Michael Coren has been trying manfully for forever to get the truth out.
Will Maclean’s finally succeed?
One million, eh? Really? That’s about one-fifth of the population of the Greater Toronto Area crammed into a 2-km parade route through downtown city streets. The letter writer, Steven Murray of Victoria, BC, whose math is undoubtedly better than mine, points out that this is “physically and mathematically impossible.” “To fit one million people into that space,” he wrote, “would require 25 people for each square meter—4 to 5 times as many as would physically fit.”
The total surface area of all the streets within the Pride festival grounds, which are bordered by Bloor and Gerrard streets, Yonge and Jarvis streets, is approximately 157,100 metres squared. Aaron Gradeen, a Master’s engineering student at Ryerson University, quickly ran the numbers for me and concluded that even if people were standing shoulder to shoulder in every side street and alley, it would be highly unlikely.
“If you can fit seven people per square metre, it’s possible. That just seems like a tight squeeze.” The parade route itself would be only about 40,000 metres squared. Gradeen says that, assuming the parade route was 20 metres in width and two kilometres in length, you could fit roughly 280,000 people at the parade at any one time. That’s if there’s seven people standing in each square metre of that area.
As an experiment, I taped off one square metre in the newsroom and asked my fellow Maclean’s staffers to stand inside it. At five people, it got awkward. At six, it was feeling quite intimate. At seven, we were clinging to each other to not fall over the taped lines.
Putting the math aside for a moment, here’s a shortcut to understanding that impossible attendance figure. It most likely emerged as an estimate based on a figure in the Economic Impact Report for Toronto Pride in 2009.
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Yes, this matters.
(You just know that the NEW leftwing meme will be, “Who cares? We never talked that much about the number anyway! Tsk!!”)
The seft ALWAYS has to lie for their causes, since the truth is counterproductive to same.
And because Toronto residents (contrary to the coming reeducation/spin campaign, above) are forever being lectured that the city needs to fun Pride because it brings a squilion dollars into the local economy.
(So, presumably, would the construction of a dozen massive death camps, but anyhow…)
If the number of participants is wrong, the amount of revenue is wrong.
So no more funding — at least based on those false numbers.
(We can work on cutting funding entirely after that.)
In fact: someone should sue Pride Toronto for the amount they’ve received based solely on their inflated figures, and force them to refund it to taxpayers.
Any takers?
