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- For the Canadian author, see W. P. Kinsella.
Warren Kinsella is a Toronto-based lawyer, author, musician, political consultant, commentator on the Sun News Network, blogger and columnist for Quebecor newspapers.
Personal life
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 holds a Bachelor's degree in Journalism from Carleton University and a Bachelor of Law degree from the University of Calgary.
Politics
Campaign strategist
Kinsella bills himself as the "Prince of Darkness" of Canadian politics, although he has not worked on a national campaign team since 2000. (He left Michael Ignatieff's team before the election of 2011 and repeatedly publicly denounced his former employer.) He served as a strategist in the Canadian federal Liberal Party's 1993 election campaign "task force", and worked as a staffer in opposition leader Jean Chrétien's office. After the Liberals won the election, Kinsella became chief of staff to federal Public Works minister David Dingwall for a short time.
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. During his last stint as a national campaign headquarters worker during a federal campaign, he appeared on CTV's Canada AM brandishing a purple Barney dinosaur to mock what he claimed were Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day's creationist beliefs.
After the 2000 federal election, he concentrated mainly on Ontario provincial politics, although he did work periodically for federal Liberal politicians Allan Rock, Stephane Dion, Sheila Copps and Michael Ignatieff. While working for Rock, he became embroiled in a name-calling dispute with senior Ontario Liberals over the issue of allowing non-citizens to vote for delegates to the leadership convention. Kinsella was a vocal supporter of Chretien during the inner-party struggle that resulted in Chretien being replaced by Paul Martin and sued several of Martin's supporters for libel. He joined the Toronto-based Navigator consulting firm and later started his own company. Both firms engage in paid political campaign strategy work, lobbying and and communications crisis management.
In November 2008, Kinsella worked briefly for leadership candidate Michael Ignatieff. One long-time senior Liberal questioned the hiring of Kinsella, calling him a "human shrapnel machine."
Later that month Kinsella posted a video blog that accused an Ottawa restaurant of selling cat meat; he apologized for the comment after criticism from Chinese-Canadian groups and political opponents. Kinsella resigned from Ignatieff's campaign in May 2009. After leaving Ignatieff's office, he repeatedly denounced the former leader on his blog and in columns written for the Toronto Sun chain of newspapers.
Kinsella also was involved in the 2007 re-election campaign 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 be seen on a stage with farm activist Randy Hillier, who later ran successfully for the Conservatives. Several candidates from opposition parties denounced the post as offensive to women, and Kinsella issued an apology. The incident prompted MacLeod to write the cookbook I'd Rather Be Baking Cookies: A Collection of Recipes from Lisa MacLeod and Friends. Kinsella supported Sandra Pupatello in the leadership convention that chose a successor to McGuinty. The leadership was won by Kathleen Wynne.
Sponsorship Scandal
During the Gomery Commission's inquiry into the Sponsorship scandal, a government advertising kickback scheme in Quebec which caused severe political damage to the then-Liberal government, Judge Gomery was told that Kinsella, while chief of staff to Minister of Public Works David Dingwall, wrote a letter to the department's Deputy Minister, Ran Quail, requesting Chuck Guité be appointed to review the government's advertising and communications strategy.
Quail said he viewed the letter as political interference into civil service affairs. Dingwall and Kinsella characterized the letter as a request rather than a directive.
In his report, Judge Gomery said: “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 (Public Works and Government Services Canada)... 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 did not work for the federal government during the time of the actual sponsorship frauds. Kinsella had left government service to work as counsel to the Vancouver advertising firm Palmer Jarvis and was not involved with the sponsorship program. Testimony at the Gomery Inquiry did show Kinsella and Guite had exchanged correspondence by fax while Kinsella was at Palmer Jarvis but the nature of that correspondence was not explored in the oral testimony.
Guite ran the ad contract scam from 1996 to 1999. On June 6, 2006, a jury in Montreal found Guité guilty on five counts of defrauding the federal government. On June 19, he was sentenced to 42 months in jail. He was given full parole on September 16, 2009.
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)
- Fight the Right: A Manual for Surviving the Coming Conservative Apocalypse (Random House, Oct 2 2012)
Kinsella has also written commentary in most of Canada's major newspapers and several magazine, including the Globe and Mail, the Ottawa Citizen, the National Post and The Walrus. He is now a columnist for the right-wing tabloid Toronto Sun and smaller English-language Quebecor newspapers. He also appears regularly on the Sun News Network, Quebecor's right-wing channel.
References
- National Council on Ethics in Human Research
- http://warrenkinsella.com/books/kicking-ass-in-canadian-politics.
- http://books.google.ca/books?id=rU0yAugpDVEC&pg=PA144&lpg=PA144&dq=warren+kinsella+barney&source=bl&ots=5nbniaFqMf&sig=e8ifM6do8TBgt5rPTt0QGrLKwxM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=HOzAUZ7dAs6qqAGPhoCICw&ved=0CDMQ6AEwATgK#v=onepage&q=warren%20kinsella%20barney&f=false
- "Warren Kinsella". Warren Kinsella. Retrieved April 25, 2013.
- Patriquin, Martin (April 10, 2009). "The "Prince of Darkness" is back in the Liberal fold". Maclean's.
- "自由黨高級顧問金希拉 言論涉種族歧視.袁海耀要求向華社道歉". Sing Tao Daily. January 29, 2010.
- Taber, Jane. "Ignatieff's first test". The Globe and Mail.
- Taber, Jane (May 10, 2010). "OLO bloodletting prompts Warren Kinsella to ditch Liberal war room". The Globe and Mail.
- Ferguson, Rob (July 26, 2007). "Kinsella to stay despite 'unfortunate' comment". The Star. Toronto. Retrieved March 27, 2010.
- "Conservatives, including PM, share recipes for cookbook". CTV News. September 11, 2010. Retrieved September 13, 2010.
- Taylor, Louisa (September 12, 2010). "MPP MacLeod cooks up fundraiser". Ottawa Citizen. Retrieved September 13, 2010.
- "Gomery Inquiry: A summary of the testimony". Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. June 3, 2005. Retrieved September 27, 2008.
- http://www.yorku.ca/igreene/gomfactVI.pdf
- http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/206/301/pco-bcp/commissions/sponsorship-ef/06-03-06/gomery.irri.net/Jan%2021,%2005/gomery60jan2105.pdf
- http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/206/301/pco-bcp/commissions/sponsorship-ef/06-03-06/www.gomery.ca/documents/transcripts/en/2005/02/2005221370.pdf
External links