Thank you for the honour of speaking today, and thank you for your work on this committee.
I'm a professor at UBC as well as a family doctor, and I hold the Public Health Agency of Canada chair in family-planning research.
I urge you to consider in our federal budget a universal subsidy for contraception. As you may know, B.C. has just offered this, and it should be equitable across Canada for people to have the chance to avoid the devastating effects of unintended pregnancy.
Women and pregnancy-capable people across Canada represent over half our population, and at the moment we have been cited by the U.N. Human Rights Council as having inequitable access to contraception, a dedicated human right. This is related mostly to cost.
Part of the way we understand these inequities and the cost is through sexual and reproductive health surveys. The federal budget in 2021 funded the first sexual and reproductive health survey, which will be rolling out soon in Canada. I strongly urge you to consider, along with providing universal access to free contraception, ensconcing in Statistics Canada as a core survey an ongoing sexual and reproductive health survey so that we have the ability to show our inequities and to address the needs among people across Canada so they can have affordability in their families, support the best starts for the children they've planned and avoid having those 40% of pregnancies that are unintended increasing our health system costs across Canada.
Thank you very much.