No, I'll do that during the presentation.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
It's a pleasure to be with you here today, and also a treat to be sitting next to Jim, who, in addition to being mayor, is a great advocate of tourism in Canada.
For those of you not familiar with the Canadian Tourism Commission, we market Canada in international markets. We work with Canada's tourism industry to generate export revenue for the Canadian economy.
I believe, honourable members, that the CTC's proposed youth travel strategy has been shared with you in advance.
Canada's 150th birthday is a major milestone for our country and a unique opportunity to do something great. As Jim said, it's an opportunity to create something that will be a lifetime memory for people, like Expo 67, which people of our generation still speak about fondly.
We at the Canadian Tourism Commission have an idea for something that could make this celebration exciting, engaging, and memorable for young Canadians. Our vision is to inspire, through marketing and programs, a movement of youth travelling and exploring their country in 2017.
For the purposes of this proposal, we're targeting the age group of 16 to 29 years old. This generation is the future of Canada, and we as marketers know that it can be especially difficult to get them excited about an occasion like this. Members of Generation Y are independent; they can't be told to be excited about something. That groundswell really has to build from within. I know, as I have a few 20-somethings.
We think a youth travel movement could be just the thing to do that. More than just a night of parades, concerts, and fireworks, this would be celebrating with a whole journey. Many young Canadians are proud of their country, but they haven't really experienced much more than the town they grew up in or the place they went to school. Their travel aspirations don't include Canada. They think of exotic international destinations. This would give them a broader understanding of our country: French and English Canada; east/west, central, and north.
Inspiring a whole movement of young Canadians travelling across their own country, can you imagine what a powerful experience that would be? It would really amplify their sense of Canadian identity and sense of belonging.
I know with my three children having been in the school systems in Halifax, Ottawa, and Vancouver, all of their school trips were outside of our country. They visited the U.S. capital city but not Canada's capital city, all of them as students in public school systems in Canada.
We think the benefit of this initiative for the tourism sector will be real economic stimulus. Young travellers are actually very high-spending. They tend to travel for longer, so they spend more. They travel in the off-season. They go off the beaten path. They enjoy small local businesses.
I'd like to offer the committee members a concrete example of how such campaigns can contribute to the Canadian economy while lifting Canadian pride. The last time the CTC had special funding for a domestic campaign was under the economic action plan in 2009 and 2010. Normally our work focuses on drawing international travellers to our country in order to increase export revenues. But with this special one-time funding, we mobilized a travel marketing campaign here in Canada. It was called “Locals Know”, and it was incredibly successful,.
I'd like to show you a little bit of what that was about.
[Video Presentation]
That video showed you the year-one results.
By the end of the second year, the results for “Locals Know” in full were that nearly one in 10 Canadians who saw the campaign booked a trip, for a total of 4.5 million more trips in Canada and $1.2 billion in revenue. This activity supported over 10,000 industry jobs. This is why we see such a great potential for a new focus on the youth market in 2017.
We've done a whole suite of research—focus groups, surveys, and interviews with industry players—which shows that we have the right foundation for this new proposal before you. Young people are proud to be Canadian, and while only 10% were aware of the 150th anniversary, they believed it merited a big celebration when told about it.
In terms of travel, an incredible 91% of them said that they were interested or very interested in seeing more of Canada soon. Now, we all know that interest isn't currently translating into trips at home, as many are drawn away to exotic destinations in Europe, Thailand, Australia, etc. And we know from our research that a lot of this is because Canada is seen as expensive. It's also not seen as being exciting enough. In part, this is because many young Canadians are pretty unaware of what there is to do here. In our focus groups, we asked them where they'd most like to visit in Canada. They came up with Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. Pushed a bit, they said Whistler and Banff. Beyond that, they really couldn't think of what else there was to do. That's pretty shocking.
Our proposal for government's consideration would be a program in four parts.
First is branding. The CTC could build a youthful, enticing identity for Canadian travel. Second is blitz and buzz. We'd get the message out through a media blitz coast to coast to coast, and cultivate social media buzz—that groundswell we talked about. Third is experience, giving them a reason for their travel in 2017, the most obvious one being to join the mass of others and not be left out. There's so much space here for partners to come in with things like 2017 youth events or promoting voluntourism opportunities, or a challenge like travelling a certain distance on the Trans Canada Trail.
The last part would be deals. We'd work with industry partners to come up with major time-limited deals they couldn't turn down. There's such huge partnership potential with something like this, for example, with airlines, travel companies, the provinces and territories, festivals, lifestyle brands such as Red Bull and MTV. This is how an initial Government of Canada investment could be leveraged into a much larger program for a big impact.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today.