Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Ninu. It's an honour and a privilege to be here today.
Before I start, I want to recognize the true heroes on this call: all of the women who have dedicated their lives to making our society safer when it comes to gender-based violence. Thank you sincerely for your efforts.
For those of you who don't know, the BC Lions football club is a professional football team that competes in the CFL. The only reason we entered this arena is that we were asked to help. Gender-based violence is a complex, challenging and difficult reality, and, well, we play football.
I remember that when we first discussed getting involved with our leadership team, I expressed concerns about how our own organization's reputation might be at risk of skeletons coming out of the closet, or of current players or coaches having an incident and the press jumping all over us, dragging the BC Lions' good name through the mud. However, it was our head coach at the time, the legendary Wally Buono, who stood up and stated emphatically, “We should do this because it's the right thing to do. Our community has a problem. They've asked for our help, so let's do our best to give it.”
It turns out that Wally had experienced domestic violence in his own home growing up, and had to intervene on behalf of his mother. He went on to say that if we have challenges within our organization, we will deal with them. We won't hide from them. We will do what's right. So we took a giant leap forward alongside our partner, EVA BC, and launched the Be More Than a Bystander program.
Over the past 11 years, we have visited many locations throughout our beautiful province, teaching high school students about gender-based violence, sharing with them the tools to safely intervene, and ultimately encouraging them to be more than a bystander and break the silence on gender-based violence. It's safe to say the program has been a success. The silence has been broken, and the dialogue about this topic has been embraced by the students we have visited.
From an organizational perspective, we are among the first professional sports leagues to adopt a gender-based violence policy.
Is my time up here?