Destination Canada has released research of scenarios reflecting a range of possible outcomes on the Canadian tourism sector. They have commissioned two studies, one for international inbound tourism to Canada, and one for Canadian domestic travels.  Please click here for a PDF highlighting the results from the impact analysis developed for Canadian domestic travels. It includes two outcomes:

• The Baseline scenario assumes that the Covid-19 pandemic will be contained by early summer and will be accompanied by a relatively mild recession impacting the second and third quarters of 2020.
• In the Worst-case scenario, the pandemic is not contained until fall 2020, which triggers a more severe recession lasting until the first quarter of 2021.

Please note that the data is benchmark to the national tourism indicators (NTI) based on domestic tourism demand, which for 2019 is estimated to have reached $82.1 billion (data to 2019 Q3 from Statistics Canada, plus estimate for Q4 2019). This represents about 78% of total tourism demand in 2019 (estimated at $104.9 Billion). The provincial-territorial impact estimates are based on the Provincial-Territorial Tourism Satellite Account, which was benchmarked against the NTI to provide estimates for 2019. The labour estimates are only for jobs supported by Tourism and does not include jobs supported by local spend.

Concerning the economic impact associated with international inbound tourism (tourism exports), the evolution of Covid-19 over the last 10 days necessitated significant revisions to the economic impact scenarios that were initially developed involving our international markets.  We will share results from this updated impact assessment as soon as we can.