THUNDER BAY – Coun. Joe Virdiramo said the municipality’s recent sister city visit to Jiazuo, China was a chance to plant the seeds of trade.
The trip, which involved city officials, representatives from Lakehead University and Confederation College and delegates from the local business community, also landed Thunder Bay an international tai chi academic conference, tentatively scheduled for 2018, a partnership with Henan Polytechnic Institute.
The city will also receive three seven-foot tai chi statues which, when delivered, will be erected at Prince Arthur’s Landing.
“It’s very important that we do these types of exchanges,” Virdiramo said on Tuesday, a few days after the group returned from its week-long visit to the most populous nation in the world.
“It’s very important that we make ourselves known to the global community.”
The veteran councillor pointed to the fact Jiaozuo was once a city with one industry, coal, much like Thunder Bay’s reliance on forestry. While Jiaozuo has a population of 3.5 million and Thunder Bay’s hovers around 100,000, there’s a lot local leaders can learn from the Northern Chinese community’s economic diversification into technology, auto parts, blast furnaces, chemical, food and energy manufacturing.
“There are many similarities. We were at one time a one-industry town too,” Virdiramo said.
The Sister City program has tied Thunder Bay to five communities around the world – Little Canada and Duluth south of the border in Minnesota, Gifu City, Japan and Seinajoki, Finland are the others.
The idea behind the program is to foster friendship, good will, education, economic development and tourism.
In addition the city last week signed a Friendship agreement with Nanning, China, and plans to do the same with North Caribou Lake First Nation.
James Aldridge, Lakehead’s vice-provost international, said more and more universities and colleges in Canada are relying on international students to fill their classrooms. Lakehead has more than 1,200 international students this year, a third of which come from China.
He said the memorandum of understanding to bring the tai chi conference to the city was a direct result of the trip, adding there will be a tourism component to the visit as well.
“They’ve hosted the conference in Jiaozuo before and they’ve had hundreds of people at that conference,” Aldridge said. “I expect that researchers alone should be hundreds of people.”
Lakehead Public Schools’ Sherri-Lynn Pharand said the overseas visit was an opportunity for the board to increase its own foreign-student population, working with the college and university to sell themselves as a one-stop education option.
“It’s also important for our students, who will be living and working in a global society, in order for them to know and understand different cultures, different ways of doing business. It helps to get to know one another,” Pharand said.
Virdiramo said the statues are another measure of the trip’s success.
“We have a gift of three huge bronze statues, which means we are respected, which means we are valued. To me that’s a success factor right there.”
