Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for having me.
I am a two-time Olympian, a mother of three young hockey players and a victim of egregious sexual abuse within our Canadian sport system.
I also work in this space. I made that choice to work on the front line of this crisis, and have for over four years. I have worked alongside sport organizations, athletes and government agencies helping them seek out solutions and providing education at all levels, of all ages and all roles within these organizations.
The impacts of my sexual abuse experience cannot be summed up in a few minutes. Extreme grooming, horrific sexual assaults, mental coercion and psychological abuse are some of the immense physical and mental burdens I still live with each day.
I know always what trauma feels like when it's associated with being the whistle-blower and the effects of being silenced for 17 years before my perpetrator was caught. For years I lived with anger, depression, shame, self-blame and chronic PTSD.
Yes, I made the Olympics, and yes, I became an eight-time Canadian champion. Success does not automatically translate to happiness or health. I can tell you that first-hand. In fact, in many ways our focus on success above all else is a shield for victims. I would give back every medal I ever won to have prevented what happened to me from happening to me.
I know why it is critical to remove an abuser immediately from the environment. After I was taken into the woods for six hours and coerced through threats of suicide, I only had him reappear the next day, standing in the woods in camouflage, to watch me during the biggest race of my life.
I know what it's like to retell my story hundreds of times and be traumatized each and every time I tell it, including today and throughout a two-and-half-year criminal trial and investigation that resulted in a 12-year prison sentence. I know what it feels like to have to testify in court 36 hours after giving birth to my baby and bringing her in the room with me so I could take breaks to breastfeed during cross-examination. I will never get back my daughter's first week of life. That is why I have an unparalleled commitment to create a different sport future for her and her two older brothers.
I also know what it takes to have a publication ban lifted on my own name so that I could put my name behind this movement over four years ago and share openly many times a month my abuse all in an effort to educate and shift the system. Each time I do this, I relive those memories, those experiences and those traumas. I do all this because change happens in the real conversation. If people don't know clearly what happened to me, how are we going to know how to help others?
I've been committed to this work and have worked with your previous sports minister, Kirsty Duncan, dating right back to 2018.
I'd like to introduce you to another term: victim shaming. To have people actually insinuate or even directly allege that since that I choose to lean into this crisis and go into organizations to help them find solutions, identify systemic risks and environmental challenges, that in some way, shape or form I could ever be accused of helping them cover up abuse. To those who say that, I say you're not worth my energy or my defence. I live in this space every day. It is my life purpose, and I choose to believe that at the end of the day we all want the same outcome, which is real progress. That is where I put my focus. I ignore the noise and let the work be the priority. My company and I do this better than anyone else in this industry.
I'm all cried out for today, apparently, for myself, but I am not cried out for my children. First, foremost and forever, I am an athlete advocate and one of the first who ever came forward in this country. I know many of you have spoken from that perspective. Let me give you a little bit of an enlightened perspective of safe sport in our country.
The crisis is much more than coach-athlete abuse. With fewer than 5% of cases we see being sexual in nature, it is much more than sexual abuse. I speak to more athletes on this issue on the front lines than anyone else in our country. I say that to contextualize my experience and perspective. There is intentional harm. That is certain. What we also know to be true is that we have deep, cultural conditioning and normalization of behaviours in sport, and we need to end this systemic acceptance of maltreatment.
Here are some examples. I educate hockey coaches on the perils of bag skating and football coaches on the trauma of running suicides. Both these ingrained practices are now considered exercises as forms of punishment, and many coaches still believe in their validity.
This isn't about judgment. It is about education. Much like concussions, once we know better, we do better.
These coaches will almost always respond to me with, “Well, I was bag-skated, so it can't be that bad”, to which I respond, “Well, yes, 25 years ago after an athlete was knocked unconscious we, also gave him, her or them sniffing salts and sent them back on the ice.”
We need to change. I provide education to young athletes being sanctioned for hazing. When I ask them how they don't think what they did is harmful, they say, “Because, Allison, this happened to me four years ago.”
I talk to referees who are quitting alongside 70% of their peers in this province alone because, in addition to the 900 complaints they filed for discrimination in hockey alone last year, they are tired of being chased home by angry parents. I am even on the bench of my own son's hockey game watching parents in a fist fight in the stands and parents yelling profanities at the refs. Just last week, as a parent was ejected from a game for ref abuse, this parent left and, in front of dozens of 11-year-old athletes, called out, “Hey, ref, why don't you just go kill yourself?”
Yes, I talk to athletes who are actively in the grooming process. I work with them to help them understand what that is and why being their coach's favourite and best friend is not healthy, why feeling that if they aren't their coach's favourite they won't make the team is a clear sign of grooming and why, if they feel they are playing out of fear, they may also be playing under psychological abuse.
We are overly focused on the problem or, at best, polishing the problem, when we need to lean into the solutions that are already evident. We need to deprogram the cult—yes, the cult—out of the culture of sport. This requires patience and grace as people wake up to the system that they have been normalized to over so many years. This has led us to think that everything is okay because it's something we've seen or experienced since early childhood: kids in bathrooms and on buses naked; coaches berating athletes; racial slurs being thrown around like common language; and administrators failing to focus on the victim and instead protecting the institution's reputation.
All of this needs to change through concerted proactive prevention and educational tactics. We need to train on grooming. There are only four stages: favouritism, personal bond, isolation and complicity. I learned these stages of grooming when I was 30 years old when I was speaking on a stage. How much do you think I would have wanted to know about those stages of grooming when I was a young athlete?
Last but not least, I will just share that I challenge all of us to move forward, not backward. We are a system, and sport is in crisis. We need to invest more in our organizations that are supportive of and working to fund the shift in sport. We need to swiftly and severely sanction individual offenders, but every time we look in the rear-view mirror we take away from the gas pedal that we must push down on.
In the last four years, I have seen progress and I have seen mistakes, including a very poor implementation of the mandatory changes at the NSO level. Most of all, I have seen us put more focus on what to do once we catch someone instead of what to do collectively so that abuse doesn't happen in the first place. When we place success on sanctioning an offender and ignore the system around them, we have allowed another person to be villainized and victimized.
I challenge all of us with this because I truly believe that sport can still be a beautiful place to raise my children. I will not give up on that reality, and I ask that you don't either.
Thank you.