Elizabeth (Liz) Rowley is a politician, writer, and political activist in Ontario, Canada. Current leader of the Communist Party of Ontario, and a leading member of the Communist Party of Canada,[1] Rowley has campaigned for office many times at both the municipal, federal and provincial levels.
Born in British Columbia, Rowley attended university in Edmonton, Alberta and was active with the Young Communist League of Canada campaigning on issues such as women's reproductive rights and an end to the Vietnam War. After traveling across the country, she subsequently moved to southern Ontario, and worked as a typesetter apprentice and secretary in Windsor and later Hamilton. In Hamilton in the 1980s she was involved in campaigns against the Ku Klux Klan and had her home destroyed and car burnt. She also became active the local labour movement and municipal politics.
Rowley moved to Toronto in the late 1980s after being elected leader of the Ontario Committee of the Communist Party, one of the first women leaders of an Ontario political party, and led the Ontario Committee of the Communist Party in the 1990 general election. Shortly after, during the Communist Party's internal dispute on dissolution following the fall of the Soviet Union, Rowley became a leader of the group opposed to then-General Secretary George Hewison's proposals to abandon Marxism-Leninism as an ideology and liquidate the Communist Party of Canada into a broad-left formation.
Rowley was one of the first party activists to be expelled during the dispute, which later included Sam Hammond, now BC leader of the CPC, former Party General Secretary William Kashtan, Kimball Cariou now editor of the People's Voice, and Miguel Figueroa, current leader of the Communist Party. The resulting legal case, of which Rowley was a chief negotiator, resulted in the assets of the party being split in half and the Leninist group keeping the Party name. The Communist Party held a new convention and new elections, at which Rowley was again elected to the Party leadership, and began another legal challenge this time to maintain its identify as a registered political party, the Figueroa case.
Despite red-baiting, Rowley was elected school trustee in the former Toronto borough of East York during the 1990s where she became an outspoken progressive voice. She was active in campaigns against Mike Harris including the Ontario Days of Action. Rowley strongly opposed the free trade agreements that she believes threaten public services, is a promoter of public education and medicare, and has promoted civil rights and labour causes.
After her term as school trustee, Rowley returned as Ontario leader of the CPC. In 2001, she was again re-elected to the Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Canada, and replaced Hassan Husseini as leader of the Ontario Communist Party around the same time. She has worked as a columnist for the People's Voice, a Communist Party newspaper, and has also written numerous articles on public resistance in Canada that have been translated into several languages and published around the world. She has most recently been outspoken on issues such as proportional representation, the G20 arrests in Toronto, the Rob Ford administration, migrant and immigrant rights in Toronto, and labour issues.
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