Date
March
14
2007
Members Present
ITEM 1: PRAYER
Assembly Members
Debates of March 14, 2007 (day 2)
Topics
Statements
Member’s Statement On Administration Of Territorial Sports Organizations
Michael McLeod
Deh Cho
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, along with my colleague from Thebacha, I, too, would like to speak to the frustrations that are facing the territorial sport organizations in applying for funding. The Canada Winter Games were recently held in Whitehorse and many NWT athletes that were there held their own against the rest of the country. Many of the coaches and mission staff and those that are directly involved with the athletes are volunteers, Mr. Speaker. It’s these volunteers that allow the athletes to compete. We ask the volunteers to coach and mould our athletes and yet we offer them very little support.
Volunteers have to fill out a lot of applications, Mr. Speaker, for funding. They don’t get much help in filling out those applications, and then they have to account for everything afterwards and they don’t get much help in doing that, either. We have over 27 different sport organizations, as my colleague pointed out, and each one of them face the same problem. I’ve seen the table of all the money that was owed by these territorial sport organizations and it amounted to a lot of money, Mr. Speaker.
We have too many boards within the sport organizations and, like so many things within the government, we tend to have too much admin at the top and that takes a lot of money away from those that directly use the program. It’s a problem that’s right across the board, Mr. Speaker. A new sport council was formed recently and came into effect and that didn’t really have the blessing of a lot of the territorial sport organizations.
Mr. Speaker, we have to offer support to the volunteers with the amount of paperwork that we expect them to fill out. I do know volunteers that have been burned out because they’re expected to do so many things and they’d rather just step back and not have to deal with the politics and the admin of sports. This takes away from those who these programs were really designed for, Mr. Speaker, and those are the athletes.
I met a guy one time who was a goaltending coach for one of the NHL teams and he said the North has some of the best natural athletes he’s ever seen. We just have to make sure we nurture them. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
---Applause