The thing is, you never really know how a single terrorism incident will play out.
Pat Moscaritolo, the head of the Greater Boston Convention and Visitors Bureau last year pointed out to CBS News that it took his city’s tourism industry more than two years to recover from 9/11. Yet it took just a few weeks after last year’s Boston Marathon bombings before tourists returned in force.
Yes, the scale of the attack on the Twin Towers in New York dwarfed what took place in Boston in April 2013. Nevertheless, three people died in Boston, more than 250 were injured, and residents lived through four days of uncertainty before authorities captured the second of the Tsarnaev brothers who had set off the bombs.
This week’s attack on Parliament Hill by a lone gunman triggered a daylong lockdown of the city’s downtown core and produced headlines around the globe. How badly will this hurt a local economy that is only now starting to recover from several years of federal government downsizing?
While tourism is billed as the third-most important sector in the National Capital Region, with 20,000 employees, it makes up only three per cent of the total workforce.
Between eight million and nine million people visit the capital each year, but 85 per cent are Canadians who tend not to spend heavily. Another seven per cent each arrive from the U.S. and overseas.
A question potential visitors will ask is how vulnerable they feel visiting Ottawa knowing that this week’s attack by Michael Zehaf-Bibeau took place in the heart of the tourism district. Especially now that Canada appears to have been targeted by Muslim radicals.
After the bombings at the Boston Marathon finish line on April 15, 2013, the city’s mayor — according to Moscaritolo — was delighted to receive a resolution from the heads of nearly 40 national tourism authorities. The gist: all the countries would do what they could to promote travel to Boston.
A spokesperson for Jim Watson said Thursday that Ottawa’s mayor had received nothing similar, but it’s very early to co-ordinate that kind of international effort.
The number of international visitors to Boston did slip marginally the month after the Marathon bombing, but began escalating after the July 4 weekend as it became apparent the attack was an isolated incident. By last July — the latest month for which figures are available — the number of international visitors to Boston topped 89,000 — up 20 per cent year over year. Life does go on.
The tourism rebound was helped by a global advertising campaign, paid for in part by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which highlighted Boston’s undeniable attractions.
For the moment, tourism authorities here are not thinking along similar lines.
“We’re not planning a specific campaign,” said Noel Buckley, the president and chief executive of the Ottawa Tourism and Convention Authority. “We believe Ottawa is one of the safest cities in the world and will continue to remain so.”
That might be so — and the longer we go without another incident that creates international headlines, the more outsiders will believe it.
In the meantime, the institutions most vulnerable to fears about a recurrence are the Shaw Centre and the Macdonald-Cartier International Airport. At any given moment, the Shaw Centre is negotiating to bring in thousands of potential delegates. News of the shooting will not have helped, particularly given the convention centre’s downtown location.
The airport is already experiencing anemic growth in passengers — it’s estimated about 4.7 million passengers will course through the airport this year, up slightly from 2013 but roughly the same as 2012, reflecting the reduced number of government employees in the region.
Furthermore, the airport had been counting on relatively strong growth in the U.S. and other international markets to help offset anemic trends domestically. Last year about 27 per cent of passengers started their flights outside Canada.
But the aftermath of the shootings in Ottawa could produce surprises. Perhaps Canadians will travel here more often in solidarity, to do their bit to show that acts of terrorism will not disrupt our way of life.
jbagnall@ottawacitizen.com