The Black Rod

Do you smell another city audit coming? This bombshell has been ticking away on the Internet for more than a week. Jul 4, 2013, 3:56 AM wait until the final cost overruns become public....yowza....upwards of 20%....still dealing with screw ups like having to go back and insulate a two season mechanical system. We're not going to identify the source other than to say its A Person In A Position To Know. The official price of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers stadium is $190 million. Add a 20 percent cost overrun ($38 million) and you have a stadium that's costing almost DOUBLE what was originally proposed to city taxpayers . But, but, but...wasn't the stadium built at a fixed price, with all overruns the responsibility of the contractor?  Phil Sheegl, chairman of BBB Stadium Inc. (Blue Bombers-Bisons), the entity that built the stadium, says so. http://forums.bluebombers.com/index.php?topic=32791.0 But The Person In A Position To Know says not.  .....

Imagine this... A passenger on a Winnipeg Transit bus captures a hate crime on video with his cell phone. Local television stations get wind of what he's got and turn the video into a news story. But... Their story is all about how tough it is being Ralph Kramden in Winnipeg.  All the racism in the video is deliberately excised. Well, you don't need to imagine. That's exactly what happened, with CBC and Global News this Friday.  T hese "professional" journalists decided to whitewash the story for general consumption.   And they would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for citizen journalist Marty Gold, of The Great Canadian Talk Show, who decided to watch the video (posted on Youtube) for himself and was floored by what he saw. He started to spread the word. The video depicts the disruption caused on a Corydon bus in downtown Winnipeg in the middle of a June afternoon by two foul-mouthed men who had been harassing a girl to the po...

The CBC stumbled across a great story the other day, but didn't recognize what they found and didn't know what to do with it. A perky reporter burbled on about how some group called Economic Development Winnipeg had created a series of videos  promoting the city's advantages to entice companies to start doing business in the city. There was one problem, though, said the reporter. "The average citizen, they're not high on the city — and I have no idea why" she was told by a rep for a CEO recruitment company. Some group wants to lure businessmen to move to Winnipeg while the people who live in Winnipeg think the place is a dump.  Why, you ask? Well, why don't you start with the joy of living in the murder capital of the country, the gang capital, the province with the lowest after-tax income in the country and the highest taxes west of Quebec, a city with the most incompetent city council in the country, a downtown overrun with panhand...

With an angry mob of outraged citizens howling for her head, city manager Gail Stephens is fleeing the City of Victoria for refuge in Winnipeg. Stephens, who, funnily enough, was once Winnipeg's first chief administrative officer, will start a job with the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in August. She'll be a perfect fit. Back in Victoria, she's accused of misleading Victoria city council in 2011 by deliberately lowballing the cost of a contentious bridge project --- just ahead of a civic election in which the bridge replacement was a big issue for many voters. It wasn't until March of this year that a memo produced in answer to a freedom of information request revealed that, two months before Stephens declared the project was "on budget", city officials knew the real cost of the replacement bridge would be millions of dollars higher than the $77 million budget. A citizens watchdog group has called for an independent ...

The NDP lemmings have followed their leader off the cliff.   They pinched their noses tight, swallowed their anti-emetic pills and voted for the dirtiest politician in Manitoba, and now they're paying the price. He's taken them past the point of no return and even the most stalwart supporters of the Party are wondering "why"? Greg Selinger hasn't only watched his personal popularity plummet, he's taken the NDP with him to the bottom.  A Probe Research poll shows the NDP support has collapsed to a root cellar low of 28 percent  compared to the Opposition's 46 percent; and  that's not even half the story . Outside Winnipeg,  the NDP are dead meat, garnering barely 18 percent of decided voters . Given the 3 percent margin of error in the poll, the NDP are tied with, if not below, the Liberal Party (16 percent), which hasn't been a viable political force in Manitoba since the Swinging Sixties. *  NDP support is far behind the Conservati...