Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport

Message from Jeremy Luke, CEO

At the CCES, we work in collaboration with our partners to produce a more fair, safe, accessible, and inclusive sport system for Canadians. It is our pleasure to share with you some highlights from the first six months of this fiscal year to demonstrate the impact of this work. We welcome your input and suggestions on how we can continually improve and how we might bring additional value to the work you do.

Our priority areas are anti-doping, competition manipulation, True Sport and ethical sport engagement – all of which are critical to a values-based sport system and a positive sporting culture that drives both performance and participation. We are grateful for Sport Canada’s ongoing support of this work and their confidence in the CCES.

It’s critical for Canada to continue to be a world leader in protecting athletes’ right to clean competition. We recognize the immediate concerns and risks associated with sport gambling as it relates to sport integrity and athlete safety – and the need for a national policy and educational resources on competition manipulation. Culture change in sport is clearly needed as a component to addressing safe sport in a long-term comprehensive manner. Through our work in True Sport, and the culture change we have established around doping prevention, we can help address this challenge. Poor governance can be a key predictor of ethical issues within sport and we are committed to assisting sport organizations improve their governance through initiatives such as governance education, risk management training, management by values workshops and development of various template policies or guidance.

With this new Progress Report, we’ll be bringing you a timely account of our headway toward our objectives, including stats on measurable outcomes as well as milestones that we feel are worth celebrating. Please never hesitate to reach out – we would welcome hearing from you.

Contact us!

Ethical Sport Engagement

Our focus on collaboration is at the forefront in our work to identify emerging ethical issues and develop research-based solutions that address them. In the current climate, it’s crucial to recognize issues early and work together to address them. The CCES is contributing in the governance area with a suite of e-learning courses and workshops, with the view that good governance is key to addressing safe sport issues and fostering a positive sport culture. We appeared before the House of Commons as part of its study of Safe Sport in Canada, and participated in Hockey Canada’s Beyond the Boards summit – and we are excited to be engaged in this area.

The CCES received and responded to 14 ethical enquiries since April 1, 2023.

Provided access for over 700 learners to Governance Essentials, an e-learning course developed in collaboration with Sport Law targeting volunteer directors at the NSO, PSO, and LSO levels. 

Connected the Responsible Coaching Movement (RCM) to True Sport and values-based sport through newsletters and webinars delivered in collaboration with the Coaching Association of Canada (CAC).

Updated the online Risk Registry with widespread risks affecting the Canadian sport community, including Safe Sport, competition manipulation, cyberattacks, and large-scale destabilizing incidents.

True Sport

The CCES continues to act as the network leader for values-based sport through our work in True Sport. To help True Sport members activate the seven True Sport Principles, we develop tools and resources, offer activation workshops, and do outreach. We also support a team of volunteer Champions that are working to increase awareness of True Sport.

The Hope on the Horizon Tour brought True Sport Activation Workshops to sport leaders in four provinces, with plans to stop in four more provinces/territories.

A Mitacs research grant will allow our partners at the University of Guelph to evaluate the impact of the tour. 

True Sport membership reached a milestone of 5,000 members in May, amid a cluster of OFSAA (Ontario high school sport) championship registrations for five different sports.

We gained nine new True Sport Champions in Quebec, Prince Edward Island, British Columbia, and Ontario. These leaders promote values-based sport in their communities and help build awareness of True Sport across Canada.

Events and Awards

Tools and Resources

Anti-Doping

Athletes are at the core of our anti-doping work. We educate and support athletes and their entourage so they can make clean sport a priority. To give them confidence that they are competing on a level playing field, both at home and abroad, we contribute to the efforts of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), offer our services to international events held in Canada, and run the world-class Canadian Anti-Doping Program (CADP). We had the opportunity to engage directly with athletes at the AthletesCAN advisory committee meeting, where we updated on the 2024 Prohibited List and the upcoming World Anti-Doping Code review process.

At the halfway point of the year, we had conducted 1,889 tests, which is well on track to meet our fiscal year objectives.

Fourteen sanctions were confirmed for a wide variety of anti-doping rule violations, including trafficking and whereabouts failures.

We strive to stay connected with international developments in anti-doping, both learning from our colleagues and helping shape the future of anti-doping. So far this year:

• CCES staff attended the 2023 WADA Therapeutic Use Exemption Symposium in Incheon, South Korea.
• WADA staff attended the CCES Board meeting in April in Montreal.
• We submitted feedback to WADA regarding the 2024 Prohibited List and the 2024 Monitoring Program.
• Jeremy Luke attended the Norway Anti-Doping Session on the theme, “Preparing for the Future of Anti-Doping.”
• We participated in the Continental Results Management Project, various Global Learning & Development Framework working groups, and the WADA Education Committee.
• CCES staff sat as an observer on the Sport Human Intelligence Network meetings, which aims to increase human source intelligence gathering capabilities and coordination among anti-doping organizations.

Education & Athlete Services

Competition Manipulation

The risk of competition manipulation is growing fast as the regulated sport gambling market opens up, so the CCES is leading the development of a national response to this threat. We’ve made great progress in this area so far this year, in consultation with stakeholders during a national symposium and with our peers internationally. We’re pilot-testing a template policy, educating stakeholders, and receiving anonymous reports through the new CCES Integrity Hotline. This hot topic was our most common source of questions from the media, resulting in six media mentions and interviews.

Symposium

Together with McLaren Global Sport Solutions, the CCES hosted the 2023 Symposium on Competition Manipulation and Gambling in Sport in Toronto.

The event brought together 150 delegates from important stakeholder groups: athletes, sport organizations, governments, gambling operators and regulators, pro leagues, sport integrity units, and law enforcement.

The symposium examined the severity of the issue globally, highlighted the current international approaches to mitigate the issues, and laid out a framework for a national program to combat and prevent competition manipulation.

Over 80% of the responding delegates supported the need for a harmonized national policy administered by an independent organization. A White Paper in response to the 2023 Symposium will be published shortly.

International Advocacy

Canada is an Observer to the Macolin Convention, a multilateral treaty that aims to prevent, detect, and punish match fixing in sport. The CCES is also an active participant at the Group of Copenhagen (the Convention’s Advisory Group). Already this year, we:

• Attended the Group of Copenhagen meeting in April in Strasbourg to update on our progress addressing the issue in Canada.
• Participated in a taskforce to monitor competition manipulation for the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup.
• Volunteered for the Working Group on the Monitoring of Sporting Events to help develop an event calendar and monitoring strategies. A report will be published shortly.

Competition Manipulation Policy Pilot Project

• Five of six NSOs in the pilot project have finalized and implemented their competition manipulation policy (Badminton Canada, Canada Basketball, Canada Soccer, Curling Canada, Racquetball Canada, and Squash Canada).
• All six NSOs have their participants completing The Competition Manipulation Policy education course, with lifetime completions reaching 721.
• The CCES Integrity Hotline was accessed 26 times for reports of competition manipulation and doping.

Education

Music: Stagepop by Kjartan Abel (kjartan-abel.com/library). CC BY-SA 4.0 Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.