Sport in Canada

• History
• Aboriginal Athletes
• Middle-class men
• THE NHL
• THE CFL
• Baseball and Lacrosse
• Government and Sport
• Youth and Sport
• Organizations
• The Future

As the northernmost country in the Americas, Canada is home to 32 million people. It is officially bilingual (with federal government services provided in both English and French) and multicultural. Competitive sports have been essential to the Canadian economy, culture, and identity since the beginning of the modern nation in 1867.
Sports in Canada are currently organized, financed, and followed in two distinct sectors.The most visible is the masculinist and corporate professional sector, which is closely integrated with United States–based leagues and what scholars call “the sports-media complex.” The second is the network of public, private, and voluntary organizations in the amateur and Olympic sports known as “the Canadian sport system.” It is increasingly state-driven and financed, and committed to gender equity. It focuses on the participation in and the staging of national and international competitions, especially the Olympic and Paralympic, Commonwealth, Pan American, and Canada Games.
In 1998, nearly 37 percent of Canadians over fifteen years of age reported that they were active in physical activity, including organized sports. Soccer is the most widely played sport with 900,000 registered participants, 40 percent of whom are women.The overall impact of the sport and recreation sector upon the Canadian Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was calculated to have been CAN$8.9 billion, or 1.1 percent of the Canadian GDP, bigger than the mining and papers industries. It provided 262,325 jobs, or 2 percent of the total employment in Canada.

History

Canada is home to both indigenous peoples and those who have arrived from other parts of the world during the last four hundred years. Although there is a lack of recorded (and undistorted) history about aboriginal Canadians, those who arrived from elsewhere— European explorers, fur traders, settlers, and more recently, southern Canadian bush pilots and geologists in the far Arctic—readily engaged with them in various forms of physical activity and sport. Some aboriginal sports and games served as the basis for the popular sports we know today. Lacrosse, Canada’s official summer sport, is based on George Beers’s 1860 codification of the aboriginal stickball game teewarathon, which he learned from the Mohawk at Kahnawake across the St. Lawrence River from Montreal.

ABORIGINAL ATHLETES

Throughout Canadian history, aboriginal athletes have been prominent in both integrated and native-only associations and sporting events. Early in the twentieth century, marathon runner Tom Longboat from the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, Ontario, became a sporting icon across North America for his spectacular national and international achievements.Today, kayaker Alwyn Morris from Kahnawake is remembered fondly for his gold medal victory (with Hugh Fisher) at the 1984 Olympics.
That said, like indigenous peoples in many other immigrant societies, indigenous Canadians have faced and continue to face many forms of overt and systemic discrimination in mainstream Canadian sports. In response, they have developed the Northern Games, the North American Indigenous Games, special events in the Arctic Winter Games, and organizations like the Aboriginal Sport Circle to revitalize opportunities for themselves and their children and showcase their achievements and culture.

MIDDLE-CLASS MEN

Sports in Canada were codified, played, elaborated, and promoted in the context of rapid nineteenth-century urbanization and industrialization and similar developments in the British Empire and the United States. The most influential early clubs and organizations were located in Montreal, at the head of the “National Policy” economy of railroads, staple exports, protective tariffs for manufacturing, and the promotion of immigration.The Montreal Amateur Athletic Association, formed in 1881, created eight of the first Canadian national governing bodies, including the Amateur Athletic Union of Canada (AAU), which governed other sports and won many of the first Canadian championships, including the first Stanley Cup, emblematic of supremacy in ice hockey, Canada’s official winter sport.
These early clubs, leagues, and organizations were invariably restricted to the white, English-speaking, middle-class males who formed them, and they expressed and required adherence to the Victorian ideology of amateurism. Sports were quickly taken up in other cities and regions, and by those who had been excluded (often in their own clubs) especially Francophones, girls and women, immigrants, and the working class.They were assisted by the spirit of “rational recreation,” which developed out of the late nineteenthcentury urban reform movement, which inspired universities and schools, municipal recreation departments, voluntary associations such as the YMCA, and the Christian churches to organize teams and leagues. By the 1920s, sports were played and watched at some point by most Canadians, even if it was in organizations that were separated by class, gender, region, and ethnicity.

THE NHL

Growing urban densities, the popularization of sports by the mass media, and the growing marketing of sports to symbolize collective identities, especially among males, also enabled the growth of capitalist professional sports in baseball, lacrosse, ice hockey, and Canadian football. The most established of these has been the National Hockey League (NHL). Formed in 1917, it grew significantly during the years betweenWorldWar I and World War II through expansion to the United States and the development of a pan-Canadian radio network, Hockey Night in Canada, in the 1930s.Today there are six Canadian franchises—in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, andVancouver—in the thirty-team NHL.

THE CFL

The Canadian Football League (CFL), created in 1958 out of long-established community-based clubs and leagues, is the only professional league to operate on a pan-Canadian basis, although it briefly experimented with expansion to the United States during the 1990s. Today, there are CFL teams in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Hamilton, Winnipeg, Regina, Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver.The National Basketball Association entered Canada in 1946 with the short-lived Toronto franchise, the Huskies. In 1995, the NBA returned to Canada with the Toronto Raptors and the Vancouver Grizzlies.

BASEBALL AND LACROSSE

Major League Baseball entered Canada in 1967 with a franchise in Montreal, the Expos. In 1977, it added the Toronto Blue Jays.Today, only the Toronto franchises remain in these leagues. Professional lacrosse has had a much rockier history, with leagues and teams being formed and disbanded with almost every season. The National Lacrosse League currently has two Canadian franchises—in Calgary, and Toronto—in the ten-team circuit.

Government and Sport

In 1961, amateur sport received a significant boost with the passage of the Fitness and Amateur Sport Act (FAS) by the federal Parliament. The FAS Program initially supported broadly based fitness and recreation initiatives as well as high performance. After 1970, in the face of threats to national unity from Quebec separatism, the Americanization of culture, and the disaffection of the western provinces from the federal government, embittered by what they perceived to be its domination by the central Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec, the Liberal government of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau stepped up its investments in elite sport, believing that successful Canadian performances in international competition strengthened pan-Canadian unity and gave Canadians a better sense of themselves. A new federal agency, Sport Canada, transformed the voluntary amateur governing bodies into fully professionalized enterprises, with paid coaches, technical and administrative staff, and living and training stipends for top athletes.
To assist and promote elite sport development, Sport Canada also created new institutions, such as the National Sport and Recreation Centre, the National Coaching Certification Program, and the Athlete Information Bureau, and encouraged Canadian cities to bid for international games. Most provincial and territorial governments followed suit. The wisdom of these policies seemed to be borne out at the 1978 Commonwealth Games in Edmonton. For the first time ever, Canadian athletes fared better than those of any other team, and the new Canadian sport system caused so much envy that critics dubbed Canada “the GDR of the Commonwealth.”
Subsequent governments allowed the Canadian sport system to fall into decline. However, early in the twentyfirst century, sorry overall performances at the Atlanta and Sydney Olympics, growing concerns about physical inactivity among young people, and a decline in sports participation stimulated an effort to revitalize federal legislation. In 2003, the FAS Act was replaced by the Physical Activity and Sport Act.

Youth and Sport

Young women and men are the most physically active of all Canadians, with national surveys consistently showing that more than 50 percent of youth between the ages of five and fourteen years are active in sport. Sport and physical activity are a recognized part of the educational curriculum, and many municipal recreation departments privilege children and youth in their programming. The nature, extent, and provision of opportunities vary significantly from place to place, however. Increasingly, shrinking school and municipal budgets, deteriorating or closed facilities, and a shortage of qualified teachers and leaders contribute to the difficulties of delivering sport and physical activity.
Outside the public school and recreation systems, there is an extensive community-based organized sport system, especially among the middle to upper classes. But these are increasingly inaccessible for those facing economic hardship because participant fees continue to rise. Moreover, community sport continues to face the challenges of undertrained volunteer leaders and some of the darker aspects of youth sports, including the increasing preoccupation with performance rather than pleasure and participation, the intensification of training, and sexual harassment and abuse. A number of “made in Canada” strategies have been developed to address and resolve these problems, including a renewed emphasis upon coaching certification, the development of “fair play” leagues in hockey, and the introduction of child protection policies and programs.
With respect to colleges and universities, sport and physical activity are recognized as integral parts of a student’s cocurricular educational experience. All Canadian postsecondary institutions offer a variety of recreational and competitive sporting opportunities to their students, including intramural and intercollegiate or interuniversity competition. The Canadian Colleges Athletic Association (CCAA) and Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS) are the governing bodies for postsecondary sport in Canada, and both organizations work in concert with other national and provincial sport organizations to further equitable and accessible sport for Canadians. The CIS has taken significant steps to promote gender equity in sport and currently recognizes ten women’s sports and nine men’s sports.

Organizations

Framed under the umbrella of Sport Canada (http:// www.pch.gc.ca/sportcanada), the Canadian sport system is comprised of numerous national and provincialterritorial sport organizations. Some organizations of note include the following:
Aboriginal Sport Circle (aboriginalsportcircle.ca); Arctic Winter Games (www.awg.ca); Canada Games Council (www.canadagames.ca); Canadian Colleges Athletic Association (www.ccaa.ca); Canadian Olympic Committee (www.olympic.ca); North American Indigenous Games (www.internationalgames.net/namin dig.htm).

• 1860 The Native American game that becomes lacrosse is codified.
  
• 1881 The Montreal Amateur Athletic Association is formed.
  
• 1917 The National Hockey league is formed.
  
• 1920s Sport is popular across Canada.
  
• 1920s– The Golden Era for women’s sports in 1930s Canada.
  
• 1930s Hockey Night in Canada on the radio is popular across Canada.
  
• 1958 The Canadian Football League is founded.
  
• 1961 The Fitness and Amateur Sport Act is passed.
  
• 1967 The Montreal Expos join Major League Baseball.
  
• 1977 The Toronto Blue Jays join Major League Baseball.
  
• 1978 The Commonwealth Games are held in Edmonton and Canada wins more medals than any other team.
  
• 1981 The Canadian Association for the Advancement of Women and Sport is founded.
  
• 2003 The Physical Activity and Sport Act is passed.
  
• 2010 The Winter Olympics.

The Future
Sports are a recognized and valued part of Canadian social and cultural life. That said, there remain several challenges.The first challenge involves an age-old issue that has garnered public attention at different times and in different ways.This is the extent to which Canadian sport remains fair and Canadian athletes, especially those representing Canada in international competitions, exhibit ethical behavior. (“The team that marches behind the flag must represent the values of that flag,” as one federal sports minister put it.) In recent years, many Canadian athletes and their leaders have internalized these expectations, and in coalition with others have contributed to the push toward gender equity, doping-free sport, and the fair treatment of high performance athletes (an “athlete-centered system”).
As a result of the tireless lobbying of such organizations as Athletes CAN (the association of national team members in the amateur and Olympic sports) and the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES), the 2003 Physical Activity and Sport Act declared that Canadian sport policy “is founded on the highest ethical standards and values, including doping-free sport, the treatment of all persons with fairness and respect (and) the full and fair participation of all persons.” That legislation also created the Sport Dispute Resolution Centre of Canada to ensure the “fair, equitable, transparent and timely resolution of disputes.” Canadians have also been vocal and influential proponents of ethical sport internationally. Canadians were integrally involved in the development and establishment of the World Anti- Doping Agency (WADA), now located in Montreal.
A second challenge concerns the mass media, which are essential to Canadians’ understanding of sports. Most newspapers devote entire sections to sports. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation devotes 11 percent of its entire television schedule to sports, and specialized cable channels like the Sports Network (TSN), CTV Sportsnet, and Réseau des Sports (RDS) in Quebec broadcast 4,300 hours of programming annually. For almost eight months of the year, CBC’s flagship Hockey Night in Canada attracts 5 to 6 million viewers every Saturday. But except for the commercial-free CBC radio and during major games such as the Olympics, the sports media distorts the landscape of Canadian sports, giving the bulk of coverage to the men’s professional leagues while marginalizing women and athletes in the Canadian sports system. They are constrained by the basic economics of the sports media complex to marshal affluent male audiences for advertisers. In radio and television, the media are contractually bound to the leagues they cover. While many sports reporters provide brilliant, even incisive, commentary and coverage, they can be considered “embedded” journalists, with considerable limits on their autonomy. Policy makers have long struggled with this challenge in the context of the freedom of the press.A recent parliament committee recommended that the federal regulatory agency, the Canadian Radio Television Commission, direct the CBC to broadcast more events involving Canada’s national teams, and not authorize any more foreign programming services with strong United States sports components.
A final challenge is the uneven and inconsistent support for sport as an institution by federal, provincialterritorial, and municipal governments. While the Canadian government is signatory to numerous international conventions and charters that proclaim sport and physical education to be basic human rights, and the health benefits of sport and physical activity are regularly touted during major games and elections, in practice, sport and physical activity programs, services, and facilities are often on the frontline of budget cutbacks and spending curtailments. Part of this is a result of the continued perception among Canadian government officials that sport and physical activity are low priorities. The consequence, however, has been declining participation rates, especially among the economically challenged.
Hopefully, the new federal legislation and the 2002 Canadian Sport Policy, signed by federal, provincial, and territorial governments as part of the same process, will contribute to a revitalization of public opportunities. With the 2010 Winter Olympic Games to be held in Vancouver, British Columbia, there is renewed energy for strengthening Canada’s sport system, with regard to both elite sport and mass recreation, to ensure for all present and future Canadians accessible, ethical, and equitable sport.

See also Football, Canadian; Maple Leaf Gardens; Stanley Cup