I’m late to this discussion, sorry. I want to talk about these barbaric initiations into elite hockey. I also want to talk about the perspective of Gilles Courteau, the commissioner of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League.
First, a reminder. Former junior caliber players have attempted a class action in Ontario court for abuse suffered while playing on teams in Canada’s three major leagues…
Application dismissed.
But affidavits from ex-players show a dumb culture1 whose cost of entry was often paid for in sadistic initiation rituals. We are talking about 16-year-old players who are humiliated, who are sodomized, who have a rope weighted with washers tied to their penis or who are locked in a bus toilet…
It is Martin Leclerc who brings out these stories, repeatedly. Martin is what he’s always been, ever since I’ve known him from Montreal Journal : a journalist without flafla who comes up with stories that go boom-boom.
What is fascinating here is the culture of silence. Few ex-players have come forward to say, “Me too. »
There are those who raised their hands – Daniel Carcillo in the lead, the first whistleblower – those who joined this abortive collective action, an absolute minority.
Where are the others ?
They stay in the shadows.
They don’t have the shirts anymore, most of them don’t play anymore, they’ve become middle-aged men and yet… But they’re still members of the club.
It will be said that it is the macho culture of hockey, implacable mechanics which manufactures, they say, an esprit de corps. Certainly.
But the silence of the players who have suffered (but who don’t dare to speak) and the silence of the players who have suffered (but who are silent), I assimilate it Also to something else: to the strength of a group’s culture, the group doesn’t matter.
It’s hard to speak against his gang.
And not just in hockey.
Courage is not speaking against an “other” group. It is to speak against her band. Just a downside, sometimes it’s enough to excommunicate you, to self-eject you from the “club”… whatever the club.
I watch activists of all kinds go these days. There is nothing wrong with being an activist. But in any movement, there are exaggerations, there are skids, there are… crunches. In substance, in form. The flats expressed against “his” group are quite rare, even if the slippages are known, even if the excited are discreetly the object of snubs.
Among the nationalists, we do not dare bring to order the cracked Great Replacement who import here in format copy and paste the slogans of the French National Front. I know that there are sovereignists who are exasperated by this.
They are silent: the Cause, tse.
Among the hyper-progressives – the “wokes”, let’s say – I don’t see many people having a problem with the slippage of the activists who are suing a puppet in the form of an ugly black man who is accused of racism. Black in flesh and bone. I know there are dissidences, muted, far from Facebook statuses…
These dissidents are silent: white supremacy, tse.
I know that activists find that the denunciations of #metoo are not all equal, that some are frivolous, poorly supported in fact or the act of people who are not always well intentioned. But they say it in private messages sent on the sly, imploring above all not to be quoted, otherwise it is excommunication.
They are silent: the Patriarchate, tse.
In short, it’s hard to stand up against your group, your culture, your caste. His club.
This is true for hockey players, for doctors, for teachers, for unions, for cops, for firefighters, for political parties and it is undoubtedly true for the Cercles des fermières and the Amicale philatelists…
I see the law of silence among ex-junior players and I don’t see how it is different from that of doctors, teachers, unions, cops, firefighters, political parties. Because it’s strong, the group spirit. It’s strong, the part of identity that comes with belonging.
I end with the look of Gilles Courteau. I was fascinated by his gaze when he left the parliamentary committee. He made his press briefing, obliged, like a man who waits in a dressing gown for his first colonoscopy and who doesn’t really like the idea that…
Mr. Courteau stared at the same point in front of his nose for each question, like a robot badly programmed by ChatGPT, whether the questions were launched from his right or from his left: no, “his” league had nothing to do with these sordid stories, he swore to us, or very few, or in any case, ladies and gentlemen, nothing that is “with a sexual connotation”…
It was Thursday.
Except that on Monday, Martin Leclerc quoted the testimony of a former QMJHL player2 who said that several veterans stuck their fingers in his anus during his initiation. Fingers soaked in an analgesic cream (so that it burns). Mr. Courteau named this player, his testimony, so he knows his story. But he did not see any gesture “with a sexual connotation”. His sentence makers would have to explain certain things to him…
And Tuesday, The Press cites the testimony of Mr. Courteau in the context of the same class action claim in Ontario3in 2021. Oops, we see that he was much more direct about the somewhat stupid culture of his league than he was in front of the deputies in 2023…
He lied, the less charitable will say.
Nah, he told half-truths, the zhommes-de-hockey will say.
The truth is elsewhere, it seems to me: these are the words of a man who cannot betray, if only by a flat, his club, his gang, his group, his culture.
His identity.