I was very proud to host over 80 nations to talk about peace and support operations around the world and bringing in new initiatives. As you just stated, resolution 1325, look how long ago it was. It was about what are we going to do about women, peace, and security. Our numbers on peace operations have minusculely increased. What we want to do as Canada is look at where the needs are of the United Nations and also contributing nations, if we're now going to be re-engaging. That's what we're trying to do. The initiative that Minister Freeland announced is going to have overall the wider impact of encouraging other nations to increase their women and peace operations. More importantly, the first issue we have to address, which allowed us to have this discussion in Vancouver, was the need to increase the number of women in our armed forces if we're going to increase the number of women in peace and support operations. We had a lot of discussions about that, too.
I don't think I need to go into the research side of why this is important. This is the right thing to do if you want to reduce conflict, but more importantly, our initiatives, which we outlined, were about helping to improve the system and doing it in a way that it's what the UN wanted. They wanted smart pledging, making sure that in missions that are there, for each mission, one nation provides the capability, and then it's pulled out, making sure they have all the right capabilities seamlessly through until the conflict reduces. That's what we're trying to achieve.
I was also very proud of the Vancouver principles that are preventing child soldiers. I want to give tremendous kudos to General Dallaire on this. Reducing the number of kids being recruited into these organizations is going to reduce conflict. This is another opportunity for us, for Canada, to step up and offer an initiative on how to do this, and put it into our training system. I'm very proud, and I'm very excited about the implementation of this.