The Black Rod

There's an important witness that we haven't heard from in the furor over whether NDP leader Wab Kinew roughed up  his girlfriend  so badly that she could hardly walk back when he was attending university. His name is Wab Kinew. His ex-girlfriend has given reporters her story of what happened one night in 2003 culminating in being hurled across their apartment with such force that she landed on her hands and knees and suffered painful rugburn. She fled their home in fear the next day, she said. He's missed no opportunity to say that that never happened, leaving Manitobans with the only conclusion --- he's saying she is lying.  Lying today and lying when she pressed charges (which were laid by the RCMP and eventually stayed the following year by the Crown). But Kinew has never given his account of what  did  happen. And Winnipeg's 'professional journalists'  haven't asked for his version of that night.  There's no excuse for this oversight.

Delegates to the Manitoba NDP's leadership convention dispersed this past weekend with two  images in their mindseye: * their new leader dragging a woman down a hallway by her hair, and * their new leader throwing a young woman across a room so roughly that she suffers physical injury Neither image is palatable to NDP members, so over the past few days they've cobbled together a new narrative to reconcile their new leader, Wab Kinew, with the fact that one of his old girlfriends had him charged with domestic abuse. He's changed, they chorus. They're quick to say they believe the girlfriend's story of being roughed up by Kinew---"believe the woman' is now a basic tenet of the NDP--- but...  But he's changed.  He's now a model of how a man with a troubled past can re-invent himself as a decent, honourable husband, father, and political leader, say his supporters. But... Yes, there's a 'but' from critics of Kinew and his blin

Shamed by The Black Rod, Winnipeg's professional "journalists" finally decided there was something to report about an assault charge Manitoba NDP leadership candidate Wab Kinew didn't mention in his memoir. These "professionals" sat on their hands for almost three weeks after the revelation that Kinew had been hiding the existence of domestic abuse charges from 2003. Kinew said the charges were dropped because they were false, so the press stopped digging. Only after The Black Rod questioned why the woman's voice wasn't being heard did the professional journalists stir themselves. Within a day, Steve Lambert of Canadian Press had located the complainant and her story was picked up by the rest of the news herd. And what a story it turned out to be! “I went to the police because he assaulted me;  physically injured (me)."  she told Lambert. Tara Hart is her name. And she isn't backing down an inch on her claim of being assaulted by

Not so fast, Wabanakwut. Two and a half weeks ago some skeletons that NDP leadership candidate Wab Kinew had hidden away at the bottom of his closet lurched back to life.    It scared the hell out of him. But not as scared as he's going to be. Kinew had built a political career out of being the holier-than-thou candidate in the holier-than-thou Party. He turned his criminal record of drunk driving and assaults in his Twenties into an asset by claiming that he had seen the light, had reformed, and was now, in his Thirties, a paragon of virtue starting with taking ownership and responsibility for all his transgressions. Look, he said, how transparent I am with my past faults. How can you doubt my sincerity? But Kinew had to do some fancy tapdancing in late August when it was revealed that he hadn't been completely honest about his run-ins with the law. It turned out that he had concealed a pair of  arrests for domestic violence. Violence against women, especiall

Manitoba Hydro is on its deathbed. Oh, you won't find anyone official to say it. Yet . Like relatives trying to appear cheery and optimistic around a loved one that's been diagnosed with terminal cancer, the people in power are in the first stage of grief -- denial. The prognosis for Hydro was delivered three weeks ago at hearings before the Public Utilities Board where the utility was seeking punishingly higher rates for customers in Manitoba. It took us this long to read through the hundred-plus pages of transcript, to decipher the coded language of the witnesses, to interpret what they were getting at, and, finally, to understand the terrible conclusion.  We couldn't believe it, just as, we're sure, you can't--- so we did it all again, to get a second opinion, so to speak.  Hydro conceded to the PUB that it undertook a massive expansion program--- involving three (it was once four) new dams and two new major powerlines (one in the United States)---whi