Categories of harm · Chapter 4 / 15

Cyberbullying and online harassment

Cyberbullying is the most extensively documented category of online harm to children and youth in Canada. Statistics Canada's 2023 Canadian Health Survey on Children and Youth found that approximately twenty-four percent1 of Canadian youth aged 12–17 reported cyberbullying victimization, with some survey instruments and age-extended samples reporting rates approaching one in three. A systematic review by Arseneault (2018)2 documented the downstream consequences of bullying victimization, confirming associations with adjustment problems, poor mental and physical health, and socioeconomic difficulties persisting into adulthood.

Health care costs

CIHI's 2023–24 data3 (published May 2025) document 1,090 emergency department visits per 100,000 children and youth aged 5 to 24 for mental health disorders. Applying Canada's youth population of 11.3 million to that rate yields approximately 123,000 total mental health visits to emergency annually.

Since no direct Canadian estimate exists to anchor our attribution factor for cyberbullying to specific emergency admittance itself, we examined multiple sources drawn from international meta-studies and European research. From this analysis we have estimated a population-attributable fraction of between 12 and 18 percent across our low and high scenarios, pooled from three independent sources: Jadambaa et al. (2020), Takizawa et al. (2014) and a 2021 study in Pediatric Emergency Care which found that 17 percent of paediatric mental health ED patients reported cyberbullying victimization and 25 percent identified bullying as a contributing factor to their visit. The 12–18 percent range represents a conservative estimate of attribution, consistent with an overall cyberbullying incidence rate of about 25 per cent reported in the Canadian youth health survey. Overall, this yields an assumed 14,800 to 22,100 attributable ED visits against which we apply a health system cost of approximately $611 per ED visit4 — equivalent to $9 to $13.5 million.

From here we then estimate a series of subsequent health care interactions as follows:

  • a 20 percent admission rate on incidence at a cost of $11,350 per inpatient stay5 ($33.6 million to $50.2 million);
  • 4.5 physician follow-up visits at $120 each ($8.0M–$12.0M); and
  • pharmaceutical costs scaled to a similar attribution fraction ($85M–$135M).

This generates a total range estimate for health care costs of between $136 million to $211 million annually.

Educational disruption

PricewaterhouseCoopers Australia (2018), in a study for the Alannah and Madeline Foundation, estimated the total economic cost of bullying over a student cohort's entire 13-year school career at AUD $525.2 million.6 Of this, AUD $306.7 million represents senior staff time, the component directly attributable to school system resource demand. The remaining components (carer supervision, health services, and policing costs) are excluded here as they are captured separately in this analysis.

Annualizing the staff-time component to AUD $23.6 million per year and dividing by national Australian enrolment of 4.16 million gives AUD $5.67 per student annually. Converted to 2026 Canadian dollars (applying approximately 26 percent AUD price-level adjustment from 2018 to 2026 and a 0.93 AUD/CAD exchange rate average over the last year), this yields approximately CAD $6.64 per student. Currently, 6.2 million Canadian students are enrolled in K-12 education.7 Based on the 2023 CHSCY, approximately 37 percent of youth who experience bullying of some kind in the past year indicate having experienced cyberbullying.8 Based on this attribution factor9 we estimate disruption costs of between $10.6 million to $19.1 million CAD annually as of 2026.

Productivity losses

Brimblecombe et al.'s 2018 longitudinal study10 established that childhood bullying victimization is associated with poorer health outcomes and socioeconomic disadvantages persisting into adulthood, including lower health-related quality of life, reduced wealth accumulation, and higher health service utilization. To put this into the context of potential loss of productivity within the Canadian workplace we reference MHCC's workplace productivity loss estimate of over $6.3 billion from 2011, which applied to all working Canadians of all ages.13

To adjust this to our present context, we update this estimate to 2026 dollars ($9.5 billion gross) by applying a wage index factor of about 1.5 based on how median income has changed since that time. We make no further adjustment for changes in the underlying incidence of youth mental health problems since the MHCC estimate was produced. This is a conservative choice: emergency department visits for mental disorders among Canadians aged 5 to 24 rose 45 per cent between 2006–07 and 2013–14, peaked toward the end of that decade, and in 2023–24 — at 1,090 per 100,000 — remained above their mid-2000s level.11

We adjust this figure for both employment and income differences for youth between the ages of 15 and 2412 and apply a 12 to 18 percent attribution factor specific to online harms. This yields an estimate of $56 million to $83 million in present-value productivity losses for this affected cohort.

It is important to highlight that this only considers the current-day productivity losses associated with younger workers whose employment is affected by cyberbullying. The extent to which this compounds on future earnings loss through impaired educational outcomes and other longer lasting productivity implications is not assessed and would be difficult to ascertain.

References & Notes 13
  1. Statistics Canada, Table 13-10-0948-01, Health indicator statistics for youth aged 12 to 17 years, youth reported. Based on 2023 wave of survey (2024 does not include a data point for cyber-bullying). This is within the range of results reported in the 2019 survey collection which estimated about one quarter to one third of children have experienced an incident of cyber-bullying in the past year.
    ↩ Back to reference 1
  2. Arseneault, L. (2018). "Annual Research Review: The persistent and pervasive impact of being bullied in childhood and adolescence". Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. Vol. 59, no. 4. p. 405–421.
    ↩ Back to reference 2
  3. CIHI (2025a), Overall Trends in Children's and Youth Mental Health Care in Canada (Ottawa: CIHI, 2025). Data from NACRS and DAD, fiscal year 2023–24 (published May 2025).
    ↩ Back to reference 3
  4. Derived as follows: 2018-19 data from CIHI estimated the cost for an ED visit by presenting issue, which at that time represented a cost of $397 per mental health visit for all ages. This was then scaled to 2026 using data from Table 4.1 in the 2025 Spending Trends in Healthcare database from CIHI, adjusting for changes in patient mix volume and forecasting future growth.
    ↩ Back to reference 4
  5. Derived using CIHI's Patient Cost Estimator, which returned an average pediatric mental health in-patient visit cost of $9,400 volume-weighted, then scaled to 2026 based on similar trends in overall mental health and substance unit cost growth. CIHI (2026). Patient Cost Estimator. Accessed: April 15, 2026.
    ↩ Back to reference 5
  6. PricewaterhouseCoopers Australia (2018), The Economic Cost of Bullying in Australian Schools (Sydney: PwC). Total estimated cost AUD $525.2 million over a 13-year cumulative cohort. Staff-time and school-system component only; health system and carer costs excluded. ABS Schools Australia 2025 enrolment: 4,160,918 students.
    ↩ Back to reference 6
  7. Statistics Canada, Table 37-10-0109-01, "Number of students in elementary and secondary schools, by school type and program type" (Elementary-Secondary Education Survey), 2023/2024: 5,993,451; projected 6,200,000 for 2025/26.
    ↩ Back to reference 7
  8. In 2023, 65.5% of youth indicated being bullied in the past 12 months, of which 24.5% (37% of group) said this was from cyberbullying. See: Statistics Canada, Table 13-10-0948-01.
    ↩ Back to reference 8
  9. Attribution range of 25–45 per cent applied for the low and high bounds. The lower bound reflects Canadian survey data (CHSCY, Table 13-10-0948-01), where cyberbullying represents a smaller share of overall bullying; the upper bound reflects international evidence where online attribution runs higher. The 37 per cent figure in the text is the CHSCY-derived point estimate (24.5 per cent of the 65.5 per cent of youth reporting bullying), used as the central tendency rather than as a bound.
    ↩ Back to reference 9
  10. Brimblecombe, N. et al. (2018). "Long-term economic impact associated with childhood bullying victimisation". Social Science & Medicine. Vol. 208. P. 134–141.
    ↩ Back to reference 10
  11. Canadian Institute for Health Information (2015). Care for Children and Youth With Mental Disorders. Ottawa: CIHI. Emergency department visits for mental disorders among Canadians aged 5 to 24 reached 1,371 per 100,000 in 2013–14, a 45 per cent increase from 2006–07. For the recent period: CIHI (2025a), Overall Trends in Children's and Youth Mental Health Care in Canada (Ottawa: CIHI, 2025), data from NACRS and DAD, fiscal year 2023–24 (published May 2025) — rates declined from 1,582 per 100,000 in 2018–19 to 1,090 in 2023–24. This may reflect some noise associated with post-pandemic stabilization of the health system rather than an entire trend change.
    ↩ Back to reference 11
  12. Estimated wage share of younger workers aged 15–24, yielding approximately 4.9% of total compensation base (Statistics Canada, Labour Force Survey). The 12–18 percent attribution factor follows Takizawa, R., Maughan, B. and Arseneault, L. (2014), American Journal of Psychiatry, Issue 171, No. 7, p. 777–784.
    ↩ Back to reference 12
  13. Smetanin, P., Stiff, D., Briante, C., Adair, C.E., Ahmad, S., and Khan, M. (2011). The Life and Economic Impact of Major Mental Illnesses in Canada: 2011 to 2041. RiskAnalytica, on behalf of the Mental Health Commission of Canada. Workplace productivity impact of mental illness of over $6.3 billion annually (2011).
    ↩ Back to reference 13