Marching madness, on parade
Toronto Police officers will not march under the force’ s banner in this year’s Pride parade, chief Mark Saunders confirmed Friday, thus settling — sort of — a dispute that’s been going on since Black Lives Matter temporarily halted last year’s parade and demanded police be excluded in future. Last month, Pride officially agreed.
“We understand the LGBTQ communities are divided ,” Saunders said. He promised “this will have no impact on our ongoing outreach to LGBTQ communities” and to “sit down with any group who feels marginalized.” But his officers would stand down this year, he said, “to enable those differences to be addressed.”
One of the biggest “differences” in play here is perfectly illustrated in a halffamous YouTube video from the march against Islamophobia in Toronto on Feb. 4. In it, we see Yusra Khogali, co- founder of Black Lives Matter Toronto, trying to whip the crowd in an antidiscriminatory frenzy.
“When Justin Trudeau responded to the Muslim ban that this … white supremacist coward Donald Trump put forward, what did ( he) say?” she asked rhetorically. “He said he wanted to accept everyone who is not allowed into the U.S. border to Canada .”
Trudeau didn’t actually say that, but in any event the crowd cheered lustily. And Khogali quickly admonished them to stop, on account of this country’s rotten foundations: on the “genocide of indigenous people” and on “the enslavement and genocide of black people.”
Trudeau, she thundered, is “a liar, he is a hypocrite, he is a white supremacist terrorist.”
At that, a much smaller and different group of people cheered.
That first group? That’s more or less the Pride parade in its modern incarnation: a feel- good celebration of progress, openness and acceptance where all are welcome. An opportunity to set aside differences, not bash them out in public. Bring the kids!
That second group cheering? That’s a brand of activist that disdains feel- good marches and the sort of “hey hey, ho ho” protests that tweedy Annex revolutionaries enjoy before a nice dinner out. Inconveniently for Pride, this brand of activist uses a very academic vocabulary that to many outsiders sounds like lunacy.
If you hear someone call Justin Trudeau a white supremacist, it’s probably not in the jackbooted sense, but in the sense that he is allegedly perpetuating — knowingly or not — a foundational social bias in favour of white people. I’m probably doing it right now as I write this, as is every black police officer out on the beat, as was Barack Obama as president of the United States. I sort of understand the theory. Most, I’m betting, do not.
Will a Pride parade dragged back to its strident activist beginnings be less attractive to families? Will politicians hesitate to march, le st their rainbow-hued gladhanding be interrupted by accusations of white supremacist terrorism? (Frankly I’d be surprised if it wasn’t.) Does the exclusion of the police in their official capacity make a huge anodyne celebration, one of the biggest events on the civic calendar, something less than the whole- of- city event many people would like it to be?
Maybe. I can understand why people are disappointed.
What I have never understood is why people who don’t otherwise seem very invested in this event so easily get their knickers in a twist about its decisions. For years, there was an annual bun fight at City Hall over Queers Against Israeli Apartheid’s inclusion or exclusion from the event: motions and counter- motions ricocheted around the City Council chamber, threatening to put people’s eyes out.
OK, yes, Pride gets some city money. (I’ve long argued they’d be better off without it.) But so do lots of other organizations whose decisions don’t arouse such fury, and it’s $260,000 of a $10 billion budget.
Mayor John Tory has been determinedly opposing the police’s exclusion, and in a statement Friday he declared himself “disappointed and frustrated with the current situation.”
“No one should feel excluded from Pride and no group should have to decide it is better if they just don’t take part,” he said. “This current situation is not good for a city as inclusive as Toronto.”
Good grief. The police are vitally important municipal employees to whom we have outsourced the safety of the city. They’re not a persecuted minority group. Of course it would be best if everyone in the city appreciated their work, but that’s not the case. And that’s why they’re not marching this year.
No doubt it’s a token of Pride’s success as an event that the whole city seems invested in its programming. But not everyone loves every parade. This is Pride’s parade, and you can take it or leave it.
THE POLICE ARE VITALLY IMPORTANT MUNICIPAL EMPLOYEES TO WHOM WE HAVE OUTSOURCED THE SAFETY OF THE CITY. THEY’RE NOT A PERSECUTED MINORITY GROUP. OF COURSE IT WOULD BE BEST IF EVERYONE IN THE CITY APPRECIATED THEIR WORK, BUT THAT’S NOT THE CASE.