Rory Gilfillan is a faculty member and coach at Lakefield College School.In 2011, Team Canada soccer captain Christine Sinclair broke her nose in the opening game against Germany. In a sport where athletes regularly drop like they have been hit by a 303 deer rifle from injuries both real and, far more often, imagined, it was assumed that Christine Sinclair was done for the tournament. But Sinclair wasn’t a soccer player. She was a Canadian soccer player.The distinction mattered.Maybe she had never heard Bobby Clark’s line about taking the shortest line to the puck and arriving in ill humour. Maybe she didn’t know that Clark had also viciously broken Soviet star Valeri Kharlamov’s ankle in the '72 Summit series, or that Bobby Baun scored the Stanley Cup winner on a broken leg. But she certainly understood that some games matter. She grasped the assignment.Canadians played injured. Canadians played to win.At least we used to.Canada has become a house league nation. We are happy enough just to show up. Some of our athletes succeed despite our indifference between the Games, but the Winter Olympics’ paltry medal count indicates that they are the notable exception. This is not an accident or bad luck or the vagaries of sports, where the margins between victory and defeat are razor-thin. It’s now a feature of being Canadian. Where once Canadians would do anything to win, we now value participating. We are unsettled when scores are kept, and medals are awarded (except if everyone gets one). Hockey was always different, but right now the two gold medals we lost feel like a harbinger of things to come. Our mediocre performance on the world stage, especially in the Winter Games, a season that is supposed to be the defining feature of being Canadian, is not a question of a lack of resources but where we choose to direct them..We have a public broadcaster with a budget over a billion dollars that no one under the age of sixty watches, an accompanying streaming service that, if it suddenly went offline, no one would notice. We have unprecedented gun violence in the GTA, but choose to invest in a program to buy back scary-looking .22 rifles instead of going after gang members with Glocks. Police charge people who defend their homes from armed intruders, and judges give sentencing discounts to prevent deportation or to facilitate violent offenders returning quickly to terrorize their communities. We have a one-billion-dollar Federal program that covers the costs of physio, prescription drugs, and dental for denied asylum seekers; benefits that most Canadians and certainly many of our Olympic athletes either pay for out of pocket or simply forgo. Even our rural school buses lack winter tires and regularly cancel if their routes aren’t pristine, arguing in some kind of proto-DEI way that if not all kids can get to school, then no kids can get to school.Diversity isn’t a strength if there is no willingness to define and then defend the common good. Trump was supposed to be a wake-up call, not a rationalization to do nothing. Elbows up was supposed to be a Gordie Howe metaphor for grit and belligerence, not turning Heinz ketchup bottles upside down at the local Foodland or choosing not to cross the border to go to Six Flags.If Carney and his party are serious about his Davos speech, the next Winter Games is an excellent place to start. Canada does not need to be reinvented or reset; it needs to remember that we weren’t always like this. But nothing will change. Lots of words. Loads of virtue projected. No action of any kind. Because that’s what we are comfortable with. Our athletes deserve a hell of a lot better. So do the rest of us. No country can operate this way indefinitely.Rory Gilfillan is a faculty member and coach at Lakefield College School.
