Good afternoon, honourable members of Parliament. I want to thank the committee for giving me the opportunity to speak to you.
My name is Agnes Laing. I am the owner and executive director of Corona School of Gymnastics here in Ottawa. Who would have predicted that the name of our school would one day be synonymous with such a devastating global pandemic?
I am grateful that our leaders in Canada have acted with such great care, efficiency and concern for all Canadians. I know that in your attempt to save lives you have also had to deal with a dramatic economic crisis. I understand and embrace the government's decision to shut down all non-essential services.
I stand before you not only as an employer, lifetime coach, mentor and entrepreneur, but also as an expert in the industry of gymnastics. During the last 48 years, I have seen thousands of children come through our doors, generations of families, including our current Prime Minister.
At this time amateur and recreational sports are totally shut down. This will affect the health of our children as well as the thousands of people employed in our sport. To give you an idea of the numbers involved just in the province of Ontario, there are 200 clubs, 118,000 gymnasts and 4,600 coaches and administrators. On a national level, gymnastics is the seventh-largest sport.
At this time I would like to specifically address the dilemma facing the sport of gymnastics. We are not able to practise any form of social distancing due to the nature of our sport. There are many children in restricted areas with coaches required to have hands on for safety. There are many surfaces that are being touched all the time, making transmission inevitable. Gymnastics schools require indoor facilities of 12,000 to 30,000 square feet, which are usually rented, resulting in huge overheads. The total paid in rent, taxes and payroll by gymnastics schools just in Ontario alone is $62.8 million annually.
In order for our schools to survive, they will need extended support for rent from the government. The average rent in Ontario ranges from $150,000 to $250,000 per year, and since there will be no revenue for what is expected to be an extended period of time, we will require assistance to return to our space and be able to reopen when it is safe to do so for our children.
I would also like to emphasize that other sports in this country, like football, soccer, hockey and swimming, are all funded by municipal organizations run by the cities. The sport of gymnastics is on its own.
I would like to give you a sense of what a school like ours, as many others in the country, looks like. This is a unique organization. For us to pick up, leave, and store our equipment is almost an impossibility. Most of the schools have half a million dollars' worth of equipment. If our landlord throws us out, we have nowhere to store the equipment, and once we are ready to re-engage, to find a facility of that size with the specific ceiling height and pits dug into the ground would be financially impossible.
I also want to let you know that 60% of the employees in schools like ours are students. We are very sport-specific, and 87% of those involved in this sport are female. Females make up 78% of our total employees. For people involved in this sport, their skills are not easily adapted to any other kind of teaching.
I thank you for your time, and to end on a lighter note, here's a picture of your Prime Minister as a 12-year-old. I had the pleasure of teaching him.
I'm open for any questions and I welcome them.