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

Imagine you’re the editor of a major London daily. Your crosstown archrival has obtained two million pages of explosive documents, outing a Parliamentary expense scandal that's rocking the nation. They've parlayed the document trove into a  fire hose of blockbuster stories. What do you do? If you’re the Guardian, you enlist your readers in a ground-shifting, game-saving exercise in crowdsourceing. The Nieman Foundation's Journalism Lab picks up the remarkable story, complete with four crucial pointers for would-be imitators. Journalism has been crowdsourced before, but it’s the scale of the Guardian’s project — 170,000 documents reviewed in the first 80 hours, thanks to a...

03 July, 2009

Here's how a really cool national postal service communicates. Hat tip: Bessy N....

02 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
[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
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After one too many disappointments, Biblically named British writer Hephzibah Anderson swore off boinking for a year, then wrote an intriguing article about the experience. Moneyquote:
"Beware of any enterprise that requires new clothes," Thoreau cautioned, but today I am shopping for a chaste wardrobe. The clothes I pick out are generous and tough, nothing flimsy or flyaway. In my newly chaste state, my instinct is to wrap up and hide away.
02 July, 2009

Eleven Canadians living in the United States celebrate Canada Day by telling the New York Times what they miss about Canada. Moneyquote: We call our dollars loonies because the coin has an image of a loon in flight. Another old bird, the Queen of England, is on the other side of the coin. I remember singing “God Save the Queen” every morning in school. “Long live our noble Queen!” we belted, thousands of us tubby little obedient Canadians. I guess it worked. She’s still alive. (Rick Moranis) Unlike many of her generation, the late Cape Breton Post writer Eleanor Huntington, who died...

01 July, 2009
[caption id="attachment_1253" align="alignright" width="270" caption="Top row: Ruby MacPherson and current Chief Sandy Hawley. Bottom row: retired Chief Charlie MacPherson and Jody MacDonald. "]Top row: Ruby MacPherson and current Chief Sandy Hawley. Bottom row: retired Chief Charlie MacPherson and Jody MacDonald. [/caption] More than 100 residents of tiny Ross Ferry brought the community's spanking new fire trunk to the Cape Breton Regional Hospital this week for an unusual ceremony honoring an ailing former resident who single-handedly built the department's first fire-fighting vehicle. Charlie MacPherson, now of Sydney, a retired Cape Breton Transit Authority mechanic, is seriously ill with kidney disease. After fire destroyed a popular neighbor's home in the spring of 1981, Charlie volunteered to spend his two-week vacation assembling a home-made fire truck from components he and others begged, borrowed, and scrounged. The engine and cab came from an old Pepsi delivery van. The tank had been abandoned at a North Sydney machine shop. Neighbors hauled the chassis out of a makeshift junk yard in the woods near Steele's Cross. In less than two weeks, Charlie assembled these unpromising cast-offs into functioning, 800-gallon pumper truck that served for eight years as the fledgling department's main firefighting gear. Charlie went on to serve as chief until he and wife Ruby moved to Sydney in the 1990s. Over the years, the department gradually upgraded through a series of better and better used fire trucks. Then last winter, its sharp-eyed truck captains proposed that the department take advantage of the depressed automotive industry to snap up a brand new truck at the rock-bottom prices then prevailing. Thanks to the department's consistent fund-raising and prudent financial management, the gorgeous GMC C7500 tanker-pumper is fully paid for. When word came that Charlie was seriously ill in hospital, the department voted unanimously to dedicate the new truck in his honor. Last Sunday, accompanied by Ruby and sons Shane and Stephen, Charlie wheeled out of the hospital and onto the back parking lot, where he found more than 100 grateful former neighbors waiting by the new truck. Chief Sandy Hawley presented him with a framed photo of the sparkling new vehicle, and a plaque declaring Charlie a lifetime member. A reader responds after the break.
01 July, 2009
Not owning a TV, at least one connected to the outside world, contrarian is a little late with this, but it's worth reading. CTV Atlantic's Steve Murphy deftly navigates the border between politeness and persistence, while the Prime Minister Stephen H. squirms.
Q: You have been spending a good deal of time with Ignatieff lately working on this compromise that averted the election, and at same time your party is running ads that attacked Mr. Ignatieff. And frankly, we and other broadcasters have been getting complaints about those ads. How do those ads right now improve or dignifiy the political process?
30 June, 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
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