Warren Kinsella, conscience of the Liberal Party

Well, well, well...

A key Liberal warned Paul Martin's chief of staff in 1994 of serious problems with the Finance Department's awarding of polling contracts, including to a firm with close ties to Martin. A letter from Warren Kinsella to Terrie O'Leary, made public at a Commons committee Monday, warned of flawed competitions for public-opinion polling contracts, excessive payments, unnecessary work and political interference. But O'Leary and another former top Martin aide testified that they did nothing wrong. "Terrie, all of this spells trouble and you know it," Kinsella wrote in his letter. "The competition was flawed, the payment is excessive, the work is probably not needed, and the research community can be fully expected to blow the whistle on the political connections here."

This strikes me as potentially far more damning than the Boulay letter (though not the Boulay lunch). Emphasize potentially:

Herle [David Herle, another top Martin adviser] testified that several audits, including one by the auditor general, found no problems with the contract process and he suggested Kinsella has a political axe to grind.

To say the least. But wait, the plot thickens:

In a sign of the political heat involved, Kinsella told the committee that he received a telephone call recently [actually, "minutes before" he testified] from someone who suggested Dingwall might come under pressure from the Prime Minister's Office to refute Kinsella's testimony. Kinsella said he took that as intimidation. He refused to name the caller publicly, but said he would pass on the name to the committee chairman. Dingwall is now head of the federal mint.

No! You mean they threatened to deprive the Royal Mint of Dingwall's peerless management expertise? And who was that shadowy figure on the other end of the line? I think we can cross the Choo-Choo Man off the list... POSTSCRIPT: If Paul Martin is the wire brush who will scrub clean the stain of Liberal corruption, then that makes Warren the ... Brillo pad? Dutch Cleanser? Liquid Tide with Bleach Alternative? POSTERSCRIPT: I've just been watching CTV's coverage of this. (See here and here.) Ug-ly. I don't know who's telling the truth, but Kinsella has just lit the fuse for a major explosion, I expect. POSTERSCRIPTER: The more I think about this, the more it makes my flesh crawl. If anyone in Martin's camp made that call -- presumably there should be some way of verifying this from phone records, or did they call from a phone booth? -- they're absolutely crazy. Witness intimidation is serious business. It's hard to put any other construction on the conversation. So one of two logical possibilities presents itself: Either Kinsella's making it up -- under oath, and having provided the committee chairman with the name of the caller -- or we are into very deep waters indeed.