The phone on Eugenio Scalfari's desk rang. Hello? Hello, this is Pope Francis. Hello Your Holiness.  I am shocked. I did not expect you to call me. The atheist editor of the Italian daily La Republica had recently written the Holy See, asking for a meeting with the pope. Why so surprised? You wrote me a letter asking to meet me in person. I had the same wish, so I’m calling to fix an appointment. Let me look at my diary: I can’t do Wednesday, nor Monday, would Tuesday suit you? Read Scalfari's refreshing account of the rest of the conversation here....

02 October, 2013

Unintended Consequences Dept.: If next week's election turns into a Liberal sweep, as seems increasingly likely, there will be many, many new faces at Province House. All those new members will be required to find fully accessible constituency offices within one year, or forego reimbursement of their office expenses. Returning members have three years to comply. AMI, the accessible cable channel, has a nice video on the new rules: These consequences aren't completely unintended, of course, but at the time the new rules passed the House of Assembly Management Committee, few realized how many freshman MLAs might be arriving later this month....

02 October, 2013

Don Mills sounds nervous. Nova Scotia's best known pollster has been conducting a rolling poll for the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, and over the last week, his numbers have pointed to an historic rout. For the last five days, he has shown Stephen McNeil's Liberals holding steady between 55 and 57 percent of decided voters—enough to propel him to a lopsided majority. "We're under a lot of scrutiny here," he told Contrarian. Here's the latest edition, published Tuesday morning: To understand how unusual such an outcome would be, I looked at every Nova Scotia election since 1960. Over those 15 provincial votes: The winning party got more...

01 October, 2013

Redistribution has changed the boundaries of most of the 51 ridings to be contested in next week's Nova Scotia election. For the benefit of number-crunching geeks like us, Elections Nova Scotia has thoughtfully projected the poll-by-poll results of the 2006 2009 election (or any subsequent byelection) onto the new electoral districts, and published the results in PDF format. The chart shows how many votes each candidate would have received if the current boundaries had been in effect at the time of the 2006 2009 election. Here are the results, sorted by riding name (red = Liberal winner; blue = PC): Here they...

30 September, 2013

Here is the final instalment of my four posts on the NDP government’s mistakes and successes. Mistakes here and here. Successes, part one, here, part two below. Between now and election day, I’ll post a selection of reader responses, more of which are always welcome. 4. Wilderness protection Two hundred years from now, few Nova Scotians will know whether the provincial government balanced its books in 2013, or how much power rates increased between 2009 and 2013, or even who Darrell Dexter was. But they will know that a significant amount of Nova Scotia’s spectacular wilderness areas was permanently protected for the...

29 September, 2013

I like to think my home town of Kempt Head  (pop. 21) is the smallest place on earth to boast both a heavyweight champion of the world and a Nobel Prize winner. The champ, who was also a war hero, died in 1942. We lost the Nobel laureate this week. The heavyweight champ was of the unofficial variety. Jack Munroe was born June 21, 1877, at Munroe's Hill, Kempt Head. In December, 1902, he was working at a mining camp in Montana when the heavyweight champion of the day, Jim Jeffries, passed through Butte on a barnstorming tour. In each city, Jeffries...

24 September, 2013

In two posts earlier this month (here and here), I described six mistakes by which the NDP government brought itself to the brink of defeat. Darrell Dexter's government also did several big things right, in some cases defying popular sentiment to put the province on a sensible course. Here's the start of my "good things" list: 1.  A balanced budget I know, I know, they didn't balance it by much, and if you listen to the two guys hankering for Dexter's job, they didn't balance it at all. The opposition leaders base their skepticism on the fact that certain charges have been paid forward,...

22 September, 2013

Further evidence, if more were needed, that God is a New Democrat: No sooner did I put up the first part of my Things the NDP Did Wrong post than I was laid low by a chest cold that obliterated deep thought.* Here, finally, is Part Two of What the Dippers Did Wrong, to be followed, more swiftly I hope, by a two-part Things They Did Right. 4.  Tone deaf to rural NS Four years ago, Nova Scotia's New Democratic Party formed its first ever provincial government by adding an historic sweep of the rural mainland to its traditional Metro stranglehold. From the...

15 September, 2013

From a September 9 Facebook post by David Rodenhiser, marquee columnist for the Halifax Daily News until its demise in 2008, now toiling for Nova Scotia Power's communications group. In the Obituaries section of the Chronicle-Herald there are notices for no fewer than six veterans of the Second World War: Joseph “Bunny” McLaughlin, army, who brought home a war bride in 1946 Jaleel “John” Laba, army, who later owned and operated Laba’s Discount on Gottingen Street for many years Stanley Cairns, merchant mariner George Haliburton, army Adele Healy, RCAF secretary Walter Shaw, army, wounded in Germany in 1945 There’s also an obituary for Cecile d’Entremont, who passed away...

11 September, 2013

[Editor's Note: In a scrum with reporters late in his fourth, scandal-plagued term as Premier of Nova Scotia, John Buchanan famously defended one Cherry Ferguson, a favoured civil servant who'd been discovered to be holding down three senior provincial government jobs. His exact words are lost to history, but they ran along these lines: "She doesn't have three jobs. She's Deputy Clerk of the House, Chief Electoral Officer, and a lawyer for the Workers' Compensation Board. That's not three jobs." To honour this great moment in political communication, Contrarian  from time to time presents the Cherry Ferguson Award to an official who can stare...

11 September, 2013
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