Cartography Catastrophes: Too Many Canadian Maps Are Wrong This Week
Too many Canadian maps included in tourist brochures and distributed by the tens of thousands have been all wrong this week. One was distributed by Nova Scotia Tourism and two others by an Alberta tour company.
CBC reports that Anderson Vacations of Calgary, Alberta has issued several apologies after not one, but two different maps depicting Newfoundland have been riddled with astonishing errors. The maps manage to confuse two different islands and include incorrect references involving three different provinces.
Anderson Vacations issued apologies via social media and email for the first faulty map, pictured above. The map shows an image of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia mislabeled with the names of Newfoundland cities and towns.
Apologies to any of our Newfoundland friends and partners for the map oversight. It was never our intention to offend anyone…
— Anderson Vacations (@AnderVacations) May 19, 2015
The same company then published a second wrong map depicting the correct island but misspelling two city names on their own tour agenda, replacing St. John’s with St. John, which is actually a large city in the province of New Brunswick.
St. John’s is Canada’s oldest and most easterly city and is also the capital city of Newfoundland and Labrador. As The Telegram reports, this is a very important and political issue for the people and the leadership of Newfoundland and Labrador. In the House of Assembly, Liberal MHA Stelman Flynn wanted to know what the government was going to do about the situation.
“Revenues to the tune of a billion dollars in the tourism industry is at stake. We have invested millions in advertising in Canadian markets, yet travel specialists cannot even get our location right. What steps is the department taking to ensure this kind of sloppy mistake does not happen again in the future?”
Tourism Minister Darin King stated that he was unaware that the maps were wrong, but he does intend to follow up on the matter.
In a related story covered by CBC this week, Nova Scotia Tourism has recalled 20, 000 maps with a terrible printing error on the title page. The french language road map has the wrong accent placed above the letter “e” in its title which should read Carte Routière.
?Patrick Sullivan, the CEO of Nova Scotia Tourism Agency, called the mistake “extremely” embarrassing.
“I’m not happy about it and clearly we have a process that normally works in this case. We have all of our materials checked and this slipped through.”
It will cost the province of Nova Scotia at least another $5,000 to reprint the corrected map.
The Nova Scotia government is planning to destroy the 20,000 wrong tourist maps, but one Montreal artist is asking for permission to recycle the wrong maps into artwork, perhaps as a project through the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
