QUEBEC CITY (LifeSiteNews) — A pro-life crowd that gathered for Saturday’s March for Life in Quebec City was infiltrated by pro-abortion activists who threw smoke bombs and drowned out speeches with noisemakers.
The leftist counter-demonstrators, who included members of the notorious group called “Antifa,” also lined the pro-life marchers’ route and, more than once, blocked it so that that the friends and families had to change direction.
The Quebec March for Life/La Marche Pour La Vie – Quebec took place in Quebec’s capital city, Ville du Québec, on Saturday, May 31, 2025. But George Buscemi, the president of Quebec Life Coalition, told LifeSiteNews today that it “wasn’t a march at all.”
“It was a street battle,” he stated.
He estimated that for the 500–600 pro-life witnesses present, there were 600–700 people determined not to allow them to speak or march peacefully.
“I think a couple busses came from Montreal,” Buscemi told LifeSiteNews. “There were definitely unions involved. So there was a whole [crowd] of community groups from Quebec City as well.”
The official March for Life event began around 11 with Christian “praise and worship” music. As the music played, Buscemi saw a group of 30 men dressed in black clothing and COVID masks and then women in punk-like black clothing as well gathering at a nearby fountain. He then saw among the pro-lifers people in their 20s whom he didn’t recognize and “looked a bit off.”
However, they were holding pro-life signs, so Buscemi half-thought that they might be recent converts – although there were too many of them in the crowd for that to be feasible. They showed their true colors at a pre-planned signal and began their attack.
“I think it was actually when we started the prayer to start the actual speeches,” Buscemi said. “That’s when they went bananas. Chaos erupted at that point. Smoke bombs were cracked open, with acrid green-grey smoke flying everywhere. [Pro-lifers] had to throw the smoke bombs over to the other side so that we wouldn’t be completely suffocated by it.”
The smoke bombs were accompanied by a huge din, over which the speakers tried to make their speeches, interrupted by airhorns and other noises.
“We tried having speeches for 30, 40 minutes, and then we said, ‘Well, we gotta get out of here. We’ll start the march,” Buscemi said. It began shortly before 1 PM.
The organizers changed their route plans at the last minute, but the marchers were continually harassed by the crowds of leftists determined not to let them speak. The leftists banged street signs and lampposts with clothes hangers – the principal symbol of the pro-abortion movement – and shouted invectives. They made obscene gestures at the marchers and repeated over and over in French that Quebec – whose fertility rate has fallen to 1.33 births per woman – is “pro-choice” (literally, pro-choix).
There were some scuffles between the pro-abortionists and the security team, but nobody was seriously hurt.
“We did march freely, but then at a certain point, we were blocked. We had to go through minor streets, snake through different parts. Instead of going back on Rene Levesque, we had to go another way. The cops had to disperse them.”
The March and counter-protest coincided with heavy rain, and by the time the marchers got back to the park outside Quebec’s Legislative Assembly, both their numbers and the numbers of their harassers had thinned.
“There were still 200, 300 very noisy people yelling over us, making it impossible to have the event in any way. They also made it dangerous. We might have squeezed out a couple of speeches.”
The March had trucks both in front and behind the procession for music, and in his frustration during one of the bottlenecks, Buscemi clambered onto a truck and denounced the people he characterized as paid-for activists or “rent-a-mob.”
He is equally incensed at elected officials in Quebec for allowing this intimidation of free speech to go on.
“In a state there’s freedom of expression. You can’t say that and allow this kind of intimidation,” he told LifeSiteNews. “
“They basically create an air of danger, of insecurity, and that’s exactly what they want. They want to abort the March.”
Buscemi told LifeSiteNews that the pro-life movement in Quebec is “flourishing” but they will have to attentive to these realities in order to get their message out.
The event followed the cancelation of a pro-life dinner event by the Delta hotel booked to host it. The hotel had apparently received both pressure and actual threats from abortion activists.
“When the killing of unborn children is normalized and treated as a right, it comes as no surprise that intimidation and threats are used to silence those who defend life,” said Buscemi, said in a press release. “What happened at the Delta is disgraceful — and the complicit silence of our authorities is alarming.”
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