The Persistance of Inequality: An Analysis of Participation Patterns Among Canada's High Performance Athletes

Abstract

In his 1970 Proposed Sports Policy for Canadians, John Munro noted that many Canadians faced significant barriers to sport participation. His Proposed Sport Policy was designed, in part, to overcome some of those barriers and create greater equality of opportunity for all Canadians as they strived to become the best athletes in the nation and the world. Gruneau's study of 1971 Winter Games athletes indicated the extent to which socio economic status (SES) influenced participation in the upper levels of Canada's sport system in the Olympic sports.

This paper presents data gathered from a 1986-7 survey of Canadian national team athletes and all athletes who were part of the Athletes' Assistance Program in 1986 to examine the extent to which Munro's Proposed Sports Policy has created a sport system based on athletic ability rather than SES. The data suggest that despite a number of federal government programmes which the Proposed Sports Policy initiated, SES is still a major factor in determining which Canadians become the nations' top, high performance athletes. The data in this study clearly indicate that athletes from Canada's national team are significantly overrepresented among the upper SES groups and significantly underrepresented among the lower SES groups, no matter what indicators of SES are used.

² In this presentation, I am only concerned with the relationship between socio-economic status and participation in sport at the elite level within Canada. The unequal patterns of participation that I will indicate below are also found in other western countries. For information on sport and inequality outside of Canada, see Berryman and Loy (1976), Collins (1972), Crawford (1977), Eggleston (1965), Loy (1972), Pavia (1973), and Shine (1977). For general discussions of sport and inequality related to athletes, see Gruneau (1975), Heinemann (1980), Kneyer (1980), Lüschen (1981), or Loy, Kenyon and McPherson (1978, 332-81).

³ In the McPherson (1977, 172) study, 60 percent of the players had fathers from the lower two Blishen categories while Gruneau's (1976, 121) had 39 percent. This difference, I would argue, reflects the fact that McPherson was surveying players in a professional career. Many of Gruneau's middle Blishen level hockey players would soon opt for a more secure career outside of hockey leaving only those who could afford the risks — upper SES players — and those who have little to lose — lower SES players — working their way to the professional ranks. Of course, the professional ranks will have far more players from the lower SES groups than from the upper SES groups of Canadian society.

⁴ See Beamish (1985) for a discussion of how movement towards the national level in instrumental voluntary associations in sport relates directly to an increased exclusivity based on SES.

⁵ For details about the Blishen Scale see Blishen (1967), or Blishen and McRoberts (1976). One should also note that I have not used Blishen's (Blishen, Carroll, and Moore, 1987) update to his SES scale because in constructing his new scale, Blishen dropped out the Pineo/Porter-based prestige score component of the overall Blishen score. To make comparisons with Gruneau's data, I felt it was preferable at this time to use Blishen scores that still contained the prestige score component. In addition, in view of Blishen's revisions, one is now just as far ahead to report occupation and education directly rather than report Blishen scores that combine the two. I have, of course, already presented those data immediately above this section of the paper.