Honourable senators, I rise today to speak to Senator Cormier’s recent inquiry, which calls the attention of the Senate to the alarming rise in sexually transmitted and blood-borne infections in Canada.

Senator Cormier already did a stellar job of speaking about the rising rates of HIV/AIDS in his speech. So, today, I instead want to tell you a ghost story, the story of a different disease, one that we thought we had vanquished but which has come back from the dead to stalk our streets and claim our children.

Once, it was called “the great pox.” For hundreds of years, it ravaged the world, killing millions — babies and mothers, prostitutes and sailors, kings and dictators, composers and poets. Among those believed to have been killed or driven mad by the great pox were Tsar Ivan the Terrible of Russia and King Henry VIII of England, the painter Paul Gauguin, the writers Guy de Maupassant and Charles Baudelaire, the composer Robert Schumann and the gangster Al Capone. They were all its victims. There’s been speculation that Hitler, Lenin, Mussolini, Idi Amin, Oscar Wilde, Howard Hughes and even Abraham Lincoln were sufferers.

The great pox was syphilis, one of the most deadly and devastating diseases in human history. The first recorded syphilis outbreak in Europe ravaged the port of Naples in 1495. For years, historians and scientists believed that the disease had travelled back to Europe from the New World with the returning crews of Christopher Columbus. However, the latest archaeological evidence suggests that a related form of the disease may have been present in Europe even before the Columbian contact.

Shakespeare dubbed it “. . . the infinite malady . . .” and, for centuries, syphilis, which can be spread through vaginal, anal or oral intercourse, scarred the course of human events, destroying marriages, disrupting royal lines of succession and overturning empires.

But in the 20th century, thanks to the advent of penicillin, aggressive public health campaigns, premarital blood testing and a better understanding of the importance of using condoms, we thought it was a disease consigned to the history books. It all but eradicated in Canada 20 years ago. Like smallpox, it seemed the great pox would plague us no more. That was naive.

Let me give you some Alberta numbers. They are the ones I know best since, as a journalist, I covered the inception of our current syphilis epidemic and because the Edmonton area seems to have been the epicentre of the current Canadian outbreak.

Between 1992 and 2002, there were no recorded cases of syphilis in infants in my affluent province. In fact, in 1996, there was only one known case of infectious syphilis in all of Alberta. And then, suddenly, between 2005 and 2007, five Alberta babies died of syphilis, most of them in the Edmonton area. Another nine babies were born with congenital syphilis, which can cause damage to an infant’s bones, heart or brain.

At the time, the Edmonton Journal, for which I worked, reported that there were about 200 known cases of syphilis in the whole province. I wrote column after column calling for action — calling for a public health campaign to alert Albertans, especially expectant mothers. But our then health minister Ron Liepert, now a member in the other place, would have none of it. Mr. Liepert personally cancelled the entire syphilis awareness campaign his department had been planning. At the time, he said:

Those Albertans who are high risk have to take more responsibility for their own personal health and not leave it up to the general population to take responsibility for them.

Back then, I had a bully pulpit on the pages of the paper, and I thundered back with my own message. I wrote:

The return of syphilis to Canada would be a human tragedy, not to mention an international embarrassment. We must act quickly and aggressively, without moral judgment, to stem this outbreak.

Empty words, I fear, because between 2018 and 2022, Alberta Health Services reported that 50 babies were stillborn in Alberta because of syphilis contracted from their mothers in utero. They represented just one fifth of all the infants infected by the disease.

By 2023, the news was even grimmer. Last year, according to data from Alberta Health Services, over 17,000 cases of syphilis were reported in Alberta adolescents and adults, with another 340 cases in babies. Those are just the cases that have been identified. Many are probably going undiagnosed, since not all doctors today know how to identify the early signs anymore.

Syphilis has been called “The Great Imitator” because its primary and secondary symptoms — painless ulcers, a rash, fever, swollen glands, headaches, weight loss and muscle and joint pains — can easily be mistaken or misdiagnosed as something else. It’s also hard to track since the disease can lurk, latent and asymptomatic, in the body for years after the initial infection. It may only express its more dangerous consequences 10, 20 or 30 years after the initial infection. Then, syphilis can become fatal, attacking the heart, blood vessels, nervous system and brain.

Alberta hasn’t seen syphilis rates this high since the 1940s. While syphilis infections have been rising sharply there and in other parts of Canada — especially in the Yukon, Northwest Territories, Saskatchewan and Manitoba — Alberta still has the dubious distinction of leading the pack.

In truth, I’ve focused on the child mortality figures because they are the most shocking and perhaps the most likely to provoke your sympathy for those infected. But, of course, infants are only dying because their parents carried the disease. According to 2022 data from Statistics Canada, men are more likely to be infected with syphilis than women. In 2022, 65% of cases in Canada were found in men, but cases among women have been rising sharply. Back in 2018, only 21% of those with syphilis were women. By 2022, that number had risen to 35%.

According to the Canadian Paediatric Society, associated risk factors for syphilis can include injection drug use, crystal methamphetamine or other substance use, the sale or purchase of sex, experiencing homelessness, inconsistent condom use, having multiple partners and having had other sexually transmitted and blood-borne infections.

According to the Native Women’s Association of Canada, rates are 13 times higher in the Indigenous community than in the non-Indigenous community.

There’s another complicating factor: Someone in the primary stages of syphilis, during a time when they have the pox-like ulcers, has a much higher risk of contracting HIV/AIDS because of their open sores. Of course, we’re not living in 1495 or 1895. Syphilis is a bacterial infection, not a virus, and today we have antibiotics that can cure it. You don’t need expensive or complicated drug cocktails to manage it. When caught early, it’s completely treatable. If a mother with syphilis gets proper prenatal screening and testing, it’s possible to prevent babies from dying or being born with congenital syphilis. But we’re not doing enough testing or providing enough treatment.

Of course, the women who are most at risk for carrying syphilis and infecting their babies are precisely the ones least likely to receive good prenatal care, but the problem is larger than that. It’s not just men and women who are socially vulnerable and at high risk because of poverty, homelessness or addiction who aren’t getting consistent primary health care. We have a chronic crisis in this country with respect to access to primary care, which means that all sorts of young people who have active sex lives and multiple partners — from university students to young professionals — also don’t have family doctors. They aren’t getting regular check-ups, and that doesn’t make syphilis any easier to test, track or treat. Further, we are not doing nearly enough to warn people of the dangers of this revenant ghost.

I was perhaps a bit hard on former Alberta health minister Ron Liepert earlier since it’s impossible to know if a more timely and aggressive public health campaign would actually have prevented the explosion of syphilis cases. But I came of age during the AIDS epidemic and remember the admittedly belated but still highly effective public health campaigns that promoted safe sex. I remember the fights to get condom machines into suburban high schools. Those campaigns worked to help reduce the incidence of HIV infection. But with syphilis? Well, we pulled our punches 20 years ago, and we’re still not doing enough to raise the alarm perhaps because people still perceive syphilis as an historic artifact or something that isn’t really a serious or lethal.

But we have another challenge before us today. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen — all across North America — a backlash against public health campaigns, vaccination campaigns, a backlash against epidemiology, against science itself. Back in 2007, the Alberta government refused to tell people about the risks of syphilis on moral, puritanical grounds. But now we have a slightly different problem — an erosion of public trust in public health, period.

Some of it comes from a kind of warped libertarianism, the kind that equates any kind of public health measure or campaign, from fluoridation to pasteurization to childhood vaccination, with state tyranny. And some of it comes from a fear of “Big Pharma” or “conventional medicine,” a belief, spread in part by disinformation campaigns, that the doctors, public health nurses and medical researchers who have dedicated their lives to keeping us well have somehow become the enemy.

It’s not just that syphilis has returned to us from the late Middle Ages. It’s as if some of our leaders, too, want to go back in time to a medieval mindset that rejects all the scientific progress of the last century, as the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services last week makes all too clear.

Homophobia and transphobia, sadly, are also part of the equation. In Alberta, for example, the government of Premier Smith has announced that sex education in public schools will now be optional and opt-in only. Before, parents who wished to withdraw their children from sex ed classes had the right to do so, but they had to sign a form proactively withdrawing their children. Now, the province is flipping that protocol on its head, and children will only be allowed to attend such health classes if their parents give explicit permission for them to take part.

This is being done under the impetus of protecting children and their families from being “forced” to learn about homosexuality and transsexuality. But the upshot will mean that many children and teens will miss out on the chance to learn about good old heterosexual reproduction and sexual health. And the result, one might logically assume, could well be an increase in teen pregnancies and in sexually transmitted diseases.

Because, while I’ve focused on syphilis today, rates of all kinds of sexually transmitted infections are on the rise. We are losing battles we thought we had already won, and now we’re fighting not just social stigma and inertia but a veritable campaign on behalf of ignorance.

I would like to thank my courageous and wise colleague, Senator René Cormier, for launching this inquiry at this crucial time. Today, more than ever, we need a vision like his to spur us into action. Thank you, my friend.

Thank you, colleagues. Hiy hiy.