After a disappointing federal budget, Canada’s amateur sports sector says a crisis of underfunding is looming

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Tuesday should have been a thrilling moment for amateur sport in Canada. Just over 100 days before Paris lifts the curtain on its Summer Games – the first ones in the sort-of-post-COVID era – the Canadian Olympic Committee’s official outfitter, Lululemon, staged a high-gloss, Instagram-friendly rollout of Team Canada’s snazzy attire, marking the biannual signal to regular folks across the country that it’s time to start paying attention to our athletes again.

But hours after the luxe product reveal, the COC’s president and CEO, David Shoemaker, watched with growing disappointment as the federal government unveiled a budget that ignored the emergency flares he and others have been sending about a sector that’s on the verge of a financial crisis.

“It’s that juxtaposition, right?” Shoemaker said in an interview on Wednesday morning. On the one hand, athletes will finally be able to perform at their best, without COVID restrictions, and inspire the country. On the other, “there’s this story we feel compelled to tell … about the overall state of the Canadian sports system and the financial situation for our 61 federally funded national sport organizations.”

It can be frustrating to work in the world of amateur sport. Most fans see the oceans of cash sloshing around the pro leagues – millionaire athletes, billionaire owners, sponsors jetting VIPs in and out of velvet-rope events – and assume everyone’s getting rich. In fact, most athletes are barely scraping by, putting every spare penny they earn from side hustles and government funding into their training, their equipment, and their basic caloric intake.

Last month, the COC and Canadian Paralympic Committee issued a desperate plea for the federal government to step up with $104-million additional annual funding of the national sport organizations. Citing a report commissioned from Deloitte, the COC and CPC noted federal funding has been at the current level of about $200-million since 2005. Inflation alone has eroded about half of that value – never mind that the NSOs have been hit with new costs for safe sport and other programs that weren’t envisioned two decades ago.

“A five-year forecast shows that the National Sport Organizations will run a deficit of $134-million attempting to deliver on their primary mandates,” the report said. In a press release, Shoemaker said bluntly, “we’re on the brink of a crisis.”

On Wednesday, he put that into concrete terms. The lack of funding will, he believes, mean “dramatic reductions in participation in sport of which we’ve long championed ourselves being a leader.” While he didn’t expect the performance of Team Canada’s athletes at the Summer’s Games to be affected, “there are certainly some winter sports that are in financial dire straits, and two years from now, unless something were to change, they’ve got real problems.”

The COC was trying to raise the alarm because, as an organization that is almost entirely privately funded, Shoemaker hopes it can be seen as an honest broker on the issue. “While we very much depend on a strong sports system to do what we do, we’re not asking for a penny of this for ourselves.”

The sector had hoped things might have been about to change. They welcomed the cabinet shuffle last November that brought Carla Qualtrough in as Minister of Sport and Physical Activity. She is a former head of the Canadian Paralympic Committee who won three bronze medals as a swimmer in the 1988 and 1992 Summer Paralympics. But Shoemaker told me flatly that, with the lack of additional financing, “I think it’s going to be hard for the department to deliver on the full breadth of her mandate letter.”

I asked Qualtrough’s office to respond to Shoemaker’s comments about the looming crisis and his doubt that she could fully deliver on what the Prime Minister has asked her to do.

Her office e-mailed a statement that rehashed the budget funding announcements, noting that her department would be increasing the Athlete Assistance Program by $7-million annually. That’s money that athletes depend on to help pay their living and training expenses, which is very welcome.

The statement added: “Budget 2024 is investing in sport’s most pressing issues and in programs that are making meaningful progress on the broad reform and systemic change that the sport system needs. An additional $42-million has been committed to implement safe-sport measures and to support community sport programming, removing barriers to sport participation.”

All of which is perfectly fine. None of which actually answered the questions. I responded to her communications folks, saying as much; they declined to elaborate.

As it happens, this weekend the COC and CPC executive and representatives from the 61 NSOs will be in Montreal for the COC’s annual meeting. Qualtrough will speak with them.

On Thursday, I spoke with Mike Bodnarchuk, the co-chair of Ski Jumping Canada, about where the budget leaves his NSO. On the one hand, its athletes are setting records: A year ago, Alexandria Louttit became the first Canadian to win a gold medal at the world championships. On the other hand, he acknowledged that if his organization hadn’t got financial help from the COC last year, it would have had to cut its coaching staff by half.

I asked what he expected from this weekend’s meeting with the minister. He’d attended last year’s confab, when then-Minister of Sport Pascale St-Onge appeared. “It was the same old song, quite frankly,” he said. “She was saying, ‘We know what your situation is and we’re fighting the fight to get you more money, but nothing’s gonna happen right away.’ And indeed nothing did.”

“Now we have the new minister in there, and we’re hoping with her connection to sport that she’s going to be able to get into some sympathetic ears and make a case for it at the federal level and find a way,” he said.

“You always hope for the best, right?”