 Thank you very much. Chris, thank you for hosting this, for MCing this for us today. We're very grateful. And I do want to introduce some of my colleagues, Dawn McCrae. Our Minister of Education is with us. Shirley Bond, our Minister of Justice. Jane Thornthwaite, Parliamentary Secretary for the Minister of Education. And Linda Reed, who has devoted much of her career to making sure that children have access to early childhood development and programs like empathy building at the earliest days in school. I am, and also Jay and Buffy, both of you, you know, you tell stories that for every young person are your worst nightmare and for every parent, their worst nightmare. And you are examples of how, despite what you've endured, of resilience, of courage in the face of all those years, and you really are great examples of how, despite the fact that you endure these things, you can survive. You can find strength in it somehow. Which is actually how I came to this, to this passion to combat bullying in schools, because I was talking about it on the radio one day. And a woman phoned up just randomly and said, you know, bullying is just a rite of passage. It builds character for young people. And we got in a little bit of an argument briefly about it on the radio, and she left, and it left my consciousness for a while. And I got an email from a woman who wrote, who had heard that on the radio. And once she heard it, she went into flashbacks and started to remember her own history of bullying. And in her case, she was the bully. In her case, she was a woman who bullied children so brutally that she broke bones. She took two little girls and put them in the back of an old car and told them she was kidnapping them and they were never going to see their parents again. And she carried this with her for 25, 30 years after school. She became drug addicted, alcohol dependent, never had a successful relationship. And I invited her to come on my show and talk about what happened. And when she came on the show, she said after telling her story, if there is anything that you can do about bullying, you should do it. And Barbara Coleroso is going to talk a little bit about that later today. Barbara Coleroso is an internationally renowned expert in combating bullying, a former nun, former educator, and currently a very passionate woman who's devoted her life to the anti-bullying cause. In my case, I decided that I didn't want to be a bystander, which is what Barbara talks about. And so I thought about what I could do. And I heard about this project, Pink Shirt Day Project, which two young men who were standing up for bullies in Nova Scotia started in that province. And I thought, I wonder what would happen if we asked everyone in British Columbia to wear a pink shirt one day in February every year. I wonder if they would do it. And guess what? A lot of people did it. And five and a half years later, even more people are doing it. And I was so surprised to discover how many people have been touched and affected by bullying, how many children have been bullied, how many adults never ever got the closure and the healing that they needed after being bullied and carried it for the rest of their lives, how many bullies carried that regret with them and never got a chance to apologize, how many parents are frightened that their children will be targets of bullies and how many young people don't feel safe in schools, how many educators wonder what they could do to try and address this. Because for educators, it's a passion to teach children. And you know that when a child is not safe in their school, they cannot learn. We need to do more to help kids feel safe in school because bullying is not a right of passage. Bullying does not build character for children. Bullying is hurtful. In some cases, it scars people for life. And we have a duty as adults and as people who care in our schools to do everything we can to try and combat that. So that's what we're doing here today. Don McCray and Theresa Campbell are going to walk us through some of the things that the government has begun to do with our race bullying campaign. Barbara will talk a little bit about it and compare it to talk about some other international experiences that she's had. But you know the thing is that government can do a lot about this. But it's only us together that can really approach this and fix it. And I think there are three things that we need to talk about today. The first is how do we make schools safe places to report bullying? How do we as adults make schools places where if a child witnesses bullying or is bullied, they feel safe being able to go and talk to the adults in that school about it? That they know when they report that bullies will be disciplined appropriately and that the victims, the targets, will be supported. Because dealing with bullying is not like dealing with any other kind of conflict. It's not a conflict where you put two people together and say, tell each other your story, explain what happened and move on. Bullying has a perpetrator and it has a victim and we need to deal with it that way. But once we make schools a safe place to report bullying, we also have to make sure that young people are refusing to be bystanders. We need to create a culture in schools where students feel safe and know they can stand up and step in between a bully and the target of the bully. Because if they do that, bullies will be deprived of oxygen. How do we create a culture where every young person recognizes it's their responsibility to step in and protect the underdog, the victimized, the target? And the third thing is, and I know there are people here from the Dalai Lama Center, from Roots of Empathy, from other groups that support bringing compassion to schools. We live in a very uncivil culture. We live in a world where we watch reality TV and we see it pays to be mean. And we cheer on the bad guys. It's all around us. It's all around young people, all the time. How do we create schools and a society where being compassionate is the norm? Where being kind and supportive and standing up for the vulnerable is part of who we are. And I think at its root that is probably the most important thing we can do. And that's something government can help with. It's something school districts can help with. It's something educators can help with. But it's something parents need to do too. And it's something students need to take on themselves. This is something. This is something that we can tackle successfully. Children can feel safe when they are in schools. And we can do better than we're doing now. So out of today, I hope what we can get is this. We'll get a chance to look at the Erase Bullying Program in some detail. We'll get a chance to hear from the experts. And from all of you today, and I'm very grateful that you've all agreed to participate. We didn't have a room big enough for all the people that wanted to participate, by the way. From all of you, I hope that we can come out of here with some more ideas about what more we can do. We should live in a province that is proud to say we have done more to stop bullying than anywhere else in the world. That should be our goal, literally to erase bullying. That's where I want to get to. And I'm so glad that all of you are here and have agreed to help us get there together. Thank you very much.