While thousands of tourists headed to Montreal this weekend for the Grand Prix, I was there to see a substantially more aggressive spectacle: the Montreal police protecting the event from protestors.
This was, of course, part of the ongoing student strike against tuition hikes, and a more general protest against the draconian Bill 78 — and, for some, the neoliberal capitalist system in general.
I spent Friday through Sunday night in the downtown, chanting, stopping traffic and jeering the government and police – who reacted with unpredictable charging (sometimes not distinguishing tourists from protestors) and pepper spray, flash grenades and mass arrests, or as they might as well call it around here, ‘the usual.’
But if you had been following the coverage, especially on CUTV (Concordia University Television), you would already know that.
Unfortunately, the spectacle played pretty well into the hands of the mainstream media (especially English language outlets), eager to depict the protestors as violent thugs out to ruin the good time of tourists and destroy Montreal’s economy in the process.
Certainly, the downtown marches this weekend, organized, not by student organizations but by the anti-capitalist group La Convergence des luttes anticapitalistes or CLAC, were, for the most part, far from violent. In fact, the only time I saw a black blocer in action (throwing rocks at a bank window), he or she was resoundingly booed by everyone else.
Meanwhile, I didn’t see any news cameras or police at another, albeit much smaller protest, or rather protests, happening about a twenty minute bike ride away from downtown, but in what might as well have been in another world entirely.
Before heading to the downtown, which thanks to police tactics, made the Grand Prix itself look a bit timid (as a friend put it, the weaponry and armour on display by the cops really fit the whole F1 aesthetic), I bixied up to The Plateau neighborhood.
I wanted to see the casseroles which are common in this area of the city. At a few minutes after 8 pm, I didn’t see anything but the usual crowd of tourists and locals frequenting the shops and restaurants.
I was about to leave, but then I heard from one of the side streets the rhythmic dinging of a spoon drumming a pot. I biked down the street and saw several people – families, children, elderly folks — from a small apartment complex had come out on their balconies to bang kitchen utensils.
Out of context (and aside from the weather, of course), one might have thought it was New Year’s Eve.
When I made my way back to Avenue du-Mont Royal there were about a twenty people on the street banging away – making a slow circle around the intersection. I rode my bike a few blocks further down and saw around the same amount of people banging away at a different intersection a similar scene was found a few blocks further, and again a few blocks after that.
At one of these small demonstrations, I observed one excited little boy banging his heart out with a wooden spoon and thought of Robert Munsch’s famed story Mortimer (“Be Quiet!”) – and I realized how this kind of protest, with its playful nature, was allowing young and old to bring out their inner Mortimers in a safe, community setting.
Unlike the action downtown, there were few cops in sight and if passerbys felt hostility, they didn’t show it. Rather, many cars honked support and several pedestrians stopped and drummed a mailbox or whatever was handy or gave a thumbs up as they walked by.
This was a significant contrast to the downtown tourists/F1 fans, many of whom booed the protestors and gave us the thumbs down, you know, like it was violent live sports event. Meanwhile, the casseroles felt like a yard or bake sale and were about just as threatening.
Maybe it’s the second hand pepper spray I experienced downtown while watching a young woman on the sidewalk, who didn’t get out of the way of the police fast enough get sprayed in the face, but I would really like the Montreal police to be exposed for their behaviour, even if that means marches that rain on the parade of a few tourists. Yet, it seems that the more aggressively the police behave, the more easy it is for the mainstream media to craft a narrative of violent protesters. It’s a frustrating, but inescapable irony of these downtown actions.
I’m not saying people should avoid protesting there, but the casseroles do offer a nice alternative. Those families banging their pots and pans were certainly a sight for sore, pepper stained eyes. I hope such protests resume in large numbers again on the streets of Montreal and grow in size in Toronto and across Canada – it’s kind of hard to negatively spin a child or inner child’s radical equivalent of “clang, clang, rattle-bing bang – gonna make my noise all day.”
