The context in which he is writing is about the Shawinigate affair, in which former prime minister Jean Chretien was alleged to have thrown his weight around in his Shawinigan riding and engaging in (at the very least) some conflict-of-interest behaviour (here's a CBC.ca timeline, for those who care). The National Post, for which Kinsella writes a column, was obsessed with the story:
From the outset of the controversy, in or around 1999, the Post was determined to transform the inoffensive Quebec town of Shawinigan into something synonymous with the Watergate apartment complex. For months, Post reporter Andrew McIntosh (whose employer, it should be recalled, was suing the prime minister for denying him a lifetime barony) had been a veritable journalistic St. George, charging out to slay the twin-headed dragon of prime ministerial perfidy and misdeeds. To McIntosh’s frustration, no doubt, neither the Canadian public nor competing newspapers seemed to give a sweet damn. But the Post was undeterred, because, for most of the relevant period, it could count on Canada’s two conservative opposition parties, the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives, to do its bidding.
Disgruntled former Alliance staffers would later tell Liberals that the Post usually supplied the Alliance, under the leadership of Preston Manning or, later, Stockwell Day, with advance notice of the stories McIntosh and others intended to publish about Shawinigate. In this way, the Official Opposition would have sufficient time to prepare the questions it intended to raise in the House of Commons. It also ensured that the Post’s hoped-for revelations would receive a parliamentary boost, giving stories with a short shelf-life another day or two on the public agenda. While some of the twists and turns in the Shawinigate story had been the product of actual research efforts by the Tories or the Alliance themselves, it was common knowledge that most of the Shawinigan-related oppo was being done by the Post.
This is relevant because the Conservative Party, the successor to the Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties, used the allegation of a CBC reporter passing questions to a Liberal MP about the Mulroney-Schreiber affair as hook on which to hang a fundraising letter.
More in this earlier post.