Montreal – thousands of tourists headed here last weekend for the Grand Prix, but I came for what I assumed would be a more interesting spectacle: Montreal police protecting the event from protesters.
While the media depicted demonstrations as a continuation of the student strike and anti-Bill 78 movement, this isn’t entirely accurate.
Most significantly, Grand Prix protests, called not by CLASSE or other student orgs but by CLAC (Convergence des Luttes Anticapitalistes, the anti-capitalist convergence), were drastically smaller – maybe a couple of thousand at their peak – than the tens of thousands on the streets mere weeks ago.
Of course, it was difficult to figure out the actual size, since the number of police and their aggressiveness gave the impression that the happening was G20 in scale. The count was also thrown off by the fact that protesters got swallowed up by the throngs of tourists, especially when police shoved them onto the sidewalks. So who was who?
On the first night, I felt terrified and maybe a little excited as I was chased through the downtown, but by Sunday night I was bored to tears (literally – I’d inhaled some second-hand pepper spray) with the cat-and-mouse game.
Nevertheless, I spent the weekend chanting, stopping traffic and jeering at the government and police, who reacted with unpredictable charging, flash grenades and mass arrests – or, as they might as well call it around here, “the usual.”
For the most part, the demonstrators were peaceful. The only black blocer I saw in action (throwing rocks at a bank window) was resoundingly booed by everyone else. Unfortunately, that spectacle played pretty well into the hands of the media eager to paint the red-square-adorned crowd as destroyers of Montreal’s economy.
Meanwhile, I saw no news cameras at another, albeit much smaller, protest, or rather protests, about a 20-minute bike ride away in what might have been another world.
Before heading downtown Friday night, I Bixied up to the Plateau neighbourhood to see the casseroles common in this part of the city. At a few minutes after 8 on Avenue du Mont Royal, I heard the rhythmic dinging of a spoon drumming a pot, and, biking around the area, saw several people – families, children, elderly folks – on the balconies of their small apartment complex. Out of context (and aside from the weather, of course), one might have thought it was New Year’s Eve.
Back on the Avenue, I saw 20 people on the street banging away. A few blocks further down, the same thing, and so on a few blocks further, and again a few blocks after that.
Watching one excited little boy banging his heart out, I understood the way this kind of playful expression allows young and old to release their inner kid in a safe community setting.
If the casseroles felt like a bake sale, and were about as threatening, tourists and F1 fans downtown booed and gave the thumbs-down to demonstrators as if they were watching a violent live sports event.
I’m not saying the protesters were wrong to stand their ground and assert their right to amass during a lucrative sports event, but those families banging their kitchen implements were a sight for sore, pepper-stung eyes.
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