How Ignatieff’s war room handles a crisis

It’s been fascinating watching Michael Ignatieff’s war room handle the crisis of Warren Kinsella insulting Chinese Canadians. If it’s a sign of how they’ll operate in the next election, Liberal MPs have cause to worry – especially in ridings with significant Chinese populations, where the Liberal candidate just scraped by. I’m thinking, for example, of Ujjal Dosanjh in Vancouver South, who beat a Chinese Canadian candidate by less than a hundred votes; or Andrew Kania in Brampton West, who won a multicultural riding with less than a 250 vote margin; or even Keith Martin, in Esquimalt Juan de Fuca who won with less than a 100 vote gap. It’s not just Chinese Canadians who are upset by Kinsella’s smear, of course – any Canadian who believes in tolerance and treating minorities with respect would be mad. But those MPs in challenging ridings ought to be particularly nervous.

Here’s the arc of the war room’s response.

1.     Denial. When Chinese Canadians started reacting to Kinsella’s slur late this week, Ignatieff’s war room ignored the matter. Of course it did – it’s not plugged into Canada’s ethnic communities, especially the Chinese community. The Ignatieff war room basically watches CTV Newsnet and CBC Newsworld, and searches Google News. That’ll do when it comes to tracking mainstream news. But the Chinese-language earthquake that was rocking Canada was completely undetected by Ignatieff’s team. That delayed their response by at least a day.

2.     Cover up. Amazingly, the first thing Ignatieff’s war room did when they finally realized the slur was a big deal politically, was to try to “hide” the evidence of it. Kinsella took the offending blog post and video down from his website. But that’s just not how the Internet works. Not only does Google still have a cache of his blog entry, but before Kinsella realized he was in trouble, a number of people had simply copied or saved his utterances. So taking them down didn’t hide what he had said; it merely showed that he was embarrassed by what he had said, and that he either doesn’t know how the Internet worked, or didn’t care that he was insulting the intelligence of those who do, and would see his cover-up as a second insult – an attempt to trick those who he had already insulted. Seriously, for someone who claims to be an Internet guru, he is exceptionally naïve – like this time, when he seemed to think a Nigerian scam-mail letter was real; or this time, when he bought into an Internet hoax about cell phones – and then deleted his embarrassing responses to same. I wonder if Kinsella has liquid paper all over his computer screen.

3.     Lash out at others. Once Ignatieff’s team realized that the insult was causing a ruckus, and after  their ham-fisted attempts to pretend that the insult was never made, Kinsella did what he does best: he lashed out, in an attempt to switch the subject. Hilariously, he referred to a Canadian Alliance candidate from nine years ago who had made an anti-Chinese slur, too. I’m not quite sure how that argument is supposed to work. “Sure, I disparage Chinese people. But other people do, too!” But Kinsella’s example – candidate Betty Granger – was different from Kinsella in a key way: she actually resigned from her position. That’s how these stories are supposed to end – with a realization that racial slurs are wrong, and an act of contrition. If only Kinsella had the integrity to do that, instead of to desperately try to blame anyone else for his own foul mouth. I don’t speak Chinese, but I’m guessing that Kinsella’s lame attempt to switch the subject didn’t assuage the bevy of Chinese talk radio stations that were feasting on him today.

4.     Issue a non-apology. When the first three attempts didn’t work – denial, cover-up, lashing out – there really wasn’t anything else to do other than issue an apology. The story had already gone on for two and a half days, an achingly time. So Kinsella published an apology, in Chinese script, on his website. A Google translation of the text is pretty choppy, but you get the picture:

A friend of China: moral generated from the "Asian invasion" of the people of his speech? That is ridiculous. Why not condemn the gentleman said that his party? Or, recently, for immigrants than for the conservative candidate for the criminals? Or other cultural ON MPP Randy Hiller description such as "asphyxia and control"? Or originated in the reform of the League of Conservative MPs or candidates at random which of the other examples of stubborn? Job was when I was in court, refused to oppose the catastrophe and the white supremacists of the week increased by Ottawa. I am writing a book against racism and anti-racism has been the work of the Award. I am from a conservative candidate unqualified opposition of racism do not need any lessons. However, to this vibrant community in China, I apologize.

That’s just a classic. Political insiders might be able to figure out most of what Kinsella meant – the insider references, the self-serving bumf about being an anti-racism hero. But I would hazard a guess that not one in a hundred “severely normal” Chinese Canadians – especially those whose first language was Chinese – would understand what Kinsella was going on about. I’d guess that quite a few of them would even think that some of those insults listed were actually uttered by Kinsella himself, for he is unclear as to who actually said them, or anything else, really.

A real apology would have consisted of just the last sentence, and maybe an acknowledgement and explanation of why what he said was insulting and wrong.

Is this the template for how Ignatieff will handle other crises in the future? No campaign is error-free; no chatty politician, let alone a team of them, can get through a campaign without making gaffes. A war room cannot stop gaffes from happening, but they can try to defuse them as soon as possible. Kinsella turned a one-day minor story into half a week and counting – and his blamestorming “apology” will only irritate anyone who actually reads it, though I’m not sure the 200,000+ readers of Sing Tao are all clicking their way over to Kinsella’s site right now.

Kinsella’s job in the war room is to put out fires in the Liberal Party – not to start them. But given his hot temper, his vulgar language, and his poor judgment, it’s unlikely that this eruption is the last one from him. If it had been another Liberal who had uttered the “cat meat” comment, Kinsella might have reacted more coolly; but his own ego is in play, and he just couldn’t bring himself to show the contrition that he would surely have demanded from any other Liberal who had made the error.

What a fascinating snapshot into how Ignatieff’s war room works – and doesn’t work.

Is the story over yet? Not by a long shot. David Akin reports that Jason Kenney, the Minister of Multiculturalism, Citizenship and Immigration, is going to the very restaurant that Kinsella slandered, to present its owner with a “Minister's Award for Culinary Excellence in Multicultural Cuisine” – no doubt with one or two Chinese newspapers reporters in tow, and maybe a camera or two.

A cool-headed Liberal Party would roll over and play dead right now, realizing that anything they say will only keep the story going. But “cool-headed” and “Kinsella” are two words that don’t really go together that often. Case in point: at the bottom of his half-hearted attempt at a conciliatory apology, Kinsella couldn’t help but to add an update, smearing Alice Wong, a Chinese Canadian MP who criticized him. A calmer war roomer would realize that most Chinese Canadians – like every other Canadian – aren’t rabidly partisan. They’re probably pretty proud of Alice Wong becoming an MP, whether they’re Conservative or not. And for Kinsella to apologize for his cat meat comment one moment, and trash a Chinese Canadian MP literally the next moment, only digs the hole deeper. He comes across as angry and anti-Chinese – and it makes the half-apology seem even more obviously in bad faith.

What a fascinating story. I know why Kenney is keeping it alive. But I don’t know why Ignatieff is letting Kinsella keep it going.

Postscript: Here's the video of Kinsella -- though I'm sure he'll try to get it taken down from YouTube. (Question: given that it was his own words that hurt his reputation so badly, will he sue himself for defamation?)

Watching that again, I can understand why Chinese Canadians are insulted. But listen to his remarks about having girlfriends to do the cooking for him and his buddies. Oh -- so that's what women are for. Old habits die hard, I guess -- it's not the first time Kinsella talked about women being put in their proper place. That's quite a lot of content jammed into a short video clip -- he really is a master communicator.