The Black Rod

Sam Katz shrugged off everything the NDP and their press allies could toss at him and still trounced their annointed candidate for mayor, Judy Wasylycia-Leis. The NDP machine pulled out all the stops . They managed to boost the anti-Katz vote by almost 50 percent from the 2006 election--- only to see Katz re-elected by a double-digit margin (55 percent of the vote compared to 43 percent for his challenger). In fact, JustJudy's 90,000 vote total was less than Katz garnered in the last election (104,000) and less even than he received when he was first elected mayor in 2004 (99,000). The Winnipeg Free Press, the biggest cheerleader for Judy W-L, was forced to concede "It might even be his strongest mandate ever." And that was despite running the worst campaign imaginable . Katz bolted out of the starting block with a bold declaration that crime and public safety were going to be the cornerstones of his run for reelection. “This election needs to be about ...

We don't know what's more alarming---the unprecedented rampage by a spree killer in the North End or how helpless the Winnipeg police appear. On the one hand you have an armed maniac responsible for three senseless attacks in less than an hour, each progressively more frightening. He started by shooting into a crowd of young teenagers, leaving one critically wounded. Then, with police cars flooding into the area, he shot a man in the back as his victim left a house a short jaunt away from the first shooting. After a short break, he finished his night by ringing the doorbell to a house to lure the homeowner out, then shooting him to death when the man realized the danger and slammed the door shut in the killer's face. On the other hand, you have the wimpiest-ever police chief begging for help to catch the killer because the police have no leads. “This is an awful, awful event and we’re certainly committed to the public to do everything we possibly can to get...

They just can't help themselves. They've become so used to getting away with injecting their political bias into their reporting that they don't even try to hide it anymore. Mary Agnes Welch is a reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press and a member of their "crack" election team providing (what they claim is) "Winnipeg's most comprehensive in-depth civic election coverage". And, until late Thursday afternoon, she was also a member in good standing of the Winnipeg Citizen's Coalition Facebook group. You know, the left-wing bunch created in 2008 to defeat Sam Katz and any councillor who supports him. To prove the adage of the Internet Age, "everybody knows something", a sharp-eyed reader of the Free Press called Welch out in the comments to one of her recent stories, the one telling how a Free Press commissioned poll found that Judy Alphabet's fight-poverty-not-criminals plan is wildly popular with the public. The spin ...

They just can't help themselves. And that's why their influence shrivels more and more each passing year. The mainstream media---in this case the hapless Winnipeg Free Press and the CBC ---are so anxious to see Sam Katz defeated as mayor, and their own bias on taxes adopted as policy, that they're madly spinning the latest poll results to create a version of the truth that satisfies their fantasies. That in itself is bizarre since the poll, conducted on their behalf by Leger Marketing, is already so slanted it wouldn't pass a first year statistics class. The poll finds that Sam Katz is the voters' preferred candidate to be mayor by 6 percentage points, 38 to 32 for his chief opponent Judy Wasylycia-Leis. And yet the Winnipeg Free Press reported the results this way: "Mayor Sam Katz has a six-point lead on Judy Wasylycia-Leis as Winnipeg's mayoral race enters the home stretch, but a more committed core of support for the challenger suggest...

We have an election correspondent! It's a red-letter day for The Black Rod. At the beginning of the mayoral election campaign we were contacted by Jacque Pierre who said he would be attending all the mayoral forums. He offered to share what he saw and heard with us. As we feared, most of the events were dull affairs, although occasionally he would note some tidbit of interest we would file away for future reference. Publish Post But yesterday he hit the motherlode. Mayoral candidates Judy Wasylycia-Leis, Brad Gross and Rav Gill appeared together at a get-out-the-vote forum the Indian and Metis Friendship Centre. The event barely made the radar of the mainstream media, but Jacque Pierre was there and here is his blow-by-blow report of what happened and who said what. It turns out this was probably the feistiest debate yet and the MSM missed the action. We initially thought we would edit his report, with periods at the end of thoughts, capital letters, commas, ...

At first blush, the television reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press captured the public mood in his column Saturday when he dissed televised mayoral "debates". "These days -- days which include, of course, the current civic-election campaign in Winnipeg -- debates and forums are pretty much a mockery, exercises in rote repetition of over-rehearsed talking points that reveal nothing about the candidates except their shared ability to say as little as possible for as long as possible in order to avoid being caught in a "gotcha!" moment." wrote TV scribe Brad Oswald. "In short, watching televised political debates is a complete waste of time." But wait.... After spending the weekend reviewing the mayoral forums on Shaw TV and CBC TV, we have to demur. While he was spot-on when describing the folly of the format, the true blame for failing the public lies not with the politicians but with the so-called professional reporters. Th...

It's getting crowded under the bus. The provincial NDP are shifting their 2011 election campaign into high gear while the Opposition Tories are hibernating peacefully. Friday the NDP started trimming dead wood and you will be surprised to see who they're throwing out. NDP candidate for mayor Judy Wasylycia-Leis was the first to get tossed under the wheels. They've obviously decided she's gone as far as she's going and its time to shift resources to the provincial campaign. This morning she woke up to read " Dufferin residents fighting crime/ Getting phone line for anonymous tips." "This Saturday, about 500 residents of the inner-city neighbourhood will get posters advertising a new phone line dedicated to collecting anonymous tips that will hopefully clear out crack dealers, slum housing and gang houses. "It's a very tough area," said Chris Burrows. The 70-year-old former kindergarten teacher is the spokeswoman ...

David Asper did more dancing than a chicken on a hotplate when he appeared on CJOB Tuesday morning, to give an update on the new stadium he's building. OB was chasing our story three days earlier in The Black Rod that a sports fan with his ear to the ground had heard the cost of the stadium was wildly out of control, as high as $190 million instead of the $115 million the city and province agreed to pay. Asper came armed with an encyclopedia of excuses to avoid putting a total on the tenders. There were more than 100 tenders, he said. They were very complex. They needed to be evaluated. There might be overlap. Time was the enemy. Blah blah blah. "My sources tell me its in over the $130 million mark," said radio host Richard Cloutier, adding that this meant a proper stadium would cost $150-$170 million. Everyone wants a "proper" stadium, Asper volleyed, and that's why he was counting on the partnership (that would be unelected Premier Greg ...

An unprecedented election scandal is unfolding in Winnipeg while the self-proclaimed Democracy boosters in the mainstream media are purposely ignoring it. At least eight people have now come forward to election authorities saying they heard Mynarski candidate Ross Eadie tell an all-candidates forum that the provincial NDP are helping to fund his campaign. Another two attendees at the meeting have posted these internet messages on the New Winnipeg community forum confirming Eadie's public statement: Re: 2010 Winnipeg Civic Election by Northender on Fri Oct 01, 2010 10:04 am I was there. The context was Eadie taking a swipe at the three independent candidates to his left who had just completed their remarks. Eadie seemed out of control and was yelling that they were just as political as he was, but how could he run a campaign without the financial backing of the NDP and after he was elected he would be just as independent as the rest of the candidates... Re: 20...

Incumbent councillor Justin Swandel (St. Norbert) knows what its like to be spun on a spit and roasted on high heat, for that's how he felt during a fierce confrontation Thursday with opponents of the proposed new stadium for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. At an open house on the stadium, the one-term councillor (winner of a byelection in 2005 to fill the seat for 18 months before winning a full term in '06) got the message, loud, clear and in his face, from his furious constituents: We don't want it and we're holding you responsible. Swandel, who thinks he's got the election in the bag, offered them no comfort. But there's a glimmer of hope for the Fort Richmond homeowners worried about noise, parking loss, traffic disruption, and rowdyism that comes with a stadium down the block. It comes from a published report from a well-placed source. Sort of. It's "published" as a post by someone using a cute pseudonym on an internet mess...

OOOOOOOOOO. We're baaaaad. Or rather, nas- tay . The Winnipeg Free Press, also known as The-Newspaper-That-Dares-Not-Print-Our-Name, didn't do it again Sunday. When The Black Rod sparked a national firestorm of commentary in 2008 by reporting on former CBC radio host Lesley Hughes' flirtation with 911 conspiracy buffs, FP reporter Bruce Owen, sent scrambling to match us, attributed our scoop to "a local blogger", while FP columnist Dan Lett said it came from "a Manitoba blog." We don't know if it's a promotion or not to be alluded to Sunday as "nasty bloggers". (The Blogosphere is so confusing.) It sounds sexy though. It was in a story headlined ' Gender May Sink Judy: Expert ', where University of Winnipeg poli-sci prof Shannon Sampert was quoted arguing that Judy Wasylycia-Leis had a built-in excuse for losing the mayoral election (if she does)---she's a woman and society has got it in for women in polit...

Bwahahahaha. Monday, July 12, 2010 The Canadian Museum for Human Rights tells Wpg taxman "Talk to the Hand" Tut, tut, tut.... what have we here? We should have expected this from Winnipeg's biggest panhandler, millionaire moocher Gail Asper. Actually, in fact, we did. Which is why we checked. Her pet project, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, has stiffed the City of Winnipeg for $360,000 in property taxes. Eleven weeks later... Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION City taxes hover over museum Unexpected bill challenges institution's bottom line By: Mia Rabson Posted: 30/09/ 2010 (September 30, 2010) 1:00 AM | Comments: 81 OTTAWA -- A mounting city tax bill that could run into the millions the Canadian Museum for Human Rights didn't know it would have to pay is still causing headaches for the developing institution. According to both the museum's 2009-10 annual report and its corporate plan for 2008-2015 tabled in the Ho...