Published on : Tuesday, December 11, 2018
The report by the McKinsey & Company advisory firm explains one of the main issues of restraining Canada is its unbalanced tourism profile as majority of visitors tends to come in the summer months. Therefore, hotels and other tourism-reliant employers fight back to find staff in peak times yet are sometimes not capable to recruit workers by offering year-round employment.
One solution: Induce the swelling ranks of globetrotters to hold close Canadian winters.
The advisers say it worked for the northern Lapland region of Finland, which promotes round-the-clock darkness phase in winter as a must-see experience, among other winter activities.
Federal Tourism Minister Melanie Joly will unveil the report on Monday before giving a speech to the Economic Club of Canada in Toronto. An advance copy was offered to The Globe and Mail. She will be joined by Dominic Barton, McKinsey’s global managing partner emeritus and a volunteer member of a federal advisory panel on “jobs and the visitor economy” headed by former New Brunswick premier Frank McKenna.
The McKinsey report is anticipated to be used by the panel and the government as Ottawa is all set for a new tourism strategy that will be released by summer 2019 before the fall federal election campaign.
Tourist visits to Canada created a record in 2017 during the Canada 150 celebrations, with 20.8 million trips of one or more nights to Canada, as per Statistics Canada data released earlier 2018. That total increased 4.4 percent from the previous year and beat the previous record of 20.1 million visits in 2002.