Toronto to Host 2014 Homosexual “World Pride” Event
By Thaddeus M. Baklinski
TORONTO, October 19, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Organizers of the homosexual festival known as World Pride announced yesterday that Toronto was chosen over Stockholm to host the 2014 event. “We are delighted to have been awarded this opportunity to bring the world to Toronto,” said Mark Singh, chair of the Toronto World Pride committee. “The advent of a festival like this is an opportunity to highlight the acceptance of the queer community by Canadians.”
A delegation made up of officials of Tourism Toronto, the Toronto police, Toronto Dominion Bank, and the city, lobbied World Pride officials at their annual conference in St. Petersburg, Florida to persuade them to give the event to Toronto, according to a Sunmedia report.
Organizers of Toronto’s annual pride parade claim that this summer’s Pride Week drew an estimated one million people to Toronto and contributed $136-million to the city’s economy – numbers that pro-family critics have said are vastly overinflated.
Tracey Sandilands, executive director of Pride Toronto, told Toronto television station CP24 that the planned 2014 event will be vastly bigger and draw correspondingly bigger crowds.
“World Pride is going to be about five times bigger,” Sandilands said.
However, if World Pride 2014 were to be five times larger than this past years’ event, the number of participants would be approximately twice the size of the population of Toronto, which is currently about 2.5 million.
So-called “Gay Pride” celebrations are renowned the world over for their sordid and public displays of sexual behavior. Brian Rushfeldt, Executive Director of the Canada Family Action Coalition (CFAC), told LifeSiteNews.com earlier this year, in regard to Pride Toronto, that the event is “not a gay parade, it’s a sex parade … People are marching down the street nude and doing all kinds of things.”
The Toronto event will be the fourth scheduled World Pride since the event’s inception in Rome in 2000, which was also the only such event to have actually taken place.
A planned World Pride carnival in the holy city of Jerusalem in 2006 was cancelled after outrage expressed by Christian, Jewish and Moslem leaders, and the outbreak of military action between Israel and Hezbollah.
The third World Pride, in 2012, is scheduled to be held in London, England, just prior to the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
To contact Toronto’s mayor:
David Miller
Toronto City Hall, 2nd Floor
100 Queen St. West, Toronto ON M5H 2N2
Phone: 416-397-2489
Fax: 416-696-3687
Email: [email protected]
