Toronto’s huge Pride Parade slated for Sunday; police still shut out

Toronto’s unabashedly in-yourface celebration of everything LGBTQ is set to take place on Sunday against a backdrop of nasty recriminations involving the community, police and black citizens, and the sobering reality of a man charged with killing eight people, most of whom frequented the city’s gay district.

The huge Pride Parade, one of the country’s most colourful and flamboyant outdoor events, will see more than 120 groups march the downtown route — but uniformed police won’t be among them.

Self-described “out and proud” Const. Danielle Bottineau, the force’s LGBTQ2S liaison officer, said she has been left with conflicted sympathies over the tensions with the gay community that has led to the formal exclusion of uniformed officers from the parade for the second year in a row. “It’s been a tough couple of years for me personally, because I’m very much immersed in the community and the service,” Bottineau said in an interview.

Police came under fire from the LGBTQ community for failing to take the disappearances of gay men seriously for years — until January, when they arrested and charged self-employed landscaper Bruce McArthur, 66, with killing two men. That number subsequently rose to eight. With many residents feeling shock and grief, police Chief Mark Saunders inflamed the situation when he initially suggested no one in the gay community had come forward with information that might have led to an earlier arrest.

Bottineau said challenging a police-force culture based on hetero-normative white male privilege has been an ongoing battle fought by LGBTQ officers willing to make themselves visible. At the same time, she said she understood the difficulty the community has with the police service. “Unfortunately, we did our part where we weren’t doing the best job, and we need to take ownership of that,” Bottineau said.

While the big parade is important, said Bottineau, the priority is to repair relationships with the community and figure out how police can do a better job dealing with its members.

Tensions involving police and the parade were brewing in 2016, when members of Black Lives Matter abruptly halted the march to present several demands, among them that uniformed police, their floats and their cruisers be excluded. Pride organizers acquiesced, saying officers could participate if they gave no indication of being police. As a result, the force did not march last year, but Saunders hoped uniformed officers would be able to march this year.

In early April, Pride Toronto and five other organizations co-signed a letter opposing a formal police presence, citing the missing-men investigation. “Despite the fact that many of us felt and voiced our concerns, we were dismissed,” the groups said. “This has severely shaken our community’s already often tenuous trust in the city’s law enforcement. We feel more vulnerable than ever.”

In response, Saunders said he recognized how fraught the issue was, and said he wouldn’t push participation this year.

Despite the controversy, the parade, which caps off weeks of gay-themed events, is expected to draw as many as one million spectators to the sidewalks — and police will be on hand helping ensure security.