Twitter may be dying but we can still get a local controversy out of it. But first, the news.

Correction: An update/correction to my piece yesterday on Mayor Simon Yu’s first address to council. I titled the piece “Good evening, bonjour, ni hao,” reflecting what I thought was the opening of his speech. But a reader points out to me that Yu’s first word — said slightly off-mic, which is why I missed it — was, in fact, “Hadih,” the Dakelh word for “Hello.” Yesterday’s post and transcript has been updated to reflect this fact.

Also:

• Home sales in northern B.C. are expected to dip next year, according to a forecast from the B.C. Real Estate Association, but don’t expect that to mean much of a drop in prices.

• The company responsible for clearing Prince George highways is experimenting with a new two-lane snow plow.

• An increase in overdoses has prompted a toxic drug alert for the region.

• A (slight) warming trend is heading our way.

• But not so warm that you won’t want to get your cross-country ski gear .

• The fibreglass statue of Terry Fox outside the old pool has been bronzed and placed outside the new one. The cost of $24,250 came from the city’s festival/discovery place trust fund. The city, of course, has a legitimate connection to Fox as he ran the Labour Day classic here as a testing ground for his cross-Canada marathon.

• A feature on the Sk’ai Zeh Yah Youth Centre, which was recently given a provincial award for its role in crime prevention.

• Here are the details for Remembrance Day ceremonies on Friday.

Some breakfast news

This Reddit post on the best breakfast in Prince George was illuminating to me for a few reasons. First: the place to get the most responses was Aubrey’s, the new breakfast place in the EconoLodge. I was not a fan of the previous restaurants located there so I hadn’t thought to try it, but now I’m curious! Second, my vote for the best classic diner breakfast is Daddy-O’s, which this poster says is moving in across the CN Centre. Big if true! Anyways, tell me your best breakfast place in the city.

The @cityofPG social media saga turns sour

At the beginning of 2022, people following the city of Prince George on Facebook and Twitter started to notice a new tone in the posts as the city made plain-language, tongue-in-cheek posts about snow removal. And, they wanted to know, who was behind this change?

The tone of these posts was well-received by people inside and outside the city alike, with the four person communication team’s manager Julie Rogers telling CBC the idea was to communicate like a real person rather than in bureaucratic bafflegab (something that is now law in New Zealand). By summer, they had won a national award for Best Canadian Digital Communications Campaign of the Year.

But the new tone started to wear out its welcome with some residents, as they communicated concerns about city policies over social media and received what they felt were snarky or dismissive replies in return.

It also came up during the election campaign, when the city announced it would stop posting ads in the local paper prompting criticism from some candidates — and concern over the comms team’s response:

And now the page has apparently taken to trolling people who aren’t even engaging with it, replying to CTV journalist Penny Daflos’s tweets about snow in Vancouver on two separate occassions to gatekeep winter:

And that isn’t going over well with some folks, either:

The trend of brands getting weird and snarky online is old news by now, with AdWeek running stories titled “As CEO, Should You 'Shitpost?’” and Vulture noting that major companies are now openly horny. But in these cases, the social media accounts are representing a private corporation, not a city of roughly 80,000 people, some of whom may not like being represented by this type of post. And to be fair, the majority of Facebook and Twitter posts are more neutral but as we all know, that’s not what gets amplified on social media.