Seven years ago, the Edmonton Pride Parade was cancelled due to internal struggles. In 2026, the conflict arose again, with LGBTQ groups pulling out of the parade from a failure to reconcile differences with regard to police presence, among other issues. I want to examine this conflict, not as a queer person of colour, but as an engaged working-class person looking to build real institutional progress within Edmonton.
In June 2018, a group of demonstrators formed a human chain across the Edmonton Pride Parade route and refused to move until organizers agreed to ban police, RCMP, and military personnel from all future events. Within a year, the Edmonton Pride Festival Society had cancelled the festival entirely and dissolved itself. For seven years, one of Canada's largest cities held no Pride parade. In its absence, the Edmonton Police Service's operating budget grew from roughly $350 million to a projected $475 million: an increase of 36 percent. In the meantime, the community that boycotted its own event lost its public platform, its institutional continuity, and seven years of compounding political visibility.
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, in his 2022 book Elite Capture, outlines the conflict as such: when movements organize around identity rather than material demands, the most privileged members of any marginalized group naturally rise to set the agenda. Táíwò traces how the Combahee River Collective's original identity politics (forged in the late 1970s by Black lesbian socialists) was oriented toward building solidarity across difference for the purpose of material liberation. In the 1980s and beyond, what replaced it was deference politics: the principle that the most marginalized voice in the room should determine the agenda. As we see in its modern incarnation, who counts as most marginalized is adjudicated by people with institutional power: leaders who in the name of 'deference' nominate themselves.
Instead, "centering the most marginalized" in my experience has usually meant handing conversational authority and attentional goods to whoever is already in the room and appears to fit a social category associated with some form of oppression--regardless of what they have or have not actually experienced, or what they do or do not actually know about he matter at hand. Even in rooms where stakes have been high ... the rules of deference have often meant that the conversation stayed in the room, while the people most affected by it stayed outside. (Táíwò, 2022, p. 59)
Policing does disproportionately harm racialized and trans people. The history of police violence against queer communities is the reason Edmonton Pride exists in the first place. Dean Spade, in Normal Life, argues that legal inclusion strategies like anti-discrimination law, marriage equality, and military service primarily benefit the most privileged members of marginalized groups while leaving the most vulnerable untouched or actively worse off. Police marching in Pride, in Spade's framework, is the state performing tolerance while its apparatus continues to brutalize. The demand to exclude police follows logically from this critique. But Spade's alternative is not boycotting your own events. It is building material infrastructure: mutual aid networks, housing, healthcare access, decarceration campaigns. His framework supports removing police from Pride only as part of a broader constructive politics, only when the symbolic act is connected to material struggle. When the boycott becomes the entire politics, the boycott becomes the achievement. The modern radical critique has been captured and deployed as an end in itself.
The result is that these fights fail to affect the core power structure. A Pride boycott has no affected adversary. The Edmonton Police Service is not an employer that depends on Pride's participation; there is no bargaining relationship. There is no mechanism by which the absence of a parade translates into pressure on a police budget. And the numbers are merciless: in 2018, the same year the parade was halted, Edmonton city council approved a $75 million funding boost for police over four years. In 2023, council approved a three-year funding formula guaranteeing annual increases indexed to inflation and population growth. Even the two council votes to cut the police budget (roughly $11 million each in 2020 and 2022) were absorbed into the rising tide. For comparison, the Edmonton Public Library's budget grew 4 percent from 2023 to 2026, while the police budget grew 12.4 percent in the same period. The boycott's ostensible target did not only survive the movement's absence, but thrived because the movement had vacated the only public platform from which it could have mounted sustained political pressure.
The symbolic victory is real for the activists who achieved it, but the lost visibility and compounding absence from public life fall on the community members who had the fewest alternatives to begin with. The most vulnerable people in Edmonton whose material conditions Dean Spade's work is actually about did not benefit from seven years without a parade. No mutual aid infrastructure was built in its place. No housing network, no decarceration campaign, no durable institution rose to fill the vacuum. They lost a platform, and have failed to meaningfully install a solution in its place.
This is deference politics. While constructive politics builds institutions and redistributes resources, deference politics performs acknowledgment, purifies spaces, and adjudicates standing. The trap is that any attempt to fight the slide into deference politics is itself an act of privilege within the deference framework. The person who says "we should still hold the parade" is positioned as the person who does not care about police violence against Black and Indigenous and trans people. The proof is in material accounting: seven years, no parade, $125 million more in police funding, no mutual aid infrastructure built in the gap, no decarceration campaign launched from the energy of the boycott, and no constructive politics.
Instead of asking if police should be at Pride, we should examine why the only fights progressive movements seem able to win are against themselves: why the energy, the organizing capacity, the institutional willpower that could not bend a police budget by a single dollar proved more than sufficient to destroy an entire festival organization in under a year. The systems of domination that the boycott was ostensibly targeting are not only intact, but better funded than they were before the boycott began.