Ridiculous clickbait headline from Marek to say that the report declares hockey Canada is "failing women and girls". He's correct that the paper (15 pages) outlines the beginnings of a plan to address issues and barriers, but they've mostly identified a bunch of questions that will produce a whole bunch more papers and ultimately come down to asking for more money. But the word "fail" doesn't appear in the document even once.
The most critical piece of data in the paper is that women and girls account for 19.9% of registered players in Hockey Canada. Basically, four men and boys play for every one woman and girl. Therefore, I would ask the paper writers to be very clear in what they are looking for with regards to, "Equity in resource allocation". It's fair to say that women and girls are put off the sport by underfunded and/or derelict programming, but I think we must also deal with some reality in the fact that women are not drawn to high speed contact sports at the same rate men are. My dad and I are hockey players, my sister and mother aren't, and that's because they have zero interest, not because Hockey Canada is failing them. Are they arguing that funding be allocated in this 4:1 ratio with perhaps some funds dedicated towards growing the women's side, or are they going for something closer to 1:1?
They also mention "To date, there is no ice equity access policy in Canada, which has resulted in ice time managed at the local level being given priority to groups with agreements that often pre-date the creation of women’s and girls’ hockey programs in their respective communities". Are they calling for men and boys hockey to give up their ice times? There's not enough ice time to go around, men's league games are already notoriously 11pm on weeknights, what is their vision of equity here and how can they build up women's hockey without tearing down men and boys? (build more rinks, yay! transfer ice times away from existing leagues, boo!) My wife might play if she could have 7pm ice times or weekend afternoons, but every single rink in the city already has those ice times booked for kids. I'm sure as heck not playing then!
So much of this will happen naturally if we let it. As more women play, more leagues will spring up to support them, and more research opportunities for many of the posed questions will present themselves. If there are enough new leagues, there will be demand for new rinks and that will lead to more ice availability. The "plan" this paper outlines might serve as some guiding structure for Hockey Canada as they continue to grow the grassroots women's game, but a lot of it is just recognizing that a growing demographic doesn't have the same grassroots support as an existing demographic. Hockey Canada should obviously take the lessons learned from the men's side and apply them to the women's side, and perhaps a bit of cash and energy will help smooth things out, but women playing a sport that men already play doesn't exactly call for reinventing the wheel.