The Black Rod

The Winnipeg Free Press is working so hard at being trendy that its forgotten something important--- to report the news. This week they were hyping an appearance at the trendy Winnipeg Free Press News Cafe by trendy millionaire moocher Gail Asper. News Cafe website: "Join the Free Press for a (late) Power Lunch with Gail Asper, No. 2 on the Winnipeg Free Press Power 30 list, at the Winnipeg Free Press News Café... Hear the inside scoop from the woman behind the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, one of the most-anticipated projects in Winnipeg's history." 18 people showed up. Once Gail Asper got her mouth running, she unleashed a series of bombshells, none of which has been reported in the pages of the FP. So we'll do their job instead. Gail Asper revealed: * The fund-raising Friends of the CMHR haven't raised a penny in the first seven months of 2011. * The cost of construction has risen $3.6 million. * The cost of the museum might go eve

Manitoba Hydro is fighting tooth and nail to keep the Public Utilities Board from finding out the details of their latest contracts with American buyers. They're going to court to keep the contracts secret and the PUB blind. You can understand why the PUB is antsy about Hydro's deals. The last time Hydro signed on the bottom line, they wound up selling power to the U.S. at less than it costs to produce it, meaning that your rates have gone up to subsidize the Minnesota users of Manitoba electricity. And the dam they built to provide the subsidized power (Wuskwatim) was partially privatized without the approval of the Legislature, with a third being sold off to a group of Indian reserves, who couldn't pay for their share and had to borrow the money to pay Manitoba Hydro -- from Manitoba Hydro. To top it off, Hydro agreed to pay the reserves profits from the power sale even in the years when there were no profits, which is the foreseeable future. You know

There's one thing you can say about millionaire moocher Gail Asper and her stalwart supporters like Sam Katz. When they start to screw the Winnipeg taxpayer, they are consistent and utterly without shame. Only two months ago Mayor Katz gave Gail Asper's pet project, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, a present of $3.6 million. "Here, we don't need it," he said, just before rushing to the microphones to whine about an infrastructure deficit. "Wahh. We don't have any money to fix the streets. Wahhh. It's Greg Selinger's fault." Today, guess what? The CMHR has stiffed the city on its property taxes for the second year in a row. And that's after the city shaved their tax bill down so that they owed less than last year. Yessiree. Despite sucking up more than 30 million federal dollars in the past three years in, ahem, "operating costs", the CMHR can't find a penny to pay their taxes. (There's a legal

Six months in, and the biggest good news story of the year is going unreported. What would you say if we told you that crime in Winnipeg had dropped 26 percent in one year? Well, don't get excited, because we can't make that statement. But we can say that there's been a 26 percent drop in the ten crimes surveyed by the police department's Crimestat service. That's a huge improvement and its not driven solely by a phony drop in car thefts. (Phony because there was no legitimate reason for the sky-high level of car theft in Winnipeg in the first place. To credit anyone with reducing car theft is like congratulating the local arsonist for setting fewer fires this year. If the provincial NDP, judges and probation officials had done their job, there would have been no car theft epidemic.) The single dark cloud over the good news is in Crimestat is the likelihood we may recapture the unwanted title of Murder Capital of Canada again. Winnipeg's 16 homicide