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Winnipeg Free Press - ONLINE EDITION
MYND
Last night’s Manitoba Young New Democrats delegate selection meeting in the bowels of the U of W was pretty neat, if only because the meeting actually started on time, the votes were counted before midnight and there was some yelling.
The 250-or-so students had a little good-natured shout-off after Selinger and Ashton finished speaking, hoisting their signs and chanting each candidate’s name.
Ashton, as he is wont to do, did some high-octane pandering. He promised to reinstate the tuition freeze (bad policy), create an anti-racism bill (hello, free speech Charter challenge) and name himself the Minister of Youth (Orwell). But he is a firebrand speaker.
Selinger in his shirtsleeves was a bit more low-key. Everyone always calls him "professorial," which is true. But he got in some good laughs and slagged the Wall Street robber barons and did a little pandering to the next generation of leaders, too.
Oddly, Selinger got a round of claps for saying he’d end the tuition freeze but at least cap fee hikes, which made me wonder how many in the audience were "real" students and how many were Selinger workers primed to applaud on cue.
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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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