Huge influx for 4/20

Some people spend their April 20 partying. Kawisaiénhne Albany spent hers trying to protect her driveway as thousands of revellers flocked to the territory in the busiest 4/20 to date.

Even blocking it with garbage and recycling bins didn’t work to stop everyone from trying to park there.

“At one point, a car decided he was going to just park in my driveway, and when I told him no, they started to mock and laugh at me until my cousin’s boyfriend came out and had to threaten them to get out. Not without calling us down first,” she said.

There were cars flying up and down all day up until midnight, said Albany. “One truck was racing up and down the road all day and holding a shotgun out of his window and shooting it off,” she said.

Having lived with her grandparents in the past in a less central area, she said she was insulated from how intense the day can be. She feels something needs to be done to ensure things go smoother next time.

“For next year, it needs to be a policy of getting in, grab your weed, and get the hell out because at this point, nobody in the community who lives in the community wants to go and leave their house at all, because they’re either afraid their house is going to get vandalized or somebody’s in their yard, or because it’s too dangerous on the road to drive,” she said.

April 21 didn’t make her feel much better, either.

“Just from across my apartment, I can see all the garbage in the ditch after 4/20, and I haven’t seen any store owners going and cleaning up that mess. If anything, the people who took the initiative were the high school students who cleaned up on Earth Day,” she said.

Surete du Quebec (SQ) spokesperson Marc Tessier said there were no arrests on 4/20. While there were no reports of shootings that he knows of, he said, there is an ongoing investigation into one weapons-related incident.

“There was an incident in which a person allegedly displayed a weapon following a noise complaint,” Tessier said. “However, there were no threats or weapons pointed at anyone.”

Kanesatake Perimeter Security Team coordinator Kane Montour told his team to bring their A-game, but even with the squad hustling, it was tough to keep up.

“People were calling us non-stop telling us there’s people parking in our private driveways, there’s people walking on our private properties, both sides of the road we can’t even get through,” Montour said. “At some point it was just kind of unmanageable for us because we’re dealing with everything at once.”

He said one store owner, who owns two shops, contacted Perimeter Security ahead of time to give them a heads up and coordinate a security plan. That operation also had private security on hand that Perimeter Security could coordinate with as necessary.

That was a big help, said Montour, who hopes other stores will follow that example in future years.

The volume of calls was compounded by how hard it was to get around the territory, Montour said. To get from one side of Kanesatake to the other was about a 40-minute round trip, by his estimate.

There was also one car accident, Montour said, and it was impossible to make sure cars adhered to parking rules.

“We had this one person throwing rocks and getting mad, rightfully so, because they’re parking on his property, and doing whatever. Kind of just loitering around and urinating, things of that nature, so we had that going on,” he said.

Multiple driveways were completely blocked, leaving the owner unable to get out, said Montour. He went around a nearby party showing people pictures of the cars trying to locate the owners so he could ask them to move.

“KPS was putting out a lot of fires that day,” Montour said. This also included removing outsiders from areas like the cemetery and the lacrosse box.

Montour said he understands that store owners look to 4/20 as an opportunity to generate business and raise awareness about their stores, but he sympathizes with community members’ concerns.

“It’s a shame because on such a beautiful day, they feel like they’re hostages on their own territory,” Montour said.

For Albany, the day was a microcosm of a landscape of cannabis sales on the territory.

“There needs to be regulations on the stores, and I know there are some stores that actually follow a good schedule, and not all stores are to blame for this craziness. But unfortunately, the bad stores outweigh the good stores,” Albany said.

“The agreement from the beginning was that the customers would buy and get out, but now the stores have accommodated these customers who think they can do whatever they want on our land and be disrespectful no matter what, and it’s scary because we have no idea who these people are.”

According to the SQ, about 80 tickets were issued for illegal parking on Route 344 over the course of April 20.

[email protected]

Marcus Bankuti, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter