Sports ministers draft new policy

MIRIAM HILL

Provincial and territorial ministers responsible for sport met in Iqaluit last weekend and endorsed the country’s first Canadian Sport Policy, a document that will act as a model for Nunavut’s own sport policy.

The ministers meet once a year to discuss their portfolio and Nunavut’s capital city hosted the group, which included Paul DeVillers, the federal secretary of state for amateur sport.

Manitok Thompson, the minister in charge of Sport Nunavut, said the policy is a good one and its guidelines and curriculum will be used to set up the territory’s policy in the future. The policy is meant to give direction to leaders to create a more effective and transparent sport system, to underscore the importance of sport to health and improve the sport experience “from playground to podium.”

Although the ministers said 13 priorities and 22 actions have been developed directed at a number of issues, such as increasing the public’s understanding of and participation in sport and enhancing Aboriginal sport development, no concrete examples of what actions will be undertaken were available.

“For Nunavut [a sport policy] gives us more bullets to say that there’s a lot more diabetics now, more cancer, but we can avoid that if we can get into recreation, into sports, into exercise. This is what this is about,” Thompson said. “Maybe we’re spending a lot of money on health issues when we can avoid it if we can get into exercise and sports and healthy active living.”

The link between sport and health was reiterated the next day when the ministers made a presentation to the Romanow Commission on the Future of Health Care, also in Iqaluit to hear submissions.

No extra money was promised from the federal government at the sport ministers’ meeting, but Thompson said it was beneficial to have the ministers visit Nunavut since the country’s newest territory has its own specific challenges when it comes to infrastructure needs.

“When you talk about infrastructure needs in Nunavut, as a politician, you’re really talking about priority housing, health centres, roads, water, sewage and so on. And a lot of the times our recreation facilities are not really a priority, it’s more a cosmetic thing,” she said.

“I was able to say maybe if we had a separate pocket altogether for our recreation facilities that would help out youth a lot and even our population. For example, you can’t really jog outside in the middle of winter, unless you want to freeze your lungs.”

While most communities in Nunavut have arenas, Thompson said they are not being used to their full extent because of global warming. The way the arenas are constructed requires cold weather for the ice to freeze inside.

“If we were to put more money into recreation facilities, make them concrete, or something with artificial ice, then people can roller blade in them,” she said. “Right now we’ve closed them for the rest of the year.”

Thompson would also like to see a program for swimming pools in the territory, but she said right now it’s not a priority for government.

“Across Canada, they’re finding that if we exercise more we have healthier communities,” she said. “We can cut the cost down on people getting sick if people would exercise more and get into active living.”