According to the event’s main organizer, the reasons for the shocking cancellation of Montreal’s Pride festival can be boiled down to one simple but glaring fact: the lack of hiring of security personnel.
The parade was canceled on Sunday morning, just hours before it was due to start.
In an interview with CBC Montreal’s Daybreak host Sean Henry, Simon Gamache said that’s when he learned that “about 100” security personnel needed to police the parade route had never been hired.
“It was never done,” said Gamache, executive director of Montreal Pride.
“It’s something we’re going to look into. As you can imagine, we take it very seriously. I don’t want to speculate at this point,” he said.
“Obviously, I’m the chief executive of this organization, so ultimately I’m the person responsible for this.”
With tens of thousands of disappointed spectators and participants, some organizing impromptu events of their own, Gamache must explain what went wrong, why and what it all means for the future of the organization.
Gamache, who has been the organization’s executive director for less than a year, said Montreal Pride had enough resources to complete the recruiting process, but for some reason the task was overlooked.
Sunday’s march would have been the city’s first large-scale Pride parade since the start of the pandemic.
Montreal Pride had initially tweeted that the decision to cancel the event was made in collaboration with Montreal police. The organization later corrected its statement, saying that the decision was made solely by the organizers.
Crowds braved the rain at the Esplanade du Parc Olympique on Sunday evening to watch the remaining events of the festival. (Sean Henry/CBC)
The cancellation caught many people off guard, including Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante.
“If we had been informed of the lack of staff or anything else, [we] would have put the necessary energy,” said the mayor during a press conference this Sunday.
“My frustration this morning is realizing that it looks like decisions have been made, but we’ve never been informed, and that’s disappointing.”
In a tweet, Montreal police stressed that they were not involved in the decision to cancel the parade and that they were ready to help with the security of the event.
The organizer says it was too late
As a result of the abrupt cancellation, members of Montreal’s 2SLGBTQIA+ communities immediately began coordinating off-site events.
A sit-in was planned at Place Émilie-Gamelin in the city center to protest the cancellation. A crowd of would-be paraders gathered there to march down Rue Ste-Catherine.
“We were promised a place for our voices to be heard and now it’s been taken away,” said Salem Billard, a queer activist who planned the protest. “Now we’re experiencing so much violence, even going to Pride events… And we want to reclaim this place as our home and not as a corporate festival. [event].”
It was impossible to save the event because so many people would need to be hired but also trained in a matter of hours, Gamache said.
“There is a whole [set of] logistics around this event. It is not simple. And we felt we couldn’t guarantee a safe parade for the community,” he said.
When asked how the cancellation would affect his future as Montreal Pride’s executive director, Gamache said, “It’s not up to me to decide.”
“I want to stay. I was hired last September to restructure this organization and that takes several years to do,” he said.
The executive director said the sponsors of the event have been supportive and none of them have asked for their money back.