Duffy paid, even when no one asked
Senator often covered services volunteers expected to do for free
OTTAWA — What a weird little racket it was, what seems to have been Mike Duffy’s quest to be loved or at least to be kindly regarded.
As the suspended senator’s criminal trial on charges of fraud, breach-of-trust and bribery started its third week Monday, court heard from a second person who had neither sought nor expected to get money from him, but nonetheless did.
This time it was Duffy’s cousin David McCabe, who for years had been clipping the local papers in Prince Edward Island, scanning photos and stories of anyone in the family who got mentioned and sometimes local news or comments that were “favourable ... to Mike or the island,” and sending them off to Duffy, then a private citizen and national broadcaster.
But Duffy was appointed as a senator from P.E.I. in 2009, and in 2010, McCabe got a cheque for $500 from Maple Ridge Media Inc., one of two companies run by a Duffy crony that were used to dispense a good chunk of his annual senatorial research and office budget.
McCabe asked Duffy about the cheque, and “he said it was for all the scanning and articles I emailed him,” he told Ontario Court Judge Charles Vaillancourt via a remote video link from Charlottetown.
“Did he pay you while he had the TV show?” prosecutor Mark Holmes asked. “No,” said McCabe.
In the same way did a young intern named Ashley Cain, who testified last week, find herself the recipient of a $500 cheque from the same company.
For five or six months in 2010, she worked as a volunteer a couple of hours a week in Duffy’s Senate office, never expecting to be paid.
Now to this category of witness, and to those who performed more traditional services for Duffy and who either had contracts or arrangements to be paid for their work, Duffy’s lawyer, Don Bayne, has a familiar set of questions.
Did the witness not do genuine, actual work? Did the witness not in fact do it at a modest rate, if not for a bargain-basement price?
And, as he put to McCabe, “There was no suggestion any of (the money) be kicked back to Senator Duffy?” or as he asked Cain, “There was no aspect of Senator Duffy seeking some personal benefit from this $500?”
With Peter McQuaid, chief of staff to then Conservative P.E.I. premier Pat Binns and who received about $8,400 over three contracts to do something for Duffy (it’s unclear quite what), Bayne’s questions were even more pointed.
One of McQuaid’s contracts, for instance, was approved by the formal Senate bureaucracy for up to $5,000; McQuaid billed for less than that.
“He (Duffy) didn’t say, ‘Why not crank the bill up to $5k and we can split or something?’”
“Absolutely not,” said McQuaid.
“If a man had been wanting to defraud the Senate, he could have done that?” said Bayne. “Yes,” said McQuaid.
“But he didn’t, did he?” Bayne asked.
“No,” said McQuaid emphatically, “he certainly didn’t.”
So it has come to this at the trial then, that the absence of, say, a demand for a kickback — a negative — is said to render a transaction positive and pure.
Two of McQuaid’s contracts went through the usual cumbersome Senate “services contract” process, though in both cases, the requests for funds were submitted too late and had to be retroactively adjusted by obliging bureaucrats. McQuaid was paid by the Senate.
But in the case of the third, the cheque for $2,887.50 came from Maple Ridge Media.
McQuaid said Duffy had “indicated to me that Senate budgets were tight, and he’d still pay me, but he’d do it a different way.”
He told prosecutor Holmes they’d discussed the matter on the phone, and Duffy “said he couldn’t do it through the Senate, but he’d find another way to do it (pay him).”
This time, there was no contract, no invoice, no tally of the hours McQuaid worked, and the two men, he said, had no meetings. They did it all orally. “I told him orally how much I charged to him for the year, because he had said to me he was going to find another way to pay it.”
McQuaid would call Duffy, or vice versa, and Bob’s your uncle — that was consulting and advice!
Mind you, even when McQuaid filled out all the forms and was paid through regular Senate channels, his description of his work was elastic.
That lump sum of $2,500 he charged in March 2011, for instance, he told prosecutor Holmes, was purely for a specific project he did for Duffy on the proposed Atlantic Power Accord.
“Is the description (on the invoice) accurate?” Holmes asked. “Absolutely,” McQuaid flatly replied. “It’s all I did for that year. ... It was a very specific piece of work.”
But in cross-examination by Bayne, he cheerfully also agreed that the $2,500 was also for “the broader services you continually and consistently performed throughout all three years.”
Peter McQuaid clearly thinks well of Mike Duffy, who threw him work when he was a lonely Conservative in a freshly Liberal province.
And David McCabe, well, who doesn’t have someone like that in the family, the record keeper of big events? He was doing a mitzvah for his famous cousin.
Not every family historian is paid with public funds, however, and that’s the shame of it. There’s a reason lucre is so often called filthy. National Post