No sooner had we posted a commemoration of the first decade of The Black Rod than we got a tip that one of our featured players had popped up on the radar again. Lesley Hughes is the infamous Liberal party candidate who was kicked off the party slate in 2008 when she got caught up in a firestorm over something she wrote years earlier that critics attacked as a blatantly anti-semitic remark. It was The Black Rod that first publicized her comment, which almost instantly took on a life of its own and within 24 hours immolated her fledging political career. For the record, here's the relevant segment of what Lesley Hughes wrote in a column titled Get The Truth written for community newspapers in Winnipeg in 2002. "Many official sources are claiming to have warned the American intelligence community, which spends $30 billion a year gathering information, about the attacks on the twin towers on that heartbreaking day. German Intelligence (BND) claims to have warned the ...
The origin of the Usher of the Black Rod goes back to early fourteenth century England . Today, with no royal duties to perform, the Usher knocks on the doors of the House of Commons with the Black Rod at the start of Parliament to summon the members. The rod is a symbol for the authority of debate in the upper house. We of The Black Rod adopted the symbol to knock some sense and the right questions into the heads of Legislators, pundits, and other opinion makers.