Mr. Chair, members of the committee, thanks for the airtime today.
As governments continue to unfold a restart strategy, it's essential to recognize the critical role that community sport, parks and recreation play. Equitable access to public recreation programs and facilities is fundamental to Canadians, especially for the most vulnerable in our society. It must be understood that the social costs that will result without the full return of these services are profound. Recreation leads to healthier people and more connected communities.
The economic contributions that municipal parks and recreation make have been absent throughout the pandemic, from youth employment to sport tourism to program user fees. Further, Canada's economic recovery relies heavily on the productivity of parents, who require safe and secure child care, camps and programs for their children or day programming for their aging family members.
The challenges of returning community sport and recreation are significant. Municipal systems are struggling to return to the same level under new operating conditions, with some communities facing such severe financial challenges that they're actually closing pools and arenas, some permanently, despite being able to have them open as regulations allow.
Government funding announced to date is well-intentioned but is not accessible to our sector. For example, municipalities do not qualify for the Canada emergency wage subsidy. Returning to a full staff complement for a restart will thus be difficult and costly. The government provided $72 million in funding for sport to support national sport organizations to prepare for the return to play, but the return to play cannot happen without the facilities and spaces that we provide.
The government reallocated existing infrastructure funds via a COVID-19 resilience stream, but this is not new funding, and there remains a significant infrastructure gap left unaddressed. Municipalities will continue to face the same difficult decisions on how to allocate infrastructure funds that do not equate to the magnitude of the infrastructure needs in our communities.
The government recently announced the Canada healthy communities initiative, which will provide $31 million to communities to make needed adaptations to spaces as a consequence of COVID. This is an excellent initiative, but we call upon the government to provide significantly more dollars, as $31 million will not even begin to meet the demand.
Our sector has come forward with two requests of the federal government to help return community sport, parks and recreation services to Canadians.
The first is that we call upon the federal government to create a community sport and recreation recovery fund to support the full return of recreation and sport programs across Canadian communities. A multi-year burst of funding will ensure that community sport, parks and recreation services can be returned to the most vulnerable in our society and that rural communities are not left without these fundamental services as a legacy of the pandemic.
This is not an infrastructure funding program. Instead, it is for activities such as promoting and destigmatizing the return to community sport and recreation, adapting recreation and sport programming, supporting practitioners and volunteers to adapt to post-pandemic realities and ensuring that our services are still able to support the most vulnerable in our society.