Firefighting

With the traditional Fire Truck Month now re-scheduled and stretched out over the entire Fire Truck Season which, coincidentally, precedes election season, it is entirely appropriate, then, that the apparatus of Williams Dunderdale2011 Government be turned entirely to putting out political fires.

So when VOCM reports, as it did Tuesday:

Liberal Education critic Marshall Dean says students who are hoping to obtain funding to attend post-secondary institutions in the fall are being told their applications can't be processed before the deadline. Dean says some students only received their acceptance letters since Canada Post employees returned to work after their postal strike. Now, with a July 8th deadline, students are being told their applications cannot be processed.

Dean says the processing of applications falls under the Department of Human Resources, Labour and Employment, and he wants the minister to act. He says he wrote Minister Darin King last week, but he hasn't received a response.

then before the Open Line show is out, Dr. Darin Luther King calls in to rectify:

There's a reprieve today for post secondary students who are going to miss the deadline to apply for government funding because of the disruption in mail service. The original deadline of July 8th was too tight this year because of the postal dispute.
However, on VOCM Open Line with Randy Simms this morning, Labour Minister Darin King said the deadline has been extended to the end of the month. King says the government doesn't want to see anyone miss out because of the postal dispute.

Long-standing decades-old pollution problem in Hopedale? There's a meeting to deal with that, plus an announceable on another northern Labrador environmental nuisance.

The Burin Peninsula needs a little love? Then a couple of doses of love it shall get, and that, on top of the ferry-related carrot now being dangled in front of all the shipyard towns and ferry-dependent communities.

Want internet? They have the internet for computers now.

What better time than the pre-election present to throw some money at the mooses?

And can you ever have too much dollar-sign-heavy boilerplate?

Budget 2011 Standing Strong: For Prosperity. For Our Future. For Newfoundland and Labrador provides funding of $216.4 million for road and bridge improvements, supplemented by an additional $35.2 million in Federal Government funding, for a total road and bridge investment in 2011-12 of $251.6 million.

Not even when the wharf-related press release it's attached to renders the "road and brige" boilerplate nonsensical?

Back in the old days, this is the sort of pattern that would make you bet there's an imminent election call. Heck, you can almost map the districts that the Progressive Conservatives Dunderdale2011s have

Now that the suspense is removed by fixed-election dates — oh, sorry, fixed election-dates — you just have to wonder... couldn't some of these long-term fires have been put out before now?