Halifax Pride is excited to bring 2SLGBTQIA+ folks and allies two whole weeks of pride-filled celebrations.
From drag shows to queer markets, picnics to the parade, this year’s Halifax Pride festival is set to be one of the best yet, at a time where it’s as important as ever.
“Things are really exciting,” says Halifax Pride chair Connor McKiggan. “We’ve got our full staff on board and everyone is working full speed ahead.”
The programming this year strikes a balance between celebration and advocacy. Events like the melaNATION QTBIPOC Showcase on Thursday, July 17 gives a voice and platform to the racially diverse intersections in the queer community. The Back To Our Roots Picnic and Market on Friday, July 18 celebrates Black creativity and queerness through art.
“There’s lots of different ways for folks to come out and celebrate pride, but also kind of stays true to the roots of pride programming and the advocacy elements, as well,” says McKiggan. “We really want to create a space where lots of folks can see a space for themselves within the festival programming.”
Halifax Pride has partnered with several businesses and organizations to fill up their festival calendar with events for and from the community. Community events in particular are helped further by funding from Halifax Pride. McKiggan says a pool of $15,000 was rolled out to help support grassroots Pride events.
“It’s important that we work with community programming,” says McKiggan. “As you can see on our festival calendar, not only do we have Halifax Pride organized events, but we uplift community-organized programming as well, and really recognize the grassroots elements of Pride as well.”
Celebration and resistance
Their most attended event is the annual Halifax Pride Parade, which will be taking place on July 19 at 12pm. The parade begins on the east end roundabout of Cogswell Street, heading east before turning south onto Barrington Street. The parade will then turn west onto Spring Garden Road, north onto South Park Street and will end where Bell Road and Ahern Avenue connect, near the Garrison Grounds where the festival site is located. South Park Street will contain an accessible viewing area, low sensory viewing area and a masked viewing area.
The festival on July 19 will feature their Drag on the Mainstage event as well as a community market. McKiggan is also excited to see music integrated into the celebrations during the first weekend, as well as afterwards on Saturday, July 26 with an event titled Gaylidh taking place at the Neptune Theatre. It’s a queer spin on Scottish ceilidh, mixing the joyful and spirited dance with traditional tunes.
“We’ve worked with queer artists before to do music showcases and we’re really excited to have queer musicians returning to the main stage programming,” says McKiggan.
This all fits into their theme for this year—”flourish”, connecting to our roots while dancing ourselves into the future. Pride is as much about happiness as it is resistance to the norms that make queerness othered, and there’s no better source of resistance than joy itself. For McKiggan, it’s important to remember the significance of Pride, especially as places both near and far attempt to limit the rights of the queer community.
“It’s really important that as we celebrate Pride that we remember where Pride gets its roots, and it’s important that we take a look across the world, and in our own community, and speak truth to the experiences that queer and trans people are having,” says McKiggan. “And the truth of the matter is, our fight is not over—there is rising hate…inclusion isn’t something that happens for two weeks of the year. Inclusion isn’t a campaign; it’s a culture, and culture is something that you have to build and you have to work with the community.”
In the spirit of working with the community to tear down existing boundaries, Halifax Pride is hosting several education sessions alongside their traditionally celebratory programming. These sessions can be found throughout their calendar.
Canada Pride 2027
In 2024, it was announced that Halifax Pride had won the bid to host Canada Pride 2027 after a selection process from Fierte Canada Pride, a national organization of which several Pride organizations across the country are members of.
The Halifax Pride Festival has seen up to 50,000 guests attend across 40 events throughout its two-week run. This acts as both a sign of its success in community engagement but also economic sustainability, driving up business for local hotels and restaurants as people come from away to stay in the city.
“We’re so excited about this because of course, the festival is a major tourism driver for Halifax, and [we just got] raving reports from our local business and hotel partners about how the Pride Festival supports them and everything it does for our local community,” says McKiggan.
“So Canada Pride is so exciting because we are really going to be continuing to scale up our festival, so folks can expect to see more and more programming coming out of Halifax Pride up to the Canada Pride Festival, which is going to be a quite expanded version of the festival with lots more exciting things happening and folks from all over the country and world coming to celebrate Canada Pride with us.”
The Halifax Pride website states that it expects to bring out over 150,000 attendees to Canada Pride 2027. For an event as big as this, they are already within the planning stages.
“The team has already been at work on it for over a year,” says McKiggan. “We’re so excited that it’s launched publicly and we’re able to share this incredibly exciting news for folks because as impactful as the Halifax Pride Festival is on our local community, our economy and tourism sector, Canada Pride is going to be even more so.”
For full details on Halifax Pride, its activities for the 2025 festival or Canada Pride 2027, visit the website at halifaxpride.com.
This article appears in Jul 1-31, 2025.