Thanks so much for the question.
I know that resolution 1325 is well known to the committee, but as you mentioned, not all Canadians know it that well. It's the first time that the highest security-focused body in the world—the UN Security Council—has said that women are not only victims of conflict but also powerful agents of change. It says that they have to be included in all formal processes to prevent and end violent conflict, and then rebuild afterward. I often share that it's the Security Council resolution that is most translated into other languages, more than any other one, which I think speaks to its relevance. I've seen, over 20 years, that women in communities around the world use it as a tool to hold their own governments accountable, saying, “Even though you've said you will do this, we're not seeing action.”
You mentioned some milestones and the things that are going well. Right now, as I mentioned, we have 85 countries that have national action plans. Some of them admittedly are very weak, but they are all a tool around which people living with war around the world have been able to organize and to say that this is something that the international community has said is their right.
We're seeing an increasing number of policies. We're also seeing a lot of data and research emerge. We first saw the resolution emerge 20 years ago, the last time Canada was on the Security Council. We didn't even know the state of the numbers, and I think you would all have been terrified by the methodology used to document it. Researchers were looking at signed peace agreements and the number of women in photos to figure out that in fact the proportion of women who were mediators was two per cent. Four per cent of people who signed peace agreements were women, yet they were dealing with issues and agreements as they relate to security that affect the entire population. We've seen a lot of progress in that way.
You've asked about next steps and our vision. We're still looking to close some of the big gaps in this space. There's a strong ambition that was set out by the agreement, and there are still significant areas where we don't see it consistently applied. A lot of that relates to the work of women in communities and being recognized, getting funding, getting access to decision-making, being protected. We' re increasingly looking to close some of those gaps.
My hope is that over time, we'll see a complete shift in burden from having to start many events and meetings, as we often do now, by justifying the value of inclusion and talking about the contributions women make, to people having to justify and defend exclusion. We'll get to a much more nuanced consideration of gender and we'll get a lot more integration into education and training, as Brigadier-General Bourgon mentioned earlier, so that we will have more and more people coming up through the system who are familiarized with these ideas much earlier on.