The Black Rod

Jenny Motkaluk landed a couple of haymakers on incumbent Brian Bowman the day she announced she was running for his job as mayor. No more rapid transit, she said, and even the unfinished line to south Winnipeg was on the chopping block if possible. Rapid transit was  Bowman's legacy project. And as for his pledge to open Portage and Main to pedestrians? History. Not gonna happen, declared Motkaluk. The battle lines appeared drawn.   Instead of spending hundreds of millions on Bowman's vanity transit plan, she believed in "putting more buses more frequently onto the roads that we already have so that we can serve Winnipeggers right now." She would be a meat-and-potatoes mayor.  Spend tax money on the priorities of the taxpayers and not the politicians. What a concept! Bowman was momentarily stunned. Interestingly he didn't rush to the defence of his vaunted rapid transit dream.  But he countered Motkaluk's Portage and Main stand---he would hold a referendum and

Brian Bowman is running scared. Six weeks away from an election for mayor of Winnipeg, a poll showed that eight out of ten voters were looking for someone other than the incumbent to fill the post. After four years in office, Bowman had the support of barely 22 percent of decided electors. But with the undecided measuring at 57 percent, the poll was meaningless. The polling company, Probe Research, should be ashamed to have even released such a perverted measure of opinion. Three weeks later, a (heavily manipulated) poll (more about that in a minute) showed that Bowman's support had grown to 34 percent, or roughly three voters in ten. This time the pollsters claimed they could peer deep into  the undecideds ( 39 percent of those polled) and detect that Bowman's support was actually 61 percent.  Given that his main opponent's support had barely climbed from 11 percent to 15 percent among decided voters, Bowman should have been taking a victory lap. But a poll with 39 percent