Montreal in Turmoil: Three Stories Defining November 2025
November 2025 has been a month of significant social upheaval in Montreal, with three interconnected stories capturing the city's evolving landscape of protest, resistance, and civic engagement. From bridge blockades to underground transit movements, Montrealers are finding new ways to make their voices heard in an increasingly complex urban environment.
The Jacques-Cartier Bridge: A Symbolic Battleground
The entrance to Montreal's iconic Jacques-Cartier Bridge became the site of another protest this month, continuing a long tradition of this infrastructure being used as a stage for political expression. This latest demonstration adds to a rich history of the bridge serving as a symbolic location for various causes over the years, from environmental activism to calls for social justice.
According to reports from La Presse, demonstrators strategically blocked access to the bridge, drawing attention to their cause while causing significant disruption to the city's already strained transportation network. The choice of location is far from coincidental – the Jacques-Cartier Bridge has long represented both the connection between Montreal's different boroughs and the division between different social and political forces in the city.
This latest protest reflects a broader pattern of civil disobedience that has characterized Montreal's political landscape throughout 2025, with citizens increasingly turning to direct action to voice their concerns about various social, political, and economic issues affecting the city.
The Underground Resistance: STM Riders Fight Back
While some protesters choose the symbolic height of bridge entrances, others are waging a different kind of battle in the depths of Montreal's metro system. As reported by the Journal de Montréal, a fascinating phenomenon has emerged among STM riders: organized groups of customers are actively evading fare payments and coordinating to avoid encounters with special constables.
The movement has taken on an almost game-like quality, with riders sharing real-time information about constable locations through social media platforms, particularly a Facebook group called "Contrôle en cours – STM" that has grown to over 8,000 members. This digital organizing represents a new form of collective action, where technology and social media are used to facilitate what participants frame as resistance against an unfair system.
This underground movement coincides with an ongoing STM strike that has disrupted normal transit service throughout November. The strike, involving various categories of STM workers including maintenance staff, bus drivers, and metro operators, has created a perfect storm of transportation challenges that seem to have catalyzed this unusual form of rider resistance.
The images captured by the Journal de Montréal show riders not just passively avoiding payment, but actively "hunting" constables – a term that speaks to the adversarial relationship that has developed between some riders and transit enforcement. This dynamic raises important questions about public space, the social contract, and how economic inequality plays out in urban transportation systems.
The Bigger Picture: Three Acts of November 7th
These two stories represent just part of the broader narrative of Montreal in early November 2025. According to Le Devoir's coverage of "Les trois actus du 7 novembre" (The three news items of November 7th), these events were part of a particularly newsworthy day that captured the city's complex social dynamics.
While we cannot access the specific details of Le Devoir's November 7th coverage without the full article, the pattern is clear: Montreal was experiencing a convergence of different forms of civic action and political expression. The bridge protest represents traditional, visible demonstrations, while the metro fare evasion represents a more decentralized, technology-enabled form of resistance.
Digital Resistance and Community Organizing
What makes these 2025 Montreal movements particularly interesting is the role of digital technology in facilitating collective action. The STM fare evasion movement's use of Facebook groups to coordinate activities represents a new chapter in how urban populations organize against perceived injustices. Unlike traditional protests that require physical presence at specific locations and times, this form of resistance can happen spontaneously across the entire transit network.
This digital organizing also reflects broader changes in how social movements function in the 21st century. The speed at which information can be shared, the ability to coordinate activities across vast urban areas, and the creation of online communities around shared grievances all contribute to new forms of civic engagement that would have been impossible in previous decades.
Historical Context and Future Implications
These November 2025 events continue Montreal's long tradition of being a city where social movements can flourish. From the province's Quiet Revolution to more recent student protests and climate activism, Montreal has consistently served as a laboratory for new forms of political expression and social organization.
The Jacques-Cartier Bridge protests add to this infrastructure's legacy as a stage for political drama, while the STM underground movement represents a more subtle but potentially equally significant form of resistance. Together, they paint a picture of a city where traditional and new forms of protest coexist and sometimes intersect.
The convergence of these movements during November 2025 – against the backdrop of ongoing labor disputes, economic challenges, and social tensions – suggests that Montreal is experiencing a period of significant civic transformation. Whether these developments represent a temporary response to specific circumstances or the emergence of new, more enduring forms of urban resistance remains to be seen.
Conclusion: A City in Transition
The three stories that defined November 7th, 2025 – and the broader month of which it was part – reveal Montreal as a city in transition. From the symbolic heights of the Jacques-Cartier Bridge to the digital underground of metro fare evasion, Montrealers are finding new ways to challenge authority, express dissent, and claim space in their city.
These movements, while different in their methods and immediate goals, share a common thread: a rejection of traditional political processes in favor of more direct, immediate forms of action. Whether this represents a healthy diversification of democratic expression or a concerning erosion of social order depends largely on one's perspective. What is clear, however, is that Montreal in November 2025 is a city where the relationship between citizens, institutions, and public space is being actively renegotiated.
As the city moves forward, these stories will likely be remembered as important markers in Montreal's ongoing evolution as a center of social innovation, political experimentation, and urban resistance. The digital tools that enabled the STM resistance, the strategic use of public infrastructure for protest, and the spontaneous organization of citizens all point toward new possibilities for civic engagement in the 21st century.
