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THE COLLINS COLUMN, July 31, 2000 Kinsella's Kookpot Doug Collins
The lackwit in question is Warren Kinsella, failed candidate on Vancouver's North Shore in the 1997 federal election. The Alliance calls him "a drive-by sleaze artist", which is an understatement. Kinsella's was the dirtiest political campaign I have seen in fifty years of watching the pols perform here in the True North. Epithets and fibs flew around like confetti. He tried to trash Ted White, the sitting Reform Party MP, but it backfired on him and he was forced to crawl back to Toronto as soon as the election was over. Early on in the campaign he swore eternal loyalty to North Vancouver, win or lose. "Warren, we hardly knew ye," was the headline in the North Shore News when his made his exit to the cheers of the multitude. Toronto is welcome to him. Mr. White wouldn't shake hands with him on election night. I wouldn't have shaken hands with him, either. I would sooner have given a French kiss to the Phantom of the Opera. Kinsella is now trying to use the same tactics on Mr. Day. He had suggested that White was a secret separatist because, many years ago, he had been a member of Doug Christie's Western Canada Concept. Kinsella now describes Day as "Archie Bunker on roller skates". In other words, a racist and a member of the great army of the politically incorrect. In a letter published in a local paper during the election he claimed that Mr. Christie was "lawyer to the KKK". He was not, and never has been. Which is not to say that the KKK, if it exists in Canada, is not entitled to a lawyer. Except, perhaps, in Kinsella's view. Similarly, Kinsella believes in freedom of speech for some, but not for others. Accuracy and reason are not Kinsella's mantras. In his "daft book", Web of Hate, he libelled Roger Rocan of Vancouver Island. It cost him or his publisher $40,000 in an out of court settlement. He also wrote that the Charlottetown Accord went down to defeat because "every Jew-baiter, neo-Nazi, Fascist, Klansman and Hitler-freak in B.C. formed a formidable force to stop it". Typical Kinsella bilge. He claimed that KKK cross-burnings were taking place in the Okanagan. According to the then editor of the Salmon Arm Observer that too was fiction. He got that "news" from David Lethbridge, the communist academic in Salmon Arm whose every second word is "fascist" or "neo-Nazi", and who himself has been found guilty of libel. Bill Dunphy of the Toronto Sun counted 19 errors in one chapter. Alberta Report magazine called the book, "A web of misinformation". Three people who according to Kinsella had been interviewed for it wrote to the B.C. Press Council to state he had not interviewed them. In an article in the National Post dated Feb. 5, 1999, entitled "Freedom to Hate," he said I had declared that homosexuals "deserve Aids", that "Jews steal", and that immigrants are "atrocities". In an answering letter I challenged him to produce proof of that, but he never did. Or could. During the 1997 election every columnist in sight gave him a drubbing. The late columnist Noel Wright wrote a piece headed, "Campaign sleaze hits new low." "There are creepies and crawlies, and nasty things that go bump in the night,. Then there's the dirty tricks department of Warren Kinsella's North Van Liberal campaign office," wrote Wright. Radio commentator Gary Bannerman said White was too well known to be hurt by the fantasies and slanders of a candidate who still needed a map to find his way around North Vancouver. I wrote three columns about Kinsella's nonsense and he took me before the Press Council for them but got scant satisfaction. His latest hate target is Leo Knight, another North Shore News columnist. Knight had dared to be critical of the Liberals. Kinsella called him "a chrome-domed troglodyte" and said that the Liberals would wipe the floor with Day. If that is as accurate as the other stuff this
loose-lipped fantasist has spread around the manure yard,
said, the Alliance man is safer than the Tower of
London. | |
write to David Irving |
I
see where the Liberal Party's chief nincompoop is in action
again. Let's hope Chretien & Co. pat him on his
addled pate, because the more he natters on, the better it
will be for Stockwell Day and the Alliance
Party.