Meetings Mean Business Canada Targets Eastern Canada

Continuing its mission to advocate for the power of face-to-face meetings, Meetings Mean Business Canada (MMB Canada) visited Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa to connect with Business Events Industry executive leaders on March 21, 22 and 23 2018.

MMB Canada Chair, and the SVP Business Development & Industry Partnerships at Freeman Audio Visual Canada, Heidi Welker, Vice-Chair Clark Grue, President and CEO of the Calgary TELUS Convention Centre and Meetings and Conventions Calgary, Treasurer Reggie Lang, Manager Business Development – Groups and Incentive Travel with WestJet, and fellow board members spent several days in Eastern Canada meeting with existing and potential MMB Canada supporters. The meetings were hosted by the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Montreal Convention Centre and the Shaw Convention Centre in Ottawa.

Over the three days, Welker and her colleagues reported on the past 14 months since the coalition relaunched its rebrand from BEICC to MMB in January 2017. MMB Canada has raised over $100,000 of initial funding and counts 112 industry executive leaders amongst its supporters to date. They spoke about the Business Events Industry at large and how it generates $27-$30 billion annually in direct spending and employs over 341,000 people in well-paying, full-time jobs yet the industry is largely invisible to elected officials and policy-makers. MMB Canada is fast becoming the single advocacy voice for Business Events in Canada working in tandem with its secretariat the Tourism Industry Association of Canada (TIAC), the country's pre-eminent tourism industry advocacy organization.
 
Additional coalition meetings to continue MMB Canadas’s outreach cross-Canada are scheduled in Halifax and Fredericton in late April 2018. Welker and her fellow board members have also formed 3 committees for 2018 to research and recommend the following:

• A sustainable financial membership model
• Curation of unified data for the Business Events industry
• Executing a plan to tell the Meetings Mean Business Canada story

Speaking about the coalition meetings, current chair Heidi Welker said “Our goal for the latter part of 2017 and moving into 2018 was to meet with industry leaders across Canada to rally support for the coalition and continue the conversation regarding the strategic vision for the coalition. We want to become the single advocacy voice of the meetings industry in Canada, to communicate the economic and social value of face-to-face meetings to elected officials at all levels of government as well as stakeholders across the country and to thereby shape policy, legislation and investment to ensure our industry prospers”.

To learn more about MMB Canada, view the current supporter list, and add your organization to this growing coalition, please visit our website here https://www.meetingsmeanbusiness.ca/supporters