BadgerBruce
Registered User
- Aug 8, 2013
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In early 2020, the Canadian Hockey League (the three major junior leagues in Canada) commissioned a 3rd-party, 100% independent panel to examine discrimination, harassment and abuse in major junior hockey, limited to just the most recent 4 year period (2017-2020). This panel is known by the acronym “IRP” (Independent Review Panel).
The members of the IRP were former New Brunswick Premier Camille Theriault; co-founder of the Respect Group, Sheldon Kennedy; and former police investigator and women’s hockey icon, Danielle Sauvageau. The hon. Mr. Theriault chaired the panel.
The IRP completed and gave the CHL its report 13 months ago, in December, 2020.
The CHL subsequently muzzled the IRP members, forbidding them to speak publicly about their findings, and did not make the report public until just a few days ago, when a judge in a harassment and abuse class action lawsuit against the CHL was on the verge of ordering production of the report. The gag order placed on IRP members remains.
What is in the Report? Here, word for word, are the first two sentences of the report’s “Findings” section:
“Off-ice misconduct, including bullying, harassment and discrimination, exists in the CHL. A systemic culture exists in the CHL that results in maltreatment becoming an embedded norm.”
How did the CHL officially respond to the “Findings” (there are 13) and concrete “Recommendations” (there are 13 of these, too) of an INDEPENDENT panel they paid for to “learn the unvarnished truth”?
Horribly and diabolically.
Rather than just releasing the IRP report and dealing with the consequences head on, the CHL instead hired hired lawyer Rachel Turnpenney from TurnPenney- Milne, LLP, a boutique downtown Toronto law firm that works exclusively in the area of workplace law, to quickly write ANOTHER report intended to undercut the IRP’s report. The CHL only gave Rachel TurnPenney 30 days to do this, but by God, she pulled it off! I don’t even want to know how much this cost the CHL.
And so last Friday the CHL released, via its website, a 145-page document they call “Update on Player Wellbeing.”
The package begins with 8 pages of self-congratulatory prose in which the CHL praises itself for developing policies and procedures they think are great, the TurnPenney report claims are great, and the IRP report subsequently tears to absolute shreds.
The package continues with, you guessed it, the 50-page Rachel TurnPenney report, a purchased piece of advocacy “research” that is just breathtakingly and wilfully blind and obfuscatory.
Only after scrolling through all of this bullshite will you FINALLY arrive at the Independent Review Panel’s report, entitled “The Impact is Real … Action is Needed.”
Here’s the CHL’s link to the package. My advice is to read it in reverse order — start with the IRP’s report, then the TurnPenney report, and end with the CHL’s shameless prologue.
https://cdn.chl.ca/uploads/chl/2022/01/21095713/PlayerWellbeingUpdate_FINAL.pdf
The members of the IRP were former New Brunswick Premier Camille Theriault; co-founder of the Respect Group, Sheldon Kennedy; and former police investigator and women’s hockey icon, Danielle Sauvageau. The hon. Mr. Theriault chaired the panel.
The IRP completed and gave the CHL its report 13 months ago, in December, 2020.
The CHL subsequently muzzled the IRP members, forbidding them to speak publicly about their findings, and did not make the report public until just a few days ago, when a judge in a harassment and abuse class action lawsuit against the CHL was on the verge of ordering production of the report. The gag order placed on IRP members remains.
What is in the Report? Here, word for word, are the first two sentences of the report’s “Findings” section:
“Off-ice misconduct, including bullying, harassment and discrimination, exists in the CHL. A systemic culture exists in the CHL that results in maltreatment becoming an embedded norm.”
How did the CHL officially respond to the “Findings” (there are 13) and concrete “Recommendations” (there are 13 of these, too) of an INDEPENDENT panel they paid for to “learn the unvarnished truth”?
Horribly and diabolically.
Rather than just releasing the IRP report and dealing with the consequences head on, the CHL instead hired hired lawyer Rachel Turnpenney from TurnPenney- Milne, LLP, a boutique downtown Toronto law firm that works exclusively in the area of workplace law, to quickly write ANOTHER report intended to undercut the IRP’s report. The CHL only gave Rachel TurnPenney 30 days to do this, but by God, she pulled it off! I don’t even want to know how much this cost the CHL.
And so last Friday the CHL released, via its website, a 145-page document they call “Update on Player Wellbeing.”
The package begins with 8 pages of self-congratulatory prose in which the CHL praises itself for developing policies and procedures they think are great, the TurnPenney report claims are great, and the IRP report subsequently tears to absolute shreds.
The package continues with, you guessed it, the 50-page Rachel TurnPenney report, a purchased piece of advocacy “research” that is just breathtakingly and wilfully blind and obfuscatory.
Only after scrolling through all of this bullshite will you FINALLY arrive at the Independent Review Panel’s report, entitled “The Impact is Real … Action is Needed.”
Here’s the CHL’s link to the package. My advice is to read it in reverse order — start with the IRP’s report, then the TurnPenney report, and end with the CHL’s shameless prologue.
https://cdn.chl.ca/uploads/chl/2022/01/21095713/PlayerWellbeingUpdate_FINAL.pdf
