Sport Minister St-Onge says there's 'no coherence' in Canada's safe sport system

Canada's Sport Minister said Monday jurisdictional issues continue to hamper the government's ability to implement a meaningful safe sport system that would properly protect hundreds of thousands of Canadian children, but refuted the suggestion her government was trying to pass on the responsibility to provincial and local authorities.

"I'm not passing the buck to anyone," Pascal St-Onge told the Status of Women committee that is studying Women and Girls in Sport. "The reality is that the sports system touches multiple jurisdictions and I can't fix it alone.

"There needs to be a coherence in this system, and what we're seeing is that there is no coherence right now. And that's part of the things that we need to work on."

Over the past few weeks, the committee has heard testimony from a parade of athletes who have outlined stories of abuse they have endured.

St-Onge said any kind of abuse in sport is unacceptable, but said her department and the federal government are only responsible for about 3,700 elite athletes who compete at a national level.

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Pointing to a recently published CBC investigation, St-Onge acknowledged that's not where most of the abuse is happening.

"The vast majority of cases of abuse and maltreatment happen outside the federal scope," St-Onge said. "They happen in local clubs, leagues and gyms, all of which are within the responsibility of provincial, territorial and local authority.

"This harsh reality was recently pointed out by an extensive investigative report from CBC. Canadians all over the country are asking us to fill that gap."

In 2019,  a CBC News and Sports investigation revealed more than 200 coaches — mostly at the local level — had been charged with sexual offences against a minor under their care since 1998. Since then, CBC has found another 83 coaches have been charged or convicted across multiple sports, provinces and jurisdictions.

St-Onge told the committee she will continue to press her provincial and territorial counterparts for action when they meet this weekend at the Canada Games being held in Prince Edward Island.

"I will restate the urgency for us all to work together toward better protection, better sister system alignment and to implement trusted complaint mechanisms," she said. "As we've witnessed, there's a huge gap in the system. It needs to be closed as soon as possible."

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Last year Ottawa committed $16 million to safe sport over the next three years. The money went to the creation and operation of the Office of the Sport Integrity Commissioner (OSIC), an independent office to investigate athlete complaints, which all federally funded sport organizations will be required to sign on to by this April or risk losing federal funding.

So far only 43 of roughly 70 national sport organizations (NSO) have signed on. St-Onge said she is pushing provinces and territories to either sign on to the federal OSIC office or create a similar complaint mechanism on their own.

St-Onge also continued to deflect calls for an independent inquiry that would examine how and why Canada's safe sport system is failing. Calls for such an inquiry have come from current and former athletes, Canada's former sport minister Kirsty Duncan, and leading academics who study safe sport.

"My goals are to do justice to survivors in a safe and trauma informed way, to take stock of what has been accomplished and what remains to be done," St-Onge said. "We are currently assessing how best to achieve both of these goals."