Foreign Affairs Committee on April 2nd, 2019

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Good morning, everyone.

I'm going to call this meeting to order. Our first business of the day is the election of a new vice-chair.

First of all, I'd like to welcome Guy Caron, the new member of our committee representing the New Democratic Party.

We will proceed to the election of a chair.

I just want to comment to you, Mr. Caron, that it was really an honour and privilege to have Madame Laverdière serving with us over the last four years. We did a lot of good work over that time, and a lot of that was due to her efforts. So welcome, and I'm sure we're going to be having an equally productive time with you on the committee.

[Guy Caron, NDP, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

We're going to proceed to the election of a vice-chair.

I'm going to pass the floor to our procedural clerk Aimée to conduct the election.

Please go ahead.

[The Clerk of the Committee, Ms. Aimée Belmore]

Pursuant to Standing Order 106(2), the second vice-chair must be a member of an opposition party other than the official opposition. I am now prepared to receive motions for the second vice-chair.

It has been moved by Mr. Aboultaif that Guy Caron be elected as second vice-chair of the committee.

Is it the pleasure of the committee to adopt the motion?

(Motion agreed to)

[The Clerk, Ms. Aimée Belmore]

I declare the motion carried and Guy Caron duly elected second vice-chair of the committee.

[Some hon. members]

Hear, hear!

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Welcome.

I would like to introduce our guest for the briefing on the United Nations progress study on youth, peace and security, Mr. Graeme Simpson, lead author of “The Missing Peace: Independent Progress Study on Youth, Peace and Security”, which was released in 2018 by the United Nations study on youth, peace and security.

Mr. Simpson is the Director of Interpeace, U.S.A., and a senior adviser to the director general of Interpeace, an international organization established by the UN that develops innovative solutions to build peace, and supports locally led peace-building initiatives around the world.

Mr. Simpson, I'd like to welcome you to our committee this morning. This is obviously something that our committee is very interested in hearing about. I'd like to give you 10 or 12 minutes or so to present some opening remarks. Then, of course, we'll open it up to the members of the committee, who I'm sure are going to have lots of questions for you.

[Graeme Simpson, Director, Interpeace, United States, As an Individual]

Mr. Chair and Vice-Chairs, I'm really appreciative to the Foreign Affairs and International Development committee for this opportunity to speak to you. In some way, I feel it's imperative by way of report-back because we were very indebted to Canada for its support of the progress study on youth, peace and security, along with that of Sweden, Norway, Ireland and others. Given your contribution to this study, I hope you will see behind this a real affirmation of some of the principles that I know you stand for.

By way of background, the progress study was called for when Security Council Resolution 2250 on youth, peace and security was passed in December 2015. That came on the back of a fairly lengthy period of time in which youth-led organizations globally were lobbying extremely hard to draw the attention of the international community and the multilateral system to the fact that young people experienced that they are largely marginalized and voiceless.

Championed by Jordan—a small country on the Security Council—in the years leading up to 2015, the resolution eventually passed. I think it took a lot of people by surprise. In the passing of the resolution, we see at the council quite odd bedfellows with a common interest in addressing the deficits in young people's participation and inclusion. Some felt this was a matter of principle and that the world needed to have the sort of innovation, creativity, resourcefulness and resilience of young people accessed and brought into the system. Others saw a real risk and a threat of violence and extremism if young people were marginalized and excluded. They passed Resolution 2250 with fairly different motivations in some senses.

What was really unusual—and this is something for which I am particularly grateful—was the mandate of the resolution to conduct a study, which became known as a progress study on youth, peace and security. The reality is that because it was a new resolution, this wasn't so much a progress study as the development of a strategy for the implementation of this resolution globally. In that capacity, I was appointed as the lead author by the Secretary-General to undertake the study.

I want to emphasize that I was appointed as an independent lead author. This gave me unusual room to really say what I needed to and address the issues that I thought young people were raising. The other mandate of the study was—unusually—to focus on the positive contribution of young people to peace.

Finally, I think that implicit in this was a recognition that the Security Council was attempting to address an enduring problem of exclusion and a growing problem—which became very evident in the early phases of the study—of young people's mistrust of their governments and of the multilateral system, and often a deep mistrust even of international civil society organizations. We found that 1.8 billion young people felt voiceless, and one-quarter of those at least—and that's a conservative estimate—were living in situations of ongoing exposure to violence.

It became very clear that we couldn't address the problem of exclusion by reproducing the problem in our methodology, so I want to dwell briefly on the methods of the study. As was announced by the Secretary-General's representative when the study was released to the General Assembly in September last year, this study was one of the most participation-inclusive studies that the UN had ever undertaken.

Through Canada's help, we went beyond just the usual regional consultations with young people who could all speak English, had the language skills, had passports and were familiar with the UN. We insisted that we needed to access young people who were hard to reach and who would not normally have a voice in this. I can't do justice to the study here, but in the 10 minutes I will refer to this. I really encourage you to look at the study itself. It reflects a vibrant, extraordinary voice of young people.

In the end, beyond the regional consultations—and we did seven of those—we did five national consultations, one of which was in Canada.

Through a partnership of civil society organizations who had trust-based access to young people on the ground, we were eventually able to access young migrant women in the foothills of Guatemala, young combatants in the Philippines, second-generation migrants in the neighbourhoods of Stockholm, African-American youth in the neighbourhoods on the south side of Chicago, young combatants or refugees in South Sudan, etc.

Some 280 focus groups in 44 countries around the world, 35 thematic and country-specific studies and a survey of youth-led peace-building organizations provided unparalleled access to young peoples' voices. It's on that basis that I want to share with you some of the key findings. Then I'll be open to your questions.

The first issue that became very clear was that young people were very mindful of the extent to which they were the victims of stereotypes, particularly in relation to youth, peace and security. As soon as we spoke about peace and security, the predominant image, a very gendered image, was of a young man with a gun posing a threat and a young women consigned to the passive status of victimhood. Young people have said that both of these definitions completely deny their agency, their contributions and their resilience as contributors to peace.

What these stereotypes also did was produce what we called “policy panic”, a series of policy assumptions and myths that were not, on the basis of our explorations, based on significant evidence.

The first was an assumption that “youth bulges”—growing proportions of young people within a population—would automatically result in high levels of violence.

The second was that young people were the major threat presented by the migration waves, that there were young migrant men who are threatening infiltration and terrorism.

The third was the assumption that all young people were at risk of joining violent armed groups.

The truth is that evidence suggested quite the contrary on many of these instances. It is only a tiny sliver of young people who are engaging on the wrong side of this divide. What we had as a mandate for our study was to discover and to articulate the alternative path for investment in young people, the majority of whom were either just getting on with their lives—I don't think we should romanticize them any more than we should demonize them—while a huge number were actively contributing to peace.

The core message of the study, through the voice of young people, was that until we address the “violence of exclusion”—that's their language, not mine—we will never prevent the violence of extremism. In young peoples' own voices, this was about both political inclusion and rebuilding their trust in economic systems that were inclusive. It was about recognizing the space they needed for their operations and for their freedom of movement and assembly. It was also about their opportunities for dissent, and often peaceful protests which were seen as threatening. We argued they were actually a very important contribution to change and to peace.

Very importantly, they experienced the distinct experiences of young women as opposed to young men, and the gendered character of exclusion and marginalization, which sees the youth, peace and security agenda and the women's peace and security agenda as fundamentally joined at the hip. This was in particular about the unique experience of young women. One of the other things that we discovered, really importantly, was about the importance of providing and addressing alternatives to toxic masculinity. The issue of masculinity as a driver of violence and conflict was very important. An integrated approach to gender is at the heart of this.

The young people also expressed concern around exclusion in the education system, in criminal justice and security sector reform, and in reintegration of former combatants. It was very powerful for us to hear young people talking about how the majority of young people being reintegrated as former combatants in conflict-affected societies were young, yet they were often being reintegrated into elder-led communities, which left them feeling re-marginalized. Young people were asking us to imagine what it would look like if the receiving communities were youth organizations and were youth-led.

If the first message was that we have to address all of these areas of exclusion if we are to address extremism, the second message was that there is an extraordinary alternative avenue for investment: Not in young people as a problem to be solved, not in young people as a risk, but in the resilience and resourcefulness of youth as an attribute for peace.

Young people really demonstrated this. You'll see that the second part of the study is a description of all of the things that we found young people were doing against all the odds. They were operating across different phases of conflict, early intervention models and prevention best approaches with younger children right through to post-conflict involvement in informal peace processes. They were engaged at every level, from the most local and intimate peace-building processes, people-to-people at the local level, through to global coalitions and partnerships. They were engaged across different typologies of violence, from gender-based violence to terrorist violence to political and criminal violence, and they recognized the interface and interlinkages between these things.

They were engaged in unique partnerships where they couldn't access their governments. Very often, they were working with local mayors, local actors and different stakeholders. They were saying to us, “Don't ghettoize young people. We aren't just in one place. We are in youth organizations, but we are also in women's organizations, in human rights organizations, in civil society organizations. We are in governments. We are on both sides of the police-community divide.”

They said to us, “Every SDG is a youth SDG. Please don't treat us as just concerned with issues of education or issues of sport and recreation. We want a stake in the entire development of our societies and in the policy around this.”

Young people also demonstrated the most extraordinary, new and innovative methodologies, whether it was about sport and culture and arts, or most importantly, the progressive, creative occupation of cyberspace and social media as a tool for building peace and developing new peace technologies.

What they were doing was crying out to us for the conclusion of the study: that if we want to take advantage of this demographic dividend, especially the high proportion of young people in conflict-affected societies—but not exclusively—then we need to invest in young people as a peace dividend. This demands some seismic shifts in the way that governments and the international system are addressing this, from largely remedial and hard security-based approaches to prevention approaches that invest not in risk, but in the resilience of young people.

It involves investment in the partnerships that young people are driving in our societies with governments and with civil society, and particularly an investment in youth-led organizations. It also involves the development of new norms in our society to socialize Resolution 2250 as a meaningful domestic tool.

The study produces three categories of recommendations. I won't go into them in detail; I don't have time.

In the first category, we motivate very strongly for an investment in the resilience of young people, in their agency, in their leadership and in their organizations through funding, through supporting peace networks in the youth sector, through organizational capacities and by filling the data gaps. It's unbelievable how difficult it is to find gender- and age-disaggregated data on young people.

The second category is about addressing all those areas of exclusion in the polity, in economics, in development policy, in the educational arena and in terms of gender with regard to young people in society.

The third is to invest in the partnerships that young people forge, whether that's at the UN or whether that's in the establishment of youth delegates within the agencies of the UN and through governments representative to the UN. It's about the consultative spaces that we need to create for young people and the integration of young people fully into the 2030 agenda for development; the Resolution 1325 agenda—the women, peace and security agenda—and the annual reporting of the Secretary-General to the Security Council. In all these arenas, we've made a series of recommendations to address these problems of exclusion.

With that, I will leave you, but I'll say one last thing. I was really struck when I examined the feminist international assistance policy of Canada to see the language “human dignity”, “growth that works for everyone”, “environment and climate action”, “inclusive governance”, and “peace and security”. These are all the platforms that the youth, peace and security agenda addresses. I think we see a very powerful resonance between Canada's international concerns and those of the youth, peace and security agenda. I'd go one step further. I would encourage you to recognize that we discovered that young people exist everywhere in society. This is also an essential issue for Canada to think about as a domestic issue as much as an international one.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Thank you very much, Mr. Simpson.

We will move straight to questions from members, and we will begin with MP Aboultaif, please.

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

Thanks for a wonderful presentation this morning.

On page 4 of paragraph 7, the report comments that youth often fall in a grey area between the rights and protections afforded to children and the rights and political entitlements adults have and, in that case, you expect youth should also have. Can you please speak to the types of rights and freedoms youth are routinely denied by virtue of their age and, if there are regional commonalities in this denial of rights, what might those be?

[Graeme Simpson]

This is an extraordinary question, and I thank you for it.

Let me begin by saying that, although Resolution 2250 defines young people as 18 to 29, what became very clear to us is that youth is much more a socio-cultural phenomenon than it is a chronological age, and one of the phenomena that we identified was how, in fact, young people are often trapped in youthhood—one author refers to this as “waithood”—because the fact is that the rites of passage that dictate progress into adulthood are denied many young people.

This is very gendered, and in fact, it's not consistent. Young men who can't afford to marry, can't get jobs, can't acquire houses and can't acquire the formal status of adulthood are trapped in the status of youthhood despite their age. Often young women who are married off, often forcibly, and bear children at a much younger age acquire the formal status of adult women much younger than they ought to.

This is illustrative, because what it shows is that often young people are outside of a category that formally acquires protections under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, so they're not protected in the same way children are, but because of this waithood, they often don't acquire the trappings of adulthood that should come with all these rights.

We talk about a rights realization gap. I raise this because it is about distinct things. On the one hand, what we definitely found, particularly in conflict-affected societies where the space for civil society is closing down very often, is that the rights of assembly, participation and political engagement are often denied young people. Age bars young people's ability to run for office. Also, the repressive space often means young people are victimized. On the one hand, we are looking at that set of protections that is really critical.

But we would be misstepping, I think, if we didn't recognize that sometimes it's the gap between formal rights, which exist in the legislation, and substantive rights to which young people do not have access in reality because of generational and gender-based issues. That includes socio-economic rights, access to land, etc., and the rights to operate as youth-led organizations.

I would draw your attention to those two distinct arenas, some of which are formal, some of which are about protections that should be there and aren't, and others that are about a rights realization gap where young people are uniquely excluded and marginalized politically, economically and socially.

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

You mentioned that 1.8 billion youth are marginalized or face these kinds of rights being taken from where they would want to be, and they're not getting what they deserve, in a sense. When we have 1.8 billion, that's about 25% of the world population, which means it must be that these youth are somehow in certain regions, in certain areas, where tribal societies are more affecting the life and the future of these youth compared to civil societies, where the state is involved more and more.

What is the United Nations doing in this situation, and how do you think this is going to be solved? We know that the problem is growing because of the growth of the population, and we see that, in certain regions, the youth population is growing compared to the advanced world. How do you see that?

[Graeme Simpson]

I think you're right. We need to distinguish and recognize that there are some countries where the problem is an increasingly contracting youth population and a growing population of older people, in parts of the world. In others, there is the phenomenon of the youth bulge, the growing youth populations. There, I think the challenge to the absorptive capacity of society is striking and needs to be addressed.

I'm not sure that we should too readily distinguish between conflict-affected societies and societies that are free of conflict.

It was very striking to us, and I draw this comparison deliberately, to hear a young man on the south side of Chicago talking about guns in ways that were strikingly similar to those of young men in South Sudan. We need to recognize that, because the experience of marginalization and exclusion of young people is not a phenomenon exclusive to the conflict-affected societies of the global south.

Whilst these are important observations, I also think we need to nuance them with what we heard from the study.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Thank you.

MP Vandenbeld, go ahead, please.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Thank you very much for your report and for being here today.

You speak about marginalization and exclusion. How do these affect democratic political processes? I know there are a number of studies that show that globally, young people today are less attached to democracy and more inclined toward accepting forms of authoritarianism than in previous generations. I notice that your report talks about various ways of making sure that young people are included in democratic political processes. How are you seeing this?

I know young people are not trusting as much in the traditional democratic elections and governments. A number of young people are saying that they are futile, that democratic processes can't change things. Do they see this as a way of changing, of being included? Are they starting to write off those kinds of democratic processes? What does that mean for the future, particularly of some of the fledgling democracies?

[Graeme Simpson]

It means we have to act and we have to enrich the exercise and processes of inclusion and participation and do more to accredit the systems. I think you're right. First, we need to disaggregate what we mean by political participation. We had a submission by the department of political affairs, DPA, as it was at that point in the UN, which was very helpful because, in looking at their own practice, they were asking how they disaggregate young people's political participation.

On the one hand, they were attentive to the formal political process, electoral processes and formal governance issues. However, they were also talking about national dialogue processes, the participation of young people and responsiveness to young people's demand that they have a voice in policy arenas that affect their lives but in which they have very little stake.

I'll give you two examples. It's very striking to us that young people often describe two—among many—very prolific places where they said, if you're thinking about the state-society relationship through the youth lens, what are the places where young people intersect most directly with their states? They were saying it's in relation to the criminal justice system and in relation to education. They are aware of criminal justice reform processes and juvenile justice processes, etc., but they have no stake and no voice in that policy sphere. Similarly, they are the primary targets of an education system in which they have very little voice in the policy world that defines educational priorities, curricula, etc.

There's a very tactile method that falls below the formal levels of political participation. I think young people are very astute in saying, when they think about what they mean by expanding participation and process, these are the arenas in which they are most affected and where they should have a voice, and don't.

For DPA, it was very interesting because this extended to reconciliation processes in the wake of conflict, to constitution-making and reform processes, to a spectrum of political engagements, rather than just in the formal process of electoral politics. I think that is enriching because it also expands the spaces in which we can rebuild young people's trust and sense of belonging and confidence.

There's particular concern around young people being excluded, because of their age, from running for office and saying we need to have more young people in office. It's not about whether they can vote; it's whether they can run and in some societies the bar on that. There's a real honesty and recognition by young people that inclusion is not unconditional—in many societies, a concern that participation in political processes often subjected them to manipulation, to party political control, to a series of manipulative and corrupt intents. Young people are saying they don't want to participate in systems that appear to be corrupt or servicing elites, etc.

This is not all young people. These are very important voices, because they nuance the way in which we think about this.

In answer to your last question, yes, I do think this is a trust issue. In some senses, I think there was a growing message of young peoples' loss of confidence in formal representative politics. Part of what I've said is that there are other ways of engaging in what participation means, which are not just about narrow approaches to representation.

We need to recognize that young people were saying this isn't just about being invited to the table, already set, but recognizing the table they have set for themselves. There are the innovative, creative spaces in which young people are creating places of direct action, of participatory democracy through social media and cyberspace. Yes, these things present their own risks if they aren't moderated, and they can be grabbed and controlled by others, by those of nefarious purpose. But there are very important participatory technologies that young people have to teach us about ways of expanding our democracy and creating participatory approaches to democracy.

We can't be naive about the digital divide, which is also very gendered, by the way. These are important issues to engage in.

I hope I've answered your question without posing more questions than I've answered.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Yes, thank you for that.

On the social—

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

The time is up.

MP Caron.

[Guy Caron, NDP, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Simpson, for that informative presentation. I'd like to ask you about the study recommendations.

Something struck me with respect to youth inclusion. When it comes to young people, it's easy to see how freedom of association, freedom of opinion and freedom of expression can be impacted. I'm curious about freedom of association and freedom of peaceful assembly.

In terms of barriers to those freedoms, what did the study show?

My second question has to do with the undermining of all those freedoms. I imagine that the barriers youth encounter were a frequent topic of discussion, not to mention how they are defined. Were any potential solutions explored, or are you waiting to see what happens next or what follows this initiative?

[Graeme Simpson]

I think I addressed some of the questions around the freedoms in relation to the earlier question on human rights, and I won't dwell on that.

I think, globally, the prevailing frustration of young people is the stereotype that sees them primarily as a risk and a threat. Youthful protest and dissent, even when peaceful, is often treated as a problem to be solved, as a risk factor, particularly but not exclusively in undemocratic societies. The prevailing concern that we had was the massive investment in security-based and criminal justice-based responses to young people at the expense of an investment in all the resilience, resourcefulness and creative spaces.

In some ways, I think young people were demonstrating that there is an alternative investment path. It's one of the reasons—in the recommendations we've made—that we've staked a claim for the establishment of a fund of $1.8 billion, one dollar per young person, as a signifier of what we need to invest in. That's not a lot. That investment in youth-led peace-building organization is the critical space for free operation.

It is not just about securing the institutions and funding the institutions—and there's a risk of harm in polluting them by doing that—but very much about ensuring the space in which they can freely operate. I think these are critical rights that young people across the globe were speaking to us about.

When you ask if solutions are presented, the study is peppered with illustrations of the ways in which, with minimal resources.... Honestly, the survey undertaken of youth-led peace-building organizations showed that 80% to 90% of youth organizations are volunteer-based and have extremely limited resources of perhaps $10,000 a year. Only about 8% were spending $100,000 a year or more. There is an investment opportunity in these organizational forms that is about expanding democracy and expanding the room for participation.

[Guy Caron, NDP, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Thank you very much.

I have another question for you, but you may need some time to answer.

A common thread that unites young people all over the world is technology, especially social media. Technology can be a very useful tool for organizing and mobilizing, but it can also be problematic because it can lead to isolation. Social media sites function on algorithms, which connect like-minded people to one another, bringing them together around common interests. The downside is the loss of diversity of views.

What role will technology play in the contribution of young people to advancing peace and security around the world?

[Graeme Simpson]

You're absolutely right. I think that, in some ways, the discourse around social media and ICT reflects the broader problems we've been talking about. On the one hand, this is very easily seen, especially when occupied by young people as a threatening space, a place where they'll be recruited into nefarious organizations, a place where they're endangered; but on the other hand, there's actually a real innovation and creativity in the way in which young people are cultivating those spaces, very often for good.

It's very healthy for us to think about the organizational attributes and limitations of these forms of social interaction. I don't think that for young people this was ever articulated as an alternative to participating in the other spaces in society. If we talk about it as an organizational tool, young people are very astute at understanding that you can establish connectivity without really connecting people in durable ways, and that it's not a substitute for social movements, for example.

I think young people are very clear about finding the right balance, and it's not a simple solution.

That said, I think that the innovation and technologies for peace that are there, and that young people are occupying, are at risk of being closed down in the process of us trying to moderate the negative impacts of the social media and technology space. This features very prominently in the study. I don't think we answer all these questions, but what we certainly do is reflect young people's voice about exactly the complexity that you've identified. This is something we have to wrestle with. I don't think the solution is to shut down the space. The solution is to invest in the positive manifestations and the ways in which it's being used and crafted.

[Guy Caron, NDP, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

MP Sidhu, go ahead, please.

[Jati Sidhu, Liberal, Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Simpson, for your presence here this morning.

Minister Freeland announced some funding for Elsie initiatives. The whole motive is to get younger women involved in peacekeeping. Can you speak on that and how it's going to have an impact around the world, with the small funds allocated towards it?