A nasty split in the NDP tests Greg Selinger's leadership skills

There's a split in Manitoba's ruling NDP and it's growing wider and nastier by the day.

The first crack in party solidarity developed when Thompson MLA Steve Ashton took on Finance Minister Greg Selinger for the leadership following Gary Doer's departure. There was no love lost between the men.

It was papered over at the leadership convention when Selinger topped the vote with 1317 to Ashton's miserly 685. But the split has obviously festered ever since and was positively oozing last Wednesday when Ashton's campaign manager Russ Wyatt tore several strips off unelected Premier Selinger at the last city council meeting of the summer.

Speaking on the debate over adopting Light Rail Transit as the priority for the city over Bus Rapid Transit, Wyatt attacked Selinger for failing to respect council's choices for its infrastructure priorities. Instead, the provincial NDP is trying to force the city of Winnipeg to spend all the money in the infrastructure pot on completing phase two of BRT to the University of Manitoba, he said.

Wyatt launched a blistering attack on Selinger and his bullying attitude towards Winnipeg:

"There is a disagreement taking place between this council and, specifically the mayor, and the premier of Manitoba. The premier is of the view that the Building Canada Funds that are available for Winnipeg, approximately 63 million from the federal government and 63 million from the provincial government and we have to come to the table, 63 million of our money, so 189 million is the total amount we're talking here... the premier believes they should go towards finishing off the BRT line..."

"... it's this council that sets the priorities. The premier was elected premier back in Oct but he was not elected mayor. I don't remember anybody cheering 'we just elected the premier and the mayor. It was the premier of Manitoba and that's what he was elected to be. He has a right to express his opinion but in the end of the day he has to listen to the elected officials coming from this chamber."

"if the premier of the province is hearing what we're saying, the roads and the bridges are crumbling. We want that to be the priority. We have ... said back in April that this was a priority and this premier refuses to respond to this council and address these concerns and the situation continues to get worse and worse."

"Mr. Speaker the debate is $189 million. $189 million that (we) as a council requested and the premier says he is broke. Well in 2008 he found $141 million... to build -- remember the dispute at the floodway with the government? $141 million of our infrastructure money, Mr. Speaker, that went to his legacy project...

After that announcement, the next announcement was ... 212 million to go into centre port. Not our priority. Of which 70 or $80 million was provincial funds that would have been earmarked to roads and bridges in this city..."

Two days later, Wyatt picked up the cudgel again as he stood by a railway crossing at Plessis Road with Mayor Sam Katz to say upgrades to Plessis were one of 11 infrastructure priorities endorsed by city council in April to be paid for with money from the Building Canada Fund. This time he declared he had the support of Manitoba Infrastructure Minister Steve Ashton.

Them's fighting words.

Selinger has to respond or lose face. He can't have a cabinet minister contradict him in public. He has either to demote Ashton or force Ashton to disavow his former campaign manager Russ Wyatt. And picking a fight with a take-no-prisoners maverick like Wyatt on the eve of a provincial election is fraught with danger.

Meanwhile, you can ask why the MSM political reporters are ignoring this story.

The unreported bombshell conspiracy evidence in the Trudeau/SNC-Lavelin scandal

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...

Crips and Bloodz true cultural anchors of Winnipeg's aboriginal gangs

(Bebo tribute page to Aaron Nabess on the right, his handgun-toting friend on the left) At least six murder victims in Winnipeg in the past year are linked to a network of thuglife, gangster rap-styled, mainly aboriginal street gangs calling themselves Crips and Bloods after the major black gangs of L.A. The Black Rod has been monitoring these gangs for several months ever since discovering memorial tributes to victim Josh Prince on numerous pages on Bebo.com, a social networking website like Myspace and Facebook. Josh Prince , a student of Kildonan East Collegiate, was stabbed to death the night of May 26 allegedly while breaking up a fight. His family said at the time he had once been associated with an unidentified gang, but had since broken away. But the devotion to Prince on sites like Watt Street Bloodz and Kingk Notorious Bloodz (King-K-BLOODZ4Life) shows that at the time of his death he was still accepted as one of their own. Our searches of Bebo have turned up another five ga...

Manitoba Hydro is on its deathbed. There, we said it.

Manitoba Hydro is on its deathbed. Oh, you won't find anyone official to say it. Yet . Like relatives trying to appear cheery and optimistic around a loved one that's been diagnosed with terminal cancer, the people in power are in the first stage of grief -- denial. The prognosis for Hydro was delivered three weeks ago at hearings before the Public Utilities Board where the utility was seeking punishingly higher rates for customers in Manitoba. It took us this long to read through the hundred-plus pages of transcript, to decipher the coded language of the witnesses, to interpret what they were getting at, and, finally, to understand the terrible conclusion. We couldn't believe it, just as, we're sure, you can't--- so we did it all again, to get a second opinion, so to speak. Hydro conceded to the PUB that it undertook a massive expansion program--- involving three (it was once four) new dams and two new major powerlines (one in the United States)---whi...

Nahanni Fontaine, the NDP's Christian-bashing, cop-smearing, other star candidate

As the vultures of the press circle over the wounded Liberal Party of Manitoba, one NDP star candidate must be laughing up her sleeve at how her extremist past has escaped the scrutiny of reporters and pundits. Parachuted into a safe NDP seat in Winnipeg's North End, she nonetheless feared a bruising campaign against a well-heeled Liberal opponent. Ha ha. Instead, the sleepy newspeeps have turned a blind eye to her years of vitriolic attacks on Christianity, white people, and police. * She's spent years bashing Christianity as the root cause of all the problems of native people in Canada. * She's called for a boycott of white businesses . * And with her Marxist research partner, she's smeared city police as intransigent racists . Step up Nahanni Fontaine, running for election in St. John's riding as successor to the retiring Gord Macintosh. While her male counterpart in the NDP's galaxy of stars, Wab Kinew, has responded to the contro...

Exposing the CBC/WFP double-team smear of a hero cop

Published since 2006 on territory ceded, released, surrendered and yielded up in 1871 to Her Majesty the Queen and successors forever. Exposing the CBC/FP double-team smear of a hero cop Some of the shoddiest journalism in recent times appeared this long August weekend when the CBC and Winnipeg Free Press doubled teamed on a blatant smear of a veteran city police officer. In the latest example of narrative journalism these media outlets spun stories with total disregard for facts that contradicted the central message of the reports which, simplified, is: police are bad and the system is covering up. Let's start with the story on the taxpayer funded CBC by Sarah Petz that can be summed up in the lead. "A February incident where an off-duty Winnipeg officer allegedly knocked a suspect unconscious wasn't reported to the province's police watchdog, and one criminologist says it shows how flawed oversight of law enforcement can be." There you have it. A policeman, not ...

Winnipeg needs a new police chief - ASAP

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 a...

The Black Rod

Search This Blog