U.S. Pride celebrations stand defiant against Trump's rollbacks of LGBTQ-friendly policies
The month-long celebration of LGBTQ+ Pride reached its rainbow-laden crescendo on Sunday as huge crowds took part in jubilant, daylong street parties from New York to San Francisco.
Pride celebrations typically weave politics and protest alongside the colourful pageantry, but this year's iterations took a decidedly more defiant stance as Republicans, led by President Donald Trump, have sought to roll back LGBTQ+ friendly policies.
The theme of the festivities in Manhattan was, appropriately, 'Rise Up: Pride in Protest.' San Francisco's Pride theme was 'Queer Joy is Resistance,' while Seattle was simply 'Louder.'
Toronto Pride likely smaller in 2026 because of lack of funding, executive director says
Lance Brammer, a 56-year-old teacher from Ohio attending his first Pride parade in New York, said he felt 'validated' as he marvelled at the sheer size of the city's celebration, the nation's oldest and largest.
'With the climate that we have politically, it just seems like they're trying to do away with the whole LGBTQ community, especially the trans community,' he said, wearing a vivid, multicoloured shirt. 'And it just shows that they've got a fight ahead of them if they think that they're going to do that with all of these people here and all of the support.'
Doriana Feliciano, a self-described LGBTQ+ ally, held up a sign saying, 'Please don't lose hope' in support of friends she said couldn't attend Sunday.
'We're in a very progressive time, but there's still hate out there, and I feel like this is a great way to raise awareness,' she said.
Manhattan's parade wound its way down Fifth Avenue with more than 700 participating groups greeted by huge crowds. The rolling celebration passed the Stonewall Inn, a Greenwich Village gay bar where a 1969 police raid triggered protests and fired up the LGBTQ+ rights movement.
The site is now a national monument. The first pride march was held in New York City in 1970 to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.
Meanwhile, marchers in San Francisco, host to another of the world's largest Pride events, headed down the California city's central Market Street to concert stages set up at the Civic Center Plaza. Denver, Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis and Toronto, were among the other major North American cities that hosted Pride parades Sunday.
Several cities, including Tokyo, Paris and São Paulo, held their events earlier this month while others come later in the year, including London in July and Rio de Janeiro in November.
Since taking office in January, Trump has taken specific aim at transgender people, removing them from the military, preventing federal insurance programs from paying for gender-affirming surgeries for young people and attempting to keep transgender athletes out of girls and women's sports.
Peter McLaughlin said he's lived in New York for years but has never attended the Pride parade. The 34-year-old Brooklyn resident said he felt compelled this year as a transgender man.
'A lot of people just don't understand that letting people live doesn't take away from their own experience, and right now it's just important to show that we're just people,' McLaughlin said.
Gabrielle Meighan, 23, of New Jersey, said she felt it was important to come out to this year's celebrations because they come days after the tenth anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark June 26, 2015, ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges that recognized same-sex marriage nationwide.
'It's really important to vocalize our rights and state why it's important for us to be included,' she said.
Manhattan also hosted on Sunday the Queer Liberation March, an activism-centered event launched in recent years amid concerns that the more mainstream parade had become too corporate.
Marchers holding signs that included 'Gender-affirming care saves lives' and 'No Pride in apartheid' headed north from the city's AIDS Memorial to Columbus Circle near Central Park.
Among the other headwinds faced by gay rights groups this year is the loss of corporate sponsorship.
American companies have pulled back support of Pride events, reflecting a broader walking back of diversity and inclusion efforts amid shifting public sentiment.
NYC Pride said earlier this month that about 20% of its corporate sponsors dropped or reduced support, including PepsiCo and Nissan. Organizers of San Francisco Pride said they lost the support of five major corporate donors, including Comcast and Anheuser-Busch.
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Winnipeg Free Press
32 minutes ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Senate Republicans are in a sprint on Trump's big bill after a weekend of setbacks
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CTV News
2 hours ago
- CTV News
Canada cancelled its digital services tax. What was it and why did the U.S. hate it?
President Donald Trump, right, and Prime Minister Mark Carney participate in a session of the G7 Summit on Monday, June 16, 2025, in Kananaskis, Canada. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein) OTTAWA — Tech giants such as Amazon and Google will not have to shell out close to $2 billion as expected today, as Canada moved to cancel the controversial digital services tax on Sunday, just one day before the first payment was due. The announcement from Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne came late Sunday evening, following a phone call between Prime Minister Mark Carney and U.S. President Donald Trump. That call concluded a flurry of discussion between the two countries since Trump suddenly announced on Friday afternoon that he was ending all trade talks with Canada and threatened new tariffs. But the standoff had really been building for years. Here's a brief look at what the tax was about and why Trump made such a drastic move to try and kill it. What is the digital services tax? 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The Biden administration also pushed back against the tax, and the stance isn't isolated to Canada, with the U.S. also opposing digital service taxes imposed by other countries. Before the tax was rescinded on Sunday, the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Canada said its 'members have been warning for years that this tax would become a flashpoint in the Canada-U.S. relationship. That moment has arrived.' The tax is 'retroactive, one-sided, and deeply damaging to cross-border trade,' Rick Tachuk said in an emailed statement, which encouraged Canada to cancel its tax. Michael Geist, Canada research chair in internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, wrote in a blog post Saturday the current conflict shouldn't come as a surprise. 'Canada pushed ahead despite efforts at an international agreement on the issue and later dismissed the increasing friction over the issue with the U.S., which has been signalling its opposition to the DST for many years,' he said. 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Friday afternoon, shortly after Trump's post went live, Carney told reporters he hadn't spoken to Trump that day but that 'we'll continue to conduct these complex negotiations in the best interests of Canadians.' So what happened on Sunday? A flurry of activity followed Trump's post on Friday, culminating Sunday night in the call between Trump and Carney. The decision opened the door for trade talks to restart, and Carney said in a statement, the overall results of those talks were paramount. 'In our negotiations on a new economic and security relationship between Canada and the United States, Canada's new government will always be guided by the overall contribution of any possible agreement to the best interests of Canadian workers and businesses,' he said. 'Today's announcement will support a resumption of negotiations toward the July 21, 2025, timeline set out at this month's G7 Leaders' Summit in Kananaskis.' This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 30, 2025. Anja Karadeglija, The Canadian Press
National Observer
2 hours ago
- National Observer
Trump's anti-offshore wind ire leading US states to look north for Atlantic Canada clean power
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Maria Hardiman, spokesperson for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, told Canada's National Observer her department was now in 'regular communication' around developing 'new energy sources,' including Canadian offshore wind that would allow it to lower electricity costs and boost energy independence in the state and the wider US Northeast. 'Building on our efforts to connect our regions through transmission, there are significant opportunities to construct new onshore and offshore wind projects across Canada and the [North American] northeast,' she said. 'We will continue to explore these partnerships to bring down energy bills and bolster the energy independence of our region.' Industry insiders say other states in the region, led by New York, are investigating tapping projects off the province of Nova Scotia, which is set for a first leasing of construction sites later this year. "These US Northeast states' options to meet their clean energy targets with onshore renewables are quite limited. So for this reason, large-scale Canadian offshore wind could come into the picture," says Aegir Insights' Signe Sorensen Yet, Massachusetts was the only state that would specifically comment on whether it was looking to source Canadian offshore wind power, when approached by Canada's National Observer. A spokesperson for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), a public-benefit corporation that handles power procurement for the state — which has a nation-leading target of bringing 9,000 MW of offshore wind onto its grid by 2035 — said it 'continues to be focused on advancing the offshore wind industry in the US.' 'We applaud Canada for growing its offshore wind industry which will help to spur additional innovation and support expansion in the North American market,' NYSERDA spokesperson Deanna Cohen told Canada's National Observer. States keeping projects low-profile Industry observers suggest many states have opted to progress projects in 'relative silence,' hoping that keeping a low profile will save their developments from Trump's anti-offshore wind ire. However, several market analysts believe Trump's pullback on what had been a steadily-maturing US offshore wind sector will mean there is a 'golden opportunity' for Canada to deliver power to key markets south of the border. 'The US, which was expected to become one of the world's main [offshore wind] markets, is now going in completely the opposite direction for political reasons,' said Signe Sørensen, an analyst with Danish offshore wind consultancy Aegir Insights. 'This could matter a lot to Canada.' The New England states have been 'spearheading the US build-out, procuring lots of offshore wind' as part of former US President Joe Biden's objective of adding 30,000 MW of production by 2030, she said. 'Delays to construction now will have ramifications far beyond Trump's term. 'These states' options to meet their clean energy targets with onshore renewables are quite limited,' said Sørensen. 'So for this reason, large-scale Canadian offshore wind could come into the picture.' John Dalton, president of Power Advisory, a US power sector consulting firm, told Canada's National Observer there was 'definitely a case' for future offshore wind production from Atlantic Canada being exported to New England. 'The Trump administration has largely derailed the realization of the [US Northeast's] electricity market's clean energy and offshore wind goals,' he said. 'States will be pivoting to other resources … with policymakers very focused on securing low [electricity] costs.' Nova Scotia offshore wind price 'very favourable' A price check between power purchase agreements finalized by US states with developers for wind farms now being built off the US — including the multi-billion-dollar Empire Wind 1 and Sunrise Wind off New York and Revolution Wind off Rhode Island, which would together power well over 1 million American homes — and a number of the proposed projects off Nova Scotia compares 'very favourably' the Canadian sector. 'The economics of Nova Scotian offshore wind would certainly be competitive with these and future US offshore wind projects,' said Sørensen, though she declined to provide hard 'levelized cost of energy' figures – the industry benchmark metric for the cost of a project over its lifetime compared to the revenue generated by purchase power agreements, citing commercial confidentiality. Aegir CEO Scott Urquhart noted: 'Nova Scotia has a huge area of shallow water that could house tens of gigawatts [tens of thousands of megawatts] with excellent economics. Looking at distance to markets, interconnections to the US are not a crazy idea — they've been doing similar distances off Europe for years.' Given the historically high electricity prices in the US Northeast and the fast-rising power demand forecast, Aegir calculations suggest Nova Scotian offshore wind supply could fit well with states' pursuits of a strategy led by greater diversification of clean energy sources. Atlantic Canada's rich wind resource Winds rush along the coastlines of Canada's Maritime provinces at speeds similar to those off Northern Europe — at roughly 40 km/h — where offshore wind farms have been generating power to the grid for more than 30 years and have led to the development of a sector employing over 300,000 people. Canada's Atlantic Economic Council said last year that offshore wind off Nova Scotia could become a $7-billion market by 2030, creating an initial 5,000 jobs amid other benefits for regional economies. Nova Scotia is set to hold its first auction, where waters would be leased to developers to harness a first 5,000 megawatts (MW) of energy, before the end of 2025. The Global Wind Energy Council, an industry body, said in its most recent annual report Canada could add a first 1,000 MW by 2034. But under the aegis of making Canada an 'energy superpower,' Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston has pitched a 40,000 MW project called Wind West as a means of meeting 27 per cent of the country's total energy demand. Multi-billion-dollar visions of a massive offshore wind-powered transmission trunkline running along North America's Atlantic coastline are not new. Several long-distance power transmission projects have been considered over the past decade, including the high-profile Atlantic Wind Connection backed by Google, Swiss green-energy private-equity house Good Energies, Japanese industrial conglomerate Marubeni, and Belgian transmission system operator Elia.
