Federal sports minister Carla Qualtrough says registry of offenders coming in March

Carla Qualtrough was questioned in Ottawa on Tuesday by Heritage committee members of Parliament after her announcement that a commission, not a public inquiry, will delve into what she has called a safe-sport crisis.

A public registry of individuals who have been sanctioned under the Universal Code of Conduct to Prevent Abuse and Maltreatment in Sport (UCCMS), and whose eligibility to participate in sport has in some way been restricted, was announced earlier this year by Qualtrough's predecessor Pascale St-Onge.

The purpose of the registry will be to alert organizations and prevent the re-hiring of abusers.

Sport bodies quietly parting company with abusers, which allowed them to be hired elsewhere, was a common complaint of athletes at parliamentary committee safe-sport hearings in 2022 and 2023.

Qualtrough, who returned to the sports portfolio in July after first serving in it from 2015 to 2017, said getting all federally funded sports organizations signed onto the UCCMS was the first step to a registry.

How to incorporate the provinces and territories in the registry, and how to handle people under investigation but not yet sanctioned, are details still to be worked out, the minister said.

"If an individual has been sanctioned under that code of conduct, then they will appear on the registry," Qualtrough said. "As of this April, every funded organization by Sport Canada is now required and has signed onto the code, so we now capture all those organizations under the code.

"What isn't yet part of that would be anyone who has been accused or perhaps in the process of an investigation, which is [what] I'm currently trying to track, is how we can remove people from the sport context during that investigatory period."

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