I would say a couple of things. First of all, I'm very aware of the seriousness of these issues, having myself served in a country where these issues are very much at the fore. Prior to taking on this assignment, I was the representative of Canada in Kandahar, and so I dealt with these issues on a daily basis.
Actually, we try to make sure we're addressing the issue of women, peace, and security at the global multilateral level--which is about setting norms and setting standards so that you can hold countries to account and you can help to establish best practice--and we also approach it in country-specific circumstances through our embassies and through specific activities in our work with international organizations and NGOs.
I didn't want to take up too much of the committee's time, but we do all kinds of specific things in countries. We support women's participation as mediators in peace processes. We make sure that women can participate in peace processes. We've been a strong advocate, for instance, for women's participation in both the DRC and in Sudan, in the Darfur peace processes.
We have provided resources to facilitate land-dispute mechanisms. One of the biggest issues that women often face in countries post-conflict and post-disaster is that they don't have land tenure rights. So we have very specific projects in a number of countries to try to help women deal with that.
SGBV investigation has been an important part of our activities in Afghanistan, in DRC, and in Colombia, for instance. In Colombia we've put a number of projects in place specifically to try to address issues of impunity, because these issues weren't being looked at.
So I could give you a whole list of things we do, but I totally agree with you; we are very much in the practical, very much with our sleeves rolled up, here in Ottawa, as are all of our colleagues around the world.
Am I confident that we'll be able to do something with the action plan? Yes, because we already are. What the action plan enables us to do, though, for the first time is to try to bring all this stuff together within one coherent plan. It sets out a list of priority activities that we're going to do. It helps us to establish the baseline for these things.
To go back to the question that Mr. Dorion asked about the finances, our starting point for this was to look at the fact that there is all of this money already being spent by Canada in situations of armed conflict and in humanitarian crises. Let's start with this: how do we make sure that the money that's already being spent has the lens of women, peace, and security being utilized? As we look at that, then we can determine whether or not there are additional needs in certain places.
Even for my own organization, I was looking at my figures over the last couple of months. I manage the global peace and security fund, and this past year--if you understand your interpretation of women, peace, and security--we've spent about $32 million on projects that directly benefit women and girls in situations of armed conflict. Of that, $1 million is spent specifically around Resolution 1325, and $5.7 million is to address sexual and gender-based violence, but then the rest is for mainstreaming these issues.