Previous Issues
Time to get serious about tourism
?A booklet enclosed within the Toronto Star a few weeks ago was instructive about what it did, and didn’t, contain. It was called Do It!, and was supposedly a comprehensive guide for the Star’s readers on what to do in Ontario this summer, with a heavy emphasis on the GTA. There were event listings that went on for pages, maps of all the tourist hot spots, and a number of fascinating feature articles about various aspects of the province’s tourist industry.
We were disappointed, but hardly surprised, that Uxbridge Township received only two mentions in the entire book, despite being within an hour’s drive of the vast majority of the booklet’s readers. On the GTA map, there was a huge void in the area between Stouffville and Lindsay, except for a solitary green square, indicating trail riding potential at Pleasure Valley, just south of town. And remarkably, on a page dedicated to family-oriented agri-tourism, there was a 500-word article about Steve and Lisa Cooper’s Ashworth Road farm and its Uxbridge Maze (you’ll recall reading about the same farm in our June 25 issue).
We’re familiar with both these attractions, and they’re long-established, first-class operations deserving of many visitors from the big city. But if you were to ask most local residents to list Uxbridge’s prime tourist attractions, we suspect Pleasure Valley and the Cooper Farm would not be in the top five. And yet in Do It!, there is no mention whatsoever of the Leaskdale Manse, the Foster Memorial, the Uxbridge Historical Centre or our renowned hiking trails. The York-Durham Heritage Railway is mentioned, but passengers are asked to get on in Stouffville. There are many other museums, monuments, literary historic sites and hiking experiences mentioned, but not in our neck of the woods.
In the event listings, you will find ribfests, highland games, heritage festivals and agricultural fairs by the score, but not those in Uxbridge. No, as far as the Star is concerned, there really isn’t a heck of a lot going on up here in which the day tripper or weekend tourist would be remotely interested.
Now, it could be just coincidence that both the Cooper Farm and Pleasure Valley have professional PR people working for them on a contract basis, not just to promote the tourist aspects of their clients, but to generate business for the Cooper’s CSA operation and Pleasure Valley’s convention/meeting facilities. These people, as Do It! demonstrates, know well what they’re doing. And they are succeeding.
The Township also has tourism promoters pitching on our behalf. They work for the Region of Durham, they’re based in Whitby, and they also work for Oshawa, Pickering and Scugog. Do It!, we feel, demonstrates they’re not doing an effective job in selling Uxbridge’s attractions.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, we think it’s high time the Township got serious about tourism (as well as selling the Township to people like physicians and industrial corporations), by hiring a full-time PR professional. Too many of our attractions rely on volunteers, however creative they might be with limited time, skills and money.
They deserve more help, and the Township should be providing it. A booth at the CNE is a start, but it needs to be aggressively followed by a campaign designed by someone highly skilled in the field. The investment in that person’s salary will undoubtedly pay off in spades. For evidence of that, Council need look no further than the Cooper Farm or Pleasure Valley.
They deserve success, but so do we.
