Henry Aubin has a decent piece summarizing many of the recent ideas for attracting tourists to the city, and says that instead of emulating events held elsewhere, or trying to bring them here, we should capitalize on what makes the city distinctive. Fuelled by coffee and a sunny Sunday morning, here are some things that occur to me.

First, we're on an island in an archipelago. That's unusual – most cities are not. We could use more of the small islands, offer more boat tours, floating hotels, we could find ways to make coming to Montreal an encounter with life lived on the water. Imagine – you land at Trudeau, and are immediately transferred to the Lachine Canal where a boat brings you downtown! The St. Lawrence is a hell of a river – even the Rivière des Prairies and the Mille-Isles are respectable rivers. Major cities have to make do with piddly little rivers like the Seine or the Thames. When it comes to rivers we've got the real action.

(Note that historically all three of Montreal's amusement parks – La Ronde, Belmont Park and Dominion Park – were built near water and have used it as one of their attractions. Going out on boats is fun. We already do some of that – we need to find ways to do more living on the water.)

We have a lot of disused churches, some quite nice, and as churchgoing continues to decline we'll have more. Let's turn some of them into free hostels for travellers. Yes, free. They would be kept clean and offer a bed, breakfast, wi-fi and a little secure storage for three days to anyone with a foreign passport. Nothing too fancy. But it would be a draw, and people who aren't paying for hotels would spend money on other things.

We have poutine.

We have winter. Winter tourism will never be for everybody, but maybe we could offer rental parkas and snow boots. Kanuk is already making parkas that last for years – we can get them to make an indestructible, adjustable rental parka along the lines of the Bixi bicycle.

And finally, it's key that we stand a little apart from the corporate sameyness of the rest of North America. Sure, when you get on the highway and drive out of downtown you see the same franchises in the suburban sprawl that you'll see in any city on this continent. But downtown, our restaurants and retail have not yet been completely overtaken by the chains. We need to find ways of supporting and describing the varied richness of the tables and the shopping here. Especially now, while the loonie's down again.

There you go. It would've cost thousands for a think tank to come up with this stuff, but I'm putting it out there for free. Now I need another coffee. posted at 10:34