The Legault government still intends to tighten the net to better protect young athletes from abusers, but it will still be some time before new measures are put in place.
Faced with the damning findings of a report from the Ministry of Education which demonstrated shortcomings in the process of checking coaches’ criminal records, the Minister responsible for Recreation, Sports and the Outdoors, Isabelle Charest, announced last August his intention to strengthen the Sports Safety Act.
The objective was then to table a bill during the fall session, she confided in an interview at the time.
Since then, fall has given way to winter, and this legislative piece is still awaited. “We were delayed,” explains M’s press secretaryme Charest on the line, while assuring that the minister intends to table her bill “as quickly as possible”.
It should be added that the Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, tabled Bill 47 in December to “strengthen the protection of students”, in response to another investigation report which identified problems in the management of cases of sexual misconduct in schools.
Concretely, the government wants to ensure that the background of a teacher who moves from one establishment to another is better known before being hired.
Presented at the very end of the fall session, this bill could not be adopted, and it will be necessary to wait until at least the resumption of parliamentary work in the last week of January for elected officials to consider the question.