Toronto economic committee votes to continue Pride funding amid police debate

Toronto's economic development committee has voted unanimously in favour of renewing the city's annual $260,000 grant for Pride Toronto, in the midst of a heated debate over the role of police in the Pride parade.

For this year at least, Pride Toronto says officers are only allowed to march in the parade if they leave their uniforms, weapons and vehicles behind — a position that has prompted calls for the city to defund the organization. While the economic development committee approved Pride Toronto's funding request, the grant must still be approved by city council as a whole, which will vote on the issue later this month.

"We celebrate Pride, we appreciate Pride, we love Pride in this city. It has great benefits to our city: economic, otherwise and social," said economic development committee chair Michael Thompson.

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He said Toronto Pride and police should be given time to work out an agreement for next year's parade. "Let's take the adult position and sit down and dialogue," he said.

Following a Black Lives Matter-led protest during last summer's parade, in which members delivered a list of demands to the organization, including the banning of uniformed officers and police floats from future Pride events, Pride membership voted in favour of those demands at its annual general meeting in January. In February, Toronto police chief Mark Saunders said that to help heal the divisions within the Pride community, police would not be participating in this year's parade, aside from providing security. Some councillors, led by John Campbell, have argued that Pride Toronto should not receive city support if its official position is to exclude police.

At Monday's economic development committee meeting, Pride Toronto executive director Olivia Nuamah emphasized the tourism and spending that the annual Pride festival draws to the city. Past festivals have had an economic impact of hundreds of millions of dollars. She celebrated the committee's vote Monday to renew funding for her organization.

"We're incredibly pleased," Ms. Nuamah said. "Everybody is supportive of this festival; everybody wants to see it happen."

Mayor John Tory, who said he spoke both with Chief Saunders and Ms. Nuamah Monday morning, issued a statement saying he supported funding this year's festival. He said both sides told him that yanking city support now would hurt ongoing and "constructive" talks about including the police again in the future.

But Mr. Tory made it clear that Pride, which he said was supposed to be all about "inclusion," should not be excluding the police. And, speaking to reporters, he would not commit to supporting funding for Pride next year if a deal with the police does not materialize.

"I am not going to engage in hypothetical speculation about what happens in future years," Mr. Tory said. "I am just saying for this year … both of the parties involved in these constructive discussions ... told me that to withdraw funding at this stage would not be helpful in their ongoing attempts to achieve a resolution to this issue."

Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam, who does not sit on the city's economic development committee but who attended Monday's meeting, said that given Pride is a sexual liberation movement and a political one, it would not "bode well" for those outside the community to pull funding from the organization.

"It would be horrible, I think, if the City of Toronto or anyone on city council was to table a motion to defund Pride. I think it sends the wrong message for a city that's growing at the pace that it is," she said.

Last year's protest at the parade and the events that have followed have caused a major rift in Toronto's LGBTQ community and within the city as a whole, with many saying they will boycott the parade because of the organization's stance on police. At Monday's meeting, one individual presented the committee with a printout of an online petition that included almost 9,000 signatures of individuals asking that uniformed officers be allowed to march in the Pride parade.

On March 7, Ms. Nuamah released a statement clarifying that police were welcome to march in this parade, but not if they were dressed in their official uniforms, with weapons or vehicles.

"Some members of our community don't find it celebratory – they find it threatening," Ms. Nuamah said. "We heard that from a long-standing consultation so we've chosen to sit down with police and review that."

This year's Pride parade will take place on Sunday, June 25.