Playing = Winning

Sport participation touches many aspects of Canadians’ lives, yet many people are unaware of how powerfully sport affects them:

• It changes individuals – including their health and well-being, their social networks and sense of social connection, and their skills.
• It affects communities – including the social cohesion and social capital of communities.
• It has an impact on the economy – creating jobs and providing work for thousands.
• It helps to shape our national and cultural identities.

To investigate how sport benefits Canadians’ health, skills, communities and economy, as well as contributes to shaping our national and cultural identity, Sport Canada commissioned the Conference Board of Canada to provide original data about the impact of sport participation.

The resulting report, Strengthening Canada: The Socio-Economic Benefits of Sport Participation in Canada, included data from a National Household Survey on Participation in Sport of 2,408 households.

It found that more than 13.7 million adult Canadians take part in sport as participants, volunteers or attendees, including more than eight million who actively participate in sport.

Here are some additional highlights from the survey about the many benefits of sport:

Health Benefits

Participation in sport and excellent health are closely linked in Canadians’ minds. Active participants attach very high levels of importance to sport as a source of relaxation, fun and recreation; physical fitness; improved quality of life due to better health; and stress relief.

Individuals can gain significant health benefits from physical activity through sport (or other means) by achieving the right levels of frequency, duration and intensity of activity, such as those outlined in Canada’s Physical Activity Guides to Healthy Active Living (www.paguide.com).

Improving health through sport and other forms of physical activity could significantly reduce health-care costs. Recent estimates of health-care spending due to physical inactivity range from $2.1 billion to $5.3 billion annually, representing as much as 4.8 per cent of total health-care costs.

Sport is just one component of good health, as the keys to good health include a combination of physical activity (both sport and non-sport activity), eating nutritious foods and avoidance of harmful behaviours, such as smoking.

Skills Benefits

According to survey respondents, sport participation develops a wide range of skills and attitudes, including teamwork, leadership, problem-solving, decision-making, communications, personal management and administrative skills.

Sport also builds character and personal qualities, such as courage and the capacity to commit to a goal or purpose, as well as values, such as respect for others, self-discipline, a sense of fair play and honesty. Young people find sport enables them to channel their energy, competitiveness and aggression in socially beneficial ways.

More than 50 per cent of active participants believe that sport is very important to their personal skills development; almost 90 per cent believe that it has some positive impact.

The vast majority of active participants, volunteers and attendees rate sport as an important source of skills that they can apply away from sport. These skills also help people to play a more positive role in their communities and family life.

Social Benefits

Sport participants interact with many other individuals, which improves interpersonal relationships, establishes the basis for trust and builds teamwork skills.

Public investment in sport brings many benefits to communities. Most respondents feel that sport participation strongly encourages individuals from different backgrounds to work and play together in a positive way.

It gives individuals of all ages good opportunities to be actively involved in their communities, which help them learn positive lessons about responsibility and respect for others, and gives them the chance to give back to their communities.

Sport is a valuable element in Canada’s learning culture that builds a wide set of transferable skills that are important in both work and life.

Economic Benefits

Household spending on sport has a significant impact on the Canadian economy:
$15.8 billion of household spending was on sport (in 2004). This figure constitutes 1.2 per cent of Canada’s 2004 gross domestic product (GDP) of $1.3 trillion.

Sport spending is characterized by large numbers of relatively small purchases and expenditures on a variety of different goods and services. Sport supports about 2 per cent of the jobs in Canada.

[Source: Sport Canada; The Conference Board of Canada’s Strengthening Canada: The Socio-Economic Benefits of Sport Participation in Canada]

The Definition of ‘Sport’

Sport is defined as an activity that requires a degree of physical exertion and skill and that typically involves competition with others and a set of rules, or as a physical activity undertaken to improve personal sporting performance (for example, training to reduce time or improve distance).

The definition excludes competitions of motorized vehicles and physical activities that involve neither competition nor the intention of improving personal sporting performance.