Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development

Comité permanent des affaires étrangères et du développement international

For immediate release

Ottawa, February 26, 2021 -

The Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development presented an interim report to the House of Commons entitled Part 1 of a Study on the Aftershocks of the COVID-19 pandemic – the Humanitarian Burden: Ensuring a Global Response and Reaching the Most Vulnerable.

The Committee’s report highlights the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic threatens to unravel decades of development progress – through dramatic increases in extreme poverty and food insecurity, for example – and emphasizes how certain population groups, such as women, children, people with disabilities, refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced persons have been disproportionately affected.

The report stresses the need for a more coordinated, timely and needs-based response among states to the pandemic’s humanitarian burden and calls on Canada to play a lead role in that effort. It also recommends that the Government of Canada draw on the capabilities of all development actors in its global efforts – large and small organizations, as well as new and long-established partners – and that it channel a greater proportion of its humanitarian assistance directly to national and local humanitarian responders in affected areas.

In total, the Committee’s report makes 10 recommendations that touch on these, and other issues, such as vaccine access for the world’s most vulnerable populations. It recommends, for instance, that the Government of Canada report to Parliament on its efforts to redistribute any excess COVID-19 vaccine units for vaccination efforts in developing countries, and that it explore how existing or new federal funding mechanisms could be used to strengthen the institutional capacity of local humanitarian organizations.

The Committee is now proceeding with the next segment of its study: the pandemic’s impact on children in situations of armed conflict and displacement.

The full text of the Committee’s report is available on its website.