We all know about some of the crazy strikes environmental or animal rights activists have staged to try and stop big businesses from stepping all over normal people and our precious planet to make more money. I can’t count how many movies I have seen featuring a scene with people tied to a tree or laying down on the ground in front of a building about to be demolished to try and save them from harm. You would think whatever you’ve seen in a movie is probably much more extreme than any of the real work done by activists in the real world. However, as you’ll see here, truth can often be stranger than fiction.
Police in Montreal have just opened an investigation into an incident that occurred in late April of this year involving activists, a local engineering firm, and lots and lots of crickets. A group of activists calling themselves the “Anti-construction Crew” released hundreds of crickets into an office that had only recently been completed, causing a literal “invasion of insects”. They released so many crickets into the building that the employees couldn’t work amidst the throng of insects. The group was targeting the Montreal-based architecture firm Lemay, which is involved in the construction of a new immigration detention center in Laval. The groups reasoning behind using crickets to get their point across was, “We see the release of these crickets as merely the beginning of a concerted effort to stop the new immigration detention centre from being built. Crickets are known to reproduce quickly and are difficult to exterminate. Their constant noise and quick proliferation through any space they have access to makes them much more than a nuisance to have around.”
The architecture firm they targeted, Lemay, along with another architecture firm based in Quebec known as Groupe A, are being paid a pretty penny to the tune of over $5 million to design the immigration detention center. They seem like the kind of big company earning tons of money for a job people might object to that are often targeted by activists in movies, so the group did seem to have their heart in the right place. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the company they actually attacked with their cricket invasion. The office actually belonged to the neighboring office of an engineering firm merely affiliated with Lemay, called Elema. The group didn’t even attack the correct company with their crickets, which the president of the company, Dominic Miron, claimed were nothing a competent exterminator couldn’t handle, and the situation was controlled “quickly enough”. I guess it wasn’t the massive insect invasion that the activist group thought it would be.
What other insect do you think would have been a better choice for invading an office building? Have you or anyone you know ever experienced a serious insect infestation like this at your work place?