Mr. Speaker, as I explained the last time I commented on this bill, I am saddened by the extent to which people, especially young people, are affected by bullying.
For example, we all remember Marjorie Raymond, a young, 15-year-old girl from Gaspésie who committed suicide last year, after years of bullying at school. We also remember Jamie Hubley, another 15-year-old from Ottawa, who took his own life last year after being humiliated and insulted by classmates because of his homosexuality.
We all want to put an end to bullying. However, the approach by the Conservative Party and the NDP will do nothing to address the issue. Even if the challenge is enormous, we already see many potential solutions, both in the provinces and abroad, and the fact that we only put off everything until later without committing to any action could leave us without a solution to fight against this serious problem affecting our society.
The federal government has a role to play in combatting bullying, and here it should be noted that the previous Liberal government was active in this regard. When I was first elected to the House in 2002, the then Minister of Justice, Martin Cauchon, initiated an anti-bullying ad campaign and boasted that through the national crime prevention strategy, the government of the day was involved in over a hundred projects across the country designed to deal with the question of bullying.
One example was the then minister for multiculturalism, Jean Augustine, who spoke in the House of the program called reaching across differences, which provided information and training to elementary school children in British Columbia to increase their awareness of the impact of discrimination and bullying.
Here we must remember that bullying needs to be addressed from multiple angles, as a question of justice, of safety and health, of multiculturalism, of education, of the status of women and so on. One cannot adopt a myopic approach that treats the matter as solely something for the criminal law to be addressed after the fact. Prevention is the key.
Regrettably, how to prevent bullying is not an easy question. Many groups have studied the question and report back that it involves families, teachers, schools, communities and fostering a culture that goes beyond zero tolerance, to use a phrase from the Fondation Jasmin Roy, to 100% intervention. Many of the efforts in this regard involve items of provincial jurisdiction, such as education or realms the law does not touch easily, such as what our children see on television or even what they observe in their own homes.
That said, there exists a plethora of groups and initiatives in communities across the country that the government should continue to support. Moreover, Ottawa must collaborate with the provinces to ensure that each level of government is supported by the other to ensure maximum efficiency and that redundant efforts are not made. In short, we need a comprehensive and collaborative national bullying strategy. This is something on which we can all agree.
Unfortunately, today, we are not debating a strategy or a bill. Instead, we are debating a motion to create a special committee that will study the issue for 12 months and then write a report.
This is the main issue: if we adopt this motion, we will study the problem for 12 months, and we will create a report that will require nothing from anyone and might not lead to any bill and any additional funding to community organizations. We will only have a nice report with black ink on white pages that the government will be able to ignore as soon as it comes off the press. How will this contribute to improving life for our young people? That's what we call putting off things.
While I emphasize the need for a national bullying strategy, I am concerned about a process that gives the Conservatives a blank cheque to say what they feel is appropriate and will only result in a report to be issued in a year from now, which could easily be ignored.
Moreover, the motion itself does not define the scope of bullying to be studied by the committee, such that committee meetings on this could look at union busting, political intimidation and other types of intimidation that may not involve young people at all.
As I mentioned, various governments have looked at this question previously in response to a spate of teen suicides resulting from bullying. Numerous American states have changed their laws to address the epidemic of bullying, in particular, cyberbullying.
In that regard, my colleague, the member for Vancouver Centre, proposed legislation that passed in the House at second reading to ensure that cyberbullying would be caught by Canada's Criminal Code. I look forward to Bill C-273 coming back from the justice committee and being adopted by the House.
Such concrete actions are what the House should be studying and adopting rather than engaging in the exercise of study yet again. We have plenty of examples to turn to from around the world. In the U.K., for example, the education and inspections act gives headteachers the power to regulate the conduct of pupils when they are not on school premises and are not under the lawful control or charge of a member of school staff. This can relate to any bullying incidents occurring anywhere off school premises, such as on school or public transport, outside local shops or in a town centre, for example.
The U.S. state of Maryland has one of the most aggressive anti-bullying laws in the country, with students encouraged to fill out anonymous forms when incidents occur, protections for students who blow the whistle and reports of incidents published by schools are accessible to parents so they can monitor the school climate.
Simply put, there is no shortage of ideas out there for how to combat bullying and we all agree that this is a grave problem that must addressed urgently. In that regard, I do not fault the sponsor of this motion for wanting to help. We all want to help and do what we can. My biggest concern is that he proposes the committee trust the Conservative majority to come up with a solution.
As I noted at the outset, bullying is an epidemic in our country that all too often has tragic consequences. I applaud the parents, teachers and community groups seeking to make a stand and improve the lives of youth affected by bullying. I hope Parliament will also play its part for we must all work together to make the bullying of young people a thing of the past.