This just wasn’t cricket: anarchists use chirping insects in pressure tactic

MONTREAL — Some might say it just wasn’t cricket.

A group of anarchists hoped to use the chirping insects to express their opposition to a new Montreal-area immigration detention centre.

They are boasting on their website of recently unleashing “thousands” of crickets inside a building housing a Montreal architectural firm that was awarded a contract for the centre.

But it didn’t actually turn out the way they wanted. 

Montreal architectural firm Lemay, one of the companies hired to work on the project in Laval, was targeted by Montreal Counter-Information, which describes itself as a website for anarchists to “diffuse their ideas and actions”.

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The group says its “amateur construction crew released thousands of crickets” into Lemay’s newly built headquarters last month.

It called the action the beginning of a concerted effort to stop construction of the Laval holding centre, which is scheduled to be ready in 2021.

It said crickets are known to reproduce quickly, are difficult to exterminate and that their constant noise makes them a nuisance.

But that’s not the way things turned out — the crickets actually ended up in another locale and were pretty quiet. 

The president of Montreal engineering firm ELEMA, which rents space in the same building, recently moved in and was in the process of renovating. 

“There was a wooden panel that served as a door at the rear,” Dominic Miron said in an interview Wednesday.

“They just moved the panel and placed about 100 crickets next to the door and left (and) when we arrived around 6:30 in the morning, we found them, called an exterminator and swept them up with a broom.” 

Miron described the insects he discovered as pet shop crickets.

“It’s not the big crickets that are found in nature which we hear all summer . . .they are small crickets that don’t make much noise,” he added.

Miron said the activists stole nothing from his office and there was no damage.

“They wanted to cause a sensation, but they didn’t get what they wanted,” he said.

The federal government is investing $56.1 million in the new Laval holding facility, which is part of a national plan to improve immigration detention centres, including facilities in Toronto and Vancouver.

In response to an email from The Canadian Press, a spokesman for Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said there would be no comment because police are investigating.

But Goodale said in a separate statement the government “wants to effectively limit the use of detention to those difficult cases where there are serious concerns about the individual being unidentified, a flight risk or a danger to the public; and we need to minimize the use of provincial jails.”

Activist groups have expressed concerns some people are currently held in provincial jails because of the risk they pose.

The new immigration holding centre will allow for their transfer from the jails and will be able to handle multiple levels of risk.

Peter Rakobowchuk, The Canadian Press