activism, Anarchist, communization, General, Police, Prisons, Quebec, repression, Student, Transcribed

STUDENT STRIKE! POPULAR STRUGGLE! / GREVE ETUDIANTE! LUTTE POPULAIRE!

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This week’s show features a conversation with Maria, an American-born anarchist and former University student living in Montreal, Quebec. Maria shares with us the context of the student and social strikes of earlier this year in this conversation.

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Transcription

TFSR: We’re speaking with Maria who is an American living and participating in the student movements and student strikes in Montreal, Canada, here to talk a little bit about what she’s experienced and give a little context for the strikes and maybe where it’s going in the coming year. Thanks a lot for joining us.

Maria: Thanks for having me.

TFSR: You gave a presentation yesterday at Firestorm that was very interesting. You built up a history to explain to the people who were present about why the strikes have looked the way that they have in Canada, and talk about the chronology of events. Do you care to go over that again?

Maria: Sure. So I’m not a historian. This is going to be a little bit brief, or briefer than it could be. A lot of the ways that the student unions work in Quebec were inspired by French student unions, which in turn were inspired by the Spanish Civil War and different assemblies that started happening through that. The way it got to Quebec was because there’s a lot of back and forth between France and Quebec. During the 60s, a lot of French students were trying to organize in a very different way, and it started happening in Quebec as well. One of the things that people grabbed onto in Quebec is something called “syndicalisme de combat,” which is a type of unionism that places action in all its forms, at the center of the practice of the union, and affirms the primacy of mobilization. It’s a unionism that’s very into general strikes, very into the escalation of protest and vary into economic disruption. This was inspired by actions in France in 1968.

Students in Quebec thought of themselves as intellectual workers at the universities. They created student unions that were as combative as workers unions, that organized in a similar way to workers unions, but were operating with students in the university. The way those operations look is that there are general assemblies that happen on a faculty level at each school across the province, in Quebec, and those general assemblies in the faculties make decisions that are relevant to those students. One of the decisions that they can do is, if they are facing a fee increase, if they’re facing other problems that they want to confront, they can decide to go on strike. The different assemblies that are part of the departments at the schools are also federated. So there are three main federations that were a part of the most recent strike in Quebec. One is called FECQ, one is called FEUQ and one is called ASSE. ASSE became a coalition for the strike. They’re most often referred to in the media as CLASSE, which stands for the Coalition Large de l ‘ASSE. ASSE is the most left student federation that exists.

ASSE’s structure is based on these little general assemblies that are happening in the faculties in the schools, which then go to regional councils to make decisions at a regional level if they need to get made. There’s also a provincial council, but the regional council and the provincial council don’t make day to day decisions about the schools. The major decisions end up getting passed back to the general assemblies in each faculty so that students can decide at a faculty level what they want to have happen. The way this works for strikes is that the faculties will start having strike mandates, and once enough faculties have strike mandates the regional councils will start going on strike, and then the larger federations will be on strike. It involves a building block kind of effect where schools will pick a certain date and then start striking from that date, and more and more and more schools will join them, as they have general assemblies to decide on whether or not to strike.

Students have been striking in Quebec since 1968. In 1967 the Quebec government created a CEGEP. Students graduate from high school at age 16, and then they go on to CEGEP. They go to CEGEP from age 16 until age 19. So it’s three years of school, and they’re all free. Essentially, you can get a trade degree from a CEGEP, or you can get some sort of pre-university degree, and you have to have this pre-university degree in order to go on to university in Quebec. Before the 60’s, a lot of francophone students in Quebec were not going to university. The anglophones were way over-represented in the universities, partly because anglophones controlled the economy in Quebec and a lot of the universities were elite, private, Catholic-based universities. So in ’67 the CEGEP system was created, and by ’68 there was a huge demand for francophone students to go to university, but there were no universities for them. So fifteen CEGEPs went on strike through their student unions, and that strike led to the creation of the UQAM, or the Université du Quebec system. I think there’s five or six different universities in the University of Quebec system. There’s one in Montreal, there’s one in Sherbrooke, there’s one in Chicoutimi, there’s one in a bunch of different cities across the province.

So that was their first ever strike. It was really successful. I think it was only for two weeks, or something really short. Ever since ’68 the students have been going on strike every few years, mostly against fee increases. But also in ’74 for instance, they went on strike against aptitude tests, which were being used just for francophones to keep francophones out of certain schools. Then when they won that strike, in ’74 they took on the loans and bursaries program and managed to abolish parental contributions to loans and bursaries. They went on strike again in 1983 in solidarity with a general strike that was happening with workers in Quebec. In 1983 they also won. During that strike, there was a law that was passed that recognized student unions as legal bodies. So there you start having the student unions and their politics getting written into law in Quebec in a way that allows them to function much more legitimately than they could before. There were strikes again in ’86 another strike in ’88 another one in 1990. Another important one was in 1996 which is when tuition was frozen. I don’t know what the number was when tuition was frozen at that time. The most recent large strike was in 2005 and that was the biggest strike, that was the longest strike, and that was the strike that, I would say, led up to the 2012 strike. A lot of students who had been involved in the strike in 2012, were either in CEGEP or in high school in 2005 and were very involved in that strike as well. They remember the different things that happened during that strike, and had been doing a lot during the strike to avoid some of the pitfalls that happened in 2005.

One of the things that happened in 2005 was that there, the government was trying to change the loans and bursary structure again and switch a lot of money that would have been a bursary into a loan. So the difference between a bursary and a loan is that when you get a bursary, you don’t have to pay it back. When you get a loan, you have to pay it back. So people were, of course, outraged that they were going to start having to pay these bursaries back, and decided to go on strike. There was still the same three different student federations representing all the different unions in Quebec, except that CLASSE was called ASSE at the time. When the students were invited to the negotiating table with the government after seven weeks of striking, the ASSE was not invited to those negotiations because they refused to condemn certain tactics that were being used by the strikers at the time.

TFSR: Property destruction is one of the examples that you brought up.

Maria: Yeah, economic disruption is a really huge tactic that gets used widely in the student movement during these strikes. They go on strike in order to carry out economic disruptions. So the ASSE was refusing to condemn those tactics, and the FECQ and FEUQ, decided to go to negotiations without them. They agreed to a deal that ASSE probably wouldn’t have agreed to. I think all they managed to get back was that $103 million switched back from loans to bursaries, but there was a bunch more money that was also supposed to get switched back, or that the students were pushing to switch back that didn’t get switched back. ASSE was counseling its members at the time to refuse to agree to this deal.

So the 2005 strike ends, and in 2007 there was a failed strike where people were trying to protest tuition hikes. The tuition went up between 2007 and 2012 from $1,600 in 2007 to $2,100 in 2012. In 2011 it was announced that the tuition would increase again from $2,100 to $4,000 in the next five years and that is what kicked off the strike that started in February 2012. The hike was announced in March of 2011 and then people immediately started mobilizing for a strike. That looks different in different schools, but it does mean that conversations start to happen at a general assembly level in the different student unions about what they should do about these tuition hikes.

TFSR: So when I think of my time in college and I think about faculty, I think a faculty is necessarily separate from the student body and having distinctive interests in a lot of ways. They may have affinity with students because they work with the students on a regular basis, and they’re the people that draw them in, but the university I went to in California was very administrative, top heavy, and was running itself a lot like a business. It had seven vice presidents, and the student population is maybe 5,000 people. So it seems strange to me when I think of faculty in terms of teachers that have that have life employment at the university, or ones who are trying to get up that ladder to be able to be employees for life, for them to argue on behalf of student strikes around the increase of tuitions against the administration. So what does faculty look like in relation to students and in relation to administration in Quebecois universities?

Maria: In universities in Quebec, the faculty is very supportive for the most part of student strikes. Partly, I think, because a lot of them lived through strikes themselves and understand that their university system was fought for and fought for in a certain way. So I’m not exactly sure why the teachers don’t teach during the strikes, but I suspect it has something to do with union mandates that don’t let you cross a picket line. One of the very important things that happens during strikes in Quebec is that the students picket their schools. They stand outside their classrooms, they talk to their classmates who are maybe trying to go to class and try and convince them not to, the same kind of thing you would see on a union picket line outside a factory or something. So because the teachers want to be in solidarity with the students, I think a lot of their union protocols state that they can’t cross the picket line because it’s dangerous or because they just refuse, because that’s their principles. So they don’t cross the picket line, so there isn’t class at a lot of the universities.

TFSR: So if ASSE and FECQ and FEUQ–I really feel like I’m swearing. But you were saying that those are faculty organizations. So is it that the students present initiatives to the faculty organizations?

Maria: FECQ and FEUQ are student unions. FECQ is one of the more moderate university student unions and FEUQ represents a lot of CEJEPs, and so they’re just the more moderate ones. ASSE represents both universities and CEJEPs. There is a teacher’s union called FNEEQ that’s talking about maybe going on strike in August, but so far, we haven’t seen any teachers unions officially strike in solidarity with the students. A lot of teachers just refused to teach.

TFSR: OK I was just confused, because it felt like what I was hearing was that the faculty was determining what the students move would be, and then the students were going out and operating. But okay, thank you.

Maria: No problem. So one of the biggest actions that kicked off the strike, was a huge demo on November 10th, 2011 which marched through downtown Montreal. There were about 20,000 people at the demo, and it ended with the paint bombing of Jean Charest’s office. So for people who haven’t heard this name before, Jean Charest is the Premier of Quebec. I guess the American equivalent would be a governor. His office is right in downtown Montreal, so people paint bombed his office. Then a bunch of different people occupied the principal’s office at McGill University, which is one of the biggest and most elite anglophone universities in Canada, not just in Quebec. So it’s pretty surprising that there was an occupation at McGill. I’m not that interested in talking about McGill’s role in the strike, because I don’t think as a school, they’re that important. But this occupation was pretty important in terms of mobilizing people around the strike. While they were occupying the principal’s office, riot cops were called onto campus. They tear gassed a bunch of people. Well, not tear gas in Montreal. They don’t use tear gas because it is too heavy and floats down into the metros, so they use pepper spray and CS gas. So they were gassing people and maybe there were two arrests. I don’t think there were that many arrests. The occupiers decided to leave after the cops showed up so it didn’t end that intensely.

The next major event that happened during the strike was on February 17th. There is a CEGEP in downtown Montreal called CEGEP du Vieux Montreal, and they’re one of the most radical CEGEPs in the city. People go to that school knowing that they will go on strike at least once during their tenure at that school. And so when I was in Montreal in 2007, the strike that ended up failing kicked off. The strike started with an occupation of CEGEP du Vieux. And I’m sure that’s true in other years too. So on February 17th, students from CEGEP du Vieux called a strike and occupied their school. Now the difference between CEGEP du Vieux and other CEGEPs, is that CEGEP du Vieux voted to go on unlimited general strike until free tuition. So they have a strike mandate that might last a pretty long time. They’re one of the schools that are still on strike right now. That occupation ended with 37 arrests. There were huge barricades that were built outside of the school, but the cops got in anyways and arrested 37 people. By February 20th, there were 36,000 university and CEGEP students who were on strike.

On the 23rd of February, the Jacques Cartier bridge was blocked. This is something that reoccurs often during the strike. People block bridges as a form of economic disruption while they’re on strike, in order to pressure the province to change according to the demands that they end up having. On March 8th, at a big demo that’s happening in downtown Montreal, I believe someone named Francois Grenier gets hit in the eye by a sound grenade. This is a thing that the Montreal police use to try and disperse people. They shoot them out of guns, I believe. I don’t know how big they are, but they explode in the air above the demos, and you can feel the ground shake under you. They’re really, really loud. So he got hit in the eye with a piece of shrapnel from one of these sound grenades, and lost sight in that eye. That night, there was a spontaneous night demo in response to this action. One thing people are starting to learn at this time, is that the police will respond how they will respond, and even if we stand in the streets with our fingers in the air saying “We’re staying passive, we’re not trying to do anything violent,” which was a big thing at that demo that day, there were people in the streets doing peace signs saying “On reste pacifique” in French. Even though people are doing that, the cops are still using really intense means to try and get people out of the streets. So there was a spontaneous night demo that night in response. It was one of the first night demos of the strike, that becomes another tactic that people use a lot during this strike. On March 15th, there was the annual anti-police brutality demo, which every year in Montreal, descends into a riot involving a whole lot of different people from a whole lot of different places in Montreal, including people from out of town who come into town for the demo. In 2012 it was bigger than it had been in many, many years. I think there were about 4,000 people there. Some fun stories that I heard from that demo were that a bunch of teenagers in masks managed to get the cavalry police to turn and run. I’m not exactly sure what they were doing, but someone was telling me later about seeing the horses turn around and run, and that was pretty inspiring.

On March 20th, the Champlain bridge got blocked. Montreal is an island. There’s a whole bunch of different bridges onto the island. This is another one of those bridges. On March 22nd 250,000 people take to the streets in downtown Montreal on the one month anniversary of the strike, and that demo felt like a parade. One of the things that happened during that demo that got talked about a lot was that there was a small group of people in black face pulling a huge papier-mache head of Jean Charest, but they had anglicized his name. I forget what it was. It was like John Chabot or something. It wasn’t a French name anymore. That points to an interesting historical thing about Quebec, where Quebecois people are both colonizers and colonized. So they colonized the indigenous population in Quebec, and then were colonized by the British. So there was a lot of solidarity happening in the 1960’s between the Quebecois nationalist liberation movement that happened and the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, a lot of third world liberation struggles around the world. The Quebecois people or the people who were into nationalism in Quebec, were very good at making those ties and trying to bring out that struggle.

TFSR: So what was the relationship with the indigenous and First Nations peoples in Canada?

Maria: I’ve been reading because I don’t know too much about Quebec history. I’ve been reading a little bit about the FLQ, the Front de Liberation de Quebec, which was the main armed struggle group that was existing in the 60’s at the time. They don’t talk about the indigenous population in Quebec as far as I can tell. People were also referencing something else, it has a different name, but in Quebec it’s the Patriotes, like “the Patriots.” That was another war that had happened between French people who were living in that region and the British, but at that time, I believe there was a lot more collaboration between the French and the native population. After that war, a lot of native folks got pushed onto what are called reserves in Canada, not reservations, like they are here. A lot of people were pushed onto reserves. A lot of people were pushed further north and told that they couldn’t move around as easily as they could before. Land extraction started happening, resource extraction started happening really intensely, and it follows a similar pattern as it did in the US, in terms of brutal, brutal suppression of any sort of indigenous uprisings.

One thing to mention in terms of race and the student movement too, because I think another thing that happens that a lot of people say, “Oh, this is a white movement.” But there were a lot of students of color who were involved in the movement. There is a contingent of students who are calling themselves Students of Color in Montreal, who are super involved in mobilizing at different schools, and had anti-racist, contingents that would show up at a lot of different demos. So that’s something to keep in mind. One tactic that gets used a lot during strikes is something that’s called a “manifaction” which translates to a demo action, basically. And so those demo actions towards the end of March are getting bigger. They’re radicalizing a lot versus the cops. There are more people wearing masks. The manifactions are more about blocking things. They’re more about blocking the flow of capital, or however you want to talk about it, than they are about breaking windows and things like that.

So on March 29th there was a blockade/occupation of the Loto-Quebec building. Another popular building that people would go to was the SAQ headquarters, which is the state-run liquor organization. Around the end of March, the manifactions were happening two, three, four times a day and at this point, 316,000 out of 420,000 students in Quebec are on strike. So a vast majority of the students are on strike. Also towards the end of March, a lot of creative, huge demonstrations start happening. One cool one was this masquerade demo that happened, and it was creative, but it wasn’t super confrontational. At the end, there was a tiny black bloc, and at the end of the demo, three anarchists were arrested and charged with conspiracy and 13 counts of mischief. That’s not even the first time that people start getting conspiracy charges during the strike. It was just the first time I had seen it happen. People are starting to get intense charges by the end of March. This was just one of the first ones I had heard of.

Another big manif-action that happens, is on April 11th. The National Bank gets blockaded. The economic disruptions are still happening a lot. This National Bank blockade was one of them. There’s no public call for this bank blockade, and it gets organized in crews from twelve different schools. There was only one arrest, and they managed to block the National Bank for about an hour and stop anyone from going in or out of the building. Around that time, a lot of nighttime sabotage type acts started happening. There were rumors of unexploded Molotov cocktails in two different offices. I also think it was around this time that a manifaction went to the Minister of Education, whose name is Line Beauchamp. It went to her office, broke into her office and trashed her office. So things are starting to get really confrontational. Around this time injunctions start. One of the ways that the province tries to break the strike is by allowing students to bring court actions against their schools in order to force through what essentially would be back-to-work legislation. These injunctions are saying these schools have to be open on this date, and you can’t keep them closed anymore. But all the injunctions do is create more confrontations at the schools. So schools start hiring private security companies. I don’t have the numbers on me, but the numbers from some of these security apparatuses that get set up at the different universities in Montreal are really intense, including McGill, which didn’t even see a huge strike happen.

TFSR: The basic activity of that would be to stop students from forming a picket line, or being able to hold a picket line, to be able to block teachers from accessing the university? With the injunction, if the student is found to have been blocking access to the university, are they kicked off campus and not allowed back on the property so they can’t blockade, or what?

Maria: I don’t think so. The way the injunctions were supposed to happen is that the schools would be forced to open. I think a lot of professors were being told, if they didn’t open the schools, they would be fired or their unions would face intense fines maybe. It was trying to break the pickets, and it was trying to scare people, and it didn’t work. People were still on the picket lines, but I don’t think they were getting higher charges from the cops or anything like that. The cops would arrest a couple people at the picket lines after the injunctions, but it didn’t seem like it was a lot more people than it would have been before, and there were a lot more confrontations with riot cops at picket lines. There weren’t really riot cop confrontations with picketers before that. But because of those confrontations with the riot cops, a lot of the schools stayed closed because teachers were saying it’s not a safe atmosphere for us to open the school. So that bought people a few more days to keep organizing and keep their schools closed. Another thing that happened at that time right around the injunctions was that students released a bunch of locusts into their school that kept their school closed for a little while. Another group of students released crickets into their school and that kept their school closed.

There were tons of tons of demos happening around this time, including nighttime ones that were just about attacking the cops and booing at pacifists. People were really angry about the injunctions, really angry about the fact that there hadn’t been any response from the government at all at this point in the strike. On April 20th, there was a really key thing that happened in Quebec. They are trying to start a new wave of resource extraction in northern Quebec, which is mostly indigenous folks, and there’s a lot of indigenous opposition to this resource extraction plan. It’s called Plan Nord in Quebec. On April 20th, Charest was trying to hold a conference in downtown Montreal in order to tell people about Plan Nord and invite people to apply for jobs up north. During that conference, there was a riot that happened outside of the conference, and it was the first day that the provincial police were brought in against the strikers. It wasn’t just strikers at this demo. The other thing that was big about this demo was that it was organized by a coalition of students and anarchists and people doing anti-colonial solidarity work in Montreal. It wasn’t just students who were there. There were indigenous women who had walked from Saint-Adèle, a town outside of Montreal, to Montreal for this weekend of events. That day, people were telling me that they saw black flags everywhere. There were a lot of people in masks at that demo, and people were arriving in waves. So every time the cops tried to disperse the crowd, people would just regroup in another location. That kept happening all day. People must have made a charge at the riot cops. There were rocks thrown at the cops, and there’s videos online of the cops just turning and running away from people. Then the SQ gets brought in. They look like the army. Their uniforms are brownish-green, and they don’t have the same riot gear on that the Montreal cops wear, but that day was really big for a lot of people in terms of seeing the cops turn around and run from people for the first time ever.

One interesting thing that happens right after that, is that there was supposed to be a second day of demonstrations against Plan Nord, and CLASSE called off their meeting point for Saturday. So a lot of students decided not to come. One of the better arguments that I’d heard about why that happened was that these students were taking away media from the indigenous folks who were protesting against Plan Nord, and they wanted to give people a space in the media, or a space for their message to get out. But what actually ended up happening is that everyone who showed up on day two got arrested. So there were maybe 200 arrests on day two. The demo was way smaller. It was way easier for the cops, who were already angry about day one, to just kettle everyone and give them all tickets for illegal assembly.

In the week after Plan Nord, negotiations started between the government and some of the student unions. I don’t believe CLASSE was involved at the time. Sometime during the next week, Charest came out with his offer to the students, and it was like a Public Service Announcement style thing that was saying, “Okay, here’s the deal. I’m going to only decrease the tuition hike by $1 but I’m going to spread it out over seven years.” If you did the math, it actually ended up being a higher hike than it would have been in five years. And people laughed at it intensely.

TFSR: So this is at the time that he was sitting down at negotiating table with the two other student unions that I’m not going to pronounce, and then making this announcement, but demanding that the students stop demonstrations during that time?

Maria: In the weekend after Plan Nord the there were rumors about a negotiation starting, and it became a thing where the government said they wouldn’t negotiate with CLASSE unless they condemn the violence. At this point, CLASSE represents the majority of the students on strike, which is a difference between the strike in 2012 and the strike in 2005. So CLASSE does end up going to the negotiating table, but it’s because FECQ and FEUQ give them a seat, not because the government invites them. Although they do end up issuing a statement condemning violence against people, and I believe they refused to condemn the property destruction. So the negotiations start, and that’s when the night demos start. Line Beauchamp, the Minister of Education, comes out at the time and says, “Let’s have a truce while we’re negotiating. Let’s negotiate in good faith. Don’t call any demos during this negotiation.” CLASSE doesn’t agree to this because they don’t have the power to agree to something like that. So as soon as the negotiations start, I think it’s like a day or two into the negotiations, one of the student unions who is affiliated with CLASSE, calls a demo that’s called “F*** the Truce” because they were pissed off that the Minister of Education would even ask them not to go into the streets during the negotiation.

So this Fuck the Truce demo happened at night. It definitely had a lot of anarchists involved in the organizing. People had masks on. People were being confrontational, fighting the cops, etc. The next day the government kicks CLASSE out of the negotiations saying that they wouldn’t keep their end of the truce, and FECQ and FEUQ walk out in solidarity so as not to be put in the same position that they were in 2005 because I don’t think they would survive it again. They had already lost a lot of support after 2005 because they looked like they were collaborating with the government to the detriment of the students in another union, and they didn’t want to do that again. So a thing starts happening where the demos are really intense for a few days, and then as more and more and more people come into the streets, the feeling in the streets gets a little bit less confrontational. The first few night demos, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night of that week, were huge, really intense. A lot of people running. The cops try and disperse these demos, and then people come back together, and then they try and disperse it again, and people come back together again, until at the end of the night, there’s a thousand people maybe, running around. They were the same people who had been at the manifactions from the beginning of the strike. So it’s people who have had a lot of street action together who are slowly learning a lot of things together. By the end of the week, though–because thousands and thousands more people are coming into the streets because they’re pissed at negotiations collapsing–this dynamic happens again, where it’s a lot of pacifists in the street coming up with a lot of different ways to violently try and stop people from doing property destruction. One of the things they were trying was encouraging everyone sit down, to try and expose someone who might have just done something illegal. Another thing they would do is actually try and hold people in a spot until the cops could come and get them. There were fist fights that broke out. It was intense.

This is all in the lead up to May 1st, which in Montreal, is the day on which a huge anti-capitalist demo happens. In the past, there was only a big union demo, and then I think a couple years ago, there was a split, and people started organizing an explicitly anti-capitalist demo, because the union was starting to try and police their actions at this union demo. So May 1st happens. In the lead up to May 1st, everyone is thinking, “Oh my gosh, this is gonna be huge. This can be bigger than the G20 in Toronto. This is gonna be great.” And on the day of, the demo is huge, way bigger than it had been in years past, and it also had a really huge black bloc, the biggest one I had ever seen in Montreal. The cops react accordingly. There was a really intense cop reaction almost as soon as the demo started. It ended up with the cops shooting tons of sound grenades off over people’s heads. They were using paint guns essentially, where they would spray paint at you and then try and catch you later if you had paint on your clothes. They were also doing this thing where they would sprint for blocks and blocks. They would sprint for like, three blocks, four blocks, and then get in the cars, another group of cops would come out and start sprinting again. So there’s lots and lots and lots of running, and the demo gets dispersed pretty fast. On May 4th, I believe there is a congress or a conference that gets called in a town outside of Montreal called Victoriaville, and it’s the Liberal Party meeting to discuss their strategy.

TFSR: Just to pipe in that the Liberal Party is the party of the Premier. Right? And liberal in Canada; does that mean the same as it does in the US?

Maria: Yes, essentially. Although in Quebec it’s different.

TFSR: It’s more free trade, outspokenly. It’s economically, what we would call conservative in the US, right?

Maria: In Quebec, the main political parties that exist provincially, are the Liberals and the Parti Quebecois, which is a separatist party. The Parti Quebecois is the official opposition in Quebec.

So the Liberals are having a conference, sort of to talk about the student strike, sort of to talk about whether or not they should hold an election, because Jean Charest has to hold an election before December of 2013. People decide that they’re going to go to Victoriaville and confront this conference that’s happening. After Victoriaville, people described the day to me as a war zone. It was all provincial police, and none of the Montreal police. The police were using tear gas, which is way heavier than the gas that people are used to in Montreal. It hurts a lot more to breathe in. Someone got hit in the side of the head with what I think was a rubber bullet and ended up in a coma. There’s really intense videos from that day, of this person bleeding out of a huge wound in the side of their head. They had to get moved three or four times, which you’re not supposed to do for people with head injuries, because the cops kept charging people, even though this person was surrounded and people were trying to stop anyone from moving this person. Someone else lost an eye that day. It was intense injuries all around. But also similar to Plan Nord in the fact that people were throwing rocks at the cops. They had these little tiny fences that came up to your waist that were zip tied together, that in the videos I’ve seen looked intensely easy to just knock over. People just knocked them over, and then it turned into a riot. One other thing that happened that day was that as people were heading back to Montreal, there were a ton of busses that had been rented to drive people to Victoriaville, and at the end of the day, the cops decided to arrest the last bus that was headed to Montreal. They pulled 100 some odd kids off that bus and gave them all charges of participating in a riot, and they are all still facing charges. They’re still gonna have to go back to Victoriaville for court. They’re part of the over 2,500 people who’ve been arrested throughout this strike.

TFSR: You had said that this bus happened to be anglophone students for the most part? There is a lot of overlap between them, even if the anglophones are in a different position, have a different relationship with the Quebecois State.

Maria: This strike saw students at McGill on strike for the first time ever, I believe. There were two faculties: the Faculty of Social Work and the Women’s Studies Department, that went on strike. So there were picket lines at McGill. They were really intense. There were also picket lines at Concordia, it’s the other main anglophone university in town. I don’t think Concordia University had gone on strike before this year. They had a ton of faculties on strike. At different points in time, people were picketing at Concordia, which was unheard of. There was a lot of organizing going back and forth between the two anglophone universities. They were pretty good at supporting each other during the strike, as well as trying to support the francophone universities. So yeah, it was a bus full of anglophones that got arrested.

After Victoriaville, there are still different manifaction happening every day, still two, three, four a day. One of the things that happens is that there’s a coordinated action in which people smoke bomb the Montreal Metro. There were videos of them online that you could see, there’s smoke coming out of the metro. People aren’t really panicking, but the metro system gets shut down because of the smoke. So on this coordinated day, people all shut down the metros. The metros actually shut down for a few hours that day. There’s a lot of different reactions to this across the city. It sort of falls on whether or not you support the students. A lot of people were like, “I don’t mind missing my bus. I don’t mind missing the metro. I support the students. They need to do what they need to do.” And then there were angry people all over the radio being like, “Oh, these stupid kids. Who do they think they are?” All sorts of things getting said.

Another thing that starts happening after that in the media is that these people who carry out these smoke bombings are getting called terrorists, and some citizen decides to send in photos that they think might be the smoke bomb suspects. After that, these people turn themselves in. I think there were four of them, and they end up facing terrorist charges. I’m not sure if it’s actual terrorist charges, or if it’s “leading people to believe that they are facing a terrorist attack.” It might be something like that, as well as conspiracy, as well as mischief, as well as all these other charges. So they sit in jail for a really long time, like a week, and there’s a noise demo at the jail while they’re there. They’re all being held in provincial jails, which are on the island of Montreal. There’s a really huge noise demo outside the jail for them, which was pretty cool. Then when they get out, they face really intense conditions. This is something else that’s been happening to people during the strike, which I don’t think has been talked about a lot. Some of the conditions they had, were that they weren’t allowed to be within 300 meters of a metro. Other conditions that people have been facing is not being allowed to associate with anyone who has an open file with the police. Other people have to carry around their conditions at all times.

The worst thing I’ve seen so far is people actually getting exiled. There’s three people that I know of who’ve been banished from the island of Montreal as part of their bail conditions. They’re not allowed to come to Montreal except for court. These are people who’ve lived in Montreal, who’ve been organizing during the student movement. Some of them have family in Quebec, so they’ve moved in with their families. Some of them don’t and have had to move to other provinces. It’s not something that’s gotten a lot of media.

TFSR: That is so intense. Like that one person you were talking about, who was able to go back on one day, to be able to move all their stuff off. In the face of increased repression of students, by the Montreal government, we also see an increasingly intense resistance at and beyond the manifactions, including the smoke bombings of metro stations that shut down transit in the city. No one was hurt during these actions, but three accused activists were arrested and banished from the island, dubbed terrorists. Let’s have Maria continue.

Maria: On May 14th, Line Beauchamp, the Minister of Education quits. Some people are pretty excited about this. Some people are obviously a little bit more reserved about whether or not they think it’ll change anything. The person I believe, who gets her job was the finance minister, whose name I think is Michelle Courchesne, but I could be wrong. After that, there are still a lot of schools fighting injunctions pretty intensely. On the 18th of May, Law 78 passes. I’m going to talk a little bit about that later. Another thing that happens on May 18th is that an anti-mask bylaw passes in Montreal. So this means that you can’t wear a mask at a demo without facing a specific ticket for wearing a mask at a demo. Before this, if you get arrested, the way it works in Montreal is the cops generally try and mass arrest people. They’re really into that. They’ve been yelled at by the UN for relying on mass arrest tactics as a way to stop people from going to demos. They’ll kettle everyone in. All of a sudden people will be at a demo and realize that there’s a line of cops in front of them, a line of cops behind them, and no escape on either side of the street. Then the kettle slowly closes as more and more and more cops join the kettle. Then they put zip ties on everyone, put them on STM busses and bus them out to processing centers at different points around the city.

One interesting thing that happened at the time was that the bus drivers were refusing to drive these busses anymore, because as the busses were being driven through the city, people knew that it was all students being stuck on those busses and were trying to do things to the busses as they were driving by. The bus drivers don’t just drive around detainees after mass arrests, they also drive the cops from location to location. So you’ll see busses that are just full and full of cops. So the bus drivers union says they won’t drive these busses with the cops in them anymore. The cops just find specialists to drive those busses but it was a pretty cool thing to see happen in the news.

Anyways, the mask law passes, Law 78 passes. There’s a whole bunch of things to remember about Law 78. One is that it makes it illegal for anyone to participate in a demonstration that has more than fifty people at it, where the organizers did not give the cops their route and the length of time that they think their demo will happen. Law 78 also ends the semester for all the university and CEGEP students. So it’s essentially a lock out. The students can’t go. There are no classes happening. There’s nothing to picket. The schools are all shut down. They’re all locked shut. Law 78 also meant that really intense fines could get imposed on student unions who were trying to organize a strike, including individuals within the union trying to organize a strike. It could still result in really intense fines. That weekend, the 18th of May weekend, that Law 78 passes–the mask law passed either the Thursday or the Friday. That was the weekend of the Anarchist Book Fair in Montreal, and the Friday and Saturday and Sunday night, night demos were really intense. Friday night, there were Molotov cocktails at the night demo, which was a first in a long time for Montreal. On Sunday night, there was an anti-capitalist bloc of people who had organized themselves pretty well, and that demo ended with 300 people getting arrested, I believe. But it also saw some really cool things happen, like people breaking open kettles. There’s a video online. This is this is all on video. There should just be, like a video timeline of the student movement that someone can make. But you can see these people are stuck in a kettle. There’s a line of cops to the north of them and to the south of them. They realize that the line of cops to the north of them doesn’t have as many cops in it as it could. So they organize themselves really fast to just charge the cops, and they charged the cops, and something between like 75 and 100 people escaped that kettle. The people who were left in the kettle got really f***d up, but the people who managed to leave made it to the end of the night. I’m sure some of them ended up getting arrested in the big kettle that happened at the end of the night. But seeing kettles get broken open wasn’t something that people had seen before, so that was pretty exciting.

TFSR: Another thing that you had said about the law too, was that it outlawed protests within a certain amount of feet of the school, or meters of the school?

Maria: Yeah. I don’t know exactly how many meters of a school it is, but that made the pickets explicitly illegal, because those were demonstrations in front of a university or a CEGEP. On May 22nd, it’s the three month anniversary of the strike, Law 78 has just been passed, people are really pissed. The same thing is happening that happened before, where you’ve got really confrontational demos for like, three or four nights, and then all of a sudden, there’s thousands more people in the streets and things calm down a bit. This time, it’s a daytime demo, and 500,000 people show up for this demo. It’s huge. Someone was telling me that they think it’s the biggest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history. There were two routes that day for the demo. The demo was planned by the CLASSE, and the CLASSE didn’t give the cops their route. But the CSN, I believe, a union in Montreal had also helped organize the demo, and they had given the cops their route. So the demo starts in this big plaza sort of thing, it’s called the Quartier des Spectacles, like “The Neighborhood of Spectacles” in Montreal. It starts there, goes up a street, and then you can either turn left or you could turn right. Turning right was the route that had been given to the cops and the majority of people at the demo, the vast, vast majority of people at the demo turned left. There was also a small anti-capitalist contingent at that demo that managed to exploit the fact that the demo was huge and moving in a big square, and just wreak a bit of havoc in the middle of the square, because the cops couldn’t get in through the demo to do anything to them.

Later the next night, at the night demo on May 23rd, there was the biggest kettle I’ve ever heard of in Montreal. There were 500-some people all stuck in the same kettle on one corner in downtown Montreal. Sometime in the week after that, the casseroles start. The casseroles are a tradition that comes from Chile–I believe Bursts, you did a little bit more research on these. It’s where people take pots and pans out of their house and walk out into their neighborhoods. In Montreal, it was working. People would walk out into the streets of their neighborhoods and just walk up and down their block, hitting a spoon against a pot until a bunch of their neighbors had come out and joined them, the noise levels become deafening, and in some neighborhoods, they organized themselves to have banners in front of their casseroles. There was a neighborhood called Villeray, and they had a sign that said in English, “Villeray Disobeys,” meaning Villeray disobeys Law 78.

The casseroles are happening in different neighborhoods all over the city. One of the popular slogans that comes out at the time of the casseroles is “La grève est une grève étudiante, mais la lutte est une lutte populaire.” So “The strike is a student strike, but the struggle is a popular struggle”, and people really start pushing that. Another thing that happens at the time of the casseroles is neighborhood assemblies. The first one happened in a neighborhood called Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie, which is in the northeast of Montreal, and they call the neighborhood assembly. The basis for a lot of the neighborhood assemblies is that people are against Law 78 and in support of the student strike, and then are trying to create more autonomous infrastructure in their neighborhoods. So what they’re actually called in Montreal is “Les Assemblies Populaires Autonomes de Quatier.” So the “popular autonomous neighborhood assemblies,” and they’ve been happening in maybe thirteen different neighborhoods on the island of Montreal, and then in , three different suburbs of Montreal, perhaps. There’s a lot of them. The neighborhood assemblies are pretty cool in terms of trying to build power in a neighborhood way. One of the reasons why I think they started happening is because the students had been locked out of their schools and all went back to the neighborhoods where they lived. So some neighborhoods where there’s really strong neighborhood assemblies, a lot of the participants are students, but there’s also a huge range of participants in all of the neighborhood assemblies.

One other thing to mention at the time, I think there was a lot of debates happening, and still this is all really new for a lot of anarchists in towns. There are a lot of debates happening around the casseroles, around the neighborhood assemblies, about how easily cooptable they could be. One of the ministers provincially, whose name is Bachand, came out and said that the casseroles are great. They’re a really great break from the more confrontational night time demos. The provincial government already does the good protester/bad protester dynamic that we’ve seen in lots of other places. They started doing this really intensely around the casseroles, because they realized that the casseroles had really huge popular support. So they start trying to do this divide between the really nice casseroles and the really terrible night demos. People have tried to start thinking about, “OK, how do we make the neighborhood assemblies not as easily cooptable as the casseroles?”

One of the ways that tried to happen in one of the neighborhoods in Montreal was that people came together in their neighborhood to go to the next big event of the student strike, which was the Grand Prix. So the Grand Prix in Montreal is a Formula One race that happens. It’s like a car race that happens on this island that’s just off of the Island of Montreal. There’s huge parties that happen around the Grand Prix in the streets of downtown Montreal. Downtown Montreal is a huge haven for festivals in the summertime. There’s lots of streets that get blocked to traffic, to have concerts, to have different shows, to have all sorts of things. So the Grand Prix was one of the first to start in Montreal, and that weekend, a bunch of neighbors from one neighborhood marched from their neighborhood to a meet up of people who had decided to disrupt the Grand Prix. So that was kind of cool. Other things that happened that weekend, the Grand Prix saw the SQ in the streets of Montreal again, and the SPVM, the Montreal cops, reacting really intensely to people being at the Grand Prix events in downtown Montreal, mostly. People who tried to get out to the Formula One race on this island on that Sunday, were getting turned around at the Metro if they had a red square on.

I didn’t talk about this yet. The red squares are usually made from felt, but they’re little red squares that people pin to their shirts that are a visible sign of support for the student strike, and it was something that started in 2005. I think it comes from a French saying that means “squarely in the red” and is against student debt and all that kind of stuff. It has come to be a symbol of the student movement, and because the student movement has generalized so intensely in Montreal, it’s come to be a symbol of this struggle that involves way more people than just the students. That isn’t just talking about the student strike anymore, it’s talking about all sorts of things. So that’s sort of the symbol of the struggle, is this red square.

So the cops were turning around anyone who was wearing a red square who were trying to get out to the island where this race was happening. It isn’t just this racetrack on the island. There’s like little beaches. There’s a whole amusement park that’s out there. But if you had a red square on that day, they weren’t going to let you on the island. They were going to turn you around on the metro and then threaten you with arrest if you didn’t leave the metro station and stay away from the metros for the rest of the day. There were tons of people in downtown Montreal. You couldn’t tell the difference between who was a student protester, because people were good at not putting their squares on in certain instances. Who was a student protester and who was a Grand Prix fan? So the cops can’t keep the student protesters out of the downtown core because they can’t tell who’s who. One thing that kept happening that was really funny was that the cops would rush the demo, as people were in the night demo, and people would melt up onto the sidewalk, blend in with everyone else on the sidewalk, and the cops would be standing in the intersection, stopping traffic themselves until they got bored and then decided to march away. They would march like a block or two away, and people would take the intersection again. It all was happening at one main intersection. People would take the intersection again, pull out their pots and pans from their backpacks, start yelling student chants in the streets and all other sorts of chants that were happening during the student strike and then they would hold that corner until the cops rushed again, and then melt back up onto the sidewalk. Then the cops would leave again, then they would go back into the street. It happened like four or five times in one night. It was pretty funny. On June 13th, there was the sabotage of a railway line in Farnham, Quebec. That was when the International Economic Forum of the Americas was happening in Montreal. There were also big demos against that, although none of them were super confrontational, but they were pretty exciting, pretty big.

TFSR: And what did that sabotage look like? What was it exactly?

Maria: I’m not sure. There’s a communique about it online somewhere.

TFSR: Did they catch anyone that they’re attributing it to?

Maria: Nope. So after June 13th, I don’t have any specific dates for anybody, but where we’re at now is that people are, as far as I can tell, taking a break until August. One of the things that Law 78 mandated was that there be a special semester. Never in the history of Quebec student strikes have people lost a semester due to being on strike, and so they’re trying to save this semester. The way they’ve figured out to try and save it is to force students to go back to school starting August 13th with the CEGEPs. The CEGEPs are starting August 13th, but start anytime between the 13th and the 17th, they’ll have a month and a half where they have to finish that winter semester that they started but didn’t finish, and then the universities start their special semester at the end of August. So most of these schools still have strike mandates, and if they don’t, they’re going to have general assemblies coming up soon, and you’ll be able to follow online whether or not they decide to stay on strike. A lot of them will. There’s a convergence that’s been called for Montreal, starting on August 13th and going until the 17th. There’s a website called bloquonslarentree.com, I believe. That’s where you can go to figure out information about the convergence. A lot of neighborhood assemblies are trying to mobilize support in the neighborhoods for the picket lines. The picket lines are going to start again on August 13th, and they’re going to be really intense. I mean, the cops don’t need any reason to try and squash picket lines, but now they have this legalized way that they can justify what they’re doing through Law 78, even though Law 78 has been really intensely criticized, and the Quebec Human Rights Commission recently came out and said that they think it’s unconstitutional. But the courts are refusing to hear the case until January, so we won’t know until January if the law is going to be struck down. So for now, it stands, and once the picket lines start again, it’ll stand, and it’s scaring a lot of people, so we’ll see what’s going to happen in August.

TFSR: Is that a general call out for people beyond the communities within Quebec to try to make it in?

Maria: Yeah, people are organizing billeting. The websites are in English and French. People are organizing billeting and trying to make it a good place for out-of-town-ers to come if they want to come in and help with the picket line. It’s important to keep in mind the ways that the Montreal cops act, the fact that it could be really easy to get arrested during these strikes or during these picket lines when they start up again in August. So people who are thinking of coming need to keep that in mind.

TFSR: The Canadian governments seem very good at blocking up access to people getting in from the US who they think might be troublemakers.

Maria: Yeah, I heard a lot of stories around the time of the Anarchist Bookfair, of friends trying to get up from the US who were having difficulties getting into Canada. Another thing that’s happening right now, if I can add this really quick, is that the provincial government is threatening to have an election at the beginning of September. One of the things they’re hoping to do is completely deflate any momentum that this movement has going for it by funneling that into an election campaign. So the neighborhood assemblies are trying to be strategic about this. People are trying to start thinking about ways to funnel energy from the elections into the neighborhood assemblies and tell people that that’s the place where you can make decisions for yourselves, not necessarily in the elections. There’s also rumors of a general strike. One of the unions in Montreal sort of has a strike mandate. I don’t quite understand how it works.

TFSR: This is a healthcare union for the most part?

Maria: It’s called CSN, and I know they represent the hospital workers. I don’t know who else they represent. It’s a bunch of people across the province, and from what I’ve heard, they’ve gotten a strike mandate from the grassroots as a reaction to new user fees that are getting imposed on the health care system. But their union president wrote into the clause of the strike, “We will go on strike when it is deemed appropriate.” So they have yet to deem it appropriate. Who knows if they will, but that’s something that could happen in terms of the strike spreading into the working sector of Quebec, and people going on strike in solidarity. Not just in solidarity with the students, but for these broader reasons, for things about rising health care fees, about a lot of things that are changing in Quebec and across the country in Canada.

TFSR: A lot of anarchists have taken note of and been critical, you’ve said, of certain personalities within the student movement that seem to be taking up a lot of space and even taking a bunch of power, presenting themselves as faces to the media and sort of feeding into the media need for talking heads. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Maria: Sure. In Quebec, francophones have coined the phrase “imagisme,” which, if I understand it correctly, is about these spokespeople for the CLASSE specifically, trying to have a really good image in the media and saying certain things that they might not have said in the past. It’s important to keep in mind that the structure of the CLASSE is such that the CLASSE spokespeople are only supposed to be explaining what has been voted on in general assemblies to the media or to, the Premier, because they’re also the people who go to the negotiations. But the way it’s been happening in Montreal, it’s partly the fault of the media, and not necessarily the fault of this person himself but, one of the spokespersons for class, Gabrielle Nadeau Dubois, has been getting a lot of media face time. The media love him, and they want to put him on this pedestal as the leader of the student movement. Some people criticize him for not doing enough to stop that from happening. So people are bringing out this imagisme thing and saying that CLASSE is too concerned with the image. Gabrielle has been saying things in the media that people can construe as trying to override things that are happening at the general assemblies. There’s a female person who is also a CLASSE spokesperson, who hasn’t been in the media as much as Gabrielle, and people have been talking about that a lot, because CLASSE has a feminist mandate. I mean, they have a whole feminist committee, that operates and talks about sexism within the CLASSE, sexism within the student movement. So that’s something they’re super into talking about, but the way the media has been portraying CLASSE, through only representing Gabrielle, has been erasing a lot of the more radical things that CLASSE does.

TFSR: So how have anarchists who are outside of the student movement been interacting with this? What kind of critiques have come out from anarchists in terms of the relationship between anti-austerity and human rights and human needs and dignity on one side and then on the other, the demand for the abolition of government.

Maria: So I’m just going to talk about how I’ve experienced this, because I haven’t been in school for this whole strike, and it’s super alienating to be going to demos where all of the chants are about how tuition needs to be lower and how we need to abolish student debt and things like that. It was more exciting to be going to some of the demos where there were majority anti-capitalist chants. That was pretty sweet. In terms of your question, I think a lot of radicals, not just anarchists, who’ve been trying to think really hard about how these neighborhood assemblies can work, have been confronting that question. Like, “we think this is about so much more than anti-austerity. It’s always been about more than that. And sometimes, when our language is all about anti-austerity, people think that that’s all we’re about.” So trying not to talk about things in that way, and instead being really careful about talking about neighborhood power, talking about building infrastructure within our neighborhoods to better support each other. One cool thing that one of the neighborhood assemblies started doing is having a legal support committee so that people who aren’t students can help support anyone who’s been arrested at any of these demos. And they’ve been really clear about like, “We’re not going to do the good protester/bad protester thing. People get charged with whatever the cops want to charge them with. We’re going to support anyone who’s been arrested during this strike.” And they’ve been really good at organizing rides out to the centers where people get taken to to get processed by the police in order to pick them up. So I think people haven’t really been talking about what you asked so much, but have been more concentrating on what can these neighborhood assemblies do? How can we stop them from getting coopted and how can we make our language clear? How can we be honest about who we think we are and how we’re talking about ourselves as anarchists involved in these neighborhood assemblies? I don’t think people have figured it out yet, because this all still feels really new, but there’s a lot of conversations happening.

TFSR: So most of the protests were initiated by people from the CEGEPs or the from the universities but how have secondary education or younger been involved in any of this?

Maria: I know one person who goes to one high school in Montreal, I don’t know too many high school students in Montreal. Some of the high schools ended up striking for a day against the tuition hikes. It’s way harder to strike in a high school because the organizing structures are different. There’s a student council instead of a student union, and they don’t have a whole lot of power against their administration, and there were picket lines at some of the high schools. They had a lot of fun with it. The person I talked to was really excited about having gotten to play her instrument outside of her school for a whole day.

TFSR: So you were saying that there’s a lot of criticism that’s come from anarchists, of student unionism and of being really process oriented and process heavy. Can you talk about that?

Maria: First, a little bit about my context. I am not from Quebec. I’m not from Canada. I went to one of the elitist anglophone universities in town. While I was in university, we were trying to get general assemblies off the ground as a thing that could even happen at our university. There wasn’t any history of it. People weren’t that interested in doing it, and it was really hard to do. So I have a tendency to romanticize what happens at the francophone universities because I’ve never been involved in any sort of vibrant student unionism myself. From what people have told me, sometimes the general assemblies can be really reliant upon rules of order, it’s hard to figure out how to participate if you’re new, and it’s hard to be spontaneous about deciding to do different things. So those are some critiques that anarchists have brought up to me in terms of ways to stop myself from romanticizing these unions that happen, even though I do think that because of these structures that do exist, the strike is possible. But I’m sure the structures could be tweaked and changed and become more spontaneous for people when they need them, they aren’t super flexible.

TFSR: Do you see there being a lot of overlap between what is becoming more generalized resistance and neighborhood assemblies and beyond, outside the student movement, between those needs and demands and then other causes that are being organized around in Montreal and greater Quebec? You mentioned the decolonizing, the attempts, what about No One is Illegal organizing within the city? Is there much of an overlap, or are they two different tendencies and trajectories?

Maria: There’s overlap in terms of people who are organizing. So Solidarity Across Borders is a big migrant justice group in Montreal. They held their annual Status For All demo at the end of May. This was right after Law 78 got passed. Demos were huge. I was hoping that their demo would be huge. It’s usually really tiny, and not a lot of people care about folks who don’t have papers, folks who are having really hard time accessing all sorts of resources in Montreal, people who are getting deported a lot. People are trying to take sanctuary to get papers. It’s really tough to not have papers in Canada these days. There wasn’t a huge crowd, there wasn’t a huge surge from the student movement to go support people who don’t have status. And that was disappointing in terms of people not being able to make connections between all of these different things that are happening. But then a lot of people who are involved in migrant justice organizing have also got involved in their neighborhood assemblies. So there were casseroles that were happening, that were called, “Status For All Casseroles.” People are adopting this casserole tactic.

There was a really big action that happened in Montreal last week in solidarity with Algonquin folks in northern Quebec who were protesting resource extraction on their land and the government trying to mess with their leadership structure. And a couple hundred people came out. It was pretty exciting. It was an action that only got called a week in advance. It was in the form of a manifaction, casserole kind of thing. It drew on a lot of rhetoric from the student movement, but was about this group of Algonquins who are opposing resource extraction on their territory. So sometimes the links get made, sometimes they don’t. It’s hard to tell when it happens and when it doesn’t. There’s other huge things happening in Canada in terms of the prison system changing a lot, and I don’t think there’s been a lot of connections. There was a call out for a neighborhood day of action with the neighborhood assemblies in the lead up to the student movement, or in the lead up to the start of the pickets again in August. That’s supposed to happen on August 10th, which is also Prisoner Justice Day in Canada, just like a day that commemorates people who’ve died in prison. People who wrote the call out for that knew about Prisoner Justice Day and so included it in their call out. So people are trying to spread the word about different things that have always been happening in Montreal, and radicalize the discourse in that way, but it’s been hit and miss.