In Helvetica type, written on pantone 226 "dusk" coloured nylon, set against our brown urban prairie landscape, a banner affixed to a lamppost overlooking the fountain in front of the Alberta Legislature reads: "Alberta is open." The laughable phrase is punctuated with a period and an asterisk leading the eye underneath, to more comedy, "Because we embrace diversity." In the Corporate Identity Manual chapter 3.4.1 Punctuation (from which I gleamed the typeface name and proper color of the banner) it is written "the use of punctuation re-enforces this as a personal brand, helping us to tell the whole story of Alberta." Indeed it does, especially the asterisk.
In 1998 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in Vriend v. Alberta that all jurisdictions across the country should include sexual orientation under protected grounds in their Human Rights legislation. This was the result of the Edmonton-based case in which Delwin Vriend sued the Alberta government for failing to protect him when he was fired by King's College for being gay. All provinces and territories fully complied at the time—except Alberta. The Progressive Conservative government did not write in the ruling. It was left to sympathetic and industrious, yet hand-tied, staff at the Alberta Human Rights Commission to note the ruling in printed material using an asterisk. So, if after being discriminated against for your sexual orientation you were so wise, bold, enabled or empowered to look up covered grounds for protection you would not see sexual orientation listed along with gender, physical disability, race and other protected grounds, rather you may have noticed an asterisk. If you were not too deflated or frustrated you may have followed it and eventually you would see in small type a line noting that sexual orientation was also covered. Seeing the asterisk was like a second-rate consolation prize, an add-on to assuage the suffering. Now seeing the asterisk waving from its improbable queer pink backdrop is like an ironic slap in the face. Does someone at Alberta's Public Affairs Bureau, responsible for the creation of this banner as part of Alberta's new brand, have no knowledge of the province's recent history? Or is this piece of Alberta corporate identity a sly and/or hurtful wink to the decade-long foot dragging of the Progressive Conservative's failure to fully enshrine sexual orientation into the Alberta Human Rights Act? I can't tell.
What is more offensive than the words, which have been attributed to local, national and international focus groups, is the use of the asterisk.
How is it possible that a symbol that for so long directed many Albertans to acknowledge their government did not embrace them has come to highlight a lie that the province is hoping to pin its reputation on. More than 10 years after the Vriend decision—and mere months after the banner was put up in front of the Legislature—the province, after much activism and lobbying from various LGBT groups, moved to finally fully include sexual orientation into the Alberta Human Rights Act through Bill 44.
Sadly, yet not surprisingly for Alberta queers, the long overdue recognition came with a price—Section 9. The section creates a provision, already similarly included in the Alberta School Act, which allows parents to pull students out of class if they do not agree with what is being taught. Proponents of the clause point out this can include sexual diversity. At the same time as the province was supposedly making inroads at embracing sexual orientation it created an opening in which diversity could be censored. Adding insult to injury, Section 9 came shortly on the heels of the province's announcement that it was no longer funding gender reassignment surgery (GRS), thus further reducing the ways in which Alberta was embracing diversity.
While the asterisk-as-stand-in for the province's lack of tolerance may be removed from the Alberta Human Rights Act it lives on symbolically through systemically anti-diverse practices such as Section 9 and the delisting of GRS and physically as part of Alberta's brand. In hoping to tell us the whole story of Alberta though the use of the asterisk, the brand does so by reminding Albertans that no matter what is sold to us through branding exercises Alberta is not open. Because it does not embrace diversity.
No comments:
Post a Comment