Canada’s efforts to combat abuse in sports saw slow progress in 2024

CALGARY — Steps to make Canadian sports safer were made in 2024, but to what end?

A national commission began cross-country public consultations, an online registry of people sanctioned or under investigation for maltreatment in sport went live and a seismic shift in handling future complaints was announced.

Canada was said to be a long way from the culture change identified as key to draining sport of toxic behaviour.

“The progress is definitely slow and a bumpy ride,” said Erin Willson, an Olympic artistic swimmer and past president of AthletesCan, which provides a unified voice for national-team athletes.

“The big question that I’ve wrestled with probably for the last seven or eight years is how do we change the culture of sport? It all comes down to the values of sport, what are we valuing and what are we praising? I really do believe that everything trickles down from there.

“It’s all well and good if we can tell each other that we should treat people better, but when the only thing that we’re celebrating is winning … we’re never going to be able to change.”

Bruce Kidd, a University of Toronto professor emeritus in sport and public policy, gives Canada a middling grade in safe sport for 2024

“I would say we’re in the C-plus territory,” said Kidd, a former runner who represented Canada at the 1964 Olympics.

“There is a universal code of conduct to prevent and eliminate maltreatment and abuse, the UCCMS. There’s still way, way, way too many people who don’t know that.”

Athletes Empowered director Amelia Cline, a lawyer and former elite gymnast, says beyond increased awareness there is a problem in sport that needs to be fixed, she saw minimal progress in 2024.

“There’s still a lot of people in the system that are either turning a blind eye to what’s happening, or they’re actually enabling it by retaliating against the people who come forward and discouraging people from coming forward,” said Cline. “When those people are allowed to continue in this system with impunity, you’re not going to see any change.

“You still have people who are in the system experiencing abuse, and they are terrified to come forward, even with all of these policies and all of these processes and all of the public awareness of these issues, that tells you that the change actually isn’t permeating right? It’s just sort of surface-level. It’s not actually getting to where it needs to go. Unfortunately, we’re still in that space.”

After the explosive headlines of 2022 and 2023, when athletes shared tearful testimonies before parliamentary committees about sexual, physical, and verbal abuse, and Hockey Canada faced scrutiny over its handling of sexual assault allegations against members of the 2018 national junior men’s team, 2024 was a year of reckoning.

The Office of the Sport Integrity Commissioner (OSIC) made public in March a searchable database of people sanctioned or whose eligibility to participate in sport was restricted.

As of December, the registry listed eight sanctioned individuals and 18 under provisional restrictions.

“OSIC’s registry still only covers the national level,” said Cline, who spoke to parliamentary committees about the physical and verbal abuse she endured at the hands of coaches as a young athlete.

“There’s a whole lot of grassroots incidents that are happening without people knowing about them. In some of the work we’ve done, we have some people who don’t know that their own coach in their own club is under investigation because it’s been so swept under the rug.

“The further development of the registry is going to be really important.”

The Future of Sport in Canada Commission, which was announced by then-Sports Minister Carla Qualtrough in December 2023, began public consultations in Toronto in October and will conclude on Jan. 31 in Victoria.

The commission’s mandate is to produce recommendations in 2025 to make sport safer and improve systems through elements such as culture, policy, funding, governance, reporting and accountability.

“The appointment of the Future in 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 actually share and talk about their experiences in a very thoughtful way,” she said.

However, the political will to implement the commission’s recommendations is unclear, following Qualtrough’s announcement that she 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 stint as minister from 2015 to 2017.

“Sport has to have a status in the cabinet that is commensurate with the huge challenges,” Kidd said.

Qualtrough also announced that three years into its existence, OSIC will move in 2025 under the umbrella of the Canadian Centre For Ethics in Sport, which administers drug testing in Canada under the World Anti-Doping Agency’s code.

The minister said in an interview earlier this year the CCES was capable of streamlining the complaint and sanctioning process and, because the CCES board isn’t government-appointed, the move can satisfy those who felt the complaints body needed to be more independent.

“Over the course of a year and a half, or two, it became obvious there would be a better way of delivering those functions, those services, things like the athlete tip line, the investigation, the sanctioning … the things that OSIC does, that could perhaps address both the perceived and the real challenges those functions were facing in that organization,” Qualtrough said.

“CCES has an existing structure for their anti-doping program. They’ve got this established organizational infrastructure … that they can draw upon to fulfil those responsibilities.”

Willson was concerned about safe-sport fatigue because “everyone is kind of over it to a certain extent or it feels like that.”

“There are still a lot of issues that need to be solved,” she said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 22, 2024.

Donna Spencer, The Canadian Press