I can start with this, and again Common Vision outlines this quite nicely. There are quite a few different real and/or perceived barriers to physical activity for Canadian youth. It can be time; it can be money; it can be safety; it can be social norms; it can be bullying. A number of these other ones are outlined in Common Vision.
This is why the foundation is that different sectors have a role to play. Within a family environment, again, children often follow patterns that are typical for that particular family. I'll make an analogy with the food guide: the Canada food guide says it's not just what you eat, but even how you eat together as a family. We see similar patterns: families that move together tend to move together and eat together. Some of these notions are about how family environments have shifted, in many cases, over the last number of years, and how we can have supportive family environments.
Similarly, when you think about where youth live, learn, play and work, each of those environments has a set of actors, a set of different sectors that can influence how things unfold in those particular environments, through incentives in some cases, and in other cases through disincentives, I will say, for how things play out in those different settings.
That's why Common Vision outlines what different players can bring to the table. It was not intended as a specific implementation plan, but that work is under way now. As we speak, officials are working on the bones, the concrete steps about how we move forward, together with provincial-territorial governments and other sectors, to support that initiative.
What I would say is we have some very encouraging results from some of the work we have done in attempting to show what works and trying to scale that up.
I'll give another example, which is Trottibus, which was mentioned in the early remarks. We mounted a challenge a number of years ago that asked Canadians what they thought would work to increase physical activity for children and youth in Canada. The winning-prize dollar recipient, if you will, was Trottibus.
Trottibus is a walk-to-school program. It was an adaptation of what's been used in some other countries. It didn't have the features of the Japan model noted earlier, about regulating distance to school. Within a Canadian context, in Quebec winters, sometimes communities had new arrivals to Canada. In other cases there were linguistic barriers for some of those families and children. There were really interesting results in increasing physical activity levels for those children, but importantly, there were also other benefits in terms of fresh-air time, how to dress in the winter cold, how to practise sidewalk safety. Also, those communities, in some cases, then influenced the design of the areas around their schools so that they were safer—changing sidewalk access and arranging for less car traffic outside of the school so that the air quality outside the school was better.
We've seen some really interesting results. That was time-limited funding, but the results are quite promising, I would say, for potential applicability to other parts of the country.
Another example I'll use is APPLE Schools. In this particular one, it isn't a school-based setting. For many of us from our era, once we got to school, we stood in line and waited for class to start. If we'd been sitting on a bus or in a car all morning, to stand there for another 10 minutes to wait for a class to start is probably not the best start to the day. They've tried to change the social norms in the school setting, to say, “Here's the lineup, but what are you going to do on your spot?” You're actually lined up, but you're moving as you get ready to enter that school. It's really thinking about, within those different settings and the actors around, what can be done.
Perhaps I'll stop there. I have other examples I'd be pleased to raise if you'd like.