Peter Hudson is a writer currently researching the history of North American banking in the Caribbean. He teaches in the Department of African-American Studies at SUNY Buffalo.
By Peter James Hudson
Caribana, Toronto’s annual carnival, takes place on the first weekend of August. An initiative of Caribbean migrants that first took to the streets in 1967, today it has become the most spectacular and largest street festival in North America, attracting carnival aficionados and visitors from across the world. Caribana is not, however, without its contradictions. This week, Peter Hudson considers the double-edged sword of corporate sponsorship of the festival, celebrated by the diasporic Caribbean community as an integral part of Canadian culture today.
The announcement in early March that Canada’s Scotiabank had entered into a two-year agreement to sponsor Caribana, Toronto’s annual carnival, was greeted with neither jubilation nor outrage, but, it seems, a slightly jaded, typically Canadian, indifference. And no wonder. Caribana’s ongoing fiscal woes and administrative tribulations have become as predictable as Lent, while many Torontonians’ views of Caribana are colored by a hopeless nostalgia: invariably it seems, Caribana was better back in the day before it was tainted by hip hop, before the parade location moved from University Avenue to the edge of downtown at Lakeshore Boulevard, or before it left the golden year of its birth, 1967.
But perhaps what was most striking about this indifference was not what it says about the way people view Caribana, but what it says about how people view banking and, more broadly, the relationship of global corporations to culture.
In many ways the sponsorship is a good thing. While Caribana was, as they say, the Caribbean community’s gift to Canada during the country’s Centennial celebrations, the sad fact is that in many ways this gift has been rejected. Or perhaps it’s better to say that Canada took the gift and rejected the giver. Caribana, much like Canada’s Caribbean-descended youth, has been the country’s stepchild, an annoying and unwanted burden. Caribana is routinely neglected by both government and corporate sponsors despite its size (it is the largest festival of its kind in North America, regularly bringing out over a million people), the money it brings in to the city (an estimated $300 million last year), and the length of time it has been on the scene (over forty years). A thinly-veiled racism suggests that Caribana is the cultural product of a non-native, migrant community whose cultures and traditions are marginal, foreign, even un-Canadian.
With Scotiabank on board as a major corporate sponsor, Caribana gleans a long-overdue mainstream legitimacy that will surely encourage other funders to step up to the plate. It joins a stable of Canadian cultural events and institutions supported by the bank to the tune of $46 million in 2006. Hockey Night in Canada, the long running Saturday-night staple of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, features a pre-game segment called Scotiabank Hockey Tonight.
The National Hockey League’s Ottawa Senators play at the Scotiabank Place. In Toronto, Scotiabank Nuite Blanche offers an annual, city-wide dusk-to-dawn revelry of performances and art exhibitions. One of the country’s richest literary awards is named the Scotiabank Giller prize, the bank’s name prominently displayed on the cover of the nominated novels. The library of the University of Toronto has a Scotiabank Information Commons. Across the country Scotiabank Cinemas offer the latest Hollywood fare.
Scotiabank has stated that their sponsorship of Caribana continues their long history of investment in the Caribbean. Founded in 1832 in Halifax as the Bank of Nova Scotia, the bank’s profits initially came through the maritime trade in cod, sugar, molasses, and rum between Canada and the West Indies. In 1889 it opened its first offices in the region in Kingston and rapidly asserted itself as the British colony’s most influential financial institution. It opened branches across the island and accumulated local deposits while acting as banker to the colonial government and issuing local currency. It would not relinquish these latter responsibilities until the establishment of the Bank of Jamaica in 1961. In the meantime, the bank expanded throughout the region and opened branches in Havana in 1906, San Juan in 1910, and Santo Domingo in 1920. Today, Scotiabank maintains a presence in practically every state and dependency in the Caribbean and Central America, from Anguilla to the Virgin Islands, as part of a network of more than 2,100 branches stretched over fifty countries and five continents.
Scotiabank has also claimed that their Caribana sponsorship is a way of supporting Toronto’s ethnic diversity. “Scotiabank Caribana makes our community a richer one by celebrating the diversity of the city,” they have stated in press release. Surely, while “celebrating diversity” could also be read as “corralling new customers,” this attitude towards race and ethnicity is more progressive than the one displayed by the bank in past.
Back then, “diversity” wasn’t seen as worth celebrating and people of color, especially people of African descent, were viewed as culturally backward – little good as either workers or bank customers. A 1908 article in the bank’s staff journal, The Nova Scotian, claimed that “the Jamaican negro … will not work as long as he has any money.” Thirty years later Daisy Murphy, wife of a Jamaican branch manager, echoed this sentiment. In “Jamaica: Rich Man’s Playground – Poor Man’s Paradise,” published in the Canadian Banker in 1938 Murphy describes the majority of Jamaicans as “born gamblers” who were “too lazy to work.” Murphy’s comments don’t necessarily explain the bank’s willingness to hire Jamaicans as messengers and janitors, though it does perhaps clarify why it took the bank close to a century to hire a Jamaican-born General Manager, preferring instead to give the administrative jobs to Canadian-born (read: white) staff.
Either way, now Scotiabank appears ready to embrace the Caribbean community, both at home and abroad, take their money, and recognize their contribution to Canadian culture. But at what price comes recognition? Next week’s column will address this question.
