Rights in the Moment

AIDS Calgary hosted its annual conference and general meeting on June 21 at Fort Calgary.  The theme of this year’s conference was “Rights in the Moment” and focused on the rights of people living with HIV, sex workers, and people who use drugs.

AIDS Calgary was pleased to welcome a diverse panel of engaging speakers from across the country to share their knowledge and experience with the room. 

We were excited to start our day off with an inspired talk from Donald MacPherson, Executive Director of the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition.  Donald shared his passion for the creation of drug policies based on foundations of human rights, social inclusion, and public health.  Donald discussed some of the innovative visions for drug policy being developed at the Coalition.  These solutions promote policy based on scientific evidence, rather than a traditional punitive approach.

 AIDS Calgary was pleased to welcome Alan Young, associate professor of law at Osgoode Hall Law School.  Alan has an interesting and diverse breadth of experience which he refers to as “Sex, Drugs, & Rock n’ Roll” law, bringing a unique perspective to the conference.  Allan spoke about his success in bringing a constitutional challenge against the existing prostitution laws in Ontario.  He provided a thought provoking discussion around the ways in which ideology shapes laws and the harmful effects this can create.  Allan described the inherent harms sex workers experience as a result of the existing prostitution laws and how he was able to highlight this in order to move the case forward. 

From the B.C. Center for Excellence in HIV/AIDS we welcomed Dr. Val Montessori and Irene Day to open our afternoon session on Treatment as Prevention.  These speakers described the development and use of the Treatment as Prevention model at their clinic in Vancouver, and the dramatic success of this model at reducing HIV transmissions in Vancouver and internationally in the HPTN-052 study.  We closed out the conference portion of the day with a discussion panel and a lively Q&A session following their presentation.  Treatment as Prevention continues to be an exciting and dynamic topic which generates a lot of attention and discussion.

The AIDS Calgary annual general meeting directly followed the conference portion of day, providing us with an opportunity to showcase our year’s successes and recognize the work of our community partners:

Leader for Life Award – SHARP Foundation

Corporate Giving Award – Ship & Anchor

Individual Giving Award – David H. McEwan

Community Partner Award – Fairly Tales Presentation Society

Positive Voices Award – Alberta Primetime

Roger LeBlanc Award – Jennifer Vanderschaeghe

Thank you to everyone who attended this year’s conference and annual general meeting and helped to make it a success!

This blog was originally posted on AIDS Calgary's blog, The A Word, on June 28, 2012.