Canadian Heritage Committee on June 5th, 2012

[Parm Gill, Conservative, Brampton—Springdale, ON]

Are there going to be competitions Canadian athletes are going to be participating in for the first time in the Paralympics?

[Henry Storgaard]

Absolutely.

[Parm Gill, Conservative, Brampton—Springdale, ON]

Can you tell us what those might be?

[Henry Storgaard]

Well, I have 150 athletes attending. I'm sorry I'm not fluent with the ones who will be competing for the first time. I'm not fluent in their names at this point in time.

I could get back to you on that.

[Parm Gill, Conservative, Brampton—Springdale, ON]

If you could, that would be great.

I'm not sure if you have the answer to the other question I had. I'd like to know if there are competitions Canadian athletes are not participating in. Maybe you can give a reasoning as to why, what we may be lacking and what we can improve on to prepare our athletes to participate in these competitions in future Paralympics.

[Henry Storgaard]

In terms of the competitions we're not competing in, that's probably about two-thirds of the events and opportunities to compete. We're not competing in two-thirds. The reason for that is multifold.

First, perhaps the Canadian Paralympic athlete did not make the qualifying standard to attend the games. We're under the exact same rules and regulations as the Olympic athletes in terms of game standards.

Second, there may be cases in some sports and some activities that we've not had the funding to develop that particular sport or that particular team in the past few years and we just don't have a team or athletes that are at a world elite level of competition.

There's a whole range. It would be the same as in the Olympic Games, where not every slot is filled.

[Parm Gill, Conservative, Brampton—Springdale, ON]

Thank you.

One of the other committees that I presently sit on is the health committee. We recently studied the importance of healthy lifestyle in preventing chronic disease. How active are your organizations in promoting fitness and physical activities to Canadians, and especially to Canadian youth?

Maybe all of you or some of you will have the opportunity to answer that.

[Chris Jones]

I also wear another hat. I'm temporarily running an organization called Physical and Health Education Canada, whose primary vocation is to get children and youth active in sport.

I'd say we do it in a mixed way across the country. Some areas are effective at it, some school boards are more committed to it than others, but I think it's still a patchwork. I think a lot of kids go without what they should be getting in terms of physical activity and access to sport and recreation.

I think it varies in some of the national sport organizations too, as to how well kids are brought in at the intake level. Some do it very well, and others probably could still improve it.

Back to your point about the links, I think what we're seeing is that the habits that are formed in early years persist into adulthood. If that kid is sedentary—and we know that 25% of a kid's day these days is spent in front of a screen—those behaviours begin to manifest as chronic illness later in life. There's clearly a lot of evidence about the prevalence of type 2 diabetes, about a number of issues that could have been prevented.

One final point I would make is that we put together a graph that showed that the cost of swimming lessons for one year for a child is about $360, and the cost to the Canadian health care system of treating diabetes for one year for a kid who's got that is about $15,000 a year. Clearly, if we could get more kids into the pool we'd probably have fewer coming up with some of these issues.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Moore]

Thank you, Mr. Gill.

We'll end on that note.

I want to thank all our witnesses. We had a very interesting discussion today, with lots of questions and answers. We appreciate all you're doing for sport.

Another committee is coming in now, so we'll have to vacate this room.

Thank you all.

The meeting is adjourned.