On the morning of Feb. 16, students and other activists gathered outside the Montreal Stock Exchange to protest the privatization of public services in Quebec, including issues such as rising Hydro Québec prices, healthcare costs, and tuition fees. The protest culminated with police pepper spraying some of the the activists.

The activists united as one group under the title “The Coalition Against User Fees and Privatization of Public Services.” According to their website, the coalition is composed of 156 community organizations, unions, and student and feminist groups.

The group hoped to raise awareness for its causes by preventing employees of the stock exchange from arriving to work for the day. The protest began at approximately 8:00 a.m. and quickly spread from the front of the Montreal Exchange to the adjacent Delta Centre-Ville Hotel.

In front of the Exchange, a crowd of a few hundred students and other social activists held up banners and signs while chanting slogans, placing themselves in front of all entrances and denying entry to the building.

“We’re here to contest the raise in tuition,” a protestor from the Université du Québec à Montreal’s (UQAM) student union AFESH (L’Association Facultaire Étudiante Des Sciences Humaines) who requested to remain anonymous, said. “It’s about accessibility—we have a lot of parents at UQAM, and we’re fighting strongly for them so they can support their kids and have an education also.” 

The group was carrying a banner and had positioned themselves to block the entrance of the underground parking area connected to the Exchange.

“We want education to be accessible for everyone and that’s our main goal,” Anne Sarah Brian, a student from Collège de Maisonneuve, said. “We want the government to return to the fees of 2007.”

“We want the government to tax the natural resources of this country … it’s not a lack of funds. It’s the fact that the funds are not put in the right places,” Corinne Trubiano, another protestor, said. 

Around the back of the building, the situation was less peaceful. Many employees of the Exchange had been using the attached Delta Centre-Ville Hotel to reach their workplace, so protesters had blocked it as well. By 11:00 a.m. there was a tense standoff between police and protesters, with police cordoning off the hotel entrance from two groups of protestors who had gathered in the driveway.

“This is really where the main confrontation is,” McGill student Becca Yu said. “We’re hoping that by shutting down this building for the day, it’ll put pressure on the government to reverse these policies … without actually directly blocking the building, it’s so easy to just ignore a big crowd of people.”

By 11:30 a.m. the Montreal police decided to extend the cordon around the hotel in order to allow hotel guests to enter and leave. Starting on the right side of the entrance, they pushed protestors back out of the driveway so that guests, including a children’s hockey team, could leave the hotel.

At roughly 11:45 a.m. this tactic was repeated on the other side of the hotel entrance, but police met greater resistance and were actually pushed back by the crowd of protestors for some time. After addressing them through a megaphone, police used pepper spray to clear the protesters.

“They pushed us further and further away,” Dan Parker, coordinator of 99%, the official publication of Occupy Montreal, said. “Some of the more militant activists started pushing back and of course that’s when the pepper spray came out and people started running for it. Fortunately, there [are] medics here and they’re taking care of people with Malox.”

By 12:15 p.m., the protestors from the front of the Montreal Exchange joined those who had been blockading the entrance to the Delta Centre-Ville, and proceeded to march around the area, stalling traffic for a while.

“University is a good time [for students] to get involved, and especially to fight the tuition costs being raised,” Parker said. “I would invite all students to find out from their local organizations who are mobilizing around the tuition fees to find out how it relates to the privatization of our services … Education is a right, and we shouldn’t watch more people get more in debt and lose their access to education.”