Reading Gaston Deschênes’ recent post about the Quebec motto, “je me souviens”, I felt envious. Envious because instead of a modestly evocative provincial motto, rooted in history, we here in British Columbia must endure an inane slogan invented by political hucksters. “British Columbia: The Best Place on Earth” was dreamed up in the bowels of Premier Gordon Campbell’s Liberal government and began being deployed in government advertising in 2004. Since then it has been emblazoned on vehicle license plates and repeated in almost every message emanating from Victoria.

The slogan sums up everything that is smug and self-regarding about this province, which has a highly developed sense of its own specialness. Many of us believe that we live in paradise, the envy of the world. As our homegrown humorist Eric Nicol once observed, “British Columbians like to think of their province as a large body of land entirely surrounded by envy”. While many outsiders think of BC, when they think of it at all, as a rain-sodden outpost of meager civilization, a province with too much geography and not enough industry, we who are privileged to live here insist that it is, well, the best place on earth. And now it is official; the government says so.

Hard to remember that there was a time, long before the invention of tourism, when visitors to British Columbia saw it as the edge of nowhere, home to cannibals and some of the foulest weather on the planet. “This Coast is as Silent and Solitary [sic] as the House of death,” moaned the captain of one early-nineteenth-century trading vessel, “and I wish that I was as Clear from it I would take Very good Care that no man Should Ever Catch me in this part of the world again.” Early traders called the interior of the province “The Siberia of the Fur Trade”, a reference to its isolation and forbidding winters. Later colonists huddled in their scattered settlements, fearful of the local Indians, occasionally dispatching gunboats to enforce their notional authority. They appreciated the wealth that BC offered in the form of plentiful natural resources, but they never would have thought they were living at the centre of the world.

As the twentieth century began, British Columbians, or at least those involved in the tourist trade, began to feel the need to elevate their rhetoric in order to attract visitors to the mountain parks and coastal hideaways. Once they had conjured up a place that was more playground than province, they inevitably began to believe their own publicity. Tourist brochures presented a fabricated image of the place, accompanied by breathtaking photographs of the wild coast or the majestic Interior, usually with a totem pole somewhere in the foreground. Early slogans that were used to sum up life here included “The Evergreen Playground”, “Always Cool, Never Cold”, “The Playground of North America”, and, until very recently, “Beautiful British Columbia”.

Of course these phrases give a partial, cartoonish character to the province. One does not look to the literature of tourist promotion for subtlety or accuracy. Still, to call oneself “The Playground of North America”, or even “Beautiful British Columbia”, is a far cry from the triumphalist bombast of “The Best Place on Earth”.

British Columbia is unique in claiming that it is the “best” anything, anywhere. None of the other Canadian provinces feels the need for such a boastful slogan. The state of New Mexico appears to go one giant step further than BC; it bills itself as “The Best Place in the Universe”. But presumably this is a sly reference to the infamous alien spacecraft that supposedly crashed near the town of Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, and is done with tongue planted firmly in cheek. The government of British Columbia, on the other hand, displays no sense of humour whatsoever about its claim. The Liberals firmly believe that our province is the best place on earth. Why? Because they have made it so.

I won’t deny that BC is a beautiful place. Many places are. But the best place on earth? Not likely. No place is. Since the government began using its grandiose catchphrase, at least one online petition has sprung up asking that it be rescinded. The petition calls it “embarrassingly arrogant”, “vague and mostly meaningless”, “presumptuous and distasteful”, and “shockingly pretentious”. They get no argument from me. But there is little hope that saner, less swollen heads will prevail. We are stuck with “the best place on earth”, at least until next year’s Olympics are over.