Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the members of the House who have spoken in support of the bill. I also want to thank the Canadian Teachers' Federation and the Canadian police boards for also supporting the bill.
I want to assure everyone in the House that the bill is not bringing a new provision into the Criminal Code. Within the Criminal Code there already exist criminal sanctions against criminal harassment, defamatory libel and false messages, and they pertain to all forms of communication, including print media, radio, speech on the phone, et cetera.
All the bill is doing is adding cyberspace or a computer to the list of things that are already there, so the bill is not changing anything. It is adding a new form of communication to the communications messages that the already existing component of the Criminal Code pertains to.
I heard people speak, and I heard a lot of them being concerned about children. Bullying is one thing. Bullying occurs in schools. The difference between bullying and cyberbullying is that a lot of people do not bully each other in their community or in their workplace because we can see them doing it. It is not adult behaviour, and people are ashamed to do it.
What has happened is that since cyberspace and social media have occurred, people who would not be caught doing this face to face are now using social media to bully their colleagues in the workplace, to bully their neighbours, to bully people in their communities. They are doing things that they would never do before. It has moved forward from the bullying in the schoolyard to this new type of bullying that affects adults and people of all ages. I wanted to clarify that.
Under the Criminal Code provisions, when and if someone goes to court, obviously the youth protection agencies and the court would look at it in terms of the age of the person it is applicable to, so nothing will be criminalizing young people in the bill.
The really terrible difference about cyberbullying is its anonymity. It allows people of all ages to bully each other and spread false messages, to carry out criminal harassment and to defame and libel people they know and talk to every day, but nobody would know it was them.
The problem about cyberbullying or this kind of bullying is that because it is done anonymously and because it is done on the Internet, it lasts forever. A person might be 95 or 102, and this messaging would be there about that person. A person may be moving to another country, but it will follow them wherever they go because of the nature of cyberspace. They can never escape it. There is no way they can run and hide.
I have some colleagues who talked about harm. The harm is real. My mother used to say, “Sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never harm you”. I used to believe that, but that is no longer true.
We do not have to punch somebody, push them, shove them, do nuggies on them or do whatever we want to do anymore. We do not need to hurt somebody physically, because the emotional damage done by cyberbullying is so expansive, and it reaches everywhere, even after death, that people cannot escape it. That is why a lot of people resort to suicide as a result of cyberbullying. I can think of no outcome that is worse than someone committing suicide. This is a real issue, and I really wanted to speak to it.
A lot of people suggested that there are other areas within the Criminal Code that could apply to this issue. I want to assure everyone here that I have learned a lot listening to people speak in this House. There is no limit to what we can learn when we listen to other people's opinions.
If the bill goes to committee, I am prepared to be open to anything that will strengthen the bill and make it more effective and more relevant. I do not believe that as the House of Commons, as parliamentarians, we should abdicate our role and wait until the Senate has done something. We have a duty here to legislate. We are elected officials. I want us to deal with this here in this House and in this place.