Fair enough. My guess, based on my experience in the news industry, is that he had kept his editor updated throughout the day, and the editor asked him to write an article that, as you say, ventured into editorial territory. If they had wanted a "just the facts, ma'm" article, they could have easily pulled something off the wires.

Did the reporter go too far, take cheap shots, etc? Maybe. But I think he was--generally speaking--completing an article in the way that it was assigned to him. Front-line reporters don't typically tell their editors what kind of article they are going to write--it's typically the other way around.

Having travelled through Winnipeg extensively in the past 3 years, I have noticed that the Free Press tends to give their writers broader leeway when it comes to editorializing within their articles. We may disagree whether the article was fair, but if anyone at the government level is basing their decisions about appropriate actions to take based solely on this article, the problem lies somewhere other than at the paper.