Staying ourselves

We don’t have much of a spring in PEI, insulated as we are by slow-warming Atlantic waters, but we wake one morning in June to discover it is full-blown summer. All at once, a thousand greens splash out in contrast with tilled red soil. Surrounding waters reflect the blue of the sky in the ripples and wakes around white-hulled fishing boats. Those ancient legume lupins bloom, so even the ditches are filled with colour.

And the roadways the ditches border begin to be filled with out-of-province license plates: tourist season. And under-valorized and under-funded as a tourist draw is PEI’s cultural sector. While arts and culture organizations hustle to put plays on summer stages and to maintain community museum collections without year-round staff, Tourism PEI’s exit surveys quietly tell the story of cultural tourism’s importance, concluding in 2023 that the cultural tourism market in PEI “accounts for more than half of the total overnight pleasure travel market,” and that cultural travel parties “not only spend more, but also stay longer than non-cultural tourists.” 

Perhaps on a grass-scented June evening you will visit a community hall in rural PEI to take in one of the performances of traditional music, dance, and storytelling that make up the PEI Mutual Festival of Small Halls. Last year, the Festival’s director Josh Ellis tells me, almost half of ticket sales went to visitors from off-Island. Visitors drawn here to the festival stayed an average of eight nights and spent $1.8 million during their visits. 

This is cultural tourism at its best: culture rooted deeply enough to fill half the seats with locals, while welcoming visitors to fill the rest. As Lindsay Connolly uncovered in a discussion paper on cultural tourism produced for CreativePEI in 2025, cultural tourism works best when we do what we love, artistically and culturally, and invite others in. 

“Many cultural tourism operators are already contributing to year-round activities, events, experiences, and employment opportunities that impact PEI residents’ quality of life,” the discussion paper says, “and, whether they realize it or not, also align with [Tourism] priorities.” But this kind of tourism does not sustain itself; it depends on sustained investment in artists, arts workers, and cultural organizations creating contemporary culture now. 

How can I say that cultural tourism is under-recognized in the land of Anne of Green Gables? Living as we do in the land of Anne, we get trapped in the dual nature of L.M. Montgomery’s beloved creation: where Anne is so visibly a commodity, we forget to look beyond the pig-tailed products to the artistry and culture beneath them. And we remain stuck in a past artistic rendering of ourselves. 

In their history of tourism in PEI, The Summer Trade, Alan MacEachern and Edward MacDonald note how even that June landscape is both beautiful and marketing an idea of beauty. In PEI tourism, “Summer and everything it invokes is the commodity being sold,” they say. “The Island gains from the trade but also gives something away.” The problem for culture within tourism is the conundrum of Island cultural identity. Across PEI’s tourism history, we have “simultaneously sought to change to accommodate visitors’ needs and stay unchanged to accommodate visitors’ desires.” This is the ultimate PEI tourist trap. 

What PEI most needs is sustained support for artists and cultural organizations, telling the story of who we are in this landscape now, today. Believe it: if we invest in the culture being made here now, and leave an open door and an empty chair, visitors will continue to join us.