The Black Rod

The Walking Dead is a popular television show about small groups of people trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world overrun with zombies. The Walking Dead is also the story of the Manitoba Progressive Conservatives, a zombie political party pretending it's alive in a world overrun by the NDP following an apocalyptic election. You know how this plays out. The people will be okay in the long run. The zombies? They're dead already, they just don't know it. The Tory walking dead had a ghoulish meeting this weekend to rehash the debacle known as the last provincial election. Everyone with anything to do with their disastrous campaign met to discuss what went wrong and what went -- well, wrong. Because nothing went right. But, wouldn't you know it, that's not how the people behind the campaign see it. They've slapped on Hugh McFadyen's crazy happy-face, the one he wore thoughout the march off the cliff, and they've proclaimed the election...

For a brief moment, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights dropped its public mask and revealed its true agenda. The national moneypit's biggest shill, CEO Stuart Murray, travels the country to put a happy face on the private Holocaust museum that was foisted on the public as the first "national museum" built in 40 years. Its backers, the Asper Family, realized they couldn't afford it without a pipeline into the public purse, so they tweaked the idea by folding the concrete Holocaust museum into a vague, undefined promotion of "human rights" in order to win a "national" patina for the project. Murray still can't exactly define what the $310 million CMHR will be, other than it will have two permanent exhibits---one for the Holocaust and the other for Canada's alleged mistreatment of its natives. Here's how a professor described the museum's mandate in a lecture at the Fort Garry Hotel in October: "Murray emphasize...

So you're the police chief in Murderpeg. Four years after you got the job, the city is setting a record in the number of homicides, StatsCan has named us the most violent city in Canada , and Pollyanna the Mayor is fighting with the national airline that says downtown is too dangerous to bunk its crews overnight. The murder rate would be double if it wasn't for the skill of the medical professionals who keep saving the lives of the daily victim of a shooting or stabbing. The Rock Machine is fighting the Hell's Angels while street gangs have overrun half the city. And a spree killer is still on the loose a year after he gunned down one man outside a house, one man inside a house and gut-shot a teenaged girl on the street for no reason except to see her die. (She lived.) Wouldn't you know it, the uppity politicians and public started asking what you were going to do about it. Apparently a helicopter that keeps communities awake half the night isn't en...

More than a year ago, in a blog post, retired Deputy Chief Menno Zacharias ripped back the curtain from some of the most secret inner workings of the Winnipeg Police Service. What he wrote was astonishing---and never more relevant than today, on the heels of Police Chief Keith McCaskill's much anticipated crime strategy. Perhaps shocked at breaching the blue code of silence, Zacharias later refused to give more details and never returned to the point despite our best prodding. The mainstream media ignored his comments entirely. To put his observations in context you need to know that it's been 15 years since New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his hand-picked police commissioner Bill Bratton wrote the book on fighting crime in the big city. Proving that their method wasn't a fluke, Bratton later moved right across the country to Los Angeles and recreated his success in reducing the crime rate by phenomenal amounts. Giuliani and Bratton designed ...

They say a chicken with its head cut off can run the length of a football field. Which brings us to the depressing news that former MP Brian Pallister is again musing about running to be leader of the Manitoba Progressive Conservative Party. Ugh. What a disturbing sight. And yet, how apropos. Reach into the political graveyard for a someone to lead a party headed directly there. Obviously some people haven't yet realized that the Tory Party is dead. We don't say that rhetorically. We mean dead. Devoid of life. With no future---even if it continues to lurch forward for months or even years. After all, the Liberal Party of Manitoba continued to exist as a zombie party for almost 20 years until all that was left in 2011 was a disembodied head which just keeps rolling along. The backroom geniuses who brought you Hugh McFadyen and the election debacle of '11 think the Party can be revived with a leadership convention. If you can graft a new head on the robust...