Tories setting a bad example in bullying fight

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Jamie Hubley (CP)

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Marjorie Raymond (CNS)

OTTAWA -- There is nothing but heartbreak in the suicide last week of Quebec teenager Marjorie Raymond.

Nothing but sadness over the October suicide of 15-year-old Ottawa teenager Jamie Hubley.

Both teens took their own lives after years of being bullied at school.

In the wake of their deaths, inevitably the same questions came up: How do we stop bullying and what is government going to do about it?

After Marjorie's death, Quebec Premier Jean Charest pledged to review the province's policies on bullying.

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty went a step further and introduced new anti-bullying legislation last week that would require more action by school boards and give schools power to expel students for bullying.

Jamie's father, Ottawa city councillor Allan Hubley, said the legislation was a start, but we must also find out what is driving bullies to behave like that in the first place.

To understand where teenage bullies learn their behaviour, one need not look too far.

Look at any comment section on any media website for proof that bullying is alive and well outside the schoolyards. Tune in to any Canadian legislature and see how our elected officials treat each other. It's bullying, plain and simple, hidden as it may be under the guise of free speech or open debate.

One wonders, under the new law in Ontario, what would happen to a teenager who started calling all the kids in the class and spreading a falsehood about another schoolmate. Would they be called on the carpet for bullying, suspended or possibly even expelled?

Or would they be allowed to continue because it's just freedom of speech? Would the principal condone the behaviour because hey, maybe the rumour is true after all?

If you ask Conservative government house leader Peter Van Loan, apparently the answer to the latter question is yes.

Last week, Van Loan acknowledged his party was behind a series of phone calls being made into the Montreal riding of longtime Liberal MP Irwin Cotler. The calls from a polling firm were asking voters for their support for the Conservative candidate in an upcoming byelection because Cotler was stepping down.

But there is no byelection. Cotler is not resigning.

But Van Loan said, hey, the rumours might be true because they've been around pretty much since Cotler was first elected in 1999. So really, why not spread more of them? And hire a polling firm to start making calls to make the rumour sound official.

Because, hey, it's just freedom of speech, right?

This is not the first time Cotler has been targeted by bullies. In 2009, the Conservative party sent a tax-payer-funded flyer to Jewish voters in Cotler's riding accusing the Liberals -- and indirectly Cotler himself, who is Jewish -- of participating in an anti-Semitic conference in South Africa in 2001. The accusations in the flyer were simply wrong, even according the rabbi who led the Israeli delegation at that conference.

It was a clear attempt to undermine Cotler in his own community. It's also known as bullying.

Manitoba Conservative MP Candice Hoeppner looked truly stricken Thursday when answering a question about Raymond's death in the House of Commons.

"Bullying is completely unacceptable," she said. "It should never be tolerated."

Part of that intolerance, Hoeppner told me later, means MPs have to lay off the bullying themselves. She wasn't specifically referring to the Cotler incident, but to behaviour in general in the House of Commons.

"As MPs, we have to look in the mirror sometimes," she said. "Part of the banter back and forth is just part of the job, but sometimes it just goes too far."

Hoeppner said one of the most effective ways to stop bullying is for other kids to step up and tell the bully to stop. It's one of the hardest things a kid can try to do, because there is always fear they will become the bullying target themselves. But Hoeppner is right -- it is an effective defence.

One can only hope the same might be true of our leaders.

Perhaps it has already started.

Bruce Anderson, a pollster and a longtime political adviser to both the Liberal and Conservative parties, wrote on the weekend that a party that styles itself as the best defender of law and order should know the difference between right and wrong.

"And this is wrong," Anderson wrote of the Cotler incident.

"Not clever, not amusing, not evidence of a more sophisticated political machine that works all the angles while others are asleep at the switch. Just wrong on every level."

mia.rabson@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 5, 2011 A7