Protests thwarted the Olympic torch relay in Toronto earlier this month. The Olympic torch relay will pass through southern Ontario on Sunday afternoon, with demonstrators continuing to rally against it.
Activists plan to greet the torch with a peaceful protest when it arrives for a celebration at city hall in Kitchener.
The activist group AW@L said it expects about 100 people to attend what it is billing as a family-friendly rally and march against the Vancouver Winter Games, which begin in February.
The group argues that the Olympic venues are on traditional aboriginal land, that the sporting event's show of being eco-friendly belies Canada's poor environmental record and that Games organizers have broken promise after promise about leveraging the Olympics to build social housing.
"In Vancouver, in preparation for the 2010 Games, neighbourhoods have been brutally gentrified, drastically increasing homelessness and the marginalization of the urban poor. And to make matters worse, new bylaws have been passed in Vancouver that essentially criminalize homelessness and poverty," the group says on its website.
The torch is on a 45,000-kilometre journey to more than 1,000 communities across the country ahead of the Vancouver Games, with additional stops Sunday slated for London, Ingersoll, Woodstock, Stratford, Cambridge and Waterloo. Protests have greeted the torch at many events along the way.
While the Olympic flame dates to ancient times, the modern torch relay began when Nazi Germany hosted the Summer Games in Berlin in 1936.
With files from The Canadian PressShare Tools
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