The Black Rod

If you wanted to stop mowing city boulevards so they could return to wild forest and grassland and Winnipeg could eventually boast of having the largest population of prairie dogs, you were welcomed by city planners. Too many mosquitoes? Flood the city with bats to eat them. Brilliant, trilled the planners. If you believed the future of Winnipeg lay in turning the clock back to the 19th century, before the internal combusion engine was invented and cars replaced horses, you were embraced and pushed to an exhalted position at the front of the line. But if you felt that city taxpayers should have the final say about how the city should grow, develop and look 25 years from now, you were reviled, scorned, insulted and treated like a leper. Welcome to OurWinnipeg, the sham consultation process conducted over the past week. OurWinnipeg is the latest of the series of phony public non-consultation processes conducted by Mayor Sam Katz and his supporters. You know...

Was murder victim Kyle Earl thinking of punching out Justin Bieber when the teen pop star came to Winnipeg last September? A friend of his says yes. Meaningless empty talk? Punk bravado? Or a sign of how deluded gang members have become in Winnipeg, that they see attacking a pop star as their ticket to fame? The day after 16-year-old Kyle Earl was shot to death while sitting with friends on the steps of West End house, this post appeared on AQ, a forum for World of Warcraft gamers: Perrym69 this is a very sad day for me, i just wanted to talk a little bit about it to make people aware. my bestfriend (Kyle Earl) was killed last night, by another gang member. this is very sad because he was my best bud since i was 5. i remember 2 days ago i told him to leave the gang he was in . and he told me he was going to. and he was supposed to sleep over this weekend. it makes me very sad i lost my bestfriend/ my brother. this made me realize that their really is bad ...

Judy Wasylycia-Leis's first step into civic politics demonstrated that she was either woefully ignorant or an easy dupe. Either way, she showed she's not mayoral timber. Judy Alphabet (as she's called in news circles) thought she could score some points by criticizing the approval by city council of a contract with the French company Veolia for the design, construction and operation of the South and North End sewage treatment plants. She must of thought it was a safe position to take, given that the process taken by Veolia proponents (a rushed vote and few details of the contract including who's responsible for cost overruns and how profit is split) was attacked by the Left (the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives) and the Right (the Canadian Taxpayers Federation). What she didn't realize is how she was being played for a sucker by the real opponents of Veolia, and why. Judy Wasylycia-Leis may be the NDP's stalking horse in the comin...

Somebody get the man a crying towel. Then show him the EXIT door. One of Manitoba's biggest bleeding heart judges was all weepy this week at having to sentence a local idiot to prison. “I unfortunately have my hands tied,” bleated Judge Brent Stewart before imposing a mandatory minimum four year prison sentence on Jordan Flett. Boo hoo hoo. Stewart, you see, is from the hug-a-thug side of the fence . He was the founder of a Christian street ministry in The Pas and he started the Restorative Justice Program at the Peguis and Fairfort Indian reserves; you know, that deal where victims are supposed to give criminals a big hug and forgive them because the criminals said they were sorry. Stewart couldn't bear putting stupid Jordan Flett behind bars. And for what? For simply shooting a man down because he was in the way of Flett's original targets, his ex-girlfriend and her new beau. At the time Flett was 18 and had never been in trouble with the law, to ...

And you wonder why we call Greg Selinger the dirtiest politician in Manitoba? It's getting so you can't turn over a rock in this province without finding Selinger scurrying away from under it. The latest scandal is how Selinger's wife got a cushy government job. She was, ahem, "appointed" by Selinger's colleagues in cabinet to be the assistant deputy minister of community planning and development, the little-known but powerful branch of provincial government that controls land development in Winnipeg and other municipalities. There's a word for hiring your family members --- nepotism. What's the word that describes hiring your friend's family member?.... Cronyism. It's not illegal, but it stinks. But by now the stench of scandal is so great around Selinger that nobody can notice the difference. James B. is one person who wouldn't be the least surprised to find how Selinger's cronies decided to line his fami...

After too many months on hiatus from The Black Rod's weekly War in Afghanistan feature, we were still playing catch-up last week, but already we were shocked and dismayed by what we found. The only sign of a real war is the drone war in Pakistan. Unmanned U.S. aircraft delivered a rain of missiles Tuesday on insurgents in North Waziristan, a section of Pakistan's tribal region bordering Afghanistan. The single attack saw 18 missiles launched on a car or truck and into tents containing armed men. At least 14 insurgents were killed. It was the second strike in 3 days. More than 30 drone attacks have been recorded this year, almost all in North Waziristan, the stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban. The intense air attacks have killed many of the Taliban leadership and cast a pall of terror over the insugents. They have stopped using cell phones, because they fear their location can be pinpointed, which has disrupted communication between members who hav...

Yikes. Did you see that? The kickoff to Judy Whatsername's mayoral campaign had more pratfalls than a convention of clowns. - Councillor Bill Clement stole her thunder and knocked her off the front page by dying the night before her big day. - She declared she wanted to bring transparency to City Hall. And to prove it she dyed her hair to disguise her age (58). Did you see the newspaper pictures? It looks like she's wearing a bad toupee. At least she stood out in the crowd, which, like a Jets game, was a sea of white---hair, that is. Judy said she wants to engage youth, but somebody needed to ask her to be more specific how she defined youth. - She thought it was a good idea to be endorsed by a former mayor --- Bill Norrie, who is 81. Yikes. He looked like an extra in a zombie movie, except that zombies have more vitality. Norrie was Yesterday's Man to Yesterday's Man. He was mayor before cell phones, before computers, before plasma TV...

Hello? Anyone there? For the second time in a week, the self-proclaimed champions of human rights are conspicuous by their absence. The fact that two depraved children tried to murder a storekeeper in cold blood is bad enough. The official silence to the charge that the attack was a hate crime is inexcusable. Fifty-year-old Jesmen Syeda barely fought off two knife-wielding children in her convenience store on Keewatin Street Sunday night. One stabbed her in the neck with a steak knife, the younger slashed at her and stabbed her in the hand with a smaller-bladed weapon. They had no motive other than to kill her ; they were regular customers, they knew they would be caught, unless they intended to remove the only witness to their crime. "They didn't come for robbery. They just wanted to kill her," said her husband Rick Alam. "I think it's a hate crime," he told CBC reporter Gosia Sawicka. To her credit, she checked with police--- ...

It's been quite a while since our last War in Afghanistan report so we've got a lot of catching up to do before we can get back into the rhythm of our weekly reviews of events. So let's start with the broad strokes. 1. Victory in Iraq. Even the most ardent defeatists now admit it. We won. We, as in the West, but particularly the United States and its allies in the Coalition. Al Qaeda was sent packing. Their terror tactics failed. A new Iraq is climbing out of the rubble left behind by Saddam Hussein and the Islamic terrorists who saw in his defeat an opportunity to confront and humiliate the United States. Instead, it was they who were humiliated by being forced to run for their lives, run back to Afghanistan whence they came. It's important to collect the names of those who wanted to quit in the darkest days, who wanted to surrender to the terrorists, who wanted to give up the fight for freedom and democracy once the fight got hard. We ...