Good afternoon, Madam Chair and members of the committee.
I appear today as a storyteller, a filmmaker, a scholar and an educator with a commitment to and track record of exploring issues and telling stories about women and girls in sport in Canada.
My core recommendation today is that we need more stories to be told about women and girls in sport to make sport better, more equitable and safer for women and girls.
These include the stories of abuse and hardship that have been told with such grace and generosity by some of the witnesses before this committee. Sharing stories is shining a light into dark places where rot has grown. Light and attention are what is needed to get rid of the rot. I believe these stories have the power to change sport, but we also need stories to show us what sport can be for women and girls in Canada.
In my doctoral research examining the audience for professional women's hockey, I heard again and again how often the stories about women in sport are the stories of the problems of women in sport. If this is the only narrative we hear, the performative risk is that the repeated association among “women”, “sport” and “problem” becomes normalized and naturalized.
We need stories showing sport as a site of empowerment for female athletes at every skill level—stories about the now and the future, fully inclusive stories, as well as stories about the long history of women and girls in sport in Canada. Consider the ubiquitous Heritage Minutes. Of the 97 videos produced telling stories about Canadian history, 12 of them tell stories of sport. Of those 12, only one is about female athletes—the Edmonton Grads basketball team. Heritage Minutes exist because of significant public funding, but why then are they not fully representative of the Canadian public?
I have three recommendations to make to the committee to support more opportunities for storytelling on multiple media platforms.
The first is about funding for media coverage of women's sports. The systemic and persistent lack of media coverage contributes to the perception that women and girls in sport are less worthy of an audience's attention, literally less valuable in terms of ratings. It perpetuates the idea that women and girls have no legitimate role in sport and puts the safety of female athletes at risk. I recommend special funding from Canadian Heritage dedicated to media coverage of women's sports. To be clear, this does not mean broadcasting the occasional midday game, but instead investing in women's sport broadcasts in prime time, with high production values and significant audience development. We saw this strategy work with women's soccer in 2015 and 2019. It is worth noting that the CBC spent decades investing in men's sport, constructing the audience for sport to be the audience for men's sport. The public broadcaster should be compelled to make equal investment in the broadcast of women's sport.
The second recommendation I have is about funding for scripted and factual media content. Meaningful media coverage demands more than covering games, races and matches of occasional elite competitions. I recommend specialized funding from Heritage Canada to support the creation of factual and scripted stories of women and girls in sport for broadcast television, streaming platforms and other digital media platforms. I note the impact of the Netflix documentary series Formula 1: Drive to Survive and how it increased public knowledge, appreciation and viewership for that sport. At the very least, I would like to see more Heritage Minutes dedicated to historical Canadian female athletes, such as Bobbie Rosenfeld and the indigenous women's softball team from Six Nations, Ontario.
The third recommendation is about athletes telling their own stories. Athletes are too often silenced. I recommend the creation of digital storytelling funding for sporting organizations to provide the tools and platforms to teams of all levels that will allow girls and women to share first-hand stories of their experiences in sport. Imagine a YouTube channel dedicated to showing Canadian female athletes from all over the country sharing their experiences, their training, their competitions, their triumphs, their hardships and their camaraderie.
To conclude, the stories we tell help to shape the world we live in. Stories about sport in particular work to construct our mythologies and our ideas about culture, value and gender. We need to tell stories that shine a light on the abuse suffered by many women and girls in sport, and we need stories that celebrate sport as a space that can empower, strengthen and support women and girls to make not only sport but all of society better and safer.
Thank you very much for this opportunity.