This year, the celebrations take on greater significance because Toronto’s usual 10-day festival is being replaced by World Pride. Last June, he attended his first Pride Week event – the rainbow flag raising outside city hall. Whether the mayor should attend the parade or not has become an annual debate in Toronto since Rob Ford was elected in 2010. “He’s just not going to march in the parade, that’s his choice.” I think those are strong words,” Doug Ford told reporters Thursday. Taking his usual position of defence, Doug Ford said the mayor has gay friends and supports the fact that the event will bring in a lot of visitors, but he “just chooses not to go.”ĭoug Ford said he and the mayor will “keep with the family tradition” and be out of town when the parade takes place June 29. The mayor was not at city hall Thursday, and his staff said he was taking a sick day.
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I have never gone to a Pride parade so I’m not going to change the ways I am,” Rob Ford said at the student-run public forum, drawing jeers from the crowd.Īfter the event, the mayor refused to explain what he meant by “the ways I am,” leaving it up to the public to interpret the remark. Mayor Rob Ford has never attended the annual parade, a hugely popular celebration attended by previous mayors, and he is facing fresh criticism over the reason he gave for missing this year’s event.Īt a mayoral candidates forum at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus Wednesday night, the mayor strayed from the usual reason that he gives reporters – that he chooses to skip the parade because it coincides with an annual gathering at the Ford family cottage. Doug Ford is defending his brother’s decision to again skip Toronto’s Pride parade and he is denying renewed claims that the mayor is homophobic. and Quebec have all started using precious health-care dollars to hand it out for free.Coun. For many gay men, PrEP is nothing more than an aid to promiscuity, yet left-wing governments in Ontario, B.C. Experts are now, unsurprisingly, linking PrEP to a rise in drug-resistant gonorrhea.
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In fact, the main focus of Canada’s gay lobby recent years has been demanding that taxpayers fund PrEP, an expensive HIV medication that gay men can take to reduce their risk of catching the virus during condomless sex. Photo by Craig Robertson/Toronto Sun/Postmedia Network Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his family walk in Toronto’s Pride parade on June 25, 2017. Similar groups exist in Canada and do laudable work, but they always seem to be overshadowed. Many of those marching in Sweden were from groups that fight to achieve basic rights for gay people in places like Russia, Uganda and Iran. I ended up in Stockholm during their pride festival a few years ago and it highlighted for me how self-absorbed Canadians LGBT activists can be. There’s also the sheer selfishness of the thing. If a politician believes in family values, why would he or she want to be associated with such debauchery? Disturbingly, more and more parents are bringing young children to watch the parade, exposing them to provocative displays of sexuality that no child should witness. I’d say that was just an accurate description of what goes on.
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Some on the left have claimed Ford’s description of Pride as an event where “middle-aged men with pot bellies” run down the street “buck naked” was evidence of homophobia. With Pride now so closely associated with radical anti-police NDP activists, any conservative who attends is walking into a hornets’ nest.Īnd that’s not the only reason a centrist or right-leaning politician might want to skip. Photo by Jack Boland/Toronto Sun/Postmedia Network Article content Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders updates the media about the Yonge Street van attack that killed 10 pedestrians in a file photo from April 24, 2018. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.