Canada’s Statement to the 2017 UN High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development

Wednesday, July 19, 2017
New York, New York

Mr. President, Mr. Secretary-General, your Excellencies, Honourable Ministers, distinguished guests: the 2030 Agenda is also Canada’s agenda.

The 2030 Agenda is the defining global framework of our time and Canada is fully committed to implementing the Agenda at home and abroad.

To do so, we recognize that we need to reach out to all levels of government, Indigenous Peoples, and other key stakeholders.

Canada is committed to “leaving no one behind”, both at home and abroad.

At home, our domestic priorities are already well-aligned with the SDGs. We are:

• striving to reduce inequality by growing the middle class;
• investing $120 billion in infrastructure over the next decade;
• renewing our relationships with Indigenous Peoples; and
• promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment.

Indeed, Canada has taken concrete steps to support SDG 5 and the other gender-related goals and targets of Agenda 2030. Prime Minister Trudeau has led by example in appointing a gender-balanced Cabinet.

Canada’s Budget 2017 includes our first-ever Gender Statement as part of a federal budget. It contains more than 60 measures and investments that are identified as having differential gender impacts.

These tangible actions include $101 million towards establishing a national strategy to address gender-based violence, a $7 billion investment over 11 years for early learning and childhood development, and providing more flexible maternity and paternity leave.

In our work abroad, SDG 5—achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls—will be the entry point under Canada’s new Feminist International Assistance Policy, and will drive progress on the other SDGs.

We believe that the best way to reduce poverty and leave no one behind is through a Feminist International Assistance Policy.

This new policy is anchored in the 2030 Agenda and will refocus our attention on the poorest and most vulnerable, including those who live in fragile states.

The SDGs provide an important framework for collective action to achieve gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls, as well as the realization of their human rights.

They explicitly recognize that we cannot hope to accomplish this ambitious agenda if half the world’s population is not included in decisions, in power, and in opportunities.

Gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls will now be at the heart of our international assistance efforts, marking a significant shift in what we do and how we do it.

We will:

• support sexual and reproductive health and rights;
• combat sexual and gender-based violence;
• promote women's economic rights and equal access to economic resources, including access to ownership and control over land and other forms of property, credit, inheritance, natural resources and new technology; and
• promote human rights, the rule of law, and women’s voice as agents of change.

Moving forward, Canada will devote no less than 15 percent of its bilateral international development assistance to initiatives that directly target gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls, as a primary objective within five years.

On top of this, we will increase our attention to integrating gender equality across all of our work. By 2022, 95 percent of all programming will contribute to robust gender equality outcomes.

Canada has also recently announced a $150 million, five-year commitment to support women’s organizations that promote women’s rights and advance their leadership at the local level.

In March, we announced $650M to support access to the full range of sexual and reproductive health services and information. And we remain committed to the elimination of harmful practices, such as child, early and forced marriage and female genital mutilation and cutting. 

Canada remains firmly committed to addressing climate change and encouraging ambitious action by all to shift the world towards a more sustainable and climate-resilient economy, including through the implementation of the Paris Agreement and by re-joining the Convention to Combat Desertification.

Domestically, Canada has established the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change, a concrete plan that will allow us to meet our international commitments.

Further, our Federal Sustainable Development Strategy addresses the environmental aspects of the SDGs.

And internationally, we will continue playing our part, guided by the approach articulated by my Prime Minister Justin Trudeau when he was in New York just under a year ago to sign the Paris Agreement that developing countries should not be punished for a problem they did not create.

In short, to quote Canada’s Minister of the Environment and Climate Change Catherine McKenna, on climate change, Canada remains all in.

However, greater efforts are needed to assist developing countries and low-income countries to achieve the key SDG targets by 2030. Public resources, both domestic and international, will play an important role.

Official development assistance is an important source of financing for sustainable development, but we know it is insufficient to meet the financing needs of the 2030 Agenda. We need to find innovative, new ways to use ODA to unlock new resources for achieving the SDGs.

To reduce this financing gap, Canada has stepped up its engagement on financing for development challenges that are so key to implementing the 2030 Agenda.

For example, Canada and Jamaica co-lead a Group of Friends on SDG Financing at the UN, which seeks new sources of public, private, and philanthropic financing for SDG goals.

And in May, Canada established a Development Finance Institute in Montreal to leverage ODA to attract additional funds through blended finance and risk mitigation.

In the same month, we created a Canada Infrastructure Bank which will attract private sector and institutional investors to new infrastructure projects in the public interest to help bridge our own infrastructure gap and free up public funds to provide essential social services.

The 2030 Agenda challenges all of us to broaden our partnerships and to think, work and deliver sustainable development differently.

All of you can count on Canada to do its part to ensure that Agenda 2030 is implemented effectively, and that no one is left behind.

Thank you.