The Decibel - The Hockey Canada trial and how we talk to young men

Episode Date: June 9, 2025

On Monday, closing arguments are set to begin in the trial of five former members of Canada’s 2018 World Junior Hockey Team. Michael McLeod, Dillon Dubé, Carter Hart, Cal Foote and Alex Formenton were charged with sexually assaulting a woman known publicly as E.M. in London, Ont. in June of 2018. Michael McLeod also faces a second charge of being a party to sexual assault. All five men have pleaded not guilty.Rachel Giese is the author of the 2018 book, Boys: What It Means to Become a Man. She’s also the Culture & Life editor at The Globe and Mail. Today, she’s on the show to unpack what this trial tells us about our cultural understanding of consent and masculinity, and how we can have better conversations with boys and young men by reaching them where they’re at.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

After more than six weeks, closing arguments are scheduled to begin on Monday, in the trial of five former members of Canada's 2018 World Junior Hockey Team. This is the trial of Michael McLeod, Dylan Dubé, Carter Hart, Cal Foote, and Alex Formonton. Each has been charged with sexually assaulting a woman known as EM at a hotel in London, Ontario, in June of 2018. Michael McCloud also faces a second charge of being a party to sexual assault. All five men have pleaded not guilty.

It was a trial that was full of tension from the beginning. There was an early mistrial, then a second jury dismissal, both arising from concerns over interactions between jurors and defense lawyers. Finally, it proceeded as a judge-alone trial. As the closing arguments begin, we wanted to take this moment and look at what this trial tells us about our cultural understanding of consent and masculinity.

So today, we're talking to Rachel Giza. She's the author of a 2018 book, Boys, What It Means to Become a Man. She's also a deputy national editor at The Globe. I'm Manika Raman-Welms and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Rachel, great to have you here. Thanks for being here. Thanks so much for having me. I think a lot of people have been following this trial very closely. And I've been wondering, what do you think it is about this situation that's really caught people's attention,

that's affected people so much? I think there's an element to the Hockey Canada trial that's a real Rorschach test. I think people are bringing a lot of their own personal histories and biases about sex, sexuality, about the sport of hockey, you know, our beloved national sport, about gender dynamics. So I think that how one looks at this case says a lot about, you know, maybe who you identify in this. I think it also is, you know, yet another case where we have the question of consent and what does it mean and what does meaningful consent look like at the forefront of the case. And we also have this element of new kind of technology,

which is the consent video element, where the complaintant EM, there are video recordings of her saying that she was OK with what was happening, and what it means to have something like that on video. So we've added this element of tech to what is a kind of, unfortunately, one other high profile story about a trial centering on alleged sexual assault. Yeah, we are definitely going to get into that video and the issues surrounding that a little bit later. But I just want to kind of stick on some of these broad topics that you're mentioning

here. I'm glad we're talking to you because I know you've written extensively about gender politics. You published a book in 2018 called Boys, What It Means to Become a Man. And you've also just written a piece for the Globe about how we're failing young men. What made you want to write this recent piece? Well, you know, I wrote my book and my book came out in 2018. I started writing it in 2014. So we are, you know, a decade on. And even while I was writing my book, I was seeing this kind of cultural shift that allowed for a tiny opening around gender roles and gender norms, a sort of a bigger conversation that was looking at, you know, how do we raise

boys versus how we raise girls? How do we have conversations about consent and healthy relationships? How do we think critically about messages around masculinity? And by that, I mean traditional forms of masculinity. And then we saw a retrenchment back into a backlash, a call for more, you know, rigid gender norms, a call for something certain in a changing world. And I think now we're also in a moment where we have a lot of autocrats, a lot of political movements globally that are trying to attack and pull back the rights of women and girls, whether that's over their reproductive rights, whether that's

over their economic autonomy, and a kind of a resurgent of the idea of traditional gender norms, whether that's happening on a bigger political scale or whether it's happening in places like the Manosphere. So sites online, forums, chats, you know, the rise of people like Joe Rogan who kind of preach a particular kind of gender roles for boys and for men. Right. I thought it was very interesting reading your recent piece that you wrote for the Globe. You start this piece off by talking about a time, I guess this was about 10 years ago,

when you were a reporter and you were hearing from a lot of male readers. What were they telling you? I was writing at the time about what would become the Me Too movement and the growing calls from women to address sexual harassment and sexual violence. And we were hearing from more and more women on social media sites and speaking out and saying, this thing that I'd been silent about,

this thing that we've kind of normalized, is kind of what it means to live as a woman in the world, whether it's the cat calls or the harassment or whether it was just being afraid to walk down the street at night. And I started hearing from men who wanted to tell me about what they had done. No one confessed any crimes to me,

but they wanted to talk about the time when they had a moral, but they wanted to talk about the time when they had a moral lapse, or they wanted to talk about what it meant that they sat on the sidelines when the boss made a suggestive comment that clearly made their female colleagues uncomfortable, but they didn't speak up. Or they had been in a relationship where they were having an encounter that was consensual, but they could tell the woman maybe wasn't into it. And so they wanted me to tell them, were they part of the problem? And if they were, how could they do better?

And these are complete strangers reaching out to a reporter. These are complete strangers. Many of them wrote to me anonymously. For the most part, I really felt that they were reaching out to me in good faith, because I don't think that they had anywhere else to go. That I was this reporter reporter and I was also writing about not just the perspective of girls and women

who had experienced this, but the way that social pressures had a role in how boys and young men behaved. And so I think I was perhaps writing about in a way that was trying to understand why boys and young men might behave in certain ways, rather than just saying it was wrong and bad, but saying, well, here are all the pressures,

here are all the social messages these guys are getting. So how do we address that as a way to help men be engaged in the movement to stop gender-based violence? And so I think that they wanted to have a woman say to them, yeah, you probably could have done better, and here's what you need to do. And I don't think I, you know, I couldn't get very involved in the lives of these men. But I found it, I found it poignant. Yeah, what does it tell you that this is the outlet that they were looking for here?

I think it told me that, you know, I can't say for certain whether they did know better. But I think what I found was people looking back at past actions who were hearing from their wives, their girlfriends, their friends, their sisters, their colleagues. And suddenly, it was like they were seeing things that had just seemed like normal to them or funny or a joke, and suddenly thinking, oh, I should have spoken up. They were actually hearing women's experiences.

Maybe they were told them before, but they actually heard them for the first time. And I think that they were experiencing some guilt. And what I felt was that these guys were really trying to understand, like, how much of that was me and my moral failings? How much of that was just what I was told was normal? This is sort of what guys do, you know? I think that we have a lot of messages in our culture that boys will be boys, that there's a certain amount of bad behavior we should anticipate from young men. And I think a lot of these men felt that they hadn't actually been encouraged to behave differently. They hadn't actually been given the tools to have honest conversations.

They hadn't been given the tools to stand up to somebody who was saying something misogynist or homophobic. Well, let's talk a little bit more about these cultural messages then that you're picking up on here. I know this is a big question, but I think you are someone who can tackle this, Rachel. How would you describe the cultural understanding of what it means to be a man in this day and age? Big question. Big question. I mean, I think that, first of all, I think there's lots of different kinds

of masculinities. I think the one that I want to talk about, and I think the one you're asking about, is a kind of very traditional, conventional masculinity that has been sort of inherited through our culture, that prizes a lot of what we think of sort of stereotypical macho qualities. So these are things like being physically strong, being a breadwinner,

not being vulnerable, not crying, being sexually successful, so having a lot of swagger. It means being like one of the guys. It is a kind of masculinity that exists in opposition to what we think of as femininity. So if we think of femininity as soft, nurturing, vulnerable, tender, emotionally intuitive, then this kind of masculinity is everything in the opposite. And I wanna be clear that not all these qualities are necessarily bad qualities, being strong or brave or successful.

These are not bad things. But I think that when I think about this kind of masculinity, it's a masculinity that often tells men how to be successful in ways that aren't actually very good for them. So it tells men that, you know, in order to be successful you must never express your feelings. Well that is terrible for their mental health. It says to men, you know, to be a successful man you have to take a lot of risks, you have to binge drink, you have to drive fast, you have to, you know, don't be vulnerable and go see a doctor. Well, all

of those things are terrible for their health. So a lot of these masculine norms are things that might make a guy look like a successful man, but it oftentimes cuts him off from his emotional life, from the capacity to be vulnerable, from looking after himself, and it leads to a lot of isolation. AMT – So it sounds like what you're saying is this kind of narrow definition then it can actually cause harm to a lot of boys and men. KM – For sure, absolutely. In the same way that we can point to codes of femininity that say in order to be a successful woman you must be skinny and so girls starve themselves

or you know your looks matter more than anything else and then girls struggle then with trying to chase some kind of beauty ideal and not thinking that who they are inside matters. In the same way these kinds of very conventional ideals of masculinity cause a similar kind of harm and we see that with increasing rates of suicide or we see that now particularly you know in parts of the manosphere where young boys are taking steroids to build out their bodies, or we've seen the rise of movements like the incel movement, where there are young men who feel because they are not sexually successful or traditionally good looking, they go to these sites that are full of hatred and misogyny. So these codes, these rules can be very limiting and very damaging to boys and young men, and then it can cause them to do damage to girls and young women.

Yeah, and I think that's, I guess, the next step that we should talk about, because you're mentioning a lot of things that we are hearing about these days, the manosphere in cells. Like, these are all things that are kind of in the zeitgeist. And so you've kind of made the connection of how this can harm, then, boys and young men. If we take it a step further, then, yeah, how does that potentially cause harm to other people in society? We know the profile of mass shooters is primarily young men, right? So we know that there is a kind of pipeline

that occurs in the manosphere from boys. They sort of are a little curious about weightlifting videos or diet videos. And the algorithms can then, in various sites, start delivering more and more extremist material that radicalizes them towards a kind of misogynist thinking, white supremacist thinking. And so you have these kind of powder kegs brewing. So I think that if we're raising a generation of boys and young men to be cut off from their vulnerability, cut off

from their feelings, cut off from empathy, then they're not going to be able to be good partners, good friends, good bosses, good spouses. They're not going to support equality for women. They're not going to believe it when women say, I was abused or hurt. They become broken people and then they harm others. And I this is making me think back to the start of our conversation when you were

talking about all those men reaching out to you kind of looking for help or advice too because I imagine when we're especially when we're talking about different sectors of the internet now too maybe some of these guys are going to these places you know looking for a kind of community as well. So I guess, can we talk about that a little bit too? Like there must be some form of reaching out happening. For sure. And I mean, I think that's a great point because I think for most boys and young men, I don't

think that their first thought is, I want to go, you know, to Discord or Twitch or YouTube to find sexist videos. I think they want friends. I think that they want connection. And I think particularly the generation that had some of their childhood during lockdown, you have a generation that has relied more and more heavily on digital spaces for community

and connection. And a lot of those spaces are actually great. A lot of those spaces are meaningful and positive or benign, and I don't think that it's a simple thing as internet bad. But I think that the motivation for so many boys and young men is they're seeking connection. They're seeking community, connection, affirmation. They're seeking connection. They're seeking community, connection, affirmation. They're seeking answers. In some of my past research from my book,

boys don't get a lot of sex education from their doctors, say, so a girl, because she might go on the birth control pill or something, might have a little bit from the family doctor. But boys don't, when they have questions about sex, and boys have a lot of questions, is my body normal? Does it work, am I okay, am I, you know, what is happening with my body?

These are normal questions for people to ask, right? People aren't talking to boys about that. Or I like somebody, how do I ask them out? How do I initiate a first move? Am I good looking enough? Am I not good looking? I mean, all of the tender questions that a typical preteen teenager has,

boys want someone to answer those questions. So if they don't have people in their life that will answer those questions honestly, that will engage sometimes in uncomfortable, awkward, difficult conversations with them, then they will find those answers by people who don't have their best interests in mind, who want their clicks and their eyeballs

and their engaged time, but they don't really care about those boys' wellbeing. They don't care if those boys know how to have a healthy relationship. They just want their attention. We'll be back in a minute. So Rachel, I think one of the big questions of the Hockey Canada sexual assault trial really hinges on consent. You alluded to this a little bit earlier so let's talk about this now. It came up during Carter Hart's testimony and he was the only defendant to take the stand. The Crown attorney asked Carter Hart about a video that another

accused player, Michael McLeod, took of the complainant EM saying that she consented. And I just want to go over this exchange that happened in court here. So the Crown attorney asked Hart if he agreed that, quote, logically speaking, you would only think of recording a consent video if there was some possibility in your mind that the person might later say they weren't consenting, end quote. When Hart said no, she asked him why else MacLeod would have taken a consent video. And Hart responded, quote, lots of professional athletes have done those things before, end quote. So Rachel, I guess I want to ask you about this idea of getting proof of consent.

What do you think that says about our understanding of consent? Ooh. It says our understanding of consent is really deeply messed up, right? I think that the big no means no, yes means yes. I understand why that became the sort of prominent way that we talked about consent with young people, a big part

of, you know, orientation programs at colleges and universities and sex ed programs. I remember those little buttons first year of university, right? No means no. And then there might be a spinoff to enthusiastic consent, you know? And you know, it's not a bad start, right, to make it super simple. You know, it's important if you are doing any kind of activity with someone that you want to make sure, you want to respect them to say, is this okay for you? Is this what you want? But it's a terrible place to end the conversation because that consent conversation doesn't actually look like how sex actually happens. It's not a

contract you sign at the beginning and you agree to all the terms and you lay out all the acts that are going to unfold over the next five minutes to three hours and you have sort of a blanket. Everything that's going to happen here is going to be okay. Like so many other activities, sex is something that is fluid, it changes, something might start to feel good, but then it doesn't feel good, people might change their mind, you know, it's a lot of things. And sex isn't also logical for most people. It involves emotions and history and vulnerability. So I think that what we've done with oversimplifying consent to say, yes, I consent or no, I don't consent, is that we actually haven't taught people to

have the kind of ongoing conversations about sex. And I think that it might be good in addition to teaching young men, yes, no consent, talking to their partners about what is pleasurable for you? What do you enjoy? What feels good for you? How can I make you feel good? If those began to be some of the terms, is this still feeling good for you? To be able to pay attention to body language,

I think we also have to acknowledge that for a lot of young women and women, they consent to sex because they don't want to spoil the mood, because they don't know to spoil the mood, because they don't know that they can say no, because they start saying yes, but then it feels different and they don't know how to... I think it just assumes that somehow one of the most intimate human acts has to be bound by a very simple, one-time only like you've got five seconds to consent and

then that's it, as opposed to an ongoing conversation. And I think when I talk about the kind of conversations we need to have with young men, it's getting at this stuff. It's saying to them, you have to have an emotional vocabulary. You have to be emotionally intelligent. Your partner's pleasure and comfort needs to matter to you. And also, I think one of the things that we don't talk about as well is, I don't know that boys, even if they're initiating sexual contact, if it always

feels consensual for them, or how much are they responding to pressures to perform, how much are they responding? How much do they feel when they engage in a sexual act that they have to live up to some status idea of, you know, to be a successful man, you have to be a sexual conqueror? Can you talk a little bit more about that? Because this seems to connect back to the previous idea too about these narrow definitions of masculinity.

Yeah. Yeah. In some of the experts that I spoke to for my book, they talked a lot about the fact that boys, sometimes they can feel pressure from girls. Sometimes they feel that if they don't make the first move and aren't sexually sort of more aggressive or assertive, the young woman might think that they're not manly enough or they're not living up to being a real man. Sometimes they feel that their friends are expecting them to be these letharios and come back from an encounter with some kind of story of conquest or sexual success.

I think that one of the questions when I talk to sex educators, one of the questions they heard most often from boys is, is my body normal? Is it functioning normally? And am I good at this? But they're not asking their partners those questions. So I think that when we say to boys, you must never show your vulnerability. You must always have this

strong exterior. We don't allow them to say, actually, I'm not ready to engage in sex, or I thought I wanted it, but now I feel nervous or scared or, you know, or it's not working for me or whatever it is. So I think that when we talk to boys about consent, and the other thing I want to say is we also know that the reporting of sexual assault of everybody is underreported, but it is also of boys and young men, right? We also know that lots of boys and young men feel like they can't speak up about unwanted encounters

that they have had. And so I also think teaching boys about does it feel good in your own body? So if they don't feel that they can think about they have had. And so I also think teaching boys about does it feel good in your own body? So if they don't feel that they can think about what feels good in their own body, if they don't feel like they can have emotional conversations, how on earth can we expect them to recognize the vulnerability in their partners and to respect their partners' boundaries? Yeah, those are all really important things that, yeah, if we're not thinking about them,

they're really absent in these kinds of encounters. I want to come back to this idea very briefly, Rachel, that you were talking about the black and white, the yes, and no, no means no kind of thing. Because that does seem to really set up this kind of dichotomy too, right? Of like maybe one person pushing for it, the other person kind of guarding against it in some way.

Can we talk about that? For sure. I mean, I think this is such an important point because I think culturally, we have set up girls as the sexual gatekeepers. We have said that girls, young women, women, if they want sex too much, well, then they're sluddy, not feminine enough, not good, not moral.

And so they shouldn't want it. They should wait to be pursued. And then they're the ones who put the brake on things. And you can see this idea embedded in the very nature of these consent videos, right? It's like the assumption is the guy is always gonna want it and the girl isn't.

So you have to get her consenting on tape because the assumption is that she won't want it. So first of all, this is a terrible thing about how little we care about women's pleasure to think that they wouldn't want it. And also what we think about women who do enjoy sex and their bodies because we think that that somehow makes them wrong or bad or immoral. And we always assume that men, boys, young men are the sexual pursuers, the aggressors,

the initiators. And that is also a troubling dynamic, right? It just sort of traps people into these roles. But I think if we say this is the only way to be, and I mean, the other whole other part of this conversation is we're talking strictly in terms of heterosexual sex, right, and we're leaving out people who are queer. But I think it really does set up this idea

that girls and women, young women are the gatekeepers. They are the ones responsible for stopping it because with boys, there's no breaks. It's just foot on the accelerator and girls always have to be the break. I also want to ask you about this idea of being a bystander when something is happening. Just to go back to the trial, the five accused players, they weren't the only ones in the room with EM that night. There were also several other hockey players in the room. Some of them testified during the trial. They're not accused of any wrongdoing.

But I guess, are there conversations to be had here about what it means to be a bystander in this kind of situation? Yeah. I think if we want to address this issue, we can't see it either as a one-off conversation, and we can't see it about, here's a boy, a guy, a man who did something wrong, and he exists in isolation.

I think we have to understand the culture that they exist in and the messages they get. And I think when it comes to bystanders, it is very hard to stand up to somebody who is your friend or is somebody you admire if you are afraid that you'll get bullied, if you're afraid that you'll be called a homophobic slur for saying, guys, I don't think this is OK.

I think that that takes an extraordinary amount of bravery that certainly not a lot of adults can even have to step in when they think something is wrong. There's just a lot of, I think, all of us have this innate hesitation. We don't want a cause of fuss. We don't want to embarrass ourselves. We don't want to be rejected from our circle.

And I think bystanders play a key role in tacitly approving of something that they see happening if they don't step in and say, wait a second. I'm not sure this is OK. This needs to stop, or I want to check in, or you know. And I think that that is incredibly important to not just talk to young men about what it means to not engage

in something sexual without consent in the broadest term, but also to say, if you see something that doesn't feel OK, whether that is a sexual encounter, a sexual assault, or whether that's the telling of a misogynist joke, whether it's somebody has forwarded the nudes of their ex-girlfriend to you and your choice to either forward them along and laugh at it or to say, this is absolutely not okay. It's not okay to forward these nudes or whatever it is. So I think that there is a lot to talk to, you know, boys and young men about how to be allies, how to stand up. And just because they didn't do the thing,

it doesn't mean they aren't responsible for helping to change the culture. Before I let you go, Rachel, we're likely gonna hear a decision on this trial at some point in the next few weeks, but in broad terms, I guess, where do you hope the conversation on consent and masculinity goes from here?

I mean, I really hope that the men who care about these issues, and there's a lot of them out there, there's a lot of extraordinary groups that are working with boys and young men to have conversations about healthy relationships and healthy forms of masculinity. I'd love to see more men talking about this. I'd love to see more men who are role models for young men, whether they're teachers or coaches or leaders in some ways in their communities, having these kinds of honest conversation with boys and young men.

I'd like us to look at our policy around sex education in the country because that's under attack right now. And a lot of our education around building healthy relationships is part of sex ed curriculum. So I'd like to see a bigger conversation about that and looking at bringing more comprehensive education to young people about emotional literacy, building healthy relationships,

and honest talk about sex and sexuality, talking about porn and the influence it has over how young people view and perceive sex. I think that we have to be as the grown-ups a lot braver because if we're not stepping in, there are people who will be putting out giving messages to young men that we don't want them to be receiving. Rachel, this was a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here. Thank you. It was my pleasure.

That was Rachel Giese, a deputy national editor at the Globe and Mail. That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramon-Wilms. Our producers are Madeleine White, Michal Stein and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.