The Black Rod

Our heads are spinning. Reading about the Asper plan for South Point Douglas is like taking the most exciting ride at the Red River Ex without leaving home. Is it because the plan is so gi-normous you can't get your head around it? Or is it because of a week of effective P.R. spin? We think it's a lot of both. The project is so huge the press can't focus on more than one aspect at a time. For once, we don't blame them. The deal is so complex it seems reporters have glommed on to the stadium as the one facet they feel the public can absorb. Imagine having a giant, steaming, home-made pie put on the table after a Thanksgiving meal and you know you can only have one delicious slice because more will make you sick, and it's your favourite pie, so you'll have one large piece and dream about the rest. The whole Asper pie is at least ten slices: 1. A new 30-40,000 seat football stadium that will be everything and more than was proposed for the Polo Park site. More par...

Donald Worme, the lawyer for the family of Matthew Dumas, demonstrated Thursday the absurdities a lawyer can get away with in a court of law and still be considered a reputable member of the bar. In rejecting the evidence of an RCMP expert on police use of force, Worme suggested at the inquest into the police shooting of Dumas, that young aboriginals be given an even chance to kill police officers who try to make an arrest. If that wasn't enough, he dismissed all of the evidence at the inquest and stated that his position was that Dumas was only wiping away pepper spray from his face when he was shot by a policeman who wrongly thought he was being threatened with a screwdriver in Dumas' hand. “(The shooting) was consistent with training and best practices,” RCMP Cpl. Greg Gillis said. Dumas was armed with a screwdriver (an edged weapon, in police parlance) and was within a 25 foot no-go zone that police are taught to maintain by fatal force if necessary. Sad precedents have sho...

One week into the inquest into the shooting death of teenager Matthew Dumas in 2005 and we know what happened. And what happened is nothing like what the professional race-baiters have been peddling for the past three years. * Winnipeg police were hot on the heels of a group of natives who had robbed a man they didn't know in his own home in East Kildonan. The group had taken a taxi from Dufferin Avenue to the area of the man's home, and took the same taxi back to where they started. The police, knowing from the taxi driver where he dropped the robbers off, saturated the area. They knew they were only minutes behind the gang and stood a good chance of running across them. * East Kildonan's then-community constable Jon Mateychuk was alone in his police car but joined the sweep anyway. He saw the boyish looking Matthew Dumas walking alone down either Dufferin or a street nearby (news reports have failed to make it clear). Dumas spotted the police car and caught Mateychuk...

Three years ago The Black Rod scooped the pants off all the mainstream newsmedia in Winnipeg with an exclusive story on how Matthew Dumas spent the last minutes of his life. At the Dumas inquest Thursday, the lawyer for the family cited this brief moment of time as the most important in the story next to the actual shooting of Dumas because, as Canadian Press reporter Tamara King put it, it was "the last chance to subdue the young man before it turned fatally violent." Why did every newspaper, television and radio station ignore the story for 3 years? The answer lies in why The Black Rod came to do the story in the first place. 1. We cared. We cared about the facts. What happened that day on Dufferin Avenue? Who did what in what order? We cared about the truth. The MSM was devoting its coverage to the blame-the-police crowd who were shouting racism at every opportunity. The Police Chief was holding secret meetings with native so-called leaders to offer them special secret acc...

If a news bombshell goes off at an inquest and no one reports it, is it still explosive news? The coverage of the Matthew Dumas inquest has been spotty and confusing. Carol Sanders is doing the most thorough job so far for the Winnipeg Free Press, but even she was either absent or unaware of the importance of what came out Monday. The inquest heard from Ken Warren, who was robbed in his Martin Avenue East home in an incident that sparked the eventual shooting of Dumas by police, and from the Spring Taxi driver who inadvertently drove the gang of thieves to the Martin Ave. home and back to the North End. Cab passengers should know by now that their picture is taken every time they enter a taxi. As you would expect, the police recovered the photos of the group that robbed Warren. And guess who's face showed up, according to the unreported testimony at the inquest. None other than the man of the hour's, Matthew Dumas himself. It was headline news that never made it. Immediately af...

It's only taken the mainstream media in Winnipeg THREE YEARS to catch up to The Black Rod on the Matthew Dumas story. And even then they've managed to mangle the story so much it's barely coherent. After Dumas was shot to death by a policeman he had been menacing with a deadly weapon, the daily newspapers devoted reams of copy to native demagogues who accused the police of racism and of killing an innocent aboriginal boy on his way to his grandma's for tea. Now, when the truth is coming out at the inquest, the MSM is asleep at the switch. Witness Rod Pelletier testified police caught up to Dumas on his doorstep and lead him away. The next thing he knew, his daughter was calling that Dumas and the police were fighting. He rushed back to see Dumas on the run again. Only Carol Sanders of the Winnipeg Free Press managed to report accurately what Pelletier said. And even then its hard to say if she recognized the importance of a witness who demolished the native community...

So let's get this straight... - The police get a tip that some drug dealers are about to make a delivery. - They're given the make of car and exact licence number. - They stop the car, arrest the drug dealers at gunpoint, and find they're transporting what the newspaper describes as "a large amount" of marijuana and methamphetamine. - A judge throws out the evidence and blames the police for stopping the drug dealers. Yup. That pretty much summarizes the justice system in Manitoba. To cap it off, Queen's Bench Justice Brenda Keyser said she was letting the drug dealer in her court go free because that's what the public would want. To convict him because he got caught red handed with the drugs would, in the words of the Free Press, "send the wrong message to both police and society at large." Say what? Is Keyser on drugs? What wrong message would convicting a meth dealer send? That justice was working? No, silly. "The average citizen woul...

The new government of Pakistan has capitulated to the Taliban, surrendering control of the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan through so-called peace deals. Pakistani troops are to retreat from the region, leaving the Taliban in charge. That's how peace in Pakistan is defined. The result if that the war in Afghanistan has become a war of attrition, what the New York Times calls a see-saw war. We can pick two days---one from each of the past two weeks--that typify the war in the summer of 2008. Tuesday, May 27. 12 police officers and 12 civilians are killed. Five of the policemen died in gun battles in Kandahar province as Taliban fighters attacked a remote outpost on the Pakistani border. Another four sent as reinforcements were killed when remote-controlled bombs blew up their vehicles. Three children were killed when a Taliban insurgent planting a bomb under a bridge blew accidentally blew himself up. The children were playing nearby. In Logar province in eastern Afghanistan a ro...

"You've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya punk?" Somebody give the baby a crying towel. Supersized. Grammy loser Rob Wilson is boo-hoo-hooing all over town about being stopped by police and accused at gunpoint of driving a stolen car, which turned out to be his own and not stolen. The beefy Christian rapper says he's a po' victim of racial profiling because he's a beefy black man driving a fancy car. Tip to you Fresh I.E., du-u-ude. If you go out of your way to cultivate the image of a thug, to dress like a thug right down to the stupid backward baseball cap, to drive around with a yout' 15 years your junior riding shotgun and wearing shades like a thug, you shouldn't be surprised to be treated like a thug. And man up, for Christ sakes. The first thing the 35-year-old man-boy Wilson did is go crying to his wifey, who turns out to be CBC employee Sheila North Wilson. And the next thing you know, CBC has an "ex...