The Black Rod

The slander of two candidates for school trustee in St. Boniface is the latest example of fake news that's fast becoming the trademark of the Winnipeg Free Press. The story by reporter Chris Kitching uses the slimiest newspaper tactics to pass off a smear campaign against the two as a legitimate news story. It might have worked in the Sixties, but today's readers are too savvy to the tricks of biased journalists to overlook the obvious. The FP's attempt to undermine the campaigns of these two candidates is such a classic example of fake news it should be studied in legitimate journalism classes as a how-not-to produce a story. The headline reads: 'School trustee candidates ‘parental rights’ campaign literature raises concerns'. Note the quotation marks around the words parental rights. That is supposed to delegitimize the term by isolating the words and indicating there's something suspicious about the users. They wouldn't use quotation marks if the ...

  When the Louis Riel School Division gleefully announced that the board had suspended one of its school trustees, only The Black Rod examined the reasons why. To our astonishment, we discovered that none of the publicized reasons for suspension were valid. Trustee Francine Champagne had done nothing, said nothing, or written anything on the job that fit any of the alleged reasons for her suspension. So why, we asked, would the remaining trustees risk their reputations and maybe even their jobs, to excoriate a duly elected school official who was innocent of any wrongdoing? The answer presented itself two weeks later with the unexpected announcement by Ryan Palmquist, another LRSD trustee, that he was coming out of the closet. Palmquist said he was a 'bisexual' who was married, to a woman, and was the father of three children. He could, he said, hide as a pretend-heterosexual, but he "owed" it to gay and transexual kids and their families to share the risk of ...

  Last week the modern-day witch hunters took up    their pitchforks, their torches, their puritan capes and their Woke bibles and dashed to save the world from the devil in their midst. The Witchfinder General, Sandy Nemeth, the chairwoman of the ultra-woke Louis Riel School Board trustees, announced proudly that trustee Francine Champagne had been suspended for three months, the most serious punishment the board could impose. Her crime?    Did she cast spells? Did she own a black cat? Did she dance at the crossroads with Beelzebub at midnight? No. She posted on Facebook. Those posts allegedly, as CTV news quoted Nemeth,    had "a strong transphobic sentiment" and were disrespectful of the LGBTQ2S+ community. Trustee Ryan Palmquist was more specific on CBC. "... those gay kids and transgender kids and their families and the whole community that are the ones who are at risk. They're the ones who are potentially subject to bullying, potentially subject ...