Dave Perkins

Canada took another large step on the road to athletic third-worldism yesterday when the world swimming body yanked the world aquatic championships out of Montreal, marking us as sporting welshers.

The only stunning part about it, really, is that no federal politician, smelling another opportunity to go galloping into Quebec on a white horse to save the day, came up with another $12 million or $18 million or whatever it was going to take to spare Montreal another red face. Our pols, for once, resisted the urge to throw good money after bad.

The city that watched the Expos go away � to say nothing of the world Gay Games, which earlier fled � will somehow survive without playing host to 2,000 fluid floggers this summer. But this isn't about Montreal, which suddenly has a lot more available hotel rooms July 17 to 31.

This is really about Canada, now forever stamped in the minds of the international sporting community, if it wasn't already, as an ice-and-snow country. Period. Completely unreliable when it comes to holding a major summer sports event.

All 22 members of FINA, the world governing body for aquatics, voted to pull the plug for financial reasons because organizers hadn't come through with enough sponsor cash. The three levels of government had ponied up something like $44 million already for an event that relatively few Canadians, rightly or wrongly, would care about.

Consider, too, the timing. It comes as India struggles with the requirements of holding the 2010 Commonwealth Games, which it won by spreading its bribes out deeper and wider than Hamilton could. If India loses the ComGames, the noise will begin to move them to Hamilton. But who would trust Canada with the job now ?

The Ontario and federal governments were on the hook for $500 million ($250 million each) to pay for the ComGames, another event few Canadians care about.

If we can't get our act together to pay for a little swim meet, how could we handle something like that? Besides, all that money has disappeared by now. The feds have put their share into the 2010 Olympic basket. Ontario is trying not to lay off nurses.

"It's setting Canadian sport back several years,'' Linda Cuthbert, president of the Aquatic Federation of Canada, told Canadian Press of the decision.

"There are questions in the international community about Canada's commitment to sport. For any (sports) federation looking at hosting an event in the next 10 years, you can be sure they won't have confidence in our ability to host it.''

Other than use the word "host'' as a verb, she is correct. She might as well have added this: All of Canada's focus is on winter sports. More specifically, it's all on hockey. That's all Canadians really and truly care about. There are pockets of interest and support for any number of sports, but coast to coast and top to bottom, it's hockey, with everything else a distant second.

That said, corporations are interested in the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, which is the entire focus of our government(s) and Sport Canada. The Canadian Olympic Committee, a marketing organization that routinely misses the mark in its pronouncements, is on record as pretending a first-place finish in the medal count is an achievable goal.

Such a feat, only five years away now, requires not only vast amounts of resources, but strong and decisive leadership operating free of bureaucratic restraints. In the sports community, even if that first commodity were present, lack of the second is by far the more severe problem.

Paul Henderson, former head of the world sailing federation and an ex-member of the International Olympic Committee, said the Montreal fiasco "is only a symptom, not the disease, focusing on the level to which Canada has fallen.

"When will you all wake up and realize that Canadian amateur sport is in chaos?'' Henderson burbles.

Considering yesterday's embarrassing news, would anybody disagree with him ?

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