Plate debate rapidly becoming thorny issue
Does online poll really back plan to ditch ‘Wild Rose Country’?
It is a three-way contest that has caught the imagination of Albertans and sparked fierce debate as one candidate emerges as a front-runner.
I am obviously not talking about the Progressive Conservative leadership race that has sparked nobody’s imagination; I am talking about Alberta’s great licence-plate contest, pitting three proposed designs against each other.
According to the government’s web page, where 155,000 Albertans have so far cast a ballot, design No. 2 is winning with almost 49 per cent of the vote. That’s the version with a realistic picture of a wheat field and Rocky Mountains as opposed to the more stylized, almost cartoonish, versions 1 and 3.
Government officials point to the web page as proof that despite critical comments from the media and opposition parties, Albertans support a change of the plate’s design that includes dropping the “Wild Rose Country” slogan and replacing it with the bureaucratically inane “Alberta.ca.”
Except that apparently they don’t.
A public-opinion poll of 603 Albertans released a few days ago from Insights West indicates that almost 60 per cent of those surveyed don’t want the plates changed, while 26 per cent do and 15 per cent aren’t sure.
A majority are also in favour of keeping “Wild Rose Country.”
Government officials quietly dismiss the public backlash, saying people will get used to the idea pretty quickly once the plates are affixed to vehicles. Again, they point to the thousands who have voted on the government’s web page as evidence the idea is catching on. Except that maybe it isn’t. The government’s poll only provides three options. There is no option No. 4 that could, for example, allow someone to vote for “none of the above” or “leave the plate alone” or “is the government so afraid of the Wildrose party that it’s using the pretext of an upgrade to erase Wild Rose Country from the plate?”
Providing only three government-approved options is a bit like asking Albertans if they’d rather be slapped in the face, poked in the eye or kicked in the groin — and then declaring that Albertans want to be slapped in the face.
Maybe nobody wants any of the government’s choices — just as the independent public opinion poll would seem to indicate.
What’s remarkable about this story is how it is dominating Alberta politics. That’s in part due to the fact we’re in the summer doldrums. It’s also because it’s an issue Albertans care about.
Then there’s the fact the government botched the whole thing.
Officials will quietly, very quietly, admit that they could have done a better job of rolling out the licence-plate change.
They say the plate needs to be upgraded to include a state-of-the-art, easy-tosee reflective coating used by virtually every other jurisdiction in North America.
They explain they didn’t put the design change out to an open competition because there was a chance a winning design with complicated graphics that was a hit with the public would have been prohibitively costly to produce.
They didn’t explain that part very well, thus opening themselves up to an angry backlash that now includes an allegation that one of the design options is taken from scenery in Montana, not Alberta. The government denies the accusation, but it’s just one more embarrassing nail in the government’s licence-plate coffin.
And a niggling question remains — even if the government truly had to upgrade the plate, why remove the slogan “Wild Rose Country”?
Officials sheepishly admit the obvious — that government politicians wanted to stop giving the Wildrose party free publicity. Yes, it would seem government MLAs are that petty and insecure.
They could have simply changed the slogan to the province’s official motto “Strong and Free” which would have removed the offending “Wild Rose” and would at least have been defensible. It also wouldn’t have given the Wildrose party an opportunity to lampoon the government’s licence-plate contest by holding a contest of their own. Both government and opposition will announce their winner in the middle of August, just in time for the great plate debate to overshadow the final days of the not-so-great PC leadership race.
Speaking of which, for those of you less than thrilled with the current design options, the government won’t make any final decision until after the PCs choose a new leader and premier.
And, so far, candidates Thomas Lukaszuk and Ric McIver are opposed to changing the slogan while Jim Prentice, typically, wants more consultation.
The great plate debate is far from over.