Mr. Speaker, how many of us stopped playing sports when we were kids because we weren't good enough to make a team or because we kept getting benched in favour of the better players on the team? How many of us didn't try a sport at all because we thought well, I am not the athletic type, I'd never be able to compete with the athletic kids? Or how many of us were on a competitive team but there were so many practices and games, it was so intense, there was so much pressure, it took over our lives and then we quit because it just wasn't fun anymore?

Sports are supposed to be fun. It's supposed to be a game, play. As we get older, hardly any of us become professional athletes. We tell ourselves we should stay active but realistically, none of us are going to make time for sport in our busy adult lives unless it's fun. And yet for some reason, so much of our system of organized sport revolves around the idea it has to be competitive, that we need to focus resources on the most skilled players and weed out the rest. The idea that the drive to win is the thing that's going to motivate us the most, even from a young age, to try and push to be our best selves, that if we're out there giving everyone participation medals and no first place trophies that we will never develop excellence.

Well, we can look to the country that won the most medals in the recent Olympic Games, Norway, a country of only 5.6 million people, tiny even compared to Canada and yet they have the best winter athletes in the world. Yet, they do not have any system of competitive sports for youth under the age of 12.

Their national youth sports strategy is called Joy of Sport for All. It's about ensuring there's a place for every child in every sport and encouraging everyone in the family to play sports together. Of course, there's also an emphasis on building competence in sports. It's more fun when you can feel confident in your skills. I think Norway's model is a good reminder that we can afford to shift resources towards more emphasis on inclusion in youth sports. We need to recruit more coaches who may not be or have ever been the elite athletes themselves, but they're able to create joyful spaces for kids to play and grow and build physical and mental resiliency. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.