And the Ethnic Frenzy in Québec Continues...

Former NHL coach stunned by Quebec racial slurs

CTV.ca News Staff

A former National Hockey League coach of the year was left shaking with anger and humiliation after a Quebec crowd allegedly hurled racist slurs at him during and after a recent game.
Ted Nolan, former coach of the Buffalo Sabres and current coach of the Moncton Wildcats in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, said he was shocked when the crowd in Chicoutimi, Que. attacked his racial heritage on Friday night.

Nolan is an Ojibway Indian and is originally from Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.

Fans allegedly shouted racial slurs during the game, and continued afterwards as he left the Centre Georges Vezina arena and boarded the team bus after losing 4-3 to the Chicoutimi Sagueneens. A police car even had to attend the scene.

"All of a sudden it just escalated more and more, and people were pretending to shoot the bow and arrow and the tomahawk chop and, you know, the hand on the mouth making the warrior cry and bringing derogatory racial slurs as far as my native heritage," Nolan, 47, told CTV Atlantic on Sunday.

The Canadian Press reported Nolan as saying he hasn't experienced racism to such a degree since he was a child.

"I thought this stuff happened in the 1940s," Nolan said. "The racial slurs that we listened to throughout the game were just disgusting. It was really a bad night."

Nolan was told by referees and arena security staff that verbal abuse is not enough to justify removing fans from the arena. He said that has to change.

"If you grab those people and you escort them out of the building and tell them they're not welcome, that could help a lot," Nolan told CTV.

One of the NHL's most well known and successful aboriginal hockey players, Bryan Trottier, is a familiar face to many Canadian hockey fans. He played on six Stanley Cup-winning teams, is the seventh highest NHL scorer of all time, and now hosts hockey clinics across the country.

Racism is a topic he takes seriously.

"It's really unfortunate people are just backwards about it and want to make other people feel less about themselves," Trottier told CTV Atlantic in Saint John, N.B. where he was helping raise funds for a senior men's recreational hockey league.

Fan excitement that spills over into abuse is not acceptable, agreed Al MacAdam, coach of the Halifax Mooseheads. He was stunned by what had happened in Chicoutimi, and said rules that apply to players and coaches should apply to fans as well.

"The teams are competitive. Chicoutimi and Moncton are going after each other. Fans are caught up in the passion of the game but just like coaches, managers and players, that passion has to be controlled," MacAdam told CTV.

The Quebec league's hockey operations director has also agreed there is no room in hockey for racism.

"Those things could happen, but I think the policy of the league is we don't tolerate any of those. It's a situation that players and managers are aware of. It's tolerance zero for slurs," Marcel Patenaude said.

With a report from CTV's Monica Verma