Thank you very much.
Honourable members of Parliament, it is with a profound sense of duty and responsibility that the Canadian School Boards Association accepted the Standing Committee on Health's invitation to share our views on motion M-206 further to the committee's study on the level of fitness and physical activity of youth in Canada.
The Canadian School Boards Association, or CSBA for short, represents over 300 school boards in Canada, providing public education to nearly four million students from kindergarten to secondary school.
Collectively, in fulfilling their many mandates, school boards provide young people with a safe and healthy learning environment where they can develop and grow so that they can achieve educational success.
We educate youth and adults with a view to shaping informed, conscientious and independent members of society who will actively contribute to its development.
Finally, we recognize the importance of health and wellness, and we work to promote healthy living through physical activity, healthy eating and substance abuse prevention.
Through these mandates, we help foster the kinds of behaviours we hope all our students will adopt, both before and after they graduate high school. These objectives represent the lasting contribution and heritage of trusteeship of the school boards that make up Canada's public education system.
In fulfillment of these objectives, school boards across Canada strive to provide all students with a core and essential program that is designed to enhance the well-being of the whole student across the physical, cognitive and emotional spectrum. It includes their participation in physical education programs; health studies courses, including sexual and reproductive health education components; extracurricular athletic and sporting activities; human nutritional programs; and the promotion of general well-being among all students through a complement of ancillary programs, supports and services.
As an association, we also remain active partners of the Joint Consortium for School Health, a partnership of 25 ministries of health and education across Canada who work to promote a comprehensive school health approach to wellness, well-being, achievement and success for all children and youth.
Through our mandates and these relationships, we as school boards have become concerned by many of the same issues that motion 206 has sought to address. In this respect, your study of fitness and physical activity among Canadian youth could not be timed more appropriately. Four years ago, an organization known as Active Healthy Kids Canada developed an international report card on physical activity for children and youth. Their goal was to determine how our youth compared with those in 14 other nations in terms of physical activity. Needless to say, Canada received a D- grade on that report card in terms of physical activity overall, while we scored a D grade for active transportation. Our score on youth participation in organized sporting opportunities was better, yet we still received a final grade of C.
Somewhat more promising, however, and this is where we as education partners have been able to respond to the local needs of our communities, is that the report card found that the vast majority, 95%, of Canadian students have regular access to a gym; 91% have access to playing fields; and 73% of students were found to have access to school areas with playground equipment during school hours.
Increasingly, however, in spite of our best efforts as school boards, we find our objectives for our students at risk or under challenge. The challenge comes from many different factors. They include the risks associated with sedentary lifestyles; the growing role and application of technology to perform what were once physical routines and tasks across seemingly all aspects of life; the availability of resources for populations and communities that may not have benefited from the same degree of generational exposure to physical education as other Canadians; the ongoing impacts of poverty upon youth; the risks inherent in youth addictions and substance abuse; and the ongoing pressures of infrastructure renewal in terms of both the built environment and such consumable capital resources as supplies and equipment.
Another significant concern relates to the degree to which academic achievement in core subject areas related to literacy, numeracy and the sciences have come to dominate public policy focus and discourse.
While we remain in support of vigorous and rigorous action to promote these knowledge-based domains for the benefit of all Canadians, other subject matters, including physical and health education, unfortunately have not received the rightful emphasis they deserve, particularly in the senior high school years of education.
As CSBA, we know that physical activity remains an important determinant of academic success, backed by ample evidence-based research. If Canada wishes to increase its success and achievement and knowledge-based competence, then it remains essential to also promote the physical domain in equal measure. In the longer term, this speaks not only to Canada's economic competitiveness but also to its public investment in health and social programming. It follows that if we as a society fail to address the whole needs of every student—body, mind and spirit—then we will have failed in our mission and denied our vital interests.
While the promise of long life and health expectancy is one that we hope for all of our students, the preceding factors do continue to limit the possibilities that can be provided through public education toward our ability to help our students to fulfill this promise.
This said, we know that together with our partners we can rise to meet every challenge, and so we welcome this opportunity to share our thoughts with you, our federal colleagues, toward the development of greater emphasis on promoting youth fitness and physical activity.
The remaining portion of our remarks are therefore designed to focus on how Canada's public school community can benefit from enhanced federal partnership toward promoting these objectives.
The first recommendation is that we suggest the childhood fitness tax credit be expanded to school-related athletic and sporting activities.
Two, we recommend the establishment of an application-based transportation or travel expense fund through the minister of amateur sport, or potentially the establishment of a national charitable status to assist schools with demonstrated need to compete in provincial and national sporting competitions and also in support of required fundraising activities for the same purpose.
Three, we strongly encourage the reinstatement and expansion of federal funding for after-school active and healthy living programs, as it would be a prime consideration in meeting targets for increased activity for fitness for students.
Four, as it has always done, the federal government can continue to invest in community recreational infrastructure. What we suggest is that, if this is not already the case, funding could be targeted through specific criteria that would favour projects that benefit those recreational structures that are often co-located between community clubs and centres and public schools.
Five, as has been said by our colleagues from Boys and Girls Clubs, proper nutrition plays a key role by enabling physical activity and promoting fitness. Diet precedes exercise as part of a healthy daily routine. Unfortunately, high rates of poverty continue to impact some of our students and deny them this right to food security. There are three distinctive federal responses that we advocate on this particular recommendation.
The first would be increased funding in support of meal programs and healthy eating in schools. For some students, the meals that we provide are not one of the many meals they might receive but the only meal they receive. Funding to expand existing programs would prove to be a direct enabler of fitness and physical activity for Canada's most impoverished students. Second, we advocate for the promotion of localized food security measures designed to respond to needs in remote and northern communities. Third, for Canadian families with lower income, food stamp programs and milk coupons received as a component of social assistance programming can provide essential benefits for meeting daily nutritional requirements.
Six, we propose that consideration be extended to the expansion of federal roles in funding disability-related assistive technologies by redefining this role in terms of both disability mitigation and disability redress. In this respect we believe that, while this would by no means be a replacement of your current support for assistive technologies by enhancing focus on athletic equipment, at the same time you can provide real benefit for Canada's youth through your support for students with special needs and exceptionalities to meaningfully participate in sport and physical activities alongside their peers.
We remain an active partner of the Assembly of First Nations—