NDP leadership candidate admits to run-ins with law

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This article was published 17/08/2017 (2442 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

NDP MLA and party leadership candidate Wab Kinew faced new revelations about past run-ins with the law Friday — including accusations of domestic violence — after a rash of anonymous emails about him were sent to media outlets.

All the newly disclosed legal troubles date back more than a decade, but still raise questions about why he was not more forthcoming about them in the past.

Among them are two counts of domestic assault in 2003 that resulted in a stay of proceedings a year later.

Kinew, who was elected to the legislature in Fort Rouge last year, said in an interview Friday that the alleged assaults “didn’t happen.”

“There was no substance to the allegations. It was investigated. It was dropped,” he said.

Kinew, 35, previously admitted to assaulting a taxi driver and to an impaired driving charge — he refused a breathalyzer test.

On Sept. 28, 2004, he was fined a total of $1,522 for the assault charge, the refusal to submit a breath sample and failing to comply with two court orders.

He now also admits that he was charged with assault after a fight at an Ontario First Nation in 2004. He later received a discharge.

He also revealed he was once charged with theft after he “found” a money order worth about $500 and cashed it.

Charges were stayed after he repaid the victim.

“In 2006, I found a money order. I cashed it. That was dumb,” he said.

More recently, in early 2015, the Crown applied to garnishee his wages at the University of Winnipeg to settle a speeding ticket.

By the time Kinew paid, the bill had grown to $606.50.

Kinew, who is running against former longtime NDP cabinet minister Steve Ashton for the party’s leadership next month, called the Free Press on Friday to address the rumours about his past.

“Some of what I heard in these emails are lies, some are untruths about my family,” Kinew said.

“But there are some specific other issues in them that I did want to address.”

The emails sent anonymously to the Free Press did not mention the 2004 incident at Shoal Lake in Ontario, where Kinew said he got into a fight and faced assault charges. The author and former CBC broadcaster volunteered that information.

“It went through a judge; he said, ‘Keep the peace for six months,’ and the charges were discharged,” Kinew said Friday of the Ontario charges.

Ashton said Kinew should have released all the details of his legal troubles before now.

He said the charges of domestic assault, although stayed, are “of significant concern.”

“It’s important, especially with legal issues, to be up front and to tell people the whole truth,” he said.

Ashton released a copy this week of a disclosure form he filled out with the NDP and challenged Kinew to do the same. So far, he has not, although he did offer to release his tax information.

The NDP has attempted to make ‘transparency” a “defining issue” between themselves and the Progressive Conservatives, Ashton said.

“You can’t go after Brian Pallister for not disclosing all sorts of things if you’re not prepared to lead by example,” he said.

Last year, Kinew received a pardon from the Parole Board of Canada after a decade during which he kept the peace, wrote a book and held down high-profile professional jobs and became a sought-after candidate to run for political office.

He said he went through a vetting process before the last provincial election and the NDP is “fully aware” of his past.

“I’ve been very honest about my past. I’ve spoken about how I started life on the reserve and moved to the city and had run-ins with the law and then turned my life around through education and hard work and family supports and culture,” he said.

“For me it was about first tackling addiction and then dealing with some underlying character issues that were left after I did that. And from there I continued building family life and getting married and all these sorts of things. And then I became a successful person.”

The NDP leadership convention will be held Sept. 16 and 17 in Winnipeg. Kinew has been considered the frontrunner in the contest.

Winnipeg political scientist Christopher Adams said whether the new revelations damage his chances will depend to a certain extent on how he deals with them publicly.

“I think the NDP delegates… will stand behind Wab Kinew if they were standing behind him before,” he said.

But Adams said the fact that new information is coming out now about the younger candidate indicates the leadership may not be the slam-dunk for Kinew that people once thought.

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca