Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to follow up on what I wanted to ask earlier, in my first intervention.
The sustainable development goals, as you know, Ms. Bowden, are universal in nature, as opposed to the millennium development goals, which applied only to developing countries. The SDGs apply to both developed and developing countries. As I mentioned, and as you know, one of the goals of the SDGs is to ensure the availability of robust data. At the time of the MDG final report, they noted that only 51% of countries maintained data on maternal causes of death.
News reports last fall highlighted something that I think is of concern as the SDGs apply to Canada. According to reports at the time, the WHO reported a higher maternal mortality ratio for Canada in 2017 than Statistics Canada did, and by a significant amount. In fact, reports indicate that Canada's data is so incomplete that the World Health Organization, UNICEF and others estimate that Canada's maternal mortality rate could be as much as 60% higher than what is being reported by Statistics Canada. If those estimates by the WHO are correct, while our maternal mortality rate is still low by global standards, those higher numbers would put us in the bottom tier of countries in OECD.
Can you tell us what gaps there are in data collection in Canada?