Team Canada hockey player Emily Clark presents Prime Minister Mark Carney with an Olympic jersey in Ottawa in January. In his first federal budget last November, Mr. Carney allocated no new funding toward sports.Patrick Doyle/Reuters
Oren Weisfeld is the author of The Golden Generation: How Canada Became a Basketball Powerhouse.
The sports arena is arguably the most political space in modern life. In Canada, for instance, the home team usually provides a land acknowledgment before singing the national anthem, praising the country that, as we just acknowledged, was stolen from Indigenous peoples.
It requires a lot of cognitive dissonance before the game even begins.
We are living through a time of extreme political strife. U.S. President Donald Trump launched a trade war with Canada almost as soon as he took office and has threatened to make Canada the 51st state. He blatantly disregarded international laws by abducting the acting president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, wants to take control of Greenland, and is pushing for regime change in Iran. He posted a picture on his Truth Social account featuring a map with an American flag covering Canada.
Kelly: Canada’s Olympic dream can be found in creating 40 million neighbours
Recent polls suggest 17 per cent of Americans favour Canada becoming a state or territory, and the Canadian military has conceived of models to respond to a hypothetical American invasion. Even though war remains unlikely, many Canadians feel like they can no longer take their democratic liberties for granted. And they don’t need me – a sportswriter with an admittedly narrow understanding of geopolitics – to tell them this. But as we conceive of new ways to take back our nationhood and Make Canada Great Again, sports are the place to start.
Prime Minister Mark Carney knows this. He won the 2025 federal election behind an “elbows up” campaign, appearing in commercials around ice rinks and publicly cheering on Team Canada throughout the 4 Nations Face-Off, when Connor McDavid potted the overtime winner to defeat Team USA in the gold-medal game, echoing Sidney Crosby’s Golden Goal from the 2010 Olympics – the most-watched television broadcast in Canadian history.
As a former student athlete who played goalie at Harvard, Mr. Carney understands the power of sports and appeals to it when beneficial. So, as Canada begins to reimagine itself as a more stable, independent, and self-sustaining country, why is sports being left out of the picture?
The Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) and Canadian Paralympic Committee (CPC) are wondering the same thing. Together, they requested an additional $104-million in funding from the federal government in March, 2024, citing a Deloitte study that found that Canada’s 62 national sports organizations (NSOs) are being asked to do more than ever with diminishing resources. Canada allocates less than 1 per cent of its federal budget to sports ($327.1-million), with no change to funding levels since 2005. (Norway, the current medals leader, invests about $550-million annually despite having a population one-eighth the size of Canada’s). The current deficit of Canada’s 62 NSOs is projected to grow to $134-million by 2028.
The two committees insisted that an increase to Canadian sport system funding is “urgently needed” for NSOs to continue supporting athletes, provincial federations and clubs across the country while trying to win medals on an increasingly competitive international stage – one that sees some European federations outspend Canada by a factor of 10. “If we continue to rely on overstretched, under-resourced national sports organizations who fund and support these athletes on these journeys to the podium, if we continue to overstretch them and make more and more demands and don’t increase their funding, then it’s just not sustainable,” COC CEO David Shoemaker told The Canadian Press in 2024. “I worry about performance in Milano Cortina [in 2026] and certainly for [Los Angeles in 2028],” he later added.
Short-track speed skater Steven Dubois celebrates winning a gold medal at the Milan Cortina Games on Wednesday. 'Canadians love the Winter Olympics. They love seeing their athletes on top of the podium,' says past Olympic champion Jennifer Heil.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
Still, in Mr. Carney’s first budget last November, no new funding was allocated toward sports. Unsurprisingly, Canada got off to a slow start in Italy, winning no gold medals until Day 9 of a Winter Olympic Games for the first time since 1968. Even the men’s hockey team looks vulnerable.
“There’s so few groups in this world that can unite an entire country, can transcend borders,” Canadian gold-medal-winning freestyle skier Jennifer Heil told the CBC. “Canadians love the Winter Olympics. They love seeing their athletes on top of the podium.” Now more than ever.
Technology has transformed Canadian society from a mass culture full of collective experiences to a more alienated one, manifested through personalized screens and individualized content. It’s increasingly rare to find things that embed us in a social world of collective attention like a concert or live sporting event, making sports one of a handful of entities that still wields community-building power. “Sport provides opportunities for genuine people‑to‑people connections,” COC president Tricia Smith said. “It’s all about building a better person, a better country and a better world through sport.”
Canadians know this because sport is already a big part of our identity. The first organized ice hockey game took place at McGill University in 1875. Hockey quickly became synonymous with Canadian ideals and ubiquitous in communities around the country, with kids from Beauceville, Que., to Cole Harbour, N.S., becoming national heroes and leading Canada’s teams to 14 Olympic gold medals. Parents buy vans to lug around hockey gear and travel en masse to tournaments around the world, with Canadians outnumbering Czech fans at the recent Olympic quarter-final.
However, for one reason or another, the importance Canadians place in hockey has failed to transcend that sport. In basketball, for example, despite producing the best player in the world and 25 current NBA players, Canada’s teams remain at a disadvantage compared to their international competition. Basketball federations in France, Germany, and the U.S. invest up to six times what Canada Basketball does, enabling them to host longer and bigger training camps, more competitive exhibition schedules, and better performance environments, including five-star hotels outside of the Olympic Village.
COC, CPC will continue to lobby feds for sport core funding after budget gave none
“You have to train like the best to attract the best to then be the best, and if we can’t invest the funds in the appropriate training camp, coaching and pre-competition resources, we won’t be able to attract the best,” Canada Basketball CEO Michael Bartlett told the CBC. “We’ll continue to try and attract more brands and philanthropists and donors to support basketball in this country. But we also need government to step forward to support the sector at least on pace with inflation.”
It’s not just up to politicians. Corporate Canada needs to continue investing into sports that are popular with old and new Canadians alike such as basketball, soccer, and cricket – the fastest-growing sport in Canada. The press needs to continue investing in storytelling, sending reporters to cover big events like, you know, the Olympics.
Canada’s Yuvraj Samra during a 2026 ICC Men’s T20 Cricket World Cup group stage match between Afghanistan and Canada in Chennai, India, on Thursday.R. SATISH BABU/AFP/Getty Images
Canadians need to show up as well, not in a transactional way but genuinely, taking advantage of the inherent sports fandom that lies dormant inside us before bursting through during the playoffs or Olympics. Go cheer on your local high school and university teams; participate in community-centre basketball runs or badminton games; enjoy baseball at the local park; see why there is hype around new Canadian pro leagues like the Canadian Elite Basketball League, the Professional Women’s Hockey League, and Northern Super League; and, most importantly, bring people together with a viewing party for the upcoming FIFA World Cup or with a travelling party to cheer on Team Canada at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. That’s how Canadians can build traditions that eventually restructure civic life – ones with sports, community, and a healthy kind of nationalism at the forefront.
“This isn’t just about Olympic success,” David Shoemaker said. “It’s about how important sport can be to the lives of Canadians.”
It’s time for Canada to come together through our shared passion of sport – to develop a new national identity, one that repudiates the current American administration’s values of intolerance and othering and instead prioritizes the same things that make sports so great, including unity, teamwork, togetherness, leadership, health, and fun. That way, the government will have no choice but to follow along, and the momentum will snowball faster than Connor McDavid skating through the neutral zone.