Physical Activity Rates Continue to Fall in Canada

New numbers from the Canadian Health Measures Survey, 2022 to 2024 conducted by Statistics Canada just came out that dive deep into physical activity rates in Canada.

The results are not good.

In the period from 2022 to 2024, close to half of adults (46%), over 9 in 10 preschoolers aged 3 to 4 years (91%), and over half of children aged 5 to 11 years (52%) met recommended physical activity levels. These rates have remained relatively unchanged since the period from 2018 to 2019, when these measures were last collected.

I could not find the specific results from 2018 to 2019 for children and preschoolers, but the percentage of adults who were reaching the recommended physical activity rates was 49.2%. This means that there was a decrease of over 3 percent for Canadian adults.

More alarmingly, the new study raised the alarm on youth aged 12 to 17 and physical activity rates. In the years 208-2019 they already had the lowest physical activity rates of any of the age groups with 36% meeting the recommendations. But in the years 2022-2024, this had dropped to 21%. 

A 15% drop in Canadian youth aged 12-17 meeting the physical activity recommendations. 

It has even starker results when broken down by gender. The gender gap is seen across all age groups:

• Children aged 5-11: males 66%, females 37%

• Youth aged 12-17: males 33%, females 8%

• Adults aged 18-79: males 53%, females 39.2%

These are really not encouraging results. Canadians are becoming less active each year. I really struggle to understand why activity rates continue to fall. Are Canadians just lazy, or are we just a product of our environment? Our cities continue to sprawl outwards which makes it very difficult to walk or bike anywhere. Further dependence on cars then increases traffic and the amount of time it takes to get home after work. So Canadians have less time and less energy to go to the gym or the pool. I think this is potentially the largest contributor to physical inactivity rates. We need to change the way our cities are built. We need greater density and greater access to public transit that makes it easier for everyone to get around.

What can we do to address this and reverse these declining rates of physical inactivity?

The Stats Canada report actually offers two glimmers of hope for reversing this trend: spending time outdoors is associated with higher levels of physical activity and people who use active transportation also tend to have higher levels of physical activity. 

Luckily these two things go hand in hand. By choosing active transit options to get around, you are inherently choosing to be outdoors. By investing in bike lanes, wider sidewalks, pedestrian zones and other initiatives that increase accessibility, safety and year round transportation options, we can increase the percentage of Canadians who are meeting the physical activity recommendations. 

We need to invest in our green and blue spaces within, close to and outside our cities. Access to nature is really important for increasing physical activity rates. Seeing projects successfully finalized like the creation of National Urban Parks that the Government of Canada previously announced will go a long way to helping more Canadians access the outdoors and get active. 

Sport culture also needs to change. We need to lower the costs of sport and recreation programming. We need to increase the capacity of sport clubs that allow them to accept more members. We need to make it so that women and girls can participate in sport and recreation. 

For all of the above to happen, it will require big investments into recreation infrastructure, which is currently estimated to be as high as $270 billion (this includes all roads, bridges, libraries, health care facilities, and recreational facilities etc). A different report found that between 30 and 35 percent of recreational and cultural facilities are in fair, poor or very poor condition. In some categories (such as pools, libraries and community centres), more than 60 percent are at least 20 years old. And that report came out in 2019, 6 years ago, so this percentage has probably increased since then.

If we continue to underinvest in public infrastructure, we will continue to see the disintegration of important sectors and the disintegration of Canadians’ health. This cannot continue.

Without denser cities, greater access to green spaces within and around cities, without greater investments in public recreational infrastructure, these physical activity rates will continue to decline and put our health at even greater risk.