Is organized sport on the decline in Canada?

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Team Canada’s athletes have been returning from Rio to cheers and applause, but not everyone is basking in the post-Olympic glow.

One of the country’s top sport policy experts points out participation in organized sports in Canada has declined significantly over the past two decades.

“We have all this talk about how young kids will be inspired to become involved in sport and yet no money goes toward ensuring that,” says Peter Donnelly, the director of the Centre for Sport Policy Studies at the University of Toronto.

“The only people who will become involved in sports are all the usual suspects — middle class, suburban kids whose parents are invested in it and who can afford it.”

Donnelly says Canada’s amateur sport funding model is similar to one used in the UK and Australia.

“Funding is reserved for those sports where we expect to win a medal and a lot of the resources go into whoever they think will be successful. Some sports like basketball don’t get much money but others like swimming get lots of money,” he tells NEWS 1130.

Donnelly would like to see Ottawa adopt a funding model found in some Scandinavian countries.

“Sport organizations there have a double task and they are funded appropriately for them. The first is to produce excellence and top class athletes who will hopefully succeed at the Olympics. The second is to build participation,” he explains.

“While we talk a good game with that, we really don’t do anything about it. In fact, Canadian participation in organized sports has gone down almost 20 per cent in the past 20 years.”

Donnelly believes there is too much hand-wringing about medal tallies to the detriment of organized sports in Canada. “If we’d come back from Rio with no medals, there would have been a lot of moaning about it but nothing in Canada would have changed — our quality of life and place in the international development index would still have been exactly the same,” he says.

“What I would like to see is much more connection between the success of high-performance sport and building participation in this country. Grassroots participation has a lot more benefits than a few medals.”

Donnelly says there need to be policy changes at all levels of government in Canada to direct more funding toward boosting sport participation levels.

“At the moment we are pulling all our best athletes from a really quite small proportion of the population — people whose parents can afford to pay for all the training, equipment and travel necessary to get up to the top levels. How many more Wayne Gretzkys or Andre De Grasses are there out there who didn’t have the opportunity?”

While increasing funding for amateur sport would be costly, Donnelly feels there is potential for a huge payback.

“There’s all sorts of data suggesting that with active, healthy youth in society, crime goes down, mental health problems decrease and all kinds of good things happen that save money in other areas.”