Minister of Sport Pascale St-Onge stands during question period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2022. The federal government is giving $225,000 to the national athletes association AthletesCAN to centralize services into a one-stop shop. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
GATINEAU, Que. – The federal government is giving $225,000 to the national athletes association, AthletesCAN, to centralize services into a one-stop shop.
AthletesCAN serves as the collective voice of national-team athletes, which has grown louder in recent months because of safe-sport issues.
Sport Minister Pascale St-Onge announced the funding Friday.
The money is to create one hub for information and resources already across the sport system in the areas of safe sport, funding, E-Learning, the Canadian Olympic and Paralympic committees, Commonwealth Sport Canada and those organizations’ athletes councils.
The hub will also link to Game Plan, which is an athlete wellness program, and provide an athlete data collection tool.
“Athlete representation is essential in the Canadian sport system,” St-Onge said Friday in a statement. “It ensures that the measures put in place represent the real needs of athletes.
“Our government is proud to support AthletesCAN so that they can provide the right tools for national athletes to create powerful and impactful change in the sport system.
“With their new project, AthleteHUB, they’ll be able to centralize all of the information athletes need for support, resources, training and modules in one website.”
AthletesCAN members include athletes currently competing for Canada or who have retired within the last eight years in Paralympic, Olympic, Commonwealth, Pan American and Parapan American sport, as well as world championships in sports funded by Sport Canada.
“There is an ever-increasing demand to support and educate high-performance athletes in navigating the complexity of the Canadian sport system, and how to utilize its resources efficiently,” said AthletesCAN president Erin Willson, a 2012 Olympian in artistic swimming.
“The AthleteHUB will close this gap and provide direct access to athletes to the information they will need on their journey towards a successful and empowering sport experience.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 10, 2023.
