Once a special aide to Jean Chrétien and chief of staff to former Public Works Minister David Dingwall, Kinsella has, with a few notable exceptions, been associated with the Liberal brand since Chrétien took a shine to him in 1987. Few people in Canadian politics dare say a bad word about him, for fear of being lambasted on his website or pursued legally by Kinsella himself. Kinsella has five ongoing lawsuits in Toronto alone, against Paul Martin, Public Works Minister Christian Paradis, several journalists and author/pundit Ezra Levant, from whom Kinsella is seeking $5 million in defamation-related damages.
Kinsella’s blog, meanwhile, is a self-referential hodgepodge of his thoughts, occasional apologies and plugs of his punk band, Shit From Hell. He also praises his heroes and excoriates his enemies-though the two seem interchangeable, depending on the day. In 2007, for example, Kinsella called Mark Steyn the “best conservative writer alive.” A year and a half later, Steyn was a “country club bigot and pompous windbag.”
Earlier this year, Kinsella attempted to have Kathy Shaidle, one of the bloggers invited to Israel, removed from a TVOntario current-affairs program, calling her “racist garbage” and sending a letter of complaint to Ontario’s minister of education. Yet Kinsella himself appeared on the same show with Shaidle two years before without protest-even though Shaidle’s controversial views on minorities and AIDS were well known at the time. He even posted the video clip of the show on his site, and wrote that Shaidle was “nice.” In 2006, Kinsella implied he couldn’t work for Ignatieff: “I simply object to too many of Michael Ignatieff’s views,” he wrote. Yet he will work in Michael Ignatieff’s war room in the next election. (Kinsella refused further comment.)
Not everyone’s thrilled about this development. “Bottom line is that Liberals just don’t get why we’d choose to stand next to a human shrapnel machine,” said a longtime Liberal who has worked with Kinsella frequently over the years but has since fallen out with him.
What remains uncertain, however, is why the Conservative Party continues its attack on Kinsella in the House of Commons. Lauzon says Kinsella’s role as head of Ignatieff’s war room-a volunteer position-won’t begin until an election is called. (Conservative spokesperson Ryan Sparrow wouldn’t comment, citing the Kinsella’s lawsuit against Paradis and the Conservative Party.) “I don’t know if they are worried about me-I sure wouldn’t be, if I were them. But I certainly can see how it might look like they are,” Kinsella wrote in an email to Maclean’s. “Which, as I say, is dumb. If I were them, the person I’d be worried about-really, really worried about-is Michael Ignatieff. Because he’s going to be the next Prime Minister, and they’re going to be out on their keesters.”
That is, if Canada’s Prince of Darkness has anything to do with it.
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