Thank you for having me here today.
It's a very difficult task for sure to follow that kind of act. That was very well done. I'll try to keep my portion very short so we can get to the questioning.
In hockey we maybe don't have as much of a problem with the facilities, even though you can always have more facilities. In general in hockey we're pretty lucky to be taking care of that half-decently. I think that is what is good for hockey.
To go right away to the certification for coaching, I think everyone knows that it's at the grassroots that we need to have a little more experienced coaching. That's where you teach the players, and that's where you learn a lot. I think that is a problem we're facing, in our sport anyway, as we don't have enough experienced coaching at that younger age.
There are a couple of reasons. Sometimes a parent can be a very qualified coach in peewee teams, for example, but they're not allowed to do that because of the parent and employer situation. Then we'll have another coach who is not as qualified as the other coach could be. That may be a situation that we can change. It doesn't matter if it's a parent or whomever; if we can find qualified coaching, I think we should use it.
I have experience from Finland. Some of you who follow hockey know of Saku Koivu and Mikko Koivu. Their dad was coaching our team at the same time that the boys were playing hockey. I thought that worked very well.
I know that there have been examples in Canada. I can use Darryl Sutter as an example. He's coaching the Los Angeles Kings right now, but he was coaching the Calgary Flames at one time, and in the last lockout he was coaching his son's team. I believe it was a peewee, atom, or bantam team. In the final game of the season when he was coaching, he was escorted from the rink because, by Hockey Alberta standards, he didn't have the qualifications to coach.
Those are situations we're facing once in a while, so maybe there could be a little bit of understanding in a certain situation.
There are good experiences with the parents who coach, and obviously there are not so good experiences, but I think we should look at who is the most qualified to coach these younger ages.
Obviously, money always comes into play. In every category we're talking about, everybody has their hand out and is asking for more money, but that's just a fact of what we have.
I think the participation rates in Canada are declining dramatically. I have no numbers, but the provinces have a problem getting the players to their provincial camps. They're declining from 200 players to 80 players. I understand that computers and all that type of thing, the cheaper activities, are taking over. That's also one of the cases that we're dealing with.
On Canada versus Finland, for example, in female hockey, Ontario has about 45,000 female hockey players, while Finland has 2,500. Those are the numbers we're dealing with. Finland obviously is starting to do whatever they can. But we have a lot of volume here, and we're coming to the place where, if we have qualified coaches, we could make way more noise in Canada, in my opinion, than we're doing right now.
Therefore, I think that for this government help, for money, obviously it's a situation where everybody's looking for it.
I think it's very good to have these types of discussions, and I'm very privileged to be part of them.
If there are any questions, I'd be more than happy to answer them. That was just a short portion of my opening statement.