Great, thank you.
Good afternoon. I am absolutely honoured to be here, so thank you very much for the invitation. On behalf of ParticipACTION, we thank you.
For the next ten minutes, I'll just tell you a little bit about ParticipACTION, and why we are back. We were relaunched in 2007, so we'll let you know why we're back, what we have done for the last four and a half years, and the results we have achieved.
ParticipACTION is a national, not-for-profit organization solely dedicated to inspiring and supporting active living and sport participation for Canadians. We were originally established in 1971, and we're a pioneer in social marketing; we have become internationally recognized for our compelling communications to promote physical activity. Throughout the 1971-2007 period, there are indisputable data that point to physical activity levels increasing as ParticipACTION was alive and well and promoting physical activity.
In the late 1990s, core funding for the sector funding began to wane. Without financial support to continue to its campaign, ParticipACTION closed its doors in 2001. With the generous support of Sport Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada, we were revitalized in 2007 as the national voice of physical activity and sport participation in the country. Our vision is that Canadians will be the most physically active on Earth. That's our vision, and I'm sticking to it.
We were a Canadian icon, and we remain a Canadian icon. Looking at people between the ages of 35 and 54, 88% know ParticipACTION's brand, while 80% of all Canadians know our brand. I come from the private sector, and I moved to the not-for-profit sector because I'd like to go and change the world; I would have died for those brand equity numbers years ago.
ParticipACTION is the galvanizing force that moves Canadians to move more. As a catalyst for action, we really create change through communications, through capacity-building, and through knowledge exchange. Under communications, ParticipACTION promotes active living through multimedia for the purpose of raising awareness, educating, and inspiring—a million-dollar word—behaviour change.
In addition, ParticipACTION works with its partners to coordinate communications and ensure consistent, unified messaging—which is very important in this country—across and within the sector. ParticipACTION's goal is to inspire Canadians to be more physically active and to inspire society to make it easier to do so.
Within capacity-building, it's important that there are programs to support people. To this end, ParticipACTION helps build capacity by generating investment and leveraging assets within the sector. Under that pillar called “knowledge exchange”, ParticipACTION ensures Canadians and its partners are informed by gathering, translating, and disseminating the most relevant information, data, and research on physical activity and sport participation.
We also believe strongly in measurement. We measure everything we do before, during, and after, and measurement is also part of that knowledge exchange pillar. Whatever you remember about ParticipACTION—whether you remember the 60-year-old Swede, the flexed arm hang, or Hal and Joanne—most of you will remember ParticipACTION fondly, so it's wonderful that we're back.
The reasons that we are back are not so wonderful. I'm going to give you some stats, because I strongly believe we have an inactivity crisis in this country. Left unattended, it will have a destructive impact on our health, our economy, and our society in general.
Fewer than half of all Canadians are as active as they need to be. Kids who are active are smarter, happier, and have better self-esteem and mental health. They are better team players. They are less prone to bullying and other negative behaviours. They eat in a better and healthier way, and are less likely to smoke and engage in early sexual activity. However, according to the recent Canadian health measures survey, only 7% of our kids meet the daily physical activity guidelines, which is only 60 minutes of physical activity per day. Only 9% of boys meet that number, and only 4% of girls meet that number—that's disastrous.
Fewer Canadian youth aged 15 to 18 are participating in sport. Sport participation levels have dropped 18 percentage points since 1992. At the same time, chronic disease has been on the rise. Some conditions previously thought to be restricted to older adults—like high blood pressure, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes—are showing up in our young.
The link between physical activity and physical health is certain: the less we move, the more likely we are to become sick and to shorten our life expectancies. In fact, physical inactivity is the fourth leading cause of chronic disease mortality, contributing to over three million preventable deaths annually worldwide.
If you think that's bad, let me tell you about the costs of inactivity. A recent report, Obesity in Canada, prepared by the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Canadian Institute for Health Information, confirms that physical inactivity is the greatest predictor of obesity. In the past 30 years, the percentage of obese adults in the population has doubled, while the prevalence of obesity in children has tripled. Obesity costs the Canadian economy between $4.6 billion and $7.1 billion a year in direct health care costs and in indirect costs such as lost productivity in the workforce.