Communitech announced Tuesday that it was cancelling the 2020 True North Festival in light of the growing COVID-19 worldwide epidemic.
”Obviously it is a tough decision but one where we think that we’re doing the right thing,” Communitech CEO and President Iain Klugman told Global News.
He said Communitech has been in discussions with community partners as well as Waterloo Public Health before it came to the decision.
“We spent a lot of time talking to (community partners) and with the local health agency and decided that things don’t look like they were getting any better,” Klugman said.
He believes that even if a vaccine is found in the near future, it may take a while before things are safe again.
“Things tend to move away quickly and come back slowly in our experience so we just made that decision within this community to say, as sad as it is, this is the right thing for us to do,” Klugman explained.
With the ION LRT line finally complete, the conference was to have grown in its third year to include several other major events and spread from a two-day conference to a week-long festival.
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“We were tracking to about 25,000 attendees, which which is 10 times the number that we had last year,” Klugman said. “People were just starting to figure out what we’re up to and coming out of the woodwork and saying, ‘you know what? We want to be part of this.
“It makes it doubly disappointing because of the fact that we started dreaming of this a long time ago and just got to the point where we have an opportunity of executing. And of course, now we’re going to have to have to put it on hold for a year.”
The festival was slated to take place from June 1 to 7 in various locations in Kitchener and Waterloo.
Klugman says they are unable to postpone the event because it is unclear when the rapidly spreading outbreak will begin to diminish.
“There are lots of people who are pushing stuff to the fall. The problem is that we just don’t have any visibility is when going to get better,” he explained. “It’s very difficult for us to be making those plans right now, not knowing how long this is going to be with us.”
Communitech plans to turn its attention toward bringing the festival back sometime in 2021.
“There’s a lot that’s been built and a lot of speakers that we haven’t even had a chance to announce yet. Some huge names,” Klugman said. “We’re going to turn this into something in 18 months, not something in six months. And so we’re gonna be working towards 2021 starting right away.”
The rapidly spreading outbreak began in Wuhan, China last December, and as of Tuesday is confirmed to have infected more than 116,000 people, across 100-plus countries. It has claimed over 4,000 lives.
In Ontario, 36 people have tested positive for COVID-19 including a woman in her 50s from Waterloo Region who flew from Italy last week.
The festival joins a growing list of concerts and events around the globe which have been cancelled by the growing COVID-19 epidemic.
* With files from Global News’ Adam Wallis
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