By the time the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement had reached the height of its social prominence in Toronto and southern Ontario in the spring of 2020, its political influence was already falling from its highpoint. Over many years, local people had agitated in their places of work, their schools, their institutions, and in the streets to make Black struggles in this region and country more visible.

The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May of 2020^[1], and the death only two days later of Regis Korchinski-Paquet in Toronto^[2], signalled the possibility of a new and urgent wave of Black agitation and political action in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). But for a number of different reasons, 2020 would be the movement’s last year of substantial political and social disruption.

 By the middle of 2021, BLM’s social and political momentum had faded, even as the formal group in the United States had just experienced a record year of fundraising, and even as an entity calling itself BLM Canada was announcing the cash purchase of an $8.2 million property in the heart of downtown Toronto.^[3] Major real estate purchases in the United States served to irreparably damage the BLM brand among many previous supporters and donors. The sudden influx of money and institutional recognition also allowed activists overseeing BLM’s resources to shift the focus of their efforts, to walk away from frontline organizing and towards art and entrepreneurship.

 Instances of fatal police violence, which gave rise to BLM in Canada from 2014 onwards, have increased across Canada in the ensuing years^[4]. But BLM has faded from the popular consciousness, and no comparable organized effort against police violence has filled the void. There is no vehicle for a sustained program to divest from police and re-invest in local communities, although such a transition is as necessary now as it was a decade ago. As more people die at the hands of police and in their custody across Canada, police budgets grow, seemingly without limit.

The following is a brief exploration of the relative absence of organized Black political struggle since BLM lost influence in Canada. I approach this topic as I have for over a decade, as a journalist, but also as a Black activist and educator who is invested in the success of movements for Black liberation and restoration.

Organized Black political struggle in Canada

At any given time in Canadian history, individual Black people have found ways to thrive, and to exceed the social and material status of the average Black person in the country. But political struggle concerns itself with the day-to-day realities of the average Black person, and asks how Black people are living and dying in comparison with other racial groups in Canada.

 For example, Canada post issued a stamp in 2017 commemorating Mathieu DaCosta, whom it described as a “17th century interpreter believed to be the first person of African descent to arrive in Canada whose name is known today.”^[5] We know Da Costa’s name because he was a free Black man, unlike the thousands of enslaved Africans who would begin to arrive in New France as early as 1629.^[6] Da Costa gets a name and a central story in Canadian Black mythology. Canadians know and are taught far less about the 200-year period of French and British colonists  enslaving Black and Indigenous people on these territories.^[7]

 Similarly, the department of Canadian Heritage maintains a website of “Noteworthy figures” in Black Canadian history and contemporary life. Heritage Canada invites us to read its collection of biographies of “some notable Black people in Canada who have helped shape Canadian heritage and identity, and who have made and continue to make enormous contributions to the wellbeing, and prosperity of our country.”^[8]

 While celebrating an elite group that has given back to Canada, our federal government obscures the day-to-day realities for the average Black person, in large part by refusing to collect comprehensive data that compares social outcomes for different racial groups.^[9] But the data we do have, and the testimonies of Black people in research and media, confirm that in general Black people continue to experience a far lower standard of living than white Canadians and many other racial groups. More than this, the reality of systemic racism in Canada means it’s more common for Black people to disproportionately experience the worst social outcomes: homelessness, extreme poverty, poor health outcomes, unemployment, incarceration, and death.^[10]

 Narratives of Black exceptionalism in Canada are no substitute for movements and struggles by and for ordinary Black people. In fact, notions of exceptional blackness can serve as a distraction from widespread socio-economic disparities in the community. Sometimes a Black individual with no notable public standing will take a stand against systemic injustice (often stemming from a personal experience), and will be celebrated for their courage or perseverance. We may think of Black women like Viola Desmond in New Glasgow, or Lulu Anderson in Edmonton, each of whom fought back after being denied entry into public theatres in their respective cities.^[11] While stories like this are important, and can lead to broader forms of collective struggle, they fall outside my exploration here. Similarly, while the networks of ordinary Black people who organize privately to support and care for one another are critical to our survival and political work, I’m thinking here about much more public advocacy and action.

 As we seek to understand a broader Black liberation struggle, we should focus less on individual names, personal accolades, and exceptions to the rule. Instead we should ask how groups of Black people, and those who align with them, have identified inequities they face in Canadian society and fought for systemic changes.

 The long history of such organizing predates Canada as a nation state. It includes: the struggles of Black loyalists in the late 18th century in modern day Nova Scotia;^[12] Black refugees who arrived in present-day southern Ontario via the Underground Railroad and who, while no longer enslaved, found themselves in a white colonial territory with legal segregation and racist social norms;^[13] the organizing of Black domestic workers from the Caribbean in the 1950s and 60s for labour rights and family reunification;^[14] and the organizing of the Black United Front in Halifax in the latter half of the 20th century,^[15] to name a few examples. BLM-TO recognized its own work as an extension of local groups like the Black Action Defense Committee (BADC),^[16] which organized against local police violence beginning in 1988. It is this prospect of large numbers of Black people organizing in a sustained way for social change that I want to explore below.

BLM: formal organization and informal mobilization

BLM started as a rallying cry against the hundreds of extrajudicial killings of Black civilians each year by police in the United States—including Trayvon Martin, Rekia Boyd, Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Sandra Bland—and evolved into a ubiquitous social media hashtag, and eventually into an organized chapter of activists in Los Angeles. That first chapter, founded by activists Ayo Tometi, Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors, became the base of a national BLM network that only a year later claimed 26 chapters across the country.^[17]

Black Lives Matter Toronto (BLM-TO) emerged as a formal group sometime after October of 2014, by local Black activists including Janaya Khan, Yusra Khogali, Pascale Diverlus, and Sandy Hudson. The activists had organized a large protest in front of the U.S. consulate building in Toronto to raise awareness about the killing of Jermaine Carby, a 33-year-old Black man who had fatally shot by Peel Regional Police officer Ryan Reid during a traffic stop in September in the Toronto suburb of Brampton.^[18]

In a 2017 piece co-written by Khan and Cullors, one of the three founders of Black Lives Matter in the U.S., Khan said of BLM-TO that “[w]e agreed there was a lot of space for our own direction but that it might also be strategic to make ourselves part of an international universal movement.” The piece also contained several photos of Khan and Cullors, who had become romantic partners after meeting.^[19] The decision to connect BLM-TO with the formal BLM Network in the U.S. is critical in understanding how the local group evolved and eventually shifted its public activities and resources away from frontline activism, as I’ll discuss below.

The BLM movement in the Toronto Area, in the province and across the country, extended far beyond the formal organization that included Hudson, Diverlus, Khogali, Khan, and the small collective of organizers that made up BLM-TO. In neighbouring Peel region for example, Black community members formed Advocacy Peel to deal primarily with anti-Black racism in local schools. In the nearby city of Hamilton, young Black organizers formed formal groups like Defund Hamilton Police Services, and Hamilton Encampment Support Network. The African, Caribbean, and Black Network of Waterloo Region formed in 2019, “to strengthen the voices of [African, Caribbean and Black] peoples in the community.”^[20]

In 2020 the grassroots group Parents of Black Children formed around education issues in York Region, just north of Toronto. And in 2020, the advocacy group “Not Another Black Life” organized several mass events in Toronto, and worked directly with people and families who’d been harmed or killed by police. It’s safe to say the advocacy of these and countless other local groups was inspired and energized by the BLM movement in the U.S., even as it dealt with local concerns. These groups also buoyed one another by creating sustained political pressure throughout the region, and forcing reluctant public officials to respond to concerns about anti-Black racism.^[21]

Some existing Black-focused non-profit and community groups also became more active and vocal during the height of the BLM era, including groups that were historically less likely to make direct appeals for governmental policy change or attend pubic demonstrations. The era between 2014 and 2022 was one of relatively high visibility for Black people and their political concerns in the GTA and across southern Ontario.

The impact of BLM-TO

From its inception in late 2014 until the summer of 2021, the advocacy BLM-TO directly and indirectly influenced a significant number of policy changes and pieces of legislation in Toronto and across the greater region. I have documented some of this work in more detail elsewhere,^[22] and will summarize a few examples here that, while they stand out for me, are by no means a comprehensive set of the group’s efforts.

 –BLM-TO’s action to halt the Pride Toronto’s 2016 annual Sunday parade was one of the most disruptive and resonant mass political actions in recent Black Canadian history. The action, which reverberated across the United States and made headlines around the world, resulted in Pride Toronto cancelling police floats and booths within the festivities. BLM-TO also advanced other longstanding community demands, including increased funding for Black queer spaces, the re-instatement of a South Asian stage, funding for ASL interpreters, and “a commitment to increase representation amongst Pride Toronto staffing/hiring, prioritizing Black trans women, Black queer people, Indigenous Folk, and others from vulnerable communities.” Following BLM-TO’s action, queer and trans groups across Canada and the U.S. successfully petitioned to have police removed from local Pride celebrations, in recognition of the origins of pride as a riot against police, and given ongoing violence against queer and other oppressed communities.

-Earlier in 2016, BLM-TO held a demonstration outside Toronto police headquarters in honour of Andrew Loku, a 45-year-old man who had been shot and killed by Toronto police constable Andrew Doyle. The demonstration was initiated after the provincial Special Investigations Unit chose not to lay criminal charges against Doyle for fatally shooting Loku. Upon the announcement that the province would conduct a coroner’s inquest into Loku’s death, an official told CBC radio that BLM’s advocacy for Loku “wasn’t the only factor, but certainly it was one factor that we took into consideration.”^[23]

-During a May 2017 BLM-TO school walkout event to make demands about policing and discipline in schools,Toronto District School Board (TDSB) director John Malloy committed to mandatory anti-racism training for all staff members.^[24] The group also supported several Black students and parents who were experiencing racism within the school system.

-BLM-TO was part of a broad coalition of groups that convinced TDSB trustees to cancel a program that placed uniformed and armed police in certain high schools.^[25]

-After Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in May of 2020, and public officials in both Canada and the U.S. scrambled to quell protests and outrage, two Toronto city councillors proposed unprecedented changes to the Toronto Police, including a 10% budget cut, the creation of non-police responses for certain emergency calls, and a ban on “the use of deadly force and military-style weapons against civilians, including but not limited to firearms, chemical weapons, including tear gas or armoured vehicles, and to dispose of all such weapons by no later than one year.”^[26] While council ultimately rejected these changes, they represented a scaled-down version of policing demands that BLM-TO had been making over the previous five years.^[27]

-The rise of BLM-TO gave renewed energy to the local fight against “carding,” a widespread form of racial profiling by Toronto Police.

-In 2016 BLM-TO established a Freedom School, which began as a queer-and-trans-inclusive, three-week summer program giving children political education on “resistance to anti-Black racism in past generations and current.”^[28]

Beyond the institutional shifts these actions prompted, they also signalled broader social and cultural shifts in Toronto and beyond. As had been the case in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the organizing of mass groups of ordinary Black people was taking up space in public discussions, in news media and social media and boardrooms and political chambers, in spite of white mainstream resistance to the conversations. For many Black people, the ascendance of BLM-TO represented possibility, pride, and community power.

These are my observations from the outside, as a journalist who covered BLM-TO’s work but was not privy to its inner workings. I know all organizing work also includes internal conflicts and power struggles, and instances of harmful behaviour. And as we will see below, testimonies from former co-founders and organizers point to some of the group’s failings and questionable decisions. I would offer that one of BLM-TO’s greatest strengths—the ability of its cadre of activists to make demands through courageous and risk-taking public action—was also a great weakness.

As far as we know, BLM-TO was never a member-based organization that gave its supporters and collaborators a formal vote or involvement in its operations. It was a small group of students and young activists who, while organizing against police and government officials, tried to protect themselves from infiltration, co-optation, or sabotage. But this meant there was no democratic point of entry for thousands of Black people who were willing to show up to BLM-TO actions, to march with its organizers in the streets and face all the risks and sanctions that come with public political activity.

And as BLM-TO organizers began to accrue more resources and social standing, more of the group’s own supporters expressed questions about its accountability and decision-making. The closed model also made the group more susceptible to public attacks against the few highly visible public organizers, whose respective abilities to endure public scrutiny and criticism were especially critical to the group’s credibility and sustainability.

The public momentum and power BLM-TO built between 2014 and 2020 was destined to fade at some point. But ironically, the group’s public influence seemed to fade just as it was gaining access to state and corporate partnerships, and an unprecedented influx of money and support after the Floyd killing in 2020.

“Where’s BLM”

At some point after BLM-TO had established itself as a major nuisance to local political power, I noticed a recurring theme on social media and within comment sections of news articles: people would respond to any local news story about anti-Black racism by asking, “Where’s BLM?” The question came regularly from derisive online trolls, who suggested BLM-TO would no doubt be showing up to address what they saw as a non-issue. But very often the question came from distressed Black people who, sensing an urgent community problem, were earnestly wondering if or when BLM-TO would jump into its umpteenth local campaign. It was a sign of a need for structural change far greater than the capacity of any one grassroots group, and the sometimes unfair expectations placed on a group of young people with limited time, resources, and energy.

By the year 2019, BLM’s presence in public spaces and local media had clearly diminished. Co-founder Yusra Khogali pointed to internal problems within the group when she publicly quit in May of 2019. In a now-deleted social media post, Khogali voiced displeasure not only with some of her co-organizers, but with the Black Lives Matter Global Network to which BLM-TO belonged.

“Over the years, the nature of the organizing of BLM-TO has shifted and dwindled,” Khogali said in her post. “Over time it has become apparent that the principles I initially signed up for with some members of this team no longer align with my Black radical feminist tradition or the broader goals set out at the onset of the group. There has been a neoliberal, individualistic and self-serving shift internally within our local chapter, in addition to the broader BLM national politics, that I do not agree with or co-sign.”^[29] Khogali’s somewhat cryptic resignation would be followed up by more fulsome public grievances by other members of the Global Network.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis in late May of 2020, the BLM Global Network took in $90 million in fundraising.^[30] The unexpected windfall came as millions participated in sustained demonstrations, for Floyd and for broader issues of anti-racism and police accountability. The New York Times estimated that between 15 and 26 million people had taken part in BLM demonstrations in 2020, making it the largest political movement in modern U.S. history.^[31]

By the end of 2020, a group of ten former BLM chapters calling itself BLM10 published an open letter condemning the Global Network and its executive director Patrisse Cullors for “concerns about financial transparency, decision making, and accountability. Despite years of effort, no acceptable internal process of accountability has ever been produced by BLMGN and these recent events have undermined the efforts of chapters seeking to democratize its processes and resources.”^[32] Relatives of people killed by police made public complaints about “celebrity” activists who profited financially from their loved ones’ deaths while withholding support to families.^[33] Activists also called out BLM Global Network’s increasing outreach to the Democratic Party in the U.S., after the group had disavowed partnership with any political party in previous years.^[34]

In the spring of 2021, the New York Post reported that Cullors had purchased several “high-end” properties in recent years. Although the Post did not directly allege that Cullors had used BLM funds to make those purchases, it did cite activists demanding transparency and investigations into BLM Global Network’s finances.^[35] Cullors resigned within days of the report, saying she’d been planning to leave for more than a year, and that her departure was unrelated to the reporting on her real estate purchases.^[36]

Then in the summer of 2021, BLM Canada, a new entity created and controlled by the remaining co-founders of BLM-TO, announced its purchase of an $8.1 mansion in downtown Toronto.^[37] The group said the money to purchase the Wildseed Centre for Art and Activism, which was paid outright in cash, had mainly come from a grant from the BLM Global Network. Of all the chapters that might receive such substantial financial support from the Global Network, the choice of Toronto was notable because of the romantic relationship between Khan, a BLM-TO co-founder, and Cullors, who had served as the Globa Network network’s formal leader and only employee for several years.

The resignation of two more members of BLM-TO in early 2022 provided deeper insights into the group’s direction and priorities. BLM-TO had Sarah Jama and Sahra Soudi, two young activists from Hamilton with extensive organizing experience, to join and revitalize BLM-TO in 2020. In a January 2022 letter, Jama and Soudi disclosed that they’d left the group after learning about the purchase of the Wildseed Centre through media. reports. The leaders of BLM Canada, Rodney Diverlus, Syrus Marcus Ware, Sandy Hudson, and Ravyn Wngz, had not informed Jama and Soudi of the building purchase, even though they were recruited to help lead the operations of BLM-TO, and even though BLM-TO was meant to have its offices at Wildseed. “For BLM Canada to take money from BLM Global Network for a building without consulting the community was unethical,” Jama and Soudi wrote. “For BLM Canada to refuse to answer questions from young Black organizers goes against the spirit of movement-building.”

Jama and Soudi also said they’d been asked by the group’s leaders to sign legal non-disclosure agreements before being given any information about the group’s finances or administration. “The NDA was designed as a constant threat of legal action against us, even though we were volunteering our time to a cause we believed in,” the activists wrote.

The pair further disclosed that BLM-TO had become disconnected with many of the families it had previously advocated for, at the same time BLM Canada leaders dismissed their questions about the grievances of other BLM chapters associated with the Global Network. Jama and Soudi said they’d learned that BLM Canada had received undisclosed amounts of corporate donations from Coca-Cola and Amazon. “The BLM Canada members justified corporate donations by saying they couldn’t ethically decide which corporate donations to reject, and therefore accepted all of them,” said the letter from Jama and Soudi.^[38]

The most damning and widely publicized critiques of the BLM Global Network came in April of 2022, when New York Magazine reported that the group had secretly purchased a $6 million USD property in southern California “with more than 6,500 square feet, more than half a dozen bedrooms and bathrooms, several fireplaces, a soundstage, a pool and bungalow, and parking for more than 20 cars.” The magazine referenced the controversy about Cullors’ real estate purchases a year earlier, and said it had bolstered “the idea that there is a disturbing gap between the fortunes of the movement’s most visible figures and on-the-ground activists across the country.”^[39] Although the purchase of the California property had been made in 2020, it had never been publicly disclosed. Cullors claimed it was purchased as an arts campus for Black creatives, but could not point to many such uses of the space in the 17 months since its purchase. Cullors would ultimately admit to using the property twice for personal purposes, but denied having personally benefitted from her work with the BLM Global Network. The Associated Press reported that “[i]n the year since her resignation, the BLM foundation hasn’t hired new leadership or publicly discussed plans for money still sitting in its coffers.”^[40]

The questions about Cullors’ management of BLM Global Network Cullors’ were widely publicized and resulted in harsh criticism from both fellow activists and opponents of the BLM movement. In Canada, however, the mainstream media essentially ignored the links between BLM Global Network and BLM-TO, including the disclosures by Jama and Soudi. The large transfer of wealth from the United States to Canada, of funds under dispute by BLM organizers and families, deserved far more attention than it received. But more than this, Cullors’ downfall as the group’s leader was a precursor to the disappearance of BLM-TO and BLM Canada from the public sphere in Canada. The announcement of the Wildseed Centre purchase was one the last major public acts of Canada’s formal BLM organizations. In both Canada and the United States, activists spend millions to secure real estate for artistic practices, even though the money used for these purchases had been raised after the most publicized instance of police brutality in history. At the height of its financial prowess, its reported success in attracting corporate sponsors, and a $250,000 grant from the City of Toronto to renovate its new arts centre, BLM Canada went silent, and the once mighty BLM-TO all but ceased to exist.

Lessons from the BLM era

As I write this, the webpage for BLM-TO is no longer active; its social media account on X/Twitter has been dormant for over four years. Other national chapters claimed by BLM Canada—in Fredricton, Montreal, Vancouver, and Edmonton—appear inactive or are least not public in their activities. More recent organizing that is taking place in the name of Black liberation and social justice does not use the “Black Lives Matter” identifier. As a set of formal groups and as an informal movement, the BLM era in Canada has now come and gone.

But as mentioned at the outset, the socio-economic outcomes for the average Black person remain perilous and, in some cases, are getting worse. Black people in Canada are incarcerated at 2.6 times their presence in the general population, an almost the identical rate as their U.S. counterparts.^[41] According to the Medical Council of Canada, “Black people continue to be overrepresented in experiencing some of the worst health outcomes throughout their lifespan.”^[42] The Labour Market Information Council reports that Black youth “have a higher unemployment rate, a lower employment rate and lower earnings compared to other Canadian youth.”^[43] In an analysis on COVID-19 mortality rates in Canada, Black people had the highest mortality rate for all groups included in the study.^[44] Although Canadian police forces and government agencies do not publish statistic about police violence, research from the Tracking (In) Justice project and mainstream media have demonstrated an increase in fatal police violence in recent years.^[45] The police killings of Black people, including, Erixon Kabera, Afolabi Stephen Opaso, Chad Facey, Mathios Arkangelo, Omar Mohammed, and Moses Erherhie, continue without accountability or changes to policing policy. Politicians in Ontario, Manitoba, and Alberta are attempting to reverse the Black-led efforts to remove armed police from public schools.^[46]

The BLM era provided a sense of confidence and possibility for ordinary Black people that seems to have diminished in recent years. A deeply cynical wave of corporate appropriation emerged following the murder of George Floyd, as governments and multinational companies wrapped themselves in the BLM brand, and made any number of gestures towards Black life that had nothing to do with unaccountable policing. We are now see the backlash to that corporate response, as conservative and fascist forces decry the “woke mob” they claim has taken over institutions, and attempt to roll back initiatives for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), anti-racism education, and cultural funding. The white guilt that propelled concessions in the immediate aftermath of Floyd’s murder has been washed away, mainly with time and platitudes, but also with some meaningful initiatives to employ and support Black people.

But the impact of the movement itself is still with us and must be advanced. The naming and identifying of anti-Black racism will not quickly be erased from public and institutional life, or from the mouths and hearts of Black people who experience it. The recognitions of anti-Black racism from our governments, no matter how grudgingly or insincerely they were uttered, cannot be taken back. The research demonstrating ongoing racial inequities in Canada—much of it propelled by the broader BLM movement—is ours to study and build upon. A generation of young people who grew up in Toronto and the GTA engaging in Black advocacy in their communities and seeing it on the news are marked with those experiences. For this reason BLM-TO’s Freedom School, which continues to operate in 2025, seems to me to be one of the group’s most important interventions, even though it is far less known than other works.

 The ongoing grim realities of Black life call for an ongoing response, for sustained organizing and collaboration with all those fighting against the inequities of racial capitalism. The BLM movement was a special era that can never be replicated, as it was born of a unique set of circumstances and opportunities. And for the many critiques of the formal BLM-TO organizing I’ve highlighted here, I will always be grateful for the life-saving work of those organizers, and all who organized, worked behind the scenes, and took risks with them. But perhaps the biggest lesson I’ve gleaned from that era is that people need to have a direct say in the organizing being done in their names.

By design, BLM-TO was never a democratic entity. While I can say in hindsight that it didn’t necessarily need to be, we did need and continue to need organizations in which large groups of Black people have a direct stake. If a group is to have leaders and decision-makers, it’s best if they’re chosen by and accountable to a much larger set of people, especially regarding the solicitation and spending of money, and the taking of risks during public demonstrations and other actions. I can understand if the organizers within BLM Canada decided to discontinue their  frontline organizing efforts after many years of struggle. However, their decisions to spend millions on a real estate venture is contributing very little to ongoing struggles for Black liberation. Since the vast majority of their supporters had no engagement with their most significant organizational decision, anger and disappointment at the outcome is to be expected.

Questions of safety are always at play in this kind of work. Black organizers rightly argue that their activities will always put them at risk of state surveillance, infiltration, sabotage, and criminalization. Many may choose to act in small groups of trusted comrades to minimize risks. But none of these choices need to be at odds with a sense of accountability and trust. The 2022 disclosures of Jama and Soudi about their experiences with BLM-TO help to illustrate this point.

The organizers say BLM Canada leaders justified their refusal to share organizational and administrative details by themselves as a “cadre,” a tight-knit group that keeps itself safe without revealing itself fully to others. That BLM Canada would give this explanation to organizers it had recruited to do public work demonstrates how detached it had become from its own work and responsibilities. As Jama and Soudi pointed out in their statement, “[t]his appropriation of the term ‘cadre’ is not an excuse for a refusal by the four BLM Canada members to communicate openly about political decisions and huge financial expenditures that impact an entire community.”^[47]

It’s also worth briefly revisiting the failed 2020 vote in Toronto to defund the police by 10%. The measure was introduced by city councillors Kristyn Wong-Tam and Josh Matlow almost immediately after Floyd’s murder, as well as the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet, a 29 year old Black woman who fell to her death from her high-rise apartment building after a police response. I believe the measure failed because, like so many other measures after George Floyd in Canada, it was too hasty and had very little to do with local realities.

Matlow and Wong-Tam didn’t have the support of mayor John Tory, nor the necessary votes at council to pass their proposal. And notably, they did not consult widely with Black communities before they tabled the motion. But perhaps most tellingly, Wong-Tam and Matlow could not publicly articulate the specific call call for a 10% police budget reduction. Why did that number matter, and where exactly were the funds meant to come from? BLM criticized the plan as inadequate and called for a minimum 50% reduction of the police budget. The lack of alignment between the city’s main advocacy group and the councillors proposing to defund the police was stark.

The proposal seemed more designed to suit the councillors’ political needs than to make meaningful change at the Toronto Police Service. I appreciate the analysis of scholar and activist Robyn Maynard, who organized with BLM-TO for a short time in 2020/21. Maynard said during one our many chats that it might have been wise for BLM-TO to accept and endorse the 10% offering to signal progress for all its efforts. I see some wisdom in this idea, even though it likely would not have changed the outcome of the vote (only eight councillors supported defunding the police, while 16 opposed the measure).

But I would add that as advocates we might all have put more emphasis on the stunning call by Matlow and Wong-Tam to disarm police, outside of the emergency task force. That proposal, which also failed at council, is a far more direct response to the kinds of death and injury BLM-TO and many others have been fighting against for so long. Even now, any reduction of the number of armed officers patrolling the streets or responding to calls would greatly reduce the harms of police encounters. Further, while Wong-Tam and Matlow did pass a portion of their motion for non-emergency responses to emergencies, particularly in cases of mental health distress, the adequate funding and resources for such initiatives have not followed. So while the 2020 defund motion was mostly unsuccessful, it did provide openings for future advocacy.

Finally, I return to the issue of police in public schools as a potential site for continued organizing, mobilization, and coalition-building. Much has been written, included by myself, about the fight to remove police from the Toronto District School Board between 2007 and 2017. And although we now see police and politicians attempting to reinstall such programs after they were cancelled in jurisdictions across Canada, I see hope in the ongoing organizing on the issue.

Education continues to be a battleground for Black students and their families, and it tends to be a more day-to-day concern to many more people given of the common experience of attending public school. In fact, the many campaigns across different regions and provinces to remove or keep cops out of public schools is a uniting legacy of the BLM movement in Canada. Such campaigns centre Black students, but also the experiences of Indigenous youth, racialized youth, disabled students, queer and trans students, and undocumented students.

In Toronto and beyond, organizers succeeded in getting cops out of schools by building broad coalitions and uniting oppressed people under a common cause. We may not have the capacity and momentum we had a decade ago, but this blueprint for campaigning and organizing, along with accountable and democratic organizing, can hopefully help us keep up our struggles, and to take advantage of future opportunities for widespread recruitment, mobilization, and change.

This chapter is dedicated to Sahra Soudi and Sarah Jama, two former McMaster students and organizers from Hamilton, Ontario whose principled acts inspired my writing.