How storm water complicates municipal sewage treatment by frequently overwhelming treatment plants, why this is such a hard problem to fix in older cities like Sydney and Halifax, and what property owners can do to help, all in one cute video courtesy of Halifax Diverse, the Sierra Club, Halifax Water, and (Bousquet-bait warning) TD Green Streets: For more information on the exponential cost of designs that anticipate rare environmental events, see the 100-year flood. For a real life example, Coke Ovens Brook in Sydney, Nova Scotia, has vast sloped sides, lined with heavy plastic and armoured with stone, all to convey what is usually a tiny trickle of...

13 July, 2016

Contrarian reader Bill Fry's grandparents had a farm in Medford, less than three kilometres from Kingsport, whose bustling, early 20th Century train station Dan Conlin cataloged here last week. Bill writes: Back in 1930, my mother would walk over a mile to Kingsport, get on the morning train to attend the Kings Academy in Kentville, then take the afternoon train back to Kingsport. So the train was actually the school bus for all the students from Kingsport. My mother says the older boys use to bully them on the train—take their lunch boxes and eat the good stuff every morning. The students from Kentville didn’t...

10 July, 2016

On Monday, Pier 21 curator Dan Conlin, whom Contrarian readers know from his annual tally of Halloween revellers on Duncan St. in Halifax, carried out a curious experiment. Using a 24-page railway timetable from July 4, 1914, which the Nova Scotia Archives has made available online, he tabulated the trains and steamships arriving and departing the village of Kingsport, in the Annapolis Valley. As Dan explains: I used a replica station board, the kind stations used to post on their platforms, to recreate a day in the life of a long-gone station 102 years ago.  (Rail service ended there in 1962.) It is interesting that Kingsport in the Annapolis Valley...

06 July, 2016

Last week, I featured Ask-a-Pilot Patrick Smith's reminiscence of pubescent adventures sneaking into the cockpits of planes waiting at Boston's Logan Airport. I mentioned my own tired and emotional encounter with a Goodyear Blimp and its generously tolerant night watchman. "It was a little  different in Nova Scotia, at least where I grew up," writes Cliff White: Once in junior high, just as lunch break was ending, several blimps appeared. The bell rang, but some of us ignored it, just so we could watch this rare sight a bit longer. Amazingly for that time and that place, we weren't strapped. But were all given...

17 June, 2016

  In response to Gus Reed's droll dissection of management practices at the Waterfront Develop Corporation, an analysis that rested heavily on the WCL's blue-blood sameness, Peter Kavanagh writes: I loved the post and the strength of the critique, but I am confused about the whiteness claim. Without doubt, the corp is remarkably uniform, but it is the link between whiteness and ableism that escapes me. Are you and Gus really trying to suggest that if they were less white this wouldn't have happened? To me it is the lack of a disabled voice or perspective that is the key issue. Surely neither you nor Gus...

17 June, 2016

  Gus Reed, the eagle-eyed wheelchair rights advocate, has trained his gaze on the Waterfront Development Corporation, and turned up facts so startling, he was moved to write commission chair Dale Godsoe. As usual, Gus is as entertaining as he is perspicacious. Dear Ms. Godsoe, I am Gus Reed, one of the people on a tear about the Stubborn Goat, your contractor, and the unequal protection afforded people with disabilities by the public health authorities. I realize there is confusion in government about jurisdiction and the building code, but that doesn't excuse the haphazard approach or the jury-rigged result. From your website, I learn...

16 June, 2016

  The Trudeau administration has purged the Prime Minister's official website of news releases issued during Stephen Harper's reign, and asked Google to ensure its search results no longer point to the deleted material. News stories about the issue have mostly concentrated on the requests to Google, but the purge itself is the real problem. Liberal dismiss the controversy, insisting it was only a housekeeping effort to ensure search results produced up-to-date information. They're right, insofar as the 51 requests to Google for search engine updates are concerned. But that leaves the question why historic content was purged in the first place. The deleted material, or some of it, has been retained and moved to...

16 June, 2016

In a recent episode of the Freakonomics Podcast, Patrick Smith, the airline pilot who hosts the Ask a Pilot website, told a wonderful story about his fascination with airplanes and flight as a Boston pre-teen: One of the things my friends and I used to do during junior high school was we would take the subway out to Logan Airport in Boston—back in those days, of course, you could just walk through security without a ticket—and we would stake out the jet way when a flight came in. And after all the passengers were off, we would walk down the jet way and approach...

10 June, 2016

  The Stubborn Goat's controversial new pub on the Halifax waterfront will operate on provincially owned land without an accessible washroom, in violation of the Nova Scotia Building Code and several other statutes. And that's just fine, said Waterfront Development Corporation (WDC) spokeswoman Kelly Rose in a terse, one-sentence email: The accessible washroom is located next door at the Visitor Information Centre and meets the requirements for the seasonal Stubborn Goat location. Tourism Nova Scotia's Visitor Information Centre is not "next door." It's 225 feet away, across a boat slip and beyond the next wharf, along a boardwalk often jammed with people. In distance and inconvenience, asking customers in wheelchairs to...

08 June, 2016

  Dave Pell, whose free daily email newsletter is the most entertaining news aggregator on the internet, has written a simple but wonderfully clear analysis of the media's role in creating Donald Trump's winning candidacy. Political races and sports are covered in the exact same way in America. You get predictions about what a competitor needs to do to win, a brief spurt of action, postgame analysis, and a bunch of repetitive talkshows during which former players provide often obvious insights—which consumers continue to rehash around the social media watercooler. It's not just the media, it's you, too, dear reader: [Y]ou know it’s true...

08 June, 2016
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