Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders is taking the high road by announcing that his force won’t march in this year’s Pride Parade.

By bowing out, he may save Pride Toronto from more rancorous internal debate about whether it’s appropriate for police to take part in the parade.

But there’s no getting around the fact that Pride Toronto has taken a big backward step by effectively telling the police that they aren’t welcome any more as official participants in the LGBTQ community’s biggest annual celebration.

It has taken many years of hard work for the police to move from a position of confrontation and even persecution of LGBTQ people to a much more positive relationship. Seeing the chief and uniformed officers marching in the Pride Parade was a highly visible symbol of this welcome progress.

It was also a concrete sign that Pride is committed to inclusion of all people – even those who have not traditionally been its allies.

In a statement on Friday, Chief Saunders struck all the right notes.

He said he was withdrawing his force from the parade because of the divisions within the LGBTQ community on the issue, and to “enable those differences to be addressed.”

And he promised that the decision “will have no impact on our ongoing outreach to LGBTQ communities… We will continue to develop respectful relationships and build new ones.” In other words, the police force isn’t just going off to sulk.

But Mayor John Tory was also right to say that he was “frustrated and disappointed” by the outcome, “that an event that is meant to be, and in fact is all about inclusion, has now somehow become about exclusion…. We know that diversity strengthens us as a city and pushing people apart weakens us as a city.”

Unfortunately, the soured relationship between police and Pride is not limited to Toronto.

Chief Saunders’ announcement came days after the Halifax police force said it would bow out of that city’s Pride parade this year “to allow for a meaningful discussion” of issues raised about relationships between police and LGBTQ people. And in Vancouver, the group Black Lives Matter has petitioned the Vancouver Pride Society to remove all uniformed, armed police officers from its parade.

It was BLM Toronto that started the controversy last summer when it staged a sit-in at the Pride Parade and raised a series of demands on behalf of black people and other groups, including that police be disinvited from taking part in an organized fashion.

That, in turn, led to a highly charged debate within Pride Toronto, leading to a decision in January to endorse BLM Toronto’s demands, including banning police floats from the parade.

It’s understandable that Saunders would want to get out ahead of any final decision on police participation and step back while Pride Toronto works out its position on this issue.

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And hopefully some good may come out of it. For one thing, Saunders’ determination to keep on working with LGBTQ communities is commendable. As is his frank acceptance of the fact that the police force has a lot of work to do to gain trust among all groups. “We have come a long way,” he said. “We have much to do.”

It would have been far better, though, for this necessary work to go on while allowing police to continue their participation in the Pride Parade. It’s easier to build on a positive relationship, rather than start from a position of suspicion.

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