All posts tagged Calgary Stampede

Does Bizarre Bethune brouhaha signal ideological rift within Harper Conservatives?

by David Climenhaga on July 16, 2012 in Canadian History, Canadian Politics, Media with 14 Comments

Communist physician Norman Bethune, left, and a comrade from the Red Chinese Army speak with Canadian Treasury Board President Tony Clement, right, in a vignette as imagined by Sun News Network. Below: Dr. Bethune, looking weirdly contemporary with a fashionable goatee; far-right ideologue Rob Anders; the real Mr. Clement.

Is the bizarre brouhaha over who stood up for the Chinese national anthem and what its words are evidence of a serious ideological split within Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s ruling Conservative Party of Canada?

If you think stuff like that only matters in places like Communist China and North Korea, maybe you should think again!

Apparently public signs of an ideological spat can signal trouble among party cadres, not to mention the apparatchiks who support various party ideological factions, in pretty well any old secretive and authoritarian regime.

That said, it may require the services of a skilled “Kremlinologist” to get to the bottom of the battle within Mr. Harper’s CPC that began on July 11 when Treasury Board President Tony Clement attended a ceremony in his Ontario riding marking the reopening of a spruced-up museum honouring a Communist saint all but forgotten anywhere but China.

It does seem as if the fight between people associated with ultra-right-wing Calgary West MP Rob Anders and ideological moderates like Mr. Clement and Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird over tax money spent on the museum may be a sign of deepening fissures within the CPC.

Alas, the mainstream media has paid scant attention to this seemingly silly affair, and that only to dismiss it as an insignificant and mildly amusing tempest in a teapot, not as the important indicator of internal struggle it may be.

Only Sun News Network, Mr. Harper’s semi-official state media, seems to be taking the storm with the kind of humourless gravity it deserves – leastways, if you happen to view neoconservative ideology as seriously as do the gang of four or so MPs closest to our Dear Leader, Mr. Harper. This group includes Mr. Anders.

Charles Adler, a Sun News commentator associated with the extreme neoconservative element within the Harper CPC, seems to have been the first to attack Mr. Clement, Member of Parliament for the well outfitted and brightly painted Parry Sound Muskoka riding. (No starvation among the peasants there, thank you very much!)

On July 12, Mr. Adler took issue with Mr. Clement’s role in the decision by the Harper government to spend $2.5 million upgrading the former home of Norman Bethune, the Communist Canadian physician who became a hero to millions of Chinese for fighting alongside Mao Zedong in the late 1930s. The “shrine,” as Sun Media keeps calling the well-appointed little museum on the site of Dr. Bethune’s former home, just happens to be in the general vicinity of the riding’s famous gazebo, sparkling public washrooms and glass-smooth sidewalks built for the G20 conference in faraway Toronto back in June 2010.

Now, it seems most likely given his record that the moderate Mr. Clement wasn’t thinking about ideology at all when he championed sprucing up the museum, which is said to be extremely popular with visitors from China. More likely he had in mind the ice-cream cones his constituents could sell to Chinese tourists and his well-known penchant for letting no local gazebo go unimproved if Ottawa is paying.

Nevertheless, Dr. Bethune’s Communist history provided the opportunity for party ideologues seem to have been waiting for to snipe at moderates identified as supporting the project.

Having pretty well eliminated the old “Red Tories” from the CPC after its takeover by the far-right Reform Party during what’s now known as the Invasion of the Party Snatchers in 2003, this may indicate the radicals now see an opportunity to purge the party of its moderates as well.

Dr. Bethune, who by all accounts wasn’t a very nice person at all, succumbed to his own sloppy surgical techniques in China in 1939 and soon after was raised to the status of official saint by that country’s ideologues.

Rather like the War of 1812 with the Americans, the Communist Dr. Bethune seems at first glance like an odd choice for a pro-American market-fundamentalist party like Mr. Harper’s. But that is before we remember that the prime minister’s commercial backers would very much like to see doors opened to more business with Mainland China. (The phrase “Mainland China,” by the way, is an ideologically freighted way of saying you understand the capitalist island of Taiwan is not part of Communist China, even though both Taiwan’s leaders and those of the mainland insist it is. Well, whatever…)

As Mr. Adler’s shouts subsided, Mr. Anders himself, one of the PM’s gang of four, appeared on the semi-official state broadcaster to condemn the project – although he was more circumspect about attacking Mr. Clement by name, leaving that task to his well-trained ideological attack dogs.

Speaking of whom, the fray was next joined by Ezra Levant, another Sun News bloviator with impeccable CPC ideological credentials and close personal connections to both Mr. Anders and the prime minister. On Bastille Day, Mr. Levant eviscerated Mr. Clement anew in one of his trademark TV tirades.

The sharply observant Mr. Levant, who can spot an ideologically suspect lapel pin at 40 yards, apparently noticed Mr. Clement smiling and nodding in time with the Chinese national anthem in a video clip of the opening of the renovated museum.

Mr. Levant owns the real scoop in this affair, because it was he who looked up the words to the Chinese anthem – presumably on Wikipedia, the principal source for Sun News’s crack research team. “It’s a war song,” he huffed. “Here’s what Clement was smiling along to…” And, indeed, as he observed, so goes the March of the Volunteers: “Brave the enemy’s fire, March on! March on! …”

Sun News was all over the Communist song’s lyrics, and the fact Mr. Clement stood up for it, like an angry bull to a red flag – no doubt holding in reserve for the moment the certain knowledge Opposition Leader Thomas Mulcair, notoriously the holder of a French passport, has stood for that country’s anthem, La Marseillaise, which goes, “…Formez vos bataillons, Marchons! Marchons!…”

Another Sun News yammering head, Brian Lilley, also piled into the affray, but, frankly, there’s only so much of this stuff one can watch without requiring sedation.

While the full meaning of this dispute is not yet clear, it is evident the tag-team attacks on Mr. Clement by the PM’s tame commentators, and the defences mounted by other party moderates like Mr. Baird, not to mention defences by the Globe and Mail and elements within the Prime Minister’s Office, signal a widening of the rift between the CPC’s most radical cadres and its moderates.

Meanwhile, in the prime minister’s home city, another ideological battle erupted over the words of a different national anthem.

This time it was the bilingual Canadian national song, O Canada, a version of which sung at the Calgary Stampede included only the English words.

Perhaps the Stampede’s organizers were concerned the French version would needlessly arouse passions among the PM’s Protestant fellow believers with its Catholic-sounding war cry of “As is thy arm ready to wield the sword/ So also is it ready to carry the cross/ Thy history is an epic/ Of the most brilliant exploits/ Thy valour steeped in faith!”

Then again, maybe it was just that no one in Cowtown speaks French. Except for Mr. Mulcair, of course, and he was wisely only passing through.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Chuckwagon carnage: Three horses die and Calgary Stampede blames the lead horse!

by David Climenhaga on July 14, 2012 in animal cruelty, Calgary Stampede with 12 Comments

A chuckwagon race at the Calgary Stampede in 1957. Canada’s greatest city? Below: One resident of Canada’s greatest city camps it up for the occasion.

“Autopsy shows lead horse in chuckwagon accident died of ruptured aortic aneurysm,” shouts a headline in yesterday’s Calgary Herald.

So… what? The Calgary Stampede’s going to blame the chuckwagon crash that killed three horses Thursday night on “equine error”? Shoulda seen a vet, that dumb hoss…

Have you noticed that in such situations it’s usually the driver that gets blamed? If a passenger jet skids off the runway with fatal results, it’s pilot error. If a bus plunges into a ravine, it’s the driver’s mistake. If a kid piles an ATV into a tree, well, he was inexperienced and wasn’t wearing a helmet. Not our fault! It’s reassuring to consumers, and, more important, may limit the liability of the company that serviced the jet in China, sold the ATV, or whatever.

But in Calgary, during a Stampede chuckwagon race, it would violate the unwritten laws of Cowtown to blame the driver – at least if he’s a macho man in a Stetson hat and a pair of high-heeled boots with jingly spurs – so this time the poor horse will have to take the rap.

Still, you’ve got to admit, blaming the “mishap,” as the Herald’s stenographer neutrally put it, on a horse is a new one.

What’s next for the Herald’s headline writer in Hamilton, Ont.? “Autopsy shows crippled rope-calf had congenital trick knee”? Nope, here’s the Herald’s actual alternative headline: “Record attendance Thursday at Calgary Stampede; Centennial year drawing in the crowds.” Now that’s the Herald we know and love! When in doubt, count Stampede gate receipts.

There’s scant satisfaction in saying “I told you so,” but as was predicted in this space on May 25, and again on July 5, horses were certain to die cruelly at the Stampede this year, as they die every year and will continue to die every year, as long as the Stampede insists on treating animal cruelty as a suitable spectacle for entertainment.

There’s really no getting around this obvious interpretation any more. The wagon driver’s no doubt sincere on-air tears for his horse, which he described as a pet, won’t do it. The Stampede’s pathetic excuses certainly won’t do it. Nor will the Stampede’s meaningless promises to improve its “Fitness to Compete Program.”

When a Stampede spokesperson says, “the Calgary Stampede, and the people who bring their animals to the Stampede, care deeply about the welfare and well-being of those animals,” you’re entitled to laugh out loud. It’s all stuff that’s found on the floor of the Stampede cattle barn.

This is about money. The money you can generate in substantial amounts by holding exciting events. The money you can make in prizes pushing your horses hard around the tight corners of the chuckwagon races.

And if animals are put in danger to generate the excitement required to make money, well, too bad, Durango. That’s the true attitude of everyone involved in this disgrace.

Our sour prime minister goes around telling the world that Calgary’s the “greatest city” Canada. Well, I’ll give him this: it’s a pretty enough town in a suburban sort of way, and the streets are clean. But every year at Stampede, “Canada’s greatest embarrassment” would be closer to the truth.

Meanwhile, Calgary City Council is considering a ban on shark fin soup at the city’s Chinese restaurants. I’m certainly not saying this isn’t a worthy cause if the trade in sharks’ fins is endangering the species worldwide. And no one’s saying horses are an endangered species – except every year during the Stampede.

Just the same, Calgary’s aldermen – as they still insist on calling themselves – would do better if they turned their minds to cleaning up their own back 40 first.

Real men don’t kill horses for fun. It’s time for the Calgary Stampede to man up and end this practice.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Is nothing sacred? Turbulent pastor jumps to the front of Calgary’s Stampede Parade!

by David Climenhaga on July 8, 2012 in Alberta Politics, Calgary Stampede, Media, Religion with 8 Comments

Pastor Artur Pawlowski and members of his flock march at the head of the Calgary Stampede Parade on Friday. Below: Pastor Pawlowski with Alberta Solicitor-General Jonathan Denis. Below that: Pastor Pawlowski with Prime Minister Stephen Harper. All photos grabbed from Facebook pages belonging to Pastor Pawlowski or his Calgary Street Ministries.

Artur Pawlowski, Calgary’s most turbulent priest, managed to march with his eccentrically dressed supporters right at the front of the 100th anniversary Stampede Parade on Friday.

This should be news, because the normally omnipotent Calgary Stampede Board didn’t particularly want Pastor Pawlowski to be there – in fact, last year they tried to get a court injunction to prevent him and his flock from protesting along the parade route.

Don’t expect to see or hear much coverage of this oddity, however, because the Calgary media have an unwritten policy of never saying anything even mildly controversial about the Stampede when its gates are open to paying customers. Publicly speaking ill of the Stampede is considered sacrilege in what used to be known as Cowtown, even if that means journalists must take with good grace the obvious disdain of Parade Marshal Ian Tyson.

Alert readers will recall Pastor Pawlowski, the noisy street preacher who has been accused of breaking Calgary bylaws more than 70 times over the past few years, as the man who prompted a particularly intemperate Sun News Network commentator to call Mayor Naheed Nenshi an “anti-Christian bigot” when city police stopped the preacher from conducting a private religious ceremony inside city hall. Never mind that Mr. Nenshi had nothing to do with police being called to that particular disturbance back in December 2011.

At the Stampede Parade on Friday, Pastor Pawlowski and members of his Calgary Street Ministries appear to have showed up moments before start time with their Canadian and Israeli flags. The Calgary Police let them join the fun, right at the front so it could be said they weren’t technically part of the event. Perhaps the officers didn’t want to be called the “boys with the billy clubs” again, or anti-Christian bigots, an accusation that is thrown around with cheerful abandon in the Alberta of 2012.

This sets an interesting precedent for other unauthorized groups that may want to join future Stampede parades, but never mind that just now.

A little way back down the parade route along with Premier Alison Redford and Mayor Nenshi came one of Pastor Pawlowski’s apparent supporters, Alberta Solicitor-General and Justice Minister Jonathan Denis. It’s not clear how Mr. Denis felt as the province’s chief law enforcement officer about Pastor Pawlowski’s unauthorized presence at the head of the parade.

But notwithstanding the pastor’s frequent problems with the law – mostly tickets for noise bylaw violations when conducting services in public – Mr. Denis, the MLA for Calgary-Acadia, was not inclined to ignore Mr. Pawlowski’s support during last spring’s tight-fought provincial election.

Just before the election, Pastor Pawlowski delivered a little succor to Mr. Denis’s Progressive Conservative party, which was being strongly challenged by the far-right Wildrose Party led by Danielle Smith, who casts herself as a defender of Christian values.

According to an account by Calgary Herald columnist Don Braid, Pastor Pawlowski spotted a photo of Ms. Smith at a Hindu ceremony, where she was clad in traditional Indian garb and said to be asking for blessings from the gods. “The pastor erupted,” Mr. Braid wrote just before the election. “Smith will not have his vote, he wrote, because she ‘crossed the line from being tolerant of other people and their beliefs to actively participating in their idolatrous practices.’”

Not long after the election, the Solicitor General wrote the pastor a letter thanking him for organizing a June 17 event called the Calgary March for Jesus.

“March for Jesus is an opportunity for believers to publically (sic) profess their faith in Jesus Christ, give him glory, and make known what he has done for us,” Mr. Denis wrote under Solicitor-General Department letterhead on June 20. “As a supporter of the March for Jesus, I thank you and all the organizers who made this event a success.”

It remains to be seen if Mr. Denis will write another letter to Pastor Pawlowski thanking him for his contribution to this year’s Stampede Parade.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Big money speaks quietly to the recalcitrant Calgary Stampede on its 100th anniversary

by David Climenhaga on July 5, 2012 in animal cruelty, Calgary Stampede with 3 Comments

Cowboys in the aftermath of a bad chuckwagon spill at the 1937 Calgary Stampede. Below: Chuckwagon races as they’re supposed to appear; Stampede Programming VP Paul Rosenberg; Bell Canada logo of yore.

Money talks, and what money is saying now, the day before the 100th opening of the Calgary Stampede, is that Canadians are turning away from animal cruelty as entertainment.

Sometimes a whisper is louder than a shout, and the big money was barely whispering on the topic of harm to animals at the Calgary Stampede, which opens for the 100th time tomorrow. But rest assured those sibilant sounds from the upper reaches of Bell Canada’s corporate office in Montreal are being heard clearly in the boardroom of the Stampede Board as the “Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth” marks its centennial.

The Calgary Herald, which like its namesake city is nowadays all hat and no cows, briefly reported yesterday that the Canadian telecommunications giant had quietly pulled its support from all rodeo events at the Stampede.

This is not the biggest deal on God’s green acres, seeing as Bell Canada has merely switched its support to other Stampede events that aren’t seen by large numbers of Canadians as being openly cruel to animals, but it’s a sign of the times and of what’s to come.

It does not mean that such events as the unquestionably exciting chuckwagon races, which every year are responsible for the deaths of at least a few horses, or calf roping, a particular bête noir to certain animal rights groups, will stop at once. Count on the Stampede Board, the Calgary rodeo’s powerful governing body, to find alternative sponsors as long as it can.

But Bell Canada’s sponsorship decision marks the beginning of the end of these events because it shows public disapproval can bite when it’s tied to something that has the potential to cost the corporations involved in these affairs money. And when that money – or, rather, the lack of it – threatens to trickle down to the corporate bottom line, things start to happen.

So while Bell Canada was very careful not to say anything that suggested customer email campaigns like the one organized by the Vancouver Humane Society had anything to do with its withdrawal of support for the rodeo events, it is said here you can be confident that’s at least part of the story behind the sponsorship switch.

Bell Canada can be forgiven for not making the point explicit, and possibly for easing out of the Stampede instead of just marching away, spurs a-jingle-janglin’. The company may not wish to suffer a noisy counter-boycott from some rodeo boosters, or to have its executives’ mothers’ virtue abused on-air by publicity craving right-wing television commentators.

Just the same, this perceived success is likely to embolden opponents of the Stampede’s most egregious events to extend their campaign to other companies that sponsor activities widely perceived as needlessly cruel to animals.

For its part, the Stampede would prefer to dismiss the campaign as an effort by “animal activists who may be just as interested in the fund-raising possibilities that a campaign of this nature offers” and a few misguided bloggers.

In a post on the Stampede’s website yesterday, Programming Vice-President Paul Rosenberg compared the strong feelings of many Canadians about “the participation of animals in exhibition, competition and education events” to the debate between vegetarians and the rest of us who eat meat. He took a subtle dig at the Vancouver Humane Society for not operating an animal shelter, and promised to continue practicing “strong animal care,” whatever that means, at the Stampede.

As for the Herald’s brief and not terribly informative report on Bell Canada’s sponsorship decision, it trotted out the familiar refrain that rodeo is a Western cultural icon. The annual 10-day event, it said, “is a celebration of cowboy culture that features the rodeo and chuckwagon races.”

There’s a good case to be made, however, that the story the Stampede is all about the cowboy’s trade, a vital part of our Western culture and all that, ain’t much more than an entertaining yarn to be spun around a campfire.

As a real farmer commented on this blog in response to a recent post on this topic, “the Calgary Stampede was an exercise in urban nostalgia 100 years ago and it was a perverse distortion of the reality of ranching then and still is today.”

“Those calves used in roping used to come into the local auction markets in September mostly broken and crippled,” the commenter wrote. “Now they disappear. People who actually make their living raising cattle never resort to yipping, yelling or horseplay. A few oil-fueled start-ups do it for a few years while blathering on about free enterprise, while taking advantage of government supplied community pastures, support programs, and any other welfare they can grub up, before they flip the land and move on – good riddance to bad rubbish.”

The Stampede Board, made up largely of powerful business figures to whom too many Southern Alberta politicians all but owe their souls, will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th Century, let alone the 21st. That might be a useful project on which someone can practice his or her otherwise obsolete lassoing skills!

But it will happen, as long as money keeps talking as Bell Canada quietly did this week.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Horse dies in Stampede chuckwagon race – no one does anything about it

by David Climenhaga on July 9, 2011 in Uncategorized with 7 Comments
A chuckwagon race at the Calgary Stampede sometime in the murky past. Cruel to horses then. Cruel to horses now.

It was opening night yesterday at the Calgary Stampede: another horse died in a chuckwagon race.

So what else is new? Last year six horses died at “the Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth.” This year, well, it’s just beginning.

Everybody in Alberta knows rodeo activities are cruel to animals. Everybody in Alberta knows chuckwagon races are dangerous for horses. Nobody in a position to do anything about it cares enough about it to do anything about it.

Indeed, nothing will ever be done to fix this situation by anyone remotely connected with the Calgary Stampede or the government of Alberta. After all, the Stampede Board owns Calgary’s soul and always has, and a goodly portion of the Alberta government’s as well.

Most Albertans let this go on because we don’t much care, because we enjoy it, because there’s money to be made doing it, or some combination of all three.

Everything you hear from the Calgary Stampede about how they really, really care about the safety and welfare of their horses is a load, if you’ll pardon the expression, of horse manure. (Example: “Honestly, we’re greatly saddened by what happened,” a Stampede spokesman said in today’s Calgary Herald. “We take the care of our animals very seriously.” Right.)

At least Calgary’s faint-hearted media covered last night’s animal death – although, as might be expected, the emphasis was on what the Stampede is doing to prevent horses being killed, not on what it does every year to kill them. Naturally, the story started out by telling readers that “the death comes during a year when the Stampede has made a number of changes to the chuckwagon races and increased veterinary inspections to make the competition safer.”

Do you wonder how a veterinary inspection can make an inherently unsafe race safer? Never mind!

A local radio station reported today that a blood sample had been taken from the horse before it was put down. Maybe they’re going to argue that the crash in which the horse broke its leg was the animal’s fault – as the Alberta authorities like to do when a human worker dies on the job. You gotta know, those rodeo horses live a tough life – at least half of them have a barley addiction!

In the past, Calgary media have attempted outright to suppress the debate about animal cruelty at the Stampede.

Back in 2009, both Calgary daily newspapers refused to run paid advertisements by the Vancouver Humane Society. The ads made the self-evident case that calf roping is cruel – though not as cruel by a long shot, it seems to me, as chuckwagon racing.

Some observers were surprised at the time that the Calgary Humane Society had nothing to say about this. They should not have been, really. After all, back in 2009, the Calgary group defined its goal as merely mitigating the effects of practices it knew perfectly well to be cruel.

“The Society recognizes that rodeo, chuckwagon racing and other related forms of entertainment involving the use of animals occur in Western Canada. Therefore, it is in the best interests of the animals involved that the Society work with those who use the animals to ensure the potential suffering is minimized,” it stated weakly on its Internet home page, noting that, like cheating at cards, “as events … chuckwagon races are not illegal.”

Since 2009, while the society’s position has not really changed, it has grown a smidgen braver, testing the limits of what Calgary will put up with by stating that it “fundamentally opposes high risk rodeo events like chuckwagon racing, calf-roping, and steer wrestling.” It even has a number to call for people who observe instances of animal cruelty at the Stampede. However, like everyone else in Alberta, it is not really prepared to do anything about systemic cruelty to animals at the event.

The blunt fact is that the only way organized cruelty to animals in the form of rodeo sports will be stopped in Calgary and elsewhere in Alberta is through political and economic pressure from people in other provinces and other countries.

This post also appears on rabble.ca.

Rebranding Cowtown? The irons are in the fire!

by David Climenhaga on August 13, 2010 in Uncategorized with 5 Comments
The Board of Calgary Economic Development, with their Los Angeles bankers. Warning: Calgary officials may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below, Mikhael Gorbachev with the white hat he really liked, the one Ronald Reagan gave him. Below Gorby, the Pope. How can you tell he hasn’t visited Calgary yet?

CALGARY

You can take the cow outta Cowtown … but the smell of cowflops lingers.

Can it be more than two decades since I reported that they weren’t going to sell cows in Calgary any more? For those of you who collect statistics, the last one they sold in Cowtown wasn’t actually a cow, it was a 1,915 pound Texas longhorn steer, name unrecorded, probably because it didn’t have one, and it fetched the princely sum of $3,700.

Back then, I reckon, they figured cows just didn’t match up with the notion of what was certain to become Canada’s most dynamic city.

But, whatever, that was then and this is now. Here it is 21 years later, plus another oil boom that we managed to piss away just like the last one we memorialized on that bumper sticker, and it turns out that shipping the cattle trade to Strathmore didn’t help one itty-bitty bit.

Cowtown is still Cowtown, a place with all the vices of a small town and none of the graces. Just can’t help itself!

It is truly distressing news that leads us to this inevitable conclusion. To wit: the good burghers of Cowtown, as it were, recently took it upon themselves to strip from their community the last vestiges of what they once were, are now and ever shall be. Nosireebob! They were gonna get themselves a whole new slogan.

Now, none of this is to say that, just like any other Canadian city, Calgary doesn’t have its share of citizens who drink white wine, enjoy reading poetry that doesn’t rhyme and even … as shocking as this may be to those of you who are hearing it for the first time … run advertising agencies!

But in the minds of the worthies in charge of the boondoggle known as “economic development” in Cowtown, there was just no way they figured a local ad agency could come up with a slogan that would show Calgary as the kind of forward looking, dynamic, futuristic, expensive restaurant sort of place it had turned into in their hopes and dreams. And, anyway, “Heart of the New West,” complete with a stylized white cowboy hat, just wasn’t cutting the heifers any more.

So they decided it was time for re-branding – and, you gotta know, in a place with a name like Cowtown, re-branding is a concept that evokes more than thoughts of new letterhead with a snazzily updated icon. Like, ouch! Just the same, they loaded up the truck and went to Bever-lee … Hills, that is! Movie Stars… Swimmin’ pools (without ice) … Los Angeles!

Yup, that pretty well says it all right there. Just like the Clampetts, flush with their oil money – Jed, Granny, Elly May and Jethro Bodine – Calgary Economic Development just had to go to Los Angeles, where they found a company that’s “a catalyst for revitalization” (really! I’m not making this up!) and paid it $190,000 US.

And for this they got – hold onto your Stetsons, buckaroos – Canada’s most dynamic city!

Well, actually, they didn’t even get that. “Canada’s most dynamic city” turns out to be merely a “position statement.”

Later, cowkids! “The brand should embrace Calgary’s history of attracting ‘self-starting, self-confident optimists’ as well as the city’s values of ‘volunteerism, integrity and hospitality,’” says a pifflesheet published by Calgary Economic Development, kindly passed on to us by the CBC. In other words, sometime later, they’ll get something with dynamic in it.

In the interests of efficiency, here are some possibilities:

Calgary, California’s most dynamic city….

Calgary, Canada’s most American dynamic city … and weirdly proud of it….

Calgary, Canada’s most dynamic weather…

Guys? This just isn’t working! If you’re really sick of being known as Cowtown, here are a couple of possibilities that actually might work: Close down the annual spectacle of animal cruelty called the Calgary Stampede. And stop giving white cowboy hats to all your big-shot visitors. (I wonder where Mikhael Gorbachev keeps his?)

Oh, yeah, and quit feeling like you have to go to California and pay big bucks to get re-branded. (After all, there’re a couple of ad agencies in Calgary right now heating up some irons in the fire to help you with that project!)

The need you feel to go Stateside for marketing help? It’s a sure sign you still have a trace of you-know-what clingin’ to your boot-heels! And that’s no bull…

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.