Organizers of the Edmonton Pride Festival have canceled what was to be a 10 day event over threats and demands issued by unhinged far left activists.
Like similar events in most other cities, the festival was to be a celebration of gay pride. Throughout the 80’s and 90’s, such events served as central gatherings and rallying points for all things left of center. But in 2019, if you’re holding an event that merely focuses on gay pride, you’re not inclusive enough for the far left, because you’re not talking about people of color, immigrants, colonization, climate justice, islamophobia, or anti capitalism.
Their list of demands include references to “QTIBPOC” and “LGBTIQ2S+” (whatever those mean) while also demanding $41,500 plus monthly funding to combat capitalism. They also claim that the Edmonton Pride Festival Society is causing harm to the QTIBPOC community.
The activist groups protested last year’s parade because the organizers refused too uninvite police and military.
Evidently the two sides tried to hold a meeting to discuss their differences, but festival organizers ended up calling the police on unruly SJW’s, as The CBC reports:
The decision comes not long after police were called to a meeting of the board of directors.
The board was meeting on April 4 to discuss a list of demands put forward by two local organizations — Shades of Colour and RaricaNow — that advocate for people of colour and refugees in Edmonton’s LGBTQ community. The demands include a call for the festival to allocate more funding to under-represented artists and facilitators.
The same groups also helped organize a demonstration at last year’s Pride parade calling for the organizers to uninvite Edmonton police, RCMP and military personnel, amid a Canada-wide debate over the presence of police in Pride parades.
The groups have been meeting with the board over the past 10 months and drafted a list of seven demands for the board, said V. Guzman, a co-organizer and facilitator with Shades of Colour.
Four representatives from the two groups were invited to speak at last week’s meeting, according to Clayton Hitchcock, co-chair of the Pride Festival Society. But when roughly 30 supporters showed up, they were stopped at the door and told they had to be members of the organization to participate in the meeting.
In an interview with CBC News last week, Hitchcock said group members pushed their way into the meeting. He said members of the board felt unsafe and decided to call police.
Guzman, a Latinx non-binary person who uses they/them pronouns, said no one from the group was arrested and police were co-operative.
But they said it was “a moment of pure irony” when the board called the police on a peaceful group trying to discuss the history and relationship between police and Edmonton’s LGBTQ community.
“Whoever called the police — I don’t know who it is — I don’t think they understood the systemic issues that we were bringing up within our demands,” they said. “I remember yelling at them, ‘You do not understand the repercussions of your actions and what you just did to our community.’”
As per a Facebook post by the activists protesting the Pride events:
Ease of reading version: https://drive.google.com/file/d/14YbfuNswFwFyIT3eTHac5Ekf8LHGudz7/view?usp=sharing Hiiiii…
Posted by Shades of Colour Community YEG on Saturday, March 30, 2019