COVID-19 has caused events all around the world to be can­celled.

But the or­gan­is­ers of the Toron­to Car­ni­val de­cid­ed they were not go­ing to al­low the pan­dem­ic to rain on their pa­rade.

And so the con­cept of The Vir­tu­al Road was born.

The Toron­to Car­ni­val was held on­line this year re­plac­ing the reg­u­lar Grande Pa­rade, Aneesa Oumar­al­ly the chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer at Fes­ti­val Man­age­ment Com­mit­tee the pro­duc­ers of the Toron­to Caribbean Car­ni­val told Guardian Me­dia.

And the event was a suc­cess, at­tract­ing over 100,000 peo­ple on­line Oumar­al­ly said.

Oumar­al­ly who lived in T&T be­fore mi­grat­ing to Cana­da as a teenag­er de­scribes her­self as a “Tri­ni to the bone.”

Both she and her hus­band at­tend­ed sec­ondary schools in Na­pari­ma and have al­ways been ac­tive with the West In­di­an com­mu­ni­ty in Cana­da.

As part of her work for pro­mot­ing Caribbean cul­ture Oumar­al­ly joined the board of di­rec­tors at the Fes­ti­val Man­age­ment Com­mit­tee.

When the for­mer CEO left last May, the board need­ed as­sis­tance in or­gan­is­ing the Toron­to Car­ni­val.

Be­ing the chair of the gov­er­nance com­mit­tee at the time Oumar­al­ly was in­stru­men­tal in the suc­cess­ful host­ing of the event.

Oumar­al­ly was even­tu­al­ly named CEO.

With this be­ing her first Toron­to Car­ni­val, she was look­ing for­ward to the event this year.

But then the COVID pan­dem­ic hit and Toron­to went in­to lock­down.

And so on April 8, the fes­ti­val man­age­ment com­mit­tee an­nounced the can­cel­la­tion of Toron­to Car­ni­val.

“For the past 52 years, the Toron­to Caribbean Car­ni­val (for­mer­ly Carib­ana) has de­liv­ered an ex­cit­ing sum­mer fes­ti­val fea­tur­ing elab­o­rate cos­tumes, Caribbean mu­sic, and food in our Grand Pa­rade. This fes­ti­val is a labour of love cre­at­ed by our ex­tra­or­di­nary tal­ent­ed artis­tic stake­hold­ers, and sup­port­ed by par­tic­i­pants and vol­un­teers,” the or­gan­i­sa­tion stat­ed.

“Tak­ing in­to con­sid­er­a­tion the mass crowds that at­tend the events, it presents a tremen­dous risk re­gard­ing the spread of the virus, it is there­fore unan­i­mous that the pri­or­i­ty must be the health and safe­ty of our pa­trons and hav­ing weighed all these con­sid­er­a­tions there is no choice but to can­cel this year’s fes­ti­val.”

The Grande Pa­rade usu­al­ly at­tracts a mil­lion peo­ple and rais­es around CAD$400,000 in rev­enue.

The com­mit­tee promised that if cir­cum­stances changed and the City of Toron­to al­lowed events af­ter Ju­ly 1, they would find a “non-tra­di­tion­al for­mat”to cel­e­brate.

And so said so done.

Start­ing on Ju­ly 3 they be­gan a month of vir­tu­al events which fea­tured among oth­er things steel­pan and ca­lyp­so.

“We said we had to find an­oth­er way to cel­e­brate,” Oumar­al­ly re­port­ed.

“From start to fin­ish we learned a lot, we learned what was not work­ing dig­i­tal­ly, what peo­ple liked look­ing at what peo­ple didn’t like. Dur­ing this time we al­so formed re­al­ly good part­ner­ships. The On­tario Sci­ence Cen­tre even brought sci­ence to Car­ni­val,”she said.

Dur­ing the Ju­nior Car­ni­val week, On­tario Sci­ence cre­at­ed ex­per­i­ments to show the chil­dren sim­ple as­pects such as  “how ma­te­r­i­al would dance on a speak­er and it would form a pat­tern and they did it to so­ca mu­sic of course,” Oumar­al­ly said.

The Caribbean Tales Film fes­ti­val al­so showed a movie about Pe­ter Min­shall which was played on their King and Queen night.

And on Au­gust 1, the Vir­tu­al Road was held.

“The con­cept of the Vir­tu­al Road is that we were go­ing to en­cour­age every­body across the world to par­tic­i­pate with us in Car­ni­val over Zoom. So Zoom was free it was a free Car­ni­val, all you had to do though was reg­is­ter for your Zoom link,” she said.

And the mas­quer­aders an­swered the call.

The event last­ed 13 hours from 9 am un­til 10 pm.

It trav­elled through Aus­tralia, Japan, the Unit­ed King­dom, and of course T&T. 

DJs and live per­form­ers rep­re­sent­ed each area.

T&T was rep­re­sent­ed by Nailah Black­man, Free­town Col­lec­tive, DJ Ana and Ul­tra Sim­mo.

Every hour a dif­fer­ent coun­try was rep­re­sent­ed with the slo­gan “all roads lead to Toron­to.

“To be hon­est with you I was asked by me­dia here what suc­cess for the event would look like, and I said if we get about 50,000 peo­ple I would be over the moon. We got in ex­cess of 100,000 peo­ple par­ty­ing with us from across the world,” she said.

“We could not ex­pect that peo­ple would be so ex­cit­ed; it was 13 hours of so­ca and they stayed 13 hours,” she said.

The des­ti­na­tion mar­ket­ing or­gan­i­sa­tion for Toron­to’s tourism in­dus­try Des­ti­na­tion Toron­to claimed “Car­ni­val wins” af­ter see­ing the suc­cess of the event, Oumar­al­ly said.

“We got an A in our re­port card for cre­at­ing this en­vi­ron­ment,” she said.

Oumar­al­ly said she was heart­ened to see the ca­ma­raderie and cheer that the event caused.

“We told peo­ple put on some feath­ers, but they were decked out from head to toe in their cos­tumes, boots in­clud­ed ready to go,” Oumar­al­ly said.

“Peo­ple have said we’ve cre­at­ed his­to­ry by putting on this vir­tu­al Car­ni­val and it showed the abil­i­ty of Toron­to Car­ni­val to think quick­ly on our feet and to piv­ot,” she said.

Oumar­al­ly said over­com­ing odds is the em­bod­i­ment of Car­ni­val.

“It feels fan­tas­tic to have done some­thing to cel­e­brate our cul­ture and her­itage and it al­so shows the re­silience of Caribbean peo­ple. Car­ni­val is born out of re­silience and this is just an­oth­er form of re­silience,” she said.

“If you put your mind to some­thing you can make changes and peo­ple recog­nise that we may not be able to do some­thing in the same way we are ac­cus­tomed to do­ing it but we were not afraid to try some­thing new and that is what I learnt, our com­mu­ni­ty was not afraid to try some­thing new, they want­ed the ex­pe­ri­ence of be­ing to­geth­er, they want­ed the ex­pe­ri­ence of com­mu­ni­ty, and they want­ed to have that pride in their her­itage,” Oumar­al­ly said.