Scott Stinson: Ottawa restores scandal-hit Hockey Canada's funding, just as its women's team plays for gold

Article content

The gold-medal game at the IIHF Women’s World Championship was a thriller, of course.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

Try refreshing your browser, or
tap here to see other videos from our team.

Scott Stinson: Ottawa restores scandal-hit Hockey Canada's funding, just as its women's team plays for gold Back to video

It was Canada versus the United States, a matchup that is hockey as art. Two teams flying around the ice, playing the sport on the edge of a knife because any loss of the puck would see it instantly ferried the other way in pursuit of a scoring chance.

It was back-and-forth action, Canada taking the lead and the United States equalizing, and repeat. The game finally turned late in the third period when Canadian defender Claire Thompson flipped a backhand high over the glass on the penalty kill. The Americans would score almost immediately on the 5-on-3 and add another with an extra skater, both courtesy of team captain Hilary Knight. Team USA scored again on an empty net for a 6-3 win in a game they didn’t lead until there was about four minutes to go. A rousing comeback, a heartbreak loss, a great advertisement for the quality of the women’s game.

And for some reason the government of Canada, or Hockey Canada, or both, thought this was an event that deserved to be upstaged.

Just past 5 p.m. on Sunday, about two hours before puck drop of one of the greatest rivalries in sport, Hockey Canada sent out a statement that the federal government was restoring its funding, which had been pulled last spring amid a flurry of scandals that resulted in the resignation of its senior leadership and the replacement of its board.

The announcement called the renewed funding “an important milestone for Hockey Canada in our journey to earn and maintain the trust of Canadians.”

Which, OK, fair point. It is definitely a milestone of sorts. But this was also a sold-out game with a national television audience, with Canada going for a third straight world title in less than two years, to add to the gold medal they won last year at the Beijing Olympics. Most of the players on the Canadian roster, and many of the Americans, are approaching their fourth year of not having a professional league, having hung out their collective shingle in hopes of creating a viable pro league after the CWHL folded in 2019. This was a huge moment for them, one of the rare times over those several years when they had a high-stakes game to play. And suddenly, here was an announcement about Hockey Canada trying to put its many scandals behind it — scandals, it should be noted, that had precisely zero to do with the women’s team.

Ottawa pulled its funding last spring after revelations that Hockey Canada had quickly and quietly settled a lawsuit with a young woman who alleged that she had been sexually assaulted by a group of players after a 2018 banquet in London, Ont. Further reporting uncovered that the organization maintained a multi-million dollar fund, using fees collected from grassroots players, that had been used, in part, to pay out millions to settle liabilities that included sexual assault claims.

Pascal St-Onge, the Minister of Sport, was in Brampton to announce that the government had restored funding. Asked about the timing of the announcement, she said, “When we suspended the funding for Hockey Canada, it was never a matter of it being forever. It was so that proper change was implemented in the organization. I’ve set three conditions for them. They’ve met those three conditions.”

(Those conditions included signing the government’s new Safe Sport Agreement, implementing the recommendations of a report produced by a retired judge, and a promise to report more frequently to Ottawa.)

Those accomplishments are vague enough to have happened at any time over the past several months, which, again, makes the timing of the announcement bizarre. Did the government want to take part in Women’s World Championship photo-ops, but not unless this unfortunate piece of business was squared away first? Did Hockey Canada want to slip the news out there on a busy day, in hopes of avoiding much scrutiny over the steps it took to regain the government’s trust? It was only a few months ago that Hockey Canada’s former executives were being angrily grilled by members of the Parliamentary heritage committee in Ottawa; none of them sounded the least bit of a mind to turn the funding taps back on. So what happened since? Aside from the minister’s opaque conditions — you know someone is trying to make a list look longer when they add “provide regular updates” as a significant goal — there has been almost no public resolution of the outstanding parts of the scandal, such as sexual assault allegations involving members of two of Canada’s men’s world junior teams. St-Onge said on Sunday that since police investigations have been reopened, the details about what Hockey Canada knew and what it did about it will have to stay private for now.

But if all the government was going to announce is that unspecified progress has been made, couldn’t have done that a couple of days from now? Or a couple of weeks ago? Or, at basically any time that wasn’t immediately before the women’s gold-medal game?

It suggests that the timing was deliberate. Someone wanted this news out there just as the Canadian national women’s team was about to try to win a world championship. Only they know why.

sstinson@postmedia.com

Check out our sports section for the latest news and analysis.