It would have been easy for the city of Montreal to have saved the $25,000 it took to forcibly end the occupation of Square Victoria. On the night of November 24th, 2011, the Occupants of La Place du Peuple responded to the borough of Ville-Marie’s eviction notice with consensus: we would voluntarily leave the square, despite the fact that we had received a strong vote of confidence from Mayor Tremblay only days earlier. “The conscience of the city”, as he had called the occupation, was on its way out.  Many Occupants spent a sleepless night packing up in order to make the following day’s dismantling as painless as possible. We, a structureless group of friends who had been perfect strangers only a few weeks prior, were however surprised by the city’s failure to communicate among different departments, as the structures for which we had negotiated a later eviction date (the kitchen, yurt and hospital) were surrounded by police and forcibly evacuated.

We have thus far refrained from submitting our own bill to the city, which would certainly include material seized and never returned (an estimated $3000-worth of kitchen equipment, which we had used to serve over 40,000 free meals) from the camp. There is no price for the trust we have lost in our city administrators and the SPVM after our many seemingly positive negotiations were met with betrayal.

Occupons Montréal established a free library, a cinemathèque, a soup kitchen and a shelter for whoever needed it, but perhaps most of all we gave citizens a public Agora. From October 15th to this very moment, from the occupation of Square Victoria to the ongoing general assemblies at the Darling Foundry, we facilitate direct democracy on a full stomach. We value these services at well over $25,000, and consider the city’s disorganized use of public funds in order to disrupt them a true source of indignation.

Written collectively by six members of Occupons Montréal, among them:
Jamie Klinger
Paul Bode
Dan Parker