Canadian Heritage Committee on Feb. 27th, 2013

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Moore]

Thank you, Mr. Boughen.

Next we will go to Madame Boutin-Sweet for seven minutes.

[Marjolaine Boutin-Sweet, NDP, Hochelaga, QC]

Good afternoon, gentlemen.

We started the study last Monday. In talking about young people's training, I was very surprised to see that four of the five witnesses thought it was best to reduce, even to eliminate, competition. The reason why I don't play any sports today is because I don't like to compete. If there had been less competition, I might have played sports today. I am sure that I am not alone in feeling this way. The witnesses were focusing more on the idea of encouraging talent rather than competition, developing children in sports and helping them learn rather than compete.

Mr. Toth, you talked about multi-sport athletes. I think your remarks were along the same lines.

How do you feel about removing competitions from young people's training?

Either one of you can give me an answer.

[Chuck Toth]

Shall I go first?

[Clive Tolley]

She asked you, not me.

[Chuck Toth]

I thought you were asking Clive.

I'm actually going to steal Clive's thunder here and talk about hockey a little. I have a friend by the name of Drew Callander who played with the Regina Pats years ago. He was big into hockey. He pointed out something many years ago and it stayed with me. He talked about a hockey school that he was at in Calgary and it was done by, I think, some Russian players. He talked about the number of times a kid passes or receives the puck in a game and the number of times he actually takes shots on net in a game. Those numbers are very low. So you're not developing skills in a game, because you're only shooting the puck at the net two or three times or receiving the puck half a dozen times in a game.

Personally, I would like to see more practice, because I think those skills are developed more in practice than they are in a game. So when you talk about less competition, there's some merit to that.

The problem is there are many coaches out there who, for various reasons—some of them I have personal thoughts on—want to play games; let's play games. To my mind, in some of the sports we have, there are too many games and not enough practices. In basketball at the high school level you may have three practices to one game. Some people would argue that's not enough practices for the one game to develop the skills. Again, that comes to mind from taking a page from this hockey school that I heard about.

[Marjolaine Boutin-Sweet, NDP, Hochelaga, QC]

Before you answer, I would like to mention that those people talked about the possibility of children playing a number of sports instead of just one.

Go ahead, Mr. Tolley.

[Clive Tolley]

That's what we're trying to do through hockey. The entire hockey program runs on volunteer coaches, and parents are paramount to the success of any program. So when a child starts hockey at the age of four, five or six years, we give the parents a talk. We try to get them to see they are entering hockey for the same reason they would be taking up any other sporting or cultural activity. You put your child into music lessons because you want them to learn music and enjoy it for a lifetime. You put your children into hockey or sport for the same reasons, and at ages four, five, and six the parents seem to buy into that and saying that yes, they're putting their little child into this and he will learn skills and have fun. It's going to be non-competitive, and everybody is in it for the right reasons.

Somehow through the years it becomes more and more competitive and more and more elite, but we continue to pound away at the thought that you start playing sport for fitness, fun, and health reasons and you can play it for a lifetime. I'm in my sixties and I play old timers hockey. There is a whole bunch of us out there enjoying the camaraderie, the fitness, and the fun of it. We're trying to transfer that kind of thinking to the beginner programs.

Also, when we run practices for the introduction of players, what we call the initiation program, we use a variety of teaching aids. We don't just use a hockey stick and puck. We use soccer balls where they hit the ball with their hands or feet. We use different obstacles that they go around, over or through. We're trying to develop a total athlete. We're trying to develop a healthy attitude in terms of the players and the parents. We're trying to have people involved in the sport for a lifetime, and if some of those people happen to have that special competitive ingredient in their heart that they want to become an elite player, then they'll surface sometime in their late teens, but we want enough programs that you can choose your place.

There should be competitive elite programs and recreation programs and everything in between so that, as a player, you don't have to quit at some point in time because you're not competitive. You can find a place where you can continue to enjoy the sport for a lifetime.

[Marjolaine Boutin-Sweet, NDP, Hochelaga, QC]

My second question is different.

Mr. Toth, you talked about gender equality in the programs you work on and about the fact that girls—who usually don't play sports as much as boys—have the same opportunities as boys. In some sports, boys are greater in number, and in other sports, girls are greater in number.

Are coaches able to deal with sexism and bullying from one gender to another?

[Chuck Toth]

I'm going to try to answer the question, as I understood it to be asked. I think that's the advantage at the high school level of having teachers involved in coaching the kids. When you have the educational component, much of what happens in the classroom can be translated and applied to the court or the field or whatever.

Just to throw something in there, coaching makes better teachers, and teaching makes better coaches, in my mind.

On what they deal with in the classroom with both sexes, the idea is those skills you learn in the classroom from dealing with both sexes are transferable to the athletic pitch in some way.

Do we teach that this is how we coach girls and that is how you coach boys? No, we do not, and I'm not sure anybody does necessarily. You learn from experience. I've coached girls' basketball and I've coached football. I've looked at both. Sometimes you handle them differently, and sometimes you don't.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Moore]

Thank you, Madame Boutin-Sweet.

Mr. Simms, for seven minutes.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, gentlemen, for joining us. I've struck a theme over the past two or three witnesses of the involvement of high schools, only because that is probably the most important gateway in smaller communities for people who want to go from being a participant in a sport to getting to the elite level as someone who shows a lot of talent.

Mr. Toth, if, say, a 12-year-old kid in school is showing a great amount of talent in a certain sport, how do you go about advising physical education instructors to recognize that talent, and where do you go from there?

[Chuck Toth]

In phys. ed., I'm not sure how much that's going to show. I don't think the phys. ed. classes would necessarily focus on that. I think phys. ed. classes are primarily for the ideas of fitness, being involved, and long-term activities. As Clive said, he's in his sixties, and he's playing hockey.

I think high school phys. ed. is supposed to be trying to give those kids an opportunity to be introduced to as many sports as possible, and certainly in the classes we call credit phys. ed., where they give a lot of different activities that supposedly would be for the long term and for the rest of your life—

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

And in the case of school sports?

[Chuck Toth]

In the case of school sports, if a coach, and not necessarily the phys. ed. teacher—I think that's important: I know many, many coaches and they're not all phys. ed. teachers. One of the best high school football coaches I know of is an English teacher. It doesn't fall just on the phys. ed. people; it's people who have an interest in it and are going to pass on that knowledge to the kids.

If you do recognize that, in the cities it is easier, absolutely, because they're more exposed. However, there is some connection between the high school athletics and the sport governing bodies. For example, in Saskatchewan, whether it be basketball or football, there are ID camps, whereby the sport governing bodies would recognize or have camps that would recognize the elite athletes there. If you have a kid in small-town Saskatchewan who is a pretty good athlete, that would be a very good place for them to go in order to see how their skills stack up against others in the province.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Toth. That sheds a lot of light on what I've been asking about for the past little while.

Mr. Tolley, one of the huge issues, I think, and from my own experience—and I'm not as heavily involved, obviously, as most people here—is the retention of volunteer coaches, especially in hockey, and in other sports as well. They have bad incidents, or it takes a lot of their time, or whatever it is. To you, what is the biggest obstacle to retaining good, dedicated volunteer coaches?

[Clive Tolley]

We're currently involved in that daily. Almost all of our coaches in minor hockey are parents. They typically have some experience in the game, maybe not always but mostly, and some even at an elite NHL level. They go back to their Canadian town or city, let's say, and start a family. Now their child is four, five or six years old. It could be a boy or a girl. We have a huge increase in female hockey registration and a very active program. Now the parent says, “I need to be involved. I need to coach. I've played. I want to pass some of this on.”

One of the obstacles—I don't see a way around it currently, but we could brainstorm about it—is that we must ensure that any coach on the ice with our children has a criminal check. We also must ensure that they have a basic coaching training. For instance, with the four-, five-, and six-year-olds, the course is called Introduction to Coaching. Of course, it's based on teaching the core technical skills of skating, puck-handling, passing, and shooting. We require each and every coach to be trained in that way before they're allowed on the ice.

We also insist that they take a Speak Out course to make sure they're up to skill on those issues. So we're asking somebody before they even—

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

I'm sorry to cut you off, Mr. Tolley.

Did you say a “Speak Out course”?

[Clive Tolley]

Yes. Each Canadian hockey coach takes a Speak Out course. That is about learning how to protect themselves and the children around the whole area of abuse and sexual abuse. It's a standard requirement to make sure that everybody's operating a safe and healthy program.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Okay.

I agree with you that these vulnerable sector checks, background checks on individuals, are highly essential. I'm asking both of you this question: are you having any problems in getting these checks done in a timely fashion in the case of people who have red flags? Maybe their name is similar to that of someone who has committed offences or that sort of thing.

[Clive Tolley]

I'm not currently aware of any problems. It seems to me we have good people with good intentions doing the vast majority of our coaching, and we've put up enough barriers to stop anybody with potentially the wrong kind of attitude or behaviour.

I guess what I was saying was that we already have so many requirements of a volunteer coach. Many of these things take their time and their money, and that's before they even get on the ice. Once they get on the ice, we're asking them to wear a helmet. We're asking them to have a proper training suit, to wear hockey gloves, to carry a stick, and to wear proper skates. There's an investment that we're asking here in terms of finances and commitment for these parents who become volunteers.

We cannot operate Canadian hockey without volunteer coaches. If we had to pay each one of these volunteers, the system would simply fall down. It just wouldn't work.

As to what we can do, I think we can do things like provide more exciting skill development opportunities for them, bringing in people who are experienced from other parts of the world or from the professional leagues to do clinics. We can send some people on trips internationally to get training. We can maybe work with manufacturers of equipment to get sponsorship for the kinds of things the coaches must wear—helmets, skates, sticks, gloves, and training suits.

What we're trying to do in Saskatchewan is to make it fun in terms of skill development for the players and for the coaches. As we develop these coaches, when we do a clinic, we want those coaches to go out there with a smile on their face because they had a fun time and they learned something that they can pass on to the children.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Gentlemen, thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Moore]

Thank you, Mr. Simms.

Now we'll go to Mr. Richards, for seven minutes.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Mr. Tolley, I'll start with you on the hockey side of things. On the previous panel, we had Mikko Makela, who coaches a girls hockey program down in Warner, Alberta.

I'm going to ask you the same question that I asked him, because I see here, in the background we have on you, that you also happened at one time to have coached the Turkish national hockey team.

Is that correct?

[Clive Tolley]

I did, yes.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

I'd be interested in hearing the story behind how that came to be. If you'd like to share that, I'd be interested in hearing briefly about it, but the question I want to ask you is the same question that I asked Mr. Makela.

Having had that experience in another country, I'd like to hear your comparison between the two. In other words, is there anything we can learn from your experiences there? Is there anything in terms of certification, qualifications, or anything else that you think you've picked up from the way they've set up their hockey program there that could be helpful for us, or something that we could pick up here in Canada that would be helpful? Maybe it's the opposite. Maybe there's something you saw over there that we're not doing that is a good thing.

Can you give us a bit of a comparison as to what some of the differences are in terms of how they approach coaching certification and qualifications, and the whole program?