Remembering our spirit

Forget Spirited Energy, I’ll take a liveable province

KERRI WOLOSZYN STAFF

Last week the Manitoba government decided to spend another $800,000 on the “Spirited Energy” campaign. This comes after $1.6 million has already been spent on the “re-branding” and brings the total up to a whopping $2.4 million. Premier Gary Doer claims that the province needs more money to compete with places like Saskatchewan, a province running a similar campaign. Is spending more money on advertising really going to bring more people to the province?

It is hard for me to think of Manitoba as a brand but, I guess, in order to sell anything you need to make it appeal to the consumer. If people seek to consume Manitoba then I suppose we need to appeal to those people’s sensibilities.

The Spirited Energy campaign has received a lot of backlash from the people and politicians who call this province their home. The very tagline was the butt of jokes for months on end. The more recent backlash comes from politicians who see the government spending money on something of seemingly little importance instead of spending that money on fixing what is broken about the province. The area of Main Street nearing downtown is a place that always seems to be looking to be “fixed.” The amount of money that it would take to make this stretch of well-travelled road “attractive” to visitors would surely be enormous. But then, isn’t the entire campaign about image anyway?

In a way, I see the point of those creating the backlash. The Spirited Energy campaign makes Manitoba seem like a brightly coloured land of curly-cues and polka dots, where we are all smiling because of our great jobs and our reasonable cost of living; where our young people are excited to get their tuition rebates and enjoy wearing white t-shirts with “Manitoba” written on them. Where we all have positive attitudes about living through the frigid winters and never, ever complain about it. I see their point and I actually enjoy living here.

Why not spend the $800,000 on ways of fixing the things that the Spirited Energy seeks to mask? Perhaps because $800,000 would only fix so much but can mask plenty.

On the Spirited Energy website I am told that the re-branding of Manitoba is “important.” The site says, “It’s important, because the image we hold in our minds reflects not only the way we feel about ourselves, it can shape the way others feel about us, too.” With this, I agree. If we think we live in a wonderful province with lots to offer then, yes, we can become just that. If we complain about how we will never be Toronto (but, of course, we would never want to be Toronto) or Vancouver then we will never even be ourselves.

However, the Spirited Energy campaign is not entirely, and has never been, just for Manitobans. To think this would be foolish. The campaign is meant to bring more people into the province. The full-page ads in some of Canada’s largest newspapers make this point perfectly clear. The province needs more people to thrive and showing a model on Photoshopped backdrops is, apparently, just the ticket.

And what will people see and remember when they get here? I sure hope it is not the things that are currently being masked by those large hanging Spirited Energy flags. I sure hope it is not the decay. I hope, in fact, that they remember something that was put so succinctly by the old campaign, if that’s what it could be called. I hope that visitors come and remember that Manitobans were really quite friendly.

Kerri Wolozyn is a fourth-year film studies student and the Manitoban’s roving reporter.