Tom Brodbeck

Columnist

Tom Brodbeck is an award-winning author and columnist with over 30 years experience in print media.

When Tom first started covering politics in Manitoba, paper files, hand-held tape recorders and direct access to politicians were the norm at the Manitoba legislature and city hall.

While technology and public relations strategies have changed significantly since then, the task of getting the story behind the story and trying to make sense of it for readers hasn’t.

Tom has been doing that as a news reporter and a columnist since the early 1990s, covering city, provincial and federal politics with the enthusiasm of the most ardent political junkie.

Whether it’s dissecting budgets, exposing wasteful spending or doing deep dives into complex government policies, Tom approaches his job as a journalist with the rank-and-file reader in mind, always interested in how decisions made by politicians affect the average person on the street.

Tom has covered some of the biggest stories in recent Manitoba history, including the Tory vote-rigging scandal, the privatization of MTS, the Flood of the Centuryin 1997, the Crocus Investment Fund debacle and the NDP mutiny that led to one of the worst provincial government defeats in decades.

Born and raised in Montreal, Tom came to Manitoba in 1990 and graduated from the University of Manitoba with an economics degree. He joined the Free Press news team in 2019.

Tom is a long-time community centre volunteer and an outdoor ice-rink maker. When he’s not pounding his keyboard, he’s usually behind a drum kit performing live with the Winnipeg-based Stephanie Westdal Band.

Tom was selected as the winner of the Manitoba Historical Society’s Margaret McWilliams Book Award for popular history for his 2024 book Treaties, Lies and Promises: How the Métis and First Nations Shaped Canada.