PROSECUTOR RIPS DUFFY
Defence insists Duffy ‘answering for all the sins of Senate administration’
You can’t steal from your employer... You can’t abuse your position of authority to unjustly enrich yourself
— Crown At torney Mark Holme s
By the very kindest light, which is to say that cast by his lawyer, Donald Bayne, Mike Duffy is but the scapegoat of the scabrous Senate, where rules, policies and practices are so loosey-goosey that you can hardly blame a guy for fiddling them.
As Bayne cried triumphantly at one point in his opening statement as Duffy’s fraud-and-bribery trial began here Tuesday, this in relation to the allegation that he tried to circumvent what scant financial scrutiny existed over his research and office budget, “There was no oversight to be avoided, and all the senators know it.”
Bayne painted Duffy as perhaps guilty of a few administrative errors and in fact as a victim without a corrupt thought, “an extorted person” who was cruelly forced by the beasts in the Prime Minister’s Office to repay some of the entitlements he was probably bloody well entitled to and who accepted Nigel Wright’s $90,000 to do it.
Wright was at the time Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s chief of staff, an independently wealthy man known to be furious about the alleged piggery in which Duffy engaged and keen to make the embarrassment he had become go away.
Though Wright isn’t charged, Bayne described him, a handful of senators and others in the PM’s office as co-conspirators in a scheme to force Duffy “to repay money” even they believed he “probably didn’t owe.”
If Bayne’s defence of the 69-year-old suspended senator could be summed up in one line, and it can’t, it might go like this: If Senate rules on filing expenses, the designation of a primary residence, handing out contracts and hiring people, what constitutes work and what doesn’t — you know, on everything — are found to be deeply wanting, Duffy is not to blame, and if the Senate is but a hog pen, Duffy is but one of them.
If you lie down with senators, in other words, you get up greedy and amoral.
As Bayne told Ontario Court Judge Charles Vaillancourt several times, “Mr. Duffy didn’t write those rules.” Yet, “He’s alone here, as though answering for all the sins of Senate administration.”
If it’s an interesting defence — all the kids did it, so why are they picking on this one pink fellow? — it’s not wildly different from the prosecution theory of the case.
As Crown attorney Mark Holmes said once of the Senate, almost in passing, “That’s the philosophy of the place; there’s very little scrutiny … and nobody [he appears to have meant Senate staff ] has the temerity to challenge it.”
He was speaking about Duffy’s habit of signing a stack of expense claims in advance (“Whether others do it doesn’t matter; it’s not appropriate,” Holmes said) and then submitting receipts later to support them.
But where Bayne suggested Duffy was merely playing by the insane rules of the Red Chamber and should be judged by the Senate’s indulgent and chaotic “normative conduct,” Holmes said he should answer to the common-sense propositions that govern the rest of the world.
Key among these, Holmes said, are “One, you can’t steal from your employer and two, you can’t abuse a position of authority to unjustly enrich yourself.”
In his mild way, Holmes threw out countless examples of how Duffy allegedly crossed even the watery lines that purport to govern Senate conduct.
The most devastating of these, perhaps, was how Duffy paid a former volunteer in his office by funnelling her $500 from a colleague’s company Holmes said he used as a sort of “reserve pool of funds.”
This volunteer had no expectation of being paid, Holmes said, and while a “generous act on Senator Duffy’s part if he was inclined to reach into his own pocket,” he didn’t, of course, but instead dinged the taxpayer.
Another example Holmes cited was how Duffy, having been explicitly told that “hair and makeup” aren’t considered a legitimate Parliamentary expense and having had his claim rejected (stop the presses, a claim was ever rejected?), simply funnelled the woman $300 through his buddy’s company.
Bayne later had a little fun of his own with this one.
In fact, he said, the makeup was for “a G8 conference, a G8 televised conference, a G8 televised conference appearance” of Duffy with Harper at the PM’s request — and, Bayne crowed, that $300 covered not only Duffy’s “perfectly standard makeup,” but the woman also “made up the Prime Minister of Canada!”
If Harper cringes at that, perhaps he should.
As Holmes noted once, “Not to be provocative, but Senator Duffy was probably ineligible to sit in the Senate as a resident of Prince Edward Island … He was constitutionally eligible to sit for the residents of Ontario.”
After all, as Holmes told the judge, when Duffy was appointed to sit as the senator for P.E.I., “all this while, he lived in Kanata,” an Ottawa suburb, in the same house where he’d lived for five-plus years before his appointment.
“He portrayed himself as a traveller to Ottawa,” Holmes said, claiming travel and perdiem expenses for being in the capital where he already lived and had lived “for as long as three decades,” in the province where he had worked as a broadcaster, held his driver’s licence and health insurance and where, until 2013, he paid taxes.
And everyone, presumably including the PM, knew this, knew that Duffy didn’t live in that cottage in P.E.I., but he was, Bayne said, told “he must designate” that province as his primary residence.
“It’s not about him picking up and [actually] travelling,” Bayne said. It’s about, “You are on travel status in Ottawa,” even if you actually live down the road.
The lawyers’ statements, as Judge Vaillancourt reminded everyone, aren’t the evidence. That’s the meal and it is yet to come, starting with the first witness Wednesday, but those openings were quite the amuse-bouches.