Report: Hockey Canada interim chair Andrea Skinner resigns

Hockey Canada interim board chair Andrea Skinner has submitted her resignation, TSN’s Rick Westhead reports.

“…Upon reflection, it is clear to me from recent events that it no longer makes sense for me to continue to volunteer my time as Interim Chair or as a Director of the organization…” Skinner said in a statement, as reported by Westhead Saturday night.

The news comes almost two months to the day after Skinner was appointed interim chair. Skinner was the first woman ever to head up Hockey Canada, replacing Michael Brind’Amour, who had stepped down earlier in August. Her appointment, and Brind’Amour’s resignation, were reactionary moves by the governing hockey body in the wake of revelations about its failures in investigating sexual assault allegations involving members of the 2018 Canadian World Junior team, which resulted in a lawsuit that Hockey Canada settled with the unnamed victim in May.

At the time of Skinner’s hiring, Hockey Canada championed Skinner’s appointment as a step toward “inclusion and making the game accessible to all Canadians,” an attempt to change the nation’s damaged opinion toward the organization. But Skinner’s and Brind’Amour’s testimony before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage this past week doubled down on denial, defending the existing establishment and insisting no changes were needed at the leadership level – despite the revelations that Hockey Canada had set up multiple funds, using registration fees, for the use of settling lawsuits that could include sexual assault allegations.

Skinner claimed in her testimony this week that removing the current leaders would “be very impactful in a negative way to our boys and girls who are playing hockey. Will the lights stay on in the rink? I don’t know. We can’t predict that, and to me that’s not a risk worth taking.”

In the days following Skinner’s testimony, the fallout was significant. Multiple provincial hockey bodies, from the Ontario Hockey Federation to Hockey New Brunswick, pledged to withhold registration fees from Hockey Canada. Multiple prominent sponsors, from Canadian Tire to Tim Hortons to Nike, dropped Hockey Canada. Even Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau surmised that Hockey Canada may need to disappear and be reborn as ‘Canada Hockey,’ an entirely new organization.

Skinner’s term was set to expire in November, as she was inheriting the end of Brind’Amour’s term. She was first named to the board in November 2020.