A Temiskaming-area touring route is in the works, with officials from various municipalities working together to help pull the flow of visitors further North.
“Traditionally, people head south and say, ‘Oh, let’s go to Ottawa or Wonderland or Niagara Falls’, and we have to change that mindset,” says Don Studholme, director of Kirkland Lake’s Department of Corporate Services.
“We have world-class attractions up here and we just have to market them properly.”
While most people won’t bother driving from southern Ontario to the North for a single attraction, the creation of a tourism package with multiple destinations and points of interest can serve as a stronger incentive, he says.
The project has been in development for a year and has already received roughly $600,000 from governmental funding agencies. The touring route is expected to be complete for the 2009 tourist season. Each participating community features its own set of attractions, distinct and separate from one another.
Cobalt is pushing its own efforts for tourism potential with its Historic Cobalt Village project, which seeks to revive the feel of the turn-of-the-century silver rush of the early 1900s.
Similarly, Kirkland Lake has Hockey Heritage North and a trails project; Temiskaming Shores has its Heritage Museum as well as the Temiskaming Art Gallery. Timmins has the Shania Twain Centre and the underground mining tour, while Cochrane features the Polar Bear Habitat and Heritage Village.
Festivals are also a central part of the region’s tourism efforts, with Englehart’s centennial celebration, the Biker’s Reunion in New Liskeard, and the annual Foire Gourmande food fair just a short hop over the Quebec border.
By creating the touring route, Studholme says each town could act as a point of arrival in a corridor of attractions, thereby generating a sort of critical mass.
The idea is to bring people in and keep them entertained for four or five days.
“If we want people to travel north of Highway 17, we’re gonna have to pool our marketing efforts,” he says. “We have to change.”
There’s even been some discussion to create the base of the route in Sudbury, with travelers moving up through North Bay, Cobalt and Temiskaming Shores before moving onto Timmins and Cochrane.
Travelers would then move down Highway 144 to return to Sudbury.
The route is being tentatively referred to as the “Road to Riches” tour. The name is an appropriate one, given the economic activity historically drawn from the region, says Doug Shearer, a councillor with the Town of Cobalt who is spearheading the Temiskaming touring route project.
Shearer says his town is already working on various projects to help accommodate the local interest the touring route is expected to generate, particularly with regards to conferences and convention planning.
Renovations have already begun on the town’s train station, which currently houses a military history museum. Once renovations to the town’s train station have been completed, the military history facility will be moved to the local Fraser Hotel, freeing up the station as a potential convention space.
Shearer estimates only minor work will be needed to bring the site up to standard, including repairing water damage and stripping paint before the installation of office space and multimedia capacity can begin.
The local community centre is also being pegged as a potential convention space once various repairs are completed throughout the coming year.
“Once we develop this stronger focus on presenting the region as a centre or cluster, we can start to draw people up here,” Shearer says. “This sort of thing will act as a catalyst for other economic development, which helps everybody.”
