Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Edmonton Might as Well Give Up Pipedream of Expo 2017

We get the point already.

With our government making enemies out of friends at every opportunity, Canada has succeeded in becoming a real international bad boy. The magic combo of being perceived as hardline anti-Islam, and greed-driven dirty oil producers simultaneously, gives just about anyone anywhere a free pass to disrespect our country and tell us to go flake-off.

A pretty sad situation. But, when you have signed commitments from 135 delegates to vote for you, and then only 78 of them follow through with their promise, then you know you are really unpopular. Time to change deodorants and schools, shave your head, move to a new city.

So, can someone tell me please, why are we spending anything at all on this?



Yes, this is a promo for the 2017 World Exposition, that Edmonton, of all places, is bidding on.

Excuse me, if Canada can't win an international vote that is supposed to be a lock, how is Edmonton going to win this Expo bid? Hello...?! People around the world know that Edmonton is tar sand city.

Yeah, but look at all the great publicity we get from Expo '67 in Montreal and Expo '86 in Vancouver eh. Right?

Oops, maybe not. According to the "historical" page of the Bureau International des Expositions, Canada's previous expos do not exist.

Don't get me wrong. I do think it is great for Edmonton to be putting forth an honest and I'm sure creative effort into the bid. I don't like spending outside of the country visiting other Expos and such. But, there's not that much wrong with paying local people to work on ways of presenting our country and the City of Edmonton, showing off perhaps some of our lesser-known qualities to the world. The work should be done, however, with an eye towards making the materials re-usable in the future. Because I don't think there is much hope of Edmonton winning any international popularity contests in the near future.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The "historical" page of the Bureau International des Expositions website only includes Expos between 1851 and 1931.

You'll find Montreal '67 on the World Expo page, here.

You'll find Vancouver '86 on the International Expo page, here.

Offroad Artist said...

Thanks for the comment. After publishing this yesterday I also "found" the Montreal and Vancouver pages however decided to leave the post as is due to the fact that my statement was still technically correct, the poor functionality of the BIE site (those links you give look like they should go to Vancouver and Montreal but instead they lead you back into a general pool of pages and pages of randomly located pdfs) and that the info provided if you ever do find it is so extremely limited.

Urso Chappell said...

I can attest that Expo '67 and Expo '86 are two of the most noteworthy world's fairs in history.

They are both on my ExpoMuseum.com site:
http://www.ExpoMuseum.com/1967/
http://www.ExpoMuseum.com/1986/