Warren Kinsella

Warren James Kinsella (born August 1960) is a Canadian lawyer, author, musician, political consultant, and commentator.

Kinsella has written commentary in most of Canada's major newspapers and several magazines, including The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Sun, Ottawa Citizen, the National Post, The Walrus, and Postmedia newspapers.

He appeared regularly on the Sun News Network.

Kinsella is the founder of the Daisy Consulting Group, a Toronto-based firm that engages in paid political campaign strategy work, lobbying and communications crisis management.

Kinsella is the son of physician and medical ethicist Douglas Kinsella, founder of the National Council on Ethics in Human Research (NCEHR).

He attended Carleton University from 1980 to 1984, earning a Bachelor of Journalism.

In the 1980s, Kinsella was a reporter at the Calgary Herald and later the Ottawa Citizen.

Later, as a lawyer, Kinsella was a partner in the law firm McMillan Binch.

Kinsella served as a media adviser to opposition leader Jean Chrétien's office and as a strategist in the Canadian federal Liberal Party's 1993 election campaign "task force".

After the Liberals won the election, Kinsella became chief of staff to federal Public Works minister David Dingwall.

Lawrence Martin noted in his book Iron Man that Kinsella was accused by Peter Donolo, Chrétien's communications director, of being overtly aggressive and seeing enemies everywhere.

In addition, Martin noted that many Liberal MPs expressed concern about Kinsella's behaviour.

However, Kinsella was a favourite of Aline Chrétien, the Prime Minister's wife, which meant that the complaints were ignored.

During the Gomery Commission's inquiry into the Sponsorship scandal, Justice John Gomery was told that Kinsella, while chief of staff to Minister of Public Works David Dingwall, wrote a letter to the department's Deputy Minister, Ran Quail in 1994 requesting Chuck Guité be appointed to review the government's advertising and communications strategy.

Quail said he viewed the letter as political interference into civil service affairs, while Dingwall and Kinsella characterized the letter as a request rather than a directive.

No finding of any fault was found in Gomery's report relating to Kinsella's conduct.

Kinsella ran as a Liberal candidate in the 1997 federal election in the riding of North Vancouver but was defeated by Reform incumbent Ted White.

During his last stint as a national campaign headquarters worker during the 2000 Canadian federal election, he appeared on CTV's Canada AM brandishing a purple Barney dinosaur doll to mock what he claimed were Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day's creationist beliefs.

Public affairs consultant Robin Sears in Policy Options used this incident to compare him to American Political Consultant James Carvile and argued that "The Carvillites and their young fans were less concerned with the substance of politics or its impact on citizens' building contempt for politics than with their personal scores."

After the 2000 federal election, Kinsella was a vocal supporter of Chrétien during the intra-party struggle that resulted in Chrétien being replaced by Paul Martin.

In Iron Man, Lawrence Martin noted that Kinsella saw Paul Martin and his followers "as almost much an enemy" as the opposition parties, and favored working against the Martin faction.

He would work on Liberal leadership campaigns for Allan Rock and Sheila Copps in opposition to Martin.

He left the legal firm in 2002 and co-founded the consulting firm, Navigator.

He later admitted to quitting the Liberal Party when then-cabinet minister Herb Dhaliwal had his Vancouver South-Burnaby riding association taken over by the Martin forces in November 2002.

In 2006, he left to found his own agency, Daisy Consulting Group, a Toronto-based firm that engages in paid political advertising, lobbying and communications crisis management.

Starting in November 2008, Kinsella worked briefly for Liberal leadership candidate Michael Ignatieff.

One long-time senior Liberal questioned the hiring of Kinsella, calling him a "human shrapnel machine."

Later that month Kinsella apologized for a post in his video blog that jokingly mentioned that his regular Chinese restaurant sold "cat meat."

Kinsella resigned from Ignatieff's campaign in May 2009, citing treatment of fired colleagues.

Kinsella publicly considered seeking the Liberal nomination for the 2015 federal election in Toronto—Danforth, but ultimately demurred in the belief that he would not be approved as a nominee.

He argued that Justin Trudeau's inner circle had played a role in the ouster of Jean Chretien as Prime Minister.

He has been a critic of Trudeau's leadership.

During the 2019 election, Kinsella sent tweets accusing the Prime Minister of buying drinks for Faith Goldy, making false accusations of a suppressed Globe & Mail story, and linking to a fake website that advocated Chrystia Freeland as leader of the Liberal Party.

After the election, Kinsella praised Trudeau by stating that since the election there had been "no stunts, no selfies, no over-saturation".

Kinsella worked for the Canadian Green Party during July 2019 in the run-up to the 2019 Canadian federal election.

This work was a temporary arrangement and involved "Kinsella setting up a quick-response unit for the Greens."

In October 2019, the Globe and Mail reported that Kinsella's consulting firm, Daisy Group, had, according to an anonymous source, been hired by the Conservative Party of Canada to create a campaign attempting to discredit Maxime Bernier and the People's Party of Canada.

Neither the Conservative Party nor Kinsella would confirm or deny that they are – or have been – working together.

Bernier filed a complaint to the Commissioner of Canada Elections.

On October 19, 2019, Kinsella deactivated his Twitter and Facebook accounts and posted a statement on his website that he is "pulling back from (social) media."