Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, ladies, for the discussions with us this morning.
I happened to be at the Girl Summit last summer in England with David Cameron. The father of Malala was there and he spoke quite eloquently. I wrote down what he said: “We should work on tomorrow's fathers. Why should I be a different father to my daughter than I am to my son?”
I think that's an issue we do need to work on, because what you've talked about really are discussions about changes in legislation that need to take place.
I was in Mozambique last March as part of a parliamentary delegation. There was a piece of legislation that was supposed to have been introduced in the house that said if a girl under the age of 14 was raped and the man married her, then he would not be charged with anything and he would be absolved of any crime. As a parliamentary delegation from Canada, we voiced our considered disagreement with taking this piece of legislation forward. We spoke with civil society, with parliamentarians, with the media, and that piece of legislation was pulled before we left at the end of the week.
Change in legislation is absolutely necessary to see this.
I'm very pleased to see that Malawi has recently introduced a piece of legislation that will not permit a girl under the age of 18 to be married. I think that these are some of the issues that are going to address this problem with early and forced marriage. I reflect that it was not that long ago in Canada that our government raised the age of consent from 14 to 16, because we believed that, too, was something that was going to protect girls here in Canada.
I wonder if we could take a look at one issue that was not discussed on which you may have some reflections. We've put $3.5 billion on the table for carrying forward on maternal, newborn, and child health for the post-2015 millennium development goals. One of the areas that we feel is critical is the whole issue of vital statistics and civil registration. There are probably over 200 million children that have been born and we have no record. You can't manage what you can't count.
Can you talk about the importance of how we protect children through this initiative?