Members of Canada’s LGBTQ community have denounced a resurgence of “hateful comments and attacks,” including seeing rainbow flags burned, Pride marches disrupted and increasing violence targeting them — all a stark contrast to the country’s reputation of tolerance.
For years, many parts of the country have been considered a haven where one can freely live one’s sexual and gender identity. Canada was one of the first countries in the world to legalize same-sex marriage.
However, in the five years to last year, the number of crimes and offenses in Canada related to the sexual orientation of victims quadrupled from 186 to 860, according to Statistics Canada.
Photo: Reuters
As in other places in the world, “street violence” and hate on social media has exploded over the past few years, said Pascal Vaillancourt, director of Interligne, a support service for the LGBTQ community.
“People call us and tell us about troubles that we had been hearing less and less about,” he said, pointing to a rise in verbal abuse and physical attacks.
He said he himself was recently — and for the first time — the victim of violent and homophobic threats on the streets of Montreal while out with his partner.
Canada, a “pioneer of diversity and inclusion,” is experiencing a “significant change” with a “marked decline” in public support for the LGBTQ community, said Sanyam Sethi of polling firm Ipsos Canada.
According to a major survey published in June on topics such as same-sex marriage, public displays of affection or anti-discrimination laws, Canada recorded some of the largest declines in almost all aspects among the 26 countries polled.
Only 49 percent of Canadians said they support LGBTQ people speaking openly about their sexual orientation or gender identity, compared with 61 percent in 2021.
“This is the sharpest decline in the world, along with Mexico and Turkey,” Sethi said.
Overall support for members of the LGBTQ community to be legally protected from discrimination remained high, however, according to the survey.
Tensions around LGBTQ issues in the US are spilling over into Canada, said community groups which are observing a growing polarization.
“It has become something that you can be for or against,” said Marie Houzeau, executive director of research and social intervention group Gris-Montreal.
The online posts of conservative influencers have also become an issue, she said.
Young people often hear the same types of hateful comments over and over in online bubbles closed off by social networks’ algorithms, making them feel justified when they repeat that speech aggressively against homosexuals and transgender people, she said.
There is “a climate of hate that is setting in,” fueled by conservative politicians who deliver a divisive and populist message, said Vaillancourt, who feels that the hard-fought rights of the community are “becoming fragile.”
In some Canadian provinces governments have announced that they want to toughen laws targeting young transsexuals by banning transition surgeries for minors. The policy has been strongly denounced by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose father, former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau decriminalized same-sex sexual activities in 1969.
The country is still shaken from a knife attack last year on a gender identity class at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. A man seriously wounded three people, including the teacher of the class.
Canadian intelligence services also said in their latest public report for last year that extremists against “gender ideology” could “carry out extreme violence” against the LGBTQ community.
In this tense climate, Trudeau posted on X that his government would ensure organizers of Pride marches are provided with “the necessary means of protection” so that “hate” does not harm festivities.
In the Pembina Valley, a rural and conservative region of Manitoba Province, south of Winnipeg, a Pride march was disrupted this summer after organizers and local restaurant owners received threats.
Pembina Valley Pride president Pauline Emerson-Froebe said those who attacked the march wanted to silence the community.
“Some people are against the fact that we speak publicly about our sexual orientation,” she said. “They tell us not to say anything, to just keep quiet.”
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS