Festival du Voyageur – ‘A great experience’

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/02/2011 (5546 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WINNIPEG — Some modern-day voyageurs in the provincial capital want folks in Westman to help them celebrate their storied past.

What started in 1970 as a three-day winter festival largely by and for the citizens of the community of Saint-Boniface, the Festival du Voyageur has now grown to the largest winter festival in Western Canada.

Held in Winnipeg’s French Quarter, the festival has now evolved into a 10-day celebration of sights and sounds. That along with a whole lot of snow and ample amounts of voyageur spirit. With the moniker of The World’s Largest Kitchen Party, the event celebrates the "joie de vivre" of the fur traders, who established the Red River Colony and the French-Canadian community in Western Canada.

However, while the event brings in more than 77,000 people to its 10-day celebration — including more than 14,000 students via its school program — many people in Manitoba aren’t fully aware of what goes on in and around the walls of the rebuilt Fort Gibraltar on the banks of the Red River.

So this year, festival organizers decided to do some more outreach to Manitobans, and that meant busing in a group of folks last weekend from the Brandon area for a two-day tour. This year’s festival wraps up tomorrow night.

"The logic of bringing people out from Brandon is that they will hopefully bring back the message that this is a great event to come and join in on," said Kevin Walters, the tour host last weekend and executive director of Saison Voyageur. "(We hope to) create a little bit of a relationship between Festival du Voyageur and the events going on in Brandon, so maybe we can help market each other’s events."

Saison Voyageur is the first legacy event of Manitoba Homecoming 2010, which Walters also headed up.

Along with partners Festival du Voyageur, The Forks and Culture on Every Corner, Saison Voyageur plans to promote the outdoor and indoor events that celebrate winter in Winnipeg and surrounding areas.

Saison Voyageur starts on New Year’s Eve in Winnipeg at The Forks and spans eight weeks. It will include the Assiniboine Credit Union River Trail, the Arctic Glacier Winter Park and culminates with the Festival du Voyageur.

Walters said last weekend’s festival-sponsored bus trip from Brandon — which included members of the tourism and event industry, media and contest winners — could be the start of an annual charter.

While it’s obvious that people can book their own hotels, find their own way to the festival site and easily make their way around, a chartered bus tour with a host and planned events is always an attractive option for tourists.

"That’s what we would like — next year instead of 20 people coming in from Brandon, we have a couple of buses coming in from Brandon," Walters said, noting a tour operator in Dauphin is also interested in setting up a charter.

"We could either sell it directly ourselves, or sell it through a Brandon operator."

One of the invited guests last weekend was Brandon Chamber of Commerce general manager Nathan Peto.

"I saw this as a great opportunity to check out another community, to see how they do things and how they do business with non-profits," Peto said.

"And culturally, it’s been a lot of fun. It’s been fantastic — the food, the music — it’s been a great experience."

Last year, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers football club joined the Brandon chamber and offered promotions to attract fans to Canad Inns Stadium for home games.

Peto drew a comparison to that and this year’s outreach by the Festival du Voyageur.

"Obviously, Winnipeg sees Brandon as a virgin market for some of these events and they want to bring people out. But I think it’s important not to forget that buses go both ways and we should start marketing our events," he said, mentioning events such as the summer and winter fairs, the Brandon folk festival and Rock the Block.

Enter fellow traveller Neil Thompson, president of the Provincial Exhibition of Manitoba.

He said the Provincial Ex is looking at forging ties with the Festival du Voyageur. It’s hoped that could even result in setting up a bus tour from Winnipeg to Brandon.

"I talked to the president (of the Festival du Voyageur) about the opportunity of exchanging people and having a little bit of a presentation at the Royal Manitoba Winter Fair and us doing the reverse as well," Thompson said. "Just so that we can build and share those ideas back and forth between the organizations because we’re not really competing, we’re just trying to make each other’s events better."

Judging from the crowds at the festival last weekend, the event certainly is a major draw — even in frigid temperatures.

And it attracts a wide variety of people from all walks of life.

Last weekend that included a young couple from Brandon, Mark Poole and Celya Byers, who won the trip through a local radio station.

"It’s been awesome," Poole said shortly before hopping on the motorcoach for the trip home. "There are friendly people everywhere and there is great food and music."