The fate of this year’s Divers/Cité festival in Montreal was up in the air on Wednesday after the federal government said it would not approve funding for the event.
Divers/Cité, Montreal’s gay pride arts festival, was counting on $155,000 in new funding from Ottawa.
In an email from Industry Canada, spokeswoman Christiane Fox said there are just too many worthwhile events to allow government funding for all of them.
The directors of Divers/Cité in Montreal said bureaucrats told them their funding request met all the criteria, and that final approval was with Industry Minister Tony Clement’s office. But on Monday, organizers were told the Conservative government had rejected their request.
Suzanne Girard, director of Divers/Cité, said Wednesday the event's organizers are reeling from the news.
"To be told that there is no money, when there is. They have $100 million put aside; they chose not to give to Divers/Cité. The reasons … we don’t know. Is it we're gay? Is it we're Montrealers? We’re Québécois? It's incredible they would decide at this late date, five days before our event starts,” said Girard.
Girard said the Divers/Cité festival, in its 17th year, provides vital economic stimulus.
"Per capita, we bring in more tourism than any other festival in Canada. And you can ask any Montreal taxi driver, the hotels … about our impact on Montreal … we are a niche market, we are an extremely important tourism event," said Girard.
Luc Fournier, director of an umbrella organization for Quebec's major international events, says the department has known from the outset that the province's festival circuit is the most powerful in the country and might scoop up a large proportion of the funds.
Just for Laughs and the Montreal International Jazz Festival received half of the Quebec total of $12-million. Only large-scale events across Canada that could prove they attract significant numbers of tourists met the criteria to apply.
“I told them many times that with the criteria they had, they wouldn't be able to fund events in the Maritimes and the Prairies, or very few,” said Mr. Fournier, of the Regroupement des evenements majeurs internationaux.
“If Industry Canada is saying that Quebec is getting more, well, with the criteria that we received we already told them that.”
The directors of Divers-Cite had actually sprung to the defence of Stephen Harper's government earlier this month, telling The Canadian Press that the Conservatives had never treated them differently. Some in the gay community attacked them for their comments.
They had submitted a bid under the new Marquee Tourism Events Program for $155,000 to add performers and promotion to this year's $2-million event.
Government relations and marketing director Paul Girard said bureaucrats handling his file at Industry Canada told him his application met all the criteria, and had been sent up to Minister Tony Clement's office for final approval.
When he phoned to check on the bid Tuesday, Girard says he was told by a senior bureaucrat that the $100 million tourism program had received so many requests, the government simply had to make a choice.
[. . .]
Paul Girard said he has noticed that although Divers-Cite received two-year funding by the Economic Development Canada this year, for the first time the agency did not send his event a public letter congratulating them on their continued success.
Before 1991, former Yugoslavs enjoyed visa-free travel since the mid-1960s, unlike the nations of what used to be communist Eastern Europe. Generations of Serbs grew up travelling freely abroad, but the young now are almost completely unaware of the benefit.
"It was ok to go to Italy for a weekend when I was young," Bogdan Stevovic (54), a Belgrade teacher, told IPS. "However, my 19-year-old son does not know what it looks like. For a week's holiday in Greece he had to queue the whole night in front of the Greek embassy just to submit his visa request in the morning."
[. . .]
[Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo] were omitted from the EC list for visa-free travel. "These countries have not yet fulfilled the conditions," the EC said in its statement. That meant they had not introduced biometric passports, secured their borders or engaged in a fight against organised crime. Visa-free travel for them could be re-examined by mid-2010, the EC statement said.
There was fierce reaction in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where the EC move was viewed as a political message primarily for Bosniak Muslims, who are the largest ethnic group, that suffered the biggest losses in the 1992-95 war, mostly at the hands of Bosnian Serbs.
"It's further discrimination against us Bosniaks," Sarajevo resident Mirsad Juzbasic told IPS on the phone. "It's a shame after what happened here during the war. We'll remain in a kind of a ghetto."
It's different for Bosnian Croats and Serbs. Both are able to obtain passports from their ethnic mother countries, meaning they can hold dual Bosnian and Croat, or Bosnian and Serb citizenship.
Many Bosnian Croats opted for Croatian passports as far back as the mid- 1990s because Croatia was exempt from the visa introduction in 1991.
Bosnian Serbs have realised now that it's easy for them to obtain Serbian passports. "The only problem is we have to wait for Serbian citizenship for 15 months," Jelena Stojkovic (24) told IPS on phone from Banja Luka, capital of Republika Srpska, the ethnic Serb entity within Bosnia. "But it will be good for us. We can see what Europe looks like now."
Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, who declared independence in what Serbia officially considers its southern province in February 2008, are regarded by Serbia as its citizens, but Serbia is unable to provide biometric passports because it has no jurisdiction over the province – even if the ethnic Albanians would want to travel on a Serbian passport.
Toronto Life Square—the massively unattractive ogre on the north-east corner of Yonge and Dundas, which houses not only a Future Shop, Google's local offices, and an AMC that uncomfortably doubles as Ryerson classrooms, but also a vast and ever-growing pool of all of our tears—is "broke," according to the Globe and Mail. What's more: Toronto Life, who scooped up the naming rights in 2007, "has been locked in a months-long legal dispute to remove its name from the project." (Perhaps the magazine finally realized the irony of suggesting that the building that loomed over Dundas Square added anything to Toronto life.)
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