Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Social Affairs, Science and Technology
Issue No. 49 - Evidence - November 1, 2018
OTTAWA, Thursday, November 1, 2018
The Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology, to which was referred Bill S-244, An Act respecting Kindness Week, and Bill S-248, An Act respecting National Physicians’ Day, met this day at 10:31 a.m. to give clause-by-clause consideration to the bills.
Senator Chantal Petitclerc (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Welcome to the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology.
[Translation]
My name is Chantal Petitclerc. I am a senator from Quebec. I am pleased to be chairing today’s meeting.
[English]
Before we give the floor to our witnesses, I invite my colleagues to introduce themselves, starting on my right.
Senator Seidman: Good morning, Senator Munson. Thank you for being here to discuss this piece of legislation.
Senator Judith Seidman from Montreal, Quebec.
[Translation]
Senator Poirier: Good afternoon, and welcome. Rose-May Poirier from New Brunswick.
Senator Mégie: Good afternoon. Marie-Françoise Mégie from Quebec.
[English]
Senator Ravalia: Good morning and welcome. Mohamed Ravalia from Newfoundland and Labrador.
Senator Dasko: Donna Dasko, Toronto, Ontario.
Senator Manning: Fabian Manning, Newfoundland and Labrador.
Senator Cordy: Jane Cordy from Nova Scotia.
Senator Omidvar: Ratna Omidvar from Ontario.
[Translation]
The Chair: Today we begin our study of Bill S-244.
[English]
I would like to introduce our witnesses. We are pleased to have with us the Honourable Senator Jim Munson, sponsor of the bill. From Kind Canada, we have with us Rabbi Reuven Bulka, Rabbi Emeritus, Congregation Machzikei Hadas.
Rabbi Bulka, before I continue, I want to assure you that we stand in solidarity with you and the Jewish community following the tragic events in Pittsburgh.
We also have with us Jeff Turner, Vice President and Chief Development Officer, as well as Madam Jennifer Levine, volunteer.
[Translation]
Welcome, everyone.
[English]
We will begin with Senator Munson. I want to remind everybody that you have seven minutes for your opening remarks.
[Translation]
You have the floor, Senator Munson.
[English]
Hon. Jim Munson, sponsor of the bill: Thank you for having the four of us here today.
It’s a special day. I think every day should be a kindness day, and I think every week should be a kindness week. To sit here beside the rabbi, a week after the tragedy in Pittsburgh, we know that love conquers hate, and we understand that.
Can you imagine that in the neighbourhood that this tragedy happened was the home of the real Mr. Rogers? When you think about children’s shows, he talked about love all the time. And, of course, that was echoed over and over again throughout the United States and around the world, that was his neighbourhood. He preached a lot of things to a lot of children and to so many people about love and kindness over hate.
I’ve gone to the national cenotaph over the last 20 years, and when you hear Rabbi Bulka speak, you listen, and you listen to him on November 11. He reminds me of the sacrifice of my uncle who died in the Second World War, he reminds me of uncles who survived the Second World War, and in that moment of kindness and of compassion of forgiving, the rabbi speaks for all of us in this country. So I’m always moved by that, and I take great solace in hearing him speak.
In my own office, there are acts of kindness that are taking place at least once a week. You have seen it with Michael Trink in my office who has Down’s syndrome. Michael has been working with me once a week for the last eight years. With Michael, not only do you see a man involved in inclusion and hugging others and just being with others, the kindness that you see with that young man through the security guards, through the stenographers, through the workers around, Mike just hands out kindness each and every day through his hugs and through his conversation. So you see his acts of kindness, and it’s so important.
I lived with him through the spirit of a son whom my wife and I lost some time ago from Down’s syndrome. Michael is the spirit of Timmy Munson each and every day. By the way, we’re going to an Ottawa Senators game tonight, and he said we’re going to have the Beach Boys on tonight in the car so we sing all the way there. Who thinks of those things? That’s an important thing to remember.
Jean Chrétien, when I worked with him once, was in northern New Brunswick where I’m originally from. There were no cameras around, and it was the middle of the winter, March 2002. He got out of the car before getting onto the plane. There were these Acadians sitting by the fence, and they were cold and it was freezing. He walked over and talked to them for 20 minutes. I stayed in the car. When he got in, I said, “Prime Minister, that was a wonderful thing that you just did.” He said, “Jamais.” What did that take?” I said, “It took time.” He said, “That’s all it took was time.” Time to be kind. He didn’t have to do it, but he moved on for just a moment. So I use that time this morning to tell you about these stories.
This morning I put my tie on — my SOS Children’s Village tie, who I work with. Talk about kind acts happening in this country and around the world of children who are being fed and cared for in the villages within their communities around the world. This reminds me because people talk to me and say, “What is that tie about?” Glad you asked because it’s out there in telling that particular story.
I wanted to put those stories out there. I’ve had great conversations with Jeff and the rabbi about this bill and have done research on it. If we think about it for a while, the oxytocin and the production of serotonin in the brain, it’s good for you if we take a breath and hear ourselves thinking and speaking.
Kindness helps with symptoms of stress, anxiety, depression and can lower blood pressure. Researchers have also noticed that kindness is contagious. For example, when someone is kind to us, we are more likely to be kind to someone else, spreading kindness many times over. You can see less bullying. I can see this bill becoming law, and I can see schools across the country and universities having programs dealing with the simple act of kindness. It’s healthy for you.
I saw first-hand with my World Autism Awareness Day bill, which became law in 2012, that it helped build awareness about autism. Organizations across this country, speaking with one voice on April 2 and every other day, have more events in more schools where children are paying attention to the friend beside them. Because that friend may act a little differently, you don’t look at that friend and judge. It’s non-judgmental. It is about saying, “How are you? You are part of us. You are part of humankind.”
I’ll leave it at that because other witnesses do have some very important, kind things to say, and it’s very kind of you to have us today. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
Now we are following with Rabbi Bulka.
Rabbi Reuven Bulka, Rabbi Emeritus, Congregation Machzikei Hadas, Kind Canada Généreux: Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Thank you dear and worthy senators. I really appreciate your “kind invitation” to appear before you to share my thoughts about Bill S-244, which I hope will become a clarion call for kindness over the course of the generations.
I begin with an expression of gratitude to dear Honourable Senator Jim Munson not only for sponsoring this bill but also for doing it with such eagerness and enthusiasm.
There is no doubt in my mind that everyone here today, as well as those in the Senate and the House of Commons, are enthusiastic proponents of kindness. The issue before us is whether that enthusiasm translates into a bill officially establishing kindness week across our great country.
With the help and support of leading members of the community here in Ottawa, I was fortunate to launch Kindness Week in Ottawa in 2007. My colleague to my left, Jeff Turner, was deeply involved in it because it went through the United Way. I have seen first-hand how Kindness Week works. Hundreds of schools have kindness-related programs in their schools; kindness-related events abound in the city; local leaders, including the mayor, take part in the Kindness Week launch, at which the mayor’s proclamation of Kindness Week is front and centre.
The evident success of Kindness Week in Ottawa led to the next stage, establishing Kindness Week in Ontario a number of years ago, spearheaded by local MPP and future Attorney General Yasir Naqvi. I have always tried to convince him that his embracing of kindness was what led him up the ladder in the provincial government and he’s never argued with me.
Kindness week across Canada is the next natural step.
My motivation in establishing Kindness Week in Ottawa was to counter the bullying epidemic that had invaded our schools. The logic was simple. Telling children not to do something does not help that much and at times can be counterproductive. But helping children do nice things and say nice things to others creates the type of positive energy that suffocates bullying.
There is much research on kindness and its impact that are vital to our appreciating its wide reach. We know that kindness in hospitals reduces the length of time spent in hospital for similar relatively long-stay issues by a full day on average. The savings implications are obvious.
Kindness produces the serotonin that my dear colleague — is a rabbi a colleague of a senator?
Senator Munson: Absolutely.
Rabbi Bulka: Okay. I’ll take it. That serotonin is often lacking in people with mental health challenges. With the astounding number of Canadians having mental health issues, proliferating kindness seems like such an effective, low-cost way to help this matter in a huge way.
Kindness in mega doses can snuff out not only bullying. It can snuff out hate, an issue that is front and centre for all of us, especially now. On a lesser level, kindness can minimize the incidence of road rage among other not-so-social manifestations.
We know from our experience in Ottawa that Kindness Week embraced by leadership at all levels has made a difference. We know, too, that it has made a difference at the provincial level.
We are convinced that establishing kindness week on a national level will have an enormous impact on our country.
I foresee our Prime Minister issuing a proclamation for kindness week in Canada. I foresee every MP promoting kindness week in their constituencies, as well as the senators. I foresee a Canada-wide embrace of kindness as a result of the inspiration of Bill S-244. This bill, if passed, as I fervently hope it will be, can potentially raise the Canadian consciousness of the importance of kindness, and the ensuing commitment thereto, to levels that will make our great country even greater and make a large dent in some of the critical issues we face, including mental health, the cost of health care and bullying, among others.
Finally, in these turbulent times, having Canada become the first country — I emphasize “the first country” — to institutionalize kindness on a national scale will be an expression of leadership of global proportions of which we will be eternally proud.
I conclude with these words from Yasir Naqvi, the aforementioned driving force for establishing Kindness Week in Ontario.
He writes — and this is at my request as he would have come here today but was not able to do so as he was out of town — “The third week in every February is Kindness Week in Ontario” — thanks to the work of Rabbi Reuven Bulka. He continues by saying, “It was unanimously endorsed by the members of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario in 2009. It is a simple deed but a powerful one. Simple acts of kindness can have a profound impact on individuals and communities. Our aim is to help strengthen a culture of compassion, thoughtfulness and kindness, and to counter a prevailing tendency towards cynicism. The result is communities across Ontario organizing events, such as free skating for Syrian refugees, promoting respect and oneness. Today, more than ever, we need to motivate people to undertake acts of kindness—neighbours, strangers, young and old, reaching out to each other to build a kinder Canada.”
On that note I say to all of you, thank you for your time and dedication.
The Chair: Thank you, Rabbi Bulka.
Now to Mr. Turner.
Jeff Turner, Vice President and Chief Development Officer, Kind Canada Généreux: Good morning. It’s a pleasure to be here and, as everyone else has said, it’s very kind of you to have us here. We’ve been looking forward to this and working with Senator Munson for some time. It’s wonderful for us to get to this point.
“The world could use more kindness.” “I wish there was something you could do about my workplace.” “We seem to have forgotten about compassion and empathy and about being kind to people.” These are some of the comments I hear every day when I tell people where I work and what I’m doing with Rabbi Bulka at Kind Canada. Kind Canada’s goal is to engage and inspire Canadians to be kind. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t get some reaction similar to that and it intensifies the more conversations that I have. I’ve been doing so for four years — in large groups, small groups, community associations and networks across the country — and the message remains the same.
Unfortunately, though, I’ve also learned there are a significant number of workplaces and sectors in this country where people are suffering. Rabbi Bulka spoke about mental health issues. There’s also a large scale cost to that in the billions of dollars. As Wayne Wouters, former Clerk of the Privy Council determined, the federal government alone spends $9 billion a year on sick leave, and they know a significant amount of that is related to mental health issues. I’ve spoken on a number of occasions with Dr. Zul Merali, President and CEO of the Royal’s Institute of Mental Health Research. He quickly goes to the reference of serotonin, as Rabbi Bulka and Senator Munson have, and the production of oxytocin and other neurotransmitters that we need as humans to engage with each other. In the case of serotonin, it encourages brain elasticity, which helps people recover from incidents they find troubling or upsetting. Dr. Merali says that eight out of 10 patients in mental health centres in this country are lacking serotonin. You’ve all experienced a serotonin boost in some way, maybe not realizing it. When you do something kind or see someone else doing it — that’s what we call the bystander effect — you can’t often help but get a little smile on your face and a little flush of, “That was a good feeling.” Rabbi Bulka is very much about road rage; we kid him about it all the time. When you’re in traffic and you let someone in line who has been waiting for some time — you take that second — and they wave and smile back, it’s a remarkable feeling. You experience the opposite when the recipient isn’t quite as generous with their thanks, or you’ve been waiting for three and a half minutes to get out of a Tim Hortons’ parking lot in the morning and can’t understand why no one could take a second to let you out.
The situation facing us in many places is one that we’ve been paying close attention to as we build partnerships and have these conversations across the country. A recent white paper from the Association of Public Service Executives illustrates that 25 per cent of their respondents are exposed to bullying. That’s a 4 per cent increase year over year since the last time they did the survey.
We then started looking at ways to help that. We’ve partnered with Ottawa Public Health and created kindness workshops. We’ve done a number of them under their direction and support.
We’ve recently become a partner with the Professional Institute of Public Service of Canada, PIPSC, in the development of an online certification course that people can take as a professional development opportunity. This is with an eye towards helping individuals, but also working on a large scale to provide tools for organizations that are looking for ways to make change happen in behaviour and culture in their environments.
Talk of a national kindness week has been enthusiastically received by hundreds of people with whom I’ve spoken. Just the mention of this gets people enthused and excited about it. In schools, workplaces and communities across Canada, people are ready to celebrate this and engage in it.
We’ve found that, with kindness week in Ottawa, Rabbi Bulka spoke about — I was the point person with United Way Ottawa for almost 10 years. At times, we couldn’t keep up with the demand from schools and workplaces to have the rabbi come and speak, or for our team to go and participate. At times, we had hundreds of schools and businesses in this city fully engaged, all looking for a way to improve the lives and the experiences people were having in their workplaces and schools.
In a recent workshop I was attending with Ottawa police on bullying, their numbers indicate that 50 per cent of high school students in this city are subject to cyberbullying on a regular basis. Our approach, as the rabbi said, is not to talk about things from the “anti” perspective, but kind kids don’t bully; they’ll support others. Other people will step forward. That’s what we’re hoping to do.
A week of the year dedicated to reminding us about a simple act of kindness being so impactful resonates with us all. Such a week would play a significant role in creating culture and behaviour change across this country.
It’s a week. It’s a great start. It would be a fun, powerful and potentially life-changing experience for thousands of people. Being part of this and being in the first country in the world to undertake legislation to create this would be just absolutely spectacular. I hope we see that happen. Thank you all for your time.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Turner.
We will now turn to our last witness, Ms. Levine.
Jennifer Levine, Volunteer, Kind Canada Généreux: Thank you for welcoming me to your committee. I am a teacher and a strong advocate for teaching kindness in the classroom. I have run kindness education workshops for student teachers at the University of Ottawa, and I am excited to share some of the experiences I have had teaching kindness to children in Ottawa’s public schools.
As part of a pilot program with Kind Canada, in 2016 to 2017, I taught kindness education on a weekly basis to students in Grades 3, 4 and 6 at Steve MacLean Public School. The program included lessons that focused on teaching and practising compassion, empathy, respect, acceptance, gratitude, generosity and so much more. I taught the students about the importance of being kind to one’s self, to others in their lives and to people they don’t know in their neighbourhoods and around the world.
The program was very well received by the teachers, administrators, parents and most importantly by the students. They enthusiastically participated in all activities and were fully engaged in all aspects of the program.
The interest they showed in the weekly sharing sessions, where students were given the opportunity to openly discuss acts of kindness, was often the highlight of our weekly classes. This is where we celebrated kindness.
It became obvious, as the year went on, that the children grew more and more eager to do acts of kindness. I was able to gauge this increase in enthusiasm based on their behaviour and level of participation. Often, they would see me and almost burst with excitement as they were prepared to share their stories.
As I was only with the students for one hour a week, I relied on the teachers to report any impact the program was having on the students over the balance of their time at school. According to their teachers, the impact the program had on the students was simply incredible. Some of the examples are as follows: The students grew more accepting of one another’s differences; they looked out for each other and students in other class grades when out in the playground; they supported each other’s learning during class time; they used kindness vocabulary on a regular basis; they became ambassadors of kindness within their entire school; and most important, the incidents of bullying and general acts of meanness decreased significantly.
The teachers enthusiastically welcomed the weekly kindness lessons. It was a break from the generic curriculum, which brought joy and excitement to their classes. They loved the positive results. They also built on the lessons that I taught by incorporating kindness education into their regular weekly lessons. They shared these lessons with other teachers who wanted to inject some of the magic they witnessed from my kindness classes into their own classes.
The parents were equally enthusiastic. They supported the program, and one even reported back that this was the highlight of their child’s school year.
Regular kindness education is so important to the overall positive growth and development of all children. A dedicated kindness week often sparks this enthusiasm and motivates teachers, administrators and students to keep up the culture of kindness in schools.
We see kindness clubs develop and student leaders emerge. Children, like adults, reap the benefits of doing and receiving acts of kindness in the same way. It simply makes them feel good, which inspires them to keep on going. Imagine the inspiration that will come from an entire country doing acts of kindness at the same time. I know first-hand that the impact of a nationwide kindness week will be powerful and transform the culture of our schools.
The Chair: Thank you very much. We will now proceed to questions from senators.
I remind my colleagues that we have five minutes for questions and answers. Because we have four witnesses, I would like to ask you to direct your question to whom you want to answer. Of course, witnesses can answer if more people have something to say about a specific question.
We will begin with our deputy chair.
Senator Seidman: Thank you all for your presentations and being with us. It’s special to be sitting here talking about kindness when almost daily we turn on our televisions and see acts of hatred. For all of us sitting around this table, we’re very grateful to you. Perhaps we’ve all felt the emotional warmth that’s so attached to this idea of kindness. Just listening to the impact of it probably brings on the very feelings that people feel when they have acts of kindness. I know I have a big smile on my face. It was so wonderful to listen and then I could feel the warmth of the smile on my face while listening to this idea of kindness.
Whether it’s altruistic — paying it forward, which is a concept that we’ve heard about — or whether it’s self-improvement for our health, we recognize the value of kindness. So I am grateful and thankful to all of you, and to you, Senator Munson, for bringing this legislation forward.
One question to Rabbi Bulka. It’s great that we would be the first country with a national kindness day. That’s a huge example for the rest of the world. Why have you chosen the third week of February for this? Is there some particular reason?
Rabbi Bulka: That’s a good question. We were going through all of this. For many people, it makes more sense to have it in the summertime, when we don’t have to worry about when the next snowfall is going to come and we get snowed out. We looked at every month of the year, and each month seems to be taken.
When the legislation establishing Family Day was in the offing, it seemed like a natural thing to start off. We have the launch on the Friday before Family Day, so the first day of kindness week is actually Family Day. One of the things we emphasized a lot is that you have to be kind with your family. We’re often most mean to people closest to us. It starts off that way, but towards the end of the week, it crescendos out into the larger community. There was a method to our madness.
Senator Seidman: Absolutely. Thank you. That’s helpful. I don’t know if Senator Munson has anything to add.
Senator Munson: I just had a thought. It’s the week after Valentine’s Day. It’s a natural fit.
Senator Seidman: Right. I think that oxytocin is called the love hormone.
Senator Munson: More so than cannabis.
Senator Seidman: That’s great. Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
Senator Manning: Thank you to our witnesses. I fully support this piece of legislation and congratulate Senator Munson on bringing this forward.
I grew up in a family of nine. My mom spent 12 of the first 16 years of her life in an orphanage. Her dad passed away very young, and she and her sister ended up in an orphanage. She was a very kind and generous lady. I have a card, as a matter of fact, in my office, and one of her quotes was, “You may forget somebody’s telephone number and address, and you may even forget their name, but you won’t forget their kindness.” She always used to say that to us; so we try our best. Another one she used to say was that there’s good in everyone. Sometimes you have to dig a little deeper to find it than in others.
Having the opportunity to sit here this morning, listen to your discussion, and talking about something that is positive — and there are a lot of things in the world today that are negative — feels really good. In the business we are in here, sometimes we get opposite sides that dig in their heels on certain issues. We’re good at that here, but I think we have unanimity around the table when it comes to having an act passed through Parliament that will put forward a week of kindness in Canada. To be leading the way in the world is great, and I congratulate everyone involved in the process. I look forward to supporting the bill.
I have travelled this country several times, and outside the country, with Senator Munson. He is a very kind and generous man himself. He gets on my nerves some days, to be honest with you, but not in a bad way, but every now and again I need him to translate my language.
I wanted to ask a question about learning. Rabbi, you spoke about some activities that go on in the schools in Ottawa that you have brought forward, or that groups or individuals involved with you have brought forward. Could you elaborate on that so we could take them back to our own provinces and maybe when the time comes to find this week next February, please God, that we can propose some of these to our schools?
Rabbi Bulka: Thank you for the question. We reinvent ourselves every year. Every year what we try to do is focus on a new area mainly where kindness might be neglected. For example, one year the focus was on kids when they were going out of the house to make sure to thank your dad or mom for making your lunch. A simple thing that kids probably don’t do; right?
One year the focus of kindness was on the custodians in the schools that are taken for granted, but they’re the ones who keep the bathrooms and the floors clean and the lights on. If they weren’t around, the school couldn’t open.
Other times we had kindness focused on the teachers, and we had kids coming in in the morning and making sure to say hello to the teachers and then, when leaving in the afternoon, to say, “Thank you for teaching me today,” as opposed to just running to the bus.
One year the kindness emphasis was on the school bus drivers who, again, spend their time telling the kids to tone down and don’t be mischievous on the bus, but to hear them getting off the bus and saying, “Thank you for taking me to school,” and going home and saying, “Thank you for taking me home.”
Basically what we did was get the kids alert to things. There are so many things around them that they take for granted that they should acknowledge and say thank you for. Hopefully, when they get older, they will be doing it in different dimensions. Those are the things we did, and we had kindness assemblies where, depending on the schools, we had somewhere there was real enthusiasm about kindness competition, about doing things, collecting money for shelters or food banks. You had schools that were engaged and sometimes had competition which raised more money. There are all sorts of things we continue to do in the schools to make it robust.
Senator Manning: Ms. Levine, when you go into any classroom — and we will get back to mental health issues, which we work on here at this table also — and are teaching acts of kindness and encouraging younger students to be kind — because there may be students in your class who have maybe not experienced a whole lot of kindness outside the classroom — is there an opportunity to see that a student lacks that kindness because they’re not shown it themselves, to improve their situation around the classroom in regard to their friends and associates?
Ms. Levine: That’s the nice thing about the work that I was doing where I was going into schools for a year long. You really do develop those relationships with students and get to know who needs a little more guidance and hand-holding. But the development that you see over the course of the year, the change that you see within the students from their exposure to ongoing lessons on kindness and the use of kindness vocabulary, you really see that change over time.
The idea of a kindness week would be wonderful in schools because it would spark a continued practice of kindness. So, yes, that week would be an amazing thing for every school to participate in, but the true impact comes with the repeated practice of kindness. For those students or children who are not really getting that at home or experiencing it in their neighbourhoods, it gives them a very safe place to develop those skills and practice.
I guess the short answer is, yes, it does have that kind of impact.
Senator Munson: Senator Manning and Ms. Levine, you sparked a thought in my mind of what kindness can do when you talked about the pilot program in Grades 3, 4 and 6. My wife, in St. Lambert Elementary School on the South Shore of Montreal in the late 1960s, with McGill University, started the first pilot project in an English Protestant school board for children in those ages, and my wife taught, at that time, four or five years. Every child by the thousands in Quebec, the English-speaking part, is fluently bilingual today. They cracked that bilingual barrier because of what was taking place in Quebec. So those children today, some of whom are very successful lawyers, politicians and businesspeople, now in their forties and fifties, are now speaking the French language, and they’re speaking it in their work, and they stayed in Quebec.
When you talk about a project like this in terms of kindness in Grades 3, 4 and 6, it’s not only through the school year, and when they get into high school and university, it can last forever. Thank you.
Senator Cordy: Thank you very much for being here this morning. After watching television before I went to bed last night and waking up to the news this morning, it’s a pleasure to sit down to talk about kindness. As Senator Seidman said earlier, the world appears to be getting more and more divisive; yet we know there are huge pockets of kindness.
In my church, we do backpacks for homeless people. We make hot meals for people in a homeless shelter — two meals every month. The St. Vincent de Paul society helps the needy. They help those who are mentally ill, giving them their basic needs. There are a lot of organizations in our community that do that, but sometimes we get overwhelmed by the negativity and the divisiveness and the us-versus-them and the haves and have-nots. When I listen to you, it makes me feel good inside.
One of you mentioned earlier that when you see somebody do something kind, or someone smiles and says hello to you, it not only brings a smile to your face but a smile to your heart. It makes you feel good. It’s not why somebody does it, but it makes us all feel more positive.
Mr. Turner, could you tell me what Kind Canada is? How did it get started?
Mr. Turner: The rabbi and I go back quite a number of years. It was probably close to 10 years ago that we were speaking, and he talked about a national kindness week. Rabbi Bulka has been working on Kind Canada for five years now. I’ve been with it for four.
The rabbi started this really with the goal to pick up on the success of kindness week in Ottawa but on a grander scale. We came together, and we’ve been growing since with this vision that we’ve created to inspire Canadians to be kind. Along the way, we have come to have three focus areas: the workplace, the education sector and health care delivery. In each of those, we are developing programs where we see needs and opportunities to really engage and work with organizations, individuals, communities and the education system to help make change.
The way Senator Munson spoke about bilingualism, if we could replicate that with people being kind, our country would change, and the world would change with it.
We’ve created a number of partnerships. We’ve been fundraising for the programs we’ve started. Our partnerships are designed around engaging like-minded organizations and individuals who want to be part of this. We often hear people refer to a movement — create a movement of kindness — from coast to coast to coast. That’s at the core of what we’re trying to do.
Senator Cordy: Ms. Levine, I used to be an elementary school teacher, and it’s a great way to start these programs. Do you go in and teach these as a volunteer, or is it part of the curriculum?
Ms. Levine: I go in as a volunteer. I created the curriculum that I teach, with lots of research and practice. I’ve been working for many years in classrooms, but the pilot project itself that we did in three different classes was quite structured, based on proven activities, programs and vocabulary that I had already practised in different classes. It was really to gauge the impact. That’s what was watched—the impact on the students.
I don’t know if that answers your question.
Senator Cordy: Is there any move or activity on getting it as a part of a curriculum so that it could be taught in every school in Ontario?
Ms. Levine: That would be wonderful.
Senator Cordy: Yes, that would be wonderful.
Rabbi Bulka: That is one of the things we have on our mandate list, but it’s a bureaucracy challenge. Getting five minutes a year into a school curriculum is what they call the impossible task, but we’re still hopeful.
Senator Cordy: Maybe if we have a kindness week, that would be a building block.
Rabbi Bulka: That would help for sure.
Senator Cordy: Thank you all for the work you’re doing, and thank you, Senator Munson, for bringing this bill forward.
Senator Omidvar: Thank you all. I know there are a lot of senators who are kind, but I think Senator Munson is really one of the kindest senators in my experience. Thank you for being kind to me.
Senator Munson: Except on the ice.
Senator Omidvar: I don’t play hockey, so I wouldn’t know.
Acts of unkindness seem to dominate so much of the reality nowadays, but recently in the Senate, we’ve also been hearing about intentional and unintentional acts of unkindness. I reflect on the inquiry on anti-Black racism, and it comes to me that the opposite of kindness is unkindness. I hope we can talk about unkindness at some point, too.
I wanted to point out something and then ask a question. Other jurisdictions have taken other ideas forward, and I wanted your reflection on that. Bhutan measures gross national happiness. It actually puts out a report. There is a World Happiness Index. I think Canada is always sixth or seventh is always on that list. Norway is always at the top. The United Arab Emirates has a minister of national happiness.
Is this the beginning of incremental happiness, or are you focusing on the week of kindness as the end of your efforts?
Rabbi Bulka: I don’t want to speak for the senator, but I can tell you this: I quote the late Viktor Frankl who argued vociferously that the more you try to seek pleasures, the more elusive it’s going to be, and if you focus on something beyond yourself, like kindness, which is really kindness to others, it will make you happier. In other words, it is something that comes as a byproduct rather than something that is intentioned. So if the byproduct is that we will become the number one happiest country in the world, I would be delighted.
Senator Omidvar: That was an appropriate philosophical answer to my question.
No one has anything against kindness. I certainly don’t. I wish we could get a shot for kindness the way we get our flu shots, but hopefully science is developing in that direction. But there is a World Happiness Day, which is November 17, I believe. It’s not a law, but it’s a movement that countries are joining. It came out of an NGO movement.
I wonder whether we need a week of our own or whether we should simply add our voices to existing movements. If we have a national happiness day, which I like, will we then have a national humility day and a national empathy day?
My specific question is: Do you have any understanding of how much this will cost the government?
Senator Munson: It will cost nothing. It will cost a smile.
Senator Omidvar: That’s the answer. I wanted to get it on the record.
Senator Munson: When you talk about the recognition of days, I realize that those are very important. I’ll give you the example, though, of autism awareness day. Canada legally did not have recognition of World Autism Awareness Day, even though a hundred other countries under the UN convention did recognize, legally, World Autism Awareness Day. When I was pushing for it on April 2, there was a bit of a pushback, saying, “Why doesn’t the minister just declare it each and every time?” But having it there enshrined in law within our Parliament, the message went out to every autism group in this country that uses it as a template to organize and educate. When you talked about the schools here, the school here in Ottawa changed its whole mandate about being kind to your little buddy seated next to you in Grade 5, who wants to live in a world of inclusion but can’t verbalize it the way others do.
You have that kind of empowerment taking place when it is legally done.
There might be a little money involved in terms of education, brochures and so forth, but can you imagine 338 members of Parliament and 105 senators who legally know that this is a week that could turn into another week? It could be the break week that you’re going back to our constituency. You’re talking not only about what you’re doing and listening to what others are saying, but you’re being kind about it and doing it because it’s a law.
That’s extremely important.
Senator Ravalia: Thank you very much. That was very inspiring indeed.
My own life has been significantly impacted by acts of kindness. I grew up in an apartheid society. When I first went to medical school, the thing that was my salvation and touched me deepest was my professor of medicine, from Lithuania. He and his family had survived the horrors of the Holocaust. He sat down with the minority students, one-on-one, and advised us that while Apartheid was a reprehensible system, it should not break us, and then ensured us that his support for us was unconditional. That reaching out in kindness was so meaningful to so many of us who felt somewhat marginalized by the system we grew up in.
Every single one of us could reflect upon individuals who have ended up being our mentors because they were willing to go that extra step to show kindness.
Is there any evidence to suggest that rural communities are kinder than urban? I’ve spent 30-plus years in a community in Newfoundland and Labrador that embraced me, loved me, nurtured me and made me feel so special that when I leave my community and come to a place like Ottawa, I’m often anxious, apprehensive and longing to get back to my roots.
I wondered if there is a climate difference. If you grow up in a place where there are 300 days of sunshine versus 20 days, does that impact kindness? These are hypothetical questions, but I would be interested to hear what your responses are.
Ms. Levine, thank you for your wonderful talk. You talked about kindness vocabulary. Would you be able to give us specifics with reference to that?
Rabbi Bulka: One of the other hats I wear, as the chair of Trillium Gift of Life Network, which is responsible for organ and tissue donation across Ontario, one of the ways that we monitor how we’re doing and try to get the rates of donations up is by having people register to be organ donors. This is not the usual knock of Ottawa against Toronto, but the bigger the city, the lower the rate of registration. Toronto probably has the lowest registration percentage. I am not intending to insult them — I’m not a Leafs fan — but the cities that do the best are the ones that are more rural because, somehow or other, being together with other people, fending for each other, promotes the kindness that we’d like to see all across the board.
That observation is, at least if you use the gauge of who signs up to be an organ donor, 100 per cent.
On the other matter you talked about, it’s been found that people who live in darker areas — for example, in Alaska — where sunshine may be one hour a day in the wintertime, rates of depression go up. There is nothing that is a better antidepressant than doing kind things to others. The moment you step out and do things for others makes you feel better, and whatever antidotes we need for a population where best estimates are that one in five is depressed, the idea of going ahead and doing things for others is not magical — it doesn’t work for everyone — but certainly the general malaise that comes from “Life doesn’t have any meaning, I don’t feel good, I don’t have any purpose, it’s dark,” and all that, you go and light the life up for someone else, and it has a great impact.
Ms. Levine: Your question was about kindness vocabulary. It took me quite by surprise to recognize that students didn’t know what certain words meant. We throw around words like “empathy,” “compassion” and “respect.” They hear these words all the time. You need to respect your elders, but when you ask them what that means, they didn’t really know; so the focus of teaching them simple definitions of these certain words and trying to incorporate them into their daily lives and then recognizing one another by using these words really had their minds turned on in a different way.
When you teach that the word “respect” means treating people the way they deserve to be treated, and then when you have them try and recognize one another for doing acts of kindness and using the word “respect,” it was interesting to see how they started to utilize the vocabulary. That would carry over into the playground where they would start to show compassion. They would even use the word.
Even the word “generosity,” everyone thought it meant you have to give money, “I’m a kid; I don’t have money,” but we talked about being generous with our compliments, smiles and different ways we can be generous humans. In teaching them the kindness vocabulary, we had a list on the wall, and every week we would reveal the new kindness word and what the definition was, and then that week that would be the focus. I would come back the week later and the enthusiasm for learning what “courage” really meant was pretty incredible; so that’s why the focus on teaching a kindness vocabulary was so successful.
The Chair: Thank you.
Senator Dasko: Thank you so very much for your presentations today. It seems like a wonderful idea. It’s very heart-warming to listen to your discussion of it and plans for a campaign.
Have you done any public opinion research on the idea of kindness week? You are wanting to launch it as a national idea in legislation. Have you asked Canadians and public opinion research what they think of a kindness week? In particular, what they might think the impact of such a week might be.
Perhaps you haven’t done such research, but if you have, among which regions — demographic groups, gender, age, socio-economic status — would you have found more or less support for such an idea?
Rabbi Bulka: I wish we had the money to do it, but we’re not that rich of an organization; so we rely on anecdotal stuff. We rely on reports. Jeff had mentioned that we haven’t found anyone who would say there’s anything bad about it. On the contrary, where this has been tried in all sorts of places, including workplaces and schools, it brings out the best in people.
Somehow or other, I get the feeling that if we asked people — I’m not downplaying your question, and probably a good pollster would have a chance to do this in a way that would be subtle enough that people would not come back and say, “Hey, this is a stupid question.” They would be able to do it in some way that they will find this out. But there is every evidence from all of the research that kindness has a positive impact wherever you go.
You know it from your own experience almost intuitively, when you say something nasty to someone and put them down, they’re going to be affected that way. If you say something nice, it’s going to encourage them. But the idea of doing something like that would be great, but I think we already know the results.
Senator Munson: I do know that Senator Yonah Martin is enthusiastic about this. She wanted to bring a principal and the children from a school in Vancouver to this committee because they have been practising kindness. When they heard about this, they got very excited in Vancouver. Here we are connecting others through this message today. And anecdotes, or whatever the case might be, we’re just at the building stage. Research would be excellent. You’re an excellent researcher yourself.
Senator Dasko: I’m not working in that industry anymore; I just want you to know that.
Senator Munson: No, but I can see you with a random act of kindness talking to some of your fellow researchers in Toronto, “Do you know what is going in Ottawa today? Would you believe it? I wonder if there is any research done on that?”
Senator Dasko: Get a free question out of them. Yes, that’s possible. I’m sure it would be very easy to craft a question. It would not be around the concept of kindness, which, of course, it would be the concept of dedicating a week, as we’re being asked to do here in the Senate.
I just have one other question. You’ve talked about the organization — by the way, I love this little card. I’d like to have a couple of them to give my adult children. I think they might benefit. Acts of kindness. I hope they’re not hearing me say this.
You’re hoping that the organization, Kindness Canada, will be the leading organization promoting this. You talked about partnership. Do you foresee linking up with, let’s say, some of the established national organizations to promote this? That costs money too. If you’re going to create a movement or an awareness of initiatives, it costs a lot of money for the things one needs to build national awareness.
I’m wondering if you envision any partnerships. Let’s say with leading organizations, YWCA or YMCA — I’m just naming them as an example — or how you would want to go about building partnerships in a movement? That’s my question.
Rabbi Bulka: Jeff has actually worked on this and has created some very powerful partnerships.
To your point, the passage of a bill that would create a high profile here would definitely make this much more attractive. We would not want to claim ownership of the responsibility for this. We would love to do it, but really, we would love to see everyone avalanching in and saying, “We want to be a part of this,” as opposed to this becoming a turf battle. It would be unkind to do it that way. Jeff has wonderful examples. Go ahead.
Mr. Turner: Great question, senator. Thank you. Quite a number of folks I’ve been talking to over the last few years — Senator Munson mentioned Senator Martin — we are partners with Global Dignity and participated in the last workshop they had here in Ottawa. Global Dignity Day was two weeks ago.
Last week I attended the Forum for Young Canadians with an eye towards introducing national kindness week — of course, my caveat to everyone is that we’re working on this, we have goals and aspirations, but the feedback is when you can get to that point, we’re very prepared to engage. When I spoke to the folks at the Forum for Young Canadians, they thought students would love this and they would become ambassadors.
Part of my work has been looking to build partnerships. I mentioned PIPSC. They have 57,000 members. Their national executive has voted to become a funding partner of ours, work with us and are prepared to start helping with that messaging. The Association of Professional Executives of the Public Service of Canada, or APEX, has offered as well, as has a group in Western Canada called NIDMAR, which is the National Institute of Disability Management and Research. They have a broad constituency across the country, around the world and they too are looking for this to become something that can help them advance the work they’re doing in terms of ensuring disabled people find themselves back at work. Also, Community Foundations of Canada is ready. So we have quite a list of folks we’ve talked to, all are in support of it and anxious to get out and start helping create this tide of kindness.
Rabbi Bulka: Another partner that we want to have, Jeff — I have to keep reminding him when we do this — is the Canadian Automobile Association and how kindness can impact on road safety and road rage.
Senator Poirier: Thank you, Senator Munson, for bringing this bill forward. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for sharing all that you have shared. It’s inspiring. I think bringing awareness to the importance of this in our daily lives is something that we all have a responsibility of working on, and I think doing this would be great.
I’m not the best person on social media, but I have to say this just shows how something can go so big. We had a young lady from the Moncton, New Brunswick, Riverview area, Becca Schofield, who was going through cancer and she passed away, a little while back. When she became very ill, they put together what I think is called a hashtag or something. She started a movement that was just #BeccaToldMeTo, and it went viral. People were out there doing all kinds of acts of kindness. When someone would ask, “Why did you do that? Becca told me to.” It moved on and on. I think a lot of people all over will remember that for years to come.
Senator Munson, in your experience with you did it with Autism Day, where you were able to bring it in successfully and keep talking about it. What are your plans to make sure that the first time we have a national kindness week that Canadians are aware of it? I know we all have a responsibility, each and every one of us, to make sure that our communities know about it.
How did you do it with Autism Day? Did you go out on social media? How did you promote it?
Senator Munson: First on Becca, she was front and centre in my speech, you might remember, in the Senate. I am a New Brunswicker, so #BeccaToldMeTo.
There were some chats this morning about some senators that don’t tweet, and I tweet a lot.
Senator Poirier: Okay. I don’t.
Senator Munson: But I use it as an instrument for social change. I use it as an instrument of promoting good deeds of others and good deeds that we’re doing in my office each and every day. I think that is an important instrument, particularly for young people, to use Instagram, whatever you have to use, to send those very positive messages.
When it came to autism, it wasn’t by any social media. It was a gentleman on Parliament Hill when I first arrived on the Hill 15 — not first arrived; I arrived in 1972 — but 15 years ago as a senator. He had a billboard on his front saying, “My son has autism. Help me.” He looked at me and said, “You used to work in the media and used to ask a lot of questions. I want you to answer some. You’re a senator.” So he came to my office and we sat down. It comes back to taking time.
We held each other, cried together and he talked about his 9- or 10-year-old son at the time who wasn’t getting proper services. Out of that came the idea of moving things through the Senate by a statement, and I wondered what I could do after that. When you speak within the walls of the Senate, who’s listening, sometimes? Then I was told, “Launch an inquiry, which is a longer statement.” Okay. Then what do I do? That’s the end of it. I said no. It was Senator Art Eggleton and Senator Willy Keon who said, “Bring it to the Social Affairs Committee.”
After that, we did six weeks of study. After that came a report from a person with autism from New Brunswick, who was very skilled in computer technology. He told us in this very room, “Senators, if we don’t do something now, you’re going to pay now or pay later.” He said that. It was his title for this book of what happened, which is a template being used throughout the whole autism community.
At that time, there were so many different voices out there. Now there’s CASDA, the Canadian Autism Spectrum Disorder Alliance. Governments have done things. They haven’t done the national strategy, which I hope will happen, but there have been Chairs of Excellence in universities. There has been funding for Canadian autism partnerships. There is now Ready, Willing & Able, an adult autism working program, and many other things. That’s where it happened.
So when, as a senator, that opportunity walks through your door, don’t close it. It’s a place to go, and at the end of the day, using various elements of social media will connect us all in the age that we’re living.
[Translation]
Senator Mégie: First, I’d like to thank you for your presentations. I’d like to make suggestions for the list of kindly beneficial actions. It could be a doctor or health professional showing kindness. That would be a good start on the topic of kind therapeutic action. What I want to get to with this is the other kind action already mentioned by my colleague Senator Ravalia. I’m thinking of schools where a lot of ethnic groups are represented. Have you ever taught or given workshops in schools where the children were from different ethnic groups? This could perhaps bring them closer and reduce prejudice. Did you ever do that? If so, did you notice any effects?
[English]
Ms. Levine: Thank you for your question. The schools that I have worked in thus far are multicultural to a certain extent. There are children from different walks of life and different socio-economic backgrounds, so there is some variety in the classrooms.
When we talk about acceptance of one another, it brings up a lot of raw feelings for some students who have dealt with discrimination, even in a way, at a young age, where they don’t really understand what’s happening. When you delve into these topics with students at an age-appropriate level, it does help open discussions, conversations and attitudes towards one another. Also acceptance, even if it’s not necessarily the colour of our skin but our abilities and what we are good at and not good at. You will find in any group setting of 20 to 30 children, there will be 20 to 30 differences times 100.
So the answer is “yes.” There is a tremendous impact when you’re having open dialogue with children. They want to learn and have positive experiences with each other.
[Translation]
Senator Mégie: Mr. Turner, I believe I understood earlier that you spoke about online courses and had received requests from public servants. Was it your organization, Kind Canada, that was invited to present those workshops, or are they online courses?
[English]
Mr. Turner: The origin of the program is ours. I have been looking for partners for some time. There’s a cost associated with building it. The course would be designed as a professional development opportunity taken over a period of time, where people will experience a number of different elements within the program.
On various occasions where I’ve been speaking about this, I’ve been pursuing partners. That’s what took me to PIPSC and others.
Along the way, when we partnered with Ottawa Public Health, it was because of a need expressed to us by others asking if we could help — if we could participate in some way to teach people — show them what kindness can actually do. That’s what led to it.
We’ve been asked on a number of occasions by Ottawa Public Health. We’ve now started a program with PIPSC, and we’ve just been asked to do our second workshop in Saskatchewan. We were out in British Columbia two weeks ago.
It’s a combination of things — mostly us driving it — but when people become aware of it, they turn right around and ask us for more. Our hope is that it continues to grow.
Senator Munson: I can’t help myself, Mr. Turner. For the people who are going to be watching this by the hundreds of thousands and connecting with each other, what is PIPSC? Outside of public servants, there could be some people paying attention, hopefully. Could you explain PIPSC to us?
Mr. Turner: Thank you.
Senator Munson: We do this all the time here, by the way.
Mr. Turner: PIPSC is the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada.
Rabbi Bulka: In regards to that, we referred to ourselves as KCG, which is Kind Canada Généreux. That is our official name, but KCG, we didn’t want a mix-up with Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Senator Omidvar: I know we should all be kind, but I am fairly pragmatic, so I want to ask you a pragmatic question. You’ve talked a lot about kindness in children, and I think good habits of kindness instilled in children will make us all a kinder, gentler, better society. Schools, though, are outside the reach of the federal government because they are creatures of the provinces.
Rabbi, you are completely right. I tried to make a tiny change in a school curriculum in a local school board. It was like climbing Mount Everest, and I was not successful.
What plans do you have to institutionalize happiness week in the ranks of the school system by working with the provinces?
Rabbi Bulka: The plan — it’s not working as quickly as we would like — is to have a product that we would go to the schools with, basically to the Minister of Education in each of the provinces. We’ve been told this could take anywhere from five to 10 years and there is no guarantee it’s going to help. So we have started looking for alternative ways to engage the younger population through social media.
Instead of a front-end goal, it has sort of receded because we don’t want to waste time. It hasn’t escaped us yet. We still would like to have that.
Maybe I’m dreaming in technicolour, but the idea of having a national kindness week may be the prod for the individual provinces to say, “Well, if we have it nationally, let’s see what we can do provincially to make it work.” That is our hope.
Senator Omidvar: That would be the right way to do it. Thank you.
Senator Munson: With autism, they also talk about provincial deliverables when it comes to health money and so on and so forth. It happened because of the collective behaviour of pretty well everybody in the federal government passing these messages along. In schools, they have flag-raising ceremonies. An autism flag goes up on April 2 in a lot of schools. At city halls — where the federal government has no place — they too have flag-raising ceremonies, discussions and so on. I think it crosses that barrier.
The Chair: We are running out of time. Your testimony has inspired me to be kind, and I can’t say no to Senator Manning, who promised to be very short.
Senator Manning: Not a question, a comment, and a good segue into my comment is from Senator Omidvar. The world wasn’t built in a day, but we did put a man on the moon, eventually. In my view, kindness starts with each of us and spreads out from there. As the rabbi said earlier, kindness is contagious.
I mentioned in my mom’s quote a while ago. I developed a thank you card in my office that I send out to people on a continuous basis, and I have the quote from my mother inside the card. So kindness is passed on, it’s contagious, and it starts here.
The Chair: Thank you for that comment. I want to thank our witnesses. If I can read this room properly, you are proof of the snowball effect of kindness and smiling.
I want to ask our witnesses to stay in their places for a few minutes, because someone wants to take a photo before we go to clause by clause.
We are now going to move through clause by clause of two bills, Bill S-248, respecting National Physicians’ Day, and Bill S-244, An Act respecting Kindness Week. They are both simple enough bills. I just want to put it there that if at any point a senator is not clear or has a question on how to process or wants clarification, please feel free to ask.
Is it agreed that the committee proceed to clause-by-clause considerations of Bill S-248, An Act respecting National Physicians’ Day?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
The Chair: Shall the title stand postponed?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
The Chair: Shall the preamble stand postponed?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
The Chair: Shall clause 1, which contains the short title, stand postponed?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
The Chair: Shall clause 2 carry?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
The Chair: Shall clause 3 carry?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
The Chair: Shall clause 1, which contains the short title, carry?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
The Chair: Shall the preamble carry?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
The Chair: Shall the title carry?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
The Chair: Shall the bill carry?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
The Chair: Does the committee wish to consider appending observations to the report?
Hon. Senators: No.
The Chair: Is it agreed that I report this bill to the Senate?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
The Chair: Thank you.
Is it agreed that the committee proceed to clause-by-clause consideration of Bill S-244, An Act respecting Kindness Week?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
The Chair: Shall the title stand postponed?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
The Chair: Shall the preamble stand postponed?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
The Chair: Shall clause 1, which contains the short title, stand postponed?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
The Chair: Shall clause 2 carry?
Hon. Senators: Carry.
The Chair: Shall clause 1, which contains the short title, carry?
Hon. Senators: Carry.
The Chair: Shall the preamble carry?
Hon. Senators: Carry.
The Chair: Shall the title carry?
Hon. Senators: Carry.
The Chair: Shall the bill carry?
Hon. Senators: Carry.
The Chair: Does the committee wish to consider appending observations to the report?
Hon. Senators: No.
The Chair: Is it agreed that I report this bill to the Senate?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
Congratulations, Senator Munson and Rabbi Bulka.
(The committee adjourned.)