'At the brink of falling apart': Sport organizations hope new government heeds urgent call for funding
CBC
At the end of a successful Summer Olympics in Paris last year, David Shoemaker issued a stark warning.
Canadians took home 27 medals from France after standout performances in swimming, beach volleyball and track and field, to name a few.
The Canadian Olympic Committee CEO said he believed Canada has the potential to do more, but that he worried the athletes' full potential won't be unlocked without more resources from the federal government.
"I worry about performance in Milano Cortina and certainly for LA [in 2028]," Shoemaker said that day.
"There hasn't been an increase in the core funding of the national sports organizations, the 62 federally-funded national sports organizations, in 19 years. They are having to do so much more with so much less, including the demands upon them to create a safe and barrier-free healthy sports system that we all want so badly."
WATCH | Canada's new secretary of state for sport talks transforming Canada's sport landscape:
Fast forward almost 10 months and Canadians have a new government, led by a new Prime Minister, Mark Carney.
The new person in charge of the sports portfolio is a familiar face in the Canadian sports world: Adam van Koeverden, the retired kayaker who owns four Olympic medals, including gold in the K-1 500-metre from the 2004 Summer Games in Athens.
There's no minister of sport in this government. Koeverden is the secretary of state for sport, part of a two-tiered cabinet created by Carney.
He'll also have to navigate what's been described as a safe-sport crisis across the country. The Future of Sport in Canada Commission will report back in March, and van Koeverden, who gave his own recommendations to the panel earlier this year, will guide how the government will respond to its findings.
Perhaps even bigger than all of that is preserving what sport means to Canadians at a time when that identity is under threat like never before. It's a tone both the Canadian Olympic Committee and Canadian Paralympic Committee struck in a joint statement released after the new cabinet was named in May.
"As we face an unprecedented crisis of national identity, this portfolio will be critical in achieving this government's urgent nation building priorities," the statement said. "Sport unites Canadians like nothing else can – bridging geography, language, and politics."
When it comes to nation building, Nathan Bombrys sees a role for rugby.
The Canadian women's rugby union team is ranked second in the world heading into the sport's World Cup in England, which begins in August. Bombrys, who is Rugby Canada's CEO, believes the Canadian women have a shot at winning the tournament.
