The Black Rod

Let's play charades.  We'll start. Four  words. Washing hands. Wringing.  Washing.  Soap. Dirty hands. Dirty. Okay, next word. Stripper pole. Pole. Pole...ish. No.  Start over.  Vote.  Voting.  Ballot. Oh, Pole-itics. Next word. Here. Now. Everywhere?   Map. Man. Manitoba! Dirtiest Politician in Manitoba! GREG SELINGER!!!! Do we win?   No. With Greg Selinger, everbody loses. In less than a week,  the Dipper Follies has become the best show in town, with everyone glued to their radio and television sets for the latest twist and turn. What melodrama!   Five dissident MLA's.  Careers on the line. Stare-downs. Ultimatums. Veilled threats of retaliation.  A resignation expected yesterday, today, tomorrow. Like Scandal, the TV show? No, more like NDP Friends, with Stan Struthers in the Joey role.   The dissidents are called the Rebel Five i...

Reporters recently went gaga over the story of an activist who brought a live chicken to Winnipeg City Hall. A delegation showed up to pitch the joys of raising chickens in the city. One of them pulled a live chicken out of a bag. Security was called to get the fowl out. That's the kind of story that only comes along once in a lifetime. Of course, it was covered by every news outlet in the city. The story left everyone laughing. Everyone who isn't Brian Pallister, the newly minted leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Manitoba. In one minute, that chicken created more excitement than Pallister has managed in the six months since he announced his bid to be party leader. In the week before the current session of the Manitoba Legislature got underway, Pallister had two opportunities to create some buzz. He was the guest speaker at a Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce breakfast, surely a friendly audience. News coverage: zero. The nex...

In politics, the only thing better than winning is winning so decisively you can rub your opponent's nose in it. Following the crash-and-burn campaign conducted by the Manitoba Conservatives in the last provincial election, Tory honkers are redder than Rudolph's from being rubbed in the dirt so much. One of the chief architects of the crushing defeat handed to the PC Party is the NDP's campaign director Michael Balagus. He was in Vancouver last month taking another victory lap at the expense of the hapless, helpless and hopeless Conservatives. The scene was the annual convention of the British Columbia NDP. Balagus was on a panel discussing tactics, strategies and innovation that he and two other campaign organizers across the country used to win elections. Balagus got to tell the story of how the NDP used their greatest asset---Conservative Party leader Hugh McFadyen---to turn almost sure defeat into their fourth victory in a row. We now know that for months b...

The sun is shining on Winnipeg today in more ways than one as we announce the recipient of the coveted The Black Rod Newsmaker of the Year Award for 2011. It wasn't even close. He was a shoo-in. The man of the hour. If we had a laurel wreath we would crown him with it. Mark Chipman. He brought the Winnipeg Jets back. You don't need to say another word. He's 50; he's co-owner of True North Sports and Entertainment; he's got a degree in economics and worked as a lawyer. Blah blah blah. Who cares? He brought the Jets back. Now there's an accomplishment. It's like Prometheus bringing Man fire. Or Dr. Frankenstein seeing his creation twitch and breathe for the first time. "It's alive! It's alive!" For the return of the Jets has brought life back to Winnipeg. Life and sunshine. And song. And confidence. And hope. Can love be far behind? Chipman did it, and he did it without massive government subsidy or a massive ego...

They say a chicken with its head cut off can run the length of a football field. Which brings us to the depressing news that former MP Brian Pallister is again musing about running to be leader of the Manitoba Progressive Conservative Party. Ugh. What a disturbing sight. And yet, how apropos. Reach into the political graveyard for a someone to lead a party headed directly there. Obviously some people haven't yet realized that the Tory Party is dead. We don't say that rhetorically. We mean dead. Devoid of life. With no future---even if it continues to lurch forward for months or even years. After all, the Liberal Party of Manitoba continued to exist as a zombie party for almost 20 years until all that was left in 2011 was a disembodied head which just keeps rolling along. The backroom geniuses who brought you Hugh McFadyen and the election debacle of '11 think the Party can be revived with a leadership convention. If you can graft a new head on the robust...

http://blackrod.blogspot.com/2011/10/spilling-beans-on-selinger-where-he.html Nobody knows a man better than his best friend. So, for an understanding of the character of the man elected to be the Premier of Manitoba , we turn to a most reliable source, a person who calls Greg Selinger his mentor and his close friend for over 35 years. Tom Simms is executive director of the Community Education Development Association (CEDA), one of those made-up leftwing groups whose only purpose in the community is to promote the leftwing agenda of the regional leftwing political party. Oh, and it gets its funding from the government and any do-gooder organization, like the United Way, that it can tap into. Shortly after the NDP took office and Selinger was installed as Manitoba's Finance Minister, Simms gave an extremely unguarded interview to an American fellow traveller. (That's not a euphemism; he says in his preamble he was literally travelling across Canada doing interview...

It didn't take long for Manitobans to discover what a vile human being they elected as Premier of the province. Hugh McFadyen, the hapless leader of the soundly trounced Conservative Party, had just begun his concession speech. He was thanking his "team" for running a great campaign, when, to everyone's astonishment, Premier-elect Greg Selinger tromped into NDP election headquarters to deliver his victory speech. The television stations immediately cut away from McFadyen to focus on Selinger. But the act of deliberately disrespecting a Party leader on election night was so blatant it shocked the election night hosts on every channel. Sun TV's Krista Erickson and Charles Adler were visibly stunned at what they were seeing. Guest pundit Tom Brodbeck labelled it "classless." On CBC, host Janet Stewart was noticeably upset and at a loss for words to describe the unprecedented slight to McFadyen. Her co-host, poli-sci prof Paul Thomas laun...

Well? How was it? How was what? The election, of course. But, but, but....isn't election day, like, 10 days from now? Nope. Voting started yesterday (Sept. 24) and continues non-stop, except for one break of 48 hours, until Oct. 4. That means you can vote for 8 out of the next 10 days. The election is officially over, dude. Then, who's going to win? Have you noticed that this is the first election since the cavemen that there was no poll of voter preferences? So The Black Rod did its own polling and discovered that the election is neck-and-neck between Don't Vote and Spoil Your Ballot. It hardly matters, because the winner will be the NDP---either the NDP under Greg Selinger or the NDP 2.0 under Hugh McFadyen. The Conservative Party decided to sit this one out. Selinger is the dirtiest politician in Manitoba, linked to every scandal in the past 12 years from the NDP election fraud in 1999 to the Crocus ponzi scheme to the phony deficit figures released just before the ele...

So the NDP got caught cheating in the provincial election. Gee, what else is new? When grinning Greg Selinger, Manitoba's dirtiest politician, joined Winnipeg Jets co-owner Mark Chipman to announce a mentoring program for high school students, it wasn't the first time the NDP broke the law during this campaign. And it wasn't an accident. Manitoba's Election Financing Act prohibits governments from publishing or advertising any information about its programs or activities starting 90 days before an election. The Winnipeg Jets/mentoring breach only made the news because Liberal leader Jon Gerrard officially complained to Elections Manitoba. But if the mainstream media had done their research, they would have known that Local Government Minister Ron Lemieux is already being investigated for breaking the same law in mid-August. Lemieux handed a government cheque for $15,000 to the Landmark Friendship Festival for organizers to buy new playground equipmen...