What to know
- The origins of Ottawa Pride are rooted in protest: In August 1971, 100–200 gay and lesbian activists gathered on Parliament Hill for the We Demand demonstration, calling for an end to discrimination against queer Canadians.
- We Demand was a challenge to the state. Activists understood that legal reform alone would not change the realities of queer life, particularly for people who had lived through decades of criminalization and persecution.
- Progress was anything but linear. Police raids, including the 1981 Toronto bathhouse raids, and broader national-security campaigns demonstrated how vulnerable queer communities remained after 1969 and 1971.
- What began as collective political action has grown into a major celebration and public institution, involving corporations, governments, tourism and commercial branding.
- Experts such as Carleton professor Dr. Patrizia Gentile argue that Pride remains meaningful when it connects queer liberation to racism, poverty, disability justice, decolonization and other struggles.
There is a reason Ottawa celebrates Pride in August. Long before rainbow logos, corporate floats and Pride-branded everything, somewhere between 100 and 200 gay and lesbian activists gathered on Parliament Hill on an August afternoon in 1971. They came with 10 demands for the federal government and a message that was, at the time, radical in its simplicity: Queer people deserved to live free from discrimination.
The demonstration is now known as the We Demand Rally and is widely remembered as one of the first major national actions of Canada’s 2SLGBTQIA+ liberation movement. While activists gathered on Parliament Hill, another demonstration was taking place simultaneously in Vancouver.
For Dr. Patrizia Gentile, a professor at Carleton University and co-author of The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation, the history behind the protest is also a reminder that Canada’s queer rights story is far more complicated than the neat narrative we often tell ourselves.
Ottawa’s late-August Pride celebrations commemorate We Demand, but the protest itself was also a response to another anniversary. Gentile explains that just two years earlier, Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s government had passed the 1969 omnibus bill, which reformed parts of Canada’s Criminal Code and is frequently remembered as having “decriminalized homosexuality.”
Gentile tells Queer & Now that this framing obscures what actually changed and what didn’t. The legislation meant that consensual sexual activity conducted in private could no longer be criminalized in the same way. But that did not suddenly transform the lives of Gay and Lesbian Canadians.
“Just because you so-called don’t make it criminal for people to have oral sex or anal sex in their homes,” Gentile says, “that doesn’t mean you’ve actually changed people’s lives.”
She explains that this distinction was at the heart of We Demand. The 1971 activists were marching because legal reform had not eliminated discrimination, violence or the broader systems that made life for 2SLGBTQIA+ Canadians dangerous.
We Demand: A generation living through profound social upheaval
Gentile explains that for people coming of age in the 1950s and ’60s, being known as Gay or Lesbian could carry devastating consequences. She describes a generation that lived through profound social upheaval while also navigating the realities of hiding, living double lives that often included pretending to be heterosexual, facing police violence and, in some cases, imprisonment.
These were people who had watched movements for decolonization, student liberation and feminism reshape political life. They also knew about the 1969 Stonewall Riots that rocked New York City. And they knew that visibility could come with consequences.
Gentile explains that this is what made We Demand so radical.
“It was radical in 1971 for all of these Gay and Lesbian liberation movement organizations to exist, knowing full well that the police could put you in jail,” she explains, adding that the protest did not suddenly usher Canada into complete liberation for Queer people.
Queer liberation is not a straight line
In the years that followed, police continued to raid Queer bars and spaces in cities including Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Vancouver. The decade following We Demand would eventually include the infamous 1981 Toronto Bathhouse Raids, while Queer people also continued to be targeted through national security campaigns.
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This is where Gentile believes contemporary understanding of Queer history can become too tidy. While people often celebrate big moments, protests, and anniversaries, what we often lose, she says, is everything that happened before and after.
The history of Queer liberation is not a straight line from oppression to protest to freedom. Gentile says that it is a complicated history.
The evolution of Pride in Ottawa
That complication feels especially relevant during Ottawa’s 2026 Pride celebrations, because 55 years after activists gathered on Parliament Hill to demand liberation, Pride itself has become something much bigger and, depending on who you ask, something fundamentally different.
For some, Pride is a celebration, while for others, it is an economic engine, a tourism event or an opportunity for corporations and institutions to demonstrate their support for LGBTQ+ communities. But for Gentile, Pride only remains meaningful if it remembers what it was created to do.
“The Pride that I went to when I was 16 was about coalitional politics,” she says, recalling an early Pride in Montreal that consisted largely of people walking through the streets together.
There were no major corporate endorsements, and no institutional spectacle. Instead, she says people were talking about racism and poverty alongside Queer liberation. That, Gentile argues, is what Pride should still look like.
She points to marches such as the Dyke March and Trans March as examples of Queer politics that continue to connect liberation to broader struggles around disability justice, anti-racism, decolonization and poverty.
“Pride is important because it continues the tradition that Pride was always a protest,” she says.
That distinction matters because original Pride celebrations were never simply about who 2SLGBTQIA+ people love. It was about the conditions under which Queer people were allowed to live. Who could safely walk down the street, find housing, or work without fear of losing their job because of their identity. It’s about who is targeted by police, who was excluded from public life, whose bodies were considered dangerous, criminal or disposable.
Those questions have never belonged to Queer people alone. The Carleton expert explains that they are also questions about race, class, gender, disability, and the other impacts of colonialism.
They are questions about whose freedom counts, and perhaps that is the real legacy of We Demand. Not that a few hundred people stood on Parliament Hill and changed everything overnight, because they didn’t. The state continued targeting Queer people; police continued raiding 2SLGBTQIA+ spaces, and targeted violence and discrimination continued. But Queer people continued organizing, too.
They built bars, cafes and community spaces. They established organizations, fought for changes to human rights codes, and kept demanding more.
That history is messier than the version that fits neatly into a Pride Month campaign, but it is also more useful. Because if Pride is simply a celebration of how far we’ve come, then it becomes easy to forget how quickly progress can be threatened or how unevenly that progress has been experienced in the first place.
Not everyone gets to experience Pride as a party.
For some 2SLGBTQIA people, visibility is still dangerous. For others, housing, poverty, racism, disability and/or immigration status shape what freedom actually looks like far more than a rainbow flag hanging from a storefront.
So perhaps the question isn’t whether Pride should be a celebration or a protest; maybe it has always been both. But the celebration means something different when we remember what came first.
In August 1971, a group of queer Canadians stood on Parliament Hill and refused to accept that a government changing the law behind closed doors was enough, and they wanted their lives to change. Fifty-five years later, as another Pride parade rolls through Ottawa, their question still lingers beneath all the parties, parades and rainbow branding: What are we demanding now?
