Final weekend: Canadian Tulip Festival brings $50M boost

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]With the sun shining, the weather is beautiful, as I mentioned, and the Tulip Festival is well underway, getting ready to wrap up as families take in some of the final days of the festival. CTV's Camille Wilson was down at Commissioner's Park earlier today. She's back in studio to tell us all about it.

[00:00:15]Camille. Well, Austin, it's the last weekend of the Canadian Tulip Festival, and it's been quite a busy season. There is still an influx of people drawing in thousands of visitors from all over the world, kicking off the busy festival season, and businesses couldn't be happier. So beautiful. First time for Sydney Nixon checking out the Canadian Tulip Festival with her daughter. I had heard about it. Sarah's been here about two and a half years, and I had heard about how beautiful it was, but I just couldn't get up here at the at the time that it was And this today's a perfect day. I'm so glad.

[00:00:49]>> Traveling from Maryland, this was a must-see. The weather couldn't be any nicer, and I wasn't able to bring her last year, so she flew in this year, and we're loving it. We're enjoying it, and then the tulips are just outrageous.

[00:01:02]>> The show-stopping festival in its final weekend, wrapping up Monday, has seen well over a quarter of a million guests since it started on May 8th.

[00:01:09]>> We expect to see another 100,000 over this weekend, so we should get close to our usual 350,000 uh visitors. And just a few steps away in Little Italy, businesses say the tulips are drumming up business. I'd say almost double, maybe. It takes a lot of prep work and a lot of staffing to get ready to handle all that crowd like this. Youana German and Dan Vasile came specially for the Tulip Festival. She said she had to dress for the occasion.

[00:01:37]>> I thought while going to see flowers, I might as well be a flower. Hundreds of thousands of tulips, about 100 tulip varieties, are blooming across the capital, and although it's reached peak blooming season, some tulips can bloom until the beginning of June. Just amazing.

[00:01:53]>> For me, what was the most interesting thing is to discover so many types of tulips. I had no idea that there are so many types of tulips.

[00:02:02]>> The 74-year-old festival has 120 tulip beds across the National Capital Region, allowing guests to really stop and smell the flowers.

[00:02:10]>> It's taken us quite a little bit of time to just get past the first few beds.

[00:02:15]It's so sad. And the way the sunlight is hitting through the tulips and filtering through, it's gorgeous.

[00:02:19]>> I think one of the things is we both we both enjoy art and we both are artists, not professional artists, but we're artists.

[00:02:27]The executive director of the Tulip Festival says the Tulip Festival Festival alone creates a $5 million economic boost, drawing big crowds right up until the end of the festival, Victoria Day Monday, Austin. Yeah, it's certainly a real draw for a lot of people. CTV's Camille Wilson reporting live for us tonight. Camille, thank you very much.