The top of the United Nations’ HIV/AIDS program is urging Prime Minister Mark Carney to reverse his government’s planned cuts to foreign aid and global health funding.
“My message to Prime Minister Carney, to Canada, and to all the opposite donors is, stay the course,” UNAIDS executive director Winnie Byanyima told The Canadian Press on the sidelines of last week’s G20 leaders’ summit in Johannesburg.
“Without global solidarity, the inequality between countries will proceed to widen. We are going to live in a more dangerous world as these inequalities increase.”
Last week, Carney announced Canada’s first-ever cut to funding for the Global Fund, a serious program for fighting infectious diseases on the planet’s poorest countries.
The brand new funding pledge is 17 per cent lower than Ottawa’s last contribution to the fund in 2022. The fund helps combat the spread of diseases equivalent to AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria through measures like providing mosquito nets and medicine for HIV patients.
The move got here just weeks after the federal budget called for $2.7 billion in cuts over 4 years to foreign aid — and months after Carney vowed through the spring election campaign that his government would “not cut foreign aid.”
The Carney government argues the help cut brings spending back according to Canada’s pre-pandemic allocations.
Ottawa increased its development and humanitarian spending through the pandemic, partially to revive stalled progress on fighting major illnesses equivalent to AIDS and tuberculosis as governments turned their attention to COVID-19. The US radically in the reduction of its aid spending this 12 months.
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Byanyima was on the G20 leaders’ summit to assist present a report commissioned by the South African government on rising global inequality.
The report argues economic polarization inside and amongst countries is generating resentment which is chipping away at political cohesion and risking instability.
The authors call on governments to discourage the spread of violence and autocracy by pursuing more egalitarian domestic policies and reforming financial systems in order that developing countries can escape the debt trap attributable to high rates of interest and natural disasters driven by climate change.
Byanyima said Canada can look to leaders equivalent to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, who said his country has reaped more economic advantages from gender equality within the domestic workforce over the course of a long time than from oil revenues.
“After we reduce inequality between countries and inside countries, we even have stronger economies,” Byanyima said.
She also said Canada should get behind global efforts to counter tax evasion.
When pressed concerning the cutbacks during his time in Johannesburg, Carney identified that Canada’s share of the organization’s total funding has gone up. That’s since the fund’s total envelope has diminished.
“We’ve needed to take pragmatic, responsible decisions across the board in government, which also included returning our aid budget to the extent pre-COVID,” Carney said. “Inside that, though, we’re focused on where it has a maximum impact, very much including on this continent.”
Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand echoed those points to reporters in Johannesburg.
“Canada’s contribution continues to be meaningful. It continues to be material. It continues to be significant,” she said.
“Africa is Canada’s largest recipient of international assistance, and our assistance will proceed.”
Bloc Québécois MP Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe said Thursday there was a “worrying” and “problematic” shift under Carney away from Canada’s long-standing approach to help and human rights.
“There’s an increasing number of links being made between international aid and international trade within the vision of Mr. Carney,” he said in French.
The cuts come as advocates mark World AIDS Day on Monday, at a time when many say humanity has the tools needed to finish the HIV pandemic but not the funding to distribute crucial treatments to the fitting people.
Jayati Ghosh, a outstanding Indian economist who co-presented the inequality report alongside Byanyima, said Canada should work to make sure developing countries can produce life-saving medicines which can be often blocked by “an mental property regime that excessively raises the prices of essential medicines.”
The issue became outstanding through the COVID-19 pandemic, when many developing countries waited longer than richer countries to secure what turned out to be an insufficient variety of vaccine doses — at the same time as they were blocked from creating their very own versions of those vaccines.
“Governments need to think, in ways beyond (foreign aid), by way of the regulations globally that they’re helping to support, that really worsen conditions for developing countries,” Ghosh said.
© 2025 The Canadian Press