Another way to fund health care in Canada

Ottawa urged to get more active in funding sports facilities
JAMES CHRISTIE
Globe and Mail

As provincial and territorial sport ministers get ready for their trip to the Canada Games in Whitehorse this week, each will pack two things — a parka and a message for the federal government to get serious again about sport and physical activity.
"Like a lot of people, my perception is that it looks like a step back," Jim Watson, the Ontario Minister of Sport Promotion, said of the federal cabinet shuffle that knocked sport back from being a full ministry to a file being handled by a junior Secretary of State, Helena Guergis. She is already laden with the weighty portfolios of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.
Monday, the federal government put $5-million over two years into a revival of ParticipAction, the non-profit marketing program for physical activity, but that's nowhere near enough, Watson says.
The federal government is sinking more than $500-million into the Vancouver Olympics and inspiring kids to break the bad habits that have led to a rise in childhood obesity. But where will those kids get active, Watson questioned in an interview.
"A lot of our infrastructure at the grassroots level dates back to Centennial projects in 1967," he said. "Arenas are old and crumbling. In Ontario, 13 per cent of our arenas are 50 years or older. The ice plants are inefficient and there are environmental challenges. We need the federal government to be engaged. We had a [provincial and territorial sport ministers] meeting in September, and the feds didn't show up."
Big shows do figure in federal spending, he said.
Aside from the hundreds of millions going into the Vancouver Olympics, more than $30-million in federal money is going into the Canada Games, a domestic type of Olympics, Watson said.
"But we don't get that kind of investment in Ontario unless the province gets international games, and that hasn't happened since the 1930s, when Hamilton had the Commonwealth Games," he said. ". . . London [Ont.] did have the Canada Summer Games a few years ago, but we need more community-based facilities.
"I'm looking forward to the Whitehorse Games and to meeting the third federal sport minister in a year . . . and to impress on federal ministers that the government has been missing in action for years."
Watson said that after three decades of cutbacks in sport that pushed Ontario athletes to look for training in other provinces or U.S. schools, Ontario is getting back into the game.
The province has committed $40-million in the past fiscal year to refurbishing and building sport infrastructure, he said.