Saturday, August 14, 2004

"The life of a Canadian Sports Minister is only slightly longer than a fruit-fly and almost as glamourous" ~ Jonathon Gatehouse

Should Canada spend more money funding olympic athletes?
This article suggests we invest at least $50 million a year.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes! It's less money those bastard government contractors can steal from us.

JK said...

I think that Canada being a developed country needs to spend more money on sports development. I think that we should spend somewhere near what Australia spends (Approx. $100 M). That sounds like a boat load of money, but I feel that the Olympics is way more than just sport. Everytime a Canadian athlete comes in 18th in a preliminary round, I feel like we are being laughed at, or worse yet, forgotten. "We are nice people, but not quite good enough". The Olympics and the military, are the two of the most outward signs of a country. I'm not going to get into military right now. I think we need more funding for sport in Canada, so that we can show the word who we are, not just "nice people".

Look how many medals Australia wins compared to us. They are a smaller country with less money. Heck, the Baltic countries, and event the former Soviet countries have more medals than we do. With that past argument, it kind of makes my previous argument useless. I don't think the former Soviet states spend more than we do. However, they have fewer athletes, so...... son of a....

OK I think I need more time to research. I'll be back.

Jake said...

Not just Olympic athletes, but yes, if the government is going to be out there spending money, amateur sport should be very high on the list. At both elite and recreational levels, at that.

They could start by fixing the gender gap in funding. Did you know that Canada's women's soccer players receive far less funding than their male counterparts? Can you think of a single non-retarded reason for that? No? That's because there aren't any. (In fact, if anything, the women should get more, on account of the fact that they distinguish themselves from the men by not sucking.)

Anonymous said...

The Olympics are a waste of money. If you want to encourage healthiness, activity, etc, encourage mass amateur sport: little league baseball, beer league hockey, indoor soccer leagues. Don't spend it on a few elite athletes when it could be better spent getting millions of people involved.

Jones.

Heather said...

On this one I would be more inclined to agree with Jones. I love sports and all, but frick in the grand scheme of things, what difference does it make if we get 30 gold medals? Really?

It would be difficult to justify an expenditure like $50 million when the monies could be used for more pressing items. (like the military who have been sharing uniforms in Afganistan) I think $16 million is plenty, but I am not an althlete going to represent my nation at the Olympics, so perhaps their veiwpoint would be a whole lot different. I should ask Danielle for her opinion.

I also enjoyed reading Mustafa's thoughts on this at POI.
http://www.pointsofinformation.ca/mt-tb.cgi/245

Anonymous said...

Heather,

You're posting trackback links to our post on POI--those won't work for visiting the site. You need to use the "Permalink." Trackbacks are for letting people who visit our site know that you posted in response to it. You need to use them in your trackback function for them to work.

- Mustafa