Thank you very much.
I really am privileged to be here today and I appreciate the opportunity to share some of my thoughts with you.
My background briefly is that I am a past Olympic athlete, having competed in the 1964 and 1968 Olympics. I also coached an athlete to our 1976 Olympics and I'm a founding member of CAAWS. Actually, my whole career, not on necessarily the money side but on the commitment side, has been in the area of gender equity and benefits for girls and women in physical activity and sport, so thank you for asking for my thoughts.
I wanted to take a slightly different approach, because I think you'll hear from many of your witnesses about the statistics and a number of the problems. I wanted to look at a practical approach to how we might move our agenda forward from where are today.
We've had government involvement from the federal side—and I'd like to thank you for that—for over 50 years for women in sport. We've had policy papers and recommendations from not only the governments but also a number of conferences, whether provincial, national or international, on women in sport. I think it's fair to say we have a plethora of things we could do, but we've had a very difficult time even under the leadership of CAAWS to get the resources we need and to get an approach that helps us implement those recommendations in the area of girls and women in sport. I think that due to the number of associations that we have in our system as well as the different levels of government, it's often hard to get coordinated approaches. We've made significant progress and I think Rio is a place we could take as a launching block as we move forward here to try to bring about continued, sustainable, long-term change.
I'd like to talk about a couple of statistics. Some of them were mentioned, so I'll be very brief. One statistic from the Canadian mental health survey, which I think is really important, is that only 9% of children and youth as of 2012-13 spent 60 minutes in physical activity—not even rigorous sport, but physical activity. ParticipACTION is taking this on, and it's going to be part of what they do and really try promote for their 150th birthday. I think we need to realize that we have a very small base of people who believe that physical activity and sport are part of how we identify ourselves as Canadians and who understand how important they are for the health of our youth.
CAAWS, of course, has a number of stats—and you'll be able to read those, and Penny Werthner mentioned the numbers around the coaching. On the boards of PSOs and NSOs, and those that are delivering our sports systems, we have probably only 25% to 30% women.
I would like to see us really look at those opportunities where we feel we can really lever change. One of the best has been Canada Games. Canada Games has been funded on a long-term basis through commitments both by the federal government and by the provincial government, and we have seen change because of those commitments. They have a board that is totally committed, they have an affirmative action program called women in coaching, they have targets for what they're going to do, and they have to publicly report back their findings every year.
We need leadership; we need focus; and we need to be able to lever what's there to really measure whether we can, in a specific area, take a platform and bring about real change. I think we've seen the same things with Own the Podium. It was always considered that women were not as competitive as men. I think that myth was shattered in Rio. However, that takes an organization that puts the equity of women and men in sport right at the top of the agenda. If you perform, if you're on the pathway of performing, you will get funded. We need to have that kind of gender equity criterion in the things we do.
I would like to say it takes focus, it takes leadership, and it takes sustained funding. If we have those, I think we have the recommendations that we can pick and choose from. I would say we need three things that will start to bring about long-term change: gender equity at the governance level of NSOs, gender equity in our resource allocations—and we can do that by writing those things into our bylaws and having snap audits to make sure those amounts not only are in the budgets but actually are being spent on girls and women—and gender equity in our national coaching staff.
It's quite simple if you look at how Canada Games and how Own the Podium have gone about it. They have criteria. The criteria are very clear and very focused. If you don't meet the criteria, you cannot receive full funding. I think if we did the same things in those areas for gender equity, we would see real change.
I also would like to ask—