There was a time not too long ago when Moncton was a severely psychologically depressed community.
In the 1980's, thousands of jobs were lost when the CN shops, CFB Moncton and the Eaton's catalogue warehouse all closed in short order. On top of this, the internecine language wars were at their height. The city was shell shocked and there was a real fear that the community would not survive.
The best the city could do for a promotional slogan was "Moncton, we're OK".
Shortly after this, Frank McKenna came on the scene and using a little Irish blarney, convinced the city (and the province) that you had to believe in yourself in order to succeed.
He turned the linguistic dilemma in Moncton into a (relative) strength and introduced the call centre industry. He used the city's central location and promoted the community as a retailing and commercial distribution hub. He insisted that the city could do anything that it wanted to.
There were surprising initial successes with this strategy and the city
did begin to believe in itself.
The Times & Transcript realized how successful McKenna's strategy was and started to get on the self promotion bandwagon, sometimes displaying embarassing excesses in hyperbole and indeed occasionally knocking other communities, especially when trying to promote Moncton in direct head-to-head comparisons.
I understand that this could cause hurt feelings in the other communities and really, this sort of strategy should be abandoned by the T&T. It isn't necessary anymore. Moncton no longer has an inferiority complex.
The intercity competition for entertainment and sporting events as well as immigrants and new industries however will go on.
The new dynamism I see in the Maritimes is quite intoxication for a lad who grew up in the 1960's. I
really enjoy seeing the entire Maritime community beginning to assume that anything is possible. This is so much preferable to the "goin' down the road to T.O." philosophy which was rampant during the 1960's and '70's.
So let the competition continue. The relative attributes of each Maritime city will have to be expressed when competing for any worthwhile prize. I just hope that this promotional activity can be conducted in a civil fashion.