Mary Walsh looks back at ambushing Canadian politicians, including the time she 'screwed up'

As her spay self-importance Marg Delahunty, comic virgin mary Walsh spent years dauntlessly ambushing Canadian politicians, skewering them with barbs and insults phrased as friendly advice.

But for Walsh, every ambush was always “deeply, deeply terrifying.” 

Walsh would turn up to press briefings sporting large glasses and often violent shades of blush and eye shadow. She wore a breastplate and mini skirt — inspired by the hit 90s TV show Xena: Warrior Princess — and waited to pounce as politicians took questions from journalists.

“Everybody else was dressed appropriately. And I was there in a few bits of red felt with gold glue around my breasts, brandishing a plastic sword from Toys “R” Us," she told The Current’s Matt Galloway.

“I would just feel so embarrassed and ashamed. I would think, 'Well, shag it. I've got nothing to lose, certainly not any shred of human dignity.’ And you know, I'd just go for it.”

Web Exclusive: Marg Delahunty's Greatest Hits

Walsh looks back at her life and career in a new collection of essays, Brassy Bit of Aging Crumpet: A Memoir in Pieces. The book explores her highs and lows, from how poor health affected her childhood in St. John’s, N.L., to the happiness she’s found as she’s gotten older. 

She helped put Newfoundland humour on the map with the comedy troupe Codco, before creating 22 Minutes in the early ‘90s. The long-running series featured Walsh as beloved characters like masculinity correspondent Dakey Dunn and advice-dispensing octogenarian Mrs. Eulalia.

Walsh wanted 22 Minutes to be a show that could “speak truth to power,” and created Delahunty as a way to “let the people in charge know what the people thought.” 

“I thought that we could do that by speaking directly to politicians,” she said.

One of Walsh’s most famous ambushes was when she ended up kissing Stephen Harper, when he was running to become leader of the newly formed Conservative Party of Canada in 2004.

Walsh stopped Harper at an event in Ottawa and told him he’d never become prime minister if he insisted on being “against everything,” and he should find something to support, to embrace.

“Embrace me!” she cried — and promptly kissed Harper on the lips when he obliged. 

Looking back now, she said it was like “kissing a fence post.” 

“Very, very bad kisser … whatever you think of Stephen Harper, he's definitely not a good kisser,” she said.

There were ambushes where she admits she “screwed up,” in particular when she approached Ralph Klein, then-premier of Alberta, inside the legislature in Edmonton. Walsh was dressed as a cowgirl, complete with toy cap guns that bang when fired. She joked to Klein's face that his fiscal policy and budget cutting made him worse than Scrooge or any of "the greatest villains in literature."

She said Klein responded with a remark that “wasn't very nice,” and in a moment of panic, she froze and couldn’t think of what to say next. 

“I was just in a desperate state and didn't think and took out the cap guns and started banging them off in the middle of the legislature,” she said. 

“Conservative papers went mad and they were right; I should never have done that. But it did prove to me that you must not have a gun at hand, because if things go wrong, you will use it.”

In the book, she writes that there was one politician she was always happy to accost: former prime minister Jean Chrétien.

“He seemed to be so comfortable in his own skin, and he was so funny,” she writes.

“I felt reassured that, even if I did mess up, we’d still end up taking a great piece back to Halifax with us. Prime Minister Chrétien would save the day no matter what.”

How Xena inspired Marg Delahunty, Princess Warrior

Walsh doesn’t know if Delahunty would have the same success today as she did in her heyday in the ‘90s and 2000s.

“In Edmonton, when we came to the legislature, all the security said was, ‘Close the door, we're not heating Edmonton,’” she remembers.

“But things changed radically with 9/11 … and the world has moved to politicians simply saying what it is that they are rehearsed to say, and nothing else.”

She sometimes wonders if poking fun at politicians didn’t have the effect she intended.

“Sometimes you think, did we contribute to the dark side where politics is just a joke?” 

“Did we make things too funny?” she wondered, before laughing and adding, “No, Mary, you definitely did not make things too funny.”

Audio produced by Alison Masemann

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