On Friday last week, the Ontario Court of Justice convicted Tynan Liebert, a CUPE militant unionist and member of the Communist Workers Circle who works in the electrical trades. The Crown initially pressed two assault charges against Liebert for his role in shutting down a fundraiser for prominent federal Liberals. Due in part to Toronto Police Service’s (TPS) Project Resolute, Liebert has been convicted of a single charge of assault.
In an interview with The North Star prior to the conviction hearing, Liebert stated: “I’m here today against my will because I’ve been charged with two false counts of assault for participating in a protest that successfully shut down a fundraiser by then Liberal Cabinet Ministers Chrystia Freeland and Yara Saks.”
Liebert’s lawyer, Mathew Campbell-Williams, explains that “the court’s justification was that Tynan was a party to the assault that took place. The court did not find that he was the one who committed the assault but that he participated by encouraging it.”
Resolute, a repression offensive in Toronto
Liebert says he is one of the 130 or more people who’ve been arrested as part of Project Resolute.
Project Resolute, as explained by CUPE-3092 shop steward and member of Communist Workers Circle, Danny Tarade, is a special project of the TPS founded shortly after October 7. The project was reportedly pushed by Indigo CEO Heather Reisman, whose charity funds post-secondary education for IDF soldiers who complete their military service.
Tarade continues, “[Project Resolute] is considered an expanded hate crimes unit and framing things that if you’re protesting for Palestine; therefore you’re an anti-semite. It gives broader powers for surveillance, for brutalizing people.”
Under Project Resolute, TPS has partaken in pre-dawn raids, street snatch-and-grabs, and surveillance against Palestine solidarity activists. Project Resolute has also plugged TPS into the s and CSIS’s “intelligence-sharing model,” increasing the surveillance capacity of Toronto Police.
Liebert’s case and those of other labour activists have gained the attention of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and the resistance group Masar Badil, both releasing statements of solidarity.
Labour and Palestine
To Liebert, the cause of Palestine and the cause of labour are intimately bound up, explaining, “no oppressed people can take its fate into its own hands until it has learned to cast aside the hypocritical morality of its oppressor […] It’s by learning to support the Palestinian resistance and learning to identify with the Palestinian resistance that workers can cast off the hypocritical morality of the employers.”
Despite claiming that it will recognize Palestinian statehood in September at the 80th session of the United Nations general assembly, the Canadian government has continued to implicate itself with Israeli aggression in Palestine by continuing to export military goods to the IDF. Domestically, Canadian oligarchs and politicians fund initiatives like Project Resolute, targeting labour activists such as Liebert.
Workers around the world have taken action in support of Palestine’s fight against occupation and genocide; in November 2023, workers in Belgium refused to handle military cargo destined for Palestine, while only in July 2025, Montreal workers blockaded a MAERSK warehouse—the primary shipping company for military cargo to Israel from the US.