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A clever headline might say something like “Ashton fades to black” or “NDP Orange: The New Black.” Clever perhaps. But not accurate. Because there is nothing about Steve Ashton that suggests fading away or going gently into the good night. That’s not who he is. Not quite House of Cards material perhaps, he is still one of the toughest bare-knuckle street-fighting politicians of any party in Canada, not just the NDP. Internal party opponents who underestimate his resolve do so at their own political peril.
In a two-way leadership race against 35-year-old rookie Fort Rouge constituency NDP MLA Wab Kinew, Ashton, 61, has decided on the high-risk gambit of revisiting two long ago stayed criminal domestic assault charges against Kinew from April and May 2003 when the leadership aspirant was 21 years old. The alleged victim has not been identified and both assault charges were stayed at the request of the Crown in 2004. A charge that is stayed can be reactivated within one year of a judge granting a stay of proceedings, but seldom are, and such was the case with Kinew’s.
Wab Kinew, a former CBC Radio and TV reporter and host, author, rapper, and later acting associate vice-president of Indigenous Affairs at the University of Winnipeg, was born on the Ojibways of Onigaming First Nation near Nestor Falls, Ont. in Northwestern Ontario’s frontier Sunset Country in the Central Time zone, but grew up mainly in suburban Winnipeg. Aside from the two stayed assault charges from the Spring of 2003, Kinew was no saint, a fact he readily admits. Even before the later stayed assault charges, Kinew was convicted in February 2003 of failing to provide a breathalyzer or blood alcohol sample in a driving case, and was fined $922. After the stayed domestic assault charges, he was convicted in June 2004 of assaulting a cab driver and fined $300. As recently as October 2014, an unpaid speeding ticket eventually resulted in $606.50 of his wages being garnisheed by the Crown from his wages at the University of Winnipeg. Kinew has also apologized for several misogynist and homophobic tweets he made from his Twitter account, particularly back in June and July 2009, when he was actively rapping and by then 27 years old. And on Oct. 17, 2012, Kinew tweeted, “Riding in my limo back to my king size sweet [sic] feeling really bad for those kids in Attawapiskat #haha #terrible #inative.” Kinew was by now 30.
All told, CTV News Winnipeg reported Aug. 22, Kinew has been charged with more than a dozen offences, most dating back to 2003 and 2004.
So why is it such a high-risk gambit, one which clearly smacks of political desperation, some, if not many, would say, for Steve Ashton to go on the political offensive over those two long ago stayed criminal domestic assault charges against Kinew from April and May 2003 when he was 21?
First, Kinew, if not in detail always, has nevertheless many times in many places in recent years, including on social media and in his 2015 book, The Reason You Walk, apologized for his past behaviour.
Secondly, in April 2016, the voters of Fort Rouge elected Kinew as their MLA, as he defeated then Manitoba Liberal leader Rana Bokhari, Progressive Conservative candidate Audrey Gordon and Green Party candidate Grant Sharp, to hold onto the NDP seat held by retiring incumbent Jennifer Howard, a former NDP cabinet minister.
Thirdly, the Manitoba NDP vetted Kinew, as they did Ashton, and sanctioned both their leadership bids.
The narrative that Kinew has apologized for his past and is a changed, albeit gradually, man is a powerful one for anyone who believes youthful indiscretions can and often are followed by remorse, forgiveness and redemption. Wab Kinew has clearly made something of his life and is a net contributor to society. There is no reason to think he wouldn’t make a good leader for the Manitoba NDP.
At the same time, it also true that much less is known publicly about those two long ago stayed criminal domestic assault charges against Kinew from April and May 2003 than the other matters, both criminal and non-criminal, that he has apologized for. Zita Somakoko, a Manitoba NDP member and domestic violence survivor advocate, has suggested to several media outlets this week that Kinew needs to be more forthright in explaining the stayed assault charges from 14 years ago. CBC News Manitoba reported today that Somakoko had “shared her dismay at Kinew’s responses with Steve Ashton….”
Several Manitoba media outlets received two anonymous emails last week containing previously-unreported details about Kinew’s legal history, including the two stayed assault charges against a woman from 2003.
Mohinder Saran, the MLA for The Maples, who was booted from the NDP caucus earlier this year as the result of sexual harassment allegations, which he denies, recently ordered copies of Kinew’s complete court documents.
Saran told CBC News Manitoba that he is unofficially working on behalf of Ashton’s campaign to attract delegates, but declined to comment about the court documents. Kinew currently has 588 committed delegates for the Sept. 16 leadership vote to Ashton’s 339 delegates. Saran denied sending documents to Ashton’s campaign or the media.
CBC News Manitoba compared the metadata — essentially, the file’s digital “fingerprint” — from the PDF document containing Kinew’s court records sent to media anonymously to that of the PDF containing Steve Ashton’s personal disclosure statement from last week, showing no involvement with the criminal justice system, which was sent via his campaign’s email account.
The two files were created using the same make and model of scanning device, CBC News Manitoba reports.
This does not prove that the two files were necessarily created on the same printer, however, CBC News Manitoba says it analyzed dozens of PDFs sent to media from various other NDP groups and sources, none of which were made using the same device.
Political analyst Christopher Adams, vice-president of Probe Research, and an adjunct professor at the University of Winnipeg in the Department of Political Science, who has served as an election desk analyst for various media outlets in Manitoba, told CBC News Manitoba that while this is not proof of direct involvement by Ashton or his campaign, it does put his campaign under the microscope.
“If I were Perry Mason, this is strong circumstantial evidence,” he said, referring to the famous fictional lawyer.
“I am not a lawyer. I am a political scientist, but it does start showing you that maybe something is coming out of the [Ashton] campaign,” said Adams, who added “that sometimes supporters go ‘rogue’ and use tactics not authorized by a political campaign.
Ashton said Saran was not involved in his campaign and denied any knowledge of how the leaked court documents were sent to the media.
“I don’t know. I was a sent a copy [of the anonymous email received by media] last week, so I don’t know what the story is there,” Ashton told CBC News Manitoba.
“When the campaign received the [anonymous email] our decision was not to go public with it. Not to leak it, not to go public,” he said.
CBC News Manitoba says they requested a copy of the email that Ashton says his campaign received. “He has not responded to this request.”
“I think Ashton is right to ask about what were those things?” Adams told CBC News Manitoba. “Who was the person involved? What was the actual incident that caused this, that eventually led to the stay of charges? I think Ashton is kind of doing what we would expect him to do,” he said.
Ashton, who had been the marathon man of Manitoba politics, last year did what every political analyst and commentator in the province believed was impossible. He lost the supposedly safest NDP seat in Manitoba to Progressive Conservative rookie Kelly Bindle by 210 votes.
There have only been 13 provincial general elections since the Thompson constituency was created in June 1969. Progressive Conservative Labour Minister Ken MacMaster, who won the seat in the Oct. 11, 1977 election, and held it for four years until 1981, was the only Tory to ever hold the seat before Bindle. Before MacMaster, Ken Dillen, who ran against Ashton as a Liberal in the 2011 election, held the seat for the NDP from 1973 to 1977, while Joe Borowski held the seat in 1972-33 as an Independent NDP, and from 1969 to 1972 as an NDP member. Borowski defeated former Thompson mayor Tim Johnston’s father, Dr. Blain Johnston, by seven votes in the Feb. 20, 1969 byelection in the old provincial constituency of Churchill, which included the town of Thompson. He went on four months later to win the newly-created constituency of Thompson in the June 25, 1969 general election.
Ashton had won nine consecutive elections between 1981 and 2011 before going down to defeat in 2016 in his bid for 10 in a row. Ashton was first elected to the Manitoba legislature at the age of 25 in the Nov. 17, 1981 provincial election, defeating MacMaster by 72 votes.
He has a much less impressive track record to date, however, in his two previous bids for the Manitoba NDP leadership in 2009 and 2015. In a two-way race in 2009, NDP finance minister Greg Selinger took almost two-thirds of the ballots cast and sailed to victory in the two-way race with 1,317 votes to Ashton’s 685, while in 2015 Ashton finished third on the first ballot with a similar share of the vote totals.
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