Steps have been taken in 2024 to make Canadian sports safer. But what is its purpose?
The National Commission has launched a cross-border public consultation, an online register of people who have been sanctioned or are under investigation for sports abuse has been launched and groundbreaking changes to the handling of future complaints have been announced.
Canada is said to be a long way from the cultural change identified as key in sport to root out harmful behavior.
“The pace of progress is definitely slow and arduous,” said Erin Willson, an Olympic artistic swimmer and former president of AthletesCan, which provides a unified voice for national athletes.
“Probably the biggest question I’ve been wrestling with over the last seven or eight years is how do we change the culture of sports? It all comes down to the values of the sport. What do we value and what do we praise? I really believe it all flows from there.
“If we can tell each other that we need to treat people better, that’s all well and good, but if the only thing we celebrate is winning… we’ll never change.”
Bruce Kidd, professor emeritus of sport and public policy at the University of Toronto, gave Canada a middling rating for safe sport in 2024.
“I’d say we’re in C-plus territory,” said Kidd, a former track and field athlete who competed for Canada at the 1964 Olympics.
“We have UCCMS, a universal code of conduct to prevent and eliminate abuse and abuse. “There are still too many people who don’t know that.”
Aside from increased awareness, Athletes Empowered executive director Amelia Cline, a lawyer and former elite gymnast, said there are problems with the sport that need to be fixed and that minimal progress will be made in 2024.
“There are still a lot of people in the system who are either turning a blind eye to what’s going on or actually enabling this by retaliating against people who come forward and preventing people from coming forward,” Cline said. “If those people are allowed to continue to stay in this system with impunity, you won’t see any change.
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“There are still people experiencing abuse within the system. Despite all these policies and processes and public awareness of these issues, they are afraid to come forward. It doesn’t seep in, right? That’s kind of surface level. It doesn’t actually get you where you need to go. Unfortunately, we are still in that space.”
After explosive headlines in 2022 and 2023, in which players gave tearful testimony to a parliamentary committee about sexual, physical and verbal abuse, Hockey Canada announced in 2018 that sexual assault against players on the men’s youth national team had occurred. We were investigated due to issues with the handling of the allegations. Year of reckoning.
The Office of the Sports Integrity Commissioner (OSIC) released a searchable database of people who have been sanctioned or have restricted participation in sport in March.
As of December, the registry listed eight people as sanctioned and 18 as temporarily restricted.
“OSIC’s registration still only applies at the national level,” said Cline, who told a congressional committee about the physical and verbal abuse she endured at the hands of coaches as a young athlete.
“A lot of grassroots incidents are happening without people knowing. Some of the work we’ve done has coaches at their clubs being so covered up that people don’t know they’re being investigated.
“Further development of the registry will be really important.”
The Commission on the Future of Sport in Canada, announced by then-Sports Minister Carla Qualtrough in December 2023, began public consultations in Toronto in October and is scheduled to conclude in Victoria on January 31.
The committee’s mandate is to make recommendations to make sport safer by 2025 and improve the system through elements such as culture, policy, funding, governance, reporting and accountability.
“Future appointments to the sports committee have been a good thing, albeit a slow process,” Kidd said.
Wilson called the committee “a step forward.”
“This gives a lot of athletes the power to really share and talk about their experiences in a very thoughtful way,” she said.
But the political will to implement the committee’s recommendations is unclear after Qualtrough announced he would not seek re-election and appointed Terry Duguid as the next sports minister on Friday.
The sports portfolio has seen six leadership changes in just seven years since Qualtrough first took up the role between 2015 and 2017.
“Sport must have a place in the cabinet worthy of its enormous challenge,” Kidd said.
Qualtrough also announced that in 2025, three years after its founding, OSIC will move under the umbrella of the Canadian Center for Sports Ethics, which governs drug testing in Canada under the rules of the World Anti-Doping Agency.
The minister said in an interview earlier this year that CCES could streamline its complaints and sanctions procedures, satisfying those who think the complaints body should be more independent because the CCES board is not appointed by the government.
“Over the course of a year and a half or two years, it became clear that there was a better way to deliver these functions, these services, the things that the OSIC does, including player reporting, investigations, sanctions. Perhaps you can solve both the perceived and real problems facing that function in that organization,” Qualtrough said.
“CCES has an existing structure for its anti-doping program. “They have a solid organizational infrastructure they can leverage to fulfill these responsibilities.”
Willson was concerned about safety sports fatigue because “everyone has gone overboard to some degree or feels that way.”
“There are still a lot of issues that need to be addressed,” she said.
