Status of Women Committee on Nov. 21st, 2022

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

I call the meeting to order.

Good morning, and welcome to the 40th meeting of the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women. Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted on Monday, October 31, the committee will commence its study of women and girls in sport.

Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format pursuant to the House order of June 23, 2022. Members are attending in person in the room and remotely by using the Zoom application.

I would like to make a few comments for the benefit of the witnesses and members.

Please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking. For those participating by video conference, click on the microphone icon to activate your mike, and please mute it when you are not speaking. For interpretation for those on Zoom, you have the choice at the bottom of your screen of French, English or the floor. For those in the room, you can use your earpiece, which is attached to your microphone. You can choose your language there as well.

For members in the room, if you wish to speak, please raise your hand. For members on Zoom, please use the “raise hand” function. The clerk and I will manage the speaking list as best as we can, and we appreciate your patience and understanding in this regard.

In accordance with our routine motion, I am informing the committee that all of our witnesses, with the exception of Léa Clermont-Dion, have completed the required connection tests in advance of this meeting.

Before we welcome our witnesses, I would like to provide this trigger warning. This will be a very difficult study. We'll be discussing experiences related to abuse. This may be triggering to viewers, members, staff and anyone with similar experiences. If you feel distressed or if you need help, please advise the clerk.

I would now like to welcome our first panellists for today. As an individual, online, we have Léa Clermont-Dion, who is a producer, author and political scientist. From Global Athlete, we have Rob Koehler, director general. From Gymnasts for Change Canada, we have Amelia Cline, lawyer and co-founder, and Kim Shore, co-founder.

We will provide everyone with five minutes for opening statements. We're going to be rather flexible here, but please watch me, the chair.

Our first panellist does not have the headset, so we're going to start with a sound check, if you don't mind.

Léa, could you work with our clerk right now?

[Léa Clermont-Dion, Producer, Author and Political Scientist , As an Individual]

Yes, absolutely.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

We'll start with our next witness. I'm going to pass it over to Rob.

You have five minutes for your opening statement. You have the floor.

[Rob Koehler, Director General, Global Athlete]

Thank you Madam Chair.

Dear members of the committee, in no way is my testimony today to negate the positive experiences that athletes and children across Canada have taken from sport. I would further appeal to those athletes who have had positive experiences to listen, observe and become allies of survivors of abuse.

We at Global Athlete have directly and indirectly heard from athletes in the sports of gymnastics, soccer, bobsleigh, skeleton, athletics, cross-country skiing, water polo, swimming, artistic swimming, boxing, canoe/kayak, rowing and figure skating. Their lived experiences must be listened to and must be taken into account, and these evil behaviours that surround sport must be removed.

The fact that athletes have turned to Global Athlete and not the current system should speak volumes; athletes fear and do not trust the sports system. Under the current framework, it has been terrifying and traumatizing for athletes to come forward. They are all brave survivors.

As leaders of this country, we need to make sure that abusers and the enablers are made accountable for their actions. The current sports system has dramatically failed athletes. For almost a year, Canadian athletes have been loud, and they have been mostly ignored—until today. We thank you for that.

This is the first step to answer their calls for a third party independent judicial investigation across the toxic culture of abuse in Canadian sport. Make no mistake: Abuse in sport is global. Canada now has the opportunity to be a leader, as it was in the Dubin inquiry, and to change the culture of sport in Canada.

The Dubin inquiry removed the right for sporting organizations to test their own athletes. It's time to address abuse in a similar fashion. Human rights and child rights must be at the centre of this change.

Over the past year, Global Athlete has been inundated with lived experiences of physical, sexual and emotional abuse that have not been met with adequate remedy. Canadian athletes have said their sporting organizations have failed them. All you have to do is look in the media. Athletes are actually taking lawsuits against their own sporting organizations because they have failed to act. This speaks volumes as to why sport cannot be trusted to regulate itself.

Abuse in sport is a human rights issue, not a sport issue. Abusers recognize the power imbalance that leaves athletes powerless and coaches and administrators as the almighty powerful. Athletes have shared lived experiences with me that have ripped my heart apart, and I know they would do the same to you.

The lack of action and desire to meaningfully tackle these complaints is disturbing and, without doubt, borderline negligent. The lived experiences are heavy. The least we can do is listen, assist and demand justice and change. Every victim of abuse needs justice to heal.

I will not get into the details of the abuse that I have heard from select athletes, but I will provide some common themes shared by them. Athletes do not trust the sports system or sport administrators to operate and act in their best interests. Athletes and parents fear retribution. When they do speak up, retribution becomes real. Sport has silenced athletes for years. Athletes are not believed. They are gaslighted to questioning their lived experiences and are forced through retraumatizing processes when coming forward. Allies of athletes who work in sport organizations try to come forward and are limited by confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements. These are not sport issues; these are human rights issues.

No confidentiality or non-disclosure agreement should prevent or stop anyone from coming forward to expose the truth. For decades, sport has operated under a veil of sport autonomy. This autonomy has given sport the ability to operate with ultimate authority and with little to no oversight or accountability.

Over the past months, we've witnessed how Sport Canada has limited scope and power, and how they fail to make sporting organizations accountable for their lack of action and wrongdoings. Instead of addressing the root problem, Canada has created more problems by empowering sport structures to oversee human rights issues.

The Sport Dispute Resolution Centre of Canada was first appointed in this role, and then, based on anecdotal evidence, the Office of the Sport Integrity Commissioner was established. These are all sport entities trying to solve human rights issues with limited powers and limited independence.

Sport is a small community, and there are far too many real or perceived conflicts of interest to adequately address these issues. Canadian athletes whom we've heard from are tired of band-aid solutions.

Dear members, on behalf of thousands of Canadian athletes, we appeal to you today to strongly support a third party independent judicial investigation. Your actions following this study must send a clear message to every child, youth and elite athlete that they will no longer be forced into silence and will be believed and protected when they come forward.

Madam Chair, members of the committee, thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thank you very much, Rob.

I'm now going to pass it over to Kim Shore for Gymnasts for Change Canada.

Kim, you have the floor.

[Kim Shore, Co-Founder, Gymnasts for Change Canada]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to this committee.

This feels like a watershed moment for sport, particularly gymnastics.

When you think of gymnasts, picture little children six to eight years old starting their competitive journeys, training 20 to 30 hours every week, oftentimes spending more time with their coaches than their parents.

These are the profoundly vulnerable little humans entrusted to coaches who promise to teach them to flip and fly. These are the children I speak for today and for whom we call upon this government and this committee to enact a judicial inquiry into human rights violations against athletes and a lack of mechanisms protecting children in Canada.

As a former gymnast myself, and mother of a former gymnast, I know the beauty and the potential benefits that sport offers if delivered with an ethic of care and a child-centric approach. However, the hundreds of reports we have received and the arrests made in the last seven months alone confirm our worst fears: Gymnastics is rotting from the top down and the bottom up.

I wonder how many of you would choose gymnastics for yourself or your own child if you knew what we do.

When you were a child, would you have chosen to repeatedly feel your physical safety was threatened by an adult bullying you to do dangerous skills that you knew could result in catastrophic injuries?

How many of you experienced a trusted coach pressing your legs into oversplits while you sobbed and begged for them to stop, but they just screamed at you to “shut up”?

Who here spent the prime of their life with their face stuck in a toilet bowl throwing up every meal? Who obsessively weighed themselves or were force-fed in hospital to treat an eating disorder, all the while with the soundtrack in their head repeating, “You're fat. You're too ugly to be a gymnast. You look like the Pillsbury Doughboy”?

How many of you have experienced confusion, nausea and panic when a trusted adult suddenly says, “I want to touch you”, or you had to choose between the safe haven of your sexually abusive male coach just to be spared from the outright cruelty of your female coach?

Have any of you lived in chronic pain since adolescence? Have you self-harmed because the voice in your head said, and maybe still says, that you're worthless, useless, lazy?

Lastly, imagine spending thousands of dollars on therapy just to become a functioning member of society.

Our Gymnasts for Change team is here today. My friends, how many of us can relate to these examples?

You are all standing. Stay standing, team, if the pain, misery and fear you endured as a child athlete was worth the medals you won.

This is a reality for many child gymnasts in Canada—violence, degradation, humiliation and some of the worst abuses you can imagine—yet still there is no plan for prevention.

Let’s remember that the lack of diversity in gymnastics means these are often the most privileged children in our communities. If we can’t even keep them safe, what does this mean for kids who are racialized or transgender, or who have a disability—children who are exponentially more vulnerable to maltreatment because of intersecting systems of oppression?

As awful as these examples of abuse are, survivors tell us time and again that what haunts them the most is not having been protected by the adults who had the power to do something, and who instead chose to protect their friends and the brand.

Gymnasts for Change Canada was a movement we hoped we'd never have to start. Collectively, we believed that if we informed the provincial governing bodies, Gymnastics Canada and, as a last resort, Sport Canada, somebody—anybody—would listen to us. They would act with haste to protect athletes. However, we were wrong. Nine other countries have already completed independent investigations into their gymnastics programs. They are two years ahead of Canada with efforts to dismantle these cultures of cruelty with legislative changes and binding mechanisms that protect athletes' human rights.

Let me be very clear: What we’re discussing today is not a sport crisis: It is a human rights crisis happening in sport. Canada needs leaders with strong moral courage who will call for a national judicial inquiry to uncover a past that must never be repeated and to generate solutions that have never existed. The time for bold and brave action is now. Every child in Canada deserves to enjoy sport and grow up to be a better person because of their sport experience, not despite it.

I ask this committee, how can we continue to hear these stories and not act?

Thank you so much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thank you, Kim.

We're going to move on. We're going to do another sound check with Léa. I will pass that over to the clerk.

[Léa Clermont-Dion]

Good morning.

Is that better?

[The Clerk of the Committee, Ms. Alexie Labelle]

Can you talk a bit more?

[Léa Clermont-Dion]

Yes. Can you hear me better?

Otherwise, I can try to do it without a headset.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

This is the chair speaking right now.

Thank you so much for being here today, but I recognize the impact it will have on our interpreters if they cannot get the proper interpretation. We've had too many health issues. We would like to invite you back another time to provide your testimony so that we can continue on today. I'm afraid we won't be able to hear from you today, but we will ensure we hear from you in the future. Thank you very much.

With that, we're going to start our rounds of questioning. We will be doing our regular six-minute rounds. I will be flexible with the time, but I will ensure every party has its allotted amount of time.

I'm going to start it off with Anna Roberts. Anna, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Anna Roberts, Conservative, King—Vaughan, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you so much for your bravery. It's a difficult and an emotional situation, and my heart bleeds for you. Thank you for coming and sharing your stories with us today.

I'm going to direct my first question to Kim.

I was reviewing some of your notes and some of the segments I watched. One of the things you said stuck with me: “This is an important first step that must lead to a national independent third-party judicial investigation led by human rights experts.” This is a quote you made. “We have been clear that the Office of the Sport Integrity Commissioner (OSIC) is not equipped to handle this investigation. They lack independence, power to compel and they are directly funded by Sport Canada who has time and time again failed Canadian athletes.”

What would you say to this committee about a third party being organized by athletes and people who are in a better position to understand what has happened? Could you elaborate on that?

[Kim Shore]

Thank you, Madam Chair, for the question.

I'd like to hand that answer over to my colleague from Gymnasts for Change, Amelia Cline.

[Amelia Cline, Lawyer and Co-Founder, Gymnasts for Change Canada]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I think it is critically important that any third party judicial inquiry be led by athletes and particularly by survivors.

Survivors have a unique experience in sport that they can bring to bear, especially, for example, when it comes to drafting the terms of reference for any sort of investigation. What we've learned from speaking with the other countries that have undertaken investigations such as these is that it is vitally important that the terms of reference be crafted in such a way that they will actually get to the root issues within the investigation. Even at the outset of any sort of effort to create an independent investigation, survivors need to be consulted.

[Anna Roberts, Conservative, King—Vaughan, ON]

Maybe you can answer this for me too, and correct me if I'm wrong.

Once a coach or individual has been charged, I understand that there's no registry.

[Amelia Cline]

That's correct.

I can really only speak to gymnastics because that's my experience. Gymnastics Canada has a list of those suspended and banned that is publicly available; however, there's no discipline history that is provided publicly. If someone is suspended for a year, for example, it will show up that they have been suspended. As soon as their suspension is over, their name disappears from that list.

There's no way for parents to know whether they're being coached by someone who actually has a discipline history, and certainly there is no national coaching registry that would show the discipline history of coaches in other sports either. There is the theoretical possibility that a coach could be banned from gymnastics, for example, and then begin coaching in soccer, football or hockey. There's no clear way for parents or individuals to track where these coaches end up after they've been disciplined.

[Anna Roberts, Conservative, King—Vaughan, ON]

You mentioned that other countries are ahead of us by two years. From their example, what do they do to stop these particular individuals from getting involved in other sports?

[Amelia Cline]

In a number of different countries, they've tried various different things. Currently in the U.K., there are efforts under way to actually change the legislative framework around much of this: better safeguarding, with better and stronger child rights efforts.

Essentially, as we've been saying, this is a human rights issue as opposed to a sporting issue. This is really a child's rights issue, and legislative and policy change to essentially take a child-centric, child protection approach to these issues seems to be the discussion that's happening in other jurisdictions.

[Anna Roberts, Conservative, King—Vaughan, ON]

Would you agree that, just as it is for any other abuser, the record should never be expunged and should be released to the public and stay there permanently? Would that not help to ensure that these individuals never, ever have the opportunity to abuse a child again?

[Amelia Cline]

Absolutely, and I often use the example of other trust-based professions: teachers, doctors and lawyers. We all have public disciplinary records. That's because we're in such a position of power and such a position of trust with the public. It's recognized that we give up some of our privacy rights in an effort to protect the public if we abuse that power.

I see that being analogous to the position that coaches are in, especially in sports such as gymnastics. The people over whom they have power are these very vulnerable children. Why wouldn't we have a publicly available discipline record at that point?

[Kim Shore]

I would like to add that it's impossible for parents to make informed decisions about which coaches or clubs are safe for their kids to participate in. For example, on the banned-and-suspended list that Amelia referenced, there's no indication of what the charge was or what the breach of the code of conduct was.

This person on the list may have breached a financial aspect of their membership rights to Gymnastics Canada, but we don't know if it was finance, abuse of children or bullying and harassment of a peer. That is what Canadian parents and children deserve to know. It's who is interacting with their child and what kind of environment it is, so that they can make an informed decision on whether they put their child with this coach who has a history of abusing other children—I'm not sure who would do that—or choose the club and the coaches who are doing it well.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thanks so much.

Thank you, Amelia. I see that Amelia is trying to help me with my timing. Thank you. I appreciate that.

I'm now going to pass it over to Anita Vandenbeld. Anita, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'd like to start by thanking all of you for being here and for speaking so openly with us. It is making a difference. It will make a difference. We very much appreciate this. I think I speak for all members of the committee when I say that we really are focused on protecting children.

I'd like to direct my first question to Ms. Shore. For many Canadians who are not involved in sport or who don't have children in sport, this is something that is quite shocking to see. The question that many of us have is how is it possible that this has gone on for decades? Have people been looking the other way? It's human of us to want to protect children, so somewhere something went wrong. When I talk to friends who were athletes, they all say, “Oh, we knew who the creepy coaches were”. They knew. There's a whisper network. Everybody was sort of hush-hush, but nobody really said it.

I want to put an open-ended question to you about how this happened despite the fact, as I understand it, that there have been safety officers in gymnastics in Canada for 30 years. What is it that has gone wrong?

[Kim Shore]

Thank you, Madam Chair, for the question.

Many things have gone wrong. To your point about looking the other way, wilful blindness is very prevalent in sport, particularly in gymnastics. We are taught as gymnasts that there's no crying in gymnastics. Put a smile on your face even if your ankle feels broken or your back has torn muscles. Put on a smile and go out there and do your job.

You said it's natural to want to protect children. What I honestly feel has happened is that gymnastics has forgotten that these are children. Coaches use the language “I'm here to produce elite athletes”—“produce”. We don't “produce” children; we nurture them. We grow them. We teach them.

There is a very, to my mind, unfortunate and corrupt network of adults protecting adults. I can speak only to gymnastics specifically, but I have sat on both the provincial board of Alberta for gymnastics as well as the national board for Gymnastics Canada, and I have repeatedly seen friends protecting friends, information not coming forward, boards of directors who are uninformed, who know half the situation only, who rely on the narrative of a single person to inform them, and undoubtedly with that narrative comes not only a perspective but a desire to protect their friends and themselves and potentially their job. Yes, as adults in sport, we've all looked the other way.

As a parent, I was groomed. As an athlete, I was groomed. The worse grooming was as a parent, because I kept taking my child to gymnastics although she would come home and say, “Mommy, the coach hates me. The coach is mad at us. The coach yelled at us. Look at these burns on my skin I got from having to repeat a skill a hundred times over and over.” As trusting people, we implicitly think that these people are there, as you said, with a second nature to protect children, so at first you start excusing the behaviour because you would never dream there was anything different.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Just a moment.

We just want to make sure everybody can hear.

Andréanne, you had it too?