A fleeting moment on CBC radio this morning pointed to a disintegration of the social fabric in rural Nova Scotia that ought to be more clearly on our collective radar. Jim Morrow, proprietor of Victoria County's only newspaper and CBC Cape Breton's volunteer “party line” correspondent at municipal council, declined to name the public members of the newly created Victoria County Police Advisory Board. Justice Minister Ross Landry created the board to serve as liaison between the RCMP and the County Council. Host Steve Sutherland asked who was on it. Morrow: I don't know if I should really say that, because some of the...

14 February, 2012

Cape Bretoner Gordie Sampson now lives in Nashville, where he produces about 75 song demos a year, mostly in the country-pop vein. In a CBC Radio interview this morning, he reflected on what makes country music different: I write country song for the most part… The lyric is more important in this genre than really any genre I think. The lyric and the melody together really has to move the listener. In R&B or other types of modern music, the idea is to make people dance. In country music it’s, often times, its to hurt people’s feelings. To make them re-think that...

10 November, 2011

In a call to CBC-Cape Breton last week, North Shore resident David Papazian spoke a widely held but rarely voiced opinion about the $38 million project to dredge Sydney Harbor in hopes that someone will build container terminal here: The money could be much better spent fostering small business here in Cape Breton which is a much better engine of growth than these sort of mega-projects that require huge amounts of capital at the taxpayers' expense, with a whole lot of expectations and dreams and hopes that — maybe not, but very likely — will become another chapter in the probably fairly...

09 October, 2011

Speaking on CBC Cape Breton last week, former Conservative Education Minister Jane Purves offered a rare, even-handed take on Nova Scotia's education funding debate: The government is genuinely looking for savings in education. I think it has been very good at promoting the truth that the syste has cost way more over the last 10 years but there are far fewer students. However, I’m wondering if in retrospect it was wise to floaat this 22 percent because they should have known what was going to happen: And what’s going to happen is that every board is going to come up with...

27 January, 2011

Mount St. Vincent PR students looking for a case study on how not to do an interview may want to file away this CBC-Cape Breton year-end interview with John Lynn, CEO of Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation. Interviewer Steve Sutherland comes off as polite, patient, and persistent. Lynn's obvious beefs with local media coverage may or may not be valid, but he undercuts his message by appearing peevish and evasive. Anger rarely works on radio or TV. This guy needs to dial it back....

22 December, 2010

Contrarian reader RM thinks our post crossed the line: [T]his commentary was in poor taste. Yes, this veteran has every right to comment, but I think it is more important to respect the views of the the family of the fallen soldier. Let us make our comments without seeming to criticize the wishes of the family. Thanks to the many readers who pointed out that our link to CBC-Cape Breton reporter Bobby Nock's interview was broken, and thanks to website wizard Mike Targett for fixing it while Contrarian was helplessly sans Internet over the far Northern Atlantic....

02 July, 2010

One particularly noisome aspect of modern journalism is its fixation with grief porn: those maudlin public displays of grief over tragic events by people otherwise uninvolved in the lives of those actually afflicted. Grief porn is wholly a product of media pandering. it's a way for people to feel good about themselves -- and just incidentally show the world how good they are -- by displaying, often in bizarre or saccharin fashion, how badly they feel about the misfortunes of strangers - especially spectacular or notorious misfortunes besetting newsworthy or celebrity strangers. Well, here's a rare exception: a gutsy interview...

30 June, 2010

CBC Cape Breton's Information Morning host Steve Sutherland did a deft job Tuesday Morning holding Finance Minister Graham Steele's feet to the fire on the NDP's no-deficit, no-tax-hikes, no-program-cuts campaign pledge. Steele had a well-rehearsed answer, including a far-fetched analogy about a family doctor whose honest diagnosis gets overruled by four specialists, but Sutherland was politely persistent. He pressed Steele twice more to explain the glib falsehoods at the core of the NDP's spring election platform. "The fact is that we were acting on the best information we had at the time," Steele said. "The fact is that now we are in...

17 November, 2009

The New York Times has corrected its obituary of Donald Marshall, Jr., following remonstrations from Contrarian and from one of the lawyers who represented Marshall before the celebrated inquiry that bears his name. The original Times obit, published in its August 7 edition, two days after Marshall's death, contained the following paragraph: Late on the night of May 28, 1971, Mr. Marshall and a friend, Sandy Seale, went walking in a Sydney park and tried to rob an older man, Roy Ebsary, who drew a knife and killed Mr. Seale. As Contrarian wrote to the obituary's author, William Grimes: The Royal Commission on the...

23 October, 2009
manning-mackay
A spirited CBC Radio forum for candidates in Cape Breton South last Thursday degenerated into a shouting match in the back parking lot of CBC  Sydney after the show. Feisty Liberal veteran Manning MacDonald and earnest NDP up-and-comer Wayne MacKay nearly came to blows after MacDonald took umbrage at suggestions he was an absentee MP. The debate itself, on CBC-Cape Breton's Information Morning, featured a generational clash as MacDonald, 66, defended attacks from MacKay, 34, and Tory Stephen Tobin, 25, both teachers (sort of). Cathy Theriault of the Greens, a one-time Marijuana Party candidate, also took part.
06 June, 2009