Arthur Kent, the journalist who ran for a seat as a Progressive Conservative in the Alberta provincial election earlier this year, has filed a defamation suit against CanWest Publishing Inc.

Kent revealed the details of the suit Monday on his website arthurkent.ca.

The lawsuit names CanWest and Don Martin, an Ottawa-based columnist for the Calgary Herald. It is in response to a profile of Kent written by Martin during the provincial election.

The article was published on Feb. 13 in the Herald and the National Post, papers owned by CanWest.

On his blog, Kent calls the article "inaccurate, biased and damaging."

"Published during a heated election campaign, it was nothing less than an act of political vandalism," he says.

Kent says the article had a devastating effect on his bid for a seat in the Calgary Currie riding, which was eventually unsuccessful.

Kent wrote a rebuttal to the Martin column, but it was never published, either in the Herald or the Post.

He then asked his lawyers to notify the Herald, CanWest and related parties that he would be pursuing court action for the alleged defamation.

A Statement of Claim was filed by Kent's lawyers on July 15 against Don Martin, the National Post Company, CanWest Publishing Inc. and two related companies.

The offending article, Kent said, was published as an opinion piece in the Post and the Edmonton Journal, but as a page-three news story in the Herald.

"It is an intensely personal, venomous attack on both my character and the conduct of my campaign. It even drags in my family, conjuring up damaging comparisons based on falsehoods and bias," Kent said, adding that he has never met Martin.

The article quoted unnamed "senior campaign strategists" as well as other insiders in the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party.

Kent took issue with the following aspects of the article:

• Claims his campaign manager warned him that half the campaign team "was ready to quit if the candidate didn't start behaving."
• Claims Kent's financial officer "was rumoured to be on the verge of quitting."
• A statement in the article that "insiders gleefully describe how all of Kent's brochures blew off a pickup on the Deerfoot Trail, tying up traffic while workers scurried between cars retrieving thousands of pamphlets wind-whipped into a paper blizzard."

In his online statement, Kent refutes all three points. He said his campaign team was never on the verge of abandoning him, his financial officer vowed he never threatened to quit, and only a few boxes of pamphlets fell off a truck, totalling just a few hundred.

"Especially in Alberta, where one political party has dominated for nearly four decades, new candidates must be able to challenge the status quo without fear of this kind of malicious attack," Kent said.

CanWest has not commented on the suit.

Previous lawsuits

In September, Kent announced he had reached a settlement with the makers of the feature film "Charlie Wilson's War."

Kent, 55, filed his suit against Universal Studios in April of 2008. Kent claimed that his intellectual property rights were violated because the filmmakers used footage in the movie from his 1986 reporting in Afghanistan without his consent.

The 2007 film, about covert U.S. dealings in Afghanistan, stars Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

The veteran war correspondent is not unfamiliar with big legal battles. From 1989 to 1992, Kent worked as the host of "Dateline NBC," but was fired after a contract dispute. Kent sued for breach of contract and settled with NBC in March 1994.

Under the terms of the agreement, NBC paid Kent an undisclosed amount and retracted prior statements about Kent and the dispute.