calder
The Halifax Chronicle-Herald details the arrest of Anne Calder, a defense lawyer and former Crown prosecutor, on suspicion of smuggling prescription narcotics to a client in the Burnside Jail. As it happens, contrarian knows Calder slightly. She has always struck us as an idealistic, compassionate, conservative woman. She was also an outspoken admirer of Peter MacKay, with whom she served when they were both Crown prosecutors in Pictou County. An Amherst native, Calder followed an unconventional career path.  She graduated from Dalhousie and Carleton Universities, then worked as an airline flight attendant before earning her law degree at the University of British Columbia. At various times she worked as as a Crown prosecutor, either staff or casual, in Halifax,  Truro, Pictou, and New Glasgow. Along the way she spent a few years in New Zealand, and graduated from the one-year, masters in journalism program at King's in 2006.
15 July, 2009

.. .. .. .. First coffee prevented Alzheimer's. Then beer, wine, and spirits prevented Alzheimer's. Now, according to the Journal of Neuroscience, a big fat doobie prevents Alzheimer's. Can sex be far behind? Moneyquote: Our results indicate that cannabinoid receptors are important in the pathology of AD and that cannabinoids succeed in preventing the neurodegenerative process occurring in the disease. [Emphasis contrarian's] Hat tip: D. Parsons. UPDATE: Devastating development. [Hat tip: W&G]...

14 July, 2009

[caption id="attachment_1459" align="alignleft" width="615" caption="Screenshot: coincidental tweets."][/caption] Contrarian has fully recovered from the fleeting (and uncharacteristic) sympathy we felt for Prime Minister Harper over the Case of the (Allegedly) Missing Host. We hereby revert to our customary stance: a plague on all their holier-than-thou houses. Let's review: A  Catholic vicar general complained that the Prime Minister has committed not just sin but scandal by failing to consume the host during holy communion at Romeo LeBlanc's funeral. When the press dutifully reported this, PM spokesman Dimitri Soudas (he of the misattributed Ignatieff non-quote) insisted Harper had indeed consumed the host, whereupon more protectors...

11 July, 2009

Is Peter MacKay channelling John Buchanan? Is Stephen Harper keen to cultivate a second Danny Williams in Atlantic Canada? Those are two possible explanations of the Harper Government's mean-spirited, post-election reversal of its commitment to help fund the $40-million, four-rink arena planned for Bedford. The Conservative about-face presents an early test for Darrell Dexter's Government. Last month, the feds assured HRM officials that the project was on track to receive $15 million in infrastructure funding from Ottawa's stimulus program. The NDP Government likewise committed $15 million, and HRM was to finance the remainder. Last Friday, Ottawa abruptly informed city hall it no longer...

09 July, 2009
Talk to almost anyone in the federal civil service, and before long, they'll bemoan the way Harper has  concentrated power in the Prime Minister's office. If Pierre Trudeau viewed backbenchers as "nobodies," Harper appears to lump cabinet ministers and senior civil servants in the same contemptible category. The Toronto Star's James Travers recently called for "a saint to roll back all the power hoarded in the PMO." In today's Hill Times, W.T. Stanbury, retired professor of Commerce and Business Administration at UBC, proposes seven steps for doing so. Quotes after the jump.
06 July, 2009
Halibut - large Contrarian reader LH who fished halibut in Alaska for eight years, the very place where Greg Easterbrook said Individual Transferable Quotas have created a sustainable fishery producing top quality fish. He writes:
Quotes, yes, definitely; Transferable, absolutely NO! Clearwater or some other fishing company would own them all either by outright purchase or yearly leasing. ITQ’s are the reason we have arm chair millionaires. [The quota owner] sits in his chair and collects $15,000 or more while someone else catches the fish. The money is in the paper not the fish... The most successfully managed fishery in the world is the Canadian lobster fishery. The resource is in good shape. One of the reasons: if you are licensed to catch it, then it is you who has to do so, full stop. Other factors are, of course, protection of the species by size, sex, harvest effort, and trap limits.
Ah, but some would say the Maritimes lobster industry represents an informal application of property rights to the fishery. In many lobster grounds, fishermen occupy individual “berths,” where they enjoy an exclusive right to set traps. These property rights have no basis in law, but they are rigidly enforced by community custom.
04 July, 2009
Crest Halifax has a thoughtful discussion about the problem of low frequency noise from windmills, and the illness some say it causes.
Of course it is possible that those reporting the symptoms of Wind Turbine Syndrome are more sensitive to sound and vibration than most people, or even than detection instruments. It’s also possible that other factors are at work. Could the illness be, to some extent, psychosomatic in nature?
03 July, 2009

Greg Easterbrook thinks Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs) hold the key to saving vanishing fish stocks. He makes the case in the current Atlantic, part of an article called 15 Ways to Fix the World. After describing a delicious halibut dinner in Girdwood, Alaska, he writes: Good restaurant? Yes, but even better fishery management. About a decade ago, the Alaskan halibut catch was switched from a system of “catch all you can” in a very short period, to a system of tradeable permits. Now halibut season does not happen over a few chaotic days marred by colliding boats and overlapping lines, followed...

03 July, 2009

The indefatigable Wallace J. McLean (note correct spelling; mea culpa) has risen to contrarian's challenge, and defended his view that the MacDonald government's paving proposals were as politically skewed as the Harper government's selective approvals thereof. This time he buttresses his case with a map, using traditional party colors in two shades: darker for ridings in which the government proposed  paving; lighter for those where it did not. Turning this map back into numbers, the Rodney government proposed work in two out of six rural Liberal districts (33%); three out of eight rural NDP districts (38%), and 13 out of 21 rural...

03 July, 2009
Embassy Magazine outs the Harper government's effort to strip foreign policy documents of vestigial Liberal language:
DFAIT insiders tell Embassy that since the Conservative government took power in 2006, political staffers have directed rank and file Foreign Affairs bureaucrats to stop using policy language created by the former Liberal government.
02 July, 2009
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