Canadian elite sport policy, and the debates surrounding it, has been marked by a historically ambivalent disposition towards full-on participation in the `sporting arms race`. On the one hand, since the establishment of Sport Canada and the onset of a professionalized national sport bureaucracy in 1971, the Canadian sport system has been heavily weighted toward the pursuit of elite sporting success, prominently though not exclusively measured in terms of Olympic medals. Despite misgivings from some National Sports Organizations, sub-national governments, and sports studies scholars (see Macintosh and Whitson 1990; Thibault and Harvey 2013), a focus on the unbridled pursuit of competitive excellence was the principal orientation of sport policy through most of the next two decades.
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