Evidence of meeting #142 for Justice and Human Rights in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was non-disclosure.
A recording is available from Parliament.
10:45 a.m.
Liberal
Iqra Khalid Liberal Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON
Thank you kindly.
Ms. Porth, if I can turn to you now, there is a lot of data out there that shows the intersectionality of these prosecutions. We see that there's an overrepresentation of black men who are prosecuted under these provisions.
Can you talk a bit about how we as a federal government can approach a fairer system of developing these laws, taking into account race and the overrepresentation of certain races?
10:45 a.m.
Sex Work Policy Researcher, Pivot Legal Society
The recommendation is that you don't create new laws, that you would only prosecute very malicious and intentional HIV transmission and that you would use laws of general application.
The law doesn't appear to be colour-blind, right? It tends to fall more heavily on certain populations, and there certainly seems to be a trend of a lot of prosecutions against black men, due to really racist assumptions.
I think you need to address this through public education as well. I noticed in one of the articles I read about the new directive—and the comment stream underneath, which is always very enlightening—that the Canadian public is still woefully ignorant about HIV/AIDS.
I haven't seen any real public education in a long time. I was in first-year university when the crisis hit, and I watched friends I was going to university with start dying. People remember that; they don't remember that it's a chronic but manageable disease now, that people aren't running around deliberately infecting people.
Some leadership by the government in terms of public education, I think would be important as well.
10:45 a.m.
Liberal
10:45 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Anthony Housefather
I want to thank all of our witnesses again.
We are grateful for your participation. Your input will certainly help our study.
Also, for those who joined us by video conference, thank you so much for giving us your time.
I'm going to suspend the meeting so that we can move to an in camera session on witnesses for a different study we're going to be doing.
Thank you again so much.
[Proceedings continue in camera]