bout de papier, Vol. 5, No. 4 (1988) — Winter 1988 // Hiver 1988, pp. 25–26
On October 28, 1987, pursuant to a decision by Cabinet, the Secretary of State for External Affairs formally announced the department’s intention to use sport actively as an instrument of cultural diplomacy. Joe Clark said that sport unites us more regularly than politics. Our athletes can help the modern Canada to better know itself. More than that, it can encourage others to discover Canada.
That desire to promote Canada abroad lies at the heart of the new international sports relations programme. The moment could hardly be more propitious. Canada is coming into its own as a sporting nation. Calgary is host to the 1988 Winter Olympics, and Victoria and Toronto are vigorously bidding, respectively, for the 1994 Commonwealth Games and the 1996 Summer Olympics.
Canada recently won the Canada Cup and other major hockey awards, including the world junior championship. Ben Johnson, as the expression goes, is the fastest man alive, while Brian Orser holds the world figure-skating title. Our skiing and curling teams excel. Ian Millar is the very best show-jumper, Carolyn Waldo the top synchronized swimmer, and Gaetan Boucher the defending Olympic speed-skating champion. Rick Hansen captured the imagination of millions the world over. The list of Canadian world-class athletes goes on: Jean-Marc Chouinard, Victor Davis, Lori Fung, Gail Greenough, Wayne Gretzky, Pierre Harvey, Angella Issajenko, Joe Ng, André Viger to name a few. They, like hundreds of their colleagues travel the globe every year, and the ISR programme is looking to take full advantage of this fact.
Why mix sport and diplomacy? Just because everyone else does it is not reason enough. There must be — and is — a rationale that is positive and relevant. Sport exchanges can serve as a significant expression of our broader political and economic relationships and interests. Canada’s firm stance on sporting contacts with South Africa, for example, has forcefully demonstrated our opposition to apartheid. Arrangements such as those made in the past with important multilateral organizations like the Supreme Council for Sport in Africa can give substance to Canada’s commitment to the Third World.
Heightened visibility abroad and a multifaceted image of this country’s promise and possibilities are fostered by extensive sport contacts. Sport can also be successfully linked to tourism promotion. In Japan, public relations activities associated with visits by Canadian ski teams form an important part of our embassy’s work; Canada in turn has become a major location for Japanese ski tours.
Sport can play an important support role to Canadian marketing efforts in the newly-industrialized countries of the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific as well as those of well-established trading partners, contributing to more effective commercial relations. Narrowly conceived, sports linkages can promote trade in related industries such as sporting goods and equipment and technology. Used imaginatively, sport can set Canada and its products apart and make them known. In the early 1980’s External Affairs capitalized on the popularity of the “Crazy Canucks” in Western Europe by distributing posters and media kits which linked the success of our ski team to the Canadian tourism and manufacturing industries. More recently, a reception hosted by our Embassy in Caracas for the visiting 1987 Canadian Davis Cup tennis team provided a starting point for a joint Canadianbout de papier Vol.
Venezuelan trade venture and helped to raise the overall Canadian profile in Venezuela, particularly with the business and commercial community.
Sport is not simply a vehicle for Canada’s commercial interests. It is also a useful medium for international cooperation and mutual understanding. It reaches into every country, every society, overcoming religious and cultural barriers. When bilateral relations stiffen or falter, sport can help to sustain Canada’s presence in a concrete and highly visible form. Today our co-operation in sport with countries in Eastern Europe can serve as an avenue to general confidence-building and to increased contacts between East and West. Rendez-Vous ’87 and the Canada Cup tournament, each with more than 200 million television viewers, are powerful examples of the drawing power of sport as a means of strengthening linkages with the Soviet Union.
The origins of sports diplomacy at External Affairs lie in the extraordinary impact of the first Canada-USSR hockey series in 1972. As Eric Morse, the department’s Head of International Sports Relations until 1986, explains a recent issue of Champion: “External noticed. With 3,000 avid fans headed for Moscow, and all normal business in both countries suspended for the duration, they couldn’t help but notice. A task force was set up in Ottawa to handle the government’s interest in the event. Ministers and the Prime Minister became involved. The departmental archives of the event read like a scenario for the Yalta Conference.” Thus the creation in 1972 of the International Sports Relations Desk. Staffed at first by part-timers, it became a departmental fixture, equipped with a permanent officer, by 1974. That same year, Canada signed a sports exchange agreement — its first – with the Soviet Union.
Undoubtedly, as Morse points out, the rise of the sports function in External was assisted by the development of Fitness and Amateur Sport (FAS) and a structure and outlook for the development of Canadian sport at both the national and international level. Hockey Canada had provided the catalyst, and External saw the importance of working with athletics on a more regular basis.
By the 1980s it became increasingly necessary to have someone to take up the challenge on behalf of sport in the foreign policy process, to ensure that policy-making was sensitive to the needs of sport and athletes. As sport grew in prominence and profile, so too did the range of activity: liaising with FAS; assisting national sport bodies with their international programmes; helping individuals travel abroad to compete; negotiating further international athletic accords, such as that with East Germany in 1984; working with posts to ensure that Canadians are well cared for in other countries; facilitating the visits of foreign sportspersons; and backing cities in their bids to bring international games to Canada.
In 1986 there was the hint of something more, a new level of activity in international sports relations, when the Nielsen task force on programme review suggested that here was an area where more not less was required. The Secretary of State for External Affairs was asked, in consultation with the Minister of State for FAS, to carry out a thorough evaluation of the role of sport in foreign policy.
External began by consulting 57 of its posts abroad. Of the forty-nine which responded they were almost all uniformly positive. The posts clearly put a great deal of thought and energy into their reports. Sports technical assistance projects can contribute, we were told, to the public affairs programmes of African, Middle Eastern and ASEAN posts, but would be completely unsuited to those of Western European or US missions. Posts in Western Europe, the United States and the Caribbean are on a Canadian “sport circuit” in which visits involve all levels of competition and are frequent. Missions further afield are involved in far fewer exchanges but on the other hand the athletes are usually national or Olympic calibre. The value of sports promotional materials also varies considerably. Thus press kits and photographs, for example, would be very useful in Western Europe where they are given broad dissemination by the media, but of marginal utility in Eastern Europe.
The missions agreed that sport has become an important aspect of Canadian foreign policy, but that its full potential has yet to be realized. Until now, it was felt, our foreign policy has not benefitted fully from the hundreds of Canadian sports tours and visits that take place each year. Our missions also emphasized that they need adequate advance information as well as suitable promotional materials.
Following upon this endorsement, the Secretary of State and subsequently Cabinet approved a strategy that contains the following elements:
a) Information: The highest priority is to provide posts with advance information on athlete and team travel abroad. Missions cannot maximize the opportunities associated with a sport visit if they are not given adequate notice.
b) Promotion: Posts must be given adequate promotional materials, particularly in relation to selected world class competitions.
c) “Backing a Winner”: Outstanding Canadian athletes, whether amateur, professional or “retired,” will be engaged as goodwill ambassadors to appear at special events like trade shows or exhibits.
d) Touring: Tours abroad by Canadian teams and athletes will be encouraged in order to reach difficult geographic areas or extended to include target countries. e) Blockbuster events: Promotion campaigns mounted around events such as the Calgary Olympics and the Seoul Summer Games to showcase Canadian talent, whether in sport or in the arts, and to project a positive image of the country and its possibilities.
f) Sport Development Assistance Projects:
These projects are suited to those areas where it is difficult to mount other cultural activities, but where it is nonetheless essential to establish a Canadian presence.
As Mr. Clark has said, sportspersons are and have always been among the country’s best ambassadors. Although the programme is very new and resources remain limited, the recent Cabinet decision recognizes the potential of sport diplomacy, and suggests that sport should now be seen as a legitimate and valuable part of Canada’s international cultural relations.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 5, No. 4 (1988) — Winter 1988 // Hiver 1988, pp. 25–26. Read the rest of this issue →
