First of all, I'd like to thank the committee for having me here; it's a marvellous opportunity. It's such an important issue. I would really call it the “childhood obesity and inactivity” committee, because I think these really are such deeply connected issues.
What's happening to our children is almost overwhelming, when we hear that only half of Canadian kids are getting enough physical activity for optimal growth and development. And when we hear some of the statistics around obesity and inactivity for our children, they're alarming. We know the health costs—that it costs twice as much to have an inactive, obese smoker in our system as to have a healthy person; that our system is built on the premise that our healthy young people support our aging population. We can only imagine what happens when the young people are not healthy.
There's also a huge cost to the children themselves, not just in the quantity of their lives but in the quality of their lives—how they feel about themselves when they're inactive and overweight. That was really startling to me as I wrote my book Child's Play: Rediscovering the Joy of Play in Our Families and Communities. I talked to a lot of children and listened to how children who are obese feel about their futures. Some of the studies I read showed me that these children felt less hopeful about their futures than children with cancer.
As an advocate for children and activity, I think we deserve to take a serious place in this discussion. We need to look at physical activity as not a “nice to have” for our Canadian children but a “need to have”, a primary building block for good health in our children. I think sport and physical activity have too often in our culture and in our funding strategies been seen as an extra, as a “nice to have”.
My first recommendation to this government and to this committee is that we put serious dollars into physical activity initiatives for children. There are so many programs out there that we see are working; they're actually getting kids active. There are lots of experts in our country who know how to get kids moving, know how to take an inactive child and get them engaged in physical activity, and they're struggling for funding. They're constantly having their hands tied. I think we have to look at a serious financial commitment that's not going to take a back seat when we have a critical issue in health care but is going to be a sustained commitment on the part of the government.
There are people now in Canada.... This issue has been talked about in the media now for at least three years, and people are starting to pay attention. I would argue that we are reaching a tipping point, where people are wanting to take action. For three years we've been running something called Silken's Active Kids. We take calls from people who have heard us speak, who have read articles I've written, and who say, we want to do something. These people want to know how they can connect to the best ideas and the best practices, how they can take action.
We got a call last week from the City of Vancouver, which is hosting the Olympic Games and which is asking us, how can we get our community more active? So there are people who are really searching for the ideas, the strategies, the best practices. They want to connect to others who are having success in this area.
I believe there's a place for a national strategy on getting children active, a national strategy that would engage communities and give them a tool kit for how to get things active. There are a lot of tools for how to get children active.
There's a lot of duplication in this area. Many of us, in our cities, in our schools, are being charged by the same challenge—let's get our kids active—and we're duplicating marketing materials, duplicating strategies. There is an opportunity here for the federal government to take a lead position, with a national strategy that engages Canadians. It could be with the Olympic Games, or it could be with other programs that are being suggested, but I believe there's a real need in this area.
I can't speak on this issue without addressing what's happening in our schools. Our schools used to be a place where physical activity was taught by physical activity experts, where we had intramurals, where we had sports. Our schools today no longer provide enough opportunities for children to be active.
I think one of the most startling things I learned while writing my book is that our elementary school children are being taught by teachers with little or no training in physical activity. We are not empowering our teachers to teach physical activity with innovation, with enthusiasm, with skills. How do we expect to turn on a generation of kids to being physically active when we're not even giving them the basic skills and giving the teachers the innovation in order to teach physical education properly?
As well as physical education, children are no longer receiving adequate access to after-school sports and intramurals. After-school care and before-school care have become really important. There's a huge percentage of children now in after-school and before-school care. I think this is actually a really important opportunity. We should be training our before- and after-school care providers in activity, in how to lead groups of children. Now many children come home at 6:30 in the evening from school, and they're hungry, and they have homework, and their families are tired.
That window between 2:40, which is when my children get out of school, and 6:30 is a very important window for activity. I'd like to see a lot more effort being put in on the part of the education system, with us as a federal government and provincial governments really supporting it.
Our schools are public spaces. In a place like Rouleau, Saskatchewan, theirs is the only gym in the entire city. They should be available for all children to be in after hours, to play. There are many programs we have come across in our country that were running basketball clubs or running floor hockey and that have had to close down because of the fees they were having to pay to keep that gym open after school hours. I don't think this should be happening. When we have an obesity crisis in our country, when we have a crisis around inactivity, those schools should be open for all the children in all the community to enjoy without this cost.
The last recommendation I would like to make is that we're very careful about the message we share with our children around inactivity and obesity. When we think about our fondest memories of childhood, for many of us it was riding our bicycles around the neighbourhood and playing road hockey. The neighbourhoods were our network; we met our neighbours; we connected to a sense of community. While we were running and jumping and playing, we were experiencing joy. And we weren't thinking about strengthening our bones or building our lung capacity; we weren't thinking about getting healthy; we were just playing.
I think the messages we as a government and we in our organizations share has to be around that joy and that play for children, because that's what children want to do.
Thank you.