 Well, perhaps we can get started. It's a little after seven. There may be some more come. And if not, it doesn't really matter. It's a quality, not quantity that counts. So thank you for coming out to this. And I guess the first thing I should do perhaps is a brief introduction of myself. Wayne McKay is the slide suggests and have taught at the law school in various names before it became shulik, as well as since then. And done a few other things was director of the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission from 95 to 98, president of Mount Ellison for a term from 2001 to 2004. And most of my teaching has been in the public human rights constitutional area, although I've also taught in education law and privacy law and a few other areas as well. But what we're here to talk about tonight is the area of cyber bullying. And that sort of began as I'll talk a little bit about in the slide presentation, which we'll start in a moment, really came about after 2011 when I was asked to chair the Nova Scotia task force on bullying and cyber bullying. And sort of made what I thought was a kind of joke when the report was released in 2012, which was I hope I wasn't going to be typecast as the guy who talks about cyber bullying. But that's more or less what has happened since 2012. I'd say I get a fair number of speaking engagements. And I'd say more than 90% of them have to do with cyber bullying, a few who still on human rights and constitutional and other things. But cyber bullying has kind of accidentally reinvented myself as somebody who knows something about cyber bullying. I'll let you determine whether or not that's true. Anyway, so tonight's talk is going to be kind of an overview talking about some of the issues around cyber bullying. And as the title suggests, and it's also the title in part of the Cyber Bullying Task Force report, responding to cyber bullying, there's no app for that, which at least at the time I came up with that, I thought it was relatively clever. You could decide that or not. But it's sort of one of those layers of things, because obviously there seems to be an app for everything these days. But there really isn't an app that responds to cyber bullying in its full sense. But as with anything you do these days, it wasn't too long after the report was released with that name on it, I had very all kinds of enterprising people contacting me. So yes, there is an app for that. In fact, we have the perfect app to respond to cyber bullying and various parts of that, it might even be true. But there really is not an app in the full sense of responding to the problem as we'll talk about it. So that's the talk for the night. I thought I'd start off with a fairly interesting TED talk for those of you who look at TED talks these days, and I suppose showing my age, but perhaps the age of some of you in the audience as well, that rethinking Monica Lewinsky, and for some of you in the audience, that would be a name you don't necessarily know or only vaguely know. But back in, I guess, 1998, a fairly famous, infamous, whichever connections with former President Clinton. But it's interesting, and I encourage you to have a look at the TED talk she does, which is really quite interesting, about sort of again talking about reinventing, saying, well, as she says here, when her reputation and dignity and so on were being attacked, she had the term cyberbullying in 1998, wasn't really much of a phenomenon, but as she describes herself as patient zero in the cyberbullying epidemic. And not just around what happened in terms of her connections with former President Clinton, and of course there's other whole layers of gender discrimination as to how Mr. Clinton, former President Clinton has gone on and sort of didn't sort of suffer too much from that, but she not so much, but also received a great deal of what's now cyberbullying as a consequence of that, and the reference to almost my life as she talks about his suicidal thoughts and that kind of thing. So if you haven't looked at the TED talk, which for those of you who are technologically inclined or have friends who are, it's a very interesting watch to see what she says about that. And that's only 17 years ago, but now as she says, she was one of the early high-profile victims of cyberbullying. That quote there, well there's two quotes, one slightly dated, although still relevant on the right, I'll do the little cartoon in case you can't read it from there, first the Deater cartoon, the key to combating cyberbullying is having good role models, mother talking with her child in schools, and then off to the right the what appears to be, although he doesn't name them, former Prime Minister Harper and some others saying look at the newest video I just posted about Justin, so it didn't work that well if that's cyberbullying and whether it is or isn't, but anyway making the point that adult role models are an important part of cyberbullying. We often think of it as being young people, but it's not exclusively that. And then the quote from my report on cyberbullying, the main point of that, I won't read the whole thing, but that cyberbullying is really a symptom of a more deep-rooted and serious problem, which is the deterioration of respectful and responsible human relations. And I think that's partly going back to the point that there's no app for that, there may be apps for aspects of cyberbullying, but that's really a symptom of the bigger problem as to why do people do that? Why are people engaging in the very hurtful, negative kind of things they do online? And that's the much larger, more difficult issue. And one that's not simple to solve, but there are strategies and there are things to do about it. And we'll, I'll talk about that. And I should have said at the outset I'll try to keep us close to an hour or no longer and then open it up for questions. And if I end earlier, we'll have more time. So the short background, some of you would know, some would not in terms of the Nova Scotia experience. And in some ways Nova Scotia is kind of the epicenter for dealing with cyberbullying, for better or for worse, in a host of ways. But in the spring of 2011, there was a number of much more low profile situations where young Nova Scotia, mostly women died tragically in suicides connected in some ways to cyberbullying. And the Department of Education got a lot of concern and response about that as you'd expect. And as is often one of the political ways to respond to that was to create a task force and they asked me to chair that. So that's kind of the origin of it. And that's a rather important point because I'll talk about Ritea Parsons later on. A lot of people, at least from outside, think that the task force came after or that it was connected with Ritea Parsons but that came a whole year after the release of the task force. So, but it did start in that kind of way as well. And in response to these deaths and other concerns, they set up the task force in May 2011 and the task force reported on February 29th, 2012 or at least it was dated then. At least if you're gonna have a very time-demanding thing, it's good to at least do it in a leap year so you get one extra day. And if I recall, it was submitted about 11.30 on February 29th just to show it's not just students but profs sometimes wait right till the deadline. Released actually officially in March. So that's the sort of chronology of it. Before talking more about cyberbullying, though I think to really understand cyberbullying, you have to look at it in some ways, I think in the broader context of the internet and both technology and social media and the internet. And the more I research and do some studying in this area, the more I'm struck by a number of things. First of all, how much technology and social media has changed the way we do just about everything but also on the many paradoxes that come with the internet. And this will be kind of a theme throughout the talk, lots of good things but some not so good things as well. And some of the paradoxes just that I've sort of picked out community building but social isolation. The picture up in the students or young people standing by the wall in theory being together but all on their iPhones or whatever, smartphones, whatever it might be together but isolation at the same time. And that's I think a really interesting concept of the internet that while it offers all this promise of connection, not always the case. Focus, it should give us a focus but yet the internet is a major source of distraction. And if this were a class and maybe some of you are doing it anyway, I wouldn't have seen it but most of us know that what's happening all the time is a bit of that distraction where people with laptops ostensibly taking notes are also checking emails and eBay or their stock market reports or whatever else occasionally between taking notes. So the sort of the, I think largely myth that now people talk about multitasking. Well, multitasking is not actually a myth but effective multitasking is largely a myth that most of the studies now suggest that yes, you can do a lot of things at once but you aren't doing any of them quite as well. So anyway, there's that focus distraction paradox. Empowerment disenfranchisement. I mean the internet and social media is a very powerful thing but also like everything it's unequally distributed. So in some ways it should produce more equality but probably accentuates those who have access to it and those who don't, those who can afford iPhones, those who can't and so on. And access to others experience should make us as a society and as people more empathetic but in fact as we'll talk or I'll talk a bit more about later it seems to be producing along with other things a kind of empathy deficit. So anyway, all these kind of paradoxes of the internet. Interesting little diagram that I came across which was constructed basically by looking at I guess it's Facebook and links between various friends and somebody do a diagram and all their links to friends which more or less produce a map of the world with one interesting and not surprising when you think about an exception which is China because at least at that point probably still true. China was not really allowing Facebook so China doesn't appear in this map but it's constructed simply by mapping out all the ways in which various Facebook connections interlinked. And so again, sort of that paradox that in one sense you're creating a connected global community but yet there are our omissions and just as a completely minor except kind of classic Nova Scotia aside the map was actually done by somebody who worked for Facebook who was originally from Halifax so all great things come from Nova Scotia, right? And in terms of part of the internet in context lots of positive things it's kind of a cultural mirror reflecting many positive things deliberative democracy, the Arab Spring which isn't quite so springly right now or sprightly or whatever but the Arab Spring in many ways facilitated by social media all these kinds of things political activism, community building the little quote at the bottom revolution will not be televised, it will be tweeted and when you think about the sort of political power of iPhones and tweets and all of these kind of things quite important and then on the right side the images on Turkish graffiti including a code that allows citizens to get around the government firewalls and being not terribly learned in technology myself one of the other ironies of my current reinvention is a cyberbullying expert but I'm told that it wouldn't be as simple as them then just changing that so by putting that out there it allowed people to get around the various government firewalls so very useful possibilities of technology and social media but then as well it also reflects as a cultural mirror the negative sides of behavior as well and one of the things that makes cyberbullying powerful and so damaging is the wide audience and the wide impact that it has so for example the isolating part of social media and the kind of image sort of says that that while you're alone in your room or wherever you are the internet can be a very isolating experience especially if your colleagues and friends are picking on you or targeting you the myth of nostalgia all that sort of the myth but when I started out with the cyberbullying task force a lot of people would come up to me everywhere grocery stores or wherever else because it was a pretty high profile thing and one of the most often things some people mostly people my age or in that range would say well but it's simple if you're getting a rough time on the internet just disconnect just don't go on the internet what's the problem it's simple you just don't go on the internet which as I discovered both then and since then it's really not realistic it's not realistic period but it's certainly not realistic for young people who live online you know I think somewhere in the report I said if a young person had a choice between stopping breathing and being having to disconnect from the internet they would probably decide to stop breathing I mean it's just it is life is online and you just have to look around to see that so that's nostalgia is fine but it's not a realistic solution to simply go offline so keep calm and go offline this is not a realistic solution our new reality is a different one and I don't know if you can see that particularly their clever little cartoon you probably can't see it too well from here but we've always kind of had our connections but they were a little more basic than the online ones with pictures which are now Instagrams and so on if you think about the kind of networks we created we had them but they weren't on the internet social media variety but still the same thing and how has internet changed us and I think that's a whole other it's a whole topic for another day but an interesting part of trying to understand cyberbullying and these kind of things is that it's kind of almost Marshall McLuhan kind of the medium is the message for those who remember that and so on in that it's not just that the content is different but the medium itself has changed us in all kinds of ways one is on the question of empathy and lots of studies now suggesting that it has produced a kind of empathy deficit of sorts because we're kind of removed from reality connection at the same time isolation community but a different kind of community an online community and for many people they spend huge amounts of their time online their sort of Facebook friends are their friends culture of instant gratification and that's not just the internet and social media but there is a lot of that that we expect instant responses you remember the old days when people actually sent letters and you had to actually wait for them to arrive and then maybe people would respond and so on now it's tweets back and forth and lots of other things I could go on about but the sort of the deity of brevity brevity is definitely in right I mean in that tweets are better than emails because they're shorter right that's a kind of assumption maybe but what impact does that have on how we write how we say things whether how people read things so it is part of changing who we are now it's having set that big broad context of the internet let's come back to cyberbullying so from a legal point of view what is cyberbullying because it's in that context that we have cyberbullying and the Nova Scotia Cyber Safety Act picking up on elements of the definition we came up with in the education context in the report has defined cyberbullying very broadly so it's electronic communication and we list some but any form of electronic communication that is repeated the underlying part here repeated or with continuing effect and in some ways everything on the internet is actually repeated or with continuing effect because it never really goes away you don't ever really delete anything so that's part of it being a very broad category that is intended or ought reasonably expected to cause now that's sort of legal language but an important point in order to be cyberbullying both for the Cyber Safety Act or other purposes it doesn't have to be intended can be intended and sometimes is but it's also cyberbullying even if you didn't actually intended but you reasonably ought to have expected that harm would come and that's a really important point because often the answer here cyberbullying was just a joke we didn't mean anything by it we didn't intend to harm anybody well that's fine but it still had that impact whether or not you intended it so it's not just a problem of intent and then it goes on to cause fear and this is the parts when we come later that people are concerned are too broad and maybe we'll have some discussion of that cause fear, intimidation, humiliation, distress or other damage or harm to another person's health, emotional well-being self-esteem or reputation so a pretty broad category of possible damages and was defined that way in part because it's a never-evolving thing so we wanted a broad definition so things didn't get lost although I should say I was not in any way actually involved in the drafting of the Cyber Safety Act a lot of people assume I was since I did the task force and so on but it's kind of another story but that happened without much input from really anybody and I didn't have any input into that but the definition was similar to the one we came up with in the report in the last little part and includes assisting or encouraging such communication in any way and that's another really important point about the Cyber Safety Act and cyberbullying in Nova Scotia that it's not just the person who does it but the person that assists or encourages it as well and that was a very deliberate addition which not all provinces have because the sort of ganging up on people is a significant part of the negative and damaging aspect of cyberbullying then not just this was bullying this is cyberbullying but on bullying as well people are cheering or on the online equivalent if somebody says Susie is the ugliest girl that ever existed on the earth and then 100 other people say I like that comment well they're assisting or encouraging that cyberbullying comment and if you think about the tragedy of the Ritea Parsons case and others that it wasn't just a few people doing it but other people piling on so that's a really important part of it Cyberbullying is a part of bullying more generally and the report was on bullying and cyberbullying and sometimes bullying has kind of got a little lost in relation to cyberbullying but it's still there as well and that was a little bit of a debate on the task force because in the US they tend to treat them somewhat separately but we basically concluded that cyberbullying is a subset a set of bullying and within that there's various forms and some sexualized some not and so on but we treat them as connected now this goes a bit back to the Monica Lewinsky thing I started off with one aspect that's quite prevalent in cyberbullying is shaming there's a very good book if you're looking for interesting books to read John Ronson's book on so you've been ashamed and publicly shaming it's in his quotes kind of an interesting one shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be the snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche and I think it's a useful little comment especially the last part that when you think about the sort of collective impact of shaming is what's problematic each individual's part may be quite small but the end result is really quite damaging and that's true across the board but it's particularly true when I did the St. Mary's study in relation to women and sexual violence and these kind of things that the ways in which they are shamed online can be quite damaging so that's another aspect of cyberblogging not just for young people you might have remembered how long ago now not too long back the Lenore Zahn case where a young person also a constituent who was circulating to his friends and anybody else he could find a picture, a topless picture of Lenore Zahn taken from her days as an actress with the L word and she didn't actually use the Cyber Safety Act in the end but it raised that issue and a lot of people hadn't realized before that that the Cyber Safety Act applies to adults as well as young people and it gets a lot of use and actually about at least 50% or more are adults who are victims of cyberbullying so even though we think of it in a young context and young people are particularly vulnerable it is an issue for adults as well a significant problem and one of the things we tried to do in the task force is get some sense of that and these are just a couple of them indicators but we thought important to talk to the young people themselves about their experiences with cyberbullying and how they saw it and we had an online survey which was actually way too long by what survey should be and it's kind of that's relevant in a sense because it probably took about 45 minutes to fill out this online survey and as any good marketer will tell you very few people are going to spend 45 minutes online they would spend 5 minutes online and what's surprising is in spite of that we got 5,000 responses which at least at that time was the highest response the government ever had to any online survey they had ever done that's one odd thing and the second thing was that about 60% of the respondents were young people so to have young people care enough about the issue to sit down and spend more or less 45 minutes filling out a survey is pretty amazing so that in itself I think said something and we got a lot of useful information out of that we also had focus groups with young people in every school district in Nova Scotia and also had certain focus groups among particularly vulnerable communities Aboriginal, LBGT students, visible minorities disabled and so on so got a lot of useful information and to the extent there's any one of the rays of hope in this problem is that peer response the for example the pink shirt thing wearing my pink shirt today or pink t-shirt was a very effective campaign in part because it was peer driven that their own colleagues started sending a message that cyberbullying is not cool this is not a good thing to do this is a bad thing to do and so that's I think really where a lot of the hope comes that when young people themselves decide collectively and try to enforce that that's not acceptable that's when we make progress not exclusive to schools workplace as well has issues of cyberbullying I haven't done as much work on that but some have and that's obviously an issue as well and some of you may have experienced that both bullying and cyberbullying in the workplace a lot of impacts and I guess this is a really important point I think about cyberbullying it is a form of bullying but in many ways a much more serious one because of its permanence and its wide impact so there's a number of consequences physical emotional injuries cost personal health headaches emotional disorders self-esteem all kinds of things in some cases related to suicide but short of that the consequences are quite significant and far reaching and even though suicide is not a cause and effect thing there have been some studies that certainly suggest that being cyberbullied certainly is correlated at least in part with the possibility or the likelihood of committing suicide so those are all concerns sort of putting a face on some of this a lot of people unfortunately and this continues but little less high profile lately young people who have been bullied or cyberbullied that have died by suicide including Rutea Parsons and Amanda Todd and a few other high profile ones but some that aren't so high profile and this is I could have done 10 times as many faces but I think it sort of puts a human face on this it's not something that's just abstract this is a real problem and again to really make the important point that suicides are complex things it's not exactly cause and effect but certainly there seems to be some connection and just to pause there for a moment I think one of the reasons that young people particularly in junior high and even elementary and senior high are particularly vulnerable because that's a point that being included is critical nobody wants to be outside as you get older you're kind of happy to be outside and be odd and different but at that point it's not so cool and you want to be included in the group and so I think that's one of the reasons that the impacts are particularly great in that area and one of the reasons that schools have such an important role to play human relations and human rights is a symptom of deeper problems as indicated earlier and adult behavior and adult role models play a significant role I don't know if you can really see this but the boss is giving the employee a rough time he then goes home and gives his wife a rough time who gives the kid a rough time who picks on the cat so it's one of these things like and it is a kind of like domestic violence kind of thing you have role models of things going on in your own life and it sort of underscores another important point that it would be easy to kind of demonize the bullies and cyber bullies and victims obviously have to be recognized and supported but they too are coming from a place of hurt and difficulty very often and the line between the bully, the victim and even the observer are often difficult to draw and they sometimes move around somebody who was cyber bullied at some point later cyber bullies and so on so it's part of that sequence it's an international problem, it's not just here this particular Santa Clara County in California it's just one example, very similar situation in some ways to the Rataya Parsons case 15 year old Audrey Pot and assaulted sexually assaulted by her classmates then cyber bullied and I mentioned earlier about the lack of empathy and the sort of concerning parts of that that so many times the victim is revictimized after these kinds of things in that case, I think it's the one where they sort of took the side of the boys who were arrested and charged and then were cyber bullying her for destroying their lives because she reported them so there's sort of something wrong with that story. National problem as well Amanda Todd on the West Coast for not, well it's 2012 went online with the series of cue cards sort of as a cry for help before she actually died by suicide and did die by suicide eventually but this was the case which has an international dimension as well where she was persuaded to pose topless on the internet by sort of threats and persuasion as it turns out it looks like by somebody in their basement in the Netherlands who was doing this to people all over the world including Amanda Todd on the West Coast and that's another whole aspect of this and Todd Loyek I believe was the son of a counselor in Ottawa, one of the earlier ones not always women in these cases as well who was a victim of both bullying and cyber bullying in school and took again died by suicide so it's a national issue as well and obviously local and national Ritea Parsons which probably in many ways the most high profile case not just out of Nova Scotia but out of Canada as well and Ritea Parsons which of course is a great tragedy is in many ways a major catalyst for most of our significant legal changes in the area of cyber bullying so and as I pointed out briefly earlier her case actually came a year after the release of the report almost just a month different and you can never say this with certainty and some significant parts of the report were implemented but I think there's some that were not that might have made a difference one of them being a recommendation in the report that school boards have a jurist and clearly have a jurisdiction to deal with cyber bullying even if it's off premises and after hours as long as there's a negative impact back in the schools that they can't police everything but if the effect has a negative impact back in the schools you do have jurisdiction and that's particularly concerning in the Ritea Parsons situation because part of her story was that after she was allegedly at least sexually assaulted by four classmates off school premises and after hours but that then a pictures taken and circulated that was widely known around the school clearly would fit that definition but both at the original school and other schools the school board said well we can't do anything about that so in fact there was no discipline process there was no investigation they were not questioned she went back to the school with the same people that were involved and on the theory that in part at least that they had no jurisdiction which was I think wrong then and clearly wrong now and after the Ritea Parsons case the Education Act has been changed to clearly state that they have that jurisdiction but they did have that jurisdiction before which is a point I made in the report and the gentleman who did the justice system study that was released just recently also confirmed that that was his view as well that that jurisdiction was there all along so anyway just one example and I'm not suggesting that would have absolutely made the difference but it could have got a great deal of attention throughout and a public opposition to some of the responses as there should have been of the various systems in Nova Scotia that failed her the justice system failed her the health system failed her the education system failed her and so that's really what has led to some of that and they put all of those have been studied now the education system early on and just recently the justice system as well investigated and we'll get to that in a moment in fact there so in the education one where an ex Ontario deputy attorney general concluded that there were problems and the education system in some ways failed Ritea Parsons which clearly was true and in terms of the justice system as well that that's even another case where particularly on the cyberbullying aspect and perhaps on the sexual assault issue although that wasn't so clear in their view that the system failed her so there is at least a legacy from that clever cartoon of course were blessed with excellent cartoon as Bruce McKinnon being I think perhaps one of the best certainly the best nationally if not internationally and one of his comments on that was about whether or not more serious response to some aspects of the task force might have done something about what happened more broadly speaking of course again cyberbullying is a white thing just this is kind of a bizarre and kind of sad little aside as a follow-up to the Ritea Parsons context at one point some dating site I think somewhere in Germany who I guess just mined for pictures and then put up pictures without anyone's consent and all that which all other thing but put her picture up as attractive young girls and canned available for dating not realizing that her picture was there so much because the fact that she was now dead and they did take it down but that's just sort of part of another whole story when you put things out in the internet you don't know what use it's gonna get the Cecil the lion story and maybe this is not quite as sympathetic a situation but the dentist certainly got a lot of cyberbullying after the line killing in that context and a woman fired after tweeting about AIDS and I could have updated this with a whole series of people who ran or attempted to run for a campaign who had earlier online lives come back to haunt them and so on so and then the order one of the orders in the case of Chief Andrea Paul for a member cyberbullying her so it's a pretty widespread phenomenon results of the task force and the add or another of our good cartoons that's supposed to be me and former minister of education Gen X in the sense that at least some of the recommendations of the task force were not fully embraced I guess I would perhaps say some work but resistance to some of the recommendations a number of things suggested legal changes education teaching digital citizenship and I think that's a really important concept if I leave us enough time which I better get moving or I want to discuss I think I don't know to what extent that's happening some efforts are being made in that direction but maybe not enough in my view one of the things which probably triggered this little cartoon one of the small minor recommendations in the task force was that on an experimental basis that cell phones should be banned from the classroom unless they're needed for what you're actually doing if it was part of the teaching or if it was necessary for health or other reason that on at least an experimental basis leave cell phones outside and that was completely rejected as unworkable and would cause far too much protest from parents and students in other words it's probably true but seems to me still not such a bad idea but still doesn't probably happen I don't know at any event I think well I don't think we banned them but at least in law classes I haven't had too many people operating on cell phones while in class but maybe we're a more civilized lot maybe not prevention programs really important so education law but also prevention obviously far more important given the high stakes and consequences here for prevention and again it'd be interesting and I guess my little political thing I would throw out there and not to criticize per se but our current government the Liberal government of McNeil has been very quiet on the issues of bullying and cyberbullying now we can conclude one of two things everything's completely under control and it's all fine now or nobody's really looking at it and I think it would be interesting to have a bit of report card and how are we doing on these kind of things you know are we really preventing this have we put in place some of the supports not just on cyberbullying but for suicide prevention are there better supports for victims and for bullies dealing with these kind of things so in many ways I don't think we're asking enough questions about other the changes that need to be made have been made and restorative approaches is one positive possibility which does have a peer control so those were just some of the things that we recommended needs a wide range of responses it's a big sort of community wide society wide problem so you need all kinds of levels of response not just schools although they're important parents, justice system, teachers government, internet service providers I think there's a lot more they could do so there's a whole lot of things there in simple terms we were kind of recommending a trinity of responses education, intervention, prevention and law and policy and in some ways although I make my living in law law is not the most important of those that education and prevention in many ways are more significant although you need all of them one of the important roles of law is stated in the report is to kind of anchor the changes whatever the range of changes might be and an analogy to that is drunk driving it's not that long ago that we had very different views about whether it was okay to engage in driving while consuming alcohol but by changing the laws having a lot of education a lot of working and changing education and consciousness we now have not perfect but a much healthier view on matters of drunk driving or domestic violence although again lots of room to improve but I think law can be should be a statement of our values and should anchor some of those other changes digital citizenship really important Perry Aftab talks about digital hygiene sort of like flossing your teeth for these things but that's one element but I think it's much bigger than that as well you know what's proper and respectful behavior online prevention programs in all kinds of ways and we recommended that there would be an analysis excuse me off what does does and does not work as far as prevention because lots of people claim they have very effective prevention programs but do they really prevent so I don't know where we are on that I hope we're making some progress law and policy and there's been some changes in that so I'll get into that now any legal changes have to occur in a constitutional framework and they would sort of move along a little faster here now but whatever changes we make have to operate within our constitutional framework the provinces do certain things the feds do certain things they have to operate within the charter but there are some options even with that human rights lawsuits and so on restorative approaches a new and I think valuable tool that can be used and I went in the short time we have to go into that in any great detail but in simplistic ways looking at bringing people together working out a solution that is not adversarial or blaming so much as reestablishing new relationships and again best operated at a peer level and quite a lot has happened in Nova Scotia on that front which is positive possibly has its limits and we can have a great debate about this but of course the not too long well about a year ago I guess right dental Facebook scandal and where restorative justice did some quite good things I think but was one response but had its critics as to whether that was the right response when you're involving matters of sexual harassment and so on but it's still important it gives me a chance to sort of test the tenure as well by providing the president's image in a compromising way right barriers to effective responses whatever we do does have some limits I mentioned earlier constitutional limits you can't however big the problem is you have to pursue it in a constitutional way so we have to look at some legal limits on that privacy, division of powers free speech various sections of the charter so that's one limit on what we can do the complexity and magnitude of the problem it's a huge problem which doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything but it's challenging desensitizing impact of technology and social media and that's I touched on that earlier a really big problem but it's not going to be easy to change and accountability and responsibility and I mentioned earlier and there were very specific recommendations in the task force report about the government reporting back on progress made on various areas of education prevention and so on as far as I know none of which has happened to the legislature or others but there should be some accountability federal responses now former prime minister Harper saying that part of this is not just bullying it's the wrong term it should be seen as criminal and I think there's some truth to that and we responded to that as a society in some ways it is a form of violent expression and is it too soft a term kids will be kids they're just rough housing he has to learn to take his knocks and you hear a lot of people as well saying well you know in my day you just got some of your biggest friends and you beat up the bully and it all ended and well maybe but it's not always that simple and it's a very useful report from the much maligned and fair enough senate on cyberbullying which is under the name of you know cyberbullying hurts and really identifies some of those kind of behaviors and it's I think the image kind of makes that point some existing provisions in the criminal code can be used for cyberbullying assaults criminal harassment uttering threats child pornography child pornography being the one that's most frequently used and was the one used in the ritea parson's case at the end of the day at the time of ritea parson's and others the police weren't perhaps as creative as they should have been in applying existing criminal code provisions I think they could have done a lot more than they did but there are some that apply we have added and again this is a direct consequence of the ritea parson situation that now we have a new criminal code provision on the distribution of intimate images without consent or the so-called revenge porn and so on which applies to both regardless of age adults or young people so that if you're distributing an intimate image without consent that you're now engaging not just in illegal behavior but criminal behavior in some ways it's kind of surprising that that wasn't the case before but it wasn't but it is now with some limits of some fairly carefully constructed limits that we have to be in a situation where you reasonably expect privacy and so on but that's an important addition to the criminal code in addition to what we already have important in part and this is a whole other lecture as well but in relation to women a great deal of cyberbullying is sexualized that much of the online targeting of women has to do with sexualization of women and the sort of how they play that going back to Monica Lewinsky and so on some criticisms of the current legislation and the application of things first of all the uh... issue of sexting that's kind of an interesting aside sexting is actually i'm told largely an adult term that a lot of young people who do what we might call sexting wouldn't call it sexting it's just sharing information or sharing naked pictures or whatever it is and it's fairly widespread i'm told and i sure that's true and most people don't realize that they're actually in it at least in a technical and more than technical sense engaging in serious crimes including child pornography if the images are of people under the age that is child pornography and it's used has been used in a number of cases not just the rite of persons as a major charge i think the distribution of intimate images without consent is probably a better vehicle for that now because child pornography wasn't really intended for that situation it was primarily intended for adults praying on young people and among other things uh... having a charge of child pornography can get you on the child of the sex offender registry for life all kinds of things and so it's doesn't really neatly fit the crime but is quite frequently used the Nova Scotia cyber safety act and i want to go through this fairly quickly but there's some really interesting points on that statute that a lot of people don't realize uh... first of all it creates what we call a tort of cyberbullying for those who don't go to law school the torts basically a civil wrong you can see it's not a criminal offense but you can sue someone civilly for damages so you can be sued for cyberbullying for money damages caused which can be quite extensive protection orders somewhat like uh... in the domestic abuse kind of context uh... prevention orders which is important that you can get orders again that's perhaps a bit like domestic like restraining orders in the case of cyberbullying uh... from justice of the peace we have a cyber scan unit which is a specialized investigation unit that investigates these matters and can do things and the last point this is quite interesting i'd mentioned earlier the bystanders are liable under the act but also the parents are liable and this is one that i'm surprised has gone a lot more attention than it has which is that parents are liable jointly and severly we talk in legal terms liable for the cyberbullying of their children are required as a way to try to defend from that to engage in reasonable online supervision of their children which again is not defined any more than that in the cyber safety act itself's a pretty interesting question what are reasonable supervision first of all you've got an interesting age gap in terms of their technology gap in terms of parents and child in some cases in terms of knowledge and acting almost every case young people know more about the internet than the adults but also uh... what is reasonable supervision so you say well yeah i've got totally reasonable supervision i have them pass in their cell phone at the end of every day and i go through it if they've got half a clue they've erased anything that's not all problematic and you haven't really discovered anything right or something so yes i engage in really uh... outstanding online so we have our computer in the living room well what about your iphones and all the rest of it so what is reasonable online supervision is a big question and principals and school officials now have obligations to investigate cyberbullying so it's a very far-reaching piece of legislation also uh... responses in education acts not just know viscosa but elsewhere they've also added cyberbullying legislation and the jurisdiction point i made earlier really important now that schools recognize that they have a jurisdiction to deal with cyberbullying even if it's not immediately on school grounds if the impact is back on school and if you think about retaya parson's if a picture of a young woman engaged in sex and or being sexually assaulted is circulating that's going to have an impact on the school one would think the main responses as i understood it off the school officials as to why they didn't do anything was kind of a two level response first of all uh... we didn't know what was happening so they must have been the only people in the school that didn't know that those pictures were going around which is not a great situation or secondly if we didn't know sort of in the alternative and if we didn't know in the alternative we had no jurisdiction either is problematic some criticisms mainly that it goes too far it's overly broad uh... too much limit on free speech and uh... one of our local privacy expert david frazier has a case that's being uh... i think being considered right now on a free speech challenge to the cyber safety act because it is as we looked at earlier a broad definition so does it go too far in limiting free speech or is it a reasonable limit on free speech like pornography like hate speech like others that we might have and we're going to get some guidance on that it's difficult because it crosses jurisdictional lines like who has jurisdiction the fact that somebody in the netherlands is cyber bullying Amanda Todd in bc what legal system applies to that so there are complications those are challenges schools are thinking about and the parents are thinking about rather uh... possibly suing schools for negligence if they don't have adequate prevention measures for cyber bullying and if i were an enterprising uh... lawyer right now i'd be handing out my card and saying this is potentially quite large field in that everybody knows that cyber bullying occurs so it's uh... it's a foreseeable injury in schools uh... what are you doing about it and if you're not doing very much about it and cyber bullying occurs is that negligence and does that negligence then result in your child failing out having to move to a different school all kinds of things and uh... sometimes uh... expensive lawsuits can make people take note so already happening quite a bit in the united states not much in canada yet defamation another possibility not just in schools but anywhere if people are defaming you online uh... you can do some something about that another Nova Scotia case the brag communications case where a young woman who was uh... and a fake facebook site that was defaming her and making negative and sexualized comments wanted to pursue it without giving up for identity which is really important because then you get re victimized and the spring court of canada reversed the Nova Scotia courts and unanimously said yes she can do that yes it limits free speech yes it limits free access to the court but given extensively citing Nova Scotia's task force report so i'm happy with the decision uh... they concluded that obviously there's a serious harm here and it's uh... a legitimate limitation on free speech this is a unanimous decision just as a bella uh... talking about that but i'll go through that constitutional challenges i've touched on that uh... free speech privacy is another important issue the little cartoon show and tell is not an invasion of privacy you could have a debate about that i guess it's a little cartoon size uh... and another potential limitation when you're pursuing cyberbullies is how far can you go in invading privacy very extensive provisions under the cyber safety act about looking at people's computers seizing their uh... iphones permanently if in some cases requiring uh... that they'd be disconnected from the internet and judges have started making those kind of orders in probation cases even where it's not cyberbullying now or elements like that so again you have to balance is in so many things pursuing a serious wrong but doing it in a way that's acceptable privacy maybe needs to be rethought off in some ways as a human right these days and so there the victim as a right to privacy as well that was the brad case that you want to be able to sue that for defamation without having to give up for identity so that she could be further attacked because they knew she was human rights is another simpler way to come at this and we're getting close to the end here uh... in that you don't have to uh... necessary a higher lawyers and take the long process of going to court you fit into one of the vulnerable categories identified under the human rights code as a woman being cyberbullied or disabled person aboriginal uh... gay person any of these that fit under the code then you can also make a human rights complaint because it is a form of harassment which is covered in the code and interestingly as i indicate in the report and here uh... that's a major way of responding to cyberbullying in australia and it's a particularly effective one because human rights commissions are much more accessible then courts would be for these kinds of things and they have a range of options you can educate mediate you can uh... have uh... it's a lower cost you can go to restorative approaches in Nova Scotia so there's a range of different things that can be done through human rights going back sort of where i started uh... cyberbullying is a one part and not a very nice part of our cultural change in the world of us internet and social media and technology with that i think we have to think about be engaged in a different kind of citizenship i mentioned earlier the importance of teaching digital citizenship not just in schools but as parents you know what's a of responsible online behavior what's acceptable online behavior and for anyone who has ever looked at this and that was part of my immersion in the task force it's really pretty uh... depressing actually in daunting it's almost like a police officer seeing crime scenes it's really pretty horrendous the nasty kind of things people say and do online even after cases like retaya parson's her parents and others were cyberbullying saying well it's a good thing she's dead because she was no good anyway and all the it's really quite unbelievable how much nasty stuff is done online why do people think it's okay to do that i mean even for that matter why would somebody think it's a fun thing to do to take a picture of somebody being sexually assaulted why is that a fun thing to do and circulate to your friends so you can all think that's a great thing where's the sort of sense of respect and decency that goes with that i don't know if we actually even teach citizenship in school anymore but assuming we do to some extent i think one aspect of that needs to be digital citizenship because that again we live in part online and for a lot of younger people the online part of our lives is as important in some ways as the offline part so that's i think really significant uh... responsibilities i'm going to playing on the three hours of their school here rights responsibilities and respectful relationships a lot of cyberbullying is about relationships you know it's what kind of connections you haven't thought whether they're positive or negative so that's really the going back try to be symmetrical here for a start and then uh... monica whiskey calls it an empathy deficit and she's not the only one but i think that's true and there's a lot of studies blame that all on the internet or social media knows what all that comes from but it's a very serious concern i think that in a an age where we have more knowledge and are more connected that we should be more understanding and pathetic but yet we have an empathy deficit and again not strictly tied to age either more broadly than that and it's you can't legislate empathy so how do we get there is really important and actually not that she has answers but again uh... looking at that ted talk uh... monica lewinsky has some interesting things to say about that as i mentioned earlier part of the legacy of the tragedy of uh... retia parson's death is that she is really reformed in a way that nobody else was successful in doing including the task force uh... to really uh... slowly pulled justice along in a way that it responds better to the problems of cyberbullying distribution of intimate images the cyber safety act the changes in the school system those kind of things again brilliant cartoon by mckinnon so you know it is so often finally discussion so i'll do my unfair little comment as well that in terms of who won this little scuffle i'm still here doing this uh... the education minister isn't any longer so i guess i did okay what's that well that's possible at that that would be a very good reason to all right thank you and open to questions it's been a little bit on the concept of nexus that was in your report and the practicalities of that my understanding of that is unless there's disruption to operation, there's no real nexus there in terms of the schools, the school jurisdiction thing, yeah well this is another interesting point i don't know how much this is happening it's easy enough or not easy enough but you can make these legal changes but to have them really be effective are they educating people about how do you put that into place and i don't know if that's happening it's supposed to be happening that after the the cyber safety act and the changes to amend the code supposedly there were to be education sessions but what does that mean on important things like that it has a negative impact back on the school and so how big a negative impact and if i kind of understand where you're going with that i do understand i kind of was uh... difficult on the educators but they can't police everything and uh... part of the school response when it was originally proposed was well how can we really police what's happening in the bedrooms at home and so on are we supposed to crawl around look in bedroom windows at night and so on right and the answer is no but then you do have to deal with it once it has that impact back on the school so going back to my comments of being critical about some of those schools in the retaya parson's context i think they should have no one if they didn't the picture circulating and people are talking about this and it's an uncomfortable situation for her and the boys involved in all this kind of thing once it has that kind of an impact back in the school then you have jurisdiction if it's something very unpleasant but only involved students that had no really impact back in school probably not directly within their jurisdiction because you can't cover everything there isn't a clear line but i think that's an area where there needs to be some education what are some examples what is an negative impact back on the school having said that one of the other uh... elements of modern uh... social media and technology is everything travels very fast once it happens you know everyone knows and that's one of the thing that distinguishes sort of old school yard bullying where it happened quickly it's over nobody much remembers everything is captured now permanently and people share it with everyone so there's not a lot that happens off school grounds that doesn't have some impact back but i don't i mean i don't know yet but simply the fact that their students doesn't necessarily give you jurisdiction the health school board disciplinary policies each board has not exactly the same disciplinary policy so i would hate to believe here with the impression that all school boards would have reacted the same way as maybe you're describing the way health facts respond no very that's a really fair point and i think i don't know how far along they've got on that one of the things also coming out of the retia parson's case in the studies is now they are trying to make it more uniform across the board but they didn't all have the same approach and had different uh... approaches to it absolutely no that's a good point thank you yes i wondering how much specifically defences defamation the truth where it's not defamation a bad effect disemnating how context Okay, that's a really good point. If it's defamation, then presumably it does apply. I mean, it is defamation, whether or not it's in the cyberbullying context. One of the differences is that the impact is much greater, and there are some early cases now that are recognizing the damages you can get for defamation are higher if it's online defamation because the negative impact's so much greater. But as far as defenses, I think it would still apply. So focusing on it just there, yes. But under the Cyber Safety Act, which is one of the things that my friend and colleague, David Frazier, raises, there aren't those kinds of defenses under the Cyber Safety Act. So if you were doing it as defamation, yes, you can talk about truth and prove whatever other defenses might be there. But under the Cyber Safety Act, partly because it was done fairly quickly without a lot of input, there really aren't, there are no statutorily stated defenses. So it's irrelevant to an action, a tort action even, because they create their own tort under the Cyber Safety Act, but relevant if it's defamation. And I think that's an important point. If they should probably have some defenses there. Now, truth is a tricky one. Just putting that, putting aside the legality of it for a moment. I mean, let's take my example. Somebody's being cyberbullied online that this is a really ugly person. Well, assuming we have some objective standard. Let's say, okay, by some objective standard, they are relatively ugly. Well, it's still problematic, it's still cyberbullying, it may not be changing the reality, which is they look like they look. But it doesn't make it any less cyberbullying, because you're dealing with it and attacking them in a way that's irrelevant and all those kind of things. So in a sense, it is a different kind of context, whereas defamation, in order to have a successful defamation action, you have to have some damage to your reputation. And so, I mean, again, one could raise it on a, again, if they go to the Lewinsky talk, they might say, well, you know, what, it was that defamatory or was at least some of the commentary based on actual fact or whatever, but doesn't make it less cyberbullying, may like make it less defamatory. Yes. So I guess, continuing that conversation, a lot of the issues with the current the act as it is, one of the biggest, I guess, comments against the act is the fact that we have a lot of these resources in our legal system are ready to deal with most of these issues. And the report the federal government generated stated there wasn't a need to change any of the criminal code to add anything except for the So I guess my question is really, is there is there any necessity for like being for the act itself and what are some of the negative consequences that might actually come out of that moving forward? Okay. Interesting question. First of all, let me separate out sort of the federal criminal side and the cyber safety act. So in the criminal context, unlike in the cyber safety act, they did an extensive study and as you said, concluded that with the exception of the distribution of intimate images, there was a lot of provisions there already that could respond to cyber bullying. They didn't need to change everything. They just had to apply it more creatively. And so I think that's true there. Not quite so much the case in the civil side. So you might first of all say there is probably a greater need, there was and perhaps still is, a greater need for some new laws on cyber safety in the civil side of things, maybe not as far as this is gone. And then you also have to look at the sort of practicality of that, even if you could have lawsuits, like you could have a lawsuit for breach of privacy or you could have a defamation lawsuit. But how realistic is that given the costs of lawyers and the time and all of that, one of the advantages of the cyber safety act is that you have trained investigators that investigate can make recommendations. So those are on the positive side. But there are some negatives. And I think that's again, the balancing. Did they go too far on the definition itself? And if so, what do we do about that? Did they go too far on the kinds of sanctions, including seizing iPhones and disconnecting from the internet indefinitely, maybe forever? Is that going too far under other charter provisions? So one of the dangers in all of these is the pendulum may swing too far. So is the Cyber Safety Act, as some argue, too draconian? Like yes, we have a serious problem. Yes, we have to do something about it. But does this particular legislation go too far? Does it not have enough defenses? Should it, for example, another thing, which if they perhaps had some more input and had a bit more time to work this through, should the rules be exactly the same if the victim is a child or an adult? You know, should there be somewhat tougher responses if the victim is a vulnerable child as opposed to an adult? And should there be greater free speech protections if it's between adults, which is actually cleverly and not accidentally? The case that David Frazier has brought to the courts under the free speech challenge is two business partners who are adults. Well, should the rules be the same there as a school context where some vulnerable young woman or young Aboriginal person or something is being victimized? Maybe the rules should be different. So I think it's necessary myself, but I've been immersed in this, probably have a bit of a bias, but maybe it probably should be refined somewhat. And hopefully the government might think about doing that before the courts strike it down, or at least in some respects, there's nothing stopping them from amending parts of it with some advice perhaps from the courts. So I wouldn't personally say it's unnecessary, but it probably could be de-clawed a little bit. Yes? I guess if you're asking, can you rely on me to be mouthy about it, the answer is probably yes. I have a fair track record on that as several people have found out, but I think in more importantly in a way, there is an important role for monitoring all of these kind of things in the schools, in the cyber safety act and so on, and a classic topic for research. I think a couple of students alluded, we have one of our second year moot court problems this year, I think is based on a free speech challenge to the Cyber Safety Act. So there'll be some sort of lots of bright income out of that, but I think it's an important area to do that, look at what's good that's happening under these kind of things, and there's a lot of good that's happening, and the use it's getting suggests there was a vacuum there, but are there ways it can be improved? So not any law professors, but law students, others, I hope are monitoring that. I guess also as the general public, I think needs to have an ongoing role in holding the people accountable for actually making these kind of changes. It was part of my contract, although it was a term that they may be missed, that I put in when I got hired to do the cyberbullying task force was that I would continue on in a kind of monitoring role or as an advocate for the recommendations, which is kind of an atypical thing, actually, which I'm sure the government of the day felt, that once you submit a report, that's supposed to be yet, okay, you've submitted your report, it's recommendations, they're going to do what they're going to do. That's the end of that. But I think there is a role in my opinion on this and others to make sure that that accountability is there. So, yes, me, but hopefully lots of others as well. Yes. That's a really interesting question. And the answer is yes. There were some, first of all, as one would expect the typically vulnerable groups were also vulnerable to cyberbullying. One of the most vulnerable groups was actually gay and lesbian, the LBGT community, that was one of the main ones, visible minorities as well, disability as well, although just as an interesting aside on disability, technology is always a kind of double-edged sword. But there was certainly cyberbullying, particularly in relation to mental disability, more than physical. But interestingly, technology and social media allowed the people with disabilities, sometimes to be the bullies, because it doesn't matter what your physical or other disabilities are, if you can sort of hide behind the computer and have good computer skills, you can pick on the homecoming queen or the football quarterback or whatever, as much as they can pick on you. So there's one odd sense, because of course, technology can be a liberating kind of thing for people with disabilities. But anyway, the general answer is yes. And some thought that was not a sort of sort of empirically defensible study. One of the groups that was highest was the LBGT community, the gay lesbian community. And women, although they weren't identified because we don't think of that, women are particularly vulnerable online. There's a lot of interesting studies about that, that the line that a woman online has to present, you're in order to be acceptable, you have to be suitably feminine and sexual to be acceptable, or otherwise, you're just not cool at all. But if you cross the line into being a slut or something else and you're in deep difficulty, and that in general, people are far less critical of women's images and women's representations online than men, by and large. So again, replicating the kind of gender inequalities as well. So again, going back to the internet as a kind of mirror of our society, it mirrors and magnifies some of those divisions that are already there. Yes. There's been a lot of case laws where the trigger would be for a civil torsion, which point people thought they could take back or have taken it. I didn't answer it. And there haven't been a lot. And again, I'm kind of surprised and maybe it'll come that with the creation of a tort of cyber-building, a whole separate tort under the Cyber Safety Act that more haven't explored that. And there may be some out there, but they're not that I know of yet. There are some exploring negligence in both particularly in relation to schools, but other places as well. And the significance of that is mostly they're pursuing it in the U.S. and elsewhere, where they're not it's they're not adequately educating and preventing. So it's not even so much it is after the fact that somebody's suing for damages. But they're even if they say, well, we had the usual, we expelled them and they kept coming back, they kept doing it. Now what courts are saying, but that obviously didn't work. So what are you doing to educate them about greater tolerance for sexual orientation or greater tolerance for visible minorities? So it's in its early stages in Canada, but much more developed in the U.S. and likely coming soon to a theater near us, I would think. I don't know if there's no more questions or close to the end. So thank you very much for your time.