COC launches $500-million Team Canada 2035 plan

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The Canadian Olympic Committee has unveiled a 10-year plan to make Canada a top-five country across winter and summer sport, get over a million more young people involved in sport and champion climate action to preserve sporting environments.

The COC unveiled the Team Canada 2035 strategy Monday, just 11 days out from the opening ceremonies of the Milan Cortina Winter Olympic Games.

The three-pronged plan of Podium, Play and Planet will be backed by a $500-million private investment in sport driven by the COC’s 39 corporate sponsors and Canadian Olympic Foundation donors, COC chief executive officer David Shoemaker said.

The COC wants to accelerate the development of a diverse staff and board, promote safe, inclusive and barrier-free work environments in its own operations, foster a safe, equitable and inclusive environment for athletes, partner with Indigenous peoples to increase inclusion in sport, and work with other sport organizations to achieve those goals.

The COC says the loss of outdoor skating days and reduced snowfall due to increased temperatures, and an increase in wildfires, are among the reasons for wanting to reduce its carbon emissions by 50 per cent by 2030 and get to net zero by 2040.

The COC wants to be an example for others in sport to do the same.

Canada is a top-five nation in Olympic winter sport, and ranked 12th in the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.

“We can be a sporting nation like none other,” Shoemaker said. “We can be the world leader in connecting our Olympic results to transforming how young people get into sport in this country.

“This isn’t just about Olympic success. It’s about how important sport can be to the lives of Canadians. I don’t think we’ve been doing a very good job of connecting those things in the past. This is our commitment to do that over the next 10 years.”

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Shoemaker said the COC embarked on the project two years ago, and its goals were approved by the country’s national sport organizations early last year.

The COC also presented its data and plan last year to the Future of Sport in Canada Commission, which was tasked with making sport safer and better, and which issued an interim report in August.

“I’d like to think we saw some of that in its report,” Shoemaker said.

“The Canadian sport system and sport at the grassroots level is becoming increasingly inaccessible.

“We believe that we need to work hard at creating greater access, and there are lots of programs that exist already today, Tennis Canada’s First Serve program or Canada Snowboard has an Indigenous snowboard team. Our “Play” pillar will look to work with NSO partners in these areas.”

The COC will disclose its carbon footprint annually with 2022 as its baseline.

“None of our ambitious goals around being a top-five nation on a combined basis in the winter and summer Games or getting one million more young people into organized sport can be achieved if our sporting environments aren’t preserved,” Shoemaker said.

“We hear about it from winter and summer athletes alike, melting glaciers where skiers train and perform, or Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson talked about the increasing difficulty of being beach volleyball players with stifling heat or forest fires making it difficult to breathe.”

The COC and Canadian Paralympic Committee have twice asked the federal government on behalf of national sport organizations for an increase in annual core funding, which they say hasn’t increased since 2005.

Core funding has been described as the blood in the veins of an organization that pays for operations and the development of the next generation of athletes.

Two federal budgets passed without a core funding increase – the ask was $144 million in 2025 – although athletes got a raise in their monthly assistance cheques in 2024.

Shoemaker hopes Team Canada 2035 sends a signal to the federal government that sport is worth the investment.

“As much as it’s a framework for all of our sport partners, it’s equally a framework for the federal government that we’ve now long advocated for their increase in federal funding to the sport system,” he said.

“If a lack of a vision had been a reason why they’d been reluctant to do so before now, we hope this gives them added impetus to do it going forward.”