A few weeks ago the world gathered in Mexico City for the 17th annual International AIDS Conference (IAC), a multidisciplinary gathering of individuals and organizations involved in the politics, science, healthcare and culture of HIV/AIDS.
Some of the bigger stories emerging from the conference were the need to further integrate the rights of men who have sex with men (MSM) into HIV prevention work, the growing activism amongst sex workers to have their profession legitimized and the news that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has under-reported instances of HIV infection in the US.
But the big story for Canadians at the IAC was not what was being done around the world, but what the Canadian federal government was and was not doing about HIV/AIDS back at home.
Since Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s no-show at the opening ceremony of the 2006 International AIDS Conference held in Toronto—a historically important opportunity for the leader of the host country to address the world about HIV/AIDS—community leaders and activists have been disappointed with the Conservative government’s lack of understanding about what needs to be done in response to HIV/AIDS.
The Conservatives continue to disappoint, recently announcing funding changes that will see less money going to AIDS service organizations and less money being spent on HIV/AIDS altogether.
According to the Canadian AIDS Society (CAS), in 2004 the federal government—after intense lobbying from groups across the country—pledged over five years to double funding to the Canadian Strategy on HIV/AIDS. At its height the federal government was to be spending $84.4 million dollars on HIV/AIDS, working towards the mid-‘90s recommendation that they should be spending $100 million.
But rather than hitting the $100-million mark, or even doubling the contribution, the Harper government has announced that they will be reducing and redirecting monies spent on HIV/AIDS in Canada by $26 million over the next five years to focus on the internationally focused Canadian HIV Vaccine Initiative (CHVI), as well as to meet a 2004 Liberal budget cut they say was to come into affect now anyway. The redirected funds will be going towards microbicide and vaccine research, something that has HIV/AIDS activists and frontline workers upset.
As activist Louise Binder, chair of the Canadian Treatment Action Council explained at a CAS press conference at the Mexico City conference, “It was always agreed by those providing the funding and the community with which they consulted that large research endeavours, including those for vaccines and microbicides, would not come from this [community] source of money because it would immediately swallow up the fund.”
While some estimates say the federal government will now allocate as much as $5 million towards the CHVI, a collaborative initiative with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Dr David Butler-Jones, the chief public health officer of Canada has said the figure is actually $3 million.
What is agreed, however, is that the money will not be going to community organizations, something experts agree is a mistake. According to a statement by CAS at the IAC, “The best way to contain the epidemic in the short-term is by providing sustained funding to community-based AIDS service organizations, which will enable them to effectively continue offering the treatment, support, education and prevention programs they already provide.”
For Binder, who lobbies on behalf of people living with HIV, the reduction in funding and the redirecting of money is proof of the lack of leadership coming from Harper’s government.
“This is a matter of national shame,” she told delegates at the IAC. “When young girls are being infected at ever-higher rates, when Aboriginal people are so over-represented in new infections, when Caribbean and African Canadians are being infected at escalating rates, when HIV infection rates among men who have sex with men are climbing again ... we need leadership, not abdication of responsibility.”
For Albertans, the federal cuts mean $50 000 less will be spent on HIV prevention and AIDS awareness in the province. With over 4000 cases of people living with HIV in Alberta, and ever-increasing STI rates that experts look at as a sign of increased HIV infections in the near future, the loss of money means AIDS service organizations will be making choices based on financial considerations, rather than on the needs of clients and the community.
Jennifer Vanderschaeghe, the executive director of the Red Deer-based Central Alberta AIDS Network Society, is finding herself forced to make difficult choices about where to focus scarce resources.
“Unless we move buildings—which is not an option—then I am going to have to cut prevention work because there is no way I can reduce the amount of frontline work we do,” she says.
As Vanderschaeghe sees it, the redirection of money simply doesn’t make sense. “The negative impacts of cutting community funding will be felt long before the positive effects of a possible vaccine.”
HIV Edmonton Executive Director Deborah Jakubec agrees.
“Great, work on a vaccine,” she says, “just don’t take away money from the community.”
Jakubec says the cuts mean a loss of $13 000 for AIDS work in Edmonton next year, which will mean less support and prevention work being done in the capital city, and an increased workload on already busy staff.
For Daven Seebarran, executive director of AIDS Wood Buffalo, the cuts from the federal level will have a disastrous effect in Fort McMurray and the surrounding areas the agency serves.
Dealing with a record amount of drug addiction and homelessness, along with a transient population and other social conditions that raise the risk of HIV transmission, Fort McMurray is bracing for a difficult year. The funding cut will mean 10 000 fewer condoms will be distributed in the city, and the loss of the agency’s peer ambassador program that does prevention, awareness and support outreach with urban poor, rural, sex worker and other at-risk populations.
The cuts, Seebarran says, also represent all the work the agency can’t even dream of doing, which he says could have disastrous implications.
“This will result in greater numbers of people being infected as we are unable to stem the tide of the epidemic,” predicts Seebarran. “With the boom of Fort McMurray, we need more funding to prevent the epidemic from getting out of control, not less.”
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