B.C.’s plan to get tourism back on track
British Columbia premier Christy Clark unveiled a new $1.1-million tourism campaign last week designed to entice Ontarians to the province. It’s part of “Gaining The Edge,” B.C.’s new five-year strategy to increase tourism revenues by 5% a year to $18 billion by 2016. That comes with a promise of reliable funding and, in a political about-face, a new version of Tourism BC – the crown corporation scrapped by former premier Gordon Campbell just months before the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.
Tourism BC was set up in 1997 to market the province at arm’s length from its then-NDP government. In August 2009, Campbell’s Liberal government shocked the tourism industry by firing Tourism BC’s president and CEO Rod Harris and rolling his staff into the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and the Arts. At the time, the government said it was a move to reduce administrative costs and better coordinate marketing efforts before and after the Olympics.
“It certainly was a shock to the system,” said Peter Williams, director of Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Tourism Policy and Research. “There had been an ongoing, growing dependency on Tourism BC to make things happen across the province and it was the go-to agency at the time.
“Tourism was knocked off its heels in terms of the priority that government was giving it when Tourism BC was deleted.”
Why bring the crown corporation back from the dead? The Liberals’ opponents say their plans to internalize marketing haven’t paid off.
NDP tourism critic Spencer Chandra Herbert said the Liberals spent $37 million to promote B.C. just prior to the Olympics and don’t have much to show for it. New government statistics show the overall number of tourists to B.C. dropped 2.6% between Q2 2009 and the same quarter in 2011; the rest of Canada showed an overall increase of 0.8% in that timeframe.
“Obviously the economy is tough, the dollar has an impact, but that should be felt across Canada, not just in B.C.,” Herbert said. “Killing Tourism BC six months before the Olympics threw the entire industry into a tailspin. We do need to get back to the industry [being] in charge… instead of a politician or a bureaucrat deciding where the marketing dollars should go.”
Steve Regan, CEO of the Tourism Industry Association of BC, said the industry is working with Clark’s government to design its new version of Tourism BC and is optimistic about the government’s latest strategy of 5% revenue growth per year.
“The government is definitely heading in the right direction; they are listening,” Regan said, but added it’s too soon to release details of the new organization.
However, Pat Bell, B.C.’s minister of jobs, tourism and innovation, said the structure for the new organization will be developed after a careful look at different regions around the globe and consultation with the industry.
“We are also looking at the old Tourism BC model and we’ll take the best pieces from all those different proposals and build something that people are comfortable with,” Bell said. “But anyone that tells you that Tourism BC [was] perfect hasn’t been listening to some of the folks that I have… There was a sense in the tourism world that the leadership was not reflecting the broader interests of the industry.”
(On this point, the NDP’s Herbert agrees somewhat, saying there were “challenges” with the old Tourism BC’s model. “I don’t think the solution is to immediately go back and create exactly what was there before. I think we need to find ways to ensure that the smaller tourism operators feel that their voice is being heard just as well as the larger operators.”)
Bell paints the government’s shift in policy as a reaction to the tourism industry’s desire for a destination marketing organization that has strong industry involvement and a funding formula that provides predictability over the long term.
The year it was shuttered, Tourism BC had a reported budget of $64.9 million. Now it has $52 million for 2012, and Bell said he expects that to stay level. “That’s not an insignificant budget. We are amongst the highest spenders in terms of our marketing campaigns.”
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