Mr. Speaker, I had the great pleasure and honour of representing Canada at the United Nations last week for a full week. The convention carries on this week as well. Women from around the globe are part of the annual convention on the status of women. This is the 61st year of the UN Commission on the Status of Women to end discrimination against women.
I was very glad to be included in the Minister of Status of Women's delegation. We were able to absorb a lot of the teachings from around the world. We heard, more than anything, in every single session, which were all focused on women's economic justice, what we can do as leaders in our countries to remove barriers to women's economic success. Every time the solutions of pay equity and child care kept coming up as ways to alleviate economic and domestic pressures on women and allow them to participate more fully in the economy.
We heard a lot about the disproportionate load of unpaid care that women tend to take on in families, whether it is early on looking after infants, or looking after aging parents near their end of life or helping with palliative care, or the in-between domestic housework, although certainly in Canada men are really stepping up on that front. We heard again and again from other countries that a significant piece of the economic problem for women is having to take part-time work so they can accommodate the in-between work.
We heard about the impact of political gender-based violence against elected women. There were a number of sessions on this. It was raised in question period in 2016, on the occasion when Sandra Jansen, a member of the Alberta legislative assembly stood in that House and in a very powerful way described the misogyny and sexism that she has faced in her job and particularly online.
During the course of the convention last week, the Inter-Parliamentary Union tabled a report, a global look at the kind of sexual violence women parliamentarians around the world face in the course of their public service. It was extremely troubling. Of the women parliamentarians from 39 countries who were surveyed, 41.8% have received extremely humiliating or sexually charged images of themselves through social media. Social media has become the primary place in which psychological violence is perpetrated against women parliamentarians.
The IPU also reported that 65% of women parliamentarians said that they had been subjected often to humiliating sexist remarks during their parliamentary term. This is a problem, of course, because we are trying to encourage more women to get into politics and government. Just two weeks ago, all the seats in the House, except for one, were filled by women who took the place of MPs. More women were in the House than had ever been in the entire history of Canada.
I would like to know from the government, following on our conversation from last year, what it is doing to protect women parliamentarians from this kind of political harassment that can affect their ability to serve the public.