Warren Kinsella

For the Canadian author, see W. P. Kinsella.

J. Warren Kinsella, (born August 1960 in Montreal, Quebec), is a Toronto-based Canadian lobbyist, lawyer, author, musician, political consultant, commentator, and blogger.

As a political strategist, he has been described as Canada's "James Carville" and "Prince of Darkness". He is the president and co-founder of The Daisy Consulting Group named after a famous Democratic Party ad in the 1964 U.S. presidential election.

Personal life and Education

He is the son of physician and medical ethicist Douglas Kinsella, C.M., founder of the National Council on Ethics in Human Research (NCEHR).

Kinsella has a Bachelor's Degree in Journalism (Honours) from Carleton University, and a law degree from the University of Calgary.

He and his wife have four children. In late 2000, he established a popular weblog, "Latest Musings".

Politics

Kinsella served as a strategist in the Canadian federal Liberal Party's 1993 election campaign "task force", as a staffer in opposition leader Jean Chrétien's office. After the Liberals won the election to form the government, Kinsella became chief of staff to federal Public Works minister David Dingwall. He also worked in the party's "war room" in the 2000 federal election, where he gained national exposure by appearing on CTV's Canada AM brandishing a purple Barney dinosaur to highlight Stockwell Day's creationist beliefs, which saw the Liberals win a third mandate.

Kinsella ran as a Liberal candidate in the 1997 federal election in the riding of North Vancouver but was defeated by Reform incumbent Ted White.

A vocal supporter of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, Kinsella criticized the campaign of Chrétien's rival and successor, Paul Martin, several times in the 2004 federal election, and 2006 election, which saw the Liberals reduced to minority government and then defeated, respectively.

In December 2006, he revealed on his National Post blog that his firm had been actively supporting the candidacy of new Liberal leader Stephane Dion.

Kinsella also played a role 2007 re-election of Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty and his Ontario Liberal Party. In the 2007 campaign, he wrote a blog post suggesting that Progressive Conservative MPP Lisa MacLeod would rather bake cookies than run for office. Several candidates from opposition parties denounced the post as offensive to women, and Kinsella issued an apology.

Sponsorship Scandal and Gomery Commission

Kinsella's actions as an aide to a Liberal cabinet minister briefly figured in the 2004 Canadian Sponsorship scandal. In 1995 while working for David Dingwall then Minister of Public Works, Kinsella wrote a memo to then Deputy Minister Ran Quail recommending that the government's communications be reorganized under a centralized delivery system and that Chuck Guite be assigned to head the new agency. Dingwall testified that he instructed Kinsella to write the memo.

Gomery in his November 2005 report concluded: “This communication was rightly taken by Mr. Quail to be a highly inappropriate attempt by political staff to interfere in the internal administration of PWGSC, which is entirely within the jurisdiction of the Deputy Minister. …To his credit, Mr. Quail resisted the temptation to take offence… Mr. Quail decided that Mr. Kinsella’s memo was a mistake by an inexperienced political staffer who did not know better than to attempt to give direction to a senior public servant on how to organize his department....As to why he would have wanted Mr. Guité to be given important new responsibilities, the record is unclear. But we do know that Mr. Guité and his personnel at APORS were given the whole responsibility for the management and administration of the Sponsorship Program when it came into being in the spring of 1996. …When CCSB was created in November 1997, it constituted almost exactly the consolidation of functions that had been advocated by Mr. Kinsella two years previously."

Kinsella left government service to work as counsel to the Vancouver advertising firm Palmer Jarvis, two years prior to the creation of the sponsorship program which was the mandate and focus of the Gomery Commission.

Kinsella was a witness at the Gomery Commission and frequently mocked Judge Gomery on his web site. Accusing the Gomery Commission of bias against Jean Chrétien and Chrétien loyalists.

Legal action

Kinsella has been a party to several libel actions and threatened defamation suits.

Kinsella's publisher paid an undisclosed financial settlement in 1998 for his comments regarding Reform Party activist Roger Rocan in Web of Hate, along with an apology stating: ""Harper Collins ... and Warren Kinsella state that the words 'fascist, Klanmen, Jew hater and Hitler freak' should not, and do not refer to Roger Rocan [and] regret any adverse inference concerning Roger Rocan which could have been taken from the passage."

In January, 2006, he launched a $600,000 lawsuit against a blogger, Mark Bourrie, for posting about Kinsella's role in advocating the government's hiring Chuck Guite in the lead-up to the sponsorship scandal. The lawsuit was settled out of court.

In 2008, Kinsella threatened legal action against Canadian bloggers who he alleged libelled him. The issue aroused controversy in the Canadian blogging community, which preceded to have a legal defense fund setup. The matter was eventually settled without litigation when most parties involved came to compromise.

Earnscliffe Communication Group

In April 2004, a memo written by Warren Kinsella critical of the manner in which polling contracts were awarded to the Earnscliffe Communication group on behalf of the Finance department, surfaced in the media. The July 24, 1995 memo written to Charles Guité stated: "None of these procurements were conducted through (Public Works), contrary to cabinet-approved guidelines. This is simply unacceptable. I require an immediate explanation as to how the department in question was permitted to breach the guidelines.". On April 18, 2005, Kinsella appeared before the Standing Committee on Public Accounts and was asked to explain the July 24, 1995 memo. The hearing was a highly charged political atmosphere in which numerous heated exchanges took place.

Involvement in punk rock

File:Tribbles.jpg

Front Cover

In his youth, Kinsella was the bassist of the Canadian punk band, "The Hot Nasties". In 2005, Kinsella wrote Fury's Hour: A (sort-of) Punk-Rock Manifesto (Random House, 2005), a history of the early days of punk.

Kinsella is now playing in punk rock band Shit From Hell.

He wrote the song, Barney Rubble is My Double, featured on the Hot Nasties long play cassette tape and the Shit From Hell self titled CD. It was also covered by The Evaporator's on their Ripple Rock album.

Writing

• Unholy Alliances (Lester, 1992)
• Web of Hate: Inside Canada's Far Right Network ISBN 0-00-638051-4 (HarperCollins, 1997)
• Party Favours (HarperCollins, 1997)
• Kicking Ass in Canadian Politics (Random House, 2001)
• Fury's Hour: A (sort-of) Punk-Rock Manifesto (Random House, 2005)
• The War Room: Political Strategies for Business, NGOs, and Anyone Who Wants to Win (Dundurn Press, 2007)

Kinsella has also written commentary in most of Canada's major newspapers, including the Globe and Mail and the Ottawa Citizen. He was recently media columnist for the National Post. In 2008, Comment editor Jonathan Kay wrote a column denouncing Kinsella's views on the use of Human Rights Commissions as a means of preventing the publication of material offensive to Muslim groups. Two days later, Kinsella announced on his blog his resignation from the Post, commenting, "I don't mind being a minority voice - my views on human rights hopefully made that clear enough, in recent weeks - but, sometimes, you can only stomach so much. Being the father to an aboriginal child, for example, I have been appalled by the paper's positions on First Nations issues; they were horrible. On racism, on human rights, on a lot of things. It gets to you, after a while. Like Graham Greene said in The Quiet American - sometimes, to remain human, you have to choose sides. So, I have."

External links

• Warren Kinsella's website
• Daisy Consulting Group
• Audio interview with THECOMMENTARY.CA's Joseph Planta