Thank you.
Mr. Chair and Committee members, I would like to thank you for inviting me today.
My name is Beth Potter and I am the President and CEO of the Tourism Industry Association of Canada.
Before my remarks, I acknowledge that we are gathered here today on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Anishinabe Algonquin nation.
TIAC is the national advocate for tourism in Canada. On behalf of thousands of tourism businesses, we promote policies, programs and other initiatives that foster the sector's growth.
Tourism matters. It enables socio-economic development, job creation and poverty reduction. This drives prosperity and provides unique opportunities to women, minorities and young people. The benefits spread far beyond direct GDP contributions and employment. The indirect gains extend through the entire travel ecosystem and supply chains to other sectors.
Despite some improvement over the last few months, tourism businesses incurred a heavy debt load to get through COVID and continue to struggle financially. They face barriers to attracting investment and have considerable challenges attracting and retaining the necessary workforce to run their operations. Disruptions in supply chains, inflation at a 40-year high and rising interest rates are now also impacting our businesses.
Our recent submission to Minister Boissonnault outlined key priorities to help tourism reach its full potential. We recommended key goals to be achieved by 2030. These relate to tourism spending, dispersion, workforce, international overnight visitors and our global competitive position. We have four pillars that will help to achieve those goals.
The first one is to attract and retain a sustainable tourism workforce. The recovery and growth of tourism largely hinges on addressing the significant labour shortages that exist. Tourism HR Canada also submitted a comprehensive proposal to Minister Boissonnault and recommended targeted recruitment campaigns and a specific indigenous workforce strategy.
In the areas of training and skills development, it recommended increasing the number of high school programs, modernizing post-secondary programs, launching comprehension national tourism job bridging programs as well as investing in skills development and training. TIAC supports these recommendations and urges the government to act on them. THRC is a unique organization and is a centre of excellence and expertise in this area. As such, we recommend that the government contribute ongoing resources to them to enable them to carry out this important role.
Our second pillar involves improving access for visitors to and within Canada. Enabling and facilitating the movement of travellers to and within Canada is critical to tourism success. To improve pre-border screening wait times and congestion at airports, additional resources should be allocated to greater adoption of biometrics and the use of other digital tools such as e-gates.
Additional resources should be allocated to expand the trusted traveller pilot program nationwide. The Canada electronic travel authorization program could be enhanced and used to harmonize and streamline a number of Canadian-recognized global security agreements. The government could also take a leadership role and assist in redeveloping routes to connect Canada via motorcoach.
Our third pillar focuses on developing and promoting tourism assets. Significant resources are needed to ensure that Canada has world-class tourism assets and to promote them for travellers to discover and experience. Estimates undertaken by industry experts suggest that it would take billions of dollars in new capital to fully achieve our asset goals. Support for the creation and refurbishment of tourism assets should entail a suite of financial measures. Much of this new financing could be administered via existing organizations. We know in particular the need for targeted support for assets in the indigenous tourism sector.
We recommend a new tax credit for retrofits and upgrades. This would incentivize investment in renovations across the country. A new capital cost allowance could be introduced for capital investments, allowing 100% of the investment in new tourism assets or major renovations to be claimed in the year in which they occur.
To help attract greater private investment, the government could establish pools of public lending capital. Such investment could help leverage billions of dollars from private sources.
To encourage the development of new, sustainable, innovative assets, or refurbishing existing ones, particularly in underserved rural and remote areas, new grants and non-repayable contribution programs could be created.
The marketing and promotion of our assets is also critically important. We recommend that the government increase its annual allocation to Destination Canada to a level on par with its counterparts in other leading countries and commit to that funding for five years.
We also recommend that the government introduce a national meetings, incentives conferences and events fund to also help stimulate the business event sector. The government should encourage its regional economic development agencies to provide greater assistance to destination marketing organizations for this purpose.
Our last pillar is a regenerative and inclusive tourism sector. As tourism works hard to get back to prepandemic levels, there is an opportunity to make the sector more resilient, sustainable and equitable. We recommend that the government invest in regenerative tourism and acknowledge tourism's role in carbon reduction by introducing tourism-specific programs in support of businesses for new sustainable projects and retrofits across the country.
Canada also strives to be a place of inclusivity and opportunity for all communities. TIAC recommends that the government introduce new tax credits for businesses that develop specialized equity recruitment programs, as well as allocate resources for the implementation of an indigenous-led workforce strategy.
In closing, I trust our more detailed proposals in our written submission, which we will table later this week, will enable you to consider the priorities in the upcoming budget.
Thank you very much. I look forward to our discussion.