Honourable members of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage and members of the Canadian safe sport community, we thank you for inviting us here today.
We are the heads of a company that specializes in receiving and handling complaints, a company that contributes greatly to safety in sport.
Indeed, the entire Quebec sport and recreation community benefits from our reporting mechanism and our services as the Office of the Complaints Officer. For two years now, we have been serving 90 sports and leisure federations, in accordance with the mandate we received from the Regroupement Loisir et Sport du Québec. We are also appearing before you today as parents of competitive athletes, for example, in soccer, rugby, baseball and hockey.
My name is Vicky Poirier. I am a chartered professional accountant, a forensic accountant, and the founder and president of ALIAS. I am accompanied by my colleague Danny Weill, the executive vice-president of ALIAS.
When a person finds the courage to blow the whistle, it is essential that he or she be treated with kindness and professionalism and that the case be handled efficiently.
I became involved with ALIAS because of my forensic accounting background while investigating devastating financial fraud. I felt that the frauds could have been prevented if someone had dared to speak out. But witnesses didn't speak up because they were afraid of retaliation and of not being believed. So I created ALIAS, an anonymous and confidential reporting mechanism designed to handle a complaint from receipt to resolution.
Afterwards, I quickly realized that the majority of the situations denounced were not financial in nature, but rather related to human interactions. The passion that lay dormant in me was ignited. Since that day, we have been receiving and processing all kinds of complaints.
At ALIAS, we are guided by three main principles: ethics, efficiency and objectivity.
This path led us to the world of sports, where we act as the Office of the Complaints Officer for the province of Quebec, as mentioned above.