The Black Rod

There's a new challenger in town for the title of Fake News Champion. Stand aside Dan Lett, columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press and current holder of the belt. Your new competition is your colleague, Ryan Thorpe, who's been described by his alma mater as an  "investigative reporter who covers crime for the daily newspaper." This past Saturday Thorpe was responsible for a three-page spread headlined "SAFETY FIRST, everything else last." The thrust of the article is that the budget for policing (and the fire department and paramedics, but mainly the police) takes such a big bite (nearly half) out of the budget there's hardly anything left for other services. This Saturday he had a follow-up story arguing that Winnipeg spends too much money on police salaries when only 34 percent of reported crimes are cleared. To bolster his argument, Thorpe's both stories cited the work of Kevin Walby, "a criminologist and associate professor at the University

When it comes to Fake News, nobody can match Dan Lett, the "political columnist" for the Winnipeg Free Press. But he surpassed himself last Friday when he concocted a story accusing Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister of hiring a private investigator to "dig up dirt on NDP leader Wab Kinew" prior to the 2019 provincial election. The story was based on those apocryphal anonymous "sources" who, of course, "have asked not to be named for fear of reprisal." Given that Lett has been a shill for the NDP for months (more on that soon), coordinating his anti-Pallister columns with NDP political attacks, its not hard to figure out who his "sources" are. The Page One news story, carried under Lett's name with no mention of being 'opinion', continued on the jump page where, if one read that far, in paragraph 20 of the 28 paragraph story Lett conceded that the PI was actually a researcher hired to pour through the legal records of Kinew

It's been two-and-a-half weeks since an aboriginal mob overturned two landmark statues on the grounds of the Manitoba legislature and Winnipeg police haven't made a single arrest. This is suspicious since the vandalism happened right under the eyes of dozens of uniformed police, none of whom who lifted a finger to stop it. In fact, the next day, Police Chief Danny Smyth commended the police at the scene for doing nothing. Even after officers were spit on and had rocks thrown at them, the police failed to respond, effectively sending a message that they were ceding the streets to violent rabble. Smyth, reading emotionlessly from a written statement, reassured the public that the police "will be investigating this."  Yay. He said they would start by watching footage from security cameras at the Legislature.  He forgot to mention the cameras are a good 200 or 300 feet away from the site of the vandalism and assaults on individual officers. The blatant inaction by

  Canada has a new hero. He's Artur Pawlowski, the pastor of Calgary's Street Church. On Easter weekend a band of six government thugs showed up at his church to stop the religious service declaring they were there to prevent the spread of Covid-19. For Pastor Pawlowski, it was too much. Sacriligious government intrusion into a church on the holiest days of the Christianity was a red line not to be crossed. Like an exorcist driving out demons, he confronted the menacing gang of officials. "OUT!" "OUT!" "GET OUT!" "GESTAPO IS NOT ALLOWED HERE!" "NAZIS ARE NOT WELCOME HERE!" "GET OUT!" "DO NOT COME BACK WITHOUT A WARRANT!" At first, the authorities thought they could intimidate Pastor Pawlowski by standing their ground. But with parishioners rushing to his defence by filming the confrontation with a sea of cell phones, they conceded defeat, but not before showing their contempt by saunte

  Oops. While trying to slap down a group of clergymen challenging in court the province's shutdown of church services, a Winnipeg sciiiiientist has inadvertently proven that the science behind the mandatory mask order is bogus.  The Science Emperor has no clothes. In a letter to the editor of the Winnipeg Free Press, Dr. Peter Zahradka wrote : A significant part of their argument is that the science is not being referenced as part of the action taken by the province on the advice of the chief public-health officer. It seems like the main objection is contained within these few statements: “Show us the science. And if the science is there, maybe there will be fewer conflicts.” Challenging science? What odious effrontery. Zahradka concluded his letter with this sneering comment: "There is no reason not to produce the evidence for those who do not know how to search the medical literature to find it — which, surprisingly, seems to include the lawyers involved in this case."

  Early in the week we were watching a television news report on an anti-mask protest in Steinbach, when we heard possibly the stupidest comment ever spoken in Manitoba. The reporter (from Global TV if memory serves well) had plucked a young woman out to represent the anti-protest sentiment.  She said she recognized that the protest was about "individual rights" but, she continued, 'individual rights were not the mountain you want to die on.' WHAT????  We leaped out of our chairs as one. WHAT???? INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS LIKE THE RIGHT OF FREE SPEECH ARE EXACTLY THE MOUNTAIN YOU WANT TO DIE ON! we shouted. What made the shocking statement even more appalling was that it was made only days after Remembrance Day. You know, the day we set aside to honour the thousands who died fighting a world war to preserve individual rights.  And spoken only weeks before we mark the 30th anniversary of the end of Communism in the Soviet Union and the return, after 50 years, of individual rig