The Black Rod

She's a mental health counsellor who "worked with women and children living with domestic violence and who are abuse survivors." She's a nurse who is part of a project team for STOP-GBV, "a national project looking at Gender-Based Violence in Women 55 years of age and older, and the resources that are available to support them." She's a former teacher and domestic violence victim who threw her support behind the Conservative government's DISCLOSURE TO PROTECT AGAINST INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE ACT, an implementation of 'Clare's Law' which gives women access to information about their partners' past history of domestic violence. She's a former school trustee who highlighted the campaign "16 Days of Activism Against Gender Based Violence" on her social media platforms. It's an annual international campaign that begins on November 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. She's another

  What do you do if you're a news reporter and the biggest story of the day, if not the election, falls right into your lap? Well, if you work for CBC Winnipeg, the answer appears to be 'news be damned' if it doesn't fit the narrative being promoted at the moment. The Black Rod happened to be on the scene when a deranged man smashed out the windows of a clearly marked CBC vehicle on Main Street in broad daylight Monday afternoon.  The female reporter cowered in the front seat, weeping while speaking to someone on her cell phone. The male camera man huddled in fear in the back seat as he, also, talked on his phone. Neither of the news crew was using their phone to capture video of the attack. The car was parked outside of Our Place/Chez Nous at 676 Main St. just south of Higgins. The CBC team had obviously just interviewed some of the directors of the drop-in centre that's closing after 30 years on the Strip amidst, as their CBC report later that evening put it

  When the Louis Riel School Division gleefully announced that the board had suspended one of its school trustees, only The Black Rod examined the reasons why. To our astonishment, we discovered that none of the publicized reasons for suspension were valid. Trustee Francine Champagne had done nothing, said nothing, or written anything on the job that fit any of the alleged reasons for her suspension. So why, we asked, would the remaining trustees risk their reputations and maybe even their jobs, to excoriate a duly elected school official who was innocent of any wrongdoing? The answer presented itself two weeks later with the unexpected announcement by Ryan Palmquist, another LRSD trustee, that he was coming out of the closet. Palmquist said he was a 'bisexual' who was married, to a woman, and was the father of three children. He could, he said, hide as a pretend-heterosexual, but he "owed" it to gay and transexual kids and their families to share the risk of

  Last week the modern-day witch hunters took up    their pitchforks, their torches, their puritan capes and their Woke bibles and dashed to save the world from the devil in their midst. The Witchfinder General, Sandy Nemeth, the chairwoman of the ultra-woke Louis Riel School Board trustees, announced proudly that trustee Francine Champagne had been suspended for three months, the most serious punishment the board could impose. Her crime?    Did she cast spells? Did she own a black cat? Did she dance at the crossroads with Beelzebub at midnight? No. She posted on Facebook. Those posts allegedly, as CTV news quoted Nemeth,    had "a strong transphobic sentiment" and were disrespectful of the LGBTQ2S+ community. Trustee Ryan Palmquist was more specific on CBC. "... those gay kids and transgender kids and their families and the whole community that are the ones who are at risk. They're the ones who are potentially subject to bullying, potentially subject to violence.&qu