The Black Rod

Janice Lukes has to be fired from Winnipeg council's executive policy committee immediately. She was hand-picked by Mayor Brian Bowman to sit on EPC and to chair the city's influential public works committee.  We'll give him the benefit of the doubt that he didn't know what a mistake he was making. Winnipeg cannot have someone who openly breaks the law sit on the city's most powerful committee.  Especially now that we see how much of a Trojan Horse she is for the bike lobby, promoting, priorizing and spearheading major projects that benefit a tiny special interest group at the expense of the rest of taxpaying Winnipeggers. It was that allegiance to the bike lobby that caught her up. The Winnipeg Free Press recently published a story about a stretch of Pembina Highway leading to the University of Manitoba that bicyclists feel is unsafe. Stretch of Pembina has already proved deadly for cyclists By: Kristin Annable  It’s a no man’s land for cyclists. A ...

There's a great disconnect between the Winnipeg Free Press and the public. As the newspaper's circulation has melted away by the thousands, its owners have gradually abandoned the average citizen to align themselves with the rich and powerful. They don't stand up for the little guy anymore; they believe the little guy is standing in the way. They see their own readers as stupid, so consumed by their petty hardscrabble lives that they can't see the big picture and thus need the guidance of the Winnipeg Free Press to understand reality. Case in point---a column Saturday mocking the hoi polloi by veteran city hall reporter Bartley Kives which was titled: What do we want? Everything! Just don't raise our taxes http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/breakingnews/what-do-we-want-everything-138735589.html Kives compared Winnipeggers to spoiled children. He called them "impressionable if not outright clueless", people too dense to realize that ...

What's going on here? * The City starts fogging for mosquitoes in mid-June without the usual whining from the moonbats on and off council, and footdragging by hippy dippy city entomologist Taz Stuart. The spraying of malathion is aggressive and weekly. ** Mayor Sam Katz, the erstwhile champion of fighting mosquito infestations with briquettes, dragonflies, minnows, and assorted other Hogwart's magic methods, muses that the conditions to begin fogging are too restrictive and need to be changed. *** The City announces that wading pools and spray pads will stay open well into the Fall as long as it stays warm and children want to play. Nobody says we can't afford it. **** The City declares war on property owners who fail to repair derelict buildings that have peppered low-income neighbourhoods forever, acting as magnets for crackheads, arsonists and gangs. The goal is to eliminate 100 vacant and derelict buildings a year. A new law giving the c...

Five weeks ago, The Black Rod got an e-mail from a resident of Point Douglas. He was frustrated at getting nowhere with city officials as he tried to get information on the plans for the Disraeli Bridge reconstruction. Actually, "nowhere" would have been one step closer than he got. The stone wall on information was so thick he couldn't even get acknowledgement that anyone had heard his knock. "Can you help?" he wrote. "Give us a couple of days," we replied. We quickly determined this was a story that needed as wide exposure as possible. As many as 14 homes in Elmwood were threatened with expropriation and the elected "representatives" of Point Douglas and Elmwood were ducking all questions from residents of the area. Our correspondent had taken his story to the mainstream media, particularly the Winnipeg Free Press and CBC, and had been given the brush-off from the "professional journalists." No story here...

We fell for it hook, line and sinker. The Disraeli Bridge Deception is a textbook example of everything that's wrong with city hall in Winnipeg. But this is an election year, and Mayor Sam Katz may find it one doublecross too many for people to stomach. It was April, 2008, when city hall announced that the aging Disraeli Bridge needed to be replaced expeditiously. The bridge had reached the end of its lifespan, we were told, and it was literally beginning to fall apart. But, in keeping with the modern mode of democracy, the public would be consulted about its preferences in a new bridge. So a series of public meetings were held where taxpayers could give their opinions on three bridge proposals which were variations of a four-lane refurbished Disraeli bridge with a new bicycle lane and a pedestrian walkway or two. The best-received, carrying a cost of $140 million, was duly announced. Twenty months later, City Hall is signing contracts for two bridges instead of on...