Dear Members,

We hope that this newsletter finds you healthy and warm as winter is upon much of the country now. COVID-19 impacted us all in 2020.  The safety of our families and our athletes came first in all our decisions this year. We have been fortunate to not lose funding and are managing better than many sport organizations. Not all our clubs and provincial organizations have been so fortunate and that may impact our sport in the longer term. We hope you all stay committed to rebuilding the foundations for our sports in 2021.  

While our National championships were cancelled, Olympics postponed and many of us had to forgo competitions March through to June, our Domestic program has attempted to “go Virtual” in this new, less-travelled world and we now have a new and improved website in both official languages, a classification system for rifle and pistol (shotgun coming in the next year), co-hosted Community Satellite Events and a monthly coast to coast championships program.

We have secured and updated our staff positions and job descriptions and have three employees whose duties are posted on the website for all to understand how our office functions. These staff, Connor, Joey and Sue have helped us improve our office procedures, our responsiveness to our membership and meet our obligations as a National Sport Organization. Our financial accounting and new and improved Finance committee is up and ensuring we improve our fiscal risk management.

Our major funder SPORT CANADA has required that the SFC commit to align with the Universal Code of Conduct and the Respect in Sport movement. This has added commitment for our volunteers and athletes to take the training and walk the talk of respectful conduct in all aspects of sport. We have contracted a third party to deal with respect and harassment complaints required of us as a National Sport Organization. This should provide athletes, parents, officials and coaches assurance that complaints can be dealt with in a fair manner.

We have supported our High Performance team members and coaches with their broken up training programs and improved our mental training program and our mental health policies in the process.

We are still working on a few things: We are trying to improve our connectedness to our Provincial and Territorial Sport Organizations; we have a volunteer liaison trying to influence Hamilton bid for the 2026 Commonwealth Games to including target shooting sports and we are trying to improve the availability of coaching programs for both community and high performance level coaching. Our year of funding doesn’t end in December and we have work planned through to March to meet our operational goals.

Please, if you are looking for things to do, think about becoming an SFC volunteer to become a trained coach, official, design and implement our marketing strategy, help out on a committee or just help us proof read our webpage to improve it for our members. Any skills you have to offer would be welcomed.

Dr. Sandra Honour
President
The Shooting Federation of Canada