Tag Archive: Justin Trudeau

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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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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Adler-Kinsella Show: in which I defend Trudeau on personkind, and on all kinds of pipelines

— 02.09.2018 09:36 AM

Every Thursday, I have a radio-via-phone encounter with my great friend Charles Adler.  This week, the encounter took place by luggage rack two at Calgary’s Airport (said airport having received more snow than the North Pole before we started wrecking the planet).

I valiantly defended the Prime Minister on personkind-gate – which shows no signs of abating, and may be getting worse – because I actually believe him when he said he was trying to make a dumb joke that fell flat.  But you only get so many of those “it’s just a joke” mulligans in this business.

I defended him on the growing Alberta-B.C. spat, too.  I said to him what I have heard from so many partisan Conservatives and Liberals here in Alberta: they admire Rachley Notley’s intelligence and guts.  She may still lose to Jason Kenney, but there’s a lot of admiration for her here – particularly for how she’s taking on the nation-wrecker Horgan.

Anyway, here it is.  Me, I’m now off to many hours of lectures at the Faculty of Law!



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“I find you so pretty” – senior PMO director to young woman looking for a job

— 02.05.2018 11:32 AM

This is wild.  Wild.

Look at the message Myriam Denis, an experienced and bilingual communicator with a Liberal pedigree, got from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Deputy Director of Operations:

“I find you very pretty,” he says.  One of the most senior unelected officials in the federal government, sending messages like that, not even bothering to hide his identity.

That’s not all: Ms. Denis – who I have never met – was being hit on by a guy who worked for Bardash Chagger, presently the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons.  That guy, an advisor to Chagger, allegedly put his hand on Ms. Denis’ thigh when they met to discuss a job opening.  She says he told her she had “a nice bikini body.”

After all this outrageous behaviour by two senior men in the Trudeau government – two men who, coincidentally, had both worked for Melanie Joly – Myriam Denis did not get the job.  She did, however, complain to Chagger’s Chief of Staff, a woman (thankfully).  The chief of Staff took her complaint seriously, it seems.

But get this: right after Ms. Denis wrote briefly on Facebook briefly about getting hit on by a senior Trudeau operative, she heard from another Trudeau guy.  He told her that he “handles [human relations] in the Prime Minister’s office.”  That’s a quote.

Except he didn’t.  The Claude-Eric Gagné investigation was being handled by an outside, arms-length law firm.  Not someone who worked within PMO.  (Oh, and the guy’s title was “Director of Administration and Special Projects.”  Not HR.)  So: one of Gagné’s fellow directors at PMO seemed to be falsely claiming to be “handling” sexual harassment cases like Ms. Denis’.

Was he truly contacting her to help? Or was it just to cover it all up?

She is the victim, here, and should have the final word, and you should read every word:

This is wrong on so many levels. Even if he was truly the HR person in the PMO, it would be extremely inappropriate for him to be contacting potential victims when there was an ongoing examination by a third-party investigator.

Until the moment I received the Facebook message from Brett Thalmann, I was willing to believe that Vidah and Gagné were just two cases of “bad apples” within a big organization. I am not so sure anymore. This third strange experience makes me think that it might be more than a few isolated incidents of reprehensible behaviours.

I feel a lot of sadness and empathy for the women who are currently working [in Justin Trudeau’s PMO].


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#MeToo, #cdnpoli and #questions – UPDATED TWICE

— 02.03.2018 02:01 PM

Timing is everything, in comedy and in politics.

Late on a Friday – just as Maclean’s was breaking a huge story about the Harper Conservatives knowing that they had a candidate accused of sexual assault, and let him run for them anyway – the government let slip that the Deputy Director of Operations in the Prime Minister’s Office was no longer employed there.

Rule of thumb: when (a) a government, any government, quietly releases something (b) on a Friday (c) in the evening, it is usually meaningful.

This Gagné fellow was pretty senior.  In any PMO, only the Chief of Staff, the Principal Secretary, the Director of Comms and the Director of Operations are more senior.  An Ops director will generally have more power than any ministerial Chief of Staff, or most members of cabinet.

Some of what there is to know about Monsieur Gagné, and his alleged behaviour, is starting to trickle out – as one brave woman is suggesting, here.

Many questions remain.  There’s no question, however, that #MeToo isn’t winding up on Parliament Hill.

As Friday’s late-breaking stories suggest, it’s just getting started.

UPDATE: Right after the above post went up, some anonymous person(s) started to email the pleadings in my divorce to Ottawa reporters.  Now, why do you think that is happening?  And which political team do you think might be doing it, eh?

Ottawa sure is a nice town.

UPDATE TWO: Oh look: now they have updated my Wikipedia page to say I abused and neglected my children. A Teksavvy customer in Ottawa did it. From a friend: “To reiterate, the edit came from a computer on a DSL network associated with TekSavvy customer assigned address 23-233-60-119.cpe.pppoe.ca at 7:01pm EST Saturday February 3 2018 in the World Exchange Plaza, likely at one of the lobby firms there.”


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