Thank you, Madam Chair. At the outset, I want to thank the Legislative Assembly for giving me the opportunity on this committee to travel and to look into this particular bill and this issue. It was certainly an issue that provided us with a lot of input and a created a lot of thinking amongst committee, both individual and us as a group. I want to thank the Ledge staff for the work that they did setting up our travel, setting up our meetings and so on, and looking after us as we travelled. And I would like to thank all the presenters that we heard from. They were many. I particularly want to thank the students. It’s been mentioned before, but it was novel that we heard from students, and our public hearings there were a little bit less formal, a bit like pulling teeth sometimes to get the kids started, but once they got going we got some really interesting perspectives from the students. It was a new process and it was an experiment. I think that’s been mentioned already. But I think it’s something that certainly the various committees should think about doing again. It certainly gave us a different perspective on the issue.
I don’t think it’s any secret, and certainly I expressed right from the time that the amendments were brought forward that I don’t feel… I did feel and I still feel that any legislation that was brought forward – and I said this at the time – to address bullying should be more comprehensive than what we have before us, and that was my major disappointment. I think Mr. Dolynny suggested that, as well, that there’s not much in these amendments to address bullying. It’s been said that it’s a societal issue. I absolutely agree. It is an issue that goes well beyond schools. We can’t deal with bullying and/or cyber-bullying within the four walls or the six or eight walls of the school, however many they have these days. We can’t deal with bullying within the walls of the school. You know, then the kids leave and, basically, how do you monitor that once they’ve left the school? That’s my concern with this legislation, with these amendments, that it doesn’t deal with the whole issue, it doesn’t deal with the community and the issue of bullying within the community. That’s my concern there.
However, I am glad that we have got something here. As much as I wish it were a lot larger and more comprehensive, I’m glad that we do have
something. I think, though, and I’m going to say this more than once, but these amendments, this bill should be considered as no more than a start to address bullying and to try to deal with bullying in our society.
A big focus of the bill is establishing a territorial code of conduct and a safe schools policy, both of which I agree with, but both of which were not available when we went and did our consultation on the bill. They’re still not available even at this point. And we heard from quite a few people who said, well, I can’t really comment on the bill because I haven’t seen the code of conduct. It’s referenced a number of times in the amendments, but I have no idea, basically, what it contains and what it means. I haven’t seen a safe schools policy so I don’t really know what that is, so it’s very difficult for me to comment on the bill. We heard that from a number of people. Probably more so from trustees of boards and, you know, sort of people at a higher level, at a superintendent or a board level, but it certainly was mentioned a number of times.
I have this question for the Minister. At some point these two documents are going to be developed and my question to the Minister is: How will the stakeholders be involved in the development of these two documents? There was a recommendation in our report from the committee that says – if I can find it – “the code of conduct in the safe schools guidelines and regulations should be provided to Standing Committee on Social Programs and other education stakeholders for review and feedback in advance of their enactment.” I feel very strongly that this is a very core piece of these amendments that are going to be used to address bullying through discipline and so on. We’ve consulted on the act. We now need to consult on the code of conduct and on the safe schools policy. It needs to be a broad, across-the-board consultation.
I’ve also said before that this legislation cannot be considered the end point. It’s not going to work if we just put these amendments in place and don’t do anything else. We’ve heard from quite a few people in the presentations that these amendments must be backed up by a number of other things, and one of them is to address root causes of bullying. Bullying is a way of somebody acting out and they are acting out for a reason and we need to treat the reason. That’s what I’m calling root causes. If we don’t provide programs or we don’t provide staff within the school who can deal with the root causes of the bullying, disciplining is not going to be the answer and it’s not going to make it go away.
Mr. Dolynny mentioned the public awareness and education campaign that’s referenced in the motion that was passed by this side of the House. That needs to be put in place as well. It needs to be part
and parcel of these amendments to the Education Act.
There needs to be increased support either for the boards and/or schools, and when I say increased support, I’m talking about financial support so they can hire more staff and human support. They need more teachers in the school or counsellors within the school, either one or both, in order to deal with bullying. Teachers have extremely full days already and we’re now requiring that they take a portion of their day whenever bullying occurs to deal with it. That means they are then drawn away from whatever they’re doing in their classroom or whatever they are doing at that point in time in school.
So we can’t expect this to be lumped on top of teachers’ duties already and say here you go, here’s something else to do. We heard that, I think fairly loudly, from a number of teachers.
The other thing that I think is absolutely required, and this, again, is referenced in the recommendations from the committee, is we need broader anti-bullying legislation. As I said, this is a start, but we need to, as a government… It needs to be a separate bill because it has to work across our society, but there needs to be broader legislation which deals with bullying in the workplace, deals with bullying in the community, any place other than the schools, which isn’t now covered.
I think that’s about it, Madam Chair. I just want to reiterate again, as I said before, I think this is a first step and I appreciate the fact that this first step is being taken. I have to put my faith in the department and the government that they see the other things that are necessary to support these particular amendments, and I have to put my faith in the department and the government that they will take the necessary steps to make sure that these amendments work, and they don’t just sit isolated and not do the job that is intended. Thank you.