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Jon Gates was a Canadian AIDS activist from Vancouver who, in 1989, moved to Ottawa to work with the Canadian Council for International Cooperation and pursue a specific project with the International Committee for AIDS and Development. Gates and his peers, while working in Ottawa, engaged with multiple organizations such as the Red Cross, Oxfam, the Legal Network, and the Canadian AIDS Society to address the AIDS crisis in developing countries.

Gates himself was specifically concerned with how this pandemic affected people in sub-Saharan Africa. At the core of his activism was his goal of developing coping mechanisms on how to live with AIDS rather than preventing it (with infection rates at upwards of 30%). His major impact within his journey into AIDS activism, started with calling on the people of the richer western nations to come together to refuse the vaccines toward a treatment of AIDS until those countries made it affordable and available to poorer nations affected by AIDS. Gates was considered quite radical by many at the time as research into a treatment and cure for AIDS was on the horizon and the concept that people should deny this vaccine was enough for many to dismiss his ideas for their personal benefit.

Gates died in December of 1992 to AIDS, but his legacy lives on in his activism for a cause that affected so many lives around the world.