That was a peculiar performance by Cape Breton Regional Municipality Mayor Cecil Clarke Friday. At a hastily called, 3:30 p.m. news conference, the mayor denounced municipal affairs bureaucrats for piling $4-5 million in new charges onto the financially strapped municipality, while rejecting his reasoned pleas for help coping with CBRM's fiscal mess. Since his election in the fall of 2012, Clarke has quietly led CBRM officials and citizens through a deliberate process to identify efficiencies in the municipality's far flung operations. They pared capital spending, and made what appeared to be an honest effort to come to provincial (and federal) negotiations...

23 March, 2014

A lot of people who ought to know better have been whistling past the graveyard in response to the Harper government's plan to scrap Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation and assign responsibility for federal development assistance to the remote and largely indifferent Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency. Make no mistake: this marks the end of a direct federal pipeline Cape Breton has enjoyed since the Donald Commission Report in the Pearson Administration. Anyone who claims it's not grim news for the island is either naive or disingenuous. ACOA minister Rob Moore managed the spin with adroitness we have rarely seen from the Harper government. He...

20 March, 2014

When documents released by Edward Snowden revealed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) routinely hovers hoovers up metadata on telephone calls made and received in that country, officials first lied about the practice, then defended it on grounds the information obtained was trivial. President Obama insisted the gathering of metadata amounted only to "modest encroachments on privacy" and "a circumscribed, narrow system directed at us being able to protect our people." He emphasized that NSA was "not looking at content." A new, crowdsourced study shows that telephone metadata—information that includes the date, time, and length of phone calls, and the numbers called, but not the...

18 March, 2014

In March, 2013, the non-profit, open-source research organization, OCEARCH, caught a four-metre, 900 kg, female great white shark off the Atlantic coast of Florida near Jacksonville, then released it after attaching monitoring and tracking devices. In the year since, the shark has travelled 31,000 kilometres, visiting Cape Hatteras, Bermuda, George's Bank, Placentia Bay, and the Grand Banks, before crossing the mid-Atlantic ridge to a point 1200 kilometres off the coast of Ireland. In late October, Lydia, as the researchers nicknamed her. spent three days exploring Newfoundland's Placentia Bay and Merasheen Island: You can follow Lydia's travels on OCEARCH's interactive, live-tracking map. You can follow...

11 March, 2014

A 1957 photo showing, left to right, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Pete Seeger, Charis Horton, Rosa Parks, and Rev. Ralph Abernathy at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. It is thought to be the only photograph of King, Seeger, Parks, and Abernathy together. The school was a training ground for the civil rights movement. Parks herself trained in the library pictured above shortly before her fateful refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus in 1956, the act of civil disobedience that touched off the 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott. Charis (pronounced with a hard "c") is the daughter...

08 March, 2014

The New York Times this morning published a correction of a story it ran 161 years ago, on January 20, 1853: The Times does take its responsibility for factual accuracy seriously. This whimsical correction of two, 161-year-old spelling errors was one of nine corrections it published today. Five years ago, at the urging of Contrarian and Provincial Court Judge Anne Derrick, the Times corrected its obituary of Donald Marshall Jr. The original version of the Times obit had incorrectly described the circumstances surrounding the killing of Sandy Seale, the 16-year-old boy whom Marshall was falsely convicted of murdering. For all they criticize...

04 March, 2014

A thin skim of ice formed on the Bras d'Or Lake this weekend, and the forecast week of bitter cold and light winds promises to deepen and strengthen its wintery cover. Forty years ago, this was an all-but-annual occurrence. In the middle decades of the 20th Century, Victoria County's legendary physician C. Lamont MacMillan routinely crossed the lake in a homemade half-track to reach ill patients in the depths of winter. But as our climate has changed, the frozen lake has become a rarity. Consider this a placeholder for a compilation, coming soon, of the outraged comments that flooded in from...

09 February, 2014

A catchy little ditty about surveillance of citizens, en français. In partial translation: If you have nothing to hide, then you could put a camera in your bedroom and your bathroom, and publish images on internet. Or if you have nothing to hide, then you can get your login and your password on facebook or in google, publish and everyone can go dig it. Our lists of things to do Our soft sms Our writings of anger And our address books Our favorite pubs Our schedules pool Our sworn enemies And the name of the neighboring Nothing, nothing, nothing to be ashamed of nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing to hide H/T: Bethany Horne...

08 February, 2014

Progressive Conservatives are voting in Halifax at this hour on whether to review Jamie Baillie's leadership. Some of the delegates have cameras. Contrarian isn't saying who. Pete Seeger taught us not to name names....

08 February, 2014

A childhood friend found this disturbing 1956 photograph by the late Life Magazine photographer Gordon Parks on the Facebook page of the African-American history group BlackPast.org. She reposted it on her own Facebook page, and I reposted to to mine, adding, "It's worth remembering that this was less than 60 years ago." It didn't take long for Gus Reed to post this photo of the posh Hydrostone restaurant Epicurious Morsels, adding: 60 years ago there was a separate entrance for African Americans at the Birmingham bus station. 60 seconds ago, this was the wheelchair entrance at a restaurant in Halifax. One of...

05 February, 2014
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