Firemen’s ladders beware. In the wake of this weekend’s leadership victory, Liberal leader Stephane Dion is set to unveil a campaign platform calling for sweeping E.U.-style regulations which would set out such details as the proper length of firemen’s ladders. The plan also calls for the hiring of 200,000 more civil servants over four years, and the adoption of the 35-hour work week.

“Stephen ‘arper’s efforts at ‘big-gouvernement conservatism’ have been disgrace,” Dion said. He pointed out that while government spending under the Bush administration grew at the fastest rate since Lyndon Johnson’s days in the ’60s, the size of government in Canada has remained roughly the same during this time.

“Through this maudit gouvernement’s misguided poliçies, we face the risk of falling further behind,” Dion warned.

Meanwhile, the Canadian Federation of Students is rushing into damage control mode, after Jesse Greener, chairperson of CFS-Ontario, took to the stage with former Liberal leaders to congratulate Dion. What’s worse, Greener praised Jean Chrétien’s Canada Millenium Scholarship Foundation-a bète noire among student union leaders-in an off-the-cuff remark caught by a rogue microphone.

“I got a little carried away,” said Greener, who admitted to “putting away a few” during the interminable line-up to vote. Ambling drunkenly through the crowd, Greener suddenly found himself at the podium during Dion’s speech, directly across from Chrétien.

“He looked so wrinkled and sad, it just made your heart break,” Greener recounted. “So I said ‘Jean, man, your Millenium Scholarship thing was a real swell idea!’ But that was by no means an endorsement of it.”

Greener’s comments set off a firestorm in the blogosphère. On Sunday, CFS national chairperson Amanda Aziz asserted in a statement that the federation’s staffers are free to back whichever party they wish.

“I guess this puts paid to the notion-aired by some misguided critics-that the CFS is nothing but an NDP front group,” Greener said. “This proves how much of a big tent organization the federation really is.”

Other CFS officials, meanwhile, took a different tack.

“What’s your problem?!” an unnamed national office staffer yelled into the telephone before hanging up, when asked to comment.