WCOC: Chamber Spotlight page 1

It’s Exciting Times at your

Chamber of Commerce

For more than 136 years The Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce has been the “Voice of Business” in Winnipeg. Over the past five years The Chamber has seen dramatic growth in our membership, which rose from 1,600 to almost 2,100 members in that time frame. The Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce recently developed a new three year strategic plan that was meant to leverage The Chamber’s growth over the last several years to do some big things. Even we didn’t think they would be this big!

Selling Winnipeg to the World

One of our city’s most exciting initiatives is creating a buzz in the business community. This Chamber-driven project is meant to collectively pursue investment opportunities for Winnipeg. To date, a number of steps have been taken to make this a reality:

a business call team of 60 high-profile volunteer representatives is calling on the top 250 companies to get leads of potential new businesses;
we are gathering local business intelligence of our key advantages and those sectors they match up with best; and
we are also identifying areas in which we need to improve to achieve success at attracting, expanding, and regaining business.

Vision Winnipeg

It’s amazing what can happen when you give passionate Winnipeggers a chance to dream about what’s possible for their city. That’s what we are asking different groups to do from all areas of our city as we have undertaken a process to create a Vision for Winnipeg.

Leadership Winnipeg, a program working with over 20 future community leaders, facilitated five consultations focusing on five different lenses of our city (downtown, arts and culture, economic opportunities, environmental sustainability and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights)

In addition, The Chamber has established a high school council made up of students from over a dozen schools in Winnipeg that are providing us with valuable insight into the type of city young people are looking for.

Left to right: Chamber CEO Dave Angus, business owner Rob Clement, and Mayor Sam Katz attend news conference announcing the elimination of the business tax to almost 4,000 small businesses.

Chamber Lobbying Finally Paying Off

For years The Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce has been calling on City of Winnipeg politicians to scrap the hated business tax. Close to 10 years ago we put together a detailed policy position outlining how it could be done and the process to make it a reality.

Over the past couple of years Mayor Sam Katz has shown a willingness to scrap the tax and has taken steps to reduce the rate that businesses pay. In the most recent municipal budget, city council fully adopted one of The Chamber’s key recommendations on the elimination of the business tax by beginning a threshold approach and removing more than 4,000 businesses from the business tax rolls.

The Chamber will continue pushing city councillors to move forward on this issue and will not stop until the tax is eliminated.

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