New HIV infections in Canada are rising. Advocates say years of progress are at risk
New modelling data from the Public Health Agency of Canada shows there was a 22.8 per cent increase in new HIV infections between 2022 and 2024. In 2024, an estimated 2,517 new infections occurred compared with the 2,050 infections recorded two years earlier.
In 2019, B.C. declared an end to the HIV epidemic after new AIDS cases had declined by 90 per cent and new infections were at a record low. But since then, Montaner says infection numbers have been moving in the other direction.
In May, Manitoba's public health minister declared HIV a public health emergency after HIV rates rose sharply, becoming 3.5 times higher than the national rate. Earlier this year, Saskatchewan reported infection rates just under Manitoba's, making theirs the second-highest rates in Canada.
“What we're seeing is a resurgence of HIV, both new infections and AIDS, which was until two or three years ago, persistently declining — because the strategy was working,” Montaner said.
Jollimore says the face of HIV is changing in Canada. He says when the AIDS crisis began in the 1980s it was centered in big cities, mostly affecting gay men, but today, it is showing up in rural and remote communities without adequate health infrastructure and resources. He says more investment is needed to reach those people. “It tends to thrive in pockets where there's the least connection to care,” Jollimore said. “In those communities where stigma or discrimination or racism may prevent someone from coming forth to get tested or treated.”
This week, global health leaders at the International AIDS conference in Rio de Janeiro warned that major foreign aid cuts, mostly from the United States and other high-income countries — including Canada — could unravel years of progress. UNAIDS says, in 2025, international funding for HIV testing and treatment initiatives in low- and middle-income nations plummeted by 18 per cent.
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Friends, this is what people mean when they that the erosion of public programs and services like healthcare functions as genocide. Despite this having broad impacts, we can see that the specific socioeconomic discrimination that queer people face specifically makes them disproportionately vulnerable to the loss of those services. The AIDS "Crisis" does constitute genocide when it was purposefully left unaddressed in its early years in the hopes that it would resolve the US's "gay problem," and it's the same today when these policy decisions are made with decades of research that tells us specifically whom will be harmed the most.
The neoliberalization of healthcare certainly hurts us all, but they understand that particular groups of people will weather its consequences better than others. The implicit nature of this targeting affords them the cover of incompetence or ignorance despite this being the consistent, documented effect of policies that minimize care for HIV and AIDS for half a century now.
This happens to coincide with a decade-long fascist campaign targeting queerness that now defines US federal politics? Canadians were about to elect a party that ran on killing trans people before Trump scared them into voting Liberals in again. They know what they're doing.