Large crowds in Toronto’s Church-Wellesley Village over the Halloween weekend have some advocates raising concerns around future event safety in the city’s queer spaces.
Travis Myers, co-founder of 2SLGBTQ+ advocacy group Friends of Hanlan’s, said it was “shoulder-to-shoulder” walking down Church Street during the village’s annual Halloween on Church festival on the weekend.
“By the time I reached the next intersection, I was ready to dip,” Myers said, noting that it took around 45 minutes for him to walk one city block.
Over 80,000 people were expected to attend the festival, according to Toronto police estimates. Toronto police Chief Myron Demkiw said Monday around 50,000 people turned out.
Following the festival, Myers said numerous members of the community reached out to the group to report incidents ranging from pickpocketing to verbal and sexual assault.
“It really doesn’t seem like there was a great effort that was taken to protect the people of this community,” he said, noting that the 2SLGBTQ+ community has a “fractured” relationship with police, so not every incident may have been reported.
Toronto police said that over 80,000 people were expected to attend the annual Halloween on Church Festival over the weekend. (Ivan Arsovski/CBC)
Toronto police spokesperson Nadine Ramadan said in an email Monday that the event attracted “particularly large crowds.”
“As attendance increased, additional officers were deployed from across the city to support crowd management and public safety,” she said.
According to Ramadan, the most common calls on Saturday in relation to the festival were for pickpocketing and cellphone thefts. CBC Toronto asked police if there were any reports of sexual assault or harassment, as noted by Myers, but they did not comment.
Mayor, police chief respond to concerns
George Pratt, chair of the Church-Wellesley BIA, which organizes the Halloween on Church festival, said the BIA will be meeting with the city to “debrief” about the weekend festivities.
“It seems to be growing every year. I don’t know what the solution is but hopefully we’ll make it less congested,” he said.
Asked about the crowds Monday, police Chief Myron Demkiw said at an unrelated news conference there is ongoing work between police and the city around best practices for street festival planning.
“Whenever you have street festivals happening, we do our best to work with the local community to ensure the environment is as safe as possible,” he said.
Concerns around street festival crowding and safety previously came up in the city over the summer, after massive crowds were reported at its annual Do West Fest and prompted an early shutdown. About a month later, concerns around safety management came up following the Salsa on St. Clair shooting in July.
Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow, who was also at Monday’s news conference, also acknowledged concerns.
“Street festivals need to be done in a way that is safe,” she said, noting that she will be “working very closely” with the Church BIA and local communities to figure out how “it can be structured better.”
2SLGBTQ+ community should be at centre of festival: councillor-elect
Curran Stikuts, the councillor-elect for Toronto Centre, the ward that the city’s Church-Wellesley Village is in, said Halloween is an important part of the city’s queer history.
“We’ve seen over the past weekend and past years, frankly, that it’s grown exponentially with a lot more folks coming in. And that’s created some real pressures for the neighbourhood, the BIA and for the community at large,” he said.
“There are tens of thousands of people who are coming down to this area for Halloween every year now, and that requires a more fulsome response from the city.”
Myers said that moving forward, branding around the Halloween festival should be centered around the 2SLGBTQ+ community.
When crowds amass, festival goers may not understand they are in a queer space that’s in the “middle of the Gay Village” because it’s hard to identify queer markers in the area, he said.
“I heard people asking why there were so many drag queens around them. You’re on Church Street, honey. There’s going to be drag queens any day of the week, but especially there should be on Halloween,” Myers said.