Thank you to the member from Ottawa–Vanier for bringing this forward. As a school social worker for 11 years, this is such an important topic that I’ve been pushing forward with throughout my career. I’ve seen the billions and billions of dollars that companies profit every year and the negative, harmful impact it has on kids.

Today we honour the memory of the Afzaal family. We know that that young man was radicalized online through these very algorithms that we talk about. In the fall of last year, on the campus of the University of Waterloo, a young man was radicalized and acted out a hate crime against people studying gender and sexuality.

The violence that we see in schools—kids are playing more and more graphic violent games online. We’ve seen attention spans shrink from about 15 minutes to less than seven, so teachers are trying to tap-dance to get people’s attention. It’s undermining the very education system that we are investing in.

It’s affecting kids’ eyes. They have “old kid eyes,” where they’re getting glasses at an earlier age because they’re watching hours and hours of screens online.

In my school board, we did a survey and found that 30% of students were getting a good night’s sleep. So not only do we have to worry about safety and privacy; it’s affecting the very development and health and well-being of young people, because they are not having a good night’s sleep. Every family that I would visit, the first thing I would ask is, “Where is your cellphone? Let’s talk about how you use it.” Because I know it’s under their pillow every night. It beeps, it blops, it bloops and they’re waking up throughout the night and not able to study and focus and get up for school in the morning. We haven’t even discussed attendance issues. If you talk to anybody in the education system right now, the wheels are falling off. Kids are not showing up. So, yes, we could have the bells and whistles when they get there, but if they’re not there to begin with because they didn’t have a good night’s sleep, we’re no further ahead.

I am going to spend my time focusing on pornography. This is something that is happening in our midst and we do not know the realities that are faced, and I’m alarmed at what’s happening in our society. When COVID-19 came into action, our school board had a monitoring system so we could catch if kids had made a threat to someone else, a threat to their own life, or were watching eight times or more of pornography. Guess what the number one referral I had from then on? I didn’t have these referrals before. They started when we started paying attention to what kids were logging on to in elementary schools on school board things. And we could block the heck out of these, but those are the referrals that we were getting and I was having to call principals, parents and teachers to talk to students about excessive pornography use by very young kids.

We know now that kids are watching pornography before they have even had their first kiss, before they’ve had their first sexual encounter. Some 48% of 13-year-olds have seen porn; 35% of the scenes in popular pornography contain non-consensual behaviour. So more than a third of the porn that these young under-13 kids are watching involve non-consensual behaviour.

Did you know that choking is a norm? This is not the pornography any of us have ever considered in our lifetime. Choking is a norm. At my local hospital, our sexual assault support people are getting specialized training to understand the negative impacts of choking. Kids, instead of getting accused of attempted rape, are now getting accused of attempted murder. These are young boys.

Did you know the most dangerous category are boys under 12? Why? Because we have not armed them with the understanding and information they need to have about consensual sexual activity. So we need to go much further, and I know this education is not happening in schools.

I worked my tail off to get digital citizenship content, which is widely available—it’s practically free—into every school at every developmental stage. Adults, if they do know—which is rare—have no idea how to respond, whether it be staff in schools or caregivers themselves. We have not armed them.

When I look, as a social worker, to refer a student who has consumed violent, misogynistic hate, here we are, working so hard to eradicate interpersonal violence, but we have so much indoctrination happening in our midst and we are unaware and we have not done enough to curb it.

And if you look in society for those not-for-profit, widely accessible, free services, I tell you, they do not exist. In Burlington, as the member from Burlington should know, this month, the very sexual offending clinical support with the experts that train all of us was shut down. In Hamilton, Kitchener and London, the program that supports young offenders to stop reoffending was shut down.

So we are unprepared and we need to do better to help our kids have healthy relationships.