The Black Rod

Winnipeg Mayor Sam Katz had to do some big-time fudging of the facts to sell his runaway property taxes to the public. His latest budget calls for a 3.87 percent increase in taxes, and a promise to keep raising taxes for the indefinite future. So what, says Katz, the City of Winnipeg still has the lowest municipal property taxes among major Canadian cities. In fact, those are the exact words used in a wraparound Winnipeg Budget supplement carried by all the city's weekly newspapers, just immediately above a photo of Mayor Sam grinning from ear to ear, and beside a bar graph allegedly comparing taxes in Canada's major cities. You will note we used the word 'allegedly'. Memo to the Mayor: did you really think we wouldn't check? The Mayor's PR blitz cites the source of the comparative taxes paid in cities from coast to coast as "City of Calgary 2011 Residential Property Taxes & Utility Charges Survey", released Novem...

You don't say. Or should that be, you better not say, White Boy . Mia Rabson, the Ottawa reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press, writes that poking fun at the faux hunger striker Chief Theresa Spence "plays into the stereotypes and racism that underlie much of the struggle First Nations have had in this country for the past 140 years." Oh, and the taunts "encourage the racist thinking that has reared its ugly head in spade since Idle No More and Spence started gaining national attention." Rabson and the rest of the MSM crowd are big on smearing people with the label "racist" to silence them . Her colleague Lindor Reynolds went to Morris, Manitoba, to prove her liberal bona fides by attacking the editor of a local newspaper who gave a thumbs down to native "leaders" who make terrorist threats. Free speech be damned. The "professional journalists" have spoken. And while they speak, they sure don'...

Winnipeg city councillor Paula Havixbeck has had a target on her back since October. So her vindictive removal from the mayor's coveted executive policy committee came as no real surprise. It had just been a question of when. October, that's when the rookie councillor did the unthinkable. She stood up to council's bully twins--Mayor Sam Katz and his closest friend city CAO Phil Sheegl. Katz and Sheegl were then furiously trying to cover-up the scandal of how the company owned by Katz's business partner and other close pal Sandy Shindleman wound up with $14 million in city contracts to build four new firehalls without anybody on council knowing about it. "What's the big deal? Everybody knew," was Katz's first try to put the fire out. Everybody did know the firehalls were being built, but the name of the contractor was kept a deep, dark secret by then-deputy Fire Chief Reid Douglas, who had inexplicably gone behind counc...