Thank you for your question.
We hear very commonly from young people who are struggling to find acceptance within themselves and from the members of their community. That can have a very profound impact on their mental health and the degree of hope they can hold onto for what life holds for them as they come into themselves and into their adult lives.
What I'd like to really emphasize to the committee is that it's not so much any one individual's actions that can have such a grievous impact on a person's sense of worth, but rather the attitudes of the community around the incident or around that person, where there's a benign neglect of the situation, where people turn a blind eye, people don't intervene or call a bully out on their behaviour to communicate to the person who's being targeted that in fact those ideas and ideals are not shared by the broader community. It's when school officials, other students, family members, and the community in general remain silent and don't intervene to let a young person know that they do have value, that they do have worth, and that as a community they can expect a life of their own design, that they can expect to experience love and a sense of value and opportunities. Those kinds of interventions, simple as they might sound, can be really enormously helpful. That's the kind of support we provide.
We operate out of Toronto, but we serve youth throughout Ontario, so we get phone calls from remote communities, where a person feels like the only individual they've ever met who might identify as lesbian or gay or bisexual or trans. They can hear one person 1,000 kilometres away say to them, “You're not abnormal. It's okay to experience the thoughts and feelings and desires you have.” Just to hear that person at a remote location say that and say, “There will be opportunities for you in this life”—and I can say that because I know, because I've been there myself—can be enormously powerful.
In terms of broader social change, we need to create a climate in schools where it's understood to be unacceptable to communicate homophobic and transphobic values on the playground or in the classrooms.
Certainly, those broader initiatives for social change help young people to understand that they do live in a country, in a society, where hate and oppression won't be tolerated.