How Hockey Canada’s code of silence helped rot the country’s national sport

“Our board frankly does not share the view that senior leadership should be replaced on the basis of what we consider to be substantial misinformation and unduly cynical attacks,” then-interim Hockey Canada board chair Andrea Skinner told parliamentarians last Tuesday – just days before her own resignation, and exactly a week before the organization’s CEO and entire board of directors stepped down. “I appreciate that others disagree with us, but our positions are based on the information that we have and understanding that Hockey Canada has an excellent reputation.”

What new information arose between Skinner’s statement and the mass resignations a week later? In the wake of Skinner’s testimony, multiple corporate sponsors, including Nike, Bauer, and Tim Horton’s walked away from Hockey Canada’s men’s program. Multiple provincial hockey governing bodies did, too. And the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, suggested that perhaps the federal government, from which Hockey Canada receives significant annual funding to oversee the sport at a minor level across Canada, ought to simply create a new body to do the job. All that was indeed technically new.

But really, the information available to Skinner, former CEO Scott Smith, and the rest of Hockey Canada’s directors when they resigned was the same information they had in June. That was when Smith first spoke to parliamentarians about a settlement Hockey Canada paid to the alleged victim of a sexual assault that she said involved multiple players from the 2018 under-20 world champion Canadian team. In fact, what Hockey Canada’s higher-ups knew this week and knew months ago is what they’ve likely always known, but have, naturally, avoided talking about. They know about silence.

Jus