Saskatchewan has many things going for it, but this development speaks to the fact that under Premier Wall the insignificant is ascendant.
"Premier Brad Wall says the Town of Martensville, a bedroom community of Saskatoon, will officially get city status in November."
In Wall's World, apparently, the Sask Party thinks it can keep the Saskatchewan public distracted from real and pressing issues by engaging in empty and absurd exercises like granting a de-facto Saskatoon suburb 'city status'. At best a town, Martensville is nothing more than a faceless home developers dream of cookie cutting heaven. Really, it's nothing more than a burb where relatively affluent worker bees from Saskatoon go to sleep. Hardly a city!
However, that doesn't stop other boosters from overplaying the significance of the event:
"There's a great significance to yet another city in Saskatchewan because in the national consciousness, Saskatchewan is a place that time forgot - ... " says Bill Waiser, a professor in the history department at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.
In fairness, Prof, Waiser knows not of what he speaks. And it's not his fault, he's been brainwashed by living most (if not all?) of his life in a province where a community must only have a population of 5,000 ... to get city status.
No matter what the new official moniker implies, Martensville is, and will remain, nothing more than a burb.
A new City?
Absurd!
Martensville needs an NHL team!
ReplyDeleteIf I'm not mistaken, a community of 5000 in Manitoba can also declare themselves a city. (And I believe it's automatic at 10000.)
Hey Cherenkov,
ReplyDeleteYou may be correct.... I always thought the pop. threshold here was 10,000 but I could be mistaken.
Even if a community 'can declare themselves a city' after hitting 5,000... it don't make it right.
If we don't put a stop to it where's it gonna end? Hamlets declaring themselves villages? Villages themselves towns? Towns claiming to be cities? And then the big one... cities declare themselves provinces, then provinces - countries! Oh the horror!
5,000 people constitute a TOWN... nothing else.
You know, the reverse too could happen. What if PEI suddenly wakes up one day and decides it doesn't like the costs attached to province-hood.... does it then claim to be an 'island city'?
Actually, Ontario is particularly confusing as regards what constitutes a city or a town; Kenora, Dryden, and Pembroke are cities, whereas Markham, Richmond Hill, and Oakville are towns. Go figure...
ReplyDeleteAnd as regards Saskatchewan being "a place that time forgot", it's rumoured that when the film version of Barbara Gowdy's novel Falling Angels was made, they did it in Saskatchewan, because it looked like Don Mills did in the 1960s.