Evidence of meeting #42 for Subcommittee on International Human Rights in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was inclusive.
A video is available from Parliament.
12:35 p.m.
Liberal
Ali Ehsassi Liberal Willowdale, ON
I'm just saying that we have to demonstrate some consistency here. I don't think it's necessarily coming down to who can stay and who can't. The golden rule for this committee is that there has to be consensus. Obviously, there isn't consensus on this particular point. I think the meeting should be adjourned at one o'clock.
Thank you.
12:35 p.m.
Liberal
12:35 p.m.
Conservative
Mike Lake Conservative Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, AB
Given that there's no consensus, I didn't even really move a motion, but I think we need not waste any more time. It's clear that there are a couple of members who have to leave.
12:35 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Fayçal El-Khoury
We have to go for questions and answers.
We'll adjourn at one o'clock.
The floor is yours, Mr. Lake.
12:35 p.m.
Conservative
Mike Lake Conservative Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, AB
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I was just listening to a couple of different points that sort of jumped out at me. One was social progress. Dr. Novak was bringing up social progress in addition to cognitive progress from inclusion.
Paola was saying that there is a misconception out there sometimes that kids with disabilities hold back other kids.
Dr. Novak, in the research, you brought up the idea that there's social progress in addition to cognitive progress when you have meaningful inclusion. There's this idea of helping peers to be a part of the solution in a sense.
Can you speak to that a little bit?
12:35 p.m.
Fellow, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, As an Individual
Absolutely, thank you very much.
I'm happy to answer that. I think that's a really important point to raise. Inclusion does not exist within a silo nor does engagement in any sense.
You have to have a fulsome response to the social factors. It has to be fully participatory in order to get movement along the continuum to meaningful change and improvement of the particulars to have better quality of life for those with disabilities, to engage them on a social basis, an economic basis and an educational basis. There's engagement at the preliminary level from the point of the childhood education level all the way up to end of life cycle so you're looking at it from a holistic point of view.
In terms of kids with disabilities participating in their own education, that's something that's been addressed as well. It's part of the radical education movement embracing the idea of particpatory measures. There's a type of research that heavily involves methodology around participatory methodology. At the same time, you can take that and transition it into interventionalist approaches. That means embedding these different elements plus lived experiences of not only those who have disabilities or are affected by disabilities but also their families, their communities and other stakeholders. I would encourage the incorporation of all those different elements rather than seeing it through a singular lens. This is really about intersectional lenses.
12:35 p.m.
Conservative
Mike Lake Conservative Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, AB
I would love to dig into that further, but I have a very limited time for questions.
To Ms. Weeks, the Washington Group child functioning model was mentioned in the call to action. You gave a little bit of background to it. Maybe you could tell us a little bit more about how that functioning model is used in practice on the ground.
12:40 p.m.
Lead Health Statistician, The Washington Group on Disability Statistics
The data collected with the child functioning model provides two things.
One is information on difficulties that children are experiencing in certain domains of functioning, whether that's seeing, hearing, mobility, fine motor skills, learning, playing, controlling emotions, anxiety or depression. Overall, many data users tend to use that to dichotomize children with disability versus children without; however, the other use of the data, of course, is to kind of drill down into those specific areas of functional difficulty so that any programs or efforts can be targeted to the particular type of difficulty.
Can you elaborate a little bit further if I haven't specifically answered your question?
12:40 p.m.
Conservative
Mike Lake Conservative Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, AB
I'm trying to figure this out. For an individual child, in a specific location somewhere in the world, you said that you have a model that's used for two- to four-year-olds and a model that's used for five- to 17-year-olds. A big part of the challenge we have is that we don't know who those kids are. In many parts of the world, those kids are hidden. They're “invisible”, to use a word that some would use.
The question I have is around maybe a community health worker who is working for an organization, or something like that. If they're given access to this model, they might have an opportunity to meet one of these kids as they're visiting the families from home to home, and they might be able to, I imagine, use the model to give some form of a broad assessment of a child's situation or disability. Is that how it would work?
In other words, if we scaled that up to more and more organizations on the ground that are meeting families everywhere in the world, might we identify more kids with disabilities who are currently invisible to the system, and might we have that opportunity to get those kids included in school systems?
12:40 p.m.
Lead Health Statistician, The Washington Group on Disability Statistics
Yes. The more we harmonize the use of the same kinds of modules to identify children with disabilities, not only in our censuses, not only in our nationally representative surveys, but also in our programming.... When dollars are spent through programs, you have to attach the requirement that information collected during those programs will be collected in the same way. This harmonization is absolutely critical, whether it's administrative data sources, programs or our usual national data collections.
12:40 p.m.
Conservative
Mike Lake Conservative Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, AB
Thank you.
I have one minute left. I'm going to Eric, if I could.
You were talking about institutionalization. I guess this is further to the question I asked Dr. Novak a few minutes ago. I would ask for a comment on inclusion and individuals who don't have disabilities. What is the impact on those individuals when we get inclusion right?
12:40 p.m.
Executive Director, Disability Rights International
Thank you very much.
Yes, once we address the issue of inclusion, it has a much broader impact on children who are not labelled with a disability. What we know is that institutional segregation creates impairment and leads to disability of all children, essentially. We are generating more and more impairment by placing children in institutions. By creating inclusive societies for children with disabilities and by allowing that form of segregation to be avoided, we are protecting all children from the dangers of psychiatric, psychological and cognitive impairments as well as protecting them from human rights violations, exploitation of labour and trafficking and other forms of abuse we see in institutions—
12:40 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Fayçal El-Khoury
Thank you, Mr. Rosenthal. You have exceeded the time by almost half a minute.
We have to do a sound test because Ms. Kulbir Singh was not able to give her remarks earlier. We will suspend for a moment.
Yes, it is working now.
Ms. Kulbir Singh, you have the floor.
12:45 p.m.
Disability Inclusion Specialist, World Bank Group
That's wonderful. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Members of the committee, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for undertaking this study in disability-inclusive education. A special thank you goes to the Honourable Mike Lake for introducing this issue to the parliamentary agenda.
I am pleased to be here representing the World Bank, a multilateral institution that provides financing, policy advice and technical assistance to governments of developing countries.
My name is Ruchi Kulbir Singh, and I'm a disability inclusion specialist. I'm joined here today by my colleague, Charlotte McClain-Nhlapo, World Bank's global disability adviser, who joins us from a remote location in South Africa.
During my remarks, I will provide an overview of the World Bank's authorizing environment, and then share three key learnings from our experience in developing inclusive education and delivering it at scale through the World Bank's assisted-financing projects, along with recommendations.
The World Bank has been making considerable progress in promoting the rights of persons with disabilities throughout its operations. The World Bank's authorizing environment includes a commitment to ensure that all World Bank-financed education projects and programs are disability-inclusive by 2025. In addition, we have the IDA19 and IDA20 policy commitments, which make special reference to disability inclusion—and, in IDA20, to education more particularly.
The World Bank's authorizing framework is the social framework that presents entry points for inclusion. What that means is that every project, education, and otherwise must identify differentiated risks and impacts on persons with disabilities and design programs that prevent and mitigate such risks to ensure equal access and participation.
I am now going to share with you some distilled lessons from our work on improving and promoting disability-inclusive education.
First, there is a strong commitment among government partners to promote disability inclusion in education; however, the catalyst necessary to promote inclusion in education, which is strategic financing and budgetary support, often remains elusive. Regular financing is essential to operationalize a twin-track approach to ensure that a systems-level strengthening for inclusive education is possible. At the World Bank, we have implemented this approach of providing strategic catalytic grants through our two trust funds on disability-inclusive education in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, and we have seen big gains in countries such as Rwanda, Ethiopia and Nepal.
This operational playbook of investing in catalytic grants has also supported us to deliver at scale. For example, in Rwanda, an investment of $2 million U.S. by the World Bank's inclusive education initiative has successfully influenced several aspects of a $150-million investment project in areas such as teacher training, learning materials and infrastructural components, by applying the lens of disability inclusion. Hence, it is our recommendation that continuous financial resources must be available to provide just-in-time support to countries as they take small but critical steps towards ensuring inclusive education.
Secondly, children with intellectual disabilities are the most marginalized, overlooked and stigmatized amongst the disability groups. Moreover, within the disability groups, research indicates that issues concerning intellectual disabilities often receive little to no policy support or financial investment as compared to other disability groups. Resources in the form of financial and assistive technology are often channelled to organizations that may have the strongest lobby or advocacy on the ground.
Third, the commitment toward disability-inclusive education cannot afford to be political. Countries must support this agenda because the right to education is a human right and because article 24 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities prohibits discrimination on grounds of disability and promotes access—
12:50 p.m.
Disability Inclusion Specialist, World Bank Group
Support towards disability-inclusive education should not be an occasional policy agenda, and we must move beyond thinking just in terms of access to education for children with disabilities and move toward quality learning.
Mr. Chair, one last point I would like to make before I close is that disability is an experience that intersects with other aspects of human experience and identity. In development circles, disability is often viewed as a separate agenda, and it need not be so.
The Government of Canada has championed the promotion of rights of girls, women and LGBTQI groups. However, the intersecting lens of disability and gender has often been overlooked within those investments. We recommend taking advantage of the momentum around the gender discourse.
Thank you once again.
12:50 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Fayçal El-Khoury
Thank you.
Now I would like to invite Mr. Zuberi to take the floor for seven minutes, please.
December 12th, 2023 / 12:50 p.m.
Liberal
Sameer Zuberi Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
I'd like to thank all the witnesses for being here and for your testimony and Mr. Lake and the committee for making this study possible.
Disability is an extremely important subject, as is education, and ensuring that all people who have a disability can receive a dignified education and be full participants in society is critical.
While we were in committee, I saw the news, although I won't talk about it in this moment, but it brought to mind what's happening within a conflict right now in the Middle East.
Ms. Mustafa, I thank you for your testimony and your story as a young person who lived in a conflict zone in Syria and later on got the tools to really develop to your fullest capacity. I'd like to hear what your ordeal was like while living in conflict within Syria and what that experience meant for you as somebody who was living with violence and war. Can you talk a bit more about that, please?
12:50 p.m.
Disability and Refugee Rights Advocate, As an Individual
Sure. I would love to address that.
Living with a disability, especially when it was physical, made me feel like I was the obstacle between my family and reaching safety. There was always the anxiety of what to do if we had to evacuate at a moment's notice, which might not always have been possible.
I think this is even more visible for people with other types of disabilities. If you're hard of hearing, you would not be warned of bombs coming or an impending bombing. If you had a visual impairment, you would have to navigate an environment full of debris and rubble to reach safety or to access any form of security.
It took a toll on my emotional and mental health to be in that situation as a person with a disability, just in feeling like I was a burden on everyone else, that they could escape easier if I wasn't there, and—
12:55 p.m.
Liberal
Sameer Zuberi Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
Can I ask you this? I just want to get a bit of precision regarding some answers for the testimony. The breaking news is that the prime ministers of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, all three prime ministers, called for urgent international efforts toward a sustainable ceasefire in Israel and Gaza in the Israel-Gaza conflict. You were a young person and conflict was happening around you. If you could put yourself in the shoes of the young people within Gaza today, what do you think they're going through right now?
12:55 p.m.
Disability and Refugee Rights Advocate, As an Individual
I think they're in what I call “survival mode”. They're experiencing feelings of helplessness and despair in that situation. They're hoping for the best outcome, but not expecting it. They are praying the situation will not become worse, or that they will not end up losing their lives or someone they care about.
12:55 p.m.
Liberal
Sameer Zuberi Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
I've been told that U.N. agencies were quite robust, assisting and very much present on the ground, in particular for persons with disabilities in education.
Was that your experience? Did you find there was a stronger presence within Syria as compared with other conflicts?
12:55 p.m.
Disability and Refugee Rights Advocate, As an Individual
I was personally not approached to participate in any initiatives related to education. I did not receive a proper education until I was in Germany, which was at the age of 17.
I always say that people with disabilities are forgotten in times of peace, let alone in times of war, in terms of access to education. Also, I would not have had any access to information related to initiatives made by U.N. agencies. There were other humanitarian actors in regard to the topic of education within conflict. That's one of the barriers that also presents: the lack of access and exposure to education when it comes to conflict.
Oftentimes, education is not prioritized when you're just trying to survive. In that context, I believe a very minuscule portion of families or people who have disabilities would have access to services, when it comes to education during a conflict.
12:55 p.m.
Liberal