At an event in Washington, D.C., last week, a representative of Tourism Toronto asked the foreign media to consider the bright side of the G20 summit being hosted in Toronto, and not just focus on the protests and security disruptions. Curious (and dubious), I spoke with vice-president of communications Andrew Weir about how this billion-dollar event could be seen as a good thing.
Do you really think the G20 will cast the city in a positive light?
Big cities host big events and this is an opportunity to show the world Toronto's place in the world. It will establish Toronto's place as one of the truly global cities. Events like the G8 and G20 can only happen in certain cities, they can't just happen anywhere. But more than that, let's look at the couple days of the summit itself. We're looking at, by any conservative estimate, 20,000 people. That's a big group coming to the city at a time when it's no secret when our industry had a challenging year. Events like this really help. This is how tourism starts to come back. You've got hotels and other businesses in the community that had been reducing staff, now they're hiring. This is almost a stimulus package for the tourism sector, that helps bring an economic sector back.
Do you really think it will make a difference? The people coming are politicians and media. Are those the kind of people that will stimulate tourism?
There's what happens in the two days of the summit and then there's the longer term. In the immediate term, it's a city with 40,000 hotel rooms that will be very close to sold out.
And everyone who actually lives here will be gone....
I'm not sure about that. We've hosted big things before and we've closed things before. It's not the first time. And while it's true that the leaders themselves are not going to be going out to restaurants and galleries and theatre, there are tens of thousands of other people.
There are large delegations, it could be 800 to a thousand people. Only a few of them are going to be with the leader in the secure area. The rest of them are going to be at meetings like any other business meetings. Convention delegates do go out to restaurants and bars and they bring their spouses. It's like any other convention in that way and conventions are important economic drivers.
It's not like Obama's going out for dinner. Of course not. But if the U.S. delegation has 800 people, there's probably a few dozen that are with him. What are the other 750 doing? They're not in the secure zone. They're meeting with their counterparts from other countries and going out for dinner. And that's important business. Nobody for a minute thinks Obama is going to be wandering through Kensington market and shopping in the cheese shop. But there are other people who are going to do that.
And in the longer term?
We have an education job to do to let the world know what Toronto is all about. When you bring a thousand TV cameras to a city, that's a good start. That's a good way to raise a city's profile.
It's a summer weekend. The skyline's going to look great and they'll shoot all kinds of footage up and down through Toronto and they'll do most of that before the summit even starts. They're doing it for South Africa before the World Cup, they did it for Vancouver and they will do it for Toronto. It's what we call the set-up story. It's a powerful image. We do have a profile problem. We're not on enough people's radars.
Reporters from around the world were brought to Toronto last week for a tour. Have they written much yet?
I think that will come in the two weeks prior. We're doing a lot of work now to make sure that happens. The goal is to make sure their coverage includes Toronto as part of the storyline. Similar to the way Pittsburgh was. People talk about the teargas there, but I went down and met with my counterparts in January and went through binders and binders of media coverage and most of it was about their amazing transformation. Many people until September didn't know that they stopped making steel there decades ago. They think of it as an industrial centre, and that couldn't be further from the truth. The city has suffered from a lack of eyeballs on it.
And have more people been visiting Pittsburgh since their summit?
I don't know. I haven't asked.
But they feel like it was a success?
It starts with profile. We'll worry about converting that into tourism business. The opportunity here is that media will be here and they'll be writing about Toronto. We know that media coming here are political and economic reporters, but they also write about the place that it's happening. The Globe and the Star both ran stories in the lead up to the summit in September about Pittsburgh's art scene. It had nothing to do the summit, but that's what the media was doing before it started.
Did the people in Pittsburgh give you any indication about how the locals felt about it? I don't feel like anyone's really selling it to Toronto
The extent of the logistical challenge, and what that means to the people living and working in the downtown is not lost on anyone. Including us. Our offices are downtown. But we're also looking at a bigger picture and I hope that a lot of Torontonians will look at that bigger picture and see that this is our chance on the world stage. The Olympics were a logistical nightmare, years of construction and all these kinds of things, but you do these things because it's an opportunity to make a contribution as a country and a city and to be on the world stage. If we are the great global city that I and many people believe we are, then we ought to embrace the opportunity and not just look at the traffic snarl it might create.
But with the Olympics, you can see the upside. I think people in Toronto are wondering what the positive trade off is for the inevitable images of protests and traffic congestion.
Even when you see protests on TV, nobody thinks that's normal activity for Toronto. Nobody's going to say to themselves, "Cross Toronto off the list, there's protests there." People understand that's a traveling show that goes with the summits. I believe the security forces are prepared and the protesters are trying to generate this kind of panic in advance. I'll leave it to others to judge if they're succeeding. But it's the threat of protest that is just as effective as the protests.
Can you quantify how this summit could be a success for the city?
Profile is the culmination of all kinds of things, but this will help cement it, we hope. The people who come here are going to respond to the welcome they receive, so I hope Torontonians welcome our international visitors as they always have done.