Mr. Speaker, quite frankly I wish I had a little more than 10 minutes. To spend a year of parliamentary life on an issue and to summarize it in 10 minutes will be a challenge. I will deal with a couple of issues I feel passionately about in terms of my commitment to their being implemented.
I have to say to the hon. member for Longueuil, I celebrate her initiative in putting this debate on the floor of the House of Commons. I salute again the hon. member for Rimouski—Mitis who I know is with us here in spirit. Her contribution throughout the whole year and a half as we listened to hundreds of witnesses and read hundreds of briefs will be around for a long time in this Parliament of Canada.
My passionate interest in amateur sport stems from an educational background during my formative years in high school. I had the privilege and pleasure of going to a Catholic private high school in Toronto, St. Michael's College School. The school was run by the Basilian Fathers, an order of priests who believed that the whole person could not be developed unless sport was an integral part of their development. They believed that the key to a young person developing academically, spiritually and obviously physically was to make sure that sport was an integral part of their program.
I had the privilege of knowing men like Father Henry Carr, CSB, Father Mat Sheedy, CSB, Father Art Holmes, CSB, Father Brian Higgins, CSB, Father Tom Mohan, CSB, Father Jim Enright, CSB, Father Cecil Zinger, CSB, Father Norman Fitzpatrick, CSB, and lay teachers Jack Fenn, Dan Prendergast and Mike Lavelle, men who believed that coaching and working with young people was a vocation. These men believed that there was a theology of sport. In other words we were not there just to develop the body but it was part of developing and maturing the soul as well. That is something that has slipped today.
We heard witnesses. The Coaching Association of Canada told us that hundreds of schools across Canada no longer had coaching staff to look after their representative teams. It is almost unbelievable in a country like Canada that there are high schools without coaches.
We need to get back to pressing the nerve of Canadians that developing the fabric of this community and country must have a sport component attached to it.
A few years ago Cardinal George Flahiff, CSB wrote a paper on the theology of sports. He gave a lecture in 1955 to a group of coach educators. I only want to read two paragraphs from it but it is very important:
The immediate or proximate end of sports, as well as of gymnastics, physical education and similar activities, is not hard to define; it is the training, development and strengthening of the human body from both the static and dynamic points of view (i.e., from the point of view of its physiological development and from the point of view of its use in action). But there are higher ends, too, towards which all sports must tend if they are not to fall short of the function they are meant to fulfil as truly human activities. The body is not an end in itself; along with the soul, which animates it, it makes up the unity that is a human person. The soul has the higher function; it directs the body and, so to speak, uses it for the purposes of the human person as a whole. As a result, sports and all physical education can serve higher and more remote ends than the one mentioned; for, the more developed and better trained the body is, the more readily and effectively can it be used to further the development, interior as well as exterior, of the whole man. This is to suggest that sports have a very real role to play in the perfecting of a human person and, common with all human activities, they must have as their ultimate aim to bring man closer to God.
That was a quote from Cardinal George Flahiff, CSB, from this paper in 1955.
I believe this is a part of the report that we are not focusing on. When people ask me which recommendation in the report I am most committed to, I tell them that it is the recommendation that deals with the 1,300,000 young people under 16 who are living in poverty and do not have access to organized sports. That is the essence of the report.
We talk in the House about fiscal priorities. We have been obsessed with the fiscal priorities here over the last eight to ten years. We heard witnesses, doctors with qualifications, who came to us from the section of Health Canada that deals with physical fitness. Those doctors told us that if we could mobilize, motivate and energize another 10% of Canadians to spend half an hour a day on physical fitness, the treasury of Canada could save approximately $5 billion a year just in health care.
Here we are scratching our head over $60 million to look after young kids who do not have access, when we have been told by the best in the Government of Canada that if we mobilize Canadians to become more physically fit we will save billions.
The report is not about professional athletes. It is not about sucking up to millionaire hockey players. The essence of the report, the 68 out of 69 recommendations, as we said when we tabled it, are like a seamless piece of fabric.
The professional system in the country depends entirely on the amateur development system. We cannot have a good professional system if the amateur system is not sound. I am saying something on top of that point. Forget their commitment. Only one in 250,000 young kids becomes a professional athlete. What we need is a society where people have the dignity and the confidence to feel that their potential has been fully developed.
I go back to my Basilian mentors: the Father David Bauers, the Father Ted McLeans, the Henry Carrs, the Tom Mohans and the Cardinal Flahiffs who have convinced me that one cannot develop a whole person academically and spiritually unless sport is an integral part of their life.
I want to say to all members in the House that I salute my colleague, the Minister of Canadian Heritage, who after 90 days tabled 53 of the 69 recommendations in a positive way.
I know the spirit of the Liberal Party and especially the vision and spirit of the Prime Minister. I believe in the not too distant future that every single recommendation in the report will be implemented in some way, shape or form. I thank all members who worked on the committee for their co-operation. We will continue to move forward.