By John Francis
Destination Stewardship.
It’s an interesting concept, one that’s getting a lot of traction now in an area much like ours — if you ignore the fact that it’s about a hundred times our size with about a hundred times our population — Vancouver Island.
Like the peninsula, Vancouver Island has a low population density, a lot of wild shoreline and a large National Park presence.
Like the peninsula, its main industry is tourism, with retirement also a major economic driver.
Like the peninsula, its National Park towns (Tofino and Ucluelet) have ridiculously inflated real estate values and a long-term rental sector that is being hollowed out more each year and converted to Short-Term Accommodations.
Like the peninsula, it has a large First Nations presence which has been trying to bring the conversation around to the concept of stewardship for a century or so.
Like the peninsula, Vancouver Island hasn’t done much to address its problems around tourism, but the winds of change are blowing in both places.
On the peninsula, we have the Sustainable Tourism Advisory Group, which brings together representatives from all of tourism’s stakeholder organizations to brainstorm and coordinate. It’s a committee, so things move slowly, but there are some exciting initiatives in the works to measure and manage the numbers of people who come here and develop strategies for the future.
Vancouver Island is taking a different tack — they’re thinking in terms of destination stewardship and trying to tame the relentless pursuit of “development”.
Last April, Tourism Vancouver Island reinvented itself as 4VI. The name reflects the four pillars underpinning sustainable tourism: community, businesses, culture and the environment.
Lebawit Lily Girma explains the importance of the change in an article in the online tourism publication Skift: https://skift.com/2022/07/18/early-lessons-from-vancouver-island-tourisms-shift-from-marketer-to-social-enterprise/
4VI’s mission statement:
4VI (formerly Tourism Vancouver Island) is a social enterprise in business to ensure that travel is a force for good for Vancouver Island – forever. 4VI is contributing to an enduring, vibrant and sustainable visitor economy by delivering innovate tourism advisory services and investing profits into powering the stewardship of Vancouver Island in four pillars of social responsibility: communities, businesses, culture and environment. 4VI is also a signatory to the Glasgow Declaration on Climate Action in Tourism.
Joanna Haugen, writing about 4VI on the Sustainable Brands website (https://sustainablebrands.com/read/walking-the-talk/4vi-creates-new-model-for-destination-marketing-organizations-by-becoming-a-social-enterprise) explains that:
“A social enterprise is a revenue-generating business that identifies a social benefit and directs its revenues toward that good; in the tourism industry, this is a completely new way for a Destination Management Organization to operate.”
She quotes 4VI’s CEO Anthony Everett: “Through the pandemic, we saw not only businesses but residents asking, ‘How can tourism contribute to making this a great place to live?”.
If you Google 4VI, you’ll get lots of information on it. I noticed that most of the content is heavy on polysyllables and light on actual nuts-and-bolts action. But you have to like their basic precept that tourism should improve an area’s quality of life.
If 4VI is successful in changing tourism so that it benefits the whole community as much as it benefits the community’s entrepreneurs, that would be a worthwhile accomplishment. We should watch 4VI’s progress and strategies to see if any of them would work if you scaled them down 99% to fit the peninsula.
Tobermory Chamber of Commerce will have an opportunity to move in this direction when it starts receiving a portion of the Municipal Accommodation Tax. Regulations require that MAT money must be spent in a way that benefits tourism.
A great place to live is a great place to visit, right? So the question is — can some of the MAT revenue go towards making the peninsula a great place to live?
Maybe when you scale things down by 99% they get simpler — you can get it down to nuts and bolts.
Municipal water and an expanded sewer system in Tobermory would sure be a huge step in the right direction. So would a sewer system in Lion’s Head.
Sidewalks in our villages and bike paths beside our busy roads would sure improve our quality of life.
They would benefit community, businesses, culture and the environment. Maybe we should be talking about how to do these things rather than whether or not to do them.
