MILAN – Canada’s Secretary of Sport knows what it is to be an Olympian, albeit in a summer sport.
Adam van Koeverden, an Olympic kayak champion, said the fan came out in him at the Milan Cortina Winter Games, particularly while watching his favourite winter sport of cross-country skiing.
“Not just Canadian athletes, but all athletes,” he said Friday at the Canadian consulate in Milan. “I watch them, and I have a degree of educated awe that I can feel.”
The Liberal MP for Burlington North-Milton West, who was the 500-metre champion in 2004 and owns three more Olympic medals, was handed the sports post in Prime Minister Mark Carney’s first cabinet just under a year ago.
Van Koeverden served six years as parliamentary secretary to successive sport ministers after first being elected in 2019.
Canadian athletes, and by extension the national sport system, are under a hot spotlight at the Olympic Games as successes and misses are magnified in the biggest multi-sport stage on the planet.
With three silver medals and four bronze, Canada had yet to win gold on Friday, which was the deepest a Canadian team had gone, not standing atop the podium since the 1988 Olympic Games in Calgary, where the host team was shut out of gold.
The Canadian Olympic and Paralympic committees have lobbied the federal government on behalf of national sport organizations (NSOs) for an increase in core funding, with the latest ask a $144-million raise in 2025.
Core funding is money all NSOs count on to fund operations, athletes, coaches and support staff, and they say it hasn’t increased since 2005. It’s been described as the “blood in the veins” of an organization.
Two federal budgets have passed without an increase, although athletes saw a $410 raise in their monthly athlete assistance cheques in the 2024 budget.
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Chief executive officer David Shoemaker has said that Canada’s athletes “are having to increasingly do more with less.”
Van Koeverden maintains there’s been considerable investment in athletes by the federal government, which spends $266 million annually on sport.
“In the last seven years, we’ve managed to increase the athlete assistance program by 45 per cent,” he said, adding there have also been increases in mental health services, support for student-athletes and funding at sport institutes that provide science and medical resources.
“It has been dwelled on that one stream, which represents about 15 per cent of our sport funding, has remained the same, but the total sport budget and all of the things that I just mentioned, since the time when a lot of organizations have been indicating, about 20 years, has more than doubled.”
The sport system must also do more than build Olympians, van Koeverden said.
“That’s one reason that we fund sport, but there’s a dozen others too,” he said. “My main sort of policy obsession is making sure that everybody has an opportunity to play regardless of your financial background, your situation, where you live, who your parents are, how much money you got, whether you have a disability or not, whether you feel like you belong, let’s lower all those barriers.
“It’s a question of do you want to fund Olympic performance for Olympic performance or do you want to fund sport for all the great reasons in the way that will benefit children, youth, families, seniors, communities, for all of the reasons and all the ways we know it can? What you get out of that is also Olympic performance. That’s my vision.”
Where the federal government has opened the coffers for sport, van Koeverden says, is in the infrastructure money in the 2025 federal budget to build and revitalize pools, arenas and fieldhouses.
“It used to be a be like a $200-million fund, and now it’s a $51-billion fund,” he said. “It’s shared with waste water and public transit, but the availability of funding for sport infrastructure is vastly broadened and increased.
“We’ve got good facilities in our country, but we need to build more. The prime minister is not shy about wanting to build Canada, and that includes sports facilities.”
As for Canada hosting another Olympic Games or a multi-sport event such as the Pan American or Commonwealth Games, van Koeverden said the push does not come from the federal government.
The feds provide financial support for such ventures, such as the $320 million for FIFA World Cup matches in Toronto and Vancouver later this year.
Van Koeverden is a believer in the public legacy pieces that multi-sport events leave behind.
He points to the Milton velodrome in his riding, built for the 2015 Pan American Games, where Olympic track cyclists train, and parents push strollers when it’s snowing outside.
“Before we get too wrapped up in how much the Games cost to implement and do, let’s also look at how timely that infrastructure comes to fruition when we have a deadline and a Games to host,” he said.
“It is a matter of working together with all levels of government to make sure it’s a priority, to make that it’s utilizing existing infrastructure, to make sure the public money that goes into it is going to serve Canadians for decades.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 13, 2026.
