Status of Women Committee on Nov. 21st, 2022

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thank you so much.

Finally, I will pass it over to Indigenous Sport and Wellness Ontario.

Belle and Christina, if you could share your time for the next five minutes, I will pass the floor to you.

[Belle Bailey, Assistant, Sport Program Development, Indigenous Sport and Wellness Ontario]

[Witness spoke in Anishinaabemowin as follows:]

Kwey, Belle Bailey nid-ijinikàz. Pikwakanagan nid-ondjibà. Makwà ashidj mikinàk nidòdem.

[English]

My name is Belle Bailey. I'm an Algonquin from the Pikwakanagan First Nation, and I have been passionate about sport my whole life.

In 2017, I had the honour to be chosen to represent Team Ontario at the North American Indigenous Games as an athlete. In 2020, I was hired by Indigenous Sport and Wellness Ontario to help administer many aspects of the same provincial sports body. It is a role I am still in today and enjoy very much.

In 2023, I will be coaching the Ontario badminton team as we travel to Nova Scotia next summer to compete at the North American Indigenous Games once again.

I am here to speak to you today on behalf of Indigenous Sport and Wellness Ontario, and, for the remainder of this speech, I will be referring to the organization by its acronym, ISWO.

ISWO is the designated provincial aboriginal sport body for Ontario, serving all indigenous peoples and communities across the province, including first nation, Inuit and Métis living on and off reserve in rural and urban settings.

Our organization develops opportunities for participation in sport and cultural activities that promote wellness and positive lifestyles. We have implemented a women and girls program that is intended to increase opportunities for them to participate in sport, recreation and physical activity while empowering them through increased confidence, capacity and knowledge.

Recently, we developed a women and girls sport fund and organized the first-ever Sharing our Strength women and girls conference.

We would like to put forward the following observations.

First is that gender equality in sport in our country is grossly imbalanced. It is common knowledge that girls' sport participation rates decrease as they enter adolescence, leading to a dropout rate of one in three girls leaving sport by their teens. By ages 19 to 24, that number is reduced to a 34% participation rate. For indigenous women and girls, this disparity is even worse, with only a 24% participation rate starting in their teenage years.

Our second observation is that Canadian sports media don't provide proper representation of women athletes who could act as role models for youth. Studies show the 92.6% of content is solely related to men's sport coverage; however, additional research shows that Canadians want to watch women's sport content. The issue is that they can't find a place to watch it. As you can imagine, similar information on the representation of indigenous people in the sports media is almost non-existent. Representation matters.

Our third observation is that conscious and unconscious gender bias plays a huge role in all aspects of sport. Women's abilities and skills are systematically underestimated. This perceived inequality is a barrier to sport for women and girls. Men are viewed with the assumption that they are competent in sport. Women must first prove themselves and then fight every day to show that they are competent. Once the element of racial bias is added regarding indigenous people to the bias that already exists for women, one can easily see the uphill battle that must be fought.

Last is our fourth observation: This conversation leads directly to pay equity, as there is a correlation between lower wages being caused by the lack of media coverage and under-representation in leadership roles. While Canada has made strides in this regard, much more work is needed.

ISWO would like to make the following recommendations.

The first is to increase sports programming targeted specifically to women and girls that creates safe spaces for them to pursue physical activity and wellness opportunities. This will reduce psychosocial barriers to recreation, health and wellness. These opportunities can put women and girls on the sport pathway to participating in sport for life.

Our second recommendation is to showcase and celebrate more female athletes as a whole. This also includes showcasing more indigenous women and girls succeeding in sport. By recognizing and acknowledging athletic excellence and sharing the stories of success, we can continue to inspire and provide role models for younger athletes to look up to. As previously stated, representation matters. What you cannot see, you cannot become.

The third recommendation is that the Government of Canada's commitment to achieving gender equity in sport at all levels by 2035, in our opinion, is much too late. Recent surveys have shown that one in four girls aren't committed to returning to their prepandemic sports at a time when sport may be more important than ever. Let's move this timeline forward.

Last, number four is to increase support for building sport pathways and career pathways for women to increase the number of female athletes, certified coaches, managers and personal trainers, who in turn can serve as role models for younger athletes.

In closing, my name is Belle Bailey. I'm a proud Algonquin woman from the Pikwakanagan First Nation and I am here today representing Indigenous Sport and Wellness Ontario. We will continue to advocate for women and girls in sports and hope the committee will consider our recommendation seriously.

Madam Chair, we would like to express our gratitude to the committee for this opportunity to be heard. Thank you. Meegwetch.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thank you very much.

I'm going to let everybody know at 12:30 that there are supposed to be bells for the one o'clock vote. At that time, I will have to take a vote on whether or not we'll continue to go at that time, so I'm letting everybody know that there's going to be choice for us. I'm going to say we should probably continue since we have all of these great people in the room, but I'm going to get started before the bells.

We will start with six minutes for Michelle Ferreri.

Go ahead, Michelle.

[Michelle Ferreri, Conservative, Peterborough—Kawartha, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you again to all of our witnesses for being here today. I really appreciate your time. I know the whole committee does, those virtually and in person.

Ms. Fowler, if I may start with you, I had the opportunity to do some interviewing on the heritage committee with Hockey Canada. At that time, one of the witnesses, Mr. Smith, referred to the hockey players—it's almost subconscious, in a way—as though they were commodities.

I couldn't help but think that if we are treating our children or our players or our athletes like commodities, how will they then treat others? I am curious about what your thoughts on that are in terms of sport overall.

[Dr. Teresa Fowler]

Thank you for that big question. I'm sorry; the back-flow right away is putting me off a bit.

Again, our study is grounded in hockey culture. That's not to take away from the experiences that other folks have shared, but what we see in our work is exactly what you're talking about. It's how these players are commodified for the winning aspect and how that then empowers them to treat others.

It doesn't. Men in our study talked about wanting to speak up and speak out; however, nobody in the dressing room was, so therefore you just go along with what the coach says. When the coach is telling you to win at all costs, those costs, unfortunately, come at the expense of women and girls, as we have learned this summer.

I think it's also important here to mention, and then I'll turn it over to Shannon so she can add, that researchers have been doing this work for decades. These stories are not new for researchers and victims. People have not been listening, so Hockey Canada, while it is certainly a tragic event, also offers us an opportunity, as others have said, to really shift the culture of sport.

I'll turn it over to Shannon.

[Dr. Shannon Moore]

Thank you very much. I appreciate that question about commodification, because it was a huge theme in our research. The participants spoke of how when they were 15—all of our participants were over 18—they felt the sport was a job as early as 13 and 14 years of age and how there was no joy in the game for them anymore. I know somebody referenced the notion of joy earlier. They did not speak about the sound of their skates on the ice, camaraderie, having fun. They spoke about it as the steps to get to their next level of the sport. We felt that this made them feel constantly precarious, as I mentioned, and that precarity was one of the reasons that they didn't speak out.

We could speak to many other reasons that we think our participants did not speak out about assaults that they witnessed or sexism that they witnessed, but commodification was certainly a huge theme that reduced people in speaking out.

[Michelle Ferreri, Conservative, Peterborough—Kawartha, ON]

Thank you so much for that.

I know we've heard some really powerful testimony and some great ideas in terms of legislation. I think one of the pieces that I would love to see further conversation on—and perhaps you have the research—is parents' role in that commodification, of buying in to the coach's idea that your child is directly linked to their worth in the game. There is a lot of responsibility on parents in this conversation, in that they too are siding with the coach at the expense of the child.

I'm curious about your thoughts on that and what we can do as elected officials to implement policies to help educate parents better so that they're not pushing their agenda onto their child.

[Dr. Teresa Fowler]

Thank you for that. That is a good point. Again I'll turn it over to Shannon, because everybody is implicated in this culture—not only parents but fans and media, as was mentioned before, with respect to the amount of broadcast time for men's sports over women's sports. All of us are complicit in that.

If you ask what the government can do, we need to start by looking at where sport falls within the portfolio of the federal government. As we mentioned, it falls under Canadian Heritage. If sport fell under health, imagine what a difference that lens might make with respect to how we approach sports.

I'll pass it over to Shannon.

[Dr. Shannon Moore]

Thank you.

I think it's a lack of education in general. Certainly I am housed in the faculty of education, but one element that came out of our study is that there's a general lack of education for coaches and players for understanding healthy masculinity and the ways in which they potentially commodify other people in their lives.

Then, obviously, there is education for parents. There is just a complete lack of education around gender at all. Certainly they are constantly schooled in gender, but they do not discuss gender in overt ways.

We think that the locker room culture was a huge issue with this. It's a space in which the young men and boys do not have a coach. There's a lot of discussion in the locker rooms and there's the idea that you have to keep things in the locker rooms.

I would ask parents about how children are being “adultified” in this process of commodification. You have young children at 12 and 13 years of age never getting a season off. It's not that they go play baseball in the summer; they're now going to hockey camps because they need to get ready for the next steps. I would be asking parents how they are playing into the commodification and the adultification of their child.

Often we think we don't need to talk to men and boys in hockey because they're a privileged group of people. As Teresa's other research is showing us, they need to be talking about their experiences with masculinity in the process of being made into a gender through hockey.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thank you so much.

I'm going to interrupt now because the bells are ringing. I'm looking for unanimous consent to carry on with the testimony.

Fantastic. Seeing that consent, we'll carry on.

Jenna Sudds, you have six minutes.

[Jenna Sudds, Liberal, Kanata—Carleton, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses for being here today and for the very important work that you are doing.

I'd like to start with a very basic question. I will direct that to Ms. Sandmeyer-Graves from Canadian Women and Sport.

First of all, I'll acknowledge that data shows that typically half as many women participate in sport as men. I'm wondering if you can share with us what factors you see in your work that help explain why that is.

[Allison Sandmeyer-Graves]

Thank you for the question.

Yes, it's true that women and girls participate at far lower rates than men and boys. As referenced, we have research that shows that during adolescence—those teenage years—girls who are playing drop out at a rate of one in three from sport, while boys stay in sport and drop out at a rate of one in 10.

The question as I understand it is, what's going on? At the end of the day, it's complex and multi-faceted. The girls tell us that the most important factors for them are things that come up around access to sport. Girls still don't have the same number of opportunities and ease of access to play, for sure, but they also talk about quality of sport.

Sport has been designed by men for boys and men historically, so all efforts to include girls and women in sport are remedial. It's retrofitting. It's “bolting on”, if you will. It varies from sport to sport, but sport is still largely led by men. Even sports dominated in participation by women have largely male coaches. If you look at sports like ringette and others, you see that they're really defined by men. They are designed and delivered through a male world view, and girls are saying that it's not working for them. They don't feel like it was designed with their needs and interests in mind. It stops being effective for them.

They also talk about things like safety. They talk about bullying. They talk about real struggles with body confidence and body image. In sport, your body is on display, and people are constantly interacting with it.

It's a multitude of factors, but what we ultimately have girls saying is that this is their discretionary time, their out-of-school time and their away-from-other-friends time, and sport ultimately isn't serving them.

Of course, safety is very much part of that. When you talk to girls about safety and when we talk about maltreatment broadly, it's not just about safety from sexual abuse and sexual harassment; it's psychological safety and emotional safety. It's safety among their peers. It's safety with the adults in the room. Looking at that holistically is really important when we start to think about solutions.

[Jenna Sudds, Liberal, Kanata—Carleton, ON]

That's incredible. Thank you very much. It's very apparent we have lots of work still to do.

I'd like to direct my next question to Ms. Bailey, who is here in the room.

You shared recommendations with us today. I think I counted three, the last one being that the government commit to achieving gender equity in sport. I'd love to give you the floor for you to talk a bit more about what that looks like to you and to expand upon that recommendation.

[Belle Bailey]

I'm sorry. Could you repeat that last one?

[Jenna Sudds, Liberal, Kanata—Carleton, ON]

I believe the third recommendation that you listed was around the government committing to achieve gender equity in sport. If you'd like to, could you expand upon what you think that should look like and what that means to you?

That's not to put you on the spot. If I'm putting you on the spot, I can move on.

[Christina Ruddy, Director and Coordinator, Government Relations, National Strategy , Indigenous Sport and Wellness Ontario]

Would you like me to go ahead?

[Jenna Sudds, Liberal, Kanata—Carleton, ON]

Yes, absolutely.

[Christina Ruddy]

When we talk about gender equality in sport, we're not looking at just the big picture of what we see on TV and stuff like that. It's also about grassroots equal opportunity. It's about the same opportunities for boys, girls and LGBTQIA2+. It's that they have the opportunity to even try for sport.

When we come from an indigenous perspective, we're also looking at the multiple barriers for indigenous people in sport, including poverty and distance, and we have to acknowledge the Far North. Most of those opportunities come to boys and men, not to women. We need to look at more investments in those who are further away from sports in their lives, who are placed further away by poverty, by nutrition and by all those basic things that are common in mainstream populations but not when it comes to indigenous peoples.

When we talk about gender equality, we're looking at a bigger picture: equal opportunity for boys, girls and all the different communities around that and what it could look like in the future. That could be absolutely beautiful, right? We recently attended the national aboriginal hockey championships. There is equal representation there between men and women. That's from our own community putting those youth forward to have those opportunities, but it takes the whole community and a national effort to do it.

We get equality in those places, but we don't get it at the grassroots level. That's where we need to look deeper: at the grassroots at home in our backyards and also targeting both women and girls.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thank you.

We're now going to turn it over to Andréanne Larouche.

Andréanne, you have six minutes.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I, too, want to thank the witnesses, here, in the room, and online, for their participation. It is becoming quite clear just how desperately needed this study is.

My first question is for Ms. Fowler.

When I sat on the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, in the summer, I was deeply concerned. I believe you were one of the researchers who signed a letter that was received as part of the committee's study.

I see Ms. Moore nodding her head as well. Feel free to jump in, if you have something to add.

Why did you write the letter? What about the Hockey Canada situation this summer made you feel the need to write the letter?

[Dr. Teresa Fowler]

We decided that Shannon was going to go first, but you asked me directly, so I'll go.

We signed the letter as researchers who have been doing this work. As I mentioned, researchers have been doing this work for some of both decades, although not necessarily me. It was important for us to sign a letter to say, “Hey, we're here.” We've been talking about this for a long period of time. Our colleagues have been sounding this alarm for a long period of time.

It's the question that brings us all here. If people have been sounding the alarm in men's sport, doesn't it make sense then that nobody is listening when women are sounding the alarm in other sports?

I'll turn it over to Shannon.

[Dr. Shannon Moore]

Thank you.

Thank you for going first again. It gives me a little time to collect my thoughts, so thank you for that.

I think we signed on to the letter because we do not see systemic changes. We see an attempt to brand the changes that are needed in sport and hockey with slogans, but there isn't a real attempt to listen to what researchers have been saying.

Although our third co-researcher was an elite-level male hockey player himself, people consistently try to find ways to undermine what we are saying, either because we are female athletes and parents or because our co-researcher, Dr. Tim Skuce, is no longer an elite-level player. Now ageism is used to discount what he is saying.

We signed on to the letter for exactly the reasons Dr. Fowler gave: It's because we think that people need to actually listen to researchers who are speaking directly to athletes who are afraid to speak in other contexts and listen to that research and actually do something about it, rather than using these superficial “silver bullet” attempts.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

You said the solutions were known. You listed some of them in your opening statement and your first few answers.

Ms. Moore and Ms. Fowler, recap for us, if you would, what we need to take away from your recommendations.

[Dr. Shannon Moore]

I think we need to recognize that these issues are systemic and work to change the culture rather than having discussions centre on “bad apples”. What has happened thus far is that people have been isolated and deemed not to represent the culture, and so the idea is that we will just cut them out.

We need to have discussions and workshops about sexual violence, consent and healthy relationships as part of team training. We need to make space for discussion about the brand of masculinity that's expected and promoted and rewarded in hockey culture. It is damaging not only to the people in the lives of these men and boys but also to the men themselves.

I will pass it over to Dr. Fowler to see if she has anything else to add to our recommendations.

[Dr. Teresa Fowler]

Yes. We actually mentioned, in the piece we wrote for The Conversation Canada, that we really need to—and that's what this committee is doing, which we're thankful for—interrogate these institutional practices that reward this particular brand of masculinity, and we need to consider all of the hierarchies that are contributing to this practice and go beyond the superficial.

As Shannon mentioned, the rebranding does nothing to change a culture. It just puts more lipstick on top of it.

What folks in positions of power in these organizations need to do is really reflect on how they respond to these incidents. Don't just brush athletes aside. Don't tell them to come back after the game. Really devote time to listening to our athletes and protecting our athletes.