Canadian Conservative Party Condemned For “Hypocritical” Participation In It Gets Better Campaign

An update on a previous post, a video by a group of Canadian Conservative Members of Parliament aimed at supporting gay youths who are bullied had drawn almost 6,000 viewers by Friday - and no shortage of reaction, reports The Montreal Gazette. On Thursday, the Tory politicians posted an It Gets Better video online in the wake of the suicide of Ottawa teen Jamie Hubley, whose funeral was held that day. In it, several MPs ranging from Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird to Public Safety Minister Vic Toews repeat the maxim "It gets better" in a bid to reassure youths they have support and can seek help if they are ostracized or bullied over their sexuality. While she said it is great to see MPs reaching out to bullied youth, Queen's University psychology professor Wendy Craig pointed out that all the participants merely repeated the same line in the video. "It would have been nice for them to personalize it and make it meaningful," Craig, who has done extensive research on bullying, said on Friday. "I would have loved to hear personal anecdotes or stories, and more solutions of what we can do." Just like "inoculating (against) the flu," Craig said the Tories need to treat bullying as a public health problem and implement a national strategy aimed at changing the way children think about bullying. "(Bullying is) an epidemic in our country," said Craig. "We need a movement like seatbelts or helmets. It's a social cultural change in the way that we think about standing up for the person who is being bullied or being victimized." Dan Savage, a Seattle writer and founder of the It Gets Better Project, the viral video movement sparked by a YouTube video he created to inspire hope for gay youth facing harassment after a rash of bullying suicides in the U.S., was not impressed, and weighed in through an online column. "I'll just say this about Canada's Conservatives' contribution to the 'It Gets Better' Project: People who are in a position to make it better - elected officials - but who have chosen, over the years, to make it worse, can come around," he wrote. "But it's going to take more than a video to undo the damage done by Vic Toews and Canada's conservatives. This was, quite literally, the least Vic and his fellow conservatives could do. The very least." Savage wrote in response to messages from Canadian readers singling out some of the participating MPs, like Toews, labelling them as "hypocrites" for sending a message of support to gay youth when they had previously voted against same sex marriage in the House.