Scott Stinson: Hockey culture won't change until the money goes away

For a moment there, it looked like real change was upon us. But only for that moment.

By: Scott Stinson

When the controversy about what happened after a Hockey Canada golf tournament in the summer of 2018 first blew up about 18 months ago, much of the ensuing media coverage dealt with big-picture themes.

This is often the way of big stories: you chase the details of the original event, but at the same time a wider lens is applied. Are there larger issues at play? And so, in the case of an alleged group sexual assault at a London, Ont., hotel after a Hockey Canada banquet, questions naturally led to where they do with uncomfortable frequency: the sport’s culture.

While it was clear that Hockey Canada’s leadership had failed spectacularly in its extraordinarily passive response to a young woman’s complaints about what happened to her in 2018, and had kept on failing right up to and including its testimony before a parliamentary committee in the fall of 2022, questions were also rightly asked about the influence of the country’s elite hockey system in all of it.

It’s a system that sometimes seems as though it was designed to create problems. Kids who show promise at the earliest ages can be funnelled into a system that almost treats them as professionals, where the idea of playing for fun is replaced by pressure to win and to make the best possible team, even if it’s three towns from home. In later years, the best players who continue into major-junior hockey will be drafted as teenagers, forfeiting earnings and mobility rights for the chance to stay on the most popular Canadian pathway to a pro career. They move away from their parents, live with strangers, and become professionals in most ways, other than compensation and union protection. The best of those players might make a World Juniors team, the chance to represent Canada at one of the tentpole events on the country’s sports calendar, larded with blue-chip sponsorships as one of TSN’s biggest properties. Their labour is provided for free.

The potential pitfalls of our hockey-industrial complex, a development system that prizes elite performance above all else, and which is governed largely by the Old Hockey Men archetype, get mentioned every time a hockey-culture controversy flares, which unfortunately is rather a lot. In just the past few years, former Calgary Flames coach Bill Peters resigned over the use of racial slurs years earlier toward a former player, and several former members of the Chicago Blackhawks leadership team lost their jobs over their handling of sexual misconduct allegations levelled against a coach by a former player.

The Hockey Canada story, while just the latest on a continuum, also seemed big enough that an actual reckoning might be at hand. Politicians were frothing, provincial organizations were demanding answers from the national body and, crucially, sponsors were withholding their money.

But even with the revelation of criminal charges in London against five former members of the 2018 World Junior team, and an apology from that city’s police chief for the fact that it had taken so long to reach even that point, the imagined hockey reckoning seems awfully narrow in scope.

The major-junior system, briefly under siege and with its leaders called before a parliamentary committee in 2022, is unchanged. One of its teams, in Lethbridge, Alta., hired Bill Peters as head coach this past August. While the National Hockey League held its All-Star celebrations in Toronto this past weekend, the Hockey Diversity Alliance, a group formed by current and former NHL players in 2020 to counter the sport’s crotchety old ways, held separate events, its relationship with the league having fallen apart over concerns that NHL leadership wasn’t interested in making the kinds of changes the HDA supported. Mike Babcock, the former Detroit and Toronto coach whose old-school treatment of his younger players had been called into question in his time away from the bench, was hired by Columbus within days of his severance package with the Maple Leafs running out. Babcock didn’t make it to an official game with the Blue Jackets, after reports that he had asked to see photos on players’ phones led to an NHLPA investigation and his subsequent departure from the organization. And, after a controversy last season in which a handful of players refused to wear special Pride-themed jerseys during warmups on designated Pride Nights meant to promote inclusivity in hockey, the NHL this season mandated that themed jerseys of any sort — those in support of cancer awareness, for example — would be banned from warmups. Other visible displays of support for LBGT rights like rainbow stick tape were also formally banned, but several players have used it anyway.

The Old Hockey Men culture, in other words, has again proven to be entrenched. Same old, same old. There are times at which hockey’s part of the Canadian experience is wonderful — the sticks on porches across the country after the Humboldt tragedy, or the sold-out crowds for the new women’s professional league — but its low points never seem to amount to much.

Will the court proceedings in London eventually raise the kinds of questions that will prompt major changes? Perhaps. But it seems worth noting that at the last edition of the World Juniors this past holiday season, all the big-time corporate sponsors were back on board. Everyone seems to agree that hockey needs to change. But so long as it keeps making money for everyone — except the junior players, that is — why would it?

Scott Stinson is a writer based in Toronto. Find him on X: @scott_stinson

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