When selecting a Newsmaker of the Year for 2018, the Winnipeg Free Press delegated the job to their readers. Apparently the newspaper has nobody on staff with enough news sense to be capable of sifting through the year's stories to determine who had the biggest influence on Manitobans. So the FP went with the readers' choice---Tina Fontaine, who was described as the "heartbreaking catalyst for change." The fact that she had been dead for four years was not a strike against her. It was the death of the fragile 15-year-old girl whose body was discarded in a blanket in the Red River that made her what she is today -- an icon of the missing and murdered aboriginal women movement. "... Tina's story was a primary driving force behind a public inquiry into murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls, which the federal government granted in 2016," wrote Niigaan Sinclair, the author of the Newsmaker 2018 story. Sinclair normally writes an opinion co
The origin of the Usher of the Black Rod goes back to early fourteenth century England . Today, with no royal duties to perform, the Usher knocks on the doors of the House of Commons with the Black Rod at the start of Parliament to summon the members. The rod is a symbol for the authority of debate in the upper house. We of The Black Rod adopted the symbol to knock some sense and the right questions into the heads of Legislators, pundits, and other opinion makers.