10/08/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1DjKBRS194/
Canada just gave Michael J. Fox its highest civilian honor for nearly three decades of fighting Parkinson's. Back in the U.S., where he built that fight, Washington spent most of last year with the Pentagon's Parkinson's research program at zero, and the White House now wants $5 billion cut from the National Institutes of Health.
Fox is 65 and rarely appears in public anymore. On Friday he made the trip to Rideau Hall in Ottawa, as reported by CBC and The Canadian Press, to be promoted to companion of the Order of Canada, a rank capped at 180 living people.
He's worn the white officer's pin for 16 years. Now he gets the red one.
When he was diagnosed, Fox was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, and he hid it for years because he worried audiences would laugh at a sick man. He went public in 1998 anyway. Two years later he started a foundation that has since put more than $3 billion into Parkinson's research, more than any other nonprofit on Earth.
He kept working through tremors and balance problems. He made "Still," the 2023 documentary about his life with the disease, and last month, as People reported, the Emmys handed him the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award to a double standing ovation.
At Friday's ceremony, Governor General Louise Arbour borrowed his most famous film to say that "back to the future has always been a much better idea than forward to the past."
The U.S. has been going the other direction.
More than 110,000 American veterans are living with Parkinson's, according to the Parkinson's Foundation. The Pentagon runs one of the only federal programs dedicated purely to the disease, studying why troops exposed to herbicides and other chemicals get sick, a link the VA already recognizes.
In March 2025 a stopgap spending bill cut military medical research by 57%, as Roll Call and Stars and Stripes reported. Parkinson's got nothing.
The program came back in February with $16 million. Its funding had already been flat for a decade, and House members wrote that it was getting four to six times more applications than it could pay for.
That's the small money. The big money is the NIH, the country's main engine of medical research.
The White House's 2027 budget asks Congress to cut it by $5 billion. Fox's foundation and two other Parkinson's groups warned that would slow breakthroughs for the 1.2 million Americans living with the disease.
Last year the White House asked for a 40% NIH cut and Congress refused, so they're trying again.
Congress has pushed the decision past the midterms, and the stopgap money runs out December 11.
Fox isn't waiting on them. His foundation keeps funding the science Washington keeps shortchanging, and at 65, with the disease getting harder every year, he told People he feels privileged to spend his days "bringing everything I've got to help cure this disease."
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