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.”

Ear­li­er this month, the prov­ince un­veiled three po­ten­tial de­signs for a new li­cence plate, which will be avail­able next spring. The pub­lic is en­cour­aged to vote in an on­line sur­vey to de­ter­mine which plate will be used.

The de­sign that Nicols be­lieves is based on Sweetgrass Hills uses a stock photo the prov­ince pur­chased from Shutterstock, said Service Alberta spokes­woman Lisa El­liott. The photo was titled “Foot­hills of Alberta,” she said.

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.”

Do you think the scenery featured on one of the proposed licence plate designs is of Montana?

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.”

Service Alberta con­sulted 3M Canada to come up with the de­sign con­cepts.

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.

The second plate op­tion is a view of the moun­tains near Mor­aine Lake in Banff. The third is an art­ist’s ren­der­ing of a moun­tain scene, said El­liott.

While it’s not clear wheth­er the first plate de­picts Alberta or Mon­tana, gov­ern­ment use of im­agery has been con­tro­ver­sial in the past.

In 2009, the prov­in­cial gov­ern­ment used a photo of a beach in north­ern Eng­land as part of Alberta’s $250-million rebranding in­itia­tive. When the Ed­mon­ton Journal re­vealed that the photo was not, in fact, of an Alberta beach, the government a­pol­o­gized, say­ing in a state­ment, “We screwed up. We’re sorry.”

In 2011, the gov­ern­ment also came under fire for hir­ing a Van­cou­ver-based pro­duc­tion com­pany to shoot an inter­nation­al tour­ism cam­paign for Trav­el Alberta.

estark@calgaryherald.com

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