In the News

Five years ago, tour operator Mimoza Jakimi used to bring 100 Americans a day to Southern Ontario on packaged holidays that included tickets for shows in Toronto or trips to the Shaw and Stratford festivals. Today, that U.S. business has simply disappeared, and she's lucky to sell a handful of single theatre tickets to day-trippers from Buffalo.

"For the last year and a half, they have dropped drastically," said Jakimi, who is general manager of Keith Prowse Canada Ltd., an international tour operator specializing in ticketed events. "What's keeping them home, it's really hard to tell."

U.S. tourism to Canada fell by 5 per cent in 2005 and will have dropped another 1.6 per cent by the end of this year, the Conference Board of Canada predicts. That leaves the Shaw and Stratford festivals struggling to balance budgets in which as much as 40 per cent of box-office dollars come from across the border, and weighing the economic and political reasons that Americans still aren't travelling.

"It's really unpredictable," said Colleen Blake, executive director of the Shaw Festival, where the box office is recovering from the 15-per-cent decline it suffered in 2003, the season SARS hit Toronto and the United States invaded Iraq. "We seem to be so vulnerable to what's going on in the world."

Both the festivals, which experienced some of their best years in 2001 and 2002 despite the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and tourism operators trace the beginning of their problems to the summer of the panic over severe acute respiratory syndrome.

But a variety of other factors, including the strong Canadian dollar, which makes a trip across the border less of a bargain for Americans, and longer waits to get back into the U.S. because of increased security, are also to blame. The latest figures from the Tourism Industry Association of Canada show that car trips from the U.S. dropped 9 per cent in June compared with the same month last year.

"After the SARS issue, there was a sense of urgency . . .," said Stratford's general director, Antoni Cimolino. "But the impact was actually less than what has happened with the appreciation of the Canadian dollar."

While Stratford still attracts a loyal American following devoted to seeing Shakespeare on stage, Cimolino figures the combination of higher prices and the inconvenience of the border crossing is keeping casual American theatre-goers away. Stratford's American audiences, who account for more than their share of the box-office dollars because they see more shows and buy more expensive tickets, have dropped another 4 per cent this season. Before 2003, 40 per cent of the festival's box office receipts were accounted for by sales to Americans; today, it's about 36 or 37 per cent.

Cimolino says he will be hard-pressed not to run a small deficit on this year's budget and that ticket sales, which ran as high as 670,000 during the festival's golden anniversary season in 2002, will come in under 550,000.

The smaller Shaw Festival has experienced a better year and less precipitous drops -- American sales still account for an unwavering 40 per cent of the box-office dollars, Blake said -- but the larger financial picture is bleaker because the festival, which never posted the million-dollar surpluses Stratford enjoyed in the late 1990s, is left paying off a $4-million debt from 2003 and 2004. Blake hopes to generate a surplus of $300,000 or $400,000 this year that she can put against that debt; ticket sales are expect to reach at least 285,000, down from 325,000 in the late 1990s.

Blake is less inclined to blame the strong Canadian dollar, pointing out that Americans who come to Canada for theatre are affluent, and is more concerned about the perception that crossing the border is increasingly difficult because of the American government's announcement it will require passports at all land borders by 2008.

"Every time news about the passports hits the press, we can feel it at the box office," Blake said. "It's so confused. People think, 'Oh, I need a passport, I can't go.' "

Although most of Shaw and Stratford's adult U.S. patrons are regular travellers who do have passports, both festivals says the requirement will really affect school groups. "It will shut the border in terms of school kids," Blake said. "No one wants the liability if one kid on the bus doesn't have the passport."

Both Blake and Cimolino are lobbying U.S. politicians and officials on the issue, and have found a sympathetic ear, especially in the border states. Blake hopes proposals for family cards and day passes might ease the restrictions, but Cimolino points out that the youth of the terrorism suspects arrested in June in the Toronto area doesn't help the festivals when they plead for an exemption for school kids. When he visited Washington this year, he met with an official at the Department of Homeland Security who knew all about the Stratford Festival, but warned him that many Americans just want tighter security. Cimolino heard the same story again and again as sympathetic politicians told them they got it; the problem was their constituents.

"As the world gets more complicated and the borders get tighter, our ability to understand each other through the arts is going to be limited," Cimolino said. "Doors are closing when they should be opening."