Four months ago, I leapt to the defence of former CTV Ottawa Bureau Chief Laurie Graham, whose appointment as principal secretary to Premier Stephen McNeil came under attack from anti-government scolds. Today there's a fresh kerfuffle about former Chronicle-Herald columnist Marilla Stephenson's promotion to a newly created civil service position as liaison between the Executive Council office and government departments. Since October 2014, Stephenson had been working on contract doing outreach for the One Nova Scotia Commission. The two hirings seem superficially similar, but they differ in one crucial respect. Graham received a discretionary political appointment. When Stephen McNeil's term as premier ends, so will her employment. Stephenson received a civil service appointment. She has a job for life, and...

26 July, 2016

Call me contrarian, but I don’t believe Nova Scotia will have an election this fall. Speculation about a fall vote has been rampant since Province House reporters and opposition MLAs raised the alarm back in May. The government's five-year mandate doesn't expire until October, 2018, and the usual four-year benchmark between elections is still a year off. But the latest Corporate Research Associates poll shows McNeil's Liberals with a commanding 59 percent to the PC's 21 percent and the NDP's 18. So the temptation to go early exists. Pretending to call an early election might be a smart strategy. It forces opposition parties into panicked preparations where methodical...

25 July, 2016

At first glance, it looks like one of those iconic shots of Sable Island horses, but it's actually a scene from Google Street View. This week, Street View added Sable to its Trekker program, which features virtual off-road tours of spectacular sights around the world. Danielle Hickey, Parks Canada Acting External Relations Manager for Mainland Nova Scotia, lugged Trekker's portable, backpack version of the Street View car camera around a central section of Sable last September, collecting a connected series of 360° images. The thick blue lines in the image below give a rough idea of the paths she followed. [UPDATE] Since posting this, I've learned the blue...

13 July, 2016

How storm water complicates municipal sewage treatment by frequently overwhelming treatment plants, why this is such a hard problem to fix in older cities like Sydney and Halifax, and what property owners can do to help, all in one cute video courtesy of Halifax Diverse, the Sierra Club, Halifax Water, and (Bousquet-bait warning) TD Green Streets: For more information on the exponential cost of designs that anticipate rare environmental events, see the 100-year flood. For a real life example, Coke Ovens Brook in Sydney, Nova Scotia, has vast sloped sides, lined with heavy plastic and armoured with stone, all to convey what is usually a tiny trickle of...

13 July, 2016

Contrarian reader Bill Fry's grandparents had a farm in Medford, less than three kilometres from Kingsport, whose bustling, early 20th Century train station Dan Conlin cataloged here last week. Bill writes: Back in 1930, my mother would walk over a mile to Kingsport, get on the morning train to attend the Kings Academy in Kentville, then take the afternoon train back to Kingsport. So the train was actually the school bus for all the students from Kingsport. My mother says the older boys use to bully them on the train—take their lunch boxes and eat the good stuff every morning. The students from Kentville didn’t...

10 July, 2016

On Monday, Pier 21 curator Dan Conlin, whom Contrarian readers know from his annual tally of Halloween revellers on Duncan St. in Halifax, carried out a curious experiment. Using a 24-page railway timetable from July 4, 1914, which the Nova Scotia Archives has made available online, he tabulated the trains and steamships arriving and departing the village of Kingsport, in the Annapolis Valley. As Dan explains: I used a replica station board, the kind stations used to post on their platforms, to recreate a day in the life of a long-gone station 102 years ago.  (Rail service ended there in 1962.) It is interesting that Kingsport in the Annapolis Valley...

06 July, 2016

Last week, I featured Ask-a-Pilot Patrick Smith's reminiscence of pubescent adventures sneaking into the cockpits of planes waiting at Boston's Logan Airport. I mentioned my own tired and emotional encounter with a Goodyear Blimp and its generously tolerant night watchman. "It was a little  different in Nova Scotia, at least where I grew up," writes Cliff White: Once in junior high, just as lunch break was ending, several blimps appeared. The bell rang, but some of us ignored it, just so we could watch this rare sight a bit longer. Amazingly for that time and that place, we weren't strapped. But were all given...

17 June, 2016

  In response to Gus Reed's droll dissection of management practices at the Waterfront Develop Corporation, an analysis that rested heavily on the WCL's blue-blood sameness, Peter Kavanagh writes: I loved the post and the strength of the critique, but I am confused about the whiteness claim. Without doubt, the corp is remarkably uniform, but it is the link between whiteness and ableism that escapes me. Are you and Gus really trying to suggest that if they were less white this wouldn't have happened? To me it is the lack of a disabled voice or perspective that is the key issue. Surely neither you nor Gus...

17 June, 2016

  Gus Reed, the eagle-eyed wheelchair rights advocate, has trained his gaze on the Waterfront Development Corporation, and turned up facts so startling, he was moved to write commission chair Dale Godsoe. As usual, Gus is as entertaining as he is perspicacious. Dear Ms. Godsoe, I am Gus Reed, one of the people on a tear about the Stubborn Goat, your contractor, and the unequal protection afforded people with disabilities by the public health authorities. I realize there is confusion in government about jurisdiction and the building code, but that doesn't excuse the haphazard approach or the jury-rigged result. From your website, I learn...

16 June, 2016

  The Trudeau administration has purged the Prime Minister's official website of news releases issued during Stephen Harper's reign, and asked Google to ensure its search results no longer point to the deleted material. News stories about the issue have mostly concentrated on the requests to Google, but the purge itself is the real problem. Liberal dismiss the controversy, insisting it was only a housekeeping effort to ensure search results produced up-to-date information. They're right, insofar as the 51 requests to Google for search engine updates are concerned. But that leaves the question why historic content was purged in the first place. The deleted material, or some of it, has been retained and moved to...

16 June, 2016
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