Canadian Heritage committee  That's the million-dollar question, actually. As I said, I believe that, if we start funding community initiatives and if you ensure that some of that funding goes to young people, particularly young people who are in schools and universities, who can come up with the kinds of pl

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you. Yes, our board did go through a very tumultuous time. We had 21 directions from the Ministry of Education including, for example, the establishment of a human rights office, which we've done. We do extensive training in human rights and in equity, in terms of the est

Canadian Heritage committee  I think what has happened has forced us to be clear in terms of a process for managing incidents of hate and discrimination, because we really had to rebuild trust with our communities in terms of how we managed these kinds of issues. We had lost the trust of a lot of communities

Canadian Heritage committee  I am familiar with it. This is the challenge that we face, because it depends on government priorities, obviously. I'm calling for a national action plan, and I think we need the kind of action plan that will survive changes of government. I'm not sure how we do that, but I thin

Canadian Heritage committee  As far as hate crimes and hate acts are concerned, I think data collection is critically important. Currently, the onus is on our law enforcement agencies to collect the data, and most of the data we have actually comes from law enforcement. In dealing with our indigenous studen

Canadian Heritage committee  I would recommend that we work with our law enforcement agencies. Folks have obligations to report these things to law enforcement agencies. We also know that there are a lot of hate crimes that are unreported. Just from my experience in working with colleagues, they tell me abou

Canadian Heritage committee  I think we have to embrace social media. I tell my staff all the time, really, if you put this in the hands of our students, they will solve it. There's a small percentage of them who hold views that are insidious. However, the majority of our students are good students who want

Canadian Heritage committee  If I may add, part of our protocol is to connect with the hate crime division of the police, in our case the York Regional Police services. We have a relationship with them. The protocol is to connect with them and they do the collection. We also connect with our community agenci

Canadian Heritage committee  What you have to do is you have to name it and then you have to work on education about it. One of the things that we're doing as a district, as a particularly large complex organization, is looking at, for all those who work for us, if they have attitudes that we know are contr

Canadian Heritage committee  I think when things happen.... I know there are high-profile things. When we have white supremacists parading about our country, I think it's important our leaders come out and call them what they are. Call them out and let folks know that they don't represent who we are as a nat

Canadian Heritage committee  First of all, in our district we have not been collecting the data. However, we have a protocol for dealing with any incidents of hate. We have them at all levels of secondary and elementary. Our protocol is that the students are suspended for at least one day of school, and incl

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you. First, I thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak today. I want to let you know, though, that I am not speaking as a representative of the York Region District School Board; the views will be my personal views. I also want to begin in the spirit of reconcilia