TAKES
ONE TO KNOW ONE
I
am known in this country as a political activist, someone
who runs campaigns for candidates and political parties. I
work for people I believe in and whom I like, and I am
pretty busy at that. Along the way, I have learned a few
things about how to conduct campaigns...
In
every campaign I have helped to run, I have found it
worthwhile to take a bit of time —
before the campaign, after the campaign —
to evaluate the effectiveness of our strategies and
tactics. When we do that, we always learn something new,
and we always learn that we could have done something
better. Let me offer, then, a few suggestions
about...strategies and tactics we can perhaps use...
The
tendency a lot of us have, when facing off against a group
as well-funded and as evil as Big Tobacco, is to be sucked
into a war of statistics. To try and win the day with
columns and graphs and charts and numbers...
If
we come up with a scientist, they will buy a scientist. If
we come up with a medical report, they will buy a doctor's
soul, and produce false medical reports. If we come up
with charts of tobacco mortality rates, they will come up
with more charts, filled with lies...
—Warren
Kinsella, Speech
to the Global Dialogue Conference, 3
November 2005
Top
Liberal political advisers plotted damage control in the
wake of a startling TV broadcast exposing an insider win
scandal at the Ontario
Lottery Corp, according to documents obtained
by Sun Media.
Warren
Kinsella, Jim Warren and others met four
days after the Oct. 25, 2006, Fifth
Estate program which revealed the story
of Bob Edmonds, a 78-year-old lottery customer and cancer
survivor who was ripped off of his $250,000 prize by a
lottery ticket retailer, the documents show.
The
broadcast also detailed an unusually high number of major
lottery wins by ticket sellers and their employees.
Edmonds had to wage a three-year battle against the
lottery corporation and settled in 2005.
But
Edmonds' battle revealed the agency's measures guarding
against retailer fraud were "woefully
inadequate," Ombudsman Andre Marin noted in a scathing
report this week.
The
meeting of Liberal strategists days after the Edmonds'
story focused on hiring experts to counter the view of a
CBC mathematician that a disproportionate number of
insiders were claiming major prizes, due to the fact that
this group spends almost three times as much as the
ordinary consumer.
$5GS
SURVEY
The
lottery corporation spent $5,000 for a survey of retailer
spending and $44,250 for the views of stats experts.
The
PR brain trust wanted to convince people that insiders won
more frequently only because they played more often.
"As
soon as the 'insider win' scandal was exposed, the (OLG)
took action —
but instead of investigating what went wrong...it reacted
like a business facing a public relations nightmare, it
hired experts to dispute the CBC's findings, even though
as our investigators discovered, it knew full well that Mr
Edmonds was far from alone," Marin said.
At
the meeting were: Kinsella, a top Grit strategist; Warren,
a lottery corporation executive formerly with Premier
Dalton McGuinty's office, and reps of two large public
relations firms.
—Sam
Pazzano, "How
The Grits Tried To Spin A Scandal: Emphasis Was On
Attacking Story Rather Than Lottery Probe,"
Sun Media, 28 March 2007
One
should not as a rule reveal one's secrets, since one does
not know if and when one may need them again.
—Joseph
Goebbels
Kinsella: The personal
becomes not
just the political but the pathological
Kevin
Michael Grace,
11.15 am, 2 April 2007►
