I'm firing up a new hashtag for you Twitter folks.
It's called #ottawaspends. I'm thinking this can be Twitter location for discussion of the federal government's economic stimulus plan. You're free to tweet whatever you want on this tag, of course, but my tweets here will be more keyed to information and data point delivery.
For example, I'm going to try tweet quick bullet points whenever I get a press release in which a federal politician anywhere in the country issues a press release outlining any kind of federal spending. Now, I've only got 140 characters so here's the syntax I plan to use:
#ottawaspends [DEPT] [MINISTER RESPONSIBLE] [POLITICIAN ANNOUNCING] [AMOUNT] [PROVINCE] [MUNICIPALITY] [DESCRIPTION]
So how will that work?
Well, this morning, for example, ACOA (the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency) issued a press release in which Senator Donald Oliver announced, on behalf of Infrastructure Minister John Baird, a federal investment in some Nova Scotia municipalities for wastewater and drinking water systems. The combined federal, provincial and municipal investment is about $6 million but the federal portion is about $2 million. So my tweet will be:
#ottawaspends ACOA BAIRD OLIVER $2m NS Kentville Wastewater and drinking water projects
More details on these spending announcements should be posted at the Government of Canada news release centre but some, like ACOA's, are only posted at their departmental Web site.
Now this may be new money, old money, yet-to-be approved money — I don't care. The point of this is that on this date and time a federal politician stood up somewhere and took credit for putting some cash in the system. You're going to see Prime Minister Harper do that later today in Berwick, NS.
If you're new to Twitter, you can play along by simply following me — I'm davidakin on Twitter . If you do that you'll get all my tweets. Or you can head here to just follow this hashtag.
You can also track #ottawaspends through your favourite RSS reader. Here's the link to the #ottawaspends feed.