By Ethan Reyes, special to the North Delta Reporter
The Delta Pride Society will be hosting its fifth annual pride picnic again this weekend, a public demonstration of community solidarity in the face of rising discrimination and bigotry.
Launched in 2018 (the event took 2020 off due the COVID-19 pandemic), the Delta Pride Picnic came about after a recent transplant to Delta, a mother with a transgender child, posted on Facebook looking for local events to mark Pride month.
Since then, it has grown into a community-favourite family-friendly event with live music, dancers, drag performers and activities like cookie-decorating, face-painting and Pride-themed games.
“Our attendees are children, youth, adults, and senior citizens. People come with their blankets and chairs and enjoy a nice picnic time together on the lawns. It’s a really wonderful, heartwarming space,” said Delta Pride Society board member Christa Horita Kadach.
For this year’s picnic — happening on Sunday, Aug. 20 from 11 a.m to 3 p.m. at Memorial Park in Ladner — there will be food trucks on site, and attendees can pre-order event-themed picnic baskets from Four Winds Brewing (fourwindsbrewing.ca/products/dps-picnic-baskets).
The picnic is also striving to be more accessible, Horita Kadach said, with special emphasis on accessibility for the differently-abled, such as the inclusion of American Sign Language interpreters at this year’s event.
Horita Kadach said a climate of intensifying anti-queer sentiment on both sides of the Canada/U.S. border has made events like the Delta Pride Picnic all the more essential.
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“People consider what’s happening in the States to be trickling up,” Horita Kadach said. “Those sentiments in the States are definitely emboldening people in Canada.”
Pride flags at Ladner United Church and banners hanging from street lights near the intersection of Highway 17A and Ladner Trunk Road were defaced with black paint earlier this summer — both incidents are being investigated as hate crimes by Delta police — and the nearby pedestrian overpass is regularly home to anti-2SLGBTQI+ protests.
Morgane Oger, a trans-rights activist and former vice-president of the B.C. NDP, said the recent wave of anti-2SLGBTQI+ protests like those seen on overpasses in Delta and North Vancouver are contributing to a climate where harassment is permissible.
“I think it would be fair to say in Delta as a whole, which includes people who are LGBT but also [their] family members, they are really starting to express fear to me that this is starting to impact their sense of safety,” Oger said.
SEE ALSO: Anti-trans hate speech causing ‘great harm,’ to gender-diverse children: Report
Although progress is being made, Horita Kadach said there is still plenty of work to do in the fight for greater acceptance — which is why it’s important to remind detractors and naysayers that the community is here to stay, despite efforts to intimidate like those seen here in Delta.
“Community is where we can thrive as ourselves. I think that may be the most important part of the picnic: just being a place where the community can gather together.”
For more information on the Delta Pride Picnic, visit deltapridesociety.ca, @deltapridesociety on Facebook or @pridedelta on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter).
editor@northdeltareporter.com
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