Contrarian reader Wallace McLean noticed something else about those maps: [T]he US Census Bureau seems to generate unemployment data for the 3,140 counties and "county-equivalent" units of geography below state level, with an average population of under 100,000. Statistics Canada only provides (roughly) comparable data for 73 "economic regions" within Canada, with no sub-provincial/territorial data for PEI or the territories. The 73 regions have an average population of over 450,000. Even if you could get free and up-to-date data out of Statscan, it's not nearly as fine-grained as what they seem to have in the States. There would seem to be some fundamental...

04 August, 2010

The indefatigable Wallace J. McLean (note correct spelling; mea culpa) has risen to contrarian's challenge, and defended his view that the MacDonald government's paving proposals were as politically skewed as the Harper government's selective approvals thereof. This time he buttresses his case with a map, using traditional party colors in two shades: darker for ridings in which the government proposed  paving; lighter for those where it did not. Turning this map back into numbers, the Rodney government proposed work in two out of six rural Liberal districts (33%); three out of eight rural NDP districts (38%), and 13 out of 21 rural...

03 July, 2009
Some days ago, contrarian reader Wallace J. McLean challenged contrarian to determine how many of the paving projects Nova Scotia submitted for federal stimulus funding were in provincial Tory ridings. "Too much work," we said, and went back to surfing Digg and Stumbledupon. Well, turns out Wally is a blogger himself, and after days with a magnifying glass comparing project lists with the boundaries of Nova Scotia's 52 provincial ridings, he offers an answer:
Of the 37 projects put forward by the late Macdonald government in NS, five were located in Liberal districts, and five in NDP districts, based on the 2006 election results.... Twenty-six were located in districts which the Tories held, or had won in 2006.
30 June, 2009