Be … in which place? Decades-old P.E.I. licence plate evokes recent N.B. slogan
Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick are enmeshed in a Confederation-themed slogan controversy, but it turns out this may not be the first time this province's marketing efforts have owed a nod of inspiration to the Island.
Take a look at this discontinued P.E.I. plate, in use from 1973 to 1975, recently spotted near Sussex.
The slogan "The Place to Be in…" struck Rothesay's John Fraser as conspicuously similar to a recent New Brunswick marketing campaign featured on licence plates.
The "Be … in this place" campaign, launched in 2008, let New Brunswickers fill in the ellipsis with their own ideas about what one could "be" in the province.
It was developed by a marketing group called the Branding Merchants, led by Stuart Baker.
"Here in New Brunswick, you can be better, you can be happier, you can be challenged and you can be fulfilled," former premier Shawn Graham said at the time.
Those four iterations may have been more than the rest of the province bothered coming up with in the subsequent few years. The slogan was taken out of use in 2011.
Lack of marketing originality
Fraser found himself storm-stayed in Roachville about a six weeks ago, when he noted a P.E.I. plate on the wall of J.J.'s Diner.
"I couldn't help but notice the similarity between the logo on it and our now thankfully defunct NB logo," the plate collector wrote in an email.
"[It] sure looked to me that the powers that be here in NB simply lifted our logo right off that plate ... with just a little alteration."
Government of New Brunswick spokesperson Nancy Champion could not verify if there was any connection between the two slogans.
In search of a rhyme
The version of the plate in J.J,'s Diner is a truck plate from 1975.
It went into use in 1973 to mark 100 years since the province joined Confederation.
According to Ron Ryder, a spokesperson for P.E.I.'s Department of Transportation Infrastructure and Energy, the Lincoln-like figure to the left was designed to evoke one of the Fathers of Confederation.
He added that no one with the department had remarked on any similarity with the New Brunswick slogan.
Andrew Osborne, who writes a Canadian-themed column for the Automobile License Plate Collectors Association's magazine, doesn't think New Brunswick owes P.E.I. any tribute on this one. The slogan was really about rhyming "be" with 1973.
He did note in an email that P.E.I. elected not to use the slogan on its hearse plates.
There was, however, at least one accusation of "plate-giarism" in 1971, when Minnesota (10,000 lakes) took issue with Manitoba (100,000 lakes), according to Osborne.
Nonetheless, it appears this Atlantic Canada case can be written off to coincidence.
