The Black Rod

Infuriating tales of board mismanagement and government malfeasance that cost taxpayers more than $70 million peppered a recent update on the jinxed Canadian Museum for Human Rights by Heritage Minister James Moore. Only a tiny audience of 16 showed up to hear Moore at the Winnipeg Free Press News Cafe, and it's hard to say how many could separate the eye-opening inside stories from the pure falsehoods being peddled to justify the federal government's blank cheque to save the failed project from insolvency. One person who certainly needs to listen to the interview with Moore http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/Heritage-Minister-James-Moore-dropping-into-News-Cafe-Wednesday--169332836.html is Canada's auditor general who should be curious about questionable, if not fraudulent, government spending on the CMHR. Moore started by floating the idea that there were two main reasons why the budget for the museum has ballooned from $265 m...

Winnipeg got a lesson in true philanthropy this past week. A retired pharmacist who quietly -- nay, secretly, to even his family --- saved up a million dollars, donated it this week, half to the Misericordia Health Centre Foundation and half to the Riverview Heath Centre Foundation. Laurie Johnston did it with humility and with little fanfare. He didn't ask for a towering statue to be erected in his name, a backlit plaque, or even a framed certificate from the Premier. He did it, he said, to repay a debt to a deceased family friend who generously gave him $200 to tide him over in the weeks before he took his final pharmacy exams so long ago. Passing it forward was payment enough for him. People couldn't help but contrast his donation with the spectacle of a family of millionaires demanding a blank cheque from the federal government to finish building a giant monument to their deceased father under the guise of a gift to the community --- a gift nobody ask...