It's a great question, and it's one I'll answer conservatively, because I don't know a whole lot about what's going on in every country. I know some great examples are Australia and Norway. In Norway, physical activity is a way of life. People cross-country ski to school, they walk, and they really integrate activity in a way that we were doing 20 years ago. They don't seem to have the same challenges around fear. In our communities, we have so much fear around letting our children out of our sight. I think we've done an outstanding job of keeping our children safe over the last decade and a really bad job of keeping our children well. Some of that is around our own personal comfort zones about letting our children out of our sight.
We need to create safe places for our children to play in our communities that won't cost anything. We're promoting an idea called “play in the park”, which any community can do; 72% of Canadians live within a kilometre of a park, which is an amazing statistic. I got that from Mark Tremblay, actually--from some of his material. It doesn't take a lot of effort to get a couple of neighbours together to supervise a park one night a week so that children can enjoy unstructured activity. Then the whole neighbourhood starts to find out about it, and you can imagine some of the initiatives that can grow from there.
With respect to your question, there are some countries that never seem to lose that connection to the outdoors and to the unstructured play that our culture is certainly in danger of losing altogether and certainly has lost significantly in the last 20 years.
By the way, that 20 years actually gives me hope. That tells me that this is not a long-standing cultural norm and that we as Canadians actually know how to play, how to do sport, and how to be physically active. We just have to re-educate ourselves about the importance of it, and we have to make it a priority.