Aviation and weather buffs will want to study this exceptionally detailed analysis of severe weather in the area where Air France Flight 447 went down last week. While newscasts this morning centered of the role possibly faulty speed sensors, Tim Vasquez of the website Weather Graphics speculates intelligently on such factors as turbulence, lightning, icing, hail, and other precipitation. This is a brilliant piece of work, clear and if you have an elementary understanding of meterology it is quite easy to follow. Having spent a lot of time in the tropics I can attest to the high altitude 'anvil' formations . Even...

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

The Swedish Pirate Party, which favors legislation to ease copyright restrictions, won 7.1 percent of the vote in today's balloting for the European Parliament. This assures them of one seat in Sweden's 18-seat delegation to The Hague, but probably fall just short of the votes needed for two seats. It makes the Pirates Sweden's fith largest political party, and positions them for the 2010 Swedish Parliamentary elections. If they cross the five percent threshold in that election, they will be assured of at least five percent of the seats in Parliament. They hope seats will give them political power they can...

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
The NDP have joined the Liberals in insisting that voters go to the poll without knowing who donated to their campaign. The party revealed the names of labour unions and corporations that gave to the campaign, but withheld the names of individuals who contributed a total of $287,013.12. "The initial advice we received from [Chief Electoral Officer]  Christine [McCulloch] is that there were privacy concerns," said N-dip campaign director Matt Hebb. "If she has different advice now, I will take a look at it.' McCulloch's press aide Dana Philip Doiron told contrarian last week that, in response to requests for an opinion, McCulloch merely told the parties they should seek their own legal counsel, because it was not appropriate for her to issue legal advice.
07 June, 2009

Contrarian reader Scooter Bob complains that the media is ignoring NDP ads that are just as negative as the Tories': The NDP are distributing a two-page flyer. On one side is a less-than-flattering picture of Rodney MacDonald and a list of five alleged missteps — ERs closing & longer wait times; wasting money on expensive vehicles for ministers; putting HST on electricity; and putting the province in more debt. Isn't this exactly the same negative, US-style electioneering the NDP are complaining about? Why doesn't the media report on this? Perhaps because the ads go a step further by implying illegality by the...

07 June, 2009

"One man with two good secretaries could run Nova Scotia."  — Robert Stanfield, premier, 1956-1967. He did not say the man had to be any good; only the secretaries....

06 June, 2009
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