St-Onge urges provinces to accelerate efforts to make sports safer for athletes
CTV
Sport Minister Pascale St-Onge says ending abuse in sport will require complaints processes that include provincial-level athletes, not just national ones.
Sport Minister Pascale St-Onge plans to push her provincial counterparts to hasten their efforts to investigate abuse in sports when she meets them in February in Prince Edward Island.
St-Onge said in August she asked provinces to sign on to the new national Office of the Sport Integrity Commissioner for provincial-level complaints, or develop their own similar program. She said they all committed to doing so.
"I'm going to ask them what their progress is, where they're going, what their timeline is," she said. "This needs to happen as quickly as possible. I think we're facing an urgent matter. We're hearing these stories of abuse and maltreatment at all levels. It shouldn't be a jurisdictional issue. All athletes should know where to turn to when they're facing these situations."
The federal sport integrity office opened in June to handle complaints and investigations for national-level athletes in sporting organizations that sign on to the program. St-Onge has said any of the 64 national sporting organizations that haven't signed on by April 1 will lose their federal funding.
As of Jan. 10, 22 were full participants, but the sport integrity commissioner's website says many more are in the process of doing so. There are six additional sporting groups who are signatories, including training institutes in the Atlantic and Ontario and the Canadian Olympic Committee.
But the national office is limited to complaints and investigations involving national-level athletes, and St-Onge said the vast majority of athletes in Canada are training and competing at non-national levels. That includes provincial athletes, high schools and community clubs, all of which fall under provincial jurisdiction.
Currently only Quebec has a provincial-level complaints system, Sport'Aide, formed in 2014 to address the growing issue of violence in sport in the province.
