3. BACKGROUND (cont.)
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3.2 Official Languages in the Sport System
In 1985, the federal government established the Bilingualism Initiatives Program to assist NSOs in providing bilingual services and ensuring equitable access to their programs. The program provided funds to allow NSOs to translate documents, provide language training for administrators and coaches, and provide simultaneous interpretation at meetings. Canadian Heritage now administers a similar program – the Program for the Development of Official-Language Services – which provides funding and consultation services to any nonprofit organization that wishes to improve its capability to offer its services in both official languages. The program offers a maximum of $85,000 over a five-year period for specific activities geared to helping organizations function in both official languages, rather than for ongoing program support, and it is little-used by NSOs. No sport organizations applied for funds in 1999-2000, and only one has applied in 2000-2001.
As noted above, the federal government created several arm’s-length agencies during the 1970s, including the National Sport and Recreation Centre (later renamed the Canadian Sport and Fitness Administration Centre), housed in the James Naismith Centre in Gloucester, Ontario. It provided office space and some central services, including translation, to sport organizations. In 1995, Sport Canada reviewed its support for the centre and concluded that it was no longer contributing significantly to the objectives of building the sport system, developing high performance sport, and promoting mass participation in sport. Sport Canada began to phase out its financial support to the centre beginning in 1995-96. The move away from funding sport administration was consistent with the arm’s-length relationship Sport Canada was developing with sport organizations. At the time of our study, in the fall of 1999, a number of NSOs were in the process of moving their head offices out of the centre to locations throughout the National Capital Region. By this time, individual NSOs had assumed complete responsibility for their own official languages programs, with varying degrees of success, as we shall see in later sections of this report.
As part of the review leading to Sport: The Way Ahead, the minister’s task force commissioned special studies, including one on Equal Linguistic Access to Services in Sport, which formed the basis for five of the report’s 117 recommendations. The study concluded that “many inequalities exist throughout the Canadian sports system in the provision of services in the official language of choice, and that the lack of linguistic equality in accessing services constitutes, in certain areas, systemic barriers to full participation in the sports community of both official language groups.”5 The study identified problems in three main areas: training camps and seminars, selection to national teams, and participation in the democratic activities of NSOs. The essential elements of the study’s recommendations were:
- The criteria for selection to a national team should be published simultaneously in both official languages. Appeal mechanisms for selection disputes should be available.
- Members of both language groups should participate in the decision making of sport organizations.
- Information necessary for athletes and members of the sport community to participate, compete and communicate (such as coaching materials, rules and regulations, and policies) should be available in both languages.6
The task force report endorses and expands these recommendations in two recommendations addressed to Fitness and Amateur Sport (as it was then called) and three addressed to national sport organizations. The task force called upon the federal government to continue to act as a catalyst with the sport community in terms of official languages and to co-operate with the provinces to develop joint programs to enhance the bilingual capability of national and provincial sport organizations.
The task force also recommended that national sport organizations:
- continue to provide in both official languages core administrative and communication services that will assist athletes and members of the sport community to participate, compete and communicate (e.g., coaching materials, rules and regulations, policies, etc.);
- make available, in both official languages concurrently, information necessary for equitable participation in governance and decision making for members of both linguistic groups, according to their membership profiles; and
- publish and distribute national team selection criteria simultaneously in both official languages. Differences or disputes arising from athlete selection decisions that cannot be resolved through the sport organization’s own appeal process should be subject to an arbitration mechanism.7
These recommendations provide an orientation for the official languages program in sport today. They were implemented through the inclusion of minimum expectations regarding official languages in the Sport Funding and Accountability Framework, which will be discussed more fully in later sections of this report.
In summary, early in this decade, the federal government simultaneously adopted a “handsoff” approach to the administration of sport organizations, including withdrawing funding from the Administration Centre, which had provided some common services; clarified its expectations on social policies, including official languages; and cut funding to sport organizations. This withdrawal from direct involvement in sport programs and reduction of assistance were consistent with federal government policies of devolution and downsizing discussed in OCOL’s report on Government Transformations.8 Although Sport Canada requires sport organizations to meet certain official language requirements as a condition of funding, the combination of federal initiatives during the last decade has affected their ability to do so.
