Tom Pearson
Dear Mike:
We are very disappointed with news that all the tourist information centres in Sunset Country have been closed.
Ontario’s Sunset Country is home to 100,000 lakes, 60,000 square miles of boreal forest, and a wilderness landscape with few rivals in North America. The region covers the entire western border of Ontario, and each summer more than 181,000 Americans enter into Canada at the Fort Frances border crossing.
The Lake of the Woods area is the destination of choice for much of Manitoba and the U.S. Midwest.
As a board member for the new Regional Tourism Organization 13C, as well as president of the Ontario Sunset Country Travel Association and the North Western Ontario Tourism Association, I am very concerned with the Government of Ontario’s decision. This judgment was made without any input from the Ontario Tourism Marketing Partnership Corporation’s (OTMPC) marketing partners.
We understand the need to balance budgets, but depriving small business of an important avenue to market their products is not the way. More than half the small businesses in Canada do not have a website or any online marketing.
There is a reason for that: Internet access is limited throughout the vast geography of Northern Ontario.
The digital divide refers to any inequalities between groups, broadly construed, in terms of access to, use of, or knowledge of information and communication technologies. The majority of small companies that offer destination tourism in the north cannot access the web to market their services.
The Government of Ontario’s decision to move mainly into Internet marketing will negatively impact small businesses in the northwest.
There also has been a lot of talk of using travel “apps” to give travellers instant access to any tourist destination in that area. This will work great in southern Ontario but in Northern Ontario, unless you are right inside a small town, you will not have Internet service.
We need tourist information centres to be able to offer “all” that is available to visitors to Sunset Country and the northwest.
RTO 13C recently spent $1.5 million on marketing in the U.S. Midwest and western provinces. OTMPC also has spent millions of marketing dollars in the cities of Minneapolis and Chicago promoting Northwestern Ontario, only to have guests entering Canada in Fort Frances to have limited information of tourism experiences available.
With all the Ontario tourism centres closed in Sunset Country, what kind of message are we sending to our guests? They will enter into Ontario from the U.S. or Manitoba and the first building they’ll see is a boarded up tourism information centre.
We hope that the McGuinty government will reconsider its decision to close all the tourist information centres in Sunset Country. Tourism is a huge part of our economy and we need Queen’s Park to hear us.
(Signed),
Tom Pearson
Camp Narrows Lodge,
Rainy Lake, Ont.
