I'll take that. That's a very good question, because as I said, young people aren't distinguishing.
You're asking about the younger children, but when we talk about digital natives who are growing up immersed in digital technologies, we're finding that even at the university level now young people are having a hard time. For example, a couple of years ago we had a young student at McGill who tweeted that he was at a seminar and he wanted to use an M-15 to shoot the presenters. Then basically, when asked, he said he was just venting. These are repeated.
There was a case in California. A Justin Bieber type of young man had a promising career in music; he was about 14 years old. He put on his website that he had golden brown eyes, and in response to that he got such venomous posts on his website by his classmates and schoolmates, some of whom didn't even know him. They testified in court that this had become a competition as to who could post the worst insults. They said they weren't even thinking about the victim; they were just being jocular and funny.
If you look at society—if you look at television sitcoms, comedians, reality shows—you'll see that the norms of what is funny, what's a joke, what's an insult, and what's harm have shifted. As the Supreme Court of Canada said in the A.B. v. Bragg Communications Inc. case, this is now discernable harm. But as Wendy mentioned, we need some legal definitions as to “intent” and “harm”. What is “perceived intent”?
If I can continue quickly, a British Columbia teenager committed suicide because one of her former friends yelled at her on the phone, “You are effing dead.” She thought the kids were really going to kill her, and she killed herself before that. The lower court in that case said that when there is perceived harm, that can be considered as criminal harassment, so the perpetrator was charged. But that's still a grey area; the high courts haven't really ruled on that.
So yes, these amendments would affect kids, because they really don't realize. If school principals see this as a way of reporting it to the police and putting them through the criminal justice system, then I think you're taking away opportunities to teach them and you're putting them through a system in which they're now labelled as criminals or young offenders, and then they're treated like young offenders. So that's one of the issues, that they could be labelled.
I agree that the police actually do play a very good liaison role, but for young people who don't know what they're doing, it's a difficult issue.