This Is A Prison, No Matter What You Call It

Activists are determined to halt the construction of a new migrant detention centre in Laval

- Jon Milton

It was a cold New Year’s Eve in Laval, the island suburb just north of Montreal. A few hours before 2018 turned to 2019, a group of about 150 people had bused into Laval. Bundled against the cold, with backpacks full of fireworks and noisemakers, they were getting ready to ring in the new year with a demonstration.

Sandwiched between Laval’s industrial section to the east, farmland to the north, and sprawling suburbs to the west, there is an area of the city with four prisons, all next to one another. A minimum security “federal training centre”; the Leclerc provincial women’s prison; a multi-level security federal training centre; and a detention centre for migrants, administered by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA).

Every year, anarchists and prison abolitionists organize noise demonstrations outside the four facilities on New Year’s Eve. It’s part of an international anarchist tradition, whose origins are unclear, and serves as a way to remind the people inside that they aren’t alone at a particularly difficult time of year. Participants shoot fireworks into the air, bang drums, and rattle the fences that surround buildings filled with cages.

“Every city, every town, burn the prisons to the ground.” Four prisons, four stops planned in the demonstration. But this year, an extra stop was added to the itinerary – the site where CBSA plans to build a new detention centre for migrants.

Stopping at a nondescript spot, a patch of open land between the existing jails, speakers told the crowd about the CBSA’s plans for the new detention centre, garnering boos from listeners. One speaker described having family members who had been locked inside the existing migrant facility nearby, and affirmed that no new prison would be built.