"Kinsella has cynically glommed an ancient rumour to a present-day movement. And news outlets, this one included, wondered out loud what exactly Kinsella was talking about, and who had this bombshell story."

This week, self-styled raconteur and bon vivant Warren Kinsella wrote about the coming #MeToo tide barreling towards Ottawa. “There are other men who are about to be exposed,” Kinsella, a professed Liberal Party insider, wrote. “Count on it. The media have been on their trail for many weeks. Once it gets through the editors — once it is okayed by the lawyers – other men will be going down. It is overdue. It is needed.”

Kinsella’s next sentence was even more vague and sinister. “One of these men is very, very powerful. The stories have been known about him for three years. They are in affidavits, plural. His name will shock you.”

The tactic was familiar for those who keep a watchful eye on Kinsella: make a few vague accusations, promise impending doom, then let the speculation run wild in the (heavily moderated) comment section of his preening, self-referential blog.

To be honest, it’s occasionally amusing. In August 2015, Kinsella predicted Liberal Party would be “wrecked” by Justin Trudeau’s “Senior Strategist” and his “Campaign Manager” (Gerald Butts and Katie Telford, respectively—though of course Kinsella doesn’t name them.) “Knives are sharp, memories are long,” Kinsella wrote.

Long story short, the Liberal Party won the election two months later, thanks in large part to Butts and Telford, and Kinsella’s prediction was disappeared from his site. Everyone then went back to bed.

This time, though, Kinsella isn’t amusing, but irresponsible. Ottawa is an especially tense and politicized place these days. Fuelled by the whispers and rumours of sexual harassment and worse, the climate is “overwhelmingly toxic”, in the words of one MP who spoke to iPolitics editor James Baxter. NDP MP Erin Weir, who this week found himself publicly accused of harassment without knowing exactly who he allegedly harassed and how he allegedly did it, is but one example of this atmosphere.

Open-ended and purposefully nebulous, Kinsella’s “his name will shock you” routine didn’t help any victims, real or perceived. Worse, by suffixing his thinly veiled reference with the #MeToo hashtag, Kinsella has cynically glommed an ancient rumour to a present-day movement. And news outlets, this one included, wondered out loud what exactly Kinsella was talking about, and who had this bombshell story.

Toronto Sun columnist Mark Bonokoski predicted the “very powerful” politician would be outed “soon, apparently. Maybe within hours”, before insinuating that the politician in question was Justin Trudeau. (Newsflash: he’s still Prime Minister.) Similarly, it was used as a partisan weapon: Conservative MP Lisa Raitt tweeted out Kinsella’s words, unchallenged, to her more than 32,000 followers a few hours after he’d written them.

Of course, I could point out how saying “other men will be going down” is a bit like reminding one’s audience that the sun will rise tomorrow in the east and water is indeed wet. I could also debunk this rumour by saying what is already well-known: like many rumours, it is one made of wishful thinking and sizeable imaginations, marinated in partisan bitterness following the 2015 election. It has since floated around in various iterations on blogs and Twitter, and stayed fresh in the minds of fevered partisans—and, in recent days, on the blog of a certain would-be punk rocker with an ax to grind. And it worked, in that everyone talked about Warren Kinsella this week. I wonder what he’ll do next.

—

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.