The Manitoba Summer Fair returned to the Keystone Centre grounds last week and the five day show attracted close to 25,000 visitors.
The Summer Fair which ran from June 8-12 was held for the first time since 2019. The pandemic kept the fair from happening over the past two years.
The Manitoba Summer Fair has been a social gathering in Western Manitoba for over 135 years, featuring entertainment and community celebration. The fair has Midway rides, entertainment stages, KidZone, Ag Awareness area, horse shows and trade show vendors.
The Provincial Exhibition of Manitoba hosts the fair and President Kathy Cleaver was pleased with the turnout. “It was amazing to see all those people together again. We started off and we had five days or relatively good weather and that was a real gift. Started off a little slow but on Saturday I had never seen so may people in one place at one time so it was a smashing success on Saturday.”
“I think the midway operator is happy and I think we’re happy. We’re just tabulating a final numbers now. We’re on par with other years. It started slow but the rest of the week made up for it. We’re on par with the number from 2019. It looks like about 25,000 people went through the gates over the five days.”
Prior to the fair a private midway event was held over two weekends and fair organizers were worried that could hurt their attendance. “I don’t think it had a huge impact and it looks like there’s lots to go around so we did okay.”
Fair organizers are working to improve the exhibition’s bottom line and have cut back in certain areas and done lots of fund raising over the past two years due to the pandemic and the challenges brought on by not being able to hold any fairs.
“We did cut back and some people weren’t ready for the fair. We canceled the demo derby due to low entries and we called off the draft horse show due to low entry numbers. There wasn’t as many exhibits and we focused on running the midway and it’s essential for us to get back to doing events for our organization to survive” said Kathy Cleaver.
Up next for the Provincial Exhibition of Manitoba is Ag-Ex in mid November.
