The Black Rod

  With 2022 receding fast in the rear-view mirror there's just enough time to ordain the annual Newsmaker of the Year. He arrived with the biggest anticipation, the biggest name, the biggest voice, the biggest lead in the polls, and the biggest hype in the press. He ended the year as the biggest loser, and that's not a reference to having the biggest waistline in the race to be mayor. Ladies and gentlemen, say goodbye to Glen Murray. Goodbye because his crash-and-burn campaign was like watching the Hindenberg drop gently from the sky before erupting in uncontrollable fire, consumed in minutes. That sucker will never fly again. With an election set for October, the press treated Murray's anticipated candidacy like the Second Coming. Murray, who was mayor from 1998 to 2004, had come home to retake the reins at city hall. When would he announce? The official announcement came on June 22.  To the press, the election was over. Nobody could beat Glen Murray. His campaig...

  By any measure, Glen Murray is unfit to be mayor of Winnipeg. He's been openly lying to voters for months about the disgraceful behaviour that caused him to be fired from his "dream job" as head of the Alberta think tank the Pembina Institute. And coupled with his thuggish attempt to intimidate the female Mayor of a small township in Ontario when he was in the Liberal cabinet, his actions speak volumes about his prejudice against women whether they are colleagues, employees or elected officials. Murray has hidden behind the fiction that he left Pembina because of "personal issues" and that any recent criticisms are just sour grapes from employees who objected to his attempt to modernize and shake up the think tank. A couple of devastating investigative reports by CBC have shown that nothing could be further from the truth. Murray's critics aren't hiding behind the usual "anonymous sources" that too many "investigative reports...

It's astonishing how hard the Winnipeg news media are working to sanitize the details of former mayor Glen Murray's disastrous stint in his "dream job" (before he got fired) at the Pembina Institute, an  Alberta clean-energy think tank. Is it because they think their readers/viewers can't handle the truth or that they are too sensitive to be told the gross facts? Or is this reflective of their slanted coverage of the Winnipeg mayoral candidates? Murray quit his job as an elected member of the Ontario legislature to become the executive director of the Pembina Institute because, he said at the time, he couldn't resist his "dream job" , working on environmental issues at the end of his political career. Then, only eight months later, he got the bum's rush out the door. Today Murray is painting himself as a victim. He was hired, he says, to bring fresh thinking to the think-tank but the organization couldn't handle change, so they agreed "m...

There's always been something fishy about Glen Murray's abrupt and unexplained departure from his "dream job" in Alberta. Murray left the prestige, salary, and power of a cabinet minister in the Ontario government to head a think tank in Calgary. He raved rhapsodic at the opportunity to lead the fight against climate change in his new post. From an interview with Steve Paikin of TVO, TVOntario, a publicly funded English-language educational television network, just after taking over as executive director of the Pembina Institute  https://www.tvo.org/ transcript/2463712 WHEN I TURN 60, WHICH WILL BE IN A COUPLE OF WEEKS, THAT WAS THE THIRD PHASE OF MY LIFE,  SORT OF THE ELDER PHASE. ... BY THAT POINT I WOULD KNOW MYSELF BETTER , I DON'T HAVE TO PROVE MYSELF ANYMORE , AND I WAS GOING TO DEDICATE ALL OF MY ENERGY TO  THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE IN THE WORLD, AND FOR ME, IT'S CLIMATE CHANGE. ... BUT I THINK IT TAKES AN ENORMOUS AMOUNT OF TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP A...

  A months-long campaign of intimidation to get a small-town mayor in Ontario to approve a housing development ended in 2010 when a federal auditor in the tax department was arrested for framing the mayor on a bogus allegation of tax evasion. Three years later, that auditor was about to go to trial when the intimidation of Mayor Marolyn Morrison of Caledon, Ontario, revved up again from a most unlikely source.  At the heart of the new pressure campaign was an Ontario provincial cabinet minister---Glen Murray. Last week CBC News carried half of the sordid story . This is the full story as uncovered in a two-part investigative series by the Globe and Mail in 2018 (with background from other older news stories) - including an email from Murray's chief of staff warning him to stay out of the matter as any involvement by him in the contested land-for-housing  dispute could be construed as interference in a quasi-judicial process. To see for yourself, scroll to...