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I had the opportunity to meet Robert Bell, executive director of the New York City-based Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) last week when he was in New Brunswick.

Bell was in the province gathering information that will be used to help select the ICF's global Intelligent City for 2009. Both Fredericton and Moncton made it to the short list of seven out of almost 400 submissions from around the world. Even if Moncton or Fredericton are not ultimately named the Intelligent Community for 2009, in my opinion, they already won by getting to the top seven.

Whatever the reason, a number of people reacted to Fredericton and Moncton making the list of intelligent communities by questioning the process. I received a number of telephone calls, emails and blog postings from New Brunswickers questioning the validity and credibility of the process.

For many of these naysayers, the idea of Fredericton and Moncton beating out 380 communities from around the world doesn't make much sense. How could two communities in one of the poorest regions of North America go through a serious process and win?

As Robert Bell said in his own words, this is not some type of "beauty contest" where a handful of people evaluate subjective factors and then choose the winner. A group of experts and academics evaluate a rigorous set of criteria and then assign individual scores to each of the seven finalists. Then these scores are aggregated to determine the short list and the eventual winner for 2009.

Underneath the wafer thin veneer of confidence coming out of our politicians, community leaders and newspaper editorial pages, I have long believed that New Brunswickers suffer from a collective lack of self-confidence. This is likely due to 140 years of being the poor cousin in Confederation.

We need to tackle this self-confidence problem head on. We should bring Dr. Phil to the province and have him put all 750,000 of us on the couch. He could dig up all of these insecurities and help us work through them. You know the ones I am talking about.

We don't believe New Brunswick can attract top global companies. We don't believe that New Brunswick can incubate exciting new entrepreneurs that can compete with anyone, anywhere in the world. We don't believe that people might actually want to move to our province. We don't really believe that New Brunswick could ever achieve economic self sufficiency.

I hope that New Brunswick sends a large delegation to the ICF event in New York City in May. I hope Business New Brunswick sends their top sales guys and gals to pitch New Brunswick to every technology company at the event. I hope the local economic development agencies in the province also turn out in full force to support their communities. PropelICT should also be there to represent New Brunswick's IT industry.

After all, New Brunswick's information technology firms are one of the main reasons Fredericton and Moncton made the short list.

Finally, I hope that a number of IT industry champions attend the event and showcase the talent we have here in New Brunswick. Let's storm New York City and make the case for New Brunswick.

To paraphrase Leonard Cohen, it may be necessary to first take Manhattan before we take New Brunswick. In other words, in order for New Brunswickers to truly believe in the potential of our own province, maybe we need some big wig New York think-tank to convince us.

David Campbell is an economic development consultant based in Moncton. He writes a daily blog, It's the Economy Stupid, at www.davidwcampbell.com.