Hockey Canada: Burn It All Down

On A Culture, And An Institution, Broken

(This column will avoid as much as possible any graphic or unwelcome details, but still, this discusses sexual assault and violence, so all readers should be warned accordingly.)

“Outraged? I’m barely surprised.”

I’ve tried to write this piece now for weeks – I can’t stop thinking about the horrors of what the 8 players after a night of drinking did in London, Ontario just over four years ago. I can’t stop thinking of the victim, how she was failed by so many, how Hockey Canada failed this country, how mortifying all of this is. But the main thought I’ve been trying to articulate this whole time is how fundamentally unsurprised I am by all of this.

It's always been obvious to anyone who wanted to look that this country’s relationship with hockey was (and is) deeply unhealthy, from the way that Dany Heatley – who was at the wheel of a car crash that killed one of his closest friends – was just allowed to not just keep an NHL job but given all opportunities by my Senators and by Hockey Canada, including two Olympic appearances. As a kid, I loved Heatley, because I was young and stupid and because all the adults made it clear that it was okay to love him, because he could score 50 goals two straight seasons.

It's always been obvious because the way this sports allows everything to be warped around it is deeply unhealthy. The prevalence of the CHL and the World Juniors, the way that we know who these star players are from the age of 14 or 15 sometimes, the way that they are feted and their worlds centered on them is insanity, and it is the cause of this culture where nobody gets to say no to them.

Obviously, it’s not every player who’s ever made major junior hockey – I went to high school with someone who made the OHL, and partied with someone currently playing professionally – but it is a problem that high performing athletes are told that their needs come first so much, because it starts to become not just a belief about their relationships to their teams, but their entire mantra in life.

It’s a culture where goalscoring comes above integrity, where winning games is more important than integrity or decency, and one where people are never upbraided when they’re assholes, especially at a time when kids and teenagers really need to be told when they’ve crossed a line. If your focus is solely on how Hockey Canada is handling their affairs, you’re misguided, because this isn’t just an institutional problem, it’s a cultural one.

Obviously Hockey Canada is a disgrace and needs to be destroyed, but if your focus is solely on how Hockey Canada responds to these complaints of misconduct and abuse and not also on reducing the number of actual sexual assaults, then you’re missing the actual problem. This is only going to be fixed with real cultural change from a young age – proper coaching that doesn’t put winning as the only priority, an end to the kowtowing to talent, and the CHL teams need to come up with some proper form of anti-sexual violence training to put their players through before every season, at the minimum. It’s a cultural issue when star players across two generations – 2018 and 2002 – think it’s okay to sexually assault women, because both sets of players were clearly raised in a fundamentally broken way. To save the sport, this has to change, and it has to do so now.

…

Now, just because I wanted to start this article with the focus on the biggest villain in this – the rapist players and the culture that produced them – don’t for a second think that Hockey Canada isn’t also fucking scum, because they are.

It’s come out today that between insurance settlements and payments from the National Equity Fund, Hockey Canada has settled 21 cases worth $8.9M. (Given the reported settlement with the London woman and the reporting that $6.8M of that $8.9M is related to one man, it seems that those numbers don’t include the London victim’s payment, but I’m guessing about this.) The National Equity Fund, of course, is paid for, in part, by minor hockey registration fees – meaning that my parents, who paid for 17 seasons of hockey between me and my brother, helped in part pay for settling sexual assault allegations.

What a pleasant thing to learn.

Hockey Canada priced in rape to their business model, effectively – deciding that it was just easier to pay out these settlements as opposed to, you know, fixing anything – and they did it with the money of the parents of kids who just wanted to (in most cases, not particularly well) play hockey. As one of those kids who was not good at the sport, I loved playing it just because even at my level, it was exhilarating. I remember the rush of a goal on my birthday one year, and the high it gave me. And the check my parents wrote that year probably paid to protect some scumbag.

They knew that current (and probably former) NHLers have credible rape allegations against them, and not only did they do nothing, they didn’t care. The World Championship team from this year has at least one player on it who has yet to comment on their status vis-à-vis the 2018 assault, and if they’ve been settling this many cases, there’s probably been a lot more people whose cases they settled, and then played for them again.

It's a truly disgusting institution at this point, and this is the textbook definition of institutional failure. The reason the National Equity Fund was used in the London attack was because they didn’t want their insurance company investigating it. Why? Because they know it would unveil a whole lot of shit they don’t want out there. They put protecting themselves above the victims, despite the fact that this institution gains nothing from protecting the players. If we’re as good at this fucking sport as we love to claim we are, then we should be able to win without the services of known rapists. And yet, Hockey Canada protected them anyways, and failed the country they are supposed to serve.

Burn it all down.

There’s literally no other option.