With a new smartphone app designed to capture a share of the tourism market, the rich and vibrant history of Temiskaming is now at visitors’ fingertips.
Developed through Le Centre culturel ARTEM, the Temiskaming Interactive Circuit (TIC) comprises six tours that guide visitors through the area, encouraging them to stop at various points of interest along the way. Three additional “health circuit” tours counsel visitors on exercises they can do to make their tour a health-wise option.
The Haileybury fire of 1922, Temiskaming’s agricultural heritage, and the silver rush of Cobalt all get their moments of glory. Each tour includes an audio file telling the history of the area, guiding visitors to the next point of interest along a predetermined route. Audio files are complemented by photos highlighting the points of interest.
The Cobalt tour, for example, features commentary by Cobalt Mayor Tina Sartoretto, who regales visitors with the legendary tale of the Cobalt silver rush and the town’s subsequent boom and bust cycle, leading to its current designation as the most historic town in Ontario.
Most tours are available in French and English, and 250 points of interest are incorporated across the cultural tours.
Nicole Guertin, who was a driving force in developing the app, is a strong advocate for telling the area’s stories. Rather than focus on developing huge, unsustainable tourism projects, she favours capitalizing on the community’s existing assets.
“I think, often, for developing tourism in Northern Ontario, we tend to want to do big white elephants, like a Shania Twain Centre or Hockey Heritage North, but our history is more all sorts of little stories,” Guertin said.
She first alighted on the idea for the app almost a decade ago while working for Direction Ontario, an organization dedicated to fostering and promoting Francophone tourism in Ontario. But with smartphone technology still in its infancy, she admits she was thinking too far ahead of her time.
Fast forward a few years and the technology has now caught up. Visitors interested in taking the tours have two options: they can download the app onto their smartphone, or they can rent —free of charge — one of 10 iPads available for use. Last year, the tablets were rented through local museums throughout the area, but this year, they’ll be supplied through local hotels, because, Guertin says, “that’s where the tourists are.”
“If a hotelier can convince someone to do a tour and they stay an extra night, it makes a big difference for us,” she said.
Because ARTEM is limited in its funding, there won’t be an extensive marketing campaign to generate interest in the initiative. For that, Guertin is relying on word of mouth. But even locals may help in that regard. While developing the app, ARTEM held community meetings to gauge what stories people wanted to be told about the area, and more than 100 people came out to share their ideas.
Guertin believes there is already a strong foundation to see this kind of project expanded throughout the North, extending the mining narrative beyond Temiskaming and into outlying areas.
“There would be a really big need to do some kind of project like that, more at the regional level, on mining, between Cobalt, Kirkland Lake, Timmins,” she said. “There’s so much mine history.”
