radical organizing in so called Quebec.

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Revolt is stirring all across Quebec, and is spreading on a daily basis. 66 student associations have already voted a reconducible strike. Night demos are adding up. At the Vieux Montréal and the Université Laval, campuses are being taken hold of and transformed into political spaces. The UQAM was blocked today. While it took the 2012 Spring a few weeks to really get in gear, the 2015 Spring has taken off in the space of a few days. The movement begins at the point where 2012 had stopped. The strike is on the march. ...

In the evening hours of March 24 2015, we slashed the tires of a McGill security division SUV and attacked the James Admin. building with flying chunks of concrete, vanishing quickly thereafter into the darkness of night. We claim responsibility for this latest attack in retaliation to the University’s profiling, surveillance and harassment of students and activists affiliated with the group Demilitarize McGill. Recently released internal documents reveal that as early as 2013, agents of the McGill security division were given orders to monitor, photograph and follow individuals present at Demilitarize McGill activities, including after they’ve left campus. ...

On Wednesday night, February 25th, we pulled the fire alarm in the Macdonald Engineering building of McGill university, disrupting the presentation of professor Andrew Higgins, a McGill weapons researcher, as a minimum gesture of sabotage and revolt against the University’s ongoing complicity in colonization and imperialist warfare. This action was simple, required little planning and zero expertise, disrupted our enemies where it hurts and was infinitely more uplifting than any symbolic protest or SSMU general assembly we have witnessed in recent time. We believe that acts of resistance – both large and small – against those who profit from and those who facilitate the growth of the military-industrial-complex are valuable, and ought to be carried out whenever and wherever possible. ...

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On the morning of February the 4th, I decided to descend from my high-perch of hate, to strike with intent against the further development of military and surveillance-state infrastructure taking place at McGill University. As a contribution to the project set in motion by our friendly neighborhood AIA, I waited until the coast was clear and then proceeded to jam & clog several toilets on the 7th floor of the Mechanical Engineering department on the corner or University and Sherbrooke, which is where you’ll find the offices of Newmerical Technologies and the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Laboratory. ...

This is the final installment in our “After the Crest” series exploring how to navigate the waning phase of social movements. It is a personal reflection on anarchist participation in the 2012 student strike in Montréal and the disruptions that accompanied it. The product of much collective discussion, this article explores the opportunities anarchists missed during the high point of the conflict by limiting themselves to the framework of the strike, and the risks they incurred by attempting to maintain it once it had entered a reformist endgame. ...

In the spring of 2012, a massive student strike in opposition to a tuition hike, rocked the streets of the Montréal for over six months. Protests and militant street actions became part of the daily and nightly reality of this Canadian metropolis. Several times during this tumultuous spring, the numbers in the streets would reach over one hundred thousand. Police routinely clubbed students and their allies, and arrested them by the hundreds. Some were even banned from entering the city. But every time the cops struck, the student movement got bigger and angrier. ...