Thank you for those questions.
Your first one relates to how it's integrated across the department, the now consolidated department of Global Affairs Canada.
Really, the North Star essentially is our national action plan on women, peace and security. When I started the role, I spent several months speaking with people across that department as well as various others at all lengths, from locally engaged staff to ambassadors, deputy ministers, etc., and asked first of all what they knew about it and what they needed to implement more, and there was overwhelming consensus that we have the policy framework that we need. We need implementation of it and we need the implementation to be more consistent so that we are implementing it when crises emerge and it's a little more reflexive than it might be now.
In terms of the way that I'm integrated, my office itself is based at Global Affairs. There are four staff, including me. I'm very fortunate, as I mentioned, to have two secondees from DND and from the CAF, as well as a range of people I work with across different offices. While it's both an advantage and a challenge to be, as I sometimes describe myself, a kind of floating box in an organization chart, it also presents a lot of opportunities to engage in different areas. I work with regional bureaus as well as thematic bureaus to talk about the extent of our implementation and gaps that still need to be filled.
Your question related to feminist foreign policy. The government has spoken to date of our feminist foreign policy as being composed of various components, with women, peace and security and our action plan being one of them. Our feminist international assistance policy is another. “Strong, Secure, Engaged” is a third, and then our trade policy is a fourth. Those are kind of pillars of the feminist foreign policy.
In talking about it around the world and at home, I recognized that “feminist” is often a very loaded word, especially when you associate it with security and defence issues, but I find that when you unpack the concept, almost without exception, it's something that the vast majority of Canadians agree with. The way that I think about it and the way that I think the government articulates it and implements it is by recognizing that every single person has equal rights and should have an equal opportunity to access those rights, and that we are all better off when that happens, so it is looking at power structures—not just equality, but power.
You mentioned how GBA+ fits into that. Gender-based analysis-plus is a tool of analysis. It's a process through which we can identify how an issue might differently affect men or women or boys or girls or people who are in urban settings or rural settings or people with disabilities. It's only a tool for understanding. An approach of women, peace and security and our feminist foreign policy is a positive determination to create more equality and reduce the inequality that is identified through that analysis. Part of the issue, I think, is making sure that we do strong gender-based analysis-plus and then do something with that information.