Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm honoured to be invited here today. I represent, as you've heard, Planned Parenthood Toronto, a community health centre that since the 1960s has been advancing reproductive justice and sexual and reproductive health for young people through primary care, mental health care, community programs, research and advocacy.
Why should what we are seeing on the ground at PPT matter to this committee? It's because the disturbing trends that we are experiencing—particularly along the fault lines of gender, bodily autonomy and safety for women, girls and trans people—are tied, sometimes quite directly, to Canada's presence and field of influence abroad. Along with climate disaster, which also impacts women, girls and trans people disproportionately, it is also no exaggeration that the terrifying global backsliding around gender is the most urgent issue of this generation, as it is a tool to mainstream authoritarianism across the world.
Canada, of course, is not immune to such global trends. They are global. At last count, the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada identified that well-funded anti-abortion activists are in every level of our own governments, including over 80 at the federal level, showing that here in Canada, anti-choice organizing is taking its lessons well.
There is so much that could be said, and there are so many linkages to be made. However, I want to take this opportunity to focus on two illustrative areas: the profound impact of predatory Canadian so-called colleges on young women and girls in rural India and the ongoing violence against women and girls as a result of Canadian resource extraction projects.
Reproductive justice, defined by Black and indigenous feminists through the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, is the “right to have children”, “to not have children” and to raise those children “in safe and sustainable communities.” Crucially, it pushes the somewhat narrow reproductive rights argument further to a social justice approach. Every woman, girl and trans person should have the right to have children, to not have children and to raise those children in safe and sustainable communities.
As climate disaster and hard-right governments grow in power globally, we see the dire impacts locally. Every year, PPT is funded provincially with $74,000 to support non-insured clients—to access abortion, mostly—most of whom have precarious status or are students with inadequate health insurance. Increasingly, who we see are students from predatory colleges that are actively and intentionally luring foreign students to Canada and then abandoning them once they get here. No actual education materializes, and there's no way to get home. Their families' entire savings and often exorbitant loans have been spent to somehow get here. Our non-insured budget for abortion care has ballooned from $74,000 to $500,000 in one year.
Those coming to us are part of a new phenomenon: rural farming communities in India are sending not their sons but their daughters for education, hoping for a better life in the context of escalating climate change, globalization and deep indebtedness, with no relief from a hostile Indian government. Many of these young women find themselves highly exploited, sexually assaulted by landlords, trafficked locally or subjected to coercive relationships with no resources. As providers and advocates, we're scrambling to respond.
I have watched the important witness statements at this committee petitioning Canada to stay accountable and fulfill its crucial, stable, feminist gender-funding commitments globally. I want to underscore this. Now more than ever, this is a matter of life and death. It is crucial that Canada work with local feminist organizers, both on the ground, as it were, and also online, where well-funded misogynist and authoritarian organizing is increasingly happening. I also want, with great urgency, to add a layer born of personal experience.
My late father was a Canadian mining and resource extraction executive. Specifically, he had a key role in negotiating contracts between Canadian mining companies and countries like India, Mexico, China, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Madagascar. Often our whole family would go along with him, giving me an exciting childhood of travelling around the world, riding giant coal dump trucks, hearing casual conversations over imported Pizza Pockets about how entire villages were being displaced forever in order to allow for the Canadian-led mining operations. I've been propositioned aggressively, as young as 12 years old, by grown Canadian men who were perhaps used to displaced and trafficked local children to whom I bore a close resemblance. We fled the onset of civil war back into the safety of Canada, leaving friends, classmates and neighbours behind to face the horror.
Canada is both a great hope globally and, frustratingly, one of the biggest perpetrators of extractive practices that contribute to climate disaster, result in profound loss of human rights and land, and result in the sharp increase in abuse, sexual violence, trafficking, degradation and state terror of women, girls and trans people. In addition to our feminist and strategic SRHR funding commitments, there must also be an honest reckoning with Canada's economic practices around the world, a reckoning that has both the will and the teeth.
As the executive director of Planned Parenthood Toronto, someone who grew up around Canadian mining projects, an immigrant and a feminist, I urge that this reckoning come as soon as humanly possible. For women, girls and trans people, our very survival depends on it. Our planet's survival depends on it.
Thank you very much.