Montreal Pride parade to go on as planned Sunday after 2022 cancellation: director

Montreal's Pride parade will proceed on schedule this weekend, the organizer of the city's LGBTQ+ Pride festival said Saturday as he reassured prospective attendees the event would not fall prey to the sort of abrupt cancellation that unexpectedly derailed last year's festivities.

The 2022 edition of the parade was called off just hours before it was supposed to begin in downtown Montreal, prompting Mayor Valerie Plante to call for an independent inquiry tasked with determining what went wrong.

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It concluded the cancellation was due to a misunderstanding among Montreal Pride festival personnel after they discovered 96 of the 200 volunteers needed to work security for the parade were never recruited.

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But Montreal Pride Executive Director Simon Gamache said there will be no such complications for 2023. He said the organization has since fixed all of the problems that scuttled last year's parade and this year's event will take place on Sunday as scheduled, barring any uncontrollable situations.

"If there's a tornado, I have no control over that. But yes, there will be a parade tomorrow. Absolutely," he said in an interview Saturday, assuring residents that Montreal Pride has all of the staff members and volunteers it needs. "We're very ready. We've been ready for months."

The inquiry's final report, released last October, laid out a series of miscommunications that plagued the 2022 parade.

"Confusion" between two "key" unnamed organizers led one of them to declare the event was cancelled without Gamache's knowledge, the report said. On-site volunteers, personnel, security agents and police subsequently disbanded, which compelled the festival to publicly confirm the event would not proceed.

The report also identified systemic communication and governance issues within the festival organization and recommended 13 reforms to address them. They included additional oversight of parade planning by Montreal Pride senior management, an update to the organization's emergency response plan and more training for staff.

"We were extremely proactive as soon as we received the report, and we drew up an action plan (to quickly address its recommendations)," Gamache said.

The process also offered an opportunity to revisit the organization's structure, he added.

"Montreal Pride was created in 2007 and then it developed quite organically," Gamache said. "We reached a point where maybe we needed to make everything we were doing more operational, better, more professional. And that's what we've done."

Gamache suggested the stakes are particularly high this year, and not just because of expectations for a successful parade.

"We live in a very particular societal context," he said. "There's a lot of hate right now, a lot of it on social networks ... In this context, we need to ally. We need to ally with each other more than ever."

"The parade is a fine example: it's not just the (LGBTQ+) communities that march, our allies do too, in the streets and on the sidewalks."

"So that's really what we're hoping for."

The 2023 Montreal Pride parade route for Aug. 13, 2023. Roads will be closed in the area to accommodate.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published on Aug. 12, 2023.