On April 21, nearly two dozen 2SLGBTQI+ and allied organizations put out a list of demands for Ontario’s political leaders.

Twenty-three organizations launched the Queer Vote Ontario (QVO) campaign, which aims to get issues important to the community on the Ontario election agenda.

“2SLGBTQI+ communities make up 10 [percent] of this province but are almost never mentioned by our political parties outside of pride month,” said Fae Johnstone, the campaign’s organizer and the executive director of Wisdom2Action, in a statement. “We are facing rising anti-2SLGBTQI+ hate and a queer youth mental health and homelessness crisis. This election, we demand our parties step up on queer issues.”

Queer Vote Ontario’s campaign features three calls to action on important policy priorities. It also includes a survey for local candidates and a questionnaire for all provincial parties. Ontario residents can sign a pledge to vote for parties who actively support 2SLGBTQI+ communities and send letters directly to party leaders through the website.

Three urgent calls to action

QVO has three specific and urgent calls to action as part of its campaign. According to Tyler Boyce, executive director of the Enchanté Network and a member of the coalition, QVO members together decided upon the CTAs, which were “based on a number of different criteria, most important of which being sustainability of the sector.”

The CTAs will give candidates the opportunity to commit to actions that will support the 2SLGBTQI+ community, if they are elected to government after the June 2022 Ontario election.

Boyce noted in an interview with Future of Good that this gives the political parties “an opportunity and clear instructions on how they can put their actions where their words have been over the past two years.”

#1: Create a Provincial 2SLGBTQI+ Secretariat and Action Plan

Currently, there is a federal-level LGBTQ2 Secretariat, and an Ontario-based one would play a similar role.

The success of that “LGBTQ Secretariat has allowed our sector to have better and stronger relationships with the federal government to better understand federal processes,” said Johnstone in an interview. “The hope and dream of this Secretariat is they would keep our communities on the agenda within government processes.”

According to a statement from QVO, this Secretariat would “play a key role advancing 2SLGBTQI+ health, rights, safety and inclusion across the Government of Ontario, while ensuring the needs and priorities of 2SLGBTQI+ people are considered within all government policies and programs.”

The Secretariat would not just be responsible for listening to the concerns of the community; it would also bring those concerns to the appropriate governmental departments. 

And if the first-ever Ontario 2SLGBTQI+ Action Plan is created, this will allow the community to be prioritized and stay on the agenda.

As Debbie Owusu-Akyeeah, executive director of the Canadian Centre for Gender and Sexual Diversity and another of the campaign’s organizer, pointed out in an interview, the recently released 2022 federal budget showed “funding commitments of around $536 million to implement the national action plan on gender based violence. Those transfers are going to provinces and territories, and so there has to be [an answer to the] question: what are provinces then going to do to ensure that LGBTQ organizations [are not excluded from the funding]?”

The 2SLGBTQI+ Secretariat and Action Plan would ensure that funding gets to where it is needed most within the community.

#2: Create a dedicated annual funding program

The second QVO ask is for a $25 million program for 2SLGBTQI+ social, health, and community services. This would help to “scale up their services to more effectively improve the health and well-being of 2SLGBTQI+ people in Ontario,” according to QVO’s statement.

“Oftentimes, it is the frontline 2SLGBTQI+ organizations… that are filling in the gaps within our health system, employment systems, and migratory systems that are not being met,” Boyce said. “Our members are really doing that work within an underfunded reality – it doesn’t make sense. How can we expect queer and trans organizations to fill the gap in every sector of our public institutions?”

This funding program would help meet the high demands for care that these community organizations are faced with, as well as provide for those in greatest need.

#3: Expand coverage of and access to gender-affirming healthcare

The province of Ontario currently does not cover many health expenses that are necessary for the 2SLGBTQI+ community. The final CTA asks that access to – and coverage for – much-needed healthcare be improved.

“Lack of public health insurance for gender-affirming healthcare means that trans and gender diverse communities, who are disproportionately economically impoverished, must pay out of pocket for medically necessary health services,” QVO’s statement reads.

Gender-affirming healthcare refers to the medically necessary care that allows a person to transition from the gender they were assigned at birth to the one that matches their gender identity. Examples of this care include facial feminization or masculinization surgery and permanent hair removal, among other key procedures. 

When asked for details on how healthcare in the province could be transformed, Johnstone said it could “include working with Ontario health teams as part of health systems transformation to make sure that they are thinking of trans communities in their regional planning.”

She also stressed the need for “more doctors to get [inclusive] training at medical school. We need more physicians who have the willingness and competence to serve our communities.”

Disproportionately impacted by violence 

The most recent Statistics Canada report showed that police-reported hate crimes in 2020 reached an all-time high of 2,669 in total. Ten percent of these crimes targeted 2SLGBTQI+ people. A special 2019 report on LGBTQ2+ communities recorded a total of 263 hate crimes that targeted victims due to their perceived sexual orientation, and more than half of these (53 percent) were classified as violent.

As well, from 2019 to 2020, the largest increases in all reported hate crimes were recorded in Ontario (up by 316 incidents from the previous year). And in every year that data has been available, 2SLGBTQI+ people “tended to be the youngest among hate crime victims and sustain the highest proportion of injury.”

Boyce noted some of the issues that affect the communities his organization works with. “When looking at safety, employment, housing… or health outcomes, 2SLGBTQI+ communities are consistently disproportionately impacted — and this is from data that was before the COVID 19 pandemic. So as we come out of the pandemic, [we need to understand] how these disproportionate realities that existed before have been worsened.”

Owusu-Akyeeah sees this reality through her work with youth. In an interview with Future of Good, she said, “We are seeing a lot of young people who are subjected to certain types of family violence being pushed out of their homes, just for being who they are.” 

A significant portion of Canada’s total youth homelessness population – 25 to 40 percent – identify as 2SLGBTQI+. So that is “a very, very large representation of queer and trans young people who are being pushed out of their homes because they don’t have supportive parents or families,” said Owusu-Akyeeah. 

Before the pandemic, in 2018, 2SLGBTQI+ Canadians were twice as likely as their non-2SLGBTQI+ counterparts (27 percent versus 13 percent) to have experienced homelessness or housing insecurity. Rejection from parents increased their risk of homelessness, according to Statistics Canada. This suggests that the family home may not be a social safety net for 2SLGBTQI+ youth if they lose their access to housing, the way it is for many non-2SLGBTQI+ young people.

Queer- and trans-serving organizations are building power in numbers

“[Queer] organizations are chronically underfunded and have been neglected by decades of provincial governments,” said Owusu-Akyeeah in a statement. “This election, we need all parties to recognize that saying they include us isn’t enough; our communities need clear commitments, with financial resources, to address the crises created by homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia.”

This coalition came together at a time when the sector’s coordination efforts are strong. “Things have shifted… with the establishment of the National LGBTQ Secretariat [and] with the fact that we have organizations like the Enchanté Network, where LGBTQ organizations from coast to coast to coast are connected in a way that they have never been before,” said Owusu-Akyeeah. “[Now we have] that central piece to help with communications and help coordinate advocacy initiatives that are really fighting for the capacity building that our sector has never had… LGBTQ organizations across the country are the most coordinated they’ve ever been.”

However, despite the cross-country advocacy initiatives and improved coordination, 2SLGBTQI+ people’s welfare is still under threat. QVO aims to ensure that 2SLGBTQI+ identities are not erased or forgotten and that their rights, safety, and health are a top priority on the Ontario election agenda this year.

“We have twenty-three civil society organizations who came together without funding, with bootstrap resources, and we’ve got a comprehensive campaign,” Johnstone said. “We are queer, we are here, and we are not going to be left out of this election.”

Taking an intersectional approach

Boyce emphasized that QVO’s advocacy needs to take an intersectional approach in order to be successful. “We understand that in the province of Ontario, the most violent type of hate crime is against queer and trans communities. We also understand that the most common type of hate crime is against Black communities. [So] it’s incredibly important that as we make these asks to the province, we’re asking them to continue to prioritize those most marginalized within… our community.”

Owusu-Akyeeah also confirmed the importance of intersectionality in their work. “For a very, very long time, advocacy on our issues looked a very particular way. They looked very white, they looked very old, and very cis male.”

She notes that because the movement “was being led by the most privileged people in 2SLGBTQI+ communities,… what that meant was that one or two LGBTQ organizations [had the] ear of decision makers.”

This campaign will be different in its approach and aims to ensure that there is “a focus on the most marginalized,” said Boyce, because “that is the way [in which] everybody benefits.”

The current response

As the campaign has just launched, no party has completed the official QVO pledge yet. However, Andrea Horwath, leader of the Ontario NDP, expressed to QVO that she supports the campaign. Horwath also stated that the “NDP will always celebrate and support 2SLGBTQIA+ communities,” and outlined various measures the NDP is committed to, including the creation of a “2SLGBTQIA+ Inclusion Action Plan.” 

The Ontario Liberal Party also released a statement affirming its commitment to specific 2SLGBTQ+-supportive actions. These include the provision of “culturally competent and gender affirming health, mental health and long-term care”, reducing “wait times and barriers to gender-affirming surgeries,” and providing “$20 million to 2SLGBTQ+ community centres, organizations and Prides.”

Boyce wants to remain hopeful that Ontario politicians will understand that their CTAs are reasonable, scalable, and impactful. However, past precedence in Ontario does not give him a lot of reason to be optimistic. 

“Politicians have shown that they’d much rather show up at a pride parade and wave a corporate pride flag than actually take concrete measures to improve the conditions that queer and trans people are living through in the province,” he says.

He also noted that this will be “the province’s first election coming out of a global pandemic, in which every single political party has noted that social inequity has been exacerbated. So it’s my hope that those weren’t just empty words, that the parties are actually ready to take some concrete action to refute the status quo and finally include… the queer and trans agenda into the broader agenda for the province of Ontario.”

Owusu-Akyeeah said the “launching of this campaign will really give our organizations, but also the communities we serve, the answers we really want to see [on where] these parties stand. And I think that’ll be interesting to see.”

When asked how the campaign would sway those in power who may be reluctant to support their initiatives, Johnstone says that their CTAs can also be viewed from an economic lens.

“My argument is that investing in… health services, building capacity, addressing systemic homophobia and transphobia – those are economically viable interventions. We lose so much money due to gay kids being kicked out of their houses – that costs our housing sector millions of dollars, that costs emergency rooms millions of dollars. If we can address systemic homophobia, it simply increases the economic potential of queer and trans people across Ontario. And if [economics is] what the government says it’s all about, this would be my way of showing it.” 

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