Companies paid to investigate safe sport complaints lack independence, athletes say

Amelia Cline waited years to move ahead with a formal complaint against her former coach, but when the former Vancouver-based gymnast finally spoke to a "safe sport" case manager, she was told to "manage her expectations."

The 33-year-old was told up front it's unlikely the coach, who was at the time still training athletes at the highest level, would face anything more than "a slap on the wrist" despite Cline's allegations of verbal and physical abuse dating back decades. 

"Obviously hearing that as a victim, as a survivor, it's incredibly re-traumatizing. It's invalidating," Cline said.

Cline said she had flagged Gymnastics Canada about the issue for years. In 2021, the national sport organization hired ITP Sport and Recreation, a private Ottawa-based safe sport agency, to handle the complaint.

"To have a case manager who hasn't even investigated a complaint yet making that determination right at the very first meeting, I was very deeply concerned about how that complaint was going to be handled."

Cline said she never followed through with her complaint.

She is one of several former athletes calling for change in how abuse is reported in Canadian sports. Since 2018, for-profit companies such as ITP have emerged as an answer to Sport Canada's mandate that federally funded sport organizations must provide athletes access to an independent third party to manage complaints.

These companies are difficult to trust because they're paid by the very same national sport organizations they're tasked to investigate, say athletes who have experienced abuse, which destroys any perception of objectivity or independence. What's resulted is a complaint process they say is slow, painful and ineffective. 

Multiple ITP officials told CBC