Sure. Thank you for the question, Mr. Chair.
I think there are a number of areas in which we encourage growing collaboration between not only relevant government agencies that are responsible for different aspects of UN development goals but also civil society. I think those would include the deep collaboration that we've already seen for decades between Canadian and Taiwanese indigenous communities, meeting both developmental and cultural preservation heritage objectives of indigenous communities. We've seen this with respect to learning from the Taiwanese and how they manage health outcomes. It's a very different environment from Canada's, but it's an environment in which they have adopted in the past much of the Canadian approach to the public health system and public health insurance, but with local characteristics.
When things like SARS have broken out, or the pandemic that we're currently experiencing, we've taken advantage of that opportunity to look at not only how Taiwan is managing those health outcomes but also at whether there are lessons learned there for the work we do as a member of UN agencies across the commitments of the UN to global health or development outcomes.
Beyond that, Taiwan offers a very interesting governance story, a positive story, that gets at the capacity to move from being one of the poorest countries in Asia only a hundred years ago, or one of the poorest jurisdictions, to being an economy today that is dynamic and has a high GDP per capita but is also very inclusive in terms of participation by women and participation by other minority groups. There are a lot of lessons there.
Canada has worked with other partners and Taiwan through something called the GCTF, a global initiatives platform. Although outside the UN system and outside international organizations, it's a platform that the Taiwanese government has put in play to offer its best practices. We've now sponsored two of those events. We look forward to working with Taiwan, Japan, the U.S. and others to bring to the fore Taiwan's unique experiences even though it's not able to sit at UN organizations and do so formally itself.
Thank you.