It has been known that there is a viscoelastic instability in the channel flow past a cylinder at high Deborah (De) number. Some of our numerical simulations and a boundary layer analysis indicated that this instability is related to the shear flow in the gap between the cylinder and the channel walls in our previous work. The critical condition for instability initiation may be related to an inflection velocity profile generated by the normal stress near the cylinder surface. At high De, the elastic normal stress coupling with the streamline curvature is responsible for the shear instability, which has been recognized by the community. In this study, an instability criterion for the flow problem is proposed based on the analysis on the pressure gradient and some supporting numerical simulations. The critical De number for various model fluids is given. It increases with the geometrical aspect ratio h/R (half channel width/cylinder radius) and depends on a viscosity ratio ${eta}$(polymer viscosity/total viscosity) of the model. A shear thinning first normal stress coefficient will delay the instability. An excellent agreement between the predicted critical Deborah number and reported experiments is obtained.