Making change
A champion for human rights and social justice, Dr. Berger has worked in support of groups including refugees, torture victims, people with HIV-AIDS, drug users, members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, impoverished and unhoused people.
The Officer of the Order of Canada shared stories of his advocacy work over the years and the measures he took to achieve results.
In the 1990s, he plastered downtown Toronto with flyers to lobby the Ontario government to make methadone more available for heroin users. The flyers included the deputy health minister’s private phone number.
The tactic worked. Berger met with the deputy minister a couple days later, and within weeks, the provincial government announced funding for a methadone clinic – that exists to this day.
In 2012, the federal government announced drastic cuts to refugee health care. Berger co-founded and co-chaired Canadian Doctors for Refugee Care, which coordinated nationwide protests by doctors against the cuts.
His organization worked with the Canadian Association for Refugee Lawyers and took the federal government to court. The cuts to refugee health care were overturned.
Berger, a pioneer in HIV-AIDS care in Toronto, recalled the dire situation in the 1980s before there were treatments.
“We all carried death certificates in our briefcases, because [each month] we were declaring up to half a dozen mostly young men, dead,” said Berger, an associate professor emeritus of family and community medicine at the University of Toronto.
To combat the stigma around HIV-AIDS, Berger founded the Toronto HIV Primary Care Physicians Group and created the HIV Project Centre Primary Care Mentor Program.
