Last year the federal government saw fit to give Toronto’s annual gay pride festival a “marquee events” grant of $397,500 to fund the event. This year the festival will get nothing in the way of federal funding. This, despite the festival being a major tourist attraction for the city of Toronto drawing hundreds of thousands to partake in the excitement and give the local economy a boost estimated at close to $136 million.

But some have yelled foul at the decision not to fund the pride festival and we at the Ontarion must admit that we are yelling right along with them. While, it’s entirely possible that the decision not to grant funding to the pride festival was made in the spirit of equality for all marquee events and that it wasn’t ideological in any way, is it likely? A trend is revealing itself and it’s not looking good for Prime Minister Harper and his conservative cronies.

Recently, Harper’s conservative Ottawa has been responsible for such glittering decisions as the defunding of many women’s groups and keeping the international maternal health initiative wholly free of abortions. With the Conservatives having no problem allowing social conservative ideology to enter into these aforementioned policy and funding decisions, what is to stop those burned by the lack of pride festival funding to assume this recent development to be of the same vein? It’s difficult for anyone not to raise an eyebrow at the long string of heavy-handed social conservative moves recently made by the federal government.

According to representatives from the conservatives, the decision about who was to receive the grant money was based on merit. The goal being that the money given to the event would not only help the event grow but stimulate the local economy. As much as the ‘smaller’ events are probably very deserving of the funding they are now receiving at the expense of the pride festival, with the revenue that Toronto’s pride events generate and the large community that the festival celebrates, how is there not merit?

The Ontarion is not suggesting that Toronto’s gay pride festival should always get such a large share of the federal marquee events grant money by virtue of it having merit in principle and being revenue generating. Our criticism is mainly of the way that the pride festival found itself sans federal funding. Having come accustom to receiving federal grant money in order to grow, the Toronto gay pride festival went from being able to count on hundreds of thousands of dollars of funding to nothing at all. Just like that. Rather than giving the festival a smaller amount of funding, but less to allow for other events to receive grant money, the decision was to spread the wealth around at the complete and total exclusion of one of the most participated in marquee events.

It certainly sends a message, whether the Conservatives intended the sharp blow or not.

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