Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Parents in the Northwest Territories have a legitimate expectation that their children will be safe in our schools and neighbourhoods. Children should feel confident that no one will hurt them or threaten them and that no one will say demeaning or sarcastic things to them. Parents in my riding are deeply concerned about bullying and so are students. They recognize the seriousness of the issue.
When students in Jean Marie River had the chance to work with TV star Dakota House, they produced a play centred on bullying and gossip. In Fort Simpson we’ve seen lives damaged and families leave town because of bullying. Schools in Fort Simpson have tried to prevent schoolyard bullying by introducing new games that include everyone and by signing up parents to help with supervision, but it’s hard for school authorities to watch every moment.
Timothy Gargan-Lacasse, a student who represented Nahendeh in last year’s Youth Parliament, presented a motion demanding zero tolerance for bullying. He said, “So many kids are getting bullied these days and might drop out and never come back, and in extreme cases, commit suicide.” Suicide, Mr. Speaker. You can’t get more serious than that.
Mr. Jack Yeadon, a concerned parent, wrote in the Liard Times last April that bullying is a life and death issue that we ignore at great danger to our children, to ourselves, to the future of our community.
In the North and in my riding of Nahendeh, we may be even more sensitive to the issue of bullying than people elsewhere in Canada. One well-known impact of residential schooling was to make some students bullies and abusers, taking out their own pain and oppression on weaker children. That’s part of our history. As Mr. Yeadon says, it’s not enough just to identify and stop individual bullies; we have to look at how and why the bullying is happening, how a child becomes a bully or a target of a bully and what role bystanders play. Only then do we have a chance to stop the cycle of violence that for some began in their parents’ and their grandparents’ day. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Menicoche. The honourable Member for Hay River South, Mrs. Groenewegen.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It used to be that bullying was seen as a normal part of growing up. Kids who were bullied just needed to learn to stick up for themselves. Fortunately, our thinking has changed and we’ve become aware of how much bullying really does hurt. Even as adults, many people still carry emotional scars from what used to be thought of as just the ordinary rough and tumble of the schoolyard.
At its most basic, bullying is when someone keeps saying or doing things to have power over another person. It can take the form of name calling, threats, leaving a person out of activities, stealing or breaking their things, posting mean comments on Facebook or Twitter, or other tactics aimed at making a person feel scared or uncomfortable. It can also escalate into physical violence or even murder, as we’ve seen in a few high-profile cases in Canada.
The victims of bullying can feel lonely, unhappy, frightened and unsafe in their schools and communities. They may be sick from the stress. They may lose confidence in themselves. Or they may not want to go to school anymore.
I cannot tell you how sad it makes me that some young people have resorted to suicide because they saw this as their only escape from bullying. This is not something to be taken lightly.
As I understand it, we do not have a territory-wide policy on bullying, but leave it to individual schools to establish their own ways of handling it. I have heard some disturbing stories from concerned parents and I am not convinced that the approach we have now goes far enough to protect our youth. I want to be sure that we are taking this matter very seriously, that we are keeping up with the absolute best practices, policies and legislative tools available, and that we are sending a clear and consistent message: Bullying hurts and we will not tolerate it.
On a personal note, and judging by the statistics that we read in a CBC report today, I’m sure there are other people in this room that were bullied as a child. I was bullied as a child and I will briefly share the story of going to a girlfriend’s house to stay overnight and her parents came home drunk. I got very scared and I wanted to go home to the security of my own home where I’d never seen drunk people or I’d never seen alcohol. My dad had to come pick me up. Well, that girl whose father came home drunk was so offended that she made it her life’s career after that to make my life miserable in school. I didn’t like school very much to start with and I sure didn’t like it after that.
It does leave scars and it does change the way you interact with people. I will say one interesting thing…
I would like to seek unanimous consent to conclude my statement. Thank you.
---Unanimous consent granted
A very strong support network of your family comes in at these times, and I think it’s very important that our children do feel the security and acceptance of their own family when these kinds of things happen in the world out there at large.
I think it’s a good message to parents that we can’t always control everything that happens to our children. I know that in my foray into politics, people have asked me, how can you stand people saying things about you? How are you thick-skinned enough to go out there and do it? And in a strange kind of a way, maybe it was because I did develop that ability to kind of shield some of that. That’s a bit on a reaction that’s been positive. But for the most part, bullying does hurt. It’s completely not tolerable in our society and we should do everything we can to stop it. Thank you.
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. The honourable Member for Hay River North, Mr. Bouchard.
