Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the terrific member for Sackville—Eastern Shore. It is a great honour to share my time with him.
We have been talking a lot about the bill. At the end of my comments, I will talk about some of the concerns I have about how this bill has been put together by the government and the concerns that we have heard from my colleagues about other aspects of the bill that have been included.
What I would like to talk about is what most of us have shared in the House: our concerns about cyberbullying and the influence of the Internet as a tool used by those who want to frighten, abuse and intimidate people.
Three names come to mind in recent past. We have lost the lives of some very vulnerable young people. Amanda Todd, Rehtaeh Parsons and, in Ottawa and indirectly related to the issue we are talking about, Jamie Hubley. These are names that brought this issue to the forefront and I want to mention their names because it was really quite something when we lost these young people. There was an outpouring of sentiment, but it also caused legislators like us to reflect on what we could do. That is very profound, because, as we know, that does not always happen. It was a moment where we saw members of Parliament and members of provincial legislatures try to look at how we could deal with this issue.
I would like to take it and relate it to what my friend from Edmonton—Strathcona was talking about. Let us take another look at this, beyond the scope of this law, and talk about the issue a bit more. We need to look at the fact that it is not just the Internet.
Before I was elected as a member of Parliament, I was a teacher. On many occasions, I had to deal with young people who were very isolated. They were people who came to me because they were feeling vulnerable. There were a number of cases where I had students who were contemplating suicide. Because they had no one else to turn to, as a teacher, I ended up being the person who they dealt with.
It always took me by surprise how few resources there were for young people to turn and get help. That is something we can work on with the provincial governments, providing people with assistance. It is not just about the Internet. It is about the fact that people are isolated. When I was teaching, there was certainly a concern about how the Internet was being used. Now we have social networking, which is part of the issue we are talking about now. It is interesting. There is a paradox. This young generation is the most connected generation in the history of the world. My sons can Skype with someone on the other side of the world and connect with people. The paradox is that we have the most connected generation, but we also see some of the most isolated young people ever.
As we have heard many times, the technology is such that people can go inward if they are in a cycle of depression, if they feel isolated, or if people are intimidating or bullying them. They can just go into the virtual world. Mr. Speaker, you are a parent. You know that the virtual world is fraught with all sorts of danger and concerns. We need to address that. As others have said, and we agree with them, the bill is about making some changes in the Criminal Code, but it does not solve the problem. We have to look at prevention as well.
When I was teaching, I worked with the Media Awareness Network. It is a fantastic not-for-profit group that deals with media literacy. I was able to avail myself of its resources when I was in the classroom. What we did was talk with young people about the messages they were getting in the media, now on the Internet and social networking sites, with which they were bombarded.
They are being bombarded with messages about how they should behave, what they should do and what they should buy. For young women, in particular, it is about how they should look. They are being pushed to consume things or buy things to somehow become a better person, when we know that the essence of someone's personality is about the values they carry and the influences they have to make them better people, not how they look, what they buy or what they consume.
I look at the curriculum in our schools, the resources for young people and it is not enough. We can do our jobs as parents, but let us be frank about this. When kids reach adolescence, they actually turn away from their parents and are more influenced by their peers. In this virtual world that has been created through the Internet and technology, with Facebook, Twitter, et cetera, there are obvious temptations for people to reach out to others to essentially give them confidence in who they are. This is where we saw the problems for the people I mentioned, like Amanda Todd.
Just recently, we heard from Amanda Todd's mother, who was speaking about media awareness, I believe it was last week in Winnipeg. What she was saying to parents, educators and everyone was that we needed to connect with each other to help our young people. Yes, we need to ensure we know what our young people are accessing on the Internet, on Facebook, et cetera, but we also need to have that human dimension. That is where we need to see our schools and our communities reaching out to people to bring them in and for those who are feeling vulnerable, to offer opportunities for them to share with us what their anxieties are.
I have talked to numerous educators. My wife is a teacher as well. What we have noticed lately is that there is much more anxiety among young people now than there ever was. Again, it is connected to how people are connected. They are feeling bombarded by Facebook, with Twitter and texting, where people who want to lash out or isolate someone can do it without really facing someone. That is the whole problem here. It is the anonymity.
Therefore, there are a lot of anxious young people. We see this in the skyrocketing number of them who are being identified with anxiety disorder. This is, frankly, what we should be looking at because once people are feeling anxious and they turn to social media to find friends and community in a virtual world, we then see where they can really descend into chaos. We see luring happening there. We see people who try to pretend to be friends draw people in and then abuse them.
If we are going to understand the issue that we are talking about today, we need to go beyond just changes to the Criminal Code, which of course we support.
Let us see the federal government work with our partners at the provincial level to come up with really smart media awareness programs that are well resourced, and I mentioned the Media Awareness Network is a terrific resource, if we are to help young people be aware and be literate when it comes to what they are confronted with on line.
This is not about the government doing it for them. Let me be clear about that. This is about the government resourcing groups that are already working on these issues. It means that we all take this issue with a lot more depth than just saying we will change the Criminal Code and that will somehow fix it. It means we have to look to those who are victimized.
I will just underline a couple of groups that are obviously important here. I think of trans-youth and gay and lesbian youth. I think of those who are different because of the way they look, or the fact that they may be introverted. We need to reach out to them.
I wish Bill C-13 was just about that. I wish the government had not brought in these other measures, which we have some concerns with about privacy that have been noted.
What I want to finish off with is, let this not be the end of this issue. Let us look at how we can better reach out to young people. Finally, a smart suggestion would be to reach out and listen to young people, because they will have as many ideas as we have on how to help young people who are so isolated.
My final recommendation would be for the government to work with the provinces to actually create spaces to hear from young people, for them to make recommendations on how to combat cyberbullying, as we call it, but deep isolation. Therefore, at the end of the day, we can say that we have been able to help prevent these horrific, tragic deaths we have seen, in the names of Rehtaeh Parsons, Amanda Todd and Jamie Hubley.
