The Black Rod

Corporate documents from Manitoba demanded by a federal government agency have turned up missing. Without them, there's no way to prove that a shadowy committee which oversees the spending of tens of thousands of dollars from Red River College was created legally. If those documents can't be found or it turns out they were destroyed, hidden or never existed , high-level executives and former executives of Red River College could face charges which carry a maximum penalty of six months in jail and/or a fine of $5000. This includes the college lawyer, a former vice-president and the Dean of Business. A whistleblower tried to warn Colleges Minister Erin Selby last year that the shady committee was not legitimate and that $275,000 of college money was at risk, only to receive a form letter telling him to take his complaint somewhere else. Once it was clear the minister intended to do nothing about the bogus committee, the whistleblower was dis...

When it comes to Manitoba Hydro, the Public Utilities Board has set off more distress signals than the Titanic, with less response. Hydro has been in the news all week after the PUB granted the utility a two percent rate hike effective April 1st. Hydro says it needs the money to forestall large losses as a result of the warm winter just past. The mainstream media has parroted this excuse. Nobody has pointed out the strange coincidence that a rate hike denied Hydro just in January by the PUB was reinstated, with an extra 1 percent top up, exactly one day after the chairman of the oversight body retired and a new chairman, appointed by the NDP government, took his place . If this means what it appears to mean , it's bad news all around for Manitoba ratepayers since the MSM seems unwilling or unable to report the facts about Hydro. The Winnipeg Free Press is reporting on its front page today that Mayor Sam Katz bought season tickets to the W...

Talk about a rush to judgement ... In a case with no witnesses, no motive, no murder weapon and, if what was presented in court is any guide, NO EVIDENCE AT ALL, the RCMP considered the murder of Beverley Rowbotham solved within 3 weeks. Their conclusion: the husband done it because we can't find anyone else to pin it on and we got other stuff to do. ( See Part One - There must be a public inquiry into the bungled trial of Mark Stobbe http://blackrod.blogspot.ca/2012/03/there-must-be-public-inquiry-into.html ) Now we'll be the first to say that police always know more than they tell the public, and that its a losing bet to armchair quarterback a police investigation on the basis of years of CSI, Criminal Minds and Law-and-Order (all versions). But when they try to send a man to prison for the rest of his life based on a case so thin that it's invisible to the naked eye, the onus reverses and t...

A botched murder investigation. Check A prime suspect painted with a bullseye by police afflicted with tunnel vision. Check A dubious eyewitness who identifies the suspect with certainty at trial. Check An overzealous prosecutor who would go to any length to get a conviction. Check Sound familiar? The prosecution of Mark Stobbe follows the blueprint for a wrongful conviction exactly as writ large in a series of public inquiries in Manitoba in recent years. The only difference is that in those inquiries (Sophonow, Driskell, Unger) the juries convicted the accused on the evidence presented to them, and it was the NDP government that had to concoct reasons, such as those above, to toss the guilty verdicts, hold staged show trials to exonerate the convicted men on bogus grounds, and pay millions in compensation (except for a surprised Kyle Unger who got nothing.) In the case of Mark Stobbe, the egregious behaviour of police and prosecuto...

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...

We know, at last, why Manitoba Hydro launched its balls-to-the-wall, take-no-prisoners assault on Miss Whistle, their former consultant who filed a Whistleblower complaint over Hydro mismanagement. The answer slipped out in the latest hearings of the Public Utilities Board into Hydro's risk management practices. It turns out the Hydro Whistleblower... * was standing up for the Manitoba ratepayer. * said Manitobans were being overcharged * said Hydro was deliberately overestimating the chance of a record drought in order to dupe the PUB into approving the higher-than-needed rates, and *said Hydro could make more money with less risk without embarking on a decade-long spending orgy on new dams to fulfill long-term contracts to sell power to the U.S. In short, she was saying everything Manitoba Hydro didn't want you to hear. The PUB counsel was questioning Dr. Atif Kuburski, one of two economists from McMaster Unversity hired to look at Hydro's oper...