Honourable senators, I rise to mark the World Day Against Child Labour, which will take place on Saturday. Although the incidence of child labour dropped by nearly 40% from 2000 to 2016, the numbers have begun to climb again, and the pandemic is only accelerating that trend.

An estimated 160 million children worldwide are forced to work, nearly half of them under dangerous conditions. Because of the lockdown and supply chain disruptions, schools closed and parents lost their livelihoods, which pushed more children to endanger their safety, dignity and growth to help their families.

Human Rights Watch provided a startling picture of the situation in its report entitled I Must Work to Eat, which shares the testimony of 80 children from Ghana, Uganda and Nepal. Before the pandemic, thousands of children were already working in Ghana’s gold mines, even though it is against the law. Worse yet, the children explained that they have to crush the ore into smaller pieces, breathe in dust and handle toxic mercury. Fourteen-year-old Solomon said that he is sore all over from carrying sacks of ore from the bottom of the mine pit to the top for 12 hours a day.

Children are starving. In Uganda, a 13-year-old girl named Florence had to start working because she was starving. Her family was surviving on porridge and tea. Once schools shut down, Florence and her eight siblings no longer had access to free school meals.

Many children in Nepal have reported that, during the lockdown, they began working at least 10 hours a day in carpet factories. In the report, 14-year-old Gita explains how hard weaving is. She said that her fingers hurt from knotting the threads, her eyes hurt from looking at the design map, and sitting down for hours really hurts her legs.

Reading that report left me feeling ashamed. As Canadians, how can we be aware and take advantage of child labour without doing everything we can to combat this scourge, which is related to poverty? How can we even accept it?

The pandemic is also having a devastating impact on girls in South Asia. Early and forced marriages more than doubled last year in Indonesia, putting girls at higher risk of poverty, violence and disease, as they are becoming pregnant too young. Parents, themselves impoverished, are telling their little girls that their job is to be a wife and mother.

There is no simple solution to this tragic reality. Canada can afford to do more to help poor families directly. Our government and our businesses must also be vigilant about rooting out child labour from their supply chains and helping the kids get back in school.