Council rejects call to cut Pride funding
By vote of 27-17, Councillor John Campbell’s motion fails
A Toronto councillor’s attempt to suspend the city’s annual grant to Pride Toronto over police participation has failed by a vote of 17-27.
Council voted down Councillor John Campbell’s motion — which stated that $260,000 flow only if uniformed, armed police officers are welcome to march in the annual parade that caps Pride Month — after almost seven hours of heated and often emotional debate Friday.
The Etobicoke councillor has never been to Pride, but said he was sticking up for officers, including those who are gay, after the huge LGBTQ festival failed to “live up to its core value of inclusivity.”
Pride issued the request for cops to not march in uniform and with weapons in January in response to demands from Black Lives Matter Toronto, members of which halted the 2016 Pride parade during a protest that lasted about 30 minutes. The group, which in the past criticized police over carding, accused Pride organizers of “anti-blackness.”
Campbell told council: “You don’t bring people together by pushing them apart, and that has been Pride’s solution. You’re either inclusive or you’re not.”
Many councillors, however, noted that Police Chief Mark Saunders has asked officers to not march in uniform in this year’s parade, while he works with Pride to try to find consensus on police participation in the 2018 event.
Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam, Toronto’s only openly gay councillor, said parade-goers from communities including racialized, trans and disabled Torontonians “will experience the uniform of a police officer differently,” based on their own in- teractions with them.
She noted the city grant is for elements of the month-long festival, not the parade itself, which she called a “celebration of sexual liberation” that grew out of protests against 1981 police bathhouse raids for which Saunders officially apologized last year.
Suspending the grant would cancel Pride events for families, “clean and sober” revelers, black Torontonians and more. “If you want to support inclusion, that’s what you support,” she said.
Wong-Tam also noted city staff said Pride’s stance was closely examined and found not to violate any city policies on discrimination or inclusion.
Councillor Neethan Shan, who in February won a Ward 42 byelection and became Toronto’s first TamilCanadian councillor, said he wants more, not less, city money to flow to Pride and Caribbean Carnival as a way to help combat “systemic inequities and historic disadvantages placed” on members of those communities.
He urged council to reject Campbell’s motion, which, he said, was an attempt to “micromanage” Pride and was a misunderstanding of the idea of inclusion.