Early in 2009 six queer Canadians filed a complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission stating that the Canadian healthcare system is homophobic. In their filing document they provided a list of health issues affecting queer Canadians, including lower life expectancy than the average Canadian, higher rates of substance abuse, depression, and inadequate access to care and HIV/AIDS. While G20 countries work to make good on their pledge to cut deficits in half in the next three years, a broad coalition needs to act and raise awareness on how the G20 negatively impacts health.
Looking at current statistics, budget cuts will only worsen a bad situation. According to Health Canada "although they represent only 3.3 percent of the Canadian population, aboriginal persons comprised five to eight percent of existing [HIV] infections and six to 12 percent of new HIV infections." In 2008 gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men made up 45 percent of new HIV infections in Alberta, an increase from the previous year. "Prior to 1996," reports AVERT, "females comprised 14 percent of HIV diagnoses in the age group 15 – 29, whereas in 2007 this proportion was 36 percent." It could be estimated that racailized people are also over represented in HIV cases, but not confirmed as many test sites do not collect information on ethnicity—in many ways a practise that silences or disappears a group of people.
Looking at this collection of statistics and considering the work of early AIDS activists you can understand the devastation they would feel of having worked to ensure those who came after would live longer and with less stigma only to have them harassed by police, suffering greater health risks and caught in judicial purgatory for exercising their democratic freedoms. What is the point of fighting for life when the quality of those lives is comprised?
It is not just through HIV rates that we know minorities are under attack in Canada. If we take a social determinants of health approach to looking at the quality of life for Canadians—the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age—then we see that the Government of Canada is putting our health at risk. The cuts to the Status of Women department, Jason Kenney's editing out of same-sex marriage in immigration documents, the ongoing treatment of aboriginals in Canada, the delisting of gender reassignment surgery and the handling of the G20 arrests and profiling of queer activists all point to the fact that our well being is being ignored.
As queers in some cases we are under attack on multiple sides. Not just for our sexuality or our politics, but also for our economic beliefs, our gender, our skin colour, our background, our definition of family and so on. With this in mind, maybe it's time to pool resources and create our own reality to ensure that all peoples are being taken care of.
In his book Pleasure Consuming Medicine Kane Race advances the idea of "counterpublic health"—a take off from Michael Warner's work on publics/counter publics. In an interview with activist Trevor Hoppe he discusses how creating counterpublic healthcare highlights the limitations of 'public' health care when dictated by a mainstream moral ideology as we have in Canada and points to the benefits of collective organizing, “So much health work and health education today advocates individual solutions to public health problems. But if we think about the early response to HIV/AIDS, it is quite clear that much of its success depended upon creating a shared horizon of concern about the threat, as well as specific contexts of collective self-activity.”
In truth we have to do both. We have to hold governments accountable—as not play into the neo-liberal dream that all individuals will just take care of themselves leaving governments to spend all our taxes on "security"—and we have to work together to ensure we all have the possibility for healthy vital lives.
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