The Black Rod

D espite ISP problems that have hobbled us for weeks, we can't let the year go by without our annual naming of the Newsmaker of the Year.   While reviewing the news stories of 2014, we were surprised how many carried the fingerprints of this man. Although credited with each story in the press, it's only when you look at the body of his work over the year that you recognize what a powerful eminence grise he actually was, his influence spanning from city hall, to the Legislature, to the halls of academe to Parliament Hill.   We proudly honour as The Black Rod Newsmaker of 2014 -- Colin Craig, Prairie director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.   Just look at the headlines:   * RCMP launch criminal investigation of fishy contracts handed out during Sam Katz's term of office. * Poof! Red River College's head honcho disappears like a thief in the night. Administrators discover the spiffy marble counter tops in her home came from a multi-...

The NDP-backed candidate for mayor, Judy Wasylycia-Leis, has broken election law by accepting donations from a union. Two days ago the Winnipeg firefighters union announced it was endorsing her for mayor. But yesterday that endorsement exploded in her face when another mayoral election candidate, Robert Falcon-Ouellette, started asking questions about the extent of the union's support. Union boss Alex Forrest sneered "It's a stupid complaint."  He then told the Winnipeg Free Press that the signs carried and t-shirts promoting Wasylycia-Leis by his members "were all invoiced to her campaign."      Reporter Aldo Santin got confirmation from the Wasylycia-Leis campaign that the items will be a reported campaign expense. That's what's known in police circles as "a confession." The city bylaw governing municipal elections, passed under orders by the provincial NDP government, states categorically: Prohibited contr...

It's hard to say who should be more embarrassed by the latest mayoral election poll --- the pollsters, the press, or the funders?   The first crowd-sourced election poll in Canada turned out to be such a bust that the pollsters had to invent something new to give its funders to justify taking their money. Winnipeg's Probe Research Inc. issued a poll grading the support of the candidates for mayor, but with a 29 percent undecided response, the poll was less reliable than your daily horoscope. Ten percent undecided would be large.  Twenty percent would be huge.  But almost 30 percent is a joke, a bad joke that invalidates the alleged results. In a desperate move to keep some credibility, Probe Research invented a momentum index, claiming to measure which candidates are moving up in public opinion and which down.  When was the last time you heard of something like this?  Hint: NEVER. But they had to deliver something to the pri...

When it comes to electing a mayor, nothing says a city is dynamic, bold, and thriving like a stara baba collecting an old-age pension. This week Judy Wasylycia-Leis, 63 in August,  announced her second run at the mayor's job. She still has zero experience at City Hall, still marches to the orders of the NDP, collects two retirement pensions and would be getting a third, her old age security cheque, if Mayor. Do you feel the excitement, yet? Despite getting trounced by Sam Katz in the mayoral election four years ago, JWL thinks her campaign the second time around needs only minor tinkering.  Most specifically, she doesn't have to pretend to be apologetic for promising higher taxes. Katz handily defeated JWL by at least paying lip service to protecting seniors and low-income homeowners from her promised tax hikes. Of course, it turns out he was either lying or ..., well, lying, because the first thing he did after re-election was sta...

Brian Bowman is a true son of his generation. Without a lick of experience at City Hall, this Gen X-er believes he should start at the top, as Mayor. To compensate for knowing nothing about the job he wants, he says he will provide the city with "leadership."   Now, ordinarily this would be greeted with oohs and ahhs from an electorate that's seen the city reel from one scandal to another under Mayor Sam Katz and those councillors who blindly support him on executive policy committee. But seeing as how all the mayoral candidates will likely play the leadership card, how does Bowman stand out? Tuesday morning, before filing his papers to run for mayor, 42-year-old Bowman, a lawyer, showed up on Charles Adler's morning talk show where he expanded on his idea of leadership.  One word. Vision. Yep, Bowman is running on the vision thing.   'Vision' is the code word among the Ivory Tower elite for the rich man's burde...

Waiter, a double serving of crow for the Winnipeg Free Press table, please. The first week of the new year isn't even over and already the corrections are piling up and apologies flying over at the Free Press. Facts wrong? Political bias? Yep, just business as usual. First, there was the public face-plant by columnist Lindor Reynolds whose front-page story about the closing of a family-run fabric store named the wrong store throughout the story. So sorry; heh, heh, we all make mistakes; now quit calling me, she told readers the next day. And then there was the story by Ottawa reporter Mia Rabson which revealed that the series of Conservative Party-bashing stories she'd written throughout 2010 were w-r-o-n-g wrong. Full-out, completely wrong. Vaccine centre had quiet death -- Bidders not told of decision for six months -- Timing rules out local politics as factor By: Mia Rabson Posted: 5/01/2011 1:00 AM OTTAWA -- Canada's chief pub...

Sam Katz shrugged off everything the NDP and their press allies could toss at him and still trounced their annointed candidate for mayor, Judy Wasylycia-Leis. The NDP machine pulled out all the stops . They managed to boost the anti-Katz vote by almost 50 percent from the 2006 election--- only to see Katz re-elected by a double-digit margin (55 percent of the vote compared to 43 percent for his challenger). In fact, JustJudy's 90,000 vote total was less than Katz garnered in the last election (104,000) and less even than he received when he was first elected mayor in 2004 (99,000). The Winnipeg Free Press, the biggest cheerleader for Judy W-L, was forced to concede "It might even be his strongest mandate ever." And that was despite running the worst campaign imaginable . Katz bolted out of the starting block with a bold declaration that crime and public safety were going to be the cornerstones of his run for reelection. “This election needs to be about ...

They just can't help themselves. They've become so used to getting away with injecting their political bias into their reporting that they don't even try to hide it anymore. Mary Agnes Welch is a reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press and a member of their "crack" election team providing (what they claim is) "Winnipeg's most comprehensive in-depth civic election coverage". And, until late Thursday afternoon, she was also a member in good standing of the Winnipeg Citizen's Coalition Facebook group. You know, the left-wing bunch created in 2008 to defeat Sam Katz and any councillor who supports him. To prove the adage of the Internet Age, "everybody knows something", a sharp-eyed reader of the Free Press called Welch out in the comments to one of her recent stories, the one telling how a Free Press commissioned poll found that Judy Alphabet's fight-poverty-not-criminals plan is wildly popular with the public. The spin ...

They just can't help themselves. And that's why their influence shrivels more and more each passing year. The mainstream media---in this case the hapless Winnipeg Free Press and the CBC ---are so anxious to see Sam Katz defeated as mayor, and their own bias on taxes adopted as policy, that they're madly spinning the latest poll results to create a version of the truth that satisfies their fantasies. That in itself is bizarre since the poll, conducted on their behalf by Leger Marketing, is already so slanted it wouldn't pass a first year statistics class. The poll finds that Sam Katz is the voters' preferred candidate to be mayor by 6 percentage points, 38 to 32 for his chief opponent Judy Wasylycia-Leis. And yet the Winnipeg Free Press reported the results this way: "Mayor Sam Katz has a six-point lead on Judy Wasylycia-Leis as Winnipeg's mayoral race enters the home stretch, but a more committed core of support for the challenger suggest...