The Black Rod

Manitoba's lawmakers went back to work Tuesday. They were as giddy as schoolchildren on their first day back from summer holidays. Maybe it was because the first order of business was a new holiday for Manitoba, one less day for Legislators to work. The Black Rod couldn't make it to the Legislature. There was a backlog of newspapers to read, and by the time we finished, we couldn't share the bonhommie under the Dome. Monday, Sept. 24, 2007 Winnipeg Sun RUDE AWAKENING "A St. Norbert widow was in shock after a car tore through a backyard fence and shed before striking the rear of her townhouse early yesterday morning...Nearly four hours after the newer model Dodge Neon tore through the shed...a young man showed up and tried to drive it away." "...the young man claimed his "friends" had stolen and crashed his family car.""Police expected the driver would face a charge of joyriding..." Tuesday, Sept. 25, 2007 Winnipeg Sun Cop Nearly R...

O'Learygate--- the scandal that keeps on giving . A brief recap: - The Seven Oaks School Division wanted a new high school to replace West Kildonan Collegiate. - But the province refused to approve new schools anywhere when students could still be accomodated in existing schools. - Undaunted, the Seven Oaks School Division launched a scheme to get a new high school. - They found some land they could buy cheap, so they bought twice as much as they needed for a school, with a plan to build a subdivision with the extra land, and use the profits to cover the cost of the school site. - They ran into two problems: They lost their shirts on the subdivision, and their scheme was exposed by a taxpayer who began asking questions about the legality of a school division using tax money to become a land developer. To disguise their humiliating financial loss, they come up with a quick explanation: The land they bought for a school was an asset. When they sell it, they will cover their losses an...

Last time, we showed you how the architects of O'Learygate misled the public, the press and the Legislature by slipping an IOU they wrote to themselves into the books to hide a $307,000 loss on a land development they secretly backed with taxpayers' money. In her special audit of the O'Learygate land development, Manitoba auditor general Carol Bellringer said such a deception was perfectly okay according to generally accepted accounting principles. Also perfectly okay is how an IOU that may never be cashed can be considered an asset, while debts that will have to be paid are not considered as liabilities. As part of the land agreement the Seven Oaks School Division signed with the City of Winnipeg the school board is obligated to pay another $265,000 once a new school is constructed on the land the SOSD bought and developed in Swinford Park. In addition, they must pay $58,000 for drainage . That's $323,000 in future expenses that are written into the development deal ...

Once upon a time there was a company called Enron . Nobody really knew what they did. Or how they made money. But every year they would announce large profits, and their auditors would swear it was all on the up-and-up according to generally accepted accounting principles. Fast forward to Winnipeg, 2007. Manitoba's Auditor General Carol Bellringer released her report on a shady land development undertaken by the Seven Oaks School Division, known colloquially as O'Learygate, after Brian O'Leary, Superintendent of the Seven Oaks School Division (and, by coincidence, former NDP campaign chairman). * In 2001, anticipating the need for a new high school, the school division bought land in the Riverbend area of West Kildonan. * They bought twice as much as they needed for a school. * Instead of simply selling the surplus, they decided to become land developers-- with taxpayers' money. * They eventually sold 71 finished lots in what is known as Swinford Park--- and lost t...

What leadership skills and characteristics do you feel are important in a Chief of Police for the City of Winnipeg? Winnipeg is looking for a new police chief and the final choice will be made by Anita Stenning, the city's Chief Administrative Officer. Part of the process is, of course, the obligatory "consultation" with the public. The question above was the basis of a couple of public meetings this week to gauge what Joe Citizen sees as important in a chief. But Anita Stenning already knows the answer. The people have been shouting it for months. They want an anti-Ewatski. Someone the direct opposite of the bumbler that's held the post for nine long years. Someone who will make crimefighting and crime prevention his only priority. The people don't want a politically correct hire. They know such a person will make decisions based on political correctness that serves to justify his -- or her -- hiring. They don't want "hope". They don't want ...

Three students, fighting for their lives, had kept Seung Hui Cho out of German class where he had come to finish them off. ( http://blackrod.blogspot.com/2007/08/revisiting-virginia-tech-massacre-part.html ) Cho pumped five or six shots into the door in frustration. Then he turned and walked across the hall to Room 204/ Solid Mechanics class. He was in for a surprise. The class had been in high alert from the moment Prof. Liviu Librescu saw Cho, gun in hand, leaving the room next door, Room 206, about three minutes earlier. Librescu told his students to get to the back of the room while he kept watch by the door. Two male students had bolted for safety, only to wind up right in front of Cho, who shot one of them twice. Back in Room 204, the students were doing what they could. "Everybody just got down on the ground," said Richard Mallalieu, 23. "We used desks to shield ourselves. One of my friends (Alex Calhoun - ed.) called 911." "Somebody went up to the do...

Review, rethink and revise Blame our obsessive need to know the truth. To achieve our goal of providing the very best account of what happened April 16, 2007 at Virginia Tech we've had to constantly review our source material and, if necessary, rewrite our story to incorporate new information. We have to do it again. The transcript of a 911 call from Room 211/French class gives us a rough timeline to what happened in the last eight minutes of the massacre. While preparing this piece, we came across an obscure first-hand account by a student in Room 205. The story ( 'It was the most horrifying sight' , April 19, 2007, Times News Network, Times of India) was attributed to "a computer engineering student at Virginia Tech who was present in the Norris Hall that day. He wants his name to be withheld because the university has barred students from talking to the media." A little bit of detective work matching quotes identified the student as Zach Petkewicz, whose sug...

1-2-3. The cut and thrust of war was the story in Afghanistan last week. 1. The American launched a furious offensive in the Tora Bora region of eastern Afghanistan. The air assault on the first day was unlike anything seen all year. 2. Five Nato soldiers were killed in separate attacks. 3. A disappointing lack of progress in rebuilding the vital Kajaki Dam Tora Bora You want shock and awe? You got it. The Americans got wind in July that 300 Arab, Chechen, and Pakistani insurgents had moved into the mountains of Tora Bora a month earlier. The Tora Bora cave complex is "an entrenched network of caves and tunnels carved into the Safed Koh mountain range on the Nangarhar-Pakistan border." It's where many believe Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda followers made their final stand against a U.S. air assault before escaping into Pakistan in 2001. On Sunday, Aug. 12, U.S. airpower returned to Tora Bora with a vengeance. The skies over Nangarhar province were full of Air Forc...

Virginia Tech began its fall semester Monday. We're going to mark the return to classes by revisiting that dark hour in April when Seung-Hui Cho roamed the halls, killing 25 students and 5 staff members and wounding over a dozen. By incorporating vital new information we can correct mistakes in our previous stories and put the events into a better perspective than was possible before. The Rosetta Stone to the story is a transcript of a 911 call from Virginia Tech which was released to the Washington Post in June. It allows us to orient the happenings at the school and to correlate various time estimates by students. The results are often breath-taking. Cho's rampage started much later than we thought and took much less time than we imagined. He killed 30 people in four classrooms in the space of only 11 minutes. And, we now know that the shots caught on a student's videophone and broadcast on CNN were Cho's final rampage, the exact moment when he was killing students ...