Canadian Heritage committee  How else do I say it? I mean, aren't they the “go-to”? The buck stops at the top. I would argue that, perhaps, the individuals consulting to get their on-the-ground information have vested interests in supporting their own businesses or the funding they receive. I think there's a desperate need in Canada and Canadian culture, in general, for a persona of “We're all nice, and we're all about the best interests of everybody else.”

Canadian Heritage committee  Quickly, I would just say that the money would be better spent towards a national inquiry so that we could develop a proper framework rather than just send piecemeal money. I had the experience as a parent where the coaches emailed us and said, “You must send your child to practice whether they're sick or not.

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you very much for the question. I appreciate that. I'm not an expert in national inquiries, other than I know that we have them. I think I speak for most of the advocacy groups. If we could do an inquiry that is crafted outside of the sports jurisdiction, with human rights and child protection experts sitting at the table, and with the voices of survivors who have not yet been consulted, that would be a first good step towards producing something.

Canadian Heritage committee  I want to say one quick thing about the national inquiry. My hope would be that recommendations for legislative change would come out of that inquiry, which we have no research on. You brought up background checks, Mr. Waugh. They are sorely lacking. There is a disconnect between the RCMP system and the municipal system.

Canadian Heritage committee  As Ryan said in his speech, it's the height of arrogance to say that we know everything. I agree that she's done a tremendous amount of research on athlete abuse. She's defined it and she's identified it, but that doesn't help us with the system necessarily. We can all agree that there is abuse in the system.

Canadian Heritage committee  Well, I am a parent of a gymnast. Because I loved the sport, I allowed my daughter to try it. She fell in love with it and was abused physically, emotionally and psychologically. She continues to live in chronic pain with a wrist injury. I put in a complaint with Gymnastics Canada while I was a board member and said, “Please don't give me any special treatment,” and there were four or five other families from the same club who put in a complaint with me.

Canadian Heritage committee  —and it was totally overwhelming. I live with the guilt every day that I let my daughter try that sport.

Canadian Heritage committee  The sanctions are based on only the one complaint, even if there are other witnesses, so that's part of the problem. They then get a two-year suspension for having harmed a child in ways that could last for years and years. The coach gets two years, because they only looked at one complaint, even if there were five witnesses.

Canadian Heritage committee  These stories represent systemic failure. We don't want to trot out survivors to tell the awful, embarrassing things that Ryan and I had to say today. We don't want any more people to have to do that. We want the stories to represent information that will inform how our system is failing us, then go above that and see how the funding models and the relationships among all the different agencies are failing us.

Canadian Heritage committee  I echo what Ryan said. In my hand, here, I'm holding the statement of a young survivor who was raped by her coach in the bathroom of the gym facility when she was seven years old. When she was a teenager, he returned to the gym after he'd been in prison, convicted of sexual offences against other children—not her, though.

Canadian Heritage committee  I keeping going back to the national inquiry. The only way I can see this happening is for people to have a venue to go and speak to someone who they feel is neutral. I won't speak to anyone who is involved in the sports system right now. I was called out publicly in a national report, because I didn't speak.

Canadian Heritage committee  I believe that we need a complaint mechanism run outside of sports. OSIC was developed by long-tenured sport academics and sport leaders, etc., and they are all in sports. It's being funded by Sport Canada, which is problematic right there, so take it outside of sport. I spoke to someone who was on some of the original planning committees for the UCCMS and, I believe, OSIC as well.

Canadian Heritage committee  I have a similar perspective to both of you, with the exception that I think a national inquiry doesn't need to take as long as the way it's been described by many opposers, that it will take so long that it will take away from what they're doing right now. I think many of the solutions that are being offered could work.

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. I thought it was just me whose hips were too fat by age 10, and whose coach went to strippers so that he could tell us how it looked when girls did the splits on glass tables. I thought it was just me whose coach terrified her into attempting skills—one of which resulted in a broken leg—and who screamed things like, “You're a waste of my time, your mother's money and your own effort.”