On hockey racism, Legault gets it right

In this country, hockey is not a game. It is, as Ken Dryden titled his classic book, The Game, capitalized. It’s that important to us, maybe too important. It can be one of the best things about living in this vast, wintry land, and it can bring out the worst in us. Hockey can bring us together, if only temporarily, as a community or a country, as fans. Immigrants become Canadians faster through hockey. In Montreal, when the Canadiens make the playoffs, the team becomes a conversational icebreaker between strangers from different backgrounds. Punjabi bhangra dancers shoot videos in the red jersey given the tongue-incheek, Catholic-sounding nickname of the Sainte-Flanelle (the Holy Flannel), of a team named for French-Canadians. But hockey can also divide us, by providing an outlet for the bigots among us. After Maxime Comtois failed to score a gold-medal winning goal for Canada at the world junior championships in January, he was subjected to an online flood of abuse, much of it anti-French. At the time, Comtois was 19. And before the internet broke down the social isolation of individual racists, showed them that they’re not alone and gave them a place to gather, in this country there were already the stands in the hockey arenas. So, when some spectators at a recent game in the lower-Laurentian city of St-Jérôme racially taunted a black visiting player and harassed his family even physically, it was not an isolated incident, in Canada or in Quebec. That the player, Jonathan Diaby, is an adult paid to play in a semi-professional league does not make the incident any less serious. But there have also been reports from across Canada of Indigenous players as young as 11 years old, in the pee wee category, subjected to racist taunts, even by other children. After La Presse columnist Alexandre Pratt broke the St-Jérôme story, he followed up by reporting that on the same day, in Trois-Rivières, racial slurs were directed at a 13-yearold Indigenous player on a visiting team by spectators and even an opposing coach. But something positive has come out of the St-Jérôme incident. In Quebec, it’s easy for politicians and the French-language media to condemn bigotry when the victim is, like Comtois, a French-speaking Quebecer. But discrimination against the province’s own cultural minorities is sometimes minimized. While French-speaking Quebecers are a majority in their home province, they are keenly aware of being a minority in Canada and North America. And minorities are sensitive to how they are perceived by others. The St-Jérôme incident, however, has been well publicized by the media, and there has been widespread public support for the player and his family, and condemnation of the racists who taunted and harassed them. Public pressure has resulted in the hasty adoption by the league involved, the Quebec-based Ligue nord-américaine de hockey, of a policy calling for games to be halted and spectators thrown out for racist, sexist or homophobic behaviour. This was after Premier François Legault stepped up and used what Theodore Roosevelt called the “bully pulpit” of high public office (“bully” in this context meaning “very good”) to lead opinion. Legault denies that discrimination in Quebec is a problem serious enough to hold public hearings on it, like those held across Ontario in 2016. And some of the racists in the St-Jérôme incident may have been supporters of Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec party, which carried the riding in the election last October. But Legault, a hockey fan himself, didn’t wait to be asked about the incident before he raised it with reporters, saying in French and English that the game should have been halted and the racists thrown out. It was the right thing to do, and if that’s what Legault thought, then good for him. And if he did it because he thought that’s what Quebecers wanted and expected their premier to do, even better.