Destination Canada

With more than 30 years of leadership experience across tourism, media, and the public and David has built a career around strengthening Canada's global tourism competitiveness while driving meaningful economic impact.

Before joining Travel Alberta, David held executive leadership roles with Destination Canada and the Tourism Industry Association of Canada.

He also served as the Deputy Minister of Tourism and Sport for the government of Alberta for nearly three years.

David, thank you so much for joining us today.

And it was a great brand proposition for about 10 years.

COVID allowed us to stop and breathe and think about what we were doing as a destination perspective.

At the time, Katie, Destination Canada kept putting out research about who are the destinations, they didn't say the friendliest, but the most welcoming of visitors, right? Alberta was always at the top of the list.

And so we sort of, and I had just moved here, so I was sort of kind of getting this notion that friendly is part of the brand.

It's everything.

And very timely because a business event that we hosted in 2023 was, called the International Isotopic Medicine Conference is on the global stage for a global award and because 18 countries people from 18 countries travel to Saskatoon to talk about to develop and learn about isotopic medicine because of the Sylvia Fedorek Center here and because of all of the work that's happening from this Department of Physicians at the University and now There was just a study done on Saskatoon by Destination Canada based on the impact of that event.

So because we bid on this conference for Saskatoon, the Sylvia Fedorek Centre was immediately injected with half a million dollars from investors that came here and saw the excellence of our industry and isotopic medicine here.

And now I can...

magic.

It depends on what kind of a traveler they are.

One of my favorite things to do, Destination Canada has a tool.

You can go on their website and determine what kind of a traveler you are.

We are here doing a podcast on a bus.

I am with Virginie de Visscher with Destination Canada, and we are so excited 'cause we are talking about ICCA.

Uh, we're gonna be in Panama all together here in November.

Talk to me about ICCA and the role that it's played in you being able to connect on a global basis.

And I mean, it doesn't even stop there.

We do a lot of work with Destination Canada as well to promote the city and partner with initiatives all across the world.

Often you'll see us out in these convention spaces with convention centres within our city, as well as the provincial bodies and as well as these international bodies being Destination Canada to really promote our city as a whole.

and our country as a whole.

And that's kind of a big upcoming event for you with your CFO hat on.

You can do it.

Look, if there's Destination Canada, there's Parks Canada, there's Restaurants Canada.

And so, oh, my gosh, we love it.

We love it.

Yeah, I think it's getting there.

I know certainly with Travel Alberta and Destination Canada and the new federal tourism growth strategy, all of them have identified Indigenous tourism as one of the pillars of growth moving forward.

And so it's growing there, but there's a whole new system that has to be built up around that to support it.

Part of it is our work as Indigenous nations to provide the product, and I'm using that product word in quotations here, When I was in Northern Thailand, one of the things I noticed is that the tourists came right into a community and they were, I would, you know, flat out, they were rude, they were obnoxious, they were walking like right into a hut.