I suspect you have a better answer to the question than I do.
Again, it's not necessarily just like UNICEF, but the UN is as strong or weak as its members. Many of the things you refer to affect the Security Council. If the Security Council violently disagrees, as it does on Syria or other conflicts, it's very hard for UN agencies, or any bit of the UN, to do more than pick up the pieces, or as I said earlier, stick plasters on the wound. We have to be realistic about that. It's not in our power. It's more in your power and the governments of the world to sort out the Security Council and to try to reach consensus. I think that's where leadership does come in. As you know, a lot of people in the world are looking to Canada as a country at the moment. In these uncertain times, you have an opportunity as you've had in the past—and you've cited many of the examples from the past. It isn't a new role for Canada to kind of lead from the front on this in international politics. That's your role as parliamentarians, but also the government's role. There are few governments in the world that want to do that.
In terms of wider UN reform, I think the secretary-general is very keen to sort out the bureaucracy and inefficiencies. Part of the UN that does need modernizing and sorting out.... On joining the UN, some of it shocked me. It's partly that there are many historical factors involved in this. It's also that many of our boards are governments and are also pressing for things that aren't very efficient in terms of making staff move around and how budgeting is done. There needs to be a lot of reform on that. I think we can also collaborate even better than we're doing.
I think there's a bit of a hidden success story here. For example, UNICEF with the WFP, UNHCR, UNFPA, and whether it's on FGM, early marriage, or humanitarian efforts, we're doing enormous programs together. With the WHO and UNDP, and with an enormous amount of World Bank funding behind us, we're running a new program in Yemen with hundreds of millions of dollars for child health and nutrition. We need more of that. We need to look at how we leave bigger results and change.
All I would say, as a relative newcomer to the UN, is that I think the UN is at its worst when it's not clear about what it's trying to achieve. I know that's an obvious statement, but if we're clear that we want to wipe out some of these neglected diseases or polio, or we want to get all the girls in the world into school, whether it's at a country level or a global level, I think then you get people rallying and bringing their different energies to make that happen. If we endlessly just discuss—as it feels sometimes in New York—process, then everyone just goes in circles. A lot of the discussion in New York is about process. I don't understand half of the jargon and I'm sure you wouldn't either. I think that's not just a UN problem. Member states contribute to making that discussion bad as well, by endlessly focusing on process, rather than big things to change. I know that's an obvious statement, but that would be my insight.