Last week at Pride Toronto’s annual general meeting, the voting membership agreed to ban the formal participation of Toronto Police Services from the upcoming Pride Parade. This would mean that no official police float or uniformed officers would be part of the celebration. Pride’s board of directors still needs to vote on whether to go through with what their membership has decided, so the decision is still not final.
Much like the fervor that erupted after the Toronto chapter of Black Lives Matter (BLM) halted last year’s Pride parade with a list of nine demands to call for greater equity within Pride as an organization, the same usual suspects voiced their displeasure at Pride’s voting membership for approving to follow through on what was agreed upon at the parade.
READ MORE: Pride Toronto votes to remove police floats, marches from parade
Out of BLM’s list of demands, which range from re-establishing the South Asian stage at Pride to ensuring that more black trans women and indigenous people are hired within Pride as an organization, the only demand that people seem to be focusing on is the call to remove an official police presence from participating in the Pride marches and parades.
Even the leader of the Progressive Conservative party of Ontario, Patrick Brown, felt the need to get in on the action, tweeting:
While it’s not surprising that a conservative politician would want to show their support for the police, Brown’s solidarity with the police is somewhat perplexing since nowhere in its list of demands does BLM state that police are to be excluded from participating as members of the LGBTQ community. Is Patrick Brown unaware that police uniforms are not permanently grafted to officers’ skin?
READ MORE: Black Lives Matter wants protest demands met by Pride Toronto despite flip-flop
This week video emerged of an arrest wherein a police officer is on video telling the man filming that he is going to get AIDS should the man being arrested spit on him: “He’s going to spit in your face, you’re going to get AIDS. Stop recording or I’m going to seize your phone as evidence and then you’re going to lose your phone.”
WATCH BELOW: Waseem Khan filmed police tasering and arresting a suspect wanted for assault Tuesday morning. As Khan filmed the incident while standing a short distance away on a sidewalk, two officers threatened to seize his phone as evidence.
Aside from displaying an egregious lack of basic biological knowledge, as the HIV virus is not transmittable through saliva and AIDS is the syndrome caused by the HIV virus, it provides a window into the way certain officers can conduct themselves. As Arshy Mann noted in his piece for Daily Xtra, “if the Toronto police continue to engage in this kind of behaviour, in full public view, accompanied by intimidation of bystanders and despicable, serophobic commentary, they shouldn’t be surprised that some people don’t want to be marching beside them.”
The 2016 Pride Parade was the first time that Canadians had a Prime Minister march in the parade. It was a welcomed reminder of just how much progress we have made in this country. But to ignore the obvious fact that progress has not come to all members of the LGBTQ community equally is shortsighted at best and willfully blind to racial inequality at worst.
READ MORE: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau marches in Toronto Pride Parade
Nobody is claiming that the police still regularly harass white gay men and women the way they once did, in the not so distant past. But is it really impossible to fathom that interactions with the police would differ significantly between a white lesbian from Rosedale and a black trans woman from Parkdale?
The entire conversation surrounding Pride and BLM has also ignored basic facts and history. Pride was born out of opposition to police brutality. The first Pride parade was in 1969 after the infamous raids on New York’s Stonewall Inn. Toronto only started celebrating Pride in 1981, which was a direct result of the bathhouse raids, something that Chief Mark Saunders only apologized for last year.
BLM’s detractors continue to peddle the fiction that the Toronto Police have a longstanding tradition of having an official presence at Pride. The very first time a Toronto Police Chief marched in the parade was in 2005. The first Toronto Police Service float? That came much later, with the first one appearing in 2014. Indeed, a grand and long history of two Pride Parades is what people are claiming is being ruined for the sake of ensuring that all members of the LGBTQ community feel safe.
Toronto Police officers are well within their right to choose to boycott this year’s parade and not come at all. It is even understandable as to why some would want to do just that. But if the police are indeed sincere in their efforts at outreach to all members of the LGBTQ community, then they will continue in those efforts, and not just for the photo opportunity of marching in a parade.
Supriya Dwivedi is host of The Morning Show on Toronto’s Talk Radio AM640 and a columnist for Global News.
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