Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
It's a pleasure to join you here today. I'm sorry I'm not here in person, but I do appreciate this very much and thank the committee for including the tourism perspective in your important study.
I would like to offer just a quick overview, if I can, of the organization that I represent—the Canadian Tourism Commission— and really give you a bit of a picture in terms of how the CTC incorporates Canadian music, Canadian festivals and events, into our international tourism marketing, and why it's important for us to do that.
First of all, we are Canada's national tourism marketing organization. We're a crown corporation that leads the industry in marketing Canada as a premier four season destination.
We know that travel and tourism is one of the world's fastest-growing sectors. It is an $84-billion industry for Canada's economy, but a very competitive marketplace.
Through our international tourism marketing activities and our trade and sales activities in 12 countries, we really are competing hard for a visitation, supporting over 170,000 mostly small and medium-sized businesses in every nook and cranny and region of our country.
Our model is really partnership-based. We work with the Canadian private sector, from hoteliers to chefs to ski resorts and the cultural industry, to leverage every dollar that we get and double our marketing impact. We work with our international travel trade by connecting international buyers with Canadian sellers. We have a meetings and conventions division called Business Events Canada. Its mission is to create awareness of Canada as a great place to hold international conferences. We know that holding international conferences is great for filling hotel rooms, cultural centres, and restaurants, but we also know that we bring very important people to our country. It's like a big familiarization trip to our country, where, when they get here, they see what they see, and they invest here, they send their kids to school here, and perhaps even buy Canadian products from here. We know that the long-tail effect of that is significant.
We also work, of course, with the public sector, the provincial and territorial tourism marketers, to leverage their investments.
We're always looking about 5, 10, or 20 years out, to see what competitive advantages we can create and develop. One of these opportunities relates to our music industry in Canada and, of course, to some very important people who really appreciate great music—I think we all do—and that would be youth.
We know that young travellers represent a large and lucrative market for Canada. Internationally, it totals to about 187 million travellers, representing about 20% of our annual global arrivals, and it is the fastest-growing segment.
We're focusing domestically on youth because they present a large domestic tourism opportunity as well. There are 5.2 million Canadians up to the age of 29, reflecting about 15% of our population. Canadian youth travelling in Canada spent an average of about $1,400 over 14 nights, and that's pretty much on par with what our international long-haul travellers are spending.
And yes, music festivals and events are significant motivators for youth travellers, and this is a key pillar in developing the youth travel strategy that we have under way at the CTC.
While still in development and only seed-funded by us at this point, our youth strategy focuses on the opportunity of leveraging existing Canadian festivals and events to attract those travellers. We've pulled together a youth council, and we're pleased to have representation of that FAME group—Festivals and Major Events Canada—that was mentioned by Mr. Monahan as an important contributor to help us build the right plans for the travel movement.
In the future, we're planning on hosting two influencer programs this summer focused on youth and music. These will focus on the Osheaga Music and Arts Festival, in Montreal, and Pemberton Music Festival, here in British Columbia.
We're also market-testing new concepts around youth initiatives connected to music festivals and events, and we will have this analysis completed later this spring. We're doing a little bit of research on that.
We look to the Canadian music industry for inspiration when we do our marketing in general. Last summer we asked Canadians to help us create an anthem for Canada. We created this program called 35 Million Directors, one of the most viewed tourism videos around the world of all time. The video connected us to a soundtrack that was Yukon Blonde, which is also a Canadian band, and we were able to highlight them to Canada and the rest of the world.
We focus on the Canadian signature experiences collection, which includes major cultural events in those experiences, including the Calgary Stampede, the Montreal Jazz Festival, the Harvest Jazz and Blues Festival in New Brunswick, and Celtic music in Cape Breton.
The long and short of it is that the tourism industry really relies on the culture and the music industry to help us round out that experience for Canada. We're known broadly and widely for our great outdoors, our beautiful cities. What we need and what we need to support is more the culture, and music plays a huge role in that culture to help us round out the experiences that Canada has to sell and offer.
We're highly supportive of this industry. We really like to partner with it, work closely with it, to help us collectively inspire the world to find a destination in Canada.
Thank you.