Metro Pulse/Cover/Quebec: Tearing Down the Fence

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First Person: Transforming the Streets
One protester's reflections on Quebec

By the time we arrive on Wednesday, the People's Summit has already been meeting all week, drafting an 80-page alternative version of the FTAA treaty in polite parliamentary sessions translated into English, Spanish and French. The CLAC groups, in contrast, are just now assembling, rolling in by the busload and carload in anticipation of the real Summit and the street protests that will accompany it. There's some cross-over between the two camps, but they seem to regard each other with suspicion. I pick up a newsletter issued by "Les Anarchistes," which includes an article denouncing the People's Summit as a bunch of "reformists" who merely want to tweak the economic system rather than (as the anarchists prefer) tear it down and "build an egalitarian society on the ruins of the crushed old world."

I'm guessing another difference is that the People's Summit people are staying in hotels for upwards of $80 a night. We, on the other hand, find ourselves paying $5 for a patch of floor in a health club called the Extreme Gym. Hobbes and I throw our sleeping bags down in the aerobics room with about 30 other travelers. Over the next two days, the club will become increasingly crowded. By Friday night, we will be lying on concrete in the gym's large boxing room with hundreds of other protesters (the lucky ones get to sleep on the canvas of the boxing ring).

The normal rules don't apply. Mary from Asheville and her friends bed down next to us. "We have got to find somewhere else," Mary says. "I can't afford to pay $5 a night."

The statement sounds a little absurd; this is $5 in Canadian money, about $3.60 in U.S. cash. The only way our rooming could be cheaper is if it were free. But that's the point. Hobbes has already told me not to expect to pay for any food during our stay here; someone, somewhere will be giving it away.

And so I'm introduced to another fact and facet of these protests: they are not merely demonstrations against something; they are demonstrations of something. One of the most common phrases I see on banners, stickers and fliers in Quebec is "Another world is possible." And in their brief convergence here, many of the participants seem to be trying to manifest that world—a place where food and shelter is available to those who need it, where you are invited and also expected to contribute something to the community, where you take care of yourself and each other without the blessing or supervision of any outside authority.

On Thursday morning, Hobbes and I find the free food. It takes a while, because the map we have shows the dining spot to be somewhere that at first appears to be completely cluttered with highway on- and off-ramps. But underneath the arcing swaths of asphalt, between the massive concrete pillars that support the elevated roadways, there's a gravel plain strewn with wood and metal sculptures, vivid galleries of psychedelic graffiti art splashed across every available surface, and a makeshift nomad's kitchen erected under a banner that says "The PedAler's Feast." The "A" in "PedAler's" is an anarchist logo, like so: A. The insignia is kind of the Nike swoosh of the young protest crowd (except of course that it's not trademarked—unlike the "Fuck Le Sommet" T-shirts I see some protesters wearing, which have tags identifying them as Fruit of the Loom products manufactured in El Salvador).

Breakfast consists of bran muffins and gummy oatmeal gruel. There's a plastic jug for donations, but no money is required. You do have to clean your own dishes, though, in cold soapy water provided at a washing station. I talk to the guy who seems to be in charge, a tall young man with long blonde hair and a bristly beard who looks like he should be named Thor and, in fact, is ("My mother's Icelandic," he explains). He's from Winnipeg, where he's a member of a group called the Free Kitchen. He says he's here to support the protesters and also to provide a model of non-profit commodity exchange. "In a lot of the countries that are involved in the discussions, a lot of their lands are taken up growing single crops for export," he says. He mentions coffee and bananas. "When they should be growing food for their own people to eat." In Quebec this week, even the oatmeal is ideological.

I find a patch of scrub grass and plop down to eat. I listen in on a group next to me talking about the next day's protests. A bleach-blond girl in a black sweatshirt with a woman-power emblem on it says to her friends, "O.K., so if one of us gets arrested, are we just gonna pile on top of each other?"

The CLAC "spokescouncil" is not exactly open to the press, but it isn't closed either. If you know where and when it is—the Université Laval, 3 p.m. Thursday—you can go. And since this is posted on a handwritten placard in the information room of the Horizon Centre, I don't feel like I'm violating any rules by attending. (Well, maybe the one that says "MEDIA must be accompanied by a designated media delegate AT ALL TIMES," but who's counting?)

I get there about an hour late and find the meeting well under way. It's in a large atrium of a college building. There are probably 150 people seated on the floor or watching from balconies one and two stories above. It's a young and scruffy crowd, the kind you'd expect to see at an indie rock show—lots of patchwork clothes and tousled hair, with political buttons and patches much in evidence on jackets and backpacks.

There's a big red CLAC banner on the wall, and the earnest, dark-skinned young man with the microphone seems to be a CLAC representative. He's moderating a discussion about tactics for tomorrow's protests. A few groups are planning to hold peaceful roadblocks to shut down traffic on three of the city's main avenues. They can't decide whether to do this early in hopes of actually blocking some delegates from reaching the Summit or to wait until after a planned march at noon.

The conversation is all in reasonable, matter-of-fact tones, and the microphone is open to anyone who wants it. Volunteers patiently translate every statement from French to English or English to French ("anti-globalization" hardly seems a fair label for such an international assortment of groups). There are nearly equal numbers of males and females, and women actually seem to speak a little more often than men. Hobbes had told me about the open, participative nature of the councils; he didn't tell me about the "twinkling." Instead of applauding when a speaker says something they like, people are supposed to wave their open palms so they twinkle like stars.

The earnestness and even cuteness of the whole proceeding becomes increasingly surreal as talk turns to expectations of more direct confrontation. One young bearded guy in a knit cap (there are a lot of knit caps) stands and identifies himself as being from a "hard-yellow group" in the U.S. Midwest. (From what I can tell, "green" groups are completely peaceful; yellow groups believe in civil disobedience, including the possibility of being arrested; red groups believe in more assertive action, including physical confrontation.)

"Nobody's saying much about red groups, for obvious reasons," the knit-cap guy begins. "But the fence will be penetrated, probably in several places, and when it happens, we are pledging to be there to support the red groups. We will go in behind them. I don't have to say more than that; just know when and where it's going to happen and be there." There is much twinkling.