Thank you to the committee for your leadership and your work on this issue, and for the invitation to appear before you today.
Among the four of us, I know we're going to be covering off a lot of statistics, and there are some very powerful ones. Circulated in your package is a brief from Oxfam that provides, from our perspective, some very compelling reasons that we, as Canada, should be exhibiting our leadership and demonstrating our leadership globally in addressing this issue, and how critical and important this is for women around the world and for the women who are most poor around the world.
I don't want to start with the statistics. I want to bring us back to who we are talking about when we're talking about these initiatives globally. I have the opportunity and the privilege to meet with many of these women and young girls as I travel around the world. As I say, I think it's important, when we're looking at what we can do with billions to benefit hundreds of millions, that we do have in our minds who it is we are talking about.
Young girls who are supporting their families are working in the maquilas in Managua. They are 16 years old and they have two children. They're working in difficult conditions, earning poor wages, and often facing significant occupational health and safety hazards, and yet they are absolutely determined to raise their family and contribute to their community, contribute to their economy, and contribute to a better future. But they recognize that in order for them to do that, they need some support. They need access to comprehensive community health services to ensure that their sexual and reproductive rights are respected and that their ability to access the services they need are supported.
We're dealing with women in southern Africa, in communities in Namibia, where the rates of HIV infection are among the highest in the world. These are women who are living in hovels made of paper or plastic, who have a number of children, who themselves have had very few opportunities to get an education. These women have few opportunities to get any access to information, but more importantly to the power they need in order to exercise control over their lives and to create an environment in which their children have the prospects to live a better life than they do.
I've spent time in Darfur, meeting with literally thousands of women and girls, themselves terrorized and traumatized by the violence in that country. Hundreds of thousands of them have been victimized by rape as a strategy of war. They are dealing with the caustic and corrosive impact, on themselves and their family and their community and their future, of large numbers of children born of violence.
So when you're dealing with these different circumstances and you see how rending this is for people, you can't but recognize the urgency and the enormity and the absolutely compelling reason that we need to do much more in this area.
We need to understand that in taking on this issue, there's no quick fix. It's not a little thing here; it's not a little thing there. It is a comprehensive, integrated response that is required to deal with the full range of health and human services to ensure that people can secure their sexual and reproductive rights, but that also situates that in the broader context. We recognize that the thing that will have the largest impact on how many children a woman has is how much education she has received. The thing at the end that will have the biggest impact on her ability to access health services is that there's a coherent national health care system that has publicly available services with no fees and no barriers to access.
We need to then be addressing these issues at the level of individuals, in terms of behaviours and attitudes, and at the community level, in terms of cultural norms and societal values. We also need to be looking at these issues systemically, in terms of the services that are available within nations, and recognize that it is in the bed, in the household, in the markets, in the parliaments, in the courts, and in the streets that the future of those women and their prospects for living a healthy life, being able to raise children who cannot just survive but can thrive—all of that—is what is at stake here.
We're very clear about what we need to do. What we've been lacking in this case is the political will and the commitment to do it.
The week before last, I was invited to address the United Nations General Assembly on the millennium development goals. And there I raised the issue of the amount of money that has been committed by the world for bailing out the banks and refloating the economies of the global north.
The American ambassador to the United Nations took some umbrage at what I said, because he interpreted it as a critique of how much money had been allocated to reviving and restoring and revitalizing our economies.
While I might have had a certain quibble--I might have suggested that a deeper gender analysis might have been brought to bear on how that money was spent, or that there might have been more environmental sensitivity to how that money was spent--at the end of the day I said I had no concern at all about how much money the world had committed to refloating the economies of the north. But it's really important that we understand that the bar has now been set, against which our performance globally will be measured in terms of our response to the more than one billion people on this planet who are deeply poor.
When we look at this initiative with respect to maternal health and supporting the capacity of children to survive, we have to be absolutely clear about the amount of money we're talking about. It is a pittance compared to the trillions that have been mobilized. And anything less than the full amount of money that is required in order to ensure that women can secure their sexual and reproductive rights, that there are full and comprehensive health services available to citizens of this planet, that we have the educational support, and the support to clean water and sanitation, and all of the other building blocks that are essential not only for prosperity but for equality on this planet, indicates that we are negating our responsibility as citizens and as human beings.
You're in a privileged position, as leaders and as respected people within this country, to bring a very clear message to the government to support this initiative; to indicate that we need serious bucks behind it; and to indicate that the expectations of Canadians in terms of our obligations to our values, our traditions, and our understanding of our role within Canada with respect to this issue demand that we raise the bar, raise our level of ambition, and commit seriously our resources and our energies to this objective.
Thank you.