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.