The Departmental Innovation Award is given to the department that best demonstrates an innovative approach to solving a need that benefited a section, division, the department, government as a whole or the general public.
This year’s award goes to the Tourism PEI Team, part of the Department of Fisheries, Tourism, Sport and Culture, for their work on modernizing and professionalizing tourism standards and enforcement. This award recognizes their resourceful approach to tackling the challenges posed by unregulated short-term rentals (STRs).
Tourism PEI identified the urgent need to regulate the growing number of these rentals and the resulting reduced long-term rental availability, increased housing costs, and enforcement difficulties. To address these issues, Tourism PEI implemented a data-driven, collaborative enforcement framework that leverages automation, analytics, and cross-jurisdiction collaboration to streamline regulatory processes and enhance enforcement. Tourism PEI modernized the Tourism Industry Act, which mandates platform operators to list only licensed establishments. Automated STR identification and compliance monitoring enable real-time detection of unlicensed STRs and the centralized CRM system tracks enforcement actions, ensuring transparency and accountability while reducing administrative burdens. Formalized data-sharing agreements with municipalities enable consistent enforcement across jurisdictions, reducing regulatory loopholes. Outcome-driven reporting tracks progress, including compliance rates, STR investigations, and housing stock recovery.
This has truly been a thoughtful and contemporary approach to problem solving! This initiative has delivered significant benefits to residents, municipalities, licensed STR operators, and governments. It aims to return three hundred housing units to the long-term market by year three, easing rental shortages and stabilizing prices. Enhanced regulatory oversight has increased detection rates of illegal STRs by over fifty per cent, ensuring more operators are brought into compliance. The automated approach has reduced administrative workload by an estimated forty per cent, freeing staff for higher-value tasks and cutting STR investigation time from months to weeks.
Tourism PEI's efforts exemplify public sector innovation by using technology and collaborative governance to drive meaningful, measurable improvements for their team and department and for our province.
Congratulations to Kent MacDonald, Keith Hansen, Jody Curly-Howard and the entire team!
L-R: Keith Hansen, Jody Curly-Howard, Premier Rob Lantz, & Kent MacDonald