Could I just add to that?
If you look at comparisons, you'll see that Japan is very interesting. They don't build a school more than four kilometres away from where the students live who are going there. Everybody in Japan walks to school. They're walking 20 minutes a day from home, so there and back means 40 minutes a day on average, just without anything else.
There isn't that concept in Canada. I mean, I know there are geographic and weather differences between Japan and Canada. I'm not going to suggest that we should walk 10 miles in the snow to school, uphill both ways, but maybe one day a month we could have the walking school bus sort of concept, whereby the person who lives the farthest away stops and knocks on the next person's door, and then they knock on the next person's door. By the time the group of students gets to school, there are 15 or 20 all walking the three- or four-kilometre walk together. Then they've done exercise for a day and they promote the awareness. That's safe as well. I think something like that needs to be undertaken.
The other issue I found, too, is that we don't let our children play outside as much as we used to. People say it's unsafe. Perhaps it is, but I think we have to make a distinction between risky and unsafe. There's risk involved in everything, right? This is the funny thing, the ironic part of this whole thing. If you talk to people from Diabetes Canada, who are doing good work raising awareness of the prevalence of diabetes, you'll hear there's I think a one in nine or one in 10 chance of contracting diabetes as a result of a sedentary lifestyle.
The risk of getting kidnapped is less than one in 13 million, I think, in Canada, if you just look at it from a strictly odds perspective. You think you're safe; you're keeping your children inside because you think you're protecting them, when in fact you're probably doing more harm than you possibly could doing otherwise, and it's much more foreseeable harm. That's a cultural thing, and an attitudinal change is needed.
It's changed since I was in about my teenage years. I noticed it because there were a few incidences of kidnapping locally in my neighbourhood, which made people aware of it, and people just kept their children inside.
The concept now in the research, at the beginning of a study, is that some people use the term “free-range children”. We have to get back to the concept of free-range children. Tell them to go out and play and come home when the lights are on or when they need to eat dinner. That wasn't a novel concept when I was an eight-, 10- or 12-year-old. That was just my normal day. We've moved away from that in 30 years.