Well before he was sworn in, Duffy seamlessly had made the switch to the public teat.
Shameless senator’s first Senate expense came a day after appointment
When the man with no shame met the place with no rules, so perfect was the marriage, so instant the attraction, the fireworks must have been spectacular.
The news release announcing Mike Duffy’s appointment to the Senate went out on Dec. 22, 2008.
Before the appointment even took effect on Jan. 2 of the new year, well before he was sworn in, Duffy seamlessly had made the switch to the public teat. It took less than 24 hours. And when he submitted what appears from the documents introduced here at his criminal trial to have been his first claim for expenses, there it was, oh yes — his very first claim for a per diem of $ 81.55, made while he was in the National Capital Region in his own house in an Ottawa suburb, was for Dec. 23, the day after the news release.
That Monday, Dec. 22, Duffy presumably was just another schmuck who worked for a living as the host of a CTV news show on politics and bought his own groceries; by the Tuesday, well, he had latched like a champ onto the waiting taxpayer breast.
And the Senate for its part, well there was the familiar vacuum of clarity and rules, and when, as it appears, Duffy and Sen. Pamela Wallin, respectively new senators from Prince Edward Island and Saskatchewan, wrote someone to ask for a little guidance, they got it from the person of Christopher McCreery, then a policy adviser to Sen. Marjory LeBreton, who was then the Conservative government leader in the Senate and a mucky- muck.
In a Jan. 6, 2009 letter to Duffy and Wallin that was Wednesday shown in court by Duffy’s lawyer, Donald Bayne, McCreery’s message was simple — don’t worry, be happy! Fill your boots! You should only enjoy!
The letter isn’t yet a formal exhibit at trial, but it is public.
Bayne didn’t say what prompted McCreery to write Wallin and Duffy, but since it was addressed only to them, it seems a reasonable inference they’d inquired about the pesky residency business.
Residency is at the heart of some of the 31 fraud and breach of-trust charges Duffy faces here. He claimed living expenses while comfortably ensconced at his Kanata home, which he’d formally designated as his “secondary” residence, while deeming his Cavendish, P. E. I., cottage his “primary” residence.
But if as it appears he was nervous about pretending he actually lived at the cottage when much of Canada knew he’d lived in Ottawa for decades, McCreery rode to his rescue, all balm and calm.
Why, he began, the Senate “is the master of its own house”, and the last time a senator was disqualified was in 1915, and besides, he wrote, and these first four words were in bold, “The Senate has never disqualified anyone for not being a ‘ resident’ of their province of appointment providing they own property there.”
He went on: “I checked all of the authorities on the Senate and residency is not defined.
“My interpretation of this is that there has been a longstanding convention that so long as a senator owns property in his or her province of appointment then they are allowed to sit as a senator from that province, even if they live in Ottawa 99 per cent of the time.”
After all, in McCreery’s words, the Senate is considered to be an “honourable” chamber, where a member’s word/ oath is taken as true, “so if they say they are a resident of province X and have a deed to prove it, the other Honourable Members do not question it.” This convention would explain why no Senator has ever been disqualified on the basis of not being a resident of their Province of appointment.”
For the record, the lone witness to testify thus far, Mark Audcent, who was the Senate law clerk and Parliamentary counsel during the salient Duffy period, essentially agreed that there are no rules that define “residency” in any hard or meaningful way.
But it was his practice during his brief orientation with new senators to point out what he called “the natural tension” that exists between the need to be in Ottawa for Senate business and the need to mix with the people you purportedly represent. He would urge newbies to track, or have their assistants track, how much time they spent in their home province.
And, Audcent said, there are “indicators” of residency — physical presence of course, or as he put it, “it’s pretty hard to say you live in a province if you’re never there”; which community you participate in; where you receive government services such as driver’s license and health insurance, and where you have societal relationships.
Ontario Court Judge Charles Vaillancourt has already heard, from prosecutor Mark Holmes in his opening statement, that by most if not all those measures, Duffy lived large in Ottawa.
Bayne, of course, wasn’t much interested in these indicators.
A key aspect of his defence is that senators are constitutionally obliged to call home the property they own in the province they represent, and that Duffy was, as Bayne put it several times, but “a rookie senator with no Parliamentary background” who was led like a lamb to slaughter to the anarchic abyss that is the Senate.
But if as it appears Duffy was required to designate his P. E. I. cottage his primary residence to qualify as a P. E. I. senator — it means that Canadian senators may actually be required to fudge the truth to get the job — nowhere does it appear to have been written that he also had to designate his Ottawa house as a secondary residence or file for “living expenses” of $ 81.55 a day from the couch in his actual real house in Ottawa.
In other words, latching on as Duffy did is not yet a mandatory requirement to be in the Senate, though it may a convention: How heartening.