Canadian Government Tries to Stop Bullying: An Expert’s Critical Analysis
Why $250,000 Programs Fail and What Actually Works
A Well-Intentioned Program With Fatal Flaws
The following article from the Ottawa Citizen describes the Canadian government’s announcement of a $250,000 anti-bullying program. While any attention to bullying prevention is welcome, this program represents the exact approach that has consistently failed to reduce bullying rates over the past decade. As an expert with over 20 years of experience in bullying prevention, I must provide a critical analysis of why this initiative is unlikely to succeed.
The Ottawa Citizen Report
Ottawa Citizen Article Excerpt:
OTTAWA — On Monday, more than a year and a half after the suicide of 15-year-old Jamie Hubley, bullying was once again the topic at the late teen’s high school — but this time, the focus was hope.
At A.Y. Jackson Secondary School in Kanata, Heritage Minister James Moore announced the Canadian government would provide $250,000 in funding for a new national anti-bullying project.
“If we do nothing, it will lead to the death of children,” said Moore, whose riding in British Columbia is home to the late Amanda Todd.
The Canadian Red Cross will run the project, which is expected to have an impact on more than 50,000 young people across the country.
As part of the Stand Up to Bullying and Discrimination in Canadian Communities project, the Red Cross plans to train 2,400 teenagers ages 13 to 17 on how to deliver bullying prevention workshops and connect with their peers. After training, each teen will commit to reaching out to at least 20 others in his or her community to create a larger conversation about bullying.
The Program’s Structure
According to the Ottawa Citizen report, the program includes:
- Training 2,400 teenagers (ages 13-17) on bullying prevention
- Each trained teen reaching out to 20 others in their community
- Three youth-led forums in British Columbia, Ontario, and the Atlantic Region
- Expected impact on more than 50,000 young people nationwide
- Total government investment: $250,000
Expert Reactions: Mixed at Best
Even within the original article, experts expressed significant reservations about the program’s potential effectiveness.
“I think that the challenge now is to not think this is the entire answer… Adults have to be engaged in the anti-bullying discussion just as much as their children.”
— Claire Crooks, Centre for Prevention Science
“In the big picture, it would be unrealistic to think this would have a significant impact on the bullying problem.”
— David Smith, University of Ottawa Education Professor
Read the complete article: Ottawa Citizen – National Anti-Bullying Program
The Troubling Context: A Decade of Failure
Before dissecting this specific program, we must acknowledge the sobering reality documented in the Ottawa Citizen article itself:
A report released by UNICEF Canada in April ranked Canada twenty-first among 29 countries when it comes to the prevalence of bullied children. One-third of Canadian children have experienced bullying.
“Over the last 10 years, the rate of bullying has not significantly declined.” — Lisa Wolff, UNICEF Canada’s Director of Domestic Policy Education
This statistic reveals the fundamental problem: Despite numerous initiatives, programs, and government announcements over the past decade, bullying rates remain essentially unchanged. The approaches we’ve been taking simply aren’t working. Yet here we are again, investing in another program that repeats the same mistakes.
Why This Program Will Fail: An Expert’s Critique
As someone who has dedicated over 20 years to bullying prevention, authored four books on the subject, and worked with countless schools across North America, I must be direct: this is an absolute waste of taxpayers’ money.
My critique isn’t meant to diminish the Canadian Red Cross, which is an invaluable organization that helps thousands of people every day. Rather, it’s to educate politicians, administrators, and the public about why this approach is fundamentally flawed and what actually works.
The Core Problems With This Approach:
1. Focusing on Bullies and Victims Instead of Bystanders
This program will continually focus on bullies and victims while ignoring the most powerful force for change: bystanders. Bystanders represent 100% of our community—everyone is a bystander at some point. Yet this program provides no comprehensive strategy for empowering the silent majority to intervene.
2. Treating Bullying as a School Problem
Does bullying stop when students go home? Of course not. Bullying is a community problem that extends to neighborhoods, sports teams, online spaces, and everywhere young people interact. Yet this program focuses primarily on school-based interventions without engaging the broader community.
3. Relying on Peer-to-Peer Training Without Expertise
The program trains teenagers to deliver workshops after just a couple of days of training. Let me be blunt: I’m not interested in listening to a teenager talk about bullying when they have no experience, professional training, or presentation skills to keep an audience engaged.
What are these teens going to do? Add a few posters to walls and read PowerPoint presentations at school? This superficial approach cannot address the complex psychological, social, and systemic factors that perpetuate bullying.
4. Inadequate Follow-Up and Evaluation
The program lacks any meaningful follow-up structure. Students get a couple of days of training, tell 20 friends about bullying, and then what? Where are the monthly reinforcement exercises? Where are the pre and post-surveys to evaluate effectiveness? Without systematic follow-up and rigorous evaluation, we have no way to know if the program is working or simply burning taxpayer money.
5. Insufficient Funding for National Impact
As Professor David Smith noted in the article, this is a “modest investment” of a quarter-million dollars. To put this in perspective: $250,000 spread across an entire country, training 2,400 students, and supposedly impacting 50,000 young people. That’s approximately $5 per young person “impacted.” What meaningful intervention can possibly occur with that level of investment?
The Critical Questions Nobody Is Asking
Essential Elements Missing From This Program:
- Teacher Training: What about educating the adults who spend six hours a day with students? Teachers are on the front lines of bullying prevention, yet this program provides no teacher training component.
- Parent Education: What about educating parents about recognizing warning signs, monitoring digital activity, and supporting their children? Parents are crucial partners in bullying prevention, yet they’re excluded from this initiative.
- Bystander Empowerment: What about all the students who watch bullying occur? How can students speak up safely when they witness harassment? This program provides no comprehensive bystander intervention training.
- Reporting Systems: Are there anonymous, accessible reporting systems being implemented? Without safe reporting mechanisms, students who want to help have no clear path forward.
- Administrative Buy-In: What about training school administrators, counselors, and support staff? Effective bullying prevention requires comprehensive institutional commitment.
- Community Integration: Where is the involvement of police, youth organizations, community leaders, and local businesses? Bullying prevention requires community-wide engagement.
- Evaluation and Accountability: How will success be measured? What metrics will determine if this program is working? Without rigorous evaluation, we’re flying blind.
The Fatal Flaw: Starting at the Bottom
The problem with this program is that it’s trying to fix bullying by starting at the bottom—with students—and hoping change will trickle up. This has never worked and never will.
The Right Approach: Top-Down Implementation
We need to start at the top with school boards, police, and parents, and work our way down. Here’s why:
Why Top-Down Implementation Works
- Policy and Resources: School boards control policies, funding, and resources. Without their commitment, individual school initiatives lack support and sustainability.
- Adult Modeling: Students learn from what adults do, not what teenagers tell them to do. When administrators, teachers, and parents model respect and intervention, students follow.
- Systemic Change: Bullying is perpetuated by systems and cultures, not just individual behavior. Changing systems requires leadership from the top.
- Accountability: Adults must be held accountable for creating safe environments. Student-led initiatives cannot provide this accountability.
- Consistency: Top-down approaches ensure consistent messaging, policies, and interventions across schools and communities.
- Sustainability: When bullying prevention is driven by institutional commitment rather than individual enthusiasm, programs continue even when motivated students graduate.
The Canadian Government’s Bureaucratic Runaround
My experience trying to engage with the Canadian government on bullying prevention illustrates the systemic problems. Years ago, I contacted the federal government about comprehensive bullying prevention programs. Their response? “You should talk to the education minister.”
I contacted the education minister. Her response? “You should contact the school boards.”
This bureaucratic passing of responsibility ensures nothing meaningful gets accomplished. Meanwhile, the government holds press conferences announcing programs that look good politically but lack the depth and comprehensiveness required for real impact.
What Actually Works: A Comprehensive Community Approach
After 20 years in this field, I know what works because I’ve seen it succeed in schools and communities across North America. Effective bullying prevention requires:
1. Universal Bystander Education
Train every student, staff member, parent, and community member on their role as bystanders. Use the complacent complicity theory: when you’re complacent, you’re complicit. Empower everyone to remove the oxygen that feeds bullying.
2. Comprehensive Stakeholder Engagement
- School board commitment with dedicated funding
- Administrative leadership and accountability
- Teacher training on recognition and intervention
- Parent education programs
- Law enforcement partnerships
- Community organization involvement
3. Systematic Follow-Up and Reinforcement
One-time training doesn’t create lasting change. Effective programs include:
- Monthly classroom exercises reinforcing concepts
- Regular parent communications
- Ongoing professional development for staff
- Student leadership opportunities with adult mentorship
- Annual refresher training
4. Robust Evaluation and Data Collection
- Pre-implementation climate surveys
- Regular pulse surveys throughout the year
- Incident tracking and analysis
- Post-implementation evaluation
- Longitudinal studies tracking outcomes over years
5. Professional Expertise and Engaging Delivery
Bullying prevention presentations must be delivered by trained professionals who understand child development, group dynamics, and effective communication. The message is too important to leave to well-meaning but inexperienced teenagers reading PowerPoint slides.
6. Tools and Resources for Sustained Implementation
Effective programs provide:
- Anonymous reporting systems
- Curriculum materials for ongoing education
- Parent guides and resources
- Staff protocols for responding to incidents
- Digital resources for reinforcement
- Assessment tools for measuring progress
The Name Game: Why the Red Cross?
Let me be direct about something that troubles me about this announcement: I strongly suspect the government chose the Canadian Red Cross primarily because of its name recognition, not because of demonstrated expertise in bullying prevention.
The Canadian Red Cross is an outstanding organization that provides critical disaster relief, first aid training, and humanitarian assistance. But bullying prevention is not their core competency. Meanwhile, organizations like ReportBullying.com—a Canadian company with extensive experience, proven methodologies, comprehensive follow-up systems, and specialized expertise in bullying prevention—were never even contacted.
This isn’t about sour grapes. It’s about effectiveness. When government prioritizes optics over outcomes, taxpayer money gets wasted and children remain vulnerable.
“At Least They’re Doing Something”
I know what some people are thinking: “Well, at least the government is doing something. Isn’t any effort better than nothing?”
No. Ineffective programs that appear to address bullying but actually accomplish nothing are worse than doing nothing because they create the illusion of action while wasting resources that could fund effective interventions.
When politicians announce anti-bullying programs, the public assumes the problem is being addressed. Pressure for real solutions decreases. Parents feel reassured. School boards check the box. Everyone moves on.
Meanwhile, bullying rates don’t decline. Children continue suffering. Tragedies like Jamie Hubley and Amanda Todd continue occurring. And in a few years, we’ll have another press conference announcing another ineffective program in response to another preventable death.
This approach will fail. You watch.
A Passionate Plea for Evidence-Based Solutions
I’m so passionate about anti-bullying work. I live and breathe it every day. It’s not just a job—it’s a calling born from personal experience as a bullying victim and nurtured through 20 years of research, program development, and working with schools and communities.
I’m not here to attack the Canadian Red Cross, which does invaluable work. I’m here to educate people and politicians about how to actually reduce bullying. This program is not the right approach, and pretending otherwise serves no one except politicians seeking photo opportunities.
What Canada Actually Needs
As Professor David Smith noted in the Ottawa Citizen article, Canada needs a comprehensive national anti-bullying strategy that engages multiple stakeholders and researchers to find evidence-based solutions. This strategy should:
- Be developed by bullying prevention experts, not politicians
- Include adequate funding for comprehensive implementation
- Engage all levels of government, education, law enforcement, and community organizations
- Prioritize bystander intervention and community-wide culture change
- Include rigorous evaluation and accountability measures
- Provide ongoing support and resources, not one-time initiatives
- Address bullying as a community problem, not just a school problem
The Stakes Are Too High for Political Theater
Heritage Minister James Moore was right when he said at the announcement: “If we do nothing, it will lead to the death of children.”
But doing something ineffective is functionally equivalent to doing nothing. The stakes are too high—children’s lives are literally at risk—for political theater and half-measures.
We know what works. The research exists. The expertise is available. What’s missing is the political will to implement comprehensive, evidence-based solutions that require sustained commitment and adequate funding.
Your Voice Matters: Join the Conversation
I would love to hear your comments about this program. Do you think this peer-training approach is the right solution? Do you believe $250,000 spread across an entire nation can create meaningful change? Have you seen similar programs in your community succeed or fail?
More importantly: Are you willing to demand better from your government? Are you willing to advocate for evidence-based, comprehensive bullying prevention programs that actually work?
Change happens when citizens hold their leaders accountable. If you care about protecting children from bullying, speak up. Contact your representatives. Demand evaluation data from existing programs. Support organizations with proven expertise. Don’t accept feel-good announcements as substitutes for effective action.
Our children deserve better than political theater. They deserve programs that work.
Learn About Proven Anti-Bullying Solutions
Featured Speaker: Jim Jordan
President of ReportBullying.com
With 20 years of experience in bullying prevention and intervention, Jim Jordan has become one of North America’s leading voices in evidence-based anti-bullying programs. He has authored 4 comprehensive books on bullying and is recognized by principals across the USA as the best School Anti-Bullying Speaker.
Jim’s programs focus on community-wide bystander education, comprehensive stakeholder engagement, and systematic follow-up—the evidence-based approaches that actually reduce bullying rates. His expertise comes from two decades of research, program development, and real-world implementation in schools across North America.
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