Canadian Heritage Committee on Oct. 4th, 2016

[Élaine Lauzon]

Thank you.

In Quebec, at present, there are no official programs for retaining our athletes or our best role models. This is an atrocious oversight. These athletes do it very spontaneously when they see an existing role model, for example, a woman who is a coach or an official.

Most of them become speakers. They also become role models to encourage girls to get moving, but we lose them when it comes to being coaches, officials or administrators on various committees. Something needs to be developed so we do not lose them. We must not simply wait for an existing role model to take them under her wing, even though that does happen. That may answer Mr. Breton's question about coaches in the schools. Often, it is young people who play at the college or early university level who coach girls or boys in the schools. They have not been trained and they have no idea what they are going to do there. Often, they are beginners.

We really have to put a structure in place that is not complex, that will give them good training for their new role, whether as an official, a coach or an administrator.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

A quick answer, please.

[Dr. Penny Werthner]

A really quick answer, coming back to Marion's comment about best practices, is I think we've had some programs in place. So quite historically now we had a program that created a year-long program for women athletes who were interested in being women administrators, and we put them in a national sport organization environment. We put them with women as mentors and we created that environment where they developed the skills to be successful over a lengthy period of time, a year, and as a result some of those women are actually still in the system leading our sport organizations, few as they may be. So I think we have a model there that we could work on because I do agree they have to learn some skills just as anyone does.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you.

Marion, did you have a quick answer?

[Marion Lay]

I think for the sake of our women athletes, because what we've just heard is you hear about them in the Olympics and then they're dropped, if we had a mentorship program where they could get a stipend, it doesn't need to be fully...and they get some training and they see that their skill set they've learned is useful. It could be working with girls in refereeing, or officiating, going into coaching, looking at sports administration, looking at research that they may eventually want to do. But we never open that avenue to them. So we give them money to go and get their academic career, but we don't give them funding where they can come back and look at how they want to contribute back into our system. Current real athletes, unless they're retiring, may not be able to do that as they're going to go on for a longer career, but we have the last number of top athletes from our Olympics and Pan-American and Commonwealth Games who I think would be thrilled to be part of something where they have a sense of belonging and can contribute back.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you.

Mr. Vandal.

[Dan Vandal, Liberal, Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB]

Thank you very much for a great discussion. I think we were all proud of our athletes in Rio, especially so with the great performance by our women athletes. My question is around a program called the athlete assistance program, and it's open to anyone who has this information, if indeed anyone does. I know that there was $27 million distributed to roughly 2,000 athletes in Canada in 2014-15. Would anyone know how much of that actually went to women athletes?

[Karin Lofstrom]

One of my colleagues in the room might know.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

It doesn't seem like it.

Go ahead, Dr. Werthner.

[Dr. Penny Werthner]

I'm sorry, I don't have the specific answer, but what I would say is that athlete assistance money is going to all our nationally carded athletes. So given that we're at about 44% give or take—because that's across all countries, somewhere in that neighbourhood—of women athletes competing for Canada, somewhere in the neighbourhood half of athlete assistance is going to young women athletes who are competing for Canada.

[Dan Vandal, Liberal, Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB]

Forty-four per cent of our carded athletes are women?

[Dr. Penny Werthner]

That's an international statistic. I'm not sure if anyone has it just for Canada, but it's somewhere in that vicinity for sure.

[Dan Vandal, Liberal, Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB]

Would anybody have any information on the Own the Podium program and how many female athletes get funding through Own the Podium? Perhaps those are questions better asked to—

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Ms. Lay.

[Marion Lay]

I was going to say that I don't think we have those stats; however, I think Penny is saying the same kinds of things. There are those who qualify at the performance standards, and we have a number of women there. We're in that 40% and and we know that 59% of women athletes went to the Olympics. I would say they are receiving their programs, maybe not directly, but the programs they're part of would receive that proportion of the funding that's going out. We could find those stats quite easily.

[Dan Vandal, Liberal, Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB]

We will have other witnesses, I'm sure, who will have that precise information.

As a father, and as a grandfather to my granddaughter, this is for CAAWS. One of the things you've said is that adolescent girls are dropping out of sports and physical activity in early adolescence. I don't think your recommendations actually addressed that issue. I'm wondering if you could tell us what is the best thing that we as government could do to prevent this.

[Karin Lofstrom]

I would say that we need to have the system recognize that girls potentially want different things than boys and we need to have conversations with the girls about what they want in order to make their sporting experience something that they want to stay with.

We find that if we get girls in programs and they're having successful experiences, they want to stay. Also, culturally and in the media, we need to show that it's normal for girls to be active in their teenage years. It's not all about the magazines and the fashion pieces. It's about the role-modelling pieces and seeing other women who are in sports, and having those women come back to see the younger girls and be involved in their training. We need to have those kinds of catches, those hooks that make them think that this is where they want to be, that this is the cool place to be amongst their peers.

[Dan Vandal, Liberal, Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB]

Right.

[Allison Sandmeyer-Graves]

If I may add to that, CAAWS has run quite a successful program over the years that has really focused on training the program designers and the front-line staff who are creating the sport experiences, so that they come into it and—just as we were talking about with coaches and phys. ed. teachers—design those experiences that ensure girls have the competency, the confidence, and the motivation to stick with it, not to try to fit into a male model of sport, but to have one that really is adapted and supportive of them and the experiences they need in order to have that longevity.

[Dan Vandal, Liberal, Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB]

That's great. Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Julie, you have two minutes.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

There's one thing we haven't touched upon. We've talked a lot about elite athletes, but we haven't touched very much on the professional athlete side. When we talk about infrastructure and infrastructure investments, is there anything there that can touch upon promoting female professional athletes? When we look at our media pages, you're right: we're not seeing much about professional athletes.

I'll start with CAAWS.

[Karin Lofstrom]

For sure, I've seen a lot of work in the last few years on the Canadian Women's Hockey League.

We have great success and a great following for the women's team at the Olympic level, but when it comes to the Canadian Women's Hockey League—with an American team thrown in there—it doesn't get the same following. A lot of those same athletes are playing on those teams. Again, we talked about it in an earlier session around media and sponsors in terms of having people coming to watch the events and buying tickets. If they don't know it exists because it's not reported in the papers.... It's a kind of vicious circle. How do we get the first part started?

We've had some success at CAAWS in partnering with the Dairy Farmers of Canada. They're getting behind the Women's Hockey League and women in sport, which is a kind of odd pairing, but it's been really positive. Farmers also have daughters. They're out there in every community. It's been positive.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

From the federal perspective, does anyone have any ideas on what our role can be in helping women gain a profile in professional sports?

[Karin Lofstrom]

I don't know if there's anything in tax breaks for sponsorships or for organizations to donate to or sponsor women's organizations. Maybe there are pieces that way that could help, so that it's an incentive for them to sponsor women's teams or women's sport.