Tourism Winnipeg

Cover photo: Mike Peters The uncertainty around the COVID-19 virus and its variants continued to monopolize 2021. We faced a rise in cases and continued restrictions and carefully monitored what that would mean to already-struggling businesses. While companies do not like uncertainty, our business community once again rallied and rolled with the changing economic environment. They now have policies and plans in place, and experience helped guide them through another difficult time. Despite the continued challenges around fewer in-person meetings and restricted travel, our teams across EDW worked hard to zero-in on relevant data to help businesses and our organization make informed decisions about next steps. This allowed us to leverage those insights to find opportunities across business development, foreign direct investment, talent recruitment and tourism. At the same time, we continued to market Winnipeg and position it within a global context. We gained attention and accolades from international think tanks and iconic pop culture magazines. We will use those accolades to our advantage to start conversations with businesses about why they should consider Winnipeg as an ideal place to grow your business. We worked in lockstep with the Province of Manitoba to create a reopening plan for our economy and with other stakeholders to fill the pipeline for conventions and business events. We bolstered our marketing capacity and content to reach new markets to find talent for Winnipeg companies while assisting in the development of programs that would be the most impactful for businesses' recovery. One of the major initiatives we worked on to support local companies was Retrain Manitoba, a $12.5 million upskilling and training reimbursement fund, meant to encourage businesses to invest in their employees and their future growth. In the following pages, you can explore some of our highlights and successes of this past year. We're optimistic for a strong recovery in 2022 and beyond because our team did the work. We spent much of those 'locked down' months creating and implementing solid strategies to position our city for more opportunities. Positioning Winnipeg for growth Message from Chair & CEO Dean Schinkel Chair Office Managing Partner, Deloitte Dayna Spiring President & CEO Economic Development Winnipeg Inc. 4 2021 ANNUAL REPORT

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