Women and their allies participated in marches across Canada Saturday afternoon, from large cities to tiny villages, demanding the advancement for the rights of women and other vulnerable groups.
The movement started in the U.S. following President Donald Trump's inauguration in 2017.
In Toronto, the crowd at Nathan Phillips Square braved the extreme cold temperatures and snow to hear from speakers before the march.
Speakers called attention to Premier Doug Ford government's repeal of the modernized sex-ed curriculum and Thursday's announcement on changes to post-secondary tuition and grants.
Further east, a large group braved glacial temperatures that dipped below -22 C to hold a rally in a downtown park in Montreal.
Jumping and stomping their feet to keep warm, they waved an assortment of handmade signs demanding justice for missing and murdered Indigenous women, an end to sexual harassment and abuse, and basic gender equality.
And in the small fishing village of Sandy Cove, N.S., attendance for the annual march exploded this year to 50 people, two years after the first march charmed the internet with its small-scale demonstration of just 15 people.
In the U.S. ...
The Women's March returned to Washington on Saturday and found itself coping with an ideological split and an abbreviated route due to the government shutdown.
The original march in 2017, the day after President Donald Trump's inauguration, drew hundreds of thousands of people. The exact size of the turnout remains subject to a politically charged debate, but it's generally regarded as the largest Washington protest since the Vietnam era.
Organizer this year submitted a permit application estimating that up to 500,000 people would participate, but the actual turnout was expected to be far lower. Parallel marches were planned in dozens of U.S. cities.
The original plan called for participants to gather on the National Mall. But with the forecast calling for snow and freezing rain and the National Park Service no longer plowing the snow, organizers changed the march's location and route to start at Freedom Plaza, a few blocks from the White House, and head down Pennsylvania Avenue past the Trump International Hotel.
This year's march has been roiled by an intense ideological debate.
In November, Teresa Shook, one of the movement's founders, accused the four main leaders of the national march organization of anti-Semitism. The accusation was levelled at two primary leaders: Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian-American who has criticized Israeli policy, and Tamika Mallory, who has maintained an association with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
Shook, a retired lawyer from Hawaii, has been credited with sparking the movement by creating a Facebook event that went viral and snowballed into the massive protest on Jan. 21, 2017. In a Facebook post, she claimed Sarsour and Mallory, along with fellow organizers Bob Bland and Carmen Perez, had ``steered the Movement away from its true course'' and called for all four to step down.
The four march organizers have denied the charge, but Sarsour has publicly expressed regret that they were not ``faster and clearer in helping people understand our values.''
Despite pleas for unity, an alternate women's march has sprung up in protest and planned a parallel rally in New York on Saturday a few blocks away from the official New York Women's March protest.
- With a file from NEWSTALK1010