Why JQT did not march in Vancouver Pride

As we prepare to welcome in the Jewish New Year of 5786, we are reflecting on the past year, and what has occurred across Canada with Pride celebrations. We believe that Pride celebrations should be a celebration for everyone. Unfortunately, this year (like years before), Pride festivities have been deeply painful and fraught for the Jewish community. Given the media attention on Pride in Ottawa, Pride in Montreal and TransFest in Victoria this summer, involving policy statements and protests around Israel/Palestine, we are not surprised that there is also speculation surrounding our decision not to march in Vancouver Pride for the past couple of years. Here’s the tea!

The relationship between the Jewish community and Pride organizations in Canada is much like a rollercoaster ride. Some years, it’s good. Some years, it’s not. We will not comment on what happened in Montreal, Ottawa or Victoria, as we were not involved and what we can decipher is that the circumstances are different from our experience. Instead, we will offer a history lesson, specifically Vancouver’s history with marching in Vancouver Pride! We encourage you to study our timeline of 100 years of BC Jewish Queer & Trans Oral History backed by archival research: https://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/1821608/Timeline-Of-BC-Jewish-Queer-Trans-History/

The first recorded Jewish gay presence at Vancouver Pride was in 1994 with a group called Kehillah. In 1996, Or Shalom Synagogue joined the festivities, marking the first formal participation of any Jewish organization to march at Vancouver Pride. Then in 2010, Vancouver Hillel Foundation (today, Hillel BC Society)–together with the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver–marched at Vancouver Pride in a first community-wide Jewish contingent. It is important to understand that in the 90’s, and even in 2010, Vancouver Pride policies around applications to march in the parade were very different than they had become by the 2020’s. 

The first controversial incident around Israel involved Yad B’Yad (a group of Jewish queer professionals and allies) and the Vancouver Queer Film Festival (VQFF) in 2014, resulting in a VQFF policy banning all national flags in advertisements. This coincided with the Jewish community’s decision to stop marching in Pride and instead host a Jewish community booth. Boothing at Sunset Beach continued in 2018 under the ad-hoc Jewish Pride Planning Committee (a conglomeration of Jewish community organizations and Jewish queer leaders hosted by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs).

From 2021 to 2023, JQT Vancouver became a community partner of Vancouver Pride Society, which allowed our group to booth and march under JQT’s banner with waived fees. This community partner status took years of relationship-building with Pride to achieve. It provided a space in the parade specifically for JQT, which we shared with those who marched with us under our banner. It was not a relationship that JQT arranged between Pride and the Jewish community as a whole. This was a point that many in the Jewish community who wanted to march at Pride, but under their own banner, did not understand. Other Jewish community groups that wanted to march under their own banner rather than ours had two options at the time: they could have sought to build a relationship with Pride on their own and obtain community partner status like we had done, or they could have applied to march in the parade for a fee, like Hillel BC and Jewish Federation had done in the 2010s. No Jewish community group in the early 2020s, other than JQT, chose to pursue either of these options. 

JQT’s decision to not march in 2024 and 2025 was for two reasons: 

1) As a small volunteer charity, we simply don’t have the capacity to organize a march anymore. We cannot guarantee the safety and well-being of participants given the heightened polarization around Israel/Palestine and the challenges this creates for Jewish and Israeli queer folks at public events. Also, marching in Vancouver Pride has not been identified as a priority for the JQT community, as evident in our 2022 community needs assessment.

2) Vancouver Pride Society’s leadership underwent massive shifts in late 2023/early 2024. In particular, they stopped communicating with some of their former community partners, including us. We have used the time since to focus our attention solely on our community’s mental health and supporting our seniors, and probably would have done so with or without losing contact with Vancouver Pride because of the capacity and safety concerns already mentioned. 

Vancouver Pride Society now has new leadership, and we reached out to them to share our experience as a former community partner and to gather information. As of August 2025, we have been told by Vancouver Pride Society that JQT is welcome to return as a community partner and march at Vancouver Pride, and that the wider Jewish community is also welcome to march at Vancouver Pride as a community partner or paying participant, should either party decide to do so in the future. While tensions around Israel will remain, we believe that queer and trans Jews, including Israelis, just like queer and trans members of any religious, cultural, or immigrant community in Canada, should be welcomed at Pride celebrations. We hope that all communities can safely march and celebrate in Canadian Prides in the years to come. 

JQT Vancouver
September 16, 2025