The federal government’s HIV funding still falls short of the recommendations

In 2006, then Prime Minister Stephen Harper came under fire for refusing to attend an international conference on HIV/AIDS on Canadian soil.

But just 16 years later, as the world battles monkeypox and a COVID-19 pandemic, it almost seemed like the AIDS conference had become an afterthought.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was unable to attend this year’s conference in Montreal. Harjit Sajjan, the Minister for International Development, was due to attend the conference but his appearance was canceled the day before the conference started and no representative attended in his place.

Sajjan announced on July 29 that the federal government will provide an additional US$15 million contribution to the multinational organization UNAIDS between 2023 and 2025 to address the HIV/AIDS crisis on a global scale.

On Monday, Duclos announced the federal government would provide a one-time funding boost of $17.9 million for the country’s HIV response — with $8 million to fund HIV self-testing, which normally costs $35 each -dollars cost.

Duclos says the other $10 million will go towards expanding community-based HIV testing in northern, remote or isolated communities in Canada.

“Making testing more available by making it directly available to people helps break down the barriers that too often prevent people from getting tested, treated and treated,” Duclos told reporters at an AIDS 2022 news conference .

While organizations like the Community Based Research Center (CBRC) in Vancouver are excited about the additional funding, the $18 million boost still falls short of the approximately $27 million needed to meet the claims to meet a 2003 health care coalition and bipartisan recommendation in 2019 to allocate $100 million annually to the federal HIV response.

For CBRC Executive Director Jody Jollimore, funding presents two problems; Not only is it a one-off boost, but the funding is too vague to determine its effectiveness.

“The prime minister’s opening of the conference would have signaled that Canada is serious about the HIV response,” Jollimore said, adding that many of his colleagues, friends and fellow activists were “very upset” by Trudeau’s absence.

The NDP bemoans the Liberals’ “lack of leadership” on the HIV response

According to the federal NDP, the Liberal government has shown a “lack of leadership” in meeting HIV goals across the country.

In a statement released Tuesday, NDP health critic Don Davies noted the Liberal funding push still falls short of the $100 million pledged by the 18-organization health coalition ahead of the conference. The additional funding is still below the 2003 and 2019 bipartisan recommendations for a $100 million annual federal allocation to fight HIV/AIDS.

Davies warned that the number of HIV infections is increasing worldwide. At the same time, access to treatment is slowing down. Even more blatantly, the Public Health Agency of Canada says that since 2018 nearly $125 million earmarked by the federal government for HIV/AIDS has gone unspent.

Addressing hundreds of visa denials by the government that prevented both delegates and researchers from attending the conference in Montreal last week, Davies said the decision had “critical voices from countries hardest hit by HIV/AIDS affected are excluded from an important conversation”.

“We cannot take a serious role in eradicating the spread of this disease without engaging the experts who are on the front lines of this fight,” Davies said in the release.

“Worse, Canada’s refusal to grant visas to many people from Africa has sent a message of race-based decision-making that shames our international reputation,” he added. “The absurdly long time it takes Canadian immigration authorities to make decisions for a well-convened conference is incompetent at best and disgraceful at worst.”

“Activism is a legacy of the AIDS movement”

The biggest news from the conference focused on the number of new HIV infections registered worldwide in 2021 – 1.5 million – which surpassed the United Nations global target by 500,000 people. The data shows even more clearly that every two minutes a young woman becomes infected with HIV. Not only that, every minute someone around the world dies from an AIDS-related disease.

Jollimore noted that a colleague attending the conference for the first time was impressed by the amount of activism that took center stage during the conference.

“Activism is a legacy of the AIDS movement,” he said. “It’s one of the health issues that’s very political and has led to a lot of activism and you see that’s alive and well.”

The conference was not without controversy after the Canadian government refused entry to Canada to hundreds of registered delegates who wanted to attend the conference, presumably because of their HIV-positive status.

The organizers of the international AIDS conference responded by writing a letter to Trudeau, expressing disappointment at the government’s decision to bar delegates from entering Canada.

“The exclusion of these delegates, who hail from communities and countries most affected by HIV, is a blow to the global HIV community’s efforts to restart the HIV response,” the letter said.

When it comes to future international AIDS conferences, Jollimore suggests organizers scrutinize the host country’s visa policy to ensure “everyone has the same expectations of who gets to attend the conference.”

“If the host country cannot meet those expectations, it should not be selected,” he added.

August 4, 2022 – Editor’s note: That article originally stated: “Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos only announced his appearance on the fourth day of the conference, after days of concerns among researchers, activists and conference participants that no federal government representative would be attending the international event.” However, this was Is not it. Minister Duclos was due to attend the event from the start of the conference. This line has now been removed and the piece has been updated.

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