Who is funding SOGI?

By Lighthouse News

A Quebec father has discovered that at least two of Canada’s big banks are funding the so-called “SOGI” movement, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The term “SOGI” stands for “Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity”, and describes a new trend in public school curriculum – particularly in BC – which promotes the notion of gender fluidity in the school curriculum. The issue has caused considerable controversy on the west coast, where parent groups are starting to mobilize for this fall’s public school board elections to nominate and elect school trustees who will promise to oppose the program.

But one man in Quebec has stumbled upon a different angle to this controversy. Martin Tampier has a five-year old son, and he says since his child is just about ready to enter the school system, he decided to do some research on the SOGI issue, because the curriculum is set to be introduced into the Quebec school system this September.

In an interview with Lighthouse News, he says he discovered that at least two of Canada’s big banks, RBC and the TD Bank, are contributing hundreds of thousands of dollars to SOGI-related activism in British Columbia. He says he went through some SOGI-related websites back in February, and “all of a sudden there was a page identifying sponsors, and it said ‘TD Bank and RBC’.”

He says that particular web page has since been taken down, but he’s also found other evidence, including an online copy of the minutes of a Parent Advisory Council meeting from Burnaby, BC, which showed RBC had donated $200-thousand dollars to the cause. The Burnaby PAC approved the notion of using $2,000 of that money on things like encouraging student participation in the local Pride parade.

Tampier says since he’s an RBC customer, he raised the issue with the bank; first with his local manager and then with the RBC Ombudsman. “I was quite upset to see that my bank would give money to a cause that has caused so much conflict between parents and schools in British Columbia and the protagonists of the SOGI material over parent’s rights and morality issues around sexuality and so on.” In the end, the Ombudsman closed his file without taking any action.

Tampier says this is part of a larger North American trend of large corporations getting on board with the so-called “diversity” movement. “It’s been a thing that I’ve seen happening over the last few years quite broadly; very much so in the United States, but also here in Canada. It’s really a clash between Christian freedom and religious freedom against LGBTQ rights. That’s really the topic that (comes) up all the time.” He says in the US, this has played out in a number of States which have tried to pass laws against things like trans-gender washrooms, and who have then been faced with a corporate backlash and threats of disinvestment. “It’s become very politicised, with companies now entering the stage and sometimes doing very undemocratic things, like Disney threatening to walk out of Georgia because they’ve passed laws to maintain religious freedom. The same thing happened with PayPal doing the same thing in North Carolina. It’s happening everywhere; it’s happening internationally, and it’s a very undemocratic and – I think – fearsome process where we see very large companies engaging in a very big scale in very divisive political issues in a way that is often not very democratic.”

Tampier has now started an online petition to try to pressure RBC into eliminating the funding.

You can listen to the full Lighthouse News broadcast here.