Thank you very much. I might not take 10 minutes. I'm not going to read a script. I'm going to think about why this bill came forward—and I'd like to thank John Weston, in particular, and all the other people who have supported it—but more importantly, about why it's so necessary right now.

We really are facing a crisis in the inactivity levels with our young people and people of all ages. We've seen some very inspirational things. Even just yesterday, I watched as Hazel McCallion retired at age 93 and went out skating. Those kinds of Canadians are my heroes and I look up to the 80-year-olds and 90-year-olds who are still full of life and vitality. I look at kids playing in the playgrounds and I see the same potential. Then I see kids sitting on the steps, on the sidelines, on their BlackBerry or their iPhone—I guess they're all on an iPhone. But I really am worried about where we're going.

When John and I and a few others talked about how we would judge the 2010 Olympics, the big effort that was being put in, the huge cost.... How would we measure it? Would it be successful? What were the measures we would apply? We all agreed it wasn't going to be the number of medals that Canada won. It wasn't going to be that we put on a great games and we were on budget. It was going to be, did we change Canadians' attitudes towards their own personal fitness through this big effort? That was five years ago. Nobody then would have dreamed that five years later 50% of Canadian students would have their own smartphones and be so engaged in them. We really are at a crisis level. We cannot continue. The numbers are there. We know there's a tsunami and that it's not going to be pretty if it keeps on going.

I believe that kids instinctively want to run about and play and have fun. I sense that parents are a little confused. Somehow we've gotten parents to a situation where they are insecure in sending their child to the neighbourhood park. They might be considered a parent who's negligent if they don't hover over them all the time. Yet they don't understand that putting their child in front of a device or a screen for hours and hours on end is not considered child abuse. But, really, we have to change things. I grew up in an era when we were sent out to play. We played actively. We created our own play. I was never involved in organized sport. We just had pick-up games on the street and in the backyards. Now everything has to be so organized that the kids don't have time to play. I'm not against organized sport. We have fantastic sport, and we have some great people involved in sport, and in coaching and helping the kids out. But there needs to be unstructured play too.

I'm very encouraged by what is happening. First of all, I like what I am hearing from the physical educators of this country who are recognizing that physical literacy is a basic literacy thing, and it has to be treated as a subject. It has to be marked. It has to be measured. It has to be taken seriously. I challenge them to do what other sports have done, which is to have level one, two, three, and four in their program for coaching and training of the athletes, because we are not going to get university-educated physical educators in every classroom in this country. It's not going to happen. We know that. Ideally it would happen. We need the physical educators having people who can help them, so that the classroom teacher, who is now faced with 20 or 30 kids ranging from little round people who don't know how to move very well to little buzz-bombs who are full of sugar and ready to run, has help so that the kids can be active and they can be out there.

I'm very encouraged when I see programs like HIGH FIVE, which started in Ontario and is now spreading across the country. It's a program to train what I would call play animators, people who can be responsible for children in the public parks and help get them moving. It's like level one of physical education.

There are a lot of good things happening there. I'm really encouraged, and working with John and this great group of advisers we have had in this national health and fitness day initiative, we've seen public-private partnerships and collaborations in the business world to help get involved in programs that help fill some of the gaps out there.

A lot of good things are happening, but I would say that national health and fitness day is only the beginning. Just the other day I was reading the speeches that took place in the House of Commons at second reading. It was very interesting to see how many parliamentarians were recognizing the importance of the issue and speaking of their own personal situations on how they have come to realize themselves, usually through a little health crisis, how necessary it is. I was also very impressed that the support for what we're doing has come from all parties. This is truly a non-partisan effort.

The challenge that I think we all have here is to make it happen. We don't need more studies. We don't need more research, although research and study should be ongoing so we can measure when we start to make progress. But we do need a commitment from everybody to work at this. There is no simple answer. It's a combination of what we call health and fitness. It's physical activity and nutritious, healthy eating as well. So there are some challenges.

I'm going to close with that. I welcome your questions.

Thank you.

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