The Black Rod

The Winnipeg Police force has managed to stay under the radar of the national news organizations for over three weeks now, but once their luck runs out the results will be incendiary. How Winnipeg police conduct a missing persons investigation into the disappearance of Christine Wood will become the test case for the recently announced Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women Inquiry.  Winnipeg will be the stand-in for all police departments across Canada in similar investigations. And so far, the example is not good. Here's where we would normally give the background to the case. The known facts.  Except that the "known facts" in the disappearance of Christine Wood keep changing from week to week. And the police have been no help in keeping the public informed. In fact, they're partly responsible for the confusion. Nevertheless, here's what we know culled from various news accounts. * 21-year-old Christine Wood was in Winnipeg with her parents to accompany a...

Can supporters of The Canadian Museum for Human Rights handle the truth?  * $80 million in debt with no hope of paying it off * begging the federal government to raise its $21.7 million annual allowance by at least 50 percent  to buy more time *  a report that seems to indicate the museum's fundraising arm can't collect $24 million, or almost one in four of the $151 million dollars the Friends of the CMHR boasts it has raised. Last week the CMHR announced what should have been good news ---it settled its tax bill with the City of Winnipeg.  The museum owed $2.7 million  for this year's property taxes, much much less than the $5-to-$8 million they expected their taxes to be. The federal government, which is ultimately on the hook for what's called "payments in lieu of taxes" for federal institutions like museums, paid the $2.7 million plus arrears of $6.7 million. It then put the total - $9.4M - on the CMHR's tab. The museum is already $70 million...