One Golden Pond!

There surely must be an awful lot of pond hockey playing voters in the Province of New Brunswick!

Both the Federal government and the New Brunswick provincial government have shaken their collective couch cushions to come up with some spending money for the folks that organize the annual Plaster Rock Invitational Pond Hockey championships.

400,000 dollars will be made available for two support buildings for the outdoor tournament as well as for communication equipment, ice maintenance equipment and computers. Part of the money will be destined for an improvement to this website in order to trumpet the tournament to the wired world.

However, it may not need as much publicity as the organizers might think, since it first began the tournament has grown from 40 to over 120 teams competing on the natural ice surface on a frozen New Brunswick field.

The funding may prove to be controversial for some, as the idea of spending money this large a sum of money might stick in the craw of a few, considering it's destined for what many consider just an outdoor lark.

But as the stereotype for Canada goes, if it revolves around hockey anything can go. And the Plaster Rock tournament is one event that has certainly caught the attention of the nation.

From magazine articles in Canadian Geographic to features on the CBC and TSN, the saga of the frozen pond carries on.

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It has all the makings of one of those Canadian Heritage vignettes that occasionally come across your television screen, now complete with a "funded by the government of Canada" sticker to go with it!