The Black Rod

Thank your lucky stars. You don't know how close you came to freezing in the dark just a few months ago. The unreported near-collapse of a stretch of Manitoba Hydro's power lines in Northern Manitoba could have been more of a disaster than anyone knows. We've dug out more details from transcripts of the Public Utilities Board's recent hearings. The transcripts run on average more than 200 pages a day, so it was only by chance we ran across the story of the close call that almost blacked out the province. It happened this past January, and not last year as we first thought. http://blackrod.blogspot.com/2011/04/how-manitoba-dodged-bullet-from-last.html If the situation hadn't been caught in the nick of time, Manitoba would have been plunged into a blackout at exactly the moment we use the most power to heat our homes. Last year's heavy rains resulted in extremely high water levels along the Nelson River. When winter came, it turned to ice. Heavy i...

There's a panic spreading through the Jewish community over the threat facing the primacy of the Holocaust exhibit at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. One unexpected side effect is the emergence of truths long hidden from the general public. Rhonda Spivak, editor of the Winnipeg Jewish Review, has published a clarion call to the Jewish community to fight back, and fight now, to cement the status of the Holocaust gallery as one of only two permanent galleries in the museum. She's rattled by the success the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association is having in turning the dabate over the Holocaust-only gallery that's planned for the CMHR into a national issue. Spivak wrote an 'open letter' to Lubomyr Luciuk, director of research for the UCCLA, to lambaste him and spur the Jewish community to action. www.winnipegjewishreview.com/index.cfm (She called him Lobomyr Luciak. That mistake has since been corrected online. Funny, the Winnipeg Fr...

Right on schedule. Barely four days after The Black Rod laid out the plan, chapter and verse, there it was in the pages of the Winnipeg Free Press, down to a T. The proponents of the Gail Asper-version of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights have played their last card--- anyone who challenges them is anti-semitic. "The war against the Holocaust" blared the headline over the op-ed by, guess who , Catherine Chatterley the "the founding director of the Winnipeg-based Canadian Institute for the Study of Antisemitism." It's unfolding exactly as we predicted: http://blackrod.blogspot.com/2011/03/nuke-ukes-fp-preps-nuclear-option-to.html * It's not hard to put two and two together, we wrote. * Gail Asper doesn't want to accuse the Ukrainians of being anti-Semites, although she hasn't met them face-to-face, she added. * Only "the uniformed" ask why the Asper human rights museum plans to highlight the Holocaust ove...

Only by fluke was Manitoba spared a massive power failure and rolling blackouts last year. Details are sparse but that bombshell was revealed earlier this month before the Public Utilities Board which is looking at a rate increase for Hydro. Transmission towers in northern Manitoba were being separated from their supports by (it appears) flooding on the Nelson River. If a critical tower had fallen, it would have taken out a second line and "we would have lost 3600 megawatts of supply. And we can only import a thousand," testified David Cormie, a Manitoba Hydro exec. "The loads at the time were probably in the order of 4,000 megawatts, so we would have had to have gone into rotating load shed," he said in Hydrospeak. Hydro cranked up the gas turbines at Brandon and Selkirk and stopped all exports "in order to ensure that we wouldn't have a blackout. We were in -- in a situation where we were in a rotating blackout mode but ...

As a police officer, Shelly Glover is no stranger to drive-by shootings in Winnipeg, the murder capital of Canada. But this week, as a politician, she found herself the victim of a drive-by smear, aided and abetted by the local press. The scene of the crime was Global News, which carried a short, throwaway interview with Glover about the Conservatives' chances of winning Liberal seats in Manitoba. Taking one line of her answer out of context, "professional" reporters in the city managed to manufacture a controversy based on the false premise that Glover attacked Liberal Anita Neville for being too old to be in Parliament. For the record, here's the entire question and answer with Shelly Glover so you can see for yourself exactly what was said about Neville. Nelly Gonzalez: We know that most, uh, Manitobans here are, uh, usually vote Conservative. What do you think...in many of the ridings....but , I mean, there's a couple that could be up for ...

Well, so much for the high road. The Winnipeg Free Press has gone from alluding to Ukrainian-Canadian activists as thugs threatening to knee-cap politicians who won't do their bidding to denouncing them as ignorant and uninformed rabble. Sneering condescension gives way to undisguised insults. The newspaper was tipped over the edge last week by a national poll that showed a strong majority of Canadians (over 60 percent) opposed plans by the Canadian Museum for Human Rights to have only one permanent exhibit --- a Holocaust gallery. All other genocides throughout history will be relegated to a "mass atrocities" zone. And that's the way it should be, blustered the Free Press editorial writer, because the Holocaust is ssssspecial. "Why does the Holocaust get a place in the front seat? Only the uninformed ask questions like that ," shouted the voice of the newspaper. With that, the Winnipeg Free Press started a journey down a very, very dark p...

Told ya. No sooner does Mayor Sam Katz raise your property taxes (you say levy, we say lie), than the usual panhandlers come crawling out of their holes. Did someone say Asper? Oh. We did. Yep, millionaire moocher Gail Asper has been circling City Hall for weeks, waiting for the trough to be refilled so that she can be first in line---- with Mayor Sam's help. Katz intends to raise $14 million from a hike in frontage levy, the most regressive property tax possible. He blubbers that the money will be dedicated to street repairs. Except for the fact that the amount the city spends on street repairs won't be going up by $14 million. In fact, it won't be going up at all. The higher levy will only replace money which will now be spent elsewhere---like the pet projects of millionaires . Aka the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Gail Asper has her eyes set on at least half of the money you'll be paying for the increase in your frontage levy. She des...

First an earthquake. Then a tsunami. Japan? No. We're talking about the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and the storms it's facing just ahead. March is shaping up to be a very, very bad month for the CMHR. Treasury Board President Stockwell Day has said the government intends to chop expenditures by $10.4 billion over the next 12 months to fight the national deficit. Late last week in Ottawa he spelled out chapter and verse where some of the savings will come. The CMHR is getting a million dollar haircut. The Toronto Star, which appears to be the only source to report the government's plans in detail, said "Almost every agency funded by Heritage Canada will lose money but the deepest cuts will come at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the National Library and the Office of the Status of Women. Across the board, spending will fall by 4.5 per cent." http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/952155--where-the-tory-axe-will-fall In ...

The howling mob had free rein for two weeks to vilify a decent man. They screeched and marched and chanted their kneejerk slogans at will. Prominent journalists like Winnipeg Free Press columnist Lindor Reynolds and Winnipeg Sun writer Kevin Engstrom jostled to get to the head of the lynch mob as they dropped their oh-so-clever bon mots. No means No, they bellowed as they demanded the immediate termination of Court of Queen's Bench Justice Robert Dewar. His unpardonable sin? Doing his job without bowing to political correctness. And then, this week the swarm was stopped in its tracks--- by 88 pages of print---the transcript of the sentencing of a Thompson man, convicted by Dewar of rape, but sentenced to house arrest instead of the penitentiary term demanded by the Crown---aka, the truth. "Kenneth Rhodes, rapist, won't be going to jail because Dewar feels the victim was sending him signals that he was going to get lucky. She was sending them, presumably,...

Yikes. You can tell the Asper-dominated board of directors at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights has been hurt badly by the Holodomor controversy. The Winnipeg Free Press had to ride to their rescue last Saturday after a week of hard knocks, although the gesture may have actually done more damage to the cause. In an atrocity of an editorial, the newspaper conflated the Soviet starvation of millions of Ukrainians in the Thirties (the Holodomor) with a shortage of potatoes in Ireland 85 years earlier (the Gorta Mor). They're both famines, get it? The Irish aren't demanding a separate gallery for their national tragedy, but if they were, (stupid) politicians like MP Joy Smith (Conservative) and MP Kevin Lamoureux (Liberal) "would be clamouring on their behalf..." wrote the FP. Instead, these and other deluded parliamentarians are supporting a "small but vocal" Ukrainian rump which wants a permanent gallery for the Holodomor althou...