Tisdale’s mayor and economic development officer spent three days in Ottawa to drum up more investment for the town.
Al Jellicoe and Sean Wallace met with diplomats from the United Arab Emirates, Korea and Germany.
“The best way for us to meet with foreign investors is to meet with them at their embassies,” Wallace said during an interview. “That way we get to visit them in their country while in our country.”
The economic development office said that while large foreign investment projects take years to complete, the meetings have come up with some results.
“We’ve invited them to Tisdale to bring their delegations this summer and they seemed receptive to that,” Wallace said. “We’re expecting to have delegations from the U.A.E., Germany and Korea this summer.”
That’s in addition to previous visits from China, Japan, India, The Netherlands and the United States.
The two also took the time to meet with senior officials with Agrivalue Canada as well as the Invest Canada part of the foreign affairs department.
Wallace said in a release that making the face-to-face connections is a key part of attracting investment and that behind a desk waiting for a phone call isn’t effective economic development
“If you don’t have those important face-to-face investment meetings and rely on telephone calls for economic development, that’s called telemarketing – and we all know how effective that is,” he said.
Jellicoe said in a release the meetings made the diplomats aware of where Tisdale is and the products it could produce.
“Meetings with countries that want products we can manufacture or process in Tisdale is paramount,” he said. “Traditionally, crops, and other products, are sent to other jurisdictions for processing and considering our agricultural expertise and robust transportation infrastructure there is no reason why we would need to send raw materials to other Canadian cities for processing when we can do it here.”
He added that Asian and Middle Eastern countries are looking to invest where the resources are produced.
