The Black Rod

Did you read that? The revelations by Garth Buchko, CEO of the Winnipeg Blue Gougers, in Thursday's Winnipeg Free Press were stunning, even as they sailed over the heads of news reporters and sports pundits alike. Equally stunning was the extent to which the newspaper went to avoid naming the people responsible for the food-and-beverage fiasco that's come to define the predatory attitude of the Winnipeg football club towards its fans. But let's start with the bombs dropped by Buchko: * the team is crippled by debt, and a hairsbreadth from bankruptcy * the board of directors has executed a silent coup , seizing total control of the football club and turning it into a quasi-private operation  * the harsh no-food, no-drink policy that treats all fans like chiselers was forced on the club by the need to pay off the onerous debt imposed the team by the provincial government as its alleged share of the cost of the new stadium Whew. ...

Even as month-old information is passed off as "news" by the Winnipeg Free Press, the biggest crime story in Winnipeg languishes untouched by the city's "professional" journalists. Crime reporters have been trying to put the latest outbreak of shootings and home invasions into context. CTV on Friday blamed it on a clash between two street gangs---MOB and Indian Posse. Trying to advance the story in Saturday's paper, FP reporter Mike McIntyre breathlessly wrote that "police and justice sources tell the Free Press the M.O.B. is no longer a united front and has broken into two factions..." http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/mob-breakup-is-bad-news---edited-166628926.html Uh, yeah. That's what the Winnipeg Sun reported ONE MONTH AGO after the details were revealed in open court. http://www.winnipegsun.com/2012/07/17/street-gang-splinters-into-two "A mysterious rift among members of a notorious Winnipe...

The news that Winnipeg police are planning to spend a million dollars on a search of the local garbage dump for the body of a missing part-time prostitute reminded us that we weren't finished with our first installment of our Online Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women. http://blackrod.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-black-rod-online-inquiry-into.html Two weeks ago, police announced an arrest in the stabbing death of our first subject, Cherie Lynn Richard, and the case dropped off the radar of the mainstream media in town. That's when we accidentally stumbled across the bombshell news that crystallized the lessons of her death. Deep, deep, deep within the story of the arrest carried in the July 27-29 issue of the free daily Winnipeg Metro was this stunning sentence: "Police allege Richard was stabbed after a verbal altercation took place over drugs." If true, it was a citywide scoop, something reporte...

Two months ago the Stephen Harper government announced they were shutting down the Experimental Lakes Area, a one-of-a-kind science research project, run by Winnipeg scientists. They said it was to save $2 million a year, a half-a-gazillionth of the federal budget. The ELA consists of 58 lakes near Kenora. For 44 years scientists were able to use the closed ecosystems of the lakes to do groundbreaking research on acid rain, toxic metals, the effect of phosphates on freshwater lakes, what spawns algae blooms that kill lakes, and climate change. One story on the closure declared "the ELA was to water ecology what the supercollider is to physics." As a result of the defunding of the world-reknowned project, 40 biologists, chemists and other scientists from Winnipeg will lose their jobs. Scientists from around the world have decried the Harper government's action, giving Canada a bad name in science circles everywhere. But the governm...

The tragic death of Cherie Lynn Richard happened just as we were finishing a report on the latest twist in the Canadian Museum for Human Rights fiasco. We set our work aside temporarily to concentrate on the murder on Furby Street when we noticed that everyone seemed to be ignoring, or avoiding, the obvious --- Cherie Lynn Richard had become the latest on the mythological list of Murdered and Missing Aboriginal Women. The mainstream media, which trumpets every demand for a public inquiry into these "Murdered and Missing Aboriginal Women", had missed the glaring opportunity to focus on the latest and most accessible case to see what lessons can be learned. So we've stepped into the void. We launched The Black Rod Online Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Aboriginal Women. Case No. One ----Cherie Lynn Richard. Age 20. Murdered July 22, 2012, Winnipeg, Manitoba. Normally, the story starts with a short synopsis of the event and expands from ther...

Psst. Hey, buddy. Wanna buy a museum? Have we got a deal for you. Big mofo. Ugly as sin. No heat. No lights. Its still unfinished--- but you can't beat the deal. Once in a lifetime opp, pal. Buy it for a song, and the federal government pays you $21.5 million a year.  Not a word of a lie. Hey, where you goin'? Buddy... Buddy... Think we're kidding? Okay, a little bit. But here's the real poop---as of June 30, the day you and we had to pay our property taxes to the city, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights was $453,505 in arrears on its tax bill. And that's after some Fairy Godmother secretly wiped out another $118,000 of the tax bill. We're still waiting for some explanation how that happened. If it was any other property in the city, it would have received a notice in writing from the City of Winnipeg last month that it had better come up with some heavy coin to pay off its taxes or risk being put on the list of pr...

Hear that? That's the silence on the airwaves where the popular radio station KICK-FM used to broadcast. 92.9 KICK-FM, (more formally known as CKIC-FM), operating under the aegis of Red River College, pulled the plug on itself at 4 p.m. Wednesday rather than submit to the further scrutiny of the CRTC in a licence renewal process.  That silence is the bitter legacy of Winnipeg Free Press editor Margo Goodhand, whose interference in the running of KICK-FM led directly to the demise of the station which had been on the air almost 10 years. It was only a couple of weeks ago when Margo Goodhand made the surprise announcement that she was resigning as of the end of July. She was, she said, leaving her sweet post for parts unknown after five years at the helm. However she managed to stay around just long enough to see the irreparable damage that she caused to the radio station, to the reputation of the college, and, worst of all, to the integrity ...

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...