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A large crowd of demonstrators shut down a swath of the downtown core Sunday in solidarity with protesters in Iran, who are fighting against the country’s financial collapse and the regime that led to it.
Nationwide protests in Iran started Dec. 28 in response to soaring prices, then turned into wider anti-government protests against the clerical rulers who have governed the country for nearly 50 years.
At the same time, tens of thousands of pro-government demonstrators have taken to the streets in a show of power, in response to protesters challenging the country’s theocracy.
Pooria Shafia, a Toronto-based engineer who attended Sunday’s protest, says he’s concerned about his relatives that still live in Iran.
“Every time I try to ask my cousin to see if he was able to contact them, I couldn’t bring myself to [do] it because I was just afraid of what the response would be,” he told CBC Toronto Sunday.
“You want to know how people are doing, but at the same time you’re always worried. What if the news that I hear is not something that I was prepared for?”
The protest in Toronto, which made its way from Sankofa Square to Queen’s Park, advocated in part for democratic elections in Iran.
“Well over 100,000 demonstrators” attended the protest on Sunday, Toronto police said in a statement to CBC Toronto. In a series of social media posts, the Toronto Police Service warned of delays and road closures during the afternoon demonstration in the area.
Demonstrators also voiced they would like to see action from the Canadian government, including putting in place measures that weaken the regime, deporting Islamic Republic officials in Canada and ensuring negotiations don’t take place between the theocracy and United Nations members.
Global Affairs Canada declined to comment on whether any measures will be enacted against Iran and instead referred CBC Toronto to previously published statements and a social media post in which they condemned the killings of protestors and commended the bravery of the Iranian people.
The European Union recently designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a branch of Iran’s armed forces, as a terrorist organization. Canada did the same in June 2024.
The U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, which relies on a network inside Iran to verify its information, reports that more than 49,500 people have been detained in the crackdown.
It says the violence killed at least 6,713 people, the vast majority of them demonstrators. The Associated Press has been unable to independently assess the death toll and arrest figures, given that authorities have cut off Iran’s internet from the rest of the world.
As of Jan. 21, Iran’s government put the death toll at a far lower 3,117, saying 2,427 were civilians and security forces, labelling the rest “terrorists.” In the past, Iran’s theocracy has undercounted or not reported fatalities from unrest.
That death toll exceeds that of any other round of protest or unrest in Iran in decades and recalls the chaos surrounding the 1979 revolution.
The diaspora is trying to be the voice of Iranian people, said Morvarid Sadinejad, who is also an engineer in Toronto and attended the downtown protest.
“There is a huge crime against humanity happening and we should not be closing our eyes on it, ” she said. “We’re devastated. We are heartbroken. We are going through a collective trauma.”
While Sadinejad says she’s “furious” about what’s happening in Iran, some hope still remains.
“People are chanting, people are clapping, playing music. They are not sad. We don’t have time to mourn now. We will go back and mourn these lost lives, but right now … we are in a war with the regime,” she said.
Sadinejad says her ask for non-Iranian Canadians is for the focus to be on humanity, rather than ideology.
“We don’t want them to observe the protests, we want them to join the protests. We want them to be the voice of the voiceless,” she said. “Would they have been silent if it was their loved ones, their families, their friends?”
Protests have swept across Iran but it’s not the first time people have taken to the streets to demand change. For The National, CBC’s Ashley Fraser breaks down the key differences this time and why some say pressure has never been higher on the regime.
Shafia says he wants people of all backgrounds and religions to come together and “be the voice of the oppressed.”
“There has been unfortunately deafening silence coming from the people who have been talking about human rights, who have been talking about massacres, genocides that have happened around the world in the past,” he said. “But they’re awfully quiet when it comes to Iran.”
He added it’s been difficult to live life normally in Canada knowing all that’s going on back home.
“A lot of us here have our jobs, we are working as a part of the society,” he said. “But at the same time we know that something horrible, horrible, absolutely horrendous is happening inside Iran and it makes it really hard for us to function.”
