ChazYEG
Senior Member
This is a hard pill to swallow, but it is true. Which is quite annoying.Its hard to tell, but interestingly we seem to be doing ok on migration within the province. Calgary is promoted and promotes itself much more in the media in the rest of Canada, which for whatever reasons often ignores Edmonton (it is noticeably bad and has been for a long time), so the inter provincial difference is not surprising. People elsewhere in Canada often don't know much about Edmonton.
The amount of times I've had people compare Edmonton, size/importance-wise to cities like Regina, Saskatoon and Victoria is ridiculous. And I'm not talking bout newcomers... these were 50+ year-old Canadian born and raised individuals... I recently had a conversation regarding the meaning of "major city" and a 65 yo well educated guy literally asked me "what's Edmonton's size anyway? I KNOW it is not much bigger than Victoria", when I said I didn't see Victoria as being as relevant as Edmonton. I almost bit his head off! Like, city proper is about 11x bigger, metro is almost 4x bigger... I actually had to show him StatsCan website to make him believe.
A friend from Toronto was "CERTAIN that Winnipeg was the second largest city in the Prairies by a large margin, since Edmonton, Saskatoon and Regina are all about the same size."
It is SO, FREAKING ANNOYING.
Edmonton should be increasing awareness about the city, not just because it's annoying, but because we could very well be losing on a lot (migration and business attraction) due to the VERY distorted perception people have of it.