Up to half a million take to Montreal's streets

Yesterday marked the 100th day of the student strike in Montreal, in which up to 300,000 to 500,000 people took to the streets to show solidarity with students, and to protest the draconian Bill 78. Mainstream media however is doing its best to downplay the high numbers, proclaming "tens of thousands" and that only 100,000 to 200,000 people participated.

The Globe and Mail:

A river of red-clad protesters rippled through downtown Montreal to mark the 100th day of Quebec’s student strikes, while smaller events were held in other cities Tuesday.

Tens of thousands of people clogged Montreal’s city core in a festive, multi-headed march designed to make a mockery of a new provincial law that demands protest routes be approved in advance.

For the first time, police invoked Bill 78 and a Montreal anti-mask bylaw as they made multiple arrests during a rowdy protest late Tuesday.

Even a well known provincial politician, Independent MNA Pierre Curzi, joined the crowds that strayed off the announced path in a mass demonstration of defiance against the law. A prominent student organizer wandering in the throng went further, practically daring authorities to punish him.

Organizers said the crowd size rivalled the massive protests held the two previous months, on the 22nd of March and April.

While polls in recent weeks suggested the striking students had lost considerable public support, they appeared to have been galvanized in recent days by the new Quebec law.

Since that law passed, people in central Montreal neighbourhoods have appeared on their balconies and in front of their houses to defiantly bang pots and pans in a clanging protest every night at 8 p.m.

Related events were organized Tuesday in New York, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver, which saw only a tiny group of people show up to protest. In France, a few hundred congregated near Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral.

A stone’s throw from the Seine River, people in Paris waved flags in a crowd that included many Quebecers, some of whom had brought their own signs, like one that read: “Quebec is becoming a dictatorship.”

There were two demonstrations scheduled in New York – one at Rockefeller Plaza where Quebec government offices are located, and another at Washington Park later in the day.

Organized by the Occupy Wall Street movement and by the group Strike Everywhere, the first New York event was designed to raise awareness about the Quebec protests while the second was about opposing anti-protest laws all over the world.

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