Being in the Gay Pride parade
Marching in Toronto’s gay-pride parade doesn’t mean Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives are changing their minds about important issues, says Kanata MPP Jack MacLaren. For the first time, the party had a formal presence in the huge parade on Sunday, with leader Patrick Brown and a bunch of party loyalists making their way down Yonge Street in rainbow-logo’d “LBGTory” T-shirts. Two MPPs were among them, both from Ottawa: MacLaren and Nepean-Carleton’s Lisa MacLeod.
MacLeod, the closest thing the party has to an urban member, was less of a surprise. MacLaren’s from the rural-populist wing of the party, a social conservative who made his name in the landowners’ movement.
Among other things, he’s voted against a law allowing high school students to start gay-straight alliance clubs and criticized the province’s new health curriculum. That doesn’t mean he can’t go to a parade celebrating diverse sexual orientations and gender identities, he said Monday.
“They’re all Canadians, they’re all taxpayers, they all have rights, and we have to grasp that,” MacLaren said.
The conservative contingent got high-fived all down the route, he said. “I’m not sure they’re saying they’re voting for us, but they certainly were glad to see us there … Everybody came away from it feeling very positive and good about ourselves for doing the right thing.”
Of course, this is at least as much about showing the party flag as showing support. Brown ran for the Tory leadership criticizing the party’s years of laziness in connecting with even unfriendly or indifferent communities — “You have to show up,” Brown kept saying. MacLaren was one of the former federal legislator’s few caucus supporters and that gives him a senior spot as Brown tries to rebuild the Progressive Conservatives following four straight election losses.
The party has eight outreach ambassadors now, including MacLaren. He’s also been assigned to Turks and Tamils, he said.
“I didn’t know anything about Turkey before. I didn’t even realize they were mostly Muslims,” MacLaren said. But he’s doing his best to learn quickly. The languages are still foreign to him but the food is superb. The other day he went to an Iftar dinner, with Muslims breaking the all-day fast required during Ramadan.
“What nice people. And I learned stuff,” he said.
Toronto’s Pride parade is such a huge civic event, that it’s declining to participate that attracts attention. The Tories have just stopped blasting away at their own feet by choosing to go this year.
Rob Ford always found other places to be (such as his cottage) on parade day when he was Toronto’s mayor. His habit was consistent with the voting record of someone who found gayness just icky. By not showing up at the pride parade, that’s the attitude with which Ontario’s Tory leaders aligned themselves. Not gay-hostile, exactly, not leading a crusade to undo years of increasing LBGT acceptance, but at best capable of tolerating homosexuality in a grim, teeth-clenched kind of way.
You see that in lots of Tory stances. When the legislature voted last spring on an NDP private-members’ bill to ban public funds for “conversion therapy” (to try to turn gay people straight), it passed 52-0 but nearly all the Progressive Conservatives were, er, at the cottage at the time. Opposition to the new health curriculum is always couched in complaints about a lack of consultation.
MacLaren, MacLeod and Brown have taken a great deal of grief from the harder-right elements in the conservative movement for marching in the parade. CFRA host Nick Vandergragt attacked them for taking part in a “walking porno display.”
“I would toss both of them out of the building over this and never let them back in,” he wrote on Facebook. MacLeod pretty much told him to get stuffed.
Vandergragt shouldn’t be alarmed, said MacLaren, who describes Vandergragt as an old friend. Marching in the parade doesn’t mean he’s changed his mind about anything.
For instance: “We still have concerns about the sex-ed curriculum and our position has always been that parents should have been consulted,” he said. “They need to go back to the drawing board and hear from parents. What we did yesterday doesn’t change anything about that.”
But making a point of listening is never a bad idea, MacLaren said. “I’ve always been, I guess I would use the word inclusive, though I don’t like that word a lot of the time. If somebody is gay or somebody is handicapped in some way or speaks a different language or has a different colour of skin, I’ve always felt I should go speak to these people and be accepting of these people.”