Hundreds of Canadians are planning to cross the border in chartered busses and attend the Women’s March on Washington to protest President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday.
The Canadian citizens plan on chartering around 10 coach buses that will travel overnight and arrive on the morning after the inauguration on Saturday. There are said to be even more Canadians who will likely have made their own travel arrangements the Hamilton Spectator reports.
One local Hamilton participant is freelance writer Anne Bokma who claims to be reporting from the march and has already been joined by 30 more local residents of the city who say they are also attending the anti-Trump event.
Pat Lovell from the nearby city of Burlington is also heading down to Washington DC to take part. Ms. Lovell, originally from the U.S. participated in the civil rights marches in the 1960s and claims that she can’t sit by without showing her resistance to Mr. Trump claiming that progress in issues such as the LGBT movement, women’s equality, and even the civil rights movement will slip away when Trump comes into office.
Her comments come despite repeated gestures by Mr. Trump to engage members of the black community in America and his promises to solve the problems of inner-city crime and poverty.
In the city of Hamilton itself, organizers have set up their own Women’s March to coincide with the main event in Washington DC. Co-organizer Anna Davey claims that the idea for duplicating the march came during the “spur of the moment” earlier this week on Monday.
According to Davey, around 160 people have signed up to take part and a further 400 have emailed her saying that they were interested in the event and she added, “and that number is growing every minute.”
Davey cited the reason for the march saying, “We tend to experience the same trends as the U.S. about five to 10 years later, so our hope now in organizing … is to prevent the sorts of social injustices that we are seeing in the United States with the election of Donald Trump.”
The DC Women’s March is expected to gather 200,000 anti-Trump protesters according to the organizers of the event. Several celebrities who were Hillary Clinton supporters during the presidential campaign including Katy Perry are also said to be attending.
Reports have also emerged that the Women’s March has funding links to groups supported by left-wing billionaire financier George Soros who was also revealed in leaked documents to have funded the Black Lives Matter movement.
Despite the event being a Women’s March, not all women are welcome at the event. Organizers have said that pro-life groups like the New Wave Feminists are not welcome and released a statement indicating they would not be allowed to participate because of their “anti-choice” views.