A splash at the Jacques-Cartier Bridge | Three activists will spend the night in prison

Three environmental activists involved in the Jacques-Cartier Bridge stunt have been arrested and will appear Wednesday at the Montreal courthouse. Two of them had scaled its structure on Tuesday morning, forcing its closure during rush hour.

Individuals who wanted to protest against fossil fuels could face accusations of misdeeds, said agent Camille Savoie, spokesperson for the Sûreté du Québec (SQ), in a press scrum.

Around 7 p.m., another SQ spokesperson, Frédéric Deshaies, indicated that three people were detained in connection with this event, and that they were to appear Wednesday at the Montreal courthouse.

“This is unacceptable!” The activists are non-violent and there is no reason to detain them! Our anger and our rage leave us speechless,” reacted on social networks the Collectif Antigone, at the origin of the coup – which took place in concert with the group Last Generation Canada.

A member of the Antigone Collective, Chantal Poulin, explained in an interview with The Press that one of the three people arrested had volunteered to help the police in negotiations, but had not climbed the structure.

“Our Collective has been carrying out non-violent actions for more than twenty years, and activists are always released after a few hours, under the promise of no longer disturbing public order,” she explains.

“That three activists spend the night in prison is unheard of in Quebec,” she adds, very worried.

“Oil is killing us”

According to the Antigone Collective, the two activists climbed on the structure of the bridge linking Montreal to the South Shore around 5 a.m. Tuesday morning. The coup took place in concert with the group Last Generation Canada.

Once at the top of one of the two points of the bridge, the climbers displayed a red banner on which one could read: “Oil is killing us,” in French and English.

“The view is super beautiful, but what we come to do here is serious,” said one of the climbers, who introduced himself as Olivier, in a video shot from the top of the bridge and broadcast on social networks.

He recalled that on October 8, 2019, three Extinction Rebellion activists had also climbed on the structure of the Jacques-Cartier Bridge. In his view, in the five years since, the climate emergency has worsened and governments have taken no significant action to reverse this trend.

“There have been forest fires, floods, people who have lost their homes, people who have died from heat stroke, heatwaves are getting longer from summer to summer, the effects on health, on our houses, become more pronounced every year,” he listed.

“It is very important to do everything we can to sound the alarm, make changes and put pressure on the authorities. All together, we are capable of making a difference,” he insisted.

Traffic disrupted

Activists caused the closure of the Jacques-Cartier Bridge for nearly seven hours, which inevitably led to congestion on other roads, especially on the South Shore.

SQ police officers met them at the top of the structure around 10 a.m. Negotiations between the demonstrators and the authorities took place peacefully. “Our deployed police officers have specialized training. The operation was carried out gradually to ensure the safety of everyone,” explained Officer Savoie.

Traffic on the bridge finally resumed around noon. “No one was injured during the event,” said the SQ.

Environmental claims

On Facebook, when a user criticized the Antigone Collective for “disturbing ordinary workers who have no power”, the group responded: “All other means have been tried. It is urgent that the message be heard. »

Last Generation Canada is demanding in particular that the federal government adhere to the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, “in order to stop the extraction and combustion of oil, gas and coal by 2030 and to support and finance other countries to make a rapid, fair and just transition.

The two groups also call on Ottawa to create a national emergency management agency to respond to climate disasters, such as forest fires and floods, and call for the closure of the Enbridge 9B pipeline, which transports oil from the Western Canada up to Quebec.

According to Olivier, this pipeline represents “the biggest time bomb that threatens drinking water and the safety of residents of the greater Montreal region and everywhere along the St. Lawrence River.”

Guilbeault prefers other means of activism

In a written statement sent to The Canadian Press, federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault maintained that he will not apologize for working within the “only federal party to have a credible climate plan.”

“The measures we have put in place have allowed us to move from a situation where, in 2015, we were expected to miss our emissions targets to a situation where, for the first time, emissions are decreasing while the economy is running at full speed,” he argued.

In 2001, Mr. Guilbeault, who then campaigned for Greenpeace, himself made headlines when he climbed the CN Tower in Toronto. With his colleague Chris Holden, he unfurled a banner reading: “Canada and Bush — Climate Killers.”

“I appreciate this group’s mobilization in favor of climate action and I invite them to take a closer look at our record. As an activist, I prefer methods of struggle that keep the population on our side,” the minister added in his statement.

For his part, when the demonstration began Tuesday morning, the Minister of the Environment of Quebec, Benoit Charette, wrote on social networks that it was “completely unjustifiable and totally condemnable!” “.

“These people are not helping the environment. They only frustrate people,” he added.

Controversial comments

In a message on

His comments were quickly condemned by the Professional Federation of Journalists of Quebec (FPJQ).

“He is completely wrong in his target, it is obvious that it is the job of journalists, of the media, to report and report on an event which affects the daily lives of thousands of people,” explained Éric-Pierre Champagne , president of the FPJQ.

He added that this “unfortunate” and “disturbing” statement from the minister was “another example” of the “lack of understanding” of certain elected officials of the role that journalists play in society.

With Stéphane Blais, The Canadian Press