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Hockey Canada to convene summit for discussions on player safety

The governing body for Canada’s amateur hockey leagues is convening a summit to discuss player safety.
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TORONTO — The governing body for Canada’s amateur hockey leagues is convening a summit to discuss player safety.

Details of the summit won’t be known until mid-February, but it’s expected to be held over the summer. It comes as a public outcry grows over violent headshots in the sport.

The debate was reignited last week after a hit from Quebec Major Junior Hockey League star Patrice Cormier on Jan. 17th.

The Rouyn-Noranda forward delivered an elbow to the head of Quebec defenceman Mikael Tam that left him convulsing on the ice.

Cormier has been banned from playing for the balance of the QMJHL season and playoffs.

Hockey Canada president Bob Nicholson says somehow, “we have to get rid of hits to the head at all levels.”

“When you start to talk to the doctors on concussions, it’s not just there in a few players. It’s there in too big a percentage of players at all levels.”

Meantime, two politicians with hockey-rich backgrounds, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and Liberal MP Ken Dryden, have added their voices to the rising chorus of concern over the debilitating hits.

Flaherty, who once played for Princeton University, told the Globe and Mail that when he goes to games, he sees a “fair number of high hits.”

Flaherty, who specialized in head injury cases when he practised law, said “It just has to become the culture in hockey, at all levels ... that hitting someone high is not acceptable.”

He also said the tone must also be set by the game’s top athletes in the National Hockey League.

“The NHL has to lead by example.”

Dryden, a Hall of Fame goalie, said the league should take the extraordinary step of assuming all hits to the head are “intent to injure” actions that carry more serious penalties than other infractions.

This would put the onus on offending players to “disprove that assumption — as opposed to the other way around.”