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A canny Liberal friend of contrarian suggests that Premier-about-to-be Darrell Dexter would be wise to follow Jean Charest's example and select a gender-balanced cabinet. That would mean five or six of the 11 ministers Dexter will name tomorrow would be women. A key advantage of this approach is that it would disarm the party's already isolated left wing, giving Dexter more leeway to keep Howard Epstein out of harm's way—placing him, say, in the speaker's chair. Do the math: Dexter promised a cabinet of no more than 12 members. He will take one seat himself. Cape Breton must get another, also Pictou, Kings, and perhaps Guysborough. Add five or six women, and it doesn't leave much room for white males from Metro. The left would be hard put to complain about a cabinet that raised the participation of women to an historic high.
18 June, 2009

[caption id="attachment_933" align="alignleft" width="350" caption="2009 Nova Scotia Election Results (Click image to enlarge)"][/caption] ...

12 June, 2009

[caption id="attachment_916" align="alignright" width="150" caption="CCF MP for Cape Breton South, 1940-1957"]Clarie Gillis[/caption] .. .. Cape Bretoner Joey Schwartz, now living in Toronto, is not impressed: ...

11 June, 2009

After decades in the wilderness, they emerged, victorious, on the mountaintop. They had vanquished the foe, dispatching the king and his courtiers to a life on the back benches—or worse. Victory, sweet victory, was theirs. They ruled! So they would party, right? Party was their last name. They would gather together in gay frivolity to savor the sweet fruits of victory 'til dawn. Or not. This was the scene at midnight in the ballroom of the Dartmouth Holiday Inn, where the socialist hordes gathered to celebrate. The merriment went on 'til, oh, 10:30 or so, before the troops, led by their newly minted MLAs,...

10 June, 2009
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9:50  - NDP take half the vote and every seat on Nova Scotia's South Shore, 45% of the vote in the Northeastern mainland. Astounding! 9:40  -  Look!  They let Joan Jessome back in the province. She's been in Alberta, she's been in Newfoundland and Labrador. She's back in time for the party.
09 June, 2009

Victoria County Councillor Fraser Patterson, the NDP candidate in Victoria-The Lakes, scored a coup last week when he recruited fellow councillor Paul MacNeil to take him door-to-door in his home turf of Iona. The area is a Catholic Liberal bastion, and MacNeil's family has been Liberal since before the flood. At one stop, a homemaker poked her head out the door, eyed the two politicians, and said, "Paul, does you mother know what you're doing?"...

08 June, 2009
Paul DesBarres, president of Nova Insights, who claims to be the first pollster to project an NDP majority, thinks my squeamishness about using online polling results marks me as out of touch with current market research methods. A  recent article by DesBarres expands on the point:
The home landline is no longer necessarily the best way to garner public opinion:
  • Fully 84% of Canadians and 81% of Nova Scotians are online
  • 7% of Nova Scotians do not have a landline
  • 13% among males
  • 12% among 18-34-year-olds
08 June, 2009
Halifax arts and culture activist and New Democrat Andrew Terris weighs in on the union donation flap:
As I understand it, there are two critical factors: 1. Are the members of the [Building and] Construction Trades Council separately incorporated bodies?  If they are, their donations are not illegal. The [Members and Public Employees] Disclosure Act says "a trade union and all its members and affiliates are considered to be one organization." But it looks to me like the Council is an association of unions rather than a single, inclusive entity under the act. 2. Given #1, the NDP could well have accepted the donations in good faith. The real problem was the offer of the Council to reimburse the unions, an offer about which the NDP might well have known nothing until it was leaked to you and other media bloodhounds...
07 June, 2009

Contrarian reader Rodger Rowden disagrees: Unless political parties are exempt from PIPEDA [the federal  Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act], there may very well be legal problems with releasing donor information. PIPEDA is a companion to the federal Privacy Act. The latter applies only to governments and government agencies. The former applies only to "organizations that collect, use, and or disclose personal information in the course of commercial activities [contrarian emphasis]." Political parties fall into neither category. If apologists for Liberal Party and NDP pre-election secrecy are right, we should soon see prosecution of the Tories and the Greens for coming...

07 June, 2009
[caption id="attachment_777" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Dr. Chris Milburn"]Dr. Chris Milburn[/caption] What's disquieting about our New Democratic Party government-in-waiting is the same thing that's been disturbing about Nova Scotia for decades: a lack of compelling leadership. It's not simply that our once-upon-a-time socialists have moved to the dead center of the road. Contrarian is OK with that. It's Darrell Dexter's meticulous avoidance of anything that might challenge voters in any way. The NDP knew that to get elected, they would have to win seats in rural Nova Scotia. They took polls and conducted focus groups, and discovered that rural Nova Scotians are upset about emergency room closures. So the NDP promised to end those closures, even though every thoughtful observer knows that doing so would be a wasteful diversion of scarce health care dollars. Among other things, it will make recruitment of physicians to rural areas more difficult, not easier. Why would a fully trained physician want to sit in an emergency room all night to treat one or two patients?
07 June, 2009
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