From today’s Globe and Mail:

Federal funding for community AIDS programs in Ontario is being slashed as the Conservative government readjusts overall spending and redirects money to an AIDS vaccine initiative it announced earlier this year with Bill Gates.

Money that helps prevent local organizations stem the spread of the virus and provide support to those infected is being reduced by 30 per cent across the province in this fiscal year.

[...]

Peter Hayes, executive director of the AIDS Committee of London, said the funding cuts will mean the end of programs such as one that addresses the higher rate of AIDS and HIV in the gay male population. “The reality is we are making headway in infection rates in our gay male population and to pull that resource now prevents us from really being able to continue,” Mr. Hayes said.

[...]

While the special-projects money anticipated by the community groups in Ontario has been cut by 60 per cent, Ms. [Rita] Smith[, a spokeswoman for Health Minister Tony Clement] said the actual program funding has not been touched and the total amount trimmed comes to just over a million dollars.

And she said the cuts were actually approved by the Liberals while they were still in office.

But Carolyn Bennett, the Liberal MP who was at one time the minister responsible for the Public Health Agency of Canada, said her government always juggled money within the agency to ensure that the community AIDS groups received all the funding they had been promised.

Well, fuck.

World AIDS Day is two days away and the Conservative government of Stephen Harper chooses this time to yank funding for HIV prevention?

I can’t — and won’t — downplay the importance of an HIV vaccine, nor will I dump on the valuable work of Bill and Melinda Gates in throwing a staggering amount of cash toward this important research. But pulling between 30 and 60% of funds allocated for HIV prevention programs — and pointing fingers at the previous government while doing so — is abominable.

And remember, this is from the government whose leader found it necessary to visit the remotest part of Canada while the 16th International AIDS Conference was taking place in Toronto last year. Surprising? No. Disgusting? Fuck, yeah.

More than twenty-five years into the pandemic, HIV infection rates greater than zero are still cause for concern — if not alarm — and the prevention programs gutted by this decision are absolutely the best route to reducing those rates.

Call your Member of Parliament. Call your MLA or MPP. Don’t get depressed, get angry. Act up. Fight back.

…and you might want to pull out your chequebook.