Winter isn’t dreary in Canada any more, not with the new CanSkate program.

In a frosty rink in Toronto, toddlers in jelly-bean coloured snowsuits and tiny skates zip around brightly hued pylons and cones, arms out to the side, eyes bright. It’s a hub of activity. They are like little bees zooming about the hive. No piece of the ice surface goes unused. They are intent, yet they’re having fun. They are learning to skate, the new way.

It’s part of a revolution in the way Canadians learn to skate, and last week, the Skate Canada program came to Skate Ontario, where 75,000 folks are learning skills that may take them to an Olympic podium in various ice sports. Or for most, it may be the launching pad for thousands to have a skill for life, stroking away on a Saturday afternoon at an arena, hearts pumping, faces glowing.

The new program is set up to become the best learn-to-skate plan in the country, so that speed skaters and hockey players can also hone their abilities to move across the ice efficiently. The skills aren’t tied specifically to figure skating skills, but on skating skills in general.

The program became mandatory at all 1,200 figure skating clubs in Canada in September, and in Ontario, it’s getting a boost from a Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport financing, and from Canadian Tire, which for the past couple of years has allied itself to Olympic and grassroots sport and which has become Skate Canada’s most important title sponsor. Skate Canada chief executive officer Dan Thompson refers to CanSkate as the “engine room of Skate Canada.”

The CanSkate blueprint came to life because of a Sport Canada directive to set out specific long-term athlete development programs. To make it happen, Skate Ontario is tapping into an Ontario Sport and Recreation Communities Fund, with a budget of close to $3-million meant to get people moving at the community level. Skate Ontario gets $197,220 to help pay for 360 kits filled with props (small cones, pylons, rhythmic ribbons, Frisbees, bean bags, plungers (who knew?), plastic polka-dotted balls and an enormous “parachute.” Canadian Tire provides the enormous equipment bags to carry it all.

The side-effects of this idea?  It could maximize social and economic benefits. (Ontario spends $4-billion on recreation, sport and fitness.)  And it could bring health costs down. “We know that an investment into healthy lifestyles is an investment into spending less in health care in the long run for sure,” said Micheal Coteau, who was just named as minister of Tourism, Culture and Sport last June.

Coteau had never seen the CanSkate program in action before, and he paused to watch all of the youngsters on the ice hoist an enormous red and white “parachute” and make it flutter up and down like a giant stingray.

Coteau knows the value of the CanSkate concept first-hand. His children both go to skating programs. “I’ve noticed that the more engaged they are with fun and the more the teacher uses different types of tools, the more interested they become in skating,” he said. “The truth is, a lot of sports, it they’re not done properly in the beginning, they’ll shy away. If you can capture them at the beginning by engaging them at a completely different level where they are intrigued by the fun of it, you can leverage that to get them to increase their level of skill.”

It’s worked for his children, aged four and eight, he said. They are skating, swimming and into music programs. For the first two years that his daughter took a skating program, she found it frustrating, he said. When she got to the point where she could skate well, she began to enjoy it. The CanSkate program will change all of that, offering up basics in balance, control, and agility in six stages. Students learn stronger skills and learn them faster under this program.

Skate Canada also knows that the golden years of learning are between ages seven and 11, when neural pathways are most easily formed.

Olympic silver medalist Elizabeth Manley began to toddle onto the ice at age 2 ½ and she took her first learn-to-skate lesson at age five. Her first pair of skates came from Canadian Tire. She’s now a coach, teaching CanSkate.

Kim Saunders, associate vice-president of sport partnerships for Canadian Tire, also followed Manley’s path, taking the old learn-to-skate program as a child and picking up all the skills – the hard way. Figure skating is near and dear to her heart – and to that of Canadian Tire, which began sponsorship of Skate Canada in 2013. The Canadian Tire National Skating Championships in Kingston, Ont., in January will be the company’s third tour as title sponsor of that event.

At about the same time, Canadian Tire made a general investment in Olympic and Paralympic sport – and other sport associations, too. But Skate Canada is special.

“We’ve been selling skates for 90 years,” Saunders said. “It’s just part of our heritage. We were looking for a way to support amateur sport in this country is a bigger way and Skate Canada was just a natural fit. It’s a fit for us from a business point of view. It’s a fit for us from a philosophy point of view too, to what skating can do for a child. It’s a great passion for us.”

“We are all part of the Canadian canopy,” she said. “We have to talk about spirit, with that notion that strong healthy kids make strong nations. They also make great athletes.”

It looks like organized chaos: helmeted toddlers on tiny blades whizzing about every which way on the frosty rinks of Canada. Not one of them stands still or waits a turn to try out that forward stroke, that tottery stop. It’s go-go-go amid an array of colourful props. Most importantly, they look as if they are having fun.

The scene is prime evidence that there is a revolution going on in the way Canadians are learning how to skate. It’s the new face of the CanSkate program, retrofitted to use all the scientific research on LTAD, or long term athlete development. LTAD is an acronym that is not part of everyday parlance, but it is becoming the byword of Canadian sport. About a decade ago, Sport Canada asked all sport associations across the country to adopt it and adapt it to their development programs. Skate Canada watched and learned from the rest and is one of the most recent to take the plunge. On September 1, 2014, the new CanSkate program became mandatory at all 1,200 skating clubs in Canada.

Before the launch about 60 per cent of clubs had already converted to the new program and about 3,400 (64 per cent) of Canada’s 5,300 coaches have taken the training to teach it. Now all clubs and coaches are teaching the new CanSkate curriculum. Currently, 125,000 skaters participate in CanSkate, the majority of the association’s 173,000 skating members. Clearly, this program drives Skate Canada.

The scientific studies have shown parents and coaches and athletes when it’s the best time to train a certain skill.  “Quite often we miss the boat in some of those areas, so science has told us that the best time to train flexibility is between six and 10,” said Monica Lockie, chairperson of the learn-to-skate resource group. “If we don’t get that information to all our athletes, by the time you are 14, you can still make progress in that area, but you can’t take it to your maximum potential had you trained it in that window of trainability.”

The new program will be a key guide on when to train stamina, strength, flexibility and when to acquire certain skills. “Skill acquisition is a big one,” Lockie said. “They say the golden years of learning are between seven and 11 and that’s when we really have to build those neural pathways in the athletes that will be there after puberty.”

The new CanSkate program works to build and reinforce important basic skills. Instead of just introducing a skill at one level and then leaving it, the skater will work on the same skill at many different stages. The coaches have a chance to introduce the skill, develop it and then perfect it over a longer period of time.

One of the early skills is a push-glide sequence. In the old system, it was introduced only in stage two, and then skaters moved on to other skills in different stages. But now the push-glide sequence is part of every stage. Forward crosscuts, another big one that is a little more advanced and harder to learn, is introduced without high expectations early and then through subsequent stages, the expectations rise. By stage six, those toddlers should be a whiz at forward crosscuts.

So how does this look in practice? It seems chaotic on the ice, but that’s not a bad thing. Under the old system, skaters would line up, stand still and wait their turn while the coach worked with them. There would be lots of empty patches of ice, with no activity. In the new system, every little group is following its own path, in various circuits and stations. Where there were toddlers standing still, wiping their noses and waiting their turns in the old world, now they are all moving constantly, from station to station, skill to skill. “The number of repetitions they get in practicing those skills increases by 400 per cent by going on that circuit,” Lockie said. The skaters don’t lose focus.  They no longer ask for bathroom breaks.

The feedback from coaches? Some are leery of change, Lockie said. But many who have been immersed in it already marvel at the swift progress young skaters make. One youngster moved up to the STARSkate program (Skate Canada’s learn to figure skate program) after only one year in CanSkate, rather than two or three.

The program basically runs itself when set up, but that’s because the Skate Canada committee, headed by Lockie has painstakingly created a detailed guide for coaches. Her biggest mission, Lockie said, was to create a program that worked anywhere or for anybody: a large club with 20 coaches on staff to a small club with one. It had to work seamlessly for all. “It’s taken a lot of the preparation work away from the coaches,” Lockie said. “It makes sure that our delivery is a lot more standardized across the country.” In the old system, it was up to the individual coach to come up with a lesson plan: great for coaches with 30 years of experience, harder for newbies.

This new program focuses on learning to skate, but it does not focus on figure skating skills. That makes it a prime tool for any beginners for any ice sport in Canada, like hockey, speed skating and ringette. While setting up the program, Lockie spoke to coaches from all ice skating sports to find out what basic skills they needed before they entered their sport-specific program. And she went to coaches like Tracy Wilson to talk about the essence of skating, and how, for example, to allow the body to move freely.

“We want to continue to be the best learn-to-skate program in the country,” Lockie said. Skate Canada coaches are the perfect ones to take that on. They are probably the most technical ice sport coaches around. Skating coaches understand how the blade works, how to get power and edges from the blade, and how the biomechanics of movement of the stride really work. The success of the program will lie in getting all Canadians to skate, even if just for pleasure, for fitness, and to feel safe on the ice.

The old system has produced countless world and Olympic champions, such as Patrick Chan and Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir. Just think what the new program will be able to do.