The Future of Sport in Canada: A System at a Crossroads

The Future of Sport in Canada Commission released its Preliminary Report on August 28, 2025. At 384 pages, it contains 71 recommendations, and it is the most comprehensive review of the Canadian sport system that I have ever seen. There is still time for stakeholders to provide feedback and input before the final report is released in March 2026. This includes the National Summit on the Future of Sport taking place in Ottawa this September.

The report is split into two parts:

1. The Canadian Sport System – governance, leadership, funding, and structures.

2. Safe Sport in Canada – mechanisms to prevent and address abuse and maltreatment.

For this article, I focus on Part I: The Canadian Sport System, as this is more in line with what we talk about on this podcast. Of course I must recognize that governance, policy, and funding are inseparable from safe sport. As the report itself notes:

“We were told bluntly that an underfunded sport system is an unsafe sport system.”

This was reiterated throughout the report. I think it goes further than this: it’s not just an underfunded sport system that is an unsafe sport system, but one where the funding is allocated based on medals and results reinforces an unsafe sport system. When the priorities are in the wrong place, the sector is led in the wrong direction.

Own the Podium and the Culture of “Winning at All Costs”

The report devotes significant attention to Own the Podium (OTP), created in 2005 ahead of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics and Paralympics. OTP’s mandate was narrow: maximizing medals won. By most accounts, it succeeded. But at what cost?

Since then, OTP has been criticized for shaping Canadian sport into a system driven by performance at the expense of participation and community development. As the report puts it:

“Since Own the Podium’s funding is tied to performance, National Sport Organizations are prioritizing performance at the national and international levels to the detriment of increasing participation and engaging with the grassroots.”

In other words: what perhaps began as a short-term strategy to boost national pride has morphed into a long-term structural problem. OTP may be a victim of its own success, but the culture it created—winning at all costs—remains entrenched. This is reinforced by the broad belief that the “Government of Canada’s current emphasis on high-performance and medal achievements does not align with the sport community’s desire for a sport system that, while valuing success, also embodies respect, diversity and inclusion, encourages participation and promotes health and well-being.” 

Misaligned Priorities and Funding Gaps

The sport funding realities outlined in the report are stark:

• No significant increase in National Sport Organisation (NSO) funding since 2005, meaning purchasing power has dropped by 33% due to inflation and other economic stressors.

• 90% of NSOs rely primarily on government funding. Government funding on average makes up half of total revenue for NSOs.

Despite this high reliance of government funding for NSOs, the importance of government funding for the sport sector has not been reflected in government budgets. Over the past five years the Government of Canada has invested a total of $1.3 billion, an average of $263 million a year in the sport sector. Sport accounted for just 0.082% of the federal budget in 2022-2023 and less than 0.1% in provincial and territorial budgets as well.

Sport is a rounding error on the government’s spreadsheet.

Worse still, the little funding available is skewed heavily toward elite performance. Grassroots participation, equity-focused initiatives, and community sport remain underfunded and underprioritized.

While the Commission gestures toward alternative priorities—primarily participation and physical activity—it does not clearly articulate this in any of the recommendations. I would argue that new priorities need to be identified and set in policy and funding agreements. Some possible priorities are, but not limited to: Better health, community cohesion, reduced youth crime, empowering women and girls, and reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples. Until these outcomes are explicitly named and resourced, Canadian sport will remain structurally misaligned.

Efficiency vs. Efficacy

The Commission also recommends amalgamating sport organizations to reduce duplication. Two forms of amalgamation are suggested:

• Horizontal amalgamation: pooling resources across National Sport Organisations for shared services like HR, IT, and translations. And even suggesting amalgamations of NSOs across sports (for example: Biathlon Canada, Nordic Combined Ski Canada, Nordiq Canada, and Ski Jump Canada).

• Vertical amalgamation: merging national and provincial/territorial sport organisations into a single structure per sport. (for example: Swimming Canada be merged with Swim Ontario, Swim New Brunswick and Swim British Columbia etc).

While I can see the benefits to horizontal amalgamation, vertical amalgamation raises concerns. Without the P/TSOs would large provinces overshadow smaller ones? Would the unique needs of PEI or Yukon be ignored in favour of Ontario or Quebec? Efficiency cannot come at the expense of equitable sport development across all regions. The needs to develop the sport of swimming in the province of PEI are likely very different from the needs to develop the sport of swimming in British Columbia. Ensuring these regional needs and differences are reflected is an absolute must.

Another proposed efficiency is to centralize federal funding streams currently split between Sport Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada. While Sport Canada’s funding is focused primarily on sport at the national level, there is some overlap for increasing physical activity rates. But collapsing these funds risks erasing the distinction between sport and recreation. Hiking, kayaking, and community fitness initiatives are just as vital to public health as organized sport can be, and they must not be sidelined. Funding must remain in place for other forms of recreation outside organised sport. Making sure that we protect sport and recreation is essential.

Leadership and Policy Expertise

Something that really stood out to me while reading this report is the instability and neglect of sport at the political level:

• There have been ten different ministers responsible for sport in the past 15 years

• The sport portfolio is frequently treated as a junior cabinet position

This lack of continuity has left Canada without a coherent sport policy or vision. Sport is not seen as an integral part of the health system, the economy, or immigration and settlement strategies just to name a few areas. It is consistently undervalued and under-leveraged. Earlier this year we also looked at the election platforms of the major political parties in Canada during the 2025 federal election, not a single one mentioned sport. 

Some of the gaps may also be a result of unclear jurisdictional responsibilities. Unlike other important policy areas like health, education, or defense, sport is not outlined in Canada’s constitution for what level of government is responsible for what aspects of the sector. I think this is partly a result of the cuts that took place in the 1980s and 1990s across the federal public service. The federal government got out of the business of much of its previous policy and funding responsibilities. It appears that sport may have also been a victim of these federal changes. Without clear jurisdiction, the federal government was able to offload sport policy without anyone filling that gap since.

I think that the Commission’s recommendation to form a Centralized Sport Entity to provide strategic leadership, coordination, and oversight, may be a solution to this. If structured well, such a body could finally elevate sport policy to the status it deserves. But without strong political will, it risks becoming another bureaucratic layer.

The Integration of Sport for Development and Peace

The report dedicates many pages to mapping the ecosystem of organisations that make up Canada’s sport system: governments at every level, National and Provincial/Territorial Sport Organizations, Multisport Organizations, grassroots clubs, schools, and not-for-profits working in sport for development and peace, among many others. It also provides a short outline of each of their roles in the sport system.

The report explicitly declares that sport for development and peace organizations are “out of scope.” But later in the report, it suggests that other government departments—Justice, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, among others—could step in with funding for programmes that reduce youth crime, integrate newcomers, or promote community well-being.

This is where the contradiction becomes clear: these are, by definition, sport for development initiatives. To exclude them from scope while simultaneously calling for more of them reflects a deeper discomfort in our system—a reluctance to fully embrace the idea that sport’s true power lies not in medals and rankings, but in its capacity and ability to drive social change.

Sport for development is not a concept that is foreign to sport in Canada. The Canada Games were founded in 1967 to unite Canada and help foster a stronger national identity. They were created specifically to support a non-sport outcome. We have a history of using sport for development and peace objectives. We need to get back to this.

If we are serious about reimagining sport in Canada, we must stop treating sport for development as an optional add-on and instead recognize it as a cornerstone of a modern sport system. Only then can we unlock the full potential of sport to shape healthier, safer, and more connected and resilient communities.

Conclusion: A Broken System Needs Clear Priorities

The Preliminary Report is courageous in admitting that Canadian sport is broken. But its prescriptions are cautious, stopping short of a bold reimagining of priorities. Unless governments explicitly redefine what sport is for, reforms risk tinkering at the edges.

If high performance is no longer the centrepiece, then what is? Access and participation? Health outcomes? Social cohesion? Indigenous reconciliation? Economic development? These goals must be written down, measured, and funded. If we are to only focus on access and participation, then I think we risk having a similar issue as before: a sport system with no focus. If we are only measuring participation in sport programming then will we consider we have succeeded if simply more people participate? Is this really all we want from the sport sector? We can and should have more than one priority. We as a sector have the capacity to walk and chew gum at the same time. We can juggle multiple outcomes. This is what Canadians deserve from their sport sector.

Real transformation will only come if Canada stops treating sport as an afterthought and starts recognizing it as a vital policy tool. That is the future of sport in Canada.