Canada: Model of sports planning

Over the past several weeks we featured the planning practices of Hong Kong and Canada with respect to elite sports and the Olympics. Last week, I concluded the series on the work done by the Elite Sports Committee (ESC) of HK to provide elite training programs for HK’s top athletes with a view to achieving international sporting success.

HK’s Sports Commission realized the need for a long-term strategic policy on selection and evaluation of elite sports together with a comprehensive support system to HK’s elite athletes.

With respect to Canada, we started discussing the route taken by the Canadians in planning for the summer Olympics to improve on their 18-medal, 14th place finish in the overall medal standings in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. One of the key persons for this comprehensive and expensive work is Alex Baumann, executive director of the Canadian Olympic Committee’s Road to Excellence (RTE) program. The objective of the RTE is to help Canada achieve a top-12 finish ranking in the medal standings for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.

Baumann says that given the realities of the funding system, RTE cannot provide broadly based financial fortification. Instead, its resources are geared toward individuals and sports with a demonstrated capacity to win or contend for medals. He cited rowing with its four medals in 2008, as an example of how stratified funding can pay dividends, according to a report of CanWest News Service in the Windsor Star.

How do the Canadians feel about all the funding going to elite sports? Randy Boswell of the Vancouver Sun says that a survey conducted by Leger Marketing after the Beijing Olympics suggests Canada’s success in China is fuelling a hunger for even more medals, with a higher percentage of Canadians than ever before ready to back increased federal funding for amateur athletes.

The post-Olympics poll of 1,500 Canadians showed 72 percent of respondents were satisfied with Canada’s 18 medals. This is in stark contrast to the performance of Canadian athletes in the 2004 Athens Olympics where Canada won 12 medals with only 59 percent of the population satisfied with the outcome.

How does the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) hope to win more medals in 2012 in London? The document “Road to Excellence Business Plan for the Summer Olympics and Paralympic Sports” dated April 2006 should provide the answers and be a practical reference material for our own sports officials and benefactors.

In April 2005, the 28 Olympic summer sports (and the Paralympic summer sports), the COC, CPC or the Canadian Paralympic Committee, and Sport Canada decided to create a Business Plan that would guide the way to achieving excellence at the 2008 (Beijing) and 2012 (London) Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Leading the work was Dr. Roger Jackson who realized at the outset that the Plan will see several iterations as his group engages partners in discussions, redefine issues and cost them more accurately.

If the Philippines is worried that we have not done this kind of an exercise and will therefore be going through uncharted waters, have no fear. For Canada, the implementation of the business plan will establish, for the first time, a coordinated highly effective Canadian high performance sports system.

The Canadians believe that with very strong and focused leadership in place, the Canadian sport system will build effective partnerships with governments, sports and associate organizations. The result will be world-class programs, policies and financing that will place Canada among the top nations at the summer Olympics and Paralympic Games.

Canada is entering a new era in Canadian sport, one based on effective collaboration, accountability, goal setting, efficiency and collective action for the greater good. The distinctly Canadian approach is based on establishing new, effective partnerships rather than on the efforts of a single agency, or agencies working independently. All existing funding partners must make changes in the way they contribute in order to harmonize policies and programs. Resource, jurisdiction and policy re-alignment by all partners is the gut of the new approach.

There is really nothing magical about what the Canadians are trying to do. These are the same things that we’ve been talking about whenever we talked about the need for a Master Plan for Philippine sports and Business Plans for each targeted sport if we want to prioritize sports for medals purposes.

We’ve always talked about harmonizing policies and programs and policy realignment especially when people come up with hackneyed comments that the reason for our sports debacles is mainly because of lack of funds. We’ve always made the case for accountability which should go hand in hand with goal setting.

More on Canada’s program next week.