Category: Actions

Hamilton: For the eleventh year, New Year’s Noise Demo at the Barton Jail

Posted on

For the 11th year in a row, anarchists and other rebels gathered on New Year’s eve to march on the Barton Jail. This is an international tradition, rooted in showing our disgust for prisons and their world and our solidarity with all prisoners, and especially to remember anarchists facing repression.

So we circulated a text by the Operation Renata defendants in Trento, Italy that contains some important reminders: “We have seen the suffering of families, friends, and those who have lost their own children to the hands of the state, and we have also seen most people’s silence and indifference, in spite of how much closer these tragedies are to us than we’d like to believe.” Read More …

Attack on Sidewalk Toronto

Posted on1 Comment

Last night some anarchists visited the Sidewalk Toronto office on Parliament Street. Their cheerful paint job needed some touching up to remind everyone that for all their land acknowledgements and “consultations”, sidewalk is a sinister force in our city. [Tag reads “Fuck Off Sidewalk”]

There are plenty of reasons to oppose sidewalk. Indigenous elders have criticized their tokenistic consultation of First Nations (hey, why not just remediate the stolen land and give it back, anyways?) Their aggressive proposals for data collection, private police forces and cashless stores are all pretty dystopic. and we can bet that their “affordable” housing stock will be nowhere near attainable for those who need it.

Respect to the efforts of groups like Block Sidewalk for their pushback against this plan. It isn’t a done deal so let’s keep fighting! we chose this tactic to reflect our hostility toward google and all forms of exclusivity and surveillance, and hope it inspires future action! Read More …

Toronto: November 29 Nobody Pays fare evasion report

Posted on

In response to the worldwide “Nobody Pays” call to action on November 29 for fare evasions, a small but spirited crew did just that after the climate march in downtown so-called Toronto. We joined the march as a Free Transit Now bloc, and passed out leaflets [offsite link, full text below] with some ideas about why transit is a climate, race, and class issue, why it should be free, and why fare enforcement is bad and fare evasion is cool, especially in the context of international solidarity.

At the end of the march, we circulated through the crowd chanting “Public transit should be free! Liberate the TTC!” and “Fuck the cops, fuck the haters, power to the fare evaders!”, then headed over to a nearby subway station. Read More …

Toronto: skale: a symphony of brick and glass

Posted on2 Comments

condo developer skale was attacked last night.
their ‘project’ at queen and gladstone
“a provocative and innovative symphony
of metals, glass and brick”
is another attack on the community of parkdale.
these streets
this neighbourhood
is not a “world-famous centre of cool and creativity”
it is (was) our home
our community
that we are being (were already) pushed out of by developers
yuppie businesses
and scumbag landlords.
this violence
this trauma
is tearing apart communities
and lives. Read More …

Kingston: Luxury Spa Development Sabotaged

Posted on1 Comment

Recently, we quietly entered the site of a luxury spa development just north of Kingston and sabotaged several heavy machines by adding bleach to the oil tanks (thanks to Mythbusters for the tactical advice). We waited a little while for the machines to run and cycle the bleach, and now they have disappeared. We hope that the engines are permanently disabled. Read More …

How to find and take action against border infrastructure anywhere in Canada

Posted on

Construction has begun on a new prison for migrants and refugees in Laval, QC, a suburb just outside of Montreal. As the project has advanced, the struggle to stop it has ramped up as well, with a wide variety of actions being taken to stop its construction. The prison is part of a $138 million plan called the National Immigration Detention Framework (NIDF), announced in 2016 by the governnment of Canada following a period of resistance against the imprisonment of migrants. The NIDF expands and strengthens the government’s capacity to surveil, imprison, and deport migrants, creating two new migrant prisons as well as new forms of surveillance & control such as mandatory ankle bracelets, voice biometric scans, and halfway houses for migrants.

In the midst of this it can be hard to figure out how to intervene in what’s happening, either as an individual or group. In the spirit of spreading all forms of resistance to Canada’s border and prison regimes we’ve brainstormed a list of (just some of) the ways people might contribute to this fight. Read More …

Every Death is a Murder – Prisoners Justice Day, Hamilton

Posted on

On the evening of Prisoners Justice Day, August 10th 2019, a small group of prison hating folks gathered in Hamilton, Ontario at Beasley park for a noise demo. HPS (Hamilton Police Sevices) observed the rally with excessive numbers including bike cops, a cop van, a supervisor suv and two cruisers. As our numbers grew we gathered to listen to a small introduction by the Barton Prisoner Solidarity Project explaining how PJD started and why it continues. The BPSP is a newly developed organization that seeks to thin the prison walls by building connections and magnifying the voices of those inside, while simultaneously working to smash those walls altogether by asking bigger questions about what a world without prisons would look like and figuring out how to get there. Read More …

Answering Back: Windsor’s “Drug Den”, or How We Choose to See Things

Posted on

Two prominent recent articles in The Windsor Star describe a burnt out building on Wyandot St as a “drug den” and the people using the space as “a problem crowd” of “addicts” and push for the building to be demolished. The total lack of humanity in how the situation is described is striking. Drawing heavily on the words of local business owner Andrew Steptoe, it creates an opposition between good citizens like him – whose presence matters and whose voice counts – and the anonymous drug users who are portrayed as subhuman, represented only by photos of the garbage they leave behind, and who need to be driven away. Read More …