I would add a couple of things to that.
One of the really important things that can be done is to use Canada's voice to shift the narrative. In the past, there was often this excuse that there weren't any capacitated women, or there weren't any women who were ready to be at the table. We can give you so many examples of that.
To give you one example, going back to Mali, when the violence spread there in the north in 2012, the deputy mayor of Gao was negotiating with the armed rebels to get humanitarian assistance into the camps and to her people. When we as the international community went in there to tap people on the shoulder to be at the peace table, even though she was a political leader and had been doing hands-on negotiations and was respected by her community, she was not one of the ones who was tapped to sit at the table. As a result, we had entirely men sitting at the table for those talks. That happens again and again.
We saw this with Syria as well. It was the women in the communities who were negotiating with the armed actors to get humanitarian assistance to their families and to their communities. It has taken us until these last few months to secure any role for women in the Syrian process, yet once it begins, we see the way in which it has traction.
Special Envoy de Mistura started this most recent round of talks a few weeks ago. I thought it was very interesting that in the first press statements he gave in Geneva, he was telling the press corps, “I had my first meeting.” Then it was, “I will be having a meeting in 45 minutes with government.” Then he stopped himself and said, “Actually, that's not the first meeting of these talks. The first meeting of these talks was with whom it should have been, and that's my women's advisory board. I met with them yesterday afternoon. Here is the intelligence that they gave me. Here is what they're telling me are the conditions on the ground and in the camps and what would motivate and incentivize people to go home to Syria, etc.”
I think that once we get traction and we get women's voices to these processes, it's a self-reinforcing cycle.
We also need to be looking at supporting track two processes, though, and not only focused on the formal processes. Again, we need to continue to focus on and support civil society, women's organizations in communities who are doing this work, and then linking them to the formal processes so that we're building a constituency and following through.