It would be difficult to name another time an organization fell under as much pressure to clean house as Hockey Canada did this week.
Canadian Tire announced Thursday that it was permanently ending its sponsorship of hockey’s national governing body, the day after Tim Hortons, Bank of Nova Scotia and Telus announced they would not put their name on any men’s competitions this winter, including the marquee World Junior championship tournament in December.
Chevrolet Canada, Sobey’s and Esso have also paused their Hockey Canada sponsorships. Tim Hortons and the Bank of Nova Scotia say their boycott of the World Juniors extends to not buying advertising during televised games.
In June, Ottawa froze Hockey Canada’s funding. On Monday, Pascale St-Onge, the federal sports minister, cut the organization to the quick when she said that “sexual violence has been treated as an insurance problem at Hockey Canada,” a reference to the revelation in The Globe and Mail that the organization had not one but two multimillion-dollar funds set aside to settle uninsurable sexual misconduct claims against players in its charge.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, for once not the person whose resignation was being called for, went for the throat. “It’s not like there’s something extraordinarily special about the people at Hockey Canada that means they are the only people in the country that can run an organization like this,” Mr. Trudeau said. “There needs to be wholesale change.”
The public is angry at Hockey Canada, too. A poll conducted for The Globe and Mail by Nanos Research in August found that seven out of 10 Canadians are angry that Hockey Canada didn’t tell hundreds of thousands of parents and players how their registration money was being used, and that they opposed their fees being spent on sexual-assault settlements. That poll was taken before the second such fund came to light this week.
Hockey Quebec and the Ontario Hockey Federation said this week they will withhold or stop collecting the $3 fee that Hockey Canada charges players registered with the provincial organizations. It’s a resounding, grassroots rejection of an organization that has fingers in the sport at every level below professional, yet whose actions clearly do not represent the values of players and parents.
Once you’ve lost the support of the public and the dollars of sponsors, and MPs of all stripes are calling for your head, what’s left? Even Richard Nixon knew when it was time to go.
Not Hockey Canada, though. Its interim board chair, Andrea Skinner, defended her organization and its CEO, Scott Smith, during Parliamentary hearings in Ottawa this week.
Ms. Skinner said the sport of hockey was being used as a “scapegoat” for broader societal ills, and pointed out that two Canadian politicians were recently accused of sexual assault. She also said, in answer to an MP’s request that she grade Mr. Smith’s work at Hockey Canada, that he deserved an A.
That’s an A for leading an organization that quietly settled a $3.55-million lawsuit with a woman who alleged she was sexually assaulted, while intoxicated, by multiple players – including members of Canada’s 2017-18 World Junior gold-medal team – in a hotel room in London, Ont., in 2018.
Its CFO, Brian Cairo, told a parliamentary committee in June it that settled the claim without fully investigating the matter or requiring players to co-operate with its probe – even though Hockey Canada believed harm was done in the incident.
That’s an A for running an organization that secretly used the fees of its 650,000 registered players, mostly children, to settle at least 21 similar cases since 1989.
And ever since Ms. Skinner’s tone-deaf remarks unleashed a new round of boycotts, that’s an A for overseeing the implosion of Hockey Canada’s sponsorship base, the mutiny of two giant provincial hockey organizations, the loss of advertising dollars for the World Juniors, and the disintegration of public trust.
Anyone else in such a spot would read the room and step aside, for the wellbeing of the organization and the game. Maybe it will finally happen, in the wake of the renewed public and corporate exodus that began on Wednesday.
But that would take a change of heart in the organization’s executive offices and on its board, where to date the prevailing sentiment appears to be, if we’re going down, we’re taking Hockey Canada – and hockey in Canada – with us.