Thank you very much.
Mr. Chairman, honourable members of the Committee, I am very pleased to be here today. I am delighted to be able to present an overview of our work at the Canadian Tourism Commission. While I am unable to address questions that exceed our mandate, I would nevertheless like to provide the Committee with any and all information that will be helpful to it in carrying out its mandate.
The CTC is Canada's national marketing agency. Its head office is located in Vancouver. We work in partnership with all the provinces and territories, as well as with the private sector. We have two regional offices, one in London and one in Vancouver. We carry out our activities in 12 countries.
The CTC is a federal Crown corporation wholly owned by the Government of Canada. It is overseen by a board of directors. It is accountable to Parliament through the Department of Industry. The CTC is a Crown corporation established under Schedule III of the Financial Administration Act which is evolving in a highly competitive international trade environment.
We are results driven. For every dollar invested in CTC core marketing campaigns in 2009, $101 was generated in tourism export revenues. This is new money brought into Canada's economy as a direct result of CTC's marketing investments.
Leading partnerships, we work with the whole tourism sector to raise Canada's competitiveness and showcase the country as a destination where travellers can create extraordinary personal experiences unique in the world. That's what our brand is all about.
The Canadian Tourism Commission revitalized Canada's tourism brand in 2006. It's the foundation for CTC's overall marketing strategy: to increase tourism visitation to Canada.
Canada now ranks, just this past week, as the number one country brand in the world, under a key study by FutureBrand, outperforming marketers from New Zealand and Australia. Results under this survey demonstrate that tourism is the strongest feature of the Canada brand.
Canada Keep Exploring is the tourism component of this strong brand and a powerful asset for Canada's tourism industry. That's important because 1 in 10 Canadians work in this industry.
CTC's leadership and partnerships are very much sought after in international markets, where the Canada tourism brand holds the greatest impact. Our vision is to inspire the world to explore Canada. CTC, our partners, and industry watchers, agree that sustainability of Canada's tourism industry requires an increasing number of international travellers.
CTC's third-party administered advertising tracking and conversion studies revealed that our measured campaigns in 2009 had the following attributable results. They generated an estimated $1.66 billion in tourism revenue for Canada's economy and contributed to the maintenance and/or creation of an estimated 15,284 jobs for the Canadian tourism industry.
CTC's 2011-2015 objectives are the following. The first is to increase demand for Canada's visitor economy. The second is to generate wealth for Canadians by focusing on both short-term and long-term potential for maximizing return on investments as our markets mature and evolve.
Third is to engage in effective tourism marketing, promotions, and market development activities supported by market research as we aim to support the achievement of Canada's national tourism revenue goal of $100 billion by 2015, and to focus on markets where Canada's tourism brand leads and yields the highest return on investment.
We're also focusing on concentrating on those geographic markets or consumer market segments where marketing at the national level--and that's Canada's tourism brand--leads to the highest potential for return on investment. Our focus is to convert high-yield customers by investing in appropriate communication channels based on those insights from customer segmentation research and a model we call the “path to purchase”, so we understand how customers purchase travel in Canada in particular.
Since the launch of Canada's revitalized tourism brand, Canada Keep Exploring, we've worked to build a bridge between the world's nature-based perceptions of Canada and the need to preserve a more diverse and real Canadian travel experience in a personal, emotional, relevant, and interactive way. We want to prove to prospective travellers that time spent in Canada will enrich their lives.
The CTC achieved significant success during the first two phases of our 2010 Winter Games strategy. The first phase was brand building before the games. The second was media relations and web content during the games. In many cases, our efforts far exceeded the initial targets set out in the 2007 Treasury Board submission. We are now in the final phase, which we call “harvesting the afterglow”, converting travel intentions into actual bookings in support of the ultimate goal of increasing export tourism revenues for Canada.
To provide additional support for Canada's tourism industry, through the Canadian Tourism Commission, the Government of Canada announced an investment in May 2010 of up to $8 million in marketing initiatives and programs to promote key Canadian tourism events internationally and to build upon investments in priority international markets.
In the afterglow of the most successful Winter Olympics and Paralympic Games to date, to keep the tourism momentum building internationally, and with our marketing strategy now in that conversion phase, it's acknowledged that CTC is well positioned to use this investment to generate increased tourism revenues for Canada. That is our objective.
This marketing investment will allow the CTC to better take advantage of the increased awareness of Canada as a tourism destination resulting from the 2010 Winter Games by seizing the opportunity presented under the approved destination status with China and accelerating Canada's tourism development in emerging economies of India and Brazil, economies that are leading the global economic recovery. There is no greater opportunity before the Canadian tourism industry now than that opportunity in China.
The breakdown of our expenditures is as follows. Of the $8 million, $3 million has been invested in China. This $3 million allows us to invest into a direct consumer marketing campaign for the first time. Prior to ADS, neither the CTC nor Canada was allowed to do any consumer marketing. So this investment will help us position Canada as a premier tourism destination for that country for the first time.
Approximately $5 million will be invested in increasing phase three of our Olympic Games strategy itself. The majority of this is to convert the customer interest the games created into actual conversion, by which we mean getting people from the interest level in Canada that the games produced to actually come and visit Canada. Of that, $3.3 million is for leisure conversion, a direct consumer marketing campaign with partners from across Canada, and $500,000 is in the global meetings and convention industry to help position Canada as a leading global meeting and convention destination.
The final $1.2 million will be invested in India and Brazil. These are two emerging markets for us. With this investment from Canada's economic action plan, we'll be able to enter these markets for the first time. They're showing some tremendous promise and some double-digit gains in travellers from those countries. So this will allow us to increase the investment there and to create and stimulate demand from those countries.
I would like to stop now and open the floor to some questions, Mr. Chair. Thank you.
