A lot of love letters to Vancouver this week, as the city launches its official birthday celebration today.

I have to admit that, much as I frequently feel grumpy about my city, I have woken up more than once and thought first thing in the morning, “I’m so glad that I didn’t grow up in Regina.”

Proud as I am of my Saskatchewan roots, I firmly believe Vancouver gave me a chance to sample many more futures for myself than I would have had back on the Prairies.

This is a city where people have come for generations in hope, sure that no matter how crummy things are for them when they arrive, life will surely get better. As Edward Glaeser writes in The Triumph of Cities (current bedtime reading), successful cities attract the poor in large numbers, because they offer the chance for escape that rural towns and smaller cities frequently can’t.

But, oh boy, there is so much that’s still annoying about this city, if I can be the fly in the ointment for just a moment on the day of our civic love-in.

Amid our beautiful setting, we produce some of the world’s ugliest housing. In a city that epitomizes international connection, as immigrants arrive and our residents take off to work in all parts of the world, we are populated with a noticeable contingent of scarily parochial residents and politicians. Our self-regard is off-putting. And there are too many people in significant positions here who think the city can survive on resource pillaging and consumption industries as the base of its economy.

So I wish us happy birthday, but, as I did in the years of difficult adolescence in our household, I look forward to the years when our civic brain fully matures.