Once again most news sources reported that a million people were present at Toronto’s gay pride parade. But as more than one source has demonstrated, such an attendance figure would prove impossible.
REAL Women of Canada did the math on this a decade ago. They calculated that the route was 3,300 meters long. Each side of the route would need to have 425,000 people on it (plus participants who march down the middle of the street). In order for that to work, there would need a crowd density of 151.5 persons deep on each side of the roadway. Toronto’s sidewalks can hold 4-7 people, making the larger number impossible.
This year, Maclean’s released an article on their website July 6 and in their magazine the following week that similarly questioned the million person attendance figure. The piece was in response to a letter they got from a Victoria, B.C., man, who took umbrage with Macleans’s own initial reports of one million attendees. He pointed out that in order to get one million people, there would have been 25 people per square meter along this year’s two-kilometer parade route. This is four to five times the amount that could physically fit in the space. The author, Clair Ward, tested this by laying out a square meter on the floor, and having seven people stand in it, which proved difficult. Ward wrote that her co-worker guinea pigs were “clinging to each other to not fall over the taped lines.”
The article also admits that they got the one million people number from another news source, who possibly got it from another news source, and on and on it goes.
Ward tried to track down the origin of the million figure and pointed out a report from 2009 by Enigma Research on the economic impact of the Pride event. The one million figure is not the total number of people present at one time, but the number of visits during the week-long festival. “Attendance is a tricky word,” according to Michael Harker from Enigma Research, “there’s a big difference between visits and unique attendees,” meaning that if somebody leaves and returns three times, they are counted those three times, explaining how the attendance at the parade is blown out of proportion.
