Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for your excellent presentation. It has actually brought out a lot of my own emotions, because I've only ever worked in male-dominated professions, and I've always been the minority. For a lot of your comments, it's been either “I totally disagree” or “I totally agree”, so there has been a lot of emotion for me.
First, I really appreciated your clarifying that Canada deciding to go into Mali is not just a PR exercise. It really is part of a much broader approach about us re-engaging in the world, wanting to contribute to peace operations and to the UN, and helping to change that institution and actually drive some changes forward. That's in addition to trying to introduce our feminist international policy assistance and the money that you so rightly pointed out, around $150 million, where we're trying to build capacity in a number of countries to empower women and girls at the local level. I appreciated your making that statement. I think it's an important one. It's a much broader agenda that we're trying to do.
I hear what you're saying, that when you add women, you do not automatically change peacekeeping right away. There are things around addressing local culture, changing organizations, dealing with power structures, training and building local capacities.
One of the things I always struggle with is that part of me thinks, “Why wouldn't we move right away to a quota?” I completely agree with you that for someone who is a woman and maybe an executive for a large organization, if there are only two women out of 15 people, they're not going to change anything, but if I have eight out of 15, I might actually have a big influence. Why wouldn't we move to something like a quota?