Hard-right anti-gay Conservatives 1, Moderates 0

When it comes to Canadian Conservatives reaching out to the gay community, it’s one step forward then two steps back.

Even I was surprised this week after I read that the ruling Conservatives had given almost $400,000 to Toronto’s Pride Week as a way of bolstering Toronto and its Pride celebration as tourist destinations. I was even more surprised when I learned that Tourism Minister Diane Ablonczy – a member of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Calgary cabal – traveled to Toronto to deliver the check personally.

Pride Toronto, the event’s governing organization, happily accepted the check – in part as a way of showing that Pride is not partisan.

So this was a good news story all around. Right?

Well, it WAS until the right-wing extremists in the Conservative Party went berserk about the government giving money to a gay event.

But what was Ablonczy’s worst offense, according to some? Horror of horrors, she had her picture taken with drag queens!

The result? Ablonczy has been disciplined. Prime Minister Harper stripped her of her power to announce tourism investments (even though she’s the minister of tourism), and she’s been muzzled from talking to the media.

Brad Trost, a Conservative MP from Saskatchewan, was reportedly the first to have his head spin over the site of Ablonczy and drag queens. He told the far right-wing website LifeSiteNews.com, “The pro-life and the pro-family community should know and understand that the tourism funding money that went to the gay pride parade in Toronto was not government policy, was not supported by – I think it’s safe to say by a large majority – of the MPs.”

In response to inquiries from the Toronto Star, a government spokesperson said, “I know that certainly there’s going to be folks who have their concerns and they’ve raised those concerns with us. … We’re listening.”

An unnamed source in the party told the Star: “The TV shots of [Ablonczy] with transvestites inflamed some people.”

Wait a minute. All this “inflamed some people”? And the Conservatives say, “We’re listening”? Real nice for a party that has been trying to hoodwink moderates into thinking it’s not the scary right-wing party it used to be when it was called the Reform Party.

Kudos to Ablonczy for putting partisanship and wedge politics aside in order to honor what she reportedly called Pride Toronto’s “polished and professional” application. Besides, government investment in Pride celebrations is nothing new – in Toronto, both the city and the province support the event, one of the city’s biggest tourism income generators.

In the end, what this Conservative kerfuffle means is simple. Like the Republican Party in the U.S., the Conservative Party of Canada – despite moderates in its ranks – is still beholden to right-wing extremists whose exclusionary ideas and wedge-issue politics are far outside the mainstream.