‘Confronting Canada’s troubled hockey culture’ is the theme of journalist and author Rick Westhead’s latest book “We Breed Lions.”
Westhead broke the Team Canada hockey scandal and how Hockey Canada handled the case.
His book confronts the revelations made during the Hockey Canada trial involving five members of Team Canada’s 2017 World Juniors Team.
All five were found not guilty of sexually assaulting a woman in a London, Ontario hotel room following a celebratory event in 2018.
Despite the outcome, Westhead says a toxic culture of hazing, abuse, sexual assault and inappropriate behavior persists within the hockey community.
While Hockey Canada came out with a number of policies including locker room supervision to address inappropriate behavior, it requires that kids and their parents are held accountable.
He cites a recent incident that unfolded in an Ontario locker room, and a warning, the details are disturbing.
“I wrote a story last week,” says Westhead, “about a AA U-14 team in Stoney Creek, Ontario where the players were left alone in the locker room, which is a breach of Hockey Canada conduct. And when there was no coaches there, there were players holding down their teammates, pulling down their pants and underwear, taking pictures of their genitals and posting it on their group chat. The same group chat that was full of racist and homophobic slurs.”
My book WE BREED LIONS: Confronting Canada’s Troubled Hockey Culture is out today.
Thank you to the team at @randomhouseca for believing in this book and thanks to Stephen Brunt for writing the forward.
I’m grateful to @TSN_Sports for its commitment to sports journalism and I…— Rick Westhead (@rwesthead) November 4, 2025
