The Black Rod

The City of Winnipeg's top civil servants have defiantly closed ranks around Fire Chief Reid Douglas whose handling of a $15 million project to build four new fire stations is at the heart of a scandal that's shaking public trust in city government like never before. Douglas submitted a report last week to a city committee seeking another $2.3 million from the 2013 budget to cover cost overruns on the new firehalls.  He's already spent the $15.3 million allocated for the project but only three fire stations have been built and the last, in St. James, only just started.  Douglas twice increased the size of the fourth firehall without telling city councillors why, then tried to hide the increased cost  from them, even as late as last month (September). He wrote in his report supporting the extra funding that : "The Fire Chief had the authority to change the scope of the project in order to accommodate these operational needs and efficiencies as they were antic...

Earlier this year, the New York designer of the museum's exhibits, Ralph Appelbaum, came to Winnipeg to give 200 donors to the CMHR a super-sneak preview of  the "interior wonders" they can expect to see when they visit. The museum's fundraising arm, the Friends of the CMHR, took detailed notes and reported Appelbaum's "thrilling" lecture in the group's Summer, 2012, newsletter.   Given the importance of knowing exactly what we're spending $351 million (and counting) on, we decided to scalp the Friends' account (with the really boring bits scissored out). Barf bags at the ready, here we go... http://www.friendsofcmhr.com/resource/file/newsletter_summer12_en.pdf "Appelbaum began his thrilling virtual tour of the Museum’s interior at the building entrance between two of the structure’s massive “roots”. The roots represent the earth as the common home of all people and the beginning of our journey ...

We couldn't figure it out at first. Why did they stall so long before submitting the latest annual report of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights when everything in it was known ten months ago? What were they hiding? We had to dig deep---30 pages into the 58 page report before we spotted it---there in a summary of the funding collected for the project: "Cash contributions from the Province of Manitoba ($38.8 million) and the City of Winnipeg ($16 million) have been received, as well as the private sector installments from The Friends of CMHR ($87.8 million). " Problem was, by March 31, 2012, the fiscal year end, the Friends of CMHR were crowing they had raised $130 million. It turns out that the CMHR was sitting on $42 million in IOU's at the same time it was about to shut down construction because it had no money. The museum fundraisers had collected only two-thirds of the private donations they claimed to have raised. When ...

Sam Katz, Mayor of Winnipeg, made the worst mistake of his political life last week. Instead of stifling suspicions over the odd circumstances of his purchase of a house in Phoenix, Arizona, Katz managed, with a disingenuous answer to a simple question, to stoke the mystery to new heights. Ooooh, so not good. Confronted by aggressive reporters, Katz was peppered with questions about how he came to be buying a house at a discount from the sister of the Chief Finance Officer of Shindico Realty, the company at the heart of not one, but two, audits of how the city conducts its real estate business and whether Shindico gets preferential treatment. Visibly nervous, he dismissed any suggestions of impropriety, often with a prepackaged answer: "I purchased a home in Arizona. I paid fair market value." The scrum running out of steam, one reporter threw out a softball question. When did the mayor buy the house? "I purchased a home in Arizona. ...

What's the penalty for unnecessary roughness? An unsuspecting journalism student walked into a buzzsaw of devastating criticism Sunday after innocently accepting an offer to write a column for the Winnipeg Free Press about the impact on her, the future generation of reporting, of the latest round of layoffs at the newspaper. Her crime? Honesty. Honestly. The daylong stomping she got in return was totally unwarranted. Honestly. Stefanie Cutrona is a student in her third week at Red River College's Creative Communications program. She stepped up when somebody at the FP thought it would be a great idea to ask what students looking to enter the profession thought when they saw newspapers laying off their youngest staffers. It was a great idea. But 19-year-old Stefanie never imagined the backlash that would be unleashed when she gave her honest opinion. She still may not realize that it all stemmed from her very first sentence: "I don...

Infuriating tales of board mismanagement and government malfeasance that cost taxpayers more than $70 million peppered a recent update on the jinxed Canadian Museum for Human Rights by Heritage Minister James Moore. Only a tiny audience of 16 showed up to hear Moore at the Winnipeg Free Press News Cafe, and it's hard to say how many could separate the eye-opening inside stories from the pure falsehoods being peddled to justify the federal government's blank cheque to save the failed project from insolvency. One person who certainly needs to listen to the interview with Moore http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/Heritage-Minister-James-Moore-dropping-into-News-Cafe-Wednesday--169332836.html is Canada's auditor general who should be curious about questionable, if not fraudulent, government spending on the CMHR. Moore started by floating the idea that there were two main reasons why the budget for the museum has ballooned from $265 m...