I am saddened to hear that Jackie Challis is moving on from Inuvik.
For longer than I’ve been here, she has worked her fingers to the bone to promote Inuvik and the people within it. She’s a master event planner and her presence will be greatly missed, I suspect more and more as we realize just all the hats she wore.
Wherever she is going, I hope she realizes what a valuable team member they are receiving.
However, her departure presents an opportunity to make a slight change to how the town handles its tourism and economic affairs.
Currently, the municipality has a single Tourism and Economic Development Officer, which up until now has worked relatively well. But it should be noted that tourism and economic development are two entirely separate portfolios.
It may be in the town’s interest to split the role into two separate positions, a tourism development officer and an economic development officer. Currently, the town has a robust annual event schedule for tourists to attend, a nice cool tent to host events in, a functional Midnight Sun Complex, in-town camping and a multitude of trails to explore. Several smaller venues like Ingamo Hall occasionally host events like drum dance practices that tourists would definitely be interested in. We have three hotels that are frequently booked solid during the summer season and during major events throughout the year.
But outside of that, we have four restaurants, only one of which is consistently open later in the day. Other smaller kitchens provide food weekly at the Arctic Market, as well as movie popcorn, takeaway coffee and other creature comforts. But other than word of mouth and people’s friendliness towards tourists, there is very little to connect a hungry family passing through to a local family running a side hustle making Chinese food, homemade sushi or Jamaican food, to name a few of the offerings available for those in the know.
Having a dedicated economic development officer would help the town promote its “hidden” businesses. We cannot expect tourists to find these small businesses on social media themselves. Instead, a team focused on promoting local businesses and attracting new business interests and finding ways to keep them in town would greatly enhance the experience of tourists flying in or driving down the Dempster.
This would also allow the tourism development team to focus on providing a top notch experience for tourists instead of having to stop and manage major events such as the Arctic Development Expo — an extremely important economic venture, but not exactly a tourism one. When I was attending the conference this year, I spoke to many delegates who were eager to experience Beaufort Delta culture, but because the town’s entire focus was making the Expo run smoothly — and they did a phenomenal job of it — there weren’t a lot of events happening outside the Expo for delegates. The town needs to be able to do things like keep the visitor centre open during big events such as the Arctic Development Expo, which really comes down to more staff.
Please note, I’m not criticizing any past or current performance of Town of Inuvik staff, but a reorganization of the town’s roster may reveal new opportunities.