Olympic sports to get $6million boost from federal government

Canadian Press

tsn.ca

A $6-million boost from the federal government is aimed at changing Canada's history of poor performances in team sports at the Summer Olympics.

Basketball, volleyball, field hockey, water polo and recent Games addition rugby sevens will benefit from the new funding, part of a five-year commitment confirmed Tuesday by Minister of State Gary Lunn during the Team Sport Summit in Ottawa.

The money is drawn from the larger $61-million commitment to amateur summer sports announced as part of the 2010 federal budget, and is over and above the $64 million the government provides to the Own The Podium program.

Sport Canada will administer the money, dividing it up based on the guidance of OTP officials, who will base their decisions on teams' performance and their future chances of success.

"We've got a number of team sports that have not made it into that next level," Lunn said in an interview from Ottawa. "They've come in to see us and we want to be able to support them as well. We're putting that money into Own The Podium to ensure that they can invest in the best teams, the right places, and the right amounts."

The additional funding is a boon for the five programs, which have combined to win one Olympic medal -- a silver claimed by the men's basketball team back in 1936.

Both the men's and women's basketball teams are facing tough odds to qualify for the 2012 Games in London, but the extra funding will allow Canada Basketball to build on promising youth programs that may pay dividends at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

Canada does have one volleyball medal -- a bronze won by beach duo John Child and Mark Heese in 1996 -- but the traditional teams are still looking for their first trip up the podium, as are the field hockey and water polo squads.

Rugby sevens makes its Olympic debut in 2016, and the Canadians will be looking to come out of the gate strong. Rugby Canada CEO Graham Brown said his organization is getting just under $500,000 in the first year, a good starting point toward that end.

"What it's saying to me is that there is funding that will be allocated to allow you to begin the process of building the program to be at an Olympic standard," said Brown.

"We feel we've got the right high-performance coaching in place, with support from this money that has been allocated, and now we feel we can focus on providing our athletes with the best opportunities starting in 2011 through the qualification which will conclude in 2015."

The amount each organization gets in each of the five years will vary depending on how much progress each makes or does not make in the eyes of Own The Podium officials.

Securing the money from the larger $61-million allocation to the Sport Support Program, which goes to the 44 national summer sports organizations, has been in the works since last fall. Lunn has been lobbied by a coalition of team sports seeking additional support, an idea he eventually came to embrace.

"We've got funding for the Special Olympics in the budget, we've got funding for Own The Podium, we've got funding for the Canadian Paralympic Committee, and now we've got funding for team sports," he said. "I believe in all of them, and we were very fortunate to be so successful for all of these endeavours in such a tight budget."

Brown said the funding infusion represents about five per cent of Rugby Canada's total budget and will be spent on completing internal restructuring, enhancing existing programs and on getting his sevens teams to more games.

A focus will be on the women's side, which has received far less support than the men's team due to the way much of its sponsorship money has been targeted. The women's team will now be sent to take part in the Hong Kong Sevens tournament next February or March.

Brown also insisted the traditional version of rugby will not be neglected to support sevens.

"Two-thirds of that money is focused on developing a better structure for women's rugby and enhancing the women's rugby platform," he said. "We look at rugby as a combined sport, we don't believe you can develop sevens without 15s, but the reality is you need to have more sevens tournaments to give the athletes a better opportunity.

"Part of this money has allowed us to enhance our competition structure."

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If media conglomerates among the Canadian forest, does it make a sound (policy)?

Anybody there?

Diverse voices are lost with big media mergers
Steve Anderson
Thestar.com

Several major media mergers are threatening to make the Canadian media scene an even more concentrated affair.
A few examples: CTVglobemedia has inhaled CHUM (with Rogers taking the spoils), Alliance Atlantis is on the brink of becoming a part of CanWest and Quebecor Media is poised to take over Osprey Media.
In June 2006, the report on the Canadian news media by the standing Senate committee on transport and communications concluded that there are "areas where the concentration of ownership has reached levels that few other countries would consider acceptable." Canadians agree.
Well before the latest round of mergers, 56 per cent of Canadians said they had less trust in the media because of media consolidation, and fewer than one in five Canadians thought news organizations were independent.
Canadians understand very clearly the effects of media consolidation on media choice. For example, CanWest will now own the Independent Film Channel. Since CanWest is known for its conservative editorial stances, this change indicates that the Independent Film Channel is now anything but independent.
The Canadian Energy, Communications and Paperworkers (CEP) union recently published a landmark study focusing on Canadian journalists titled Voices from the Newsroom. The study suggests that journalists and news consumers are already feeling the brunt of big media domination.
Only 9.5 per cent of journalists indicated that they believe the corporate owners of their news outlet valued good journalism over profit. This perspective perhaps reflects the bookkeeper's view of employees as liabilities – a management approach that is only exacerbated when big media get bigger.
CHUM laid off 281 people and cancelled news broadcasts across the country just hours before CTVglobemedia announced its intention to take over CHUM. Quebecor – another big media enterprise looking to get bigger – has locked out the office and editorial staff of the Journal de Québec since April 22. Journalists tried to restart the negotiation process in mid-June, only to have Quebecor negotiators reject their efforts, sticking to their original demands from last December.
With this kind of treatment it is not surprising that 44 per cent of journalists in the CEP study report decreasing desire to stay in journalism.
With the recent and likely continuing corporate centralization of media, we can look forward to more unemployed or dissatisfied journalists and more media consumers left wanting the penetrating journalism that used to be more prevalent in Canada.
Some people point to the Internet as the medium that will save us all from concentrated print and broadcast uniformity.
Unfortunately, a high level of media consolidation also means that we are in danger of losing the open Internet in Canada and the ability to choose which websites we go to. For the most part the media conglomerates that dominate conventional media also dominate web traffic.
As big media increasingly merge with Internet service providers like Rogers, BCE and Telus, we risk unwittingly trading our open Internet for a closed system.
In such a system, Internet (and cellphone) service providers can push traffic to their own content and that of their partners, while traffic to other more diverse media sites is slowed or blocked.
During the Telus strike in 2005, the corporation blocked access to a website run by striking Telus employees called "Voices for Change."
There are many more examples of non-neutral Internet service provider behaviour. A lone blogger or independent news website is hard-pressed to compete with the vast holdings and promotional clout wielded by national media conglomerates.
Canadians have historically supported media diversity. In 2002, an Ipsos-Reid poll reported that 86 per cent of Canadians believed the federal government should do something to alleviate Canadians' concerns about media concentration.
However, there is a new factor now. Canadians from across the country are speaking out loudly and clearly, asking for media choice over big media domination.
In just a three-week span, nearly 2,000 Canadians submitted comments to the CRTC demanding tighter ownership rules for big media.
The question is, will the CRTC take the lead from the Canadian public?
With a clear indication that Canadians want a more diverse media system with more media choice, will the CRTC live up to its mandate to regulate media in the public interest?

"News.. communicating news and ideas, I guess.. is my passion. And giving people alternatives so that they have two papers to read and alternative television channels."
-Rupert Murdoch

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.