Do we like Mary Walsh?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decades of satire aimed at the powerful and steady charity work, with no harm found, but the record we could open is thinner than we'd like.
Mary Walsh was born in St. John's in 1952, the seventh of eight kids, and had a rough childhood. She learned early to use humour as a survival skill, and by 18 she was in the Newfoundland Travelling Theatre Company alongside her childhood friend Cathy Jones.
That company's spoof Cod on a Stick turned into CODCO, the sketch troupe that ran on CBC from 1986 to 1992. In 1994 she co-created This Hour Has 22 Minutes, where her character Marg Delahunty ambushed politicians for a living. She also wrote, directed and acted on stage and screen, and she picked up a pile of Gemini awards along the way.
On the harm check, we came up empty in a good way. We found no campaigning against any group, no conspiracy rabbit hole and no dodgy company she keeps. Her targets are politicians, and she skewers them across the spectrum. She told Cabin Radio in 2025 she thinks Justin Trudeau is unfairly criticised, and she also called Mark Carney a gift for comedy. The honest caveat is that we could not find her speaking directly about trans rights or other group-specific issues, so this is an absence of evidence, not a ringing endorsement.
Her ambush interviews were satire, not cruelty. She said she always spoke to people as Marg like she was helping them, and that ambushing politicians taught her to empathise with them. She says satire and non-violent protest are still a way to push leaders towards fairness, but she worries that some of the most successful politicians today have the least integrity.
The good stuff is real. She has worked with Oxfam-Canada, including a fact-finding mission to Ethiopia in 1994, and has been a spokesperson for the Bell Let's Talk campaign. She was made a Member of the Order of Canada in 2001. In 2013 ACTRA named her its Woman of the Year, and the union describes her as a spokesperson for Oxfam and the CNIB who volunteers for several charitable causes.
In her seventies she is still touring. In 2022 she was out on the road with An Evening with Mary Walsh, mixing CODCO and 22 Minutes material with new work. She was also previewing her novel, and she has argued that later life is a prime time, not a decline. This year's memoir, Brassy Bit of Aging Crumpet, takes that idea further.