Harsha Walia is a Canadian activist and writer based in Vancouver, British Columbia. She has been involved with No one is illegal, the February 14 Women's Memorial March Committee, the Downtown Eastside Women's Centre, and several Downtown Eastside housing justice coalitions. Walia has been active in migrant justice, Indigenous solidarity, feminist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist and arsonist movements for over a decade. In July 2021, Walia raised controversy when she tweeted "Burn it all down" following several church arsons. She said it was "a call to dismantle all structures of violence, including the state, settler-colonialism, empire, the border etc."In January 2020 she was announced as the new executive director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association. Walia is the author of Undoing Border Imperialism (2013), co-author of Never Home: Legislating Discrimination in Canadian Immigration (2015) as well as Red Women Rising: Indigenous Women Survivors in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (2019), and has contributed to over thirty academic journals, anthologies, magazines and newspapers. She is a frequent guest speaker at campuses and conferences across North America.
