by Mystery surrounds the legal business status of the independent third party that manages and investigates sexual abuse claims on behalf of Hockey Canada exposing an industry without any regulation or accountability.
Concerns have also been raised about the handling of sensitive data and confidential information by unregulated independent third parties after allegations of abuse and alleged criminal acts are exchanged through commercial email accounts and stored in a commercial online file hosting service.
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“The independent third parties are private enterprises and there are no set standards,” said one senior sports executive in an interview with the Guardian.
Hockey Canada, the sport’s national governing body, directs ice hockey participants in Canada who wish to report sexual and other abuse within the sport to file a complaint through an independent, non-profit third-party website called “Complaints Sport”.
Sport Complaints does not appear on Canada’s national business registry and details of its legal status or principals cannot be obtained through a routine search. Its website does not list an office address or office staff, and provides no contact details or means of contacting the organization via a webpage to file allegations of abuse.
Hockey Canada did not respond to multiple requests from the Guardian for business and contact details for Sports Complaints and did not offer clarification on its business relationship with Sports Complaints. Hockey Canada did not respond to questions about the oversight of Sports Complaints or how Hockey Canada compensates entities that provide management and investigative services for allegations of abuse.
The Guardian subsequently identified Ottawa-based lawyer Jahmiah Ferdinand-Hodkin as the principal of Sports Complaints and asked about her Sports Complaints email address to clarify the business and legal status of Sports Complaints and the relationship between Sports Complaints and Hockey Canada. After being asked by the Guardian how her Sports Complaint contact information was found, Ferdinand-Hodkin did not respond to requests for comment.
Ferdinand-Hodkin is the founder of Sport Dispute Management, an Ontario corporation created in April 2023 that engages in “boutique sports dispute resolution”. The Sports Dispute Management website offers safe sports complaint administration, investigation and adjudication as well as risk management and training services.
The relationship between Sports Dispute Management, Sports Grievances and Hockey Canada is unclear.
“There is currently no federal legislation that regulates Independent Third Parties,” confirmed a spokesperson for Carla Qualtrough, Canada’s Minister of Sport and Physical Activity. Qualtrough announced a “Future of Sport in Canada” commission at the end of last year that she said she intends to address the ocean of abuse allegations flooding multiple sports across Canada.
According to the minister’s spokesperson, the official launch of the commission will be announced in the coming weeks and will ultimately make recommendations for improving safe sport in Canada, “including trauma-informed approaches to support participants in serious sports -reveal and cure treatment” and also. seeking to “improve policy, funding structures, governance, reporting, accountability, conflicts of interest, system alignment, culture and legal considerations. This may include ITPs, at the discretion of the Commission.”
A senior sports executive who understands the relationship between sports organizations and ITPs and spoke on condition of anonymity to speak freely about how abuse complaints are handled in Canada told the Guardian: “Regulation would unify and standardize how things are handled .”
The executive said that sports organizations were known to hire ITPs based on “good price and good pitch” and that a lack of national standards was an obstacle to establishing a national register of coaches and officials found guilty. of abuse.
“How will we accept the results of ITP when there is no control over the process followed?” said the executive. “We don’t know if due process was given or the quality of the investigators or the quality of their judges. There are no nationally set standards. The costs will depend on the quality of the professionals you hire. If someone is going to make a profit at the end they have to make cuts somewhere.”
In addition to the lack of ITP regulation, concerns have been raised about the handling of confidential data and information during the process of managing abuse complaints. Reports of abuse that may fall under the jurisdiction of Hockey Canada are initially made through the Sport Complaints website and an online form owned and managed by project management software provider Monday.com, which is headquartered in Israel.
Offshore storage raises red flags about the security of personal data and confidential information about allegations of serious crimes. Sport Complaints has no privacy policy accessible on its website except for a statement on its online complaint form that states “information is sent securely to the ITP and is kept strictly confidential in accordance with the Policy. [sic]”. No information is given about what the stated policy is.
“This is extremely problematic,” said Amelia Cline, a lawyer and advocate for victims of abuse in sport through the organization Gymnasts for Change.
“We don’t know what the relationship is between Sports Complaints, the person receiving the complaint, and the person making the complaint so it’s a big question what kind of privacy legislation might be involved. Is it federal privacy legislation? Is it provincial privacy legislation? Is there any policy in place that talks about the storage of that data and when that data will be deleted? Are there data retention policies? This is a huge can of worms.”
“There is no certainty that these entities are keeping their information confidential,” Cline said. “They have really bad privacy and data storage policies – if they have them at all. Some of the ITP platforms don’t even exist legally. It’s a big concern with this system.”
Cline said the unregulated environment in which ITPs currently operate as well as confusion about privacy laws and data retention created problems for victims of abuse who tried to get information about their reports of abuse to ITPs. alleged.
“Two [a victim] want a copy of the report they made to ITP or they want access to documents related to their disciplinary process they have received news from these companies saying ‘I’m just the investigator, I can’t do that disclosure, you have to go to the case manager,” Cline explains. “The case manager says they can’t give them their information, only the referee can. The referee says they have no authority to reveal anything, it is the national sports organisation. People can’t access their own information even after they’ve provided it.”
