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cblatchford@globeandmail.com

A proposal for two 24/7 television networks which could offer part of the answer to the chronic under-funding of Canadian amateur sport and athletes is gathering dust at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission in Ottawa.

More than two years and about $1-million later, the group of private investors working in conjunction with the Canadian Olympic Committee is still waiting for a hearing date.

"It's a joke," Brian Cooper, former president of the Toronto Argonauts who now runs Sports and Entertainment and is one of seven investors, snapped yesterday. Given his background, Mr. Cooper is not unfamiliar with the sometimes-glacial pace of the broadcast regulator, but said "in this case it's extraordinarily long."

Once up and running, the COC group says it would turn over as much as $30-million a year to a trust fund for amateur sports federations and athletes.

But just as important, the between-Olympics television exposure of the athletes now poised to become - albeit briefly - national darlings would help put an end to the impoverished obscurity in which many of them toil most of the time.

The COC submitted its application for two networks - the English Canadian Amateur Sports Network and the French Réseau du Sport Amateur Canadien - in early December of 2007.

Yet the CRTC, citing first a broad "regulatory framework review" and then a heavy workload, hasn't even set a timeline for the processing of the COC application.

And while telling the COC it was effectively putting "a freeze" on applications for new Canadian channels, the CRTC nonetheless approved two new U.S. channels - CBS College Sports Network and Big Ten Network, both covering college sports - and more recently, approved the Weather Channel under the same section of the Broadcast Act that the COC group has made its application.

The licences would be awarded under section 9 (1) (h), which mandates all Canadian cable and satellite distributors to carry the channels at a set rate. The COC is suggesting 60 cents a month per cable or satellite subscriber, which could end up adding as much as $2 a month to an average bill; thus, presumably, the resistance by the big players and apparent stalling by the commission.

Improbably, for all the evidence of big money at the Vancouver Olympics and the huge infusion of funds to sport in the Own the Podium program in recent years, many of the country's best athletes still pay for their own equipment, travel to competitions and even to be a part of their teams.

As Jane Roos, the tireless founder of Canadian Athletes Now (CAN) Fund, which finances athletes directly with grants of up to $6,000 twice a year, said last night in a phone interview with The Globe, "So many people are making a shitload of money at the Games, but the athletes will leave them in debt."

It was only in mid-January this year that the CAN Fund cleared its waiting list of athletes - many of them here now - waiting for financial help.

Ms. Roos said that 80 per cent of those who will so proudly wear the country's colours in competitions that begin tomorrow were funded twice, to the tune of $12,000 each, by the CAN Fund. And the non-profit organization recently surveyed the athletes who applied and found that fully 40 per cent had to cough up "team fees," ranging from $1,000 to $30,000, because their sports couldn't afford to pick them up, while 90 per cent had to pay for all or part of their equipment.

"I think the men's bobsled team still owes $40,000 on their sled," she said, not ruefully but as a matter of fact.

She mentioned gold-medal winning rower Ben Rutledge, who, like many Summer Games athletes, has helped the CAN Fund raise a lot of money for their Winter Games counterparts, and said she asked him how many people had touched his gold medal. His answer: About 20,000.

How many young people, she wondered, may have been inspired to excellence by that touch?

And of the Canadians in Vancouver, and the much larger audience who will watch the Games and be moved by what they see, Ms. Roos asked, "What is that worth, to make people cry and be proud?"

Anyone who might doubt the power of sport should have talked to Joe Juneau yesterday.

Now the assistant chef de mission for the Canadian team, Mr. Juneau had a long and successful career in the National Hockey League, but what he remembers best is his time on the Canadian Olympic hockey team, silver-medal winners, at Albertville in 1992.

He's one of those who earned a living playing the national game, one of the few sports in the country which gets television exposure and recognition even on the amateur level. But Mr. Juneau gives back like the amateur he once was, starting a youth sports program in the Nunavik region in northern Quebec, where it's not so easy to play hockey, where kids can't afford equipment, and may not have parents able to drive them to practice.

Mr. Juneau and his wife and two daughters lived in Kuujjuaq, a remote town in Nunavik, for two years, and though the family has since moved to Quebec City, he still spends long stretches of time in the North. "These athletes," he said yesterday of the Olympians, "are role models, and my kids, not only the ones I work with, need those models."

On Feb. 28, when the Games are done and the athletes' 15 minutes are gone, those kids in Kuujjuaq will still ache with need, applications will still languish at CRTC offices, and the CAN Fund will begin scratching around for money again. It's a funny old country.