As Ottawa begins to plan how to bring travellers back to Toronto, they may examine how other countries, such as Britain, recovered from similar stigmas.

CTV.ca News Staff

As Ottawa begins to plan how to bring travellers back to Toronto, they may examine how other countries, such as Britain, recovered from foot-and-mouth disease or other similar stigmas.

"If there are lessons to be learned from the past, we'll certainly put them to use," Industry Minister Allan Rock said Sunday following a conference call with ministers responsible for tourism across the country.

Britain suffered greatly due to an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in animals after many people mistakenly linked it with mad cow disease, which is fatal in humans. Elliot Frisby of the British Tourist Authority said the key was to get the message out through the media about how it was affecting the industry.

"But also, how exactly it wouldn't affect visitors to this country," Frisby told CTV's Canada AM. "That they couldn't catch it themselves. It wasn't transferable between humans and that the food and drink was perfectly safe to eat here."

Currently many travellers are cautious about Toronto, where the SARS outbreak has killed 21 people and infected hundreds of others. Fears were compounded last week when the World Health Organization slapped a three-week travel advisory on Toronto.

Tourism officials across the country are deciding on ways to fix the perception that Toronto is unsafe. It already has the help of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, which says the city is safe and an advisory is unnecessary. It has issued at travel alert for Toronto, essentially just warning people to stay away from areas where the risk of contracting SARS is higher, such as hospitals.

The Canadian plan will target both international and local tourists, according to Joe Halstead, the commissioner of the Economic Development, Culture & Tourism.

"It is our intention, once the disease is receding, to launch an international campaign to try to win back those visitors who are hesitant to come into Toronto now," Halstead told CTV's Canada AM.

"Secondly, it is our intention to begin to sell Torontonians on the city. That they should be back doing the things they were doing prior to this outbreak."

That strategy could involve the help of celebrities. New York City's former mayor Rudy Guiliani became a celebrity in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when he took a very public approach to persuading people to come back to the city.

Halstead said he doesn't think Toronto needs one face to sell it. "I think we need a consistent message and that message can be sold by many faces. Indeed, that is what Toronto is about. It's many faces," he told Canada AM.

"So at the end of the day, what is important is that they're all selling the same message to the various audiences around the world and locally."

Meanwhile, leaders on Ottawa are planning to publicly show their solidarity with the city.

Rock and his provincial counterparts agreed to meet in Toronto in the first half of May before going ahead with a previously-planned get together in Vancouver at the end of May. Prime Minister Jean Chretien is also holding his cabinet meeting in Toronto this week.

The city received a small boost on Monday, when the WHO said the worst of the SARS outbreak is over in Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong and Vietnam. However, that doesn't mean it will lift the travel advisory right away.

Ontario Health Minister Tony Clement will lead a delegation to WHO headquarters in Geneva, where they hope to convince the UN organization the outbreak is contained in the city and it is safe.

"Toronto is going to be the greatest city in the world again when it comes to our ability to attract, our ability to project the wonderful things about Toronto and Ontario and Canada," Clement told a news conference at the provincial SARS operations centre in Toronto.

Health Minister Anne McLellan, at the joint news conference with Clement, applauded the efforts of health care workers at keeping the illness out of the general population and under control.

"These people are doing a tremendous job here in the city of Toronto to, as Tony says, to make sure that everybody knows Toronto is a great city. Toronto is a safe place to come and life is going on," she said.

With a report from The Canadian Press