Foreign Affairs committee  Mr. Chair, I would like to thank Mr. Bergeron for his excellent question. To be more precise, I will speak in English. I apologize for that. Unfortunately, I'm not in a position to provide a substantive or detailed answer to that question. We would be happy to come back to the committee in writing to ensure that the member has access to that information.

Foreign Affairs committee  That is an excellent question, again. I thank the members of the committee for their patience, but as I am not responsible for the Women, Peace and Security Program, I am not in a position to answer this question in detail with sufficient information. Once again, we offer to forward this information in writing on the achievement of our objectives under the Women, Peace and Security Program in Syria.

Foreign Affairs committee  This is a very good question. Preventable maternal death is a driving force behind our comprehensive approach to SRHR. Women are dying unnecessarily because they can't get access to basic, essential health services. The member has properly provided us with the level of severity of this incident, with seven million ending up in hospital and requiring hospitalized care for unsafe abortions.

Foreign Affairs committee  I would say we have been successful at fostering a global dialogue around both child, early and forced marriage and female genital cutting and mutilation. We work with a number of like-minded countries to shine a light on where these harmful practices continue. They have not been eradicated yet, and we continue to work with stakeholders in countries both to support the policy and legislative change that the honourable member refers to and to help shift social and cultural norms at a local level.

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you. Perhaps as a framing statement, I would just say that we support the goal of ensuring that every pregnancy is wanted, that every birth is safe and that every girl and every woman is treated with dignity and respect. That informs our approach to SRHR more broadly. As I mentioned, we take a comprehensive approach where we provide partners with support so they can deliver integrated services.

Foreign Affairs committee  It's an excellent question. The only segment of the population where we are not seeing the reductions in HIV transmissions that we expect is adolescent girls in sub-Saharan Africa. It's a particularly vulnerable group. Obviously, this is intimately tied to broader questions of bodily autonomy and gender equality.

Foreign Affairs committee  Mr. Chair, I thank the honourable member for a great question. I would maybe take a step back. Since the development of the feminist international assistance policy, we have scaled up our support not just for sexual and reproductive health and rights, but also for gender equality programming.

Foreign Affairs committee  Mr. Chair, I'd like to thank the member for an excellent question, a question that Tanya and I, who are both parents, also certainly ask as we raise our teenagers. I can probably offer the most insight speaking about the international context. You are right that too often around the world youth and adolescents in developing countries don't receive adequate information both on their own rights, the right to bodily autonomy in particular, but also on sexuality and reproductive functions and services that they should have access to.

Foreign Affairs committee  I think there is a growing awareness in the international assistance community, and more particularly in the global health and SRHR communities, about the leadership role that we want to ensure communities, and the persons we aim to serve, themselves play in the work that we do, whether it be programming or policy.

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good morning, members. We appreciate the opportunity and the invitation today to provide information on how Global Affairs Canada supports women's sexual and reproductive health and rights globally. As my colleague, Assistant Deputy Minister Peter MacDougall, said at the committee's December meeting, Canada has committed to increasing its funding to an average of $1.4 billion per year by 2023‑24.

Foreign Affairs committee  Perhaps I can start. I would note that increasing equity and increasing access by all populations, in particular low- and middle-income populations, has been the single overriding focus of my team for the last two years. What our partner organizations asked for as the priority was financial support and an improved coordination mechanism to work together.

Foreign Affairs committee  We have also spoken of production capacity. Diversifying and increasing production capacity is a key element, as is speeding up the sequencing of diseases once we understand that there are new outbreaks so that we can determine vaccine responses much more quickly. The G7 has adopted a goal to try to carry out that genomic sequencing so that we can come up with new vaccine solutions within 100 days of a novel outbreak.

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you for your question. Forgive me, but I'm not able to give you details about every country, but my colleagues in charge of bilateral relations with those countries are probably better people to ask. I didn't know that Taiwan had asked Canada for doses. As far as I know, Taiwan was a model in its domestic pandemic response.

Foreign Affairs committee  Of the data and polling I have seen, and there has been extensive work done by WHO and UNICEF as well as the African Union and countries themselves, it appears that it was lack of access to vaccines that allowed misinformation to spread more actively. I do expect, though, that the portfolio we offer through COVAX will continue to evolve and be much more reliant on mRNA vaccines.

Foreign Affairs committee  I respect the decisions that our partner countries are taking about what vaccines to prioritize in their national immunization strategy. If that aligns with viral vectors, including those made available for donation by Canada, so be it, but, as we've seen increasingly, their priorities are also shifting to mRNA.