The sea was blue, the beach was gold and the children skipping through the sand dunes seemed a testament to the healthy joys of holidays in the Canadian province of Alberta.
Tourist officials and the national government in Ottawa were delighted with the promotional clip, part of a C$24.9 million (US$20.58 million) attempt to offset controversy over oil extraction in Alberta’s beautiful wildlands.
But hours of sleuthing by a puzzled sailing enthusiast, aware that Alberta has no coastline, revealed that the idyll was filmed thousands of kilometers away — across the Atlantic in England.
The girl with the flying hair and her friend were romping on the sweep of sand at Beadnell Bay near Bamburgh, Northumberland, where the North Sea rolls in from Lindisfarne.
“We think it’s quite funny — a landlocked province in Canada presenting an image of itself as an island,” said Sheelagh Caygill of Northumberland Tourism, which hopes to piggy-back on the international campaign.
News of the gaffe is spreading like wildfire on the Internet with tags such as: “Come to Alberta — no wait, it’s Britain.’’
The curious choice of a seaside beach for a place that has none was spotted by Peter Bailey, a Canadian looking for places to take his dinghy. He initially thought the scene might be set on one of Alberta’s many lakes, whose sandy shores and unpolluted water are important to the tourism drive.
Extraction is concentrated in Alberta’s Oil Sands region, which include landscapes vaguely similar to Northumberland’s coast. But Bailey tracked down the real setting — halfway between Bamburgh castle and the kipper-smoking village of Craster — after a marathon e-mail session with the Canadian officials, tourist authorities and their public-relations advisers.
Ottawa has responded by saying the choice of Northumberland symbolized that “Albertans are a worldly people.”
Tom Olsen, head of media relations for Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, said: “There’s no attempt to mislead here. The picture used just fitted the mood and tone of what we were trying to do.”
His take that the British children were “a symbol of the future” was echoed by Olga Guthrie of Alberta’s Public Affairs Bureau, who is managing the campaign.
“This represents Albertans’ concern for the future of the world. There’s no attempt to make people think that the place pictured is Alberta,” she said.
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