Mary Agnes Welch's Gripe Juice

with Mary Agnes Welch

Subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed

• Election bumf

  The Grits recently got to the bottom of some online shenanigans that have been wasting their time and clogging up their website. The culprit might surprise you.

  View Full Post 09/29/2011 11:17 AM 0

• Women candidates "abhorrently disgusting"

  We get a lot of crazy emails and phone calls here at the Freep, as does every newsroom.

  View Full Post 09/16/2011 1:46 PM 0

• Grit spin

  Victory for Liberal Leader Jon Gerrard would be four seats, which would give him official party status for the first time in years. Perhaps hoping for a last-minute surge like the one that catapulted the federal NDP into opposition in May, Grit party folk are feeling hopeful (and possibly delusional) about these four:

  View Full Post 09/13/2011 10:53 AM 0

• Adam Beach, Tory?

  Adam Beach is a lot of things – good actor, handsome and charming, clearly committed to Manitoba’s aboriginal people.

  View Full Post 09/6/2011 2:02 PM 0

• Elaborate, Mr. McFadyen

  We had a rather dispiriting scrum with Tory Leader Hugh McFadyen Friday afternoon. I fear it’s the first of many where the guy — who is known to be a policy wonk — does nothing but duck real policy debates.

  View Full Post 09/2/2011 5:42 PM 0

• Cheesy move, NDP

  My boss on our news desk got an innocuous call this morning from a staffer in the Selinger government’s media office. The staffer (who was also at the NDP’s 2015 vision launch yesterday) cheerfully offered us a tour of the new birthing centre in St. Vital.

  View Full Post 08/31/2011 12:57 PM 0

• The NDP’s Indo-Canadian problem

  I dropped by the NDP nomination meeting Sunday afternoon in Concordia, a race that caused a lot of heartburn within the party’s establishment. It offered some stark evidence of the chasm that exists between the party’s old guard and its new Indo-Canadian members. The meeting was held at a local high school, which was a pretty apt setting. Like the Grade 12 cool kids, the party establishment all hung out together while the brown guys in turbans kept to themselves. If that continues, the NDP might have a problem in a few months.

  View Full Post 06/1/2011 3:47 PM 0

• What’s next for Rebecca Blaikie?

  

  NDP candidate Rebecca Blaikie lost by 117 votes last night in a squeaker in Winnipeg North, thanks to Liberal MP Kevin Lamoureux’s strength in Tyndall Park and some advance votes that bumped him over the top.

  View Full Post 05/3/2011 1:50 PM 0

• Does this wikileak make my story look flat?

  The American embassy in Ottawa called me a crap journalist, but I don’t care. I made Wikileaks!

  View Full Post 04/29/2011 12:19 PM 0

• Is Maloway getting bruinooged?

  Elmwood-Transcona hasn't been on most people's lists of ridings to watch, including mine. But in the last few days, several politicos of all stripes have hinted that NDP MP Jim Maloway may be in a tighter race than expected. His key challenger, Tory Lawrence Toet, has a significant number of signs up in the riding and is no rookie on the campaign trail. He ran Thomas Steen's successful bid for a council seat last fall, and my impression is Toet was the tough brain behind Steen's gentle charm. Toet was also one of the area's leading challengers of the proposed OlyWest hog processing plant, a fight that took many months and consumed the riding.

  View Full Post 04/27/2011 3:46 PM 0

• Badly done, Ottawa

  I wrote today about 30-year-old Kevin Taylor, a guy with cerebral palsy who lives in St. Theresa Point in a home with no running water that’s not wheelchair accessible. His dad has to carry him to the outhouse. When Taylor can’t use his crutches, he drags himself around with his arms.

  View Full Post 04/20/2011 4:42 PM 0

• MP newsletters are kosher

  In recent days, three different voters in three different ridings have contacted the Free Press about MP newsletters arriving in mailboxes days or weeks after the election campaign began. The first to arrive, the week after the writ was dropped, was a “tax guide” from Provencher MP Vic Toews. A couple of days after that, reader Ian Wallace says he got another, more partisan mail-out from Toews that was mailed at government cost.

  View Full Post 04/18/2011 9:31 AM 0

• Wally takes swipes at Niki

  If it weren’t so Mean Girls, this (click here) might be kind of funny. Churchill Tory candidate Wally Daudrich is burning up his bandwidth with some familiar, if bush-league, swipes at NDP MP Niki Ashton.

  View Full Post 04/15/2011 11:13 AM 0

• Manitoba platforms wanted

  I was chatting with former federal cabinet minister Lloyd Axworthy recently about electoral reform and he mentioned that, back in his day as an MP, the Liberals would release a Manitoba-specific platform, with a list of promises and positions on local issues.

  View Full Post 04/12/2011 11:06 AM 0

• Iggy makes a funny

  This is possibly the best election ad of the campaign so far. The Twitterverse appears to be in love with it for its hipster humour and the speed with which the Grits got it made. I especially like the amalgamation of old-school Frankenstein-style grunting with Terminator-style cyborg face recognition software.

  View Full Post 04/6/2011 2:35 PM 0

• Strategic voting in St. B

  A group calling themselves Catch 22 is looking to foment strategic voting in 40 ridings across Canada in a bid to oust Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. They appear to be a grassroots group of lefties and they’ve earned a little press since they launched their campaign late last week.

  View Full Post 04/4/2011 10:16 AM 0

• Tale of two rallies

  I'm a couple of days late, but I've been thinking about the contrasts between Prime Minister Stephen Harper's rally in Winnipeg Tuesday and Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff's town hall the following night.

  View Full Post 04/1/2011 11:51 AM 0

• Is that Tory a Dipper?

  They might be riding high in the polls but the provincial Tories keep getting dragged down north of Winnipeg.

  View Full Post 03/29/2011 2:56 PM 0

• Trumped by Manitoba Lotteries

  Polls paid for by taxpayers are supposed to be public, according to a lot of crowing about the province's new-ish access to information act.

  View Full Post 03/24/2011 11:49 AM 0

• An election is coming!

  Here’s how I know: Premier Greg Selinger is more in-your-face than Maria Aragon. He has made seven announcements this week, including one about a literacy award this afternoon.

  View Full Post 03/3/2011 2:40 PM 0