The Black Rod

It was July 26, 2007 when Manitoba Hydro dropped the bombshell on the Public Utilities Board. The drought of 2003-2004 had traumatized Hydro. It knocked the stuffing out of Hydro's finances-more damage in a single year than anyone ever imagined. The utility ramped up computer simulations to show the board what the cost would be of a multi-year drought like, say, the five that have happened since 1929. It wasn't a pretty picture. A five year drought would cost Manitoba Hydro $2.7 billion. A seven-year drought would cost $3.5 billion. The numbers may be gi-normous, but that's not what made the PUB blanche. It was the graphs. A five year drought (starting in 2008 for demonstration purposes) would increase the debt-to-equity position of Hydro to 95-5. That's like making Manitoba Hydro a penny stock. Ask the Aspers what that did for Canwest Global shares, if you can catch them between meetings with their bankruptcy lawyers. Oh, and a seven year drought would wipe out all ...

Here it is--- the Manitoba Hydro whistleblower's letter to the editor that the Winnipeg Free Press refuses to publish. Among the explosive details in the letter: * Hydro is using obsolete computers , computers more than 20 years out of date, to make the sensitive and timely decisions necessary to prevent blackouts. * The source codes for the complex calculations that Hydro depends on to keep the lights burning are known only to one or two programmers , a fact that would horrify our American customers. * Manitoba Hydro has hidden $7 billion in potential future losses from the Public Utilities Board. * Bi-Pole III is so crucial to to Hydro's future plans that even a slight delay in getting it built threatens a catastrophic shortage of power. Hydro is hiding information from the PUB that shows rates would skyrocket if we have to build new gas turbines to make up for the power deficit. * Hydro got the result it wanted from consultants hired to examine the whistleblower's compl...

Manitoba Hydro has launched a campaign of intimidation to undermine the official investigation of a whistleblower's complaint of gross mismanagement. Employees have been told that they will be fired for the slightest contact with the whistleblower no matter how personal and non-work related it may be. One Christmas card and there goes your pension. Phone and computer records have been searched to send a message--- the all-seeing eye of Big Brother is watching everything you do. And CEO Bob Brennan has sent letters to news media referring to the whistleblower as "a disgruntled consultant" in a further assault on her character and her credibility. So much for the innocent public face of Hydro with which Brennan proclaimed that he welcomed the investigation and would cooperate fully. The threats come as the Auditor General was informed that she will have to speak with current Hydro employees to confirm details of Hydro's operations now that Hydro has managed to stifle...

Transcripts of meetings of Legislature committees are generally pretty dull reading. So why, we asked ourselves, were we getting a chill up our collective spines. Suddenly, it was clear. Without knowing it, we had entered---- the NDP's Hallowe'en House of Horrors. Page after page of last week's regularly scheduled Public Affairs Committee meeting were filled with demonic scenarios, ghosts of scandals past, and disgraces risen from the dead to scare us once again. Continue reading at your own risk. There are no treats here. Audits that go bump in the night or, Don't Call Me Quasimodo Carol Bellringer knows how fishy it looks for her to be auditing her friends and colleagues at Manitoba Hydro. But she's determined to plow ahead, the public's concern for ethics be damned. "I don't actually believe that I do have a conflict, but we do acknowledge and accept the fact that there could be that perception with the public," Bellringer, Manitoba's Audit...

"It was Brennan who specifically asked me not to substantiate the findings." With those 12 words, the woman who has become known as the Manitoba Hydro whistleblower has assured the need for a full-blown investigation of Hydro---and specifically its President and CEO, Bob Brennan. "Brennan's comments need to be refuted as completely false and incorrect," she told The Black Rod in an exclusive correct-the-record expose on Monday. Miss Whistle, as we'll call her, has gone to war over Brennan's sly campaign of attacking her credibility in light of the decision by the Public Utilities Board to look into her whistleblower complaint of gross mismanagement at Hydro. She had been a risk consultant for Hydro up to the day she gave Brennan an advance copy of a report she had prepared warning of huge and avoidable financial losses and the possibility of power blackouts. His latest salvo against her came in the Winnipeg Free Press http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/lo...

Last week it was announced that "Penny" Lenny, "Brother Can You Spare A Dime" David, and Gigglin' Gail Asper had managed to ride their daddy's Canwest Global empire into the toilet. It's been an open secret for more than a year that these business sharpies were headed for bankruptcy court. It was last October that Canwest shares officially became a penny stock. In 2000 the stock traded at $18.55 a share; it had collapsed to 93 cents in the fall (pun intended) of 2008. It hit bottom at 12 1/2 cents before bouncing up to a whopping 20 cents a share in September. And now we learn that the Aspers' plan for restructuring includes stiffing their employees for their vacation pay. When it comes to their own pet projects, they've got their hands out; when it comes to their employees, it's "talk to the hand." Among their victims are local favourites Meera Bahadoosingh and Andrea Slobodian who left Global TV Winnipeg last month for new jobs wi...

Manitoba Hydro is waging an under-the-radar power struggle with the Public Utilities Board. For over a year Hydro has been playing cat-and-mouse with the PUB, promising to deliver information the board wants, then reneging, promising, then reneging again. At issue is the utility's risk analyses for its plans to spend $18 billion over the next 15 years to build new dams in northern Manitoba . The PUB wants to know how Hydro can justify the huge expense and what alternatives they have if Hydro's profit projections evaporate into thin air. The fear is that the entire cost of the new dams will fall on the shoulders of Manitoba electricity users, not to mention the very real possibility that we will be forced to buy electricity at an unknown price in order to fulfill our obligations to provide it to American customers at a fixed price----in other words, to subsidize the U.S. buyers. Last September, The Black Rod examined PUB documentation to produce a three-part expose of Manitoba H...

For the first time ever, we need to issue a content warning. If you are easily upset by obscenity or descriptions of explicit sex acts, don't read on. The witchhunt has started. The first to be dragged to the stake is Stuart Murray, the newly announced Chief Executive Officer of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. His crime? He's not pure enough for the homosexual lobby. Detractors of the CMHR said from the beginning it was going to be a publicly funded tool to promote left-wing feminist/homosexual social engineering. Not so, insisted the museum's backers. When reporting to the federal Heritage minister in 2008, Arni Thorsteinson, then-chairman of the federal advisory committee on the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, wrote: (All emphasis herein is ours) “There was a concern among respondents in the web-based consultations and focus groups testing that the CMHR could be influenced by political activities, or special interest groups in a manner that could affect, or be pe...

Manitoba Premier Gary Doer sat stonefaced in the Legislature, staring at the raving man who stood beside him. The man was bellowing at the top of his lungs, his arms flailing, spit flying from his mouth. It was three days ago. Doer watched as the madman ranted on and on, and the lame-duck premier counted the minutes until he could walk away from this madhouse to the sanity of a diplomatic posting in Washington. But we don't have that option. For that lunatic in the Legislature was none other than Manitoba Attorney General Dave Chomiak. What set off his bout of carpet-chewing was a demand from the Opposition for him to table his promised new gang strategy or resign. Thursday, he rolled out his gang strategy. He should have resigned instead. His much touted NEW gang strategy turned out to be a cut-and-paste job of every "new" gang strategy the NDP has trotted out in the past decade. The cornerstone of Chomiak's new strategy dates back seventy years --- a list of Public ...

A group of about 30 people marched from the North End to the Legislature yesterday. There wasn't a university egghead in the bunch. Nor could you find a single Indian Chief or Nahanni Fontaine or any of the usual hate-the-police crowd who claim to speak for native people. That's because the message the marchers brought to the politicians wasn't the message being peddled in Manitoba's universities or newspapers or by racial demagogues in the aboriginal community. It was the direct opposite of the "special report" prepared by leftwing university professors for the attention of Attorney General Dave Chomiak , which embraced the "wisdom" of members of a violent street gang who said authorities should end a crackdown on gangs and concentrate on ending poverty. The residents of the North End who made the long march didn't carry signs saying "End Poverty". Their message was "Stop the Violence." And it was directed at those same gang ...