The Black Rod

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...

We were reading the weekend newspaper and having a good laugh when--bam--- we realized we weren't reading the Saturday Funnies, we were reading a special supplement on Treaties. How were we to know?  They're both equally nonsensical, illogical and downright laughable. The supplement was called Our Past Our Future and was apparently put out by the Treaty Relations Commission of Manitoba. a "neutral body" with the mandate of encouraging discussion and facilitating public understanding of Treaties.  Or, in layman's terms, government propaganda. Apparently the way to start a discussion about Treaties, given you only have 32 pages to play with, is NOT to print the treaties that apply in Manitoba.  That's a real kneeslapper.  You might even think  that's a deliberate attempt to keep people from reading for themselves what's in the treaties.  Isn't that a laugh? The next step is to rewrite history.  That's always fun, isn't it? What i...

Last week was Freedom To Read Week in Canada, and we were, you guessed it, reading---the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy. Just for a break, someone decided to clear the email. What he discovered was more shocking than Anastasia Steele in bondage and begging for it 'rough'. It was a government press release on a ban to peat mining in provincial parks. Hardly heart-pounding stuff, you say. The last time we even thought of peat moss was when we bought a Venus Fly Trap for the office. Ever since the last provincial election, government news releases have read more like NDP promotional material than neutral information on government business. We've taken note of this politicization of the public service and for that reason we pay close attention to these releases, even one on peat moss. We not only read it, we read it to the very bottom, where we found this paragraph: "Because our peatlands are a carbon sink, they provide significant c...

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'...

  He wears feathers on his head and calls himself the Grand Chief. Meet Derek Nepinak who fancies himself as a playa on the national scene, what with the mainstream media fawning over him as he makes his, ahem, demands on the Prime Minister. Nepinak has been honing his schtick in Manitoba for over a year since being elected Big Chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs. You see, he had an idea. Indians have no money. You have money. So if he could get his hands on your money, that would solve the problem of Indians without money. See how simple it is? But how to extract more of your money? The answer lay in the word "extract", as in natural resources. Nepinak has been pushing the idea of something called resource revenue sharing. That's where mining companies, drilling companies, and others have to pay Indians whenever they invest millions of dollars of their own money to develop Canada's natural resources. Is it because of all...

Imagine this scenario... Mohammed and Muhammed go to Iran, a state that sponsors terrorism around the globe, and they loudly and publicly denounce Canada. Less than two months later, an organized group creates a diversion at the Winnipeg International Airport on one of the busiest travel days of the year, possibly allowing others to test the placement and reaction of security officers. This happens only days before Christmas Eve, the holiest time of the year in the Christian religion. Later, following the disruption at the airport, Mo-Hamed, an associate of Mohammed and Muhammed, informs the members of his organization he plans "an explosive delivery" to the headquarters of Manitoba Hydro, the company that provides electricity to the province--- most importantly, perhaps, to the furnaces that heat everyones' homes in the winter. It also happens to be the organization he's had a longstanding grievance against. He is stopped by sec...