Aquatics & Aging Infrastructure: Part 1

August 21, 2025

Over the summer months local and national media outlets have been reporting on the state of aquatic infrastructure in Canada. Swimming/Natation Canada has raised the alarm over the ongoing closure of facilities across the country. Pointing to the international competitive achievements of athletes like Summer McIntosh, the national swimming organization is concerned that maintaining this level of success will not be possible if younger athletes have nowhere to train, or if they never even enter the sport to begin with because they have no local pool. The same issue exists for the other aquatic sports of Artistic (Synchronized) Swimming, Diving, and Water Polo.

Beyond the effect on elite level sport, the lack of new facility builds and the closure of existing facilities should be of concern to the wider public. Swimming is a great form of exercise that is low impact and therefore low stress on joints. The health benefits, both mental and physical, of staying active through swimming have the potential to save our health and welfare systems millions of dollars over the typical lifespan of a pool. How much exactly you ask? A very good question, and one it appears has not yet been answered by researchers (although this author would dearly love to be proven wrong on that point).

The most important health benefit, however, is learning to swim in the first place. Without learning to swim members of the public are at a higher risk of a fatal drowning. Annually, roughly one third of the 450 fatal drownings in Canada are of individuals who do not know how to swim. Research data collected by the Drowning Prevention Research Centre Canada and released by Lifesaving Society Canada show that some progress has been made. When data collection started in the 1990s there were, on average, 650 fatal drownings every year in the country. A reduction to 450 deaths per year is an improvement, but not an end point. In a 2021 report Parachute Canada estimated the cost of drowning on the Canadian economy was 191 million dollars in 2018. This is likely an underestimate, as we do not have a complete picture of the drowning problem in Canada.

Imagine for a moment if all of the swimming pools in your locale closed down. What would the effect be on your life, the life of your family, the life of your neighbours? Would you have learned to swim if there was no local swimming pool? Would your health situation be different? Imagine further the societal effect of those pool closures. If swimming lessons are not available at the local public pool how many people now learning to swim will not have the chance? I think it is reasonable to predict we would see an increase in fatal and non-fatal drownings across the country and all of the associated costs involved.

The provision of public swimming pools in Canada is generally delivered by government agencies, generally municipal (cities, towns, regional recreation boards, etc.) or by non-profit organizations (YMCA, YWCA, etc.). Repeated surveys of Canadians have shown that the presence of a public swimming pool in a community is an important draw for population growth and retention; a public pool is a service Canadians have come to expect from their local governments.

The construction of public swimming facilities, and particularly swimming pools, began in Canada in the later 1890s and the early 20th Century. The great boom in public (municipal) pool construction took place in the post-Second World War world, from the late 1940s through to the 1970s. Depending on the area of the country you are looking at, some building continued through the 1980s and early 1990s. This means that many aquatic facilities in Canada have now been in service for over 40 years. In some cases facilities are 50, 60, 70, or even 80 years old.

When these facilities were constructed, the builders did not have all of the materials and techniques that are now in use in modern pools. Aquatic facilities built in Canada from the 1970s through to the 1990s would generally be expected to have a 35 - 40 year life span, with a need for major engineering and maintenance work after approximately 25 - 30 years to get to that full service life. This is assuming, of course, that forethought went into the design for the facility in the first place with the ability to update and upgrade systems easily when technology advanced. As an example, early swimming pools in Canada (pre-First World War for the most part), were not built with filtration systems. The dirt off the bodies of swimmers would collect in the pool itself, and the pool would have to be drained and cleaned every 2-3 days in order to maintain operations. These facilities were generally not constructed with any updating potential in mind, and most were replaced in the post-Second World War building boom. Similarly, many post-Second World War facility builds repeated the error of not being designed with the ability to accommodate future changes or upgrades in technology.

So, this review covers in broad strokes why Canadians should be concerned over the state of swimming pools in Canada. Even if you are not a swimmer yourself, your tax dollars end up funding one end of the problem (building and maintaining facilities) or the other (the greater burden of health and welfare services when public recreational facilities are not available). We know that the health and welfare side, the reactive side, generally costs much more in the long run than being proactive about preventing problems (disease, etc.). But is it all really that bad? Let's find out together in Part 2 where I use Manitoba as a case study.

Christopher Love
President
Wavecrest Aquatics Inc.