The Government of Canada is investing in the city through Moose Jaw Pride.

Moose Jaw Pride Inc. has announced a $95,000 investment from Western Economic Diversification Canada.

They will be engaging local tourism and service-oriented enterprise in developing gender and sexual diversity positive spaces, places, experiences and employees, providing their front line staff and management teams with gender and sexual diversity education. Through that their hope is to create a culture of LGBTQ positive experiences in Moose Jaw and to work with those sectors to create specific LGBTQ events and programming.

As someone who was born and raised in Moose Jaw, Executive Director of Moose Jaw Pride Taylor Carlson said this is a great sign for the city itself.

Executive Director of Moose Jaw Pride Taylor Carlson.

"In some ways, it represents not only faith in Moose Jaw Pride by the government of Canada. But I feel that because of the complexity and the importance of this investment that it also represents faith in the broader community of Moose Jaw."

Carlson went on to say, "the government of Canada has faith in and believes that the community of Moose Jaw can engage in this kind of work. That's a very interesting and hopeful thing. It's not easy to attempt a culture change, and things take a lot of time. But for them to make this investment in smaller communities, they believe in Moose Jaw. And that Moose jaw can be a more positive and safer space, and can be promoted that way with the government of Canada's logo alongside it."

With the investment, The local Pride organization will be working with stakeholders throughout the tourism and service sector to provide the language, experience and context of LGBTQ voices. The funding will also go towards providing a shared common language so that they can genuinely and honestly market Moose Jaw.

Aa a community that is already one of the most well-known tourist destinations in Saskatchewan, the hope is to also create a positive and friendly LGBTQ community to visit.

"Moose Jaw is the friendly city", said Carlson. "And without taking anything away from that, and only enhancing that reputation, Moose Jaw Pride recognizes that all folks from all places can do better. And we can all do better in many ways. Whether that's with our interactions with newcomers, with folk that are different than us, folks who are differently-abled, and also LGBTQ people. And a lot of that initial important and challenging work begins with having a shared common language and a baseline understanding of the complex reality of people's lives."