Queer Ontario announces that it will not be participating in the upcoming Pride Toronto Community Consultations to be conducted by the Advisory Panel currently being assembled by Pride Toronto. The group sees the process of constituting the Panel as fundamentally flawed and inconsistent with the values and principles of community relations and community engagement. Queer Ontario raises the following questions regarding the striking of the Pride Toronto Advisory Panel:

• Given Pride Toronto’s establishment of the panel to answer to the concerns of the community — one being a lack of transparency on the part of the organization — why has this entire process been shrouded in secrecy without any consultation with the community? More fundamentally: why is Pride Toronto opposed to meeting directly with the very community it so urgently needs to re-establish a relationship with?
  

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Historically there has been widespread concern within the queer communities about unequal enforcement of the law. Queers are disproportionately targeted as being perceived as more serious offenders meriting more severe punishment.

Policing of the recent G20 Summit in Toronto has aggravated that concern, particularly in respect to the reported attitude of the police toward queer people who were detained. Our concerns go beyond this to the very laws that appear to have precipitated these detentions. Not only the enforcement of which the police themselves have retrospectively admitted was not legal, and which flies in the face of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but also the secretive way in which those regulations were supposedly enacted. Beyond that, we are concerned about the pressure from the federal government to enact tough on crime laws which appear to focus on establishing a police state; a state which is exemplified by the attitude of those who made and enforced laws during the G20 Summit.
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Queer Ontario is fundamentally opposed to the regulatory changes to the bawdyhouse laws that were secretly passed by the Conservative government on July 13, 2010, and the undemocratic process that was used to pass them.

By designating bawdyhouses as ‘criminal organizations’ and by designating their operation as a ‘serious offence’ under the law, the Harper government has once again demonstrated that it is incapable of passing provisions that are publicly accountable. In advancing their tough-on-crime agenda above any nuanced understanding of organized crime in Canada; above any consideration for the lived realities of sex professionals; and above polls demonstrating the statistical drop in crime and the low priority crime-fighting has among Canadians, the Conservative government has made yet another unwarranted decision. Unfortunately, these measures are only exacerbated by the fact that the regulation was passed behind closed doors, without any opportunity for informed debate from either fellow MPs or the stakeholders who were to be affected by these amendments.
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