Listen to this article
Estimated 4 minutes
The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology. Mispronunciations can occur. We are working with our partners to continually review and improve the results.
Get active. Get healthy. Get money. Get a banner.
Manitoba is making exercise an active competition for schools in the province, launching the Premier’s Fitness Challenge on Tuesday and dangling up to $10,000 for schools that participate.
“If the fitness challenge means maybe you’re taking a few thousand more steps a day? Amazing. If the fitness challenge means you’re starting to help out with the yardwork or the gardening, that’s awesome,” Premier Wab Kinew said at Winnipeg’s Kelvin High School, surrounded by students.
While school sports teams include many students as athletes, “there’s a lot of other students, too, whose starting point might be a little bit different, and we want you to be included,” he said.
“The point is, everybody, every single day, needs to be active.… We want everyone to participate.”
Challenge details are still being developed with phys-ed experts, teachers and administrators, said Education Minister Tracy Schmidt.
Details will be shared in the coming months, but participating schools will get up to $10,000 “to help foster this programming and to help support the purchasing of new equipment,” she said.
Education Minister Tracy Schmidt said construction is starting at Kelvin High School on a new 11,700-square-foot gymnasium and a new outdoor running track with a rubberized surface. Both are expected to open in fall 2027. (Kevin Nepitabo/CBC)
Schmidt said this year’s challenge is the first in what will be an annual event, but didn’t say if the money will be an annual contribution.
The challenge builds on the province’s new kindergarten to Grade 12 health curriculum, which makes in-person physical education mandatory for all students, Kinew said.
“Our bodies were not designed for Slurpees and Big Gulps and social media and sedentary jobs. But that’s the reality that a lot of us live in,” he said.
The fitness challenge is one way to build healthier habits, and is intended to be “a fun way that we can start that conversation,” Kinew said.
“Let’s just not necessarily compete against who that person is next to us, but compete against who we were yesterday and try to raise our standard in terms of healthiness and and our own fitness goals,” he said.
“If you start at what your baseline is today and you become more physically active to the end of the year, you win … and you get a banner for the gym.”
Kelvin High School gym and track
Kinew and Schmidt also said plans for a new gym at Kelvin are back on track — literally.
Construction is starting on a new 11,700-square-foot gymnasium and a new outdoor running track with a rubberized surface at the Crescentwood-area school. Both are expected to open in fall 2027, Schmidt said.
She called the project a “$10-million investment” that will “provide students with more opportunities to be active and engaged throughout the whole school day.”
The gym saga has been going on for more than 12 years, when the NDP government under then premier Greg Selinger announced the $6.7-million project.
Parents raised $1.2 million toward construction costs through various campaigns, but the project was cancelled when the Progressive Conservative Party came to power.
In the lead-up to the October 2023 provincial election, Kinew’s NDP revived the gym project — along with a new field and track — as an election promise.
“Talk of a new gym has been around since I started here, which is much longer than I care to admit publicly, but that makes it all the more exciting today to see it finally come to reality,” said Bruce Sirrell, Kelvin’s athletic director.
“The gym is often referred to as the heartbeat of the school. It’s where students learn, compete, celebrate, gather and connect.”