CORPORATE PRIDE
discouraged from participating. Yet these community members are the ones who would benefit most from Pride. Pride’s mandate is to provide LGBTQ+ folks with both a social space and a platform for political advocacy. Community members with means can always use their wealth to access for-profit LGBTQ+ social spaces, or press their political priorities through other channels (money is power, after all). For the most marginalized LGBTQ+ members, alternative options for advocacy and community building are scarcer. A Pride that is substantially funded by attendee fees would be a Pride that, rather than uplifting the most vulnerable, would annually remind them of their second-class status. From an equity lens, that’s indefensible. Government funding has its caveats What about relying primarily on government funding? That’s already a substantial revenue stream. Pride Toronto, acting as a case study again, receives a substantial amount of funding from the different tiers of government. For technical reasons, the exact figures are hard to come by, but the City of Toronto invested $260,000 in Toronto Pride in 2016, the Government of Ontario put in $250,000 in 2019, and the Government of Canada invested $400,000 in 2009. Taken together, these numbers fall far short of what corporate sponsors bring in, but at the very least, it’s plausible to imagine a corporate-free Pride that operates on beefed-up government support. Inviting as that seems, though, that’s not the kind of Pride we should strive to achieve.
JULY / AUGUST 2020
In general, the more diverse your sources of funding are, the more autonomy you have. When you have a diversified pool of funders, if one funder becomes problematic, you can replace them. Even major sponsors can be substituted, and though that process might be fiscally painful, it’s at least possible. The corporate sector offers
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that diversity, because there’s an abundance of businesses out there that could be approached for sponsorship, making each business fairly interchangeable. The public sector is different. While there’s a web of players that LGBTQ+ organizations can approach for funding, since large government grants are given to non-profits to redistribute as smaller grants, ultimately funding comes from three entities: the municipal, provincial and federal governments. In such a small field, each is influential. This is a problem because, if a government acts unreasonably and holds funding hostage, there’s no alternative government to go to. It’s true that playing the different levels of government against each other can offer LGBTQ+ organizations some freedom to manoeuvre. Using a non-LGBTQ+ comparison, in 2017 the federal Liberals beefed up funding for affordable housing, focusing on sending funds directly to municipalities, which helped offset cuts by the Ford government. However, if there were ever a time in the future when the political winds turn against the LGBTQ+ community, with hostility extending across multiple levels of government, then relying too heavily on public purse strings would amplify our vulnerability. Consider that, when the Harper government cut $400,000 in funding from Pride Toronto in 2010, and when Toronto city council threatened to cut its funding in 2017, these were not existential threats to Pride precisely because Pride had so much revenue from corporate sponsors. A historically marginalized community can resist hostile governments if it has independent funding, but is less able to resist if its support systems go broke when they are needed most. When looking at things from this lens, the reliance on corporate sponsorships is about utilizing the power of Big Business to provide some insurance against political whims. This tension is already
