Hundreds marched through Montreal to boycott Amazon on Feb. 15. Photo Andraé Lerone Lewis
Ryan Pyke,
Local Journalism Initiative
Unions and community members join together to call for boycotts against Amazon
A few hundred people gathered outside Montreal’s Mont-Royal metro station on Feb. 15 to protest against Amazon’s anti-union actions in Quebec.
The march began around 1 p.m., and union members from the Confédération des syndicats nationaux (CSN) and the Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Québec (FTQ) were in attendance.
Protesters walked down St. Denis St., igniting pink, blue and black smoke canisters. One attendee held a giant doll of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Denis Letourneux, a former Amazon worker, learned via email that his employment with the e-commerce company had been terminated. Letourneux attended the protest with a contingent of workers from the unionized warehouse in Laval, DXT4.
The DXT4 Amazon warehouse unionized in May 2024 and started negotiating with Amazon in July 2024. After the DXT4 facility unionized, Amazon began shutting down its Quebec warehouses, leaving many without jobs.
Although not all Amazon employees were laid off at the same time, Jan. 22 was the day employees found out about their jobs being at risk.
“It’s a fight that concerns the entire Quebec society and the entire Quebec working class,” said Felix Trudeau, president of the Laval Amazon workers’ union.
Ki’ra Prentice showed up with the Queers4Labour group, a contingent created by independent 2SLGBTQIA+ rights groups in Montreal such as Pink Bloc.
Prentice’s personal goal for this protest, however, was to join the crowd and be as loud as possible. She stressed the importance of different groups showing up for each other. A Pink Bloc Instagram post had instructed those participating with the Queers4Labour contingent to display 2SLGBTQIA+ iconography like pride flags.
“I can’t even begin to imagine what stupid loopholes [Amazon] are using now to continue to deliver while completely avoiding any responsibility to their employees,” Prentice said.
According to Prentice, the point of the flags is to demonstrate that 2SLGBTQIA+ people stand with Amazon workers.
“We come out for the labourers, for the workers, and we hope that they’ll come out for us,” Prentice said.
According to the Financial Post, Amazon can continue delivering in Quebec by using warehouses in other provinces and third-party delivery services in Quebec.
“They are subcontracting all of our jobs to even worse companies, like Intelcom, to continue exploiting the working class and raking in profits and crushing the labour movement,” Trudeau said. “Or so they think.”
He said the event’s goal was to rally the population to fight for workers’ rights.
Even though Amazon will cease operation in Quebec warehouses, it has found ways to continue fulfilling orders.
According to Forbes, Amazon is now a multi-trillion-dollar company. Trudeau compared the fight against Amazon to the fight against American imperialism.
“What we are doing right now is a good step, I think,” Trudeau said. “I’m optimistic that if Quebec’s labour movement and Quebec’s population rallies together, we can defeat the imperialist—the American imperialist—but we have to stick together, and we have to fight.”