The Black Rod

Eight months, one budget and one contract later, Wab Kinew is staring at his worst nightmare---a nurses strike. Nurses at Manitoba's largest hospital, the Health Sciences Centre, have rejected the labour contract the new NDP government presented to them this month. Their bargaining committee has gone back to government to find some solution but the NDP has already told them there will be no more money, only words---possible changes to wording in the contract. MNU The NDP and Shared Health (Employer) has refused to work with the Manitoba Nurses Union to address concerns presented in the proposed contract. Should Shared Health Nurses vote in favor of a strike, delays in healthcare will be inevitable across the board in Manitoba. This is a slap in the face of the union's top leadership who have been Wab Kinew's biggest backers and who sold him to the public as the Great Saviour of health care in Manitoba. A nurses strike would be the second vote of non-confidence in ...

The slander of two candidates for school trustee in St. Boniface is the latest example of fake news that's fast becoming the trademark of the Winnipeg Free Press. The story by reporter Chris Kitching uses the slimiest newspaper tactics to pass off a smear campaign against the two as a legitimate news story. It might have worked in the Sixties, but today's readers are too savvy to the tricks of biased journalists to overlook the obvious. The FP's attempt to undermine the campaigns of these two candidates is such a classic example of fake news it should be studied in legitimate journalism classes as a how-not-to produce a story. The headline reads: 'School trustee candidates ‘parental rights’ campaign literature raises concerns'. Note the quotation marks around the words parental rights. That is supposed to delegitimize the term by isolating the words and indicating there's something suspicious about the users. They wouldn't use quotation marks if the ...