Mr. Speaker, this Saturday is World AIDS Day. Last year, nearly 3 million people died from HIV-AIDS, with 2.1 million of those victims in sub-Saharan Africa.
This is a disease that is preventable and manageable and yet it ravages Africa. Its numbers are escalating in Eastern Europe, China and India also. Worldwide, 33 million people are infected and a shocking 5,700 people die every day from this disease, leaving a staggering 14 million orphans.
However, despite the sheer magnitude of this crisis, the government has shown no sense of urgency. The previous Liberal government committed $619 million in 2005-06 for health initiatives to combat HIV-AIDS in the developing world. Alas, yesterday's government announcement on international health would have been fine except that those moneys were earmarked at last year's G-8 summit.
Here at home, the government is putting people's lives at risk by undermining the life-saving Insite program in Vancouver and not allowing the NAOMI project and other Insite supervised injection projects to be more widely available.
I say to the government, bury that ideology--