When you’re already a target, it’s a bad idea to hang out extra bull’s-eyes. But it’s happening to the UCP’s $30-million Canadian Energy Centre, a.k.a. the War Room.

The centre’s official logo suggests arrows pointing upward and to the right (of course!). But this very image, identical except for colour, is already in use by a big American digital outfit called Progress Software Corp.

Distroscale

The Boston-based company found out quickly when the comparison started spreading on social media.

Progress Software is “looking into” possible violation of trademark — plainly indicated with the little ® — by Alberta’s publicly funded energy warrior.

The Canadian Energy Centre was working Thursday to erase all trace of the logo, hoping to make it a bad memory by Friday.

The CEC will come out with another logo soon, after checking carefully to ensure it’s not the flag of a major nation.

But there is another little problem. The graphics were provided to the CEC under contract by Calgary company, Lead & Anchor.

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“This is an unfortunate situation, but we are committed to making the necessary corrections to our visual identity,” Tom Olsen, the CEC’s chief executive officer, said in a release Thursday afternoon.

“We understand this was a mistake and we are in discussions with our agency to determine how it happened.”

The question is how a logo already in use was assumed to be original. And did the CEC actually pay for that?

Olsen didn’t want to be quoted beyond the release. An email and phone calls to Lead & Anchor went unanswered. By Thursday evening, Lead & Anchor’s website had been taken private

According to his written note, Lead & Anchor was chosen from nine respondents to a post on Communo , another Calgary marketing agency that offers “All the right talent All in one Place.”

All this falls well short of a fatal fiasco. But it’s one of those dangerous image-settings for any new organization, let alone a project as controversial as the CEC.

And it proved to be just one clanger in a startup week that produced two others.

First, content director Grady Semmens responded to a critical column in the Medicine Hat News with a note that sounded like an order to print a CEC rebuttal.

The language was ambiguous, but social media warriors who track the CEC’s every move went into a frenzy.

The note was immediately compared to the Social Credit Accurate News and Information Act of 1937.

That infamous act would have required newspapers to print clarifications and reveal sources on demand. It was declared unconstitutional. More than 90 Alberta newspapers won a Pulitzer citation for defending freedom of the press.

A single note from the CEC to a newspaper was hardly in that league. But it made an instant resistance hero of Jeremy Appel, the tough young reporter-columnist in the Hat.

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Then there was Olsen’s own little misstep. In a Global News Calgary interview, he said, “We are not about attacking, we are about disproving true facts.”

Olsen says that was obviously not “purposeful” and he, in fact, meant exactly the opposite.

The CEC, if it’s to have any impact on perceptions of the energy industry, has to be seen as reasonable, informative, fair — and competent.

It also needs to have a wide reach across Canada and into Europe and other areas where Western Canada’s energy is often maligned and misunderstood.

Above all, I think, it has to look right past the inevitable criticism from many Albertans.

The job is not to fight at home, but to change minds in far places with research and facts. The whole expensive enterprise could fail if this turns into an Alberta brawl.

Also, try not to use somebody else’s trademarked logo.

Disclosure: Tom Olsen and Grady Semmens are both former Herald journalists, as is CEC staffer Shawn Logan. Claudia Cattaneo, former Postmedia columnist, also works with the CEC.

Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Calgary Herald.