Thank you, both of you. Those were excellent. It's tough shoes to follow such eloquent speakers, but I want to start just by saying thank you to all of you. I know of your work and of your leadership and your roles. I'm very grateful, as a Canadian mom, for your focus and your energy. I've had a chance to travel and work with some of you more closely and I'm very, very grateful for how hard you work.

I'm privileged to have the opportunity right now in my career to coordinate the efforts of the Canadian Network for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health. This is a partnership of over 80 Canadian organizations focused on maternal, newborn, and child health. My colleagues here at the table sit within the network, so we speak from a common voice in many ways. Our organizations work in over 1,000 regions around the world to improve the lives of women, their newborns, and their children. We were officially created in 2012, shortly after the launch of the Muskoka initiative.

We have three key objectives.

The first is we know that we need to do a better job of being accountable in measuring results. We focus on working with our partners to make sure that we're doing the best possible job of measuring our impact and our outcomes and really tracking where the investment dollars are going, so that we know whether we're doing the best possible job we can with the limited resources that we have.

Our second key objective is to exchange knowledge. We're focusing on measuring results. We're looking to see what the best way to address these causes is, and we're taking that information and making sure that we share it with each other. There's no one in the network who doesn't know that they need to have vitamin A capsules in their implementation programs. I'm not sure five to ten years ago if that was the case.

Our third component is to engage stakeholders. We know that we can't do this alone. We know that through the network, the increased collaboration across sectors has shown itself to be very effective and efficient, so we look to engage more Canadians to join us in this effort. In addition, our experts look for opportunities to advise and inform the Canadian government in their investments.

On that note, I just want to say Canada got it right in 2010 when maternal, newborn, and child health was prioritized. Given the tremendous progress today and what work remains, we know that it's imperative to women and children around the world that this effort continue. We know that improving maternal, newborn, and child health—and Joel has articulated this so well—is foundational to economic growth, to political stability and human security, and it's a critical component of child protection.

I know that you've heard from many of our partners in the past meetings here at the standing committee. I think one of the key messages that they've shared with you is there's no silver bullet on child protection. It's going to require a multi-sectoral and multi-faceted approach. Even though I'm going to speak about one element of that approach, focusing on health, I recognize that this is just one component, albeit a critical one, of the many necessary systems and structures that afford children the opportunity to survive and thrive. I think you had Peter Singer here a few weeks ago. Peter has coined a term that I love, and which I think needs to go in the dictionary, “thrival”. It's not good enough that children survive birth and survive their first five years, they need to thrive. I think that's what we're all focusing on. We're starting to see progress. The mortality rates are dropping around the world. We're starting to see this progress and now is the time that we really need to focus on making sure that these children thrive.

The efforts to improve global health rank among the greatest development achievements. Canada has played such an important role in shaping and supporting global initiatives that have made a significant impact, such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, Gavi, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, which vaccinates millions of children year, the Micronutrient Initiative which is another great example, and of course the Muskoka initiative. Launched at the G8 summit in 2010, the Muskoka initiative has contributed to substantial progress in improving the health of women, newborns, and children, including—and I think this builds nicely on what Joel just said—through galvanizing international support and commitments.

For example, Canada was a key leader in galvanizing support for the United Nations Secretary-General's global strategy for women's and children's health, which we call the global strategy. A recently published report on the global strategy highlighted it as the fastest-growing public health partnership in history, with 2.4 million women's and children's lives saved since 2010.

I want to stop for a minute. I'm a statistician by training and we throw around these big numbers and they don't mean very much to us. So just think of a child in your life who you love, and then think of 2.4 million children who are loved and whose lives have been saved since 2010. I mean this is phenomenal. This is something that we should be celebrating. It points to the fact that we know what to do, but we just need to dig in and get this work done.

Here we are in 2015. The world is at a critical juncture to achieving lasting progress in maternal, newborn and child health. To do so, political and financial commitments must be mobilized following Canada's leadership and our footsteps with the announcement of $3.5 billion in May 2014, just a few months ago.

The newly formed Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development provides Canada with the unique opportunity to harness our foreign policy and trade tools to better achieve our development agenda. The multi-sectoral reach of the Canadian network positions us to make unparalleled progress on the ground. We're working with the academics, Canadian universities, Canadian NGOs, Canadian health professional associations, and with doctors, midwives, nurses, and surgeons who are working on the ground.

Together the Government of Canada and the 80 partner organizations of this network will bring a new level of rigour and commitment to seeing our shared aspirations achieved for mothers and children around the world.

Through increased global leadership, the international community can empower women and support increased resilience by strengthening health care systems, fighting infectious diseases, improving sexual reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health, and ensuring that the unfinished business of the health-related millennium development goals are not lost in the transition to the sustainable development goals that we launch later this year.

We're proposing that Canada make the following commitments, and I should say Canada is so committed. This is a reiteration of some of the work that's already happening. We need to renew commitments and encourage the rest of the world to renew their commitments made under Muskoka and the global strategy for women's and children's health, such as through A Promise Renewed, the every newborn action plan, and Family Planning 2020, and make sure these commitments are met.

We need to welcome and support the renewed global strategy for women's and children's health to be launched in September 2015. We're calling it global strategy 2.0. We need to support the ambitious but achievable goal of ending preventable deaths by 2030 in the post-2015 negotiations and agree to tackle inequality by focusing on those groups that are furthest left behind. I think Caroline spoke so nicely to that.

We need to provide financial and non-financial resources to deliver the post-2015 framework and support countries to raise and spend greater domestic resources on universal public services, including the newly established global financing facility in support of every woman, every child program that will be launched at the financing for development conference in Addis Ababa in July 2015.

We need to deliver an ambitious commitment on aid expenditure in support of increased domestic resource mobilization and align the ODA for the health and rights of women and children, including through the global finance facility.

I want to mention accountability. We need to continue Canada's leadership role in accountability. We need to broaden and strengthen our established global leadership by championing simplified, harmonized maternal, newborn and child health accountability frameworks. Enhanced community basic accountability mechanisms and increased efforts to produce reliable disaggregated vital statistics are critical to strengthening health services delivery.

Vital statistics in civil registration is so boring. It's hard to make it sound interesting. It's critical because when you know a child is born, and when they're registered, that child counts. That child is counted. We can track services, we can track delivery, and we can track the children. That's critical in child protection. It encompasses all of the work that we try to do.

The last point I want to make is that—and I say this a bit humbly because I'm so fortunate to have this opportunity—I see how effective we can be when we work together and when we stop creating silos, have our universities working over here, our NGOs working over here, and we come together. I would stress that we bring together organizations across sectors with different expertise to facilitate their collaboration, especially in country, where, just using Canada as an example, different organizations are working in country and they really need to be collaborating. This is imperative for increased success.

We need to enhance and capitalize on partnerships between governments, civil society, local communities, health care professionals, academic and research institutions, multilateral organizations, global funds that exist, and the foundations. The media is critical as is the private sector in coming along on this journey.

Addressing the rights and needs of women and children is key to creating sustainable change and development. The last five years of the global strategy for women and children's health and the Muskoka initiative launched in Canada, with the hard work of many of you, has shown that well-planned coordinated interventions can achieve results and save lives. Now we need to focus on making sure those children thrive and those women thrive.

The year 2015 is the time to build on this achievement, to renew commitments and support strong strategies that will end preventable maternal, newborn, and child deaths, ensure that those women and children and survive, and improve overall health.

Thank you.

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