More than a million people were treated to a vibrant display of colour and sound at Toronto carnival’s grand parade on the August long weekend, which has been described as the “premier” Caribbean festival outside of Trinidad.

Eight years after losing control of the event, the group that ran the festival for nearly four decades wants it back.

“The fact that we’ve lost control is so sad because people in our community fight about this,” said Knia Singh, who chairs the Caribana Arts Group. “Let’s get it back and when we get it back let’s fix it from within,” said Singh of the festival, which is now called the Scotiabank Caribbean Carnival Toronto.

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The event was created in 1967 by the Caribbean Cultural Committee — which changed its name in 2005 to the Caribana Arts Group — as a centennial celebration.

By 2009, the festival was pouring more than $438 million into the local economy, according to a Ryerson study.

But by then the founding organization had already lost control, after being dogged for years by infighting, mismanagement and debt.

In 2006, the committee was told it couldn’t get a city grant because of an incomplete audit in 2004 and a second audit a year later that showed the misappropriation of $9,000. The Festival Management Committee, created as an arm’s-length organization by the city, took over and is still running the event. The bank signed on as a sponsor in 2006.

This doesn’t sit well with board members of the Caribana Arts Group.

“I see it as a bank festival, I don’t see it as a Caribbean festival,” says Henry Gomez, who joined the organization in the late ’80s. “It’s almost like a corporate party to which others are invited.

“But here is a festival we built over 45 years into one of the most successful branding stories in the last 50 years, one that is known internationally. Those things should be clearly and unequivocally tied to the black community.”

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In 1966, a group of people in Toronto’s downtown Caribbean community decided to host an event to celebrate the country’s centennial. They included the late George Lowe, a land surveyor for the city; town planner Peter Marcelline; Dr. Alban Liverpool; lawyer Charles Roach; and dentist Maurice Bygrave. This group of friends formed what they called the Caribbean Cultural Committee.

With less than $50,000 raised through donations, the organization held the first Caribana event a year later. It was a cultural exhibition of art, music and poetry, complete with a parade. The world-renowned Esso Tripoli Orchestra, a steel-pan band sent by the Trinidadian government to Montreal’s Expo 67, kicked off the festival with a performance at Maple Leaf Gardens.

About 1,000 people took part in a parade from Varsity Stadium to the ferry docks.

“We were very proud of what we achieved in that first year,” says Bygrave, who was born in Jamaica in 1940 and came to Canada in 1954. “We shared our culture with Canadians and the festival garnered international attention.”

Year after year, the committee members used their own money to keep the festival afloat.

Bygrave says the dream back then was to see it generate scholarships for young people, build cultural centres and libraries, and a dedicated venue for Caribana. The founder wanted to see the island associations benefit and to see opportunities for children to learn the Trinidadian steel pan drums and to hear songs played on the radio by the Calypso monarch, the winner of the annual Calypso contest.

Bygrave calls the events of 2006 “unfortunate.”

“Some of it was our fault,” he says of the Caribbean Cultural Committee. “There was infighting. It’s hard to make a volunteer organization work.”

But “I don’t think the interests of our community are being served,” he says, adding that the Caribbean Cultural Committee would have been better positioned had it had the support that the Festival Management Committee enjoys.

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Councillor Joe Mihevc , who has served as the festival’s city council liaison since 1998, is sitting at a board table in his second-floor City Hall office. The windows look south over Nathan Phillips Square, the site of the July 8 kickoff for this year’s three-week Scotiabank Caribbean Carnival.

Before the FMC took over, money was always a problem, says Mihevc.

In 2001-02, the CCC wrote off hundreds of thousands of dollars in debts to suppliers and to the city. The city gave a grant to the committee to organize the festival but charged back for services such as garbage pickup, park fees and transportation, according to Mihevc.

He says from one year to the next, three-quarters of the CCC board would turn over and new members would refuse to pay the debts of the previous board. And there was infighting among different Caribbean nationalities that were battling for control.

Toronto’s carnival is an amalgam of Caribbean cultures that includes the mas bands — modelled after the Trinidadian masquerades, which celebrate the end of slavery in 1838. Originally, freed men and women dressed in the Easter clothes of their former owners and paraded down the road. Jamaican slaves marked emancipation with a masked parade called “John Canoe.”

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“There’s different politics,” says Mihevc of the various island groups. “It’s complex.”

When the CCC ran the event, there were constant complaints and a parade of people showing up at his door, he says.

“ ‘The Jamaicans are taking over,’ ” he would hear. “ ‘The band leaders are taking over.’

The final straw for Mihevc was the audits: “I would not have been able to get the grant money through council,” he says of the $400,000 the city usually provided, an amount matched by the province. “Staff were recommending that we pull the plug.”

The climate in 2006 at City Hall had changed after the MFP scandal, which saw a computer-leasing deal increase without proper authorization from $43 million approved by council in 1997 to $85 million.

And Mihevc says Toronto wasn’t the city of festivals it is now.

“The support and the love that is for the festival today was not there,” says Mihevc. “Some of it had to do with race. Some of it had to do with new immigrants coming in. Our history is a pretty straitlaced WASP culture.”

With only three months to go until Caribana in 2006, funding was in jeopardy, the band leaders were ready to revolt and there was an intense debate in the Caribbean community over the leadership of the CCC.

“It was a major mess,” he says. “That was my analysis.”

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Money, or lack thereof, would be a constant theme for Caribana, as it was called back then.

Everyone the Star interviewed agrees the event has been chronically underfunded.

In 1996, Caribana was pulled back from the brink after Toronto City Council and Metro Council gave the CCC two $100,000 lines of credit. Sponsorship deals were scarce and organizers that year could rustle up only $170,000 from the business community, according to a story in the Star.

Money was so short that in some years the kings and queens of the mas bands, which compete each year for the honour to lead the parade, weren’t paid their prize money.

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Stephen Weir, who has handled public relations for the Caribbean festival on and off since 1998, and who now does work for FMC, says,”You get to a point where you have to decide, should you give the mas bands their money or should we get fences and porta-potties? Or do we pay the police, because the police wanted to be paid in cash? All of those were decisions that meant some group within the festival got screwed.”

The organizers also had to pay for private security along the parade route, health inspections and the cleanup afterward.

Some years, says Weir, “all that took precedence over paying the mas bands. So yes, there was friction. But it was an economic friction as opposed to it being philosophical.

The governance structure of the CCC was also to blame, says Weir. If there were enough group members in a meeting to have quorum, they could vote out the current board at any time, even during the festival season.

In 2006, when Caribana was again in trouble, Mihevc turned for help to Joe Halstead, the retired city commissioner of economic development, culture and tourism.

CCC chair Charles Roach, one of the original founders, feared it was an imperialistic takeover by City Hall, but Mihevc says his only thought was to save the festival.

“We could not give monies to an organization that was not in good standing with the city,” he says. “We would be clobbered publicly. “We do not have, and we never have had, any interest in taking over the festival. We wouldn’t know how to do it if we wanted to.”

Mihevc made Halstead chair of the arm’s-length Festival Management Committee.

Glen Grunwald, who was president and CEO of the Toronto Board of Trade, and members from the Ontario Steel Pan Association and the Toronto Mas Bands Association also joined the group. FMC was awarded the annual grant.

The CCC board members thought the arrangement would last a year.

That understanding came from a written accord between the two groups that Halstead signed after Roach launched a Hands Off Caribana campaign. The agreement stated that the FMC was created as a “neutral, arm’s-length body” to “provide overall governance and financial oversight for the 2006 festival.” It would expire Dec. 31, 2006.

In the meantime, the CCC reorganized, changing its name to the Caribana Arts Group. A board member accused of misappropriating $9,000 was taken to court, Gomez says. “We wanted to demonstrate we were doing the right thing.”

The FMC continued to run the festival.

“What really happened,” says Mihevc, “was the FMC took over on an emergency basis. Then it did it again the next year. And you know what? Things went so smoothly that they just kept doing it. All the acrimony that had filled the newspapers for years beforehand disappeared. And that’s because of the leadership and also because of the multi-stakeholder nature of the FMC.”

Roach and Gomez joined the FMC, but the two groups fell out and the Caribana Arts Group left permanently in 2010.

“It was a slow downward progression of co-operation,” says Knia Singh, who joined the group as secretary in 2008 and became the chair last year. The final straw was the sponsorship deal with Scotiabank.

“We were always told by Charles Roach that it was our festival,” says Singh, of the former chair who died in 2012, “that FMC was arm’s-length but we were still in control. When they got Scotiabank on as a sponsor without asking us, that’s when we found out something was wrong.”

The Caribana Arts Group wanted the festival to be called “Caribana presented by Scotiabank,” but FMC had already signed the deal. “We weren’t in control the way we thought we were.”

The Caribana name, trademarked by the CCC in 1977, continued to be used by the FMC until 2010 because of an alleged secret licensing deal made by Roach, although no money changed hands. The licensing deal was the subject of a lawsuit against the Roach estate, Scotiabank and the Festival Management Committee, which was settled this year.

The Caribana Arts Group has never returned to the FMC.

Groups who participate in Scotiabank’s Caribbean carnival aren’t allowed to take part in any other competing festival in the GTA, according to an FMC contract. The Caribana Arts Group started a junior festival, called Flags and Colours, at the Yorkgate Mall near Jane and Finch in 2012.

Halstead, who was privy to the audits, believes “there was no misappropriation of funds. It was more about the ability to document properly, to account properly.”

The festival was a success in 2006, he says, and even made a small profit: “There were a lot of good volunteers out there, people who had worked on the festival in previous years, regardless of who ran it.”

His view is that “the festival just outgrew the CCC. When I came in they had no paid staff. It was all volunteers, people who were actually working full-time jobs who would come in the evenings after work and start trying to manage the festival from the side of a desk.”

When he wrote his report to the city, his recommendation was that FMC should continue running the festival.

The Festival Management Committee is run by chief administrative officer Chris Alexander and CEO Denise Herrera-Jackson, two former long-time volunteers with the Caribbean festival. They are appointed by a board. Both are paid by the organization but also do outside work as consultants.

The FMC’s one full-time position is an office administrator.

“Everybody does full-time work,” says Alexander. “We work more than the average person — night and day. It’s the nature of the festival,” which he says is run on a “shoestring.”

Most of the money still pays for the essentials: porta-potties, venue rentals, music, stage, sound, lighting, catering tables, chairs and golf carts.

Sometimes arrangements are made with suppliers to pay later, and donations are negotiated.