Anonymous Submission to North Shore Counter-Info

On Saturday, March 8th, Toronto’s International Women’s Day Organizing Committee hosted its 45th annual rally and march. Despite their claims of acting as a feminist front against the Right, this day’s actions made clearer than ever how Toronto’s IWD Organizing Committee and their sponsors constitute a counter-revolutionary liberal opposition to any true feminist commitments in this city. If we are to achieve gender and sexual liberation, we must urgently and staunchly reject and eradicate liberalism from our struggle entirely— including Toronto’s IWD Organizing Committee.

This year’s theme and rallying cry was “Fighting For Our Lives, Building Our Resistance”. But it was “resisting” one specific American policy that organizers and sponsors were referring to. In the era of Trump’s tariffs, almost every single speaker narrowed in on the ongoing intra-imperialist conflict as the most significant threat facing women in Canada today. Nevermind Indigenous land theft, racist incarceration that functions as sexual violence, deaths in custody, police killings, criminalizing local activists as “terrorists”, and financing a genocide at home against Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people and abroad in Palestine. Canadian patriotism and nationalism was at the forefront of this mobilization as speakers praised Genocide Justin Trudeau as “our ally” and organizers invited and honoured Zionist NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh. “(P)rotecting Canadian workers” and “defend(ing) our real and magnificent border spiritually and physically”— yes, someone actually said this— was centred without even mentioning how women are impacted by these new economic conditions.

Given how union-driven, sponsored, and funded this action is annually, it is no surprise that the content of the day was dictated by the political limitations and conservatism of Canadian business unionism. But, it is also working-class women who labour in manufacturing and production, long-term care, and custodial work who attend annually in their contingents. They are organized in large numbers in support of themselves and other women, they bring their signs, wear their shirts, and are proud of what they do and are ready to fight for what they deserve. But it is these working-class women who are also being pushed by their unions and mobilizations like Toronto’s IWD to divert their energies into mobilizing for themselves when convenient— that being during a bargaining year or an annual city-permitted march—and exclusively within their unions rather than on the streets, in their homes, and alongside other working-class fronts struggling for justice. These women clearly have a drive and passion for organizing, but the way unions in Canada function is that these women are made to believe that unionism is the only effective means of organizing. These women are being organized into unionism and patriotism that serves their lives in the imperial core, and they are being told the story that with more and more efforts going towards this fight, the more fruits of their labour they will see. Whether or not this story is true, there is no recognition by their unions and their counterparts at Toronto’s IWD that the limited fruits of their labour they may see are often made off the backs of Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people on this land and our sisters in the global South.

An argument could be made about labour aristocracy, but we are not facing this within Toronto’s IWD attendees. It is not the working-class women who are counter-revolutionary. These women have revolutionary potential that is being stifled by business unionism and the labour aristocracy present within Canadian unions amongst those who work for them and the members who do take power and leadership. Given the relationship between these unions and Toronto’s IWD rally and march, this is likely the case for the IWD Organizing Committee, too. Toronto’s first IWD action emerged out of the Organizing Committee running an illegal abortion clinic that even the NDP opposed. This committee and their co-conspirators continue to move further and further away from their own origins of radical left feminism as they embrace Canadian nationalism and reject the militancy of their past. It is urgent that we disrupt the separation of working-class women in the imperial core from other struggles, especially when these working-class women are being organized into wanting to strengthen our borders and conscript their children for a war with the United States. Working-class women of all kinds are being conscripted into Canada’s settler-imperialist project at home and abroad. Working-class feminist fronts must confront and work to defeat such projects, not participate in them.

In his autobiographical work Blood in My Eye, martyred Black Panther and incarcerated revolutionary George Jackson reminds us that fascism is already here and that its most advanced form is in the United States. He wrote this in 1971 and our conditions have only worsened since then. We must organize a feminist front against the real threat women and gender-oppressed people across this land already face: fascism, something that emerged long before Trump did. This means going beyond “rallies” that are held inside bourgeois university buildings and speaking about “resistance” while having cops guide marches in the streets. It means going beyond the bargaining room and the union to organize. “Years ago, ‘working with’ and attempting to influence union leadership may have been judicious, but the government has long since infiltrated and bought this leadership and legislated away the strike. Union-hall speeches and pamphlet passing are playing at revolution.” This is no longer a feasible tactic for us, Jackson writes, it’s counter-revolution.

Mainstream liberal feminist demonstrations are counter-revolutionary because they endorse Zionist genocidaires. They are counter-revolutionary because they only speak about fascism when Trump is re-elected across the colonial border. They are counter-revolutionary because Liberal MP Chrystia Freeland and Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow were allowed to march during this year’s demonstration. Canadian politicians should be scared to attend feminist demonstrations, not be eager to attend for a photo-op. Who are our true allies in the fight against the right? Who will sacrifice their comforts to ensure settler-colonialism and capitalist imperialism is exterminated? Many will, especially those who are most exploited and oppressed, but not if they are pushed by labour aristocrats and business unionism into state-legislated bargaining rooms as their sole means of struggle.

With organizers and speakers consistently referring to themselves as the Left, it becomes difficult to discern what it means, then, to resist electoralism and intra-imperialist conflict, and instead organize for a liberated world free from gendered oppression and exploitation, settler-colonialism, militarized border apartheid, and imperialism. As feminists who struggle for this liberated world, it is our duty to construct this alternative. In March 2023, several member organizations of the International Women’s Alliance hosted a counter-demonstration outside of Toronto’s annual IWD rally as an anti-imperialist platform and perspective to the women’s struggle. It was a direct confrontation to the liberalism that ideologically dominates the women’s movement today, and provided an alternative for attendees. In Ottawa this year, a feminist anti-fascist liberation march was held as an alternative to the mainstream IWD demonstration in the city that was held outside the Amerikkkan embassy to protest Trump’s tariffs. In Paris, multiple militant feminist marches were held to commemorate March 8th including an offensive front to fascist and Zionist forces who show up to these actions. For the first time in a feminist demonstration in the city, a militant block in praise of Palestinian women’s resistance led the action joined by people chanting “freedom for all prisoners” and “no feminism without anti-Zionism”. The latter was not without a fight, though, as the involvement of Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network and Urgence Palestine in the mobilization provoked a wave of calls for the dissolution of these organizations and one of the feminist marches, for the first time in France’s history of IWD demonstrations, was temporarily banned. Evidently, on-the-ground militancy and anti-imperialist perspective is what is the most threatening to reactionaries, vigilantes, and the state. On the heels of Samidoun’s designation as a so-called “terrorist” organization in Canada, it is more important than ever to defend feminist militancy with an anti-imperialist lens in Toronto.

When Jagmeet Singh was announced as an honoured guest and audience member this year, a small group of keffiyeh-wearing feminists began to chant “Free, Free Palestine” and “Shame on the NDP”. Singh was forced out of the room as a result of the mobilization and did not return. This is how we reject and eradicate liberalism from the women’s movement, we force it out of the room and we ensure it does not return. We must shut down shameful reactionary speeches with our chants, leaflet the audience about revolutionary feminist alternatives, and bird-dog politicians about their crimes against humanity. We must organize a militant feminist front year-round, not just mobilize for a one day celebration that bastardizes the significance and historically socialist roots of IWWD. We must form an offensive front to fascist anti-trans demonstrations across the city rather than just defensive strategies. Most importantly, we cannot leave the working-class women behind who are so clearly organized and ready to struggle against patriarchy and labour exploitation when we do all of this. We must not let liberal figureheads lead them astray, and as feminist militants ourselves we must confront this contradiction head-on.