We Should Want to Win

Sports are the purest measure of ambition we have. There are podiums, clocks, and clear rankings. None of it is subjective. You either build the system that produces champions, or you do not.

Canada, in this past decade, seems to be comfortable accepting itself as a middle sports performer.

But the world will only remember the fastest person alive, never the second. Sport is cruel that way, but so is science, business, art, technology, and national power. The returns to being the best are highly concentrated at the top.¹

Photo from Yahoo Sports

We should want to be the best. That instinct is not arrogant nor “un-Canadian”. It is healthy. A serious country wants its people to measure themselves against the best in the world and win.

When they do – the country is unmistakably united in a way nothing else can, with no thought to which province you come from or how you vote. A Canadian victory pushes the boundary of what the next kid thinks is possible.

We felt that at several moments during the recent FIFA World Cup.

Photo taken by our videographer Arvin Farsyad

Canadians love the idea of winning, but are culturally unpracticed and uncomfortable with the prioritization, investment, and systems it takes to get there. Winning isn’t about how loud you cheer. It is, fundamentally, a matter of rigorous objectives and well allocated resources.

To win, Canada must choose to pursue excellence. We must begin with changes to our attitude and funding systems around sport.

How We Diluted our Winning Focus

Vancouver 2010 proved that we can build championship systems. After subpar performances at Montreal 76 and Calgary 88, we established the “Own the Podium” program explicitly to direct funding towards athletes who had a reasonable shot at winning.²

It worked – Canada won 14 gold medals, the most of any at those games and the most we had ever earned at a Winter Olympics.³

However, over the past decade, we started broadening our definition of winning to include other objectives without meaningful increase in financial resources alongside it.

Landing page on the Own the Podium website

The issue is, a mandate that tries to do everything on a stagnant budget dilutes the most important outcome a top level sports system exists to do: win.

This is the result of a wider Canadian cultural note which has found its way into sports. We are hoping to do far too much on far too little, and ultimately underachieve as a result. Against countries that organize explicitly around gold, we have become spread thin and competitively disadvantaged.

If we are to win, the Canadian sport system will have to make calculated bets — prioritizing world-class resources where impact can be highest and focusing effort on tangible performance results.

Inevitably, when wins do come, political and cultural will follows – and more funding for the Canadian sports ecosystem with it. Only then will the system compound.

A Funding Gap in Canadian Sports

A funding structure that stalls

The American system is not perfect, but it has built something Canada has not: strong private channels that turn fan enthusiasm, alumni loyalty, corporate ambition, donor status, and local pride into athlete development.

To highlight the gap: U.S. college athletics alone raise roughly 24x what all of Canada's sport and recreation charities do.^{[4](https://ncaaorg.s3.amazonaws.com/research/Finances/2025D1RES_DI-RevExpReport_Final.pdf), [5](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/250623/dq250623b-eng.htm)D1RES_DI-RevExpReport_Final.pdf)}

Sport results follow the money, and our system has historically done little to bring private money in. A Canadian who wants to back an athlete, a club, a coach, or a national program has encountered friction. The tax treatment is unclear and the sponsorship rules are confusing.

So the government has become the banker of first resort, national sport organizations have become supplicants writing grant applications, and our athletes have become undercapitalized representatives of a wealthy country.

Downstream Funding Pains for Athletes

Canada’s federal Athlete Assistance Program supports roughly 1,900 athletes in more than 90 sport disciplines. Its living and training allowance ranges from $1,305 to $2,175 per month. At the highest monthly level, that is $26,100 per year.⁶ That income cannot create a serious high-performance life.

Canadian national team organizations are stretched too. In 2024 the Canadian Olympic Committee and Canadian Paralympic Committee warned that core funding for national sport organizations had not kept up with almost two decades of inflation, and that their purchasing power had dropped 33% since the last increase in 2005.⁷ Ninety percent of those organizations depend on federal money to run their programs.

The Champion Canada Plan

The Canadian instinct here is to request a bigger cheque from the government. To be fair, the federal money is growing. Ottawa pledged an additional ~$1+ billion for sport in the past six months, and the current government has emphasized sport as an important nation-building priority.⁸

But the problem has not only been the size of the federal cheque. It is also that the system does almost nothing to pull private money in alongside it.

A growing group of Canadians want to give to sport, or invest in it. Jesse Marsch’s national-team salary is supported by philanthropy and Canada Soccer has raised $25M in the past 18 months through its foundation’s Canada Rising campaign.⁹

There is room for more help if it were simple, visible, and tax-efficient to do so.

Image from Sportsnet link

So the plan is three moves: open the private channels, put a floor under our athletes, and keep our champions in view.

A) Open Private Funding Channels

1. Create Team Canada Accounts. Every verified national-team athlete gets a transparent, CRA-compliant account for approved training, travel, coaching, equipment, therapy, nutrition, and competition costs. Any Canadian can give straight into it and claim a 50% tax credit, within sensible annual caps and under real audit and fraud rules.

2. Open corporate giving beyond the usual giants. Today only a handful of big national brands have a real path into national sport. Extend the same credit to companies that give to national sport organizations, verified athlete accounts, and registered amateur bodies, and write standard templates so a firm can back an athlete without tripping over eligibility, conflict, or marketing-rights problems. Backing an athlete should feel as ordinary for a mid-sized company as buying a rink board or sponsoring the local tournament.

3. Dedicate a share of sports-betting revenue to athlete development. Single-event wagering is now part of the culture, and the athletes whose performances create that product should not be absent from the conversation about the money it throws off. Ontario’s regulated iGaming market handled about $11.4 billion in wagers and produced about $654 million in gaming revenue in 2024–25.¹⁰ Betting is regulated by the provinces, so Ottawa should pursue a federal-provincial compact to direct a small slice of it to athlete development, coaching, sport science, and safe training environments.

4. Build a Canadian Sport Endowment. Make it permanent and independently governed, funded by philanthropy, corporate gifts, estates, a share of betting revenue, and public matching. Give it a long mandate: athletes, coaches, sport science, national training centres, and a route for retired athletes into coaching and leadership. An endowment stops the whole system living cheque to cheque on the annual budget and gives Canadians one institution to back excellence through for decades.

B) Establish a national athlete income floor.

No senior athlete carrying the flag at an Olympic, Paralympic, or world-championship level should be scraping by on $26,100. Set a clear target: every verified senior national-team athlete should be able to reach at least $50,000 a year from carding, direct giving, approved sponsorship, prize money, and sport-specific support combined. The government’s role is to develop the policies, remove the friction, and create the incentives to make hitting this goal achievable within a set timeline.

C) Keep our champions in view.

Status is what changes culture, so put our champions where the country can see them: school visits, an annual ceremony with the Governor General or the Prime Minister, regular features of current and former champions on the national broadcaster, a Canadian Champions Registry, and paid pathways for retired athletes to coach the next generation.

To go even further, and if public support was supportive, there is also room to explore an update to Canadian-content expectations for sport with the CRTC. We protect Canadian music and video, but have no requirements to show any Canadian national team sports. A revision could be narrowly focused on Canadians competing under the national banner, so that national-team moments and events stay accessible to Canadians rather than disappearing behind foreign paywalls.

This Matters Far Beyond Sport…

Some of this may run counter to Canadian culture, well beyond sport, however if we decide to win sport is the place to start. The stakes are plain and the results come fast.

If you run a company, sponsor an athlete. If you are a fan, give directly to the system where possible. If you are in government, make backing athletes simple. If you are Canadian, stop treating winning as something we only care about every few years.

Let’s use the momentum from the World Cup to make a system that lasts and to decide, as a habit, that being the best is worth resourcing.

We have the players and the passion.

Play to win, Canada.

Gold Medal Men’s Hockey Team in Vancouver 2010, from the NYT