Can junior hockey be truly reformed?
UPPER ECHELON NEEDS NEW STRATEGY AFTER SCANDAL ROCKS ORGANIZATION
It is a given that Hockey Canada’s return appearance on Parliament Hill this week is a step in a process that will bring significant change.
At the least, there should be leadership changes at the governing body for hockey in this country, and the only surprising part is that they haven’t happened already. With its government funding frozen and corporate sponsors having fled in droves amid serious questions about how it handled allegations of a group sexual assault at a Hockey Canada event four years ago, resignations at the top are inevitable.
But whether the reforms stop at Hockey Canada is another question. The weeks of grim revelations about its handling of the case related to a gala in London, Ont., in 2018, along with Friday’s latest shock, allegations of sexual assault involving the Canadian World Junior team that played in Halifax in 2003, have increased scrutiny in the junior hockey system as a whole in this country. It’s a big, complicated business, with some teams churning out millions of dollars in annual revenue and others barely solvent. The major junior leagues have some of the trappings of professional sport, with elite teenagers selected in a draft that could see them forced to move far from home to play. It attracts major corporate investment — notable in a country that saw its only professional league for women fold due to a lack of financial support — and its flagship World Junior Championship has grown into one of Canada’s biggest television properties.
And with all of that comes a simple question: Is this the end of junior hockey as we know it?
It’s a question that has been asked before. While the junior hockey system has in a broad sense done the thing it is supposed to do, giving the best young players a competitive environment in which to develop, and leading to successful professional careers for thousands of them, all while keeping Canada a giant on the global hockey stage, it has some obvious flaws. And it has had those problems challenged not just by the media, politicians and labour leaders, but in courts of law.
Some of the complaints are financial. It has been argued that the Canadian Hockey League, the umbrella organization for the major junior leagues in Ontario, Quebec and Western Canada, benefits from unpaid wages, with athletes spending countless hours training, playing, and travelling while earning just a modest stipend and a promise of tuition payments when their playing career is over. That argument was the basis for class-action lawsuits filed against the league in 2014, and which remain before the courts. Another class-action lawsuit filed in 2020 alleges anticompetitive practices and conspiracy among the junior leagues, citing the limits on player choice and mobility rights. Lawmakers in Canada and the United States have questioned whether the CHL’S business violates labour rules, but the junior leagues have successfully lobbied for exemptions to the employment-standards provisions in the provinces in which they operate. Meanwhile, attempts to unionize junior hockey players haven’t gone anywhere.
Beyond the questions about the employment status of a junior hockey athlete are the issues about the environment in which they live and play. Boys as young as 16 (15 in the West) can be drafted by teams a long way from their homes, and they are expected to live with billeting families during the season. In many of the towns in which they play, the junior hockey team is a big deal, and so the teenage boys are suddenly celebrities, with all the good and bad that status confers. It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to believe that a bunch of young men transplanted from home into a place in which they mostly hang around with other local heroes might develop questionable behaviour. Those attitudes don’t necessarily extend just outward, either. Former players have alleged being forced to take part in hazing rituals; a lawsuit was filed two years ago that charged the CHL and its clubs with systemic sexual abuse of minors relating to such hazing practices.
These kinds of concerns have been raised for years, but the cases that are presently in the news appear to have caused considerable introspection at hockey’s highest levels. Hockey Canada on Monday vowed a new action plan to “address systemic issues in hockey.”
Among its many pledges were increased education and training with an “additional focus on masculinity, consent and toxic behaviours, and to drive a culture in hockey that encourages all participants to speak up” — a rare acknowledgment that such problems are not limited to the odd coach or player.
But can junior hockey be reformed with education campaigns and codes of conduct, or will it take a more comprehensive teardown of the systems in place? For the cities and towns in which junior hockey, and the chance to support kids on their way to NHL stardom, is part of the way of life, that might seem like anathema. But other hockey nations, including the United States, manage to produce star players without a junior system like that in Canada, whether by putting them on elite development teams or letting them play in college.
Meanwhile, hockey isn’t the only sport that has been forced to consider whether the manner in which it treats elite young prospects is the best way to handle potential future professionals. In the United States, where basketball and football players have traditionally turned pro after first competing in college, making countless millions for their schools in exchange for a scholarship, a court ruling last year that allows college players to receive compensation for their name and likeness has already dramatically altered the massive business of U.S. college athletics. Schools are jumping conferences and throwing money at prospects, and more than a few observers have wondered if this hearkens the end of college sports as we have known them.
The parallels to Canada and its hockey are evident. In both cases, there are professional leagues waiting to draft new members of its player pool, and which don’t have to worry about identifying them or developing them until they are ready to turn pro.
It’s always been a bit odd that a teenage hockey player might be shipped off to Sault Ste. Marie — Wayne Gretzky’s family complained about this very thing in the 1970s — or a teenage football player would play for free in front of a paying audience of more than 100,000 fans. It’s just the way things have always been.
In the States, that is changing. In Canada, we shall see.
WEEKS OF GRIM REVELATIONS ABOUT ITS HANDLING OF THE CASE.