Sonia Sidhu, Member of Parliament for Brampton South, hosted a meeting of the All-Party Diabetes Caucus with her fellow Parliamentarians.

Across Canada, 11 million people live with diabetes or pre-diabetes. This life-changing disease can have serious health impacts and leads to strokes, heart attacks, kidney failure and amputation. The Caucus is committed to working across party lines to raise awareness and support research that will lead to a cure.

At this meeting, the all-party group received updates on the work done by Diabetes Canada and JDRF, the nation's leading advocacy organizations for this disease. They also heard from Toronto-based dietician and author Andy De Santis about the relationship between diabetes and diet, and from Dr. Bruce Verchre from the University of British Columbia and BC Children's Hospital.

In past years, the caucus has worked to raise awareness among parliamentarians with initiatives like the “Defeat Diabetes One Step at a Time” challenge in which members were asked to pedometers for  10 days to track their physical activity, and brought a mobile risk assessment lab to the hill. In 2019, the House of Commons unanimously passed a motion introduced by Sidhu, recognizing November as Diabetes Awareness Month.

Thanks to the advocacy of this caucus, the Government of Canada has invested over $230 million in diabetes research teams since 2015, through the Canadian Institutes for Health Research. In 2019, Health Canada also launched The New Food Guide, which will help Canadians to make better-informed decisions about what they eat.

Before entering politics, Sidhu worked for 18 years in the healthcare sector and saw how much the system was affected by diabetes and its serious consequences. She continued to champion this issue in Ottawa and introduced the National Framework for Diabetes Act which passed last year, coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the discovery of insulin in Canada. MP Sidhu received the Sir Frederic Banting award for this work in late 2021. The government committed $35 million to this project in that year’s budget and MP Sidhu's bill will ensure that Canada has a coordinated strategy, working across levels of government, to fight this disease. The strategy is going to be finalized later this year.