Coverage of the International AIDS conference in Toronto is already flooding CBC Newsworld. It is wonderful to see the media's eye on such a critically important event. CBC Newsworld's documentary Hemispheres was covering an opening event with all the grandmothers from Africa and from Canada who are in attendance. They stressed the importance of needing enough to safeguard the health of their grandchildren and themselves and the importance of having enough for education.

Despite the excellent coverage, something is clearly lacking at AIDS 2006, and it's not from lack of planning or efforts on the part of the organizers. Our own Prime Minister declined to go to this historic event - obviously this is not on Prime Minister Harper's key priority list. Whether this is a political statement on the part of the Prime Minister, or whether he indeed is unavailable is a matter of some contention, but in any case, I think the point is clear that one makes choices. When it came to the Rwandan genocide, the world made a conscious choice to ignore the plees of Romeo Dallaire and to passively standby and ignore the cries of the hundreds of thousands slaughtered. Now, Stephen Harper is making another conscious choice. Lessons learned? A concept in peacebuilding that just does not seem to translate into the political agenda of the day.