Just been implementing something similar in Mongo v3.2.3 using Node v0.12.7 and v4.4.4 and used:
{ $gte: new Date(dateVar).toISOString() }
I'm passing in an ISODate (e.g. 2016-04-22T00:00:00Z) and this works for a .find() query with or without the toISOString function. But when using in an .aggregate() $match query it doesn't like the toISOString function!