Hello.
Many thanks to the committee for inviting me and for recognizing the importance of women and girls in sport.
My name is Marie-Hélène Thibeault and I am from Bromont. I have spent the last 12 years in Alberta, where I have been very fortunate to work with the organization Fast and Female. This organization was founded by Olympic champion and gold medallist Chandra Crawford, who won a medal in cross-country skiing at the Turin Olympics.
Chandra's vision is to keep girls involved in sport. This organization is dedicated to keeping girls aged 8 to 18 in sport. It works with female Olympic champions and sport ambassadors at the provincial level. It tries to hold events right across Canada to reach out to these young girls through activities and events that are very inspiring.
Created 10 years ago, this non-profit organization regards itself as a social enterprise. It initially launched an event that reached 50 young girls in its first year. It now holds more than 150 activities and reaches more than 3,000 young girls across Canada. The organization also reaches the parents who play a role in the development of young girls in sport.
The organization gives seminars to male and female coaches to raise their awareness of the realities that young girls face in sport and helps them understand the difference between coaching boys and coaching girls.
For my part, I am a former member of Canada's downhill ski team. I competed as part of the team for one season. When I was an athlete, I had to move to the United States to attend a downhill ski academy. Fortunately, this happens less and less because there are many more school programs that give our youth the opportunity to enjoy their passion for sport while pursuing their education.
After that, I joined the national team. To give you an idea of the problem, I must point out that, during the year that I belonged to the team, there were cases of sexual abuse, unfortunately. One of those cases was reported in the media last year and involved one of the team's male coaches. Some of my team members experienced that. The lack of female coaches and the lack of opportunity for my team members to open up and talk about their experience contributed to this case of abuse not being reported in the media until 15 years after the fact.
All that to say that Fast and Female is a movement that is dedicated to resolving the first problem: that girls are six times more likely than boys to drop out of sports at the age of 13. In other words, young girls start out in a sport at the age of five or six, but at the age of 13, they are six times more likely to quit the sport than are young boys. The goal of Fast and Female is to change this by capitalizing on our Olympic athletes, who are very inspiring.
Canada is a jewel in terms of performance, as we saw in the last Olympic Games. We have a critical mass of tremendously inspiring women athletes. Fast and Female wants to capitalize on this strength by raising the profile of these athletes and bringing them closer to communities and young girls aspiring to a career in sports.
I would like to talk about one young girl, Sydney, who recently took part in a Fast and Female activity. I am here for her and for the next generations of girls. My career is over and I am now a mother of a boy and a girl. I am a volunteer soccer and cross-country skiing coach. I want to expose my children to as many sports as possible.
I would like to read you a quote from this young girl's mother:
“Sydney said something very profound after the Champ Chats. She thanked me for taking her, and when asked what the best part of the Champ Chats was, her response was 'to know I'm not alone'. I never thought she felt alone”, said her mom, “but I guess being the only girl on her team, and one of three girls that play a boy-dominated sport at the level they do, I can understand why she would feel alone.”
At Fast and Female, we bring girls together who are involved in different sports, summer and winter sports and different age groups, to create a community, a sense of belonging. Canada is a huge country and young girls do not all live in downtown Toronto. Some of them live in isolated regions where they are the only girls on their hockey team or the only girls who want to play tennis. At Fast and Female, we really want to create that sense of belonging and community to make sure that no girls are alone.
As to our recommendations to the committee, I will divide them into three categories.
First is media and culture. We work with young girls aged 8 to 18. They of course are very sensitive to the images and role models they see in the media. There is not enough female professional sport on TV. Showing Olympic sports every two or four years is not enough. We must change perceptions of female athletes. They are constantly sexualized and the image conveyed is not an ideal role model, not for me or for my five-year-old daughter. That is not what I would like her to aspire to. I want her to be strong and confident, but not in a sexual way.
By the way, I think Ms. Pattenden and Ms. Lafrenière gave a very good overview of the sport system. We need female coaches out there. Our female athletes, since they do not necessarily have their sights set on high-performance sport, must be able to redirect their energy and passion by serving as coaches and officials. So the sports experience has to be seen in a much broader way.
In conclusion, I would say that we also need ambitious objectives. I reread the 1998 report. Investing money in that initiative is a great idea, but we need clear objectives, like those for reducing carbon emissions. As Ms. Pattenden said, we need to determine how many women are on boards of directors, to put ourselves on the line, to have ambitious goals and to make sure we meet them.
Thank you very much.