Pay for your own parade
National Post – May 12,
2010
Editorial
If you have a
language, heritage or sexual orientation you would like to celebrate, good for
you. This is
Last Friday, federal
Industry Minister Tony Clement – whose department is in charge of tourism
promotion – announced that
Critics suggested
that the federal government did not want to alienate socially conservative
Canadians by funding an event that includes exuberant, and occasionally racy,
expressions of gay club and cabaret culture. The official reason for the
withdrawal of federal money, Mr. Clement claimed, was that the parade, which
annually attracts more than half a million spectators, is successful enough to
stand on its own.
But we suspect the
real, unspoken reason for the defunding – and the reason the province of Ontario
and the City of Toronto may yet withhold their contributions, too – is that
organizers so far have refused to ban the participation of Queers Against
Israeli Apartheid (QUAIA), a radicalized group of anti-Israeli activists who
sullied the parade in 2009 with chants against the Jewish state. (Earlier this
year, Pride Toronto announced it would vet all entries in advance of the 2010
parade, to be held in June. Its specific goal is to prevent floats, such as
QUAIA's, which last year likened
QUAIA's presence at
Pride has been a disgrace: One would never witness a group of Jews chanting
gratuitous gay-bashing slogans at, say, a mainstream event celebrating Israel's
independence; so why should it be seen as legitimate for anti-Israeli activists
to march under the banner of gay empowerment? Injecting geopolitics into a gay
pride event might make sense if the country being targeted were one that
imposed vicious criminal sanctions against homosexuals (such as, say, just
about any Arab country one could mention). But as we've noted in the past,
But again, we're not
saying that anti-Israel gays shouldn't be able to hold all the parades they
want. It's the injection of public money into such events that we oppose.
Government participation inevitably presents the question of why taxpayers
should be forced to bankroll hate speech. (The same goes, we might point out,
for the shareholders and customers of Pride's remaining corporate sponsors – a
subject for another day.)
This is not a problem
confined to Pride. In the past, public money – not to mention the presence of
actual flesh-and-blood provincial and federal politicians – has been used to
support Sikh parades that glorify "martyrs" who in fact are nothing
more than dead terrorists.
One solution is for
parade-organizing committees to methodically flush out radicals, such as
Israel-bashers and Khalistani Sikhs. But that is difficult: Thanks to the
injection of public money, big-budget annual parades hosted by gay and ethnic
groups tend to become seen as the "official" voice of the organizing
community –which means radicals will fight tooth and nail to ensure their float
becomes part of the official canon of viewpoints. This leads to lengthy, ugly
intra-community battles over what floats should and should not be allowed in an
event–such as the one that's currently taking place in
There would be
another advantage to the removal of government funding from big-ticket parades:
Grassroots organizers wouldn't have to struggle against a single 800-pound
gorilla event that dominates their community's annual agenda. Not all members
of
The simple truth is
that when it comes to the prickly politics of parades, politicians and
bureaucrats cannot pick winners and losers without causing resentment and
making some taxpayers support causes they diametrically oppose. It is best to
leave the funding of such civic events to private donations, so that they can
rise and fall on the basis of local community support – not the diktats of
distant bureaucrats and the cash of aggrieved taxpayers.
(Click to enlarge)
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