Canadian Blood Donation and the Tainted Blood Tragedy
Photograph by Danny Ogilvie for Xtra!
Prior to the 1990s, the Canadian blood system was managed and overseen by the Canadian Red Cross Society (CRC). However, Canadian Blood donation in all provinces and territories, excluding Quebec, later changed to be overseen and operated by the Canadian Blood Services (CBS). This was part of the resulting fallout from what is referred to as the Tainted Blood Tragedy. The tainted blood tragedy was a result of decisions from the Canadian blood system which caused over 2,000 recipients of blood transfusions or who had received blood products between 1980 and 1985 to contract HIV, and 30,000 transfusion recipients between 1980 and 1990 to be infected with hepatitis C.
While the Krever Inquiry made “no explicit reference to the gay community” (Jackson), these testimonies, however, express the persistent homophobic logic that surrounded AIDS transmission, especially prior to the discovery of HIV, being something that ‘isn’t to be worried about,’ with Ms. H. stating that she “thought AIDS was something going around and killing gay men. I never thought it could be in the blood. It never hit me.” In his article on the subject from 1994, Ed Jackson states that there was a “subtle distinction” made between victims of the tainted blood tragedy and the “larger numbers of gay men infected through sexual transmission.” Continuing, he argues this strategy created a distinction between an innocent population and those to be blamed for the epidemic. Despite this, lawyers and counsel members felt that it had the possibility of demonstrating “how homophobia and social prejudice played a significant role in the government response in the early years” and could address previous responses from the Red Cross toward the 2SLGBTQIA+ community (Jackson).