I'm going to bridge from these presentations to a broader look at the whole question of the millennium development goals and the range of issues that are going to be addressed at the G-8 and need to be addressed globally in tackling the deep poverty that afflicts this planet.
In doing that, I think it's really important that we recognize that while the issue of maternal health is the area in which we have had the least progress on the millennium development goals, in fact we are flagging on every single indicator, in every single target that we had sent, and we have slid back from the early progress that was being made in the earlier parts of the century. In the last several years we've had a perfect storm: the global financial crisis, food crisis, fuel crisis, climate crisis, care crisis, all of which are putting huge pressures on poor people on this planet. And we're seeing, in country after country, that progress that has been made slowly and surely is eroding on key indicators across the board. This is a very preoccupying situation, and clearly a concerted global response is required.
When we consider who is poor, as has been said, it is really important that we keep in mind who it is we're talking about. We're talking about rural women and their families. There's a sub-scene irony in the fact that it is the women who produce most of the world's food who are the most poor, the most hungry, who eat last and eat least, and that is the context in which they are raising their families and they're providing leadership within their household, their communities, their nations, and their societies. We need to understand that the maternal health initiative needs to be a broad, comprehensive initiative, that it is rights-based and understands the full range of people's sexual and reproductive rights that need to be addressed. If this initiative is to be successful, it has to be situated within progress on all of the MDGs. The biggest predictor of whether a girl survives to a certain age is how many years of schooling she has; the biggest predictor of how few children someone will have is how many years of schooling she's had. So the education MDG is absolutely critical.
When we look at women's poverty, it's not just a poverty of income, it is a poverty of opportunity. It's a poverty of time, most particularly. For many women upon this planet--most particularly in a context where climate change is a real and present danger and has an impact on the lives of the poorest people on this planet--it's not a threat looming on the horizon that we need to divert; it is something that is absolutely present in their day-to-day lives. The indicator of that is the increased number of hours a day that women are spending finding and fetching water, and the increased number of days of school that girls are missing because they've been pulled out of school and pressed into the service of finding and fetching water for their family. The education goal and the water goal and the climate goal and the economic goals are all part of this broader dynamic whereby women's equality and women's access to power and to influence within their bed, within their household, within the streets, within the markets, within the legislatures, within the courts, within the parliament, is absolutely central to the sorts of changes we need to see on this planet if in fact we are to achieve the objectives that we've set out in the millennium development goals, and if in fact we are to make a serious dent in diminishing poverty and promoting justice on this planet.
Canada's response and Canada's leadership to this has been critical historically, and it's absolutely important that we seize the opportunity of our presidency of the G-8 and G-20 in moving this forward. In that, we applaud the initiative around maternal health and children's health. We want to ensure that this is broad and comprehensive and in keeping with the commitments Canada has historically made. We also want to ensure that Canada is encouraging progress on the broad range of issues and is coming to that table with really concrete proposals in terms of funding for climate mitigation and adaptation--and Clare is going to talk more about that--that Canada is addressing broadly the MDG goals, and that we're not cherry-picking and thinking that there's some magic bullet and if we could just do this one, then that's enough, because in fact these are integrally interrelated and mutually reinforcing and supporting. In the absence of serious progress on one, you will find yourself running up against the same wall in trying to achieve your targets on the other.
So we look at that, and when we do look at that, we see that the level of ambition in terms of funding is absolutely critical.
The week before last I was invited to address the General Assembly of the United Nations on this question of the millennium development goals. And in my presentation I made the comment that the world had amassed huge resources collectively to respond to the bank failures and the global economic crisis in the north. And the American ambassador to the United Nations took some umbrage at what I said and was commenting that if in fact we hadn't mustered that many resources, the people of the global south would be even more poor than they are.
Now, I might wish that a greater gender analysis was brought to bear in how the world had allocated its recovery funds, and I might wish that there was a stronger green agenda in forming that, but I pointed out to the ambassador that I was not in any way criticizing how many resources we had mobilized globally to respond to the global economic crisis. But I want to be very clear that we've now set the bar against which our performance will be measured in addressing the reality of more than the billion, and growing, numbers of people on this planet who are severely, deeply poor.
Having mobilized trillions to refloat our economies, the billions we're looking for actually to deal with life-and-death issues for billions of people on this planet is modest. In fact, it's embarrassingly modest.
So it's really important in terms of Canada's leadership that we are setting a very clear goal and that we are setting a very ambitious goal in terms of our level of funding. It's also important—and frankly a concern in a moment in which we understand from the Minister of Finance that Canada's official development assistance funding in future years will be capped—that we don't find ourselves in a situation where we are robbing Peter to pay Paul, and that in order to have a robust response to maternal health, we don't find ourselves undermining other commitments and other initiatives that we collectively are committed to and that we collectively understand are integral to the success of the maternal health initiative.
So we need to be really very clear that it is funding increases, new and additional funding, that we're looking for to reach the level of ambition and have the impact that we're seeking. And we need to be clear, whether it's the climate adaptation funding, or the range of other issues, that this is over and above. And we need to be also very clear that these need to be built on long-term commitments that ensure the money then is going to have a real impact in the real lives of real people and not go into bureaucracy, into accounting, or into old-style aid programs.
The last thing I would say is that to do that, I recognize the pressure the Minister of Finance is under. And I recognize the pressure that you are under, as parliamentarians, in setting priorities for Canadian public spending and for Canadian official development assistance. But it's really critical, then, that we take bold steps in identifying innovative sources of funding and we support the sorts of policies that will allow nations in the global south to generate from their own citizens the taxes, the royalties, and the revenues that they need to provide and fund those services in the long term; and that we collectively identify through new and innovative funding—and I know Fraser and others will speak to this—other avenues that will ensure we are providing the level of funding to this that sets us up for success and not for failure.
Thank you.