Each year, the Rotary Club of Yellowknife hosts the annual Canada Day parade for the community.
Stewart Pallard, one of the candidates in last year’s municipal election, is the chair of the parade.
He said a lot of time goes into making the parade happen.
He explained that one day, he spent eight hours reaching out to groups to ask if they want to participate.
Many tasks have to be delegated to make the parade happen. Pallard said that they have a team member that gets the permit for the parade, someone who can handle the media, and someone who keeps track of past participants and can contact them, and so on.
Pallard’s predecessor, Austin Marshall, ran the show for many years since beginning in the mid-1990s. He said that the parade started a few years after the club was formed in the 1970s.
“The parade seemed to be a great way to … celebrate our heritage and our nationality,” he said.
One of the differences between now and when Pallard joined the Rotary Club in 1993 was the laid back attitude about the parade.
They had six to eight people work on preparing the parade and part of the excitement for the team was finding out how much they collectively managed to prepare for it when the day arrived.
“Very much kind of the local small town feel to it,” he commented.
He also added that one of the other main differences is that the scale of the whole parade has increased.
This year’s parade begins at 11 a.m. on Saturday and will go along 48 Street then on to Franklin Avenue heading toward Kam Lake.
He recalled the story of how he became the chair for the first time.
He said that he got comfortable going to meetings with the other club members and hearing about the things other people were accomplishing. He explained that he admired what the more experienced members were doing in the community. Unbeknownst to him, he would soon have his chance to become more like the ones he was admiring.
“One day, when I came to the meeting, our president stood up in the middle of the room and made the announcement that our chair for the parade this year was going to be Austin Marshall,” he recalled. “I just about dropped off my chair.”
He said that the whole team chipped in to help make the parade happen, but it was his to organize.
In doing so, he said that he became known as ‘Marshal Marshall.’
He recalled a special parade in the early 2000s, though he could not recall the precise year, where someone from the club managed to arrange for planes to fly over Franklin Avenue.
“It was something else,” he said.