Well, the recurring story of Vancouver’s topping a list of (this time) “world’s most livable cities*” has been reported in the past few weeks. Woopee, I guess we should be “happy?”, “proud?”, “excited?” or …. ? Not according to a Vancouver Sun article headed as follows “Our city No. 1 again, but will it last?”
his recurring inclination of so many to say “O.K – but…” and then trot out all the negatives they can dredge up is indeed disappointing to say the least. It seems to many to be “positively un-Canadian” to smile, be quietly excited and say, “wow are we fortunate?” Instead, we hear comments like “we’re not the best, but we’re far from the worst” and following that, from the same commentator, “this is not telling us we’re the best city in every respect”. The thrust of the article seemed to be, that, because we are so “appealing” we are attracting too many immigrants and that would inevitably cause us to drop in the rankings. Yes, we need to manage the challenges of housing for our inhabitants and provide intelligent transportation solutions, but this is every urban centre’s challenge. A discussion of this knee jerk “yeah, but…” phenomena caused a humorist in our group to say that this is akin to someone applauding a married couple for their happy marriage to which the one spouse replies, “yes, it’s great, but will it last?” Everything worthwhile under the sun needs to be worked at in order to keep it in top form; why just assume that the challenge is, or will be too great? Let’s smile graciously and say “thanks, we intend to keep it this way”. I’m with Vancouver’s Mayor, Sam Sullivan, who was quoted at the end of the same article as saying that he “credits the people living in Vancouver – and their strong social and environmental ethic – for the city’s top ranking”. *The Economist Intelligence Unit
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