Canadian Heritage Committee on Feb. 16th, 2023

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much.

Now I go to the Liberals and Michael Coteau for six minutes.

[Michael Coteau, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

I want to thank all of the witnesses for being here today and for your testimonies.

I want to start with a quick question for Dr. Fraser.

Thank you so much for sharing your family's story. It is a tragic story to listen to—the amount of damage that can be applied to a young child and carried throughout his or her lifetime. I think you referred to it as long-lasting, life-threatening damage. I just want to say that it's completely unacceptable. Thank you for being here to advocate for all children in this country.

I've always noticed that with the education system and the private, national and provincial sport systems, there are systems within systems. Do you have any advice on how we could better coordinate those systems? Some jurisdictions fall under school boards, some are under the province and some are national.

Is there any advice on how we can bring the accountability together under a single system, or at least coordinate it so that best practices and strategies are presented? Do you have any advice for us?

[Dr. Jennifer Fraser]

You've just described it perfectly yourself.

We need a separate parliamentary body that—as many people have said—can't have any influence. It can't have political influence, school influence, education influence or sport influence. It just needs to be about abuse.

It starts in kindergarten by teaching children, their parents and everyone that when they have an abuse issue, this is the exact body they go to. It's only about child abuse. It handles it and addresses it and has no conflict of interest. This is being looked at as a model.

I'm not the one who came up with this brilliant idea; others did. I will share it in the10 pages that I'm going to submit. There is research that shows that this would be exactly the answer to make significant change.

I also believe—as I tried to say in my presentation—that we've gotten to a terrible place where we hold children and youth very stringently accountable by our laws, but the laws do not apply to people who are in positions of power over children. That's a great problem. I think we need to change that dynamic.

[Michael Coteau, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

Yes, the system has to be built for children, not for adults. Is that right? I think that's what you're saying.

[Dr. Jennifer Fraser]

Yes.

[Michael Coteau, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

I agree with you. There's a lot of need for change.

Thank you so much.

I want to move to Ms. Sandmeyer-Graves.

I am a former minister of sport for Ontario. Back in 2016, the Ontario government put together a provincial strategy for sport. I was astonished by some of the statistics that came out of that. In fact, I went back to the publication that was presented six or seven years ago. I was just astonished that at the NCCP, for level five, 89% of coaches in our province of Ontario were male and 11% were female. I remember someone telling us about the statistics for women athletes and the coaches they had at the winter Olympics. The numbers were similar to that. There were something like 10% female coaches and 90% male coaches, even for the female athletes.

I don't think anyone would question the fact that the more female coaches there are in the system, the more empowering and role modelling there would be and the stronger the overall system would become.

Do you have any advice for this committee on what the federal government should be doing to encourage young women to remain in sport longer? I know their retention rate is much lower than that for males. Also, on how to develop even further leadership for female role models and female coaches within the system, do you have any advice for us?

[Allison Sandmeyer-Graves]

I really appreciate your shining a light on that 2016 report and the strategy and the data that informed it. Unfortunately, I would say that coaching is one area that seems very resistant to improvement when it comes to numbers, despite many interventions.

I think what's really important to consider is that girls and women love sport. They want to participate. They want opportunities to lead. We see that time and time again. What they come up against are structural gender-based barriers to accessing those opportunities—everything from accessing ice time as a player, as a girls team, to being considered seriously in a candidate pool for coaching opportunities at the highest level. There is still a lot of gender bias in the way sport is led and in the decisions that are made and also in the ways that policies are structured and so on, which really do still privilege men over women at this point.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

You have 15 seconds.

Thank you.

[Allison Sandmeyer-Graves]

I'll leave it there.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

No, you can wrap up. You have 15 seconds to wrap up. Go ahead. Do you have anything else you want to add?

[Allison Sandmeyer-Graves]

Yes, thank you.

I think that really addressing those systemic barriers so that girls and women can thrive is the responsibility of those organizations that are responsible for designing and delivering sport.

[Michael Coteau, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

Thank you so much for being here.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much.

We will now go to the Bloc Québécois and Sébastien Lemire. You have six minutes. Go ahead, please.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

First of all, I thank all the witnesses for coming to testify in support of an independent public inquiry across all sports.

Ms. Fraser, thank you for your moving testimony. I am glad that this study we are doing gives us the opportunity to hear that kind of testimony.

You contributed to a podcast recently in which you sounded the alarm, as it were, about restorative justice.

According to your research and knowledge of child abuse, children almost never get their lives back to normal, because they are scarred for life.

What do you say to researchers like Dr. Kerr, Dr. Donnelly, and Dr. Kidd, who came to the Standing Committee on the Status of Women recently to propose this approach?

[Dr. Jennifer Fraser]

Is it okay that I answer in English?

The reason I think restorative justice is so dangerous is that I've seen it put in process at both of those schools.

The first school tried to use restorative justice in order to.... They had put the athletes into the position of saying publicly that they were liars when they reported abuse. They were now supposed to do restorative justice to clear their names, I guess, or get forgiven by the coaches who had abused them. It was psychotic, essentially. Parents refused in scathing terms to have their children put through yet another manipulation.

In the second school that I was at, as I said in my statement very quickly, they offered restorative justice because they were trying to get the principal off so he wouldn't get sex abuse charges. Then they decided that the girl was so mentally ill that she wouldn't be able to handle it. This is what happened to her brain. She basically couldn't tell if she was the victim or the perpetrator, just like they tried to do with the other students by the time they were done.

Restorative justice was developed by Katy Hutchison. Her husband had been beaten to death by drunken young people at a random party. They didn't even know who he was. They went to jail. She decided that this teenager, this young 20-something, should be saved and that he shouldn't spend the rest of his life in jail with a criminal record. She set out to restore justice between him and her. It had been random drunken activity.

That is not the same thing as an adult in a position of trust and authority who abuses children. You can't compare those two scenarios. There's no place for restorative justice in this sport situation we're dealing with. It's manipulative and destructive.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

I understand the importance of having a truly independent complaints mechanism so that victims can trust it. Obviously, the solution proposed by the school in question, as is the case for many sports federations, does not have that independence. Thus, victims will tend to not make complaints, or they will have traumatic experiences.

Thank you very much.

Mr. Koehler, first of all, I believe you received a letter from President Zelenskyy following your contribution. Can you tell us a little bit about it?

[Rob Koehler]

I'm sorry. I didn't get the question.

[Dr. Jennifer Fraser]

President Zelenskyy wrote you a note. Can you talk about that?

[Rob Koehler]

Oh, I'm not sure how that relates to this, but Global Athlete has been standing side by side with Ukrainian athletes to ask that Russia and Belarus be suspended from the Paralympic Games. As a result of our advocacy work with the Ukrainian athletes on Friday, I received a letter directly from the president, which I don't take as a letter to me; I take it as a letter to all the athletes who are standing in support of Ukraine.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

I think it is worth mentioning, especially in the current context.

I believe you have been following with interest the testimony that has been given at the Standing Committee on the Status of Women and here at the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.

Can you describe to us what you think could be included in an independent judicial inquiry that would now involve all sports?

[Rob Koehler]

I've been asked that question before, Madam Chair.

One of the answers I always give is that if there's going to be a judicial inquiry, it's not for Rob Koehler or Jennifer Fraser to determine what the scope is. The judicial inquiry should be given to a justice to give him or her free scope of what the inquiry should look like so it's not influenced by others.

The topic is there. The issues are there. A broad, sweeping mandate should be provided. It's not really my position to offer that expertise.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

There is one question that has still not been answered: what form should this independent public inquiry take? We, as politicians, may have to take a stand on this.

[Rob Koehler]

The public inquiry should be a judicial inquiry that has the power of subpoena and the ability to attach every part of the sport in Canada, whether it's provincial or national or Sport Canada. Every aspect needs to....

The reason for the judicial inquiry is not to bring down the system; it's to get a deep understanding of how the system works to improve it for the future of every child and every athlete in this country. We do not want to hurt sport. We want to see it succeed, flourish and thrive. In doing that, I think we could be models not only for Canada but also for the rest of the world by creating this new sport environment that is unique and different and can be embraced, and every parent in the country will want to put their children in sport.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much, Sébastien. You were five seconds under. That's very kind of you.