Why, exactly, were they all so keen to save Duffy?
They must be giddy with relief at the office of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
The latest instalment of the trial of the perpetually suspicious Prince Edward Island Sen. Mike Duffy ended unexpectedly Tuesday, three days earlier than scheduled. A combination of seriously ill witness Gerry Donahue, Duffy’s middleman who dispensed a good chunk of his office budget on his behalf, and a seriously ill relative of Duffy’s lawyer, Don Bayne, led to the abrupt halt.
The trial will not resume again until Nov. 18, leaving many theoretically Duffy-free weeks of the election campaign and many daily press briefings for the prime minister that will not be directly fed by trial testimony.
That said, they ought not to break out the champagne at the PMO. As the preposterously articulate Nigel Wright, the PM’s former chief of staff, was once reduced to saying of one aspect or another of the Duffy expenses scandal, “Is bad.” Is still bad. The trial has hardly been good news for Conservatives generally or Harper specifically: The former have been revealed as having dark desires (chiefly, to influence an independent Senate audit by Deloitte) and an almost magnificent lack of competence in carrying them out, while the latter appears to have populated his PMO with, as the late, great Carl Brewer once said of disgraced agent and National Hockey League Players’ Association boss Alan Eagleson’s purported friends, nothing but stooges and henchmen.
In fact, the elongation of a trial originally scheduled to last but eight weeks — Tuesday was Day 46, with another five-week session to start in November — is mostly due to its politicization.
Duffy and his lawyer want to portray the 69-year-old as a victim of the PMO, hapless in the face of their collective desire to put a lid on the burgeoning scandal by having him repay $90,000 worth of living expenses, and thus Bayne’s cross-examinations have been uber-meticulous and lengthy.
Much of the time, in fact, Bayne has delivered the evidence himself, an exercise that might be called testi-crossing.
And mostly, Ontario Court Justice Charles Vaillancourt has allowed him to do it.
A fine example of this came Tuesday. Bayne was grilling Chris Woodcock, the former director of issues management in the PMO, about an email from then-senator Marjory LeBreton, who was complaining to Wright that Duffy was “whining” in her office.
Prosecutor Jason Neubauer rose to object, pointing out that Bayne had laid no foundation for the question or even established that Woodcock had ever seen the note (he wasn’t copied on it and hadn’t).
“I agree,” said the judge, but did nothing to restrain Bayne, who picked right up where he’d left off.
“If Your Honour agrees,” Neubauer, on his feet again, pointed out reasonably, “why isn’t my friend doing that?”
So that’s how it’s been, much of the time, and it’s one of the reasons the trial has hardly rocketed along.
Testimony has also provided a sobering glimpse of the workings of the PMO — everything from how staffers tried to enforce “message discipline” (they mostly failed, given the mercurial Conservative trio of senators David Tkachuk, Carolyn StewartOlsen and LeBreton, who each sang from their own special song books) to how they misled reporters and Canadians.
Yet at the core of the trial is not the conduct of the PMO, the PM or any senator, but the pink former veteran broadcaster.
Duffy is pleading not guilty to 31 counts of fraud, breach of trust and bribery.
Emails long in evidence at the trial show that from the moment his expenses were first questioned — by Ottawa Citizen reporter Glen McGregor, who incidentally had it all nailed in that first story — in December of 2012, Duffy’s first instinct was to attack, dissemble and react with near-paranoid fury.
McGregor was asking how Duffy’s “primary residence” could be in P.E.I., as he claimed, when everyone knew he’d lived in Ottawa since 1974.
First, Duffy told him the designation “relates to quick access” to Ottawa’s Heart Institute because of his heart problems. The next day, he told Wright, in an email titled “Smear-Background FYI,” that the story was revenge by McGregor, “that former Frank (magazine) employee … Remember my successful lawsuit against them?”
(It was hardly a successful suit. Duffy had sued the magazine for $600,000; the case was settled out of court for $30,000.)
The next month, McGregor correctly reported that Duffy had applied for a P.E.I. health card — one of the documents the Senate had now decided it would use to establish where a senator actually lived.
Duffy told McGregor he didn’t speak to the provincial health minister but the next day complained to Stewart-Olsen that “the pei health min leaks deets of my health card application.”
Somehow, over the ensuing days and weeks, saving Mike Duffy inexplicably became the mantra of the PMO.
That later morphed to “keeping him whole,” a phrase that appears to have originated with Duffy’s former lawyer, which ended with Wright deciding to repay Duffy’s tab out of his own pocket and, ultimately, to disaster.
And despite the voluminous evidence, after 46 days that mystery remains: Why on Earth was saving Duffy, a popular figure on the Conservative hustings but hardly a major fundraiser, so freaking important?
Short of him having pictures of some Conservative engaged in some highly un-conservative act, nothing but nothing explains it.