Thank you for having me here today and thank you to all the panellists here today for their efforts in this space.
I am an active athlete, a four-time Paralympian and I have been on the national team since 2007.
Today I'm here speaking to you on behalf of AthletesCAN, which is the association for Canada’s national senior team athletes, founded in 1992 by athletes for athletes. We are an independent organization that is run by athletes for athletes. We pride ourselves on being the collective voice for Canadian national team athletes.
AthletesCAN focuses on ensuring an athlete-centred sport system by developing athlete leaders who influence sport policy and, as role models, inspire a strong sport culture. Our membership comprises active and recently retired athletes who represent Canada at senior world championships and are currently funded by Sport Canada.
I have been on the AthletesCAN board of directors since 2017. I served as vice-president, and I am currently serving as secretary.
Today I will talk to you about two areas: what we have been working on and have accomplished, and what needs to be done in the future to build a safe environment for all members of our sport system.
In 2019, AthletesCAN conducted a study on abuse in sport with over a thousand respondents. Of these, 75% said “yes” to being exposed to at least one potentially harmful behaviour of maltreatment.
Themes that emerged from this study were performance excellence at all costs; normalization of harm; lack of attention to equity, diversity and inclusion; a culture of fear and silence; and lack of trust in organizations to handle cases and investigations. As a result of this study and the themes, AthletesCAN hosted a national safe sport summit in 2019, where seven consensus statements based on the study and the conversations at the summit were finalized.
Two of the major next steps determined at this summit were to develop a universal code of conduct and to establish an independent third party organization at the national level to conduct investigations. Not only have these two been been achieved, but work has been done on the remaining five consensus statements. AthletesCAN has been using the findings of this study and these statements as guidance for our decision-making and work in the safe sport field.
The UCCMS was published in December 2019, with many revisions since then. It is an incredibly important accomplishment for the sport system. In developing a standard for behaviour within sport across Canada, we now have a framework that can be the foundation for all of our initiatives moving forward.
The Office of the Sport Integrity Commissioner has also recently been launched. OSIC now being in place, combined with the fact that all NSOs are required to sign on, is a testament to the work that has been done in this space at the national level since our study was conducted in 2019. We still have a long road ahead, but progress has already been made.
AthletesCAN feels that what is most important moving forward is to provide education to all stakeholders in the sport system on the forms of maltreatment within sport. This needs to be provided to all athletes, coaches, high-performance directors, NSO staff, CEOs, MSO staff, technical staff, support staff, medical staff, board members and more. They all need to be involved.
We cannot move forward with preventing future maltreatment unless all stakeholders in the sport system are educated on what it actually means and on the duties that are required of everyone to prevent these forms of behaviour. To do this, we need a full-fledged, multi-level educational system approach that is based on research and the principles within the UCCMS.
We cannot solely rely on it being accomplished through e-learning and resources that people can quickly check off their list by clicking a button. We need a dedicated organization that will take charge of developing, building, distributing and maintaining this educational system across the sports landscape at no additional cost to those who take it.
Lastly, and potentially most importantly, compliance needs to be guaranteed in all of these initiatives moving forward with checks to ensure that NSOs are accountable. This also needs to be true for all policies, programs and agreements already in place within the sport system. We cannot rely on the honour system any more within sport to ensure that all these actions are taken by all involved.
In closing, I would like to add that what I have discussed needs to be implemented nationwide. Though it's technically out of the scope of AthletesCAN, we recognize the need for OSIC or an equivalent to be in place across all jurisdictions in Canada. This applies to the educational system that I outlined today as well.
Thank you all for your time and attention to this important topic.