Renewing Canada's Strategy On HIV/AIDS
Introduction

Renewing Canada's Strategy : Introduction : Part 1 : Part 2

On December 1, 1997 - World AIDS Day - the Honourable Allan Rock, federal Minister of Health, announced the renewed Canadian Strategy on HIV/AIDS. The Minister's announcement followed an intense policy development process that centred around a two-month national consultation on the future direction of HIV/AIDS programming in Canada.

The resulting consultation process was a major breakthrough in public policy development. For the first time, stakeholder groups primarily community groups (NGOs) led a process to gather public input on a health and social issue of national and international importance. Instead of imposing policy from the top down, government acted as a facilitator and a listener. As a result, the new Canadian Strategy on HIV/AIDS is a true partnership initiative and the beginning of a new era in HIV/AIDS programming. The urgent need for the strategy's renewal was driven by a number of factors, including:

• 36,000 to 42,000 Canadians are believed to be living with HIV infection (including those living with AIDS);
• each new infection will cost roughly $150,000 in direct medical costs and an additional $600,000 in indirect costs; and
• more new cases of AIDS will be diagnosed in the last five years of this century than were diagnosed during the first 15 years of the HIV epidemics.

The federal consultations leading to the renewed strategy were marked by three characteristics:

• involvement by the full breadth of organizations and individuals in the field;
• a stakeholder-driven external consultation process that provided for unprecedented public involvement in policy development; and
• an extremely tight timeframe.

Part I of this report describes:

• the main players involved in the HIV/AIDS consultation process;
• the streams of consultation;
• consultation tools, mechanisms and processes; and
• the outcome.

Part II provides a qualitative assessment of the consultations based on interviews with key participants and recipients of the process.

Renewing Canada's Strategy : Introduction : Part 1 : Part 2