Montreal's ambitious tourism measurement initiative battered

If you had to have a job, and surely you're not one of those people who actually work - you might think about putting away the motheaten cardigan and headin' over to the World Center for Excellence of Destinations (the CED) to drop off your resume.

They've been around for a year and a half and have the difficult task of rating tourist places. I guess this means that employees get to lounge around on sunny beaches measuring how fast the hired help runs to fetch them refills when their agents tinkle their ice cubes.

Having this group here, which works with the poshy Madrid-based UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) gives Montreal an advantage, for example one year ago today we were the first city to sign National Geographic Society's Geotourism Charter.

Well now the CED has hit its first taste of controversy.

Since last summer, the CED, led by André Vallerand, started banging together something called the System for Measuring Excellence in Destinations. The descriptions of the criteria seem a bit vague but presumably they want to know if you can drink from the water supply without getting sick and whether snakes are going to jump out from under your bed, those sorts of little travel details.

This weekend at a UNWTO conference chaired by Indian Tourism Minister Ambika Soni in Madrid, India denounced the initiative and decided that it would not take part in it. France, Brazil, Iran, Costa Rica, Ghana and Spain also opposed the tourism measurement tool, which one report said might use crtieria that would put Toronto over the Taj as a destination point.

Other countries have embraced the scale, such as Mexico, so it's unclear whether the SMED has been scuttled, as one paper put it, or will carry on nonetheless.