Thank you.
This is Diane Richler. I fully support everything that Tim Shriver said. Speaking from my personal experience, my first exposure to inclusive education was when my kids were in elementary school. The first inclusive classes were starting in Toronto. When I went to see those classes, they were the kinds of classes that I wanted for my kids. They were active. Kids were working together. The teacher wasn't at the front of the room telling everybody to be quiet. The teacher paid attention to the individual needs of all of the kids.
Ten years later, my godson was diagnosed with autism. He went through inclusive education in British Columbia from preschool through to high school. There's no question that having him in the school, having the teachers learn the kinds of things that Tim Shriver mentioned, improved education not just for him but for all of the students in the school.
What concerns me is that we've made progress—and I'll turn to Canada now with some progress, such as including the word “disability” in the Charlevoix declaration and including it elsewhere—but it doesn't go down. There are platitudes. Excuse me, but it's easy to say the word “inclusion”.
What this means is really looking at investments and stopping to look at what the barriers are for this kind of kid and what the barriers are for another kind of kid, etc. What does the school have to look like? What are all the elements that have to be in an education system to make sure that nobody's left out? All too often, when there's a focus on one group of excluded kids, barriers are built up for others. We've seen that for kids with intellectual disabilities. That's a real concern with the way that some of Canada's feminist international assistance policy has been implemented.
Too often there's been a lack of focus on the fact that children have multiple identities. Girls aren't just girls. There are indigenous girls. There are girls with disabilities. There are LGBTQ girls. We need to be building systems for everybody. Unfortunately, I don't think that we're building enough into the international programming that Canada is involved in to make sure that those issues are raised everywhere that Canada has a voice to talk about education.