Responsibility for safe sport flips to Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport

The shifting of safe sport onto the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport and the shuttering of the Office of the Sport Integrity Commissioner is underway.

The CCES is the country’s doping watchdog and monitor of manipulation around sports betting.

As of April 1, the centre will also be in charge of managing and investigating complaints and reports of abuse and maltreatment in sport.

That task was previously handled by the Office of the Sport Integrity Commissioner (OSIC), which was established in June 2022 with $16 million in federal funding for three years of operations.

What was OSIC’s Abuse Free Sport program is now the Canadian Safe Sport Program, which CCES safe sport executive director Signy Arnason says will be more responsive and trauma-informed.

“We’ve brought on board, alongside my actually close to 25 years of experience working at the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, others who have massive experience working on the front lines of a reporting mechanism,” Arnason.

“All of the people that have joined this team actually don’t have a background in sport. They have a background in maltreatment.”

The CCES takes on administering the Universal Code of Conduct to Prevent and Address Maltreatment in Sport, as well as the public registry of people banned from sport or provisionally sanctioned.

Timelines for investigating complaints and communicating progress to those involved will improve, Arnason said.

“You had people that were lost within the system and had no idea where they were at,” she said. “Individuals can read our rules. They can see our flow chart. We will be communicating with them.”

The transition is happening before the Future of Sport in Canada Commission has issued a report from cross-country consultations that concluded in January. One of the commission’s mandates is to make sport safer.

The CCES also faces the same jurisdictional limitations as OSIC in that only sports bodies that receive federal funding fall under its umbrella, which can leave provincial and territorial and club sports exposed.

“We have a desire to grow this and be able to offer it at all levels of sport, but we’re not there yet,” said CCES chief executive officer and president Jeremy Luke.

“This is something we’ve raised with the Future of Sport in Canada Commission, which we’ve now met with three times, to emphasize the need to figure out the jurisdictional alignment between the provinces and the federal government, and how this initiative can extend beyond the national level, where we’re starting at right now.

“And this is where we think the Future of Sport in Canada Commission could really assist in this area of work. While we’ve drafted a set of rules, they are only rules. We are pushing for legislative changes so that the organization can be based in legislation, so that we can have a mandate that enables us to share information with other law enforcement agencies or government regulatory bodies, and perhaps provide the ability to conduct investigations with more authority.”

One of the reasons former Canadian sports minister Carla Qualtrough cited for the switch announced a year ago was to make the process more independent.

While the CCES receives federal government money, the government has no authority over selection or election of its board.

But the CCES is also not subject to the Access to Information Act, which means the public can’t request information from it.

“Broadly speaking, there are concerns, first of all, around transparency because this is a private entity,” said Athletes Empowered director and former gymnast Amelia Cline.

“As far as we can tell, they’re not going to be subject to FOI requests. There’s no obvious body that’s going to be overseeing the process independently. There are no clear mechanisms for accountability for the CCES if the process goes wrong.”

Arnason says appeals of CCES decisions can be made to the Sports Dispute Resolution Centre of Canada (SDRCC).

Cline prefers that the entire process be removed from the sports environment and given to Health Canada or the Department of Justice.

“Abuse is abuse no matter the context,” Cline said. “There’s so much incestuousness within the sport system of too many people working in various different capacities. We’re OK with it being in another government department, but not under sport.”

Former alpine skier Allison Forsyth, who is a safe sport officer for Canada Soccer and founder of Generation Safe, believes the process can be better under the CCES if cases are handled with efficiency.

“They’re actually taking my feedback as a survivor, someone who’s worked and advocated in the space for six years,” Forsyth said.

“My main points of feedback are you need to be trauma-informed when you process complaints. Meaning, they took and have taken in my experience, way too long to process. These are real human beings who are still in the environment for lower-level cases.

“It puts both the complainant and the respondent and anyone else in that environment in a very challenging, if not trauma-inducing, experience when these cases take way too long to execute.”

How effective will the CCES be at stamping out abuse in sport? Arnason pleads for patience.

“A year from now, let’s talk about this because it’s very difficult to ask people who have been damaged through a system to just flip a switch and say ‘it’s a different organization, therefore now trust us.’ It doesn’t work that way. We understand people are going to be skeptical,” she said.

“No one is promising out of the gate this is pure perfection, and find me a model that is, but we have a massive commitment to hearing from the community and to move this forward in the right direction, to substantially make a difference on maltreatment within sport.”

A statement from the office of federal sports minister and Qualtrough successor Terry Duguid said the transition to the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport “is an important step that we expect to improve transparency, independence, and enforcement in safeguarding.”

“Minister Duguid remains committed to ensuring that Canadian sport is safe, inclusive, and accountable,” the statement said. “Ultimately, the focus must continue to be on supporting survivors of maltreatment and abuse. They deserve these continued improvements in the system. Minister Duguid will continue working toward a better sport sector that puts participant well-being first.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 11, 2025.

Donna Spencer, The Canadian Press