Hockey Canada: Two Minutes for Unsportsmanlike Conduct.

 

Do I look like Gretzky? Huh?

Canada’s Minister for Sport is reported today (CBC News app) to have declared that there’s a “systemic problem” of sexual violence and toxic masculinity in Canada’s hockey culture that Hockey Canada has failed to address. Pascale St-Onge also said, “The stories that we’re reading about are deeply disturbing and sickening, quite frankly.”

Triggered by one story of members of Canada’s Junior Hockey Team sexually assaulting an intoxicated woman, tag-team-wise, an avalanche of stories illustrating the “sexual violence and toxic masculinity” have surfaced.

Clearly, our Minister for Sport is not going to let Hockey Canada get away with “a few bad apples” arguments; she’s using the systemic word which must mean something like this: you’re organized in such a way and your practices are such that you’re encouraging the violence and toxicity to happen.

Is that fair? At the local level, sports programs are generally organized into same-age, same-gender teams. Peer groups, in other words. It makes sense. Competition needs to be fair. At the same time, educators know that when a child begins to live a part of life outside the home, peer acceptance and bonding become powerful forces in his/her/their development. Add to this a zero-sum competitiveness and the garden may have been tilled for growing a triumphalist, toxic, sports “militia.”

If this could be proven to be true, then the systemic part of St-Onge's lament would be self-evident.

And herein lies a dilemma: professional sports watching is deeply entrenched in Canadian culture. To reorganize children’s hockey to meet goals of physical fitness and the inculcation of habits of sportsmanship/citizenship as opposed to competitiveness considerations, would grate across the sensitivities of thousands of sports afficionados. The Ministry for Sport can withdraw funding from Hockey Canada—which it has—until it makes meaningful changes to its practices, but can do little else.

Sports existed back in the 1950s; I lived the recess and after school games of softball and soccer, the annual field days in town, the makeshift ice rinks and ball diamonds. There may have been sandlot ball in town, but in our one-room country school, all grades and all genders played; with only fifteen students in Grades One to Eight, peer divisions were impossible. 

We have other models of play, exercise, sports, beside the Hockey Canada model. St-Onge's reference to systems that prove harmful is timely; organized hockey must take a hard look at itself.

I haven’t said anything yet about “sexual violence” or “toxic masculinity,” St-Onge’s words for the side-effects of whatever the system is getting wrong. There certainly are campaigns to counter feminism; such a campaign is evident in American Evangelicalism’s tendency to prefer a return to whatever in the Bible supports male hegemony. As to “sexual violence,” I think that in its debasement, its humiliation of victims, it serves to reinforce male dominion over females, a practice exacerbated by the peer camaraderie of the pub, the military, the traditionalist RCMP, etc., and now—according to St-Onge’s pronouncements—in a sport poorly regulated by Hockey Canada.

I’m far too short of knowledge to expound on the details of a typical child’s experience going through the levels of minor hockey programs before arriving at the AA or AAA levels where it gets really serious, especially for those parents who are pushing their young men toward a possible professional NHL career. While grooming young men for the remote possibility of a place in the big time, are we also grooming them systematically—possibly inadvertently—for an attitude we abhor? That seems to be St-Onge’s concern and should be a serious consideration for every family contemplating hockey as a part of their child’s education.

"I fell into a burning Ring of Fire..."

 

The Cinderella Planet

I spent part of the morning reading a superb piece about yet another instance where corporate/industrial development and Indigenous land use are in conflict. The article concerned the “Ring of Fire,” a rich deposit of minerals, some of which are being sought for the manufacture of electric car batteries. Located in the James Bay Lowlands of Northwestern Ontario, the deposit can’t be developed without overland access infrastructure. Rivers will have to be bridged, bogs torn up, forests cut down, all those things northerners recognize from past experience of, for instance, building and maintaining a highway link from Thompson, Manitoba to Winnipeg or from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan to Missinipi. Roads can exact tremendous ecological change, particularly to the delicate balance of land, water, plant and wildlife that has evolved since the last Ice Age in the harsh climate and conditions of the Canadian Shield.

In its pristine state, the Shield can be a paradise of clear, cool lakes and rivers and endless spruce forests.  The land teems with sturgeon, walleye, muskellunge, beaver, muskrat, moose and bear while providing an idyllic habitat for humans who have over many generations learned to live full, satisfying lives in harmony with nature’s largesse. They travel in canoes that leave no dent in the water, fish and hunt only what’s needed to survive, rely on roots and berries to supplement their diets. And in the wilderness where a meteorite deposited the Ring of Fire eons and eons ago, populations still experience that quiet life that is the north, they still dry sturgeon fillets, still hunt the mighty moose and lay in a winter’s supply of food. And the thought of “owning” any of this great north is still anathema to them,  knowing as they do that it all belongs to its creator. That they would wish to have a say into both the if and the how of development should come as no surprise.

Sturgeon Fishing on the Neskantaga First Nation (CBC News)

Shift to the national and international corporations salivating over the possibilities represented in extracting scarce minerals from the Ring of Fire. They will succeed; they have the backing of the Ford government for whom the sturgeon population, algae blooms, drained or flooded bogs and decimation of habitation doesn’t emotionally, personally register. Gross Domestic Product, profitability and jobs are the telling landmarks of progress in a settler colonialism that relies on ever-growing consumption. Settler colonialism that goes hand in hand with corporate capitalism evolves rapidly and decisively toward an end that won’t be pretty; on a limited planet, no system can keep growing indefinitely and the Ring of Fire is just one more example of consumerism’s attempt to stave off its inevitable end, at least for one more generation.

Electric cars and the batteries that they require represent one more attempt to kick the can down the road, to avert disaster without the inconvenience of reducing our wants.  

There may be only one sensible way to approach the looming climate change disaster, and it’s to reduce our consumption to match our needs instead of to our advertising-fed wants. Why, for instance, would we transport kiwi from New Zealand when our just-as-nutritious berries grow naturally where we live? Why would we fly halfway around the planet to attend a meeting on subjects that could be dealt with on the internet? Why would we holiday in places far away when creature-comfort venues can be created locally? Why would we tolerate built in obsolescence in our appliances when the means to manufacture longer-lasting ones are already in place and running? Why would we ship rice from Asia when oats, for instance, provides better nutrition than rice ever has?

Growing for export rather than for the local food market feeds into the consumption-growth-profit model. Much of Saskatchewan’s arable land is used to grow canola, from which the oil is extracted and shipped abroad for the most part. In principle, that same land could be growing oats for oatmeal, wheat for baking, potatoes for local consumption with surpluses marketed more broadly. Freight transportation is extremely unfriendly environmentally; more than profitability must eventually drive our priorities. For the population of the James Bay lowland, profit/loss motives simply weren’t considerations historically; only sustainability, conservation mattered.

Harping on the urgency of the need to shift to needs provision while reducing wants consumption may already be little more than a futile thundering against a lost cause. Breaking personal negative habits is hard enough; smoking, drinking, hamburger & bacon gorging, and lethargic living persist among many until their wants kill them. But that’s still nothing next to the breaking of bad habits in a global economy.

Localizing of economies is a must in a sustainable, renewable future on planet earth. For learning the how of this, the Ojibway of the James Bay lowlands might well serve us as teachers of Chapter One. 

For a more objective description of the Ring of Fire mineral-rich deposit and considerations for its development, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Fire_(Northern_Ontario) To read the article cited in paragraph 1, visit https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/a-divisive-road-to-ring-of-fire-ontario. 

P.S. I've borrowed the term "settler colonialism" from Enns/Myers Healing Haunted Histories. It refers to the relationship between those who historically gave something up through colonialism and those who continue to benefit from that historical fact.