A New Game Plan: What Australia can teach Canada about rebuilding its sports system

Broken, fragmented, and unsafe. The Future of Sport in Canada Commission laid bare the problems in Canadian sport and offered a roadmap on how to fix it. The report imagines new leadership, a restructured sports system with one entity overseeing all of sport. So we asked, what would it look like if that vision came to life? That question took us all the way to Australia, a country with similar geographic challenges and a deep love for sport. Australia already has one entity overseeing sport called the Australian Sports Commission. It funds national sporting organizations and produces a ton of sports science research. It also runs the Australian Institute of Sport where the best athletes have training camps and where kids from across the country come to learn about sport. And it all began 50 years ago with disappointment. After the 76 Olympic Games, Australia didn't win any gold medals. That was deemed to be a massive failure from the country's perspective. And so the government took the opportunity to use that tension that was in the community to address it. To see how could Australia, as a country with a small population, incredibly diverse geography, You know, take the opportunity to really refine and improve our sports system to help drive that success. And that's what created the Australian Institute of Sport and in later years, the Australian Sports Commission. The proof is in the results. Only three countries earned more gold medals at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games than Australia. Many of the top Olympic and Paralympic athletes train close to home at sports academies just like this one. The Queensland Sports Academy in Brisbane, the host city of the 2032 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games. It's a one-stop shop for athletes, and it's not just structure that makes it special, it's culture. The concept of the Institute environment with having Performance support really close to field of play, and experts wrapped around athletes. That's not unique, but I think our secret sauce is actually the people. It's a simple formula to get great athletes, great coaches, great performance support in a great environment. It's actually just hard to do consistently, and I think that's what we've been able to do over the last few years. We've really invested heavily in performance support. While the structure is important and the structure helps in the way that you set up the governance and all the pieces that you need to do, actually fundamentally, and this is still the core of the challenge that we have in Australia, How are you? you need to address the culture, the behaviours and the values of the people who are actually doing the work. So what can we learn from Australia? Well, coming here, I think the first thing we can learn is that there's a lot of pride around sport in this country. It matters to people. It's a priority to them. But there are also lessons we can take away from the structure of the Australian sports system, where one entity, the Australian Sports Commission, oversees sport from the grassroots level all the way up to the high performance side. It's not perfect. I definitely heard that this week. There's still fragmentation here, too. But it's certainly a system that Canada can and is learning a lot from as we look to reshape what sport looks like in Canada. With the roadmap in place Secretary of State for Sport Adam VanCouverden says work is underway reviewing whether Canadian sport would be better served with one entity just like they have in Australia. He too has looked elsewhere for clues on how to make Canada's system better. There's a lot to learn from the Australians as well as the UK sports system is great. There's a lot to learn from the Dutch, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Japan and South Korea do some really interesting things too. So the best thing about being Canadian is we're not shy about using best practices from other countries. But they're also doing the same thing about the Canadian sports system. A lot of Australian winter athletes come to Canada to train and a lot of them have been successful at the Winter Olympics. It's kind of our strength, so we're certainly not shy about working with our partners and looking at what those best practices are in other countries. Just like in Australia 50 years ago, Canadian sport is at a crossroads. It took decades for the Australian sport system to become what it is now, one of the best in the world. It's been a long journey and offers a preview of where Canada could end up. The Future of Sport in Canada Commission provided a roadmap for generational change, but there's a lot of work and political will needed to get there.