The Black Rod

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…

The Grammy's, the Oscars, the Golden Globes.  It's awards season. Which reminded us we hadn't yet given out our last (dis)honour for 2018---Bozo of the Year.

It's a category we introduced in 2013 when there was a bumper crop of contenders--Greg Selinger, Eric Robinson, Stan Struthers, Christine Melnick, and the eventual winner, University of Manitoba Professor Gary Stern who nosed out the policians by being so stupendously wrong with his scholarly declaration five years earlier that because of global warming the Arctic would be ice-free by 2013.  It's been ten years now and we're still waiting, Gary.

The award has lain fallow for a few years, but it was time to revive it for 2018 because one candidate sprinted ahead of the pack and almost demanded the recognition.  So, without further ado, we present the winner of the Black Rod Bozo of the Year 2018 award to----David Chartrand, president of the Manitoba Metis Federation.

Chartrand spent the year imitating the cart…

When selecting a Newsmaker of the Year for 2018, the Winnipeg Free Press delegated the job to their readers.  Apparently the newspaper has nobody on staff with enough news sense to be capable of sifting through the year's stories to determine who had the biggest influence on Manitobans.
So the FP went with the readers' choice---Tina Fontaine, who was described as the "heartbreaking catalyst for change."
The fact that she had been dead for four years was not a strike against her. It was the death of the fragile 15-year-old girl whose body was discarded in a blanket in the Red River that made her what she is today -- an icon of the missing and murdered aboriginal women movement.
"... Tina's story was a primary driving force behind a public inquiry into murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls, which the federal government granted in 2016," wrote Niigaan Sinclair, the author of the Newsmaker 2018 story.
Sinclair normally writes an opinion column for the…