Foreign Affairs Committee on April 23rd, 2015

[James Chauvin]

Yes, I just wanted to add something.

I had the opportunity of working in Pakistan several years ago with an organization called SMI. They were working on reproductive health. One of the young Pakistani doctors I happened to be working with gave me a beautiful card with a beautiful photo of a young man holding a child. At the bottom it says, “When a child is born, a father is born”. I framed it and put it up on the wall in my office.

I think this is something that we need to be looking at more and more. How do we engage young males in this whole issue? They can't be left out. It takes two to create a child. We need to have the young males involved in this.

I don't know what the way is to do it, but I think it's something that we need to be focusing on.

[David Morley]

But there is a way; to what we've been hearing, part of it is the safe spaces we're talking about. At UNICEF we talk about child friendly spaces, or safe spaces for children. I've seen some safe spaces for adolescents. You start with finding a place to start the discussion, because then you get your agents of change, and people will be.... It's soft, and it's hard sometimes to show the accountability of it. I appreciate that you need a longer-term vision. But it's the foundation for making some of that change.

[Bernard Trottier, Conservative, Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Trottier.

We're going to start a third round, starting with Mr. Schellenberger, followed by Madame Laverdière, and then Mr. Goldring.

Mr. Schellenberger, the floors is yours, sir.

[Gary Schellenberger, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Thank you.

First of all, Mr. Morley, you have spoken about making sure Haiti does not fall off the world's radar. I know we've talked a lot about Africa today. What is happening in Haiti specifically at the moment in terms of international development initiatives, and what still needs to be done?

[David Morley]

That's a lot. I'm not going to start with the end of that question.

I was most recently in Haiti for the fifth anniversary of the earthquake. I had worked there before and after. One of the most promising things that's happening in Haiti is that there are now more children in school than there were before the earthquake. That's very important, because that education is laying the foundations. But the list of what needs to happen is still very long. A big issue for us on the issue of child protection is the restavek, the children who are often hidden and out of sight because they're working as servants. It's one of those things, too, that we have to understand through talking, because some of the rural families send their children to Port-au-Prince because maybe it will be a better life for their children. But they can't guarantee if, as a restavek, things will be good or bad, right? They lose touch with that. It's been a part of cultural history of Haiti, too, and I think we can't just say, “This is all bad”. We have to figure out; we have to have the discussions. Personally, I think it's more damaging than not, but we still have to work through that in Haiti. I think that's very important.

Right after the earthquake, I remember the conference in Montreal when the Prime Minister said we have to think of 10 years for Haiti, which I know is a very long time. I don't know enough about the data, but I hope we are still thinking of at least 10 years, because Haiti is our neighbour. We can be of assistance there in a way that the United States can't just because of who we are.

There is hope. There is hope.

[Gary Schellenberger, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

I know that you spoke about registration. Are pretty well most births registered in Haiti? I know they have a real problem with land registry—

[David Morley]

Yes.

[Gary Schellenberger, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

—and I know their records aren't very good, but is some of that prevalent there, too?

[David Morley]

I don't know enough, I'm afraid. I'm sorry, I can't answer that.

[Gary Schellenberger, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Okay.

I know that rule of law is very important. Without a strong system, it must be very difficult to implement almost any of the great work you have suggested today. Without rule of law, poverty, lawlessness, and concern for those most vulnerable to death and child mortality have to be very difficult.

How can we engage the population in these areas, or are you able to work in these areas? I ask this of the Canadian Society for International Health.

[Eva Slawecki]

Sure.

This is one of the things. It is challenging to work in areas where there is limited rule of law. You have to engage the government, and you have to engage the community. You have to engage across all sectors. You find your champions and you do what you can. Questions about the rule of law shouldn't be a reason to give up on a country. There are always opportunities, and there's always a way to make progress.

One of the previous comments was about a failure of a project in South Sudan. I think one of the challenges for those of us who implement projects is the expectation of the donors and the funders. We have to be realistic about what can be accomplished within a given environment. I think it's important to find that little chink in the armour where you can make a difference and to move forward with that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Gary, that's all the time we have. Five minutes goes by so quickly, doesn't it?

Madame Laverdière, you have five minutes please.

[Hélène Laverdière, NDP, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

Merci, Mr. Chair.

I think it's Mr. Morley who made the comment about accountability. It's a preoccupation I have. I think that very often more and more we're confusing accountability and accountancy, which shouldn't be the same thing. So how do you answer the challenge of having to provide accountability on exercises like safe spaces? What could we do to improve the system? Everybody, of course, is free to provide....

[David Morley]

I wrestle with that, because I think part of what we have to have is a longer time horizon. We have to understand—and I think the academics here would be able to do a better job than I—what are some of the markers along the way to show that it's not just a safe space, it's not just a bunch of people sitting around talking forever just to each other, but that things are starting to change. How do you start to measure that subtle change? If you're a sociologist you would know. But you need a longer time to be able to understand that and you need the right things.

[James Chauvin]

It's a very interesting question. Actually going back to Mr. Schellenberger's comment, I think it ties in nicely because one of the issues that we deal with when we talk about the rule of law is the capacity of people to speak out and say, look, something's wrong, we need to get some change here. And are they safe in doing that? Again, I go back to when I worked at IDRC and one of my colleagues challenged us. She said it's very well for us to tell people to go out and do advocacy but are we willing to stand next to them and actually go to jail with them when they're rounded up for speaking out? So I think the whole issue of advocacy needs to be looked at and I think there are markers within the advocacy process of what is it we can be saying that if you achieve this then you've made progress. You might not be able to get to the full nine yards, but if you've gotten to two yards that's amazing and we accept that and we paid for that and that's fantastic. But how do we then protect those people who are the advocates?

[Hélène Laverdière, NDP, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

Thank you very much. In fact I had a question about advocacy but I may keep it for a bit later—

Ms. Slawecki, you have also worked on reproductive health and reproductive rights issues. Do you think that female reproductive health, family planning, contraception and so on are important for ensuring the health of the woman, the mother and the child?

[Eva Slawecki]

Obviously education is critical. The reproductive rights need to be there. A woman has to be educated enough to know what her rights are. It's not enough for the policy-makers to say that there are rights. It has to trickle down to the community level. You need to have it across the spectrum, the education of the support for the reproductive rights. The family has to feel safe in asking for their reproductive health rights to be enforced. It's critical that people know what those rights are to begin with. That has to happen throughout the education process and from the community as well informally and formally.

[Hélène Laverdière, NDP, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

Informally and formally.

[Eva Slawecki]

Exactly.

[Hélène Laverdière, NDP, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

I think this is key.

Mr. Morley, I did not get a chance to ask what your opinion is on the need to help build public health systems. Do you have any comments on that?

[David Morley]

You had mentioned Ethiopia and I think in the health system in Ethiopia, which is one that UNICEF and the Government of Canada and the Government of Ethiopia have worked on a lot, they have been training and equipping community health workers who go out around the country. There are two things I think in the kind of big picture that we see where this works. Three years ago in the Horn of Africa there was a famine. There was a famine in Somalia and there wasn't in Ethiopia. Why? Ethiopia had that grassroots.... It is the same climate, they're next to each other, but the health system in Ethiopia worked. Two months ago when Bill Gates was here I was part of a small meeting with the minister and some other NGO people. His comment was about Ethiopia—he didn't know that you were going to say this—but Bill Gates said that if Ebola had hit Ethiopia there would have only been one case because they have a strong health system that's out into the communities.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Goldring, for five minutes, please.

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

Thank you very much.

Thank you for being here today. It's very interesting.

You had mentioned Haiti. I visited Haiti and spoke with the president and his cabinet there, too. One of the difficulties that came through very, very strongly is that they were very dismissive of the role of their members of Parliament. They were very negative, surprisingly, about them as being troublesome and argumentative. You could see that they treated them with disdain. What struck me, being there for the election, at the election of the MPs, is the disconnect between the communities and the members of Parliament—an absolute disconnect. We were at a social community function with a newly minted MP who just sat in a corner and didn't mix with anybody.

What struck me was that perhaps dealing with this sort of rule of law goes along with dealing with governance, and to bringing the government into buying into having long-term understandings of ways forward. One of the things, of course, that would be very helpful to them would be if you were able to put what you've been talking about into print in some way that can be published as a direction of a way forward, much like your Convention on the Rights of the Child, but greatly expanded so that people could emulate or follow best practices. Has there been consideration of doing this to engage the governance this way and to put some of these best practices out so that everybody can see them?

I learned a lot today. I'm sure many people in other countries can, too.

[David Morley]

I haven't thought of that before, but I know that at UNICEF we're always working with governments, because ultimately members of the United Nations, member states, are on our board of directors—from that level. But we are also all the time working with ministries of health.

I think that's a good idea, but I don't know what has been done. Clearly, there are good lessons to be learned. In some countries, it works, but you need the politicians and the senior public servants ready to make it work.