08 MAY 2019: Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government has eliminated all of its tourism funding to Toronto and Ottawa, to the tune of $13 million. How should we describe this decision succinctly – well, shortsighted and stupid – might just cover it.
Tourism Toronto said the government told them in a recent phone call that their $9.5 million in provincial funding is being cut entirely. That is about a quarter of their budget of just under $40 million, said executive vice-president Andrew Weir.
“This will have real implications and we’re evaluating now what markets we can no longer promote Toronto in, which major conventions and events we can no longer bring to the city,” he said.
“By any objective business metric this is the time to be aggressive with tourism.”
Tourism last year in Toronto generated about $9 billion in direct spending, Weir said.
A radio show last evening supporting the cuts, suggested that, ‘a world class city like Toronto’ had no need to promote itself globally – after all, who wouldn’t want to visit, and what conventions would not choose to come here.
So, let’s just mention the competition – ‘world class cities’ like New York, London, Paris, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Miami, Orlando, Las Vegas, and right here at home – Vancouver. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Other cities in Canada, the US and globally are also aggressively promoting themselves for both tourism and corporate convention travel.
When visitors come to conventions and see and enjoy what the city has to offer, they often return for vacations with their families. And that list of cities above, quite aside from what they offer conventions and tourists have significant and longstanding reputations as “world class cities” and many are “bucket list choices”. I would suggest that unless the many virtues of Toronto are strongly promoted it will not be on many tourist ‘must see’ destinations, and few convention planner’s top choice of location. And you can bet the same applies to Ottawa.
Toronto Mayor John Tory said 44 million people visited the city last year to spend their money, but the province gets the tax revenue.
“We don’t get a penny of it,” he said. “The province is the beneficiary and yet they took a huge sum of money for Toronto and Ottawa, yes, the two biggest tourism centres in the province, and just took it away. I think that’s bad for Ontario.”
Ottawa Tourism said their $3.4 million of provincial funding is being cut, which was 15 percent of their budget.
A spokesman for the minister of tourism, culture and sport said in an earlier statement that the government’s new tourism strategy will be rolled out in the coming months.
“We are taking real action to boost Ontario’s tourism sector, and will ensure value for money in our tourism investments, so we can do what’s right for the people of Ontario,” Brett Weltman wrote.
The funding elimination comes amid a host of other cuts to municipal funding, including to public health, child care, flood management and library services.
Tory said that will mean a more than $100 million shortfall for Toronto.
Did anybody in the government consult anybody with any knowledge of the issue – or was this another one of those ‘public hearings’ we didn’t hear about?