After an emotional and heated session at city hall on Friday, Toronto city councillors voted to keep a $260,000 grant for Pride Toronto.
The vote was 27-17 in favour of dismissing an amendment to the Major Cultural Organizations program fund which would have excluded Pride Toronto from the allocations list.
Over the last two months, Toronto city Councillor John Campbell had been pushing for a motion to pull a municipal grant used to help fund the festival’s headline event.
The catalyst for council’s full day debate and vote was a decision by Pride Toronto, last year, to ban uniformed officers from walking in the parade.
“If you are a gay or lesbian police officer, very much a part of your identity is being a police officer,” Campbell said in his opening statements. “Police officers in uniform have marched in this parade since 2005.”
In an interview with AM640’s The John Oakley Show in April, Campbell said that when the city gives money to special interest groups, “there are expectations tied to that.”
“I don’t feel that the city of Toronto should be providing money to an organization that is going exclude a very important part of Toronto,” said Campbell, “What they’re (council) trying to do is build bridges not tear them down.”
READ MORE: Councillor considering motion to pull funding for Toronto Pride parade
Last year, a sit-in by the Toronto chapter of the Black Lives Matter at the intersection of Yonge and Dundas resulted in a 30-minute stoppage of the 2016 version of the parade. Members of the African-American movement preceded to present Pride Toronto with a list of nine demands intended to curb a “history of anti-blackness” which included a ban on police in future parades.
Campbell’s motion got a boost weeks later when Toronto police’s LGBTQ officers supported the move to withhold Pride funding.
READ MORE: Toronto police LGBTQ officers asking city to nix $260,000 Pride parade grant
Friday’s session was long as very few councillors passed on the opportunity to speak.
One of the more notable addresses came from Ward 7 York West Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti just before the lunch break. Mammoliti suggested that the sit-in by Black Lives Matter was actually an illegal act.
“The same people that they didn’t want to participate, should have arrested everyone of them and put them in jail for the night,” said the councillor, “The last I knew anything about the law in this respect, they broke it. Because they insisted on stopping a major event and putting everyone at risk.”
READ MORE: Metrolinx, TTC transit officers will not wear uniforms in Toronto Pride Parade
Mayor John Tory, who in the end voted in favour of the grant, had the last word at council. Tory said the vast majority of Torontonians would have faith in the decision to continue the funding and the “journey to a better place.”
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