Month of May Day events call-out

Punch Up Collective invites organizations to participate in the Month of May Day 2025 by organizing and hosting an event or action during the month of May.

For May Day 2025, Ottawa groups and organizations are planning a month of events and activities. You’re invited to join us!

For those of us in the Punch Up Collective, May Day is one of our favorite holidays, since it honours the power of ordinary people, working collectively, to shape the conditions of our lives. We celebrate it every year. As things get harder and fascism more ascendant globally, we feel inspired to double down on celebrating and remembering that collective struggle is a source of joy and the way that we win.

In previous years in Ottawa, May Day hasn’t been just a single day but has included many different events, marches, celebrations, and more. We’d like to return to this in 2025!

The month will start with a march on May 1st, and conclude with protests of the yearly CANSEC arms fair, the largest gathering of weapons dealers in Canada.

Several local groups are already keen to organize things (more details soon) but we’d like to have even more abundance, fun, and power-building throughout the month of May.

If you’re interested in hosting something, we’d love to hear from you! We’re especially interested in including events, actions, and collective work that:

• Connect radical and left history with the present
• Expand May Day beyond a focus on wage work and workers
• Celebrate working-class culture, art, and experience
• Connect with ongoing work in the Ottawa context
• Include space for kids and families
• Are disability-accessible and address disability work
• Highlight migrant justice
• Address connections between climate chaos/the extinction crisis and working-class struggles

We’re looking for parties, educational events, cultural events, celebrations, direct actions, art builds, trainings, and more!

We look forward to sharing a month of hopefully very rad actions events across the City.To Host an Event or Action

To host an event or action as part of Month of May Day 2025, please fill out this short questionnaire on the specifics of your event. We’ll ask you for details about what you’d be interested in anchoring, make sure that you’re comfortable with the basis of unity for the month, and collect the information we’ll need for publicizing your event on the May Day in Ottawa website. Deadline for submissions is April 11th, 2025.

Looking for resources and support for hosting something? Check out our handy Ottawa Organizing Guide, which includes an event accessibility checklist, a sample planning timeline, and a list of spaces and places for holding actions and events.

Month of May Day Basis of Unity

Month of May Day is being organized on the following specific principles:

• We affirm the collective power of all who labor – paid and unpaid, formal and informal, in care work and field work – and celebrate all of the activities that sustain us and our communities.
• We take an international and anti-colonial solidarity approach, and support communities and people’s struggles against borders and jingoism.
• We affirm and support trans people and the broader ecosystem of gender and sexual liberation.
• These events are in the spirit of the People’s Global Action Hallmarks:
  • A very clear rejection of capitalism, imperialism and feudalism; all trade agreements, institutions and governments that promote destructive globalisation.
  • We reject all forms and systems of domination and discrimination including, but not limited to, patriarchy, racism and religious fundamentalism of all creeds. We embrace the full dignity of all human beings.
  • A confrontational attitude, since we do not think that lobbying can have a major impact in such biased and undemocratic organisations, in which transnational capital is the only real policy-maker.
  • A call to direct action and civil disobedience, support for social movements’ struggles, advocating forms of resistance which maximize respect for life and oppressed peoples’ rights, as well as the construction of local alternatives to global capitalism.
  • An organisational philosophy based on decentralisation and autonomy.
• Accessibility: Any event participating must allow face masks; be in a venue that does not require stairs to access; be in a place a person could reach via public transit; and (if there is a fee) include a Pay What You Can option of $0.