Re: Hand-wringing begins for Canada, Jan. 6

Hand-wringing begins for Canada, Jan. 6

People are all up in arms and worried about the state of Canadian hockey. I am not and here’s why.

First a couple of facts: 8 of the top 10 scorers in the NHL right now are Canadian. The projected #1 and #2 picks in the NHL draft this year are Canadian (Aaron Ekblad and Sam Reinhart). The projected #1 pick in next year’s draft is Canadian (Connor McDavid, who has plenty of creativity and is supposed to be the best player in the draft since Sidney Crosby).

But Canada has a problem with player development. Also how can we judge the state of Canadian hockey when we do not send our best players over to these tournaments? We were missing Nathan McKinnon, Sean Monahan and Morgan Reilly from the world juniors. I understand that other teams were missing good players too but how can we judge the best team when the best players are not playing?

Also, look at the depth of our Olympic team. The fact that players like Joe Thornton, Martin St. Louis, Milan Lucic and Eric Staal may not even make the team shows how much talent our country has. Those players would make the top 14 in any other country, guaranteed.

We don’t judge Canadian hockey after the world championships each year because we don’t send our best players over. So why do we judge Canadian hockey after the world juniors when we don’t send our best players there either!

Ben Goodings, Wellesley

After a less-than-expected performance from our national hockey team on the world stage we once again find ourselves delving into scathing post-mortems. We dissect the system into tiny pieces looking for the “cause of death”of our gold medal dominance on the ice but find nothing obvious to the eye.

In my own experience of being favoured to win gold at the ’68 Olympics in Mexico City success and failure cannot be measured nor achieved by pure ration or strong statistics alone. Currently we have placed so much emphasis on the result we have lost sight of the performance. National slogans such as “Own the Podium,” “We are Winter” or that winning silver equates to losing gold, conceals a dangerous agenda which over the long haul does not serve our nation’s youth well.

I have long since learned from my own Olympic disappointment over four decades ago that the fear of losing and falling short of expectations is far stronger emotion than the sheer desire to win on any day on any playing field. It is so much easier and much more fun to chase an opponent rather than be the rabbit yourself. Canada has become the international rabbit for hockey and all the players who wear the Maple Leaf feels it in their DNA.

This is the scenario that plagues Canada’s hockey culture from the grassroots level all the way up the chain. Rather than putting our entire system on the autopsy table we just need to give it some air to breathe to revive it.

In addition collectively we need to let go of the notion that Canada’s national ego rises and falls with its hockey scores. Our kids don’t need it nor do we.

It is time to go back to where we came from. Just let the kids play the game for what it is allowing room for fun once again. I have a seasoned hunch that the results we so jealousy covet for all our future Team Canada’s will tend to care of themselves.

Elaine Tanner, Oakville

Is it possible that the addiction to violence in Canadian hockey — rock ’em, sock ’em, hit, bash, and fight — has obscured the fact that hockey is a game, not a war? Games are competitive, yes, but they are much more about play and athletic skill. Maybe the Europeans can beat us now because they care more for the game and less for violence? Just asking.

Steven Spencer, Peterborough

Despite Canada’s dismal performance — falling on the heels of an equally dismal performance in Russia last year — at the recent World Junior Hockey Championship (WJHC) in Sweden, Canadians have long enjoyed, and rightfully so, the successes realized by the country’s hockey teams in international play.

That said, this success has long masked the problems and challenges confronting minor hockey in Canada: injuries, primarily due to body checking; registration and participation costs: the unfair advantage for players born in the first three months of the year; lack of equal opportunity; elitism and the apathy and unaccountability exhibited by Hockey Canada and the hockey establishment. To deny these facts is to deny reality.

Many Canadians — even many hockey fans — don’t know much about Hockey Canada, formally known as the Canadian Hockey Association. Yet the Calgary-based organization is the national governing body of ice hockey in this country, and controls much of the sport.

A creature of the federal government, Hockey Canada was formed in 1968. The organization became responsible for international ice hockey team selection, including Olympic and World Championships, but did not govern ice hockey play within Canada.

This changed in 1994, when Hockey Canada merged with the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association (which had been formed in 1914 to oversee Allan Cup play). Hockey Canada now has many regional branches across the country, with names like the British Columbia Amateur Hockey Association, Hockey Alberta, Hockey Québec and the Saskatchewan Hockey Association.

Hockey Canada treats the Canadian Hockey League (CHL) as a business partner. The CHL consists of the three major junior leagues in Canada: the Ontario Hockey League (OHL), the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League (QMJHL) and the Western Hockey League (WHL). Sixty teams play under the banner of the CHL, including eight U.S.-based teams.

The money involved here is quite significant. A case in point: Hockey Canada profited to the tune of $20-million from the 2011-2012 World Junior Hockey Championship (WJHC) held in Alberta. Over $6-million of that amount, or 35 per cent, went to the CHL. The WJHC returns to Canada in 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2021.

But this business relationship has produced divided loyalties for Hockey Canada, which is supposed to be concerned with the growth, health and safety of the game.

The injury rate in minor hockey, concussions in particular, is a significant contributing factor to the on-going decline in registration on Hockey Canada teams across the country. Evidence based studies attest to this injury epidemic. More and more, parents, year in and year out, have decided not to expose their children to such a high-risk recreational activity.

The main reason kids play any sport is for fun and recreation. Hitting and the risk of serious injuries remove this motivation. It is easily argued that the intense level of competition among children in minor hockey is contributing to these life-altering injuries and borders on child abuse.

This injury factor is becoming of growing concern to medical doctors, injury prevention specialists, safety advocates, and others. MP Glenn Thibault has said that violence and unnecessary physical abuse are undermining the integrity of hockey in Canada. In response, he introduced a private member’s Bill C-319 entitled the National Strategy for Serious Injury Reduction in Amateur Sport Act. This bill would mandate that the federal government sit down with first ministers of health and members of the athletic community so as to establish a framework and implement a strategy to reduce preventable injuries in Canadian hockey. At the time, only Hockey Quebec openly supported the passage of this bill.

According to Toronto neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Cusimano, body-checking should be banned from minor hockey at all ages. But of course, that would reduce the appeal of junior hockey as a spectator sport —and thereby compromise the associated financial revenues. Thus Hockey Canada’s divided loyalties.

As a former junior hockey player, and the father of an NHL player, I have been involved in the issue of eye injuries/losses in hockey going back to the 1970s. During that era, I was a strong advocate of facial protection across the board. At times, this was a challenging and difficult campaign, with derision coming from many circles within the “hockey establishment.”

During the 1974-75 hockey season, before minor players were required to wear face masks, there were 258 eye injuries, including 42 blinded eyes (and these were just the ones that were reported). A total of 298 eyes were blinded from 1972 through the year 2000. Not one of these injuries was suffered by a player wearing Canadian Standards Association (CSA)-approved facial protection.

The Canadian Hockey Association ruled in the late’70s that all minor-league players must wear helmets and face masks certified by the CSA. If that ruling hadn’t come in to force, minor hockey as we know it would have disappeared.

The challenges with injuries confronting minor hockey today parallel to a great degree the eye-injury issue of the ’70s. It is time that Hockey Canada and its affiliated organizations change their rules, so that a greater emphasis is placed on recreation and fun, and far, far less on intense competition and winning at all costs.

The CHL is one of the few remaining leagues in the world that still allows fighting — even as it markets its product as “family entertainment.”

The problem goes beyond mere institutional inaction. Hockey Canada, through its relationship with the CHL, has been a willing participant in promoting violence in the game for years. Fighting in hockey flies in the face of anti-bullying campaigns and initiatives across the country. Bullying is a matter of great concern and interest to many Canadians: school officials, police community, etc. One needs reminding that outside of a hockey rink, assault is regarded as a criminal act.

In response to a request from its counterpart in the United States, namely, USA Hockey, to ban fighting in the game, Hockey Canada’s President responded, as reported in a reputable publication, as follows: “We want to remove fighting from the game, but we don’t want to create other violent acts that may occur”. What does this mean? This statement begs scrutiny and clarification.

What does this say about Hockey Canada — a publicly funded organization, responsible for the development and well-being of the game— that has partnered with an organization that condones and allows this type of violence? The Canadian government, through the Department of Canadian Heritage (minister of sport), funds Hockey Canada. In 2011-12, it received over $3-million from the federal government. Its sponsors and marketing partners also include some of this country’s major companies

I believe that Hockey Canada has evolved into a shill for the CHL and its multi-million-dollar franchises across the country. These are, in effect, commercial entities, most of whose member teams play in municipally owned buildings.

Hockey Canada must also be taken to task for partnering with an organization that “drafts” players as young as 14 and 15 years of age. A drafted player is technically and legally controlled by the CHL team drafting him, years before that boy reaches the age of majority; with the team allowed to trade or sell him without approval of the child or parents. This practice is effectively an exploitative form of child labour.

And here’s another unpleasant aspect of the system: The Hockey Canada international selection process actively discriminates against those players who buck the junior system by heading off to a U.S. university.

Almost 500 Canadians are currently playing division-one hockey at U.S. universities. Not one of these players was considered “good enough” to play for Team Canada at the recent WJHC nor at the previous one held in Russia.

Hockey Canada’s effective boycott of Canadians playing at American universities highlights the serious conflict of interest in which it has placed itself, thanks to its partnership with the CHL.

It is about time the role, function and integrity of Hockey Canada and its business relationships, including its finances, were subject to scrutiny. The Federal Minister of State for Sports, MP Bal Gosal, is the man we should be looking to for an inquiry. Is he up to this important challenge?

Emile Therien, Ottawa

Brent Sutter’s comment “this isn’t just our game anymore” is a gross understatement. Not only have our junior hockey clubs failed to bring home the gold over the last five years, we haven’t seen a Stanley Cup in Canada since 1993.

What we have done is contaminate the game of hockey with our knock ’em, sock ’em style of play. As long as we insist on an “if you can’t beat them in the alley you can’t beat them on the ice” mentality, this meltdown in our game will undoubtedly continue.

Substituting hooliganism for skill is not the route to take. European teams have proven this beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Donald Cangiano, Oakville