Adler-Kinsella: why the Wylie scandal matters

— 03.23.2018 07:18 AM

Fifty billion in market value, gone. One of the biggest companies in the world in chaos. Governments announcing probes. And the Trudeau government looking quite nervous.

Charles Adler and me on the Christopher Wylie affair. I think this one could be very big.  Here’s a snippet from next week’s column about it all:

Usually, when an individual has become radioactive, politicos adopt a standardized approach.  The revolving-door Trump White House uses it quite a bit.  First, claim the individual in question was “just a volunteer,” nothing more.  If that doesn’t work, insist the aforementioned individual is unimportant, a “coffee boy,” in effect.  And if none of that works – and it rarely does – join the pile-on, and say, with a straight face, that the President/Prime Minister/Potentate “never met with this person, and is cooperating with police.”

Pat Sorbara was the Grits’ 2011 deputy campaign boss – and, in 2014, a very senior campaign advisor to Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne.  She is one of the few who has been willing to speak about Wylie on the record.  Wylie was “way ahead of his time,” Sorbara marveled in the Globe.  The two of them spitballed various microtargeting techniques. 

“[Sorbara] was impressed by his ideas,” reported the Globe and Mail, “but said that after his initial presentation she had to reject his proposals owing to a lack of time and resources.”  So the story changes, yet again: the Ignatieff Liberals didn’t reject Wylie because what he was suggesting was unethical and possibly illegal. 

No, they didn’t use him because they couldn’t afford it.


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A. Meet with the police.

— 03.22.2018 08:26 PM

Q. On the day the new Your Ward News – that racist, anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying, Islamophobic, women-hating piece of garbage – comes out, what do you do?


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Big trouble. Big.

— 03.21.2018 03:03 PM



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Political parties and data mining: a whodunit

— 03.21.2018 11:12 AM

Young Canadian Christopher Wylie has been much in the news lately – among other things, for single-handedly hammering Facebook’s market value, and causing lots of political earthquakes in the U.S.

When Wylie was kicking around the Liberal Party of Canada, I didn’t know him.  “Couldn’t pick him out of a police line-up,” I told an enterprising Canadian Press reporter calling around about Wylie.  “Which may be where he is heading.”

As a result of all the controversy, the Liberal Party is being asked if it went along with Wylie’s apparent plan to illicitly/illegally abscond with the personal information of millions of voters.  The Liberals should be be asked those questions. The people who create the privacy rules should be expected to know and apply those rules.

But – as I just told a Walrus writer – it is ridiculous to think that just the Canadian Liberals and the American Republicans were the only ones doing this seamy data mining.  They weren’t, I assured her.

Here, ipso facto, is a presentation I gave many years ago about what the Harper/Kenney Conservatives were up to – and long before Christopher Wylie showed up in Ottawa. The Tories, I think, were in this space before anyone else in Canada.

Winning the Ethnic Vote Presentation – March 23 2011 by Warren Kinsella on Scribd


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Fish where there’s fish

— 03.21.2018 07:06 AM


…that’s something I say so much about campaigns that my staff have heard it a billion times. Talk about the stuff voters want you to talk about. Manage the dialogue.Thus, this from Campaign Research:

“The PCs have a significant lead over both the OLP and the ONDP. This is because the policy issues that matter the most to the electorate also happen to be the policy planks that Doug Ford is seen to be performing much better on. If Doug Ford and the PCs remain focused on these policy planks, the PCs could hold onto their lead…Kathleen Wynne and the OLP are outperforming in a significant way on some of the policy planks, but at this point those policy planks are not seen as being as important.”  – said Eli Yufest, CEO of Campaign Research Inc.

So, ipso facto, the current situation: Doug Ford is way ahead of Kathleen Wynne because he’s talking about the issues people care about. Wynne, not so much.

That’s also reflected in the latest Angus Reid, seen here.

Which brings to mind an anecdote from a few months back, when various Ontario Liberal folks were getting plenty nervous. A couple meetings were convened, at which the Ontario Liberal leader and her “chief strategist” described how they would win.

Basically, they told the assembled Nervous Nellies that, if they talked a lot about the sex-ed curriculum and stuff like that, they’d do smashingly. But no one, I’m told, asked this question: “But what if the campaign is about affordability and our perceived indifference to regular folks who don’t drive Volvos and listen to CBC and live in the Annex?”

Of such things are victories made. The other guy’s.

When you talk about stuff people don’t care about it…well, you know what happens then.



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Posted this a year before the Ontario vote. It’s still true.

— 03.20.2018 07:56 AM

Let’s recap.

  1. The Ontario PCs raised $16 million last year, and the Ontario Liberals – the, you know, government – raised $6 million.  Ten million less.  The government.
  2. The most powerful mayor in Canada – a very, very popular guy who has helped the governing Liberals out of many tight spots – has all but declared war on them. And Ontario’s extremely ambitious Transport minister is Number One on John Tory’s hit list, now.  Not good.
  3. And, last night in the Sault, the Ontario Liberal Party came third in a crucial by-election – and the PCs, who haven’t held that seat since the 1981 election, crushed them with more than 40 per cent of the vote.

Screen Shot 2017-06-02 at 8.29.54 AM

That’s just the past week. Previous weeks have been just as crummy, if not more so.  The budgetary goodies, the Hydro rate cut and youth pharmacare haven’t really done what they were supposed to do.

Radical change is needed.  Three suggestions:

  1. Fire the Wizard.  The “chief strategist” is doing to the OLP what the Wizard and his pals did to the LPC ten years ago: killing it.  Get rid of that crew, now, and bring in people who know how to win.
  2. New blood, new ideas.  The OLP desperately needs both.  Caucus – and some excellent staff in the Premier’s Office and minister’s offices – say the same thing: the OLP brand is strong, but it needs excitement.  It needs new and better ideas.  It needs new blood, in the form of some impressive candidates and thinkers.
  3. Reflect.  I know Kathleen Wynne.  I’ve worked with Kathleen Wynne.  I admire Kathleen Wynne.  And I know that Kathleen Wynne will not let the Ontario Liberal Party go down to third place in 2018.  She will do the right thing.  If she is dragging down the party, she will make the selfless decision.

As of this month, the election is twelve months away.  That leaves enough time – barely – to make some big changes.

Let’s make them, now.

 


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