Ambrose exhorts PM to champion girls’ education

OTTAWA — Interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose wants Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to answer Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai’s call to put advancing girls’ education at the heart of Canada’s turn at the helm of the G7.

Ambrose met with the 19-yearold Nobel Peace Prize winner and newly minted honorary Canadian citizen Wednesday after Yousafzai used a speech to Parliament to challenge Canadians to do more for girls’ education.

“The world needs leadership based on serving humanity — not based on how many weapons you have. Canada can take that lead,” Yousafzai said.

She urged the government to make the issue the central initiative of next year’s G7 presidency, and also to host the replenishment conference of the Global Partnership for Education, a multilateral organization that has received close to $200 million in Canadian funding since 2007.

“I am asking that your government answer Malala’s call,” Ambrose writes in a letter to Trudeau released Thursday.

Ambrose was the Conservative status of women minister when Canada last played host to the G7, where the government’s maternal, newborn and child health project — an effort that become known as the Muskoka initiative — was the centrepiece.

“Malala asked us to seize every opportunity for girls’ education over the next year,” Ambrose writes.

“My party and I stand with Malala.”

Yousafzai spoke of the benefits that flow from increased access to education for girls, but next door to her home country of Pakistan, whether international aid dollars for education are achieving those kinds of results remains under investigation.

Global Affairs Canada officials say they are still looking into the possibility that Canadian dollars put into a World Bank program to increase girls’ access to education in Afghanistan might have disappeared into the pockets of corrupt officials.