In the days before the Pride parade, flags, a church, and a van were smashed in Morden and Winker
This weekend’s Pride parade in the city of Morden in southern Manitoba was supposed to be a party for Jessi Ingalls.
But after a Pride flag was stolen from the home she shares with her partner and two children last weekend, she says she’s going to Saturday’s parade as a show of defiance.
“It’s more of a protest, for sure. “It’s not really a party,” she said on Friday.
“It’s more like, “We’re here and we’re not going anywhere, and you need to learn to love and accept that or be quiet.'”
The flag of Ingalls was torn down in the middle of the night on Saturday. This is one of several acts of homophobic vandalism in the Pembina Valley area, where the city of Morden, with a population of just over 9,000, is getting ready for its second Pride parade after the first one in 2019.
Recently, vandals broke into a van, two Pride flags, and a church in Morden and the nearby city of Winkler.
Ingalls said that the day before her flag was taken down, someone working for a political campaign came to her yard sale and tried to start a fight.
“I told him he had to leave because they were hurting people. Then, during the night, our flag was taken down.”
Ingalls said that the next day, a homophobic slur was spray-painted on a van in Winkler that belonged to a friend. The van had been decorated for Pride.
“She has five kids, and they have to drive around with that van like that when it’s supposed to spread love, kindness, and acceptance.”
And on Wednesday, the rainbow-colored decorations in front of St. Paul’s United Church in Morden were taken down and left in the street.
Carrie Martens, the minister of the church, said she knew something like that would happen, so the church bought more supplies.
Martens, who is a member of the queer community, has seen these kinds of hostile acts before. Martens says that during Pride month last year, she got an angry phone call about a rainbow flag in the church’s window. The caller told her that the flag meant she was leading her congregation to hell.
Martens said that it seems like the anger has gotten worse in the last few months.
“We’ve just started to notice that the amount of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric in the community has been slowly going up.”
Acts of hostility 
CBC News reached out to the Morden Police Service to find out if it was looking into any of the incidents but did not hear back before Friday’s deadline.
The CBC has also asked for the same information from the Manitoba RCMP.
The mayor of Morden, Brandon Burley, said he knows about the incidents and that he and his council are there for the LGBTQ community.
He plans to walk in the parade on Saturday with other city council members.
Burley said, “We’re not going to let that kind of intimidation happen to our rainbow community.” “Council is on the side of the rainbow community, and we’ve got their backs.”
In the past few months, there have been other acts of vandalism against gay people in Manitoba and other places.
Reports from all over Canada say that LGBTQ and transgender flags have been stolen, damaged, or even burned.
Last month, someone stole a Pride flag from a school in Winnipeg. This happened just days after LGBTQ and Indigenous-themed books were taken from a teacher’s classroom.
Statistics Canada data from 2021 showed a 64 percent increase in hate crimes related to sexual orientation from the year before. In response to reports of more hate, the federal government said this year that it would provide emergency funding to help Pride festivals across Canada keep people safe.
People who talked to CBC about the latest incidents said they were worried that the current political climate could be making people in southern Manitoba more hostile toward the LGBTQ community. This is especially true since there is a byelection this month in the federal riding of Portage-Lisgar, which includes Morden and Winkler.
Peter Wohlgemut, president of Pembina Valley Pride, a group that helps LGBTQ people in the area, said that all of this has made some people in the community nervous.
“It’s clear that some people feel unsafe or like they’re being picked on,” Wohlgemut said.
“It’s violence against our neighborhood.” That’s very scary, and it makes people wonder, “Am I safe where I live?”
Feeling unsafe 
Ingalls said that the damage done to her house has scared her.
“When I moved here, I thought this would be my home for life. I have two kids, and this is where we raise them. They come here for school. “We give back to society just like everyone else,” she said.
“It doesn’t make us feel very safe that someone broke into my house while my kids were sleeping in the middle of the night and stole something.
Still, she said that the amount of help she’s seen in the community gives her hope.
“There are more Pride flags on houses than we’ve ever seen if you drive through Morden and Winkler right now,” she said.
“People are going out of their way to buy it to show their support and show that this isn’t usually how our community is. We don’t raise our kids this way. This is not the kind of neighborhood we want to live in.”