The West Coast All Canadian Girl pageant aims to provide a platform for young girls, ages zero to 18, to showcase their natural beauty. Anyone can join regardless of ethnicity, size, shape or disability.
The West Coast All Canadian Girl pageant aims to provide a platform for young girls, ages zero to 18, to showcase their natural beauty. Anyone can join regardless of ethnicity, size, shape or disability. westcoastgirlpageant.com

The West Coast All Canadian Girl pageant aims to provide a platform for young girls, ages zero to 18, to showcase their natural beauty. Anyone can join regardless of ethnicity, size, shape or disability.

The West Coast All Canadian Girl pageant takes place every summer and is run by director Liz McKinnon, who has much experience in the pageantry world. Along with being the pageant's director, McKinnon is also a pageant mom.

My own daughter had been involved in pageants in the USA for a while and we realized there was no pageant system in British Columbia, Canada so I started it on a whim, wanted to see if it would take off here and oh boy did it ever, McKinnon said.

So far, McKinnon has had approximately 400 girls come through her pageants since 2010, the West Coast All Canadian Girl and Dreamboat Dolls.

The average pageant I have about 40 to 50 girls, with my highest being 87 at one pageant, McKinnon said.

McKinnon holds two to three preliminaries in the spring and summer finals in July. There is also a pageant around Christmas time and they hold an accompanying toy drive in November.

In the pageants, personality is weighed more than anything else in comparison to other pageants where beauty is the most heavily judged. The girls are judged by a panel of three judges and a point system is used. The judges look at the girl's introductions, answers to their on stage questions and their poise and personality. Beauty is not judged in The West Coast All Canadian Girl pageant. The girl with the highest score at the end of the competition wins. There is a queen title for first place and princess title for second in every age group.

West Coast is an all-natural pageant, and we have beauty and casual at our prelims, McKinnon said. Keep it simple and easy, especially for the new girls. At the prelim level they also have to introduce themselves on stage and answer an on stage question if they are four years and older. Once we get into finals we add things like outfit of choice, perfectly pink wear, talent, full interview and TV commercial. The girls do not have to compete in all of it, they can pick and choose.

The pageants can be viewed by attending them directly. For more information please visit, http://www.westcoastgirlpageant.com/About.html.

Canada