SENATE SPENDING RULES POORLY ENFORCED, DUFFY TRIAL HEARS
The Senate knew it had a problem with its own spending rules when Sen. Mike Duffy was filing claims that now have him on trial for fraud, its top finance official Nicole Proulx testified at that trial on Friday.
But even when they tried to tighten up and ask questions about what Duffy was hiring his old friend Gerald Donohue to do with tens of thousands of dollars in public money, they had a problem: Duffy’s staff didn’t answer the questions truthfully. That left the Senate relying on Duffy’s word.
“You have to understand, there’s a responsibility (on the senator),” Proulx told Duffy’s lawyer Donald Bayne, who was trying to show that Duffy did his best in a sloppy system. “Before you issue a contract, the services were defined, the contract was issued, the invoice was received. And at all points it was confirmed that the services were received to the satisfaction of the senator. If you ask at all times what are the services that were provided, that is not something that we have, that we are allowed to be doing.”
Proulx was first on the stand way back in April, her testimony interrupted by a long legal wrangle over some Senate documents Bayne wanted to question her on.
Bayne read to Proulx from a Senate audit report issued in 2011, when Duffy had already been a Conservative senator for two years. It warned that senators were ignoring or unaware of basic contracting policies, such as that they were supposed to get contracts signed with consultants they might hire before those people started work. Everyone would be better off if such things were clarified, the report said.
“It’s a benefit to senators and their staff to have clear rules,” Bayne paraphrased, then flung an arm out in his client’s direction. “Not to find out years later, sitting in the prisoner’s position, accused in a criminal trial, to find out ‘that’s what we meant by that.’ You don’t fault people when you don’t have clear rules.”
Proulx agreed that lots of the Senate’s rules were vague and poorly enforced. Rulings of the Senate’s powerful internal-economy committee had supplemented written policies but they needed a comprehensive rewrite. They’d sent memos and advice, but the audit was to identify specific problems and recommend specific solutions.
Awareness of the system’s weaknesses is one reason a Senate human-resources staffer challenged a contract that Duffy’s office ordered up for Donohue, a friend from Duffy’s days as a CTV broadcaster. It was for writing and editing, consulting on web design, other duties Duffy might come up with from time to time.
(It was also, the trial has heard, to establish a slush fund for Duffy to pay for things like makeup and a personal trainer that he wouldn’t have been able to get the Senate to cover, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars.)
Can you be more specific, the staffer, Sonia Makhlouf, wrote to Duffy’s assistant Melanie Mercer. Makhlouf then asked were there any particular projects Mercer could name.
Mercer’s reply didn’t cite a specific project, but did give Donohue’s duties a little more depth. He “reviews and edits speeches or other documentation the senator drafts himself, and when the senator is unable to draft his own speech due to his overloaded schedule, then he relies on the services of Mr. Donohue to write that speech for him,” Mercer explained.
Donohue testified Thursday. The former TV technician and human-resources manager did help Duffy think of a ghostwriter for a speech laying out his conservative philosophy, he said. And he did look over an occasional speech and suggest it was a bit long. He last wrote a real speech in the 1970s. He doesn’t know anything about Web design.
That’s the way it works, Proulx testified Friday. When a senator signs off on something, we take his word for it because he’s a senator. That’s either a weakness a corrupt Duffy took advantage of or a trap he stumbled into by accident, depending which lawyer you believe.
Donohue returns to testifying Monday. His testimony is being broken up, which is unusual in a trial, because his health is poor and he can’t handle more than a couple of hours of questions at a time.