KINSELLA: Heads should roll over bungling Liberals' buttons stunt

Article content

The first rule of fight club: Don’t talk about fight club.

The second rule of fight club: Don’t talk about fight club.

The third rule: If you break the first or second rule, Warren will fire your ass, and you will never work in politics again.

Yours Truly ran many war rooms for Jean Chretien and Dalton McGuinty between 1992 and 2011. We did OK in those campaigns.

On Day One of every campaign, when all of my fresh-faced war room charges were still well-rested and still committed to regular bathing, I would relate the three above rules. It was a ritual, always observed.

It wasn’t because I was a fan of David Fincher’s 1999 cult film – although I did like his cinematic social satire quite a bit. I recited the three rules because they could spell the difference between the campaign’s victory or defeat.

My war roomers weren’t allowed to tell spouses or significant others about what they did on the campaign. They weren’t allowed to say anything on social media. In particular, if a member of the news media approached them with a microphone — and that happened a few times, they were to be as silent as a POW.

The people who worked in my campaign war rooms didn’t engage in dirty tricks. Our focus was always on the public record of our political opponents: Their quotes, their votes, their use of bank notes. I wasn’t interested in a candidate’s sex life or their families.

Voters, in their wisdom, always feel the same way. The job of any successful war room is to tell the verified truth about the public record of a political adversary, not their personal life.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

Try refreshing your browser, or
tap here to see other videos from our team.

Play Video

Should a war room be aggressive? Yes. Should a war room be critical of the other side? Yes. But a war room should never, ever reveal how it does what it does. “We don’t tell them how we make sausages,” I tell my war rooms. “For a reason.”

Which brings us to this past weekend, and the deeply, deeply stupid mistake made by the war room of the Liberal Party of Canada. On the weekend, it was revealed that Liberal war room operatives had buttons made up which they left in plain view at the conservative “Canada Strong and Free” conference.

Here is some of the things the buttons said:

• “THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS”
• “LOCK JUSTIN UP”
• “MAKE CANADA GREAT AGAIN”
• “DANIELLE SMITH FOR CPC LEADER”

The buttons pushed MAGA-like messages, and were designed to be picked up and worn by conservative delegates. Who would then — almost certainly — be questioned by media in attendance.

The Liberal war room types were beside themselves with glee. They patted each other on the back. After distributing their fake buttons, they adjourned to a Sparks Street bar frequented by political staffers and — fatefully — journalists.

One of the Liberal war room idiots loudly boasted about what they’d done, while an enterprising CBC reporter was within ear shot. She got him to confirm what he and his pals had done. She then wrote a story about what the war room of Mark Carney was up to.

The story went across the country and obliterated anything else the Grits hoped to publicize on the weekend. The Liberal war room had violated the first fight club rule: They had talked about fight club.

That these morons should be fired is a given. If they’d pulled that stunt on my watch, I would’ve made certain they’d never work in politics again.

The Mark Carney campaign, however, just shrugged. They issued a three-paragraph statement saying, alternatively, it was just a joke, we only did some of it, and we take it seriously. And: MAGA, blah blah blah.

Not good enough. Those staffers need to be fired, and anyone who approved the stunt needs to resign. And Carney needs to tell us what steps he’s taken to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Will he? Will they? Doubtful. They’re probably gathered around the campaign water cooler now, laughing about how clever they are.

They’re not. They’re morons. And if they’d been working for me, they’d be flipping burgers at McDonald’s right about now.