For 87 years, rain or shine, war or peace, the Elks May Day Parade marched its way through downtown Prince George on the first Saturday of May.
Residents lined the streets to see floats and bands, politicians and pageant winners waving from the back of convertibles, and clowns and other entertainers captivating the kids.
That tradition will be broken this May, due to a lack of community interest.
"In the last few years when we've had a parade, it's been hard to get any participation in it and there just seems to be not that much interest in the city," Elks past president Lawrence Meier said.
That declining interest has been slow but steady over recent years. As Meier pointed out, the tradition of naming a May Queen ended years ago, marching bands are now a rare breed, as are parade floats. Some May Day Parades had as many as 25 floats in years past but some of the more recent parades have struggled to have 10 come out.
"We used to get floats from all over the area," Meier said. "The city hasn't had a float for years either."
This isn't just a reflection of an aging population and fewer kids willing to sit on a curb, excited to see the sights and hear the noises of the parade. In a few short years, the Elks themselves could be as defunct as the parade they hosted for so many years.
As reporter Ted Clarke explained in a feature story last fall on service clubs in Prince George, these clubs and the good work they do, like hosting spring parades, are in danger due to the declining number of members.
"Service clubs are dying, let's face it," said Pete Peters, another local member of the Elks. Membership in Elks is down by two-thirds over the past 30 years across Canada, he said, and there are fewer and fewer members in all service clubs, locally and nationally.
As the membership director for the Nechako Rotary Club, one of three Prince George Rotary Clubs, I'm living this problem firsthand. In many parts of the world, Rotary continues to be popular. Clubs often have a waiting list to join and membership carries great community prestige. In North America, however, those days are past.
Peters hit the nail on the head when he told The Citizen that age and changing values are to blame.
Most people under 40 see membership in Rotary or any other service club as some old-fashioned tradition their dad did back in the day. People still volunteer but how they volunteer has changed. Prior generations volunteered to help the entire community and supported projects even if they wouldn't benefit directly from that work. Today's generations, however, are more inclined to volunteer to help their kids and/or themselves and people like them. In other words, the volunteering is more personal or more selfish, depending on your standpoint.
Service clubs, meanwhile, are a diverse group of people supporting a diverse range of projects, mostly local but many of them national and international in scope. The work service clubs did, and still do, helps build community, whether it's with infrastructure like soccer fields, the hospice house, the Kordyban Cancer Lodge, the water spray park, and the band shell, to name a few, or sponsoring sports teams, student scholarships, important work by other non-profit groups, or hosting special community functions, whether that's Operation Red Nose at Christmas or a May Day Parade.
In his Friday column, Jason Peters talked about interest in the track and field, soccer and football community to explore building an indoor/outdoor artificial turf facility, to allow outdoor soccer to start earlier in the spring and football to run later in the fall. It wasn't long ago that those groups would have first approached local service clubs for financial and fundraising support. In today's Prince George, they will have far better luck trying to scrape together from legacy funds from the Canada Winter Games, some joint support from multiple levels of government and some private business sponsorship.
The pain Prince George feels when service clubs are hurting is for more than the loss of a parade. Service clubs work on opportunities to bring people together and the less often that local residents come together in common spaces for community activities, the less connected residents feel to each other and to Prince George.
Thank you, Elks, for 87 great parades. We will all be worse off if there is never an 88th May Day Parade.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
