Minister targets tourism growth at Falls event
Says Canada needs new strategy to protect jobs, compete with emerging destinations
Canada’s fall from being a top 10 world tourism destination is behind the launch of a new federal strategy to attract more visitors.
“Over the last 10 years, we’ve begun to fall behind” and Canada currently sits at No. 17 on the list, said federal Tourism Minister Melanie Joly, at Table Rock Centre in Niagara Falls Monday to announce the creation of a panel to reverse that trend.
Former New Brunswick premier Frank McKenna, who will chair the group, agreed, saying “we can grow this industry much larger than it is today.”
In Niagara, about 2,800 businesses and 40,000 jobs are dependent to some extent on tourism.
Tourism employs about 1.8 million people across Canada — “more jobs than the oil and gas, mining, agriculture, auto manufacturing and aerospace industries combined,” Joly said.
“And these numbers are sure to increase due to a tourism boom around the world. The global tourism sector is worth nearly eight trillion dollars and is growing by more than four per cent every year.”
Canada needs to be ready to accommodate those tourists, she said. The goal is to have a new strategy in place by early 2019.
About 20 million international tourists visited Canada in 2017, an increase of more than four million since 2013. Last year, Niagara Falls received about 14 million visitors from Canada and elsewhere.
Niagara Falls Tourism executive director Noel Buckley called it “encouraging” that Joly chose to kick off her national effort in Niagara Falls.
“I think it’s really positive news that people are recognizing the importance of the Falls” to Cana-
dian tourism, said Buckley, who is also president and general manager of Scotiabank Convention Centre.
One key locally is to keep border traffic moving, he said.
“Around the terrible time of 9/11 and passports and everything else, there was a real focus on the idea that we have to keep goods and services moving over the border,” he said.
“Well, the tourism industry was saying you have to keep the goods and services — and people — moving over the border. Any thickening of the border dramatically impacts our industry.”
Greater Niagara Chamber of Commerce president Mishka Balsom, who also attended Monday’s meeting, said the study comes at a good time — while more people than ever are travelling, countries like South Korea, China and India are opening themselves up as prime attractions.
“But it doesn’t mean fewer people are coming to Canada, I think it’s a shift to saying more people are travelling to countries that we haven’t historically seen (as destinations),” she said.
Niagara, and Niagara Falls in particular, have seen strong performances in recent years. What the Canadian tourism industry needs to do, Balsom said, is ensure its infrastructure, services and workforce are ready to handle the expected increase in visitors coming here.
“It’s a complex issue,” she said. “It’s not just marketing, it’s what are the services we’re offering, the visa situation (and how quickly they can be processed for foreign travellers), our airports - how quickly can people reach us?”
Both Buckley and Balsom were glad Joly and McKenna recognized the need to protect and create more jobs in the tourism industry.
In an interview after her speech, Joly said the Liberals have increased funding to Destination Canada, the Crown agency that oversees the country’s tourism industry, after sharp budget cuts under the former Conservative government.
“So that has helped a lot to move the needle, but there are structural barriers that we know are prevalent in the sector,” she said. “Accessibility to certain regions … also we have to make sure we have the right infrastructure in place.”
For Joly, Monday’s stop in the Falls included a roundtable meeting with local MPs and tourism industry stakeholders.
From there, she was headed to similar gatherings in Winnipeg, then Churchill, Man., Yellowknife, Vancouver and Victoria, B.C., before returning to Montreal on Sunday.