A week after the Young Liberals of Canada launched a major national petition drive to end Canada’s discriminatory gay blood ban, Canadian Blood Services has quietly launched a public opinion poll on the issue - underscoring how this key public health policy is being decided based on politics and polls rather than science.
A new Ipsos poll commissioned by Canadian Blood Services polls specifically on the issue of ending the gay blood ban, and concedes that CBS needs to "convince" Health Canada before the discriminatory policy is ended.
"While it’s encouraging to see that Canadian Blood Services might finally be interested in making a change, it’s incredibly alarming to see public health policy being decided by polling," said Justin Kaiser, President of the Young Liberals of Canada. "Canada’s health policies should be based on science and evidence—not a discriminatory outlook on sexual orientation, and not on politics or the polls. The blanket 5-year ban on gay men donating blood is stigmatizing, outdated, and backward - and it needs to end."
Before asking respondents whether reducing the ban on gay blood donation from a 5 years to 1 year is a step in the right direction or wrong direction, the poll states that "Canadian Blood Services must convince its regulator, Health Canada, that this change would not introduce additional risk to the blood system."
The Young Liberals of Canada support the replacement of the current policy with a framework of behaviour-based screening for every blood or organ donor regardless of sexual orientation, providing an evidence-based method of ensuring that all donors are safe and eligible. Similar methods exist in Mexico, Spain, Italy, Chile and Portugal with fully successful results. Regardless of source, all donated blood is already comprehensively tested for infectious diseases.
Two days after the start of the petition drive, Canadian Blood Services announced a critical need for more blood donations.
"When we have a critical need to save lives, it just doesn’t make sense to put polls before public health and exclude people from donating blood based on sexual orientation alone," added Jonathan Crombie, VP Policy for the Young Liberals of Canada. "A recent UCLA study showed that potentially millions of lives could be saved if the United States allowed gay men to donate blood, and we can extrapolate similar life saving results for Canada."
Canadians can sign and share the petition to end the discriminatory gay blood ban by visiting: ylc-jlc.liberal.ca/all-of-us
