Grants and drag queens don’t mix
National Post – May 11, 2010
By Kevin Libin

According to some senior Conservatives, the decision to deny Toronto's Pride Week funding from the government's Marquee Tourism Events Program was cast in stone last summer. This week's confirmation that the gay-themed celebration would be frozen out this year only made it public.

So intense was the caucus backlash last July against a publicity photo of then-tourism minister Diane Ablonczy awarding $400,000 to a Pride committee group, including busty transvestites, the story goes, that the order to Industry Canada was to design a new process that would ensure the event would not qualify again.

"They've been on top of this since way back then to make sure this doesn't happen again," says one Tory close to the Industry Minister. "They had a year to restructure the program in a way that would exclude Toronto Pride."

But that's just one version. Other senior Tories have others. One posited that Prime Minister Stephen Harper enjoys stoking social issues that divide the Liberal caucus.

It's an iron rule in politics that if you can't govern your party, you can't govern the country, and after Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff botched a vote meant to embarrass the Tories on their reluctance to fund abortions overseas, denied sufficient support from his own party to pass his own resolution, the Conservatives were giddy with schadenfreude. Another chance to pit socially conservative Liberals against their leader promised only more fun.

Still others interviewed sense the invisible hands of Mr. Harper's chief of staff, Guy Giorno, a passionate Catholic, and Darrel Reid, a senior policy advisor and former president of the evangelical group Focus on the Family Canada.

And so it appears even senior Tories aren't quite sure what the Tories were thinking by helping to reanimate old fears of a theologically driven "hidden agenda" by appearing to single out the gay community for selective neglect.

"This is again another example, in my opinion, of a reckless, ideological cut from a Conservative government which actually has a history of attacking gay rights," said Liberal tourism critic Navdeep Bains. Pride Toronto's executive director said the only explanation she saw was "some kind of homophobia. I mean, it makes sense."

Unfortunately for the Tories, the Ablonczy story has more evidence behind it than any of the others, and that the decision to deny Pride a second bite of the economic stimulus pie was, ultimately, a political one. Last summer, Saskatchewan MP Brad Trost confirmed to LifeSite News that his fellow backbenchers didn't respond well to Ms. Ablonczy's photo-op.

"The pro-life and the pro-family community should know and understand that the tourism funding money that went to the gay pride parade in Toronto was not government policy, was not supported by, I think it's safe to say, a large majority of the MPs. This was a very isolated decision."

The Marquee program was handed to Industry Minister Tony Clement, and the Pride funding was officially put "under review."

This week, Mr. Clement argued that Pride was merely a victim of a revised process favouring smaller urban centres over Montreal and Toronto, which were permitted, under new rules, to get only two events funded each (smaller urban centres, like Quebec City and Winnipeg received more). But that new policy, as it happens, was created shortly after the Ablonczy kerfuffle, specifically to keep another drag queen photo opportunity from happening again, according to ministry sources.

The new move may appease social conservatives members, but Tom Flanagan thinks the downside isn't worth it. At some point, cultural funding decisions boil down to preference and since the Tories cannot deny they chose two other Toronto events – the Luminato arts festival and the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair–over the gay fiesta, they can't entirely escape accusations of indulging a narrow social conservative base, one of their most vulnerable political weaknesses.

"The Tories deserve all the criticism they get if they just cut selectively according to their intuitions," says the University of Calgary political scientist and former Conservative strategist.

Worse, he says, the Tories get little out of it, being in no danger anyway of losing any anti-gay vote to the Liberals, while their fundraising is adequately broad to save them from having to cater to narrow interest groups.

In the search for explanations about why the Tories would invite more speculation about hidden agendas by cutting out Pride, Mr. Flanagan prefers his own pet theory. "It's just atrocious political management," he says.