Regina saw its biggest Queen City Pride parade ever on Saturday as the event wound through downtown.
The colourful celebration for the Queen City Pride parade had 122 participants and thousands of attendees.
“There’s a lot of people here at the actual parade, so I don’t know who’s left in the city,” joked Riviera Bonneau, a Queen City Pride board member. “We’re expecting hopefully a couple of thousand people to be able to watch the parade and participate and to hopefully come to the park afterwards.”
Over the years, the Queen City Pride has grown in attendance and in the support it has received from Regina. It’s a great sight to see for Bonneau.
“We’re a small little group and it’s grown into this incredible 10-day festival every year that people love to get into and love to celebrate with us,” Bonneau said. “We have to almost try to contain the number of people coming because we have so much in only so little space. So, it’s grown a lot in the last 30 years.”
Parade participant Olivia Redston-Davies attends the pride parade every year as a watcher, but this year, for the first time, she participated in the parade itself.
“It feels really fulfilling to be here supporting different communities, different community members, standing up for others’ personal rights in what we believe in,” she said. “We’re all just human and we’re just trying to exist and feel happy.”
Dominka Krzeminska of Big Sisters of Regina said that in the work she does, the organization serves a lot of kids in the community, and they are all about inclusivity.
“There’s a lot of kids who require or need that additional support and we want to be here to support them,” she said.
“Pride parades started as a protest. It wasn’t a celebration for obvious and important reasons, and I think now that it is a celebration, it is amazing to see.”
People of all ages and all walks of life were in attendance to celebrate pride.
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