Former world junior players accused in Hockey Canada sex-assault case set to stand trial

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The sexual-assault trial of five members of Canada’s 2018 world junior hockey team will begin this week in a courtroom in London, Ont., 15 months after police in this city laid charges.

Jury selection will be held Tuesday and the trial is expected to start after that.

The trial is scheduled to run as long as eight weeks and could include testimony from a number of NHL players – men who were also part of the 2018 junior team.

The case has served as a reckoning for Canada’s beloved game.

Michael McLeod, Dillon Dubé, Carter Hart, Cal Foote and Alex Formenton are each accused of sexually assaulting a woman in a hotel room after a Hockey Canada fundraising gala in June, 2018. Mr. McLeod also faces a second charge of being a party to sexual assault.

Each player has denied the accusations.

An initial police investigation into the incident was closed without charges in 2019, but three years later, TSN reported that Hockey Canada had quietly settled a multimillion-dollar lawsuit filed by the woman relating to that night. A Globe and Mail investigation then revealed the existence of the National Equity Fund, a special multimillion-dollar fund built through player registration fees that Hockey Canada has been using to settle sexual-assault lawsuits.

Amidst national uproar about the case, London police reopened their investigation in the summer of 2022.

At the time of their arrest in January, 2024, all five of the accused were playing professional hockey.

Mr. Dubé was a member of the Calgary Flames, Mr. Hart was with the Philadelphia Flyers, and Mr. McLeod and Mr. Foote were playing for the New Jersey Devils. Mr. Formenton, who had previously been a member of the Ottawa Senators, was playing for the Swiss club, HC Ambri-Piotta.

That it took just a little over a year for the case to get to trial, at a time when Canadian courtrooms are severely backlogged, is unusual.

On Monday, lawyers representing the players either did not respond to requests for comment or declined.

Lisa Dufraimont, a professor and associate dean at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University, who studies criminal law and evidence, said there have been a number of changes to the way that sexual-assault cases are handled in recent years.

The most significant example concerns legislation that passed in 2018 – along with a number of court rulings, notably the Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling in R v J.J. – which imposed stricter controls on the use of a complainant’s private records, such as text messages, which may be in the possession of the defence.

“Now, if the accused wants to use that in court, the defence has to go through an admissibility process that’s quite strict,” she said, speaking generally and not about the specific case. (It is not clear whether this change will play any role in the trial of the five players.)

This week’s trial in London is the highest-profile sexual-assault case to take place in Canada in the MeToo era. In the last seven years, Prof. Dufraimont says courts have become increasingly strict about the use of rape myths and stereotypes relating to the actions of a complainant.

She said it was notable that the five accused players have opted for a trial by jury.

“It’s quite clear where judges are at on the question of myths and stereotypes around how complainants are expected to behave. They know about them and they reject them. It’s not completely clear that members of the public reject those stereotypes. It’s more of a question mark,” she said.

On the other hand, given how highly publicized the case has been, there is always a risk that people may have formed views about the event, she said.