Activists marked World AIDS Day on Monday by calling on the federal government to honour a Trudeau government promise to reform the laws on HIV disclosure, and to provide enough funding to get Canada's efforts to end the pandemic back on track.
The HIV Legal Network says Canada's stalled progress on preventing new HIV cases — especially among Indigenous people in the Prairies — is costing governments millions of dollars.
"We have failed to meet these targets by virtually every metric," the group's co-director Sandra Ka Hon Chu told a news conference last Thursday on Parliament Hill.
She cited data from the Edmonton-based Institute of Health Economics, which pegged the average lifetime cost of a new HIV infection at roughly $1.44 million. While that sum is mostly due to lost productivity, it includes $310,000 in direct health care costs.
New data released Monday by the Public Health Agency of Canada said there were 1,826 new HIV diagnoses outside Quebec in 2024, a figure Ottawa says represents a "small decline" after several years of increases.
HIV analysis group CATIE said Monday that the drop likely stems from changes in diagnosis casework, and "should not be interpreted as a reduction in HIV transmission," which modelling suggests is still going up.
Activists argue Canada is still seeing new cases in part because communities most affected by HIV avoid testing and treatment due to the risk of prosecution.
Canadians living with HIV can be prosecuted for not disclosing their status to sexual partners, even when they are taking prescription drugs the Public Health Agency of Canada says renders HIV "untransmittable" to someone without the virus.
"The law does not reflect the scientific reality," André Capretti, a policy analyst with the HIV Legal Network, said at last week's news conference.
"The criminalization of HIV non-disclosure is not only discriminatory and scientifically outdated, it also undermines everything that we are trying to achieve. It drives people away from testing, from treatment and care."
The HIV Legal Network says at least 206 people have been charged in Canada for allegedly not disclosing their HIV status through at least 224 criminal cases since 1989.
Service organizations say people are being threatened with arrest for non-disclosure of HIV status every few months. While such cases don't always lead to arrest, a sexual assault prosecution can put an individual on the National Sex Offender Registry.
The Liberals have been promising to fix the issue since 2016 and issued advice to prosecutors in 2018 meant to prevent them from laying criminal charges when there is no realistic possibility of transmission.
But nearly a decade later, it's not clear whether the government of Prime Minister Mark Carney will follow through on the Trudeau government's stalled plan to reform disclosure laws.
On the social media platform X, Carney reposted a video of Health Minister Marjorie Michel attending an event with activists Monday.
The prime minister also said in a post that on World AIDS Day, "we remember victims and stand in solidarity with advocates, survivors, and communities leading the fight against HIV/AIDS."
"Advances in medical science have transformed what it means to live with HIV, though the stigma has not vanished," said Carney's post, which did not reference criminalization. "Too many Canadians still face the weight of that stigma alone. Together, we can build a country where every Canadian can live with dignity."
Michel issued a statement that made no reference to criminalization.
Justice Minister Sean Fraser's office said it has been consulting with various groups, including by having his parliamentary secretary, MP Patricia Lattanzio, give remarks at a panel on the issue last week.
"Our work is ongoing and we are engaging with stakeholders at this time," wrote spokeswoman Lola Dandybaeva, in a statement that also did not reference criminalization.
The HIV Legal Network also took aim Monday at restrictions on needle and syringe programs in prisons to prevent the spread of HIV, and at provinces cutting back on supervised injection sites.
On Monday, MPs and senators in the Global Equality Caucus — an international network of parliamentarians dedicated to tackling discrimination against LGBT+ people — called on Ottawa to boost spending for treatment and prevention to put Canada on track to meet global targets.
"Progress is at risk of being undone by complacency," reads a joint statement endorsed by 17 Canadian senators and five MPs, including Liberals Rob Oliphant and Hedy Fry.
Ottawa's own statistics put Canada behind most G7 countries on efforts to end the spread of the disease — Canada trails the U.K. on all three indicators and France, Italy and Germany on ensuring those with HIV are aware of their status.
The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS says funding cuts by countries like Canada and the U.S. — which have helped to reduce global funding for AIDS campaigns in developing countries by about a third — are undermining progress on ending the epidemic worldwide.
Last month, the head of UNAIDS urged Carney to reverse Canada's first-ever cut to the Global Fund, a major program for fighting infectious diseases in the world's poorest countries, as well as his overall aid cut.
The government has argued it is aligning aid spending to levels that existed before the COVID-19 pandemic, but UNAIDS says there could be a drastic uptick in suffering as Washington and its peers withdraw foreign aid.
Picture Courtesy: AP Photo/Yirmiyan Arthur
