It’s National Tourism Week, so let’s celebrate SuperNatural British Columbia!
When I was a teenager I would go to downtown Victoria in the summertime with my friends. We would hang out on the causeway watching the buskers and mixing and mingling with the tourists. Victoria is an incredibly warm and welcoming place to visit.
Following high school, I spent a considerable amount of time working in the service industry. Some of my most important training for life came from working the frontlines as a waiter serving people from around the world in a range of restaurants from family to fine dining. This experience is formative for my personal habits and grooming standards, how I set a table and my personal urge to help the service staff, as I highlight in this post. There is no doubt that my experience serving visitors to Victoria is foundational to my work serving my constituents and the people of British Columbia in the Legislative Assembly.
Tourism is one of the economic opportunities for our provincial government in a transition away from a resource-dependent economy. In fact, the two go hand-in-hand. People want to see SuperNatural British Columbia but each passing year there is less to see. I remember a conversation with a local leader in the tourism industry. He was crystal clear. Tourism operators want a healthy environment. Visiting a forest with giant trees, paddling a kayak in the Salish Sea, whitewater rafting the Fraser, or the prospect of catching a big fish or capturing the image of a grizzly or wolf in the wild is globally appealing.
Tourism is the bridge
Unfortunately, we are carving away our forests with more rhetoric than economic transition plan. In my role as the Tourism critic, I have met with operators from across the province. There is increasing frustration with our resource management practices in the province.
There is a massive opportunity to attract visitors to major centres like Vancouver, Victoria, the Okanagan and the Kootenays. However, there is so much more to the rest of our province and we are only taking advantage of a fraction of our potential. The provincial government should be working closely with resource towns in transition. We should be supporting communities like Port Renfrew when they decide to re-brand as the “Tall-Tree Capital.” We should protect old-growth not auction it.
Let’s embrace the opportunity that tourism presents for the short, medium and long-term economy of our province. At a time when we face a tremendous test due to global warming, elevating this Ministry is an important step. Admittedly, there are emissions related to travel, but we need to aggressively reframe the value proposition of our province. We cannot afford to continue to have a strip it and ship it mentality. We need to nurture nature and invite people to visit us and soak it in.
Image by Jondolar Schnurr from Pixabay
0 Comments