The special commission on young people’s screen time, which will likely be set up this fall, will not have to submit its report before May 2025, deplores the Parti Québécois (PQ).
In an interview on Wednesday, the leader of the PQ, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, denounced the fact that the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) wanted to take several months to study the impact of screens and social media on the health of young people.
Mr. St-Pierre Plamondon argues that these impacts are already known and well documented. He calls for the commission to accelerate its work so that concrete measures can be put in place from January 2025.
“We are in a standoff between the PQ and the CAQ on the issue of deadlines. In France, we assessed this question in one month to quickly give ourselves the means to act,” he underlined.
“You have to give yourself three, four months, but not a story that lasts for years. The CAQ insists that we plan this over a year, that would postpone us until next May, which means that there will be no measures before September 2025. This is unacceptable,” he insisted.
At the office of the government’s parliamentary leader, Simon Jolin-Barrette, the response was that discussions were still underway with the opposition parties.
“We deplore the exit of the leader of the PQ, who wishes to rush the work and only give the commission a few months to fulfill its broad mandate,” we said in an email sent to The Canadian Press.
“We must take the time necessary to do things well and to adequately document the situation prevailing in Quebec. »
“Let us remember that this is a sensitive and important issue that will ultimately have an impact on our children. We therefore invite the PQ to collaborate rather than politicizing the process that we want to be transpartisan,” we added.
On May 25, pressed by the youth wing of his party, Prime Minister François Legault proposed creating a special transpartisan commission, like the Dying with Dignity commission, which would look into the issues surrounding screens. .
Mr. Legault is accused by the PQ of blowing hot and cold on this issue, to the extent that he does not hesitate to qualify social media as “virtual pushers”, while ridiculing certain PQ proposals, such as that of ‘establish a numerical majority.
This proposal was also taken up by the youth wing of the CAQ, before being defeated in the general council last month.
More and more studies show that screen use by young people is harmful to their health. Last year, the United States’ chief medical officer said that social media is the “driving force of a national crisis in youth mental health.”
The special commission proposed by Mr. Legault must look into: young people’s screen time, supervision measures, particularly at school, access to social networks, cyberbullying and minors’ access to pornography on the web.