Edmonton is lovely and all, but let’s not kid ourselves
Welcome to Edmonton.
The world’s most perfect city. Don’t believe me? Well, golly gosh, you cynic. You clearly didn’t read the latest job posting for a new deputy city manager.
Yes. The City of Edmonton has launched a “world wide” executive search for a person to head up the city’s communications department.
And let’s just say, someone really wanted to sell the city to applicants who might not know about Edmonton.
The job posting invites people from around the world to a city that sounds like a cross between Xanadu, the Emerald City of Oz and Wakanda.
Of course, there’s the standard fulsome praise for our river valley, our public school system, our festivals, our bike lanes, our entrepreneurial culture, our affordable housing prices. A little over-the-top, perhaps, but certainly not outrageous.
And then? Things get a little more fantastical.
“We are an uplifting city that embodies the spirit and intent of Treaty No. 6, where prosperity is shared and enjoyed by all, whether your ancestors date back 8,000 years or you just arrived last week,” gurgles the job post.
“We are ... a safe inclusive city that’s free from racism. No one lives on the street, and no one is trapped in poverty.” Really? Really??
Now, don’t get me wrong.
I’d love to live in a city free of racism. Where no one lives on the streets. Where prosperity is shared and enjoyed by all, and no one is trapped in poverty.
But to pretend that we already live in that city is insulting. It’s delusional. And it’s disastrously counter-productive. Our streets aren’t paved with gold. Our bridges aren’t made of vibranium.
Such empty boasts make us sound smug and complacent, uninterested in doing the hard work required to build a better, more just community.
Not only are we trying to lure people here under false pretences. We made ourselves look ridiculous on an international stage. No one could take such empty claims seriously. At least, nobody should.
I’m not trying to trash Edmonton. Relative to other cities around the world, we are pretty egalitarian and multicultural.
But free from racism? How could anybody say that about Edmonton with a straight face? If you’re old stock Anglo and upper middle class, you might never have encountered prejudice directed toward you personally. But are the people who wrote this job post so perfectly insulated from reality as to think racism has been utterly vanquished here?
A city where no one lives on the streets? Maybe that’s true in Windermere or Glastonbury. But take a walk downtown. Take a walk through the river valley. Take a walk along Whyte Avenue. The only way you can blithely assert that we’ve eliminated homelessness in Edmonton is to travel the city with your eyes pinched shut.
Who was responsible for coming up with this ludicrous, laughable, loopy, ad? Well, that’s hard to pin down.
The headhunters in question are AltoPartners, an international executive search firm with offices in 58 cities in 36 countries — including Calgary.
Shauna Louie, a partner in the firm’s Calgary office, says her staff worked with the city to come up with the ad’s wording.
“We did it in tandem, together,” Louie told me. “They’re our client.”
Louie said it wasn’t her company’s place to question the client’s choice of language.
As for the city? Patricia Hutchison, who speaks for city manager Linda Cochrane, told me the language was “lifted” from a draft city “vision” document, and was meant to be aspirational.
“While idealistic, it represents the aspiration for council, moving forward.”
A few hours later, I received a call from Ashah Wrightsell, the city’s acting manager of human resources. Because of my questions, she told me the city had decided to rewrite the posting to indicate they were describing an imagined city of the future, not the actual city where the job candidates would be working.
That’s good. Still, it doesn’t explain how the original ad got approved in the first place.
It does demonstrate, though, how things can go off the rails when our leaders become so intoxicated with visions of our imaginary future that they drop the ball on managing our imperfect present.
The rest of us aren’t living in their idealized poverty-free, racism-free utopia. We’re coping with the gritty realities of today’s Edmonton.
I’m tired of empty, aspirational vision statements. We can’t make our city picture-perfect by closing our eyes and wishing away our problems. Time to buckle down to the hard work of fixing this place, here and now.