In 2024, steps were taken to make Canadian sports safer, but to what end?
A national commission launched public consultations across the country, an online register of people sanctioned or investigated for abuse in sport was launched and a radical change in the handling of future complaints was announced.
Canada was said to be a long way from the cultural change identified as key to eliminating toxic behavior from sport.
“Progress is definitely slow and full of obstacles,” said Erin Willson, an Olympic artistic swimmer and former president of AthletesCan, which provides a unified voice for national team athletes.
“The big question I’ve struggled with probably for the last seven or eight years is how do we change the culture of the sport? It all comes down to the values of sport, what do we value and what do we praise? I really think it all flows from there.
“It’s all well and good if we can tell each other that we should treat people better, but when all we celebrate is winning… we can never change.”
Bruce Kidd, professor emeritus of sport and public policy at the University of Toronto, gives Canada a medium rating for safe sport by 2024
“I’d say we’re in C-plus territory,” said Kidd, a former runner who represented Canada in the 1964 Olympics.
“There is a universal code of conduct to prevent and eliminate mistreatment and abuse, the UCCMS. There are still many people who don’t know.”
Athletes Empowered director Amelia Cline, a lawyer and former elite gymnast, says that beyond increased awareness there is a problem in the sport that needs to be solved; saw minimal progress in 2024.
“There are still a lot of people in the system who are turning a blind eye to what’s happening or who are actually enabling it by retaliating against people who come forward and discouraging them from coming forward,” Cline said. “When those people are allowed to continue with impunity in this system, we will not see any change.
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“There are still people who are in the system suffering abuse and are terrified to come forward, even with all these policies and all these processes and all the public awareness about these issues, that tells you that change is actually not permeating, right? It’s just kind of surface level. You’re not actually getting where you need to go. Unfortunately, we are still in that space.”
After the explosive headlines of 2022 and 2023, when athletes tearfully shared testimonies before parliamentary committees about sexual, physical and verbal abuse, and Hockey Canada faced scrutiny for its handling of sexual assault allegations against members of the men’s junior national team From 2018, 2024 was a year of reckoning.
The Office of the Sports Integrity Commissioner (OSIC) in March made public a searchable database of people who were sanctioned or whose eligibility to participate in sports was restricted.
As of December, the registry included eight sanctioned people and 18 under provisional restrictions.
“The OSIC registry still covers only the national level,” said Cline, who spoke before parliamentary committees about the physical and verbal abuse she suffered at the hands of coaches as a young athlete.
“There are many grassroots incidents that occur without people knowing about them. In some of the work we have done, we have some people who don’t know that their own coach at their own club is being investigated because it has been swept under the rug.
“Further development of the registry will be really important.”
The Commission on the Future of Sport in Canada, which was announced by then-Sports Minister Carla Qualtrough in December 2023, began public consultations in Toronto in October and will conclude on January 31 in Victoria.
The commission’s mandate is to produce recommendations by 2025 to make sport safer and improve systems through elements such as culture, policy, funding, governance, reporting and accountability.
“The appointment of the Future of Sport Commission was a good thing, although it moved slowly,” Kidd said.
Willson called the commission “a step forward.”
“It gives a lot of athletes the power to share and talk about their experiences in a very thoughtful way,” he said.
However, the political will to implement the commission’s recommendations is unclear, following Qualtrough’s announcement that he will not seek re-election and the appointment of Terry Duguid as the next sports minister on Friday.
The sports portfolio has seen six leadership changes in just over seven years since Qualtrough’s first term as minister from 2015 to 2017.
“Sport must have a status in the cabinet that is commensurate with the enormous challenges,” Kidd said.
Qualtrough also announced that, three years into its existence, OSIC will move in 2025 under the umbrella of the Canadian Center for Ethics in Sport, which administers drug testing in Canada under the World Anti-Doping Agency code.
The minister said in an interview earlier this year that the CCES was able to streamline the complaints and sanctions process and, because the CCES board is not appointed by the government, the move may satisfy those who felt that the complaints body needed to be more independent.
“Over the course of a year and a half, or two, it became clear that there would be a better way to do those functions, those services, things like the athlete reporting line, the investigation, the sanctions… the things that it does. OSIC, that could perhaps address both the perceived and actual challenges those functions faced in that organization,” Qualtrough said.
“CCES has an existing structure for its anti-doping program. “They have this organizational infrastructure in place… that they can draw on to fulfill those responsibilities.”
Willson was concerned about fatigue in safe sports because “everyone has gotten over it to some degree or feels that way.”
“There are still many problems to be solved,” he said.
