Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence

Himself made a rather extraordinary claim in the House of Assembly during Question Period today.

PREMIER WILLIAMS: The hon. the Leader of the Opposition knows very well that we support districts. We support your district. There is a school in L’Anse au Loup. There is a school in Port Hope Simpson. More road money has gone into your district than the entire Province collectively put together, so we do not punish districts.

How very magnanimous of the Father of the Motherland; letting traitor opposition districts have schools!

Anyway: in 2004, under the Provincial Roads Improvement Program, the district in question – Cartwright-L'Anse au Clair – recieved $300,000 in PRIP work, 1.1% of the PRIP budget, placing it 33rd amongst the 39 districts which had PRIP projects that year.

In 2005, the district received 100,000, 0.3% of the budget, ranking 36th out of 38.

In 2006, it received 930,000, 1.7%, placing 21st out of 31.

In 2007, the figure was $1.45-million, 2.4%, again 21st, but out of 38.

In 2008, it was $1.5-million, 2.0%, or 28th among 40.

In 2009, The Most Accountable Government In The Universe stopped releasing its district-by-district PRIP budget figures.

Now, PRIP is but one pot of money from which road money is drawn. But little or none of the other pots have seen money going into highways in Cartwright-L'Anse au Clair during the Danny Williams-Government era.

The widening and "hard-topping" – paving, apparently, is passé – of the Trans-Labrador Highway, cost-shared with the federal government, is restricted entirely to portions of the TLH in the two districts that were "intelligent" enough to vote correctly in 2007.

Even the construction of Phase III of the TLH, as beneficial as it might be to the communities of southern coastal Labrador, has taken place almost entirely within the boundaries of the electoral district of Lake Melville.

So is the Premier's claim really – how you say? — backuppable?