Last year, the MAT delivered $1.9 million to the County. An amount sharply up from 2024’s $1.3 million. 

In 2023, $1.55 million poured into county coffers. All this largesse is generated by our hosts and their visitors. Short term accommodators (AirBnBs), bed and breakfasts, and hotels must charge a 4 percent tax on their offerings and remit it directly to Shire Hall. 

The proceeds of the County’s tourist economy are a rich, reliable, and growing income stream. 

There are few rules about how municipalities spend MAT funds, beyond a key provision: half must go to a dedicated Destination Management Organization (DMO). In PEC, we have two. In return for half of this windfall, Visit the County and StayPEC are charged with the task, broadly speaking, of marketing the County. That includes what the industry likes to call “product development.” 

In this case, the product is Prince Edward County. 

As for the municipality’s share, in the absence of a framework to direct how the MAT is spent, it goes to the roads. Since the funds started flowing in 2022, over $2 million has gone to roadworks. This is an essential investment into rural infrastructure which benefits everybody, tourists and residents alike. But it is not focused on developing the distinct qualities that make this a  place to visit — and live.

That should be the basic rule for directing the hard-earned proceeds of our tourist economy: to develop and enhance those things that draw people here. 

That is why I direct your attention to the Have Your Say portal, which is soliciting feedback on how to spend the MAT until August 14.

We need some creative, strategic, careful thought, like that demonstrated, for example, by the creators of the Arts Fund.

In 2024, The Community Services, Programs and Initiatives department, together with the County Arts Council and The County Foundation, devised a plan to foster the arts that are already flourishing here. A very small portion, $50k, of MAT funds is directed to a dedicated Arts Fund. The County Foundation, which manages the fund, pledged a further $25k, bringing the total to $75k. That money is now distributed to arts organizations across the County, for things like CAFF, the County’s fledgling film festival, the County Stage Company, and the Department of Illumination’s Summer Pageant and Firelight Lantern Festival. 

The plan makes perfect sense. Our arts and cultural organizations not only make this a flourishing, vibrant and unique place to live, but draw great quantities of high-spending visitors.

It is also doubly beneficial, as it takes the arts out of the competition for the community grants program, which is now open only to organizations directly addressing community needs, such as food insecurity, homelessness, and access to training and education. 

The Arts Fund offers a model example of taking money generated here and re-investing it to make more money here — to create a place that flourishes by doing what it loves to do. PEC has a rich arts culture and draws people with great entrepreneurial spirit. It’s a dynamic combination. We need to invest in it.

The thinking can be traced back to one of Canada’s great thinkers on tourism and other place-based economies, Zita Cobb. 

After making a fortune in tech, Ms. Cobb, an eighth-generation Fogo Islander, returned with her brothers to the tiny island off the coast of Newfoundland where they were born. They wanted to rebuild the island’s economy, devasted in 1992 by the collapse of the Cod fishery. They built the Fogo Island Inn as a way to draw global tourism dollars to the island, and keep them there. All of the Inn’s profits are re-invested into the local community via The Shorefast Foundation, while everything is sourced locally in the running of the Inn that can be. As Ms. Cobb told the Canadian Senate this spring, “The Fogo Island Inn opened in 2013. It employs more than 220 people and is widely recognized as the leading global model of community-led, regenerative tourism. More than half of every guest dollar stays on Fogo Island; more than 96 percent stays in Canada.

“If sustainable economic development is possible in a small community on the edge of the Atlantic, it is possible in communities across this country.”

She would tell us that the proceeds of the County’s tourist economy — all of them — need to be invested back into that economy. That is the only way to grow it. 

The starting point for a place-based economy is asset mapping. Our tourist economy is an asset, and so are all the things that make it work: the wineries, the beaches, the boat tours, the museums, the historic architecture, the lovely towns and villages, the unique hotels, the farm stands and farmers’ markets, all of it.  

“Asset-based community development,” says Cobb, “means every move we make is meant to strengthen place.”

How to start? It’s simple. Find out why people visit the County and support it. That is the start and the finish of it. Take what draws people in. Invest in it and make it stronger.

Keep the funds here. Move them around. Generate more funds.

As Ms. Cobb further explained to the Senate:

“Twenty years ago, my brothers and I came home to do what we could for our island’s economy. In doing this work we learned that the market and government institutions that shape our economy do not optimize for where Canada’s assets reside — in the places we live. 

“Beneath the many crises we hear cited most often — housing, affordability, economic opportunity and mental health — sits a crisis of place.”

Cobb challenges us to think of economic development in terms of community building. That is its purpose. An economy must be rooted in its place, and its goal is building that place for the people that live there. That is a place-based economy. 

Rule number one is keeping the funds here. That is how to make a world-class tourist destination that is first and foremost a place people can live — and flourish — in.