The Black Rod

MPI spokesman Brian Smiley says car owners without immobilizers should know car thieves steal cars to use as "four-wheel bullets" on city streets. Winnipeg Police Sgt. Doug Safioles says the worst car thieves suffer from a mental disorder that impairs their knowledge of right and wrong. Manitoba Justice Minister Dave Chomiak says he's going to Ottawa to lobby for tougher laws against car theft. So, let's see... We have to blame law-abiding car owners for car theft. We can't blame the car thieves because they're nuts. And the Conservatives are soft on crime and should listen to the NDP for solutions. Uh huh. It's bad enough that MPI has decided the solution is to blame the victims. And that the police are now making excuses for the people they arrest. But seeing Dave Chomiak pretend to be tough-on-crime is too much. Yet, it was only fitting that the living symbol of failure in the NDP government should be front and centre at Tuesday's car-theft news con...

The biggest single reconstruction project in Afghanistan's Kandahar province, where Canadian troops are stationed, was completed one week ago Tuesday---to the total silence of Canada's mainstream media. It cost Canada $500,000 and three soldiers killed.The major newspapers and television newscasts, which never pass up an opportunity to showcase some critic of Canada's mission to Afghanistan, didn't think it was newsworthy. The project is a two-lane road, less than 3 miles long (4.5 km), which connects the farming district of Panjwai district to Highway One, the ring road that links Afghanistan's major cities. It means that farmers can now bring their produce to bigger markets in Kabul to the east, Herat to the west, and even to Iran. Since the Kandahar-Kabul section of the highway was opened, travel time has been cut from two days to five hours . Panjwai farmers can now finally tap into that road to prosperity. The Kandahar road project was conceived in war. It w...

Somebody play the theme from Bonanza. There's gold in them thar e-mails. We've spent the past couple of days parsing what government bureaucrats said about the failing fortunes of the Crocus Fund in e-mails to each other in the fall of 2000. We can sum it up in one word: Eureka. The e-mails, leaked late last week, reveal a much different reality than what the NDP has been telling Manitobans for the past year. We learned: · the real reason why Crocus had to turn into a Ponzi scheme · how government officials tried to keep important information OUT of the Crocus prospectus · that the Department of Finance had "serious concerns" about the performance of Crocus as early as 2000 but Crocus had too much power with government for anyone to challenge them · the likely identity of the "higher authorities" that Crocus officials claimed had given them the okay for their 10-year-plan when civil servants in mid-2001 were slow to give their approval That's Couldn...

With the wave of recent bombshell leaks of finance department memos and emails regarding the NDP cabinet's earliest knowledge of big troubles with the Crocus Investment Fund, we have to take a fresh look at everything we thought we knew, and when we knew it. From our archives, we are reprinting our earliest timeline of what we thought happened when the fund collapsed. ********************* The Black Rod (originally published Jan. 3, 2005) Today's topic: the Crocus Fund. The question on everyone's lips today is whether Crocus is about to croak. Ever since trading in shares of the Crocus Fund was suspended in December, a cone of silence has descended over everyone who knows anything about, uh, that thing where they take your money and put it in stuff to, uh, create jobs and stuff. The only thing we know for sure is that the NDP appoints someone to sit on the Crocus Board of Directors on the basis that that person will never, ever, under threat of torture or worse, tell the go...

You expect to encounter blowhards and know-it-alls on the sports pages. Hell, that's half the fun. But the arrogance demonstrated Wednesday by Winnipeg Free Press reporter Paul Wiecek transcends all propriety and wanders into dangerous territory. It wasn't his adolescent reference ( x 2) to the officials who accompanied Prime Minister Stephen Harper to the Brier in Hamilton as "turds". That wouldn't get him arrested. This could: Wiecek was informed that Harper's meeting with Alberta skip Kevin Martin was a private conversation. "It's private" said "the clown who demanded I turn my tape recorder off..." "Now, I've heard Harper's government is paranoid, but when a harmless chat with a famous curler gets classified as a state secret, can it be long before Dick Cheney is declared the deputy prime minister?" "Of course, I didn't turn off the tape recorder. And the muffled sounds it recorded captured exactly what I ...

In the good old days if the Crocus Investment Fund caught wind of criticism they would send out a team of enforcers to, ahem, have a chat with the Doubting Thomas. When everybody walked out of the back room, everything was copasetic. There would be a lot of back slapping, man-hugs, and everyone would sing from the same hymn book. It was so simple back then. Today, the fund has collapsed and the word scandal has been attached to Crocus and Fund . And the muscle comes in a different package. Take the case of Winnipeg Free Press reporter Dan Lett. Last week he was merrily writing stories about a leaked heretofore unknown secret cabinet document that proved the NDP knew in 2000 that Crocus needed to become a Ponzi scheme or it would go broke. The NDP gave their blessing. And then he got a call from someone he calls "my Grit source." Like Saul on the road to Damascus, he had a mystical conversion. Hallelujah. Another sinner saved. The truth, he wrote, had been there all along. ...

The assassination and capture of senior Taliban commanders in Afghanistan by NATO forces this winter has spooked the insurgents into a murderous spy hunt. A Taliban spokesman from Helmand province told the Globe and Mail (via a delivered videotape) that between 60 and 70 suspected spies have been arrested and many of them killed. A landowner from Kajaki in Helmand province told government authorities that the Taliban executed 13 of their own people and arrested 3 more. The latest victim was apparently a doctor who worked at a hospital in the capital of Helmand, Lashkar Gah. He was kidnapped last Saturday and his body found Wednesday dumped on the side of a road. He was shot in the head and chest. The Taliban don't need proof of actual spying. They consider anyone working for the government, aid groups, the U.S. military or NATO to be traitors and subject to death. The Black Rod has learned that in Kandahar province, among the Canadian troops stationed there, the threat has a human ...