No, I’m not joking. Last night at the EC Convention gala, EC’s much anticipated new brand was unveiled…to much eye-rolling. It’s another classic ‘couldn’t make this s@*t up’ moment, courtesy of our national federation. Because of course this ‘brand’ new logo is so similar to the decades-old CET logo that you could be forgiven for thinking that the shot above is a trip down memory lane to a brand unveiling circa 1990.
But I am being unfair to the CET logo, which is in fact superior to this copy cat.
The red-on-black logo on the left is the CET logo. The white on red one is the new Equestrian Canada logo. Note the inferior shoe design and pasty hue, compared to the appealing image it seeks to emulate. This is the proud spawn of a Vancouver design firm called Hulse & Durrell. One can only imagine what all their brand research and mind-blowing creativity has cost the new and improved EC (your membership dollars at work!). According to the person who’s been keeping me up to speed from the convention floor, the designers, who were on hand in Montreal last night to unveil the logo, declared that they had spent ‘hundreds of hours’ developing it.
Another pearl of wisdom dropped from the lips of one of the ecstatic designers last night was that they decided they couldn’t put the image of a horse in the logo, having discovered that horses all looked different and did  different things. I guess the brand brainiacs didn’t bother looking at any other national equestrian federations’ logos. Otherwise they would have seen plenty of horses, all of which found a balance between looking like a horse and not looking like one particular kind of horse that does just one particular thing.
United States
Australia
Belgium
Great Britain
Germany
France
Mexico
New Zealand
These are just the countries I looked up, which is a total of 100% with a horse (or in GB’s case, a horse’s tail) in the logo. There’s reinventing the wheel, and then there’s reinventing a square wheel.
And how about that new name, hey? Wowsers! I wonder how many hundreds of brilliant thinking hours that took to dream up. I mean, how many options for a new name are there? We’re talking about a national sport organization here, not Lululemon. Obviously Canadian Equestrian Federation wasn’t an option, since that would be going back to a name from the past. But then again, an old name would make sense, given the logo they ‘created’ to go along with it.
The first press release has come out post-convention, and it’s a doozy. I can’t give you a link to it because it hasn’t actually been posted on the EC website yet, only delivered to my inbox. The headline is “Equine Canada Members Unanimously Approve Special Resolution to By-laws”. Sounds pretty straight forward, yes? Well, actually, no. Funny word, ‘unanimous’ is. I always thought it meant ‘everybody’, but according to the press release itself, it couldn’t possibly have been a unanimous vote of the 27 members, because only 19 of them were at the convention…or so EC claims:
“The following members were in attendance during the inaugural meeting of members, held during the 2016 EC Annual Convention in Montreal, QC.”
Category A – Equestrian Sports
Craig Collins – ON
Jon Garner – AB
Michel Lapierre – QC
Mike Lawrence – ON
Karen Pavicic – BC
Elizabeth Quigg – ON
Cara Whitham – ON
Category B – Provincial and Territorial Sport Organizations
Nicole Duplessis – QC
Adrienne Smith – NS
Geri Sweet – MB
Jean Szkotnicki – ON
Gord MacKenzie – BC
Susan Harrison – BC
Heather Findlay – NB
Category C – National Equine Affiliates
Jill Barton – ON
David Brent – ON
Tina Collins – ON
Dr. Wayne Burwash – AB
Muriel Burnley – ON
This statement and list of names contains at least one provable untruth. Unless the convention took place on the bridge of the SS Enterprise, there is no chance that Karen Pavicic was there, Â since she’s competing at the Tryon CDI in North Carolina, where today she placed second in the Grand Prix Special.
Beam me up, Scotty. There’s no intelligent life down here.
