Bill C-9- petition & letter-writing

We from Grandmother to Grandmother groups and our friends urge all Members of Parliament to put in place the changes that are necessary to Canada’s Access to Medicines Regime to ensure that antiretroviral drugs are available to the people and countries of Africa that need them so desperately.

A sample letter to send to MPs:

Your address

April ?, 2007


Dear

I am a member of Grandmothers Embrace, the South Simcoe group of Grandmothers to Grandmothers. There are now over 150 Grandmother Groups across Canada, working to raise awareness and provide support for our counterparts, the grandmothers of Africa who are raising the millions of children orphaned by the AIDS pandemic.
As you are no doubt aware, Canada’s Access to Medicines Regime came into effect in 2004 with the admirable goal of making it possible for Canadian companies to obtain “compulsory licences” that would authorize the manufacture and export of the lower-cost, generic versions of patented drugs needed by people in developing countries. Unfortunately, the law as it now stands is not working: no drugs have been exported under this Regime. The federal government is currently reviewing the legislation and will report to Parliament in May.
The World Health Organization estimates that, in the period between the passage of the Access to Medicines Regime and the present, more than 25 million people have died because they did not have access to existing medicines and vaccines.* I urge you to act quickly and do everything in your power to ensure that changes to the Regime are made so that antiretroviral drugs are available to people who desperately need them.

Yours sincerely,


*Instead of this sentence you might say:
In 2006 UNICEF reports that 530,000 African children under 15 have been newly infected with HIV/AIDS and 9 out of 10 are not getting treatment.
OR
Since the law was enacted in 2004, between 1.7 and 2.3 million people per year have lost their battle with AIDS.