‘Designed to conceal’: Hockey Canada set up a second multi-million dollar fund for sexual assault claims
In the past few months, reporting from the likes of TSN’s Rick Westhead, and subsequent testimony before Canadian parliament from Hockey Canada major decision makers, have detailed the governing hockey body’s botched handling of an investigation stemming from allegations made by an unnamed woman that eight members of Canada’s 2018 World Junior team sexually assaulted her. Among the many blunders revealed in the months since the initial Westhead story: the news that Hockey Canada had allocated a fund, drawing from registration fees, to pay for sexual assault claims and other lawsuits.
As the Globe and Mail’s Grant Robertson and Colin Freeze reported Monday: it turns out there was more than one fund.
“Several years after Hockey Canada began using player registration fees to build a large financial reserve known as the National Equity Fund to cover sexual assault claims and other lawsuits, it channelled a significant portion of that money into a second multimillion-dollar fund for similar purposes,” the story reads.
“Known as the Participants Legacy Trust Fund, the reserve was created by the organization and its members with more than $7.1-million from the National Equity Fund. The money was earmarked ‘for matters including but not limited to sexual abuse,’ according to Hockey Canada documents obtained by The Globe and Mail.”
The trust was set up to cover uninsured claims against Hockey Canada’s member branches that took place between 1986 and 1995. The fund was supposed to be dissolved in 2020, but that did not happen. In late 2018 and early 2019, Hockey Canada and its members went to court and altered the terms of the trust to keep it active until 2039.
Canadian MPs, interviewed for the Globe story, expressed suspicion specifically about the name of the fund.
“The name of the fund is designed to conceal and there is no doubt that that is the attempt,” said NDP MP Peter Julian. “This is another example of stonewalling and concealing of information that hockey parents and the general public need to know.”
When MPs asked CEO Scott Smith in June where Hockey Canada got the money to pay out the claim related to the 2018 case, he never mentioned the use of the National Equity Fund, any alternate fund or registration fees.
The revelation of this second fund and its secret uses comes one day before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage hearings resume with testimony from Hockey Canada’s past board chair, Michael Brind’Amour, who resigned in August, as well as interim chair Andrea Skinner.