The Black Rod

Well? How was it? How was what? The election, of course. But, but, but....isn't election day, like, 10 days from now? Nope. Voting started yesterday (Sept. 24) and continues non-stop, except for one break of 48 hours, until Oct. 4. That means you can vote for 8 out of the next 10 days. The election is officially over, dude. Then, who's going to win? Have you noticed that this is the first election since the cavemen that there was no poll of voter preferences? So The Black Rod did its own polling and discovered that the election is neck-and-neck between Don't Vote and Spoil Your Ballot. It hardly matters, because the winner will be the NDP---either the NDP under Greg Selinger or the NDP 2.0 under Hugh McFadyen. The Conservative Party decided to sit this one out. Selinger is the dirtiest politician in Manitoba, linked to every scandal in the past 12 years from the NDP election fraud in 1999 to the Crocus ponzi scheme to the phony deficit figures released just before the ele...

So the NDP got caught cheating in the provincial election. Gee, what else is new? When grinning Greg Selinger, Manitoba's dirtiest politician, joined Winnipeg Jets co-owner Mark Chipman to announce a mentoring program for high school students, it wasn't the first time the NDP broke the law during this campaign. And it wasn't an accident. Manitoba's Election Financing Act prohibits governments from publishing or advertising any information about its programs or activities starting 90 days before an election. The Winnipeg Jets/mentoring breach only made the news because Liberal leader Jon Gerrard officially complained to Elections Manitoba. But if the mainstream media had done their research, they would have known that Local Government Minister Ron Lemieux is already being investigated for breaking the same law in mid-August. Lemieux handed a government cheque for $15,000 to the Landmark Friendship Festival for organizers to buy new playground equipmen...

Bob Wilson's last hope of exoneration lies with a memory stirred up by The Black Rod. The former MLA has been fighting for 30 years to clear his name after being convicted on a drug-smuggling conspiracy rap that sent him to prison for 7 years. Last January we told Wilson's story on the heels of the arrest of Ian (Whitey) Macdonald, Wilson's former friend and the kingpin of the pot smuggling ring that brought Wilson to the attention of the RCMP. http://blackrod.blogspot.com/2011/01/bob-wilson-moment-in-sun.html Before he could be extradicted to Manitoba, Macdonald managed to break out of jail in Florida, leaving Wilson to take the fall. Thirty years later he was tracked down, arrested and returned to Winnipeg on the original drug charges. We said then that elements of the Manitoba Justice department weren't happy to see him surface because it put them in an uncomfortable position regarding Wilson's claim that he was innocent and wrongly convicted. ...

In less than a week, the election forecast for the NDP has turned from sunny and mild to unsettled with a chance of revulsion. It's getting cooler. The winds have shifted. Radar is picking up clouds on the horizon. Is there a storm coming? Or will it just blow over? It's too soon to tell. But, unexpectedly, a theme is developing within the election campaign--- can you trust the NDP? And in the eye of the growing tempest is unelected Premier Greg Selinger, the dirtiest politician in Manitoba, whose re-election campaign boils down to scaring voters with attack ads that paint Conservative leader Hugh McFadyen as the Boogieman. No lie is too great to throw at McFadyen, but it's those very lies that are backfiring in the face of the NDP. It started last Saturday with a letter to the editor of the Winnipeg Free Press from Len Bateman, the former chairman of Manitoba Hydro. Selinger has consistently declared that the Conservatives have a secret plan to privati...

Ten days into the Manitoba election campaign, neither party can claim to have momentum. But Conservative Party leader Hugh McFadyen has drawn first blood. Or, more accurately, Winnipeg Sun columnist Tom Brodbeck drew first blood and McFadyen is riding piggyback on Brodbeck's work. Still, when even NDP apologist Dan Lett has to admit, grudgingly and reluctantly, in the Winnipeg Free Press that he was wrong, and Brodbeck and McFadyen were right, it's time to call in the cut man. http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/columnists/muddying-the-waters-on-budgets-129865583.html It's too early to say if this is the game changer, but the NDP's phony deficit figures could turn into just the integrity issue that tips the election. Unelected Premier Greg Selinger thought he was being clever when he delayed officially calling the provincial election until after his government released the final accounting of the 2010-11 budget on Friday, Sept. 2. The public ac...

Whither Liberals? We've been asked why we don't write anything about the Liberal Party in our provincial election coverage. Oh, c'mon. The what? There hasn't been a viable Liberal Party in Manitoba since the Swinging Sixties (that's more than FORTY YEARS AGO), and that includes the wacko election of 1988 when it became the official opposition under Sharon Carstairs with 20 MLA's, most of whom were shocked to find they had actually won their seat. One winner wanted to know if becoming an MLA meant he had to quit his job at Consumer Distributing. The Liberals haven't elected enough members to the Manitoba Legislature to rank as an official party since 1995---that's merely 16 years ago. They should run as the Ghost of the Liberal Party. In the last provincial election they got a whopping 12 percent of the popular vote. The news media continues to pretend there is a Liberal Party in Manitoba because the don't want to admit the truth. ...

The election has been called. The battle lines are drawn. It's 'the world's worst campaign' vs 'the world's worst campaigner.' Heaven help us. The Manitoba NDP under unelected Premier Greg Selinger is running a Seinfeld campaign--- it's about nothing. Selinger revealed the five priorities of the NDP campaign on Tuesday: improving health care, expanding jobs, education and training opportunities, keeping living costs affordable, making communities safer, and maintaining Manitoba Hydro as a publicly owned entity. This in direct contrast with the campaign being run by the Progressive Conservative Party under leader Hugh McFadyen, which promises improved health care; more jobs, education and training; keeping the cost of living low; making communities safer; and keeping Manitoba Hydro a public utility. Of course the NDP can't run on their record. They're running from their record. What would they campaign on? Eliminating hallway...

Politicians are always crying crocodile tears over voter cynicism, but the next time one does slap him upside the head and direct him (or her) to the spectacle we saw Thursday here in Manitoba. In the only have-not province in Western Canada, in a province that's going in the hole to the tune of almost half a billion dollars a year in deficit spending, in the highest taxed province west of Quebec, two politicians running for election were trying to outdo each other with new multi-million dollar spending promises. Its hard to say who the winner was. The loser was easy to identify---you and us. Hugh McFadyen, leader of the NDP (Added) Party (formerly known as the Progressive Conservative Party before McFadyen abandoned all conservative principles), rolled out the most expensive proposal du jour. He promised to extend the $100 a month child allowance per kid past the federal cut-off age of 12. At 90,000 eligible children in Manitoba, that would cost $9 millio...

CBC Manitoba, in collaboration with the NDP, tried a drive-by smear of the Conservatives Wednesday but wound up only proving that the New Democrats are the party of prudes. CBC "reporter" Sean Kavanaugh engaged in the worst form of "gotcha" journalism on a day when the Conservatives made real news at the release of their economic platform . They announced they've abandoned two decades of balanced budget prudence to adopt the NDP program of running deficits for years in a province that already has the second-lowest unemployment rate in the country. The NDP plans four years of huge deficits; the Conservatives have doubled that, promising eight years. The CBC "scoop"? The Conservatives played a catchy dance-inducing No. 1 hit song at a pre-election rally earlier in the week. Yep. That's it. That's what counts as "journalism" at the taxpayer-funded CBC. They hyped the story by declaring the Conservatives were...