POLITICS & CULTURE
Canada Is A Leader In LGBTQ Rights Advocacy – But It Could Be Doing A Lot More There is a lot to be proud of, but there is still plenty of room to do more By Adam Zivo
Over the past few decades, LGBTQ rights have become entrenched within much of the Global North. Though a backlash against these rights has seriously undermined progress in some areas, particularly in Eastern Europe, social acceptance of LGBTQ people has been reassuringly resilient – with the exception of trans rights, which remain contentious. As a result, some Western countries have begun exploring supporting LGBTQ rights abroad by integrating them within larger foreign policy and international development frameworks. Since the early 2010s, and in the past five years especially, Canada has been a leader in international LGBTQ rights advocacy. Despite this leadership, Canada’s commitments in this area are still in their infancy. Few actual barriers stand in the way of the Canadian government offering more support for international advocacy – and so much more can, and should, be done. In the early 2010s, Canada began supporting global LGBTQ rights by vocally criticizing foreign states that oppress queer communities. This was epitomized by Canada’s condemnation of Russia – a country which, in 2013, passed several anti-LGBTQ laws that functionally criminalized public LGBTQ existence (and crushed related rights activism). To a lesser extent, Canada also condemned African states that were similarly homophobic, such as Uganda, and engaged in quiet diplomacy in situations where public condemnation would be counterproductive.
SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2021
Supplementing this, Canada’s embassies began providing aid to foreign activists, though in a manner that was highly decentralized and lacked a strategic vision. The core of this support drew from the Canadian Fund For Local Initiatives (CFLI), which enables Canadian embassies to finance small-scale projects with grants that have an average value of $27,000. In 2014, Canada included LGBTQ rights as a priority area for CFLI grants. Consequently, at least $700,000 was disbursed that year, often in support of awareness campaigns that either targeted prejudices or called attention to local, pro-LGBTQ services. Canada’s embassies supplemented their financial patronage with other kinds of support, such as providing space for LGBTQ activists to convene and organize programming. The value of this should not be underestimated in homophobic countries, where safe places to gather are hard to find. Some embassies also went out of their way to invite LGBTQ activists to non-LGBTQ embassy events, bolstering their credibility by making them more visible within diplomatic and political circles. That Canada began championing LGBTQ rights abroad during the Harper years may be surprising to some, but it is not altogether shocking. John Baird, who served as minister of foreign affairs from 2011 to 2015, is a gay man and, prior to retiring from politics, was known for being an outspoken advocate on gay rights. The ability of well-positioned individuals to shift party priorities is very real, as was seen more recently by the activism of Eric Duncan, 42
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an openly gay conservative MP who was instrumental in turning Conservatives into loud critics of Canada’s gay blood ban. Yet the influence of one person can only go so far And, looking at things more broadly, Harperite pro-LGBTQ diplomacy can likely also be explained by conservative commitments to moral absolutism and patriotism. Unconstrained by cultural relativism, condemnations of foreign human rights abuses can align with conservative values by affirming national moral supremacy (for better and worse). The real problem with the Harperite approach, though, was that it was predominantly reactive and mostly concerned itself with the most egregious forms of oppression. Sure, Harper’s Canada would stand up for LGBTQ communities fearing imminent violence, but it had few tools to proactively support foreign LGBTQ communities beyond this. Crucially, it did not seek to nurture activist capacities and autonomy. The funding provided by the CFLI grants was simply too small, and, being project-specific, could not support the kind of long-term strategic planning needed to cultivate human rights movements in hostile environments. To use a metaphor: Harper’s Canada held a shield above foreign activists, but did not provide them with the food they needed so they could eventually hold this shield themselves. So in came the Trudeau government – the emphatic and proud patron of the marginalized. Based on the rhetoric used by this government, one would expect exploding investment into global LGBTQ advocacy. Yet, for years, the status quo remained largely the same. The prime minister made well-meaning speeches about the importance of LGBTQ rights, but provided few concrete commitments behind his words as embassies continued to fill funding gaps in whatever small ways they could. New financial support eventually arrived, but it was belated and much smaller than it ought to have been. Comparing funding for LGBTQ and women’s rights In 2019, four years after being elected with a majority government and in response to persistent lobbying by Canadian LGBTQ activists, the Trudeau government announced a commitment of $30 million towards global LGBTQ rights, which would be spread out over five years (so an annual average of $6 million). Afterwards, federal funding for global LGBTQ advocacy would be increased to $10 million. This funding pot, which falls within Canada’s international aid budget and is slated to begin being disbursed in 2021, is approximately five times larger than funding provided by the CFLI (which is still ongoing). Crucially, large swaths of this new funding are earmarked for projects that could build organizing capacity for international rights advocates, empowering them to become influential political players within their own countries. A total of $10 million is dedicated towards
