Around thirty pro-Palestinian demonstrators blocked the railway tracks at the intersection of Seigneurial and Sir-Wilfrid-Laurier boulevards, in Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville, around 10 a.m. this Saturday morning.
Police officers from the Longueuil Agglomeration Police Service (SPAL) arrived on the scene mid-morning as protesters held up a banner reading “against colonial transport for genocidal purposes.”
According to a statement from the BDS Direct Action Ad Hoc Collective, the protesters were targeting the rail transport of goods to Israel.
A post on SPAL social media explains that a 31-year-old woman and a 33-year-old man were arrested.
The woman faces charges of mischief and the man faces charges of assault and obstructing police.
The SPAL adds that four police officers were “disturbed by pepper spray” and that no one was injured among the demonstrators
Goods would travel between Montreal and Halifax on Canadian National (CN) freight trains and then to Haifa aboard ships belonging to the company Zim Integrated Shipping Services Ltd.
“We have made petitions, statements, and resolutions, and it has not worked,” said one of the organizers of the demonstration, Dominique Gagnon, in the press release. “Today we are blocking the rails used to transfer goods between Canada and the Zionist entity because the entire political class has abandoned Palestine.”