As a member of Destination Canada’s Strategic Advisory Group (SAG), Karryon founder Matt Leedham joined Australian travel industry leaders on a purpose-packed immersion trip through Winnipeg, Churchill and Riding Mountain National Park, hosted by Travel Manitoba with Destination Canada and supported by Air Canada.
Some 408 Australian travel businesses have now signed the Together for Impact pledge: a commitment to grow tourism in Canada across new seasons, regions and experiences, in ways that create real value for Canadian communities and advocate for the Australian travel industry as a force for good.
The 2026 SAG immersion trip took SAG members to the heart of the country as guests of Travel Manitoba and its partners to connect with those places and people firsthand and challenge each other’s thinking along the way.
Discovering Manitoba, with its abundance of sensory stimulation, did exactly that. Eight unforgettable days in a province that none of us will describe the same way again.
Here’s the wrap on what happened, along with the products and enriching experiences to share for anyone planning a trip to Manitoba.
Welcome to Winnipeg: The heart of Canada, on the cusp of fall
Beginning our trip from Brisbane and Sydney, we flew on Air Canada (AC) to Vancouver, then took a two-and-a-half-hour AC flight east over the Rockies. The connecting flight to Winnipeg is a breeze: bags checked through from Australia, immigration cleared in ten minutes, and on to the domestic flight.
We arrived at the end of summer, with the leaves just starting to turn. Below us, flat, fertile prairie and vast fields of golden canola. Ahead, a low-rise city with clean air and, at 25 degrees, perfect shorts and sightseeing weather.
“Canada’s heart is calling” is Travel Manitoba’s tagline, and the map agrees. Manitoba sits dead centre of the country, with Saskatchewan to the west, Ontario to the east, Nunavut to the north, and North Dakota and Minnesota to the south.
Our Winnipeg base for two nights was the Inn at the Forks, in the regenerated rail precinct where the Red and Assiniboine rivers meet (hence the name “the Forks”), a gathering place for Indigenous peoples for more than 6,000 years. Today, locals and visitors alike meet to socialise along the riverbanks.
First up, a tour of the Manitoba Legislative Building and its hidden Masonic architecture, then a sunset baseball game as the Winnipeg Goldeyes took on the Kansas City Monarchs on cowboy-themed night. It isn’t Major League Baseball. It’s better in some ways: families, diehard fans, hot dogs and a feel-good community vibe.
Bears, butterflies and human rights
Day two began with breakfast alongside polar bears and seals at Assiniboine Park Zoo’s Journey to Churchill exhibit, followed by a conservation talk. Next door, we explored The Leaf biodome, which includes a butterfly garden and is part of Manitoba’s PaRx program, where doctors literally prescribe time in nature and patients visit for free.
Then to Qaumajuq at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, home to the world’s largest public collection of contemporary Inuit art. The three-storey glass vault is the showstopper and doubles as a place where Inuit families come to trace the work of relatives: a family archive carved in soapstone.
Lunch at the indigenous-owned and operated Nonsuch Brewing Co. delivered the goods and was followed by a stirring visit to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Antoine Predock’s building of stone roots, a limestone mountain, and a glass cloud, crowned by a 100-metre Tower of Hope. Inside, glowing alabaster ramps climb from darkness to light. We managed a third of it in the time we had.
Our day closed with Fred Spence of Peguis First Nation, who taught us to carve soapstone into our spirit animals, polar bears and turtles, some more recognisable than others, followed by dinner at Passero in Little Italy.
Churchill: A frontier town that wakes up your senses
Day three saw us departing Winnipeg. Calm Air flew us two and a half hours north. I wasn’t sure what to expect. But arriving in Churchill is an experience in itself, and a privilege to be in such a remote part of the world.
A frontier town of around 900 people on Hudson Bay, low-rise, snow-free at this time of year and, for us, gloriously sunny. Murals of polar bears, wolves and seals cover the walls in town. Quad bikes sit outside the houses. Car doors are left unlocked so anyone can get in if needed, should you encounter a roaming bear. Looking around corners is encouraged. Walking alone at night in the summer months is not.
Come November, the bay freezes, and the bears walk out onto the sea ice to hunt seals, staying out until the ice breaks up and they come ashore again in July. It’s hard to grasp while you’re looking at such a vast expanse of open water.
Lunch was a bison burger, a tasty first for me. Then a bumpy ride out to the Churchill Northern Studies Centre, turning 50 this year, where all manner of natural studies happen, and the in-house Rocket Greens hydroponic farm grows lettuce and rocket for a town whose fresh produce otherwise arrives by plane or a two-day train. Nature-loving visitors can also bunk in on ‘learning vacations’ alongside working scientists here.
On our drive back into town, a female polar bear and her two cubs nonchalantly appeared and ambled off the side of the road. Not even a full day in Churchill, and already we’d seen bears. “Unbelievable” was uttered many times.
An aptly timed talk at Polar Bears International House followed on the plight and resilience of the apex predators we’d just watched cross a road. Then dinner at the character-filled Tundra Pub, our first glimpse of the northern lights (just wow), and check-in at the newly refurbished Tundra Inn. And all this in one day.
Strategy day, then belugas from a kayak
Day four was strategy workshop day, in the best meeting room I’ve ever sat in: a Frontiers North Adventures Tundra Buggy parked at the edge of the Churchill River, with belugas surfacing outside the huge windows. We heard from Travel Manitoba, Frontiers North, Churchill Wild and Indigenous Tourism Manitoba, who worked through Manitoba’s challenges and opportunities and shared Australian market insights in return.
Later that day, we kayaked the Churchill River estuary with Lazy Bear Expeditions, where those same white belugas surfaced all around us. More than 57,000 belugas move into Hudson Bay each summer, and we were witnessing their last hurrah before they migrate to warmer waters for the Winter.
That evening, a Frontiers North electric buggy, the world’s first, rolled us out to Dan’s Diner by the riverbank, again with Belugas swimming by, where we enjoyed a six-course curated degustation menu featuring locally foraged ingredients and a story to match each course. The finale of the spectacular dining experience was a rooftop whisky tasting session under an even stronger aurora overhead.
Dog carting and walking with polar bears
Day five began noisily with Dave Daley of Wapusk Adventures and his fifty-plus barking huskies. Dog carting is the snow-free version of sledding, and Dave, Red River Métis and president of Indigenous Tourism Manitoba, is a character. We all fell for his pups and enjoyed the thrill of the cart ride.
Then a short charter flight north to Churchill Wild’s Seal River Heritage Lodge. Nature on steroids. From the plane, we lost count of the polar bears we saw on the tundra, some swimming, most lying about, belugas shimmering white below. Even better, another mother and her two cubs were 100 metres from the plane when we landed.
Churchill Wild bills this as the only place on Earth where you can legally walk with polar bears on foot, and nobody on the plane was arguing. After lunch, we spotted the same mum and cubs again, plus a male around 200 metres off, unbothered as the group “blobbed” together to make ourselves look bigger.
Back in Churchill, we stopped outside the famous “polar bear jail”, where bears that wander into town are held before being flown out by helicopter, back onto the tundra or, in season, far out onto the ice. Three naughty bears were apparently inside awaiting relocation.
Then we toured Lazy Bear Lodge and Churchill Wild’s Blueberry Inn, where Indigenous Tourism Manitoba CEO Holly Spence introduced Churchill’s Indigenous operators over drinks. The night ended in Nanuk Operations’ aurora yurt, by the fire, with the northern lights overhead. Again!
Ghosts of the fort, and the Beluga farewell
Day six’s zodiac adventure with Sea North Tours was one of the moments that will stay with me longest: a bachelor pod made up of eight or so curious beluga males following our boat for the best part of an hour. Cue tears of joy from all of us on the boat.
Across the river mouth sits Prince of Wales Fort, the old Hudson’s Bay Company’s stone relic that took 40 years to build and surrendered to the French in 1782 without firing a shot. We toured the fort to find rusted cannons still pointing at the blue yonder and hear tales of extreme hardship.
That’s Churchill. Remoteness, resilience and wonder, all in the same breath.
Landing back in Winnipeg later that day, Thermëa by Nordik Spa-Nature was the perfect way to thaw and make some sense of what we’d just seen in Churchill, before a night staying at the 1913 Fort Garry Hotel.
Riding Mountain: Heartbreak, healing and bison
Day seven saw us leaving Winnipeg again, this time by bus to Portage la Prairie and the former Portage Indian Residential School, now the National Indigenous Residential School Museum. After a heart-wrenching tour, there was not a dry eye in the group. But we also heard about the healing and the good that has come from opening the museum since then. If you’re building a Canada itinerary that talks about reconciliation, this is where that word becomes real.
For more on the National Indigenous Residential School Museum, read Gaya Avery’s story from her visit to Manitoba last year: What I learned in Manitoba that every traveller needs to know
Then into Riding Mountain National Park and a cruise on Clear Lake past classic Canadian cabins, before a feast in the forest, featuring a farm-to-table sunset dinner beside what was a very ‘Clear Lake’. Our final night was at The Lakehouse in Wasagaming, a locals’ favourite town and perhaps the epitome of Canadiana in its beauty and welcoming charm.
Our final farewell day served up an early-morning bison spotting tour in the National Park at Lake Audy with our guide, wily Pat Rousseau, a delicious brunch made with a lot of love at Camp Cantina, followed by three prairie-gazing hours on the bus back to Winnipeg, before our flights home to Australia via Vancouver.
What we’re bringing home
Manitoba, of course, is a must-visit. Winnipeg and surrounds deserve at least a couple of nights before and after venturing out to Churchill, the bucket-list destination for anyone chasing the natural wonders of the world.
And yet the wildlife and natural phenomena are only part of Manitoba’s drawcard. This is a province transforming itself through reconciliation and progressive Indigenous tourism, while confronting climate change on the front line and taking its responsibility to educate and inspire the world seriously.
The Strategy Day discussions with Travel Manitoba and partners will now feed the SAG’s priorities and roadmap, with regular check-ins to keep the conversation going long after the trip. But the measure of Manitoba is not just what we were lucky enough to experience. It’s what changes as a result: stronger advocacy, new product, a shift in how the destination is sold, and something each of us chooses to champion differently inside our own organisations and the trade.
Together for Impact: Get involved and join your industry peers
The SAG’s work falls under Destination Canada’s Together for Impact initiative, and the Destination Canada Pledge is open to all Australian travel businesses and advisors.
Signatories get the Together for Impact emblem, a welcome letter from Destination Canada Australia managing director Julie King, a pledge certificate, and access to Destination Canada insights, training, industry events and profiling across its Australian and Canadian networks.
For more Information: Sign the pledge via Canada Connect, read more about the Pledge and find out how the SAG began.
Matt Leedham travelled as a guest of Travel Manitoba and Destination Canada and was supported by Air Canada. The group was hosted on the trip by Angela Cassie, Cody Chomiak, Melanie Swenarchuk, and Katherine Johnson from Travel Manitoba; Winnipeg Economic Development & Tourism‘s Sarah Robinson; and Travel Manitoba’s Australian representative Joanne Motta, with Jackie Storry from Churchill Wild, Holly Spence from Indigenous Tourism Manitoba and John Gunter and Tamara Mallin from Frontiers North.
Members of the Destination Canada Strategic Advisory Group (SAG) on the trip were Neil Rodgers from Adventure World, Brett Mitchell from Intrepid Travel, Greg McCallum from Entire Travel Group, Tim Holden from Flight Centre Travel Group, Rodney Muller from SkiMax and Daniel Walker from Sno’n’Ski, alongside Destination Canada’s Gloria Loree, Luciana Magliocco, Julie King, and Nathan McLoughlin.
Australian SAG Group members Mladen Vukic from APT and Melissa Warren from Helloworld were unable to attend the trip in person but contributed significantly to the strategic work with Travel Manitoba before the trip and during the workshop day.
KARRYON UNPACKS: The Australian trade has traditionally sold Canada as the Rockies, Vancouver and a ski season. Manitoba’s pitch is different: a cultural heart in Winnipeg and its surroundings, and shoulder-season wildlife and natural products, layered with stories and unique Canadian experiences that most competing destinations can’t match. Whether that lands depends less on Churchill’s bears, belugas, and aurora than on whether the trade can get the product in front of advisors who have never been asked about it.
