The Canadian state and sport: the dilemma of intervention^†

Abstract

Canadian sport has always been interwoven with the state. Different levels of government have enabled, encouraged and discouraged/prohibited different activities directly through legislation, regulation, the provision of facilities and other forms of patronage, and indirectly through economic and social policy, especially the stimulus of industrial production, the regulation of hours of work, the development of urban parks and playgrounds, and the promotion of public education. Many sports leaders have had political ties and have openly lobbied for state support. In the early years of the twentieth century, Canadian amateur sport leaders began calling for the creation of federal and provincial sports ministries in the interests of nation-building. The idea of significant state support for sport has been the rallying cry of the amateur/Olympic sector ever since. Those dreams were first realized when the Conservative government of John Diefenbaker created the Fitness and Amateur Sport (FAS) programme in 1961. In the early 1970s, spurred by the crisis of federal legitimacy brought about by Quebec nationalism and western regionalism and the adrenalin of the 1976 Olympics in Montreal and 1978 Commonwealth Games in Edmonton, the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau used FAS to establish new institutions of sport development and transform the traditional amateur sports governing bodies into wards of the state, creating what is known today as ‘the Canadian sport system’. These new structures have helped Canadian athletes significantly improve their performances at the Olympic and Commonwealth Games in Canada. This article is a commentary on the state-directed and state-financed system of sport development. It was written in the summer of 1980, with one foot in the Canadian sport community – at the time, I was coaching at the University of Toronto and chaired the facility development committee of the Ontario track and field association – and the other within the debates on the left on the nature of the capitalist state. Then as now, I was concerned that the sport community's preoccupation with high-performance sport marginalized sport for all, but the political landscape was entirely different: the neoliberal revolution brought about by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had barely begun.

Notes

^†Originally published in Sport, Culture and the Modern State, ed. Hart Cantelon and Richard Gruneau (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 281303.

^1. Here ‘amateur’ is used generically to refer to those sporting activities conducted under the auspices of non-profit national and international federations affiliated with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the General Assembly of Amateur Federations. Strictly speaking, the word ‘amateur’ has disappeared as a condition of eligibility in most of these sports since the IOC deleted it from its eligibility code in 1974. Largely as a result of Sport Canada grants to athletes, very few members of current Canadian national teams could be described as ‘amateurs’ within the meaning of the pre-1974 rule.

^2. In its entirety, the Canadian ‘state’ includes federal, provincial and municipal legislatures, and councils, ministries, departments, crown corporations and quasi-judicial and fully judicial agencies, none of which is identical and each of which has developed in response to very specific conditions. In this paper, unless otherwise indicated, the term refers to the federal government and particularly the Sport Canada unit of the Fitness and Amateur Sport Directorate, which reports to Parliament through the Minister of State for Fitness and Amateur Sport.

^3.Metcalfe, ‘Working Class Physical Recreation’; Schrodt, ‘Sabbatarianism and Sport’.

^4.Broom and Baka, Canadian Governments and Sport; West, ‘Physical Fitness, Sport and Federal Government’.

^5.Canada, House of Commons, 1936, 159.

^6. Canada, House of Commons, 1960, 39.

^7.Jackson, ‘Federal Government's Involvement with Sport’.

^8.Grant, Lament for a Nation; Laxer and Laxer, Liberal Idea of Canada.

^9.Beamish, ‘Socioeconomic and Demographic Characteristics’.

^10. For example Athletes' Plan Committee, Brief; Hoffman and Kidd, ‘Time is Up’.

^11.Broom and Baka, Canadian Governments and Sport.

^12. Possible exceptions to this are the COA, which has initiated several important programmes and then allowed the government to assume responsibility; the Sports Federation of Canada, which attempts to speak for the smaller, non-Olympic sports federations and some of the universities. Each presented critical briefs in response to the Green Paper on Sport (Campagnolo, Toward a National Policy). The general quiescence of the sports federations can be illustrated by comparing their response to cutbacks with that of Canadian artistic groups, also heavily dependent upon the state for funds. While the arts community has aggressively opposed cutbacks, the sports bodies have been stonily silent.

^13. By ‘One Canada’, I refer to the claim that Canada as a nation is coterminous with the federal state, that Canadians must relate to this state as individuals, albeit in two different languages. This is the dominant position in English-speaking Canada, which is fervently articulated by the present prime minister (Trudeau, Federalism and the French Canadians). But it effectively denies the aspirations of the Québécois and the native people for a collective identity distinct from the federal state and their wish to relate to other peoples of Canada through states of their own.

^14. For a discussion of other issues, see Hoffman and Kidd, A Brief in Response.

^15.Helmes, ‘Canadian Sport as Ideological Institution’; Munro, Proposed Sport Policy for Canadians.

^16.Ontario, Ontario Recreation Survey; Eynon and Kitchener, ‘Socioeconomic Analysis of Parents’.

^17.Levy, ‘Leisure and Poverty’.

^18.Hoffman, ‘Comparison of Financial Assistance’.

^19.Campagnolo, Toward a National Policy.

^20.Johnson, Poverty in Wealth.

^21. For example, Orlick and Botterill, Every Kid Can Win.

^22.Kidd, ‘Athletes’ Rights'; Whitson, ‘Sociology, Psychology and Canadian Sport’.

^23.Gruneau, ‘Power and Play in Canadian Society’; Gruneau, ‘Sport, Social Differentiation and Social Inequality’.

^24.Hordey, ‘Sports for People’

^25.Gonick, Inflation or Depression.

^26.Hargreaves, ‘Political Economy of Mass Sport’; Kidd, Political Economy of Sport.

^27.Miliband, State in Capitalist Society; Panitch, Canadian State.

^28.Whitaker, ‘Images of the State in Canada’, 43.

^29.Finkel, Business and Social Reform.

^30.Wolff, Poverty of Liberalism.

^31.Macpherson, Life and Times of Liberal Democracy.

^32.Marcuse, Essay on Liberation.

^33.Kidd, ‘Olympics ‘76’.