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December 19, 2005
Shut up and watch
Attempting to legislate racist sentiment into silence is generally a bad idea, since its principal outcome is to make martyrs out of cretins like Ernst Zundel and David Ahenakew, so it's not easy to determine the appropriate reaction to the sort of racial taunting that apparently met Ted Nolan and his Moncton Wildcats in Chicoutimi on Friday night. As the Moncton Times & Telegraph's coverage noted, "the QMJHL can't prevent fans from being racist jerks."
This is true. However, the QMJHL can and should force fans to keep it to themselves. Neither the Sagueneens nor the QMJHL as a whole can expect families — the lifeblood of junior hockey — to pay to bring their children into such environments. (This is to say nothing of what the parents of the players might think.) Chicoutimi's Centre Georges Vezina isn't a microcosm of Canadian society, and a bunch of drunken rednecks aren't Ernst Zundel. Junior hockey teams have no more an obligation to provide a forum for such stupidity than anyone else does on his or her private property.
Junior hockey teams do have an obligation to provide a safe environment for players to compete and for spectators to spectate. The Sagueneens should immediately be put on notice that another such incident will result in their forfeiting the game at hand and, as is the wonderfully apropos practice in European soccer, playing one or more future home games in an empty arena. This won't cure whatever anti-Native prejudice caused Chicoutimi fans to hurl epithets at one of hockey's most respect coaches, but then one suspects nothing will, and such social re-education is not within the QMJHL's mandate.
(Cross-posted to the Shotgun.)
Posted by Chris Selley at December 19, 2005 07:07 PM
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