Scott Stinson: Hockey Canada CEO says he is there to ‘lead the change,’ not quit
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Smith said he’d ‘like the opportunity to show Canadians what we’ve done’ at Wednesday’s hearings in Ottawa — but his audience was unconvinced
Hockey Canada President Scott Smith appears as a witness at the standing committee on Canadian Heritage in Ottawa on Wednesday, July 27, 2022, looking into how Hockey Canada handled allegations of sexual assault and a subsequent lawsuit. Photo by Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press Article content
Eventually the other skate will have to drop.
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At a second day of testimony before the Heritage Committee on Parliament Hill, executives with Hockey Canada apologized for the way in which they handled allegations of a group sexual assault in 2018.
They said they believed a woman had suffered harm.
They said they continue to hope to get to the truth of what happened four years ago.
But the players involved have not been publicly identified. When they are, and in part because of what has been said about them while they have remained anonymous, the fallout will be significant.
There were two main themes of Wednesday’s hearings in Ottawa. The first was that the Members of Parliament were not happy with Hockey Canada, and with president and chief executive officer Scott Smith specifically, who they repeatedly, one after the other, suggested should be out of a job. (Tom Renney, the recently retired CEO who was the top boss in 2018, appeared only by a video link, which it turned out was a good way to avoid questions entirely. Renney could have taken the time to knit a throw blanket given the lack of attention paid to him.)
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The second theme was that Smith does not intend to take the advice of the honourable members and quit. He said he was “here to lead the change” that Hockey Canada must make. He said he believes he has the support of the organization’s staff and board of directors. He said that as Hockey Canada embarks on its recently unveiled “action plan” to make the sport a safer place, he would “like the opportunity to show Canadians what we’ve done.”
His audience was unconvinced.
Hockey Canada faces calls for a leadership change as MPs probe victim payments 
Scott Stinson: The glaring question that Hockey Canada’s executives have yet to answer But as the strangely polite sparring of a House of Commons committee unfolded, with MPs upbraiding Smith for the lack of action that Hockey Canada took in 2018, when it didn’t even bothered to discover the identities of the players involved in the alleged assault, and Smith responding with his resolute claims that he was sorry about all that but he’s still the right guy to bring change, there was very little disagreement about the story at the root of this particular scandal.
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The MPs expressed revulsion at the allegations that a woman who was 20 years old at the time was assaulted by a group of players, while intoxicated and without her consent, and the various hockey men in the room did not dispute that a wrong had occurred. Smith called the events of that night, while uncertain in specific details, “very troubling.” Dan MacKenzie, president of the Canadian Hockey League, called what happened “these terrible incidents.” And Brian Cairo, chief financial officer of Hockey Canada, said the organization moved quickly to resolve the woman’s lawsuit, filed in April and settled in May, in part because “we did believe that harm was caused.” Smith and Cairo also said they thought it was in the woman’s best interest to offer a settlement rather than subject her statement of claim to legal scrutiny.
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Anthony Housefather, a Liberal MP, was understandably flummoxed by the way the lawsuit was handled. Had the players, identified in the statement of claim as John Does 1-8, been informed that Hockey Canada intended to settle with their accuser, he asked. Smith said the players were advised after the lawsuit had been settled. Why wasn’t the lawsuit handled by Hockey Canada’s insurers, the MP asked, and was told there were concerns that it might take some time to establish that the insurer would be responsible for that kind of coverage.
Instead, they used money from the organization’s all-purpose National Equity Fund, which among its sources of revenue are grassroots hockey registration fees. Even as Housefather, a lawyer himself, said he had never heard of an organization responding to a lawsuit in this manner, the explanation from Hockey Canada’s side was that they wanted to take care of it quickly so that the complainant was spared any more trouble.
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Which is where this case gets into unusual territory. The unnamed players, all of whom had professional contracts four years ago and some of whom could be National Hockey League players today, may have wanted to dispute the accusations in the statement of claim. They might have different versions of what happened. They still can dispute the allegations, of course, but the lawsuit was already settled on their behalf. At the least, it will be awkward when, as seems inevitable, their names are revealed. Many players on Canada’s 2018 World Junior team have already spoken up to deny involvement and awareness of the alleged incident. Others have said nothing, which is a lot easier to do in the hockey off-season. Hockey Canada’s third-party investigation, which was effectively shuttered in 2018 when the woman declined to take part, is back on, and she has provided her evidence to it. The NHL’s probe is ongoing.
And Hockey Canada, in moving so fast to deal with something today that it wasn’t nearly as interested in resolving four years ago, looks like it was hoping to get rid of a problem quickly so that its past mistakes wouldn’t become a whole thing in the present.
Not that Smith would agree.
Asked about letting the matter drop for four years, only to see it blown out in the open with a TSN report two months ago, Hockey Canada’s new boss said, “I don’t believe that we’ve swept it under the rug.”
Oh?
Postmedia News
sstinson@postmedia.com
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