April 3, 2018
Dear Olivia Nuamah, Executive Director Pride Toronto and Erin Edghill and Kevin Rambally, the Co-Chairs of Pride Toronto Board of Directors:
- This letter was written prior to the release yesterday of the joint public statement about police participation in Pride Toronto’s 2018 parade from The 519,Toronto People With AIDS Foundation, Sherbourne Health Centre, ASAAP, Black Coalition for AIDS Prevention (Black CAP)and Pride Toronto.
We have recently become aware that the Toronto Police Department has applied to have a contingent within the Pride parade for 2018. We are writing to express our opposition to any institutional police presence within our Pride parade. At the Pride AGM in January 2017, a motion supporting the community demands of Black Lives Matter Toronto was overwhelmingly passed. This included the “Removal of police floats in the Pride marches and parades,” which includes any organized police contingents. This was motivated by the racist practices of the Toronto Police towards the Black community, Indigenous people and people of colour, including queer, trans and two-spirit people. This part of the motion was again recognized as having been passed at the January 2017 AGM (for 2016) at the Pride AGM (for 2017) held in Nov. 2017. Nothing of substance has changed regarding the racist practices of the Toronto Police Department and this motion still stands. Any attempt to include a police presence within the parade, even if it is just Police Chief Saunders and a few other uniformed officers, is a violation of the motion passed by the vast majority of Pride members.
In many ways, relations between the police and parts of our community have worsened since 2016. In the fall of 2016, the police conducted their ‘sting’ operation against men engaging in consensual sexual interactions with other men in Marie Curtis Park. In response to the series of missing men in our community, including men of colour, the police assured us on a number of occasions that there was no serial killer. The police did not take seriously the disappearance of gay men of colour, homeless people, trans people and sex workers. And then in late January 2018, the police finally laid charges against Bruce McArthur for a series of murders. In this case, police inaction led to more people being killed. It was in this context that Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders had the audacity to blame people in our community for this major delay, for not bringing information forward to the police, when a number of people had done this but it was never acted upon.
For all these reasons, we are adamantly opposed to any organized police presence within our Pride parade this year, including any participation by the Toronto police chief.
Please assure us as soon as possible that this is the position adopted by the Toronto Pride Committee.
Yours sincerely,
Lisa Amin
Poni Arasu
Beverly Bain
Jeff Bale
Sharlene Bamboat
Kim Beemer
Kami Chisholm
Alvis Choi
Michele Pearson Clarke
Deborah Cowen
Brian De Matos
Robert Diaz
Pamela Dogra
OmiSoore Dryden
Andrea Fatona
Dennis Findlay
Doreen Fumia
Richard Fung
Ann Gagne
Ilaneet Goren
Andil Gosine
Amy Gottlieb
John Greyson
Nila Gupta
Anke Heiser
Tom Hooper
Andrea Houston
Richard Hudler
Adonica Huggins
Luis Jacob
Chase Joynt
Ilan Kapoor
Colleen Kearney
Mohamed Khaki
Prabha Khosla
Punam Khosla
Myung-Sun Kim
Gary Kinsman
Dai Kojima
Natalie Kouri-Towe
Lauryn Kronick
Elisha Lim
Jamie Magnusson
Tim McCaskell
Lance McCready
Christin Milloy
Alexis Mitchell
Nick Mulé
Kent Murnaghan
Ander Negrazis
Nancy Nicol
Faith Nolan
Casey Oraa
Maria-Belén Ordónez
Stacey Papernick
Andrew James Paterson
Jocelyn Piercy
Queer Ontario
Kiké Roach
Angela Robertson
Ricky Rodrigues
Alan Sears
Dwayne Shaw
Tony Souza
Doug Stewart
Matthu Strang
Rhonda Sussman
Heather Sykes
Gökbörü Sarp Tanyıldız
Robert Teixeira
Rick Telfer
Rahim Thawer
Urban Alliance on Race Relations
Wanda VanderStoop
Indu Vashist
Josh Vettivelu
Helen Victoros
Rinaldo Walcott
Lulu Wei
A.J. Withers
Anna Willats
Natalie Wood