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Title: While the Iron Is Hot Author: CrimethInc. Date: August 14, 2012 Language: en Topics: Quebec, 2012, revolt, strike, students, anarchist analysis, Canada Source: Retrieved on 29th November 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2012/08/14/while-the-iron-is-hot-student-strike-social-revolt-in-quebec-spring-2012
In February 2012, as the Occupy movement tapered off, a strike broke out
against austerity measures in the Québécois higher education system.
Prevented from occupying buildings as it had in 2005, the student
movement shifted to a strategy of economic disruption: blockading
businesses, interrupting conferences and tourist events, and spreading
chaos in the streets. At its peak, the resulting unrest surpassed any
protest movement in North America for a generation.
In this comprehensive report, we chart the strike action by action, from
its awkward beginnings through the high point of the revolt and the
emergency measures with which the government attempted to suppress it.
At each stage in its development, we explore why the strike assumed the
forms it did, and analyze the forces competing to push it forward,
suppress it, or coopt it. Like the Oakland port blockade of November 2,
2011, the strike suggests a path forward out of the strategic impasse
resulting from the Occupy evictions; it also demonstrates that building
a capacity for confrontation is an infrastructural project, no less so
than any community institution.
The CÉGEP system is composed of every collège d’enseignement général et
professionel, or cégep, in the province of Québec. Most Québécois
students enter these schools at age seventeen, at the same time that
students elsewhere in North America would be entering the twelfth grade.
There are two main options at cégep: pre-university programs, which
usually last two years, and vocational training programs which usually
last three years and provide students with some kind of trade
certificate at the end. For anarchists, the most interesting
characteristic of cégeps is that they are full of teenagers who aren’t
yet quite as jaded as their older peers, and understand that criminal
records before the age of eighteen are less serious.
FÉCQ, the Federation of Québécois College (i.e., Cégep) Students, and
FÉUQ, the Federation of Québécois University Students, are two separate
student federations that represent most students in the province of
Québec. Although they represent different demographics, their politics
and internal structures are very similar.
ASSÉ, the Association for a Syndical Student Solidarity, is the other
student federation in Québec, representing students at both cégeps and
universities. Unlike its counterparts FÉCQ and FÉUQ, the raison d’être
of ASSÉ is to achieve free and universally accessible education in the
province. Its analysis has always been feminist and anti-neoliberal, but
not anti-capitalist.
Immediately before the student strike of 2005 began, ASSÉ and several
unaffiliated student associations formed a larger coalition to
facilitate organizing. This was CASSÉÉ, the “enlarged coalition of
ASSÉ,” whose name rhymed with the French adjective for “dead broke” as
well as the verb “to break.” CASSÉÉ was dissolved after the 2005 strike
ended.
A new coalition was formed for the 2012 strike, called CLASSE—the “large
coalition of ASSÉ,” whose name may reference either classes at a school
or class relations.
CLAC, the Convergence of Anti-Capitalist Struggles, is an organization
with a long history in Montréal. Besides organizing the anti-capitalist
May Day demonstrations for the last three years, it was involved in the
Montréal side of organizing against both the FTAA summit in Québec City
in 2001 and the G20 summit in Toronto in 2010.
CRÉPUQ, the Conference of Québécois University Rectors and Principals,
is an organization intended to represent the interests of university
administrations across Québec. Its main offices are housed in downtown
Montréal’s Loto-Québec Building.
Québecor is a media and communications corporation that owns—among other
things—the right-wing Journal de Montréal and Journal de Québec
newspapers and the Sun News Network, an English-language television
channel that could be considered the Canadian equivalent of Fox News.
Hydro-Québec is Québec’s state-run hydroelectric corporation.
The SPVM is Montréal’s municipal police force, whereas the SQ—the Sûreté
du Québec, literally “the safety of Québec”—is the provincial police
force.
The word “casserole” usually refers to a stove pot in French, but in May
of 2012, it became an adjective that was appended to the word
manifestation or manif in order to indicate something new: a
demonstration in which people march in the streets banging pots and
pans. In Montréal English, this is referred to as a casserole demo or
simply a casserole.
Blocking entry to class is arguably what distinguishes a student strike
from a student boycott. Both the media and those anti-strike students
who find themselves trying to talk their way through a hard picket often
try to explain things to militants: “You see, you’re confused about what
you’re doing. This is a boycott, and because it’s a boycott, other
students shouldn’t be prevented from going to class and professors
shouldn’t be prevented from teaching.” The usual argument is that
students are consumers, not workers; they are not withdrawing services,
but refusing to use a product that they have already bought. This is
deceptive. Universities are social factories; they produce the specially
trained workers—not just skilled, but also disciplined and able to
follow orders—that the capitalist economy of Québec needs to function.
At the moment, they are actually producing too many trained workers, and
so production needs to be ramped down. This threatens many people whose
survival, or at least their quality of life, is currently tied to this
system. One of the best ways to fight back is cease all production, to
stop any part of the factory from functioning.
Some labor unions, while supporting the strike to a greater or lesser
degree, insist that only labor unions can legally go on strike;
therefore, what students in Québec have been doing is a boycott. Of
course, there was a time when anything that could be called a strike was
strictly illegal. The militancy of the labor movement was what
encouraged states to recuperate hierarchical unions into the ruling
order and grant the right to engage in limited strike actions under
certain conditions.
The Liberal government had made the decision to turn most of the
bursaries in the “loans and bursaries” student financial aid program
into loans that would have to be repaid. All the major student
federations, from the reformist FÉCQ and FÉUQ to the “combat
syndicalist” ASSÉ, opposed the reforms.
The strike started February 21, when the anthropology students’
association at the Université de Montréal—a member of CASSÉÉ—approved a
strike mandate. Things really began three days later, on February 24,
when more than 30,000 members of CASSÉÉ entered the strike. FÉCQ and
FÉUQ called for strikes on March 4 and March 9 respectively, and by
March 15, there were over 100,000 students on strike across the
province.
The strike, which lasted a month and a half, was the longest and most
disruptive up to that point in Québec’s history. There were numerous
manif-actions over the course of the strike: blockades of bridges,
blockades of the port and the casino, sabotage of gas stations,
disruptions of underground shopping centers. There were also
confrontational demonstrations involving attacks on police and private
property. For the government, the strike’s negative effect on the
economy became more significant than the savings that might have been
derived from cutting bursaries.
The government eventually chose to negotiate with “the students”—meaning
the leaders of FÉCQ and FÉUQ, not CASSÉÉ. Unlike the 2012 strike, in
2005 the reformist federations represented the majority of striking
students, and the leaders of those organizations were happy to return to
class as soon as the government withdrew its reforms. To be clear: they
backed down precisely when the government was in a position of profound
weakness, missing the opportunity to mount the pressure further and
secure greater concessions. Militants associated with CASSÉÉ denounced
the leaders of FÉCQ and FÉUQ as traitors; during one infamous action,
they released rats into FÉUQ’s offices. Yet isolated in the face of
intensifying police repression, CASSÉÉ could not continue striking for
long; it was soon forced to disband.
2005 was the first year that the student movement used the symbol of the
red square, indicating that students were “squarely in the red”—an
expression that works as well in French as in English. Without
acknowledging its origins, the students appropriated this symbol from
the direct action-oriented anti-homelessness movement that had been
quite powerful in Montréal just a few years earlier. On March 30, 2005,
some militants hung a giant red square from the giant cross on Mount
Royal that overlooks the city; this became a lasting image of the
strike.
Tuition had been unfrozen. University enrollment cost Québécois students
$100 more than the year previous.
In an effort to begin a longer-lasting unlimited general strike in 2008,
general assemblies at a few isolated schools across Québec—mostly
associated with ASSÉ—obtained strike mandates for November 12, 13, and
14. Hard pickets were organized, including one at Dawson College, the
first anglophone school ever to participate in a student strike. There
was also an occupation at Cégep du Vieux Montréal, brutally repressed by
the police in an event remembered as “the Tuesday of the batons.”
Because of the repression, efforts to block entry to classes were
generally ineffectual.
There was no strike in 2008. The movement was disorganized. Tuition
increased by another $100 the following year for Québécois students; the
hikes continued for the specified amount of time, ending with the
2011/12 school year.
The Liberal government in power since 2003 met in Québec City with
representatives of CRÉPUQ and the three student federations. Busloads of
students arrived from across Québec to demonstrate outside the summit,
especially from Montréal. Inside, the government and CRÉPUQ confirmed to
the student representatives that, beginning in the 2012/13 school year,
tuition would increase by $325 each year for five years; they insisted
that the decision had already been made and there was no alternative.
This prompted the student representatives to walk out, after which a
motley group of anarchists, party communists, and other militants
attempted to get in: they infiltrated the building, spray painted walls,
and attempted to build barricades and break down the doors of the
conference room before Québec City police chased them out.
Better than nothing, but no repeat of the siege of Millbank Tower in
London, England, less than a month before.
The Alliance sociale—a coalition of seven labor unions plus FÉCQ and
FÉUQ—called for a demonstration on March 12, 2011 to demand an
“equitable budget.” In a callout for an anti-capitalist contingent,
anarchists denounced this organization, its rhetoric—particularly its
appeals to the middle class—and its shortsighted strategy of trying to
replace one gang of politicians with another. When the day actually
came, twelve people wearing black were identified to the police as
troublemakers by union peace marshals; they were arrested before the
demo could begin, charged with criminal conspiracy and possession of
weapons, and given non-association conditions with one another. The
conspiracy charges were quickly dropped.
A spontaneous solidarity demonstration was called for that night; mostly
anarchists showed up, and there were clashes with police. One popular
slogan that night was LE 15 MARS, LA VENGEANCE (“March 15, REVENGE!”),
referring to the annual anti-police demonstration a few days later.
Unfortunately, the anti-police demo on March 15 was shut down after only
forty-five minutes.
On March 24, the finance minister’s Montréal offices were briefly
occupied, and a disruptive march spontaneously followed. A week later,
on March 31, during a “national” demonstration called by all three
student associations, militants associated with ASSÉ occupied the
offices of CRÉPUQ in the Loto-Québec building on rue Sherbrooke, with
some anarchists participating. The occupiers quickly negotiated with the
police to be let out of the building, but people remained congregated in
front of it and refused to disperse until the police used flash-bang
grenades.
These clashes were indecisive and at the time it was unclear what
strategy was behind them. Yet they showed that some participants in the
student movement were willing to interfere with business as usual.
Shortly after Occupy Wall Street failed to occupy Wall Street on
September 17, people in Montréal—like others around North
America—organized their own spinoff. Rather than building momentum for a
strike, many people shifted their energy into Occupy (or Occupons)
Montréal, a movement that quickly took on many problematic
characteristics. These included strict pacifism, fetishizing the general
assembly, and accommodating the participation of a nationalist militia
that serves as a place for citizenists[1] and white supremacists to
recruit new members. Whereas established anarchist scenes elsewhere in
North America at least tried to engage with the local manifestations of
the Occupy phenomenon, anarchist engagement with Occupy Montréal didn’t
last long at all.
While others were laboring to challenge the widespread notion that
nonviolence offered a viable strategy for an anti-austerity movement,
Occupy Montréal gave this fallacy a renewed credibility. As people
sought to identify the specific ways that capitalist exploitation was
intensifying in Montréal, Occupy Montréal embraced a simplified analysis
needlessly imported from the United States. When militants were
strategizing about occupying something, Occupy Montréal had the
unfortunate effect of making many people shy away from that word lest
they be associated with the 99% rhetoric.
No matter the richness of Montréal’s own traditions of resistance—they
couldn’t compete with a mass-produced cookie-cutter protest culture
imported from south of the border.
During summer 2011, FÉCQ, FÉUQ, and ASSÉ agreed to present an ultimatum
to the government on November 10: concede to our demands or we strike. A
staggering amount of movement resources was poured into promoting this
ultimately pacifying demo. The involvement of FÉCQ and FÉUQ was
controversial among more radical students, on account of their betrayal
of the 2005 strike.
The day started with pickets at several schools. Some of these,
especially on anglophone campuses like Concordia and Dawson College,
were “soft” pickets that didn’t attempt to block entry, while others
were “hard”—although not always effective, as at UQÀM, where many
workers and students were able to slip past the pickets into the school.
The demonstration started in the afternoon, with several contingents
from the universities and cégeps in the downtown area converging on
avenue McGill College. The demo marched around downtown for a long time,
and when it finally returned to McGill College, there was a
confrontation at Jean Charest’s Montréal offices in which one militant
was arrested; this was partially the fault of demo organizers associated
with FÉUQ, who sabotaged efforts to attack the building. Several others
were arrested nearby at an occupation of McGill University’s
administration building. Once again, the organizers of the demo, this
time including ASSÉ militants, sabotaged the efforts of those who wanted
to announce to the crowd of what was happening close by. The organizers
insisted that it was time for students to get back to their buses,
willfully ignoring the fact that a large portion of the crowd was from
Montréal.
Fewer people would have been in the streets if November 10 had been
explained as a day of confrontation, like the recent actions in defense
of education in Italy, Greece, Chile, and even England. But how useful
were the additional participants, if the result was a passive
demonstration that the government could ignore? Even if we consider it
desirable to present ultimatums to the government, wouldn’t it have been
more persuasive to deliver that threat by doing something and
threatening to keep on doing it?
The November 10 ultimatum had been ignored—so the strike began. Two
departments at Université Laval and one department at UQÀM voted to go
on strike and join CLASSE. From this point on, the number of students on
strike increased every day for about a month and a half.
On February 17, 2012, the students of Cégep du Vieux Montréal voted to
go on strike and join CLASSE. The school administration had already
stated that, in the event of a successful strike vote, they would close
the building and prevent the school from being occupied as had happened
in 2005 and, briefly, in 2007. The strike vote took place online, but as
soon as the results were announced, students voted in a general
assembly—held in the cégep’s cafeteria—to occupy the building. It is
possible that, in the course of this discussion, it was agreed that
barricades should be built; it is also possible that the possibility of
doing so was merely discussed. In any case, some people began building
them while others called for people to show up from other schools, and
still others continued talking in the general assembly.
The brief occupation of CĂ©gep du Vieux exemplified the negative
influence of Occupy on the opening phase of the student strike. The
general assembly has a long-established place in most francophone
schools; in this case, a sizeable proportion of the participants treated
it as an end unto itself, rather than as a tool unto an end. As more
militants and police arrived at the school, the assembly continued,
discussing questions less and less relevant to the situation at hand.
Furthermore, the participants showed themselves to be completely out of
touch with reality—exemplified by their continuing to discuss whether to
endorse barricading the building even as others were already doing so.
Many students of the cégep, opposing the strike or simply dismissive of
outside help, went around bothering people—particularly anglophones,
especially those less capable in the French language—about what they
were doing in “notre école.” Those building barricades were threatened
and provoked, although no actual fights broke out. Elsewhere, others
vigorously argued with “outsiders” and “troublemakers” who had equipped
themselves with fire extinguishers in preparation for the eventual
police siege, ultimately frustrating those people enough that they
decided to leave. Others used the fire extinguishers anyway, but by that
time, many people had left the premises with a sense of how badly things
were going to end. There had been a call for general participation, but
this was immaterial for an angry minority that probably didn’t want
anyone getting unruly but found it easiest to attack those who couldn’t
speak French or who weren’t studying at that particular institution.
There was no plan for the occupation, and while it’s not certain that it
could have been held successfully if there had been a plan, the lack of
preparation didn’t help. Many people had very little sense of the layout
of the building, which is built onto the side of a large hill, giving
the police the option to enter from one of the higher floors and
progress downwards to the lobby where the general assembly and the bulk
of occupiers had eventually moved. Certain militants started building
tall barricades on the front steps and additional ones on higher floors.
Other people drank and partied.
Throughout the occupation, no one took action to evict the school’s
security guards, who were allowed to roam freely, impotent to stop what
was going on but collecting evidence that was used in criminal
proceedings later. For the most part, cameras were not sabotaged, nor
even covered up. One particular person filmed everything, evidently with
good intentions, but the police later confiscated his camera and used
his footage as additional evidence. These failures to act, failures to
think, and failures to tell people Stop fucking filming, tabernak de
câlisse! cost dearly, as the subsequent police investigation turned up
lots of evidence against those who had committed “acts of mischief”
during the night.
The occupation lasted nine short hours altogether. A small group of
students who had locked themselves in a classroom were the last
militants in the building.
The brief occupation of CĂ©gep du Vieux was the only attempt at a lasting
occupation of a university or cégep building during the entire strike,
and its failure had major ramifications.
In contrast to 2005, when many buildings were occupied, the police and
the university administrators immediately sent the message that lasting
occupations would not be tolerated. This is what forced people to take
the streets day after day, making the 2012 strike more visible and
disruptive than the previous one.
Two and a half weeks since the beginning of the strike, March 7 marked a
turning point. By this time, there had already been many demonstrations
and a few blockades of critical infrastructure, such as the blockade of
the Jacques-Cartier bridge on February 23. Thus far in 2012, the SPVM
had refrained from using flashbang grenades or tear gas to repress
students, deeming batons and pepper spray sufficient. By March 7, it was
high time for them to escalate tactics; it was a little surprising that
they hadn’t already.
The day reprised the events of March 31, 2011. As that day, the crowd
converged on rue Sherbrooke in front of the Loto-Québec building,
although this time, no one had infiltrated the CRÉPUQ offices. The
intention, apparently, was simply to walk in and occupy the building.
The crowd also dragged metal fencing to the area from elsewhere and used
it to create barricades on rue Sherbrooke, a major downtown
thoroughfare. Riot police attacked these barricades and went on to
attack the crowd with pepper spray and batons, arresting a few people in
the process. The crowd didn’t disperse, and at that point flashbang
grenades were used to get them running. Shrapnel from one of these hit
one participant, Francis Grenier, in the face. Glass from the sunglasses
he was wearing was forced into his right eye, permanently disabling him.
If this had just been a moment when a crowd realized that cops weren’t
their friends—yet another incident in which police maimed someone
without facing any consequences—it wouldn’t have been particularly
significant for anyone except for the people affected. But things played
out differently.
An Occupy-style assembly was called for Berri Square that night, with
the organizers appealing for calm and promising people a chance to
“express their indignation.” Instead, when people gathered, angry
militants who wanted nothing to do with the organizers’ pacifying
rhetoric told them to shut the fuck up. This small group of instigators,
the most vocal element in the crowd, called for the crowd to take the
streets; most followed them. In the course of the subsequent
demonstration, projectiles were thrown at police officers, police
cruisers parked at a substation on boulevard Réné-Lévesque were
vandalized, and—in a truly epic moment—people used crowd control
barriers as battering rams against the front doors of the SPVM
headquarters while the police nearby were still scrambling to put on
their riot gear. Sadly, it was the peace police who wrested the barriers
from the hands of the indignéEs, who were evidently not expressing their
indignation in an appropriately passive manner in the eyes of the
assembly organizers.
One of the prominent chants that night was LE 15 MARS, LA VENGEANCE.
This had first been chanted a year previous, on the night of March 12,
2011. The implication was that the police would pay for their abuses at
the upcoming annual March 15 anti-police demo. In 2011, this hadn’t
occurred; 2012, on the other hand, saw the largest demonstration in the
history of the event.
In the week between March 7 and March 15, three developments paved the
way for this. Anarchists fliered and postered aggressively for the March
15 demo. In addition, there was a crucial development in the political
development of CLASSE, followed immediately by a very interesting day
and night in the streets.
In stark contrast to FÉCQ and FÉUQ, every decision CLASSE makes as an
organization is determined in a directly democratic fashion. Since
February, delegates from CLASSE’s constituent student associations plus
independent activists have physically met for two days of
decision-making each and every weekend; this is called a congress.
Whatever the problems of direct democracy, the decisions that emerge
from these congresses illustrate clearly enough the attitudes and
political consciousness of those in attendance. On March 11, the second
day of a congress held in Montréal, CLASSE’s members voted to endorse
the March 15 anti-police demo and encourage militants to attend in large
numbers. This was unprecedented in the history of the student
movement—CASSÉÉ’s congress had firmly rejected the idea during the 2005
strike—and it had a tremendous impact on the streets.
Meanwhile, the social struggles committee of CLASSE organized a demo for
March 13 connecting the struggle against austerity and neoliberalism—but
not capitalism—in Québec to similar struggles in Greece, Spain, Chile,
and Colombia. Outside the skyscraper that apparently houses the
Colombian consulate in Montréal, a small group of black bloc militants
fought police and spray painted a police car. A fight ensued between
pacifists and militants who had come prepared for a confrontation.
Images of this were broadcast throughout the media and used to highlight
“divisions” in the student movement, or as proof that anarchists had
“infiltrated” it. At this time, most sections of the mainstream media in
Québec were trying to portray some students as legitimate and others as
violent. This strategy changed later, when the entire movement was
demonized and only “the 60% of students who oppose the strike and are
quietly attending classes” were lauded.
That evening had been announced as Unlimited Creation Night at the
Pavillon Hubert-Aquin on UQÀM’s main campus. Militants at that school
had called for participants in the movement, as well as the general
population, to “come democratize art in the larger sense”—whatever that
means. Although the propaganda was intentionally vague and surreal, it
was clear that a university building was going to be occupied and used
for more creative purposes than normal.
Not surprisingly, the school administration did not want this event to
occur. In the days leading up to it, a small notice on the front page of
the UQÀM website declared: “There is no event by the name of Unlimited
Creation Night organized by students at UQĂ€M on March 13, no matter
where the information comes from.” On the day itself, Pavillon
Hubert-Aquin—with its large courtyard and ample space—was closed and
guarded by school security, and the few organizers and other militants
who showed up at the beginning of the evening were neither willing nor
prepared to break in. However, the administration had left another
building open.
Pavillon J.-A.-DeSève, just next to Hubert-Aquin, was a less desirable
space, but a giant party erupted in it and lasted long into the night.
Furniture plundered from the building was placed in the street, free
food was served from the lobby, and people started passing around
alcohol and other intoxicants. The “democratizers of art in the larger
sense” ran down corridors with paint rollers, graffiti blossomed in the
area around the building, and participants sang anti-cop songs; it ended
with an impromptu late-night march through city streets that saw attacks
on police cars and widespread vandalism, before the participants escaped
into the métro, smashing surveillance cameras.
All of this had a joyous tone very different from the so-called
“festivity” of the average passive march. In addition to fleur-de-lysé
flags and vapid rhetoric about democracy, such marches are usually
depressing for anarchists because young, able-bodied people are cheering
and having all the appearances of a good time when they have absolutely
nothing to celebrate: they are hurtling towards impoverishment without
doing anything to resist. On Unlimited Creation Night, people created
something new and enjoyable, something worth defending and
replicating—something that the state would do everything it could to
snuff out as soon as it had the chance. The unlikeliness of the event,
and its unexpected success, were worth celebrating in and of themselves.
This last aspect marks March 13 as very different from the events at
CĂ©gep du Vieux a few weeks previous. In the earlier occupation, the
prevailing attitude—or at least the most obnoxiously visible one—had
been that the occupation’s only purpose was to put pressure on the
administration and the government. Here, the occupation offered a
glimpse of a different way of relating to each other and the urban
environment.
This brings us to March 15. Since 1997, March 15 has been designated
International Day Against Police Brutality, although Montréal is the
only city where it has been consistently observed. The demonstration
typically attracts a lot of youth—chiefly homeless kids from downtown
and Hochelaga or black and Arab youth from across the city—as well as
the usual anarchists, Maoists, and other militants, many of whom are
prepared to fight the police. The demonstrations of 2010 and 2011 had
been muzzled by an overwhelming police presence, pre-emptive arrests of
organizers in the Collective Opposed to Police Brutality, and those
organizers’ poor choices of routes and starting locations.
This trend was completely reversed in 2012. With CLASSE endorsing the
march, the numbers converging at Berri Square far exceeded anything from
the past few years. Although, after they were attacked, the police were
still able to split the crowd, this did not disperse the demonstration.
Instead, for the first time in the strike, several rowdy crowds roamed
different parts of downtown and the police were completely unable to
control the situation. Condominiums, police vehicles, and corporate
stores were attacked, graffiti bloomed everywhere, and some people even
managed to loot a Future Shop.
It was not surprising that March 15 was confrontational; it’s always
confrontational, if not always successfully confrontational. There was
no reason to think that this would change the character of the
strike—and for at least a few weeks, it didn’t. However, a much larger
group of people attended than in previous years, and as in the
resistance to the G20 summit in Toronto in 2010, they learned firsthand
that those who fought back had a much better chance of escaping. The
mass arrest—accounting for about 100 of the 226 arrested—that took place
late in the evening near the Berri-UQÀM métro station targeted almost
entirely people insisting on their right to demonstrate peacefully, long
after the SPVM had declared the demonstration an unlawful assembly.
Having more people in the streets helped those who came to fight the
police; even if most people weren’t doing anything, this caused
significant logistical problems for officers who were doing all they
could to get people to disperse or at least return to the sidewalks. The
unsettlingly warm weather was also a boon. Unfortunately, as in previous
years, no one made an effort to forge lasting connections with the youth
who always come out in large numbers on March 15 but rarely attend other
demonstrations. There’s little evidence that the most marginalized
people in the city have seen the strike as relevant to them.
In early March, CLASSE had agreed with FÉCQ and FÉUQ that another
“national” demonstration in the same style as November 10, 2011 would
occur on March 22, issuing a further ultimatum to the government: this
time, if you don’t concede to our demands, we are going to begin a
concerted campaign of economic disruption. Once again, instead of
threatening economic disruption by demonstrating what the movement could
do to that end, the CLASSE strategy was geared towards winning over
public opinion via the mass media. This is certainly important, but
should not be prioritized over actually building collective power.
Anarchists attempted to organize a blockade of Montréal’s port in order
to give the day a confrontational aspect. Without the institutional
support provided to the passive demonstration downtown, however, this
wasn’t as successful as hoped.
As anarchists anticipated, the government ignored one of the largest
demonstrations that had ever taken place in the history of the Canadian
state up to that point, with more than 200,000 people in the streets of
Montréal. As hesitant as CLASSE’s congress had been to support economic
disruption, this drove almost all the members of the coalition to
embrace the notion that the time is now. CLASSE threw itself into the
project of halting the functioning of the capitalist economy in
Montréal, Québec’s economic engine. It went from simply promoting
disruptive manif-actions on its website, most of which were organized by
particular student associations or by informal groups, to organizing
these actions itself. On Monday, March 26, the first semaine de la
perturbation Ă©conomique started. Many more followed.
The CLASSE-organized manif-actions brought huge numbers of people to the
streets, but at other manif-actions—smaller ones organized autonomously
of CLASSE with fewer movement resources dedicated to them—the numbers
were also significantly boosted. Trickle-down economics is bunk, but the
trickle-down effect seems to work in popular revolts.
Before getting into how things played out, let’s acknowledge all the
manif-actions that had already been happening. ASSÉ militants had
organized several manif-actions in the 2010–11 school year; its
political culture—which was largely diluted by incorporating less
militant student associations into CLASSE—was heavily oriented towards
direct action. In 2012, student associations that had been members of
ASSÉ before 2012 independently organized several demonstrations and
actions in February: a march on Autoroute 40, an attempt to shut down
the Centre du commerce mondiale, and a blockade of the Jacques-Cartier
bridge. These were not all small affairs, though they were smaller than
some of the huge actions that followed in April 2012.
The defining characteristic of the manif-actions of the 2012 strike was
that they began very early in the morning, usually between 5:30 am and 9
am, but most often at 7 or 7:30. Their usual purpose was to disrupt the
workday, either by delaying commuters trying to get to work or by
preventing them from entering their workplaces when they arrived. There
were many variations on these general themes. Once CLASSE called for
economic disruption, there were suddenly a lot more early morning
actions: many more people were getting up to participate in them, and
space opened up for people to plan their own efforts.
Between March 26 and April 19, there were literally dozens of actions.
The head offices of the SAQ, the state liquor distribution corporation,
were blocked on March 27, and its Montréal distribution center was
blocked on April 5. The port of Montréal was blocked for the second time
in a week, and much more successfully than before, on March 28; thanks
to greater numbers, reaching at least a thousand by the time militants
reached their destination, the police did not move in for over two
hours. There were further blockades on April 5 and April 10.
On March 29, four different marches—each color-coded to represent a
different line in Montréal’s metro—started at Square Phillips and roamed
around different parts of downtown as part of a demonstration called the
Grande Mascarade. Endorsed by CLASSE and organized with the coalition’s
logistical support, all participants were encouraged to wear masks. The
reason was explicitly stated: to normalize the practice of remaining
anonymous in the face of the repressive police apparatus. One
participant was quoted as saying that the organizers of the demo were
“not calling for violence, but if people do it, that’s why we’re in the
streets, it’s for that that we are on strike. It’s to create the
opportune moment.”
Some militants did take advantage of the moment created by the Grande
Mascarade to engage in acts of vandalism, but not many. Three people
were arrested and charged with mischief, accused of being responsible
for everything that had happened during the day; one of these was Emma
Strople, who was later singled out for persecution by the police and the
judiciary. Undercovers were instrumental in these arrests.
National Bank, the only Canadian bank headquartered in Montréal, was
targeted repeatedly during this period. On April 4, their shareholders’
meeting at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel was disrupted, resulting in the
first mass arrests on the Island of Montréal since the evening of March
15: over 70 people altogether. On April 11, when a different
demonstration with a different target set out from Square Victoria every
hour for twelve hours, blockading National Bank’s headquarters was the
first action of the day. It lasted a little over an hour. At the
northeast corner of the building, businesspeople physically attacked
militants and were beaten in return, until the police finally moved in
with pepper spray. April 11’s morning blockade was probably the most
successful of any action in the “skyscraper blockade” genre.
Simultaneously, another manif-action—called by the student associations
of several cégeps in northern Montréal and the suburb of
Laval—interfered with morning commuter traffic by blocking the Viau
Bridge, one of the links between the Island of Montréal and the Island
of Jesus, for over an hour. Later on that day, demos departed from
Square Victoria every hour, some of them causing further disruption.
Militants ran through La Baie, a large department store, causing chaos,
around noon, and in the afternoon, there were physical confrontations
with security as demonstrators attempted to blockade the headquarters of
Québecor and—later again—the Montréal offices of CIBC, another bank.
With enthusiastic outside support, militants based at Concordia
University organized an ambitious action for the morning of April 13:
the blockade of Concordia’s Hall Building during the second day of
exams. In a qualitative break from anglophone Concordia’s response to
every other student strike in the history of Québec, some departments
there had gone on strike and there had been a number of small actions at
the school—though compared to what had happened at francophone schools,
the strike was still a failure there. The April 13 blockade failed when
students who were eager to take their exams poured coffee on the tiled
floor beneath the militants blocking the tunnel between the métro
station and the Hall Building—and, on the count of three, charged and
breached the human wall. The police did nothing until militants decided
to take the streets, at which point they broke out the pepper spray.
On April 19, a morning manif-action billed as ON SHUTDOWN LE
CENTRE-VILLE (“we are shutting down downtown”) started at Square
Phillips, immediately breaking into two contingents. One proceeded to
the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce’s Montréal offices and blockaded
them to prevent employees from entering; the other remained mobile,
wandering around downtown to cause chaos and distract the police.
Eventually, the mobile contingent joined the blockaders; they were
finally forced to disperse from the building by the police. People
kicked the cars belonging to civilians who tried to drive through
crowds, a practice that became common even in very passive demos, since
it is widely understood that motorists can hurt people.
In addition to mass actions like these, there were attacks on the
economy that only required a small number of people, as well as attacks
that could be considered less economic than political in their
targeting. The latter continued after the movement shifted its attention
from early-morning manif-actions towards a practice of marching in the
streets every night. We can place the sacking of the education
minister’s offices in this latter category: buses of militants unloaded
at Line Beauchamp’s offices in the north of Montréal and proceeded to
storm the building and destroy everything, leaving the employees
frightened. The Battle of Victo on May 4, discussed below, in which the
provincial Liberal Party’s annual convention was targeted, is another
example of political targeting.
Perhaps the most significant economic attacks were the ones that
targeted the métro system during the morning rush hour. On April 16,
bags of bricks were left on the rails at locations around the city,
causing chaos. This happened again on April 25 when two smoke bombs went
off on different lines, and then another smoke bomb went off in Complexe
Desjardins, a shopping center home to many business offices. On May 10,
there was much greater chaos as a result of four smoke bombs going off
in some of the city’s major métro stations. Those who are now facing
criminal charges for that action will be the first in history to be
charged with a certain provision in Canada’s post–9/11 anti-terrorism
legislation that forbids anyone from committing a terrorist hoax,
defined as the creation of a situation in which it is reasonable for
people to believe that terrorism is occurring or is about to occur.
Other attacks appeared less strategic, taken individually—graffiti,
window breaking, nocturnal attacks on parked police vehicles—but
together created an atmosphere of tension. Such attacks always occur in
Montréal, but they increased in volume after the beginning of the
strike. On the night of April 15, notably, there was a coordinated
attack on four different government ministers’ offices around Montréal,
in which windows were broken and unignited Molotov cocktails were
supposedly left inside the buildings “as a threat,” although the logic
behind such a threat is opaque. Other targets included SNC-Lavalin, the
engineering firm that built the security fence in Toronto during the G20
summit, and the offices of Le Journal de Montréal.
These and many other actions could not have become as militant as they
did outside of the context of manif-actions happening all the time, far
more often than this best-of-the-strike list can portray.
In spring 2011, Charest unveiled a new marketing campaign and a plank
for getting him and his party re-elected: Plan Nord. There was a flurry
of attention in the media about “one of the biggest social and
environmental projects in our time,” as the government website described
it; propaganda posters began appearing in the métro explaining how the
plan would create jobs and bring prosperity to Québec. Anarchists were
concerned, but at first it was unclear how to organize against the
project.
Of course, Plan Nord is not a substantive thing in itself. It is simply
the way that the government of Québec has chosen to brand its recently
accelerated efforts to colonize the Labrador Peninsula, dispossess its
indigenous inhabitants of their land and resources, use those resources
to generate quick money, and restore confidence in the future of
Québéc’s troubled capitalist economy. The south of Québec has been
colonized and exploited more thoroughly, and now this area is
unproductive in comparison to other advanced capitalist economies of
similar size. But there is no substantive difference between what is
happening in “the north” versus “the south”; it’s simply a matter of
progression, with the development of the former lagging behind that of
the latter for a variety of reasons. From the perspective of
capitalists, it makes sense to identify potentially profitable areas
that are not yet being exploited as efficiently as they could be—so the
only real policy aspect of Plan Nord is a commitment by the government
to begin fixing this situation in earnest, with certain objectives
twenty-five years down the line. The rest is marketing and propaganda.
In the Labrador Peninsula, the Québécois government will allow forests
to be clear-cut, rivers to be dammed, and open-pit mines to be carved
into the land, including uranium mines. An influx of workers will result
in a population boom; there will be new housing in many northern towns,
and probably many new towns altogether. There is even talk of
constructing a deep-water port on Ungava Bay to take advantage of the
Arctic Ocean’s new opening to seaborne trade. To connect all these new
mines, clear-cuts, and settlements, new highways will slice across the
land.
Many such projects are already underway in the north, and were long
before the announcement of Plan Nord. For example, Hydro-Québec, the
state-owned power corporation, has been building new dams on the Romaine
River since 2009 in spite of resistance by the Innu of Uashat mak
Mali-Utenam. It also makes no sense to separate development in “the
north” from the continuing project of squeezing profits out of “the
south.” Among other projects, capitalists would like to see a gold mine
dug on Mohawk territory just northwest of Montréal, a new
Atlantica-style highway linking Sherbrooke to New Brunswick across the
forests of northern Maine, and a massive expansion of fracking all along
the Saint Lawrence river valley. There is also the legislative project
of loosening environmental protections, which will affect every part of
the province. All of these efforts, alongside urban projects like the
reconstruction of the Turcot interchange in southwest Montréal, are part
of an integrated strategy of developing unproductive areas into
productive areas across the entire Québécois territory.
Given that the development that is ongoing everywhere, there are
specific reasons the government initiated a media campaign focusing on
“the north.”
First, greenwashing. The government promises that 50% of the territory
north of the 49^(th) parallel will be protected in perpetuity. For this,
Charest has already won praise at the United Nations Conference on
Sustainable Development, where he was compared and contrasted favorably
with climate criminal and general bogeyman Stephen Harper. Liberal
environmentalists, who might have otherwise caused trouble by starting a
Facebook group or running an ad in the newspaper, will be satisfied that
only half of Québec’s portion of the Labrador Peninsula will be paved or
otherwise destroyed. As a result, radical Earth defenders who don’t
compromise on these matters will be more easily isolated and smeared as
unreasonable. Similarly, the government has emphasized how many
indigenous leaders are completely on board and how the creation of
“economic opportunities” for indigenous people will help end the “social
problems”—caused by colonialism—in their communities. And what could be
a nobler goal than ending indigenous poverty?
Second, manifest destiny. The distinct shape of the Labrador Peninsula
has often been used as a symbol of national pride, and it is this shape
that has become the logo for Plan Nord. It has been a dream of
nationalist intellectuals for many years that Québec’s great frontier
should be tamed and settled by French-speaking Québécois de souche, both
because that would strengthen a Québécois claim to the entire territory
in the event of independence from Canada and because it is seen as
desirable in itself—even if this project is being undertaken by a
federalist government. Instead of the left-wing and social-democratic
strains of nationalism currently popular among young people, the
development of the north offers a different vision of patriotism for
those who would imagine themselves rugged individualists seeking
adventure and opportunity: a nationalism that has better things to do
than protest in the streets.
Third, inspiring confidence in the Québécois economy. Since spring 2011,
the premier has flown around the United States, Europe, and twice to
Brazil to present a flashy PowerPoint presentation to potential
investors about the enormous wealth that is about to be torn from the
ground. Québec has long had a bad reputation in international business
circles because of its strong(er) unions, its bureaucracy, its
(allegedly greater) corruption and organized crime, its frustrating
(albeit widely ignored) language laws, and its (somewhat) restive
population. In the context of global financial worry, the Plan Nord
campaign emphasizes two points. First, that there is a solid plan to
rocket out of Québec’s socialist malaise, and second, that this
territory is one of the largest remaining landmasses in the world that
has not yet been thoroughly exploited—so there is a lot of cash to be
made. The campaign also aims to inspire confidence in Québécois workers
who might be concerned about job opportunities in the province.
Before the strike, resistance to Plan Nord had consisted of little more
than a few speaking events, less-than-rowdy protests outside conferences
and ministerial meetings, pranks pulled on apolitical engineering
students, and workshops situating Plan Nord in the context of the
continuing colonial processes of Canada and Québec. Once the strike
started, this changed. In connection to the students’ struggle against
tuition, but looking beyond it, anarchists were able to mobilize
significant numbers of people for actions.
On March 12, a week after the Sûreté du Québec dismantled a blockade
that the Innu of Uashat mak Mali-Utenam had built on Highway 138 to
defend their lands around the Romaine River, about two hundred people
demonstrated their solidarity in Montréal in front of the headquarters
of Hydro-Québec. On April 2, there was a morning manif-action blocking
workers from entering a downtown skyscraper housing the offices of
Golden Valley Mines, Quebec Lithium, and Canadian Royalties, companies
that really have no business existing but which also happen to be
heavily involved in the renewed colonization of the north. This action,
which caused significant disruption for about an hour, presaged the
larger skyscraper blockades that followed.
These actions were part of a growing wave of struggle against Plan Nord,
but—along with almost everything else that had happened over the course
of the strike up to that point—they were overshadowed by what occurred
when Charest decided to bring his well-practiced speech to downtown
Montréal at the Salon Plan Nord, a giant job fair and pro-development
propaganda festival held on April 20 at the city’s premier convention
center, the Palais des congrès.
Four demos were called for April 20: one by No One is Illegal, one by a
group of Innu women who were walking to Montréal from the Côte-Nord as a
means of protest, one by anarchists (including those who had organized
the events of March 12 and April 2), and a fourth—by far the largest—by
CLASSE. All four started in the hour before noon, so militants had to
choose between which one they wanted to attend. Anarchists largely opted
for the smaller, non-CLASSE demos.
When people recount the story of April 20, the No One is Illegal demo is
often forgotten. For one thing, it was the smallest of the three
confrontational demos; for another, it had a different theme from the
others. The participants in the other demonstrations might have opposed
Plan Nord because neoliberal governments won’t redistribute natural
resource wealth in a properly socialist fashion, because the industrial
death machine that is Civilization should be ruthlessly annihilated, or
because of some other nuanced analysis regarding present matters—but all
of them were going to the same place, to oppose the same policies, and
hopefully to get uncomfortably close to the same despicable person. The
target of the No One is Illegal demonstration, on the other hand, was an
agent of the federal government rather than the provincial one: Jason
Kenney, the immigration minister, a racist scumbag certainly deserving
of some uncomfortable proximity in his own right.
Kenney was in town to deliver a talk called “Targeted, Fast, and
Efficient Immigration Systems with Focus on Jobs and Growth” at the
Hilton Bonaventure hotel. He was arguing, essentially, that the demands
of the market should be the most important factor determining who can
immigrate to Canada. About 100 people were on the steps outside the
hotel in a non-confrontational demonstration. There were also two groups
of people who intended to cause disruptions inside. The first group, ten
to fifteen people, entered the building up to two hours before and
waited, disguised as Starbucks customers. The second group arrived
shortly before the event was scheduled to begin, brazenly running into
the building before security could lock the doors. Both groups converged
in the building, fought their way past the security officers in the
hotel lobby, and shook the final set of doors off their hinges. They
burst through triumphantly, and—to their surprise—found themselves in an
empty room.
At this point, they missed the opportunity to overturn tables of
expensive food and glassware, but their faces were not concealed and
security officers were taking lots of pictures. The police who had been
outside watching the demonstration at the steps arrived, but everyone
managed to escape to the street. There were no arrests and everything
was over by 1 pm, so the participants were able to participate in later
events. Later on, once the speech had actually started—much later than
planned—other infiltrators with tickets to the event disrupted it.
Meanwhile, the anarchist demonstration started at Square Phillips in
central downtown. Four groups were collaborating on it: La Mauvaise
Herbe (a green anarchist collective), the Collective Against
Civilization, the Anti-Colonial Solidarity Collective, and PASC (Projet
accompagnement solidarité Colombie, which organizes locally in
solidarity with the struggles of people in Colombia). Whether or not all
the members of these groups would describe themselves as anarchists, the
discourse around the demonstration was explicitly anti-state, promoting
self-determination and autonomous action. Green-and-black flags on
bamboo poles were distributed in the crowd.
The original plan for this demonstration, decided long before the CLASSE
demo was called for, was to march around downtown delivering speeches at
specific locations—buildings housing the offices of corporations
involved in mining, construction, and so on—and eventually reach the
Palais des congrès where it could divide into a disruptive component and
a more child-friendly component. This wasn’t what happened, though.
While the demo was still roaming central downtown, participants received
calls that there was an urgent need for more people at the Palais des
congrès.
CLASSE’s demonstration had started at Berri Square and marched directly
to the palace to confront Charest, reaching the palace’s eastern side on
rue Saint-Urbain. Militants bypassed the line of riot cops at the front
door by storming the parking garage. In the palace’s eastern lobby,
there was a prolonged confrontation between unarmored cops and
demonstrators who were determined to ascend the escalators to the job
fair. Eventually, riot cops arrived to push the crowd out of the
building and then out of the area altogether. Many had already opted to
withdraw before the police charge forced everyone out.
This was the news that participants in the anarchist demo were receiving
from the Palais des congrès. Some of them wanted to cancel the original
plan and rush to the palace; others wanted to stick to the planned
route, while still others wanted to join the Innu women’s demo outside
the headquarters of Hydro-Québec, just up the hill from the palace. This
debate, which took place bilingually in the middle of a moving
demonstration, went on too long for those who wanted to proceed
immediately to the palace; they split off. Shortly thereafter, the
organizers announced that the remainder would be going to Hydro-Québec.
This meant that both groups were heading in the same direction on
parallel streets, with the first group about a block and a half ahead.
At this point, all four demonstrations were converging in roughly the
same area, but this was still a very large area containing an enormous
number of people. Some demonstrators were closer to the headquarters of
Hydro-Québec on boulevard Réné-Lévesque, others on rue Saint-Urbain were
in the process of getting chased from the east side of the palace by
riot cops, while still others were grappling with unarmored cops and
breaking windows at the west side of the palace, at the intersection of
rue de Bleury and avenue Viger. At Hydro-Québec, many were pushing to
move back down towards the palace, while others argued that people
should leave so as not to bring repression upon the Innu elders;
meanwhile, the riot police moved down Viger from the east side of the
palace to the west side. Coming from the crowd on Réné-Lévesque, from
the anarchist demo, and elsewhere, most militants who wanted to fight
gravitated towards the intersection of Viger and de Bleury. This
location became a continuous flashpoint.
Demonstrators tried repeatedly to approach the Palais des congrès, while
the police endeavored to prevent this, bloodying the demonstrators in
the process. At first, the riot police made several charges, at one
point forcing the entire crowd down Viger as far west as Square
Victoria. But people kept coming back, and they quickly figured out that
they didn’t have to run together in a straight line down the street, but
could also escape into the open square southwest of the intersection or
to the parking lot on the hill to the northwest. When the police sallied
forth too far, they could be themselves surrounded: a whole group of
riot officers was briefly encircled and pelted with stones before they
used their superior weaponry and armor to force their way out. They
could also be injured: during one police attack, two cops were felled by
stones and had to be carried away, one appearing to be unconscious and
the other suffering from a serious limp. For two hours, people attacked
the Palais, ran away, then attacked again.
To the surprise of those in the streets, during this entire time, the
small platoon of riot police protecting that side of the palace never
once received reinforcements. The police were critically understaffed
that day. Large numbers of officers were trying to monitor events
throughout downtown, but Montréal frequently deploys massive numbers of
riot cops to control riotous situations, even as many as three hundred,
while this seemed to be about fifty or sixty. The obvious reason is that
April 20 came on a Friday, the last day in a long week of manif-actions
and passive demos—the police often did not know which would be which,
and had to prepare for both—and this week came on the heels of several
other weeks like it. The police force as a whole was worn out, not up to
its best game. This is why it was on April 20 that the SQ was first
called into the streets of Montréal: they were needed to relieve the
pressure on the cops in the SPVM.
The events of April 20 showed the growing power of militants in the
streets. Many of them had become experienced street fighters over the
course of a few weeks; many were enraged after continuous police attacks
on their demonstrations and pickets. It was not only pragmatic but also
cathartic to attack these forces in return.
The geography helped, too. The Palais des congrès sits at a lower
elevation than its surroundings, with a low hill on either side to the
north and south. The area is full of tight streets and alleys in which
militants in light clothing are more mobile than police, but also large
open areas where it is logistically impossible to kettle demonstrators.
The parking lot also played an important role: it provided cover from
snipers shooting plastic bullets, a refuge in which to duck away from
police charges, and a vantage point from which to throw stones. It also
appeared that the cops were hesitant to douse the cars parked there in
tear gas. Finally, that area of downtown was full of broken stones and
debris for making barricades.
The confrontation at this intersection lasted for perhaps two hours.
During this time, militants were frequently forced to move from place to
place, but they held one location continuously: the intersection of rues
Saint-Alexandre and de la Gauchetière, just beyond the top of the
parking lot. There were anarchists gathered there at all times. The
police never sallied forth that far, and it was out of the line of sight
from the palace. Whenever street fighters got separated from their
comrades, they could go there to find others they knew.
Even though events felt urgent and fast-paced throughout, in retrospect
it might have been useful for some people to hold an impromptu assembly
at that intersection to determine whether there were things that could
be done to improve the odds for the street fighting. Could supplies have
been obtained from elsewhere? There was time. Could a collective
strategy have been hashed out? Probably not, but some problems could
have been pointed out, such as the fact that many people were throwing
rocks without masks in the full glare of media cameras. Exactly what
should and what should not be communicated in the streets is unclear,
but it’s clear that information multiplies combat effectiveness and that
this “safe zone” might have been a good place to share information.
When people decided to leave the flashpoint at the western end of the
palace, they did so of their own volition, albeit without any
discernable collective process. Participants found themselves gathered
in large numbers at the safe zone after another police attack, certainly
not defeated, but the crowd started cheering and moving towards Square
Victoria. From there, they marched rowdily to rue Saint-Urbain via rue
Saint-Jacques, attacking the Centre du commerce mondiale and other
locations on the way. At the eastern end of the palace, the bulk of
demonstrators joined the “green zone”[2] part of the protest. Counter to
the common conception of a “green zone” group, this one had been
offering sandwiches and backrubs to street fighters that wandered over,
including those in black bloc attire. They did this while making music
and entertaining some would-be seekers of employment—who were locked out
of the Salon Plan Nord for the duration of the chaos—with weird
anti-civilization street theater.
On the eastern side of avenue Viger, at its intersection with rue
Saint-Urbain, a line of unarmored police with nightsticks blocked the
street. As some marchers proceeded north into the Chinese Quarter,
militants attacked the cops with projectiles; others soon joined in. The
cops backed up as militants approached, until they turned and fled west
down the avenue to hide behind the line of riot police running east from
the western flashpoint. Like sharks smelling blood, street fighters gave
chase to the injured officers. This was the first time in the strike
that a large number of police didn’t just retreat slowly from an angry
crowd, but bolted in fear. A certain body of theory suggests that events
like this one are important for the morale of oppressed people; events
shortly after April 20 seem to corroborate this. In the following two
weeks, there were three other extremely confrontational demos: April 25,
May Day, and May 4 in the town of Victoriaville.
The riot cops, unfortunately, attacked vigorously and forced militants
back into the main crowd, marching north through the Chinese Quarter up
to rue Sainte-Catherine.
It is unclear why exactly the march left the area. It is certainly
possible that, by this point, after at least three hours of street
fighting in that vicinity, people were simply bored of that spot and
wanted to go wreak havoc on the rest of downtown. It was around this
time, however, that the Sûreté du Québec finally arrived to relieve the
SPVM of their duties defending the Palais, enabling Montréal’s police
force to regroup and mount a more relentless attack on the demo,
ultimately breaking it up.
Many people had already left at this point, satisfied with what they’d
accomplished, and everyone was fatigued. Before dispersing, the crowd
walked past the headquarters of the SPVM on rue Sainte-Catherine and
found many empty police vehicles in the parking lot; several street
fighters ran into the lot, smashed windows with hammers, dropped
cinderblocks on the windshields, and generally did as much damage as
possible until cops in vans rolled in to attack them.
It rained heavily on the second day of the job fair. Only about 200
people showed up to demonstrate; supposedly a group of them once again
entered the palace’s parking garage and began vandalizing vehicles
parked there. This was the SPVM’s justification for arresting a total of
90 people that day.
Sunday, April 22, the weather was nice again, and the joint
demonstration for Earth Day and the student strike was larger than the
last “national” demonstration on March 22. There were between 250,000
and 300,000 people in the streets.
Many consider the weekend of April 20 to be the moment that the movement
transcended its limits as a student movement, or even an anti-austerity
movement, and blossomed into a genuinely anti-capitalist and
anti-systemic revolt with a more total critique behind it.
Demonstrators’ targets included the Liberal government, but also many
institutions of capitalism, in particular the police. Perhaps this was
because Plan Nord is going to add a tremendous amount of carbon to the
atmosphere—a totalizing issue if there ever was one—and because it is a
manifestation of capitalism in its most basic accumulative form. In any
case, it felt good, and that feeling carried over into the following
weeks.
Throughout the entire course of the strike—in fact, from December 6,
2010, when the student federations walked out of the meeting with the
government and CRÉPUQ—the government had refused to negotiate with
student representatives. Charest and his education minister, Line
Beauchamp, were open to discussing the situation with the presidents of
FÉCQ and FÉUQ, but categorically refused to sit down with CLASSE until
the group denounced violence and reined in its rowdier members. They
singled out comments made by Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, a spokesperson for
CLASSE, in early April for particular ridicule: “We [the executive of
CLASSE] have no mandate from our members to advocate violence or to
denounce it.”
April 22, on the second day of their weekend congress, CLASSE approved a
motion that was reported in the media as a denunciation of violence,
sometimes as a denunciation of “physical violence.” It was not, in fact,
a categorical denunciation of everything that could be construed as
violence; it was only a rejection of violence against people, and even
here, there was a caveat allowing for self-defense. The membership would
not have countenanced any stronger, but CLASSE’s media committee spun
the statement in a positive way and the media accepted it. This was
enough for the government to announce on Monday, April 23, that it would
sit down with CLASSE at the negotiating table, on one condition: no
disruptive demonstrations during the negotiating period.
The CLASSE executive body agreed to this condition. This was both
controversial and complicated. It just so happened that CLASSE had no
actions planned for the next two days anyway, so it was possible that
the exec was only committing to two days without disruption—although
some believe that, without a mandate to do so, the representatives were
cementing a truce that would have lasted longer. In any case, a
demonstration that had been planned for the night of Tuesday, April 24,
which was not organized by CLASSE itself but by a striking department at
UQĂ€M. It was postponed for one night, supposedly because of bad weather
conditions, even though we’re talking about Québec here—people had been
marching in snowstorms throughout February. Incidentally, the weather
turned out to be great. Many saw this as the CLASSE exec putting
pressure on the department, although it could very well have been an
effort on the part of the department to respect the truce negotiated by
the exec—in which case one wonders why they made up the stupid excuse
about the weather.
Some militants unaffiliated with the striking UQĂ€M department, and
opposed to the truce, organized their own demonstration for the same
time and place. It gathered at Berri Square and took off into the
streets. Although only a small part of the crowd engaged in
confrontation, there was practically no one present who wanted to
interfere with others’ efforts to throw rocks at the police or smash the
windows of banks. Not much happened, and the police eventually dispersed
the crowd, making five arrests. It was enough, however, for Beauchamp to
kick CLASSE out of the negotiations on Wednesday morning. The CLASSE
exec insisted that it hadn’t endorsed the demo, that the demo had been
organized against its wishes, but Beauchamp accused CLASSE of playing
both sides, noting that the Facebook event for the demo was linked from
the coalition’s website. In solidarity with CLASSE’s chastised
spokespeople, the leaders of FÉCQ and FÉUQ walked out of the
negotiations as well.
That night, April 25, the postponed demo—billed as an OSTIE DE GROSSE
MANIF DE SOIR, which loses much of its charm when translated to “big
fucking night demo”—was much bigger and involved a much wider variety of
people, including a significant number of people more politically
aligned with FÉCQ and FÉUQ, few of whom had participated in CLASSE’s
campaign of economic disruption. It’s conceivable that many of them had
only been in the streets in the large passive demonstrations organized
by the reformist federations; when large numbers of people began
fighting the police, it could very well have been the first time they
had ever been around that sort of thing.
When the crowd gathered at Berri Square that night, many different
groups bloc’ed up in different parts of the square, announcing their
presence to each other using white bike lights. For whatever reason,
they had chosen not to gather at the square together, but to keep their
distance from one another; this is the only time this happened during
the strike. When the crowd started moving, there was a group of about
seventy street fighters at the front of the demo and another group of
about fifty around the middle; the latter group was unaware of the first
group until it passed through areas that had sustained considerable
property destruction. Both groups began collecting stones and chunks of
pavement early on, saving them in bags. Over the course of the night,
police were consistently attacked and forced to retreat under a hail of
stones. At one point, a police substation was attacked for several
minutes; one media source reported that police officers were fearful
during the attack that a Molotov cocktail might be thrown in. The riot
lasted three hours.
“The SPVM’s Neighborhood Post 21 was the target of casseurs [hooligans
or thugs], with many of its windows broken. The police officers inside
said they had been afraid to see a Molotov cocktail being thrown through
the openings in the windows.”
— an article in La Presse (French)
After April 25, the high point of confrontation for the night demos,
things quickly calmed down as peace police—in French, les paci-flics,
i.e., pacifiste + the word for “cop”—increasingly began attacking street
fighters: sometimes simply trying to dissuade them, other times to
demask them or render them directly into the hands of the authorities.
Although confrontational actions continued throughout the period of
night demonstrations from April 25 to just before the weekend of the
anarchist book fair in May, they became a lot more dangerous. On several
occasions in early May, the SPVM thanked “the collaborators” on its
Twitter account. Anarchists continued to distribute propaganda
critiquing pacifism and arguing for diverse tactics—but generally
speaking, confrontational action died down until May 16.
Emma Strople, one of three people the SPVM accused of committing acts of
mischief during the Grande Mascarade on March 29, had been arrested on
Tuesday, April 24 for allegedly breaching release conditions forbidding
her from participating in any demonstration that was declared an illegal
assembly. She was released on Wednesday morning, with no modifications
to her conditions, after the bail had been paid. That night, she was
arrested a second time.
The SPVM reported to the court that Emma had once again breached her
conditions. In fact, as security camera footage from the métro showed,
she was not present in the demo at the time that the police alleged she
was. Regardless, she ended up spending four nights at the Tanguay Prison
for Women in the northern neighborhood of Ahuntsic; during this time,
about 75 people showed up to participate in a noise demonstration that
marched the sixteen blocks west from Henri-Bourassa métro station to the
prison. When she was released on April 30, her conditions had been
modified: in three days’ time, she would no longer be allowed on the
Island of Montréal for any reason. She had been exiled.
In Québec, the major labor unions continue to observe May Day as
International Workers’ Day; this has generally been to the disadvantage
of those who want to turn May Day into a day of confrontation with
capitalism and the state. For many years, there was no discrete
anti-capitalist demonstration. Instead, anarchists and party communists
participated in the union march, collaborating in their own
marginalization even as they distributed propaganda in hopes of
“changing the consciousness of the workers” or something to that effect.
In 2009, a separate march of mostly Maoists and anarchists was organized
downtown, which traveled to the financial district; there was no
confrontation, because everyone was waiting for someone else to start
things. In 2010, as part of its campaign to mobilize people in Montréal
to participate in the resistance to the G20 summit in Toronto, the
recently reconstituted CLAC organized a demonstration that saw a few
banner drops and a little graffiti. Things heated up in 2011, where
there was more significant confrontation with the police.
In 2012, CLAC endorsed a call from Occupy Oakland for a worldwide
general strike on May Day, and called explicitly for “direct action” as
well as “creative destruction”. Perhaps because CLAC is not an
exclusively anarchist organization, there was also a call for an
anarchist contingent during the demonstration that emphasized
confrontation even more explicitly: “Make sure you know to stay tight
and only throw from the front,” it says, addressing problems that
continue to plague street actions in Montréal. It also called for people
to dress in black.
The demonstration started on the Champ de Mars, just in front of
Montréal City Hall, and quickly moved towards the downtown core. It may
have featured the largest black bloc that has ever taken the streets of
Montréal—perhaps 300 people. Unfortunately, this didn’t result in the
resounding success of April 20.
The police were well-prepared for a confrontation, and acted more
decisively to break up the march than they had at any other point during
the strike. Before any property destruction had taken place, the police
declared the demonstration illegal. A tactical group walking alongside
the middle part of the crowd charged almost immediately after the
declaration, breaking the march in two. At the intersection of rues
University and Sainte-Catherine and nearby, street fighters confronted
the aforementioned riot police and managed to hold their own for some
time.
Soon, however, more police rushed in from the south, and chased the
demonstration for several blocks. They did this by playing a sort of
game of leapfrog. When demonstrators ran from a line of riot police, the
slower police would load into a fleet of riot vans, which would then
drive past another line of riot police already deployed ahead and
quickly unload to chase the anarchists another short distance before
repeating the process.
The relentless chase strategy had three effects:
heroic effort;
which direction to move
alleys to recover their breath.
During the chase, a small group of militants—a fraction of those who
were bloc’ed up—tried to fight the police by running ahead, gathering
projectiles, and then either falling back or waiting a moment so they
could throw what they had on hand before running ahead again. It is
possible that, if more people had attacked the police instead of
running, things could have gone differently. In the event, though, this
was not a very wide effort.
In one of the most memorable images of May Day, 2012, a group of masked
militants taunted police with donuts dangling on strings from sticks.
These cops were in the tactical group that managed to divide the demo so
decisively. The donut gag was funny, and it still is funny. If even a
fraction of the people in the streets that day had been ready to strike
first, however, those cops would have been forced to retreat and we
might have had a resounding victory rather than a cheap laugh.
If the general assemblies that later emerged out of the casserole
demos—discussed below—had existed before May 1, it would have been
interesting if an attempt at a general strike could have been organized,
similar to what took place in Barcelona on March 29, with roving picket
lines in neighborhoods and comprehensive shutdowns of many workplaces.
It’s unfortunate that workplace-oriented groups like Montréal’s
Industrial Workers of the World didn’t take the call seriously despite
inquiries from other anarchists. CLAC, for its part, deemed itself
incapable of organizing a general strike.
2012 marked a further marginalization of the passive union demo. Whereas
the year before, the two demonstrations had consisted of roughly equal
numbers, at least twice as many people attended the anti-capitalist demo
this year.
In discussing May Day, it’s worth noting that the anarchist callout was
controversial among anarchists themselves. Many assessed it as pure
posturing that accomplished nothing except to draw more heat to the May
Day demonstration, thus facilitating its repression. This critique
assumes that, if not for the callout, the numbers of police—or their
preparation, or their willingness to attack the demonstration—would have
been significantly less, while the number of militants properly prepared
for confrontation would not have been significantly less. It is
impossible to know what would have happened, of course, but considering
the recent history of May Day and the troublemaking pedigree of CLAC, it
seems unlikely that the police presence wouldn’t have been overwhelming.
On April 29, the Liberal Party announced that it would hold its annual
conference in the small city of Victoriaville, two hours from Montréal
and an hour and a half from Québec City. The downtown hotel in Montréal
where the event was previously scheduled to take place was too
vulnerable to blockading, and the Liberals hoped that enough distance
from the metropolis would prevent militants from causing too much
trouble. CLASSE, other student associations, and some community
organizations and labor unions swiftly announced that they would send
buses.
The convention was held at the HĂ´tel le Victorin on the northwestern
outskirts of town, in an area of empty parking lots and fields
punctuated by low-lying buildings. Victo doesn’t have its own municipal
police department; consequently, defense was to be provided by the SQ, a
force that is much less experienced with “crowd control” situations and
less sophisticated in its approach to street fighters than the SPVM.
With the adversary and the terrain so different, the Battle of Victo
played out differently than anything that happened in Montréal.
On the strikers’ part, some basic things weren’t organized at all, which
might have been less problematic if it had been communicated clearly in
advance. Many people were under the impression that CLASSE was
organizing a genuine convergence in Victo, for example, with a place
where people could spend the night for the duration of the convention.
It is unclear if anyone had any serious intention to do this. In theory,
the Cégep de Victoriaville—at which the student association had rejected
the tactic of a student strike, if not necessarily the movement’s
goals—could have been used for this purpose with the collaboration of
pro-strike students there. Ironically, the Liberals saw to it that the
school was closed on Friday, May 4, with the school administrators
implying that vandalism might take place on the campus.
The buses unloaded in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart about twenty
minutes’ walk south of the Victorin. When enough people had gathered,
they marched straight up the street and confronted the suited-up SQ
police stationed behind low metal barricades just in front of the
southernmost entrance of the hotel. Quickly, the police found themselves
under a barrage consisting mostly of empty plastic water bottles but
also a few smoke bombs, while all around them, people shook the
barricades and started to dismantle them. It wouldn’t have been
particularly difficult to jump over the barricades and rush the visibly
frightened police, and probably even breach the hotel—but people were
hesitant to go on the offensive too quickly and the police were allowed
to don gas masks in front of the crowd without concealing what they were
doing.
Once again, militants were hesitant to attack first. The results were
predictable.
Soon, tear gas canisters were launched and many people were forced to
retreat from the hotel. This environment was unlike anything street
fighters had known in Montréal. Much of the area was completely open:
fields, parking lots, and empty roads, the locals knowing better than to
approach the warzone. There was a residential subdivision nearby and
many dug-up plots of land, providing more stones than could be found on
the most crumbling downtown city street. Four different lines of
confrontation appeared, with street fighters hailing projectiles upon
the police at each, taking the green recycling bins from people’s homes
to shield themselves from rubber bullets while the residents looked on.
The air was thick with a gas much stronger than anything that had been
used in Montréal, and it was difficult for those who hadn’t come
prepared with gas masks or at least vinegar-soaked bandanas and goggles
to stay close to the action. People did all the same.
Many reported afterwards that Victo was the most intense experience they
had ever had. The number of injuries was staggering. One militant,
Maxence Valade, became the second person to lose an eye, and another,
Alex Allard, nearly died from injuries to his head. At least three other
people were carried away in stretchers. The SQ, instilled since the
1970s with the idea that they might one day become the military force of
an independent Québec, wear army-green uniforms reminiscent of Soviet
soldiers and utilize armored personnel carriers. For the duration of the
conflict, their helicopter flew terrifyingly low to the ground,
presumably to intimidate.
An SQ riot bus that was surrounded by the crowd for quite some time
wasn’t given any attention by street fighters until late in the evening.
At that point, people started smashing its windows and spray painting
it, prompting a lone officer to tackle one vandal in an attempted
arrest. Other militants responded and the officer was beaten until he
released his captive. A patrol car lurking behind the demonstration
tried to intervene, but fighters surrounded it and smashed its windows
at close range with the officers inside; they retreated, abandoning
their rescue attempt. It took a charge involving a large number of riot
cops to save the lone officer.
There were only four arrests during the day. After it became clear that
the majority of militants were no longer interested in being bombarded
with projectiles, the crowd retreated to the Wal-Mart parking lot and
mostly loaded into buses without incident. Three buses that left later
than the others were stopped by the SQ on the way out of town, and one
of these—the bus rented by organizers based at McGill and Concordia—was
ordered to return to the SQ station in Victo so the teargas-soaked
passengers could be properly processed and charged. This was the only
bus with criminal charges, though there was apparently a plan to
intercept the other buses when they returned to Montréal; fortunately,
the sympathetic bus drivers dropped people off at different locations
than originally planned. At the station in Victo, people on the
McGill/Concordia bus were kept in the vehicle for ten hours, under the
watch of armed SQ guards that patrolled the aisle and prevented people
from speaking.
Although the Liberal Party convention was delayed, the event was not
canceled. In fact, since everyone had left town at the end of May 4 and
no one was interested in spending another second there, the rest of the
convention saw no confrontational protest whatsoever, only colorful
signs. For those interested in direct action, this could be seen in a
positive light. The point wasn’t simply to protest what the Liberals
were doing, but to breach the HĂ´tel le Victorin and physically engage
with some of the people who are fucking us over in concrete ways. People
made a strong effort to do so on Friday, May 4, and were no longer
capable of doing it afterwards, going home to lick their wounds—a much
better use of time than hanging around ineffectually.
Another lesson of the Battle of Victo: as long as militant resistance
remains concentrated in Montréal, it is doomed to failure. In this
particular city, it is normalized, to the point that it can be factored
into the authorities’ strategic calculations. Obviously, they intend to
put an end to it eventually, but if it is contained here in the
meantime, it is much easier to control. Whenever there are attempts to
push the boundaries in other parts of the Québécois territory, there is
hell to pay. This was shown not only on May 4, but also in the brutal
approach that the SQ used against hard pickets of schools in the
Outaouais and the suburbs north of Montréal. Despite this, the capacity
to project our power into other regions of the province, and above all
to foster cultures of resistance there, is critical for the future.
On March 30, as a result of legal action by anti-strike students at a
small cégep in the north of the province, Québec’s courts had issued an
injunction forbidding any demonstrator from doing anything to block a
student of that school from going to class. In the following six weeks,
at least 38 more injunctions were issued to similar effect. The pickets
continued anyway. Notably in Gatineau and Sainte-Therèse, both outside
Montréal, and at the Collège de Rosemont within the city, riot police
were called in to break the pickets.
In Montréal, where the fighting spirit was the strongest, the
injunctions proved impossible to enforce; there were simply not enough
police to go to the schools and keep them open. Perhaps the most notable
effort to defy an injunction had taken place on the campus of the elite
Université de Montréal on April 12. Hundreds of militants broke into two
buildings; thousands cheered as a battering ram was used in one of them.
Participants painted graffiti and destroyed computer systems, snipping
fiberoptic cables in over twenty classrooms.
With the second breakdown of negotiations between the representatives of
the government and the student federations on May 10, it is suspected
that Charest and his cabinet began to consider an emergency law to
restore order and cripple the movement. A well-publicized incident at
UQĂ€M on Wednesday, May 16, is supposedly what pushed the premier over
the edge: unable to prevent students from entering the building, one
hundred masked militants instead roamed through the campus, entering
classrooms and making efforts to prevent classes from taking place,
ranging from screaming “Scab!” to physically removing people from
classes. Such things had been happening at UQĂ€M for months, but with the
help of the media, the government seized on the events of Wednesday
morning to announce his party’s crisis-ending loi spéciale on Wednesday
afternoon. It was debated in the National Assembly the next day. By
midnight on Friday, May 18, it was law.
Charest’s law forbids any kind of demonstration from taking place within
a certain distance of a university or cégep campus, and introduces heavy
fines for anyone who does anything to prevent students from going to
classes: from $1000 to $5000 for individuals, from $7000 to $35,000 for
student leaders or union leaders, from $25,000 to $125,000 per day for
student or labor organizations. It demands that any demonstration of
more than fifty people submit an itinerary to a police agency at least
eight hours before it begins, and grants the police the power to modify
the route however they see fit to prevent threats to “the order and
security of the public.” For the 11 universities and 14 cégeps that were
on strike when the bill was passed, it suspended classes for winter
semester, stipulating that those classes would be completed in August
and September in a special session. The law is set to expire on July 1,
2013, although it is possible that it could be renewed or that part or
all of it might become permanent.
Coming into effect at the same time was the new version of Montréal’s
bylaw P–6, explained below. Despite the fact that, unlike the Special
Law, mayor Gérald Tremblay’s law has been used against demonstrators in
Montréal consistently since May 19, and despite the fact that these
updates to the pre-existing law are permanent, bylaw P–6 has gotten a
fraction of the attention from the mainstream media, the revolutionary
and reformist left, and anarchists. To be clear, every single demo that
has so far taken the streets chanting ON S’EN CÂLISSE LA LOI
SPÉCIALE!—roughly, “the special law, we don’t give a fuck about it!”—has
been declared illegal under the municipal law rather than the provincial
law.
Bylaw P–6 was first introduced in 2001, and it stipulates that any
demonstration can be declared illegal at the discretion of the police if
they have reasonable grounds to believe that it will cause “a commotion”
or otherwise endanger public order. It also forbids anyone from bringing
blunt objects to demos, naming baseball bats as well as hockey
sticks—famously used during the 2001 Québec City anti-FTAA
demonstrations to knock tear gas canisters back at police. The first
fine under this bylaw originally ranged from $100 to $300, with $300 to
$500 for the second offense and $500 to $1000 for every subsequent
offense. The new version of the law increases the fines significantly,
such that the first offense is now $500 to $1000, increasing by the
third and subsequent offenses to as much as $3000. Specifically naming
scarves, masks, and hoods, it forbids anyone from concealing their face
“without a reasonable motive.” Like the Special Law, it necessitates
total collaboration with the police, demanding that the complete routes
of demonstrations be disclosed to them in advance.
On the evening of May 16, the largest noise demo that has ever occurred
in Montréal took place at the Tanguay Prison for Women, in solidarity
with the women being held there for their alleged role in the
smoke-bombing incident on May 10, mentioned above, as well as everyone
else facing judicial repression for the events of the strike. After a
massive display of fireworks, calling back and forth with the prisoners
for ten minutes, and the release of a smoke bomb underneath an SQ
vehicle—as it was the provincial police who were overseeing the
event—well over 100 demonstrators returned to Henri-Bourassa métro
station, flowed past the cops inside, hopped the turnstiles, and caught
a southbound train leaving at the most serendipitous moment possible. A
chant of “Berri! Berri! Berri!” started, and people got off at
Berri-UQĂ€M station, joined the night demo, and participated in what was
the first confrontational demo of that type in a few weeks. It was
dispersed after forty-five minutes, several banks having been damaged.
It was Charest’s announcement of the Special Law on May 16 that heated
up the night demos again, not the consistent effort by a small group of
anti-capitalists associated with CLAC to oppose Tremblay’s mask law with
explicitly pro-mask demos. This shows the problematic consequences of
the popular focus on particular politicians as bogeymen. Since at least
2009, Tremblay had been trying to criminalize masks in order to tame the
March 15 demonstrations, among others; now, he has used the opportunity
of the strike to accomplish that and advance his project of turning
Montréal into a respectable city for bourgeois colonizers and
transnational capital. Montréal’s city council, though, draws less
attention than the ideologically heated National Assembly, nor is the
mayor as polarizing a political figure.
Laws themselves can also serve as bogeymen, distracting from the root of
the issue. There is a huge tide of popular resentment against the
Special Law, which is widely deemed to contravene the Charter of Rights
and Freedoms and which is currently being challenged in court. If that
law was actually being used, this might have the effect of arousing more
anger in the population. On the other hand, there is no controversy
around bylaw P–6, even though it has been used to repress the movement.
In fact, whenever there is outcry on Twitter that “this demo was
declared illegal under that fascist special law!” the SPVM has been able
to pacify the tweeting intelligentsia with a simple correction: “No,
actually, that law was not used. Instead, the demonstration was declared
illegal under a municipal bylaw.” It shouldn’t matter under which
particular code it was made illegal, but somehow the unwillingness of
the police to use the controversial law is seen as a moral victory for
those who support the students, even if the same purpose is accomplished
with other laws. Anarchists should take note of how many militants have
failed to address law itself as a weapon that can be employed against
us.
The night demo of Wednesday, May 16 was the most confrontational in some
time, with pacifist opposition to confrontational tactics much more
cowed than had become usual. People were angry. Over the next few days,
anarchists from across the continent arrived for the Montréal Anarchist
Bookfair, probably the largest annual gathering of anarchists in the
territory of the Canadian state. It’s tempting to assume that this
influx of anarchists explains why the nights of the bookfair weekend
were particularly crazy. In fact, that’s unlikely. For many in Québec,
especially in Montréal, Charest’s Special Law represented a shift into
fascism that they felt it urgent to oppose.
The demonstration on Friday night, May 18, was the third time that
Molotov cocktails were deployed against police in the course of the
strike. Two were thrown at police at the corner of boulevards
Réné-Lévesque and Saint-Laurent, failing to hit their targets. At that
point, the police declared the demonstration illegal and began employing
tear gas and flashbang grenades; they only made four arrests during the
night, however. The demonstration lasted until 3:30 am, with several
groups roaming around downtown as well as the Plateau neighborhood a bit
further to the north. After the initial clash, much of the night was
passive, but not entirely: in the Plateau, banks and other corporate
sites were attacked.
Saturday night was marked by a lot of people, particularly bar patrons,
joining demonstrators in the streets, as well as a few instances of
particularly random and unintelligent violence from the police. On rue
Saint-Denis, as they were charging a group of militants, they began
beating an older man who could not run fast enough. On the same street,
they invaded the patio of Le Saint-Bock, a pub. Some of the patrons on
the patio were wearing red squares—hardly uncommon in any crowd in
Montréal these days—and a few of them may have berated the police who
were attacking militants a few meters away.
There were considerable exchanges of projectiles between police and
demonstrators at the gates of McGill University, then at the
intersection of rue Ontario and boulevard Saint-Laurent. At the second
confrontation, the militants were blocked from continuing south by the
police line, but they had an uphill advantage and hailed enormous
quantities of rocks on the police. If more riot police hadn’t started
moving east along rue Sherbrooke—their aim being to block Saint-Laurent
from the north and kettle the demonstration—the demonstrators might well
have broken the line on Ontario.
It was only after this confrontation that the demonstration continued
east to rue Saint-Denis, where it encountered welcoming crowds of bar
patrons. A mix of hardcore militants and drunk people looking for
excitement built an enormous bonfire at the intersection of Saint-Denis
and Ontario. When the police moved in, people retreated to Berri Square
nearby, but were quickly dispersed as the police used an overwhelming
amount of tear gas. A total of 69 people were arrested.
On Sunday night, the police were determined to arrest a lot of people;
there were 308 arrests in total. The demonstration was marked by intense
confrontation from the very start, with lots of militants taking the
initiative to break up concrete and rain stones on the police. The SPVM
responded by charging the demo repeatedly in order to split it into
smaller, more manageable groups. In one instance, a large number of
street fighters found themselves kettled. Rather than submit to arrest,
they counted down and charged, breaking out of the kettle. Several of
them were injured by police batons, but everyone got away.
Unfortunately, many others didn’t, including many anarchists visiting
from other cities.
These were the nights when many out-of-town anarchists experienced the
events unfolding in Montréal for themselves. This was the time when the
strike was perhaps the most intoxicating and beautiful, too. The number
of people in the streets, the ferocity with which they fought even in
the face of the emboldened and intensely brutal SPVM, the knowledge that
some people broke through a police kettle and escaped what would have
otherwise been a mass arrest… Notwithstanding how many people were
arrested and brutalized, these made for some good stories when visitors
returned to their hometowns.
In the following days, street demonstrations became more passive, but
that didn’t stop the SPVM from attacking, harassing, and arresting
people. Monday night’s passive demonstration saw a brief reprieve from
the chaos, perhaps because both militants and the cops were exhausted
from the weekend. That demo did little more than walk to Charest’s
mansion in the rich neighborhood of Westmount, stand in front of it, and
chant.
Tuesday, May 22, was the day for the “national” demonstration in
Montréal and the 100^(th) day since the strike had begun. An enormous
mass thronged the streets—boosted by busloads of militants arriving from
Toronto and other cities in Ontario to express solidarity, but above all
by the large numbers of people who opposed the Special Law more than
they opposed tuition hikes. At the beginning of the demonstration, FÉCQ
president LĂ©o Bureau-Blouin called for everyone to follow the route that
the organizers had divulged to the SPVM so that people could protest “in
all safety.” Both CLASSE’s contingent and an autonomously organized
anti-capitalist contingent refused to obey.
The demo, estimated at 400,000, was impossible to control, even with
significant numbers of peace police and (presumably) undercover SPVM
officers. Taking advantage of this, street fighters thoroughly destroyed
a section of downtown in broad daylight: banks and isolated police
vehicles were attacked, and neither marshals nor cops could do anything
to interfere. This was the only significant moment of violence by
militants on Tuesday. Later on, when CLASSE’s contingent defied the
Special Law by leaving the preordained route and attempting to meet up
with the night demonstration that was trying to leave from Berri Square
at the same time, the atmosphere was not confrontational so much as
disobedient. Both the night demo and the CLASSE march were brutally
suppressed, with the SPVM reporting 113 arrests that night.
The night of Wednesday, May 23, saw the single largest number of arrests
of any night in the strike: 506 people altogether, including 30 children
who had been banging pots and pans with their parents. This was an
almost completely passive demonstration—only a small number of people
were wearing hoods or masks, and there were virtually no attempts to
fight back despite numerous provocations from the police—but it defied
the new restrictions on routes for demonstrations. Casserole demos
converged on downtown from the neighborhoods; there were people all over
the city. The police, emboldened by new laws and angry about recent
events, cracked down hard. This episode puts the lie to the claim that
“thugs always get caught.”
There has been a certain amount of debate among anarchists about how
much to focus on legal issues. We don’t respect the law in any case,
right? Yet it’s obvious that, since May 19, the confrontational
character of the strike has become much less evident. The law affects
us. Even more, it affects those who have yet to reject the law on
principle, whose participation in the movement and presence on the
streets have been so important in creating this moment.
This is a problem, and the most obvious answer to it is propaganda.
Anarchists need to present our ideas in opposition to the idea of the
law. To start with, if people in Québec want to talk about fascism—and
indeed, they’re fixated on using that particular term, fascism, to the
point that it’s useless to try to persuade them to use more precise
language—we should shift the object of popular concern away from
specific laws or tyrants. Instead, we should highlight the fact that
legal codes are weapons to destroy, and that like other weapons, they
occasionally need upgrading. We should point out that, in many different
places and contexts, emergency laws have outlived the emergency.
Finally, there’s the tendency to focus on the Special Law rather than
bylaw P–6. If we are going to focus on specific laws, we should at least
direct attention to the law that is actually being used. The provincial
Special Law faces enormous public opposition as well as a legal
challenge. Bylaw P–6, on the other hand, is invisible and seemingly
benign. Anarchists need to peel back this veneer by loudly defending the
practice of wearing masks while denouncing any law, government, or
generalized sociopolitical system that seeks to suppress it.
Direct-action-oriented anarchists are more likely to oppose the law in
the streets than in the courts, but the usefulness of attacking it on
other fronts is undeniable.
It should be clear by now that the movement is not homogenous, and that
many questions—about strategy, about ethics, about what is occurring in
the first place—have been divisive. But generally speaking, when it
comes to issues with which everyone in the movement has to grapple,
anarchists tend to find ourselves on the same side. No hesitation about
the first-person plural this time: we have rejected the strategy of
pacifism; we have rejected “political solutions” and appeals to
nationalism; we insist on autonomy in choice of action and solidarity
with those accused of using more intense tactics, such as the defendants
charged in the smoke-bombing case. There is at least one exception to
this rule, however: we do not agree about the casseroles. There is no
consensus about how the emergence of the casseroles helped or hindered
the fight against capitalism.
Anarchists who view them positively are likely to emphasize that the
casseroles are the most socially visible manifestation of popular rage
against Charest’s and Tremblay’s anti-dissent laws. They have enabled
the movement to spread into areas and demographics it would not have
taken root in otherwise; they’ve also been replicated in cities across
Canada and the world as a gesture of solidarity. They gave rise to
popular neighborhood assemblies that bear within them the seed of a
different way of making collective decisions. In some places, these
assemblies have taken explicitly anti-capitalist positions, and they
could initiate struggles against the specific forms that capital takes
locally.
Anarchists who view them negatively are likely to emphasize that they
emerged precisely when it was most critical for the night demonstrations
downtown to maintain numbers. The situation coming out of the bookfair
weekend seemed ready to explode, but it didn’t—in part because of the
casseroles that, according to some of those who initially spread the
idea, were explicitly intended to “lower tensions” and “calm things
down.”
Clearly, there were worthwhile things about the casserole demos,
particularly the ones that took place in the neighborhoods early on.
They brought the strike to many parts of the city all at once, and
because they involved large numbers of people and were dispersed
geographically, they were difficult to police or control. They provided
an accessible means for many people to participate in the movement in
some capacity; otherwise, many people might only have read about it in
the paper or heard stories from their kids, grandchildren, or older
siblings. The original idea was that on May 21, people should bang pots
on their front steps, on their balcony, or from their window at
precisely 8 pm for fifteen minutes: no more, no less. People seized on
the idea and transcended the limits of its original conception as a
stationary protest; by the night of Wednesday, May 23, there were roving
casserole demos in the streets of Verdun, Villeray, Centre-Sud,
Hochelaga, Ville Saint-Laurent, the Plateau, Saint-Henri, and elsewhere.
Many of these started in their neighborhoods but eventually made their
way to the downtown core, making the situation there all the more
uncontrollable.
The casseroles also launched neighborhood assemblies, which offer the
potential for people to make decisions with their neighbors that change
the character of the place they live. These are still very young; it
should be no surprise if some of them die out or turn into even more
farcical repetitions of the worst aspects of Occupy Montréal—though many
assemblies have taken measures to avoid its shortcomings. In many
neighborhoods, anarchists have put a lot of energy into their local
assemblies, which have become explicitly anti-capitalist projects
featuring committees dedicated to continuing the strike via direct
action. This bodes well for the start of the special semester on August
13.
So the casserole demos made the movement more visible and accessible to
people who live in the neighborhoods. What the casseroles did downtown
is a different matter. Essentially, they pacified the night demos for a
second time. The night demos had emerged in late April as a raucous and
uncontrollable response to the truce agreed upon by student leaders
without the consent of the membership; it took nearly a week for the
police and their de facto allies, the pacifist vigilantes, to impose a
certain amount of order upon them. The weekend of the bookfair,
militants overturned that order with pitched street battles more
ferocious than the night demos of late April. The passing of the new
laws, widely described as fascist by movement participants of all
political stripes, prevented those who wanted to obstruct physical
confrontation with the police from justifying their behavior with
pacifist dictums. It is widely understood in Québec that fascism must be
fought, perhaps even by violent means. It would have been useless for
those seeking to calm things down to argue that the new laws were not
fascist, because—given the hyperbolic political discourse popular in
Québec—fascism isn’t identified by objective criteria so much as by
popular rhetoric. The partisans of pacification needed a new strategy.
This, of course, was the casserole. The word is a francization of the
Spanish word cacerolazo, which means roughly “the hitting of a stew pot”
and refers to a rebel tradition that first became widespread during the
dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile during the 1980s—another
situation which many in Québec, but also many people elsewhere, would
characterize as fascist. At a time when other forms of resistance could
result in the death or torture of militants or their family members, the
cacerolazo represented a relatively safe way for people to build a
visible culture of opposition in Chile—though still one for which they
could be punished severely.
The situation in Québec today cannot be compared to Pinochet’s regime.
No doubt things are bad and getting worse, but people here do not face
the risk of extrajudicial execution for engaging in militant
confrontations with the police, nor do they have to worry about their
relatives being tortured in government jails. Some would like to pretend
that the casserole demos have replaced confrontational night demos as
the favored tactic of the movement because the situation no longer
allows anything else, but that is simply false. They have emerged
because certain people want this kind of demo instead of another kind of
demo. That is to say, these people want to express dissent with less
risk to themselves.
When downtown Montréal is seized by street fighting, signals of disorder
appear. Graffiti, broken windows, open fire hydrants, sirens, riot
police… All of these make visible the social war that is always taking
place in this territory, and they interrupt the aura of stability
Montréal needs to attract foreign investment, tourists, and
international business conferences. While loud demos that block traffic
and adorn the streets with red square stickers can also do that, it is
clear that they do it less; they are also less capable of holding their
ground when the police want to keep them out of certain areas of the
city, and they are easier to recuperate into the business-friendly image
of a democratic Québec that welcomes dissent. Raymond Bachand, the
finance minister, prefers casseroles to casseurs; he says he welcomed
the new type of demonstration as good news. Perhaps he likes the message
they send: that the movement is tired and no longer capable of the kind
of economic disruption that could force the government to offer
concessions in an effort to restore the social peace.
It should be stressed again that less confrontational demos aren’t
inherently bad. They are more accessible to people with anxiety or
mobility issues, and people who want to bring their kids into the
streets without fear of chemical weapons. Casserole demos that start at
Berri Square and wander around downtown, however, will never be as safe
as demos in the neighborhoods—and the initially large neighborhood
demonstrations shrank significantly once the demos at Berri Square
started drawing large numbers of people who might otherwise have marched
closer to their homes.
In order for the revolt to spread and victory to be achieved, whatever
that looks like, we need diverse tactics that complement one another.
Riots downtown can work well with festive resistance everywhere else[3]
because they make that festive resistance, which also presents demands
contrary to the government’s austerity program, look more palatable. But
the casseroles’ monopolization of the movement has decreased the power
of both the confrontational and the festive forms of resistance.
Knowing that pacifists do their best to impose their preferred tactics
upon every section of the movement, the challenge facing the rest of us
is to find ways to keep different kinds of demonstrations separate,
making it clear which kinds of activities are welcome where. It is
difficult to define green zones and red zones, for example, when demos
are happening every single night, but efforts were being made in
June—when, unfortunately, the chaos in the streets began to die down—to
associate certain nights with certain kinds of demos. In some
neighborhoods, the lack of energy in the nightly casseroles prompted
people to pick specific nights of the week to come out in
force—Wednesday in Saint-Henri, Sunday and Wednesday in Hochelaga—while
ignoring downtown. At the beginning of June, anarchists and others in
CLAC attempted to organize specifically anti-capitalist demonstrations
starting at Berri Square downtown every Saturday night. These were
intended not only to welcome a diversity of tactics but also to exclude
the fleur-de-lysé flag and marginalize those who wave it. Similar
efforts could gain momentum soon.
For anarchists elsewhere, it is important to dispel the myth that simply
banging pots together in the streets can create a revolutionary
situation. This is obvious, yet pot-banging still seems to be the most
common expression of solidarity with the struggle in Montréal. That’s
great, the feedback is appreciated, but we’d much prefer for people to
start pulling things off where they are than fetishizing what is for us,
in a number of ways, a very frustrating element of the struggle. If
you’re going to fetishize anything, why not look at the headlines from a
few weeks before the casseroles, when manif-actions often paralyzed
downtown and drove the police to their wits’ end?
When this report was drafted in the first week of August 2012, the
weekend of the anarchist bookfair was the last period of intense
confrontation. In comparison, the weekend of the Canadian Grand Prix
wasn’t half as crazy, but it was more intense than what happened in the
weeks before or after it. It is difficult, perhaps ludicrous, to compare
different moments in the strike in terms of an undefined intensity, but
let’s do it anyway: the Grand Prix weekend felt more like a microcosm of
the time between the end of March and the beginning of April than the
period from the end of April to the beginning of May.
To be clear, a sustained and militant confrontation with the police
lasting four days, as happened from the afternoon of June 7 to the
evening of June 10, would have been remarkable at any point before the
student strike. For comparison, the period of March 12–15, 2011 was much
less militant and involved fewer participants than the Grand Prix
weekend, but was considered a very hectic time for the anarchists
involved.
In the weeks after the passing of the Special Law and the modification
of bylaw P–6, CLASSE stepped back as the main engine of the movement and
other groups stepped up, including CLAC and some neighborhood
assemblies. During the strike, the activities of CLAC had mostly been
limited to distributing propaganda, organizing demonstrations against
Tremblay’s mask law, and the May Day demonstration. While others
dithered, however, CLAC was the first to take seriously a strategy that
was being considered in various circles of the movement: to disrupt
Montréal’s festival and tourism season. They did this by organizing a
demo with a very confrontational discourse for the opening ceremonies of
the Grand Prix weekend on Thursday, June 7, and called for disruption of
the Grand Prix in general.
The Canadian Grand Prix, part of the Formula One World Championship, is
the biggest tourist event of the summer in Montréal. There is something
to be said about how Bernie Ecclestone, perhaps the most important
person behind the F1 franchise, is a despicable misogynist and racist
whose open sympathies with historical fascist leaders are
well-documented. It’s also worth mentioning that militants in Bahrain
had called for the cancellation of April’s Bahrain Grand Prix, part of
the same franchise, because that event would benefit no one but the
brutal regime in that country. Many militants here have been inspired by
anti-capitalist and libertarian currents in the Arab Spring, and some
are directly connected to struggles in that part of the world, so there
was a strong push to express solidarity with the Bahrainis’ struggle.
The most obvious motivation, however, was that the Grand Prix is a
repulsive spectacle that generates huge profits for rich people in
Québec and elsewhere while providing no benefit to most people here.
In fact, for many who live in Montréal, it is one of the most obnoxious
times of the year. Downtown, bike lanes are closed, there is extra car
traffic, and there are throngs of tourists and salespeople trying to
sell them things. Much of this is concentrated on and around Crescent
Street, where the local business association claims that “Crescent
Street has always had a special connection with racing and cars.” This
is the site of the LG Grand Prix Festival, featuring musical
performances and augmented beer sales for the street’s bars.
The Grand Prix and associated festivities were an obvious target. People
hoped that a successful mobilization would give the struggle the spark
it needed to ignite again and stay fiery all summer.
On the morning of June 7, several people were rounded up in police
raids, including Yalda Machouf-Khadir, an anarchist who is also the
daughter of a prominent left-wing politician. She and her partner—who
are now being charged for crimes at the Université de Montréal on April
12 and at the education minister’s offices the next day—were arrested at
her family’s home and subjected to a great deal of media attention;
journalists had been tipped off, so they were ready to take her picture
as she was taken out the door in handcuffs. The timing of these arrests
was clearly intentional: they were designed to intimidate militants and
discourage large demonstrations later in the day. It is unclear how well
this worked, but the crowd that gathered to participate in the
CLAC-organized demonstration that afternoon was the smallest that had
been seen for such a widely-publicized event in months: only several
hundred people.
The target of CLAC’s demonstration was a rich bastard’s gala being held
in a converted industrial building in the Little Burgundy neighborhood.
It started at the corner of rues des Seigneurs and Notre-Dame, about two
blocks from the target. Starting so close to the event was a strategic
mistake. In what is probably the most open, alley-riddled, and
courtyard-profuse neighborhood in the entire city, the demo gathered at
an intersection that was already blocked to the west and south by riot
police behind metal barricades, making it easy for lines of riot police
to move into the streets leading north and east and create a kettle.
That is exactly what happened fifteen minutes after the demo was set to
begin, at which point it was still immobile because people were still
trickling in. Very few people were arrested, but there was a
considerable pile of black clothing, fireworks, and makeshift weapons
left in the middle of the crowd, all of which were confiscated. All in
all, it took about an hour and a half for the kettled people to be
released.
The autonomous neighborhood assembly of Saint-Henri, the neighborhood
directly west of Little Burgundy, had organized a neighborhood
contingent to march the short distance from Saint-Henri’s eastern limit
to the CLAC-designated meeting point in safer numbers. This contingent,
probably consisting of less than 50 people, gathered on the open grounds
adjacent to the Lionel-Groulx métro station—a large area that, like
Berri Square, would have been very difficult to kettle. If CLAC had
started the demo at this location or some other open area a little
further from the target, it would have been harder for the police to
repress it. It is clear from the amount of material that had to be
abandoned at the intersection of Notre-Dame and des Seigneurs that
people were prepared for a significant confrontation. The beginning of a
demo is always the most vulnerable period, and the SPVM was able to
disarm the crowd because it began in such a vulnerable location. If the
demo had been able to get moving, the open layout of Little Burgundy
would have caused the police significant problems, not necessarily at
the heavily-defended target building but perhaps on the commercial rue
Notre-Dame and certainly downtown once the crowd joined the
demonstrations going on there.
Although several hundred people were kettled, others were not. They
marched around the residential parts of Little Burgundy, disrupting
traffic and occasionally dragging things into the street. At one point,
the crowd surrounded a police cruiser, forcing it to speed away as
quickly as possible, and gave chase. Besides this, little happened until
the kettled crowd had been released and everyone assembled to march
toward Crescent Street downtown. A short battle ensued with the
unarmored police guarding the southern entry to the street where the
greater part of downtown’s official Grand Prix festivities take place,
and people stayed in the streets until midnight, joining up with the
night demo and also the ma-NU-festation—naked demonstration—that
occurred that night.[4] Despite the earlier disarmament of the crowd,
street fighters still had fireworks and boat flares to use against the
police; though they weren’t able to approach Crescent Street again,
disruption and property destruction took place throughout central
downtown.
On Friday night, a demonstration—once again, much smaller than it should
have been—set out from Berri Square and headed west towards Crescent
Street. The SPVM tried to block all entry to a vast section of the
downtown core, preventing the crowd from moving north of boulevard
Réné-Lévesque for a long time. The crowd moved west along Réné-Lévesque;
at rue Guy, the SQ attacked with rubber bullets and flashbang grenades,
forcing people to retreat back east. They finally breached the police
lines at Dorchester Square, a large open area which the police could not
effectively line the entire way; most of the crowd made it through north
to the crowded rue Sainte-Catherine, from which they were able to
proceed west to Crescent Street. At the corner of Crescent and de
Maisonneuve, one street north of Sainte-Catherine, the crowd stood
around chanting slogans and failing to drown out a musical performance
taking place a few feet away before the police pushed them out.
Saturday night, the police were even less successful at preventing
people from penetrating the areas rife with tourists. People
continuously took the streets, pulling fences into them to use as
barricades and generally causing havoc. The police responded with pepper
spray and tear gas, severely affecting many tourists and other
bystanders who were passing through or watching events unfold. It was
militants, of course, who treated these people with the medical supplies
they had on hand. Several stores and police vehicles were attacked,
including two cars parked outside the hotel where the Montréal
conference of the International Economic Forum of the Americas was
scheduled to occur the next day.
Sunday was fairly quiet on the streets, both during the day of passive
protests against the aforementioned conference and at night.
Throughout the weekend, political profiling was the norm in the streets
of Montréal and especially in the métro system, with the SPVM reportedly
on heightened alert for any activity that might have sabotaged the
transportation of people to and from the race site on île
Sainte-Hélène—an island accessible only by bridges and the métro’s
Yellow Line. People wearing red squares were routinely harassed; if they
took the métro line heading to the island, they were sent back to
Berri-UQÀM station. There, they were issued fines for “loitering on the
train,” on the grounds that they went one place and immediately
returned, or else told that they were banned from Berri-UQĂ€M station for
life. One person was reportedly kicked out of the métro system because
she was reading aloud from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four; when
she had the audacity to walk back into the métro, she was arrested and
held without charges for the rest of the day.
In some respects, the mobilization against the Grand Prix was a success.
Dave Stubbs of The Gazette wrote just before the weekend that “for the
first time in memory, this weekend’s 43^(rd) Formula One Canadian Grand
Prix is not expected to be sold out”—and indeed it wasn’t. The economy
was hurt, and the effects have continued over the course of the summer:
in early August, it was reported in all the major newspapers that
Montréal saw significantly fewer tourists in July than it had a year
previous.
Yet the Grand Prix weekend did not succeed at recreating the spring in
the summer. It was a brief period of heightened confrontation in a quiet
phase. Of the many theories as to why momentum has died down, none is
conclusive, and most lack analysis. Even before the strike,
revolutionary activity has tended to die down every summer in Montréal;
perhaps it isn’t surprising that this summer is quieter than the
previous spring, though far wilder than the summer before. That’s no
excuse, especially when our enemies aren’t taking time off from
gathering intelligence, planning, and preparing materially for the
coming confrontations. In light of the conditions being endured by
certain comrades and the very real possibility of prison time, this
situation is even less acceptable. But if the movement isn’t crushed in
one year, the Canadian Grand Prix next summer may be disrupted even more
significantly.
To fill out our chronology of the unrest in Québec, we posed the
following questions to our Montréal correspondent, who answered them
with the assistance of other participants in the Printemps Ă©rable. The
interview concludes with an epilogue bringing the action up to the
minute, when a convergence to block the resumption of the semester is
about to begin.
It’s important to acknowledge that, while the strike has had effects
throughout the province of Québec, our coverage focuses almost entirely
upon events in Montréal. The strike has played out differently in this
city, a multilingual and sprawling metropolis with dozens of overlapping
anarchist scenes and a rich history of anti-capitalist resistance, than
it has in the rest of the province. A large number of anarchists and
other radicals inhabit a limited number of neighborhoods in a ring
around downtown Montréal, making it an important flashpoint for
struggle.
course of the strike? What can anarchists elsewhere in North America
learn from this?
Discussing the tactics that militants have employed in the streets of
Montréal and elsewhere in Québec, and discussing how those tactics have
changed, it is often said that tactics escalated over time, and whenever
things were pacified, the implication is that the tactics were
de-escalated. Entire demonstrations, some of which were extremely large,
are described as confrontational or non-confrontational. This kind of
language is woefully imprecise. These terms can communicate nothing more
than a feeling, an ambience of the moment, leaving the specific
mechanics of what was going on obscure.
This is not to argue that tactics can never be ranked in some kind of
loose conceptual hierarchy, from those that are less effective at
inflicting damage to property or those who defend it—and thus entail
less risk—to those that are more effective and riskier. For example,
from lesser to greater intensity:
That categorization is arbitrary and its variable, intensity, isn’t
rigorously defined, but it can be useful to think about tactics in this
way.
Compared to most North American cities, in Montréal, the use of certain
tactics by street fighters—including anarchists, Maoists, and hooligans
whose politics are less precisely defined—is more normalized, and less
contested. This was true long before the student strike began in
February. Black bloc attire and masks, constructing barricades or simply
tossing traffic cones into the street, throwing rocks and other
projectiles, breaking windows and looting stores… if a Montréal local
hears that a hockey riot took place, she can make an educated guess as
to which of these tactics might have been used before she gets the
details. The same applies to days like March 15 and May 1, to reformist
demos that anarchists deem worth intervening in, and to the spontaneous
demos that have occurred after the police have murdered someone.
It is accurate to say that, over the course of the strike, a significant
number of participants from diverse political backgrounds have escalated
their street tactics to about the same level as those employed by the
aforementioned anarchists, Maoists, and hooligans. Throughout February
and March, as well as earlier demonstrations like the one on November
10, 2011, anarchists employing black bloc tactics or wearing masks were
often the only ones physically confronting the police and destroying the
property of capitalists, putting them at odds with many of the other
people in the street and leaving them isolated. Later on, though the
tension between pacifists and street fighters didn’t disappear, the
street fighters were a lot more numerous and some of them were running
around with giant fleur-de-lysé flags—a sure sign that others besides
“the usual suspects” were taking the fight to the police.
On the other hand, it would be inaccurate to say that anarchists on the
whole have escalated their practice of street fighting. Since the strike
began, anarchists have been doing the same thing they always do, the
difference being that they are doing it more often. Every year in
Montréal there are reformist demos at which anarchists challenge the
organizer-imposed code of conduct, anti-capitalist demos at which the
only ones trying to impose limits on the actions of anarchist street
fighters are the police, and spontaneous manifestations of rage when the
police do something particularly heinous. The strike has caused all
three types of events to happen with a much greater frequency than would
otherwise occur, but the anarchist approach to each has been essentially
the same.
As to being confrontational, it’s also inaccurate to say that the
movement became more confrontational over time, because whether or not
they were successful, there were attempt to blockade bridges and
highways even in February and early March. What happened is that, in
March, the congress of CLASSE made the decision to adopt a more
confrontational strategy as an organization—after some of its
constituent members had already been pursuing such a strategy for weeks.
But this simply meant that there were more resources for those
organizing confrontational actions, which is what led to a greater
frequency and diversity of targets: the port, the government-owned
alcohol distribution corporation’s depot, and eventually downtown
skyscrapers and events like the Salon Plan Nord. On campuses, the
intention of classroom and campus blockades was, from the very beginning
in many places, to let no one in for any reason whatsoever, and people
used whatever tactics were necessary for that purpose.
It’s possible to argue that, gradually over the course of weeks,
militants selected targets and carried out plans more intelligently. But
as to whether they were trying to be more confrontational, things were
simply different at different times and varied between people. The truce
between the CLASSE exec and the government, the loss of Francis
Grenier’s eye, the experience of seeing police run in fear… all of
these, in complex ways, affected the courage and rage of different
participants in the movement and, at certain times, contributed to a
more confrontational attitude.
All that said, there have been some innovations on the streets. For one,
rather than always seeking out rocks and other projectiles, more street
fighters have started to bring tools—hammers in particular—with which to
make the projectiles out of Montréal’s crumbling streets. For another,
street fighters have started counting down aloud in order to coordinate
their efforts, whether before attempting to break out of a kettle—as
succeeded on May 20—or hailing rocks upon police.
Another innovation has been shields, which hadn’t been seen much at
demonstrations for at least several years before November 10, 2011. The
most conventional shield format is to drill together a combination of
plexiglass sheets, foam, cardboard, and chloroplast—the stuff from which
election signs are made. The idea of painting them to look like the
covers of politically solid books, from L’insurrection qui vient to
Nineteen Eighty-Four, came to Montréal from Rome, where student
demonstrators used the tactic during the anti-austerity demonstrations
in late 2010. Although shields hold promise, especially if they could be
made of sturdy, light materials like the shields of the insurgent
strikers in northwestern Spain, their actual use has been hit-or-miss
and it’s questionable how useful they would be in fast-moving demos on
the streets of Montréal. They were useful on the open fields of Victo,
and would have been useful on April 20 if anyone had brought them; on
both those days, both sides were holding fixed positions, and there was
less hand-to-hand combat and more use of rubber and plastic bullets. In
a situation like May Day, on the other hand, it’s unclear how
shields—which are not usually carried by the most muscular people—could
have been useful against unrelenting waves of riot cops. Thus far,
shields have been used primarily for symbolic purposes: they are most
common at passive demos like the one on March 22, perhaps in an effort
to add an air of militancy to the carnival of fleur-de-lysé flags and
papier-mâché puppets.
There have also been interesting developments in how things tend to play
out in the streets. Particularly after the passing of the Special Law,
people in black bloc attire—and what the media has presented as black
bloc attire, i.e., anyone wearing a mask and looking vaguely
“anarchist”—have frequently been approached by others in the streets and
offered praise: “You’re so brave to be doing that kind of thing.” There
is now a much greater degree of solidarity between people who are
dressed to fight and those who aren’t, with several instances of
unmasked people putting themselves at risk in order to pull their street
fighter comrades out of the clutches of the police. There is even a
sports-fan-style chant—ALLEZ LES NOIRS!—which literally (and
atrociously) translates into English as “go blacks!” Crowds of hundreds
have chanted these words at the tops of their lungs.
It is now widely understood that it is a good idea to build barricades
in almost any situation. This has occasionally resulted in very good
barricades consisting of huge amounts of debris, construction material,
loose furniture from nearby cafés, and—more and more frequently—fire.
However, more often, people simply drag an item or two into the street
and no one else joins in. Sometimes, people dump garbage into the
streets not even to find projectiles, but seemingly because they believe
this will magically obstruct police vehicles. Not taking the time to
build effective barricades, or not being able to get others to help you
do this, is one thing. Doing something that has no effect on the police
while making the streets more disgusting for the people who live there,
unnecessarily annoying them in the process—that’s another thing
entirely!
Riot police are able to mount their interventions because they can move
freely through side streets, but a more widespread practice of erecting
strong barricades in a march’s wake would not only interfere with the
normal functioning of capitalism—it would make successful police
interventions much harder to pull off, especially as the demonstration’s
speed increases. Montréal would be a good place to import tactics used
by street fighters in many major European cities: flipped dumpsters and
luxury cars pulled or pushed into the street could obstruct police far
more effectively than a few traffic cones.
There has also been an increased use of Molotov cocktails, nearly
unheard of in street confrontations in North America for a long time.
Their use has been sporadic, and it’s unclear what conclusions can be
drawn here. It’s worth noting, in any case, that some people are now
willing to take things to that level.
At first, very few people wore masks or goggles in the streets, but the
experience of police brutality and CLASSE’s explicit call for direct
action and economic disruption changed that very quickly. What had
always been a small minority became the majority of the participants in
many demos. All it took was a critical mass of people in March and
April, augmented by efforts to vocalize support for normalizing the
practice, whether via the distribution of texts or in CLASSE’s explicit
endorsement of March 29’s Grande Masquerade.
In addition to the explosion in the use of masks and goggles, there has
also been a significant increase in the use of black bloc attire by
other militants at a time when many more experienced street fighters
have begun opting for “light bloc” instead. “Light bloc” means wearing
different clothes than one normally would and concealing one’s face and
other identifying features, but not attempting to achieve a uniform
look, in hopes that individual criminal acts won’t be attributed to
anyone who is caught if arrests take place before the crowd de-blocks.
The reasoning is that light bloc enables street fighters to disappear
into a diverse crowd more effectively than black clothing, keeps street
fighters from appearing as outsiders, and doesn’t attract preemptive
police attention. A lesson that many local anarchists drew from March
12, 2011—when individuals in black bloc attire were targeted and
arrested pre-emptively—is that one should be skeptical of overusing or
fetishizing the black bloc tactic. Many had been skeptical before that,
but afterwards, black blocs practically disappeared until February 2012,
whereas they had previously been a regular feature at anti-capitalist
demos.[5]
Some experienced street fighters in the anarchist milieu have been
critical of the recent propensity to habitually wear black in the
streets, echoing constructive criticisms that followed the attempt at a
general strike in Oakland on November 2, 2011. This habit distinguishes
street fighters from those around them—arguably inhibiting
confrontational behavior from spreading—without significantly improving
anyone’s ability to confront the police, since there is ample evidence
that people can break the law and get away with it whether or not they
wear black. Because street fighters in this city are frequently terrible
at keeping tight, it is not uncommon for isolated individuals wearing
black to be dispersed throughout the crowd, creating an unnecessarily
dangerous situation.
Finally, there still isn’t a lot of communication between fighters in
the street. People stick to their own crews for the most part; different
crews rarely stay tight for very long in a moving demo, and it’s
possible that many fighters don’t know what to say to others they see in
the streets or else they don’t know how to say it. Even though it is
clear that spreading information is important, it is almost certainly
unclear what information needs to be spread at any moment, and the
reality of social awkwardness is undeniable. As in a bar or at a party,
people tend to stick to their friends rather than venturing out to meet
new people.
This is all improving, albeit too slowly. One shift is that now, when
fighters throw rocks at windows when people are on the other side of the
glass, others more often approach them to suggest they use a hammer or
metal garbage bin instead. When some throw from the back, others make a
point of explaining that it’s better to go to the front to ensure that
only the intended damage is done.
There is also increasing debate as to whether the small economic damage
caused by petty property destruction is worth it. Ultimately, of course,
individuals will decide for themselves. This debate echoes the
allegation that some anarchists tend to measure the success of an action
only by counting how many windows were broken, how many police vehicles
were torched, and so on. In any case, by such a standard, the strike has
been an unqualified success. Rather than critique those who might think
this way—or the ones who construct this straw man caricature—we could
just accept that there are valid reasons to applaud damage to the
property of capitalists, and acknowledge that wider and more frequent
use of the tactics that can accomplish this—as seen in Montréal since
February—is a laudable objective.
So now that we’re deep into abstract hypothesizing, how might anarchists
see the kind of mayhem that has recently swept Montréal in their own
cities?
There is no easy answer. In Montréal, certain anarchists have been
pushing for years to make sure that demonstrations transgress the limits
imposed by the state—chiefly by the police—and sometimes also by
organizers, movement politicians, and peace police. It is important to
understand this as an infrastructural project. It involves procuring and
constructing materials, gathering and disseminating information, laying
plans and developing strategic acumen. All this organizing creates and
replicates a tradition: confrontation with the police is now normalized
in Montréal, more so than in most North American cities. But as much
effort, energy, and passion as this has required, the reality is that
Montréal’s political culture, which differs from any neighboring city,
has made this process easier. This culture could not exist if not for
Québec’s unique history over the last fifty years; it cannot simply be
replicated elsewhere.
Wherever a militant political culture comes from, however it is
cultivated, it is important for anarchists to reach out to those who
show themselves willing to fight. In Québec, that includes the students,
specifically the students who have engaged in some way in CLASSE’s
campaign against the government. In many other parts of North America,
it seems that—however politicized they might be—university students on
the whole are rarely willing to translate their politics into any kind
of action that might adversely affect their career prospects or weekend
plans. If anarchists elsewhere—many of whom are students themselves—want
to see their own towns erupt like Montréal has, perhaps they should
start making connections with folks whom it might be a little harder to
relate to, at least initially.
countered it?
The natural response of the state to resistance is repression. In
Québec, there has been resistance at many different levels, and
accordingly repression has taken a variety of forms.
We can designate three categories of repression here: the tactics school
administrators have used to dissuade students from doing anything
inappropriate; the physical violence the SPVM and the SQ have employed
against people in the streets; and the conditions that Québec’s
judiciary, in collaboration with the police and the government, has used
to prevent people from taking action again in the future.
The politics of the administrators vary from school to school. While
many schools—especially the anglophone institutions—are governed by
decided neoliberals, it is possible that some administrations are more
left in some sense of the word. Regardless, on the whole the
administrators have chosen to do their job: to control and suppress any
tendency towards direct action among their students. Some have done this
job less enthusiastically and less effectively, but they are not our
allies—far from it.
Many schools have threatened students with a variety of academic
consequences and other punitive measures, ranging from expulsion to a
certain amount of community service. These measures include failing
kids, expelling them, firing them from university-paid jobs, temporarily
banning them from campus, and fining them—in short, pushing them out, or
else pressuring them to drop out of their own accord. As one of the
goals of the austerity measures is to shrink the postsecondary education
systems that are exerting a net drain on capitalist economies worldwide,
any drop in student enrollment is welcome. The university can inflict
less pain than the courts, but administrators—whose role is comparable
to the role of the police, in that it involves maintaining the normal
functioning of capitalism—have frequently collaborated with police
investigators to bring criminal charges against militants. Their actions
impact people’s family lives, their pocketbooks, and in some cases their
legal status in Canada. Even bearing in mind our critique of schools and
the soulless middle-class lives that academics lead, it should be clear
that it is unacceptable for people to be denied control of their
destinies by these petty authority figures.
Several schools, in particular Concordia and McGill, spent hundreds of
thousands of dollars on extra security to protect their campuses. On the
topic of private security, there was often rhetoric to the effect that
private security are not our enemies the way police are, that a lot of
them are hard-working immigrants just doing their jobs, and picking
fights with them isn’t a good idea. This is ridiculous. Private security
goons have been instrumental in gathering intelligence for
administrations and for the police—and like the police, they frequently
hurt people and get away with it.
Now let’s discuss the repressive tactics of the police.
“We are not for the establishment of a police state; we know that it is
necessary to work with the population and create links. But there are
groups for that. Our job, as police officers, is repression. We do not
need a social worker as a director, we need a general. In the end, the
[SPVM] is a paramilitary organization—let’s not forget it.”
These are the words of Yves Francoeur, the director of Montréal’s police
union, spoken in 2008 during a rebellion in Montréal-Nord. Considering
that worker-employer relations couldn’t be better at the SPVM, one can
imagine that this statement reflects the entire leadership’s
understanding of their role. From the very beginning, and even before
the strike began, Montréal’s police force has approached the student
movement with a counterinsurgency strategy.
According to the conceptual hierarchy of British imperialist Sir Frank
Kitson, an insurgency has three stages. In the first stage, it poses no
real threat and is only potentially insurgent; in the second stage, it
disrupts the economy but is not genuinely threatening; only in the third
stage can it actually threaten the government. The proper approach for a
counterinsurgent force is to comprehensively surveil the movement while
it is in the first stage, and its security practices are not very
developed, in order to prevent it from reaching the second stage, then
destroy it ruthlessly if does reach the second stage, in the hopes of
preventing it from ever threatening the security of the state.
In 2012, the movement advanced from the first stage of Kitson’s
hierarchy to the second stage. The response of the SPVM has been
somewhat more constrained than Kitson deemed appropriate for British
subjects in India, Ireland, and Malaya. This is likely because, unlike
colonial police forces, the police in Montréal often need to get people
in elected office and the judiciary to support their plans—and the
latter are often less strategically astute. Still, from the very
beginning, the objective of the police has been to destroy the power of
the movement. Two of the sources of the movement’s power are, first, the
numbers of people willing to take the streets and, second, the
willingness of many of those people to transgress the limits imposed on
protest. The approach of the police has been to dissuade people from
doing certain things and, knowing the importance of picking battles, to
dissuade people from attending demonstrations where those things happen,
while permitting people to attend more passive demos.
Perhaps, early in the strike, the police were a little bit restrained
when it came to dealing with the students. It’s pointless to make
assumptions about the collective psychology of the SPVM, but they may
have genuinely believed that most students were good citizens and the
unrest was only anarchist infiltrators instigating things. This changed
quickly. The student movement, rather than collaborating with the
police, chose to accommodate troublemakers; very soon, anyone wearing
the red square could be appropriately treated as a troublemaker.
Physical violence, whether tactical or just the kind of generalized
asshole behavior exemplified in this video, is one way to get people off
the streets. Police made heavy use of pepper spray and baton attacks
throughout the strike. Flashbangs were an early addition that quickly
came to characterize almost every demo; plastic and rubber bullets have
been used more sparingly. Over time, the authorities shifted from trying
to contain demos towards actively attacking them via police charges.
Relentless offensives, like the one seen on May Day, have been rarer.
There have been multiple reports of male police molesting female
arrestees. They routinely subjected arrestees to as much pain as
possible; when searching people’s bags, they would open bottles of lemon
juice or water and pour them over the other contents of the bag. Much of
this sort of thing has been caught on tape, but the SPVM has a good PR
position and a cozy relationship with the mainstream media. The fact
that videos exist on YouTube doesn’t mean that anyone is going to see
them, and it seems that only those who already hate the police seek them
out. In any case, there is strong support from a certain portion of the
population for “giving CLASSE-holes what they deserve,” and if the
police get a reputation for being brutal and unpredictable, all the
better for them.
In comparison to the rhetoric coming from Toronto’s police after the G20
summit or the Vancouver police after 2011’s hockey riot, the SPVM’s
spokespeople have rarely said anything to the effect of “we will catch
everyone.” They know that would be an impossible task. Instead, they
imply that they will punish everyone. Everyone who takes to the streets
will suffer for it, one way or another.
In addition, a few people have been specifically targeted for attack,
with the full cooperation of the Crown (the government prosecutors) and
the media.
Emma Strople, who was initially arrested and charged during the Grande
Masquerade on March 29, was specifically targeted during on the nights
of April 24 and April 25, the first two night demos. As the police
arrested her, far from the demo which she had left before it had been
declared an illegal assembly, they explained that they had it out for
her and they were going to make her life hell.
Police raided the homes of Roxanne Bélisle and François-Vivier
Gagnon—two of the four people who turned themselves in to police custody
soon after their faces were published by the media, described by the
police as wanted in connection to the May 10 smoke-bombing incident.
Yalda Machouf-Khadir’s house was also raided. The police conducted a
search for black clothing and items that could link her to the attack on
Line Beauchamp’s office on April 13 or the events at the Université de
Montréal the day before; they ended up mostly confiscating anarchist
literature and anti-police flyers.
On June 11, one militant who had been dealing with problems unrelated to
politics—he had been the first to discover the lifeless body of his
sister after she had committed suicide—was arrested while driving from
Montréal with his family to attend his sister’s funeral in the Saguenay.
It is widely understood that the SQ, who pulled over the car on the
highway about a half-hour’s drive from the island, knew his situation
and pulled him over at the worst possible moment in order to get him to
cooperate, promising that he might still be able to attend the funeral
if he did so.
These are isolated and particularly egregious incidents. More common
behaviors include surveillance of “prominent activists”—although there
are far too many of those for it to be an easy task—the application of
non-association conditions or conditions that restrict a person’s
ability to participate in demonstrations, and a condition that has so
far been applied only to Emma Strople and two others: exile. These three
people are banned from the judicial district of Montréal—corresponding
mostly with the Island of Montréal—for any purpose other than going to
court. All three are people who have lived here for years. And even
before they could get release conditions, however oppressive, many
people have been denied bail and held in jail for periods of up to a few
weeks.
On the streets, the police have deployed undercovers, sometimes in very
large numbers, to facilitate the arrests of troublemakers—and possibly
to gain control of the front of demonstrations to lead them in a
direction that is favorable to police strategy, although this is
difficult to confirm and may just be paranoia on the part of some
militants. There will typically be more than one group of undercovers in
any given demo, with at least one group trying to gather intelligence on
those who are causing trouble and keep track of their location. A
different group will follow them out of the demo, and often a third
group will make the arrests. There is evidently a growing concern on the
part of the SPVM, however, that their undercovers may be recognizable
and could risk serious physical harm in the streets.
Anarchists have responded to all this in a number of ways, if
inadequately. One thing anarchists have done well is to continue the
tradition of prison solidarity noise demos, facilitating many more
people participating in them. On March 29, there was a manif-action that
disrupted the normal proceedings at the Palais de justice (yes, the
Palace of Justice) in solidarity with those facing charges related to
the occupation at CĂ©gep du Vieux. On April 28, there was a solidarity
demonstration of about 75 people at Tanguay Prison for Women, where Emma
Strople was being held at the time; this was probably one of the bigger
noise demos that had happened in Montréal up to that point. On May 16,
there was a larger demonstration, consisting of over 100 people,
expressing solidarity with three of the four people being held there in
relation to the May 10 smoke-bombing—Geneviève Vaillancourt, Vanessa
l’Écuyer, and Roxanne Bélisle—as well as every other victim of police
and judicial repression over the course of the strike.
Despite these efforts, the response by anarchists—and by the movement
overall—has been severely lacking. There has been no consistent campaign
to disseminate information about the ones who currently face the
harshest consequences of anyone in the movement. There has been no
message to the effect that, if the authorities can get away with
persecuting these people, that will empower them to do the same to
everyone else. In addition, there has been very little in the way of
response to those parasites upon the movement who denounce the ones who
take greater risks or who, in positions of power, fail to take any
action in their defense. The only thing that has happened is that, on a
few isolated occasions, some brave people have endeavored to avenge
wounds inflicted on their comrades—as on the night of March 7, when
militants took to the streets to avenge Francis Grenier’s eye in the
first night demo of the strike—and there have been demonstrations at the
courthouse and prison in solidarity with comrades entangled in the
criminal justice system. Both of these are good. Passion is important.
But we need a strategy that can actually support these people, building
a movement around them that will threaten our enemies and dissuade them
from trying to do the same thing to anyone else.
engage with these processes or intervene in them? What has been
anarchist in decision-making throughout the unrest?
Whether they are manifested as the direct democracy of general
assemblies, the representative democracy of certain states, or something
else, democratic ideals are inherently authoritarian and contrary to
projects of liberation. This has been argued effectively elsewhere. One
has to understand this principle to understand anarchist participation
in the strike.
There is a powerful tradition of direct democracy on francophone
campuses. Directly democratic decision-making processes were a key
component of the leftist social movements that challenged the state in
the 1960s and, among other things, forced the creation of the cégep
system and the Université du Québec. In the years after the so-called
Quiet Revolution, the new Québécois welfare state’s political class
successfully bureaucratized labor unions and community-initiated health
clinics; the people in power distrusted the population’s ability to make
decisions for itself. Such bureaucratization was much less successful in
the schools, though, as professors continued to engage in radical
politics and students developed autonomous and militant political
cultures. This was particularly true of schools in and around Montréal.
It is broadly agreed among students that a widely publicized general
assembly is the highest authority regarding what students should do in a
strike, including what can legitimately be done to school buildings. If
a general assembly votes for a strike, every student is obliged to go on
strike. If there is a vote that a building should be occupied, many
consider it indisputable that this should happen. Student associations
and highly partisan professor faculties, as institutions, have
reinforced these ideas with their propaganda and the lessons they teach
in classrooms.
But there is opposition to these ideas from within the student milieu,
most visibly from students who support Charest’s tuition hikes—some of
whom wear a green felt square in protest of the strike. They are roughly
equivalent to Young Conservatives or Young Republicans in other parts of
North America, the sort of people who would argue that “most students
are leftists by default” and that the truly radical position to take on
campus would be to support—wait for it!—fiscal responsibility. Echoing
the Liberal Party leadership, they usually rail against general
assemblies for two reasons: first, because they don’t conduct secret
votes, so anti-strike students are made to feel intimidated for
expressing their unpopular opinions; and second, because GAs have deemed
themselves unaccountable to the rule of law.
Anarchist critiques of general assemblies are currently less
visible—and, frankly, less coherent. Generally speaking, we have been
arguing since at least the beginning of Occupy Montréal, in October
2011, that general assemblies should be spaces for communication and
logistical coordination, not sources of legitimate authority. Some
anarchists, however, often justified their actions during the strike as
being consistent with the democratic decisions of certain student
associations’ GAs. This is particularly common during hard pickets and
other disruptive actions at schools, when anti-strike students and
faculty and pro-strike students and their supporters (including
anarchists) have often found themselves talking or yelling at each
other.
Perhaps some anarchists don’t see the contradiction here, or perhaps
they are using words cynically to achieve an objective, such as
trouncing the green squares in an argument. Either way, this much is
clear: these situations aren’t the easiest venue in which to introduce a
more nuanced anarchist perspective, especially when that perspective is
that those who identify with different interests in the social war are
irreconcilable enemies. But if we are anarchists, and that is what we
really think, then we should say it!
Anarchists who happen to be students have been the ones who engaged most
earnestly in general assemblies, sometimes going so far as to “rock the
vote”—spending precious hours of their lives convincing people to show
up to the GA to vote in a particular way. This might seem an even more
glaring contradiction, but there is a qualitative difference between
this kind of activity and, say, campaigning for a nominally more
left-wing political candidate. Even if anarchists reject everything that
makes them significant, successful strike votes have a social effect
that creates a space where student anarchists can engage in the
struggle—by going to demos, distributing literature, sabotaging public
transportation systems, and so on—rather than worrying about their
studies.
This, at least, was the theory. Yet successful strike votes have not
protected students from collective punishment in the form of a forced
return to class or the threat of losing their semester—something that is
expensive, if nothing else.
Initial anarchist attempts to organize their own GAs, starting in the
few weeks before the strike began, did not work out as intended. The
idea was to bring anarchists from Montréal’s myriad scenes together, to
determine what different people were doing so as to coordinate action in
a strategic way. These were not open assemblies; as a result, they were
poorly attended, few people showed up consistently, and they weren’t
very productive. Most anarchists found that it was more rewarding to
spend their time and energy outside of these assemblies, and it’s hard
to blame them.
It is easy enough to say that if only anarchists had dedicated more
energy to this process of getting to know each other and figuring out
how to cooperate, they could have had a more sustained and measurable
effect on the strike. But the simple fact is that people weren’t ready
to come together at that time, and they still aren’t. Montréal’s street
fighters are segregated into a variety of cliques; putting an end to
this segregation will be a slow process, if it is possible at all.
More recently, since the beginning of the summer, CLAC has attempted to
organize anti-capitalist assemblies as spaces of communication. This is
a good effort; so far it has produced some good results, including more
anti-capitalist contingents at “national” demonstrations and more
anarchist outreach such as the campaign against the elections.
Anarchist intervention in neighborhood assemblies—many of which were
initiated by anarchists—holds the most promise. Every neighborhood
assembly is different, but many of them—including Mile End, Saint-Henri,
Pointe-Saint-Charles, Mile End, Hochelaga, and Villeray—have significant
numbers of anarchists participating. They point to a different type of
organizing, rooted in the immediate and pragmatic aspects of struggle
rather than presumed ideological common ground.
The strike is not over, so this report can have no tidy conclusion.
Starting after the Grand Prix weekend, when we began writing, the
movement’s street presence has died down apart from a few events, but
there have been developments on other fronts. Militants have traveled
far and wide to spread news of the struggle in Québec to other parts of
the continent. CLASSE has organized strategic consultas in just about
every significantly populated place in Québec, as well as several cities
in Ontario. The premier has called an election. Autonomous
anti-capitalists have made their own call: from August 13 to August 17,
they want people to come to Montréal and help to sabotage the start of
the special semester stipulated in the Special Law—as many as ten weeks’
worth of classes crammed into five, and the last chance that the
government is offering to students at striking schools to make up the
semester that was first extended into May because of the strike and then
canceled altogether by decree.
Although it is the official policy of CLASSE to defy the Special
Law—which has yet to be applied to militants as of this writing, despite
being on the books for over two months—it seems that the organization is
keeping back from organizing, demonstrations, or other actions to block
the rentrée, the return to classes. This is sensible for their part, and
probably useful to anyone who will need legal support. CLASSE has a lot
of money, but its access to that money is precarious, and it’s all too
likely that violations of the law would be punished by an asset freeze
or fines imposed by automatic withdrawal. This is not to say CLASSE is
shying away from opposing certain provisions of the new law. It will
continue to organize disruptive demonstrations that do not collaborate
with the police, though it’s likely that these demonstrations will
target institutions other than schools.
Over the summer, CLASSE has focused on bringing its message to the
people of Québec and the students of Ontario. From an anarchist
perspective, this message can be charitably described as inadequate. The
coalition’s new manifesto, “Share Our Future”—the English translation of
which makes the scrappiest Montréal anarchist translation job look
pretty damn good—includes some tokenistic references to marginalized
elements in our society and other issues that anarchists in particular
pushed to include, but that’s it. Worse, instead of sounding passionate,
it sounds like precisely what it is: the product of a consensus process
among people whose politics and strategic approach vary widely.
Consequently, it is a litany of lowest common denominators, not an
inspiring call to arms.
In the meantime, the election is on, and Pauline Marois, leader of the
Parti Québécois, is doing her best to divert the power of the strike
movement into her election campaign. She and her star candidate LĂ©o
Bureau-Blouin, who was president of FÉCQ until June, have kindly asked
the student movement not to cause trouble during the campaign, arguing
that disruption will play into the Liberals’ re-election strategy. And
it probably will, but that doesn’t matter. If the strike movement does
not effectively sabotage the special semester, those who refuse to go to
class will suffer the consequences and the movement’s rapport de force
with whichever government comes to power on September 4 will be
significantly diminished. A large segment of the movement thinks the
most important thing is to drive Charest from power—when, in fact, the
most important thing is for the movement to become confident of its own
power.
Student associations at a few schools have already voted to comply with
the rentrée. Others, like the one at Cégep du Vieux Montréal—which, in
the spring, voted to remain on strike until free education is realized
in Québec—are going to fight it out.
For its part, CLAC has launched an anti-electoral propaganda campaign
and disseminated a call for three demonstrations: one for the day that
the election is announced; one for the leaders’ debate, although
apparently there will be several; and one for the day of the election
itself.
It is unclear what the plan is for the first week of the rentrée, but a
multilingual website has been set up to inform people of the plan as it
is determined. There are three cégeps opening up on August 13 and
fourteen in total for the week, but whether or not the student
associations at each of those schools will have decided to renew their
strike mandates on August 10 is unclear. Another website has been set up
to arrange housing and transportation.
There have been two “national” demonstrations since the Grand Prix, one
on June 22—a small and passive event of less than 100,000 people—and
another on July 22, which was a little bit bigger and a little more
exciting. An anti-capitalist contingent broke off from the main march in
defiance of bylaw P–6 and the Special Law, although the militants
involved did nothing more than disrupt traffic.
On the morning of August 1, Jean Charest announced the 40^(th) Québécois
general election. Incidentally, this was also the night of the 100^(th)
consecutive night demonstration, and both the student federations and
the neighborhood assemblies had planned to give the demonstration more
life than it had possessed in some time. Assemblies based in the
neighborhoods to the north and the east of Berri Square organized
marches that gathered more people as they passed through each
neighborhood until they reached the square.
There were clashes with police. Bank windows were smashed out and
dumpsters dragged into the streets. The police deployed their usual
weapons: batons, pepper spray, flashbang grenades. A total of 15 people
were arrested. The struggle continues.
[1] Citizenists range from affirming the privileges of citizenship to
calling explicitly for non-citizens to be deported—or worse. Citizenism
is structurally similar to white supremacism, and often overlaps with
it; in the Québécois context, citizenists emphasize knowledge of French
and acceptance of “Québécois values.”
[2] At counter-summit convergences in the turn-of-the-millenium
“anti-globalization” era, different demonstrations would often be
classified as green zones, yellow zones, or red zones. Red zones were
the most dangerous areas to demonstrate, often the places where street
fighting would take place. Yellow zones involved less disruptive or
confrontational forms of direct action, and were therefore considered
less dangerous. All effort was made to make green zones “safer spaces”
without significant risk of repression.
[3] The author does not mean to insinuate that riots cannot be festive.
[4] Pro tip: tear gas or pepper spray is very unpleasant on exposed
genitalia.
[5] The only notable exception was the night of June 7, 2011, when a
spontaneous anti-police demonstration took place in response to the
shooting of two people in downtown Montréal the previous night.