I have vented previously, here and here, about the quiet acquiescence of municipal and provincial leaders to the destruction of Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation. Why haven't the Premier, the Minister of Economic Development, the Leader of the Opposition, and other provincial leaders spoken out against the elimination of an institution, enshrined in an Act of Parliament, whose dismantling will cost Cape Breton tens of millions of dollars a year for the foreseeable future? Cape Breton is still part of Nova Scotia, after all. My purpose in this post is not to belabour the point, but to direct readers' attention to a striking...

Nova Scotians tune in on election night to learn two things: Who won, and who are the sore losers. Darrell Dexter was a smart loser, delivering the best speech of the night, a gracious amalgam of congratulations to the winners, and thanks and condolences for his followers, upbeat but laced with sadness he could not hide. Perhaps the worst thing about the crushing defeat meted out to the NDP is the suboptimal quality of the survivors. I heard both both N-Dips and Tories Tuesday night predict Sterling Belliveau will bolt to the Liberals who, if they are smart, will not take him. DPR,...

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...

PC Leader Jamie Baillie's election promise to hold power rates at current levels came in a position paper that included the following unsourced graph, purporting to show that something called "energy costs to rate payers," measured in units it did not explain, have increased by 27 percent since 2009: Wow, that certainly looks shocking! Contrarian is no statistician, and my graphic skills are tenuous, but I read Darrell Huff's classic How to Lie with Statistics shortly after it came out in 1954, and Chapter 5, "The Gee Whiz Graph," stuck with me. Of the persuasive power of graphs, Huff had this advice...

From the provincial (read: Halifax) media's coverage of the latest trumped-up MLA expense scandal [detailed here], you almost get the impression reporters and editorialists think MLAs from far flung rural constituencies are a luxury Nova Scotia cannot afford. Take the Chronicle-Herald's overwrought assessment of the housing allotment for MLAs who live outside Halifax. The editorial ridicules the idea that any employer would provide "a $1,500 monthly housing allowance to lease a second residence near our workplace but only 40 kilometres from our home." I agree with Tory leader Jamie Baillie's view that the 40-kilometre threshold dates from the “horse and buggy age,”...

Earlier today I voiced my own misgivings, and reported those of the Pictou Bee, about Conservative Leader Jamie Baillie's campaign to slow the replacement of coal fired generation with renewable electricity. Ballie's chief of staff, Rob McCleave, defends his boss: Jamie’s position is far less about politics and much more about good public policy than your blog (or the Bee) suggests. The Environmental Goals & Sustainable Prosperity Act reflected an all-party consensus, only a few short years ago, but before the NDP formed government. It balanced environmental needs with economic needs. It set fairly aggressive and world class targets for the greening of our...

I'm a friend and admirer of Jamie Baillie from long before he ran for office, but his recent foray into energy policy makes me nervous. Granted, the climate of public (and media) hostility to Nova Scotia Power makes the utility an almost irresistible target for politicians aiming at the premier's office, but Baillie's demand for easing up on renewable energy targets sounds to me like a short-term anaesthetic for long-term pain. The Pictou Bee, an NDP-flavored blog, sees it the same way, calling it Baillie's "unforced error." [O]ddly, Jamie Baillie and his Conservatives have decided that attacking renewable energy is good politics...

A recent story by Andrew MacDonald in the online journal AllNovaScotia.com included the following sentence: NSP has begun slowly moving its 500 workers out of the Barrington Tower office to a new $54-million HQ on the Halifax waterfront, dubbed the Bennett Bunker for NSP ceo [sic] Rob Bennett [emphasis in the original]. The phrase, "dubbed the Bennett Bunker," is noteworthy for having been cast in passive voice, a grammatical form journalists often decry as a way for politicians and similar miscreants to evade responsibility for their actions. Who exactly "dubbed" NS Power's office building "the Bennett Bunker?" Why, AllNovaScotia, that's who. It invented...

With the coal mining neighborhoods of Sydney Mines, Florence, Bras d’Or, and Alder Point, and the unionized workforce at Marine Atlantic in North Sydney, Cape Breton North ought to be fertile ground for the NDP. Instead, except for a single election in 1978, it has brought the party nothing but heartache. In a 2001 by-election, it put an early end to Helen MacDonald’s term as leader, passing her up in favor of Cecil Clarke, who insisted the riding needed a member on the Hamm government’s side. In the 2009 NDP, it stopped 165 votes short of joining the massive NDP tide....