#custrike

@ McGill College and Sherbrooke

erm, edited for proper link.

English translation via Concordia Students For The Strike:

More students rushed and pepper sprayed, many of whom were protesting on their own campus. At least one window was broken at Concordia, which is somehow being made into a bigger deal than the human beings who were pepper sprayed, as per usual.

Students are also occupying the Liberal part offices.

Flying pickets started at 9 this morning.

Here's an event we came up with for folks who a) don't have a lot of time to participate in direct action, b) can't/don't want to risk getting arrested, expelled, or fined, and c) have limited mobility and can't or don't want to do actions that involve tons of physical activity or an extended period of time.

At 8 AM on the 28th, we're going to meet in the atrium of the downtown Library building, and try to fill  up all the computer labs - as well as sign out all the library laptops - at once, effectively shutting down the library's computer service for 15 minutes. During that time, we will send mass e-mails to university administrators - template e-mails will be available, or come prepared to write your own. We want to particularly focus on flooding the complaint line set up by the university to handle "code of conduct violations" related to the strike - if you feel that, as a striker and/or someone supporting the strike, your right to participate in your own education has been impeded by the university's anti-strike stance, you should inform them that they are violating their own code of conduct!

Concordia has declared war on the student movement. Students all over the province have been locked out, deregistered, threatened with expulsion and failing grades, harassed, beaten, and largely treated with contempt by their own administrations. The government refuses to negotiate it's stance with us. It took a ~300,000 person demonstration to get the media to even BEGIN to take us seriously, but shit has just begun, my friends.

This week marks the start of a week of economic disruption.

There are direct actions (multiple direct actions) planned for every single day of the week. That facebook link has some info on a few of them - obviously details can't be released just yet, but there's meeting locations and contact info there. For more info, get in touch with the Mob Squad, your student union, or the student association of your department. Everyone is mobilizing like crazy.

We were ~300,000 on Thursday. There should be no doubt that we can shut this city down.

If you're not into participating in direct actions for any reason, please take my recent post to heart, we need your help. If you're not sure who to get in touch with or how to go about offering support, message me (non-anon plz so i can reply privately) so we can talk.

We shut down three major streets at once. The downtown core was immobilized for hours. We spanned 50 city blocks. Public transit was rerouted, businesses closed. Concordia University closed for the day, cancelling all it's classes and locking it's doors.

Before the march, about 100 people occupied the port of Montreal, shutting down all activity there for about half an hour. 100 people. Shut down one of the biggest economic centres of the city. And then joined the 200,000-person march through downtown.

The provincial police came in to help the Montreal cops out, but they were still so outnumbered they could barely manage to confiscate a few sticks from a handful of signs. It was the first time I've ever seen police deliberately rendered so utterly ineffectual and clearly obsolete by a large group of people. While we took the streets, dropped banners, and demonstrated, they lined up in the doorways of banks, looking out of place. Nobody wanted them there and most people ignored them. There was no way they could stop a demonstration that size, even with mass arrests - they had absolutely no control over the situation.

At one point, I crested a hill and looked around me. There was no way to tell where the march began or ended. The streets were just filled - packed - with an endless stream of people.

I learned later that it was like that not just on the street I was on, but on parallel streets as well.

There's a lot of stuff to say about this. I have a lot of critical thoughts swirling around and individual interactions/things to comment on. But right now, what I can't get over no matter how hard I try is the sheer scale of it. I had heard rumors of MAYBE 75-100K, and felt incapable of processing even the possibility of such numbers. We were TWICE THAT, and more.

I have never seen anything like that, ever before. 

200,000 people could take a city the size of Montreal.

200,000 people is the biggest demonstration in Quebec history.

200,000 people is a number that can't really be ignored.

And at the end of it, we issued a threat: the next step after this, if a tuition freeze isn't implemented