From The muse, Joan Burke on the need for the feds to pony up even more money for an area of exclusive provincial jurisdiction.
That's not the funny bit. A half century ago provinces were manning the borders to keep the federal government out of their backyard. Now everyone - including Danny Williams - is looking to get Ottawa to pay for just about everything.
Skip down to the bit where the province's education minister wants to get in on nationally co-ordinated literacy testing but she wants to make sure the tests are relevant to Newfoundland and Labrador.
Think about that for a minute.
We want to test literacy, but we want to make sure that the concept of reading and writing is actually relevant to this province. That sort of comment used to refer to the stunnedness of asking some young fellow from Bung Hole Tickle about the correct method of riding the subway.
Read the next line in the article and you will see what Burke had in mind: map-reading. Apparently being able to read a map is a skill useful only in big cities, where if all else failed you could...oooh...maybe ask someone for directions.
Out here in the middle of the freakin' woods where every tree looks suspiciously like every other tree and on the barrens the whole place is one pile of rocks and low shrubs shrouded in fog, the population consists of some bizarre products of Darwinian evolution who have GSP codes in their DNA.
Only problem is, Burke's theory doesn't quite explain the number of people around here who get lost in the country and die of exposure. "Triptik? We dun need no stinkin' CAA triptik"
By that sort of logic, someone would likely conclude the unfortunate sods were really mainlanders in disguise.
Around these parts, we'd suggest Burke needs a roadmap to a sound literacy policy.
We'd draw one but she may not be able to understand it.
