I would first like to thank you for this opportunity to speak to the committee on such an important issue today. I'm perfectly bilingual, so if there are any questions, they can also be in English, though I'll do my speech in French.
Members of the committee, I appear before you today on behalf of my employer, the Ontario AIDS Network, or OAN for short, as a person living with HIV. I am the national coordinator of the positive leadership development institute program, known as PLDI, a leadership program for HIV-positive people with a focus on empowerment. The program is currently available in three provinces.
Since the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, people living with HIV have been on the front lines, battling against the epidemic. Consider, for instance, the Denver principles and the greater involvement of people living with HIV/AIDS, known as the GIPA principle.
The time has come for those in power to stop isolating and penalizing people living with HIV, many of whom are already marginalized. I am not a lawyer or an expert on the differences in federal and provincial jurisdiction, but I can safely say one thing. Existing law on the non-disclosure of HIV status is, as you probably know, unfair and counterproductive to the objectives of increasing testing and ending the epidemic, as set out in the UNAIDS 90-90-90 target, not to mention the objectives beyond that time frame.
I will now address the usefulness of the federal directive.
While the OAN and I recognize that the Attorney General's 2018 directive for federal prosecutors and 2017 report are steps in the right direction—for which we are grateful—the directive has yet to be fully implemented and is merely a first step.
Even if every province were to adopt a directive identical to the federal government's 2018 directive, it is our view that the Criminal Code would still need to be amended, as Ontario's then Attorney General Yasir Naqvi and then Minister of Health and Long-Term Care Eric Hoskins called for in December 2017, in a joint statement:
It is our hope that with this new report, Minister Wilson-Raybould [now the Honourable David Lametti, Minister of Justice and Attorney General] will take immediate action and consider reforms to the Criminal Code to align with new scientific evidence and reduce the stigma of HIV/AIDS in Canada.
We join the Canadian Coalition to Reform HIV Criminalization in calling on the federal government to consider reforms to the law. Given that criminal law is a federal domain, the OAN maintains that the federal government has a duty, as well as the necessary latitude, to do more than simply propose a directive that applies in just the three territories.
Yes? Is there a problem?