Montreal bank sit-in case ends: Crown drops criminal charges, 14 protesters pay $300 noise fines

The Crown on October 26 dropped the remaining criminal charges against 14 Montreal protesters after they agreed to plead guilty to violating a municipal noise bylaw and pay $300 fines, ending the criminal case that grew out of a 2024 sit-in at a downtown bank.

How the case unfolded

In April 2024, 44 people were arrested after staging a sit-in at a downtown Montreal Scotiabank branch, demanding that the bank divest from Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems amid the war in Gaza. According to the defence lawyer, most of the other protesters had already resolved their cases through community service; those in court on October 26 were the remaining criminal defendants.

What each side said

Protester Eli Tareq told a news conference outside Montreal municipal court: “We want to make sure people can continue to fight things like this. If a citizen gets treated this way, what will happen when people do anything that's deemed more violent?” Defence lawyer Barbara Bedont said the remaining defendants had a strong constitutional case and warned that criminalizing peaceful sit-ins threatens freedom of expression and the right to protest.

Protesters also said the resolution fell short of the accountability they had sought from police and the justice system: the defendants had challenged their arrests under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, arguing police had violated their constitutional rights. On the other side of the ledger, protesters celebrated as a campaign victory the disclosure months earlier that Scotiabank's investment management subsidiary had sold its remaining shares in Elbit Systems. Protester Harar Hall said: “We set out to pressure a Canadian bank to stop profiting from genocide, and in that case we won.”

Source: The Canadian Press, October 26, 2026 (via Winnipeg Free Press). Quotations are the speakers' own words and do not represent this site's position.