By Wilbur Turner
June 27, 2026
One day before Stonewall, on June 27, 1969, the Criminal Law Amendment Act received Royal Assent in Canada. That single piece of legislation, known as Bill C-150, partially decriminalized homosexuality in this country. Partially. Sex between two consenting adults of the same sex was no longer a criminal act, provided both were 21 or older and the act occurred in private. The higher age of consent (21 for same-sex acts vs. lower for heterosexual) and private-only restriction were deliberate limitations, which critics at the time and later called incomplete. Police continued using related “indecency” provisions against 2SLGBTQIA+ people in subsequent years, so it did not fully eliminate legal risks or social stigma. It was a legal technicality that kept people in the shadows. But it was also the crack in the wall that a generation of advocates drove their fingers into and refused to let close.
Fifty-seven years later, we are still fighting to keep that crack open.
Pride Month did not emerge from joy, though joy is part of it. It emerged from exhaustion, from fury, from the Stonewall uprising just five days before Canada’s Bill C-150 passed, when queer people in New York City decided they were done accepting raids, done accepting arrest, done accepting a society that required them to vanish. The connection between those events is not coincidence. The late 1960s was a pressure cooker, and people who had been told for decades to be invisible were starting to refuse.
In Canada, the partial decriminalization of 1969 was followed by decades of incremental, hard-won progress. Age of consent was equalized. The right to serve in the military was won. Hate crime protections were added to the Criminal Code. Relationship rights expanded. And in 2005, Canada became the fourth country in the world to legalize marriage equality nationwide. Every single step of that progress was contested. Every single step required people to show up, make noise, and refuse to disappear.
Pride celebrations are the annual, collective expression of that refusal.
That is precisely why the people who want the rainbow community gone have made Pride itself the target. The attacks are not random. They are coordinated, they are escalating, and they follow a pattern borrowed almost wholesale from the American playbook being run out of right-wing policy shops and Christian nationalist organizations with Canadian chapters and Canadian donors.
Look at what has happened in recent years. Queer books have faced removal pressure in school libraries in multiple parts of this country, with some jurisdictions acting on that pressure and others pushing back against it. The framing used to justify those removals is always the same: these materials are not age-appropriate, they are being pushed on children, they sexualize the young. Apply that same scrutiny to the Bible assigned in a Sunday school classroom and you will find passages describing genocide, rape, incest, and child sacrifice, but the people targeting queer books are not worried about that. The target was never inappropriate content. The target was queer visibility.
Pride flags have followed the same trajectory. In Alberta, legislation restricted the flags permitted outside schools to the Canadian and provincial flags only. The Fyrefly Institute at the University of Alberta put it plainly: these restrictions are about ideology, not education. A Pride flag outside a school does not recruit children into queerness. It tells a queer child who already exists that they are not invisible in the building where they spend thirty hours a week. Removing that signal has a known name. It is erasure.
Behind all of it, if you follow the money and the messaging, you find the same network of actors: organizations with ties to the American Religious Right, political operatives testing US-developed messaging in Canadian jurisdictions, and elected officials willing to use the rainbow community as a wedge. The goal is not to protect children. The goal is to make 2SLGBTQIA+ people seem like a vector of moral decay, to make our visibility seem like aggression, and to make Pride seem like a threat to family values rather than what it actually is: a community gathering of people who fought for the right to exist in public without fear.
We are not a threat. We are citizens. We have been here the entire time.
This year, Advocacy Canada turns five years old. We were founded in July 2021 because there was a need for a national advocacy organization rooted in the west, with its feet on the ground in the Okanagan, serving 2SLGBTQIA+ people across Canada, and not flinching from the policy battles that community organizations often cannot afford to engage.
This month, we retired our original pinwheel logo and launched a bold new identity that reflects where we are headed. Five years is not a long time, but the last five years have not been slow. You can see what we have built at advocacy-canada.lgbt/orientation.
The attacks on queer visibility that were background noise in 2021 are now government policy in several provinces. The book challenges playing out in school libraries today are not a new problem arriving from south of the border. Canada has its own long history of targeting queer material. Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium in Vancouver spent years fighting Canada Customs in the courts after border officials systematically seized books and magazines destined for the store, a battle that reached the Supreme Court of Canada in 2000. What is new is the scale, the coordination, and the political willingness to use it as policy. The people who want us gone have become more organized, better funded, and more comfortable saying what used to be the quiet part from a megaphone.
June 27th is not just the last Friday of Pride Month this year. It is the fifty-seventh anniversary of the day Canada first, haltingly, legally acknowledged that we have a right to exist. We have spent those fifty-seven years expanding that right, defending it, and passing it forward to the next generation of young people who deserve to grow up knowing their government does not consider them criminals.
If you believe that a Pride flag belongs in front of a school, that a queer kid deserves to see a book about someone like themselves on a library shelf, and that “partially decriminalized” should never again be the best that Canada can offer the rainbow community, then the time to stand with Advocacy Canada is now.
We are not going anywhere. And we could not do this without you. Five years in, Advocacy Canada has big ambitions and a foundation worth building on. We are counting on you to be part of what comes next.
Happy Pride!
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July 7, 2026 at 5:00 PM
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