“When they roll back, we double down”
The following statement can be attributed to Colin Druhan, Executive Director, Pride at Work Canada / Fierté au travail Canada:
In recent months, mainstream media coverage has fixated on the decision of a small number of companies to pause corporate support for this year’s Pride celebrations. Much of this reporting has relied on overly simplistic narratives that ignore well-documented economic pressures, including a looming recession and the broader fallout from ongoing trade instability between the United States and Canada.
To Pride at Work Canada’s knowledge, many of these decisions are not the result of values-based backpedaling, but rather a combination of tightening budgets and evolving strategies designed to better meet the actual needs of Two Spirit, queer, and trans employees. After more than a decade of community voices declaring that “Pride is a protest” and that corporate advertising is not always welcome, the best companies have gotten the message. We’ve seen some redirect their support to community-led, service-oriented organizations—where it often belongs. Meanwhile, those that never cared to begin with have quietly dropped the superficial efforts that were never making an impact anyway. To them, we say: good riddance to bad rubbish.
More recently, Canadian media have centred their attention on the sponsorship challenges of a single Pride organization. While that organization holds a prominent place in the public imagination—especially among straight and cisgender audiences—its experience is not representative of the broader landscape. It cannot, and should not, be used as a barometer for how Corporate Canada or the wider public views the human rights and dignity of Two Spirit, queer, and trans people.
Pride at Work Canada hastily developed our Emergency Messaging Guide earlier this year in direct response to a wave of U.S. executive orders—titles like “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism” leave no doubt as to their intention: to dismantle equity-focused institutions and deny queer and trans people our safety, visibility, and rights. Tragically, some media coverage has mirrored that same callousness, stoking division instead of fostering understanding.
We reject that kind of discourse outright. Human rights are not optional corporate values subject to political trends—they are long-established legal obligations. We’re not interested in reducing people’s dignity to a headline or talking point just to feed the media’s insatiable appetite for our communities’ traumas.
To date, most of the feedback we’ve received on the Emergency Messaging Guide has come from individual workers—not from the companies it was written for. These individuals are deeply concerned about their safety and bodily autonomy. That’s why we’re redeveloping and relaunching our Know Your Rights guide this fall: to ensure that workers—wherever they are—have the tools to understand and assert their human rights, including the right to safety and the right to speak out against injustice.
Historically, when institutions roll back or deny our freedoms, our communities have had to double down—supporting one another to meet the moment and rise to the challenge. That’s exactly what Pride at Work Canada intends to do.
If we are to move forward, it won’t be because of rainbow logos. It will be because communities and workers know their rights, stand up for one another, and refuse to be erased.