Minister, in following up on the theme of my previous question with regard to democratic development, as we mentioned, we know that women thrive and the sustainable development goals are achieved when you have open, pluralistic, inclusive democratic processes. A lot of the expertise that Canadians have, which we are particularly good at doing, is in institutional development—parliaments, rule of law, making sure we have strong democratic institutions around the world. In my past that was one thing I was doing abroad
The all-party democracy caucus recently had a forum where we brought in experts, former UNDP people from around the world who work in this field, the Parliamentary Centre and others, who said that at the moment only 2% of ODA goes to institutional development for democracy. I don't know if this is true.
I'm wondering if that's something we might be able to consider.
We know that the feminist international assistance policy doesn't mean that we stop doing things like democracy promotion and electoral observation. It just means that we want to have more women participating, and included in and designing those kinds of programs. The programs themselves actually achieve the kinds of outcomes for women and girls that we're looking for.
I'm not asking for an answer right now in terms of the percentage, but just in general, in terms of the inclusive governance that you're doing, would you be willing to take a look at the percentage? That's not for civil society participation, but specifically for institutional development on democracy.