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.