Quebec Elections

Outaouais sport leaders urge election candidates to treat grassroots and elite sport as one

Tashi Farmilo

Excellence sportive Outaouais has added its name to a Quebec-wide open letter urging candidates in the October 5 provincial election to treat sport as a permanent part of the province's future rather than a campaign-season promise, arguing that the path from a first practice in a Gatineau gym to the national stage is a single continuum worth protecting in every region.

The appeal comes as the provincial campaign runs toward the October 5 vote and less than six months before Quebec City hosts the 2027 Canada Winter Games. The Games run from February 27 to March 14 and mark a return to the city 60 years after the first Canada Games were held there in 1967. For young athletes across the Outaouais, those two weeks are the visible tip of years of work in local clubs, and that, the alliance says, is exactly the part voters and politicians tend to forget.

The letter's central point is that recreational and competitive sport are not fighting over the same ground. Participation and high performance are stages of one journey, the signatories write, beginning when a child falls for a sport and, for a few, reaching the national level. Elite athletes drive the innovations and the inspiration that filter back to everyone else, they argue, while a wide base of participants is what allows the next standout to emerge in the first place.

Coaches get equal billing. Their development is inseparable from that of their athletes, the letter says, and a well-supported coach can shape dozens of young people over a career while lifting an entire club. Keeping that expertise in the region, rather than watching it drift away, depends on giving coaches the conditions to keep working and improving here in Quebec.

That regional stake is where the letter speaks most directly to Outaouais readers. First practices, first competitions and first ambitions usually take shape close to home, it notes. The centres that make up the alliance are meant to bridge that gap, linking local clubs and coaches to provincial and national resources once an athlete or coach is ready for the next step. Excellence sportive Outaouais, led by director general Elodie Brault, covers the Outaouais along with the Abitibi-Témiscamingue and the Nord-du-Québec, some of the province's most spread-out territory and a long way from the Quebec City venues that will draw the cameras in 2027.

The alliance, which groups eight regional multisport training centres serving all 17 of Quebec's administrative regions, is deliberate about the timing. With parties trading pledges on health, education and the economy, it wants sport counted as a real building block of the Quebec that voters are being asked to shape, not an extra line bolted onto a platform. What the province celebrates five or ten years from now, the letter argues, will rest on the choices made now.

Brault and her seven co-signatories close with an appeal built to outlast the Games themselves. When the event ends and attention moves on, they write, thousands of athletes, coaches and clubs across the province will still be at it. Sport is for life, they say, and it starts here, in local clubs, communities and regions.