The Black Rod

Now there's something you don't see every day---a major big-city newspaper committing hara-kiri.

Buh-bye Winnipeg Free Press.
We won't miss the 'new' you.

A suicide note of sorts was penned by newspaper editor Paul Samyn and published in the Saturday, July 4, 2020 issue of the Free Press.
"An apology for marginalizing people of colour, and a promise to atone for our past." cried the headline.

Obviously inspired by the police-hating mobs that are terrorizing cities throughout Canada and the United States, Samyn went full grovel. He prostrated himself begging to kiss their rings, their feet, their behinds.  He begged foregiveness and mercy and offered to make amends. He did everything but offer his mother and wife to them as his personal reparations.

Samyn wrote that the Winnipeg Free Press was always a racist newspaper. It was founded by racists, he said. Legendary Winnipeg Free Press reporters like John Dafoe were racists.  The newspaper was nothing but 148 yea…

Where ya bin? you ask.
In the modern vernacuar, we reply: 
Later, dude.

The Black Rod was jolted back into action by the televised news conference last week with the Prime Minister of Canada, 
Justin "Buckwheat" Trudeau.

Trudeau had been jaunting around the world, basking in accolades, while mobs barricaded railroads across Canada, slowly strangling
 the economy and forcing layoffs and shortgages of essential goods.

Finally, shamed by the Opposition Conservatives in Parliament for ignoring the crisis, he reluctantly cancelled the next destination
of his winter world tour---sunny Barbados---and returned to Ottawa.

Less than a week of non-action later, he stood in front of television cameras to make an announcement:  he had no idea what to do.

Yep, that was it.

The leader of a country of 35 million people formally announced to the world that the protestors had won. He had nothing. 

He had tried his best, i.e. begging the "hereditary chiefs" of native bands in British Columbia to…

In an astonishing comment that's been overlooked (or deliberately ignored) by the Mainstream Media, Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau confessed Wednesday that there are many other instances of racist behaviour by him yet to be disclosed.
Trudeau was speaking at a hastily arranged,  tightly scripted news scrum to address the discovery of a photo of him attending a party in 2001 at a private school where he taught showing him with his face and hands painted  dark brown to imitate an arab for an Arabian Nights gala.
He stuck to the script almost to the end, repeating over and over (and over and over and over) to every question that he regretted his action "deeply" (six times), was "really sorry (twice), "deeply sorry" (twice) and apologizing to Canadians (two times). He also admitted to painting his face black in high school and singing The Banana Boat song (Day-0) popularized by Harry Belafonte.
But just before he broke off from reporters, a questioner…

When did the magic die?
A week ago the Winnipeg police department delivered the bad news---crime in the city is out of control.
The picture painted by the numbers (for 2018) was appalling. Robberies up ten percent in  a single year.  (And that was the good news.)
Property crimes were up almost 20 percent. 
Total crime was 33 percent higher than the five year average.
The measure of violent crime in Winnipeg had soared to a rating of 161.  Only four years earlier it stood at 116. That's a 38 percent deterioration in safety.
How did it happen? How, when in 2015 the police and Winnipeg's police board announced they had discovered the magic solution to crime?
"Smart Policing" they called it. A team of crime analysts would pore through data to spot crime hot-spots and as soon as they identified a trend (car thefts, muggings, liquor store robberies) they could call in police resources to descend on the problem and nip it.
The police board of the day was so confident in their magic b…

By now you have read and heard thousands of words about the who, what, where, when and why of the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, as filtered through academics, journalists, performers, unionists, and historians a hundred years removed from the iconic events.
The Black Rod is offering something different. 
We are taking you through Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine to the very streets of downtown Winnipeg on Bloody Saturday to let you experience the sights and sounds of that historical day through the eyes and ears of a contemporary eyewitness, a professional observer and recorder of the proverbial "first rough draft of history". 
We found this in the Montreal Gazette, June 23, 1919 (Page 9):
Winnipeg's Tragic Outbreak Lasted Half Hour Only                       by J.F.B. Livesay of the Canadian Press
Winnipeg, June 21----The tragic events of this afternoon covered not more than half an hour. At half past two, perhaps twenty thousand persons were massed on Main street with their…

Wow.
No, double-wow.
A game-changing bombshell lies buried in the supplementary evidence provided to the House of Commons Judiciary Committee by former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould.
It has gone virtually unreported since she submitted the material almost a week ago. As far as we can find, only one journalist-- Andrew Coyne, columnist for the National Post--- has even mentioned it and even then he badly missed what it meant, burying it in paragraph 10 of a 14 paragraph story.
The gist of the greatest political scandal in modern Canadian history is well-known by now. It's bigger than Adscam, the revelation 15 years ago that prominent members of the Liberal Party of Canada and the party itself funneled tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks into their own pockets from federal spending in Quebec sponsoring ads promoting Canadian unity. That was just venal politicians and a crooked political party helping themselves to public money.
The Trudeau-Snc-Lavalin scandal is so much more…