The question, of course, is why?

According to the latest CityThink survey — conducted for Metro Halifax and the Greater Halifax Partnership — 91 per cent of us are pleased as punch to live in our awkwardly named Halifax Regional Municipality. Forty-two per cent of us, in fact, are very smug about it.

Why?

Consider that this particular poll was conducted from April 13-23, deep in the trough of the never-ending annual rite of rain that is our spring, a stretch season that will drearily continue, with occasional one- or two-day sunshine teases until sometime in late July, when our briefest of brief summers unofficially begins.

That can’t be the reason — to quote reporter Aly Thomson quoting songwriter Joel Plaskett — “I love this town.”

Nor can it be — please, no — the fact we keep electing vision-less Peter Kelly as mayor of us all, along with his barking dog’s breakfast of municipal councillors endlessly debating cat bylaws and memos on councillor decorum.

Keep in mind this city we love so dearly — and which an equal percentage of us see ourselves living just as happily in for the foreseeable future — spent $330 million-plus to build a harbour-solutions sewage solution that is only a solution when the sun shines. (See paragraph 4; see outside your window.)

This is also — remember — the city that recently secretly funnelled millions of our tax dollars into the pockets of multimillionaire entertainers because we wouldn’t spend our own non-tax dollars to buy tickets to watch them perform.

This is a city that can’t decide whether to build a new convention centre, a new stadium, both, or neither; have a historic downtown, a highrise downtown, both, or neither … what it will be when it grows up.

So why do we — me included — love it so much?

Could it be that intoxicating — if occasionally fragrant and floatable-filled — comingling of salt water and sea air?

Our accidental-but-it-works muddled mess of old and new, art and commerce, busy and bucolic?

Or perhaps, to steal another random line from the same Joel Plaskett song: “It’s not what you think?”

Perhaps it’s Joel Plaskett?

Sure. Why not? There’s got to be a rational reason that I love this town.