You'd think we'd be used to it by now.
Whether it's being known as the armpit of B.C. anywhere south of Cache Creek, where the residents are immune to the smell of money or as Canada's most dangerous city from Maclean's magazine, there never seems to be a shortage of folks taking shots at Prince George.
As our new columnist Megan Kuklis pointed out in her debut column Monday, the travel book The Lonely Planet Guide to Canada (2008) starts its description of Prince George with "trees - dead ones."
The recent 48 Hours documentary on the Highway of Tears informed its American and Canadian viewers that Prince George is "crime ridden."
And sometimes we bring it on ourselves. Born-and-raised Brian Fawcett won the Pearson Prize for Canadian non-fiction for a book called Virtual Clearcut: Or The Way Things Are In My Hometown. If you haven't had the pleasure of reading it, let's just say there's a reason Mayor Shari Green didn't bring some signed copies to hand out to our new friends in Jiangmen.
There was a time when no one in this city would have given a fat fiddler's fart what Maclean's or anybody else had to say about Prince George. Jobs were plentiful, wages were high and the city was young and growing. But those days are long past.
We've gone through serious economic upheaval and diversification, as well as drastic social and cultural change We're older, wiser and more sophisticated. We're more than sawmills, pulp mills and an oil refinery. Prince George is now in the manufacturing businesses, the cargo business, the service and supply business, the transportation business, the tourism business, the entertainment business, the education business and the healthcare business, to name a few.
So we care when uneducated others from elsewhere badmouth us and run our city down. Now that we're competing in the global marketplace, we want people to think well of us and what we have to offer. We want to be recognized as a great place to grow a career, raise a family and enjoy the best of what both urban and rural living have to offer.
We want to be known across B.C. and Canada as the place with one of the top universities in the country and the host of the 2015 Canada Winter Games. We want to be known as B.C.'s northern capital and the social and economic heart of the region.
But we also need to face our problems if we hope to overcome the Prince George stereotype. While the amount of crime has dropped in Prince George, it has dropped everywhere else in Canada, and that's how we still find the city ranked so high on Statistics Canada's Crime Severity Index. We've dropped out of the top 15 nationally for homicides per 100,000 residents, so now we need to focus on robberies and assaults.
And we also need to stiffen our upper lip.
A growing sense of community pride should come with a confidence that we're far more than our reputation. Vancouver, for example, knows its more than the Downtown Eastside, Robert Pickton, ridiculous house prices and Stanley Cup riots.
Changing reputations takes more than one news story or one marketing campaign. It takes persistence and patience. If, as a community, we continue to build on our success while addressing our shortcomings, without getting too distracted by the naysayers, we'll eventually get to where we want to be.
