PYM Toronto utterly condemns the discriminatory firing of labour leader and paramedic Katherine Grzejszczak and rebukes York Region management’s racist, anti-Palestinian stifling of worker voices speaking out for peace and justice. 

On June 20, York Region Paramedics fired Katherine Grzejszczak for expressing solidarity with what our people are going through in Palestine.

Katherine has been a frontline paramedic with York Regional Municipality since 2010. She was the president of her CUPE local for 6 years and is currently a member of CUPE Ontario’s executive board. Days prior, Katherine had posted on Facebook criticizing Israel’s mass slaughter of children and civilians, including paramedics, and called for workers to join an anti-war rally. 

While the colonial Israeli Offensive Forces (IOF) find it justifiable to directly target ambulance vehicles and massacre paramedics in Gaza, like in March 2025, south of Rafah, the management at York Region Paramedics sees that it’s crucial to silence and character assassinate Paramedic leaders here in Canada who believe in their right to stand with their colleagues in Palestine, speak out against war crimes and what the UN identifies as a Genocide. 

This is not the first time Katherine has been attacked for her support for Palestine. In April 2024, Zionists tried to get CUPE to remove her as local president for wearing a keffiyeh and having a sticker of a Palestinian flag on her laptop. CUPE stood by its members and ignored them. However, the employer gladly turned a blind eye to our people’s plight and folded under racist anti-Palestinian rhetoric. 

We stand in solidarity with Katherine and all workers who stand up for our people in Palestine.

No one is free until Palestine is free. We demand an end to all Canadian complicity in the genocide and a full two-way arms embargo.

PYM