Can civic boosterism have a contrary effect on a city's denizens? Believe it!
If you're not too tired from heaving sandbags, I need you to head straight to the shed right now and come back with every shovel you can find.
The urgent task this morning is to bury a monster that's marauded Winnipeg for almost a century: An inferiority complex that's become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Back in 1914, when the completion of the Panama Canal ended Western Canada's railway boom, Winnipeg stopped being one of the fastest-growing cities in the world. Ninety-five years later, some of us are still hung up on the fact we're not one of the planet's most important cities and are still not comfortable in our slow-growth skins.
This bizarre lack of self-esteem, which is more appropriate for a teenage kid than a 136-year-old provincial capital, has given rise to a series of sadly ironic attempts to instill some sense of civic pride in Winnipeg.
I've seen three such campaigns during my lifetime alone. As propaganda efforts go, they all achieved the polar opposite of their goals: By shining a spotlight on a supposed inferiority complex, they provoked ridicule and ultimately self-loathing among a populace that has little patience for campaigns based on psychology instead of deeds.
In the 1980s, the last time Canada faced a severely crippling recession, Winnipeg business leaders cooked up Love Me, Love My Winnipeg in an attempt to make an insecure city feel good about itself.
This was followed quickly at the dawn of the 1990s by 100 Reasons To Love Winnipeg, a campaign championed by none other than the Winnipeg Free Press.
Then in this decade, the Doer government gave Manitoba Spirited Energy, which in all fairness was intended to do something for the entire province, though nobody's quite sure precisely what that was.
The underlying assumption behind all of these campaigns was that Winnipeg can somehow achieve greatness, if only we would stop focusing on negatives such as, say, the loss of a National Hockey League franchise, a severe and unpredictable climate or the flight of young, educated people to other North American cities.
The logic behind this reasoning has so many faults, a complete list could fill an entire newspaper section. But at the risk of upsetting the people who sign my paycheque -- the architects of a new civic-pride campaign called We Believe in Winnipeg -- I have no choice but to spend a little bit of ink and pixels poking holes in the argument.
For starters, truly great cities do not feel the need to trumpet their accomplishments. They simply market them in the form of tourism-promotion efforts and business-relocation campaigns.
Secondly, no amount of jingoism can reverse continent-wide demographic trends that have seen older, formerly industrial cities in the centre of North America lose out on growth and immigration to newer knowledge centres in the mountains, deserts and on the coasts. Positive talk doesn't reverse migration trends.
Finally, top-down marketing campaigns no longer work in the viral age, as consumers are all but immune to full-frontal attacks on their belief systems. Telling someone to "believe" in Winnipeg, a city that quite obviously exists, only reinforces the notion there is a lack of faith in the city.
Personally, I think our self-esteem problem has been on the wane since the late '90s, when Winnipeggers discovered the world didn't end when the NHL left town and inner-city revitalization picked up steam.
This is purely anecdotal, but most younger Winnipeggers I know, as well as almost all newcomers to the city, are enthusiastic about a mid-sized prairie town they appreciate for all of its qualities -- qualities that don't translate well into the language of marketing -- as well as its considerable faults.
In fact, sardonic self-effacement may be an essential character of this city. Guy Maddin's greatest achievement, the pseudo-documentary My Winnipeg, begins with "I must leave it, now." The Weakerthans' One Great City, the rock band's most popular live song, has "I hate Winnipeg" as the chorus -- a chorus in fact inspired by this city's penchant for civic pride campaigns.
If you really love this city, you don't need to be told to do so. If you live here, you probably get it. If you live elsewhere, you probably don't.
Real civic pride, the kind that doesn't involve jingoism, is nothing more than familiarity and the will to do good things in your community, like heaving sandbags for a couple of hours during a flood.
bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca
the winnipeg sandbox
