[Dion]

Brent Nicols believes that the design for one of Alberta’s potential new licence plates illustrates not Alberta, but Sweetgrass Hills in Montana.

With styl­ized wheat in the fore­ground and rolling hills and moun­tains in the back­ground, Brent Nicols rec­og­nized the scen­ery decor­at­ing one of the op­tions for Alberta’s new li­cence plate im­medi­ate­ly.

The Calgary man has travelled ex­ten­sive­ly in southern Alberta and says it’s the spit­ting image of a place he’s been be­fore.

The prob­lem is, Nicols al­leges, that place isn’t in Alberta.

“That’s Sweetgrass Hills in Mon­tana,” he said firm­ly. “I know that for a fact.”

If a per­son stands fa­cing south near the Alberta ham­let of Manyberries, Nicols said they’ll see the same view that’s on the plate on the other side of the Canada-U.S. border.

“I’ve been to this place, I’ve travelled the whole of southern Alberta,” he said. “That’s the Sweetgrass Hills. I don’t care what any­body says, I’m tell­ing you that’s what it is.”

As an Al­ber­tan, Nicols said he con­sid­ers it a per­son­al in­sult that one of the plate de­signs might not even be rep­re­sent­a­tive of the prov­ince.

“It’s beauti­ful scen­ery,” he said. “But it has noth­ing to do with Alberta.”

In a state­ment, 3M Canada spokes­wom­an Car­la McFarlane said Service Alberta re­quested a “rep­resen­ta­tion of an Al­ber­tan land­scape.”

“The moun­tains in the de­signs were meant to gen­er­al­ly rep­re­sent the area land­scape and were not in­tend­ed to rep­re­sent any par­ticu­lar moun­tain range,” McFarlane said.

http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/ca...162/story.html