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26 October 2007

Meaningless numbers

At what point will someone in the provincial government's business department decide to tell the people of Newfoundland and Labrador just exactly what sorts of regulatory requirements have been eliminated or reduced as part of the so-called red tape reduction program?

"We have further reduced the number of regulatory requirements by 32,866, which means the elimination of an additional 11,651 requirements since April," said Minister [Kevin] O'Brien. "We have successfully reduced the regulatory burden by just over 10.5 per cent. This achievement puts us on the way to the halfway mark of our objective to reduce the number of regulatory requirements within government by 25 per cent."

This is the kind of vacuous statement that brings public relations into disrepute. Without knowing what the "regulatory requirements" are, no one can tell whether or not eliminating even one of them actually means anything.

This isn't news.

It's drivel.

Vacuous, meaningless tripe.

Let's not even discuss the tortured grammar of that first sentence of the quote.

Rather than this pile of words, the two communications directors involved - that's right, it took two people to issue it - could simply have printed a limerick.

You know the one:

There once was a young man named Paul

-srbp-