Vital Role of Physical Activity and Sport

Honourable senators, when Senator McBean called me earlier this year to ask whether I would speak to this inquiry, my first instinct was hesitation. What sport story could I possibly tell while standing in this chamber in the company of national champions and Olympic gold medallists? I was never an athlete. In fact, the closest I came to competitive sport in my school years was a swimming contest that ended with me nearly drowning in cold water from a sudden muscle cramp and then being rescued mercifully by my peers.

Upon reflection, I realized that sport is woven deeply into my life, not through podiums but through something quieter and more lasting. It is woven into my family, my community and our beloved Canada.

I moved to Canada with my wife, Najla, and our young family in 1988. We were newcomers, still learning this country’s rhythms, its seasons and its language of belonging. What we did not yet know was that sport would become one of the most powerful embodiments of that language.

I asked each of my three children to share a memory with me. What came back moved me deeply. And from a dear friend, I received a story that spans four generations of Canadian belonging. I am honoured to share them with you today.

I have come to believe that in Canada, sport is not merely recreation. It is one of the quiet mechanisms by which this country makes good on its promise to the child who just arrived and to the great-grandchild of the one who came before.

Let me begin with a moment so small in scale yet so large in memory that I return to it often.

Our daughter Leen was in kindergarten — five years old, small, determined and dressed for the occasion — when her school organized an ice-skating performance at a local community arena. It was a collection of very young children doing their earnest best to stay upright and in formation on a sheet of ice. Leen was not yet an experienced skater. None of them were.

At one point, the choreographer called on her and the spotlight found her. She struggled — adorably and visibly — to coordinate her movements with her peers. She wobbled, she recovered and she wobbled again. The audience erupted, not in mockery but in the warmest possible laughter and applause, willing this tiny girl forward with their unconditional cheering.

What Leen learned that day was not a skating technique. She learned about trying in public, about the grace of imperfection and about a community that shows up, not just for the polished performance but for the honest one.

Years later, as a coxswain for her high school rowing team on Lake Ontario, Leen learned something else entirely: Leadership is not authority but responsibility — how to guide, encourage and push a group of athletes to their very best even when conditions are difficult and morale is low.

She described to me the feeling of the boat when every oar was perfectly in sync: “Effortless,” she said. “Almost weightless. Like a duck gliding across still water.” The greatest feeling in sport, she told me, comes when individual effort dissolves into something larger than yourself.

She carried both lessons forward. Today, Leen is the co‑founder of a successful international NGO, a mother of two and an influential presence in every room she enters.

At age 15, our son Omar was part of a high school rowing team that competed in the Mother’s Day High School Regatta. The day was windy and relentless. Their coach offered an unconventional piece of advice: “Lift your oars faster after each stroke and let the wind carry you forward.” They were not the strongest crew on the water, but that strategy helped them win the silver medal.

It was Omar’s first real lesson that in sport — as in life — raw strength is not always the deciding factor. Sometimes it is knowing how to read your conditions and how to use them.

He has carried that lesson into a career in engineering, technology and artificial intelligence, and it has served him just as well off the water as on it.

There is one more family memory I must share, and this one belongs not only to us but to the entire country.

On February 21, 2002, in Salt Lake City, the Canadian women’s ice hockey team was up against the United States in the Olympic gold medal game. We watched as a family with an intensity I have rarely felt in a living room. Canada and the United States were navigating genuine political tension at that time — sound familiar? — and this game carried the weight of national identity.

When that final buzzer sounded, we went outside, and so did everyone else. The streets filled. Strangers embraced strangers. We were newcomers in the grand historical sense, from different parts of the world, different cultures and backgrounds, and, yet, in that moment, there was no distance between us and the celebration. We were in it. We were of it. We belonged. Sport, at its highest pitch, does not merely entertain a nation. It reminds a nation of itself.

I want to close with the story of my dear friend Dany Assaf — a prominent lawyer, community leader and proud Canadian — because it captures something no single generation can fully contain. Dany loves hockey. Born in Edmonton to a Muslim Arab Canadian family with roots in Lebanon, he grew up in the 1970s, looking up at a big, blue prairie sky above a clean sheet of outdoor ice. To him, it was almost spiritual. A clean sheet of ice, he still says, reminds him of the unlimited opportunity that is Canada.

His father, Mohamed, who never played but deeply loved the game, enrolled him at the age of four and volunteered to manage the local rink. Those post-game drives home were when a father taught his son about teamwork, humility, resilience and respect. Waiting at home was his mother with a cup of hot chocolate in hand.

There is yet a deeper history here: Dany’s great-grandfather helped build Canada’s first mosque in Edmonton in 1938, the Al Rashid Mosque, now a heritage building in Fort Edmonton Park. It looks, incidentally, like a mosque and a Ukrainian Orthodox church at the same time because the contractor was a Ukrainian Canadian, and no one had ever built a mosque in Canada before. That is Canada in miniature.

Fast forward to 2012, nearly 85 years after his great-grandfather arrived in Canada. Dany and his wife, Lisa, watched proudly as their son, Mohamad, carried the Canadian flag at midfield during the opening ceremonies of the one-hundredth anniversary of the Grey Cup, representing Canadian youth from across the country. It was a packed stadium. The Prime Minister was in attendance and shook hands with Dany’s son.

A family whose ancestor helped build Canada’s first mosque, a family who endured misguided prejudice in the wake of 9/11, watched their son walk onto that field carrying the Maple Leaf — not as a footnote, not as a symbol of division, but as a representative of Canada. Dany told me that, in that moment, he felt overwhelming humility and gratitude. He thought of his great-grandfather, of those prairie rinks, of his father flooding outdoor ice on cold winter nights and of his mother’s hot chocolate.

He thought about how this country, imperfect though it may be, had made space for his family, not just to live here, but to belong. There are times when that promise seems harder to hold on to. That is when we look to forces, like sport, that bind us together rather than pull us apart.

“Nearly 160 years into Confederation,” Dany writes, “we have collected ample evidence that Canada works for us all.” His family’s arc is proof, not because everything was easy, but because opportunity and belonging ultimately prevailed.

He tells these stories in his book, Say Please and Thank You & Stand in Line: One man’s story of what makes Canada special, and how to keep it that way.

Dany continues that work alongside our colleague Senator McBean on the board of Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame, working every day to share the stories of sport that inspire, unite and represent the very best of us.

Honourable colleagues, the stories I have shared today are not exceptional. Across this country, in community rinks and school gyms, and on neighbourhood fields, sport is quietly doing this work every single day, building confidence, forging belonging and changing trajectories. But that work depends on access. Too many Canadian children, because of cost, geography or circumstances, never get their moment on the ice, never find their boat and never discover what they are made of. The evidence is clear: Financial barriers are rising and participation is declining in precisely the communities where sport’s transformative power is needed most.

This inquiry is, therefore, an opportunity and, I would argue, an obligation for governments, sports organizations and communities to act together to fund grassroots sport, to open our facilities seven days a week and to ensure that no child in this country is priced out of the experience that has shaped so many of us in this chamber.

As our Indigenous communities have long understood, movement is medicine. I have seen its power in a small girl who wobbled on the ice but won the whole room anyway; in a young woman guiding a rowing eight across Lake Ontario in the silence of early morning; in a son who learned that strategy outweighs strength; and in a father from Alberta who watched his son carry the Canadian flag and, in that moment, remembered a great‑grandfather —

Yes, I would like to request leave for more time, please.

Thank you so much.

In that moment, he remembered a great-grandfather who had been told, “You are welcome here. We are glad you came.”

Honourable senators, sport gave our family a team to cheer for before we fully knew the language. It gave us somewhere to belong before we had the words to say so. For a newcomer family and for so many families who have made this country their home, that is not a small gift. That is everything.

As we look to this year — the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, the Arctic Winter Games in Whitehorse and the FIFA World Cup in Vancouver and Toronto — these events will produce champions and records. However, they will also produce something more lasting: the experience of a country recognizing itself and of the world seeing Canada not only as a host but as a home and as a beacon for humanity.

To every athlete, at every level, pay it forward. Make space for every child. Remind them that, with practice, passion and patience, the seemingly impossible can truly become possible.

Like the eternal Olympic flame, may Canadians’ love of sport always burn brightly.

Thank you, meegwetch, shukran.