 Hi everyone, I think we're going to get started. My name is Jillian, I'm a third year student here at Charlotte School of Law. I have the great honor to be listening today to Professor Lee McCay. Professor McCay is a nationally recognized teacher and scholar and accomplished author in the area of constitutional law and charter, human rights, privacy law, and education law. He has received numerous awards and prizes and is known for his ongoing dedication and contributions to service and the community. I don't want to embarrass him by reciting all of his accomplishments, so I will just give you a few highlights. He's a founding director of the Indigenous Black and Black Initiative and has served as the director of the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission. For three years, he was president and vice chancellor of Mount Allison University. And in 2005, he was invested as a member of the Order of Canada by Vincale Jean in recognition of his commitment and passion to human rights, equality, and diversity in Canada. He is the current Yogis and heavy chair in the Human Rights Law. And just this year, he was voted one of the Communion Lawyer Magazine's top 25 most influential lawyers for his work on cyberbullying. That was began in 2011 when he was the chair of the Nova Scotia Task Force on bullying and cyberbullying. And even though the task force was wrapped up and recommendations have been made, he has continued to speak on the issue and becoming a leading advocate for respectful, responsible relationships in the process. To me, he is my teacher, mentor, and friend. My law school experience has been enriched beyond measure because I have had the opportunity to learn from him. It's a great privilege to introduce the professor. Thank you very much, Jillian, for the very kind introduction for some of the students who might have had me a long time ago a number of changes. Well, some things change, some things don't. Well, first of all, we all get older. But also, I suspect in most cases I never wore a suit presenting. I can't imagine I did. But they told me I probably should for this. And secondly, I certainly was, and still am, pretty low tech. But I'm going to try to do this in part through a PowerPoint presentation. And there is a kind of handout of the slides. If anybody didn't get those down here at the front, you don't absolutely have to have them. But assuming I'm almost certainly not going to get through all these, they are there with a bit more information if you want it. And thank you for coming. I appreciate that, lots of other interesting things to do. And I guess heading from here to receptions and dinner and all those kind of things. All right, as Jillian suggested, my current kind of reinvention, I guess, is in relation to issues of cyberbullying and related issues, although I still do the public constitutional admin, the other more traditional stuff. But I made a bit of a joke when we launched the report that maybe I was going to be one of those actors that gets typecast so that the only thing I can do is this thing. And it's kind of turned out that way so far, that mostly the people want to talk to me from the media and everything else about cyberbullying, not about human rights or constitutional law or educational law or anything else. But anyway, that may change over time. Cyberbullying, as Jillian rightly pointed out, was kind of an immersion. It was an immersion in the issues around cyberbullying. So what I've been doing is putting together various presentations and advocating for implementing the recommendations in the report, but more particularly, promoting a safer and respectful school environment in particular, but others. And what I'm going to try to do today, or at least introduce you to, is kind of a quick panorama off the scope of the issue in general terms and then talk a little bit, since obviously it's a law audience about what kind of legal responses that might be helpful and hopefully are helpful in responding to problems of bullying and cyberbullying. So here we go. First obvious point, but wasn't so obvious to me till I got really immersed in it, is that with all the obvious advantages of technology and social media and interconnection that we have, there's also, as with most things, technological and otherwise, a flip side, which is kind of a dark underbelly of social media and technology. And at least one part of that are the problems of bullying and cyberbullying. And the whole universe, which is much more connected to young people than certainly to myself, is one that has its significant risks, as far as invasions of privacy and threats and cyberbullying and so on. But we'll get into that. The short background in 2011, the task force, and this is actually a copy of it and sort of a nice colorful cover and all of that, which is available, I'll give you the website on it at the end, started in 2011, unfortunately arising primarily out of some very, somewhat lower profile, but high profile at the time, suicides that were in part linked to cyberbullying and bullying. And in fact, these are not nearly as high profile as Amanda Todd and Reteha Parsons and some of the cases I'll talk about in a moment. But there were young women who died as a result of suicide connected in part with bullying and cyberbullying that really were the impetus for starting the task force in the first place. And then we reported in February of 29th of 2012, I tell my students that if you're gonna have to do a report you might as well get at least one extra day in, right? So leap year, right? So, and it was I think delivered about 1130 on February 29th, 2012, but on time. Anyway, so that started in 2011, about a close to nine or 10 month process and quite an interesting and challenging one, the idea to make practical long and short term recommendations to the minister of education about what might be done in respect to bullying and cyberbullying. We did a couple of things early on as a way to try to particularly look at the scope of the problem and get some suggestions as to what people think should be done about it. And one was to have an online survey since we were trying to reach young people that are a wide range of audiences and had our own Facebook site and Twitter site and all those things that I don't fully know how to navigate, but some people did. And as a result got 5,000 responses which the Nova Scotia government tells me is the highest response they've ever got to a survey. And that's particularly striking because this was done before I arrived but the actual survey itself, it took about 30 to 45 minutes to actually fill out which is quite substantial online. And so the other remarkable part about those 5,000 responses is close to 60% of those were young people which in itself sends a message that they cared enough about the issue of bullying and cyberbullying that they wanted to be heard on that even though it involved taking a fair bit of time filling out surveys which nobody much likes to do. The second thing we did, recognizing the importance of youth engagement was to have a series of youth focus groups throughout the province, every school district and also some targeted focus groups in particular areas such as Aboriginal, African Nova Scotian, disabled, gay and lesbian and so on and got some really useful information out of that and the website that I'll get put on in the last slide and you can take away with you actually has all of those appendices as well and there's a very, all of it's interesting but in particular the ones that's the summary of the youth focus groups is really quite revealing about how they see the problem and what might be done about it so I recommend that. The other issue is though my mandate from the Department of Education was to focus on schools and cyberbullying and bullying in schools, it's not unique to young people and not unique to schools and one of the interesting, I think somewhat less studied issues at the moment is workplace bullying and cyberbullying and there's a little bit done on that but not as much as there could be and who knows maybe some of you are victims or perpetrators in your own workplace, I doubt it but any event that that is an issue and one that's not as much studied. An international problem, Nova Scotia seems to be kind of the epi-center for cyberbullying because of well the task force, the suicides, the Ritea Parsons case and so on but it's very much an international issue and shortly after the Ritea Parsons case which probably most of you have heard about a very similar case in California where unfortunately again tragically a young woman commits suicide in part because of again an alleged sexual assault and cyberbullying with pictures online so unfortunately this is not an atypical thing and is all too widely known so and lots of others in the United States as well and elsewhere. National problem, actually just about a year ago I think it was October 10th a year ago that Amanda Todd in a very high profile from BC wait not only took her own life but did the YouTube the very sort of gripping and sad YouTube where she did the cards sort of explaining in part how she felt about things and that she was likely going to end her life and similar to a lot of these, not all of these she too had a sexual component to it because part of the cyberbullying was a picture of her, a partially nude picture which was then used to harass her through various schools and so on and just within the last two weeks actually Todd Loyek from North Battleford, Saskatchewan so it's not always young women although there seems to be a disproportionate number of young women just before his 16th birthday also took his life by suicide in part it's always not a directly cause and effect kind of thing but in part as a result of both bullying and cyberbullying which usually happened together it's usually not either or but if you're bullied you're likely to also be cyberbullied and if you're cyberbullied you're likely to be bullied as well and then probably now certainly in Nova Scotia and beyond the highest profile one at the local level although it's gone national and international the Retea Parsons case which many of you would know in terms of the alleged sexual assault for young boys, classmates from Cole Harbor High and two of them now being charged with child pornography and I'll get into some of that but I guess as part of the difficult and dark underbelly of social media and technology many of you might have noticed that as a kind of added injury that some dating website I think out of Germany was trolling for pictures of teenage women in Canada and I guess maybe went with the most hits on a particular image and it was Retea Parsons and presumably on a best case scenario without doing any research to know how inappropriate that was to put her picture on the site for some time till they took it down or a more sinister view is they knew full well what they're doing and thought they'd get a lot of attention whichever just another sort of sad element to that. So the Retea Parsons case occurred almost exactly a year after the release of the task force report and a lot of things to be fair to our beleaguered government at the moment they did a lot of things not all of the recommendations that were 85 of the task force report and there's still some things to be done but they did some of that but a lot more has happened not surprisingly perhaps but somewhat tragically after the Retea Parsons case including things we'll touch on like the cyber safety act and so on. So things did happen before that in the year before a couple of things that didn't happen and there's never a cause and effect that makes you pause one of the recommendations in my task force report was a clarification that school authorities have jurisdiction over this even if it's after hours and off premises so long as there's a negative impact on the school climate and that was not the interpretation of the school authorities in the Retea Parsons case and in fact they didn't engage in any discipline structure which was one of the things that she felt was part of the negativity about all this that not any were they not taking her seriously they didn't even really investigate it and they gave two reasons both of which I think were actually wrong one that they didn't have the jurisdiction because I think they do anyway and they certainly do now because after Retea Parsons the act has been amended to say that as it already does in Ontario and secondly that because there was an ongoing criminal investigation they wouldn't want to have a discipline process because it might interfere with the criminal process but as most of you would know it's not at all uncommon to have parallel process as a discipline process maybe a civil suit, a criminal that wouldn't necessarily be a problem anyway they didn't do that and other things such as which have now been acted on as well to hire more guidance counselors so there would be more human beings on site for people that are struggling with issues of mental health and cyberbullying and so on that they might be able to prevent these kind of things so you never know but there are things that perhaps could have been done the police investigation was reopened and as again many of you know although I hope you may not all be from around here that the decision even after being reopened was not to lay any charges in respect to the alleged sexual assault but to lay charges in relation to two of the boys in relation to child pornography and one of the kind of depressing actually and scary things about all of this in looking at cyberbullying is seeing how cruel people can be and to some extent where the value systems are and maybe I'm just old fashioned but I don't think that's it it seems to me not particularly funny or a good idea to be taking pictures off a young woman who at a minimum is having sex or more likely was being possibly being actually sexually assaulted and sending that online to everybody in sight same thing with the Amanda Todd case so you kind of have to pause and worry I guess about our value system that that seemed to be appropriate or fun or a good idea and anyway a little bit like the St. Mary's chant as well things like that so so a lot of attention to that and a lot of things have happened including some studies, the justice review of that still happening the education one did and there's going to be one or is one in progress for the IWK as well the Harold cartoonist Bruce McKinnon always does a great job of capturing the essence of these things and he did a cartoon about the fact that maybe had there been a bit more attention to some of the recommendations maybe these things as again never know for sure might not have happened and in fairness a lot has happened since the Parsons case although it would have been nice to happen before such tragedies occur so where to from here well they had the various the reviews including the one in the schools by Milton and Pepler Nova Scotia's Cyber Safety Act very interesting I'll say a bit more about that if we get there a bit later but Nova Scotia now is the leader for better or for worse as far as sanctions for cyberbullying it is by far and away the most comprehensive and sanction focused approach to cyberbullying in the country including a cyber scan unit with six designated investigators and so on so but that's clearly one of the things that came out of it the child pornography charges interesting to sort of pause in our lawyer hat on those kind of things that there's a number of possible sections in the criminal code that might apply to this kind of thing but whether child pornography is the most appropriate one to capture this not quite so clear I mean there's criminal harassment intimidation all kinds of other possible provisions in the existing criminal code and our current justice minister Peter McKay is apparently proceeding with some changes and we'll talk later about whether there should be an offense under the criminal code of cyberbullying but even short of that there's other things again just very recently out of Victoria the other part of the other coast of the country another similar case charged with child pornography bit of a different twist here the person being charged is a young woman who's texting and putting online naked pictures of her boyfriend's ex-girlfriend there's probably some kind of a story there but anyway the story's not a good one in terms of the impact on the victim or the impact on her as she now faces child pornography charges and I think there's one other apart from the Retea Parsons ones in Nova Scotia where a 14 year old has been charged as well with child pornography a case of these apparently consensual sex but the pictures or video of that which the other person didn't even know was happening put on YouTube and so on who should respond? Massive community problem the kind of obvious point everybody needs to respond or just about everybody in different ways parents have important roles to play teachers, school administrators, counselors you can go on down the list and including internet service providers there's an important role for everybody to play and in the task force we had a fairly extensive working group that did have representatives from most of those kind of groups including Bell Alliance and East Link and Rodgers and those kind of people and Facebook and others so it's an interesting kind of legal question who should be doing things about this and what should they be doing? How do we respond? Lots of different possibilities the obviously whole school interagency cooperation which is always a target or a desire but very difficult to do as many of you may know from even your jobs they're bureaucratic tendencies that exist about silos operating within silos and though everybody talks about cooperation between departments it's very difficult to do progressive discipline, youth engagement restorative approaches I'll touch some more on those later and my focus has been mostly on schools but as I say it's larger than that. Legal responses so criminal code obviously one possibility but as I'm sure you all would agree the criminal code is the ultimate sanction and in that sense the kind of last resort and we should always be cautious I would think in adding new provisions and new sections to the criminal code so whether or not we actually need a criminal code offensive cyber bullying or bullying is not so clear I think there's a possibility for a number of existing sections to be creatively applied so that's whether we need that's a different story but that's only one option I'll come back to that lawsuits negligence and defamation a lot of defamation cases we'll come to that in a moment as well with high damages online and negligence increasingly in various places Australia and to some extent in Canada now school boards and others are being sued for negligence not just in the cases where they've not done anything but cases where they haven't done enough that it needs to be preventive and then of course constitutional limits human rights and restorative justice so criminal code number of provisions as I've said those are just a few that might be applied in the existing criminal code and I think a lot of parents and others certainly were Taya Parsons parents and others have been somewhat frustrated by the fact that no charges were laid under the criminal code and that seemed that on some analysis you could say you could think of a number of things that could be laid and in the end they did go with child pornography but we recommended since our jurisdiction didn't extend federally that the Nova Scotia Minister of Justice confer with his colleagues about whether or not they did need to make changes to the criminal code which after Taya Parsons they did do and that the Premier Dexter as well went to Ottawa with various suggestions one of them which is an interesting idea that may emerge in new changes a new law dealing with the distribution of intimate images without consent and that's proposed not just in relation to young people so broader than child pornography that would make it an offense to so-called revenge porn and those kinds of things that with the significant invasions of privacy and those kind of things that maybe we need a law that deals with that which doesn't exist at the moment you could try to make arguments about invasion of privacy but that's not an easy process so one of the things they are exploring is whether they're going to add that as well it's always good to have the Prime Minister in your slides, right? And the Prime Minister on this one was certainly immediately after Taya Parsons on the side saying I think we've got to stop using just the term bullying describe these things it has a connotation of misbehaving and that's a really important point one that we looked at in the report language is always significant and part of the significance here is bullying too soft a term for the kinds of things that are happening should we be talking about assaults should we be talking about intimidation should we be talking about harassment and should we be using more the language of law and sanctions or whatever, stronger language than sort of morality or the kind of bullying which is like boys will be boys or everybody goes through this and we've all been bullied sort of suck it up and move on or whatever and with the advance of technology and the social media and the internet the impact is much greater so anyway that comment was made after that a number of possible amendments and there's a federal provincial report on what they might look at on that the distribution of intimate images as I mentioned earlier and with some pretty significant proposed sentences and is with any problem that you try to respond to in law there's a question of what you do and then what kind of a sanction if you find somebody is guilty so Peter McKay is the justice minister and the task force recommendations on definition couple of the definition is quite important and all of this is in the slide so unfortunately there's no test later the definition couple of points first of all we decided early on in the task force that while they are significant differences cyber bullying is really a subset of bullying and that's partly a kind of Canadian-American difference in the United States they tend to treat cyber bullying as kind of a separate category from bullying but we followed more the Canadian and British model which is to say cyber bullying is really just bullying by social media and technology it's still essentially the same concept so we defined both and I guess one of the fairly broadly defined which is good and bad you have to define it broadly so you don't leave too many gaps but by broadly defining it then you start raising constitutional limits and overbred and all those kinds of issues but one of the things that's relatively or at least was and I think still is unique to the definition here which has been adopted in the Education Act is that participating or encouraging bystanders are also liable as cyber bullies under the relevant education discipline structure so we didn't go so far as the kind of good Samaritan rule although bystanders are critical to cyber bullying that a lot of the studies say are the critical players as to how negative the impact is but so we took that encouraging or participating in some way bystanders should also be liable and accountable for their actions like the horrendous cases where YouTube videos are taking off boys raping a young girl and people are standing around cheering or fights and those kind of things so the bystander is quite critical slightly different but not very different definition in the Cyber Safety Act which is kind of quasi-criminal provincial legislation and I'll come to that in a moment lots of interesting potential lawyer work that will probably play out over the next while under the Cyber Safety Act but one of the things that it does is it deals only with cyber bullying which is kind of interesting a little bit of a different tack from ours where we say bullying and cyber bullying are together and one's a variation of the other the Cyber Safety Act with very significant sanctions and penalties and so on only deals with cyber bullying and it does not deal with bullying which is fine Cyber Safety Act as I said what the most far-reaching response legally in the country to problems of bullying and cyber bullying and the first is that it does establish a tort of cyber bullying particularly in respect to parents and this is quite large if you think about that it makes it clear under the Cyber Safety Act that you can sue not just the child or whoever it is that's doing the cyber bullying but the parent if they fail to reasonably supervise the online activities of their children which of course is quite a quagmire of issues in terms of what is reasonable supervision the gap both on technology and social media between children and their parents and adults generally is so large how can you do it if you can't don't even understand the technology and as a kind of an example of how quickly it moves and sort of outdated ideas when I was on the task force and chairing it people would come up in grocery stores and gyms and us were sort of talking about it and one of the things that I said well it's one of the things you clearly should do is take the computer and put it in the living room don't have it in the bedroom well it's fine except that the problem is computers now are tiny little things that you put in your pocket or whatever that's one step and maybe a few years ago that would be quite helpful now it's kind of irrelevant because virtually everybody has iPhones and iPads and so on that are much more mobile and that mostly young people have way more knowledge about it and in terms of reasonable supervision what are you supposed to do you seize the cell phone or the iPhone at the end of class each day and check it well if they're a tall intelligent they've eliminated anything that might be problematic knowing you're going to do that so anyway what is the sort of due diligence is up there but the Cyber Safety Act creates the tort and they're jointly and severally liable but it also creates a statutory offense that if a parent does not adequately supervise the online activities of their parents they are also liable for cyber-building under the Cyber Safety Act with some pretty serious penalties so somewhat as a kind of cart before the horse kind of situation after that the Department of Education has now circulated pamphlets and information to parents about cyber-bullying and those kind of things but certainly not any kind of a checklist of what is reasonable supervision off your children on those kind of issues protection orders sort of like restraining orders in a domestic violence kind of context very broad powers that a victim can get protection orders if they're a victim of cyber-bullying with extensive powers under that cyber-bullying prevention orders and some of this of course is raised all kinds of civil liberties and constitutional kind of questions because broad powers to search to seize computers to seize iPhones to get restraining orders that forbid them from using technology all kinds of very broad powers in relation to the prevention orders under the Cyber Safety Act which I think certainly the protection orders and probably both of them I think are administered by justice at the peace under the Cyber Safety Act. Cyber Scan Investigation Unit pretty significant financial commitment to that I head investigator and I think five or six investigators whose job it is to report any cases of cyber-bullying and cyber-bullying under the Cyber Safety Act is not restricted, it's restricted to cyber-bullying but it's not restricted to schools or young people that could be any cyber-bullying as far as I read it so adult in the workplace anywhere else so potentially could be a quite a busy unit and all of this is quite new the Cyber Scan Unit has just been put together as of September so that's again new and interesting area. Liability for cyber-bullying under the Nova Scotia structure has bystanders as I mentioned earlier participating and encouraging parent off the defendant and potentially principals or schools more under negligence but the Education Act requires now that principals investigate and that their power of investigation extends off-premises and after hours if there's a negative impact back on schools but you can imagine teachers and principals are concerned about that too so a lot of new liabilities. Potential constitutional challenges, a number of them so first of all in terms of kind of charter issues obviously free speech questions, lots of questions about is anonymity part of free speech or in any event where do you draw the line between free speech and reasonable limits like eight speech and pornographic speech and all these kind of things so now cyber-bullying has to be looked at in those terms privacy, lots of privacy issues both for victims and for cyber-bullies and all of this, search and seizure lots of issues there, fair process and even the good old division of powers because if the Cyber Safety Act is looked at in its totality you could make a reasonable kind of argument that maybe it's really criminal law in disguise that it's really 9127 criminal jurisdiction although we call it preventive and quasi-criminal as opposed to the criminal code but when you start seizing computers and sending people to incarceration and so on it starts to sound a little criminal so anyway lots of work for the lawyers on that one in the next while so the role of schools on negligence I guess it's the next one this is a pretty hot area at the moment not a lot of actual cases but some saying again as I mentioned earlier not just that you have to respond after the fact but that given the tort requirement to take steps to prevent foreseeable risks prevention because it's pretty clear and we're getting more information all the time that on just about any school setting there is going to be bullying and cyber-bullying so it's unlikely that you're the one school in Canada that has none of it so what are you doing to proactively prevent that kind of activity and a lot of those duties are there and being explored. Defamation and defamation the last little note for any of you maybe some of you work in that area the courts increasingly are recognizing that because of the reach and impact of the internet and social media damage awards in defamation cases can be quite high the one there I think was parents that were defaming teachers and principals and I believe the Newman and Hulstead case from 2004 I think the award in that case was something like $550,000 damages so the courts are recognizing rightly I think that the damage to reputation online is much bigger than if somebody says something in a meeting or they put it in the local paper which has somewhat of a limited circulation but once it's online it's online forever and the impact is quite negative so that's an interesting area a very interesting Supreme Court of Canada case in 2012 Justice Abella in the Bragg case out of Nova Scotia an interesting one where it was actually a fake Facebook site defaming this young woman in schools she wanted to take a defamation action through her parents but did not want to be named wanted to be anonymous and the open court principal would normally say you can't take a defamation action unless you're willing to say here I am and here's what happened and so it went all the way to well first of all the two levels of court Nova Scotia trial and appeal said no if you're going to take defamation you have to give up your identity and pursue it under a name not under a pseudonym or an anonymous fashion but the Supreme Court of Canada disagreed with that and in a unanimous decision where Justice Abella wrote said that it was an appropriate exception to the rule of the open court the girl's privacy interests in the case are tied both to her age and to the nature of victimization she seeks protection from it's not merely a question of her privacy but for privacy from relentless intrusive humiliation of sexualized bullying now this raises one of those nice lawyer interpretation questions how big is the exception? Clear when you look at that it may have a lot of exceptions that there are a lot of limits that the age is important this is I think under the age of 17 it was sexualized cyberbullying which has another component and that citing extensively actually from the task force report which is kind of nice they said clearly we can more or less take judicial notice that cyberbullying is a large negative thing and therefore to properly protect young people who then can have access to the courts for defamation we should allow an anonymous lawsuit which they did so whether they actually proceeded in that I don't know but the preliminary issue on that went to the Supreme Court one of the key players in that case was the kid's health phone which was an intervener in the Bragg case and they put forward a very strong brief which a lot of the court adopted saying you need to do this to properly protect young people particularly young people from sexualized bullying and cyberbullying and again that's the comment from Justice Abella which again sort of makes the point of an important exception not saying that it would necessarily apply if you were an adult I mean all the usual questions what if you were an adult what if it's not sexualized bullying but something else all of those are still open Division of Powers in addition to the federal provincial point I mentioned earlier about possible invasion of 9127 criminal jurisdiction a number of municipalities in some parts of Canada mostly in the West have passed anti-bullying and anti-cyberbullying bylaws which again raises interesting it's sort of like the anti-prostitution bylaws in Westendorp way back when and all those kind of things is that really within delegated provincial municipal jurisdiction or is that potentially invading criminal law jurisdiction but those do exist and of course as we mentioned earlier lots of charter challenges under 7-8 or actually it should be 2B free speech is 2B I'm not sure what 2E is but 2B is free speech freedom of expression lots of important questions there are privacy considerations so a little quote if you can show and tell is not an invasion of privacy which I think actually that's probably right because as you probably know you can have as much privacy invasion as you like if you consent so I suppose you might say it's forced if school isn't enforced show and tell maybe it is an invasion of privacy but I would think not in any event the key case on that again a Nova Scotia case lot of Nova Scotia case on this when the MRM case talking about search in schools and saying there is a reasonable expectation of privacy in schools for our students a reduced one from the general public but one nonetheless which also has to be respected so there's privacy considerations privacy itself and one of my newer areas I've been teaching a bit in is privacy is a contested area and a very big area right now because of technology and social media fact the sort of cynics if you like say well privacy is dead get over it full stop like you know there isn't privacy and to some extent at a strictly technological level in the surveillance society there's some truth to that but most people don't want to totally give up on that so there's a interesting challenge for law to say well what kind of things can we put in place now to actually try to protect privacy and one way I think to think about that is even reconceptualizing what we mean it's not so much a property interest as we traditionally would have kind of looked at it but maybe more of a human right that privacy in some ways is a kind of human right in the modern world that we live although not in most human rights acts but that's alright so anyway that's part of it speaking of human rights another response which is a little less adversarial as far as legal responses to cyber bullying is referring to human rights commissions for investigation restorative approaches mediation a tribunal if you go that far and in those one of the places that has done a lot with that is Australia that there are a lot of cyber bullying and bullying cases are handled through human rights commissions because often although not always the victims of cyber bullying are vulnerable groups they're gay, they're disabled, they're black they're Aboriginal whatever it might be not always anybody can be bullied or cyber bullied but some of them are and so that's another option that's a useful one range of things they can do as I mentioned also very important is the cost and accessibility that as you all know going through courts and going all the way to Supreme Court of Canada is an expensive proposition whereas going to a human rights commission and filing a complaint is a much more accessible process where in many cases you don't really even have to hire a lawyer and a lot of the work is done for you as the complainant so that's another thing harassment a particularly useful section for dealing with these kind of things human rights code harassment and cyber bullying based on disability or based on gender pretty neatly fits that so the one case North Vancouver and Gibran did already from the BC Court of Appeal has held schools liable for not adequately preventing bullying and more bullying in that case years of bullying of Mr. Gibran allegedly on the basis of perceived sexual orientation and nice little lawyers playing with words because it was perceived and Mr. Gibran said but I'm not gay so the answer at the first level is well you don't come within the human rights code then right so it says you can't discriminate based on sexual orientation doesn't say anything about perceived sexual orientation so you lose the Court of Appeal disagreed with that and said no even some places like Nova Scotia specifically say actual or perceived but even if they don't that it's discrimination to be treated adversely because of a perceived categorization and so they found them against them and very significant damages against the school ward because they didn't adequately prevent and educate about bullying they did all the usual stuff they suspended they kicked them out every time they did it but they kept doing it and one of the things the Court said is well it obviously didn't work right every time every year this kid would get bullied every year you would suspend the people who do it and the new people all the time and things never changed what you should be doing is something more systemic like educating and preventing so anyway interesting BC Court of Appeal case one of our recommendations was to along those lines to suggest a protocol between the Department of Education and Human Rights Commissions about passing along cases that might be appropriate for that restorative approaches it is another very in vogue kind of thing alternative dispute resolution looking more at integrating people back into the community focus not just on the victim but also the perpetrator, the bystanders everybody it's in part a throwback to kind of Aboriginal circle sentencing and these kind of things everything new is old and vice versa but questions sometimes about it's a very useful thing but how far does that go is that appropriate if it's sexualized cyberbullying and you have victims sort of facing perpetrators and so on all those kind of questions I'll just flip through just about every province now has cyberbullying provisions and bullying provisions in the Education Act most of them fairly recent Ontario, Nova Scotia and Quebec probably the most at the moment but others are quickly catching up and I'll just go through these but you can take that away if you're interested from one of these other provinces that just about everybody has these concluding thoughts so having tried to be balanced as you no doubt recall I'm always balanced in my presentations so having had a picture of both Peter McKay and Prime Minister Harper earlier I'll take a little shot at them now because that's kind of fair so one of the issues that we looked at and anybody looks at in bullying and cyberbullying is role models and while in schools obviously a lot of focus on young people and their activities but where do they get the role models and often in most cases it's adults and while on the one hand you have Prime Minister Harper and his wife and others saying well this is terrible we got to do something about it on the other hand and you can debate this we have attack ads and this is not unique to any particular parties having provincially as well attack ads against particular people now maybe if you enter the world of politics you consent to a certain amount of abuse and bullying and cyberbullying I don't know there's all those debates but this was sort of a rather clever cartoon by our other Harold cartoonist the adder sort of saying well role models are critical but meanwhile the early attack ads against Justin Trudeau being put out by the same people that's saying bullying is a problem very significant I think and again unfortunate that the tragedy of her death is what did it but the main catalyst like to think partly of the task force but at least as important in terms of immediate action was the high profile suicide death of Reteha Parsons and the cyber safety act the cyber scan unit changes to the jurisdiction of the education a lot happened after the Reteha Parsons case in a short time and at the moment Nova Scotia is kind of for better or for worse the kind of lead experimenter on these things and other provinces are looking to things like that to see how it works out but certainly she was the key in leading justice on that so when the report first came out the minister of education Ramona Janix didn't entirely embrace all offer some of the recommendations so the cartoonist thought she might be bullying me I don't know if she was or not but in any event that was that one and the website for those who want to look at any more detail on this or pass along is this is the right one the actual one in the piece that you have is not correct so if you're keen about that it is anti-bullying dot Nova Scotia dot CA I think the one on the actual handout is cyber-bullying Nova Scotia dot CA if you Google that'll get you there as well but this will get you directly there and it's not just the task force report but a whole number of things so in the very few moments that we have left any questions or comments or whatever yes I'm curious when you were doing the whole study did you look into what is bullying because bullying always had a problem with the suicides that happened now but it's more obvious now because bullying because it's recorded in the end of social media but did suicides happen before because of bullying and what do we know when we look at the traditional bullying person? Really good question we did look a little bit but the time was fairly short so we didn't come up with any answers in that but without doubt bullying has been around forever and to some extent will likely be around forever I mean we're not the aim of the task force was not to eliminate bullying and cyber-bullying but to reduce it and but I think two things one we record it more but probably even more significant the impact because of social media and technology is so much greater and we had people presenting to the task force saying well it used to be that at least you had your home as a sanctuary bullying occurred on the school ground but you went home and closed your door and had a relatively safe home or some did not anymore bullying is 24-7 it's on the internet and the other again age difference on issues of social media another answer people say well that's easy just shut off the computer just shut off the computer nothing to that well you might as well in fact if you gave a young person a choice you can either stop breathing or get completely disconnected from the internet my guess is they'd stop breathing right I mean that is life life is lived online social media and in fact another interesting study along kind of a bit of a tangent but we did an analysis of what were the major reasons that young people who were victim of bullying and cyber-bullying didn't tell an adult and you would think or most would think well because it'll get worse don't tell anybody because they'll make it worse number two reason number one reason my parents will cut off the internet that was the number one reason that they didn't tell somebody that they were being bullied or cyber-bullied because they might be disconnected from the lifeline of social media so I think the main answer to your question I think social media cyber-bullying has so much more impact it's still bullying but so much more impact so much more pervasive that I think there's more but we are also paying more attention to it which is a good thing there's much more consciousness now everywhere about issues of bullying and cyber-bullying any other questions comments answers solutions everybody's ready to go get a reception and dinner and all that stuff which is fine alright if there's no questions thank you very much for attending anybody wants the slides are there and it was fun thanks a lot