After Newspaper Guild members narrowly rejected a voluntary pay cut to save the financially troubled Boston Globe, the New York Times Co., which owns the Globe, announced it would unilaterally cut salaries at the paper by 23 percent. So editorial cartoonist Dan Wasserman cut 23 percent of this morning's cartoon. ...
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,...
Contrarian will be on CBC-TV's election night broadcast this evening, sharing panel duties with the estimable Jane Purves. The broadcast will run from 7 to 9 pm on the main CBC Nova Scotia channels; from 7 to 10 on Newsworld; and 7 until a final result is in (somewhere between 10 and 11 p.m.) on Eastlink. This is also Jim Nunn's final broadcast as CBC anchor. He retires at the end of the show, on which more later....
That's 29 New Democrats, 14 Progressive Conservatives, and nine Liberals, no independents, and no Greens: a narrow but workable majority for the New Democrats. The simple reality is that voters want to turf Rodney MacDonald, and they have decided to do that by turning to the New Unscary Democrats. The surprise here is that the Liberals will get so few seats. MacNeil has run a good campaign, and he will increase the party vote from its worst-ever showing in 2006. But the Liberal vote is spread thinly around the province, and so, in the language of political science profs, it's inefficient. It...
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?"...
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
An interactive guide to the most popular social media by country, from Many Eyes....
On Friday, contrarian spoke with Jaideep Mukerji, vice president of public affairs for Angus Reid Strategies, about the unpublished regional breakdowns in the Nova Scotia election poll Reid conducted last week for CTV-Atlantic. I've been reluctant to post the results for two reasons: The regional breakdowns involve smaller subsets of the overall 800-person poll, so the sample sizes are quite small. This means the statistical sampling error, the amount by which the samples can be expected to vary from the populations being polled, is quite large. Sampling error, usually expressed as, "plus or minus X percentage points 19 times out of...