The Black Rod

Manitoba's shiny new office to investigate police shootings has failed its first major test. When 24-year-old Mark DiCesare was surrounded by a veritable army of gun-toting police officers and blasted to eternity in an empty field in River Heights, the public wanted an answer to one, and only one, question. One. Count 'em. One. Did he have a gun? That's it. That's what everybody who heard the shocking news wanted to know. Did he have a gun? Once people knew the answer to that simple question, they could debate the need to shoot but at the same time would let the investigation take its course. "A police source" told the Winnipeg Free Press on Friday, Nov. 6, the day DiCesare was killed by Winnipeg police, that he did have a gun. And CJOB reported that "Brendan", who goes by one name like Madonna, also saw DiCesare with a gun, a "large" one. Yet, since the day police unloaded their deadly weapons, they've been strangely...

It's hard to say who should be more embarrassed by the latest mayoral election poll --- the pollsters, the press, or the funders?   The first crowd-sourced election poll in Canada turned out to be such a bust that the pollsters had to invent something new to give its funders to justify taking their money. Winnipeg's Probe Research Inc. issued a poll grading the support of the candidates for mayor, but with a 29 percent undecided response, the poll was less reliable than your daily horoscope. Ten percent undecided would be large.  Twenty percent would be huge.  But almost 30 percent is a joke, a bad joke that invalidates the alleged results. In a desperate move to keep some credibility, Probe Research invented a momentum index, claiming to measure which candidates are moving up in public opinion and which down.  When was the last time you heard of something like this?  Hint: NEVER. But they had to deliver something to the pri...

The public lynching of mayoral candidate Gord Steeves last Wednesday was not only ugly, it was a frightening display of how an uncontrolled news mob will gladly abandon ethics and propriety for self-promotion. Having invented a scandal, Winnipeg's best known purported professional journalists descended on a Steeves news conference determined to stir more controversy -- even if they had to manufacture it. The most egregious faux-journalist was CJOB's news director , Richard Cloutier . CJOB, with its listenership in freefall, has decided that the way to recoup its ratings is with stunts. So they determined they would go live to the Steeves news conference where, just maybe if they were lucky, trouble would break out. The problem with going live is that you can't control the event. So when Steeves began eating up time outlining a policy proposal to improve the lives of Winnipegers, it was more than Cloutier could stand.  Cloutier disrup...

Brian Bowman is a true son of his generation. Without a lick of experience at City Hall, this Gen X-er believes he should start at the top, as Mayor. To compensate for knowing nothing about the job he wants, he says he will provide the city with "leadership."   Now, ordinarily this would be greeted with oohs and ahhs from an electorate that's seen the city reel from one scandal to another under Mayor Sam Katz and those councillors who blindly support him on executive policy committee. But seeing as how all the mayoral candidates will likely play the leadership card, how does Bowman stand out? Tuesday morning, before filing his papers to run for mayor, 42-year-old Bowman, a lawyer, showed up on Charles Adler's morning talk show where he expanded on his idea of leadership.  One word. Vision. Yep, Bowman is running on the vision thing.   'Vision' is the code word among the Ivory Tower elite for the rich man's burde...

Bwahahahaha. The snow's up to our roofs, it's colder in Winnipeg than on Mars, and the mayor thinks that clearing the snow and ice off city streets is an unnecessary luxury.  Sometimes you really need a laugh. The Globe and Mail came to the rescue Saturday. In a puff piece about the over-budget, overdue, over-hyped Canadian Museum for Human Rights, writer Roy MacGregor gushed that "(m)ore than 75,000 people"  have donated money to build the thing. "It is a striking and memorable building, if rather eccentric." Which is Toronto-high society-speak for "Yikes, is it ever ugly!" http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/in-winnipeg-a-striking-museum-for-an-evolving-city/article16193962/ The punchline of the piece is how wrong MacGregor's awe-inducing declaration of public support for the epic money pit is. By all accounts, the real number of donors to the CMHR is barely 7500.  That's right, one-tenth of wh...

Once upon a time... Isn't that how all fairy tales start?   Last week construction company Shindico dispatched their talking head Bob Downs to spin a fairy tale for Christmas in which Sandy Shindleman and his brother Robert got to play the pretty princesses who need to be saved from the evil dragon, a role assigned to city auditor Brian Whiteside. It turns out that people thinking of doing business with Shindico are asking some embarrassing questions in the wake of the audit into the fishy construction of four firehalls by Shindico. To dispel suspicions, Shindico went on the offensive, declaring their innocence, condemning the auditors for getting it wrong, and hinting broadly that they know who is behind the heat and why. Was that a threat? It started with with CJOB's Richard Cloutier who gushed on air at getting an exclusive two-hour interview with Downs which included a "document dump" of, allegedly, the paper trail suppo...

Let's see if we've got this straight... *  The second-in-command in the Winnipeg Fire Department secretly negotiated a deal worth more than $15 million with the mayor's business partner to build four new fire halls, then hid the identity of who got the contract from elected members of city council. *  In order to circumvent instructions from council -- in writing -- that the winner of the fire halls contract be approved in advance, the deputy fire chief divided the contract into four : one for each new fire station, so that each fell under his city-approved spending limit and he could keep the secret of who got the contracts from the public. *  After the secret deal was accidentally revealed, councillors were told they had either to rubberstamp a three-lots-for-one land swap that the deputy chief negotiated with Shindico Realty for one fire hall built on Shindico-owned land, or else pay $990,000 -- a non-negotiable price set by Shindico ...