Don Mills sounds nervous. Nova Scotia's best known pollster has been conducting a rolling poll for the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, and over the last week, his numbers have pointed to an historic rout. For the last five days, he has shown Stephen McNeil's Liberals holding steady between 55 and 57 percent of decided voters—enough to propel him to a lopsided majority. "We're under a lot of scrutiny here," he told Contrarian. Here's the latest edition, published Tuesday morning: To understand how unusual such an outcome would be, I looked at every Nova Scotia election since 1960. Over those 15 provincial votes: The winning party got more...

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that New York City has become the first major municipality to adopt the new active symbol of accessibility, which Contrarian first wrote about in September, 2011. The result of a collaboration between Sara Hendren, graduate student at the Harvard School of Design, and Brian Glenney, philosophy professor at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, the revised icon recasts the passive, static International Symbol of Accessibility (demeaningly known as the "handicapped sign"), investing it with vigor and a sense of motion. The Chronicle reports: New York, in a move that could spark similar updates worldwide, has now agreed to use...

On CBC Radio last week, Contrarian’s old friend Ralph Surette said Nova Scotia Liberals had dumped their last nine leaders — every one since Gerald Regan — before they could fight a second election. That’s not quite true. The Liberals have had only seven leaders since Regan, and two of those took the party through two elections. Still, the record is fratricidal: The operative question is whether the Liberals will repeat this pattern when they review leader Stephen McNeil's leadership Friday. A covert campaign to unseat McNeil has featured an inept website and a mass mail-out using a purloined copy of the...

The June 9 general election saw a new party take power in Nova Scotia. It bears comment that, to the best of Contrarian's knowledge, not a single highway worker lost his job as a result, and this non-massacre occurred without notice. On September 20, 1978, the day after John Buchanan defeated Gerald Regan, many highway workers didn't bother to show up for work. It went without saying that Tory sympathizers would take over their jobs. The next time government changed hands, in 1993, Liberal hacks were so infuriated at John Savage's refusal to cleanse highway garages of Tory hires, they eventually hounded...