Sexual-assault accusations brought against HockeyCanada players last spring are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to serious issues in an organization gone wrong.
On the morning of may 26 last year, Hanna Bunton—a Team Canada gold medallist and forward for the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association —was working with the under-18 team of young women she managed when she got a notification to hop on an emergency call with her employer, Hockey Canada. The publicization of a settlement with a woman who’d sued Hockey Canada and eight of its players, some of whom were on the world junior team, for $3.5 million was about to hit.
Though the chair of Hockey Canada’s board, Michael Brind’Amour, stepped down and was replaced with former player Andrea Skinner last August, his feet were initially the only ones being held to this raging fire. To Bunton, changing this culture will require a fresh start at Hockey Canada. “The definition of insanity is when you do the same thing over and over again and expect to see change,” says the coach and player, who supported a call for the resignation of Hockey Canada CEO Scott Smith.
However, expecting that sweeping out the power holders would negate the need to re-examine the sport is not realistic. Robinson defines hockey in this country as “a total institution,” which is an idea formulated by sociologist Erving Goffman to describe a closed organization with a built-in social system in which almost all aspects of the residents’ lives are controlled, like in prisons or boarding schools.
Macfarlane recently worked with elected official Lynne Lund in Prince Edward Island to establish a ban on the use of NDAs in sexual-abuse cases; it came into effect in the province last May, and she wants the federal government to get in line too. She points out that these agreements do have their appropriate uses—they were originally created during the 1980s tech boom as a way to protect intellectual property.
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