Question Period Note: Online Harms

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• Online harm through technology-facilitated violence (TFV) is a serious public health issue that can have lasting impacts on people’s physical and mental health.
• Canadians should be able to express themselves freely and openly without fear of harm online. Our Government is seized with the particular challenges facing youth, women and the 2SLGBTQI+ community online.
• The Public Health Agency of Canada is working to prevent online harm by increasing awareness of cyberbullying and supporting projects to address technology-facilitated violence.

Social media services are increasingly central to participation in democratic, cultural, and public life. However, they can also be used to threaten, intimidate, bully, and harass people and can lead to mental health issues, especially in teens.

Technology-facilitated violence (TFV) refers to a range of behaviours whereby technology is used to facilitate virtual and/or in-person harm. Also referred to as online violence, it can be extremely emotionally harmful and can reach victims anywhere. Forms of TFV include harassment, publicly revealing personal information about an individual (i.e., doxing), hate speech, non-consensual sharing of intimate images and non-consensual creation of sexual images through artificial intelligence (i.e., sexual deepfake videos or virtual reality pornography).

In Canada, 33% of women aged 15-24 reported experiencing at least one instance of online harassment in the past 12 months. According to data from the 2018 Health Behaviour in School-aged Children study, girls are more likely to be cyberbullied than boys. For example, among grade 10 students, 16% of girls reported being cyberbullied compared to 9% of boys.

Impacts of technology-facilitated violence can be physical, psychological, emotional, and/or financial. According to the United Nations, cyberviolence worldwide is as harmful to women and girls as physical violence. Victims of cyberbullying have reported a multitude of emotional, social, and academic problems, including poor physical health outcomes, absenteeism, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, chronic stress, low self-esteem, isolation, poor relationships, aggression, and even self-harm or suicide.

Technology-facilitated violence can negatively impact a person’s ability to exercise free expression, disrupt a person’s sense of security, violate their human rights, violate their privacy, and impact their ability to fully participate in economic, social and democratic life. Technology-facilitated violence can also have an adverse impact more broadly by increasing needs for health care, judicial, and social services.

Legislative and Regulatory Framework

While Canada’s Criminal Code has no specific cyberbullying offence, cyberbullying behaviour is addressed through several existing offences depending on the circumstances and the specific behaviour that formed part of the cyberbullying incident, including child pornography (s. 163.1), criminal harassment (s. 264), uttering threats (s. 264.1), and blackmail (s. 346), among others. Also, in 2015, an offence relating to the non-consensual distribution of intimate images (s. 162.1), typically known as “revenge porn”, was added to the Criminal Code.

The Minister of Canadian Heritage’s mandate letter in December 2021 directed him to continue efforts with the Minister of Justice to develop and introduce legislation to combat serious forms of harmful online content. The Department of Canadian Heritage convened an Expert Advisory Group over the summer, and the Minister of Canadian Heritage is conducting roundtables on online safety to listen to and understand the perspectives of those who would be most impacted by the legislation. Roundtables will conclude this fall and the Minister of Canadian Heritage intends to table legislation in Parliament thereafter to hold platforms accountable for the content they host. Canadian Heritage will continue to engage Canadians, stakeholders, and affected groups every step of the way on the road to tabling legislation as soon as possible.

Health Portfolio Efforts to Prevent and Address Online Harm

PHAC funds a variety of projects to prevent family and gender-based violence, including TFV, through Preventing Gender-Based Violence – the Health Perspective and Preventing and Addressing Family Violence – the Health Perspective. Some notable projects include:
• Supporting Réseau Femmes Colombie-Britannique to develop, deliver, and test a school-based violence prevention program to address the needs of Francophone youth, grades 9-12, in British Columbia. The curriculum includes content on online violence.
• Supporting MediaSmarts to develop, deliver, and evaluate a digital literacy program for family violence survivors living in transition homes to build survivor’s resilience and well-being by helping them develop the skills and confidence to become informed digital citizens.
• Supporting Raison d’art to develop, deliver, and evaluate the effectiveness of a school-based prevention program that integrates technology and art therapy tools to teach adolescents how to identify and prevent gender-based violence, including online violence.
• Supporting Queen University’s Promoting Relationships and Eliminating Violence Network to develop and disseminate online tools to build capacity for educators to prevent dating violence, including cyberbullying victimization and perpetration, and promote healthy relationships.
Canada is collecting data on bullying and cyberbullying to inform policy development and interventions through the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children Survey (HBSC). The HBSC is a World Health Organization collaborative, cross-national research study of youth aged 11 to 15 that collects data every four years and currently has over 50 participating countries. Participating in the HBSC enables Canada to monitor trends in the percentage of youth reporting bullying victimization and perpetration from 2006 onwards, as well as enabling direct international comparisons with participating HBSC countries. In Canada, the 2022 cycle of the HBSC is expanding the collection of bullying data to include being bullied based on gender identity, sexual orientation, religion and race or skin colour.

Government of Canada Efforts to Prevent Cyberbullying
The Government of Canada is committed to preventing cyberbullying and mitigating the significant impact it can have on the health and well-being of children, youth and their families in Canada.

As part of the Federal Strategy to Prevent and Address Gender-Based Violence and the National Crime Prevention Strategy, Public Safety is supporting the implementation of multi-year projects that prioritize youth aged 12-24 years and aim to reduce cyberbullying and cyberviolence.

As part of a cyberbullying awareness campaign, Public Safety has launched a cyberbullying website (www.Canada.ca/cyberbullying), which contains information for parents, caregivers, educators, and youth. Targeted, age-appropriate booklets and factsheets that can be used in various ways, such as shared in schools, or printed at home, can be found on this site

In addition, Public Safety is working to increase knowledge of what works to prevent cyberbullying and has recently published two reports on its website: Cyberbullying Research in Canada: A Systematic Review; and Cyberbullying Programs – An Environmental Scan.

Government of Canada Efforts to Address Online Child Sexual Exploitation

The Government of Canada is committed to protecting children and to preventing online sexual exploitation through the National Strategy for the Protection of Children from Sexual Exploitation on the Internet.

Public Safety Canada (PS) has been leading this Strategy since 2004, in partnership with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Justice Canada and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, a not-for-profit organization.

Ongoing investments under the National Strategy total over $18 million per year. Key initiatives include: contributing to increased public awareness of this crime, supporting the Canadian Centre for Child Protection’s operation of Cybertip.ca; and supporting the development of Project Arachnid, a web-crawling technology solution to identify and increase the rate of removal of online child sexual exploitation material. The National Strategy has also helped to expand the RCMP’s National Child Exploitation Crime Centre’s investigative capacity.

Budget 2021 proposed to provide $20.7 million over five years, starting in 2021-22, for the RCMP to enhance its ability to pursue investigations, identify victims and remove them from abusive situations, and bring offenders to justice, including those who offend abroad.

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