44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 28, 2023
- 11:45:48 a.m.
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Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Let me start by saying a huge thank you to all of the witnesses here today. I have known many if not all of you for a long time. I have found that, as we have driven this conversation, there has never been any lack of willingness to have the conversation and to take on tough questions.
Today I am going to start with Anne and Julia, because you're the one organization here that is specifically focused on disability and inclusion.
The language that we use in the sustainable development goals talks about the hardest to reach. It talks about leaving nobody behind. When we talk about the hardest to reach and people left behind, in your experience—I'm going to focus specifically on developmental intellectual disability—how hard to reach are people with developmental intellectual disability? How much further are they left behind typically?
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- 11:49:12 a.m.
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As we're talking about potential solutions, again in the big picture, I'm going to look at Right to Play.
When I think about potential solutions, the world is focused significantly on education. It might not be enough. Obviously, we have to do a lot more on education broadly, but I think there is more than $4 billion toward Global Partnership for Education and over $1 billion toward Education Cannot Wait, just to name two big organizations globally that are working on these issues.
It strikes me, from personal experience, from my son's experience in school, that when he was included in the classroom, it helped everybody else to be better. That wasn't why we included him in the classroom; it was all about Jaden, but ultimately what we learned was that every other kid was better off for having him included there.
Right to Play does amazing work. I think you do amazing work at trying to reach harder-to-reach kids. What do you find to be the benefits for the kids without disability when you include people with disabilities in Right to Play programming?
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- 11:51:41 a.m.
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I have a very short period of time on this one, so I will go back to Humanity and Inclusion.
Do you have any advice for the other CEOs around the table, as they're thinking about the work that they already do, the really important work that they do, on how they might maybe work with Humanity and Inclusion to take action on something that we all agree is a pretty significant issue?
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- 12:21:35 p.m.
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Thank you, Chair.
Mr. Simms earlier touched on—it was in a conversation generally about budgets—challenging budgets globally right now with the circumstances we're in. Mr. Simms said that before a challenge we can do more with the money we have, not discounting the possibility of more funding but talking about bridging together what we have now.
In disability-inclusive education, there's a call to action. I don't know how many of you are aware of this call to action or have read it, but the call to action has just three main points in it. It's a two-page document. The three calls to action, in a sense, are the following. Number one is “Progressively increase budgetary allocations for disability-inclusive education towards being at least 5% of education budgets”, so talking about the percentage of budgets, presumably budgets that already exist around the world. Number two is “Set a medium to long-term target to ensure all learners with disabilities are reached in all education programmes, recognising that at least 10% of learners in any country will be learners with disabilities.” The third one is “Ensure all education programmes and grants mainstream disability and include disability-inclusion criteria and targets.” Those are the three asks of the call to action.
I'll point out that at this point in time—and you know what these things are like—not everybody is even aware that this conversation is happening. People are at different points in the process. I'll note that World Vision Canada, Humanity and Inclusion Canada, and Save the Children Canada, as of right now, I think, have signed on to this call to action. At this point in time, the other three of your organizations, to the best of my knowledge, have not.
My question is for Plan International Canada, CARE and Right to Play. When you hear me say those three things, are those things that seem like they would resonate with your organizations? Maybe we just need to reach out to encourage you to sign on to what seems like a fairly easy thing to support. I'll start with Plan International.
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- 12:24:57 p.m.
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Absolutely.
Susan, go ahead.
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- 12:25:04 p.m.
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I'm not trying to trick anybody. It's one of those things that I think sometimes the conversation has....
We're looking for incremental steps that we can take in the right direction, and we want to turn that into action. The two-pager talks about the twin-track approach and other things. It also talks about the Washington Group's child functioning module, which I think lots of folks understand. Maybe some have had some input into early diagnosis and that kind of understanding.
I'm going to go to World Vision, but this could apply to almost anybody in the group. Peter was talking about that bridging. You're already doing work on the ground in however many countries. Each of you is doing work on the ground, and you have workers focused on children's health going door to door in many communities and talking to families—I've seen it on the ground, Michael, in World Vision's case—and yet kids are getting left behind.
To what degree could you hard-wire an awareness of what developmental disability looks like into that sort of door-to-door work you're already doing, especially if we're working on tools that you can then offer parents in terms of help? To what extent could we do a better job of hard-wiring that awareness into the work you're already doing?
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- 12:42:38 p.m.
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Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I've known most of you for a long time through maternal, newborn and child health work, through the Muskoka initiative and the work done on that, which Canada really led on. It's interesting, Mohammed, talking about data. We could look at data. We knew what the numbers were, and we knew that we made a tremendous impact towards what the world had agreed was a problem, a very significant problem on maternal mortality and the mortality of kids under five.
Now we're looking at the situation here. Tim Shriver was here last week, talking about the urgency of this situation. He said, “The problem is not the disability. The problem is not intellectual and developmental disability. The problem is fear, neglect, indifference and oversight. The problem is us. The problem is urgent, and the problem is now.”
When we're having these conversations among organizations focused on disability—Humanity and Inclusion is here today, and Special Olympics and Inclusion International were here the other day—I sense that there is a real urgency. Of course, if you talk to families, you sense that real urgency in the worlds they're in.
To conclude my round of questioning here, I'm interested in what each of your takeaways is from this meeting. What can you do now, in the coming weeks or months, in terms of your organizations that will have an impact for these families and these individuals around the world who need that urgent attention now?
I'll start with CARE.
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- 12:45:20 p.m.
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- 12:45:54 p.m.
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