Public Safety Committee on May 10th, 2022

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

You have 10 seconds, please.

[Dr. Kara Brisson-Boivin]

—through education and critical skills development, which is at the heart of active and engaged digital citizenship.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

Thank you very much.

We will now move to the opening round of questions.

Leading us off will be Ms. Dancho, for six minutes.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for being here today. My questions to start off are for Dr. Kara Brisson-Boivin.

Thank you very much for your testimony. I found it very interesting. Why do you focus specifically on young adults or youth? Is there a difference between how youth interpret online information in their critical thinking capacity? Can you expand on why youth is your focus?

[Dr. Kara Brisson-Boivin]

Thank you very much for the question.

MediaSmarts is Canada's centre for digital media literacy. Part of our mandate as an organization and a national non-profit has been to focus on youth. A lot of the work we do is in the K-to-12 sector, although in the last five years we have engaged in much broader public service campaigns for all Canadians.

As for online hate, in the work we have done, we have focused on the young Canadian experience. That has been part of our mandate. We do believe that is a unique experience that deserves to be studied in its own right. The research we have done does suggests that there are interventions that need to be built and designed for young people in particular, because of some of those things I mentioned in my opening remarks, particularly in regard to the prevalence they give to peer supports and their relationships with other young people.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Would you say that the school environment ups the need for these intervention tools and critical thinking capacity? Is that what you mean?

[Dr. Kara Brisson-Boivin]

Yes, I would say so. The work we were doing was in particular focused on youth aged roughly 12 to 17, which is a critical moment in a young person's life for a variety of different reasons. Often young people are shifting between, in some cases, middle and high school. Also, young people are at a critical point at which they are exploring different identity plays and looking for community in all different sorts of ways, so those critical thinking capacities I was mentioning are absolutely prevalent.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Thank you.

Of course, we see suicides through many ages, but it's not uncommon to hear about suicides among young people, particularly in high school and middle school, as a result of bullying and that peer pressure. Those reasons for suicide are not as common, it would seem, for adults, for example.

Can you comment on that, the impact of the online universe on the mental health of young people and how your services support that?

[Dr. Kara Brisson-Boivin]

Thank you.

I would say I am not an expert. Nor is MediaSmarts an expert in young people's mental health and well-being. We focus particularly on digital media literacy, although focusing on digital well-being and our online relationships.... For example, the empathy that we need to keep at the forefront of those online relationships is something that we do. We work very closely with the K-to-12 education sector, as I mentioned, as well as other community organizations who are working on the front lines of digital media literacy service delivery across the country.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Thank you very much.

You alluded in your opening remarks a little bit to anything that others people.

Can you comment a little bit more on what you meant in terms of exclusion and how that influences young people being drawn perhaps to extremism or the like?

[Dr. Kara Brisson-Boivin]

Yes, thank you.

We know that one of the benefits of the online community is also one of our biggest challenges, and that is anonymity.

I can use the example that we know from our work in the 2SLGBTQ+ community. In that context, young people have told us that the online environment, and in particular being able to remain anonymous in spaces, is a huge benefit as they can, again, engage in identity play and find community in ways that they may not be comfortable doing in a face-to-face context.

However, we know that it also poses a great challenge because for many perpetrators, from bullying all the way up to hate groups, anonymity is a huge tool that those groups can use to their advantage, both to test the waters in various communities that young people are engaging in—for example, in gaming communities—and as an attempt to recruit potential new recruits to movements.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

For young people, in particular—and I think this is probably true across the spectrum—when you're teaching them how to avoid extremism online, is there any consideration for those who are the loners in school or who don't feel included? I don't know the polite way to say that.

Do you give any specific attention to how to build confidence in digital literacy with those who aren't fitting in and feel excluded?

[Dr. Kara Brisson-Boivin]

The resources we create are not necessarily designed for any particular demographic. For the most part, they are for a young person in the K-to-12 sector, again with the exceptions of some of the broader campaigns we have done for all Canadians.

However, I would say that one of the key lessons, or moral—if you want to call it that—or ethical objectives of these lessons is to talk about inclusion, healthy relationships and digital well-being in the online space with young people as early as possible. That is something we talk about in a broader context, but our content isn't necessarily designed for a specific demographic of use in that regard.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Zuberi, it's always good to see you, sir. You have the next six minutes, whenever you're ready to begin.

[Sameer Zuberi, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses for being here.

I'd like to start with Dr. Brisson-Boivin. What you shared with us is really interesting. You said that digital literacy is important and that we need to educate young people on how to distinguish, online, what's sound and what's not sound and how to respond, which is also quite important. You said that small efforts make profound impacts.

Can you drill down deeper into that and share with us what you have seen and how we can make that happen?

[Dr. Kara Brisson-Boivin]

In the context of online hate with young people, the biggest factors we found for why young people do not intervene is, one, because they struggle to recognize when something is definitively online hate and, two, because they don't know how to respond. This is impeded by what I mentioned with regard to young people being understandably concerned with maintaining social harmony among their peers.

However, at the same time, we know that the norms or community morals, if you will, within an online community are typically set and driven by the loudest 10%. What we found was that even a very small action within an online community to demonstrate that there wasn't consensus around, let's say, a particular viewpoint was incredibly motivating and encouraged others to respond as well.

Young people responded to this sort of peer-to-peer.... They had the opportunity to recognize and realize that other young people—or anyone in the community—were responding to the contrary. That pushed the dial within the community and demonstrated how valuable it is to let the community know that this was not the consensus.

At the same time, I want to mention that we also want to make it clear to young people that we need to set parameters around what kinds of content we should engage in, because we might suggest that a particular subject is worthy of debate, which hate groups can utilize to their advantage as well. Part of the resources, tools, lessons and critical thinking capacities we provide are to help young people determine facts from fiction or to be able to distinguish arguments based on fact from those that are attempting to sow doubt and denialism, for example.

[Sameer Zuberi, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Thank you for that.

The point you raised about the quiet bravery, nudging things forward online and giving some other perspective is really powerful.

I'd like to shift gears for a moment and go to Imam Aziz. I found your work around deradicalization within the mainstream Muslim community really interesting. I want to touch base on some remarks you made in your opening statement around the narratives and framing of this community in particular.

I want to put forth this question. Do you find that terms like “Islamic terrorism”, “Islamism” and “Islamist” are accurate? That's number one. Number two, do you find that the use of these terms is harmful in seeking our objective as a country to mitigate and reduce extremism or a movement towards it?

I'd like your thoughts on those terms in particular, please.

[Navaid Aziz]

Thank you so much for your question.

I'll break things down into two separate parts. With regard to the terms used, such as “Islamic terrorism” and “Islamic extremism”, I believe they're very detrimental to the Muslim community and other minority groups in general. The onus is put on the religion itself. The blame is put on the religion itself, but studies have shown that this couldn't be further from the truth. This has been proven in theory and in practice. The vast majority of Muslims are law-abiding citizens and contributing members to their communities and societies. It's the same thing at a theoretical level. If you study Muslim texts and the literature of Muslim scholars, you see that they are always pushing Muslims toward a balanced way of life.

The challenge here comes from an academic perspective. For the longest period of time, terms like “Islamism”, “Islamist”, “Islamic terrorism” and “jihadism” have been used. They have become mainstream and a part of the vernacular in this field of study. Trying to change the language is a very uphill battle, but I believe it is detrimental and that an effort should be made to come up with more inclusive language that does not blame a religion or a particular community altogether. As we've seen in previous testimonies, there are underlying issues that need to be addressed, and further research needs to be done on more accurate terms to use.

[Sameer Zuberi, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Thank you.

I have two minutes left.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

You have 20 seconds left.

[Sameer Zuberi, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

I'll leave it at that and give it back to you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

You actually have 30 seconds if you want to revisit the possibility.

[Sameer Zuberi, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Can you comment briefly and very quickly about the off-ramping of those who have gone into extremism?

[Navaid Aziz]

With regard to off-ramping, particularly with IMVE, we've seen, again, underlying factors such as security, education and social inclusion. All those things are very important. As soon as we take care of those issues, the ideology naturally mitigates and disappears. Rather than focusing on the ideology, we focus on the underlying drivers. When we do, the whole-society approach that was recommend previously is very effective.