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Safe Sport for Whom?: Are National Sport Organizations Addressing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Calls to Action for Sport Through Safe Sport Policies?

The Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRC) outlined 94 Calls to Action (CTA) that are essential to address reconciliation in Canada (TRC, 2015). Five (Calls 87-91) of those CTA were related to sport. One of those Calls, Call 90, emphasized the need for national sport organizations (NSOs) in Canada to create inclusive policies and programming with an emphasis on anti-racism awareness and training. Similarly, safe sport in Canada was created as an initiative to address maltreatment, discrimination, and harassment in sport. In 2019, the federal government mandated NSOs to create safe sport policies and programming. However, there has been no such mandate to implement the TRC's CTA. The TRC's CTA 90 and safe sport have been treated as separate issues and there has been no effort to see how these two initiatives could inform each other. Through the use of Bacchi's (2012) "What's the Problem Represented to be" approach and applying a settler colonial lens to my analysis, I investigated how NSO staff and safe sport policymakers are constructing safe sport in Canada and if that included addressing anti-Indigenous racism. Through 10 semi-structured interviews from participants representing a total of eight NSOs as well as archival research of safe sport and equity, diversity, and inclusion policies, I found that the participants and the policies produced three discourses: 1) Anti-Indigenous racism does not require a separate policy; 2) policies alone are insufficient: Safe sport education and resources are needed to address anti-Indigenous racism; 3) the TRC's CTA are not being treated as a priority by Sport Canada but NSOs want to act in consultation with Indigenous organizations. These discourses provide insights into how NSOs are constructing safe sport in Canada, leaving anti-Indigenous racism unproblematized, and thus furthering settler colonialism.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/44400
Date19 December 2022
CreatorsMcRae, Nora
ContributorsGiles, Audrey
PublisherUniversité d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
Source SetsUniversité d’Ottawa
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
Formatapplication/pdf

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