Back in 1971, Canada quietly did something remarkable.

It didn’t launch a pharmaceutical campaign.
It didn’t medicalize childhood.
It didn’t tell people they were broken.

It simply invited them to move.

The program was called ParticipACTION, and its vision was disarmingly simple:
Health happens when people participate in life.

Kids walked to school.
Adults shovelled snow, biked to work, and played pickup sports.
Movement wasn’t an intervention. It was just… living.

Fast forward sixty years.

We are more informed than ever.
We track steps, calories, sleep cycles, and heart rates.
We have more gyms, programs, supplements, experts, and apps than any previous generation.

And yet—by almost every measure—we are less healthy.

So what happened?

When movement stopped being life and became a “program.”

Somewhere along the way, participation quietly slipped out of daily life and got outsourced.

• We engineered movement out of work
• We engineered risk out of play
• We engineered convenience into everything
• We engineered screens into childhood

And when movement disappeared, we replaced it with advice.

We told people:

• “You should exercise.”
• “You should be more disciplined.”
• “You should manage your weight.”
• “You should motivate yourself.”

But participation doesn’t respond well to shoulds.

Health doesn’t come from compliance.
It comes from engagement.

And engagement comes naturally when life itself invites movement.

The deeper miss: we treated health as a behaviour problem

Here’s where things quietly went off the rails.

We started treating inactivity as a personal failure rather than a systems issue.

When kids stopped playing outside, we blamed screens—without asking what changed in neighbourhoods.
When adults stopped moving, we blamed a lack of motivation—without asking what work had become.
When stress rose, we prescribed coping—without asking why life felt so compressed.

Upstream, the real issue wasn’t laziness.
It was a disconnection from participation.

Participation in:

• community
• play
• nature
• meaningful effort
• shared experience

Health eroded not because people stopped caring, but because life stopped inviting movement.

What ParticipACTION understood (before we forgot)

The brilliance of the original vision wasn’t the posters or slogans.
It was the assumption beneath them:

People don’t need to be convinced to move.
They need lives that naturally include it.

Movement wasn’t framed as:

• self-improvement
• weight loss
• optimization

It was framed as:

• fun
• normal
• social
• part of being human

That’s upstream thinking.

Getting back there means going further upstream

If health is truly a function of participation, then the solution isn’t more messaging.

It’s redesigning life so movement becomes a side effect again.

That means asking different questions:

• What if kids’ environments invited roaming instead of restricting it?
• What if communities prioritized walkability over efficiency?
• What if play wasn’t something you aged out of?
• What if movement was woven into contribution, not extracted as “exercise”?

And perhaps most importantly:

• What if we stopped treating health as something to achieve and remembered it as something that emerges?

Health doesn’t need pressure. It needs permission.

When people feel connected, involved, and part of something larger, movement follows.

Not because it’s prescribed.
But because it makes sense.

ParticipACTION wasn’t really about fitness.
It was about participating in life again.

Maybe the real invitation now isn’t to get people moving…

…but to give life back its movement.

Reflection question:

Where has participation quietly left your life—not through choice, but through design?

Sometimes the path forward isn’t adding something new.
It’s remembering what already worked.

Much Love,

The program still exists – here is their Website