INUVIK - A recent pitch to resurrect Inuvik's Chamber of Commerce may fall flat unless it receives more interest from the local business community.

Last month's Inuvik Petroleum Show featured a presentation by NWT Chamber of Commerce executive director John Curran, who outlined some of the ways a chamber of commerce could positively affect the town and encouraged local businesses to sign on as members.

Mayor Derek Lindsay asked Curran to appeal to the business community at this year's trade show after watching him give a similar presentation in Edmonton a few weeks earlier. Lindsay was president of Inuvik's most recent chamber of commerce more than five years ago, an organization that relied on volunteers and lasted only a year.

This time around, Curran said, businesspeople have a better chance of making it stick.

"In the past, when it did fall down before, things were really humming," he said, adding people were too busy running their businesses to organize and attend meetings of the town chamber.

"For better or worse, they do have a little more spare time," Curran added. "The big thing is going to be finding a champion, someone who wants to be the face of the chamber."

Lindsay said a successful revival of the chamber would require a part-time or full-time co-ordinator to run the show.

"It was a one-man show when I was running it, and it just about put my business in the toilet, so that's why I gave it up after a year," he said. "I'm just hoping some new blood will get involved."

Lindsay said a chamber of commerce would, for starters, promote tourism in the town.

"The town has taken on that task to promote these things and keep them going with very little help from the business community," he said. "It only makes sense. If you want to promote your own business, you promote the town as a whole."

But not all businesspeople are welcoming a chamber of commerce with open arms.

Mary Beckett, a business owner and former Inuvik representative for the NWT Chamber of Commerce, said not much has changed within the business community since the last fledgling chamber disbanded.

"If anything, it's slower now than it was the last time around," she said. "You need to have a fairly self-starting kind of person to do it. I'm not against the chamber, I've just seen it fail a couple of times and I've put in a lot of volunteer hours trying to make it not fail."

Beckett said an Inuvik chamber of commerce needs staff and big companies as members to work properly.

"There should be a chamber to give political voice to the business association or the people in business in the community. And it shouldn't just be oil companies – it should be downtown businesses; it should be every kind of business," she said. "Wanting it to go and being willing to be the only reason it's going are two different things."

Tom Zubko, owner of New North networks, said the town doesn't necessarily need a chamber of commerce.

"The role of a chamber of commerce is stuck in the past," he said. "There are so many additional ways now that people can communicate with each other and do the things that chambers used to do for them much easier than utilizing a chamber."

"People have put an awful lot of effort into trying to do something and it hasn't really sparked with very many people so I'm kind of ambivalent about the whole thing, to be honest," he added. "I don't see anybody out there that's really clamouring to have it done other than the NWT Chamber."