Audio By Carbonatix
Vancouver has one of the most stunning skylines, a jagged expanse of skyscrapers framed by sparkling waterways and the towering North Shore Mountains. It’s a city fit for any ad campaign.
Except Vancouver is indisputably in Canada. So it’s a poor choice to use Vancouver’s lovely — but, once again, Canadian — skyline to start an ad called “Morning in America” in a presidential campaign for the highest office in the United States.
This is a lesson Marco Rubio has learned the hard way this week. He dropped the ad on YouTube this past Sunday. It opens with swelling strings and a grave voiceover announcing, “It’s morning again in America,” as a tugboat glides over the water in front of a city skyline.
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It didn’t take Vancouver residents long to realize they were looking at their own city.
The Vancouver Sun called Rubio out on his geographic mishap late yesterday, noting that famed landmarks such as the cranes in Vancouver’s port and the downtown skyscraper Harbour Centre are clearly visible. “It’s unmistakably Vancouver,” the paper writes.
The Sun even zoomed in on that tugboat, and — yep! — it’s flying a Canadian flag off the back.
To be fair to Rubio (whose campaign didn’t return a message from New Times about the snafu), his hometown of Miami is about as geographically far from Vancouver as you can get in the continental United States. Show the average Miamian a set of skylines from northeastern U.S. cities and Vancouver, and perhaps one in a hundred could pick out the Canadian metropolis by sight.
Then again, most Miamians aren’t cutting six-figure ads for presidential campaigns.
