Kimble Ainslie

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Kimble F. Ainslie is a public policy analyst, pollster, author and former politician, originally based in Ontario, Canada.

Ainslie has a PhD in Political Science from York University, as well as degrees from the University of Western Ontario and Queen's University.

He was a party leader in Southwestern Ontario for the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario in the early 1990s, but left in 1994 to form the Reform Association of Ontario. He later criticized the Progressive Conservative government of Mike Harris as being overly centrist, pragmatic and bureaucratic.

Ainslie conducted polling for the federal and provincial Tories from 1985. He became involved with the Reform Party of Canada in 1993, and worked on polling for that party.

He attempted to establish an official provincial wing of federal Reform in 1994 as co-founder of Reform Ontario with Reg Gosse. When he discovered he was unable to use the "Reform Party" name, he established the Reform Association of Ontario.

Ainslie has argued that Mike Harris and federal Reform Party leader Preston Manning arranged a secret deal in 1994, wherein Manning agreed not to agree to a provincial Reform Party of Ontario and thus split the right-wing vote with Harris's Tories. In return, some federal Reform supporters were allowed to run provincially as Progressive Conservatives. Ainslie had no involvement in this arrangement, as he had already created the Reform Association to run candidates in the 1995 election.

The Reform Association ran 15 candidates in London, Stratford-Perth, Huron in the Kitchener-Waterloo region, and in Metropolitan Toronto. Ainslie campaigned in the riding of Huron, but finished a distant fifth place with only 207 votes, after Manning repudiated the provincial party in advertisements across Ontario on May 16, 1995. Ainslie later moved to the United States of America.

He has subsequently acted as a public policy analyst for the James Madison Institute in Tallahassee FL, the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. and has been president of Nordex Research since its founding in 1985. He founded Nordex Group, a management consulting firm in 1977. Ainslie has also worked for the Fraser Institute and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, and was an occasional editorial writer for the National Post in 2002. He has also written on small business and venture capital policy in Canada, and on Canadian urban transportation, medical transportation and privatization.

Ainslie was also the Entitlements Policy Analyst for the Cato Institute from 2001-2002. He has written more than 75 articles on business and government, American workforce policy, welfare reform and social policy, charter schools and the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Ainslie has criticized U.S. President George W. Bush for both lowering "work participation" requirements for welfare, and for pressuring single mothers on social assistance to commit to marriage.[1] His articles have appeared on Fox News, CBS.com, the Independent Review and LondonFog.blogspot, and from 1985 to 1995 was a frequent commentator on talk radio in London, Ontario.

From 2003 to 2005 he was a consulting executive to a ground transportation company in London, Ontario. Ainslie has since taught political science and public administration at universities in United States and Canada. In August 2007, The Copenhagen Institute and Nordex Research published his book Financing the Gap: Small Capital and State Economic Development in Canada, 1943-2005, 432 pages. He continues his professional practice in international public policy analysis and public opinion polling.