On Monday, March 12th, a chain of events has spanned for the whole day until late in the night.
It all began early in the day with a protest in solidarity with the Innu people who recently suffered repression from the SQ (provincial police) in their blockade of road 138 against the Hydro-Québec projects on their land. The protest of about 150 people started at Square Phillips at around 12:30 to go in front of the offices of Hydro-Quebec (where cops obviously were blocking the doors) by chanting slogans like « North Plan, Death Plan », « No Quebec, No Canada, Death to all States » while distributing leaflets on the North Plan to passersbies. After a few speeches the people then moved to the administrative offices of the UQAM and from this point the street in front of the building was occupied with a crowd that kept growing in numbers -as a reaction to the news of a lock-out of UQAM- all up until the night where a « Creation Night » event had been planned.
Durant this Creation Night, some were painting on the street, others played music, among others local band Mise en Demeure have played a full set of songs making fun at pacifists and cops. Many were drinking beer sitting on a part of the furniture from the UQAM building dans ended up in the street; chairs, desks, tables and sofas.
Around 11 PM, tension has started to rise as the citizen-cops started to attempt a clean up and enforcing the law to « put back things at their place » as others kept taking the furniture out in the street. A person ripped chairs from the hands of a masked comrade, which got him a well-deserved punch in the face. It’s simple : if you act like cops you are joining the enemy so you will be treated as such. Wanna play cops? Face the consequences.
After a short confrontation between the citizen-cops and the masked men, a crowd of about 200 people detached itself and zig-zag’ed in the streets shouting anti-pacifist slogans and leaving on their tracks many walls and one cop car covered with anti-police and circled A graffiti. When the crowd arrived near the building of La Presse -the most mainstream bourgeois, reactionary newspaper in Quebec, one of Quebec’s “Fourth Branch” of the State- its windows we shattered to bits (the news outlet itself was forced to report on it… downplaying it as a mere “isolated” act) and once more the citizen-cops or undercovers -the only difference being their wage- showed up and attacked a masked comrade, but this time the masked people fought back collectively and, defending their comrades, pushed back the attack. The crowd then dispersed not long after with any arrests, even though there are rumors that one was arrested durint the protest.
A bit later at around 1 AM, about fifteen people who were chilling out drinking beer in a collective space received a visit from an entire cops squad. The situation quickly escalated seemingly after a bottle of beer was seen outside (???). Many people were sprayed, about twenty cops rushed in aggressively as if it was a raid, with batons in their hands, some in riot gear and with a dog. There has been five arrests. Outside the riot squad was deployed for dispersing the people who gathered at the street corner.
Social war and complicity!
Citizen-cops FUCK OFF!