211: The 3 Biggest Reasons for Hockey Canada's Crisis

The Hockey Canada crisis has many familiar problems. We often hear in a crisis allegations, abuse, code of silence and secrecy. But there are also the telltale signs of poor leadership and governance in Canada. Hockey culture is in crisis.

Well, the allegations around 2003 are horrible. You know, I've talked with three people who have seen video of what was recorded in 2003. I've not seen the video myself, but what they have independently described to me is half dozen players sexually assaulting a woman who was not conscious in a room.

Welcome to the Indestructible PR podcast where we use current events and tested media and PR strategies to help prevent or manage a crisis and an indestructible reputation. Oh no. Canada. Hockey Canada is in crisis. The once powerhouse hockey brand is now embroiled in a crisis over a series of troubling accusations and cover up. The reputation of the brand is now seriously tarnished. The clip that you heard at the top of the podcast was TSN senior correspondent Rick Westhead. He is someone who has broken this story and has done tremendous work following up on a series of allegations that have happened and really brought down the Hockey Canada brand. Many wonder how it all went so wrong for so long. This week on the podcast, I want to discuss the three reasons why I think Hockey Canada's crisis was a particularly deadly crisis for the Hockey Canada brand and why it was so devastating for not only the victims in the case, but also the stakeholders of Hockey Canada. The families, the players, the people who really care about a cherished brand and a cherished sport. And all of this from the perspective of an American hockey mom. So let's learn what we can do. If you happen to be a part of an organization, some of the things that you can learn to prevent a future crisis at your organization. Now, by way of background, again, I had mentioned as an American hockey mom, I'm not deeply rooted in this crisis. I don't live in Canada, so we're not going to see this on the news every night. I learned about this crisis from the New York Times, but also Twitter especially. You know, that's a news aggregate site for me and so many of my followers, my Twitter friends, are Canadian. I have many communicators up in Canada, not to mention my college roommate at Boston University. So a lot of their news tends to kind of bleed down into New England. But this is a particular story because I do follow hockey. I have been a hockey mom for so long. This story was just so devastating and yet quite familiar as well. If you read about this story, you know, it involves sexual assault, among other things, but that's at the root of it. And I had mentioned on a podcast last week Warren Weeks, a guest on this podcast. He's been on here many times. I've been on his podcast as well. He does a roundup often on his podcast that he does with his colleague John Paranack. And Warren is one of the top, I'd say one of the best media trainers in all of Canada. He's based out of Toronto. And John Paranacki also is just a real amazing crisis communication strategist. They brought on a roundtable. So they had Shauna Bruce, who has a background in emergency management, she also works in crisis communication. And Grant Ainsley, he's out of Alberta and he's a crisis expert. So I was honored that they honored with a U that they allowed me in their roundtable to discuss it. And the point that I brought in is the familiarity of this crisis, particularly because of the COVID up and the sexual allegations felt so American all the same. It felt like the Boston Archdiocese with the Catholic Church scandal. I was living, you know, in Boston at the time when that exploded. And when that happened, it was the same thing. Payoffs, allegations, abuse, moving priests around, just like the Boy Scouts of America, very similar to that. And also sports, you know, USA Women's soccer, that story's out right now. And also USA Women's gymnastics. So the idea of big groups dealing with sexual abuse is not limited to Hockey Canada, certainly, but how they managed it is followed the wrong playbook. It followed the archdiocese in Boston's playbook and many other diocese, you know, around the country. And I'm saying this as a Catholic, when there's secrecy, it creates problems. So let me just give a little background on the story and then let's just talk about the three biggest reasons why I believe that this Hockey Canada crisis was a particularly devastating crisis for the brand. So in June 2018, there was a woman going by the name of the initials in court, or in this case going by EM and she was allegedly assaulted, sexually assaulted by eight hockey players from Canada's World Junior Team. Now, if you're listening from the US and if you're not a hockey fan, it's not widely known, like if you're a hockey parent or a hockey player, you would know this. But when you grow up, you have hockey, you know, you have travel hockey, you have school hockey, high school hockey, you have college hockey. But there's this level, particularly with men's hockey, where it's, it's Juniors. So you'll find a lot of players might go, like in the US they'll go high school. If they want to play college, for instance, they might go high school, to juniors, to pro, to go to the NHL or to college. So this culture there is this just very masculine culture with the sport of hockey. And when you think about that culture, when you think about that sport, think about young men, think about young men at that age. You also playing hockey, you know, this very aggressive, oftentimes violent sport, they're out of high school or their college age, there's alcohol involved, okay? Especially after you win a game, you know, win a championship and everyone is drinking. And a risky sport like hockey also means that there's going to be risky behavior. So how they ended up here is this woman was sexually assaulted by eight players. And she in. If you read some of the descriptions of what had happened, some of the details, which I did, you know, what had happened to her was just horrific. And when you have alcohol involved and she just wasn't quite sure what happened to her, and even speaking to the person who assaulted her, trying to talk her out of basically coming out with what happened, you know, trying to talk her out of saying anything, it's just devastating to listen to it and to read it, especially as a mother of daughters as well. But when you read the details of the assault, she was quoted as saying it was violent and it was degrading. So when you have all these stories of just this brutal behavior, the Hockey Canada crisis isn't just that one incidence is a series of incidents with other females and also with males. You know, this toxic haz culture, just this culture of masculinity, of just allowing this masculine behavior to take place, could be a very oh, boys will be boys behavior. And that's the type of behavior that can lead to these types of crises. So let's talk about the three things that I think led the Hockey Canada crisis to have legs just to last, and I believe is one for the ages. You know, we're going to put that up there with some of the worst responses for a crisis. And Canada has definitely had their run of them over the summer. I mean, of course, you know, if you remember last July in the summer, it was Roger's Internet service. So it all went down. It completely, completely went down. It was a countrywide outage, and the response was dismal. And I knew this because everyone on Twitter was blowing up. They all had service enough to go onto Twitter. But when you need something that is so critical to your day to day living and not respond to it. It created a huge crisis. Also there was Bell Media and the firing of a very beloved long serving anchor on the network, Lisa Laflamme. And she was beloved and she was summarily let go and she retaliated by creating a Twitter video explaining that she did not agree to this firing and there was huge blowback. And I discussed it on TikTok and also on the podcast. So here now we have the Hockey Canada crisis right on its heels. Now, this one has been going on for a while. This has definitely been a saga. There has been investigations, leaked investigations, reopened investigation. There are secret funds because they needed to settle the abuse claims. There was non disclosure agreements. There was just toxic behav behavior up and down. You know, Hockey Canada because it is federally funded in part by the Canadian government. That brought in the government. Also, there's a lot of sponsors involved. And when sponsors begin to cut ties with an organization, that also creates more of a crisis situation. Now, the leader of Hockey Canada was Scott Smith. He was the president and CEO and the finger was pointed at him for much of this. There are so many calls for him to step down, but stood fast. He just wanted to stay in there along with the entire board. But eventually they all needed to step down. And that's what happened within the past two weeks. So there was a statement that came out that said, effective immediately, the chief executive officer and president, Scott Smith and the entire board agreed to step down. Now, something that I had said on Twitter too, when you have an entire board step down, it looks like a victory for a crisis. But as someone who works with boards, if you remove an entire board at once, it creates such a disruption for an organization. So they're getting through one part of a crisis, but they're creating another governance crisis because they have to find a whole new board. Okay, so let's just get into the three biggest reasons why I think this Hockey Canada crisis was a particularly bad one. Number one was just the general lack of transparency. Without a doubt, the biggest crises out there often have a problem with transparency. And Hockey Canada was not transparent in any of their responses about the investigation, about what's happening, any backroom dealings. The board clearly did not want to make anything public. And we don't know how much of Scott Smith being a part of it, but it seemed like everyone was in lockstep there. There was also just this prevalence of silence, particularly with the media not speaking to the media, not putting out statements. So when you have this toxic cocktail of omission and withholding the truth and non disclosure agreements and not talking about financial controls and what the management is doing. You're creating this miasma of secrecy, okay? No one can see what's happening. There's no transparency. And so in the public, when stakeholders can't see what's happening, it's the red flag for a crisis. Second, it's when leadership, both the board and executive operations, when they adopt a position of not giving in, they adopt this position of not backing down and I won't back down. And when people refuse to do that, it just kind of creates an environment where a scandal is just going to stay. It's going to stay for as long as someone decides to just fight and stick it in. Your crisis is going to stick it in right along with you. The board standing behind CEO Scott Smith is what ensured that this crisis was going to continue. Not only that, when Smith was really embroiled in it, when it was out in the open and these stories were coming rapid and the sponsors were leaving, Hockey Canada sent out a survey asking Canadians what they thought about the sexual assault scandal. And that is a doubling down tactic. Now you could look at it, I mean, research that would be the first step in any communication plan or any crisis. Communication plan certainly is the research. But the research that they conducted was more like priming. They were priming the respondent for how to answer, for example, the questions like is media criticism overblown Again, that toxic argument, the media is out to get us, the media is biased. Another question, is this something that is unlikely to happen again? Those type of priming questions are not going to provide clear, clean results. So when you have an aggressive position that you refuse to step down from, you're almost guaranteeing that you're going to stay in that crisis. Now, the board and Scott Smith did not have a choice because they eventually needed to step down. All of them left. Well, they were asked to leave, obviously. So that's what happens. That's a great consequence from not backing down. And here's a third piece that I noticed in following this crisis. It's that when you think you are above everyone else, you're above the public, you're above the press, you're smarter than everyone else. Nobody knows this is something that's just going to go away. They have this general dismissive attitude when it comes to people asking questions. Scrutiny to them is a group of rabble rousers. It's just people creating problems for us. We've got this handled, we've got this it's that we've got this attitude that can lead to just a damaging crisis that you can never recover from. Okay, in every episode I always include one indestructible PR tip that's a quick and easy leave behind tip that you can remember. That is really the one big thing I want you to remember about the podcast to help you build and keep an indestructible reput. If you work for an organization in its leadership or in a board, or you have a say in the culture of that organization, it's important to eradicate any type of cold and callous decision making. It just leads to destructive management and destructive organization. It creates an environment that leads to a toxic, rotten environment. If you create a culture where people do not feel free to speak up, you're creating a culture of bystanders, people who will perhaps witness what is happening and know what's happening and which will make it worse. It's one thing to say, oh my door's always open, you can come in and talk to me. As opposed to telling people with instructions and giving them details like a roadmap. This is exactly what you need to do to let us know that there's a problem. Maybe there's some built in immunity when someone does speak up, some type of quasi whistleblower status. You will not be punished. There won't be any punitive action if you speak up and let us know what is happening here. People need to feel safe, especially when there's something that they can reveal to eliminate a crisis like this. Because the real problem with this crisis is not the crisis itself, it's the victims in the crisis. These poor women and also these poor hockey players. There are other hockey players, male hockey players, who are also aggressively hazed and abused. And it was just created this masculine culture that was allowed for too long. Boys will be boys for too long. And that's a type of just culture that needs to be eradicated. That's all for this week on the podcast. As a reminder, my book Indestructible Reclaim Control and Respond with Confidence in a Media Crisis can be found on audible. So if you would like to join me on your your commute to and from work, or maybe as you travel to an out of town hockey tournament where you have to stay for an entire four day tournament when it's 10 degrees in a rink, put headphones in, get rid of the den of the hockey arena, of all the pucks hitting it. Thanks for listening everyone. I'll be back again next week. Bye for now.