Evidence of meeting #77 for Canadian Heritage in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was board.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Anthony Housefather Liberal Mount Royal, QC
No, I mean in 2008. When he was terminated by Canada Soccer, did you know the allegations were of a sexual nature?
Liberal
Anthony Housefather Liberal Mount Royal, QC
Did you take steps to find out more information, if you didn't know enough about what the allegations were?
Liberal
Anthony Housefather Liberal Mount Royal, QC
No.
Then you didn't alert anybody, knowing this for 10 years. How do you not accept responsibility for what happened to all those women over the next decade?
How could you say it's not related? It's completely related. You had the knowledge. You were the one person in British Columbia who had knowledge, and you did nothing. You even said that you would alert your daughter....
Of course, your daughter is important to you, but why weren't the other girls who played for these teams?
Former President, Canada Soccer, As an Individual
The allegations that were made at the time in 2008 related to years prior to that. I'm not sure there were allegations subsequent to that date.
I repeat. I don't have an excuse for not alerting anybody to the fact, when it came to my knowledge, that he was coaching in 2017.
Liberal
Anthony Housefather Liberal Mount Royal, QC
You still don't recognize that you should have done something to alert the system in 2008. You still don't recognize that you knew he was in British Columbia. You knew his job was in soccer. You knew that would be where he would seek employment. You had knowledge of sexual misconduct allegations that led him to being fired by Canada Soccer and the Whitecaps, and you did nothing. That's horrible.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Thank you, Mr. Housefather.
We will now move on to the next hour and the next witnesses.
I want to thank the committee. I want to thank Mr. Reed for being a witness here.
As chair, I find this to be quite disturbing, the fact that the people in charge of young people and looking at safety in a sport do not feel they have a moral obligation. It concerns me as chair, it concerns me as a physician, and it concerns me as a mother.
We will now suspend for a few minutes until we come to the final hour.
Thank you very much.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
I call this hour of the meeting to order.
Welcome to meeting number 77 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.
I want to acknowledge that this meeting is taking place on the unceded traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe people.
Today's meeting is in a hybrid format. Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted on Tuesday, September 20, 2022, the committee is meeting to continue its study on safe sport in Canada.
Before I go forward, there are little bits of housekeeping. For those of you who are virtual, at the bottom of the screen there's a globe icon. Please look at it. It can give you the interpretation you may need. You can check whether you want English, French or floor audio.
Everything that you say or do should go through the chair—answering questions and speaking. Do not speak unless I have acknowledged that you may. That is basically it.
I want to ask one question of the clerk. We only have three-quarters of an hour to do this. Is there any ability for us to go over that time, Mike, or do we just have a hard stop at 5:30?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Thank you. That would be very helpful.
We're going to begin with Dr. Julie Macfarlane, co-founder of Can't Buy My Silence, professor emerita of law, University of Windsor. We then have the Alberta Council of Women's Shelters, Jill Shillabeer, Leading Change call to action coordinator; and Anthony Parker, Leading Change facilitator.
Just to let you know that as a group, Ms. Shillabeer and Mr. Parker, you will have five minutes. You can divide up your time the way you see fit.
Dr. Macfarlane, you will have five minutes.
We will begin now with Dr. Macfarlane for five minutes please. I will give you a 30-second shout-out when you should wrap up.
Julie Macfarlane Co-Founder of Can't Buy My Silence, and Professor Emerita of Law, University of Windsor, As an Individual
Thank you very much.
My name is Julie Macfarlane. I have been a law professor for 40 years, working in the U.K., Ireland, Hong Kong, Australia, the U.S, and most of all, obviously, in Canada. I was honoured with the Order of Canada for my work on access to justice in 2022.
I am also, personally, a survivor of sexual abuse and rape. In 2014, I sued the Anglican church for sexual abuse by a church minister while I was a teenager. This was when I first encountered the default use of non-disclosure agreements to silence those who make settlements over sexual abuse.
I told the Anglican church immediately that I had no intention and would not consider signing an NDA. In fact, part of my settlement with the church was a new code of practice for its insurers, when working with the victims of sexual violence and abuse. It included a provision that an NDA would only be used in “exceptional circumstances”.
How naive I was then. Now I know this practice continues, and hence my commitment to legislative change and not purely voluntary change that can't monitored. I think that has other ramifications for the issues you're discussing here in the committee.
In 2013, I became aware that one of my faculty colleagues at the University of Windsor was sexually harassing students. Having heard directly from the students he was targeting, I went to my president, who ordered his suspension and an investigation. A year later, he was terminated for multiple instances of abuse and harassment in a three-page termination letter.
The students and I felt relieved until I began to receive calls from colleagues at overseas law schools where he had applied for a position. They were asking me, “Why did a tenured professor leave the University of Windsor?” I realized immediately the university had given him an NDA, a copy of which I now have. It included cleaning his personnel files for the previous 10 years and also a letter of recommendation, which he took with him.
I'm sure this all sounds rather familiar having just been listening to the testimony of Mr. Reed of Canada Soccer. It is absolutely plain that Bob Birarda was given an NDA, as this is the default practice in the settlement of sexual abuse and harassment suits. Of course, that was why nothing was ever said about where he was going to work next, why no red flag was placed by his name and why Mr. Reed would have needed to get legal advice if he was going to speak about what he had done and to place a warning on him.
We see this constantly all the time.
After two years of efforts to persuade the University of Windsor to change its policy on giving NDAs to people it acknowledged were known predators, I resigned in disgust in December 2020. I then joined forces with Zelda Perkins, who was the first woman to break her Harvey Weinstein NDA. We have created Can't Buy My Silence, a global campaign to ban the use of NDAs to cover up misconduct.
I am happy to say we have already made rapid strides in Canada. We have a bill that was passed into law in Ontario, strengthening post-secondary institutions, which now bans universities, like the University of Windsor, from doing what it did in 2014. That feels very important to me personally.
Further than that, having worked with lawmakers in Ireland to create a model bill to limit the use of NDAs to their original purpose—which, let's remember, was the protection of trade secrets—that legislation is now going forward in Ireland. It was passed into law in Prince Edward Island in 2022 as the Non-disclosure Agreements Act. That legislation covers all workplaces, including universities and voluntary positions, like coaching in a sports area. That has also been tabled in British Columbia, Nova Scotia and Manitoba, and will shortly be tabled in Ontario.
We have collected data at Can't Buy My Silence that is qualitative, through personal anonymized stories of people who have been coerced into NDAs and who consistently don't understand what they're signing and consistently aren't given an alternative—
Co-Founder of Can't Buy My Silence, and Professor Emerita of Law, University of Windsor, As an Individual
—to protect their own confidentiality.
The reality is that all these abuses—the ones we've been hearing about this afternoon and many others—are covered up in NDAs. Let's be clear: NDAs are not for the benefit of victims, although that is a prevalent myth. They are to protect the abuser and the organization. What is available for the victim is a one-sided confidentiality clause. Instead, victims have to promise to protect the party that abused them—the person, organization or both—in exchange for their own privacy.
There is literally no good reason to have non-disclosure agreements in sports abuses, or in any other cases of abuse, misconduct or discrimination. This is obviously what happened with Bob Birarda of Canada Soccer, and it is consistently the story we hear in the work we now do on the campaign.
Co-Founder of Can't Buy My Silence, and Professor Emerita of Law, University of Windsor, As an Individual
Please recognize that the Hockey Canada case has demonstrated this to Canadians. NDAs are the reason we never knew about these cases before, and they are the reason that Canada Soccer has been able to hide the misconduct of a coach who has then gone on to create further victims.
Thank you very much.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Thank you.
Now we go to the Leading Change call to action group.
Ms. Shillabeer, you have five minutes, please.
Jill Shillabeer Leading Change Call to Action Coordinator, Alberta Council of Women's Shelters
Thank you, Madam Chair.
I'm happy to be joining you today from Amiskwacîwâskahikan, also known as Edmonton, and I use she/her pronouns. My colleague Anthony Parker, who uses he/him pronouns, lives in Moh'kinsstsis, which is also known as Calgary. We recognize that we are all treaty people and have a responsibility to understand our history so that we can honour the past, be aware of the present and create a just and caring future.
My team at the Alberta Council of Women's Shelters, or ACWS, works to bring shelter-informed gender-based violence prevention education to diverse individuals, schools, community groups, workplaces and sports teams. My colleague played as a wide receiver with the Calgary Stampeders and, through our 10-year partnership with that team, has become a Leading Change facilitator as well. Through our work, we have both seen first-hand the transformational effects that our program can have.
ACWS and our members have been working in gender-based violence prevention since our organization was formed 40 years ago this month. We began strategic work to engage men and boys in the early 2000s through various programs we now call “Leading Change”. Leading Change has its roots in sports culture and was developed in partnership with Dr. Jackson Katz, who leads a highly regarded gender-based violence prevention program in the United States.
As you can see from the inspired communities model that was submitted for everyone's review, our approach is rooted in six key values, and I'd like to highlight three of those.
We are informed by women's organizations and experience. This is crucial. Though anyone can experience gender-based violence, women and gender minorities experience violence at the highest rates. Our program is both informed by and accountable back to those lived experiences.
Secondly, we take a strength-based approach, and what this means is that we focus on the things that we can do, as opposed to the things that we can't. It also means that, while we know most violence is perpetrated by men, most men are not violent. In fact, most men have more capacity to effect change than they may realize, and they are a vital part of the solution, as you have been discovering in your study.
Thirdly, we know that transformation requires long-term, large-scale and coordinated efforts, and we are grateful for the work of this committee in looking at the issues facing Hockey Canada not as limited to a few circumstances but as widespread and systemic, extending well beyond one group, one sport or one place.
Over the years, we've worked with numerous organizations. In sports, this includes both Alberta professional football teams, various minor football teams, staff at Hockey Alberta and, most recently, the Alberta Junior Hockey League, or the AJHL.
During the 2021-22 season, we started with one team, the Blackfalds Bulldogs. Over four sessions, we explored what gender-based violence is and what consent means. We discussed healthy masculinities and healthy relationships and talked about their leadership role in making change. After a transformative season, the Bulldogs put us in touch with Ryan Bartoshyk, the commissioner of the AJHL, so that we could take this work across the league.
Commissioner Bartoshyk has been incredibly supportive and had this to say about the work, may it please the committee, and I quote:
We believe that our players can use their position as role models and leaders in Alberta communities to contribute to positive change and promote anti-violence.
He also said:
The Alberta Council of Women's Shelters has provided our young athletes with education on abuse prevention, consent and assistance in identifying how they can model this leadership in their everyday lives.
We thank the Alberta Council of Women's Shelters for their commitment to this initiative and look [forward to the] partnership in the upcoming 2023-23 Season.
This past year, we worked with about 400 players in the league. We talked in depth about issues ranging from the unhealthy messaging that's circulating on some Internet forums and navigating news media on current events related to gender-based violence, to understanding the amount of safety work that most women do just to leave their house on a daily basis and how to hear a “no” and respond respectfully to that.
The players were all left with the same message: That it is not enough to not be part of the problem and that they need to be part of the solution actively. The feedback we got from this was very encouraging.
Since completing the season, as I mentioned, Commissioner Bartoshyk has invited us back for next year. We've been recognized by the Edmonton chapter of the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund for our work, and we've presented our work at a national conference, leading to conversations about how to expand the program.
May it please the committee, it's important when looking at solutions to these challenges to consider the resources required to run programs like ours. We firmly believe that supporting women's organizations to do this work both maintains accountability back to the people who have lived experience of violence and ensures that the response evolves quickly, because violence itself evolves and manifests through changing technology and in response to factors like COVID-19. We really need to be able to rise to meet this ongoing challenge in real time.
This past year, we were fortunate to receive funding from the Canadian Women's Foundation and Edmonton's Kinsmen Club for different aspects of our work.
Leading Change Call to Action Coordinator, Alberta Council of Women's Shelters
That said, these are one-time grants that require significant work to source and secure.
Our organization respectfully requests that, in its recommendations, the committee consider two items: one, that women’s organizations be supported to do this work and that any program that might be implemented have accountability back to women’s organizations; and two, that stable and multi-year funding be considered as an essential part of any proposal the committee puts forth.
Thank you.
Mr. Parker and I will welcome any questions you may have.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Thank you very much, Ms. Shillabeer.
Now we go to the question period. I'm going to have to juggle this time a little bit. I'm going to make a suggestion to the committee, and let me know if there is any disagreement with it.
I'm thinking that for the six-minute round, we could make it a five-minute round. Then we will have a second round where we can do three minutes for the two rounds for the Conservatives and the Liberals and two minutes for the NDP and the Bloc. That would give us the ability to go a little bit overtime without going too much overtime.
If everybody—
NDP
Peter Julian NDP New Westminster—Burnaby, BC
Madam Chair, I'm sorry, but I would ask you to stick to the six-minute rotation, please.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
All right. Then we may not be able to have a full second round, because we have to think about resources and getting out of the room. We will stick to the six-minute round.
Is everybody in agreement with Peter on that?
Fine. It's six minutes.
I'll begin the first round. The six minutes includes the questions and the answers, so please, everyone, try to be succinct so we can get in everything in time.
The first question will come from the Conservatives.
I have no name from the Conservatives about who will speak.
