Just days from the opening events of Pride 2023, the provincial government has announced an expanded role in supporting Manitoba’s gender, sexual, and relationship diverse community.
On May 23, Premier Heather Stefanson, Families Minister Rochelle Squires, and Barry Karlenzig, president of Pride Winnipeg, met at the Forks to share the news.
The initiative begins with the creation of the first ever Gender Equity Manitoba grant for $250,000, intended to support permanent staffing within the Pride Winnipeg organization.
“Pride Winnipeg is an incredibly important event that celebrates, acknowledges, and amplifies the need for equity in the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community,” says Squires. “As the annual festival is taking place over the next week, I am proud to be able to announce they are the first recipient of this new grant.”
The fund has been established as a dedicated annual grant whose other purpose is to help support and expand Pride events across the province as well as fund awareness campaigns and research projects.
“After 36 years, it is truly amazing to finally have core funding in place for not only Pride Winnipeg’s future, but for a future for the growing numbers of Prides in our province,” says Karlenzig. “We have been working towards this goal for over three decades. This announcement today signifies the importance of Prides around the province and the crucial funding they require to provide safe spaces for our 2SLGBTTQIA community.”
According to the province, more than 80,000 attendees turn out for province-wide Pride events annually, which plays a significant role in economic impacts to these communities.
“Being 2STLGBQIANB+ in small-town Manitoba can be very isolating and lonely,” says Peter Wohlgemut, president of Pembina Valley Pride. “Pride organizations in these communities are immensely important in supporting and helping members of the Rainbow Community connect with one another. In the same way, Pride organizations in small communities can be very isolated. Predictable, stable funding… will enable these organizations to connect and thereby support one another in their work.”
Separate from the grant announcement, the provincial government will also be expanding the mandate of the Manitoba Status of Women Secretariat to include a broader gender equity focus. The office will now operate under the title of Gender Equity Manitoba (GEM) Secretariat.
GEM will receive an increased budget in order to coordinate their added work on 2SLGBTQQIA+ issues and manage the granting programs.
“We recognize that there is an increasing need to provide community-specific services to the 2SLGBTQQIA+ population,” Stefanson says. “This expanded secretariat will have the financial and human resources necessary to ensure there is cross-departmental coordination of services to better support the needs of the gender, sexual and relationship diverse community.”
Squires will be taking the leadership as the minister responsible for gender equity in the province.
“We know that 2SLGBTQQIA+ people and families continue to face discrimination, harassment, and outright violence in our province—and until that changes, our work is not complete,” says Squires.
As another demonstration of support to the Manitoba-based gender, sexual, and relationship diverse community, the province is promising an additional $490,000 in funding to help reduce wait times for gender-affirming care for youth and adults.
The goal is to help improve access to surgical procedures provided through the Klinic Community Health Centre as well as increase clinician services from 2.5 days per week to five days per week.
Another $700,000 in annual funding will expand Shared Health’s Gender Diversity and Affirming Action for Youth (GDAAY) programming, which provides integrated healthcare and mental health services to individuals 15 years of age and older.
Pride 2023
Winnipeg Pride events will commence with a Pride flag-raising at Memorial Park on May 26 and the Legislature will be lit with a rainbow for the following week.
A weekend full of workshops and events are planned around the city’s downtown area from June 3–4.
This year’s Steinbach Pride parade is scheduled for June 25 at 1:00 p.m.
The RM of Ritchot will once again raise a Pride flag from the municipal building in June.
Locally, after three years in Ste. Agathe, Ember Klaasen is stepping back from organizing a Pride parade in her hometown due to an upcoming move to Paris. She hopes, though, that others from her community will pick up the banner and carry the torch while she’s away.
“Celebrating Pride every year not only shows support, but also brings the community together,” Klaasen tells The Citizen.
She admits to not finding her sense of community connection until she organized her first hometown parade in 2020. The local support, she says, was more than she’d ever anticipated.
“Just knowing that there is a community of people like me in the small town that I grew up in warms my heart,” she says. “It’s so much easier to be happy and to be myself because of my community. Who you are is not a choice. Sexuality and gender are not choices. Everyone deserves to be loved and accepted.”
