Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank every one of the witnesses for starting a very stimulating conversation here. I appreciate the presentations.
I've been flipping through the report card here on physical activity, and I can't quite figure out who's responsible for this. Is this Active Healthy Kids?
I see some very encouraging ideas in here and a review of ideas. We've discussed some, such as the effort in Saskatchewan, and ParticipAction. I still remember very fondly being engaged in ParticipAction when I was in school. I guess we ought to be careful with “getting back to when I was a kid” conversations, but that's often where we seem to want to end up in these discussions.
Certainly where I grew up in Winnipeg, we were outdoors. We were in the south area, in an area called the Sticks. Everybody was on half-acre lots or three-quarter acre lots, and we were all outdoors all the time. Parents had a hard time finding us. We were climbing trees and running around the woods, and we were involved in organized sports, baseball, hockey, the whole bit. Then when we got into high school, it was all the same thing with our group of kids, but that was the era. Then we got into the ParticipAction thing, you see.
So that was all good, but times have changed now, and of course we have issues, which some of my colleagues have mentioned, with security and safety for kids walking to school, biking to school, being alone on their way to school. With the type of predation that has gone on in some communities, parents are terrified about the safety of their children.
Recognizing that we're facing a different society today, I guess the whole discussion is about how we get back to those kinds of activities in the new environment. I see some encouraging ideas here. You asked what the one thing was. Maybe there is one thing that the federal government could do. We have other programs such as municipal-rural infrastructure programs. Maybe as has been suggested here, there could be a dedicated program with significant funding by three levels of government, which would encourage provinces and municipalities to be partners in promoting a new fitness and ParticipAction-type mentality.
There are all kinds of venues that communities could tailor to their own communities. In our area, there is a skateboard park, and within that segment of the population, the kids spend hours and hours there roaring around on those things, doing acrobatics that make everybody else frightened. In our days there were roller rinks and now there are rollerblades. Maybe we could create some kind of an endroit for those who like that venue and encourage that type of participation. We could have hiking trails, more trails, more rope courses, more rock-climbing, and all of those types of things.
Now, one size isn't going to fit all, but if we had a program that would allow people to pick something for their community and then build on it, using a sustained effort over a number of years, maybe there would be one thing the federal government could do and that would be to create a framework for the provinces and the municipalities to participate.
Is that really what you're looking for? As well, of course, we're talking about healthy eating and diet.