Convention centre no 'white elephant'
An opinion piece on the Wall Street Journal’s website that portrays convention centres as “fancy white elephants” was greeted with a shrug by officials at the World Trade & Convention Centre in Halifax on Thursday.
“What we are developing for Halifax cannot in anyway be compared to what is happening with the trade show industry in the United States,” Scott Ferguson, Trade Centre Ltd.’s president and chief executive officer, said in an interview.
Ferguson said Trade Centre Ltd. is continuing to turn away significant conferences and conventions for Halifax due to the diminutive size and age of the existing facility, and that trend is only expected to accelerate with organizers of big gatherings in Canada taking their business elsewhere.
The opinion piece slammed convention centres in the United States received some aggressive email circulation in Halifax. It was the topic of the day on Jordi Morgan’s morning talk show on HalifaxNews 95.7.
“The U.S. market is entirely different than the Canadian model,” said Ferguson. “American cities have gone after big stand-alone complexes measuring in the millions of square feet, and each city continues to try to outsize the other with the size of their convention centre.”
Arguments favouring a replacement for the existing 50,000-square-foot Halifax convention centre cannot be undermined by data referring to some of the world’s biggest trade show complexes in major American cities, he said.
“We’re basically at capacity once the main room is booked, allowing us to handle only one event at a time, and again, we’re talking conventions and conferences, and not the big international auto and electronics shows.”
The article critical of convention centres that appeared Tuesday was a condensed version of an article by urban affairs critic Steven Malanga of New York City. The piece appeared originally in City Journal.
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