EDMONTON, Alberta — The pandemic has pushed one of Canada’s longstanding holiday rituals, the World Junior Championships, from December to mid-summer. But even taking that into account, the absence of spectators ahead of the Canada team’s first game this week was conspicuous.
In a fan zone with expansive TV screens outside the NHL arena in downtown Edmonton, a DJ entertained a group that never numbered more than a dozen people in the hour before Canada played Latvia in its first game. On a long escalator, the number of open gates to Rogers Place often exceeded the number of people passing through them. And once inside, a predominance of empty seats allowed the chants of eight enthusiastic Latvian supporters to be heard by all.
In a country that many claim is shaped by ice hockey, there have traditionally been three mandatory rituals for fans: the Stanley Cup Finals, men’s and women’s Olympic ice hockey, and men’s World Juniors. Several of the spectators who showed up for the opening game in Canada said his transformation into a shadow of a tournament could only partly be explained by the unusual shift in the schedule. In May, TSN, a sports television network, reported that Hockey Canada, the national governing body, paid CAD$3.5 million to settle a lawsuit brought by a woman who accused eight members of the world junior team of sexually abusing her in 2018.
While shocking, they are a far cry from the first reports of sexual assault and abuse by and against hockey players. But the current scandal seems to have shaken some Canadians’ faith in a sport that’s almost as much an obsession as a national pastime.
Just outside the largely empty front gates, Jen Rutledge, a civil engineer with the City of Edmonton and holder of an Edmonton Oilers season ticket, said she only used the long-purchased ticket because a cousin from England was visiting and wanted to see a game.
“Honestly, I’m a little torn about whether I’m even going to take part in this tournament,” she said. “It’s really quite worrying to hear that player fees are going into a fund that is used to silence victims of some of these teams. Hockey is an important part of Canadian culture. But at the same time, this organization has committed many atrocities.”
Rutledge is not alone in her dismay and anger. All of Hockey Canada’s corporate sponsors, including one of the country’s largest banks and the ubiquitous coffee and donut chain Tim Hortons, have ditched it, leaving the arena devoid of the usual advertising on the ice and rink boards. The Edmonton Tourism Association is no longer sponsoring the tournament, and the federal government has also stopped its funding for Hockey Canada and ordered an audit to ensure its funds were not used to silence victims while lawmakers in Ottawa held hearings . Police have also reopened their investigation into the events of 2018. As history began to dominate the news, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said called for a “real reckoning” at Hockey Canada and condemned its leaders for their “willful blindness”.
All of this comes at a time when participation in and interest in hockey has waned in an increasingly ethnically and racially diverse Canada in favor of football, basketball and other less expensive and more global sports.
Many of the sport’s longtime critics say it’s about time Canadians accept that the sport that defines their nation — whether accurate or not — is steeped in misogyny, violence, racism and homophobia.
“It’s like Hollywood and the casting couch,” said Greg Gilhooly, a corporate lawyer who was sexually abused by Graham James, a junior hockey coach who was a notorious sex offender. “People have known for years, decades, that the casting couch was an integral part of Hollywood content production. And yet it took a grotesque breach of trust to say “enough is enough”. I hope that there will finally be a settlement here.”
Exactly why the current revelations have begun to turn the national game into a disgrace to a nation in a way that a number of previous ones have not is not entirely clear.
In 1997, Sheldon Kennedy, a former National Hockey League player, accused James in a high-profile case of sexually abusing him for five years while he was playing junior hockey for James as a teenager. Since then, James, who was named The Hockey News’ Man of the Year in 1989 (although he was stripped of the honor in 2013), has been convicted twice, served time in prison and charged a third time.
In addition, several junior players have been convicted of sexual misconduct, spared prison terms, and then signed by NHL teams. In 2021, the Montreal Canadiens drafted a junior player who shared photos of his consensual sexual encounter with a woman with teammates and was convicted and fined by a court in Sweden.
Brock McGillis, a former Ontario Hockey League player who was the first professional hockey player to come out as gay, said he believes using registration fees to pay victims was seen as particularly egregious. (Hockey Canada officials told Parliament the money went primarily to James’ victims.)
“In the past, people have been defensive because their siblings, children, or their husband or wife, someone who was involved in the sport,” McGillis said. “People felt it was an attack on their identity. But when you find out that your dollars are being used to silence victims of sexual assault and pay for the crimes and mistakes of others, you now feel guilty.”
Critics of ice hockey have long argued that the country’s player development system and national idolization of young men have created a culture of entitlement and hero worship that serves as an incubator for bad behavior.
In the 2018 case in which all names were sealed by a court, a woman testified in a court filing that she was repeatedly sexually assaulted in a London, Ontario hotel room by eight members of the junior national team after a Hockey Canada Fundraising golf game and dinner.
Like the current team’s players, most were streamed into the sport’s elite channel from elementary school. By the time they were 16, they had left home to play junior hockey in small towns, lodge with local families, and become local celebrities. From there, they transferred to college or other minor leagues, or were drafted by NHL teams. Meanwhile, her only community was her hockey community.
“It’s a great privilege to say or do what you want without any consequences or questions that come with it,” McGillis said. “You can say racist, sexist, homophobic things with no real consequences.”
And Gilhooly said fans shared the blame.
“This is one of those situations where people are put on pedestals and allowed to get away with things,” he said. “It will only be solved if society arms itself and teaches young men that just because you can, you shouldn’t do it.”
Add to that a broken system for monitoring ice hockey in Canada. Hockey Canada’s authority is primarily limited to domestic and international events and teams. Most of the responsibility for organizing and running the sport is shared among 10 provincial federations and a variety of leagues.
“Everyone sort of hosts their own autonomous show,” said Courtney Szto, an assistant professor of kinesiology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. “That’s why we’re in a situation now where it’s very easy for people to say, well, that’s for the others to do. There is a lot of finger pointing.”
But Hockey Canada’s authority over the junior national team is paramount. And so far, its board continues to resist widespread calls for his resignation, though its chairman resigned a few months earlier and was replaced on an interim basis by Andrea Skinner, a director, attorney and the first woman in the position.
Hockey Canada’s board of directors has hired a former Supreme Court Justice of Canada to review how it is governed and operated and hired a law firm to investigate the 2018 attack. But Gilhooly said that without full autonomy, no investigation is likely to be credible. He also wants Hockey Canada to suspend all national team programs until the current mess is resolved.
After Canada’s first game ended in the team’s first win, Dave and Lynette Jordan sat on a bench outside the arena, getting soft drinks from a small cooler. The pair made the two-day drive from Virden, Manitoba to compete in their 14th World Junior Tournament.
They have long quartered players for the Virden Oil Capitals, including some who Dave Jordan said he believes were abused by James.
While the recent revelation wasn’t enough to make him consider staying at home, Jordan said he was still concerned about the state of hockey.
“Hockey Canada has to fix itself, but you have to honor and watch players who go out there and give it their all,” he said. “There’s going to be a major upheaval, and hockey has to figure out how to survive.”