Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
It's nice to see you here again, Mr. Tabah. I want to take a moment to congratulate you, and all of Global Affairs, on the funding that's been announced for public engagement for the Provincial and Regional Councils for International Cooperation. I was very happy to see that. I know that you may not be working on that right now, but you have been. You've been very instrumental in that work, so thank you.
Obviously, I'm delighted that we are starting this study. It's long overdue. This is work that I've been engaged in for most of my career. I think it's vitally important that we are doing this study.
I want to start with some of the information I received from an Order Paper question I submitted some time ago that talked about the spending on SRHR. As you will know, in 2019, at the Women Deliver conference in Vancouver, the government announced $700 million that would be spent annually on the neglected areas of SRHR. Now, from what I understand, we've significantly underspent every single year. In 2019-20, we spent only $450 million. In 2020-21, we spent only $498 million. We've never gotten close to that $700 million.
Why is that?