The Steve Dangle Podcast - Rick Westhead on the ongoing Investigations into Hockey Canada | July 17, 2022

Episode Date: July 17, 2022

Warning: This podcast contains descriptions of sexual abuse, and may not be suitable for all audiences. Rick Westhead joins the Steve Dangle Podcast to talk about the ongoing investigations of Hockey Canada's handling of a lawsuit alleging a sexual assault involving players from the 2018 World Junior Team and the subsequent settlement. Transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1c5nGPE_AKh9zI-lgRuDpwojorDwh7lKpyVIuGxtYuus/edit Recorded July 15th, 2022 Read Rick's work here for continued updates on the situation: https://www.tsn.ca/rick-westhead-1.88451 Watch the full episode here: https://youtu.be/HOu2SoMENb0 If you or someone you know is in need of support, resources can be found: https://endingviolencecanada.org/sexual-assault-centres-crisis-lines-and-support-services/ For our American listeners, a list of resources can be found here: https://www.rainn.org/national-resources-sexual-assault-survivors-and-their-loved-ones Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Warning, this podcast contains descriptions of sexual abuse and may not be suitable for all audiences. Joining us for the studio, in the studio for the first time, Rick Westhead. Rick, you know, it's funny, we all maintain text message conversations outside of being on the air. So, you know, I want everybody watching this to know that we don't always meet under these circumstances. It's great to see you. It's great to have you here. But this is going to be a tough conversation. i guess a lot of what i do uh include a little closer a lot of what i do involves tough conversations yeah but important ones i think absolutely absolutely so today uh we're going

to talk about what rick knows about the hockey canada situation that's been unfolding uh jesse and steve i was sick for this episode but jesse and steve did a full episode about it um rick i want to i want to start from the very very beginning uh because i want the context to really matter here so what have you reported thus far what was the event that i guess happened so it's interesting i was actually over in europe and i got a tip uh that i needed to go to london ontario and pull a lawsuit that had not been reported on and i was working on some soccer reporting at the time and didn't have the ability to get in person to london tried to call the courthouse and i guess because of covid and everything else it was was really difficult to

to find anyone so managed through some connections to get a source at the ministry of the attorney general to find somebody in london to to work with me and over the course of days finally connected with somebody who had a copy of that statement of claim and was able to get it to me so i'm over in europe and i'm reading this lawsuit for the first time and i'm thinking oh my god and for people who haven't followed the case at all, this was a lawsuit that was filed in April of this year by a woman who is not identified in this court document. And it's a lawsuit against Hockey Canada, the Canadian Hockey League, and eight Canadian Hockey League players who are referred to as John Doe's one through eight in the statement of claim. And she alleges that in June 2018,

following a Hockey Canada gala and golf tournament event in London, Ontario, that she returned to a hotel room with one of the players, one of the John Doe's, and had consensual sex with him. And after that, he allowed into the room seven other players. And that over the span of hours that she was repeatedly sexually assaulted, and when the attacks were over that she was directed to have a shower to be on video saying that she was sober she alleges that she was pressured not to tell anyone about this and that if police did question her she was pressured not to cooperate with an investigation

that's all in the statement of claim and so you know i i contacted my colleagues at tsn and uh started reporting on it and that was a difficult process you know hockey canada i'm sure wanted to make connections with its partners and let them know what was likely coming um the canadian hockey league as well the eight john does had no idea which players uh were involved with this uh and after a period of time a lawyer representing uh the woman in this case uh told me that she was not interested in speaking publicly about it uh but that the case had just been settled remember this was only filed in april so and that doesn't normally happen for anybody that's never been through that process it usually takes months so it was filed in april

2022 and completed settled weeks later settled weeks later yeah the caveat here is you know the federation had known about this for years right and so this would not have come as a surprise to anyone hockey canada the allegations that were being made but we can get to it in a minute when the government of canada when members of parliament read about this and pursued accountability that's things got really interesting after we did the story uh the federal sport minister and members of parliament agreed that there was needed to be action on the government level uh hockey canada wasn't commenting on this uh and uh and like i said the lawyer for for this woman said that the case had been settled and and she didn't want to speak publicly about it which of course is her

right and and any um survivors right so the standing committee on canadian heritage decides to have hearings uh looking into this and so in june i went to ottawa and i listened to the testimony of tom renny the outgoing chief executive of hockey canada and scott smith the president of hockey canada who is now also chief executive of hockey canada replacing renny Dave Andrews was there as well, the head of the Hockey Canada Foundation, but he didn't really say very much during that testimony. So what we learned during this one-day hearing was a lot, actually, about this case. First, and I think most important, we learned that when Hockey Canada was told about these allegations the morning after this event in London, the woman's stepfather called Hockey Canada and reported it and Scott Smith said that he

made the return trip to Calgary to Hockey Canada's offices and he talked about this with staff and then they had a conversation with their insurers and then they called the police in London. We know that Hockey Canada then hired a law firm Heenan Hutchison in Toronto to play point on an investigation. But this is where things get interesting. The players who were on that 2018 team were never required to participate and cooperate with Heenan Hutchison's investigation. Their participation was voluntary. And that testimony, that information came out in the testimony of Rennie and Smith in Ottawa. We also heard a couple other things that were interesting. We heard that for the last five or six years that Hockey Canada has received abuse complaints at least one or two every year, and that it's also investigating two other outstanding abuse complaints.

But when members of Parliament pressed the Federation officials for information about these, their response was, we weren't ready to talk about that. We're not prepared to talk about that before you today. they were asked well how many players on that 2018 juniors team did participate with the investigation and tom renny first answered well i think it was between four and six and then later scott smith contradicted him and said no i think it was it was actually much more than that and what i heard from members of parliament after the fact was you're coming to ottawa to testify before a standing committee get your facts in order be prepared know exactly how many players cooperated in the investigation.

That one day hearing finished. We also learned that to reach the settlement, Hockey Canada did not go through its insurance company. Instead, it liquidated investments to make a payment to this woman, again, weeks after the lawsuit was filed. I don't know whether that's standard practice. I don't know if Hockey Canada has liquidated other investments to pay off people who have filed lawsuits?

These are interesting questions. We're going to get more information on this because the standing committee has at least two more days worth of hearings, July 26th and July 27th. And they're subpoenaing, they've issued subpoenas for Hockey Canada officials to come back,

for the Federation's insurance company to have someone there to testify. and this is important to have Sport Canada there and that's important because during Scott Smith's testimony he said that Sport Canada was actually told about this in 2018. Why does that matter? Sport Canada gives Hockey Canada millions of dollars in public funding every year and the question is knowing that information what did sport canada do with it did they ever freeze hockey canada's funding back in 2018 or 2019 they did did they follow up on this to ensure that it was investigated properly did it reach the minister of sport at the time

and what did the minister do with that information so sports can sport canada's got a lot of hard questions to answer as well so this is a a hockey scandal but also a government scandal basically there's a lot of pain to go around on this and rightfully so you know um what's happened since that that first hearing is we've we've seen hockey canada this week and we can talk about it in more detail uh issue an open letter to canadians explaining basically a mea culpa saying that they understand that they did wrong um i've never seen hockey canada in a statement before uh concede that there is a toxic culture in the game that was really something they have fought that actually they fought that from what i've seen for years everyone has so i think i think

we should get into that now what does reopening this investigation actually mean so in the open letter to canadians uh let's go through it hockey canada said it's going to reopen the investigation i don't know whether that means heenan hutchison is back on the job or if someone else will be part of this investigation uh you know the the federation says that players will be required to participate otherwise they will be um banned from any affiliation with hockey canada programs and activities moving forward effective immediately. I'm not sure what that means. Does that mean that if a player says I'm not going to be interviewed, that they won't be allowed to play in the Worlds? You know, if their team doesn't make the NHL playoffs, does it mean if

the NHL has this World Cup event that they can't play in that? I'm not sure if that's even a Hockey Canada event or not. So I'm not really sure how much leverage the Federation has over players beyond being able to threaten, we'll make it known. If you don't cooperate with us, we'll make that known. So those are a couple of big questions I have. But the biggest news is that the woman in the case has agreed to participate. I confirmed this yesterday on Thursday. Her lawyer emailed me and said that now that this investigation has been reopened by Hockey Canada, she's going to cooperate. And of course, that raises a million questions about what we may be able to learn and find out in the future. Wow. Is there any possibility for criminal

charges at any point? Absolutely. There is no statute of limitations on sexual assault in Canada. And I think that's an important message for people to know and hear. We often get confused between what the rules are for civil litigation and criminal law. And there are statutes of limitation for civil lawsuits. If you want to sue someone and try to get compensation for what you say that they've done to you, different provinces and different U.S. states have different limitations periods. But for criminal prosecutions, to hold someone accountable in a criminal court of law there is no statute of limitations and we've seen that play out with cases with the the boy scouts with the catholic church these are tough cases to um pursue right

because often uh people are not coming forward to share their stories of abuse for many years one of the advocacy groups that i've been talking to a lot is called child usa and they were telling me that the average age of a survivor when they first publicly report their abuse is in the early 50s so imagine that that people who are victims of childhood abuse are holding on to this having their own families carrying the baggage and the pain of what they've navigated and not talking about it until they're in their 50s so what's what's the timeline on this uh for what's next I think you mentioned they're going to issue subpoenas. It's coming up very soon, isn't it?

Well, it's a bit complicated to follow because there's multiple investigations. There's a Hockey Canada investigation, which the Federation has just said that it's reopened. There's a government inquiry. So we have two days of hearings, July 26th and 27th. And members of Parliament have told me, depending on what they hear during those two days, or maybe just as importantly what they don't hear they're prepared to have more hearing dates and call more witnesses to testify to get to the bottom of this so you have that second investigation let's not forget the nhl also says that it's investigating and trying right now to

hammer out terms and protocols for its investigation with the nhl players association so there's a look there's going to be a lot of activity on this i i have heard it's not out of the question that contracts could be terminated um depending on what's found so with that and i want to talk directly to that because i think rick a lot of people are going to ask the the question that i think you know it's rightly so from a from a fan's perspective is following the game are these people going to be held to account is there a circumstance where these names and if you can't answer because by the way i want to say this beforehand rick's not going to speculate here so i'm going to be careful in my phrasing in the question and try to see if there's something where

we can go here is there a an instance or a circumstance that could exist where these names are are publicly announced absolutely yeah people in our courts of law are held accountable for sexual assault every day um so because you're a pro hockey player why would it be any different i'm not sure you know what the london police does in this case you know whether they now try to re open its investigation and piggyback with hockey canada i don't know there's a reason that a lot of abuse survivors don't come forward with their complaints and their allegations the the police forces collectively have had a very poor record on this you know i was actually doing some digging there's a reporter named robin doolittle who's at the globe and mail yes and and she's a fantastic

reporter i used to work with her at the toronto star and what's very interesting to me is the timing months before the london gala event robin did a report for the globe and mail a series called unfounded and this was a series of stories in the globe and mail that talked about the number of Times that Canadian police, an abuse survivor comes in to report that they've been assaulted and their claim is found unfounded, meaning we don't believe there's any evidence that a claim that anything wrong happened here. And Robin, one of the anecdotes that she used in her reporting was of a woman who was 18 years old and at the University of Western Ontario and alleged that she was sexually she was at a keg party she was drinking heavily she blacked out

and when she came to she was being sexually assaulted outside on the ground she went to the police and she says when she went to the police the police officer challenged her and said it wasn't possible that you could black out parts of a night that that just doesn't happen and really challenged her on her testimony. She was able to get a copy of her videotaped statement, which Robin Doolittle reported on in The Globe. And so, Mike, I have no reason, I don't know exactly why the woman in this case

did not participate with the Hockey Canada investigation or with the London police. But it is interesting that months before this alleged attack in London, that uh you know canada's national newspaper was reporting on unfounded allegations of sexual assault and using an incident in london ontario as one of the leads for its reporting and on how the london police uh you know in the words of you know the reporting had handled this in such a ham-fisted way so i think you know uh this is a lot i mean it's a lot for a human being to

to understand or i think to absorb and i and i say that on the human level because i don't know how this can happen when i when i look at a story like this i don't know how this can happen how does this happen and then when i look at it at a human level how as an executive do you see a story like this and this is the way you handle it it's very very tough to hear that an organization as um impactful and and powerful as hockey canada uh handled these things this way this may be a speculative question but i'm going to ask it anyway um there are people out there quietly behind the scenes asking the question whether or not hockey canada in its current form under its current name as its current organizational structure

could be called into question in general like meaning that do we move on from this body after this do you feel like this is a story that's big enough to warrant that or is it far too early to even have that discussion i frankly i don't know that i'm qualified to answer that i did a radio interview about this this morning and you know the the person that did the interview with me so well you're a hockey reporter and you must know the ins and outs of this sport i'm not a hockey reporter no i'm not i don't cover the ins and outs of hockey right i barely well i i i'm on my best days i'm pretty self-deprecating but but i don't need to go there right now the fact is i don't know the sport because i don't cover hockey exclusively and similarly you know i'm

not a governance expert. Does Hockey Canada continue in its current form? I don't know. You know, that open letter to Canadians was interesting that came out yesterday. That federation, in its own words, is feeling the heat. They've had major sponsors put on pause their relationships. They've had their federal funding frozen. They've been, you know, receiving, I'm sure, on social media that they're seeing the same messages that I'm seeing and that you guys are probably seeing about how upset Canadians are about how this was handled. So this open letter was probably an attempt to repair relations with sponsors, with the government, with fans.

It's probably to keep their jobs. There's an element to that. And at the end of the day, I hope there's a part of this is about wanting to do the right thing. You know, I do think that there are good people at Hockey Canada and that they are trying to, even if it's four years late, do this right and establish a framework for policies that moving forward will prevent something like this from happening again. And I'm really careful about using this phrase, we can never let this happen again. This will happen again because there are

predators and there always have been. If you look back to the coverage of Sheldon Kennedy's case in the 1990s, after he bravely came forward and told his story. If you look at the Canadian media, there were all kinds of columns and all kinds of comments about how we have to fix the system so it never happens again. It will. The question is, how do we learn from this to introduce new policies for sports organizations that make athletes safer, and when things do happen, hold people accountable in the right way how must an organization like hockey canada and i say that because there are many organizations that are funded by governments that that are you know we've seen it in the states we've seen it here in canada it happens in europe but the same thing

how must sports organizations government funded and sponsor funded who are so important to the development of a sport and the development of youth within that sport in this country how must they handle this what is what is you know if you can give us an idea of what hockey canada didn't do now or then that they must do going forward well i think making participation in an investigation mandatory is the bare minimum isn't it it sounds like it but you would know better than i would like i said i'm not a governance expert there are there are smarter people in the room than me to talk about that and to to you know speculate on it it's interesting let's talk about what Hockey Canada has announced. So beyond reopening the investigation,

the federation has agreed to become a signatory to join on to a new government agency which is charged with receiving complaints of abuse and investigating them independently of the federations. This is really important because that means that moving forward, if you have an abuse complaint, you no longer go to Hockey Canada or to its Safe Sport Department or anyone in that federation. You now go to this independent agency, right? Sounds like a better idea. Right. And that government agency will do the investigating. It won't have a conflict of interest because it's not part of the federation.

They have also said that moving forward, that players in their elite programs are going to have education on issues related to consent. they've also said that for the complaints that don't relate to national team programming they're going to have a new reporting mechanism that's independent and i've got a lot of questions about this uh still about how independent it is and who's going to to form it to receive complaints at other levels so imagine players who are under the umbrella of provincial hockey federations or even local hockey associations it would provide them with a place to go to get independent investigations done for for everyone like watching and like us regular people how do we help the situation and like maintain the pressure on hockey canada so that like

the right things happen here well i think this is part of it talking about this and bringing a spotlight to it is in the public good you know i i know that the conversation is uncomfortable and there are people who would say this is a negative story and i understand why they'd say that but it's also there's a silver lining in this it's it's making sports safer for anyone who know who plays sports who has kids in sports don't we want that i know how fun it is to focus on um you know what's happening on the ice the nhl has never been more exciting these guys are all amazing right every one of the 700 plus players is fantastic they're dazzling but and there's a place for conversations about that but it's also important when things like this happen

to you know give it the attention that they deserve uh as a subject and i think like just Jesse to answer the question part of the what we can do is making sure that we do have a real honest conversation with ourselves and be able to as media as governments as federations as sponsors say are we is this good enough what we're doing right now I want to I want to go back to one thing you said earlier in the interview because I want to make this very clear because I want to know that i heard it right when you pulled this lawsuit in london was there a settlement in place at the time that you pulled it there was no settlement that was recorded in the court file at that time and then you had to speak to your employer who has a relationship with hockey canada

and they knew what was coming right hockey canada would have had to known what the recording was about is that correct anyone that i'm doing a story on would know what's coming if i'm doing a story on canada soccer you know the a journalist's job is to make sure that someone that you're doing a story on knows it's coming and that you give them a fair opportunity to comment and so what i would usually do what i always do is make sure that i've emailed you know i'm gonna i'm planning to do a story and this is what the story is on and this is when i'd like to hear from you before and if for some reason you can't meet that deadline please let me know and i'll accommodate you as best as i can and then after you sent those emails and by the time this story was

ready for publication the lawsuit had been settled correct okay just thought i would ask that question because i think that's that timeline i think is important um so that's a word yeah so So, Rick, I know that we've got to wrap with you here. It's never long enough. And, you know, the one thing I do want to say is the reporting that you have done on this, and I'm sure you've seen the replies, and I know you're humble and that sort of thing. I just want you to know how much we appreciate the reporting that you have done, the reporting

others like Katie Strang have done on this story. And I appreciate you because it's funny, you don't get to see this, but Rick walking into my house is like you know somebody called you immediately about they were calling you about something and you had to you had to talk to them and then right before we started here rick's like hey i got can i call you back in half an hour there's some you're working on other stories i think you you're trying to publish ones sooner rather than later so to have the half an hour block of your time for us and for the people that listen to this show regularly um even the ones that don't is a is a gift and i just want you to know how much it's appreciated thank you yeah you

know i i i uh i'm happy to be here with you guys i i appreciate the audience that you have is one that um wants to hear about a story like this we've we've actually talked before about you know kyle beach and and his story last year and uh you know i really appreciated the support for that story from from you guys at the time when there was a lot of people in hockey media that didn't want to touch that story and so um anytime i can come back and anytime i can offer you know my perspective on something as limited as it might be uh you know i want to do that with you guys open invitation i know this isn't my house but open invitation we'll get you a key yeah yeah it's a shared studio so it's everybody's studio

rick thank you so much for coming in today we really appreciate it thank you