Subcommittee on International Human Rights Committee on Nov. 28th, 2023

[Julia McGeown]

About the notion of intersectionality in general, I think that's a really important point. I think that sometimes things are in silos. For example—

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Please wrap it up quickly because time is up.

[Julia McGeown]

Okay.

The point is this: Don't just focus on girls. Don't just focus on refugees. Don't just focus on children with disability. We need to think about all of the layers, the multiple layers and how that affects a child. A child is a child who's also a refugee, who's also a girl, who also has a disability. You need to account for all of those things, not separate things.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Thank you.

We will now go to the second round.

I would like to invite Ms. Damoff to take the floor for five minutes.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Thank you to all of our witnesses for being here today and, more importantly, for the good work that you do around the world.

I'm going to start with World Vision.

You talked about taking an inclusive approach and how you missed the mark in one particular context. How do you make sure that we can include those with lived experience in developing programs, not just for the program in general but also the country context?

The second part would be, how does the government ensure that we're using people with lived experience when we are developing those programs? So often what's lacking is having people at the table with lived experience.

[Tiyahna Ridley-Padmore]

Thank you for that question.

I'm going to try to answer it with one key example.

World Vision Canada is the host of the refugee education council, which brings together 15 refugee and displaced youth from different parts of the world and with different lived experiences and backgrounds across intersections. We have youth who identify as LGBTQI+. We have youth who have disabilities. This is a group of young advocates with lived experience who are coming together to help support Canada's international development sector by informing our programming and helping ensure that the work we're doing at a programmatic and advocacy level is informed by lived experience, as well as supporting the Government of Canada.

The refugee education council works very closely with the minister and with Global Affairs Canada. Many of you around this table have had an opportunity to interact with them. It's a very strong example and a prototype of what this work can look like and what it can look like to actually bring folks with lived experience in the room to help ensure that nothing is done for them without them. I think that, especially when we're talking about the most marginalized, we need to create space for different types of knowledge, and different types of data as well. Knowledge informed by lived experience in this scenario is the most valuable.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Thank you for that.

My next question is for Humanity and Inclusion Canada.

You talked about how inclusion costs money. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how it actually saves money in the longer term.

[Julia McGeown]

Did you want me to answer?

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Yes, please answer if you can. If not, I can get someone else to answer.

[Julia McGeown]

I can answer. That's fine.

Maybe you want direct figures, but essentially, retrofitting is always more expensive than starting out by being inclusive and accessible right from the get-go, so that's an example of how it might be expensive now to make schools inclusive and accessible. Here I'm talking about physical changes—so you have, maybe, ramps or larger, accessible toilets or classrooms that are light and airy, all of the things that make a school much more accessible to all children with different types of disabilities—but that obviously costs money. It's cheaper to do it right at the beginning if you're building a new school, making it inclusive and accessible to start with, than to do it later on. That saves money.

Also, if you think about the added cost to the wider society, the cost of not educating and of exclusion—and there are reports on this that we can share—is actually more than the cost of inclusion, because by excluding children you're obviously impacting society. Maybe their parents aren't able to work, so they, themselves, won't be able to grow up to have a decent job and gain income later on in life. That has a knock-on impact on the economy, for them and also for their wider family.

We should also think about the wider costs—less about the economic costs and more about the wider costs. Not having an inclusive society in general has an important cost for society. If the society is basically closed, inward-looking and not inclusive, that's not the society we should be advocating for, so I think it's also outside of the economic question.

There are studies that look at the actual rates of improvement for economic costs and for the GDP of a country by educating all children and not leaving out a section of children because it's not accessible.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Thank you, Ms. Damoff. Your time is up.

Now I invite Mr. Lake to take the floor for five minutes, please.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

Mr. Simms earlier touched on—it was in a conversation generally about budgets—challenging budgets globally right now with the circumstances we're in. Mr. Simms said that before a challenge we can do more with the money we have, not discounting the possibility of more funding but talking about bridging together what we have now.

In disability-inclusive education, there's a call to action. I don't know how many of you are aware of this call to action or have read it, but the call to action has just three main points in it. It's a two-page document. The three calls to action, in a sense, are the following. Number one is “Progressively increase budgetary allocations for disability-inclusive education towards being at least 5% of education budgets”, so talking about the percentage of budgets, presumably budgets that already exist around the world. Number two is “Set a medium to long-term target to ensure all learners with disabilities are reached in all education programmes, recognising that at least 10% of learners in any country will be learners with disabilities.” The third one is “Ensure all education programmes and grants mainstream disability and include disability-inclusion criteria and targets.” Those are the three asks of the call to action.

I'll point out that at this point in time—and you know what these things are like—not everybody is even aware that this conversation is happening. People are at different points in the process. I'll note that World Vision Canada, Humanity and Inclusion Canada, and Save the Children Canada, as of right now, I think, have signed on to this call to action. At this point in time, the other three of your organizations, to the best of my knowledge, have not.

My question is for Plan International Canada, CARE and Right to Play. When you hear me say those three things, are those things that seem like they would resonate with your organizations? Maybe we just need to reach out to encourage you to sign on to what seems like a fairly easy thing to support. I'll start with Plan International.

[Peter Simms]

I can jump in there.

Yes, even though Plan isn't technically a signatory of that call to action as yet, that's a procedural fact. It's not because we have any issue. We completely commit to those sectorial gains. We actually have slightly more ambitious ones in other areas as well. The nature of the development industry means that we sign these things in slightly different ways, but those three commitments are the absolute priority.

[Mohammed Emrul Hasan]

Those are absolute priorities, but I'll add one more here. We've been talking about measuring and having data, and a number of people have mentioned this. We quite often forget how difficult it is to get data in any circumstances, forget about going to hard-to-reach populations for data. I hope that it is a part of the mix and that we're able to really up the game there so that we can not only get the data that helps the programming but also measure the progress and show the progress over the time of the commitment.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, AB]

Absolutely.

Susan, go ahead.

[Susan McIsaac]

Yes, Mike, we are supportive.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, AB]

I'm not trying to trick anybody. It's one of those things that I think sometimes the conversation has....

We're looking for incremental steps that we can take in the right direction, and we want to turn that into action. The two-pager talks about the twin-track approach and other things. It also talks about the Washington Group's child functioning module, which I think lots of folks understand. Maybe some have had some input into early diagnosis and that kind of understanding.

I'm going to go to World Vision, but this could apply to almost anybody in the group. Peter was talking about that bridging. You're already doing work on the ground in however many countries. Each of you is doing work on the ground, and you have workers focused on children's health going door to door in many communities and talking to families—I've seen it on the ground, Michael, in World Vision's case—and yet kids are getting left behind.

To what degree could you hard-wire an awareness of what developmental disability looks like into that sort of door-to-door work you're already doing, especially if we're working on tools that you can then offer parents in terms of help? To what extent could we do a better job of hard-wiring that awareness into the work you're already doing?

[Tiyahna Ridley-Padmore]

Some of that work we are already doing on the ground. In a number of regions where we provide teacher training on disability inclusion and disability education, teachers are equipped with sign language and able to assess and respond to various special needs. Teachers are even able to identify special needs and disabilities that learners may not have received a formal diagnosis on, and then they are able to support and work with parents and the community to ensure those learners are equipped with the right supports. We are doing some of that work already.

When we talk about the gaps and some of those shortcomings, that is in some of those more deliberate pieces. It's about ensuring that disability inclusion is not an add-on but is actually foundational and core to how we approach this work. It's the same as how we think about gender. When we talk about reaching the most marginalized, we want to make sure that we are intentionally building that into the core of our work.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Thank you.

I would now like to invite Mr. Brunelle‑Duceppe to take the floor for five minutes.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Delorme, I was surprised to hear other witnesses who appeared before you say that sometimes it seems hard for francophone children in Canada to find specialized French-language services, which requires families to turn to English-language services.

In your experience and practice, have you heard about that in the rest of Canada, especially regarding francophone children with disabilities outside Quebec? If not, others may comment on this.

There are no right or wrong answers. We're here today to discuss the subject of our study and to improve the situation. That's everyone's objective.

[Anne Delorme]

Unfortunately, I haven't heard that. We mainly work internationally, not in Canada. However, I could say that, generally speaking, the percentages of people who lack access to education in francophone communities such as those in West Africa are higher than elsewhere. There are problems in that area.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

That's the point of my next question.

When do you plan to address the problem? Your organization operates in 80 countries. The members of the Save the Children organization work in 63 countries. World Vision's representatives are virtually everywhere. I see there's a real discrepancy between the services offered to anglophone and francophone populations. That's what I've understood, but I may be wrong.

Ms. Delorme, you're very familiar with the problem. Can you tell us why it's that way? What potential solutions are there?

[Anne Delorme]

I'll ask my colleague Ms. McGeown to supplement my remarks if necessary.

We're essentially seeing something interesting happening. The organizations advocating for children's rights, women's rights and the rights of persons with disabilities aren't as well funded in francophone countries and are much more isolated. There are fewer regional mechanisms enabling those organizations to come together to plead their case to their governments and regions. We're seeing this particularly in the case of women's organizations. They're slightly more organized and funded on the anglophone side and are therefore slightly more successful at coming together and breaking out of their isolation in every country. Consequently, they have greater influence on their local governments and regions.

We're also seeing this trend in our Making It Work program, which supports the rights of women and girls. For the moment, it's much stronger in anglophone than francophone Africa.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

In Cameroon, for example, roughly one fifth of the population is anglophone and the remaining four fifths francophone. One side of the population is better served than the other, even though they're part of the same country.

Is my understanding of the situation correct?