Photo credit: Brandon News
Toronto police estimated that 350,000 demonstrators took over the streets in the city’s north end on Feb. 14, Salarr Gholami, the lead organizer of Iran solidarity protests in Toronto, believes the crowd was much bigger than that.
Toronto Today reports that the rally was one for the history books.
Toronto police say the protest was likely the largest single-day demonstration the city has ever seen.
On the same day, Vancouver police estimated that 50,000 people gathered in a local park, answering the call of Iran’s exiled crown prince Reza Pahlavi for mass demonstrations across the globe. Police in Montreal, Calgary and Ottawa say they’ve also seen well-attended rallies in recent months as people oppose Iran’s deadly crackdowns on anti-government protests inside the country.
Those protests’ stunning crowd sizes have captured headlines, but police in some of Canada’s largest cities say the rallies are part of a rising tide of demonstrations they’ve been managing for years.
Toronto police say protests happen weekly, sometimes daily, driven by an “increasingly polarized global environment.”
Overnight Saturday, the United States and Israel launched an attack on Iran. Another Iran protest was planned for Richmond Hill on Saturday. While it wasn’t expected to be as large as the one on Feb.14 in Toronto, it was planned before the attack.
Approximately 4,000 demonstrations have taken place in Toronto since Oct. 7, 2023 – more than 850 of which were related to the war in Gaza, police say..
Calgary police Staff Sgt. Rod Macnell, who manages major events in the city, said the steady increase in protests – 300 percent over four years in Calgary’s case – has been the norm across Canada since the COVID-19 pandemic.
In Vancouver, the number of protests increased by 75 percent between January 2025 and January 2026, causing financial strain for the police department, media relations officer Const. Darren Wong said.
The Canadian Association of Police Chiefs said in 2024 that increased protest activity across the country had led to an “unsustainable demand” on police resources.
