Fredericton — In a surprising announcement from the floor of the provincial legislature, Finance Minister Roger Melanson has revealed an ambitious plan to recycle the province’s digital clutter and put the results to good use.
Melanson, speaking to reporters just after the legislature’s morning nap period, identified 3 key stages to the implementation of the plan. The Data Un-encumberation Mechanism for Business And Social Security (or D.U.M.B.A.S.S) will see New Brunswickers voluntarily forwarding old emails, as well as chat history, browser caches and Internet search results, to a central “repository.”
Highly trained “technicians” (students, recent immigrants, and inmates) will then process the electronic data by determining what is of value and what can be sent directly to the province’s Recycling Bin facility, currently under construction somewhere near the city dump. Finally, data will be reused, repurposed or donated.
“We already have potential partners in China and North Korea who are very interested in buying up all our recycled bits and bytes,” stated Melanson. “In fact, North Korean buyers have graciously volunteered to sift through all the province’s hard drives and phones and do the data recycling for us.”
When pressed as to what email recycling would do for the province, the minister was vague. “I imagine that download speeds will probably increase as the phone and cable lines are cleaned up. Computers might run a bit better because of all the space we will create inside the box. And as always, we plan to just figure things out as we go along.”