Thompson Chamber of Commerce president Oswald Sawh kicked off Northern Business Week with an appearance before city council Oct. 17, outlining the organization’s schedule of activities for the week as well as its plans for the upcoming year.
The date of Sawh’s update to council coincided with the official launch of the chamber’s Facebook page.
“We’re getting into the 21st century,” said Sawh. “We hope to use this as a vehicle of communication not just to our members but also to the residents of Thompson and also non-members just to showcase what the chamber’s about and whenever we need to provide any updates on certain issues we are going to use that as well as other modes of communication.”
The Chamber of Commerce is making moves in the physical realm as well, with plans to vacate its current space in the City Centre Mall and move back to Selkirk Avenue in the downtown area, where it was before it relocated to the mall in October 2013.
“The main reason for that move is that we’re seeing the needs of our membership and one thing that the new office will provide is more space,” said Sawh. “We plan to put in a resource centre in that office that will be of assistance for people who are in business or who are looking at starting a business and we’ll be providing information on grants and loan programs and some technical assistance as well. We’re hoping that just being right there in the downtown area where we were not that long ago will be a great place for people to be able to more easily access some of the services we provide.”
Other items on the chamber’s agenda for the upcoming year include working with the city and other organizations on making Thompson as attractive a destination as possible for investment.
“There’s no doubt that we have some challenges coming up,” he said. “We’ve had challenges before and we’ve always overcome those challenges. We as a chamber feel that it’s important to have open communication. We want to be a partner with the City of Thompson when it comes to helping to address some of the challenges we see coming up but at the same time we also want to remind people there’s opportunities as well as challenges.”
As part of that mission, the Chamber of Commerce has been seeing how Thompson stacks up against other communities.
“We have looked at other places in the north,” Sawh says. “We just started to review some of the other places that are about the same size as Thompson, not just in northern but also southern locations. We’ve looked at things like comparing mill rates and licence fees and business taxes, water and sewer rates. We are mindful of one thing: that we want to make Thompson investment attractive. We are mindful of the fact that we are competing against other places in the province so as a chamber we want to work with the city to help make Thompson as attractive as possible when it comes to investment.”
The chamber also feels there are ways to improve the city’s strengths.
“We are the service centre in our region,” he said. “I expect that we will continue being so but I think there’s a lot of opportunities for us to enhance that.”
One of those opportunities is by building the tourism sector. The chamber has applied for a grant from Travel Manitoba in hopes of developing a strategic plan for Thompson tourism.
“Our main thing that we want to look at in regards to the framework is to work with Tourism North and the province to put together a grassroots approach to a Thompson-specific tourism plan that will engage the various stakeholders,” said Sawh. “We’ll talk about what are some current resources we have or some things that we feel are some opportunities and we want to make sure we have an open dialogue and we also want to make sure everyone’s on the same page. We don’t have any preconceived notions as to which areas we want to focus on. We want that to be driven by the operators and the stakeholders in the community itself and residents.”
