The federal government’s recent $6-million funding commitment to ParticipACTION underscores a critical public health priority: Canadians are simply not moving enough. As the national voice representing fitness facilities, personal trainers, and health & wellness providers across the country, the Fitness Industry Council of Canada (FIC) strongly supports having a dedicated national body to track and measure physical activity levels.ParticipACTION’s ongoing research, data collection, and Report Cards provide invaluable diagnostic insight into the physical health of our population. Knowing where Canadians stand is essential for informed policy. According to ParticipACTION: physical activity levels in Canada have been low and stagnant for years. Physical inactivity isn’t just a personal health issue—it’s a pressing public health concern.

However, continuing to allocate millions in taxpayers’ dollars toward physical activity promotion through the same organization requires urgent and critical re-evaluation.

Decades of Promotion, Stagnant Results

The stark truth is found in the government’s own numbers: despite over 50 years of promotional campaigns and more than $43 million in public funding directed to ParticipACTION’s Let’s Get Moving initiative since 2018, physical activity rates remain stalled. Currently, fewer than 46% of Canadian adults and only 37% of children and youth meet national physical activity recommendations. Most striking, only 8% of girls ages 12 to 17 years meet these Canadian physical activity recommendations. The stagnant progress shows Canadian youth improved from a D (27-33%) grade in 2005 to a D+ (37%) in 2026.  The most recent adult report card shows similar general stagnation and in several key indicators, regression.

Canadians do not suffer from a lack of awareness—they know movement is essential for physical and mental health. Within these same reports from ParticipACTION, 80% of adults agreed that they want to be physically active. Clearly the promotional messaging has been received and kudos may be appropriately acknowledged for the decades of work done in this area.  However, the bottleneck is not inspiration; it is implementation. Awareness campaigns alone do not reduce gym membership costs, fund programs, or provide trained professionals to help people safely build lifelong habits. Investing in promotional messaging while physical activity rates remain frozen across decades demonstrates that top-down marketing has hit a wall.  It is well beyond time to try a new strategy!

Shifting Investment from Awareness to Execution

If Ottawa genuinely wants to tackle Canada’s inactivity crisis, funding must shift from telling Canadians to move toward helping them actually do it. Following the lead of the Province of Manitoba, along with the call from other nations (Australia and New Zealand), a return to mandated daily physical education from K-12 will do far more than any TV commercial to improve physical activity levels. Government investment will yield far greater returns if reallocated into direct, boots-on-the-ground interventions: removal of HST on fitness (proactive preventative healthcare), recognition of fitness as an eligible medical tax expense by the CRA (line 33099), workplace wellness initiatives that do not become a taxable benefit (Health Spending Accounts), and direct partnerships with Canada’s existing network of physical activity facility providers.

ParticipACTION should be empowered to remain Canada’s premier research and surveillance body to produce increasingly granular data. But when it comes to driving real behavioral change, Ottawa must fund the physical infrastructure and facility operators that turn intention into action. It is time to move beyond advertising exercise and start lowering the real-world barriers that keep Canadians on the sidelines.  Canada’s 9000+ fitness facilities directly address the top 4 barriers cited by ParticipACTION (page 36), impeding adults from achieving higher levels of physical activity.  Recognizing the potential for true public:private partnerships is one of the levers that would move the needle and get more Canadians active.