The Black Rod

Manitoba Hydro is on its deathbed. Oh, you won't find anyone official to say it. Yet . Like relatives trying to appear cheery and optimistic around a loved one that's been diagnosed with terminal cancer, the people in power are in the first stage of grief -- denial. The prognosis for Hydro was delivered three weeks ago at hearings before the Public Utilities Board where the utility was seeking punishingly higher rates for customers in Manitoba. It took us this long to read through the hundred-plus pages of transcript, to decipher the coded language of the witnesses, to interpret what they were getting at, and, finally, to understand the terrible conclusion.  We couldn't believe it, just as, we're sure, you can't--- so we did it all again, to get a second opinion, so to speak.  Hydro conceded to the PUB that it undertook a massive expansion program--- involving three (it was once four) new dams and two new major powerlines (one in the United States)---whi...

You know things are really slow in the news business when pundits are reduced to speculating on who will be the next leader of the Liberals in Manitoba, a bunch that hasn't elected enough MLA's to be an official party in the Legislature since 1995. And on who is running or not running to be leader of the NDP, a party repudiated so massively by the electorate that any conjectured return to government can be measured in decades, not years. The public would be better served by a discussion of who will replace Brian Pallister as leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Manitoba---and hence  become Premier of the province---because Pallister's number is coming up fast.   Its not his age, although he will be 65 and collecting an old-age pension when the next provincial election rolls around.   No, Pallister's future will be determined next year---and you can spell it P-S-T.   A hike of the provincial sales tax by one percentage point doomed the ...

Former Winnipeg police chief Devon Clunis weathered a lot of ridicule when he talked about the role of  prayer in fighting crime. Well, look who's laughing now? Winnipeggers have taken his words to heart, and they're praying up a storm. People are praying they don't get shot. Or murdered. Or robbed at work. Or mugged on the street. Or have their cars stolen. A perusal of the police department's Crimestat page shows the dismal legacy of Clunis' hug-a-thug social work policing, which has been embraced whole-heartedly by the Winnipeg police commission and new police chief Danny Smythe.  The stats compare this year to last, New Year's Day to April 15: Homicides, 9 this year, 6 last. Shootings, up 82 percent.  A whopping 31 this year, 17 last. Commercial robberies, up 53 percent to 150 this year, 98 last. Muggings, 336 this year, 261 last, an increase of 29 percent. Commercial break-ins, 355 compared to 245 in '16.  (A 45% increase.) Res...

By now you've heard about Fake News. But the Winnipeg Free Press has taken the concept a step further and has introduced Fake Views . What's that, you ask?  Read on. The MSM is well aware that the news consuming public knows the tricks of Fake News and has no hesitation in outing biased opinion that's presented as "news".  The WFP gets called out every day on their comments pages. So the Free Press has decided to re-package fake news as opinion or viewpoints, or even 'analysis' to give themselves deniability when the public points out that the story spins like a top.  'It's not us, it's the writer's opinion,' they can safely bleat, they think. This weekend the FP ran a piece of "analysis" on their editorial pages headlined "Manitobans favour putting price on carbon." The title was so absurd, we had to read further. It turns out the piece was written by Curtis Brown, a familiar name to Winnipeggers.  He ...

How dysfunctional is Winnipeg as a city?  You mean apart from the former mayor and his hand-picked chief civil servant being investigated for taking (alleged) kickbacks on -- wait for it -- the construction of a new police department headquarters? Or the shiny new $300 million water treatment plant plagued by exploding generators and a leaky roof, a scenario straight out of The Simpsons? Or the fancy replacement football stadium that was built to take the team out of debt by generating so much more revenue only to mire the team in inescapable debt for the next 50 years because of the cost? Well, how about this... Winnipeg's newly anointed "Integrity Commissioner" was hired last week despite being enveloped in a cloud of controversy involving a blatant breach of privacy and a shameless violation of confidentiality. What? You didn't hear a word about that in the news stories promoting lawyer Sherri Walsh in her new post? That means you didn't ...

Ten years ago New York real estate developer Donald Trump wrote a book called 'Trump. Think Big and Kick Ass'. Today he's President of the United States of America Donald Trump. And the line of people with sore asses includes Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, the entire Democratic Party, the Republican Party establishment, and pretty much most of the news media.  They should have read his book. We did. To help you understand Donald Trump past, present and future, we've culled  thirty-three Trump tips to attain the top: "  * I love to crush the other side and take the benefits. Why? Because there is nothing greater. For me it is even better than sex, and I love sex. * In a great deal you win---not the other side. You crush your opponent and come away with something better for yourself. In negotiations I go for the complete win. * I have learned that it is important to focus on the solution, not the problem. If you put all your energy into the problem,...

Justifying the killing of an innocent person is messy business. The man who heads the body that investigates police when someone is killed or injured by them put as much polish as he could Friday on the official report into the Winnipeg police shooting of Mark Dicesare. Zane Tessler, director of the Independent Investigation Unit of Manitoba, said the five policemen who shot Dicesare to pieces at point blank range had no other choice. The evidence was clear, said Tessler, that the distraught 24-year-old had seen his world fall apart; he felt he had nothing to live for; and he intended to kill himself, eventually choosing to get police to do it for him by threatening them with a fake machinegun. If the story was so cut-and-dried, why did Tessler chose to smother it in spin? Was it to hide the clusterf*ck that immediately preceeded the fatal shooting? For the uninitiated, clusterf*ck means  (to quote Wiktionary) "A chaotic situation where everything seems to go wrong. ...