Good morning.
I'm speaking to you from Vancouver, British Columbia. I thank you for this invitation to participate in this prestudy session on Bill C-63.
To start, the majority of what I'm going to say in the next five minutes and in answer to the questions are my thoughts and my thoughts only.
Today I must stress the importance of Bill C-63, the online harms act. This bill is a comprehensive approach to addressing the growing concerns of harmful content on the Internet. Online safety, I feel, is a shared responsibility, and everyone—users, parents, educators and platforms—plays a role in creating a safer online world by ensuring protection, accountability and support.
My name is Carol Todd. I'm widely known as the mother of Amanda Todd. I am a teacher-educator in British Columbia with my work primarily centred on education on digital literacy, online safety and child abuse prevention, namely exploitation and sextortion. Providing children, teachers and families with the knowledge and skills to navigate the digital world is essential and is one of the reasons I created a legacy, a non-profit, in Amanda's memory.
My daughter, Amanda Todd, was a Canadian teenager whose tragic story brought international attention to the severe impacts of cyberbullying, online harassment and exploitation. She was born in November 1996 and faced relentless harassment both online and off-line as a young teenager. She ultimately took her life in October 2012. Knowingly, parents shouldn't outlive their children in preventable situations.
Amanda's ordeal began when she was 12 years old. She was persuaded by an online stranger to expose her breasts on a webcam. This individual saved the image and later used it to blackmail her, threatening to share the photos with her friends and family if she didn't perform more explicit acts. Despite changing schools multiple times, Amanda couldn't escape the harassment, and the blackmailer continued to follow her for two and a half years, creating fake profiles to spread the image and further humiliate her.
In September 2012, five weeks before Amanda took her own life, Amanda posted a YouTube video entitled “My story: Struggling, bullying, suicide, self-harm”, in which she showed flash cards to share her painful experiences. She detailed the bullying, physical assaults and severe emotional distress that she endured both online and off-line. The video went viral after her death, and currently it's been viewed about 50 million times across the world.
Amanda's death prompted significant public and governmental responses. In 2022, Aydin Coban, a Dutch man, was convicted of harassing and extorting Amanda in a Canadian court and sentenced to 13 years in prison. He is currently serving his Canadian time in the Netherlands.
Amanda's story continues to resonate, highlighting the urgent need for stronger protections against online harassment and better supports for victims of bullying, cyber-bullying and exploitation.
There are so many voices that remain unheard due to fear, judgment or shame, or because they can no longer speak. It is vital to let these silent voices be heard and to create a more compassionate and understanding world, where we help and not hurt.
Over the past decade, we have observed rapid changes in technology. We have watched devices that were a useful tool for communication turn into fun devices that can exploit and hurt others. Since its inception, the Internet has taken on darker tones. The word “algorithms” is now in our vocabulary, where it once never was.
Research has highlighted some of the harmful effects related to screen time. These effects include reduced well-being, mood disorders, depression and anxiety. These effects impact children and adults alike in a world filled with online media.
With increased access to the Internet comes easier access to violent and explicit online content that can impact sexual attitudes and behaviours, harm to children through the creation, sharing and viewing of sexual abuse material, and increased violence against women and girls, as well as sex trafficking.
Governments must take action to enact new laws and modify existing ones.
To make the online world safer, we must increase education and awareness. We must have stronger regulations and laws, like Bill C-63. We have to improve the behaviours of the online platforms. We need parental controls and monitoring, and we need to encourage reporting like Cybertip.ca.
Bill C-63—