The Tories pull funding for Toronto's Gay Pride Parade:
At first, Clement suggested the purpose of the Marquee Tourism Events program, part of the government’s two-year stimulus package rolled out in last year’s budget, was changed in year two to favour smaller centers.
“The truth of the matter is the program was designed this year to make sure that other urban centers also have access to the program,” he told reporters.
Canada's Conservative Government: Spreading the Pork. No one is quite buying Minister Clement's story, if only because of the horrible optics of a Conservative government funding a parade its grassroots find repugnant. Liberal MP Navdeep Bains questioned the Minister's motives:
“(The) Pride (festival) leaves a $100 million economic footprint, creates 650 jobs and generates $18 million in tax revenue. Why does ideology trump economics in this Conservative government?”
The amusing thing about the modern Liberal Party is its sheer chutzpah. They think we don't notice. For practical, administrative reasons, the government simply cannot give money to every group that goes to Ottawa begging. Otherwise the country would be going broke at a speed that would make even the Greeks stop rioting and take notice. There has to be a criteria to judge which applicants deserve funding and which do not. Since the decision is ultimately made by elected officials it will, amazingly enough, be made along political lines. Politicians are elected based on the policies and ideas they expound, however logically incoherent they might be.
When a politician makes a decision based on the values he was elected upon he is, wait for it, doing his job. When the Chretien government decided that funding Canada boosting events in Quebec was necessary for national unity, that was an "ideological" decision. The Liberals are a federalist party that believes government intervention can help keep the country together. It was a decision consonant with its values. That it became the corrupt boondoggle known as Adscam was simply the nature of the government beast. When governments spend money, as sure as night follows day, some of it will go "missing" into the pockets of supporters. Some got caught, some did not. Again, that too is the nature of government. Though Minister Clement is not being honest enough to admit it, he is making a political decision. He was doing his job. Denouncing his actions as "ideological" is the equivalent of attacking him for sticking to his principles and risking the wrath of some portion of the electorate. Only a Liberal MP would criticize someone for not being a complete hypocrite.
The real scandal here is not the government deciding to stop funding a parade, which is popular in Toronto, yet provides little benefit to the rest of the country, it's that the government is involved in funding parades and festivals as such. Many supporters of the Conservative Party consider homosexually to be either morally questionable, or an outright sin. I believe homosexuality to be natural, in the sense that orientation is probably genetically determined. Maybe Old Publius is wrong about that, maybe the "lover the sinner, hate the sin" crowd is right. Neither my mind, nor theirs, will be convinced through government subsidy or coercion. You can't force the human mind to believe what it refuses to believe. For centuries adherents of various religious sects slaughtered each other, and continue today in parts of the Third World, for their beliefs. The truth, for them, could not tolerate dissension. Largely out of sheer exhaustion a compromise was reached, church and state would be, roughly, separated. Religion was henceforth to be private matter of conscience. The state was to remove itself from the pews of the nation, and the church from the state. One could certainly advocate for policies based on one's private principles, but such advocacy was not done on the public's dime. Separation of church and state was the first great breakthrough in the development of modern freedom. If getting government out of religion helped preserve the peace of the realm, the question was raised about the value of getting government out of other matters. A totalitarian state considers all private matters to be a public concern, there is no dividing line between private and public. Everything is the government's problem, requiring its attempt at a solution. A classical liberal state works from the reverse assumption. Only when matters cannot be handled privately, and voluntarily, do we consider turning to the state. Government, to the classical liberal, is always the last resort.
A Conservative government has cut funding for the Toronto Gay Pride Parade. A Liberal government would probably restore it. Government has been turned from a protector of rights to a destroyer. Instead of protecting the rights of people, Proud and Phobe, to spend their income as they see fit, it has instead stolen money from one group and given it to another. The great immorality here is not in supporting or opposing homosexuality, but in demanding those who disagree to financially support their critics', even their avowed enemies, positions and activities. It is as morally obscene to force a Christian, who believes in the sinfulness of homosexuality, to finance the Gay Pride Parade, as it is to force a homosexual to pay for repairs to a Catholic Church. What Canada needs is to create a new rule of public policy, the separation of state and parades.
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