Being a cabinet minister requires adroit balancing skills. On one hand, a minister sometimes performs duties that border on the judicial, and must do so impartially. On the other, a minister has political responsibilities to the governing party and its allies. To judge from her public comments about an impending investigation into allegations of abuse at group homes operated by the Colchester Residential Services Society, Community Services Minister Denise Peterson-Rafuse has an imperfect grasp of both roles. The Nova Scotia Government and General Employees Union complained that managers of the Colchester homes had failed to react, or failed to react quickly enough, to...

In response to my post about "seeing" baseball on the radio (and the iPhone), Cliff White writes: Although I am not now, nor have I ever been, a major sports fan, I remember clearly listening as a young boy in the fifties to radio broadcast of local and major league games. I remember nothing of those games except the rhythm and pacing of the broadcasts. I suspect much of the nostalgia for the fifties golden age of baseball is rooted in the soothing, tension dissolving effects of those broadcasts. At a time when fears of the mushroom...

Reader Ritchie Simpson challenges me to consult a mathematician on my assertion that "one should always be sceptical of surveys that show heterosexual men had more partners, on average, than women, since this is a mathematical impossibility."
While I do not fundamentally disagree with your observation about "heterosexual men," I am dubious about your math.
My go-to guy on matters arithmetic is retired Cape Breton University professor Doug Grant, now living in exile in Kitchener. His response after the jump.

Please don't think me old, but I grew up in a suburb of New York City, listening to Vin Scully call Brooklyn Dodger games on a radio the size of a bread box, powered by vacuum tubes. The experience was formative in the sense that it left me with the belief baseball games are best seen on the radio, in singer Terry Cashman's evocative phrase. Tonight at 10, I set out from Sydney, Nova Scotia, for the 75 km. drive to my home on a remote stretch of Cape Breton's Bras d'Or Lakes. Before pulling out of the parking lot, I plugged...

Another media outlet has presented admiring coverage of the campaign by Halifax restaurateur Lil MacPherson and Halifax actress Ellen Page to oppose something one might expect environmentally conscious citizens to campaign for: the productive recycling of composted human waste as a worthy alternative to dumping it, semi-treated, in the ocean. A Contrarian reader describes today's Herald story as: One-sided journalism at its worst. Lil MacPherson is not an environmental scientist. Ellen Page is not an environmental scientist. Nowhere in the entire story is there any effort to present the case in favour of biosolids. Even the headline “Rising in defence of province’s...

Political junkies in Nova Scotia tend to keep an eye on elections in adjacent provinces, but not so much in adjacent US states. The Atlantic's James Fallows points to an interesting race for governor of Maine, where independent candidate (and Fallows friend) Eliot Cutler seemed to be coming on strong last week, rising in the polls and winning an avalanche of major newspaper endorsements. As Fallows points out, victory for an independent is not so far-fetched in the Pine Tree State, where two of the last five governors won election as independents. Viewed from a region devoid of political leadership, Cutler...

The dating site OK Cupid dips into its database of 3.2 million users to compare gays and straights, debunking a few myths along the way. A few highlights: Gays and straights have the same number of sex partners: six, on average; the same for men, women, gays, and straights.* Gays do not pursue sex with straights. (Only 0.6% of OKC's gay male users have ever searched for straight matches; only 0.1% of its lesbians users have ever done so; only 0.13% of straight users's profile visitors are gay.) Straight people sometimes have gay sex, straight women for more so than straight men. (One in four...

Transparency International rates Canada the sixth least corrupt nation in the world in a report featuring an interactive map and several interactive graphs. Founded by a former World Bank official, the NGO relies on business surveys of transparency in business process, rather than political corruption, for its guideposts....

Haligonian Warren Reed objects to the thoughtlessly patronizing word choices many journalists apply to wheelchair-users and those who discriminate them. In an email to two Chronicle-Herald reporters who recently wrote about separate cases of discrimination by Metro Transit and the Nova Scotia Justice Department against wheelchair users, he complained about three sentences in their stories: "The driver even called his supervisor, who confirmed that wheelchair-bound passengers are not allowed on [Bus No.] 60." "However, Sunday morning the driver said that he could get in a lot of trouble for letting wheelchair-bound passengers onto non-wheelchair routes." "Amy Paradis, 16, is quadriplegic and...