For May Day this year, despite the current limitations on some of our traditional activities, we wanted to safely take to the streets. It was a perfect opportunity to do a demonstration we’d been thinking about at Toronto South Detention Centre. Toronto South, nicknamed “Guantanamo South”, is a horrific place, and an especially dangerous place to be during a pandemic. Read More …
In response to the call for decentralized May Day actions, some Toronto anarchists went for a delightful ride on a clear night in late April to let banks know that we are watching and that we are ready and willing to act. Despite most branches being closed due to Covid-19, we managed to find a few branches that were continuing to open for customers. We visited several banks, gluing the locks, and spray painting messages on the concrete or exterior facade as appropriate. Our messages centred around their abysmal failure to show even a modicum of compassion amid widespread income loss among its clients. Read More …
In the last week, tens of thousands of Hamiltonians have applied for the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), the government’s COVID-19 income support package which provides payments of $2,000/month for up to four months. In this post we look into the nuts and bolts of the CERB rollout and consider what the government hopes to accomplish by ladling out all this cash. Read More …
It was a picture snapped by a friend of a friend, spotted on a walk, passed around on signal and shared on an anarchist facebook page. A banner waving in the breeze off a rail bridge, proclaiming “Genocide is not an essential service – Solidarity with Wet’suwet’en”. A few kilometers down from the spot where the banner was hung, just a few months ago hundreds of us gathered on the rails. We were part of a wave of actions stopping rail traffic across the country, demanding the RCMP get off Wet’suwet’en territory, and declaring that the Canadian economy couldn’t continue as usual while Indigenous land was invaded in the name of greed and environmental destruction. This banner echoes that moment and to me, is a small spark of hope about moments to come. Read More …
For a variety of reasons, most of which have to do with COVID-19, the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair collective has made the tough–but in our view, responsible–decision that we are not going to organize the big two-day gathering that has taken place around parc Vinet for most of the past twenty years. Instead, though, we hope to organize a different kind of event on May 17, 2020, to sustain our connections, politics, and solidarity. Read More …
On Sunday afternoon a caravan of about a dozen vehicles drove to Collins Bay Institution, a federal prison in Kingston, ON to hold a noisy demonstration in solidarity with prisoners demanding to be released in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This demo was organized in response to a call [1] from Solidarity Across Borders (https://www.solidarityacrossborders.org/en/) for caravan actions against imprisonment and for status for all. Read More …
However you tell the tale of May Day, one thing is consistent: it is a time people gather together, to march in the streets or to celebrate a new spring. Although most of us are enjoying the warmer weather blowing in, we are mostly stuck in our homes. Reading the news, trying to figure out the right thing to do, watching May 1st creep closer and wondering what it will look like this year if we can’t take over downtown and revel in May Day as we have come to know it: a celebration of anticapitalism. Read More …
Anonymous submission to North Shore While we don’t know what the coming months will look like, we are excited to announce and invite you to mark your calendars for the Toronto Anarchist Bookfair on October 24, 2020. While there is much uncertainty in the world right now, it is our hope and intention to host a bookfair this year. The need for many of our ongoing projects hasn’t stopped, and Read More …
“Words can’t communicate realities like the ones we’re currently experiencing. There can be no words to describe a condition which never existed before, which changes from one moment to the next and which has no known stages or outcomes.” – Yarostan Vochek Read More …
The prisoners of Barton Jail continue to feel that they are forgotten. Telling us that ‘No one stands up for prisoners, we don’t have a voice’ and that its a relief to have a number to call to tell the outside about what happening inside. Read More …
