Theo Fleury's Victor Walk Came Back to Calgary

Theo Fleury spent Sunday morning walking through downtown Calgary.

The Victor Walk returned to the city, hosted by the Breaking Free Foundation, with walkers gathering at 5th Street Square before heading out and finishing at a rally. Fleury was there. So were survivors who came to say so out loud, which is the entire point of the thing.

“Sexual abuse is silent in every aspect of our life. People don’t talk about it. People hide it,” Fleury told CTV News Calgary. “It’s important for us to provide a space for people to come and reveal this stuff.”

The woman who organized it was there in 2013 too

Amber Craig co-founded the Breaking Free Foundation, and her connection to this goes back to the beginning. She hosted a Victor Walk in Calgary at the same time Fleury was making the original walk in 2013, and she got there by reading his book.

“When I read Theo’s book, it certainly made me clue in that that’s what happened to me, but I still didn’t feel comfortable talking about it until the first Victor Walk, when I heard a bunch of strangers sharing their story and I just thought, ‘why am I holding this in?’” Craig said. “I shared it for the first time, and now my life is completely turned around.”

Her description of Sunday was plainer than any mission statement: “We’re just here to gather and let people share and hear other people’s stories and let them know that they’re not alone.”

Craig says she hopes the Calgary walk becomes an annual event.

Where the walk started

The first Victor Walk was thirteen years ago and it was a long one. Fleury left the child abuse monument in Toronto on the morning of May 14, 2013, and arrived on the steps of Parliament Hill on May 23, covering more than 450 kilometres over ten days. The published schedule had him going through Oshawa, Pontypool, Peterborough, Havelock, Madoc, Elm Tree, Maberly, McCullough and Stittsville before the last leg into Ottawa.

It was not a quiet trip. The House of Commons noted it before it started, in an April 19, 2013 statement by St. Catharines MP Rick Dykstra, who described the goal as asking “for greater victim support for children who have been sexually abused and for tougher penalties for those offenders.” The campaign’s specific ask that spring was a minimum of 15 years in prison for each count of sexual abuse. Along the way the walk raised money for three organizations: Little Warriors, the Quinte Sexual Assault Centre and Siksika Nations.

A statement on the Victor Walk website at the time put the aim this way: “People want to better protect our children from pedophiles, greater national awareness about the epidemic of child sexual abuse and much more access to funding for those groups and organizations who provide healing for victims, survivors, victors and advocates.”

The record behind it

Fleury played 11 seasons in Calgary, won a Stanley Cup here in 1988-89, and put up 104 points in 1990-91 and 100 in 1992-93. He disclosed the abuse he suffered from his junior coach, Graham James, in his 2009 book Playing with Fire, written with Kirstie McLellan Day.

James pleaded guilty in December 2011 to sexual offences involving Fleury and Todd Holt, Fleury’s cousin. He was sentenced to two years in March 2012. The Manitoba Court of Appeal increased that to five years on February 15, 2013, three months before the first walk, with Justice Alan MacInnes writing for a three-judge panel that the trial judge had erred. Fleury’s response that day, posted to Twitter: “This is a great day for all survivors.”

Sunday

Thirteen years on, the walk is shorter and it happens in more places at once. There was one in Prince George in July, with a Calgary walk the same day. Sunday’s went around downtown and ended with people telling the truth in public, which was always the ask.

“We have an unresolved trauma issue,” Fleury said. “People carry trauma or experience trauma, and then they carry that trauma their whole entire lives without ever speaking to anybody, without ever getting help. And how it manifests itself is in mental illness and addiction.”

More about the walk and the foundation is at breakingfreefoundation.ca.