It was early Sunday morning when SPVM police arrived at the site of the Montreal Pride parade. A person responsible for the event approached them and told them that everything was cancelled.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
Bang!
From there, it was the festival of guesswork.
Here’s what really happened. Fierté Montréal had to provide about 200 people to ensure security along the route (they were notably responsible for pushing people back before the parade floats and participants passed).
Around a hundred people are volunteer “reception agents” and around a hundred others are paid. Sunday morning, we realized that the “paid receptionists”… had not been hired.
It was Simon Gamache, general manager of the event, who confirmed this to me on Sunday, at the end of the day.
How could an event that brings together tens of thousands of spectators and a dozen thousands of participants come to this?
Before talking to Simon Gamache, I had in mind a very hard column on the amateurism of Montreal Pride. But after talking to him, I released the button. Does an event have to pay for the “forgetting” of a person or a committee who did their job badly?
“I am the general manager. I take full responsibility for it, ”said the man who took office in September 2021.
That said, I confess to having felt a huge uneasiness as a Montrealer. Pride Montreal is still not the Saint-Glinglin Fire Fly Festival! This event has a budget of $5.6 million ($1,103,000 from Quebec City, $600,000 from Montreal, not including participation from Ottawa, Tourisme Montréal and numerous partners).
I fully understand Mayor Valérie Plante for swallowing her coffee the wrong way when she learned of this on Sunday morning. She sharply expressed her dissatisfaction during a press briefing where she was to address the issue of the shootings of the last few days.
Contrary to what the ill-informed lesson-givers published on social networks on Sunday, the City of Montreal and the SPVM had done their job. But hey, it’s easier to blame the obvious when you haven’t finished your coffee yet.
On Sunday, thousands of Montrealers and people from elsewhere in Quebec and across the country experienced great disappointment. Put yourself in the shoes of community groups and event sponsors (who have paid substantial amounts for visibility). They had been preparing their participation for weeks, if not months.
Sunday morning, they were told that their allegorical float was going to stay in the garage.
This failure will obviously deal a hard blow to the event. This festival has gone through several crises (remember the war with Divers/Cité). After this black day, the coast will be difficult to go up with donors and the public.
Still on the subject of “misinformed lesson givers of social networks”, it was the festival of wandering on Sunday. Fortunately, the mayor quickly set the record straight during the 10:45 a.m. press briefing.
Obviously, we immediately blamed the SPVM police officers. They were the culprits, they were the big bad guys. Bad target.
Some have made a curious conflation with the request of the organizers of the parade, earlier this week, to cancel the presence of police during the event. Let’s clarify one thing: it was not a question here of the police officers who must ensure the security of the event, but rather of the police officers who are part of the LGBTQ+ community.
On this subject, excluding gay police officers who want to take part in the parade in order to denounce the police raids that took place in the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s is an absolutely meaningless decision.
People also imagined that the parade was canceled because the organizers had received terrorist threats. Did they really think that if an event that brings together tens of thousands of citizens had received such threats, the SPVM and the mayor would not have been informed?
All day, people have wondered if there was “eel in the rock” in this decision. Can we shut down the plot machine for the rest of the summer?
The management of Montreal Pride and the members of its board of directors will be accountable. Note that the team in place is largely made up of new figures.
Pride Montreal experienced a significant change of guard two years ago with a major wave of departures. However, the arrival of new recruits seems to be causing a stir. Sources have told me over the past few months that organizers who have been at Montreal Pride for several years are having trouble getting their voices heard by the new leadership.
“To change everything, the new organizers threw the baby out with the bathwater,” a source told me.
The new team seems more inclined to work on the ideological aspects of the LGBTQ+ community. Take a look at the Montreal Pride website and take a look at the “Demands 2022” section. By wanting to do too much, I fear that we miss certain targets.
That we extend the acronym LGBTQ + over a kilometer and that we create a flag with all the colors of Benjamin Moore, I have nothing against it. But there is reason to wonder about what is becoming of these organizations which now endorse a ton of causes.
Pride Montreal has created a list of 10 spectacular demands which it wishes to be the standard bearer. It’s beautiful, it’s noble, it’s great!
But the organization forgot to take care of the general public event which is its driving force. It says a lot about our times.