Hockey Canada's reckoning was heralded three years ago. Instead, its crisis mushroomed
On the website of Hockey Canada there is a page that lists the organization’s “Premier Marketing Partners.”
Tim Hortons has been one of those key sponsors since 2019, it says. Telus has backed the national sport organization since 2004. And Imperial Oil started its sponsorship way back in 1981.
Nowhere does it mention that “since” doesn’t include the period of about a year, from late 2022 to late 2023, during which all three premier marketing partners pulled their sponsorship dollars from Hockey Canada.
That was the height of Canada’s hockey-culture crisis. It began when TSN reported in the spring of 2022 that Hockey Canada had moved with remarkable haste to settle a multi-million-dollar lawsuit that alleged a group sexual assault involving members of the 2018 World Junior team after a gala in London, Ont., that summer.
The unnamed alleged victim was 20 years old at the time. It will reach an endpoint of sorts, when the judge in a criminal trial involving five defendants makes her ruling.
And in between, it mushroomed as further revelations were made: That Hockey Canada let its own investigation into the matter in 2018 cease once the alleged victim declined to participate, and it was informed by the London police that it had closed its investigation, without even learning the identities of the alleged assailants. That separate sexual-assault allegations had been made about members of the 2003 World Junior team. That Hockey Canada kept reserve funds on its books for, among other things, settling such lawsuits quickly and quietly.
The blowback peaked when a series of Hockey Canada executives appeared before a parliamentary committee and insisted that, while mistakes had been made, there was no need for a leadership change at the organization.
In response, the sponsors pulled their funds . Resignations at Hockey Canada followed. At the time, there was much talk about a wider reckoning for hockey in this country. Hockey Canada itself decried the “toxic culture” of the sport. There were questions about the attitudes in locker rooms, about issues relating to sexual violence and consent, and about the wider junior-hockey system, in which elite athletes often leave home as teenagers to become big stars on small-town teams, granting them a celebrity status that belies their maturity.
Almost three years later, much has changed from a legal perspective. The alleged victim in the 2018 incident, now known only as “E.M.” — her identity is protected by a publication ban — agreed to speak to London police. That brought criminal charges against five former members of Canada’s 2018 World Junior team — Michael McLeod, Carter Hart, Alex Fomenton, Dillon Dubé and Cal Foote — and an eight-week trial in London that ended last month. All the defendants have pleaded not guilty. Justice Maria Carroccia is scheduled to give her decision on the case on July 24.
But other than the criminal proceedings, it’s fair to wonder if much of a reckoning has occurred at all.
Calls for a judicial inquiry into Hockey Canada, or into Canadian amateur sport in general, were resisted at the federal level. The junior hockey system is unchanged, with the country’s three major-junior leagues still the primary training ground for future Canadian NHL players. And Hockey Canada, once besieged over its handling of the 2018 allegations, has its marketing partners back in the fold. For TSN’s coverage of the 2025 World Juniors, “feature sponsors” included Gatorade and Fidelity Investments.
The organization has undergone a transformation since the height of the crisis. “As the national governing body for amateur hockey in Canada, Hockey Canada recognizes our role, responsibility and duty to be a leader in delivering a sport that is rooted in safety, inclusiveness and respect,” it said in a statement to Postmedia.
“Since 2022, we have implemented significant initiatives to help transform the culture and safety of hockey.”
Many of those initiatives were part of an action plan announced in 2022. All national team athletes, coaches and staff, for example, must complete training on sexual violence and consent before they are eligible to represent Hockey Canada. And the organization, among other changes, now tracks all complaints of maltreatment related to hockey and publishes an annual report of the details.
Despite those efforts, it is difficult to quantify a cultural change. And anyone who followed coverage of the London trial will know there was some public support for the narratives put forth by defence lawyers: that the accused were just boys being boys.
Has the case changed hockey culture? Or is it part of a wider issue: A societal acceptance that when it comes to athletes and sex, the standards are different than they are in other industries?
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One of the startling aspects of Hockey Canada’s response to the E.M. case, both in 2018 and after the 2022 lawsuit, was the degree to which the organization didn’t seem to want to examine it much at all. In the first instance, after contacting police when it was first made aware of the allegations and hiring its own investigator, it let a partially completed probe lapse and seems to have made little attempt to find out what had happened on the night in question.
“As soon as Hockey Canada became aware of this matter in 2018, we contacted local police authorities to inform them. The same day, we also retained Henein Hutchison LLP, a firm with extensive experience in this area, to undertake a thorough independent internal investigation,” said a statement by Hockey Canada in May 2022.
“The person bringing the allegations forward chose not to speak with either police or with Hockey Canada’s independent investigator and also chose not to identify the players involved. This was her right and we fully respect her wishes,” the statement continued. The organization later clarified its statement, saying it learned the complainant did in fact make a complaint to the police in 2018.
Former executives told a Parliamentary committee in October 2022 that they weren’t sure how many of the players on that 2018 World Junior team had even spoken to the investigator they had hired. After the 2022 lawsuit, Hockey Canada swiftly reached a settlement with E.M., without involving its own insurers or even informing the alleged assailants of the allegations against them. While it looked to the outside world like Hockey Canada had tried to make the story go away quietly, former executives said that they believed the young woman had “suffered harm” in 2018 and that a quick resolution was in her best interests.
But the pattern of a team learning about sexual allegations involving players and looking the other way is a familiar one to anyone who follows sports.
Kobe Bryant , the late basketball legend, was accused in 2003 of raping a teenage hotel employee in Colorado. Criminal charges were filed, but later dropped when the alleged victim, whose identity had been leaked, refused to participate in a trial. A civil suit against Bryant was settled, but the 18-time All-Star was never disciplined by the NBA or the Los Angeles Lakers. Former NBA commissioner David Stern said at the time that the league would withhold punishment pending the resolution of the criminal case, and Bryant, then 26 years old, travelled from Lakers games to Colorado to attend court during the 2003 NBA season.
DeShaun Watson , the former All-Pro quarterback with the Houston Texans, was suspended for 11 games in 2022 and fined US$5 million (after the NFL and NFLPA reached an agreement) after more than two dozen women accused him of sexual misconduct during massage sessions. The Texans decided to trade him, and after interest from multiple teams, sent him to the Cleveland Browns for a haul of draft picks. The Browns quickly gave him a contract for five years and US$230 million, the largest guaranteed contract in NFL history at the time.
Last month, the NFL suspended former Baltimore Ravens kicker Justin Tucker for 10 games after 16 massage therapists accused him of improper behaviour during sessions that took place between 2012 and 2016. He denies wrongdoing, and when the Ravens released him in May, with an NFL investigation ongoing, general manager Eric DeCosta said it was a “tough decision” and thanked him for his contributions to the team. He did not mention the allegations.
And earlier this month, police in London, England, announced sexual assault charges against Thomas Partey , formerly a midfielder for Arsenal in the Premier League, involving three alleged victims. Partey was first arrested in 2022, but his name was not made public because U.K. laws prohibit the identification of someone who has not been criminally charged. Arsenal, however, knew of the allegations, through multiple arrests, and he played more than 100 matches for the club until his contract expired at the end of June. Partey denies the allegations. Arsenal has said it will not comment on the case because it is before the courts.
The tendency towards a hands-off approach can even be the case when the athlete is an alleged victim. In the spring of 2021, a former member of the Chicago Blackhawks sued the team over allegations that it had failed to properly respond when alerted to an alleged sexual assault perpetrated by a former assistant coach in 2010. A team-ordered investigation found that the Blackhawks let the coach resign after the season concluded, though he took part in Stanley Cup celebrations, otherwise the complaint was ignored. (The former coach was later convicted of sexual assault related to a high-school coaching job.) General manager Stan Bowman resigned, and Joel Quenneville, who was Chicago’s head coach in 2010 but was coaching the Florida Panthers in 2021, also resigned after a meeting with NHL commissioner Gary Bettman.
The NHL declared Bowman and Quenneville eligible to be reinstated last year. Weeks later, Bowman was hired to be the general manager of the Edmonton Oilers. He said at the time that his “response was inadequate in 2010,” and that he had spent time reflecting on his mistakes and learning from them. Quenneville was hired to coach the Anaheim Ducks last month. He said he “owned (his) mistakes” and that he had educated himself on “the realities of abuse.”
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The story that Hockey Canada didn’t seem particularly interested in pursuing in 2018 instead unfolded in a London courtroom beginning in April. Or, at least, competing versions of it did.
All parties agree that E.M. met Michael McLeod in a London bar on the night of June 18, 2018. There was dancing and drinking, and the two went back to the Delta Armouries hotel, where E.M. was prepared to have consensual sex with McLeod.
From there, the versions differ. E.M. told court that McLeod invited members of his World Junior team — who were all there for a Hockey Canada golf tournament — to his room to have sex with her without her knowledge or consent. Prosecutors argued she was pressured into sexual acts with multiple players, and that she feared for her safety. Defence lawyers argued that she was the aggressor who had encouraged a group sexual encounter, and that she made up the story about an assault to save face after the fact.
Carter Hart, formerly a goaltender with the Philadelphia Flyers, the only one of the five accused to testify, told court that he was excited about the possibility of a sexual encounter, and that E.M. was a willing participant.
Other members of the World Junior team who were in the room that night but not accused of criminal wrongdoing offered unclear recollections of what had taken place. One of them, Brett Howden , now a member of the Vegas Golden Knights, was cross-examined by the Crown — despite being a Crown witness — over alleged inconsistencies in his memory. A text message he had sent to another teammate saying he was “so glad he left” the hotel room and that he saw one of the accused “smack this girl’s ass so hard” was ruled inadmissible after Howden said he did not remember sending it or witnessing the act in question.
While the various former teammates tended to provide similar stories about what parts of the night they could remember, prosecutors said there was a failure of consent at the root of it all.
E.M., who spent seven days on the witness stand under cross-examination by lawyers for the five defendants, said so herself: “Any one of those men could have stood up and said, this isn’t right. And no one did,” she said. “No one thought like that. They didn’t want to think about if I was actually OK or if I was actually consenting.”
The verdicts that Justice Maria Carroccia renders on July 24 will, obviously, be significant for both the accused and E.M.
But whatever she decides, many questions will linger. What changed between 2018 and 2022 that caused Hockey Canada to completely reverse course on the incident? Where it once was happy to let the matter drop entirely, why did it offer a settlement without even giving its former players a chance to respond to the allegations? Later, why did it take the formality of criminal charges to have anyone’s playing career interrupted?
Most significantly, has anything changed? The accused and their teammates who were in the room that night all insisted that no criminal wrongdoing took place. That is, that an intoxicated young woman performed sexual acts with several men as others watched and ate pizza, over a number of hours, and nothing untoward took place.
An improbable story or just another night for the fellas?
Three years ago, it seemed at least possible that sweeping out Hockey Canada’s leadership would fundamentally change the sport’s developmental system in this country. After all, the men who eventually became criminal defendants had been elite players at the very top of the developmental pyramid.
But structurally, Canada’s hockey system has proved durable. At last month’s National Hockey League draft 16 of the top 19 players selected came from teams in the Canadian Hockey League (CHL), which includes Canada’s three major-junior leagues. Several of them will almost certainly be members of the 2026 World Junior team when it begins play in December. Meanwhile, a U.S. court in May dismissed a class-action lawsuit that had been filed last year and accused the NHL and CHL of conspiring to restrict the employment opportunities and earning power of junior-age hockey players. The judge ruled that U.S. courts were not the correct venue for such a case. (Canadian courts have already ruled against similar claims.)
And so, the pathway to the pros endures. Children and parents in small towns and big cities across Canada spend much of their winter at rinks, and a portion of their registration fees makes its way up to the national organization. A small percentage of those players will reach the elite level and play for the top teams in their region, and an even smaller percentage will eventually make it to the CHL. From there, the best of the best will be selected to the national junior team, the finishing school for Canada’s future hockey professionals.
But it still all begins back in the neighbourhood arenas, on cold winter mornings. Late last month, a little over two weeks after the trial ended, Hockey Canada announced that player registration across the country for last season was more than 603,000. It had increased for the fourth consecutive year.
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