Sask. advocate says HIV/AIDS epidemic continues to be ignored by province

While the COVID-19 pandemic continues across the world, another health crisis rages on in Saskatchewan. 

Margaret Kisikaw Piyesis, CEO of All Nations Hope Network, says high HIV rates are not new in Saskatchewan, but they continue to increase and stigma persists.

"We are leading in Canada [for] new cases of HIV," she said on CBC Radio's The Morning Edition. "I've been involved in the HIV movement for the past 30 years. This has been consistent since then."

Regina safe consumption site needed: Kisikaw Piyesis

All Nations Hope Network is a coalition of Indigenous community groups dedicated to fighting HIV/AIDS. Kisikaw Piyesis said the people who are most at risk for contracting HIV are those who inject drugs. She said there is not nearly enough money dedicated to this issue and that the provincial government doesn't support best practices like safe injection sites. 

"We need safe consumption sites in our city to at least begin to bring in this population so we can begin to work with them," she said. 

"I'd like the health minister to think harder and to think faster because the rates of HIV are increasing among Indigenous people and among populations that are most at-risk."

Saskatchewan Health Minister Jim Reiter had said in the past that the government would consider providing AIDS Saskatoon funding for a safe consumption site in the city. In the most recent budget, the organization was given $130,000, a far cry from the $1.3 million it asked for.

That money would have paid for 24/7 support staff and paramedics for every day of the year, according to AIDS Saskatoon's executive director Jason Mercredi.

Kisikaw Piyesis said she wants community groups like hers to have more input at the provincial table.

"We're really looking for solutions and wanting to talk more with the government in terms of looking for those solutions from Indigenous ways of knowing."

This is a virus that is treatable. So why are Indigenous people [and] people who are actively using drugs still dying?- Margaret Kisikaw Piyesis, CEO of All Nations Hope Network

Kisikaw Piyesis said better solutions will come from looking to people on the ground, not pouring money into institutions and systems. 

"There's systemic racism within our province. That needs to be addressed for people to feel safe to be able to walk through the doors of any system or institution to ask for help," she said. 

"This is a virus that is treatable. So why are Indigenous people [and] people who are actively using drugs still dying?"

The province's budget is due next week. Kisikaw Piyesis said she doesn't have much hope they'll get more than the $37,000 All Nations Hope Network gets to tackle the HIV crisis in the province. She said that number has remained essentially the same in the 20 years she's worked at All Nations Hope. 

"The only increase we see is the increase in HIV among people in this province. There's no increase in funding for the community-based organizations that are on the front-lines," she said. 

"People can live with treatment and it's a chronic illness, but yet people are still dying of AIDS. I think about things like that and how it's so unfair in terms of how this government is treating the HIV/AIDS movement."

CBC has reached out to the Saskatchewan Health Authority for comment.