Mr. Speaker, I am sharing my time with my hon. colleague from Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca.
I appreciate the opportunity to respond to this motion which I support. It has a lot of good things in it. I will also comment on the Mills report on sport in terms of the positive things and of course some negative things that have come out of that.
I caution all committees, or whomever will be responsible for putting these kinds of things together, that we be careful with regard to creating another federal department. It brings in another bureaucracy which we have a tough time funding now. We are bureaucracy crazy. Everything is run by bureaucracies. I would really be cautious with this idea of setting up a separate federal department.
Instead of suggesting a study be done on the feasibility of legalized betting on sport, I would suggest we forget the study. The Liberal government seems to be study crazy. It has more studies for this and that and committees looking at this and that, studies on seniors and sexuality and all these idiotic committees. Another one is legalized betting on sport. Legalized betting is not what sport is all about. Forget the committee. Just scrap that whole idea.
I have spent many years of my life educating and coaching our youth. I recognize the vital role that participation in organized sports can play in the upbringing of Canadian children. I had many years of experience in coaching both as a professional coach in the United States and as a volunteer coach in Canada. I have seen firsthand over and over again the very positive contribution of participation in sport by our youth.
There can be little doubt in anybody's mind that this is a good idea. To promote sport is an excellent means of preventing crime by our young people. It is an excellent way to provide opportunities for those who have the talent to excel in their abilities. One thing in the last member's message I kept hearing over and over again was high quality this, high quality that, high quality here and high quality there.
I always have felt that one major thing in any sporting department or purpose was to provide the opportunity for persons such as those in grade 1 and grade 6 who had the desire to participate but because of where they lived or commitments required by their parents for the high cost of equipping them to play hockey or to buy a baseball glove it would be totally unaffordable. Over and over again I have seen in my years of experience that these kinds of things are not available to everybody as they ought to be.
I get concerned about seeing $800 million put into a program where $100 million of it will be for infrastructure without any qualifications of what that really means.
What we need is the ability for our young people to have the opportunity to participate and be part of a program that teaches life skills other than the high quality of skill of a particular sport. The program needs to teach good citizenship and good health. It needs to teach a number of things that will have long term benefits for them particularly when they get to an age where they can participate in activities in their communities as an adult.
I was always a firm believer that team competitive sports such as hockey, football, basketball and so on were very good. However, along with them we need support for sport that will provide skills to individuals so that when they become adults and part of a family they can participate in other sports that are not competitive.
Having been in the United States and having coached professionally, there are some real advantages to having a program in place that will provide the avenue to work with young people and provide some high quality coaches that will train and teach them the best way to deal with particular programs.
Unfortunately when I was in the United States the philosophy of playing to win and having fun turned out to be winning is not everything; it is the only thing. When that kind of attitude begins to exist problems start to develop.
I have seen young people in amateur sports who had participated in a competition and won a division or zone competition. After their team had participated and worked together to win a particular title and had fun doing it, they advanced to the next level of competition.
It is at that point throughout the country where there seems to be an attitude that it has to be really competitive. They pick all-stars from other teams within the division instead of using the same dozen or twenty young people who managed to make this accomplishment. There is an attitude that exists in Canada that we need the all-stars from the other teams. Consequently the young people who helped the team to get to where it was were heartbroken and were staying at home while the better players went on to higher competition.
Those are the things that are disheartening, the very basic type of ideas. Unfortunately the report fails to get to the heart of the matter of what affects young people. What do we expect of our athletes and sport people when they are in schools? I cannot help but think about that terrible tragedy in Littleton, Colorado, where two people stated that the targets for their activities would be jocks, athletes.
I remember some very stringent rules in some of the schools I worked in. Not only did we do our best to encourage others to participate in whatever sport we were in, but for those people who were not inclined or did not have the desire to go into sport, the athletes in turn would show great respect for their desire to go into music, drama or whatever it was. They had a mutual respect for one another.
Because of an attitude that began down in the United States that the captain of the football team, a macho sort of athlete, is the king-pin of the school, they tend to tread on the other people who have other things in their hearts.
We do not address those things in our sporting areas. One of the problems is when we start throwing money without good ideas into a project. Money is not the answer to sports. Availability is, making it possible for all to participate. That can be handled best at the local level in our communities and not by a magic bureaucratic department creation, not by a government that will look after everybody's best interest.
We spent a lot of our time during my years in amateur and volunteer coaching in Canada selling chocolate bars, selling light bulbs and selling magazines. We did everything we could to raise funds to buy a few bats or a dozen baseballs or to buy T-shirts or caps so the young people would look like a uniformed group.
We are missing the boat when we forget about the spirit of sport at that age of young people and start concentrating on pouring money in so everyone can excel at great lengths. That acceleration will happen in spite of what goes on. We always felt that if we looked after everybody the great ones would come out of the crop, but not because of tons of money being spent to see it happen and a concentration at that level.
I encourage the committee to continue to look at this report. I would like it to involve even more people who could come up with some ideas to enhance sport and to provide an opportunity for young people. Sport is a very important part of our lives for the development of citizenship, good health and a sense of belonging. Let us not ruin it by creating big bureaucracies which are no solution.