Today, with an ever-growing crisis in Europe and just over two years since the global pandemic first hit, the travel industry took another step on the journey towards resilience in the face of disruption.
This milestone was the official signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between Hon. Edmund Bartlett, Minister of Tourism for Jamaica and Dr. Gervan Fearon, President of George Brown College, to establish a satellite office of the Global Tourism Resilience & Crisis Management Centre (GTRCMC) here in Toronto.
Present to witness the signing at the Jamaican Canadian Association Hall in North York was a group of dignitaries, tourism industry professionals and media.
The GTRCMC is a global think-tank focused on building and designing resilience in the tourism sector by mitigating the effect of global crises and disruptions. The new Satellite Centre of the GTRCMC at George Brown will be focused on enhancing the resilience of tourism destinations.
In the words of Minister Bartlett, the centre developed with the idea to “understand the application of tourism as a driver of a transformation. But more importantly, as a means of building capacity to respond to global disruptions, to be able to mitigate then manage to recover and to recover quickly — and thrive afterwards.”
In practical terms, Dr. Gervan Fearon explains that this includes “international learning exchange, joint teaching between our institutions, as well as industry-focused student exchange and applied research activities.”
The main Global Tourism Resilience and Crisis Management Centre is at the University of West Indes at Mona Jamaica, with other satellite centres in Hong Kong, Kenya, Japan, Malta, Nepal and Oman. The newly agreed Satellite Centre at George Brown College in Toronto will be the first in North America.
