Good and bad camps

The mayor of Montreal reiterated it on Wednesday: the swarming homeless camps cannot be tolerated. They will continue to be dismantled, one by one.

But there is no question of touching the pro-Palestinian camp set up since Saturday in Victoria Square, in the city’s hypercentre. This one is considered acceptable.

“People who campaign for a specific cause do not intend to stay there in the long term,” explained Valérie Plante during a press briefing.

Allow me to have serious doubts about this. This encampment is not about to disappear.

Very far from it, even.

I went there Wednesday morning. It was quiet, I must say. A “resident” washed his dishes in a fountain, after picking up the cigarette butts left on the ground by his comrades. Others distributed pamphlets.

The site was installed in a park belonging to the City, opposite the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) building. It is a large rectangle surrounded by plastic sheets, themselves covered with slogans.

The statue of Queen Victoria, a few meters away, was vandalized by anti-colonial protesters. Some tried to knock it off its base, to no avail.

The “hard core” is made up of 50 to 100 demonstrators, Barbara, one of the organizers, told me.

Their demands: that the CDPQ divest itself of $14 billion in investments, spread across 87 companies “complicit in the Israeli occupation,” such as Airbnb, Expedia and Motorola. And that the Quebec government close its new delegation in Tel Aviv, Israel.

The Caisse says it takes the situation “very seriously,” but don’t expect to see it liquidate billions of dollars of investments. Quebec will maintain its Israeli office.

In short: the demonstrators will not get what they want. Not tomorrow, not the day after tomorrow, not three months from now. They have no intention of packing up until they are right on all counts.

It’s a dead end.

If we trust what is happening at McGill University, where a similar encampment has been rooted since the end of April, the situation will last.

It is the reaction of the authorities, in this context, that I sought to understand. Because the City of Montreal has cracked down on several cases related to the occupation of the “public domain” in recent times.

We can think of orange cones, which must now be removed 24 hours after the end of a project, under penalty of a fine.

At the marquees installed by restorers on Rue Peel during the F1 Grand Prix. They were evacuated in the greatest urgency by the fire department because they were located 58 centimeters too close to the buildings.

Without forgetting, of course, the homeless camps, now gradually dismantled. They are considered inhumane, even dangerous, for itinerant populations and local residents.

In Victoria Square, the reaction of the authorities could be summed up in two words: wait-and-see and tolerance. There is no question of provoking the wrath of the demonstrators, in any way, as long as the situation remains peaceful.

But still ?

Law enforcement has learned a lot from the social movements of recent years, David Shane, an inspector with the Montreal Police Service (SPVM), told me in an interview. In particular, from the “red squares” crisis of 2012, where certain police maneuvers were severely reprimanded by the courts.

A series of factors would have to come together “at the same time” for the police to dismantle the Victoria Square encampment. There should be an “urgency” to act, due to criminal acts or violence, which has not been the case so far according to him, despite the vandalism.

There is also the fundamental right to freedom of expression, recognized again recently by the Superior Court at McGill University after two requests for an injunction.

“We are there to create security if there are excesses or situations that endanger people’s safety,” David Shane told me. We intervene as happened on June 6 at McGill, when people took over university premises. »

SPVM agents will never intervene “at the risk of their own safety” for “all in all minor” crimes or small transgressions of municipal regulations.

The SPVM will continue to monitor the camp 24 hours a day until further notice. The objective is to achieve a “peaceful outcome” as in 2011, when Victoria Square was stormed for six weeks by the “Occupy Montreal” movement.

I found this parallel interesting.

For those who remember, this occupation, inspired by the anti-capitalist movement “Occupy Wall Street”, degenerated badly over the weeks.

The original hard core has been joined by homeless people, drug addicts and all sorts of other marginalized people. They transformed Victoria Square into a scruffy open-air refuge, with hundreds of tents, where drug use and fights intermingled. The arrival of cold weather in November ended up giving the authorities a serious boost.

For the moment, the protesters are cohabiting peacefully with the workers and residents of the sector. Except that there are still many months before next winter. The homelessness crisis is also much worse today than in 2011. The creation of a gigacamp in the city center, to which homeless people would be added, is a very real possibility.

There is a way to respect the freedom of expression of demonstrators without reliving the chaos of 2011. But excesses cannot be tolerated in this nerve center, however noble the cause may be. When will the action plan be due?