It would be an exaggeration to say the right wing voices who dominate Canadian media commentary have risen in unison to condemn BC's pitch for a share of Northern Gateway pipeline spoils, but the clamor has certainly been one-sided. BC Premier Christy Clark's "attitude," wrote Kelly McParland, "is disastrous for Canada." John Ibbitson called Clark's demands "dangerous," and urged Prime Minister Harper to step in. Rex Murphy bemoaned the premiers' declining "intellectual and emotional connection to the national understanding." Andrew Coyne called it "extortion." Rob Russo told CBC Radio the fabric of the nation was at stake. A Globe and Mail...

Our old friend Ivan Smith, retired teacher and citizen Internet pioneer, takes up the suggestion that distance education could play a big part in reforming Nova Scotia's unaffordable education system: Identify a topic in grade 4 math (or grade 3 or 5) that currently is particularly troublesome for students. (This topic should be something that can be covered properly in not more than three or four class periods.) Identify four teachers, two male and two female, who have substantial experience in teaching this topic, and who have had results significantly better than average. Arrange for each teacher to teach this topic in...

I described a 250-gigabyte laptop hard drive  as "impossibly huge." Ivan Smith found one twice as big at Tiger Direct: a 500 gigabyte Hitachi Travelstar laptop drive for just $99. That's 1¢ for every 50 megabytes. Ivan has more on the incredible shrinking price of data storage here....

Aside from a small issue of geography, reader Ivan Smith says the Globe and Mail's take-out on racism in Nova Scotia, got it right. The popular notion that racism has disappeared from Nova Scotia is just as wrong as that geography. Racism is still here. Not as bad as it was in the 1960s or even the 1980s, but we still have a long way to go. How many Nova Scotians know that there were black slaves here? Smith recommends Simon Schama's Rough Crossings, a book and subsequent film depicting the treatment of blacks in Nova Scotia in the 1780s, available...

Our old friend Ivan Smith's ears perked up at our mention of an independent advisory panel to offer suggestions on how to improve a government website. He wonders if anything similar is planned in Canada. Smith points to copyright activist Michael Geist's interesting testimony March 25 before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage (available, sigh, not on the committee's website, but on Geist's.) Moneyquote: In recent years, many countries have embraced open data initiatives, including both the U.S. and U.K.  Others, such as Australia, have adopted open licenses to make government content more readily usable and...

Contrarian reader Bill Long writes: Thanks for jogging my memory about the amazing Mr. Smith. Back in my introductory days to the interwebs, his site, Nova Scotia's Electronic Attic, was one of the first to boggle my mind at the possibilities for citizen participation in information gathering and dissemination. Good to know he's still kicking. It amazes Contrarian how often Ivan's simple, low-tech, but voluminous site pops up near the top of Google searches on important topics. For example, it edges out Wikipedia for first place in a search for "Nova Scotia history." ...

Contrarian's old friend Ivan Smith—retired teacher, railway buff, and citizen watchdog—writes to decry the inexplicable removal from Lieutenant Governor Mayann Francis's official website of the brief biographies of former L-Gs it once contained: Nowadays there is a simple list of the previous office-holders, showing names, dates of service, and nothing else. Contrast this sparse treatment with the list that was available in 2005. At first glance, the two look similar, but there is a crucial difference. In the website's 2005 list, each name was a link to a brief but informative biographical note about that Lieutenant Governor or Governor. In the...