Elizabeth Rowley

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Elizabeth Rowley

Elizabeth (Liz) Rowley is a politician and political activist in Ontario, Canada. She is the current leader of the Communist Party of Ontario and a leading member of the Communist Party of Canada, and has campaigned for office many times at both the federal and provincial levels.

She attended university in Alberta and was active with the Young Communist League of Canada. She subsequently moved to Ontario, and worked as a typesetter apprentice and secretary.

Rowley was a school trustee in the former Toronto borough of East York during the 1990s. She is strongly opposed to 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. She has worked as a columnist for the People's Voice, a Communist Party newspaper, and has written several articles on public resistance.

During the Communist Party's internal dispute on dissolution following the fall of the Soviet bloc, Rowley was a leader of the minority opposed to then-leader George Hewison's proposals to abandon Marxism-Leninism as an ideology. Rowley and other leaders in the minority such as William Kashtan and Miguel Figueroa were expelled from the party and sued. As a result of a legal settlement, the assets of the party were split in half and the name of the party was relinquished to the minority, while the majority reorganized itself as the Cecil-Ross Society, an educational foundation.

In 2001, she was 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. This is Rowley's second tenure as leader; she also led the Ontario Communist Party in the 1990 general election.