[caption id="attachment_1384" align="alignleft" width="600" caption="Before and after Seoul, South Korea, removed an ugly 1970s-era highway"]Before and after Seoul, South Korea, removed an ugly 1970s-era highway[/caption]
The Infrastructurist website offers four examples of the transformative possibilities when a city decides to remove a monstrous piece of highway infrastructure, like, say, the Cogswell Interchange, and replace it with something useful, beautiful, and urban life-affirming.
07 July, 2009
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As Nova Scotia’s new government begins its third week in office, a critical early mistake is coming into focus: Darrell Dexter’s 12-member cabinet is too small for the job at hand. Cabinet selection inevitably requires consideration of gender, ethnicity, and geography: Women must take a prominent place; there must seats for Cape Breton, northern Nova Scotia, the south shore, and the valley; Metro MLAs must not appear to dominate. Legitimate political and cultural considerations of this sort do not necessarily trump such factors as experience and merit, but they compete with them. That leads to problems.
06 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
[caption id="attachment_1270" align="alignright" width="325" caption="The Boss"]dexter-finger-adjusted[/caption]
Premier Dexter's office is quietly taking a firm hand in the hiring of ministerial executive assistants, insisting the new hires must be chosen for their policy chops. Officials in the premier's office will begin interviewing candidates for long-term EA positions next week, replacing the makeshift crew of temporary EAs assigned immediately after the election. The move suggests the Dexter Government could feature a Harperesque degree of central control. Executive assistants are explicitly political positions tied to a ruling party's tenure. Each minister gets an EA to help with political aspects of the job, including major constituency issues and partisan concerns related to a minister's portfolios. They are not to be confused with the eight unpaid 'ministerial assistant' positions Dexter handed out Monday as sops to disappointed backbench MLAs who lost out in the 12-person cabinet sweepstakes.
02 July, 2009
Some days ago, contrarian reader Wallace J. McLean challenged contrarian to determine how many of the paving projects Nova Scotia submitted for federal stimulus funding were in provincial Tory ridings. "Too much work," we said, and went back to surfing Digg and Stumbledupon. Well, turns out Wally is a blogger himself, and after days with a magnifying glass comparing project lists with the boundaries of Nova Scotia's 52 provincial ridings, he offers an answer:
Of the 37 projects put forward by the late Macdonald government in NS, five were located in Liberal districts, and five in NDP districts, based on the 2006 election results.... Twenty-six were located in districts which the Tories held, or had won in 2006.
30 June, 2009
In his latest Herald column, the normally estimable Ralph Surette drinks the feed-in tariff Kool-Aid. Moneyquote:
Check out how they’re doing it in Ontario and other out-front jurisdictions, where "feed-in" laws or "standard offer contracts" are in effect — in which the utility is required to take power produced by entrepreneurs at a fixed rate, no haggling. Wherever it’s been tried, there’s been an explosion of energy entrepreneurship and new jobs. The [Nova Scotia Power] system of calling tenders one project at a time didn’t work elsewhere, and it hasn’t worked here.
Ralph makes a few good points in the column, but these two paragraphs contain more foolishness than enough.
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Ontario passed a bill authorizing the Minister of Energy to permit the use of feed-in tariffs just six weeks ago, and the regulations haven't been written yet. So it hasn't produced "an explosion" of anything yet, except perhaps hyped expectations among the uncompetitive producers who have been pushing for such a law here. As for other jurisdictions, in North America, Ontario is it: the first state, province, or country to pass a feed-in tariff law. As for tendered contracts not working, that will come as news to generations of good governance experts. Elsewhere in the same column, Ralph rightly criticizes NSP's attempt to win Utility and Review Board approval for an untendered biomass project.
29 June, 2009

Chief Electoral Officer Christine McCulloch's annual report has been posted, and it confirms our report last week that she has initiated deregistration proceedings against the Green Party for failure to comply with financial disclosure laws. As the chart above shows, the failure appears to be complete across the board: No audited financial statements, no public access thereto, and no copies or accounting of tax receipts. The Green Party of Nova Scotia received $133,469.90 in public financing last year. McCulloch's report doesn't say when deregistration will take effect, but over the weekend  party officials told contrarian they had until July 17 to avoid...

29 June, 2009
Jay Wilson challenges contrarian's references to Howard Epstein's Judaism:
In the article, “Howard’s end”,  you referred to him being, “The only Jew currently serving in the legislature.” By itself, it’s an accurate statement, but something of a throwaway statement as well. By itself, it has little relevance unless you had a specific reason for putting it in. My assumption upon reading it was your desire for full disclosure of the facts. Then in your most recent article entitled “You have my iPhone and I know where you are,” in reference to Kevin Miller losing his iPhone, you wrote, “...the chances of getting it back looked more and more like a Jewish environmentalist’s chances of getting into the Nova Scotia cabinet.” It seems to me that you’re making the implication—saying it without really saying it—that Howard Epstein was passed over for cabinet, in some part, because he’s Jewish.
29 June, 2009
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