Canadian Heritage Committee on Nov. 3rd, 2016

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Larry Maguire]

I call to order meeting number 35 of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. Today we are continuing with our study on Canadian women and girls in sport.

We have witnesses with us this morning who I would like to welcome.

Just to let you know, you'll have 10 minutes to make your presentations. Then there will be rounds of questions, with seven minutes for the first round, and that includes the answers. My colleague, who I am replacing today, is always reminding not just our guests but the questioners as well that it includes the answers.

Excuse me. I am reminded by the clerk that it's five minutes today for opening statements.

I would also like to welcome our colleague Mr. Simms today. He is sitting in for our regular chair, Ms. Fry.

With that, I welcome Ms. Lee, appearing as an individual; Brenda Andress, commissioner of the Canadian Women’s Hockey League; and Shannon Donovan, the executive director of Football Canada.

Thank you very much for being here. We look forward to your presentations.

In the order listed here, we'll hear first from Ms. Lee.

[Nancy Lee, As an Individual]

Thank you.

As a point of clarification, is it five minutes for us or five for you?

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Larry Maguire]

It is 10 minutes for you to make your presentation.

[Nancy Lee]

It's five minutes for you and 10 minutes for us. Lovely. Thank you. I'll get going. Is it seven and a half minutes...?

[A voice]

Five.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Larry Maguire]

It's five minutes for your presentations. I'll get it right yet. It's five minutes for your presentations, and seven minutes for the questions.

[Nancy Lee]

Hello and thank you, Mr. Chair, and committee members.

Thank you for the opportunity to appear today, and thank you in particular for undertaking this review. I am personally encouraged by it.

By way of introduction, I'm the former head of CBC Sports, where I was responsible for the sports programming, production, and negotiations for the broadcast rights for CBC and Radio-Canada. That included Hockey Night in Canada, the Olympics, the Pan-Ams, and a very long list of amateur sports.

Subsequently, I became chief operating officer for Olympic Broadcasting Services. We had a staff of 3,000 people and provided the host broadcaster coverage for the Vancouver Olympics. I now have been engaged by the International Olympic Committee to implement gender equality into the Olympics sports program, so this study is perfect timing for me.

I've been a board member for the Canadian Commonwealth Games association, CAAWS, and Right to Play, on the governing council at the University of Toronto, and the chair of a community sport fund in Toronto.

For my part, I will offer some comments and recommendations regarding the media. In addition, my experience in international sports and governance has given me insight into how the governance of sports organizations impacts gender equality, how the NSOs, the national sports organizations, themselves impact gender equality, and how the evaluation and oversight by Sport Canada also impacts gender equality.

All of that activity, and in some cases non-activity, plays a major role in how the media perceive women's sports and how they report on it. For a moment, let's focus on the media.

I think there are several reasons why the quantity and quality of women's sports coverage is still an issue, and here's a quick list. Budgets are one issue. Media companies don't have enough resources to spread around. Another issue is that reporters don't have easy access to the results, or they don't make an effort to get the results. Another one is that media companies don't see the business case and, by and large, the audience data, at least for television, would back that up. As for sexism, it exists for sure, but I don't believe that the majority of people working in the industry are sexist. However, it is worth noting that just one bad photo can cause a lot of harm and perpetuate coverage based on what an athlete looks like instead of how fast or strong she is.

In spite of all that, I think there is a more basic reason for the lack of attention. Most reporters, producers, and media executives just don't think about it. It's not on their radar screen. The result is that when they're making editorial decisions around what to cover and determining where to allocate resources, they are not applying a gender lens as part of that decision-making. Some of my recommendations will address that.

Last year I was asked to make a similar presentation in Qatar. It was to a group of sports organizations from Africa and the Middle East. They wanted to know why media coverage of women's sports in their countries is still an issue. My message to them was the same as it is to you today: you need to step back and figure out what the sports system is doing to enable the media to ignore women's sports. Until you fix that, you are reinforcing the stigma that women's sport is less credible.

I'm leaving my recommendations with Mr. Lafleur. I have 14, so I don't have time to go over them, but there are two I want to present now because I believe they're really important.

First, the department needs to ensure that the principle that women and girls deserve equal access and opportunities in sports is clearly and formally embedded into the policies and practices of Sport Canada, the NSOs, and the MSOs. Currently it is not.

Second, it's imperative that this principle be activated by the NSOs and MSOs, not with nuanced expectations but instead with explicit requirements matched to tangible outcomes. Plus, the administrations and their boards must be held accountable, with real consequences tied to their funding.

Obligations and real consequences for gender equality in sport are not far-fetched. People know me: I don't operate in la-la land. In fact, this week, the United Kingdom announced that its government funding would be tied to gender equality in all its sports organizations. What this means is that in the governance boards, the administration leadership, its sports program, and hosting international events in the U.K., these organizations must treat women and men and girls and boys equally. It's pretty clear, and I think it's pretty impressive.

In addition to government actions, sports organizations such as the Commonwealth Games Federation and on the international side the International Olympic Committee are putting real gender equality policies into action. The gender equality policy for the Commonwealth Games Federation has a great depth. I know that others have talked about officiating and coaching, and this policy is requiring organizing committees to have equality plans for coaches, team officials, technical officials, and athlete numbers. By the way, it has been driven by a Canadian by the name of Bruce Robertson.

As for the IOC, as we speak, there are committees that are working on concrete, practical gender equality activations, and part of that is the hiring of me to literally change the competition schedule at the Olympics so that it's equal for all genders.

To sum up, it's all about showing how women can and should play an equal role at all levels of sport and, by extension, in society at large. In closing, thank you very much for undertaking this study and for the efforts that Minister Qualtrough is already making. It's clear that Canada is in a position to lean in. What I'm asking of you is that you make sure we get the job done.

Merci.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Larry Maguire]

Thank you, Ms. Lee, for that presentation.

We'll move now to Ms. Andress.

[Brenda Andress, Commissioner, Canadian Women’s Hockey League]

Thank you, committee members, for the opportunity to speak on behalf of the Canadian Women's Hockey League.

The Canadian Women's Hockey League is the only professional women's sport league in Canada, and we're the second oldest in North America, next to the WNBA. Our 2016-17 season will mark the league's 10th season. Still existing after 10 years is in itself an accomplishment for any women's professional sport. I''ll give you some facts and figures about our league.

When we started this league we had $100,000 to run the league. Currently we are at $1.8 million. The revenue completely covers all the costs of the players, but it does not pay any of our players. We have four full-time staff and five part-time general managers. The thing that our league stands for mostly is that our entire league is 80% females in non-traditional jobs.

We're home to 125 of the world's best female athletes and hockey players, and 21 of the 24 current members playing in four nations play in the CWHL. They represent dozens more on the national level that represent teams and development programs for youth playing across Canada and the eastern States. We are also providing homes for several members of the Japanese, French, American, and Russian national women's hockey teams, all playing here in Canada.

Over the last 10 years we've been able to secure a broadcasting deal with Sportsnet, which gives us four games a year. We started out with these games and we received approximately 22,000 viewers for all four games. Last year each one of our games saw between 92,000 and 108,000, which is comparable to a Detroit-Pittsburg game of 160,000 to 180,000. Those are actual viewers. It's a higher number when you look at the people who just blink on and off, so that is close to a half a million now following us.

One of the current problems we have within our league is a lack of resources to continue to hire women. It's difficult for us to get women to coach. It's difficult for us to get women into non-traditional jobs when basically they're volunteer positions, which makes it very difficult for them to get the experience they need in order to move on.

If you take a look at our players who aren't paid—I'll just give you a couple of examples—if we paid a minimum of $10,000 per player for all our players, it would cost $1.2 million. In the NHL, 440 players each make that salary, compared to that amount that would be paid for our entire league. If we paid minimum wage to our players, in Ontario, it would be $23,000 a year. There are 299 NHL players who are making that salary on their own, except that amount would run our entire league.

We're lucky that we have the CWHL, that I, as commissioner, am female, that all of our general managers are females, and our broadcasting staff, as we start to grow our streaming game—we're putting in play-by-play and colour commentating—are females. We met with Sportsnet last week, and they actually said they would start to use us as a template moving forward. They promised that in the next year, beginning with our Clarkson Cup for the year 2018, they would start having an actual play-by-play commentator for our hockey, because that doesn't exist right now in the sports world.

We're very lucky within our league with the non-traditional jobs. Outside of our league—and we are in many different areas in professional sports, such as HR, law, and finance—you will never see women commissioners, scouts, or coaches. You will never see us as GMs, but you see that in our league. We're trying to portray to all the youth in Canada that as women, we have the right to be who we were born to be and to continue doing that. Moving forward, the main difficulty for us—and I have some suggestions about this in my notes, which I'll give you—is that peer influence and media influence are the biggest parts of growing any sport. We need to have a different look, rather than the lack of females in sports leadership, so that young girls will know they can grow up to be a commissioner.

The other thing is policies. We have a lot of policies that say women should be in things, but we need the dollars to back those policies, and we need policies that state that if you're going to run an organization, if you're going to build a facility for sports, that facility should house professional women's leagues or amateur leagues. It should not be that the money just goes to the NBA, the CFL, the NFL, or the NHL. The dollars provided for building facilities and infrastructure should come with a policy that women must be included.

I know I'm out of time.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Larry Maguire]

Thank you.

[Brenda Andress]

I'll give you my notes at the end.

Again, thank you for the time.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Larry Maguire]

Thank you.

We'll move on to our third presenter, Ms. Donovan.

[Shannon Donovan, Executive Director, Football Canada]

Thank you.

Thank you for the invitation to appear today. There aren't many opportunities to talk about women's football in front of a parliamentary committee.

Just as a little bit of background, we are talking about North American football. There are females participating in North American football. We have three disciplines. We have tackle, flag, and touch football. We are a heritage sport, as you are aware. In no way, shape, or form are we involved in or promote the lingerie league that comes and goes in the country.

Personally, I am not a high-performance athlete. I grew up involved in sports. It was just part of who we were as a family.

In terms of work experience, I'm in my 10th year with Football Canada and my fourth year as the executive director of Football Canada. Previous to that, I worked for the Ottawa Senators. I was also with Hockey Canada for five years, three of which I was the manager of female development.

I'm going to speak about what I'm familiar with, which is grassroots and the development of female sports.

Over my time, my observation has been that the keys to participation of females are opportunity and communication to females and to parents. I believe that was a huge part of what took place in the boom in female hockey in the late nineties. Once there were opportunities at the Olympics, as well as Canadian and American scholarships, that contributed to the increase in female hockey participation.

Parents want to put their daughters into the sports where they know they'll have opportunities beyond just maybe going to the pool on Saturday mornings. They want them to be a part of something that could last for the rest of their lives.

We have amazing female athletes in this country, which we have witnessed over the last few Olympic Games.

I think the other part, as far as participation goes, is the number of female coaches on the sidelines and behind the bench, especially in male-dominated sports. I coach hockey and I've had several parents say to me that they're so glad that their daughter has a female coach on the ice. It's the same thing on the football side.

Females not familiar with this sport usually become participants if they feel they are in a safe and comfortable environment. This is not only for the athlete, but also for coaches and administrators. I believe that in coaches clinics you will have better participation if it is an all-female clinic. I have witnessed that with Hockey Canada. In the early 2000s, we had some funds and we ran all-female coaches clinics across the country.

I've sat in on some clinics. You're usually the only female in a room of about 40 men. If you're not familiar with all the terms and lingo, what the five-hole is and top shelf, you're usually not willing to ask those questions.

In the all-female coaches clinics that we used to hold, we had a hockey 101. Females had the opportunity to ask those questions they probably would never have asked if they had been in a regular clinic with men. Women who couldn't find day care would bring their babies with them. We welcomed babies. We ran a two-day coaches clinic, and then after that, they would follow up with us. They provided their experience. They went back into the community and became coaches.

The mandate of female coaches on coaching staff is a large part. In football, we have started on the mentorship side, as we have very few female coaches as of now.

I think communication to athletes age 14 and older is key as far as opportunities in sport beyond being an athlete are concerned. It's a perfect opportunity for them to start coaching, officiating, even being the water girl on the sidelines, timing games, or being a team manager.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Larry Maguire]

I'm going to ask you to wrap up.

[Shannon Donovan]

Sure. Just on the football side, I've put some of the statistics in my notes. These are just from Saskatchewan. In 2011, there were 384 female football players, and currently there are 1,440. The bulk of those are in flag football, but the senior women's contact league has also contributed to that. We see that growing in all the provinces now. They're starting to work with the high schools and get female flag football involved. We're seeing significant growth. We're looking to host the 2017 women's world championship for tackle football in Vancouver. We're working with Sport Canada right now on that.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Larry Maguire]

Thank you very much.

Before we begin questions, I have some concerns or questions that we want to look at with regard to the analysts and the interim draft report. I'll call an in camera session once we get this session done, just before the athletes come to the table. I'll ask them all to leave the room at that time, just so you're forewarned. We'll deal with that for just a few minutes; I don't think it will take too long. Then we'll come back with our second panel after noon.

With that, I will open up our questions beginning with Ms. Dabrusin.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

I want to thank all of you. It's been tremendous to hear about all that you've done and all the contributions you've made to women in sport. I'm really excited. There's a lot to ask, so I'm going to jump in.

Ms. Lee, you said that organizations are undermining women's sport. That's one of the reasons there's less coverage of women in the media. I was wondering if you could provide us with some examples, or give us some of the ideas you're working with there.

[Nancy Lee]

I'll give you maybe three.

The simple one, the work that I'm doing now for the IOC, is that on the last day of the Winter Olympics, currently there are no events for women. That's going to change. How can you blame the media for not covering women when there are no events on the best day of the Olympics? That's the simple answer. The IOC said, “Of course”.

Back closer to home, it's reported that we as a group gave $3 million to the Canadian Soccer Association to host that fantastic World Cup FIFA event in 2015. There were no women in leadership positions for the very first time in the history of that event. Twenty years ago, in 1996, in the States, the chair and the CEO were female.

If Sport Canada had policies for international host events, just as the U.K. has introduced, you would be saying that that's not allowed, that events don't get your money unless they do what you say. The specific on the turf, as everyone knows, is that you don't get to treat women as second-class citizens. Here's how the media takes it. Every day the media meet with the organizing committee of an event like this. Who's sitting at the front of the table? Two men. It's the perception.

The second thing, with regard to the whole turf thing, is that essentially it was literally and figuratively a ball going back and forth between CSA and FIFA, but as a government.... At Sport Canada, we could have said that it was a non-starter. The media is sitting there and thinking that we can't even get our own house in order. They know that we're supporting this. It's a public investment.

Concepts like that are a little bit away, sort of like a sidebar, but they lead to the perception that if we don't care, if Sport Canada doesn't care, if we as a country don't care about the women, why should the media care?

I have others, but for the sake of time.... It's a long list.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

One of the issues we've been hearing about is that because there's less media coverage for women, there's less in the way of sponsorships. That has had an economic impact as far as professional opportunities or opportunities to become elite athletes go.

You mentioned that there is a U.K. funding example. Do you have any ideas of other ways in which we could start to implement change on the ground?

[Nancy Lee]

It is true. Back in my days at the CBC, the NSOs would be knocking on the door begging for coverage. They needed the coverage so the sponsor would cover their event. There are three recommendations I have on that. We need to deal with the private sector, and I'm focusing on television for now.

In the late 1980s and the 1990s, the CRTC had a requirement that the private broadcasters—and I know this about television—needed to spend some of their public benefit cash, not in kind, cash, on amateur sports. The reason I'm suggesting amateur sports, sorry, is that's where the catchment of women are playing sport. As a result of that, there was coverage that—and this is really important—the national sports organizations did not have to pay TSN to get on the air. One of my recommendations is just have them have a look at it. There's a reason they took it away. I don't know what it is, but it was a huge impact. What happened after that is they really drew back.

The second thing, and with my dear friends at the CBC, I have some very specifics regarding them to suggest to you. Part of it with the CBC, TSN, and Sportsnet is they require the national sports organizations to pay. Let's just deal with the CBC. They require these sports organizations that are out there trying to get athletes playing and participating to pay to get on the air. The reason, I'm told, because it didn't happen up until 2006 when I left, is they have no money. I think that's the wrong question. It's not a question about how much money you have; it's how you allocate the money.

Again, you will see this in the recommendations, which I hope are concrete and practical for you.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Speaking to CBC and sports coverage of women, when we had Monsieur Lacroix come from the CBC, I suggested that we do have hockey on Saturdays. There's a women's hockey league and maybe that would be a way to bring hockey back to the CBC on Saturday evenings.

You had mentioned, Ms. Andress, about infrastructure and infrastructure spending. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about that, about access for professional women's leagues to federally funded infrastructure.

[Brenda Andress]

We are a professional league, but at the same time, we're a not-for-profit because none of the women are paid, so we're still in there, Nancy, as the amateurs in a lot of different ways.

Things like when the BMO Field was built, things like when NHL teams partner with cities, partner with governments, to build a facility for sports, these are opportunities to consider, here's a ton of money that's going out. How are we including women in that equation? How are we giving professional leagues, football leagues, soccer leagues, hockey leagues the opportunity to play? We do know, based on our Sportsnet numbers, and we do know based on the Olympics, that when the game is put in front of the audience, they love us. They actually love us more than the male sport, because the sport is played, in my opinion, to the true value of a sport.

I think that sometimes you have to mandate policies and mandate dollars that are put towards us as women in sports and women in different types of genders for the different sports in order that young girls can then see what's happening here. We see ourselves playing in this sport. We see ourselves growing up and getting a career in that sport because the dollars are there. I don't believe anybody across Canada would spend a lot of money to be something that they're not going to be paid for. Nobody's going to be a lawyer, nobody's going to be a doctor, nobody's going to be a politician unless they are paid for it.

We have to provide women the access to these facilities, and to mandate those dollars going out is essential, which says we're included in it to begin with.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Larry Maguire]

Okay, thank you.

We have to move on to Mr. Kitchen.

[Robert Gordon Kitchen, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Thank you to all three of you for coming here today.

This is a very interesting and timely study. My approach to things is how we get young girls to stay participating in sport, and especially in rural areas. I come from rural Saskatchewan and I assume it's no different from anywhere else, but as a coach running a double-A team, or whatever it may be, I need to raise funds locally in order to fund that. Oftentimes I found when I was dealing with women's teams and when I was coaching my daughter in soccer, etc., professionally, there was a big challenge to go to that local stationery store, that local gas station and say, “Can you help fund this team?”

It goes all over Canada. We talked a bit about media and oftentimes when we look at the bigger point of media, when we talk about professional hockey, obviously getting those advertisers.... People want eyeballs in order to pay. If they don't get eyeballs, they're not going to give you the money. How do we do that at a smaller level? That also adds to keeping these young girls involved. If, all of a sudden, there's a big challenge, and they have to go out and sell raffle tickets or things like that, they find it difficult, and no more so than boys, but the reality is they do find it difficult because they have a bigger barrier.

Nancy, can you comment on that?

[Nancy Lee]

I was going to pitch it, but....

It's not as helpful, but I think those who will help you I call “influencers”. These are the people who are in a position to make change happen or recognize that it's an issue. When you're going to the dealerships you're talking to people who don't recognize that it's important to support this.

I'm sure you've been there. I ran into the same problem raising money for elite varsity athletes when I was at U of T. The guys write a cheque. Women don't write cheques. That's just who we are.

The specifics of it is to look at retail companies that are selling to consumers. I'll give my example. It's taking it out of Estevan but it's essentially Bell and Rogers going down to Sportsnet. Bell and Rogers have consumers, women and men who care about this. They have employees who coach. It's the same thing with their shareholders. The conversation with the chairs of both those companies is, “What are you doing in your avenues that you can have an impact on girls and women who are participating in sport?”

Sorry, it's way off topic for you.