At a provincial level, the role of government is to inject more activity through the entire school system—to encourage kids all the way from K to 12 to be active. The average right now is about 20 minutes three times a week, which means we're not teaching kids good habits for healthy and lifelong living.
At a federal level, from a private-sector point of view, it seems that the way the sport community treats elite athletes doesn't make sense. There are so many tiny little organizations that are self-run, self-organized. I understand how it got there. There's not a lot of overarching coordination inside the sport community.
From a government perspective, you start with a huge amount of money, hundreds of millions of dollars. Then it gets dispersed—a million here, and a million there. By the time it's dispersed in 120 places, it would be surprising if the sum of the parts was as powerful as the total amount of money put against it.
As a relative newcomer to the elite part of sport, it's hard to get your head around all the different organizations. You can sponsor the Olympic committee, but you have no right to deal with any of the sports. You can sponsor the sports associations, but you're not allowed to feature any athletes. You can sponsor the athletes, but you're restricted by deals they have with various brands like Nike, Adidas, Under Armour, and others. In order to do anything meaningful, you end up having to go all the way up and down and side to side.
There's no doubt there's need for investment. I have no doubt that more investment will make us more successful on the world stage. But I don't know how you get around what I politely say is the disorganization of the sports community in Canada.