The Black Rod

Well, that didn't take long. The year has barely started and we're already reminded that Winnipeg is a city governed by idiots. Winnipeg's public works committee says that the increase in water and sewer rates announced in November was less than half of what it should be. So instead of $33 more a year, homeowners will be paying $71-$76 more a year . Oops, said Public Works chairman Bill Clement. "We didn't ask the right questions," was Clement's pathetic excuse. The $33 was just to cover a portion of the city's bill for an upgrade to the wastewater treatment plant. The city also has to pay for routine sewer maintenance. Who knew, right? The difference? Oh, six million dollars . Plus. In private business, an employee making a $6 million dollar mistake would be thrown out a window. At the City of Winnipeg, incompetence is not a drawback. Editorials have lamented the surprise hike in sewer and water rates. But nobody has demanded that the members of the p...

With Canada involved in its most sustained military mission since the Korean War more than 50 years ago, we find ourselves wanting more information about the situation in Afghanistan than we're getting from the usual news sources. We've had to dig out news and analysis from sources throughout the Internet. It got us to thinking. If we have to do it ourselves, we might as well share our information with our readers. So The Black Rod is aiming to post a weekly update on Afghanistan, the action and analyses. We're hoping to make it a regular Friday feature to coincide with Red Fridays. This will be Week One. The Action The Taliban has recognized it can't win a fighting war with NATO, so its changed tactics to fight a media war. Phase One is to offer "proof" that it controls the country and has NATO on the run. The insurgents tried out this strategy in 2006. It's simple. A force of 50-100 fighters crosses into Afghanistan from Pakistan. It takes over a vil...

One of the legendary moments of journalistic history came in 1871 when reporter Henry Stanley reached the shores of Lake Tanganyika, walked up to the only white man in hundreds of miles and said: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume." Stanley had been assigned by the New York Herald to find David Livingstone, famous missionary and explorer, who had been missing in darkest Africa for six years. In his own account, Stanley told how he asked how much he could spend on the seemingly hopeless search.The Herald's publisher replied: "Draw 1,000 (pound sterling) now, and when you have gone through that, draw another £1,000, and when that is spent, draw another £1,000, and when you have finished that, draw another £1,000, and so on - BUT FIND LIVINGSTONE!" Ahh, those were the days. Stanley spent almost two years looking for Livingstone. His expedition was outfitted with the best of everything, including at least 200 porters. He must have spent a small fortune, but HE FOUND LI...

With the curtain about to drop on 2006, it's time for the annual announcement of our Newsmaker of the Year. The title this year goes to Winnipeg Mayor Sam Katz . Not only was he re-elected Mayor with a larger vote total than the first time, but he crossed the finish line with four councillors hanging onto his coat tails. And he did it in face of an unrelenting two-year campaign of smear and sneer by the Winnipeg Free Press. It got so bad that the newspaper's own editor, Bob Cox, had to write an apology disguised as a correction for the misquotes, erroneous headlines and editorial slants slipped into news stories during the election campaign. The gesture still didn't get Katz to buy a single election ad in the newspaper. His eventual victory underlined how irrelevant the FP has become. While his predecessor, the preening Glen Murray, threw out a thousand "visionary" ideas and never stuck around to accomplish even one (not counting street parties), Katz does his wo...

Taliban Driver: " Shhh. Did you hear that?" Passenger: "Is that.....?" BOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!!!! As near as we can tell, that's an exact transcript of the last moment in the life of Taliban high mucky-muck Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Osmani who was blown to itsy bitsy pieces by a NATO plane last week. It took forensic experts a week to positively (yes, we split the infinitive) identify the tiny bits of Osmani and the other three men in the car. Associated Press initially quoted their Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousef Ahmadi, as denying Osmani had been killed. But this week Reuters got confirmation from their (unnamed) Taliban source. "He has died. We got this information on the day of the strike but our leadership ordered us not to disclose it," the commander, speaking by telephone, told a Reuters reporter in the Pakistani border town of Chaman. "He was not only an experienced military commander but also good in making financial transactions for us. He h...

This weekend The Black Rod got a terrific Christmas present. It was an e-mail telling us of the latest news about Mohammed Niaz, an interpreter with the Canadian forces in Afghanistan who we had written about six months ago. At that time, life looked grim for the young man. He had been horribly wounded in an ambush on Canadian troops. He was in the hospital at the Kandahar air base where both his legs had been amputed below the knee. He was depressed and feeling abandoned as he watched others who had been wounded in combat flown to Germany and Canada for treatment. He was begging Canada for help. Our e-mailer brought us up to date. Niaz is out of hospital and back working as an interpreter with Canadian forces. His home has been rebuilt by Canadian troops to make it wheelchair friendly. And he was standing on his new prosthetic legs when he received a medal from Commander CEFCOM, (Canadian Expeditionary Forces Command) Lieutenant-General J.C.M. Gauthier as his proud father looked on....

The national news media had finally found something good to say about Canada's military mission in Afghanistan. If they squinted hard, they could see the soldiers in a role the Press could accept. Nay, a role they could embrace and endorse. That role? Victims. The sympathetic stories poured out. Canada was being abandoned by its NATO allies. Canada was doing all the fighting and dying and needed help. We were pleading. We were desperate. How sad. How beautiful. There was Canada on its knees at the NATO summit in Riga, Latvia, begging for countries like France and Germany to lift the caveats that kept their troops out of the battle zones of Afghanistan. Oh woe is us. Canadian forces are doomed. Doomed. The reporters couldn't get worked up enough. And then the military just had to spoil it all. The new Leopard tanks had arrived in Afghanistan and Canadian troops were joyfully testing them out, playing with their new toys and looking for all the world like warriors. Not victims. I...

It's been more than a week since three Winnipeg police officers were shot during a drug raid on Jubilee Avenue, and the dust has settled enough to give us a glimpse of what's behind the headlines. One thing is abundantly clear--- the raid went spectacularly bad. Only one month earlier we saw how a raid gone right was presented to the public. Drug / Weapon Arrest On November 7th, 2006 at 11:45 p.m., members of the Winnipeg Police Service Street Crime Unit executed a Controlled Drug and Substances Act warrant at a residence in the 500 block of Alverstone Street. As a result, the following was seized: --more than 32 ounces of powder Cocaine with a street value of nearly $37,000.00; --a quantity of marihuana --drug manufacturing paraphernalia --a gun and a quantity of ammunition During the execution of the warrant one of the residents' Cane Corso dogs lunged at officers resulting in an officer discharging his weapon. The dog was struck in the leg and sustained non-life threaten...