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Winnipeg Free Press - ONLINE EDITION
Fudgee-O Tax?
- Manitobans don't give a crap about the environment or poor people. Only four per cent said going green or combating poverty were their top spending priority.
- Wait, that's not true. The next question has 84% of Manitobans saying the province should give a higher priority to cleaning up lakes and rivers. People still didn't care about hiking welfare rates or building more subsidized housing, though.
- When it comes to new taxes, nearly 60 per cent said they'd support a junk food tax. Wha? Hands off my Peanut M&Ms! I checked, and this isn't actually happening, but it polled pretty well. Way better than raising the business tax or a small increase in gas taxes, two other options the NDP floated.
- 92% of people said promoting wind and geothermal would be a good way to boost the economy. I wonder if that's a little nudge to Manitoba Hydro, which has been strangely slow to embrace either.
- There was a question about balancing the budget using savings from previous years - a test to see whether the current plan to balance the books over a four-year rolling average would play alright with the public. It didn't do badly - 43 per cent said the province could balance over several years.
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About Mary Agnes Welch
Mary Agnes Welch joined the Free Press in 2002, first as a general assignment reporter and then covering city hall and the Manitoba legislature before moving to her current post as public policy reporter.
Before Winnipeg, she worked at the Windsor Star and the Odessa American, a small daily newspaper in West Texas. There, in addition to covering more than 20 counties, she took high school football scores from coaches all over West Texas by phone every Friday night.
Mary Agnes is a graduate of Columbia University’s journalism school, has won several Western Ontario Newspaper Awards and has been part of two teams of reporters nominated for a Michener Award. In 2011, she was nominated for a National Newspaper Award in the beat category. She is also the former national president of the Canadian Association of Journalists.
She once misspelled "Shih Tzu" in the paper and received 37 emails from angry dog-owners.
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