Canada Would like to play the banning game

2 Young Canadian Dancers received a letter from CADA demanding within 7 days to learn why they danced in the UK Championship against CADA rules and threatening suspension.
This is th letter of reply
To: Canada Dancesport

(Formerly Canadian Amateur DanceSport Association)



Attention to: Sandy Brittain


Ms. Brittain,

This letter is in response to your letter dated January 26th 2012.

We express the following position in regards to your demands:

I. Canada DanceSport has no jurisdiction to impose limitations;

1. We are athlete members of DanceSport BC and we are not members of Canada Dancesport. Under DanceSport BC rules, Article 3(d) our license to compete is granted by DanceSport BC. It is our position that we did not violate our obligations as members of DanceSport BC and we did not violate their bylaws. If there is any act from DanceSport BC, we will deal with it when and as appropriate.

2. It is explicitly stated in your Rule Book, Article 3.01 that the only natural person able to be member of Canada Dancesport is the so called “Honourary Member”. Thus you have no jurisdiction to impose any limitation on us as we are not your members;

3. Our relationship with Canada Dancesport is based solely on:

a. the maintained by you register CRAD as explicitly stated in Article 6.05 in your bylaw for which privilege we pay a fee of CAD$20.00 and

b. on the rules for the competitions, which you cannot extend to cover any other grounds like for example limit our freedom or govern our private life and business;

4. It is also in your Bylaw, Article 1.01 that Canada Dancesport is the ”sole national authority of competent jurisdiction for the administration of Amateur DanceSport in Canada” therefore, you cannot expand arbitrarily your power and regulations to any events outside Canada and their participants;


II. Past practice and arbitrarily applied rule, void the rule

It is a well established, long term used, and still current practice for the Canadian dancers to dance in USA under NDCA sanctioned competitions. NDCA is not WDSF affiliated organization and it belongs to WDC. We will not supply you with names of couples, who did participate in such competitions, but you can check for example the history of the Seattle Star Ball. It is a NDCA sanctioned competition and you will see many couples from Canada consistently entered it and they were/are not penalized. There are many more competitions we can point out to you. You cannot arbitrarily select to act in the situation of one competition in England and ignore hundreds of competitions held in another country in violation of the exactly the same rule you are accusing us of breaching. It is our position that with your letter you are also exposing us to unequal treatment discrimination.



III. Canada Dancesport’s rule 8.08 is unreasonable



It is our view that any attempts of Canada Dancesport or any other organization to limit our private life, our believes and right to express them (dancing is a way to express our beliefs) and/or the right to chose who we associate with is outside of the scope and the purpose of Canada Dancesport. In contrary to your own over – reaching rule 8.08 in your corporate objectives you adopted: “a) to improve, encourage and advance DanceSport on a nation- wide basis, at all levels and to provide standards for its members associations;” No doubt, limiting the ability of the current dancers to compete only where you allow has nothing to do with the words “improve”, “encourage” and “advance” and in fact achieves the exact opposite effect. It is our view that you do not have the ethical, moral and legal right to adopt such a restriction of one’s freedoms.

IV. Canada Dancesport is a corporation not aimed at the advancement of the amateur ballroom dancing and as such it is subject to the Competition Act regulations.

WDSF is the Canada Dancesport parent organization and it clearly adopted the policy of incorporating professional dancers and encourages people dancing for profit. As a member of WDSF, Canada Dancesport has an obligation to follow whatever the WDSF adopts as rules and regulations or at least this is what you are messaging publicly. We noted the changes in your name and rules in an obvious departure from the amateur dancing focus. Not only that, your commercial goals are also explicitly expressed in sub article (f) in your objectives.

Based on that, we are bringing forward an argument that Canada Dancesport is a business covered by the Competition Act and we are supporting the view that using the restrictive covenants in your bylaws and rules are far exceeding any reasonable limits. You are abusing your dominant position (in fact you monopolized the competitive dance scene in Canada) and you are trying hard to create any possible barrier for any competitors to enter the market of organizing competitive ballroom dancing by removing the ability of any dancer in Canada to attend such a competition.

V. We feel you are attempting to discriminate us on the ground of some fundamental freedoms, recognized as unalienable human rights in Canada and internationally:

1. Freedom of belief, opinion and expression: Our belief is that we express our inner self by the motion of dancing the same way we express ourselves with words. Dance is for us more of an art than just mechanical action which you can transfer to a rigid scores and regulations. Trying to limit how, when and where we can express our believes about dancing is a direct attack on our fundamental human rights of believe, opinion and expression as what you are basically did is mandating us that the only way we can express ourselves in a competitive environment as a dancer is by using your medium – your competitions only;

2. Freedom of association: restricting us from associating with other dancing events and or organization is limiting our freedom of association; Freedom to associate is a prohibited ground for discrimination which despite the fact is not directly expressed in the BC Human Rights act is implied and applied by the Human Rights tribunals and the courts;



VI. USA Dance, a sister organization of Canada Dancesport in USA announced publicly a week ago their new policy of Freedom to Participate, pledging that no restrictions will be imposed or enforced on their competitors who chose to dance whenever and wherever they want BECAUSE doing so will be contrary to the law, sport regulation, human rights and the IOC Charter. We would like Canada Dancesport to consider this approach and follow with a similar action.

VII. We can add more arguments in our support, but we will leave that for if we are unable to reach a resolution to this issue.

VIII. Our proposal to resolve the situation is as follows:

a. Canada Dancesport will withdrawal its letter and will stop any action against us;

b. We will maintain our good standing as Canadian ballroom competitors and will try our best to promote DanceSport everywhere we compete as we did so far;

c. We will support a mutually respectful relationship.

On another note, we do understand that another Canadian Couple (Jean Philippe Milot & Laurence Bolduc) has had their letter withdrawn.

Should you decide not to accept our proposal and further advance any action against us, our lawyers will be happy to serve you with our human rights complaint and court actions.

You can also be assured we will attract a broad domestic and international public and media involvement in scrutinizing Canada Dancesport’s actions in Canada.