The Black Rod

He's the saddest man in Manitoba today. Unelected premier Greg Selinger has just felt the earth collapse under his feet and his future slip away into the swollen flood waters that still cover much of the province. The Jets are coming back. That's shorthand for 'Winnipeg is about to get an NHL hockey team, again.' And it's exactly what Greg Selinger was praying would never happen. Selinger has spent the last few weeks painting himself as The Man Who Saved Manitoba. He was supposed to stride into the fall election campaign as a hero, he who singlehandedly staved off the flood on the Red River, first, then the Assiniboine, and even the LaSalle. But the water just won't go down, and the scramble to build dikes and fill sandbags and evacuate cattle just keeps going on and on and on. And its getting worse, with the overflowing lakes threatening to engulf cottage country and precipitate a new wave of evacuations and property loss, as we undergo another...

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...

Coincidence? Or in-your-face? On Saturday last, the Winnipeg Free Press ran a full-page update on the police investigation into a spree killer's night of murder last October. Two men dead, one girl shot in the stomach, one teen with a hole through his clothes where a bullet passed millimetres from his body. No arrest. Hell, not even a viable suspect. But before the day was out, another man was in hospital with a gunshot wound suffered under eerily familiar circumstances. A knock on a door, a man answered and a stranger shot him in the head at point blank range. The location, the 500 block of Dufferin Avenue, literally a stone's throw away from the second shooting in October. The MO, identical to the third shooting that fall evening; only in that case the victim died. The target of Saturday's shooting was grazed by a bullet but lived to tell about it. He was, said a police spokesman, "cooperating with police." Did the newspaper story trigge...

If there is such a thing as an NDP hit squad, it's currently tracking down John Harvie, the Green Party candidate in Winnipeg North. Harvie didn't come anywhere close to winning the seat, but he came close enough to deny victory to the NDP's star candidate, Rebecca Blaikie, daughter of NDP heavyweight Bill Blaikie. Winnipeg North was considered a rock-solid safe seat as long as Judy Wasylycia-Leis was the incumbent, but after she retired from Parliament to run a Quixotic campaign for mayor of Winnipeg, the riding fell to Liberal Kevin Lamoureux in a byelection. Lamoureux instantly became Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff's lucky charm, appearing at his side at every public appearance as a sign of the resurgence of the Grits. But the NDP were double-dog-determined to retake their Winnipeg fortress. They spared no resource, from a 'name' candidate, to money, to foot-soldiers. And for much of election night, it looked like the NDP was back in the sad...

At Wednesday's city council meeting, Mayor Sam Katz must have been auditioning for Dancing With The Stars because you've never seen such tapdancing in your life. Mr. "I Can Take It" looked on the edge of a nervous breakdown as he spewed out a string of unconvincing excuses to justify his giveaway plan to return $3.6 million of property taxes to the Gail Asper-driven Canadian Museum for Human Rights. In fact, Katz said the museum WON'T PAY ANY TAXES to the City of Winnipeg for FIFTEEN YEARS . Yes, he said that. For the first 11 or 12 years (he wasn't sure) the City will take the payments-in-lieu-of-taxes they get from the CMHR (which, as a federal institution doesn't pay taxes directly) and give it to the Province. The money is to pay off an $11.1 million secret loan that was given to Winnipeg so we could pretend we were making a significant donation to the museum to dupe the federal government into kicking in money to match contribution...

The pack journalism of the Parliamentary Press Gallery was on display like never before this past weekend. We got to see the extent to which they're willing to go to inject their personal political biases into the election campaign and to pass off their own opinions as news. But, sadly for them, we also got to see how the days of the mainstream media are numbered. It all began at a Conservative Party election rally in Mississauga where Prime Minister Stephen Harper was answering questions from reporters. Harper-hater Terry Milewski of the CBC got to the microphone with a list of carefully prepared ambush questions which he, himself, confessed were the talking points of Harper's critics. The next day, press gallery reporters for CBC, CTV, CP, the Toronto Star and even Postmedia spread stories across the country that the audience, prompted by Harper aides, drowned out Milewski's questions to protect the Prime Minister. The stories are lies. The reporters...

In between whining that Winnipeg doesn't have enough money to fix the mythical infrastructure deficit, and waiving taxes for his friends, the Aspers, Mayor Sam Katz is hoping you never find out two things about the finances of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Secret Number One Sam Katz wants city council to kickback $3.6 million in property taxes that the CMHR is supposed to pay sometime in the future, but he's hiding from the public the fact that the CMHR HAS NOT PAID ITS TAXES for 2009 and 2010 ! Its already $241,000 in arrears PLUS penalties, despite collecting $24.9 million from the federal government over those two years for operating expenses -- which were to include payments in lieu of taxes. Secret Number Two Former Premier Gary Doer was in such a rush to give Gail Asper money for her museum that he not only doubled the province's contribution, from $20 million to $40 million, but he secretly loaned another $11.1 million to the City of Winn...

Knowingly or unknowingly, Winnipeg Free Press columnist Dan Lett has become a part of the hate campaign against Canada's Ukrainian community. On his newspaper-sanctioned blog, Lett purports to address the debate over the decision, by museum trustees, to have a stand-alone Holocaust gallery within the Canadian Museum for Human Rights while relegating every other genocide in history to second-class status by lumping them together in a grab-bag gallery of "mass atrocity". The hand-picked board of the museum insists the Holocaust is the most important genocide in history because it sparked the human rights movement, a view disputed by one of their own former consultants who is among the most respected Holocaust historians in the world. http://blackrod.blogspot.com/2011/04/shut-their-mouths-first-legacy-of.html Voices of the Ukrainian community, namely the Ukrainian Canadian Congress and the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association, are arguing the...

Mayor Sam Katz is raising your land taxes so that millionaire Gail Asper won't have to pay hers on her pet project, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. While you get dinged by a hike in frontage fees (the most regressive tax on your land, which hurts the poorest homeowners the most), Katz wants to waive the property taxes on the CMHR. He says he's raising your taxes to pay the city's infrastructure deficit, but his friend Gail won't have to pay her share, you'll pay it for her. Katz wants to save Gail Asper $3.6 million because she and her Friends of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights have run out of money and need millions more. The CMHR has turned into a money pit. They not only can't raise money to finish the museum, but they can't afford their taxes either. So Katz wants to do Gail a personal favour by waiving the taxes on the museum and pretending the money will go instead to construction. Except there is no money, it...

What's round, respected and rolling away from the Canadian Museum for Human Rights? Another wheel fallen off the Asper bus. "Leave it to the experts" has been the desperate last-ditch cry of proponents of the CMHR as the public facade of the museum has slowly chipped away. But the experts have begun to desert the CMHR. Over the past few months, the truth has been forced out, bit by bit -- that the Canadian Museum for Human Rights was always intended to be a Holocaust museum, is still, and, if Gail Asper has any say, always will be. Asper and her hand-picked trustees refuse to contemplate that the mass murder of anyone else has the same significance to the world as the Holocaust. That, to them, justifies having a separate Holocaust gallery, with all the other genocides in history lumped together in a "mass atrocity" exhibit. They specifically reject the argument by the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association that the crimes of the Communist...