A 10-month-old baby rubs her eyes as she’s held by her father, who looks concerned; his five-year-old daughter clings to him while his partner shields her eyes with a blanket.
It’s a scene captured in a photo on Aug. 9 at Montreal’s Place Émilie-Gamelin by photojournalist William Wilson.
After he posted the photo, along with other pictures from that night, to Instagram, it quickly amassed thousands of shares. It was taken after Montreal police confronted a crowd of protesters and fired a chemical irritant into the park, which was filled with bystanders and families.
Montreal police told CBC they are aware of the photo and described the situation as “regrettable.”
In online comments, some people said the photo was an example of what they view as recurrent heavy-handed treatment of protesters by Montreal’s police force. Others chose to criticize the family, asking why a young baby was present at a protest where things could turn dangerous.
But in an interview with CBC, the parents explained what happened that night. They said they were attending a family salsa dancing event at Place Émilie-Gamelin in the city’s downtown Quartier Latin neighbourhood.
“I saw this firework going up, and I thought it was a firework, so I looked up, and then it landed right on my baby, like two inches from her face,” said Jean-Philippe Forget, one of the fathers pictured in the image. It was not a firework.
CBC has analyzed footage taken the night of the protest. It shows police pushing protesters, and protesters running into the park. As the protesters flee, a police officer fires some kind of projectile toward Place Émilie-Gamelin, where the salsa dancing event was taking place.
Forget and his partner criticized the police response as disproportionate to the situation and said officers’ actions exposed them and other families at the event to unnecessary risk.
Montreal police would not confirm the type of chemical irritant used that night, but Forget and his partner described seeing white smoke and feeling a burning sensation in their eyes and skin. Their account is consistent with other accounts of tear gas, which Montreal police have used to disperse crowds previously.
Forget said his daughters are physically fine and have recovered from the irritant, but his five-year-old is traumatized from the situation. Now, he and his partner Roberto Mendoza are speaking out to criticize what they say were dangerous and overly forceful police tactics.
“Nothing was going on inside the park. It was their mistake,” said Mendoza. “I don’t know what the heck they could have been thinking.”
“The way I read it, it was a misjudgment from [the police],” Forget said. “There was no danger.”
The confrontation between police and protesters occurred during the Rad Pride march.
The march, organized by P!nk Bloc Montréal and several other 2SLGBTQ+ community groups, was intended as a protest in opposition to what organizers said was the corporatization of traditional pride and a loss of its roots. P!nk Bloc did not respond to CBC’s request for an interview.
Wilson, the photojournalist, told CBC in an interview that he arrived early to cover the protest, at around 8:50 p.m. on Saturday night. Hundreds of protesters gathered near the park, where salsa dancing was in full swing. “The music was loud, it was festive,” he said.
Around 9:30 p.m., Wilson said protesters twice attempted to march east down Ste-Catherine Street toward the Village, but a wall of police officers in riot gear blocked their path. A pushing match between police and protesters ensued.
Video footage of the event shows a line of officers advancing toward the protesters, using batons to bang on their shields. The protesters begin moving away from the police and some appear to run into the park, where background salsa dancing music can clearly be heard.
Meanwhile, Mendoza, Forget and their children, who live in Toronto and were in the city on vacation, were enjoying a night of dancing and family fun. Moments before the chaos, Mendoza captured photos of his daughters in an area designated for kids. Everything was going well.
“The girls seemed to have fun. And we were about to leave, but Roberto’s Colombian, so he loves Latino music. So he was enjoying a couple of songs. We were not going to stay there long,” Forget said.
His daughter was playing with another girl, when suddenly, her mother grabbed her daughter and left. He looked around and saw 10 to 15 masked protesters had entered the park.
“I was like, ‘oh my God, what’s going on?'” said Forget. That’s when he said the canister landed nearby, right where his daughter and other children were playing moments earlier, narrowly missing hitting his 10-month-old.
Mendoza grabbed his baby as white smoke started coming out of the canister. The family of four started running in the same direction as the crowd, before Forget yelled that they should go the opposite direction to avoid the mob.
They went back to the designated children’s space, where they were surrounded by photographers. That’s when Forget used a blanket to try to protect his daughter from the smoke and the chaos. It was right then that Wilson snapped the viral photo.
“We didn’t quite understand what the heck was going on, other than our eyes burned, our arms hurt, my heart was racing, then [my five-year-old] started crying,” Mendoza said. “It was horrible.”
As the commotion was unfolding, Mendoza said the host of the salsa dancing event told the crowd everything was under control. While things settled down quickly after the canister was fired, Forget said, the event was cut short.
Mendoza said as he and his family were still getting their bearings, he got angry with a group of protesters standing nearby and yelled at them to get away from his children. But he now thinks he may have reacted too strongly.
“Actually, we ended up being hurt by the police,” he said. “I don’t know how dangerous the march was, but [the protesters] were definitely not the ones that were attacking us.”
Montreal police said in a statement that the security of citizens, police officers and demonstrators was compromised that night. They would not share details about their crowd control techniques, citing “strategic reasons” and “ongoing investigations.”
“Strategic decisions were made taking into account public safety issues, particularly due to the presence of thousands of people in Place Émilie-Gamelin and Ste-Catherine Street as part of the Pride festivities,” the statement from the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) said.
“The SPVM constantly evaluates public safety issues in its decision-making.”
The statement said anyone who feels like they have been wronged during a police intervention can file a complaint with the SPVM or an independent body.
The organizer of the salsa dancing event, Espace Yambae, in collaboration with Quartier des spectacles Montréal, declined CBC’s request for an interview, but said in a statement that they were not affiliated with the protest.
“The teams and participants were mostly surprised by what was happening nearby, but everyone is fine now,” they said.
Forget and Mendoza said that although their family is now physically fine — the 10-month-old’s eyes were irritated for a few days — the event will leave emotional scars, notably for their five-year-old daughter.
“We got home that night and she vomited and she said that she felt so tense,” Mendoza said.
Forget said she still asks a lot of questions about what happened that night, but that he is running out of answers.
“She is very, very traumatized,” he said, noting that she has been afraid of going into crowds and refusing to sleep alone ever since.
“I’m very angry that this has shaken her confidence in the police and in events and it was so unfair that that was the way that our Saturday night ended,” Mendoza said.
The family has received a lot of concerned messages from friends and family after the pictures spread. Forget said they also received questions asking why they would bring their children to such a protest.
“I would never bring my daughters in an environment like that,” he said in response to the criticism.
Forget and Mendoza said while the situation could have gone even worse, they still don’t understand why Montreal police fired at the park.
“If I had not been able to pick up [my 10-month-old] within the second that I picked her up, we could have ended up losing her vision,” he said.
Mendoza said police should show more restraint when using chemical irritants to disperse crowds.
“I don’t want this to affect anybody else in the future,” he said. “They should be trained better.”
