August 4, 2026

…because it drives economic activity.

In 2016, the City of Guelph engaged an outside company to help them understand how they could develop tourism, encourage people to visit Guelph, and understand better the reasons people were coming to our city. They invited lots of people working in the sector; hotels, restaurants, attractions and me as Executive Director of the Downtown Guelph Business Association (DGBA), to let them know what we thought was going on. As it turns out, we had many visitors who were spending a lot of money in Guelph. They were just invisible.

The type of visitors that spent the most were folks who were here on business. Unfortunately, they were the least satisfied with their time here. They didn’t know what was going on in town, they didn’t visit traditional Guelph tourism spots, they mostly stayed in their hotels and only went out to dinner in the same kinds of restaurants that they could visit in their own hometown.  All of us in the group studying tourism thought that this presented an opportunity. What if there was an easy way for them to have a richer experience of Guelph when they were here.

What emerged from that was a comprehensive strategy for building tourism in Guelph. It recommended connecting large businesses in town (University of Guelph, Linemar, Polycon Industries, etc.) with City of Guelph tourism to build visitor packages. These would encourage and incentivize people to discover more of what Guelph had to offer and by doing so take home a more positive message about their time in our city.

One of the things that I was most intrigued by was the idea that we needed to have ongoing attractions and events. It seemed to me that live music could become our “Niagara Falls”.  If we had something that was reliably on most of the time, an attraction that you could count on we could make Guelph a destination for people looking for live music. We have about 5 million people to the east of us who are within an hours drive. If we gave them a reason to visit, I felt confident many of them would come to our beautiful city. Imagine how much our citizens would love an ongoing opportunity to enjoy live music and imagine as well how many local musicians, technicians and promoters would benefit. And guess what? In London Ontario they have a live music strategy. They have a position within city hall that makes sure their city in regarded as a hub for entertainment. They don’t do this because they are music lovers; they do this because it drives economic activity.

Back to our business traveller. Now that person has a reason to go further into the heart of our city to discover the unique, the particular and the beautiful parts of Guelph. Imagine the story they take back home with them. Imagine conversations that begin, “wow, Guelph has got it going on”. But that never happened. The 2016 report languished on a shelf.

But we tried when I was at the DGBA to make the case to prove the concept with our weekend music series, where we would fill otherwise empty venues on Saturday and Sunday afternoons in the winter – the toughest time to get people to come out. And it worked. Jobs were created, venues were filled, community was developed, and joy was experienced.

I want to be elected to city council to take what we already know; what we already need to do and make it happen. The data is there, the business case is there, all that remains lacking is the will and the vision to do what we knew we should do 10 years ago.