Canadian Heritage Committee on May 1st, 2023

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

You have 30 seconds.

[Kevin Waugh, Conservative, Saskatoon—Grasswood, SK]

Okay. I want to go to Dr. Carpentier.

You mentioned result-based systems, yet in Canada it's all high performance. How do you tell the public the difference, that everything shouldn't be on the table for high performance, but in fact it should be just for participation and building up to high performance, which could take decades in this country?

[Dr. Joëlle Carpentier]

Currently, the funding system in Canada is based very much on medal potential, especially short-term medal potential.

In other countries, there are funding systems that are based on potential within a 12‑year time horizon, for example, or on an athlete's development plan for the next 12 to 15 years.

When you're in an Olympic cycle, you're looking at medal potential at the next Olympics. So we're in a very high performance system. That doesn't leave time for people at lower levels to put everything in place to ultimately get to sustainable results over time. That's what I'm referring to mostly when I say the funding system is problematic.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you, Dr. Carpentier. We've gone well over time on that one.

We'll go to the Liberals and Mr. Bittle.

Chris, you have five minutes, please.

[Chris Bittle, Liberal, St. Catharines, ON]

Thank you so much, Madam Chair.

I'd like to start with Mr. McLaren.

First, I'd like to say that your desk looks eerily similar to my desk when I was a lawyer.

You were mentioning the different structures and about their being from the bottom up. In the absence of that, do you think there is any federal or provincial legislation that can be brought into effect to make the system better in terms of the protections that you would like to see?

[Richard McLaren]

Maybe it's not legislation that makes a system better but convening the forums and discussions and trying to act as the party that brings together the national governing body with the provincial and lower echelons of the sport. It's probably a more effective way to go than trying to simply influence everything at the top level and hope that it has a filter-down effect from there.

[Chris Bittle, Liberal, St. Catharines, ON]

Thank you so much.

I'm wondering if I can ask a question about international sports organizations. We haven't really discussed it too much in this committee—a little bit in terms of Canada Soccer and other organizations. Is there a problem for Canadian sports organizations, when many of these international sports organizations are opaque and non-transparent, with maybe suggestions of corruption within them?

[Richard McLaren]

There certainly is. If you start with the Olympic world, they have the IOC. They then recognize an international federation as being the worldwide body for a particular sport, which then, in turn, recognizes the national body as being, within that nation, in charge of the sport.

I've done some investigations of international federations that demonstrate the very poor quality of leadership that international federations have on the whole. One of the biggest problems is that there's far too much concentration of power in one or two senior members, usually a president and a maybe an executive director or chief operating officer.

I notice the same impact when I look at some of the national sports organizations in Canada. Of course, that's because they take their whole model from the international sphere, and the international federations take their model from the IOC. In part, it's flawed from the top right down.

[Chris Bittle, Liberal, St. Catharines, ON]

That's fair enough.

I see, Madam Chair, that the bells are ringing. I don't know if there's will amongst the members to just keep going for the remaining 15 minutes.

I see that Mrs. Thomas has her hand up.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Rachael.

[Chris Bittle, Liberal, St. Catharines, ON]

Madam Chair, I believe that Mrs. Thomas has a suggestion that, after I'm done, we have two minutes for each party.

There is consent, I think, on the floor for that, Madam Chair.

[A voice]

That's a good idea.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

All right.

Go ahead, Chris. Continue with your line of questioning.

[Chris Bittle, Liberal, St. Catharines, ON]

Thank you so much.

Madam Carpentier, it's almost in popular culture that we see this vision of the angry coach demanding that his or her team win that championship. We've talked about quotes and the old line, “Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing.” Is winning at all costs so baked into sports, or can we extract that to a more positive model?

[Dr. Joëlle Carpentier]

You're quite right: it's really caught up in the sports culture. So it's the whole culture that needs to change, looking at what we idealize and who we set up as role models.

That's why, in my talk, I talked a lot about the importance of scientific knowledge. The science shows us that, contrary to what you might think, it's not the coaches or the behaviours we're seeing now that are most successful in the long run. So we need to make the science available and get it out to people to train and inform them. That's how a culture change can happen.

[Chris Bittle, Liberal, St. Catharines, ON]

You discussed Canada's transitioning away from its short-term model. There's been, from yourself and other witnesses, the discussion of other countries' doing it better. Has there been another country like Canada that was focused this way on short-term goals and that has transitioned away to better outcomes, in your mind?

[Dr. Joëlle Carpentier]

England and Norway are the two most popular examples right now. England made the transition a few years ago from a short-term to a longer-term funding system. Norway also has a similar system in place, which is more focused on long-term potential.

[Chris Bittle, Liberal, St. Catharines, ON]

Thank you so much.

I believe I have only a few seconds left, Madam Chair.

Thank you so much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much, Chris.

Now we're going to go to the other round. As was suggested, and I didn't hear or see anyone object to the suggestion, we'll do two minutes each.

I cannot hear the bells, so I don't know how long we have. If we give everyone the chance in another round, then we should go to 15 minutes—if that gives us enough time, because we should leave 15 minutes before the actual vote.

We'll start with the Conservatives.

Mr. Shields.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I think in 15 minutes we're already into halfway through the voting time, but I'll go quickly.

Mr. McLaren, if I read the media, it's sort of a national disaster if the Toronto Maple Leafs don't win their first round, having not won since 2004.

Having watched the last one in 1967, I will ask this: When you say to change the culture here—and we've heard that said—how do we change it? To me, when you see the headlines about how the Toronto Maple Leafs live and die, and that the city is done for if they don't win the first round, this is huge in the sense of culture and pressure.

[Richard McLaren]

I think you have to understand what the foundations of all those attitudes are, so you have to do an assessment of attitudes. That comes from survey work. We did this with Gymnastics Canada.

Then you have to establish a multidisciplinary group that covers all of the requirements. We're talking about psychology, medicine and psychiatry, along with marketing, finance and all the other traditional areas of sports governance.

You have to put them all together and get working on what are the foundational problems that you have in hockey or gymnastics or any other sport, and then, from that, work on the changes that need to be undertaken to change the attitudes, to change the culture.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

FIFA, when it becomes money in the sense of what we've seen in FIFA over the last 50 years.... When money shows up as part of Canadian soccer, all of a sudden we now have a whole lot of problems in Canadian soccer at the professional level. Is money at the root of this?

[Richard McLaren]

Money can be and in some cases is a corrupting factor, for sure.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

How do we solve that one?

[Richard McLaren]

I'm not sure that I have a good answer for that, sir.