Judy Rebick

Judy Rebick (born 1945 in Reno, Nevada) is a Canadian journalist and political activist.

Rebick was a Trotskyist activist in the 1970s, active with the Revolutionary Marxist Group and its successor the Revolutionary Workers League. She was editor of the RWL's newspaper, Socialist Voice for several years.

She quit the RWL and the Trotskyist movement in the early 1980s and refocused her efforts on the broader feminist movement. She was particularly active in the abortion rights issue, as an activist and spokesperson in the Ontario Coalition for Abortion Clinics and a supporter of Dr. Henry Morgentaler.

She also became more active with the Ontario New Democratic Party in the mid-1980s, in an internal group called the "Campaign for an Activist Party". She headed the CAP's slate for the party executive in 1986, on a platform of making the NDP more "movement-oriented" and involved in extra-parliamentary politics. The CAP also opposed the concessions which the NDP had made the previous year, in providing support for the Ontario's Liberal minority government. Though the CAP generated a significant degree of grassroots support, it was opposed by the party establishment (including party leader Bob Rae) and failed. Rebick lost her bid to become party president, losing to Gillian Sanderman by a margin of 818 votes to 361.

She ran as the NDP candidate in the suburban Toronto riding of Oriole in the 1987 provincial election, finishing third, well behind Liberal Elinor Caplan.

Rebick first gained national prominence as president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women from 1990 to 1993. She subsequently appeared on CBC Newsworld as cohost with Claire Hoy of the political debate series Face Off. When that show ended to make way for counterSpin in 1998, Rebick continued as a freelance journalist for a variety of media outlets, and was part of a group of media activists who launched rabble.ca, a web magazine and discussion forum.

With Svend Robinson and Libby Davies, she helped lead the New Politics Initiative, a movement within the New Democratic Party to refocus it as an activist left-wing party. The NPI's platform was rejected at the 2001 NDP convention in Winnipeg, but it captured the imagination of some New Democrats and suggested a way to return to its left-wing roots, away from a perceived movement towards third way centrism. She helped to wind down the NPI in 2003, claiming that many of its ideals had been embraced by new party leader Jack Layton (whom Rebick had voted for in the 2003 NDP leadership contest.)

Rebick is currently the Canadian Auto Workers–Sam Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy at Ryerson University in Toronto. She is the former publisher of rabble.ca.

Her latest book is Ten Thousand Roses: The Making of a Feminist Revolution (2005) ISBN 0-14-301544-3 published by Penguin.