Constant funding announcements have become white noise

Apr 5, 2017 | 5:00 AM

KAMLOOPS — Do you hear that sound?

Wait for it…. It’s the sound of money falling from the trees and landing on our heads. Our money.

You have to wonder what the B.C. Liberal government was doing with that cash until now. Maybe they were keeping it all in a giant sock under the mattress.

Yesterday, I started counting it up from the steady stream of press releases… and stopped at around the $200 million mark, and that was just for part of the day.

I guess timing is everything, and why not try to impress us — on the eve of an election — with our own tax dollars.

True, Premier Clark put us on notice in the Throne Speech and the Budget Speech that it was going to happen. We’ve worked hard, she said. We deserve payback, she said.

So, hour after hour, the announcements roll in — a few thousand dollars here, a few million there. Volunteer groups, schools, airports, housing, tourism, arts and culture, highways — no corner of the province, no endeavor big nor small is left out.

Clearly, we’re supposed to be enlightened, impressed and grateful but I wonder if it hasn’t lost  the desired effect. The mind, as they say, boggles. I find myself barely paying attention anymore. I plead guilty to deleting a lot of those announcements after a very quick scan.

Too much information; too much of a good thing, depending on how you look at it.

In politics and marketing, the wisdom is that you should stick to three key messages because otherwise, you lose your audience. Which is exactly what’s happening.

It’s gotten to the point where every time an announcement is made, we think we’ve heard it before — and sometimes we have.

And who knows what it’s all adding up to. Money, after all, doesn’t grow on trees.

But the thing is, it’s all become just a lot of white noise, constantly there, like an annoying ringing in the ears.