Olympics: Experts don’t think harassment accusations will hurt Canadian organizations right away
Allegations that Canadian Olympic Committee president and Canadian Olympic Foundation chairman Marcel Aubut sexually harassed a female colleague won’t have an immediate backlash on the organizations he represents, experts say.
The COC received a formal complaint last Friday about remarks Aubut “allegedly made to a colleague” and immediately began investigating, retaining François Rolland, former chief justice of the Quebec Superior Court, to head up an independent investigation, it said in a statement Wednesday.
Aubut, the COC said, has stepped down as president and chairman for the duration of the investigation.
The 67-year-old Aubut said in a separate statement that he has offered “his unconditional support to those responsible for investigating the remarks attributed to him and setting the record straight.”
Aubut, a member of the COC since 2000 and its president since 2010, was one of the faces of this summer’s Pan Am and Para Pan Am Games, as well as a vocal supporter of Toronto bidding for the 2024 Summer Olympics.
The success of the Pan Am Games will help his credibility, said Alan Middleton, a professor of marketing at York University’s Schulich School of Business, who also praised the COC for moving quickly once the complaint was made and for bringing in an outsider to investigate it.
Middleton doubts sponsors, athletes and people directly involved in the Olympic movement will immediately jump to conclusions.
“I think there will be a soft impact initially, a questioning. The most (effect) I think it would have would be a potential sponsor who wants to get behind one of the Canadian sports or the movement going, ‘Oh, let’s not move yet, let’s wait and see what happens,’ ” he said. “There may be a delay effect.”
But the COC could see sponsorship and funding drop if Rolland finds the allegations were overlooked or others come forward with accusations of their own, Middleton said.
“If (Rolland) says, ‘No, this was continued behaviour and with active intent’ — in other words anything that suggests there’s something faulty in the culture, so it’s not so much about the individual but what it says about the culture of the organization — that becomes a worry.”
But University of Toronto professor Peter Donnelly, the director of the Centre for Sports Policy Studies, said he thinks the situation will blow over no matter Rolland’s findings, with the fallout amounting to Aubut stepping down permanently should the allegations be proven true.
“He isn’t that much of a figurehead, even though he’s kind of put himself in the foreground,” Donnelly said. “It’s still the Olympics; it’s still the athletes that are the face (of the COC).”
This isn’t the first allegation of sexual harassment the organization has been implicated in recently.
A $10-million dollar lawsuit was filed in August accusing David Peterson, former Liberal premier and the TO2015 chair, of sexually harassing a female manager with the Pan Am Games.
The allegations have not been proven in court and Peterson has denied the claims, but the lawsuit also names the Canadian Olympic Committee, a partner of the games, as well as the Pan Am and Parapan Am Games organizing committee, and three members of the executive team at TO2015.