Across Manitoba, recreation and community leaders are navigating complex choices about the future of their recreation, parks, and sport infrastructure. From historic community centers in rural municipalities to bustling urban aquatic and multi-use facilities, public spaces serve as the vital heart of community life. They are where families gather, youth stay active, and newcomers build connections.
Consider a recreation director in a rural Manitoba municipality staring down a 45-year-old arena. The refrigeration plant is near the end of its life, the roof needs replacing, and council wants to know: repair it, or start planning something new? The honest answer is that nobody in the building can say for certain how many people from neighbouring communities actually visit the rink, whether demand is growing or shrinking, or what a comparable community twenty minutes away decided to do. The decision gets made anyway, just without the evidence that would make it defensible.
This scenario repeats itself across the province in different forms: aging and inadequate facilities, rising operating costs, and evolving community needs are reshaping the way professionals design programs, while local governments, remote communities, and regional leadership are increasingly tasked with doing more with limited resources.
Balancing investments in recreation alongside roads, water systems, and public safety requires clear, defensible, and evidence-based justifications. To help leaders address these challenges, CAN Active Insightsoffers a centralized, accessible platform designed to bring data-driven clarity to community planning.
A Tailored Solution for Manitoba's Unique Needs
Manitoba’s geographic diversity—spanning rural farming hubs, vibrant northern and Indigenous communities, and expanding urban regions—presents distinct recreation delivery challenges. Whether determining how to upgrade an arena to serve a region or ensuring new parks are equitably accessible to underserved neighbourhoods, local leaders need actionable evidence.
CAN Active Insights brings together infrastructure data, physical activity trends, community demographics, movement patterns, and local economic impact into a single, cohesive tool. The platform translates abstract concepts into measurable outcomes, demonstrating how investments in recreation, parks, sport, and physical activity lead to improved mental and physical health outcomes, increased participation, stronger local economies and volunteerism, increased social cohesion and community belonging, and the development of climate-resilient communities.
“One of the biggest challenges our members face is a lack of accessible information that helps them prioritize competing needs with confidence,” said Emily George, Executive Director of Recreation Manitoba. “When you’re deciding between replacing an aging arena, expanding trail networks, or investing in new community spaces, every dollar matters. Having trusted data in CAN Active Insights allows communities to make decisions that reflect both today’s realities and tomorrow’s opportunities.”
Breaking Down Silos Across the Province
The reason that arena decision is so hard to make isn’t a lack of data – it’s that the data already exists, scattered across places that don’t talk to each other. Municipalities track facility bookings, provincial sport organizations maintain registration counts, and health authorities track wellness outcomes separately, all while infrastructure and asset management takes place independently and without standardization across different administrative bodies. A recreation director trying to build a case for council must chase down multiple different data owners just to answer one question.
CAN Active Insights bridges these divides, creating a shared source of truth. By bringing scattered data into focus, communities in Manitoba can benchmark their facilities against demographically similar regions across the country, identify service gaps, and build compelling cases for provincial and federal infrastructure grants.
“For too long, recreation, sport, health, and infrastructure data have existed in separate systems, making it difficult to see the complete picture,” said Martin Sampson, CEO of the Canadian Parks and Recreation Association (CPRA). “CAN Active Insights changes that by bringing these perspectives together in one place, helping communities move beyond reactive decisions toward long-term planning that’s informed, collaborative, and focused on creating the communities in which we want to live, work, play, and raise our kids.”
Understanding How Communities Move
Beyond standard demographics, CAN Active Insights incorporates privacy-compliant, aggregated location and movement data, allowing decision-makers to understand how residents actually interact with public spaces.
For that same rural recreation director, movement data could finally answer the question nobody could answer before: who is actually using the arena, how far are people travelling, what is the demand and usage, and how does this compare with others in the province. Instead of relying on intuition alone, communities in Manitoba can leverage objective data to plan multi-use spaces, optimize programming, and address equity in access.
The Road Ahead
Manitoba is at a time where community health, newcomer integration, climate resilience, and youth engagement are top public policy priorities. Recreation and parks sit directly at the intersection of these goals.
Through CAN Active Insights, a by the sector, for the sector platform developed in partnership with the Canadian Parks and Recreation Association (CPRA), the Canadian Fitness and Lifestyle Research Institute (CFLRI), and the Sport Information Resource Centre (SIRC), Manitoba is well-positioned to lead with evidence.
The sector has always known that active communities are healthy communities; now, it has the evidence to prove it.
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To learn more about CAN Active Insights and how your community can access this data, visit www.canactiveinsights.ca or contact Recreation Manitoba.
