Contrarian will be on CBC-TV's election night broadcast this evening, sharing panel duties with the estimable Jane Purves. The broadcast will run from 7 to 9 pm on the main CBC Nova Scotia channels; from 7 to 10 on Newsworld; and 7 until a final result is in (somewhere between 10 and 11 p.m.) on Eastlink. This is also Jim Nunn's final broadcast as CBC anchor. He retires at the end of the show, on which more later....

That's 29 New Democrats, 14 Progressive Conservatives, and nine Liberals, no independents, and no Greens: a narrow but workable majority for the New Democrats. The simple reality is that voters want to turf Rodney MacDonald, and they have decided to do that by turning to the New Unscary Democrats. The surprise here is that the Liberals will get so few seats. MacNeil has run a good campaign, and he will increase the party vote from its worst-ever showing in 2006. But the Liberal vote is spread thinly around the province, and so, in the language of political science profs, it's inefficient. It...

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Steve Maher showed exemplary restraint. After innocently coming into possession of a digital tape recorder a ministerial aide had apparently left behind in a washroom, he showed no inclination to root around in dustbins after incriminating evidence. The Chronicle-Herald's Ottawa reporter listened to the recording only long enough to confirm that it likely belonged to Jasmine MacDonnell, then-communications director to federal Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt. He immediately informed MacDonenell that he had the recorder, then held it for her to pick up. It sat in a desk drawer for months, during which interval the unusually busy—or careless—26-year-old failed to retrieve it.

On Friday, contrarian spoke with Jaideep Mukerji, vice president of public affairs for Angus Reid Strategies, about the unpublished regional breakdowns in the Nova Scotia election poll Reid conducted last week for CTV-Atlantic. I've been reluctant to post the results for two reasons: The regional breakdowns involve smaller subsets of the overall 800-person poll, so the sample sizes are quite small. This means the statistical sampling error, the amount by which the samples can be expected to vary from the populations being polled, is quite large. Sampling error, usually expressed as, "plus or minus X percentage points 19 times out of...

Aviation and weather buffs will want to study this exceptionally detailed analysis of severe weather in the area where Air France Flight 447 went down last week. While newscasts this morning centered of the role possibly faulty speed sensors, Tim Vasquez of the website Weather Graphics speculates intelligently on such factors as turbulence, lightning, icing, hail, and other precipitation. This is a brilliant piece of work, clear and if you have an elementary understanding of meterology it is quite easy to follow. Having spent a lot of time in the tropics I can attest to the high altitude 'anvil' formations . Even...

The Swedish Pirate Party, which favors legislation to ease copyright restrictions, won 7.1 percent of the vote in today's balloting for the European Parliament. This assures them of one seat in Sweden's 18-seat delegation to The Hague, but probably fall just short of the votes needed for two seats. It makes the Pirates Sweden's fith largest political party, and positions them for the 2010 Swedish Parliamentary elections. If they cross the five percent threshold in that election, they will be assured of at least five percent of the seats in Parliament. They hope seats will give them political power they can...

north-korea-2 Curtis Melvin, a PhD candidate at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia,  has harnessed a vast network of citizen spies who use Google Earth's mapping tools to fill in the geographical blanks in the world's most secretive nation. The palace pictured above is one of 73 elite compounds enjoyed by North Korea's Kim Jong Il and his inner circle. Melvin's contributors have mapped the country's railways and power lines, and tagged thousands of anti-aircraft installations, nuclear facilities, prisons, mass graves, hydro dams, restaurants, banks, churches, temples,  hotels, and elite playgrounds.

Paul Withers and Jean Laroche were among the first to speculate that Rodney MacDonald's promise to lock up 15-year-olds found abroad after curfew was simply an effort to shore up his base. But is the Progressive Conservative Party base in Nova Scotia really characterized by cranky, youth-hostile, law-and-order right-wingers? Or is that some Reform-influenced caricature of the Conservative base? The party of John Hamm, Finlay MacDonald, and Robert Stanfield was traditionally long on moderation and centrism. The notion that yahoo sloganeering will discourage longtime Tories from slipping away to the Liberals in hopes of blocking an NDP government looks like a sign...

In a debate just concluded on CBC Cape Breton, NDP candidate Fraser Patterson noted that Victoria-The Lakes MLA Keith Bain is the only member one of only two [*] Conservative MLAs never named to cabinet. "In my opinion, that's just another sign of Rodney's bad judgment," he said.