Foreign Affairs Committee on April 28th, 2015

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Mr. Hawn, that's all the time we have. We're going to catch you the next time around.

Thanks.

We're going to move over now to Mr. Garneau, for seven minutes.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

Thank you very much.

Thank you for your testimony.

My first question is to Ms. Strong.

I'm familiar with the work of the Red Cross all over the world. It's commendable.

When I was young, I remember being told that when the Red Cross or the Red Crescent go into a war zone, everybody respects them and nobody shoots at them.

In a place like Syria, where we have some organizations, such as Daesh and some pretty lawless organizations, is it still the case that the Red Crescent can deliver help without feeling threatened, or is that a totally different picture now?

[Patricia Strong]

You raise an extremely important issue for us. Our movement has raised the fact that the safety of health care workers is no longer guaranteed. We're raising the profile of this globally through a project called Health Care in Danger.

Sadly in Syria we have lost more than 40 volunteers and staff who had been trying to serve the population. It's a really critical issue.

We are striving to ensure the safety of our workers all over the globe. It will always remain a priority for us.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

Thank you.

My second question is for Ms. Degnan Kambou.

We've talked quite a bit over the past few months about early and forced marriages and have been given quite a complete picture of the situation. Are you aware of any statistics that would indicate that child marriages are diminishing, if not in absolute terms but in relative terms, something that would show us that we are making progress on child marriages?

[Dr. Sarah Degnan Kambou]

I wish I had more hopeful news for you. We do see movement. For example, if we take the case of Bangladesh, we see that the age of child marriage is increasing. So rather than girls being married perhaps at the age of 16, they're now being married at the age of 17. The age is increasing, but the same number of girls are having the same rite performed.

In terms of absolute numbers I would say it's probably holding. I think there are even instances within my own country of the United States of America, where interesting studies have been done by the Urban Institute documenting cases of early and forced child marriage here in the United States, in the 48 contiguous states. So there seems to be new evidence of the practice across the world.

If I just may add, in the situation of Nepal, and Syria, Pakistan, and Haiti, after conflict or natural disaster, we usually see increases in child marriage. One, it is in relation to people's reaction to social and economic disruption. Quite often people are very hard strapped and are struggling to survive. So the option of presumably marrying a daughter into safety, relieving the family of some financial burden, is often conducive to helping them make that decision.

Finally, as they were saying with the Red Cross, one way to protect a young girl from sexual violence in a family's mind, in the community's mind, is of course to marry them and have them under the protection of a husband.

I wish I had better news for you, sir.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

Thank you.

Mr. Stevenson, you mentioned a rather alarming statistic of 6,000 women per week being infected. It seemed that the reason was that they needed money and therefore they sold their bodies for sex. That large number surprised me. Are there other reasons, cultural or societal, that women are infected simply because, let me put it bluntly, men take advantage of them, or is it really because many of them are saying, I'll have sex with you if you pay me for it?

[David Stevenson]

To clarify, the 6,000 infections every week in east and southern Africa are for the cohort of 15 to 24-year-old women and are not all due to sex work. The studies that have been done in five countries in eastern and southern Africa have basically averaged out that with a cash transfer payment you can reduce prevalence by 30% to 60% from that same cohort. What this suggests is that there is an economic rationale for infections, but not necessarily all from sex work though.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

For Cuso, excuse my naïveté, but where does your funding come from? Does it come from the Government of Canada?

[Kieran Breen]

Yes.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

I'm interested in the typical profile of one of these 250 skilled people. On average they are 43 years old. What kinds of skills do they bring?

[Kieran Breen]

It depends. It could be a 45-year-old business professional who has perhaps made a bit of money and wants to give something back to the world. We run a lot of economic development programs and they would be working, say, with small-scale farmers by helping them with thinking about how to get their goods to market. It could be a midwife who has reached the stage in her life where she thinks.... I guess what people realize is that they are global citizens. It's generally a skilled professional who wants to share his or her kind of skills. They are a diverse group. But if you got them together, I'd say the unifying thing would be that these are Canadians who care about the world and feel they've had a good life and want to give something back, and they have skills to share.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

We're going to start our second round now, which will be five minutes each.

I'll start with Mr. Schellenberger, for five minutes, sir.

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

Thank you, Chair.

Again following on Mr. Garneau's question, I'd like to follow up a wee bit.

I know that rule of law adds viability to communities. You've mentioned skilled professionals. I come from Perth—Wellington, and the Stratford Theatre is in my riding. You may know that it is part of an initiative with a theatre company in Suchitoto, El Salvador. There was a real problem with gangs and lawlessness there and the cause of a lot of this was that youth didn't have employment; they didn't have anything to do. So the Stratford Theatre with various groups, including the town of Suchitoto.... I think Cuso is part of that. Am I right?

[Kieran Breen]

They are a strong partner.

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

It is a very strong partner. They didn't only start an acting group. They started a theatre company that required electricians, props people, seamstresses to make costumes, actors, and the whole realm, lighting and so on. What they do once a year—not only once a year but at various times—is send people there from the theatre for a month or two to teach some of these trades. What happens is that the people then go ahead and run the company. They've earned the skills and they've learned the skills, so maybe they will go out into the community and start their own businesses and become entrepreneurs, and someone else takes that.

I think this program has helped to reduce the gangs in the area and has helped bring the rule of law to that area. Could you speak to that, please?

[Kieran Breen]

Yes. You've given a good description. The Suchitoto program is a fantastic example of Canadian professionals working with partners in El Salvador and young people, with a view to equipping people with skills as well as addressing an issue.

In addition to the kind of technical skills that people develop, increasingly they use drama as a way of getting young people to think through the kind of violent situation you see in El Salvador, which in some places is quite extreme. It was only a few months ago we had a group of young people from El Salvador who came to Canada and put performances on, talking about their experiences growing up in El Salvador and the way gangs impact on them etc.

This is a model we are trying to pick up on, very much about trying to get that spirit of entrepreneurship in play. A lot of young people who end up in drug gangs really only want to make a living. They have an entrepreneurial streak, and the drug gangs offer them a way to quick money. We think with all that spirit, with guidance and mentoring, those young people can go down another path.

When you go there it's a bit strange to find young people in El Salvador at one level putting on a Shakespeare play, and you see they are really committed to it. You meet their families, who are living in little farming communities etc., but the whole community has got behind that and they can see what this is giving to them. It is the partnership as well, this Canadian-El Salvadorian partnership, and it shows a pathway out of poverty, out of violence, toward a very positive future.

It's a great project, and I'm very glad you brought it up.

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

Thank you.

Mr. Stevenson, would you be able to explain how the Howard Buffett Foundation improves conditions in countries that are on the verge of conflict? Have there been any success stories where an investment went a long way to preventing a conflict?

[David Stevenson]

Yes. Speaking on the foundation work, Howard has done a whole host of investments in humanitarian conflict issues, particularly where he sees his foundation has a niche because others are not engaged in certain ways where he can engage.

One rather innovative thing that he's doing now, which you can find on the website, is financing Belgian sniffer dogs in the eastern Congo, searching out Joseph Kony, who has been on the loose for far too long. Howard says, “Well, let's try this.” It's again an example of a niche area that he'll work on.

Like me, he has spent a whole lot of time working for solutions in Africa, particularly on drought circumstances related to climate change and so on, solutions to get people out of this disaster cycle of droughts, floods, storms, and so on. That's where the solution approach goes to food security initiatives and nutrition initiatives. With the World Food Programme, we did a lot of “food for work” in restoring the agricultural production. In Rwanda, we supported the demobilization commission reconciliation process, with the returning of populations and resettlement.

There are all kinds of ways of linking support to an emergency response that help to build the conditions so the emergency will not return.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Schellenberger.

We're now going to move over to Madam Laverdière, please, for five minutes.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Strong, first, I would like to congratulate you on the efforts of the Canadian Red Cross in Nepal and around the world. My colleague Laurie Hawn's question was very interesting. It had to do with the protection of children and understanding the specific issues that they raise in a similar context.

That said, I would like to ask you the same question that I asked Ms. Degnan Kambou, namely, about the sustainable development goals.

How well do you think they meet the needs of children and youth, and specifically, what could we do to improve them?

[Patricia Strong]

Our focus on sustainable development goals has primarily been on those related to maternal, newborn, and child health. As you probably heard me say earlier, we're emphasizing the target of ending all preventable maternal and child deaths by 2030. We think this is very important.

But it isn't enough just to prevent those deaths. We really believe that people must survive and thrive and live a life with dignity as well, so we think in terms of the whole person. We would like to ensure that this interpretation of health is the one that is understood more broadly, as the WHO recognizes it, and is looking at much more than just the simple survival of children and mothers.

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

Thank you very much.

Ms. Degnan Kambou, as we know, early and forced marriages often lead to unwanted pregnancies.

How can we make sure that young women and girls have access to the services they need in this area?

[Dr. Sarah Degnan Kambou]

Thank you again for your question.

When a young girl has been married, quite frankly, in that first year in a new household, she's establishing her position within the family. And so childbearing, having that first pregnancy, is uppermost in everyone's mind. However once that first child has been born and she's established her fertility, then you can work with in-laws, the husband, the girl herself, and community leaders on how you can reintegrate the girl back into society.

There's a very well evaluated strategy that was done in the Amhara region of Ethiopia, which has a very high child-marriage rate. Working through community-based organizations, a global dialogue was started with community leaders about the practice of child marriage, about the costs to the individual mother, child, family, and community, and about the need to bring girls out of the household and help them get the kind of health services they would need to be healthy mothers and have healthy children, for their children as well.

It was also about helping build certain kinds of skills, financial literacy. If a young woman is able to join a village savings and loan group, a member of a peer group, and she's able to save, then how would she be able to invest those funds when they came to her, in terms of a small income-generating business for the family, which would help the household? In some cases it was even getting to the point of re-integrating the girls back into school, which doesn't happen in all cases, but it can be negotiated and successfully so.

What we saw at the end of that three-year program was indeed that, through this very participatory community-led process, we were able to negotiate gain through these young girls, and they themselves value that there's been progress in their lives. They have different ways of expressing that, but in terms of what might resonate with this committee, we see increased use of birth spacing methods, greater dialogue with husbands around sharing household burden, children having higher rates of vaccination, and strong participation in financial instruments within the community. So this all bodes well, not only for the household but also for the community.

So that kind of evidence exists and can be replicated in other communities.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much.

Now we're going to move over to Mr. Goldring for five minutes, please.

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you for appearing here today.

I think my question is for Ms. Degnan Kambou, but if others have a comment on it too, I'd appreciate hearing it. It has to do with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and we all know the booklet that is put out regularly into our schools that lists it. Children are defined as under the age of 18, except if they're to be recruited into the military and then article 38 indicates they can be 15. Now we know that's been corrected by protocols since, but they're not mentioned in the booklet that we put out in our schools.

My question is out of my concern that many countries signed onto the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Were they intending to seek to support that, or were they intending to support and implement that? This would all come down to governance, and you had just mentioned that in one country, Ethiopia, child marriage is very common. So how many countries have signed the rights and the protocols, and how many of those countries would not be adhering to them? And does this not come down to governance?

The other question is this, amongst all the other questions I've asked. Is there a program that seeks to, I suppose, enumerate the countries on their successes of following these protocols? Could you comment on that?