Each year on December 1st, World AIDS Day invites us to pause, reflect, and recommit. It is a moment to honour the millions of lives lost and celebrate the resilience of people living with HIV.

But it is also a call to action—a reminder that progress is not inevitable.

In 2025, that reminder is sharper than ever.

Shifting political priorities, and increasingly punitive laws around the world are disrupting HIV prevention and treatment efforts, undermining hard-won gains. Community-led services — the heart of any successful HIV response — are being sidelined, defunded, or forced to operate in increasingly hostile environments.

These international trends resonate deeply here in Canada. Earlier this month, Realize, alongside organizations across the Canadian HIV sector, urged the federal government to use Budget 2025 to demonstrate clear commitment to reversing dangerous trends in both the domestic and global HIV responses. We called for targeted investments, human-rights-centered policies, meaningful support for Indigenous-led initiatives, and strengthened funding for community-driven programs.

Yet Budget 2025 delivered uncertainty instead of clarity. And uncertainty is itself a form of disruption.

UNAIDS has been clear: the world is at a crossroads. AIDS is not over. Prevention services are being interrupted across regions hardest hit by global donor retreat. Legal and social barriers —criminalization and stigma related to same-sex relationships, gender identity, sex work, and drug use — are making HIV services inaccessible just as need intensifies.

UNAIDS Executive Director Winnie Byanyima issued a warning that should also be a guiding light: “In a time of crisis, the world must choose transformation over retreat.”

Transformation requires courage. Investment. Political will. And accountability. Canada should be helping to lead that transformation — yet Canada has pledged 16% less to the replenishment of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, than in the preceding funding period. At a moment when the world needs collective action, Canada is signaling withdrawal.

Here at home, the picture is equally troubling. Canada is the only G7 country where HIV infection rates continue to rise, with no clear plan to interrupt this trend. Communities need clarity, investment, and stability to respond effectively. Instead, Budget 2025 offers none of the following:

• No commitments to bolster domestic HIV programs.

• No assurance that essential innovations—like HIV self-testing, long-acting prevention tools, culturally safe harm reduction, and peer-led supports—will receive sustained funding.


Ambiguity and apathy do not support effective HIV prevention, nor do they uphold Canada’s human rights commitments. In fact, they risk doing the opposite.

UNAIDS emphasizes that community-led services are indispensable. These are the services that reach the people most at risk of acquiring HIV and experiencing poor health outcomes when living with the virus: those facing stigma, criminalization, racism, or poverty; those living with episodic disabilities; those navigating systems not built for them.

Realize stands uniquely at the intersection of HIV, disability, and human rights. In addition to raising uncertainty about the sustainability of the HIV response, Budget 2025 raised questions about investments in the disability community as a whole — concerns that have profound implications for people living with HIV and other episodic disabilities. Of particular concern for Realize and the communities we serve is veiled language about “savings targets” and “funding shifts” within Employment and Social Development Canada – our single biggest funder – as well as explicit mention of a “recalibration of its programs and its approach to delivering them.”  No indication is given on which disability programs may face cuts.

Without adequate financial support, accessible systems, and meaningful consultation with disability-led organizations, people living with HIV who experience disability will remain excluded from full social and economic participation.

Ending AIDS requires ending disability exclusion.
Transformation requires integration—not siloed policy.

Realize continues to undertake transformative, community-informed work that fosters well-being for people living and aging with HIV and episodic disabilities by addressing broader social inequities. 

In Ontario, nearly 40 percent of older people living with HIV live below the low income cut off. Many face impossible choices between food, medication, housing and basic necessities. The transition from provincial disability benefits to federal pension programs at age 65 often intensifies this vulnerability.

 In response to this financial insecurity, Realize has developed practical tools for community members and service providers that foster financial empowerment and will be launching the “Navigating Benefits at Age 65” Quick Reference Card. This is a practical at a glance tool designed to support frontline staff and strengthen financial empowerment as part of HIV care.

Built through our Financial Empowerment for Healthy Aging with HIV Project and informed by community-based HIV organizations in Ontario, this tool helps providers:

1. Understand how benefit eligibility changes at age 65.
2. Compare income supports and pension benefits in seconds.
3. Guide clients through benefits transitions, step-by-step.
4. Reduce confusion, prevent misinformation and improve access to income supports among people aging with HIV.

Financial security is not separate from HIV care. It is the foundation of dignity, stability and healthy aging.  Service providers tell us the same thing across the province: “The system is complicated. Clients are anxious. We need clear and accurate information we can rely on.”

Today, for World AIDS Day we reaffirm that a transformed HIV response must include social protection, income security and tools that empower both service providers and the communities they serve.

Even as policy uncertainty grows, our financial empowerment work helps individuals navigate income insecurity; our PANACHE project gathers information on the current and anticipated healthcare needs of older people in Canada aging with HIV, as well as their social needs and preferences to support evidence-informed policy-making; our SHOP resources enhance sexual health literacy and agency for older adults; and the SHINE project is unearthing the barriers community-based organizations face that impact their ability to respond to the HIV/HCV/STBBI-related needs of older adults and people with disabilities in Canada. These initiatives embody the human-rights-centered approach Canada must champion.

On this, World AIDS Day 2025, Realize calls on the Government of Canada to show the political leadership needed to meet the moment: leadership that aligns with global human-rights standards, invests in communities, protects people living with HIV and other episodic disabilities, and confronts the structural inequities driving new infections.

We can still reach the global goal of ending AIDS as a public health threat by 2030—but only if we act with urgency, clarity, and unwavering commitment.

Disruption can be overcome.
Transformation is still possible.


But only if we choose it — now.