Canada's Vanessa Gilles, left, battles the United States' Alex Morgan, right, during the CONCACAF Women's Championship final soccer match in Monterrey, Mexico, on July 18, 2022.Fernando Llano/The Associated Press
Late last month during a break in practice, as the afternoon sun beat down on Vanessa Gilles and a handful of her fellow players with the Canadian national women’s soccer team, the star centre-back framed the long-running dispute between her teammates and their bosses at Canada Soccer in simple terms.
“Pay equity, gender equity – all those are things that we as a country represent,” said Gilles, standing on the perimeter of a pitch in the north end of Toronto. “Unfortunately, in the sport, that’s not the case so far.” And so, she said, when she and her teammates open their campaign at the Women’s World Cup next week, they’ll do so with the aim to “prove it to our country, prove it to ourselves as Canadians – that we should represent our sport as we do our country.”
For more than a year now, the women’s team has been locked in a struggle with Canada Soccer, fighting for what they say is equal treatment to the men’s team: from the frequency and size of training camps to the number of support staff, program funding, salaries, and prize money. The clash spurred parliamentary hearings, prompted a series of job actions that were international embarrassments for the federation, and ultimately helped topple the leadership of Canada Soccer.
And it remains hanging over the women’s team, even as the players hope to make their deepest run yet at a World Cup.
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The fracas broke into view in June, 2022, when the men’s team announced shortly before a friendly in Vancouver against Panama that it was boycotting the match. While the players’ primary complaint was over compensation for themselves, they also demanded that the women’s team receive an equal “percentage of prize money” from their own tournament appearances.
The incident put a spotlight on the fact that the women had been playing without a contract since their previous labour deal with Canada Soccer had expired at the end of 2021.
The clash intensified in February of this year, when the women arrived in Orlando to train ahead of the SheBelieves Cup and learned that Canada Soccer had handed down what the players called “significant cuts” to their program, kneecapping their training and preparation. In an exasperated statement posted to social media, the players said, “We have been told, quite literally, that Canada Soccer cannot adequately fund the women’s national team, and they have waited to tell us this until now, when we are less than six months from the World Cup.”
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They walked off the field, announcing they would not be participating in any Canada Soccer-associated activities until the matter had been resolved. But within 24 hours they were forced back to the practice pitch by a threat of legal action from Canada Soccer. Days later, when they took the field before their first game, against the United States, the Canadian women wore purple warmup T-shirts which read, “Enough is Enough.”
All of the upheaval seemed to have left their spirit sapped. After the game, which they lost 2-0, captain Christine Sinclair acknowledged that the off-the-field drama could have either spurred them to fight, “and come out on fire, or we come out flat. … I think we looked like a team that was tired, a team that’s mentally exhausted.” They won only one of the three matches they played in the tournament, against Brazil.
Their biggest battle still lay ahead. Less than a week after the SheBelieves Cup wrapped up, Nick Bontis, the president of Canada Soccer’s board, resigned. “While I have been one of the biggest proponents of equalizing the competitive performance environment for our women’s national team,” he said, “I acknowledge that this moment requires change.”
The next month, four of the players were on Parliament Hill, telling the Canadian heritage committee that Canada Soccer had refused to open its books during the negotiations. “We have been successful … in spite of our federation for so many years,” Janine Beckie said. “We are so sick and tired … of having to scratch and claw for transparency.”
In fact, only hours before the women’s appearance, Canada Soccer had issued a statement outlining what it said was the collective agreement it had proposed to the two national teams in June, 2022. If accepted, the statement said, both teams would be paid “the same amount for playing a 90-minute match and both national teams will share equally in competition prize money.” It also said the agreement would make the Canadians “the second-highest-paid women’s national team among FIFA’s 211 member associations.”
The announcement included a statement from Earl Cochrane, Canada Soccer’s general secretary, or chief executive officer. “It is time to get a deal done,” he said. “We’ve been negotiating in good faith and want to get to a resolution with our national teams. In order to get there, we need both of our national teams to agree. Our women deserve to be paid equally and they deserve the financial certainty going into the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup.”
But the announcement itself, which was widely interpreted as a pre-emptive move designed to dull the women’s testimony, left the players feeling disrespected.
Weeks later, Cochrane resigned.
On Friday afternoon, Jason deVos, Canada Soccer’s interim general secretary, said in a statement to The Globe and Mail: “We have been working collaboratively and are awaiting replies from both of our national teams on the offers proposed to them. We share the desire to get this resolved as quickly as possible.”
In the absence of a three-way agreement, the women have expected for months now that they would at least be able to strike a temporary labour deal with Canada Soccer before the World Cup, which would ensure they would be paid for their work this year. But with less than one week to go, negotiations are still ongoing. During a news conference on Monday, Sinclair insisted there would be a deal before the first game. “We’re very close to an agreement,” she said. “It’ll get done.”
The permanent agreement, one which includes the men, will have to wait.