Foreign Affairs Committee on Feb. 4th, 2021

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Colleagues, welcome to meeting number 16 of of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted by the committee on October 22, 2020, we are resuming our study on the vulnerabilities created and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

To ensure an orderly meeting, as usual, I encourage all participants to mute their microphones when they're not speaking and direct comments through the chair. When you have 30 seconds remaining in your questioning or testimony time, I will signal you with this yellow piece of paper.

Interpretation services are available through the globe icon at the bottom of your screens.

I'd like to welcome our witnesses from the first group. We have with us Mr. Guillaume Landry, Director General, International Bureau for Children's Rights.

We also have Dr. Samantha Nutt, founder and executive director of War Child Canada, and Anu George Canjanathoppil, executive director of International Justice Mission Canada.

Mr. Landry, you have the floor for five minutes to make your presentation.

[Guillaume Landry, Director General, International Bureau for Children's Rights]

Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you.

I'm going to proceed quickly because there's a lot to say. I will try to add to what colleagues have already said in the previous session by focusing on the changing relationship between children and justice as a result of the pandemic, in the context of armed conflict, emergency or natural disaster.

What we have seen since the beginning of the pandemic is that children's relationship with justice is changing. New rules and regulations are being put in place: martial law, curfews and restrictions that ultimately affect children's lives. Schools close, and children are left to fend for themselves because their parents have to work more, travel to distant locations, or fight on the front lines.

There are obviously all sorts of other aspects to consider, such as the recruitment of more defence and security forces. I'm thinking of the Sahel, which, like most countries, has seen a massive deployment of police, constables and military in the streets to monitor the movement of people. As a result, there are far more interactions between children and these security personnel than there used to be simply because the children are not necessarily in school anymore and the interactions are becoming a part of the new norm.

The pressures on families also cause socio-economic conditions to deteriorate and, for many, the fine line between crime and normalcy is becoming blurred. As a result, many children find themselves in situations where they come into conflict with the law for a variety of reasons.

We must also take into account the pervasive presence of technology, both at home and in the poorest countries, where there are armed conflicts. Technology—cell phones are one example—is very present, and children have to deal with it and the opportunities it presents, but often without much supervision. We are seeing a significant increase in child trafficking and sexual exploitation through technology in a context that opens the door to abuse, given the increasing number of interactions between children and technology, as well as a decrease in parental, school or other supervision of access to these tools.

There has also been a decline in the number of front-line workers, that is to say social workers, justice personnel, security forces, labour and civil society inspectors, and so on. There is also a decrease in their capacity to deploy and offer services, especially in preventive but also curative fashion. This means that, for most children, the safety net is shrinking. They are more left to their own devices, and this means—as we have seen here, as in most countries—that the number of sexual assaults, and sexual exploitation, is increasing as a result of the pandemic.

This phenomenon is truly global in scope and affects all countries affected by these realities and where the family bubble has closed. The child's connections to the outside world allowed him or her to have valves, benchmarks or services, but this has reduced access to these services and increased the pressure on parents. This situation may ultimately exacerbate returns to spousal and child abuse, including sexual abuse.

These children are caught in a kind of matrix. I would like to highlight the lack of freedom. It is both a constraint and a timely opportunity—it is worth mentioning. Deprivation of liberty, as we learned last year, is seen in the fact that 7 million children in the world find themselves in preventive detention, in migration camps, in orphanages, without being able to go out. This makes them child detainees or children in trouble with the police, without convictions, without charges. More and more children are in these situations.

The pandemic has meant that, often to protect staff, many countries have unanimously explored certain measures—I'm thinking of Sudan or Palestine, for example. We saw that 85% of children who were detained were released for fear of contamination.

The alternative to incarceration, diversion, has made great strides in just a few months, and there are many possibilities. However, at the same time, curfews and regulations are imposed and children come into conflict with the law. This is the case for many adults as well. The systems are not adequate. Thus, there is a shift toward curtailment of freedom, which is of great concern.

That concludes my presentation.

Thank you for your attention.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Thank you very much, Mr. Landry.

Next we have Dr. Samantha Nutt for five minutes of opening remarks

Go ahead, please. The floor is yours.

[Dr. Samantha Nutt, Founder and Executive Director, War Child Canada]

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today.

This is undoubtedly an uncertain and difficult time for children and young people around the world, but especially for those living in poverty and war zones.

As a medical doctor and public health specialist, I've spent a quarter-century now engaged in developing and implementing humanitarian programs in support of the world's most vulnerable children, especially in my capacity as president of War Child Canada.

My testimony today is derived from direct information from our programs that span Africa, Asia and the Middle East and reach an average of 600,000 children and their families each year and which are created and managed by our teams of more than 450 staff worldwide, 99% of whom come from the communities they serve.

Certainly what I can tell you, based on our experience over the past year, is that communities within fragile states are currently facing an unprecedented challenge when it comes to protecting the world's most vulnerable children, which Mr. Landry mentioned as well. This is a reality that deepens the longer this pandemic plays out. In fact, the COVID pandemic for children living with armed conflict unfortunately threatens to wipe out much of the progress that we have seen in recent decades. These threats can be abated but only if there is sufficient public goodwill as well as concerted political action.

Today I want to focus on four priority concerns, though it should be noted that these are interconnected.

We see first-hand that children and youth here at home are feeling the harmful effects of lockdown measures when it comes to their mental health, physical security and academic performance.

But children living with war were already facing colossal disruptions to their education, sometimes for years, due to violence and displacement.

Lockdown measures in response to COVID, alongside rising social and political instability in several regions in which War Child is currently operating, have only compounded this hardship. Girls in particular are especially vulnerable as families face income declines and can no longer afford the cost of tuition, for example, or because they are too frequently pulled from their studies to tend to child care and domestic work. The longer children in such contexts are out of school, the bigger the gap in their education, and the bigger the gap in their education, the less likely it is that they will ever return. This also puts girls especially at increased risk of early and forced marriage.

Children and youth who are not in school are also at much greater risk of being abducted or recruited by armed groups, being trafficked, and of experiencing sexual and gender-based violence.

Compounding these disruptions right now is a stark lack of infrastructure to support remote or distance-based learning in low-income countries more generally, but in war zones quite specifically. UNICEF estimates that a third of schoolchildren worldwide cannot be reached by broadcast or Internet-based remote learning. Global Affairs Canada has been supporting our organization's efforts in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo to reach half a million out-of-school children through the development of radio-based education programming. These efforts are ongoing. They are quite successful. However, there is an overwhelming urgency to expand such opportunities to neighbouring regions to ensure that children who are living with war or as refugees are not further burdened by generational poverty as a lasting consequence of such disruptions to their education.

To address this, governments must start planning now, today, to work with local and international organizations engaged in education to expand distance-based learning and build out catch-up—often called accelerated—learning opportunities, which should begin as conditions allow. This is particularly critical for secondary school youth who are living with war, where the gaps are historically the most pronounced and where the runway for getting them back onto an educational pathway is usually the shortest.

The second is food security. In brief, food is getting harder to access and less affordable for communities living with war.

The pandemic has driven up shipping costs and made it difficult for farmers, especially subsistence farmers, to obtain the inputs needed to plant and get goods to market, resulting in a growing dependency on food aid. By late 2020, the pandemic had already added an estimated 120 million to the already 135 million people experiencing a food crisis in 2019. Within the areas in which War Child is working, the risk of severe malnutrition and famine is growing exponentially.

The third pressing issue is the lack of government and health infrastructure in many countries embroiled in conflict, which many of you know about already. Seventy low-income countries are unlikely to achieve majority vaccination coverage rates until 2023 or 2024. This is no secret, and the underlying cause is no mystery.

We can do more in the weeks and months ahead, and we must do more.

The fourth challenge, very briefly because I'm almost out of time here, concerns the enabling environment fostered by the pandemic in which rogue regimes, armed groups and anti-democratic [Technical difficulty—Editor ] violence, for example, in Ethiopia. Ethiopia and Darfur offer two such examples with devastating human rights abuses occurring against civilians.

In closing, I would like to assert my firm belief that the challenges I have outlined here today are not, for the most part, insurmountable.

To recover and to prevent future armed violence, children and youth living with war need more than high visibility, short-term interventions. They need integrated programs that protect their rights and shape their futures through education, access to health care, the rule of law, food security and economic opportunity. The pandemic has made realizing these goals more complicated, but it has certainly rendered them no less achievable.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Thank you so much, Dr. Nutt.

Now I'd like to give the floor to Ms. Canjanathoppil. Welcome to the committee. The floor is yours for five minutes of introductory remarks.

[Anu George Canjanathoppil, Executive Director, International Justice Mission Canada]

Greetings. Namaste. My name is Anu George Canjanathoppil and I'm the executive director of IJM Canada. We are the world's largest anti-human trafficking organization and we believe that we can end slavery in our lifetime.

We are present in all regions where the most vulnerable populations are, and my testimony comes from that experience.

I want you to picture a woman, a mother in her sari, like me, with a baby, caught in the midst of a lockdown just trying to get home. She died of hunger and thirst on the train platform. The media was flooded with painful images of her hungry child tugging at her sari to wake his dead mother, and trying to drink milk from this dead woman's breast. It makes me ask whatever happened to that baby, or the millions of children who are more vulnerable now more than ever. She was just one of the 14 million people displaced in India because of the pandemic.

The phenomenon of reverse migration has left millions of poor, vulnerable people stranded, exposed to extreme violence and a life that makes death feel like a relief.

Online child sexual exploitation tripled from 400,000 to 1.2 million in 2020. In the Philippines alone, 65% of the time it's a relative forcing these children to commit sexual acts. This is in sharp contrast to the notion that we are safer at home. There were more than 56 million children out of school in just one country in South Asia. Of those, more than 10.1 million are child labourers. Globally, we witnessed a spike in child marriages during the pandemic, resulting in 13 million more girls forced into early marriages.

This evokes a pertinent question. Are our children safe? We should care because we may have been responsible for this.

The year 2020 changed many things, but not the way we consume goods. Consumption has, in fact, increased. The products we consume continue to be made by those enslaved and trafficked. It is our irresponsibility that has contributed to getting people into this vicious cycle. Therefore, it is our responsibility to respond.

Our privilege is what causes us to think that as long as education is provided, jobs are there, drinking wells are there and poverty is addressed.... However, if a child or a woman is raped on the way to school or the well, or a father is working as a slave to provide one meal a day for his family, then we have a serious lacuna in what we believed was a solution in addressing poverty.

Communities need food, water and education, but before poverty in these communities can be addressed, the violence must be dealt with. IJM is focused on addressing that gap. We do this by rescuing victims, bringing criminals to justice, restoring survivors, strengthening justice systems and ending violence by ending impunity.

There are three regions I want to talk about today: Latin America, Southeast Asia and South Asia. All these regions have targeted the Canadian government as allies in the pursuit of the advancement of international development.

The feminist agenda is meant to elevate the rights and privileges of women throughout the world. For women to be elevated to an equal place in society, economic empowerment is needed. That's what the Canadian government has fought and continues to fight to accomplish. However, true economic empowerment cannot happen amidst a context of rampant violence. The story of the woman in the beginning is a clear example of that.

Global Affairs Canada is a crucial player in the pursuit to protect women and children from violence in the Northern Triangle. Canada can help fund a tech consortium, which will scale protection through innovative approaches. They can help Guatemala fund a gold standard of trauma-informed services for the healing and restoration of victims of violence. Andean countries have identified Canada and GAC as a stakeholder in making the protection of women and children a priority in their countries. Seven out of 10 women and girls are victims of violence in Bolivia. There is an opportunity right there for us to impact change.

Southeast Asia, the area oftentimes referred to as the manufacturing corridor, is largely powered by migrant workers and their children who are under extreme exposure to violence, trafficking and slavery, all of which have been exacerbated by COVID-19. With Canada's investment, we believe we can produce an intervention model to end slavery in the supply chain in these areas. This alone has the potential to provide protection for 17 million people—all because of Canada's commitment to freedom.

Finally, that leaves us with South Asia. As you know, India is a valued trading partner and is a strong economic force. Canada's proposed supply chain legislation, the modern slavery act, will require higher scrutiny for companies importing goods into Canada. By investing in initiators to partner with the Government of India to protect its citizens and children from violence, we can dramatically mitigate these potential negative effects. The act would actually do what it says, which is end modern-day slavery.

As a survivor of violence myself, I have committed my work to the theory of change because I have seen it work. It is what motivated me to lead the rescue of 10,000 people, but I have had a second motivation as well. It is fear. It is the fear of not having anyone show up. Fear always lies with the victims, which is so often women and children and never with the perpetrator.

I'm not a powerful influencer. I'm just another one of those women who fall into the statistic of being a victim of violence once, but each one of you—everyone sitting here—has the capacity to make history at a time like this. It's a time where everyone takes comfort in looking inward and trying to protect themselves, their community and their country. You have been willing to use your influence to impact change. You have the power to no longer allow violence to happen unchecked and to no longer tolerate it as a nation and as people. Imagine what that could mean to the lives of those languishing in violence, slavery and hopelessness.

What will you do so you don't have to see pictures of a precious baby boy orphaned because of the effects of violence on his now-dead mother?

Namaste.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Thank you so much to our witnesses for their powerful opening remarks.

We will now go into our first round of questions. They will consist of six minute segments each.

The first of them goes to Mr. Genuis. The floor is yours.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Thank you to all the witnesses.

Ms. Canjanathoppil, thank you so much for your powerful testimony. To those who are interested in learning more about this connection between injustice and poverty, there's an excellent book written by the founder of IJM called The Locust Effect. I know we have very limited time in these hearings but I would encourage those watching and other members of the committee to make note of that book, The Locust Effect. There are obviously many more stories and much more that can be said in book length than we can hear in five minutes.

I wanted to ask you two questions, both of which you touched on. How would you compare Canada's existing laws around supply chains to other models that exist around the world? What countries should we be looking to that have good, effective models of trying to advance human rights through the management of their supply chain?

My second question is about fighting online sexual exploitation. There are, of course, likely cases of victims in the developing world and perpetrators in Canada. That's a new phenomenon we can counter, so what can we do to better represent in our justice system the rights of victims who are not Canadians, and do more to ensure we are prosecuting perpetrators in Canada, even if the victims have a limited voice within our system because of where they're located?

[Anu George Canjanathoppil]

To begin with, Canada is the only country among the G8 that is not effectively positioned with legislation that can impact change in addressing modern-day slavery. That is the first place we can start looking into things. Yes, we are in the process of working through that. But even if that bill comes into play, until and unless there is a specific way we can impact how the goods are produced in developing countries.... I mentioned Southeast Asia, the manufacturing corridors. If we are not able to impact that, we are going to continue to ensure we are contributing to the global slavery index.

In response to your second question, the online sexual exploitation cases have tripled, as I mentioned, and that is a very conservative number, to be honest, because we are basing it on the number of reports that have come in. Several perpetrators are from Canada. We have been able to work in partnership with the RCMP here to identify one perpetrator whose sentence was increased.

What makes it possible for them to continue to do it? It is in the dark web, it is in silence, nobody knows what you're able to do at a time like this, and you know you're not going to be tracked back if there are, say, a million perpetrators out there. We might be lucky if we manage to get to a point where you can arrest a few. That is why the partnership IJM has with the Philippines government, the national security force there, and with the RCMP here is so crucial to addressing the crime and making sure there is a deterrence, that people think twice before going online and purchasing sex for five dollars from a child who is five months old.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Thank you for sharing that.

Let me try to get a couple of quick questions in, in the time I have left. We've had some discussions in Parliament around the company MindGeek that runs Pornhub and the featuring of child pornography on their site. Some Canadian victims have been speaking out.

I wonder if you could speak to the accountability of companies like that and Internet service providers and others. What role is there for them and for the government in pressuring them to shut these things down?

Also, I wonder if you could speak about what kinds of aid spending can advance justice. If the government were to say they're going to set aside a certain amount of money to specifically deal with justice issues, how could that money be spent most effectively?

[Anu George Canjanathoppil]

Absolutely.

As far as corporations that have taken responsibility for their acts, we saw an unprecedented shift in Australia, where a financial institution was caught for being the channel where people could purchase sex from children online. Then they committed a few million dollars to making sure that they would reverse the bad effects of the channel that actually promoted online sexual exploitation of children.

The same can be applied with every corporation. It doesn't take too much for a financial institution to understand that a few dollars like this on a regular basis is going to a certain channel. It doesn't take much for anybody to investigate and get to the root of tracking where this money is going, why it has been spent in such small amounts, and all the irregularity of the options that are available using these channels.

That's just financial space, though. There are several other ways that corporations can step up and respond.

In the interest of time, I'll respond to your other question on what a kind of investment is. IJM hopes to protect half a billion people by 2030. It is working. It is possible. We started with a goal of rescuing 1,000. We have gotten there. We have rescued thousands.

We know it is possible to get there and rescue half a billion people if there is an investment of $700 million. To put it simply, $3.30 Canadian is what it takes to identify, rescue and restore a victim, and that will lead to the bigger number of protecting a few million more. If we were to protect half a billion people, the investment would be $700 million globally.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Thank you very much, Mr. Genuis. That's your time.

Mr. Landry, I saw you raise your hand, but it is at the discretion of the committee member to address questions to the witnesses. Perhaps you will have a chance to come back to it next time.

I would now like to give the floor to Mr. Fonseca for the next six-minute round, please.

[Peter Fonseca, Liberal, Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to our three witnesses for their testimony and for giving this very powerful insight, as the chair mentioned.

I want to begin my questioning with Dr. Nutt.

Dr. Nutt, War Child has been adapting programming in accordance with local programming. Are you able to provide us with an update and/or expand on what has become of your radio-based distance education program, which you mentioned in your testimony, or the distribution of dignity kits to women?

That's my first question. We've heard about this radio-based type of programming—you mentioned it—in the Congo. Can you do a deep dive and take us through that and how that works, and let us know how it's working out for your organization?

[Dr. Samantha Nutt]

We started engaging in using the basic technology of radio.... It's actually modelled after farm radio, which started in Saskatchewan in the 1950s. We looked at areas where children were having difficulty accessing school and where a lot of girls—particularly in the eastern Congo—were being held back from school because of high rates of sexual and gender-based violence.

Families were not allowing their girls to go to school because they became very concerned that they would be attacked along the way. That presented a number of issues for those girls in terms of their access to education, as well as the increased likelihood that they would then find themselves in early or forced marriages because they were considered to be a burden on the family and not actually physically in school.

With initial seed funding from The Wellspring Foundation, we looked at using radio as a technology. In conjunction with a lot of Congolese actors and various other teachers and personalities, we recorded these radio-based educational sessions. We deployed teaching assistants to those communities, so where the girls couldn't go to school, school then came to them. It wasn't limited only to girls' participation because if you're deploying a teaching aide to a community and piping in the lesson, you want all children who need to be able to access school to be able to use those lessons.

We started at the secondary school level, and we found that within 18 months we had higher matriculation rates—so, higher graduation rates at the appropriate grade level—than the national average. We were seeing about 85% to 90% of girls who were then successful as a result of that. That was the pilot program. It involved a few thousand kids.

Then more recently, with support from the Government of Canada through GAC, we have been able to expand that to focus, in conjunction with the Congolese government, not only on areas that are now affected by violence, where kids were being held back from school, but on where kids were not able to because of [Technical difficulty—Editor] restrictions. We're about [Technical difficulty—Editor] into that now, and we're seeing some very good results.

There are a few constraints. Obviously, now we can no longer deploy, or it's a bit more complicated for us to deploy, the teaching assistants because of public health measures that need to be in place. However, where we're not able to accomplish that, we've offset it through other means—for example, by having access through telephone and that kind of thing.

We're seeing extremely good results. We're also working in Uganda to implement a very similar kind of program.

What makes it unique is not just that it's easy for kids to access; it's also that it's at a higher level of education that goes beyond primary but includes secondary.

As for the hygiene kits, this continues to happen. We're using that a lot and making sure that families have access to what they need, whether it's soap or other essential supplies, in places like Sudan, South Sudan and elsewhere.

[Peter Fonseca, Liberal, Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON]

Yes, that's great. It sounds like this is working through the pandemic and it may be the way forward for distance learning.

I want to ask you a question in regard to something that was reported, and you mentioned today, that about 90% or more—in 2018 it was 98% of your staff throughout the world—were local to the region where programs were being carried out. What are the advantages of working primarily with local partners for your program implementation?

[Dr. Samantha Nutt]

We have always done that. We have always prioritized. In fact, that is why we exist. We exist to try to decolonize aid and aid approaches in the sense that we work with local partners, they design the programs, they run the programs and implement the programs. We have either local or regional actors at all levels of our organization, including at the country director level, and they are the ones who are implementing those efforts. This means that during the COVID pandemic we have been somewhat more resilient in terms of our field approaches. We have strong robust local networks and those programs have been able to continue, whereas organizations that have a large reliance on an external expatriate infrastructure obviously have seen some of their activities curtailed as a result of the pandemic.

We believe very strongly that the best kind of humanitarian efforts invest in local capacity and make it possible for those communities to then rebuild and to do it on their own terms and with the priorities that they have identified. Our focus is always education, access to justice and economic development, and they're the ones who are driving that.

Again, it speaks to how Canada runs its aid programs. If we want to move the dial forward, we have to move beyond short-term, short-sighted interventions. We have to think about the structural challenges that children are facing in these contexts, and have a long-term view of the problems of war and poverty and abuse and exploitation, and commit for longer periods of time to see that kind of transformational change realized.

[Peter Fonseca, Liberal, Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON]

Thank you.

I have a question for Ms. Canjanathoppil.

On October 29, 2020, Bill S-216, an act to enact the modern slavery act and to amend the Customs Tariff, was introduced in the Senate. I know it's something that you've backed. Why is it important that Bill S-216 or legislation like it become law in Canada?

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Give a brief answer please, in the interests of time.

[Anu George Canjanathoppil]

Because decisions like that impact decisions in developing countries.

[Peter Fonseca, Liberal, Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON]

That's a quick answer.

What gaps in the Canadian legal framework would this bill address?

[Anu George Canjanathoppil]

The fact that we are not able to scrutinize how these products get into our country makes it a law without teeth, makes it something that does not in the longer, larger scheme of things benefit those who are in developing countries and who actually make products for us to benefit from.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Thank you very much, Mr. Fonseca.

Mr. Bergeron, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Stéphane Bergeron, Bloc, Montarville, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I would like to thank our witnesses for their valuable contributions to the work of this committee. This does not happen often. We rarely have the opportunity to hear testimony in the language of Molière, so I wanted to thank Ms. Nutt and Mr. Landry for giving me this pleasure today.

Since the beginning of our work, we have heard from many people that the pandemic has had a negative multiplier effect on the schooling of children in conflict zones. Ms. Nutt pointed out that children in conflict zones, where living conditions are precarious, are used to this kind of lack of interest in school programs. What we were told is that this is accentuated by the effects of the pandemic at the moment.

Several witnesses told us that youth who were no longer in school often found themselves in the labour market or were dragged into the hell of prostitution and human trafficking. We know that 2021 has been designated as the International Year for the Elimination of Child Labour. Quite ambitious targets have been set by the United Nations for 2025.

Do you think that, given the pandemic, these objectives will prove to be too ambitious and that there will be pitfalls along the way?

[Dr. Samantha Nutt]

Is the question for me or for Mr. Landry?

[Stéphane Bergeron, Bloc, Montarville, QC]

It is addressed to whoever wishes to answer it.