Tillsonburg explores opportunities
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A group of Chinese visitors from Toronto were in Tillsonburg Thursday to look at potential business opportunities in the town and across Oxford County.
The Canadian Municipal Business Gateway is a group of Chinese business professionals, originally from Hong Kong, who are partnering with cities and towns in the region.
“Today’s visit is about getting a taste of what small urban Oxford (County) is like,” said Tillsonburg Mayor John Lessif. “We’ve had a tour of our airport, our downtown and we’re also going over the Annandale National Historic Site. There’s a few guests coming in to talk about the quality of life that we have here in our community.”
Lessif said the Town was excited about the possibilities such a partnership could bring and were looking forward to developing and strengthening that important connection.
Since forming last fall, the Canadian Municipal Business Gateway has met with Oxford County representatives on three occasions – last November, February and now in July, joining Mayor John Lessif on a tour of Tillsonburg.
“Today we are very honoured to come here to Oxford County and to Tillsonburg,” said Simon Ho, of the Canadian Municipal Business Gateway. “I think Tillsonburg is very lucky to have a very hard-working mayor.
“We are impressed with the planning – it is quite aggressive planning to expand this downtown area.”
Ho described the purpose of the organization and some of its objectives.
“We are building a path to promote cities and municipalities,” he said. “Right now, we are in the process of building up this platform – we are very pleased with your mayor John Lessif. He invited us here and we will try our best to build up the platform using Tillsonburg as the prime model,” explained Ho.
The group is partnering with Tillsonburg and Oxford County with the aim of expanding opportunities and establishing stronger business relations between China and Canada.
“We are trying to connect these people (from China) that would like to invest in Canada or work in Canada together,” said Ho. “We are very happy and we are very comfortable to work in this town, Tillsonburg.”
Mayor Lessif noted a couple of areas of interest, including tourism and agriculture.
“They see opportunities to bring the Chinese people here to experience the quality of life that we have in rural Oxford. They’ll be producing a video and working with Cathy Bingham from Oxford Tourism,” said Lessif noting that the video is expected to be shown and distributed throughout different parts of China to promote Oxford County and the Town of Tillsonburg.
“Another very important area is the agricultural community and Oxford County is in the heart of that,” he added. “We in Tillsonburg rely so much on the success of the rural community so they’re here to explore what possibilities there might be.
“There are challenges in China with growing food and importing food and we both think that there’s opportunity to explore investment opportunities and share our fresh food with the Chinese,” explained Lessif.
The tour on Thursday was the groups first in person and hands-on experience in urban Oxford County. In addition to their visit in Tillsonburg they also toured a retirement centre in Woodstock, Bright Cheese and Butter and Gun’s Hill Artisan Cheese just outside of Woodstock.
“They’ll have to re-group and decide what they would like to see as the next step,” said Lessif “That is probably another visit and it’ll be a little more focused on the investment opportunities in Oxford County.”