Strange how the B.C. government had all the patience in the world when dealing with the Vancouver School Board, with the education minister waiting until he received a report on the internal operations before firing the elected trustees last week, but no such tolerance for the concerns of Western Hockey League players.
Even though a class action lawsuit has been filed in Toronto and Calgary, home of the Canadian Hockey League and Western Hockey League head offices, demanding teams pay their players at least minimum wage, the Liberals didn't wait for the lawsuit to make its way through the courts. Instead, under the watch of jobs minister and local MLA Shirley Bond, the province simply exempted the six teams in B.C. - including the Prince George Cougars - from the Employment Standards Act.
A Postmedia investigation published Friday reveals serious lobbying by the teams, in the form of letters insisting the teams would close without government help. It appears Bond and her cabinet colleagues did not ask the WHL to provide financial statements or any proof to show that is really the case.
Staying out of it and letting the lawsuit proceed would have allowed the provincial government to see the finances of the teams before deciding whether the WHL franchises in B.C. deserve such an exemption. As it stands right now, it appears to be a subsidy benefitting businesses profiting on the backs of teenagers.
If each of the 24 players of the Cougars was paid $10.85 an hour for 35 hours per week for 25 weeks, that would total about $9,500, costing the team about $230,000 annually.
As it stands right now, the WHL offers its players one year of free post-secondary education (tuition, textbooks plus fees) for every season they play in the league. To use UNBC's numbers, that would cost about $7,000 for an academic year, with textbooks on top of that. Each player also receives a $250 per month stipend to help them cover personal expenses. That would push their current pay structure to about equal with paying them minimum wage.
That presumes, however, that every player will pursue that higher education option offered by the league, which is not the case. Not every player has the grades necessary to get into the school and the program they want.
Furthermore, it presumes that the value of their work is minimum wage, much like the work their friends do in restaurants and retail stores. Putting it that way is laughable.
As every WHL team stresses, these are talented teenagers, the best young male hockey players in Canada. Under normal market conditions, extraordinary talent comes with extraordinary compensation.
WHL franchises are worth millions, operating each year with multi-million budgets, each striving to turn a profit for their owners. They are not charities. Revenue comes through ticket sales but also sponsorships, advertising, broadcast rights, merchandise sales, commissions from NHL teams for players the team develops and so on.
While teams have a broader mission of developing players for professional hockey careers and often take on outreach work to benefit local charities, this is simply being a good corporate citizen in the community, no different than banks supporting cancer runs and AIDS walks. The Cougars, for example, have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Spirit of the North Healthcare Foundation and the Prince George Minor Hockey Association with its annual alumni golf tournament and 50/50 game draws, respectively. They deserve the thanks of local residents for their generosity but that does not change the two relevant facts - the team is a for-profit business that pays its office employees far more generously than the workers the fans pay to see perform.
Unfortunately, the WHL crying poor rings hollow when looking at the historical and modern context. Every professional sports organization underpaid their players for decades before the players finally unionized and demanded market-value compensation for their services. To this day, team owners routinely plead poor and threaten to move their franchises if they do not receive special treatment from municipal governments, in the form of reduced or no local tax, reduced or no rent, facility upgrades or replacement and so on.
As a certain American presidential nominee would say, exploiting government loopholes to maximize profit is just smart.
In B.C., everyone over the age of 15 is allowed to work under the protection of the Employment Standards Act, ensuring employers pay young workers a minimum wage and provide safe working conditions. Bond and the B.C. Liberals feel these rules should not apply to young professional hockey players or to the businesses and owners that employ them.
--Managing editor Neil Godbout
