Time for AIDS orgs to speak out!

Time for AIDS orgs to speak out!

One more reason to support the Liberal-NDP coalition...

Prime Minister Harper has been sitting on a Gay Men's HIV/AIDS prevention campaign for a year now. The campaign was sent to his office for approval last spring. The campaign was designed by gay men using federal funding. That indicates to me that the designers already took steps to tone the campaign down to be as unoffensive as they could be in order that the PM would sign off on it.

It did not work. The campaign, ready to go, sits and grows older and out of date as each month goes by. There is a good chance the campaign would have to be trashed and all the money spent to date lost, the opportunity to educate queers lost, queer voices lost, queer lives lost.

Why did the people that developed this campaign not tell us about it. Why have they sat on this for months. Did they think questioning the Prime Minister would kill the campaign. That he would never approve it if they demanded action?

The silence of those who spent months of time and taxpayers money developing the campaign is a slap in the face to our community. We have received very little from government when we have sat back silently, politely wishing for it to act. That has been especially true with the Harper Conservative Government. So why the silence?

Harper was never going to approve the campaign, no matter how nice you played. The nicer you play with him, the less you will achieve.

The time for action is now. Queers need to tell the community how the governmment is fighting against our efforts to educate and protect our community. There is a slogan that seems to have lost favour but was popular a decade or more ago.


The coalition will listen to us. Harper will never be in our corner.

Silence = Death