QUESTION PERIOD — Women and Gender Equality
National Action Plan to End Gender-Based Violence
November 30, 2023
My question is to you, Senator Gold, and I promise I won’t interrupt your answer.
Senator Gold, over 2 billion people live in countries affected by fragility, conflict and violence. Women and girls suffer disproportionately but remain mostly excluded from peace building.
Canada is not immune to this. Gender-based violence results in the violent death of a woman every 48 hours, with Indigenous women victimized at about six times the rate of non-Indigenous. We have yet to adequately address gendered violence in our security sectors, including the Canadian Armed Forces and the RCMP.
The twenty-third anniversary of the first of the suite of UN Security Council Resolutions on Women, Peace and Security, SCR 1325, has just passed, affirming the essential role of women in the prevention and resolution of conflicts.
UN Member States are urged to create effective national action plans to implement these priorities. Canada had two such action plans until 2022, guided by Canada’s feminist foreign policy. The year 2023 is almost over —
Thank you, senator, for your question and for raising the important role that women do play in peacekeeping and also, frankly, for underlining the impact of war on women.
The recent events in Israel can be properly called a femicide as much as anything else if you actually look at who was targeted, as I saw with my own eyes yesterday.
I will make inquiries with regard to the government’s thinking on this matter. It’s an important question, and I appreciate it.
As a brief supplementary question, could you add to that, please, if there’s also going to be attention paid to the resolutions on Youth, Peace and Security so we can see the intersection in the new national action plan when it is produced?
Certainly.
